I am reminded of an early, fine autumn. August was with warm rains, as if on purpose for sowing, with rains at the very time, in the middle of the month, around the feast of St. Lawrence. And "autumn and winter live well, if the water is still and rain on Lawrence." Later Indian summer a lot of cobwebs sat on the fields. that is also a good sign: "There is a lot of shade in Indian summer - vigorous autumn" ... I remember an early, fresh, quiet morning ... I remember a large, all golden, dried and thinned garden, I remember maple alleys, the delicate aroma of fallen leaves and - the smell Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness. The air is so clear, as if it is not at all, voices and the creak of carts are heard throughout the garden. These are the Tarkhans, the bourgeois gardeners, hired peasants and poured apples in order to send them to the city at night - certainly on the night when it is so glorious to lie on the wagon, look into starry sky, to feel the smell of tar in the fresh air and listen to the long train carriage creaking cautiously in the dark along the main road. A man pouring apples eats them with a juicy bang one by one, but such is the institution - a bourgeois will never cut it off, but he will also say:
Wali, eat your fill - there is nothing to do! At the drain, everyone drinks honey.
And the cool silence of the morning is broken only by the well-fed cackling of thrushes on coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the echoing thud of apples poured into measures and tubs. In the thinned garden, the road to the big shalash, strewn with straw, and the very hut, near which the bourgeoisie acquired a whole farm over the summer, is far visible. Everywhere it smells strongly of apples, here - especially. There are beds in the hut, there is a single-barreled gun, a green samovar, and dishes in the corner. Beside the hut there are matting, boxes, all sorts of tattered belongings, an earthen stove has been dug. At noon, a magnificent kulesh with bacon is cooked on it, a samovar is heated in the evening, and a long strip of bluish smoke spreads across the garden, between the trees. On holidays, the kolo hut is a whole fair, and red hats flicker through the trees every minute. A crowd of lively one-yard girls in sundresses smelling strongly of paint, the "gentlemen" come in their beautiful and rough, savage costumes, a young head woman, pregnant, with a broad sleepy face and important, like a Kholmogory cow. There are “horns” on her head - the braids are laid on the sides of the crown and covered with several kerchiefs, so that the head looks huge; legs, in ankle boots with horseshoes, stand bluntly and firmly; the sleeveless jacket is plisse, the curtain is long, and the poneva is black and purple with stripes of brick color and lined at the hem with a wide gold "prose" ...
Household butterfly! - says the tradesman about her, shaking his head and howling. - Now these are being translated ...
And the boys in white manly shirts and short pantyhose, with white open heads all fit. They walk in twos, threes, shallowly touching their bare feet, and look sideways at a shaggy shepherd dog tied to an apple tree. Of course, one buys, because the purchases are only for a penny or for an egg, but there are many buyers, trade is brisk, and a consumptive tradesman in a long frock coat and red boots is cheerful. Together with his brother, a burly, nimble half-idiot who lives with him "out of mercy", he trades with jokes, jokes and even sometimes "touches" the Tula harmonica. And until evening, people crowd in the garden, you can hear laughter and talk near the hut, and sometimes the stomp of a dance ...
By night, the weather becomes very cold and dewy. Breathing in the rye aroma of new straw and chaff on the threshing floor, you cheerfully walk home to supper past the garden rampart. Voices in the village or the creak of the gates can be heard in the icy dawn with extraordinary clarity. It gets dark. And here's another smell: there is a fire in the garden, and the cherry twigs are tugging with fragrant smoke. In the dark, in the depths of the garden, there is a fabulous picture: as if in a corner of hell, a crimson flame, surrounded by darkness, burns near the hut, and someone's black silhouettes, as if carved from ebony, move around the fire, while giant shadows from them walk over the apple trees ... Either a black hand of several arshins will lie all over the tree, then two legs will be clearly drawn - two black pillars. And suddenly all this slides from the apple tree - and a shadow falls along the entire alley, from the hut to the very gate ...
Late at night, when the lights go out in the village, when the diamond constellation Stozhar is already shining high in the sky, you will once again run into the garden. Rustling on dry foliage, like a blind man, you will get to the hut. There, in the clearing, it is a little brighter, and the Milky Way is whitening overhead.
Is that you, barchuk? - someone quietly calls out from the darkness.
I. Are you still awake, Nikolai?
We can't sleep. It must be too late? Look, there seems to be a passenger train going ...
We listen for a long time and distinguish tremors in the ground. the trembling turns into noise, grows, and now, as if already behind the garden, the noisy beat of the wheels is quickly knocked out: thundering and pounding, the train rushes ... closer, closer, louder and angrier ... And suddenly it begins to subside, to stall, as if going into the ground ...
Where is your gun, Nikolai?
But near the box, sir.
Throw up a single-barrel, heavy as a crowbar, and shoot with a fell swoop. A crimson flame with a deafening crack will flash to the sky, blind for a moment and extinguish the stars, and a vigorous echo will burst out in a ring and roll over the horizon, dying far, far away in the clear and sensitive air.
Wow, great! - the tradesman will say. - Spend, spend, barchuk, otherwise it's just a disaster! Again all the muzzle on the shaft was shaken off ...
And the black sky is traced with fiery stripes of shooting stars. You gaze for a long time into its dark blue depth, overflowing with constellations, until the earth floats under your feet. Then you will start up and, hiding your hands in your sleeves, you will quickly run along the alley to the house ... How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!
II
"Nuclear Antonovka - to happy year". Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly: it means that bread has been ugly too ... I remember a harvest year.
At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking like black, you would open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly here and there, and you cannot bear it - you tell the horse to sit down as soon as possible, and you yourself will run wash in the pond. Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. She instantly drives away the laziness of the night, and after washing and having breakfast in the room with the workers with hot potatoes and black bread with coarse raw salt, with pleasure you feel the slippery skin of the saddle under you, driving along Vyselki to hunt. Autumn is the time for patron saint holidays, and the people at this time are tidied up, happy, the view of the village of owls is not the same as at another time. If the year is fruitful and a whole golden city rises on the threshing floor, and geese cackle loudly and harshly in the morning on the river, then it’s not bad at all in the village. In addition, our Vyselki from time immemorial, even from the time of grandfather, were famous for their "wealth". Old men and women lived in Vyselki for a long time - the first sign of a rich village - and they were all tall, big and white, like a harrier. You only hear, it happened: "Yes, - here Agafya waved eighty-three years!" - or conversations like this:
And when are you going to die, Pankrat? Perhaps you will be a hundred years old?
How do you please say, father?
How old are you, I ask!
But I don’t know, sir.
Do you remember Platon Apollonovich?
Well, sir, I clearly remember.
The old man, who stands stretched out in front of the master, smiles meekly and guiltily. Well, they say, to do, - to blame, healed. And he probably would have healed even more if he had not overeat on Petrovka onions.
I also remember his old woman. Everything used to sit on a bench, on the porch, bent over, shaking his head, gasping for breath and holding on to the bench with his hands - everything is thinking about something. “About her good, I suppose,” the women said, because she had a lot of “good” in her chests. And she doesn't seem to hear; blindly looks somewhere into the distance from under sadly raised eyebrows, shakes his head and as if tries to remember something. She was a big old woman, all kind of dark. Ponyova - almost the last century, chunki - dead, neck - yellow and dry, shirt with rosin joints is always white and white, - "at least in the coffin." And near the porch, a large stone lay: she had bought herself for her grave, just like a shroud - an excellent shroud, with angels, with crosses and with a prayer printed on the edges.
There were also yards in Vyselki to match the old people: brick, built by their grandfathers. And the rich men - Savely, Ignat, Dron - had huts in two or three connections, because sharing in Vyselki was not yet fashionable. In such families, they drove bees, were proud of the gray-iron-colored bityug stallion and kept the estates in order. On the threshing floors thick and fat hemp-stands were dark, barns and barns stood, well-covered; in punka and barns there were iron doors, behind which were kept canvases, spinning wheels, new sheepskin coats, typesetting harness, measures, bound with copper hoops. Crosses were burned on the gates and on the sledges. And I remember that at times it seemed to me extremely tempting to be a man. When, it used to be, you drive around the village on a sunny morning, you keep thinking about how well it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omelettes, and on a holiday to get up with the sun, under a thick and musical message from the village, wash near the barrel and put on a clean shirt, the same trousers and indestructible boots with horseshoes. If, I thought, add a healthy and beautiful wife in festive attire and a trip to mass, and then lunch with a bearded father-in-law, lunch with hot lamb on wooden plates and with rushes, with honeycomb honey and mash - it’s impossible to wish for more!
The warehouse of the average noble life, even in my memory, very recently, had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in terms of its homeliness and rural old-world well-being. Such, for example, was the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, who lived two eleven versts from Vyselki. While, it used to be, you get to this estate, it is already completely wrapped up. With dogs in packs you have to walk at a pace, and you don't want to rush - it's so much fun in an open field on a sunny and cool day! The terrain is flat, you can see far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun shines from the side, and the road, rolled by carts after the rains, is oily and glistens like rails. Suddenly fresh, lush-green winter grapes are spreading out in wide shoals. A hawk will rise from somewhere in the clear air and freeze in one place, trembling sharp wings... And clearly visible telegraph poles run away into the clear distance, and their wires, like silver strings, slide along the slope of the clear sky. On them sit kobchiks - completely black badges on music paper.
I did not know and did not see serfdom, but I remember at my aunt Anna Gerasimovna I felt it. You enter the courtyard and immediately feel that here it is still quite alive. The manor is small, but all old, solid, surrounded by century-old birches and willows. Outbuildings - low, but homely - are many, and all of them are as if merged from dark oak logs under thatched roofs. It stands out for the size or, better to say, the length of only the blackened human, from which the last Mohicans of the courtyard class peep out - some decrepit old men and women, a decrepit retired cook, like Don Quixote. All of them, when you enter the courtyard, pull themselves up and bow low and low. The gray-haired coachman, heading from the carriage shed to take the horse, takes off his hat at the shed and walks around the yard with his head bared. He drove with his aunt as a postman, and now he takes her to mass, in a cart in winter, and in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those on which priests ride. Aunt's garden was famous for its neglect, nightingales, turtle doves and apples, and the house was famous for its roof. He stood at the head of the courtyard, right next to the garden, - the linden branches embraced him, - was small and squat, but it seemed that he would not even last, - he looked so thoroughly from under his unusually high and thick thatched roof, which was blackened and hardened from time to time. Its front façade seemed to me always alive, as if an old face looked out from under a huge cap with hollows of eyes - windows with mother-of-pearl glass from rain and sun. And on the sides of those eyes were porches - two old large porches with columns. Well-fed pigeons always sat on their pediment, while thousands of sparrows rained down from roof to roof ... And the guest felt sullenly in this nest under the turquoise autumn sky!
You go into the house and first of all you will hear the smell of apples, and then others: old furniture mahogany, dried lime color, which has been on the windows since June ... In all the rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is because the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Everywhere there is silence and cleanliness, although it seems that chairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames never budged. And then you can hear on coughing: aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. She has a large Persian shawl draped over her shoulders. She will come out importantly, but friendly, and right now, amid endless conversations about antiquity, about inheritances, treats begin to appear: first, "blew" apples, - Antonovs, "pain-lady", boletus, "fertile" - and then amazing lunch: all through and through pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, pickles and red kvass - strong and sweet, sweet ... The windows to the garden are raised, and from there it blows cheerful autumn coolness ...
III
Per last years one thing supported the dying spirit of the landlords - hunting. Formerly dark estates, like the estate of Anna Gerasimovna. were not uncommon. There were also decaying, but still living on a grand scale with a huge estate, with a garden of twenty dessiatines. True, some of these estates have survived to this day, but they no longer have life ... There are no triplets, there are no riding "Kirghiz", there are no hounds and greyhounds, there is no courtyard and there is no owner of all this - a landowner-hunter, like my late brother-in-law Arseny Semyonitch.
From the end of September our gardens and threshing floor were emptied, the weather, as usual, changed abruptly. The wind tore and ruffled the trees for whole days, the rains poured them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening between gloomy low clouds the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west, the air became clean and clear, and sunlight it sparkled dazzlingly between the leaves, howling, between the branches, which moved like a living net and were agitated by the wind. Cold and bright in the north, liquid blue sky, and from behind these clouds the ridges of snowy mountains-clouds slowly floated out. Stopin, at the window you think: "Perhaps, God willing, it will clear up." But the wind did not abate. He agitated the garden, tore a stream of human smoke continuously running from the chimney and again caught up with the ominous hair of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. Its shine faded away, the window closed into the blue sky, and the garden became deserted and dull, and again began to sow rain ... at first quietly, carefully, then ever thicker and, finally, turned into a downpour with storm and darkness. A long, anxious night fell ...
The garden emerged from such a scuffle almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow subdued, resigned. But on the other hand, how handsome he was when it came again clear weather, transparent and cold days of early October, a farewell holiday of autumn! The preserved foliage will now hang on the trees even before the first winter. The black garden will shine through the cold turquoise sky and humbly wait for winter, warming up in the sun's shine. And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with sprouted winter crops ... It's time to hunt!
And now I see myself in the estate of Arseny Semyonitch, in big house, in a hall full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are a lot of people - all people are tanned, with weathered faces, in jackets and long boots. They had just had a very satisfying dinner, flushed and excited by noisy conversations about the upcoming hunt, but they do not forget to finish their vodka after dinner. And in the yard the horn blows and the dogs howl at different voices. A black greyhound, Arseny Semyonitch's favorite, climbs onto the table and begins to devour the remains of a hare with sauce from the dish. But suddenly he lets out a terrible squeal and, knocking over the plates and glasses, rushes off the table: Arseny Semyonich, who has left the office with an arapnik and a revolver, suddenly deafens the audience with a shot. The hall fills even more with smoke, and Arseny Semyonitch stands and laughs.
It's a pity that he missed! - he says, playing with his eyes.
He is tall, thin, but broad-shouldered and slender, and his face is a handsome gypsy. His eyes sparkle wildly, he is very dexterous, in a crimson silk shirt, velvet trousers and long boots. Having frightened both the dog and the guests with a shot, he humorously and importantly recites in a baritone:
It's time, it's time to saddle the nimble bottom
And throw a sonorous horn over your shoulders! - and says loudly:
Well, however, there is nothing to waste golden time!
Now I still feel how greedily and capaciously the young breast breathed in the cold of a clear and damp day in the evening, when, it happened, you go with a noisy gang of Arseny Semyonitch, excited by the musical din of dogs thrown in the black forest, to some Red Bugor or Gremyachy Island, by its name alone, an exciting hunter. You ride an evil, strong and squat "Kirghiz", tightly restraining it with the reins, and you feel almost merged with it. He snorts, asks for a trot, rustles his hooves noisily on the deep and light carpets of black crumbling leaves, and each sound is echoing in the empty, damp and fresh forest... A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third, answered passionately and pitifully - and suddenly the whole forest thundered, as if it were all glass, from violent barking and shouting. A shot rang out in the midst of this din - and everything "welded" and rolled somewhere into the distance.
"Oh, take care!" - an intoxicating thought flashes in my head. You whine on a horse and, as if you have fallen off the chain, you will rush through the forest, without taking apart anything along the way. Only trees flicker in front of my eyes and molds in the face with mud from under the horse's hooves. You jump out of the forest, see a motley flock of dogs on the greenery, stretching out on the ground, and push the "Kirghiz" even harder across the beast, over the greens, ups and downs, until you finally roll over to another island and hide from the eyes of the flock along with its frantic barking and groan. Then, all wet and trembling with exertion, you sit down a foaming, wheezing horse and greedily swallow the icy dampness of the forest valley. In the distance, the cries of hunters and the barking of dogs freeze, and around you there is a dead silence. The half-open timber stands motionless, and it seems that you are in some kind of reserved palaces. It smells strong from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark. And the dampness from the ravines is becoming more and more noticeable, it gets colder and darker in the forest ... It's time to spend the night. But collecting the dogs after the hunt is difficult. For a long time and hopelessly dreary horns ring in the forest, for a long time screaming, cursing and squealing of dogs can be heard ... Finally, already completely in the dark, a band of hunters rushes into the estate of some almost unknown bachelor-landowner and fills the whole courtyard with noise, which lights up lanterns, candles and lamps brought out to greet the guests from home ...
It happened that such a hospitable neighbor had a hunt for several days. In the early morning dawn, in the icy wind and the first wet winter, they left for the forests and the fields, and by dusk they returned again, all covered in mud, with flushed faces, smelling of horse sweat, the hair of a hunted animal, and the drinking began. It is very warm in a bright and crowded house after a whole day in the cold in the field. Everyone walks from room to room in unbuttoned jackets, randomly drinking and eating, noisily transmitting to each other their impressions of the killed hardened wolf, which, showing its teeth, rolling its eyes, lies with its fluffy tail thrown back in the middle of the hall and paints its pale and already cold blood on the floor. After vodka and food, you feel such sweet fatigue, such bliss young sleep that as if you hear a talk through the water. A weathered face is on fire, and if you close your eyes, the whole earth will float under your feet. And when you go to bed, in a soft feather bed, in an ancient corner room with a small picture and an icon lamp, ghosts of fiery-motley dogs flash before your eyes, the sensation of a jump will start throughout your body, and you will not notice how you will drown along with all these images and sensations in a sweet and a healthy dream, even forgetting that this room was once the prayer room of an old man, whose name is surrounded by gloomy serf legends, and that he died in this prayer room, probably on the same bed.
When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time. There is silence throughout the house. You can hear how the gardener walks carefully through the rooms, lighting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots. Ahead - a whole day of rest in the already silent winter estate. You will slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you will tackle books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, similar to church missal books, smell gloriously of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some pleasant sour mold, old perfume ... The notes in their margins, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose feather, are also good. You unfold the book and read: "A thought worthy of the ancient and new philosophers, the color of reason and the feeling of the heart" ... And you will not be willingly carried away by the book itself. This is "The Noble Philosopher", an allegory published a hundred years ago by the sponsorship of some "holder of many orders" and printed in the printing house of the order of public charity, - a story about how "a nobleman-philosopher, having the time and ability to reason, what the mind of a person can ascend, once received the desire to compose a plan of light in the vast area of his village "... Then you stumble upon" the satirical and philosophical works of M. Voltaire "and revel in the sweet and mannered style of translation for a long time:" My sovereigns! Erasmus composed, in the sixth to ten centuries, praise for tomfoolery (mannered pause, - semicolon); You order me to exalt reason before you ... ”Then from Catherine's antiquity you will move on to romantic times, to almanacs, to sentimentally pompous and long novels ... The cuckoo jumps out of the clock and mockingly, sadly cuckoes over you in an empty house. And little by little a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into my heart ...
Here is "The Secrets of Alexis", here is "Victor, or the Child in the Forest": "Midnight strikes! Sacred silence takes the place of daytime noise and cheerful songs of the villagers. Sleep spreads its gloomy wings over the surface of our hemisphere; he shakes off poppies and dreams from them ... Dreams ... How often they only continue to suffer evil! .. " old words: rocks and oak groves, a pale moon and loneliness, ghosts and ghosts, "erots", roses and lilies, "the leprosy and agility of young sha moons", lily hand, Lyudmila and Alina ... But the magazines with the names of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, lyceum student Pushkin. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her polonaises on the clavichord, her languid recitation of poems from "Eugene Onega na". And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... Nice girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, aristocratic-beautiful heads in old hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ...
IV
The smell of Antonov's apples disappears from the landowners' estates. These days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a century has passed since then. The old people died in Vyselki, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonich shot himself ... The kingdom of the small-class people, impoverished to begging, is coming. But this beggarly small-scale life is also good!
So I see myself again in the village, in late autumn. The days are blue and cloudy. In the morning I sit down in the saddle and with one dog, a gun and a horn, I leave for the field. The wind calls and hums in the muzzle of the gun, the wind blows hard towards, sometimes with dry snow. A whole Laziness I wander across the empty plains ... Hungry and vegetated, I return to the dusk in the estate, and my soul becomes so warm and joyful when the Vyselok lights flash and pulls from the estate with the smell of smoke, housing. I remember that at our home they beat me to "twilight", not to light a fire and conduct conversations in the semi-darkness. Entering the house, I find the winter frames already packed, and this sets me up even more for a peaceful winter mood. In the servants' room the worker now eats the stove, and, as in childhood, I squat down beside a heap of straw, which already smells sharply of winter freshness, and I look now into the burning stove, now into the windows, behind which, blue, the dusk is dying sadly. Then I go to the human. It’s light and crowded: the girls chop cabbage, the chippings flicker, I listen to their fractional, friendly knocking and friendly, sadly funny, country songs ... Sometimes some small-scale neighbor will come and take me to his place for a long time ... a life!
Small people get up early. Stretching tight, he gets out of bed and twirls a thick cigarette made of cheap black tobacco or just makhorka. The pale light of an early November morning illuminates a simple, bare-walled study, the yellow and hardened skins of foxes above the bed and a stocky figure in wide trousers and a loose-fitting blouse, and a sleepy Tatar-like face is reflected in the mirror. In a semi-dark, warm house, there is dead silence. Outside the door in the corridor, snoring is the old cook, who lived in the manor house as a girl. This, however, does not prevent the master from shouting hoarsely to the whole house:
Lukerya! Samovar!
Then, putting on boots, throwing a jersey over his shoulders and not buttoning his shirt in his mouth, he goes out onto the porch. It smells like a dog in the locked entryway; Stretching lazily, yawning yawning and smiling, the hounds surround him.
Burp! he says slowly, in an indulgent bass, and goes through the garden to the threshing floor. His chest breathes widely with the harsh air of dawn and the smell of a naked garden that has chilled over the night. Leaves curled up and blackened from frost rustle under boots in a birch alley, already cut in half. Looming in the low gloomy sky, the cuddly jackdaws are sleeping on the ridge of the barn ... It will be a glorious day for hunting! And, stopping in the middle of the alley, the master gazes for a long time into the autumn field, at the deserted green winter crops along which the calves wander. Two hound bitches squeal at his feet, and Fill is already behind the garden: jumping over the prickly stubble, he seems to be calling and asking for the field. But what are you going to do with the hounds now? The beast is now in the field, flying up, on the black trail, and in the forest he is afraid, because in the forest the wind rustles the leaves ... Oh, if only the greyhounds!
Threshing begins in the riga. The threshing drum hums slowly as it disperses. Lazily pulling the strings, resting their feet on the dung circle and swaying, the horses walk in the drive. In the middle of the drive, spinning on a bench, the driver sits and monotonously shouts at them, always whipping only one brown gelding with his whip, who is the laziest of all and is completely asleep on the move, since his eyes are blindfolded.
Well, well, girls, girls! - the sedate clerk sternly shouts, putting on a wide linen shirt.
The girls hastily scatter the current, run around with stretchers and brooms.
With God blessing! - says the server, and the first bunch of starnovka, launched for testing, flies into the drum with a buzz and squeal and rises upward from under it in a disheveled fan. And the drum hums more and more persistently, the work begins to boil, and soon all the sounds merge into the general pleasant noise of threshing. The master stands at the gates of the barn and watches as red and yellow scarves, hands, rakes, straw flicker in its darkness, and all this moves and fusses about rhythmically to the sound of a drum and the monotonous cry and whistle of the driver. Proboscis flies like clouds to the gate. The master stands, all gray from him. Often he glances in the field ... Soon, soon the fields will turn white, soon the winter will cover them ...
Zazimok, first snow! There are no greyhounds, there is nothing to hunt with in November; but winter comes, "work" with the hounds begins. And here again, as in old days, small people come to each other, drink on their last money, disappear for whole days in the snow fields. And in the evening on some remote farm they shine far away in the dark winter night outbuilding windows. There, in this little outhouse, clouds of smoke are floating, tallow candles are dimly burning, the guitar is tuning ...
At dusk the wind took a spree,
He opened my gates wide, - someone begins in a chest tenor. And others awkwardly, pretending that they are joking, pick up with sad, hopeless prowess:
Opened my gates wide.
White snow covered the way-road ...
I. A. Bunin, "Antonov apples" ( summary follows) - this is a picture-memory in which juicy autumn apples become the main actor, because without their suffocating aroma, the author himself would not exist. Why? Sounds, smells, random pictures, vivid images ... It would seem that thousands, millions of them rush through their whole life. Something is kept in memory for a long time and is gradually forgotten. Something passes without a trace, is erased, as if it never happened. And something remains with us forever. In an incomprehensible way, it seeps through the thickness of our consciousness, penetrates deeply and becomes an integral part of ourselves.
Abstract "Antonovskie apples", Bunin I. A.
Early mild autumn. It seemed as though it was August yesterday with its frequent warm rains. The peasants were happy, because when it rains on Lawrence, autumn and winter will be good. But time is running, and now a lot of cobwebs have appeared in the fields. The golden gardens have thinned out, shriveled up. The air is clean, transparent, as if it is not there at all, and at the same time is filled to the brim with the smells of fallen leaves, honey and Antonov's apples ... This is how Ivan Bunin begins his story.
"Antonov apples": the first memory.
Village Vyselki, the estate of the author's aunt, where he loved to visit and spent his best years... The hubbub and the creak of carts in the garden: the harvest is in progress autumn apples... Bourgeois gardeners recruited peasants to pour apples and send them to the city. The work is in full swing, even though the night is outside. A cautious creak of a long train is heard, in the darkness here and there a juicy crack is heard - this is a man eating apples one after another. And no one stops him, on the contrary, the owners encourage this irrepressible appetite: "Go away, eat your fill, there is nothing to do!" The thinned garden opens the way to a large hut - a real house with its own farm. Everywhere it smells incredible of apples, but in this place - especially. During the day, people gather near the hut, and there is a brisk trade. Who is there only: one-house girls in sundresses smelling of paint, and "lordly" ones in beautiful and rough suits, and a young pregnant elder, boys in white shirts ... By the evening the hustle and bustle and noise subside. Cold and dewy. A crimson flame in the garden, fragrant smoke, cherry twigs crackling ... "How good it is to live in the world!"
IA Bunin, "Antonov apples" (read the summary below): second memory.
That year in the village of Vyselki was fruitful. As it was said, if Antonovka is ugly, it means that there will be a lot of bread, and village affairs will be good. So they lived, from harvest to harvest, although it cannot be said that the peasants were in poverty, on the contrary, Vyselki was considered a rich land. Old men and women lived for a long time, which was the first sign of well-being: and Pankrat would be a hundred years old, and Agafya was eighty-three years old. There were also houses in the village to match the old people: large, brick, two or three under one roof, because it was not customary to live separately. They kept bees, were proud of the stallions, behind the iron doors were kept new sheepskin coats, canvases, spinning wheels, harness. I also remember the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, which stood about twelve versts from Vyselki. In the middle of the yard was her house, around a linden tree, and then the famous apple orchard with nightingales and turtle doves. Sometimes, you cross the threshold, and before other smells you feel the aroma of Antonov apples. Everywhere cleanliness and order. A minute, then another, a coughing sound is heard: Anna Gerasimovna comes out, and now, under endless judgments and gossip about antiquity and inheritance, treats appear. First, Antonov's apples. And then a delicious lunch: boiled ham, pink with peas, pickles, turkey, stuffed chicken and strong sweet kvass.
IA Bunin, "Antonovskie apples" (summary): third recollection.
End of September. The weather is getting worse. It rains more and more often. Standing like this by the window. The street is deserted and boring. The wind does not abate. It starts to sow rain. Quiet at first, then stronger, stronger, and turns into a thick downpour with leaden darkness and storm. A disturbing night is falling. The next morning after such a fight, the apple orchard is almost completely naked. Wet leaves everywhere. The preserved foliage, already quieted down and resigned, will wander in the trees until the first frost. Well, it's time to hunt! Usually by this time everyone was gathering at Arseny Semyonich's estate: hearty dinners, vodka, flushed, weather-beaten faces, lively conversations about the upcoming hunt. They went out into the courtyard, and there the horn was already blowing, and a noisy band of dogs was howling at different voices. It happened - you oversleep, you miss the hunt, but the rest was no less pleasant. You lie in bed for a long time. Around the silence, which is broken only by the crackling of wood in the oven. Dressing slowly, you go out into the wet garden, where you will surely find a cold, wet Antonov apple accidentally dropped. Strange, but it seems unusually sweet and tasty, completely different from others. Later you start reading books.
Fourth recollection.
The settlements were empty. Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonitch shot himself, and those village old men are gone. The aroma of Antonov apples is gradually disappearing from the once prosperous landowners' estates. But this poor small-scale life is also good. In late autumn in the house they liked not to light a fire at dusk and to conduct quiet intimate conversations in the semi-darkness. Leaves, blackened from frost, rustle under the boots in the street. Winter is coming, and that means, as in the old days, the small people will come to each other, they will drink with their last money and disappear all day hunting in the snow-covered fields, and in the evening they will sing to the guitar.
Antonov apples are the first link in an endless chain of memories. Behind it, other pictures invariably emerge, which, in turn, raise to the surface long-forgotten feelings and emotions, happy, gentle, sometimes sad, and sometimes painful. Everything around is literally saturated with the juicy aroma of Antonov apples. But this is at the beginning of autumn, during the period of dawn and prosperity in the village. Then their smell gradually disappears, deep autumn sets in, the village becomes poorer. But life goes on, and perhaps this smell will soon be felt again before others. Who knows?
Current page: 1 (total of the book has 2 pages)
Ivan Bunin
Antonov apples
I
... I am reminded of an early mild autumn. August was with warm rains, as if on purpose for sowing - with rains at the very time, in the middle of the month, around the feast of St. Lawrence. And "autumn and winter live well, if the water is still and rain on Lawrence." Then, in the Indian summer, a lot of cobwebs sat on the fields. This is also a good sign: "There are many shades in Indian summer - vigorous autumn" ... I remember an early, fresh, quiet morning ... I remember a large, all golden, dried and thinned garden, I remember maple alleys, the delicate aroma of fallen leaves and - the smell of Antonov apples, the smell honey and autumn freshness. The air is so clear, as if it is not at all, voices and the creak of carts are heard throughout the garden. These are tarkhans, bourgeois gardeners, hired peasants and poured apples in order to send them to the city at night - certainly at night when it is so glorious to lie on a wagon, look at the starry sky, smell the tar in the fresh air and listen to how carefully it creaks in the dark, a long train along the high road. A man pouring apples eats them with a juicy crackling one by one, but such is the institution - never a bourgeoisie will cut him off, but he will also say:
- Wali, eat your fill - there is nothing to do! At the drain, everyone drinks honey.
And the cool silence of the morning is broken only by the well-fed cackling of thrushes on coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the echoing thud of apples poured into measures and tubs. In the thinned garden, the road to a large hut, strewn with straw, and the hut near which the bourgeoisie acquired a whole farm over the summer is far visible. Everywhere it smells strongly of apples, here - especially. There are beds in the hut, there is a single-barreled gun, a green samovar, and dishes in the corner. Beside the hut there are matting, boxes, all sorts of frayed belongings, an earthen stove has been dug. At noon, a magnificent kulesh with bacon is cooked on it, a samovar is heated in the evening, and a long strip of bluish smoke spreads across the garden, between the trees. On holidays, there is a whole fair near the hut, and red hats flicker through the trees every minute. A crowd of lively one-yard girls in sundresses smelling strongly of paint, the "gentlemen" come in their beautiful and rough, savage costumes, a young head woman, pregnant, with a broad sleepy face and important, like a Kholmogory cow. There are “horns” on her head - the braids are laid on the sides of the crown and covered with several kerchiefs, so that the head looks huge; legs, in ankle boots with horseshoes, stand bluntly and firmly; the sleeveless jacket is pleated, the curtain is long, and the paneva is black and purple with stripes of brick color and lined at the hem with wide gold "prose" ...
- Household butterfly! - says the tradesman about her, shaking his head. - Now such are translated ...
And the boys in white manly shirts and short pantyhose, with white open heads, all fit. They walk in twos, threes, shallowly touching their bare feet, and look sideways at a shaggy shepherd dog tied to an apple tree. Of course, one buys, because the purchases are only for a penny or for an egg, but there are many buyers, trade is brisk, and a consumptive tradesman in a long frock coat and red boots is cheerful. Together with his brother, a burly, nimble half-idiot who lives with him "out of mercy", he trades with jokes, jokes and sometimes even "touches" the Tula harmonica. And until evening, people crowd in the garden, laughter and talk is heard near the hut, and sometimes the clatter of dance ...
By night, the weather becomes very cold and dewy. Breathing in the rye aroma of new straw and chaff on the threshing floor, you cheerfully walk home for supper past the garden rampart. Voices in the village or the creak of the gates can be heard in the cold dawn with extraordinary clarity. It gets dark. And here's another smell: there is a fire in the garden, and the cherry twigs are tugging with fragrant smoke. In the darkness, in the depths of the garden, there is a fabulous picture: as if in a corner of hell, a crimson flame is burning near the hut, surrounded by darkness, and someone's black silhouettes, as if carved from ebony, move around the fire, while gigantic shadows from them walk across apple trees. Either a black hand of several arshins will lie all over the tree, then two legs will be clearly drawn - two black pillars. And suddenly all this will slip from the apple tree - and a shadow will fall along the entire alley, from the hut to the very gate ...
Late at night, when the lights go out in the village, when the diamond seven-star Stozhar is already shining high in the sky, you will once again run into the garden. Rustling on dry foliage, like a blind man, you will get to the hut. There, in the clearing, it is a little brighter, and the Milky Way is whitening overhead.
- Is that you, barchuk? - someone quietly calls out from the darkness.
- Me. Are you still awake, Nikolai?
- We can't sleep. It must be too late? Look, there seems to be a passenger train going ...
We listen for a long time and distinguish tremors in the ground. The tremor turns into noise, it grows, and now, as if already behind the garden, the noisy beat of the wheels is quickly knocked out: rumbling and knocking, the train rushes ... closer, closer, louder and angrier ... And suddenly it begins to subside, go deaf, as if going into the ground ...
- And where is your gun, Nikolai?
- And here near the box, sir.
Throw up a single-barrel, heavy as a crowbar, and shoot with a fell swoop. A crimson flame with a deafening crack will flash to the sky, blind for a moment and extinguish the stars, and a vigorous echo will burst out in a ring and roll over the horizon, dying far, far away in the clear and sensitive air.
- Wow, great! - the tradesman will say. - Spend, spend, barchuk, otherwise it's just a disaster! Again all the muzzle on the shaft was shaken off ...
And the black sky is drawn with fiery stripes of shooting stars. You gaze for a long time into its dark blue depth, overflowing with constellations, until the ground floats under your feet. Then you will start up and, hiding your hands in your sleeves, you will quickly run along the alley to the house ... How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!
II
"Vigorous Antonovka - for a merry year." Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly: it means that bread has been ugly too ... I remember a good year.
At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking in a black way, you would open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly here and there, and you cannot bear it - you tell the horse to sit down as soon as possible, and you yourself will run wash in the pond. Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. She instantly drives away the laziness of the night, and after washing and having breakfast in the room with the workers with hot potatoes and black bread with coarse raw salt, with pleasure you feel the slippery skin of the saddle under you, driving along Vyselki to hunt. Autumn is the time for patronal holidays, and the people at this time are tidied up, happy, the view of the village is not at all the same as at another time. If the year is fruitful and a whole golden city rises on the threshing floor, and geese cackle loudly and harshly in the morning on the river, then it’s not bad at all in the village. In addition, our Vyselki from time immemorial, even from the time of grandfather, were famous for their "wealth". Old men and women lived in Vyselki for a very long time - the first sign of a rich village - and they were all tall, large and white, like a harrier. You just hear it: "Yes, - here Agafya waved eighty-three years old!" - or conversations like this:
- And when will you die, Pankrat? Perhaps you will be a hundred years old?
- How would you like to say, father?
- How old are you, I ask!
“I don’t know, sir.
- Do you remember Platon Apollonitch?
- Well, sir, I clearly remember.
- You see now. You, then, are no less than a hundred.
The old man, who stands stretched out in front of the master, smiles meekly and guiltily. Well, they say, to do, - to blame, healed. And he probably would have healed even more if he had not overeat on Petrovka onions.
I remember his old woman too. Everybody used to sit on a bench, on the porch, bent over, shaking his head, gasping for breath and holding onto the bench with his hands - all thinking about something. “About her good, I suppose,” the women said, because she had a lot of “good” in her chests. And she doesn't seem to hear; blindly looks somewhere into the distance from under sadly raised eyebrows, shakes his head and as if tries to remember something. She was a big old woman, all kind of dark. Paneva is almost of the last century, the chunks are dead, the neck is yellow and withered, the shirt with rosin joints is always white and white, “just put it in the coffin.” And near the porch, a large stone lay: she had bought herself for her grave, just like a shroud - an excellent shroud, with angels, with crosses and with a prayer printed on the edges.
There were also yards in Vyselki to match the old people: brick, built by their grandfathers. And the rich peasants - Savely, Ignat, Dron - had huts in two or three connections, because sharing in Vyselki was not yet fashionable. In such families, they drove bees, were proud of the gray-iron-colored Bityug stallion, and kept the estates in order. On the threshing floors thick and fat hemp-stands were dark, barns and barns stood, well-covered; in punka and barns there were iron doors, behind which were kept canvases, spinning wheels, new sheepskin coats, typesetting harness, measures, bound with copper hoops. Crosses were burned on the gates and on the sledges. And I remember that at times it seemed to me extremely tempting to be a man. When, it happened, you drive around the village on a sunny morning, you keep thinking about how well it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omets, and on a holiday to get up with the sun, under a thick and musical message from the village, wash near the barrel and put on a clean shirt, the same trousers and indestructible boots with horseshoes. If, I thought, to add to this a healthy and beautiful wife in festive attire and a trip to mass, and then lunch with a bearded father-in-law, lunch with hot lamb on wooden plates and with rushes, with honeycomb honey and mash, it’s impossible to wish for more. !
The warehouse of the average noble life, even in my memory, very recently, had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in terms of its homeliness and rural old-world prosperity. Such, for example, was the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, who lived twelve versts from Vyselki. While, it used to be, you get to this estate, it is already completely wrapped up. With dogs, in packs you have to ride at a pace, and you don't want to rush - it's so fun in an open field on a sunny and cool day! The terrain is flat, you can see far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun shines from the side, and the road, rolled by carts after the rains, is oily and glistens like rails. Fresh, lush green winter crops are scattered around in wide shoals. A hawk will rise from somewhere in the clear air and freeze in one place, fluttering its sharp wings. And clearly visible telegraph poles run away into the clear distance, and their wires, like silver strings, slide along the slope of the clear sky. On them sit kobchiks - completely black badges on music paper.
I did not know and did not see serfdom, but I remember that I felt it at my aunt Anna Gerasimovna's. You enter the courtyard and immediately feel that here it is still quite alive. The estate is small, but all old, solid, surrounded by century-old birches and willows. Outbuildings - low, but homely - are many, and they all seem to be merged from dark, oak logs under thatched roofs. It stands out for the size, or, better to say, the length of only the blackened human, from which the last Mohicans of the courtyard class peep out - some decrepit old men and women, a decrepit retired cook, similar to Don Quixote. All of them, when you enter the courtyard, pull themselves up and bow low and low. The gray-haired coachman, heading from the carriage shed to take the horse, takes off his hat at the shed and walks around the yard with his head bared. He drove with his aunt as a postman, and now he takes her to mass - in a carriage in winter, and in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those on which priests ride. My aunt's garden was famous for its neglect, nightingales, turtle doves and apples, and the house was famous for its roof. He stood at the head of the courtyard, right next to the garden, - the linden branches embraced him, - was small and squat, but it seemed that he would not even last, - he looked so thoroughly from under his unusually high and thick thatched roof, which was blackened and hardened from time to time. To me, its front façade was always alive: as if an old face looked out from under a huge cap with hollows of eyes - windows with mother-of-pearl glass from rain and sun. And on the sides of those eyes were porches - two old large porches with columns. Well-fed pigeons always sat on their pediment, while thousands of sparrows rained down from roof to roof ... And the guest felt comfortable in this nest under the turquoise autumn sky!
You will enter the house and first of all you will hear the smell of apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried linden blossom, which has been on the windows since June ... In all the rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is why that the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Everywhere there is silence and cleanliness, although it seems that chairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames never budged. And then a clearing of the throat is heard: the aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. A large Persian shawl is draped over her shoulders. She will come out importantly, but friendly, and now, amid endless conversations about antiquity, about inheritances, treats begin to appear: first "blew", apples, - Antonovskie, "underbelly", boletus, "prolific" - and then an amazing dinner : all through and through pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, marinades and red kvass, - strong and sweet, sweet ... The windows to the garden are raised, and from there it blows cheerful autumn coolness ...
III
In recent years, one thing has kept the dying spirit of the landowners alive - hunting.
Previously, such estates as the estate of Anna Gerasimovna were not uncommon. There were also decaying, but still living on a grand scale with a huge estate, with a garden of twenty dessiatines. True, some of these estates have survived to this day, but they no longer have life ... There are no triplets, no riding "Kirghiz", no hounds and greyhounds, no courtiers and no owner of all this - a landowner-hunter, like mine the late brother-in-law Arseny Semyonitch.
From the end of September our gardens and threshing floor were emptied, the weather, as usual, changed abruptly. The wind tore and ruffled the trees all day long, rains poured them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening between gloomy low clouds the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west; the air became clean and clear, and the sunlight sparkled dazzlingly between the foliage, between the branches, which moved like a living net and were agitated by the wind. Coldly and brightly in the north, above the heavy leaden clouds, the liquid blue sky shone, and from behind these clouds the ridges of snowy mountains-clouds slowly floated out. You stand at the window and think: "Perhaps, God willing, it will clear up." But the wind did not abate. He agitated the garden, tore a stream of human smoke continuously running from the chimney and again caught up with the ominous hair of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. Its shine was extinguished, the window closed into the blue sky, and the garden became deserted and boring, and again it began to sow rain ... at first quietly, carefully, then ever thicker and, finally, turned into a downpour with storm and darkness. A long, anxious night was falling ...
The garden emerged from such a bashing almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow subdued, resigned. But how beautiful he was when the clear weather set in again, the transparent and cold days of early October, the farewell festival of autumn! The preserved foliage will now hang on the trees even before the first winter. The black garden will shine through on the cold turquoise sky and humbly wait for winter, warming up in the sun's shine. And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with sprouted winter crops ... It's time to hunt!
And now I see myself in the estate of Arseny Semyonitch, in a large house, in a hall full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are many people - all people are tanned, with weathered faces, in jackets and long boots. They had just had a very satisfying dinner, flushed and excited by noisy conversations about the upcoming hunt, but they do not forget to finish their vodka after dinner. And in the yard the horn blows and the dogs howl at different voices. A black greyhound, Arseny Semyonitch's favorite, climbs onto the table and begins to devour the remains of a hare with sauce from the dish. But suddenly he lets out a terrible squeal and, knocking over the plates and glasses, rushes off the table: Arseny Semyonich, who has left the office with an arapnik and a revolver, suddenly deafens the audience with a shot. The hall fills even more with smoke, and Arseny Semyonitch stands and laughs.
- It's a pity that he missed! - he says, playing with his eyes.
He is tall, thin, but broad-shouldered and slender, and his face is a handsome gypsy. His eyes sparkle wildly, he is very dexterous, in a crimson silk shirt, velvet trousers and long boots. Having frightened both the dog and the guests with a shot, he humorously and importantly recites in a baritone:
It's time, it's time to saddle the nimble bottom
And throw a sonorous horn over your shoulders! -
and says loudly:
- Well, however, there is nothing to waste golden time!
I still feel how greedily and deeply the young breast breathed in the cold of a clear and damp day in the evening, when, it happened, you go with a noisy gang of Arseny Semyonitch, excited by the musical din of dogs thrown in the black forest, in some Red Bugor or Gremyachy Island, by its name alone, an exciting hunter. You ride an evil, strong and squat "Kirghiz", tightly restraining it with the reins, and you feel almost merged with it. He snorts, asks for a trot, rustles his hooves noisily on the deep and light carpets of black crumbling leaves, and each sound echoes in the empty, damp and fresh forest. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third, answered passionately and pitifully - and suddenly the whole forest thundered, as if it were all glass, from violent barking and shouting. A shot rang out in the midst of this din — and everything was “brewed up” and rolled off into the distance.
"Oh, take care!" - an intoxicating thought flashes in my head. You whine on a horse and, as if you have fallen off the chain, you will rush through the forest, without taking apart anything along the way. Only trees flicker in front of my eyes and molds in the face with mud from under the horse's hooves. You jump out of the forest, see a motley flock of dogs stretching out on the ground on the greens, and push the "Kirghiz" even harder across the beast, over the greens, swings and stubble, until, finally, you roll over to another island and disappear from the eyes of the flock together with your frenzied barking and moaning. Then, all wet and trembling with exertion, you sit down a foaming, wheezing horse and greedily swallow the icy dampness of the forest valley. In the distance, the cries of hunters and the barking of dogs freeze, and around you there is a dead silence. The half-open timber stands motionless, and it seems that you are in some kind of reserved palaces. It smells strong from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark. And the dampness from the ravines is becoming more and more noticeable, it gets colder and darker in the forest ... It's time to spend the night. But collecting the dogs after the hunt is difficult. For a long time and hopelessly dreary horns ring in the forest, for a long time screaming, cursing and screeching of dogs are heard ... Finally, already completely in the dark, a band of hunters rushes into the estate of some almost unknown bachelor-landowner and fills the entire courtyard of the estate with noise, which is illuminated by lanterns, candles and lamps brought out to greet the guests from home ...
It happened that such a hospitable neighbor had a hunt for several days. In the early morning dawn, in the icy wind and the first wet winter, they left for the forests and fields, and by dusk they returned again, all covered in mud, with flushed faces, smelling of horse sweat, the hair of a hunted animal, and the drinking began. It is very warm in a bright and crowded house after a whole day in the cold in the field. Everyone walks from room to room in unbuttoned jackets, drinking and eating randomly, noisily transmitting to each other their impressions of the murdered a hardened wolf, who, showing his teeth, rolling his eyes, lies with his bushy tail thrown to one side in the middle of the hall and paints the floor with his pale and already cold blood. After vodka and food, you feel such sweet fatigue, such a bliss of youthful sleep, that you can hear a talk like through water. A weathered face is on fire, and if you close your eyes, the whole earth will float under your feet. And when you go to bed, in a soft feather bed, somewhere in an old corner room with an image and a lamp, the ghosts of fiery-variegated dogs flash before your eyes, the sensation of a leap will start all over your body, and you will not notice how you will drown along with all these images and sensations in a sweet and healthy dream, forgetting even that this room was once the prayer room of an old man, whose name is surrounded by gloomy serf legends, and that he died in this prayer room, probably on the same bed.
When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time. There is silence throughout the house. You can hear how the gardener walks carefully through the rooms, lighting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots. Ahead - a whole day of rest in the already silent winter estate. You will slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you will start working on books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, similar to church missal books, smell gloriously of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some pleasant sour mold, old perfume ... The notes in the margins, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose feather, are also good. You unfold the book and read: "A thought worthy of ancient and new philosophers, the color of reason and feelings of the heart" ... And involuntarily you will be carried away by the book itself. This is "The Noble Philosopher", an allegory published a hundred years ago by the sponsorship of some "holder of many orders" and printed in the printing house of the order of public charity, - a story about how a "nobleman philosopher, having the time and ability to reason, what a man's mind can ascend, once received a desire to compose a plan of light in a spacious place of his village "... Then you come across" the satirical and philosophical works of Monsieur Voltaire "and for a long time revel in the sweet and mannered syllable of translation:" My sovereigns! Erasmus composed in the sixth century a praise for tomfoolery (mannered pause - semicolon); You order me to exalt reason before you ... ”Then from Catherine's old days you will move on to romantic times, to almanacs, to sentimentally pompous and long novels ... The cuckoo jumps out of the clock and mockingly and sadly cuckoes over you in an empty house. And little by little a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into my heart ...
Here is “The Secrets of Alexis”, here is “Victor, or the Child in the Forest”: “Midnight strikes! Sacred silence takes the place of daytime noise and funny songs settlers. Sleep spreads its gloomy wings over the surface of our hemisphere; he shakes off poppies and dreams from them ... Dreams ... How often only the suffering of the evil one continues! .. "And favorite ancient words flash before my eyes: rocks and oak groves, a pale moon and loneliness, ghosts and ghosts," erots ", roses and lilies, "Leprosy and playfulness of young rascals", lily hand, Lyudmila and Alina ... But the magazines with the names of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Lyceum student Pushkin. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her polonaises on the clavichord, her languid reading of poetry from Eugene Onegin. And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... Good girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, aristocratic-beautiful heads in old hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ...
I
... I am reminded of an early mild autumn. August was with warm rains, as if on purpose for sowing - with rains at the very time, in the middle of the month, around the feast of St. Lawrence. And "autumn and winter live well, if the water is still and rain on Lawrence." Then, in the Indian summer, a lot of cobwebs sat on the fields. This is also a good sign: "There are many shades in Indian summer - vigorous autumn" ... I remember an early, fresh, quiet morning ... I remember a large, all golden, dried and thinned garden, I remember maple alleys, the delicate aroma of fallen leaves and - the smell of Antonov apples, the smell honey and autumn freshness. The air is so clear, as if it is not at all, voices and the creak of carts are heard throughout the garden. These are tarkhans, bourgeois gardeners, hired peasants and poured apples in order to send them to the city at night - certainly at night when it is so glorious to lie on a wagon, look at the starry sky, smell the tar in the fresh air and listen to how carefully it creaks in the dark, a long train along the high road. A man pouring apples eats them with a juicy crackling one by one, but such is the institution - never a bourgeoisie will cut him off, but he will also say:
- Wali, eat your fill - there is nothing to do! At the drain, everyone drinks honey.
And the cool silence of the morning is broken only by the well-fed cackling of thrushes on coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the echoing thud of apples poured into measures and tubs. In the thinned garden, the road to a large hut, strewn with straw, and the hut near which the bourgeoisie acquired a whole farm over the summer is far visible. Everywhere it smells strongly of apples, here - especially. There are beds in the hut, there is a single-barreled gun, a green samovar, and dishes in the corner. Beside the hut there are matting, boxes, all sorts of frayed belongings, an earthen stove has been dug. At noon, a magnificent kulesh with bacon is cooked on it, a samovar is heated in the evening, and a long strip of bluish smoke spreads across the garden, between the trees. On holidays, there is a whole fair near the hut, and red hats flicker through the trees every minute. A crowd of lively one-yard girls in sundresses smelling strongly of paint, the "gentlemen" come in their beautiful and rough, savage costumes, a young head woman, pregnant, with a broad sleepy face and important, like a Kholmogory cow. There are “horns” on her head - the braids are laid on the sides of the crown and covered with several kerchiefs, so that the head looks huge; legs, in ankle boots with horseshoes, stand bluntly and firmly; the sleeveless jacket is pleated, the curtain is long, and the paneva is black and purple with stripes of brick color and lined at the hem with wide gold "prose" ...
- Household butterfly! - says the tradesman about her, shaking his head. - Now such are translated ...
And the boys in white manly shirts and short pantyhose, with white open heads, all fit. They walk in twos, threes, shallowly touching their bare feet, and look sideways at a shaggy shepherd dog tied to an apple tree. Of course, one buys, because the purchases are only for a penny or for an egg, but there are many buyers, trade is brisk, and a consumptive tradesman in a long frock coat and red boots is cheerful. Together with his brother, a burly, nimble half-idiot who lives with him "out of mercy", he trades with jokes, jokes and sometimes even "touches" the Tula harmonica. And until evening, people crowd in the garden, laughter and talk is heard near the hut, and sometimes the clatter of dance ...
By night, the weather becomes very cold and dewy. Breathing in the rye aroma of new straw and chaff on the threshing floor, you cheerfully walk home for supper past the garden rampart. Voices in the village or the creak of the gates can be heard in the cold dawn with extraordinary clarity. It gets dark. And here's another smell: there is a fire in the garden, and the cherry twigs are tugging with fragrant smoke. In the darkness, in the depths of the garden, there is a fabulous picture: as if in a corner of hell, a crimson flame is burning near the hut, surrounded by darkness, and someone's black silhouettes, as if carved from ebony, move around the fire, while gigantic shadows from them walk across apple trees. Either a black hand of several arshins will lie all over the tree, then two legs will be clearly drawn - two black pillars. And suddenly all this will slip from the apple tree - and a shadow will fall along the entire alley, from the hut to the very gate ...
Late at night, when the lights go out in the village, when the diamond seven-star Stozhar is already shining high in the sky, you will once again run into the garden. Rustling on dry foliage, like a blind man, you will get to the hut. There, in the clearing, it is a little brighter, and the Milky Way is whitening overhead.
- Is that you, barchuk? - someone quietly calls out from the darkness.
- Me. Are you still awake, Nikolai?
- We can't sleep. It must be too late? Look, there seems to be a passenger train going ...
We listen for a long time and distinguish tremors in the ground. The tremor turns into noise, it grows, and now, as if already behind the garden, the noisy beat of the wheels is quickly knocked out: rumbling and knocking, the train rushes ... closer, closer, louder and angrier ... And suddenly it begins to subside, go deaf, as if going into the ground ...
- And where is your gun, Nikolai?
- And here near the box, sir.
Throw up a single-barrel, heavy as a crowbar, and shoot with a fell swoop. A crimson flame with a deafening crack will flash to the sky, blind for a moment and extinguish the stars, and a vigorous echo will burst out in a ring and roll over the horizon, dying far, far away in the clear and sensitive air.
- Wow, great! - the tradesman will say. - Spend, spend, barchuk, otherwise it's just a disaster! Again all the muzzle on the shaft was shaken off ...
And the black sky is drawn with fiery stripes of shooting stars. You gaze for a long time into its dark blue depth, overflowing with constellations, until the ground floats under your feet. Then you will start up and, hiding your hands in your sleeves, you will quickly run along the alley to the house ... How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!
II
"Vigorous Antonovka - for a merry year." Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly: it means that bread has been ugly too ... I remember a good year.
At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking in a black way, you would open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly here and there, and you cannot bear it - you tell the horse to sit down as soon as possible, and you yourself will run wash in the pond. Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. She instantly drives away the laziness of the night, and after washing and having breakfast in the room with the workers with hot potatoes and black bread with coarse raw salt, with pleasure you feel the slippery skin of the saddle under you, driving along Vyselki to hunt. Autumn is the time for patronal holidays, and the people at this time are tidied up, happy, the view of the village is not at all the same as at another time. If the year is fruitful and a whole golden city rises on the threshing floor, and geese cackle loudly and harshly in the morning on the river, then it’s not bad at all in the village. In addition, our Vyselki from time immemorial, even from the time of grandfather, were famous for their "wealth". Old men and women lived in Vyselki for a very long time - the first sign of a rich village - and they were all tall, large and white, like a harrier. You just hear it: "Yes, - here Agafya waved eighty-three years old!" - or conversations like this:
- And when will you die, Pankrat? Perhaps you will be a hundred years old?
- How would you like to say, father?
- How old are you, I ask!
“I don’t know, sir.
- Do you remember Platon Apollonitch?
- Well, sir, I clearly remember.
- You see now. You, then, are no less than a hundred.
The old man, who stands stretched out in front of the master, smiles meekly and guiltily. Well, they say, to do, - to blame, healed. And he probably would have healed even more if he had not overeat on Petrovka onions.
I remember his old woman too. Everybody used to sit on a bench, on the porch, bent over, shaking his head, gasping for breath and holding onto the bench with his hands - all thinking about something. “About her good, I suppose,” the women said, because she had a lot of “good” in her chests. And she doesn't seem to hear; blindly looks somewhere into the distance from under sadly raised eyebrows, shakes his head and as if tries to remember something. She was a big old woman, all kind of dark. Paneva is almost of the last century, the chunks are dead, the neck is yellow and withered, the shirt with rosin joints is always white and white, “just put it in the coffin.” And near the porch, a large stone lay: she had bought herself for her grave, just like a shroud - an excellent shroud, with angels, with crosses and with a prayer printed on the edges.
There were also yards in Vyselki to match the old people: brick, built by their grandfathers. And the rich peasants - Savely, Ignat, Dron - had huts in two or three connections, because sharing in Vyselki was not yet fashionable. In such families, they drove bees, were proud of the gray-iron-colored Bityug stallion, and kept the estates in order. On the threshing floors thick and fat hemp-stands were dark, barns and barns stood, well-covered; in punka and barns there were iron doors, behind which were kept canvases, spinning wheels, new sheepskin coats, typesetting harness, measures, bound with copper hoops. Crosses were burned on the gates and on the sledges. And I remember that at times it seemed to me extremely tempting to be a man. When, it happened, you drive around the village on a sunny morning, you keep thinking about how well it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omets, and on a holiday to get up with the sun, under a thick and musical message from the village, wash near the barrel and put on a clean shirt, the same trousers and indestructible boots with horseshoes. If, I thought, to add to this a healthy and beautiful wife in festive attire and a trip to mass, and then lunch with a bearded father-in-law, lunch with hot lamb on wooden plates and with rushes, with honeycomb honey and mash, it’s impossible to wish for more. !
The warehouse of the average noble life, even in my memory, very recently, had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in terms of its homeliness and rural old-world prosperity. Such, for example, was the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, who lived twelve versts from Vyselki. While, it used to be, you get to this estate, it is already completely wrapped up. With dogs, in packs you have to ride at a pace, and you don't want to rush - it's so fun in an open field on a sunny and cool day! The terrain is flat, you can see far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun shines from the side, and the road, rolled by carts after the rains, is oily and glistens like rails. Fresh, lush green winter crops are scattered around in wide shoals. A hawk will rise from somewhere in the clear air and freeze in one place, fluttering its sharp wings. And clearly visible telegraph poles run away into the clear distance, and their wires, like silver strings, slide along the slope of the clear sky. On them sit kobchiks - completely black badges on music paper.
I did not know and did not see serfdom, but I remember that I felt it at my aunt Anna Gerasimovna's. You enter the courtyard and immediately feel that here it is still quite alive. The estate is small, but all old, solid, surrounded by century-old birches and willows. Outbuildings - low, but homely - are many, and they all seem to be merged from dark, oak logs under thatched roofs. It stands out for the size, or, better to say, the length of only the blackened human, from which the last Mohicans of the courtyard class peep out - some decrepit old men and women, a decrepit retired cook, similar to Don Quixote. All of them, when you enter the courtyard, pull themselves up and bow low and low. The gray-haired coachman, heading from the carriage shed to take the horse, takes off his hat at the shed and walks around the yard with his head bared. He drove with his aunt as a postman, and now he takes her to mass - in a carriage in winter, and in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those on which priests ride. My aunt's garden was famous for its neglect, nightingales, turtle doves and apples, and the house was famous for its roof. He stood at the head of the courtyard, right next to the garden, - the linden branches embraced him, - was small and squat, but it seemed that he would not even last, - he looked so thoroughly from under his unusually high and thick thatched roof, which was blackened and hardened from time to time. To me, its front façade was always alive: as if an old face looked out from under a huge cap with hollows of eyes - windows with mother-of-pearl glass from rain and sun. And on the sides of those eyes were porches - two old large porches with columns. Well-fed pigeons always sat on their pediment, while thousands of sparrows rained down from roof to roof ... And the guest felt comfortable in this nest under the turquoise autumn sky!
You will enter the house and first of all you will hear the smell of apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried linden blossom, which has been on the windows since June ... In all the rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is why that the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Everywhere there is silence and cleanliness, although it seems that chairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames never budged. And then a clearing of the throat is heard: the aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. A large Persian shawl is draped over her shoulders. She will come out importantly, but friendly, and now, amid endless conversations about antiquity, about inheritances, treats begin to appear: first "blew", apples, - Antonovskie, "underbelly", boletus, "prolific" - and then an amazing dinner : all through and through pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, marinades and red kvass, - strong and sweet, sweet ... The windows to the garden are raised, and from there it blows cheerful autumn coolness ...
III
In recent years, one thing has kept the dying spirit of the landowners alive - hunting.
Previously, such estates as the estate of Anna Gerasimovna were not uncommon. There were also decaying, but still living on a grand scale with a huge estate, with a garden of twenty dessiatines. True, some of these estates have survived to this day, but they no longer have life ... There are no triplets, no riding "Kirghiz", no hounds and greyhounds, no courtiers and no owner of all this - a landowner-hunter, like mine the late brother-in-law Arseny Semyonitch.
From the end of September our gardens and threshing floor were emptied, the weather, as usual, changed abruptly. The wind tore and ruffled the trees all day long, rains poured them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening between gloomy low clouds the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west; the air became clean and clear, and the sunlight sparkled dazzlingly between the foliage, between the branches, which moved like a living net and were agitated by the wind. Coldly and brightly in the north, above the heavy leaden clouds, the liquid blue sky shone, and from behind these clouds the ridges of snowy mountains-clouds slowly floated out. You stand at the window and think: "Perhaps, God willing, it will clear up." But the wind did not abate. He agitated the garden, tore a stream of human smoke continuously running from the chimney and again caught up with the ominous hair of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. Its shine was extinguished, the window closed into the blue sky, and the garden became deserted and boring, and again it began to sow rain ... at first quietly, carefully, then ever thicker and, finally, turned into a downpour with storm and darkness. A long, anxious night was falling ...
The garden emerged from such a bashing almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow subdued, resigned. But how beautiful he was when the clear weather set in again, the transparent and cold days of early October, the farewell festival of autumn! The preserved foliage will now hang on the trees even before the first winter. The black garden will shine through on the cold turquoise sky and humbly wait for winter, warming up in the sun's shine. And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with sprouted winter crops ... It's time to hunt!
And now I see myself in the estate of Arseny Semyonitch, in a large house, in a hall full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are many people - all people are tanned, with weathered faces, in jackets and long boots. They had just had a very satisfying dinner, flushed and excited by noisy conversations about the upcoming hunt, but they do not forget to finish their vodka after dinner. And in the yard the horn blows and the dogs howl at different voices. A black greyhound, Arseny Semyonitch's favorite, climbs onto the table and begins to devour the remains of a hare with sauce from the dish. But suddenly he lets out a terrible squeal and, knocking over the plates and glasses, rushes off the table: Arseny Semyonich, who has left the office with an arapnik and a revolver, suddenly deafens the audience with a shot. The hall fills even more with smoke, and Arseny Semyonitch stands and laughs.
- It's a pity that he missed! - he says, playing with his eyes.
He is tall, thin, but broad-shouldered and slender, and his face is a handsome gypsy. His eyes sparkle wildly, he is very dexterous, in a crimson silk shirt, velvet trousers and long boots. Having frightened both the dog and the guests with a shot, he humorously and importantly recites in a baritone:
It's time, it's time to saddle the nimble bottom
And throw a sonorous horn over your shoulders! -
and says loudly:
- Well, however, there is nothing to waste golden time!
I still feel how greedily and deeply the young breast breathed in the cold of a clear and damp day in the evening, when, it happened, you go with a noisy gang of Arseny Semyonitch, excited by the musical din of dogs thrown in the black forest, in some Red Bugor or Gremyachy Island, by its name alone, an exciting hunter. You ride an evil, strong and squat "Kirghiz", tightly restraining it with the reins, and you feel almost merged with it. He snorts, asks for a trot, rustles his hooves noisily on the deep and light carpets of black crumbling leaves, and each sound echoes in the empty, damp and fresh forest. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third, answered passionately and pitifully - and suddenly the whole forest thundered, as if it were all glass, from violent barking and shouting. A shot rang out in the midst of this din — and everything was “brewed up” and rolled off into the distance.
"Oh, take care!" - an intoxicating thought flashes in my head. You whine on a horse and, as if you have fallen off the chain, you will rush through the forest, without taking apart anything along the way. Only trees flicker in front of my eyes and molds in the face with mud from under the horse's hooves. You jump out of the forest, see a motley flock of dogs stretching out on the ground on the greens, and push the "Kirghiz" even harder across the beast, over the greens, swings and stubble, until, finally, you roll over to another island and disappear from the eyes of the flock together with your frenzied barking and moaning. Then, all wet and trembling with exertion, you sit down a foaming, wheezing horse and greedily swallow the icy dampness of the forest valley. In the distance, the cries of hunters and the barking of dogs freeze, and around you there is a dead silence. The half-open timber stands motionless, and it seems that you are in some kind of reserved palaces. It smells strong from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark. And the dampness from the ravines is becoming more and more noticeable, it gets colder and darker in the forest ... It's time to spend the night. But collecting the dogs after the hunt is difficult. For a long time and hopelessly dreary horns ring in the forest, for a long time screaming, cursing and screeching of dogs are heard ... Finally, already completely in the dark, a band of hunters rushes into the estate of some almost unknown bachelor-landowner and fills the entire courtyard of the estate with noise, which is illuminated by lanterns, candles and lamps brought out to greet the guests from home ...
It happened that such a hospitable neighbor had a hunt for several days. In the early morning dawn, in the icy wind and the first wet winter, they left for the forests and fields, and by dusk they returned again, all covered in mud, with flushed faces, smelling of horse sweat, the hair of a hunted animal, and the drinking began. It is very warm in a bright and crowded house after a whole day in the cold in the field. Everyone walks from room to room in unbuttoned jackets, randomly drinking and eating, noisily transmitting to each other their impressions of the killed hardened wolf, which, showing its teeth, rolling its eyes, lies with its fluffy tail thrown back in the middle of the hall and paints its pale and already cold blood on the floor. After vodka and food, you feel such sweet fatigue, such a bliss of youthful sleep, that you can hear a talk like through water. A weathered face is on fire, and if you close your eyes, the whole earth will float under your feet. And when you go to bed, in a soft feather bed, somewhere in an old corner room with an image and a lamp, the ghosts of fiery-variegated dogs flash before your eyes, the sensation of a leap will start all over your body, and you will not notice how you will drown along with all these images and sensations in a sweet and healthy dream, forgetting even that this room was once the prayer room of an old man, whose name is surrounded by gloomy serf legends, and that he died in this prayer room, probably on the same bed.
When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time. There is silence throughout the house. You can hear how the gardener walks carefully through the rooms, lighting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots. Ahead - a whole day of rest in the already silent winter estate. You will slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you will start working on books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, similar to church missal books, smell gloriously of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some pleasant sour mold, old perfume ... The notes in the margins, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose feather, are also good. You unfold the book and read: "A thought worthy of ancient and new philosophers, the color of reason and feelings of the heart" ... And involuntarily you will be carried away by the book itself. This is "The Noble Philosopher", an allegory published a hundred years ago by the sponsorship of some "holder of many orders" and printed in the printing house of the order of public charity, - a story about how a "nobleman philosopher, having the time and ability to reason, what a man's mind can ascend, once received a desire to compose a plan of light in a spacious place of his village "... Then you come across" the satirical and philosophical works of Monsieur Voltaire "and for a long time revel in the sweet and mannered syllable of translation:" My sovereigns! Erasmus composed in the sixth century a praise for tomfoolery (mannered pause - semicolon); You order me to exalt reason before you ... ”Then from Catherine's old days you will move on to romantic times, to almanacs, to sentimentally pompous and long novels ... The cuckoo jumps out of the clock and mockingly and sadly cuckoes over you in an empty house. And little by little a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into my heart ...
Here is “The Secrets of Alexis”, here is “Victor, or the Child in the Forest”: “Midnight strikes! Sacred silence takes the place of daytime noise and cheerful songs of the villagers. Sleep spreads its gloomy wings over the surface of our hemisphere; he shakes off poppies and dreams from them ... Dreams ... How often only the suffering of the evil one continues! .. "And favorite ancient words flash before my eyes: rocks and oak groves, a pale moon and loneliness, ghosts and ghosts," erots ", roses and lilies, "Leprosy and playfulness of young rascals", lily hand, Lyudmila and Alina ... But the magazines with the names of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Lyceum student Pushkin. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her polonaises on the clavichord, her languid reading of poetry from Eugene Onegin. And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... Good girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, aristocratic-beautiful heads in old hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ...
IV
The smell of Antonov's apples disappears from the landowners' estates. These days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a century has passed since then. The old people died in Vyselki, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonich shot himself ... The kingdom of the small-class people, impoverished to begging, is coming. But this beggarly small-scale life is also good!
So I see myself again in the village, in late autumn. The days are bluish and cloudy. In the morning I sit down in the saddle and with one dog, a gun and a horn, I leave for the field. The wind calls and hums in the muzzle of the gun, the wind blows hard towards, sometimes with dry snow. All day I wander across the empty plains ... Hungry and vegetated, I return to the manor at dusk, and my soul becomes so warm and joyful when the Vyselok lights flash and pulls from the manor with the smell of smoke and housing. I remember that at this time in our house they liked to "twilight", not to light a fire and conduct conversations in the semi-darkness. Upon entering the house, I find the winter frames already inserted, and this sets me up even more for a peaceful winter mood. In the servants' room the worker stokes the stove, and, as in childhood, I squat down beside a heap of straw, which already smells sharply of winter freshness, and I look first into the blazing stove, now at the windows, behind which, in blue, the dusk is sadly dying. Then I go to the human. It’s light and crowded: the girls chop cabbage, the chippings flicker, I listen to their fractional, friendly knocking and friendly, sad, cheerful village songs ... Sometimes some small-scale neighbor will come and take me to his place for a long time ... Good and small-local life!
The small one gets up early. Stretching tight, he gets out of bed and twirls a thick cigarette made of cheap, black tobacco, or just makhorka. The pale light of an early November morning illuminates a simple, bare-walled study, the yellow and hardened skins of foxes above the bed and a stocky figure in wide trousers and a loose-fitting blouse, while a sleepy Tatar-like face is reflected in the mirror. In a semi-dark, warm house, dead silence. Outside the door in the corridor, snoring is the old cook, who lived in the manor house as a girl. This, however, does not prevent the master from shouting hoarsely to the whole house:
- Lukerya! Samovar!
Then, putting on his boots, throwing a jacket over his shoulders and not buttoning the collar of his shirt, he goes out onto the porch. It smells like a dog in the locked entryway; Stretching lazily, yawning yawning and smiling, the hounds surround him.
- Burp! He says slowly, in an indulgent bass, and goes through the garden to the threshing floor. His chest breathes widely with the harsh air of dawn and the smell of a naked garden that has chilled over the night. Leaves curled up and blackened by frost rustle under boots in a birch alley, already half cut. Looming in the low gloomy sky, the cuddly jackdaws are sleeping on the ridge of the barn ... It will be a glorious day for hunting! And, stopping in the middle of the alley, the master gazes for a long time into the autumn field, at the deserted green winter crops along which the calves roam. Two hound bitches squeal at his feet, and Fill is already behind the garden: jumping over the prickly stubble, he seems to be calling and asking in the field. But what are you going to do with the hounds now? The animal is now in the field, on the fly, on the black trail, and in the forest he is afraid, because in the forest the wind rustles the leaves ... Oh, if only the greyhounds!
Threshing begins in the riga. The threshing drum hums slowly as it disperses. Lazily pulling the strings, resting their feet on the dung circle and swaying, the horses walk in the drive. In the middle of the drive, spinning on a bench, the driver sits and monotonously shouts at them, always whipping only one brown gelding with his whip, who is the laziest of all and is completely asleep on the move, since his eyes are blindfolded.
- Well, well, girls, girls! - the sedate clerk sternly shouts, putting on a wide linen shirt.
The girls hastily scatter the current, run around with stretchers and brooms.
- With God blessing! - says the handler, and the first bunch of starnovka, launched for testing, flies into the drum with a buzz and squeal and rises upward from under it in a disheveled fan. And the drum hums more and more persistently, the work begins to boil, and soon all the sounds merge into the general pleasant noise of threshing. The master stands at the gates of the barn and watches as red and yellow shawls, hands, rakes, straw flicker in its darkness, and all this moves and fusses about rhythmically to the sound of a drum and the monotonous cry and whistle of the driver. Proboscis flies like clouds to the gate. The master stands, all gray from him. Often he glances in the field ... Soon, soon the fields will turn white, soon the winter will cover them ...
Zazimok, first snow! There are no greyhounds, there is nothing to hunt with in November; but winter comes, "work" with the hounds begins. And here again, as in the old days, the small people come to each other, drink with their last money, and disappear for whole days in the snow fields. And in the evening on some remote farm, far away, the windows of the wing gleam in the darkness of a winter night. There, in this little wing, clouds of smoke are floating, tallow candles are dimly burning, the guitar is being tuned ...
At dusk the wind took a spree,
Opened my gates wide, -
someone starts in a chest tenor. And others awkwardly, pretending to be joking, pick up with sad, hopeless prowess:
Opened my gates wide
The road was covered with white snow ...
“... I am reminded of an early mild autumn. August was with warm rains ... Then, in the Indian summer, a lot of cobwebs sat on the fields ... I remember an early, fresh, quiet morning ... I remember a large, all golden, dried and thinned garden, I remember maple alleys, the delicate scent of fallen leaves and - the smell of Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness. The air is so clean, as if it is not at all ... And the cool silence of the morning is broken only by the well-fed cackling of blackbirds on coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the echoing thud of apples poured into measures and tubs. In the thinned garden, one can see the path to a large hut, strewn with straw. " It is home to bourgeois gardeners who have rented a garden. "On holidays, there is a whole fair near the hut, and red hats are constantly flickering behind the trees." Everyone comes for apples. Boys come up in white manly shirts and short pantyhose, with white open heads. They walk in twos, threes, shallowly touching their bare feet, and look sideways at a shaggy shepherd dog tied to an apple tree. There are many buyers, trade is brisk, and the consumptive tradesman in a long frock coat and red boots is oars. By night, the weather becomes very cold and dewy. It gets dark. And here's another smell: there is a fire in the garden, and the cherry twigs are tugging with fragrant smoke. "" Vigorous Antonovka - for a merry year. " Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly: it means that bread has been ugly too ... I remember a harvest year. At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking like black, you would open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly here and there ... and run to wash on the pond. Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. " The author describes the village and its inhabitants, buildings, way of life. We read further: “I did not know and did not see serfdom, but I remember that I felt it at my aunt Anna Gera-simovna's. You enter the courtyard and immediately feel that here it is still quite alive. The estate is small ... It stands out for its size, or, better to say, only a blackened man's length, from which the last Mohicans of the courtyard class peep out - some decrepit old men and women, a decrepit retired cook, like Don Quixote. All of them, when you enter the courtyard, pull themselves up and bow low and low ... You enter the house and first of all you will hear the smell of apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried linden blossom, which has been on the windows since June. .. In all the rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is because the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Everywhere there is silence and cleanliness, although it seems that chairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames never budged. And then a clearing of the throat is heard: the aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. She has a large Persian shawl draped over her shoulders ... ”“ Since the end of September our gardens and threshing floor have been empty, the weather, as usual, has changed abruptly. The wind tore and ruffled the trees all day long, rains poured them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening between gloomy low clouds the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west; the air became clean and clear, and the sunlight sparkled dazzlingly between the foliage, between the branches, which moved like a living net and were agitated by the wind. Coldly and brightly in the north, above heavy leaden clouds, the liquid blue sky was shining, and because of these clouds the ridges of snowy mountains-clouds were slowly floating out ... A long, disturbing night came ... From such a beating, the garden emerged almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow subdued, resigned. But how beautiful he was when the clear weather set in again, the transparent and cold days of early October, the farewell festival of autumn! The preserved foliage will hang on the trees even before the first winter. The black garden will shine through the cold turquoise sky and humbly wait for winter, warming up in the sun's shine. ” “When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time ... You will slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you will start reading books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, similar to church missal books, smell gloriously of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some pleasant sour mold, old perfume ... The notes in their margins, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose feather, are also good ... And involuntarily you will be carried away by the book itself. This is "The Noble Philosopher" ... the story of how "the nobleman-philosopher, having the time and ability to reason, to which the human mind can ascend, once received the desire to compose a plan of light in the vast area of his village" ... "" The smell of Antonov's apples disappears from the landowners' estates. These days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a century has passed since then. The old people died in Vyselki, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonich shot himself ... The kingdom of the small-class people, impoverished to begging, is coming. But this beggarly small-scale life is also good! So I see myself again in the village, deep settled. The days are bluish and cloudy. In the morning I sit down in the saddle and with one dog, a gun and a horn, I leave for the field. The wind calls and hums in the muzzle of the gun, the wind blows hard towards, sometimes with dry snow. All day I wander across the empty plains ... Hungry and vegetated, I return to the manor at dusk, and my soul becomes so warm and joyful when the Vyselok lights flash and pulls out of the manor with the smell of smoke, housing ... small-land neighbor and will take me to his place for a long time ... Good and small-land life! "
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