Mikhail went to the machine and began to type the order. For the whole empty hall the roar of the car echoed, and Misha felt a little ashamed and uncomfortable. The citizen policeman looked at him in a strange way, as if he had committed some kind of offense, and the boy decided not to look in his direction. He turned his gaze to the old woman who smiled sweetly at him.
The old woman was quite decrepit. In each of her wrinkles, whole segments of life were visible, and this frightened the boy. He did not often think about his future, did not think about what he would bring into this life, what would remain after him. And for some reason he hoped that at least something significant in its own way would remain of this sweet grandmother.
Misha was distracted from contemplation of the woman by the sound of the machine about the readiness of the drink. I would like to call it coffee, but my tongue didn’t turn. Misha burned his own with hot liquid, and although the coffee did not taste so terrible, the boy's face tightened and looked like raisins.
The coffee had already cooled down, there was very little left on the bottom, and Misha threw it into the trash can. At this time, it was just announced that the electric train to Moscow is arriving at the third platform on the right side.
At eleven twenty-one, Mikhail entered an electric train and sat in the center of the car in one of the seats by the window. There was nothing to be seen on the street, but it was cozy, and they climbed into my head different kinds thoughts.
For some reason, this old woman came to mind again. Her appearance was so standard that the boy was surprised that it really happened. Surely she has children and grandchildren who, as rarely as he himself, come to visit her. I felt sorry for her, and Misha thought about his grandfather in order to drive this sweet smiling sad old woman out of his thoughts. It was much easier to think about my grandfather. Immediately memories flooded him: how they lay in haystacks, how his grandfather drove him in a cart pulled by a horse named Rainbow, how grandfather Kolya took him fishing, and how Misha got sick after that, and Baba Nyura drank hot tea with honey and jam. I also remembered hunting, and how they gathered mushrooms, and how they swam in the river in the same forest.
The cold night frightened with its shadows and sounds. The forest was visible from the station. Misha stood for a while on the platform, “tasted” the local air and, picking up his bags, went to his grandfather's house. The road was only partially lit by lanterns, which gave a special charm, and thinking about it, the boy quickened his pace. Approaching almost the house itself, he called his grandfather and said that he was already approaching the gate. A minute later, the gate opened slightly, and a black head, or rather its silhouette, peeped out of it, then the whole body came out - grandfather Kolya. Seeing his grandson in the darkness, Nikolai, without holding back, rushed off with a cry "Bear!" right at the boy.
And then, as he is imbued with this spirit, as he breathes deeply, smiles, throws the bags, and just runs towards his grandfather with open arms, shouting "Grandpa!" The two who missed them hugged and burst out laughing, Nikolai kissed his grandson on the temple, and he, in turn, hugged him tightly by the neck. Because of laughter and shouting, the lights came on in the neighboring houses, and another silhouette ran out from behind the gate, only fuller and wearing an apron.
- Rumbled here, bawlers! Come on into the house, the night is outside!
Misha detached himself from his grandfather and ran to his aunt. He also hugged her, kissed her on the cheek, she laughed even louder than Misha and Nikolai himself, and received reciprocal kisses on the cheek.
Having dragged into the house the bags of his grandchildren, thrown right on the road, Nikolai began to ask him about how he lives, how his health, how he studies, how his mother, and did not forget about the bride. Nyura put the kettle on the stove and drove Misha into the bathhouse that was specially melted for his arrival, and when the bath procedures were completed, all three sat down to drink tea with cookies and pancakes, the most delicious pancakes.
While Misha was telling the old people about life in the city over these five years, trying not to miss anything, a healthy man ran into the kitchen. striped cat named Mattress. Sniffing the guest and, apparently recognizing, he jumped on his lap and purred. Misha stroked the lover of sour cream and with the words "It's already the first hour of the night" went to bed.
There was no extra bed in the house, and Nikolai and Nyura were against the boy sleeping on the couch, so it was decided to send Mikhail to the attic in the bathhouse, where it was warm, and stood old bed... Having dragged all the necessary bags there, Misha took off his pants, and then he thought, and took off his T-shirt too, remaining in his underwear. Without thinking twice, he climbed under the covers, and, looking at the clear starry sky through the window of the bathhouse, fell asleep.
I liked the story about the village of Gleb Shulpyakov, I would like to invite all readers of our site to read “My house in the village”.
The theme is dear and familiar - the country one. Questions about village life remain controversial - and some of our publications confirm this. Articles published 2-3 years ago - and now appear recent comments that only losers live in the village, or vice versa, only in the village does a person acquire the meaning of life and truly feel the passage of time.
Someone agrees to live in the wilderness and enjoys the minutes lived near nature, someone is perplexed how you can sit in the garden for half your life, not seeing or hearing anyone around, except for the neighbor's woman Zina, or the drunken Lenka, like Shulpyakov in the story.
Another interesting look at village life. For subscribers of the magazine will be available PDF version the story "My Happy Village" on.
Happy reading!
MY HAPPY VILLAGE
The modern man does not keep up with the time - the scenery changes faster than he gets used to them. Nothing remains from this time either in memory or in thoughts. The past is empty. Even things disappear from everyday life without ever getting old. “Where has everything disappeared? Why was it? " Also the leitmotif of life.
In my desk drawer lie charging device... The wires are tangled in a ball, it is clear that no one uses adapters. “I ought to throw it out ...” I scratch the back of my head. But somehow I'm sorry. I give the adapters to my son, he builds gas stations out of them. But pity, pity.
Last year I bought a hut in the village.
"In the wilderness, real ..." - I tell you.
“Well, where is your“ wilderness ”? - Friends don't believe me. - Kratovo? Ilyinka? "
I show on the map: "Behind Volochkom, in Tverskaya ..."
Friends nod, but for some reason they are in no hurry to visit.
"Will you be in Moscow at this time?" - at the other end is a woman's voice.
I figure it out in my mind, I think: “No, I will be in the village. Let's go in a week. "
"Oh, you have a house in the village!" - the pipe cracks.
“How good it is - home, nature. I would like to…"
"Hut! - I shout. - Hut! "
End of communication.
Last year I bought a hut in the village. In our village there is no mobile communication, anywhere and not at all. True, the drunk Lech (aka Lyonka) claims that one sticks behind Shlyopa's hut. I crawl along the wall for half a day, steaming with a nail of my boots. Damn it - no, it doesn't.
At first, the palm mechanically fumbles through the pocket, but on the second day, the phone was forgotten. I think about the pipe when it's time to get in touch. The phone is lying in the wood by the couch - it must have fallen out of my pocket when I was fiddling with the stove. With amazement Robinson, I examine the buttons, the dead screen.
I disappear in the village for weeks, and I still need a connection. Report to your own that I'm alive and well, I'm not starving and I'm not cold. That he was not attacked by predators, did not drown in a swamp and did not fall into a well, did not injure himself with an ax or a pitchfork, did not get crazy in a bathhouse and did not fight with Leha-Lenka.
"The main thing is to wait for the coals to burn out ..."
"The false mushroom in the cut darkens ..."
"Boil water ..."
"Ax at night in the house - just in case ..."
"Put a stone on top of the mice ..."
Naive people.
There is a mobile connection on Sergeikovskaya Gorka, but a foreign operator catches it there. Mine catches in the direction of Firovo, but there is a bad road into the slush - it was smashed by timber trucks when they were taking out the stolen timber. And now, a month later, I find out that there is a connection in one more place. And that all the operators are working there.
There are six huts in our village, it is practically a farm. Two families live all year round, one moves to Volochek for the winter, summer residents hang out in two huts (me and another type, a well-known old-timer). The last one, Shlepina, is empty.
- And where is the owner? - I look through the broken windows of the mountains of bottles and flaws.
- He strangled himself, - Lech replies indifferently.
There is also a horse Dasha, a cow, a calf and two dogs. One dog, Lekhina, looks like a cartoon character, the same black and haggard, with gray bald patches. For myself, I call the dog "Volchok". He sits on a leash and jumps out over the fence when you walk by - like a devil out of a snuffbox. And the second is called Vetka, she runs freely.
A country road leads through the forest to the village - from main road where is the cemetery. The graveyard, of which there are many in any region, is half-abandoned. Crosses stick out crookedly from the nettle, peeling enamel gleams in the bushes. Rust turns black through the riotous, special graveyard juiciness. Pieces brickwork, church fence. The landscape around is to match the churchyard. At first, the feeling of scarcity, inconspicuousness, deafness incredibly oppresses me. Why did I even get in here? But this impression is, of course, imaginary. To feel the latent, self-contained and self-contained charm of these lands, incomparable with the picturesque hillsides somewhere in Oryol region- or the fields behind Vladimir, - it is necessary that a person forget about the landscape, not think about it. I did not expect anything from him, did not demand anything. And then the landscape itself will open to a person.
The relief is squat, creeping. The upper line is understated - this is how a low shed overgrown with grass looks like, or a hut half buried in the ground. And there is a feeling of awkwardness; disproportionate to what you see; against the background of what you are. The forest is impassable and dense, a real windbreak. The clouds are going so low that you want to bend your head. The landscape lines are dotted and do not converge anywhere. Nothing that can be called a picture of nature does not form. It seems that discarded and scattered elements of other landscapes have been piled here. And so they left it.
In reality, it is a dome, a roof. Top of a huge geological dome. Highest point The Valdai Upland (450 meters above the level) lies in a neighboring village, that is, my hut - it's scary to think - hangs a little higher than the Ostankino tower. And then you see everything with different eyes. Everything becomes clear, explainable. After all, this is an endless gentle descent - around you. The slope along which forests and hills slide. Hence the view, its character is fragmented, like a landscape in the valley of a mountain pass. The sensation of height overtakes suddenly. At the point where the relief shoots out like a spring. There are not many such places, but they exist. It is impossible to open them on purpose, although I know a couple of villages on the hills with absolutely Himalayan views. You just go to the edge of a huge wasteland and - again! - the rollers of the hills rolled from under their feet, the screen of the sky parted. The backdrop drove over the horizon, and a huge stage, as big as the ridge of a fabulous whale, opened up. And this whale - with copses and villages on the ridge - is visible.
Kit, stage, screen - yes. But. Specific landmarks and notches were required. Serifs on the ground, identification marks. Do not overshoot a turn, do not drive through a fork, do not hit a pothole. Here ahead are the Roman ruins of the Flax Factory, which means that soon there will be a “problematic section of the road”. But the two-tiered church, what remains of it (the box) is a fork. Abandoned House of Culture, from it across the road a general store.
A memorial cross welded from reinforcement flashes by the road.
- Slap to death ... - Leha-Lyonka gloomily comments. - By car.
I obediently press on the signal.
Behind the quarry, turn, where the cemetery. The last segment. I roll into an alley barely noticeable in the dark, slow down. I look around. In the cemetery, two or three figures wander between the graves, like somnambulists, putting their hand to their cheeks. I turn off the headlights, silently return. They talk in an undertone, to themselves. Their faces, illuminated by a strange blue light, twinkle in the darkness like jellyfish. With a shrug, I turn around. Finally I peer into the cemetery twilight - no one, it was quiet. However, after a minute, a rustle is heard upstairs, on the road. A man comes out of the bushes onto the highway, then another. Third. And they disperse in silence.
I automatically go to the phone (neurosis, familiar to everyone). There is a signal.
The hut is a mechanism that assimilates time. So it seems to me, in any case, the first days. Natural aging of the material - how crowns settle or a crack stretches intricately - how a boulder goes into the ground, on which a porch - how wood becomes a stone, where you can't drive nails anymore - in all this I see time, its uniform, layer by layer, postponement into the past. Where from, how from annual rings tree, the present and the future are taking shape.
In addition, Leha-Lenka, his alcohol cycles - their amplitude is also striking in some natural constancy and predictability. It is extremely important for me to know this phase in the village, because on Leh in the village there is an electrician, firewood and a horse. This phase reads well with the first snow. If the traces lead from the hut to the bathhouse, it means that the neighbor is being "nursed". If the snow is trodden to the neighbor's hut - Lech is at the start, but he will still knit a bast for a couple of days. If the tracks are in the forest, Lech does not drink, sticks out in the forest, chopping wood.
Well, if the village is chaotically trampled - as, for example, today - Lech is at its peak. During this period, he is not so much dangerous as annoying. To get rid of his company, I always keep a bubble of cheap vodka and a glass of beer in the trunk. Vodka must be shoved in the evening, when he drives up to the "master" "with the arrival." She will "beat" him at night. And beer - in the morning, because from a hangover he will definitely be dragged as soon as he sees the smoke over the roof (“Who gave Lech a drink?”). As a rule, he organizes the leisure of the next evening for himself. That is, it simply disappears from the village.
My country life is insignificant, but boring. There are no serious matters, but: train and sweep, plug and dry, raise and prop, replace and adjust, heat - and so on and so forth.
Time in such matters flies quickly. Here the neighbor Tanya walked past the windows into the forest - and now she is returning with a full basket. The morning fog, porous and transparent, has just disappeared from the field - as from the other end a thick evening fog is already creeping in. But the strange thing is, it's not burdensome, fast time filled with insignificant trifles - time that flows away imperceptibly and painlessly - leaves in you a feeling of weight, significance. Not marked by any feats, it does not go into the sand, does not pass in vain - like that, city time. And it goes straight into the past, into its underground. Where it accumulates and matures.
And then a neighbor says to me:
- Listen to Lehu, go to the cemetery!
(During a binge, he goes to the third person.)
- Lech will not advise bad.
An old quilted jacket stands on his back with a stake, Lech looks like a hunchback. In his pocket, diluted alcohol, the main village swill, gurgles.
- Why are you suffering!
Attached, wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
Pokes an extinct match towards the country road.
It's dark in the forest, but when the lane goes out into the alley, you can see the tops of the pines, painted red by the sunset. This alley is birch-pine, birch-pine is "lordly", it was planted for walks across the field. So, by at least, says the legend. The field has long been overgrown with a birch grove, four walls and a pond with keys remained from the estate.
And the old trees, crooked and gnarled, stand.
On the way to the cemetery, I like to imagine how nice it is to continue the alley to our farm. In the village, at first, people are generally a little Manilov, so I have a huge list of urgent plans. For example, I definitely need:
Arrange a spring;
Make a bath on the river;
Attach a veranda to the hut;
Set up a bath;
Patch the leaking roof (urgently!);
And build a Buddhist stupa on the field.
To patch the roof, you need to find a teetotal man, because the drinker has “no time” plus “fears” - he will not climb the roof, he will be afraid to fall (despite the fact that yesterday this person lay in a ditch for a day during the night frosts). And so great luck, after a week of traveling, a non-drinker was found. This is Foka, aka Volodya, a man of about fifty who lives behind the Flax Plant.
- Endova! - This Foka shouts at me happily, looking around the roof. - Your endova is flowing, do you understand?
I goggle, but I can't see anything. "What the hell is a valley?"
Then Foka folds the endova from the newspaper. Explains to me how they are arranged and that in order to overlap them, the slope of the entire roof must be reshaped. I follow his big knobby fingers, real claws - these are the hands of a person who knows how to hold an instrument.
When I arrive a week later, Fock and the boy have blocked everything. We are calculating. Putting the thousandth bills in his wallet, Foka says that he is going to get married. And that's a little nervous.
- Young, from the city. - He looks at the floor. - She asked me to buy music for the car ...
I wish him the best of luck.
In the fall, I plant a pine tree behind the house. Endova and pine - this is where my manilovism ends. I will not do anything else, well, them. Thus, the great inertia of country life acts on a person. Strength accumulated over the centuries, which resists any undertaking, if this undertaking does not have direct relationship to the essential, that is, to warmth and food.
However, a bath is essential. You don't run into a neighbor, it's awkward - and it is fabulously expensive to build a new log house. Another option, you can take the old one. One such, abandoned, is in the neighboring village. And here we - me and Lech - are going.
The bathhouse looks very scary. All covered with soot petals (heated in black), crooked, with the roof pulled down on one side. But Lech is calm. If you change a couple of crowns, he says, and put in a new stove, it will be fine.
- Whose bath? - I ask just in case.
- Shlyopin.
- I got drunk in the bathhouse.
The cemetery is dark, birches rustle overhead.
Stretching out my hand with the pipe, I walk like a sapper along the fences.
Nothing, zero. Empty again.
I take a step between the grassy mounds, go around one grave, the second.
There is crackling and rustling in the tube. The signal between the abandoned churchyard and the capital is about to improve. "Hello!" - is finally heard at the other end. "Hello!"
Heat spreads through the body through the heels resting on the heated bed. The flies have woken up, they are buzzing - it means that the hut is heated as it should, enough until morning.
I am reading "Philosophy of the Common Cause" by Nikolai Fedorov.
“… All people are called to know themselves as sons, grandchildren, descendants of their ancestors. And such knowledge is history, not knowing people unworthy of memory .... "
“… Truly world sorrow is lamentation over the lack of love for the fathers and the excess of love for oneself; it is grief about the fall of the world, about the removal of the son from the father, the effect from the cause ... "
"... unity without fusion, difference without discord is the exact definition of" consciousness "and" life "..."
"... if religion is the cult of ancestors, or the collective prayer of all living for all the dead, then at present there is no religion, for there are no cemeteries at the churches, and the abomination of desolation reigns at the cemeteries themselves ..."
"... for cemeteries, as well as for museums, it is not enough to be just a repository, a place of storage ..."
“… The desolation of cemeteries is a natural consequence of the decline of kinship and its transformation into citizenship… who should take care of the monuments, who should return the hearts of sons to their fathers? Who should restore the meaning of the monuments? "
"... to save the cemeteries, a radical coup is needed, the center of gravity of society must be transferred to the cemetery ..."
The speech in the book is thick, unbreakable - the thought is scattered over each capsule, it is almost impossible to pull out a quote. And outside of speech, the phrase looks ridiculous, absurd (what does it mean “to transfer life to a cemetery?” How do you imagine it?). Meanwhile, the speech in "Philosophy" leaves no doubt about the absolute, undeniable truth. It is precisely this conviction of Fedorov that he is fascinated by his own righteousness. Not speculative, logical - but internal, personal. As if it was a matter of his life and death, literally.
But why does this question haunt me too?
“Why,” I ask myself, “when they began to re-publish Russian philosophy, did Nikolai Fyodorov pass me by? Why didn't I notice him? "
I remember the end of the eighties, a real book boom. Crowds at stalls, queues in stores. "Whom did I read then?"
It was Berdyaev - of course. On newsprint, paperbacks. Thousands of copies, which were still not enough. I read it like a revelation, in one gulp.
"So this is the country I live in!" Gasped with excitement.
"That's what her plan is!"
In the book exchange departments (there were such at second-hand booksellers) Berdyaev could be exchanged for Agatha Christie or Chase. I remember very well this feeling - the transformation of water into wine, nothing into gold. Or buy a crazy copy at a newsstand on Pushkinskaya, where "Moscow News" (revelation at the kiosk, ok).
Why exactly Berdyaev? Why did he first, and then others (Rozanov, Losev, Florensky, Shpet)? I explain this quite simply - by the fact that the young man needed a substantiation of the country, its meaning. It seemed to the young man that the connection with that country would be restored immediately after the collapse of the Evil Empire. That I will have a great past - after all, what I taught in the "History of the USSR-KPSS", I could not call the past. Then it seemed to me that with the fall of the USSR, the program for the implementation of the country's super-intention, which Berdyaev spoke about, would start automatically. Can't help but turn on - after they lived here. What kind of firewood has been broken.
And then Fedorov, a museum in the cemeteries. Sons, fathers. Trinity. Crop failures. Too phantasmagoric - and at the same time very commonplace, everyday. In comparison with Berdyaev's sorcery about the fate of the Motherland, about super ideas. About the mission.
But a quarter of a century passes, and a circle - who would have thought! - is closed. The country is plunging into the familiar and therefore not very horrible dream... Into the gray party hibernation, occasionally interrupted by terrorist attacks and show trials. Olympiads and anniversaries. Fires and man-made disasters... Through hastily, light ink sketched in the 90s, the text of "new, free Russia" in the people of the older generation more and more clearly show through the old dogmas hammered into the Komsomol youth. They are brighter and dimmer, yes. But they are, have not gone anywhere. Preserved - there, on the hardest of the discs of our consciousness. And you realize with horror that these people have not acquired anything else - for all the allotted time. They didn't change, they stayed with their recent past. They preferred him to the future.
Long forgotten are Berdyaev, Rozanov, and Florensky. There is no illusion that the story can go in the direction they showed. That Russian Europeanism is possible not only in individual minds, not exclusively on paper. The prophet was not Dostoevsky, but Chaadaev. Mission Impossible - there is neither an object nor a subject of this mission. The old material is irrevocably destroyed, and the new one is modified. What's the mission here? After everything that has happened over the past ten years, there is almost no doubt left.
"Forgive me, fathers-philosophers - they did not justify."
And then one day, on the way to the village, I stopped in Torzhok. I collect food, and at the same time I look into the bookstore to buy some read (the village returns the pleasure of reading). And here in the bookstore I accidentally come across a volume of Fedorov. And I come to the village, open the book.
My God, how simple and correct everything is. How exactly - it is worth changing the "cemetery" to the "past" ("... to save the past, a radical revolution is needed, the center of gravity of society must be transferred to the past ...").
"Where is my past?" I ask myself.
"Who will inherit this abandoned churchyard and ruined church?"
"Flax Factory and House of Culture?"
"Rotten huts?"
"Who is the heir to the time when all this stood untouched?"
"And who - when was it destroyed?"
“What past should be taken as a basis, as a model? Beyond the starting point? "
The tangle of questions seems insoluble. So that's where this passion comes from - nullifying the past! Until recently, I was ready to explain this phenomenon by the general Russian drunkenness (according to the principle "it is better not to remember yesterday"). But I'm afraid things are stronger than Russian drunkenness.
And one more question: if this is not our cemetery, then where is our cemetery?
I slowly walk back down the alley to the village.
The trees in the sky are swept with stars, behind the forest a quarry knocks, emphasizing the silence, which in these places is deafening.
Man lives in the past, I tell myself. And literally, everyday life - the past as accumulated experience. Nothing except own experience- that is, the past - a person simply does not have. And this experience, this past is a model of the future, because your every step in time is motivated by this experience. But societies and countries live in exactly the same way. Civilizations are standing. By declaring your relationship to the past, you are showing an estimated future. That which you undertake to correspond further. What to stick with.
There are countries where monuments of one era are being demolished in order to erect monuments of another - the former Soviet Central Asia. And I understand where such a country is heading. In European countries, each brick is numbered, the past cannot be moved - and everything is clear here too. But what to expect from a country whose past is in such a state? Half-destroyed or under-restored, not completely destroyed or half-abandoned, shimmering - it presents an excellent opportunity: not to be responsible for today and tomorrow. Such a past can be crushed to suit oneself, interpreted as it is convenient - according to the situation. And what? Very convenient, know-how of our time. Fedorov never dreamed.
Consciousness lives on memory - well, including. By an effort to find, to restore the past. This is one of higher forms his activity, his way of being. Self-reproduction method. Especially if we consider this activity without emotional stress. But I also cannot give up this burden - the emotions associated with the past. I don’t want to, I don’t want to! This is one of the forms of my spiritual life, and the most life-giving one. Of those that only keep me here on the surface. In life.
You can nullify the past, deprive memory of material, and consciousness - of life forms. You can supplant the experience of any loss, including the main loss - the past (or fathers, as Fedorov would say), with a positive stimulus, as long as this stimulus reaches the consumer without interruption, as in consumer societies and it happens. And then there will be no need for any cemeteries, no past. But is a person ready to agree to this with common thought?
Fedorov said: the common memory of the past makes people "united", but not "merged", "different", but not "rosy". By the way, modern civilizations are based on this idea, brilliant in its simplicity. But the philosopher could not foresee the scale, scope. Genetic disaster Soviet years and post-Soviet mixing of peoples. Great migration, which nullified the past of the Hellenes and Jews and mixed them. What does a Moscow janitor from Turkmenistan consider to be his past? a Moscow clerk from Penza? Where is his cemetery for a Moscow artist from Baku or a Moscow poet from Tashkent?
- Why? he wheezes from the other end of the village. - Leha can be, a friend came to Leha!
Waddling in my direction, he scoops up invisible puddles with his left boot. A bottle is sticking out of his pocket. Climbing up the hill with me, he squats. Swinging, lights a cigarette. We silently watch the evening fog creep out onto the field - in long felt braids. A horse wanders in the fog, but from here you can only see its head and croup. The treetops in the pink sky gradually merge into black Gothic line. The spectacle is incredibly picturesque, reference, descended from the screen - and at the same time natural, with mosquitoes and smells, Lech's wheezing and the distant thud of a quarry. And from all this, incompatible and at the same time visual - and from the excess of oxygen, of course - my head is spinning.
- Why are you alone? Che without a friend? - I involuntarily adopt his intonation.
- Looks at porn. - Lech squints at the forest. - Put it on video.
He looks me over, pushes me:
- Go see what you are ...
I have never been to Leha's hut and therefore I go, of course. I'm ready for the worst, but no, the hut is heated and clean. No alcoholic discord, only a trace of the general poverty, thinness, "worn out" of life lies on all subjects. Lekhina's mother is busy behind the stove in the kitchen. That Lech was living with an old mother, I learned quite recently - in the village she was completely invisible. And I also recognize Lekhino's past by slips of the tongue, fragments. Worked in Volochek at a factory until it closed; when he drank everything that he had in the city, he moved to his mother for permanent residence ("while the mother is alive") - where he lives. This is the most common option in the village: you can drink without working while you have your maternal pension (a lump of alcohol costs fifty dollars, a snack grows in the garden, firewood is free in the forest - what else?). If a mother drinks with her son, their chances of survival are equal, that is, equally minimal. If he doesn't drink, the son dies earlier.
From the room to the left, indeed, unambiguous screams and groans can be heard. I pull the curtain aside and enter. No one - just in front of the TV, where body parts shudder, there is an empty chair. I pull down the curtain, quietly go out into the street.
- Liked? - Lech sits in the same position, but knee-deep in fog.
- You have a good friend.
“Reliable,” he agrees.
- The name of?
In the morning, getting out of bed, you lower your feet into the chilled, scalding air - the first frosts. But in the evening I filled the couch with wood, and now they, light and dry, are engaged from the first match. The stove is heated, you can not get up, lie still - until it warms up. But we have to get up, because today we are going after Lyuska. So we decided, summer residents, to settle Lyuska in the village, because this time everyone except Leha will go to the city for the winter, and leaving a horse on Lech (and indeed leaving Lech in general) is dangerous. And Lyuska is a reliable and skillful woman. Non-drinker. She does not live very well in her village, since she does not want to perform the functions of a lonely woman - to lend for vodka or pour herself. So we invite her to spend the winter with us, where there is no one, quietly.
- Well, maybe Lech ... - I say.
- With the cattle there is a language ... - Luska nods seriously.
I look inquiringly at my neighbor. When Lyuska dives into the underground, he says that in a past life she was a cowgirl, that is, she worked with a whip and shouting. And that the drunks are afraid of her.
- There will be no problems, boys, - a shaggy head protrudes from the underground.
And the "boys" are transporting her cat and transistor, a dozen flower pots and pans, felt boots and skis. And Lyuska follows on her antique bicycle.
- Lucy, dishes. - I open the doors, show. - Use it.
- I have my own, boy, - what are you.
Jars of pickles are lined up on a bench in the hallway. Lyuska hangs colorful curtains on the windows and the stove, and it immediately becomes cozy in the hut. Table lamp, lampshade. Flowers on the windows.
- Well! - swings out the window.
Lyokha jumps back and, muttering angrily, leaves.
Looking at how cleverly and neatly, delicately Lyuska settled down - with what ease she takes on such a burden, to spend the winter in someone else's hut, to graze someone else's village - how embarrassing she is because we still doubt the correctness of what we are doing - suddenly it comes to me into the head that we are, perhaps, a righteous man. The one without which the village is not worth. Only such a borrowed one. Leased.
On the last day before leaving, an old-timer neighbor decides to take me for a ride around the surrounding villages. The end point is Fedorov Dvor. It's about twenty kilometers from us, but it will take about two hours along the roads torn by "tonars". "If we pass at all ..."
The road is two pits flooded with water, where grass and tops of firs are reflected. The neighbor fingering the levers in the car like a rosary. And the jeep climbs slowly but surely. We stand in the middle of a huge forest clearing. There is a strip of forest on the hill. There are several pine groves in the grass, as if the forest around them had been cut down, but these pines were forgotten. Gradually the eye discerns burial mounds about five or six meters high hidden in the pines. There are five of them in total, correct shape - isosceles triangle in the context. In some places the burial mounds have been dug up.
- They tried in vain. - The neighbor lights a cigarette. - In the ninth century, they burned, not buried.
I look at the gray low sky, and the dry grass swaying in waves. On a squat gloomy forest sticking out from behind a hillock. I can’t believe that such a landscape - this nondescript uncomfortable cold earth- may be such a past. However, it is, and from this thought - and from the awareness that now there is my hut, my piece of land - my soul becomes joyful and scary.
Hillocks give way to beams, hills run down into real gorges. I can't believe my eyes - at the bottom of one such gorge, an absolutely mountainous, shallow and icy river flows between wet boulders. There are plenty of them in Altai, the Caucasus - but here? A woman is rinsing her linen upstream in the bushes. The neighbor hums, she looks up, smiles. We're going on. The village of Fedorov Dvor climbed to the top of the bald hill. The slope rolls up to us in a theatrical way suddenly, like a decoration on wheels. On the third try, in a spiral, we finally climb.
I get out of the car, look around - and slowly sit down on the wet grass. Behind the gorge, one after another - the hills. Red, yellow, green (maple, birch, spruce - autumn!) - they lie like in Roerich's paintings, as far as the eye can see. To the horizon. Plum clouds creep low over the hills. In the gaps between them, the sun beats, which is why the hills flare up alternately, as happens if you try light on a stage in a theater. But it is pointless to compete with the Illuminator, who put the light on in this performance, of course.
I catch myself feeling that for the first time in many years I see beauty, which for me - how to put it? - not unfounded. Because this beauty is a part of reality that lives not only in the present tense - like all the beauties of the world that I have seen so far. It was this reality that I acquired together with the hut - for a song, as befits the most amazing things in life. It was in this reality that things were combined that could not fit in my mind a year ago. And now this ridiculous, unreasonable, wild combination - pagan mounds and villages doomed to extinction, Himalayan expanses and abandoned cemeteries with mobile communication on the graves, these alcoholic twilight, where entire villages wander - and people like Foka and Lyuska, thanks to whom these villages have not yet completely faded, died out - it was this combination that awakened in me what I could call a sense of the past. Helped me find, turn it on. Activate. Perhaps this sensation is illusory - I don’t know! But even if this is so (and this is most likely so) - I want not to lose this illusion as long as possible. To preserve, to stretch it - because I have not yet had another illusion, so deep and unselfish. After all, it is better to consider yourself adopted by a half-forgotten village - to consider an abandoned cemetery as yours - than to live without a past or with the past that those on the hill will invent for you. Because this past, brought down from above, will certainly not be in my favor.
By the way, this process is going faster than it seems.
(text by Alexander Fin)
I AM A VILLAGE RESIDENT. I have a wife and two children. And two more horses, two dogs and two cats.
I live far from the city, far from the highway. Between the hills and the forest. AND ANOTHER TWO YEARS AGO I WAS A FULLY SUCCESSFUL CITIZEN
CAREER, PENSION AND OLD AGE?
I lived in the city, studied, received my honors, had fun with friends. Then I met my woman - Irina. A son was born, then a second. Days followed by days that rarely differed from each other.
I took a job on interesting work, delved into it, achieved success. And on the threshold of another promotion I saw what was ahead. Career, retirement and old age. Like everyone else around. Like my parents.
I tried to escape this feeling of hopelessness by changing jobs. Sometimes he worked for two at once. My plans were formulated a long time ago: to buy an apartment, earn more money, then buy a bigger apartment ...
And in the summer for two weeks I went on kayaking trips or to a fishing camp. I lived happily these days, and waited the rest of the year: "Summer comes, I'll go to nature." From childhood, a familiar program: "when you go to school, then ...", "when you finish school, then ..." Until then, do as you are told.
I used to come to city apartment with a feeling of melancholy: I have already repaired all the sockets, threw out the garbage ...
Once my wife asked:
- Do you feel good anywhere?
- Yes, - I answered, - two weeks a year, in nature.
- Then why do you live in the city?
LOOKING FOR YOUR HOME
And I understood: I had to leave. Since my earnings were connected with the city, I did not dare to go far. But, just in case, he mastered web design a little and began to make money with this.
We were looking for a home. In the suburbs, we did not like: the city dumps were burning nearby, the neighboring fences pressed directly against the windows of the houses that were offered to us. But I was just afraid to think about going further than the city minibus goes.
And then one day we came to visit friends - in a distant wilderness, 80 km from the city. They lived in a large village stretched between the hills and the river. It was very interesting there. Once I realized that every weekend I try to find an excuse not to go looking for a house in the suburbs, but to visit friends in a distant village.
It's very beautiful there. Wide Don, over which the hills rise. Huge apple orchards and an alder forest extending beyond the orchard. I was looking for My place. And one day I realized that I want to live here.
In the spring we collected all our things and moved to this village, to the guest house of friends. It was an old reed house - without a foundation, wooden pillars stand right on the ground, reeds are sewn between the pillars, and all this is smeared with clay. And we began to master the village life and look for a house to buy.
ALL NEW LIFE
The urban feeling that only old age is ahead was replaced by a thrill: "EVERYTHING JUST BEGINS!" We settled in, got used to the fact that through the windows you can see the sky and grass, there is silence and delicious air around.
Earned money through the Internet. Dreams that were impossible in the city were coming true. My wife always dreamed of having a horse. And we have a one-year-old Orlov trotter. I wanted big dog and bought Alabai. The sons (at that time they were two and five) from morning to evening ran up and down the hills and built huts in all the surrounding thickets.
And all this time we continued to look for a home. At first, they wanted to settle very close to friends. The idea of joint projects and common space was in the air. But then I realized: I do not need a common land, but my land, where I can be the Master.
As a result, we found a log house on the very outskirts, with a vegetable garden extending into the forest, with an excellent hay barn, with a stable and a huge old garden. We agreed on a deal and ... thought about it.
A distant dream threatened to become a reality. A frightening "forever" loomed on the horizon. We wondered if we had made the right choice. These days one evening our young horse ran away into the meadows, into the floodplain of the river. I, as usual, went to catch her. My wife took a bicycle and followed us around the road. I caught up with the horse on the shore, it stood and waited for me. I took her by the bridle and walked towards the house. After a while Irina joined us. We walked through the meadow, the whole village lay in front of us, behind it the hills. Nearby, twenty meters away, two storks landed on the meadow. A blind rain was drizzling, there were two rainbows in the sky, and through the clouds to our future home a ray of light fell. This place smiled at us. And we were glad that we stayed.
MEN'S BUSINESS
I have been living in the village for almost two years. New families are constantly moving here, and I communicate with them. Together we repair our houses, fix cars and mow the grass. I love that I spend a lot of time at home. When I want to see my friends or parents, I get in the car and drive to the city. And at home and in the yard there is always something to put your hands on. Here my male concern for the family is expressed in simple and concrete deeds.
It's not just about making money. I again began to practice massage and bone-setting, which I abandoned in the city. I also do for us simple furniture, I take care of the garden and the horses. Gradually, the house was improved, and now our life is even better than in the city. I see how my actions change the life of my family, and from this I change myself. And I have the opportunity to stop, think, look at the clouds in the sky. Or take my dog and leave to wander alone with the whole world. And then I get back to business. I think if I had stayed in the city, I would not have reached the level of awareness that appeared here for many more years.
When I now look from here at what my concern for my family in the city looked like, I have simple cynical words. I paid off with money from my loved ones. I paid them to not be with them. And he spent his life with candidates for deputies, with clients, performers, contractors, but not with his family. I came home to eat, sleep, and more often than not my thought was: "Leave me alone, I am tired, I was making money." This was the pattern my boys saw. I remember from childhood the parental formula: if the refrigerator is full, then nothing else is required from the father.
In the city I changed masks: "specialist", "family man", "friend on vacation" .... Like all the men around.
Arriving in the village, I did not suddenly become different. It's just that masks are useless here. This is where I act in different situations differently, but it's always me.
And now I will add these lines, we will take the saddles and leave with my wife on horseback to Apple orchard, and then to the forest, and further to the hills ...
In one of the most remote corners of the south of the Bryansk region, a dozen kilometers from the border with Ukraine, near the reserve "Bryansk Les", a village of fifteen inhabitants - Chukhrai - is lost. I have been living here for almost two decades. Thanks to the lack of roads, the way of life of previous centuries was preserved in Chukhrai until very recently: the village received almost nothing from the outside world, producing everything necessary for life on the spot.
In the documents of the General Survey of 1781, it is mentioned that Krasnaya Sloboda with Sloboda Smelizh, Buda Chern 'and the village of Chukhraevka belong to Count Peter Borisovich Sheremetyev and the peasants "pay the count two rubles a year on a quitrent." So there is a contribution of the Chukhraevites to the construction of the wonderful Sheremetyevo palaces in Kuskovo and Ostankino! And so the whole story: external world I remembered the village when it was necessary to get taxes from the peasants, soldiers for the war, votes for elections.
Chukhrais are located on a low but long sandy hill among the swampy floodplain of the Nerussa River. The only street of fifteen houses, overgrown with lilacs and bird cherry trees, is all dug up by wild boars. In winter, wolf tracks are constantly seen in the snow on the street. The wooden roofs of most of the houses have collapsed. The poles of the power line laid here in the sixties of the last century, and the three television antennas - these are all the signs of the present century .. My red brick house with satellite dishes for TV and the Internet is discordant with the village. Brick house I had to build because in the first years after the creation of the reserve "Bryansk Les" there was a serious war with poachers, so I needed a fortress to live ... a person is an event. I remember that about thirty years ago, in my wanderings through the Bryansk forest, I first wandered into Chukhrai. As soon as I went to the well and looked down to see if the water was clear, a window at the nearest house under a spreading willow opened and a burly elderly hostess offered to drink birch kvass from a cold cellar. A minute later I was already in a cool house and the kindest Maria Andreevna Bolokhonova, the wife of the local forester, elicited from me all the personal information, for which I came here and with great eagerness answered my questions. Meanwhile, her neighbors came up to look at me: a front-line grandfather and two grandmothers, also all by the name of the Bolokhonovs. It turns out that there are only two surnames in the entire village: the Bolokhonovs and the Presnyakovs, so everyone has a street nickname, which, like an unofficial surname, is often inherited. It turns out that the front-line grandfather Mikhail Alekseevich Bolokhonov was on the street Elderly, and his grandmother was Pozhilikha. The second old woman, partisan Evdokia Trofimovna Bolokhonova, was called Marfina. In the village lived two neighbors, both Balakhonov Ivans Mikhailovich, both born in 1932. One, who is the groom, is known under the street name Kalinenok, and the other, the foreman, is Kudinenok. Both receive letters from relatives, but the postman Bolokhonova Antonina Ivanovna (street name - Pochtarka) always handed letters to the correct addressee, because she knows that Kalinenka receives letters from Navli and distant Ukhta, and Kudinenka is from the Moscow region. Street name often inherited with the addition of diminutive suffixes: Kalina's son - Kalinenok, Kalinenok's son - Kalinenochek.
I was surprised how residents do without a store, but they answered that without a store, money is more whole. Matches, salt and flour are brought in in the winter in a grocery store, and vodka, bread and everything else are prepared by themselves. The nearest store is in Smelyzh, but the way there is through the Lipnitsa swamps, and you can't bring much in a knapsack. Therefore, everyone bakes bread for themselves in Russian ovens on the hearth. Maria Andreevna complained about my thinness and made me take a three-kilogram rye rug with me. I have never eaten this bread tastier. In the meantime, the owner Ivan Danilovich himself appeared from the detour, also a front-line soldier-landowner and began to demand from Maria Andreevna on the occasion of the guest "to drink", that is, to drink in the local dialect, but I refused, which greatly upset the red-nosed Ivan Danilovich. By the way, a few days later I met him in the forest and he reprimanded me for refusing, they say, because of me and he did not get it.
Before the war, Chukhrai had its own collective farm "Our Way". In addition, young people worked in the logging industry. There was an excellent road to the neighboring village of Smelizh, seven kilometers away, along which the forest was taken out by horses and oxen, through the Lipnitsky and Rudnitsky bogs, impassable now, then log gats were laid.
Fifteen years ago, I recorded the stories of the villagers about the past on a tape recorder, and recently I put them on paper.
By Mikhail Fedorovich Presnyakov (Shamornaya), born in 1911:
“There was a taiga before the war. They gave a plan for felling to the village council. And we, young people, were sent to cut the forest for the whole winter. And in the spring they drove the forest on horseback, then there were no cars. When they fisted, they took the best horses into the forest. The kulak sheds were transported there, the workers were driven from across the Desna. And my brother was a fright there. Fish will give, sugar will be given, cereals will be given - so that they do not die. And the clothes were given against the salary. And in the spring the forest was planted. Up to ten thousand cubic meters in our meadows were taken out, the entire haymaking was occupied by forest. They drove rafts to Chernigov for a whole month on the water. In Makosheno, they often drove for Novgorod-Seversky, where the Jews took the forest.
Ditches were dug in the Horse bog. I dug these ditches and surrounded them with poles. The office was from Trubchevsk - I forgot what it was called. There were foremen Travnikov and Ostrovsky. I walked them a board, on which they looked at the numbers. They called me: "Come with us, we will finish your education." They paid well. Eighteen rubles were paid at that time. We were given leather shoe covers. They dug by hand. And the tractor's stumps were torn. They dried everything, built bridges. The hemp was under your ceiling. The cabbage gave birth to a good one, the gurkas were like that, and the oats were bad. They dried everything, built bridges. In the thirty-second year, in the spring, terrible water came, rolled like a rampart, like from a mountain. In our house I couldn’t reach the window by only two fingers. A commission with the district executive committee was traveling to save us, so on Ershov field their boat hit an oak, they climbed up an oak, shouting to the slaughter: "Reverse!" We went to pull them together.
And in thirty-third too big water came. And it rained, the whole summer there was water that was sown - everything softened. The state gave nothing and there was nowhere to get it. The hunger was great, half the village died. Even my dad died. The young lads died. The mother went to the city, begged: the cabbage brought bitter leaves. They slaughtered the cows, and then there was nothing to eat. Many went to Ukraine, and there is famine. And in thirty-fourth, the potato was ugly, the carrot was the size of beetroot. "
During the war, this was the center of the partisan region. Not only local detachments operated here, but also formations of Oryol, Kursk, Ukrainian and Belarusian partisans. Their number reached sixty thousand. The current Chukhraev and Bold old old men, who were teenagers almost seventy years ago, well remember the legendary commanders Kovpak and Saburov, who began their famous raids on the enemy rear from here. Between Chukhrai and the neighboring village of Smelizh in the forest there was a joint headquarters of the partisans, a central hospital, and an airfield. Here for the first time the song "The Severely Bryansk Forest rustled", brought as a gift to the partisans by November 7, 1942 by the poet A. Safronov. In May 1943, the Germans burned down the partisan village to the ground, and the inhabitants were driven to concentration camps.
Trofimovna lived all her life alone, the men of her generation did not return from the war.
The funeral of Trofimovna.
Bolokhonova Evdokia Trofimovna (Marfina), born in 1923:
“I was in the detachment named after Malinkovsky. Our commander was Mitya Bazderkin, then he died. There were 160 of us.
We, girls, cleared the airdromes for the planes, made dugouts, in the summer we planted vegetable gardens in the glades. In winter, we sat in Chukhrai, sewing. My godmother had her own typewriter, but the partisans collected them for us. They will bring us a whole bunch of parachutes, we flogged them and sewed shirts, sewed white robes - so that it would be invisible in the snow.
Which of the partisans will be hurt - they were sent to mainland, so it was called, because we were on a small land. It was on the day the partisan was wounded, but by nightfall he was already sent, did not suffer here. Planes flew to us every night. They brought us to eat, otherwise we would have died here. They brought in concentrate, brought in salt. Men most of all waited for tobacco. Sukharev was brought in packs. They brought everything. I'm worse now than then.
Once we went to Milichi, there we sowed millet in a meadow, it gave birth well. Come on, we hear - someone will flock. The boy is young, tall. Both knees were broken by bullets. White, thin: "For eighteen days I have been lying here - you are the first to come." Eighteen days without eating - not drinking! It became white-white. I ate grass all around me. Need to do something. They cut sticks, put him on sticks and dragged him to the erodrome. And the erodrome was between the Novy Dvor and the Rozhkovsky Huts. We cleared it. They took him, but we still have the documents. After their release, they were sent to his daddy-womb. And gratitude came: the son remained alive. And he sent us thanks.
And it happened that the seriously wounded were shot ... People died here ...
On the forty-third day on the Spirits day, the Germans began to clean the forest. Here, in Chukhrai, our local brought them. Skobinenko was his name on the street. How many people were beaten here ... My aunt did not run to hide: "And what God will give ..." And immediately four heads perished: two sons, a man and a grandfather. But she was not touched, only the men were killed. And many were not allowed to die here, they drove to Brasovo. There is a mass grave. 160 only ours, Chukhraevsky, little boys and old people. After the war, they went to guess their own. But it was ours, Chukhraevsky, who brought the Germans here. Skobinenko was called by the street name. Yong showed everything to the Germans. And the Red Army came, and he himself was demonstratively hanged. Himself and his son ...
Difficult, Difficult ... Only two cellars remained from the Chukhraevs ... "
When, after the liberation in 1943, the surviving people returned to Chukhrai, they immediately began to build. The state allotted the forest for free, but in the village there was not only a single car or tractor - not even a single horse! Healthy men were at the front. Pine trunks were dragged from the forest by old men, women and adolescents, so they chose according to their strength: shorter and thinner. Therefore, most of the houses in Chukhrai are small. Oaks for the foundation were harvested nearby, in the floodplain of the river and floated right into place using large spring water. Clay for stoves was also transported on boats and molded raw from it. There were few real burnt bricks - those that had survived from the pre-war furnaces; they were used only on the furnace hearth and chimneys. Roofs were made of dora - wooden plates, which were plucked from pine blocks. Such a dwelling made of local materials with minimal cost energy was environmentally friendly during construction; environmentally friendly during operation (what the author was convinced of, having lived in such a house in Chukhrai for many years); and environmentally friendly when recycled: when people stop living in the house and taking care of it, all wooden materials rot, and the adobe stove turns sour from the rain. A few years later, only a sod-overgrown depression from the former underground remains at the place of dwelling.
The post-war population has reached its the largest number in the fifties, when there were one and a half hundred courtyards. The huts were crowded so that water flowed from one roof to the next. There were no vegetable gardens in the village: the land that was not flooded by the spring flood was enough only for buildings. Vegetable gardens were made behind the outskirts in a swampy floodplain, and so that the harvest did not get wet, they dug drainage grooves, raised ridges. In another wet year, potatoes could only be planted in June, when it dried up so much that the horses with plows stopped drowning in the wet soil. But now the village is spacious: with the enlargement of the collective farms, the office and the village council were moved ten kilometers away to Krasnaya Sloboda, which is behind three swamps. The roads and gates were no longer monitored and the village turned out to be like on an island. And even hard, almost free work on the collective farm. The people began to scatter wherever they could. Most houses and chopped sheds on solid winter road They were taken to the neighboring regional centers of Suzemka and Trubchevsk.
Kalinenok recognized only tobacco grown by him.
Bolokhonov Ivan Mikhailovich (Kalinenok), born in 1932, a juvenile prisoner, tells:
“As soon as I returned from captivity, I went to the collective farm as a lad. I carried milk to Krasnaya Sloboda on oxen for four seasons. You bring three or four hundred liters. Myron and the Comedian. They walked only at a pace. Myron gave a strong light. He would definitely drag him into the bushes or into the water! Did not obey! You cry from him. But the Comedian was obedient. Then he worked as a stable boy for all the chairmen. There were twenty-five harness horses, and young people. Hay They mowed for 10 percent - first you put nine haystacks for the collective farm, then you are allowed to mow one. The children were tortured, forced to help. Under Khrushchev, they began to mow for twenty percent.
Stalin surrounded us. Our procurement agent was Korotchenkov from Denisovka. Hand over 250 eggs, 253 liters of milk, 20 kilograms of meat per year. Hand over the potatoes, I don’t remember how many ... And I have to spend 250 days on the collective farm for workdays and didn’t pay a single drop. At least stop, but don't lie! The chairman, brigadiers, accountants were watching over us so that they would not steal. And those who did not work out 250 days were judged. Grandpa Laguna was tried, she did not have time to knock out the minimum. It was taken by the police, taken to Suzemka. A few days later they were released. Taya power did what it wanted.
And they survived by planting potatoes, making sleds, and selling cattle. Hay was sold to Trubchevsk. The women drove moonshine, in Chukhrai it was the cheapest in the region. During the winter I made up to thirty sledges, tubs, bowls, barrels. In the daytime at the collective farm I am shy, but I will come home and make a tub in two evenings.
The oak for crafts was stolen in the spring of big water... You dump in the evening and work out at night. And in the morning you drive to the boat and take you home. Once, with grandfather Dolbych, they felled an oak near Nerussa, and Stepan Yamnovsky was the forester there. The water that year came innumerable healthy. And out of nowhere, Stepan comes up. Healthy uncle. Water is everywhere, there is nowhere to tick. And we: "Stepan Gavrilovich, but you have to live with something ..." make? Write the protocol - so you won't pay with khatami, after all, you have piled up an oak that is a meter thick ... ”He dismissed us. We took him to the cordon burners and a pood of flour. Yong also wants to live, he was paid four hundred rubles with those Stalinist pennies. Wow, yeon loved the burner - he would drink a bucket and never get drunk. Then he died from vodka. "
Only those who have nowhere to run and cannot afford remained in the village. Now the village is quickly captured by a forest thicket, among which the last vegetable gardens of decrepit inhabitants are scattered.
My neighbor Vasily Ivanovich Bolokhonov is taking a bath.
The Chukhrais were famous for the cheapest moonshine in the region, but now the local elixir of life can be bought only in the neighboring Smelyzh.
In all the difficult moments of history, the forest greatly rescued the Russian people, served him as a refuge in hard times. The forest with its crafts, and not Agriculture, was the basis of the material existence of the Chukhraevites. In addition to horse sleds, the Chukhrais were famous for oak barrels, tubs, wooden churns, arches, and wooden boats. The casks and barrels were loaded onto new boats and sailed either to Trubchevsk downstream to the Desna, on which this ancient city; or upstream to the confluence of the Sev River into the Nerussa, along which they ascended to Sevsk. The boats were sold along with the goods, and they returned home on foot. Already in Soviet times many of the Chukhraevites worked in logging in the winter, and in the spring and summer they rafted the forest to the Desna and further to the treeless Ukraine.
Bolokhonova Olga Ivanovna (Merchant's wife), born in 1921:
« We have not sown bread for centuries. Only when the collective farms were forced to sow. This one is not this one, anyway the grain will not be born. And everyone had vegetable gardens. And who had two or three horses, and two or three sons - their own work force, dug out large ogrods. In the twenty-ninth and thirtieth they began to dispossess them.
Hemp was planted, good hemp was born. Before the collective farms, everyone planted it in their gardens. Each has his own shirt, his own pants, his own little tokens - all made of linen.
Here, everyone was engaged in their own skill. Wheels were made, rollers, and sleds are still being made. The rim is bent. There used to be a guy, this oak tree was hovering in the guy, a runner was bending. And they drove them sold, far away, they drove them to Dmitrov on their horses earlier. And the barrels were sold - they were also made of oak. And they made aspen kubly for bacon.
We have an oak all around. In particular, men harvested oak in the spring, on boats. They stole oaks. When the flood comes, they will go by boat, they will cut the oak, beat it there with a shingle, then rivet it, and bring it by boats. They will hide in attics until winter. And they do it in winter. Oaks were cut more on the other side of Nerussa. State forests, foresters fished - this was still our mother told us. The oak will be flooded, the forester finds out, he comes and treats the forester. And that's all - the forest was as noisy as it was. "
They cut wood for themselves, cut down the state ... From the post-war period to the seventies of the twentieth century, twice as much wood was cut in the Bryansk forest than it grew. It was at this time that chainsaws, skidders and powerful timber trucks replaced the bow saw and horse-drawn traction. With the help of new technologies, the surroundings of forest settlements within a radius of many kilometers have been turned into endless clearings, and life in them has lost its meaning. Now only Skripkino, Kaduki, Staraye Yamnoye, Kolomina, Khatuntsevo, Usukh, Zemlyanoye, Volovnya, Scooty remain on the maps. On only one forest river Solka, which is only forty kilometers long in the sixties, there were five settlements: Maltsevka, Proletarsky (before the revolution - Gosudarev Zavod), Nizhny, Skuty, Solka - with schools, bakeries, shops, industrial premises... Now, on the site of these villages, a young forest has already risen and only the lilac bushes that have survived in some places and the grave crosses blackened with old age in abandoned cemeteries hint about the recent past.
Food was brought to the village on a tractor cart.
Chukhrais are rapidly dying out. Danchonk has been gone for a long time - he was hit by a horse drunk. His Maria Andreevna also died. The Elderly, Shamornaya, Kalinenok, Marfina, and other storytellers of the stories you just read have died. Their children are scattered throughout the space of the former Soviet Union... People are leaving, the unique way of life and experience accumulated by many generations subsistence farming... The spiritual and physical unity of people with nature disappears, the layer of life is inexorably turning into history ...
Now life in the village is glimmering thanks to the Bryanskiy Les reserve. In summer, it can be noisy in Chukhrai - biology students and scientists work at the new base of the reserve. At this time, the village becomes the ecological capital of the Bryansk forest. In winter, when I often leave for Kamchatka and the village is covered with snow, inspector's UAZ cars make their way to life.
Hello, my dear residents of our site! I'll start, as they say, right off the bat.
When I was in tender childhood, from two to five years old, I was asked: "Larisa, who do you want to become when you grow up?" I answered: "A pilot or ... a milkmaid." In-oh-oh-from such a polarity was! As for the pilot, I don't even have any guesses, what I got into a child's head, but as for the milkmaid, I know. This is because from an early age I went to my beloved village, to my beloved grandma. Therefore, as you understand, my story will be about the village.
In the 80s, not every Soviet child had such a treasure as a tape recorder - not because there was nothing to buy for it, there was simply not enough of them for everyone. So, one fine summer I was visiting my grandmother, and I had a bosom friend Vera. Vera was the fourth, the last beloved child in the family, a long-awaited girl (before that, all the boys were). Verin's elder brother lived with his family in Novosibirsk, but something, you see, went wrong, and they began to move from the Siberian capital to a very small town; some things - mostly things - were brought to their mother in the village. But the most important thing is that Kolka (that was his brother's name) brought the miracle-technique of a tape recorder. The tape recorder was really good, the sides were polished, the very big one, the so-called bobbin one - in my opinion, "Romantic" was called, if I'm not mistaken. We cannot describe our joy, especially since Kolka promised to give it to Vera! By evening, the village's music lovers were aware that the "starter" - as Vera was teased by her last name - had a mafon. Three village boys (our friends) asked Vera: come on, they say, we will come to you after the cows (meaning, when the herd is brought home), you will rewrite from our mafon, what they like, and we from yours. On that and agreed. Verunchik and I barely waited for these cows, drove them home and let's get ready for a meeting. And as I mentioned, they had things from her brother's family, and they found some outfits for us! We put on fashionable crimplen skirts, high-heeled shoes - so what, which is two sizes larger, but like adults! Eyes smeared with green shadows, one word - "beauties"! In such a combat outfit, we are waiting for the guys.
The sun had already rolled down the outskirts, and the August twilight was gradually creeping in. We, dancing, looked out the kitchen window, it was already completely dark, nothing was visible. All the "girls" ate and, finally, came out of the fence, rushing from the tape recorder: "Possess, possess, possession, la, la, lal, la ...". About ten meters from the fence, near the road, there was a lamppost, we entered the circle of light from this lantern, while not ceasing, as they said in those days, “gouging the shake,” that is, dancing. Yes, I forgot to say that there was a small pond opposite, all in the thickets of thistles. I stood in the circle of light a little ahead, and Vera was behind me. I don’t remember exactly how it was, but suddenly I saw that something jumped out of these burdocks and began to jump in our direction, to our circle of light, and when this something approached the border of light and darkness (from the lantern) I saw, that it is something human-sized, hunched over, shaggy, and moves in leaps. I was the first to come to my senses, yelled, grabbed the hem of my crimplen skirt, and, throwing off my shoes on the go, rushed into the yard, into the kitchen. Running in, frantically she opened the drawers of the sideboard, pulled out huge knives, grabbed them in her hands and froze in this position by open door... I don’t remember how many seconds or minutes Vera flew into the kitchen, repeating: "Oh mommies, oh mommies!" - frantically pulling out the wire stuck in the woodpile, by which the door handle was held. Closing the door, Vera immediately turned off the tape recorder, and we sat on the bench - I am with knives in my hands, Vera with a stump. We sat there for about an hour, probably afraid to move. Sit, don't sit, but you have to go to the hut to sleep. And since we were strictly forbidden to leave the "matofon" in the kitchen (they will put a mistake in the window, they will push it, Kolka will unscrew his head), we did this: I hold a heavy tape recorder in outstretched arms, Vera, striking matches, is trying to get into the well of the padlock , and at the same time (so that it was not so scary) we sing: "Soar with bonfires, blue nights ...", - well, further down the text. Closing the kitchen, bullets flew into the porch of the house, bolted the door, ufff ... that's it, we're safe.
Already in our beds we discussed in whispers who saw it and how. And this is what Vera told me: “You ran away, but I just can't stand rooted to the spot, then I look at you as you run, then at IT approaching. I don’t know where the strength came from later, like a scream, it seemed to come to her senses, yes, too, with all her might ... ”For a long time in the night we whispered so much, and decided if the guys wanted to frighten us, then after our screams, after a couple of minutes they would have appeared, but then ... And the next day we met the guys who, having apologized to us, said that they could not come because their parents did not let them go outside (I don’t remember the reason). The fact that no one played a trick on us is for sure, then it would definitely come out somehow, it would appear. Already leaving the village at the end summer holidays For a long time, Vera and I recalled this incident in our letters and wondered, so what was it all the same? Already being on this site since spring, I came across a story about a similar thing - namely, hunched over, covered with wool, moving by leaps; True, I did not remember either the name of the story or the author, I wanted to write about my own, but somehow there was no time, but I was honored.
And one more small incident that happened in the village. Earlier, if we went out into the street, we stayed up late, snapped sunflower seeds, "hunted" jokes. And on one of these village nights, we sat, as always, near the house on a bench, and something I needed to go out (where the king walked on foot ...), moved away from the company, raised my head up, and in the night sky like a second sun , only there is no light from it, suddenly a second, third “rolls out” from it and hovers over the cemetery. She came, showed everyone, for a long time we lifted our heads to the sky, watched for another hour and a half. Then they went home. When I came home, my grandmother also told me that she saw these balloons in the sky. These are the village stories turned out, not scary at all, but they took place.
All love, good luck, patience!
18 thoughts on “ Village stories”
Very interesting, thank you Lorya!
And my son and I saw a UFO the other day. Near our house there is a mega-building - cranes, tower anthills are building 16-storey ones. We returned home at dusk, the sky was covered with low clouds, and the construction site was illuminated by bright spotlights. I don't know why, but one crane caught my attention: for some reason one bright orange lantern separated from it (it seemed so) and smoothly flew parallel to the ground towards our house. Having flown about 300 meters, this "lantern" stopped (over the roof of a residential building), hung for two minutes, began to blink, slowly fading away and ... disappeared.
Rina. About a year ago I also saw a UFO. And not just like some dots, balls or disks flying high in the sky, but a really big "plate", silver color without windows, without doors. She was at such a distance from me that her the size was comparable to the size of the car. So so =) I do not see anything surprising in UFOs. I think this is normal, we are not alone in the INFINITE universe.
Anna just Anna
Hello LORIA!
Thanks as always for interesting stories, really liked it.
By the way, we, too, not so long ago, two weeks before NG, my husband and I observed something similar to a UFO. Maybe their summer season is now)) In general, there was a small red ball hanging over the area, just opposite the door of our house in the sky. Hanging to itself means hanging, pulsating slightly, then quickly, quickly, barely keeping up with it, it mixes in the sky to the neighboring area. And in flight it changed color from red to light orange. It will hang there for about a minute and back to us. Three times so tossed back and forth. Then he hovered over us again, hung, blinked and left with a candle into the sky. Looks like flew home))
