Memories of life in the village. People's Magazine Life in the village was a pleasure for me as a boy

- By Grandma - 2 - 3 - Outdoors - 2 - Moscow life - 2 - 3 - First successes in painting - 2 - Teacher Petr Afanasyevich - 2 - 3 - Admission to MUZHVZ - 2 - Professor E.S. Sorokin - 2 - S.I.Mamontov - Work in imperial theaters - 2 - Mikhail Vrubel - 2 - 3 - Alexey Savrasov - 2 - Childhood memories - My predecessors - Illarion Pryanishnikov - Evgraf Sorokin - Vasily Perov - Alexey Savrasov - Vasily Polenov - Trip to the Academy of Arts - Answers to questions about life and creativity - 2 - Valentin Serov - Fyodor Chaliapin - Korovin's advice - Korovin about art - 2

	Const. Korovin, 1893

We must return home. My father told me: “Go hunting,” and my mother almost cried, saying: “Is it really a good idea, he’s still a boy.” It's me. I shot a duck. Yes, I’ll swim across this river now, whenever you want. What is she afraid of? He says: “He’ll go into the thickets.” Yes, I’ll get out, I’m a hunter, I shot a duck.
And I walked home proudly. And over my shoulder I carried an overweight duck.
When I came home, there was a celebration. My father said: “Well done” and kissed me, and my mother said: “This nonsense will lead to the point that he will get lost and disappear...”
“Don’t you see,” mother said to father, “that he is looking for the Cape of Good Hope?” “Eh,” she said, “where is this cape... Don’t you see that Kostya will always look for this cape. This is impossible. He doesn’t understand life as it is, he still wants to go here and there. Is this possible? Look, he's not learning anything.
Every day I went hunting with my friends. Mainly, everything is to get further away, to see new places, more and more new. And then one day we went far away along the edge of a large forest. My comrades took a wicker basket with them, climbed into the river, placed it near the coastal bushes in the water, clapped their feet, as if driving fish out of the bushes, lifted the basket, and small fish fell into it. But one day a big fish splashed up, and in the basket lay two large dark burbots. It was a surprise. We took a pot that was for tea, made a fire and cooked burbot. There was an ear. “This is how you have to live,” I thought. And Ignashka tells me:
- Look, you see, there is a small hut at the edge of the forest. Indeed, when we approached, there was a small, empty hut with a door and a small window on the side - with glass. We walked around the hut and then pushed the door. The door opened. There was no one there. Earthen floor. The hut is low, so that an adult could reach the ceiling with his head. And just right for us. Well, what a hut this is, beauty. There is straw at the top and a small brick stove. Now they lit the brushwood. Amazing. Warm. Here is the Cape of Good Hope. I'll move here to live...
And we lit the stove so much that it was unbearably hot in the hut. They opened the door; it was autumn time. It was already getting dark. Everything outside turned blue.
It was twilight. The forest nearby was huge. Silence...
And suddenly it became scary. Somehow lonely, lonely. It’s dark in the hut, and all the month goes out on the side above the forest. I think: “My mother has gone to Moscow, she won’t worry. We’ll leave here in a little while.” It’s very nice here in the hut. Well, it's absolutely wonderful. As grasshoppers chirp, there is silence all around, tall grass and a dark forest. Huge pine trees sleep in the blue sky, in which the stars have already appeared. Everything freezes. A strange sound in the distance by the river, as if someone was blowing into a bottle: woo-oo, woo-oo...
Ignashka says:
- This is a forester. It's okay, we'll show him.
And something is creepy... The forest is getting dark. The trunks of the pine trees were illuminated mysteriously by the moon. The stove went out. We are afraid to go out to get brushwood. The door was locked. The door handle was tied with belts from shirts to the crutch, so that it would be impossible to open the door in case the forester came. Baba Yaga still exists, it’s so disgusting.
We fell silent and looked out the small window. And suddenly we see some huge horses with white chests, huge heads, walking... and suddenly stopped and looked. These huge monsters, with horns like tree branches, were illuminated by the moon. They were so huge that we all froze in fear. And they were silent... They walked smoothly on thin legs. Their butts were lowered down. There are eight of them.
“These are moose...” Ignashka said in a whisper.
We looked at them without stopping. It never occurred to me to shoot at these monstrous beasts. Their eyes were big, and one elk came close to the window. His white chest glowed like snow under the moon. Suddenly they immediately rushed and disappeared. We heard the sound of their feet cracking, as if they were cracking nuts. That's the thing...

School. Impressions from Moscow and village life

Life in the village was a pleasure for me, a boy. It seemed that there was no and could not be better than my life. I've been in the forest all day, in some sandy ravines, where tall grasses and huge spruce trees have fallen into the river. There I and my comrades dug a house for myself in a cliff, behind the branches of fallen fir trees. Which house! We reinforced the yellow sand walls, the ceiling with sticks, laid fir branches, made a lair and a stove like animals, laid a pipe, caught fish, took out a frying pan, fried this fish along with gooseberries that we stole from the garden. There was no longer one dog, Buddy, but four whole ones. The dogs are wonderful. They guarded us, and it seemed to the dogs, like us, that this was the best life that could be, for which we could praise and thank the creator. What a life! Swimming in the river; What kind of animals we saw, there are no such animals. Pushkin said it right: “There are traces of unprecedented animals on unknown paths...” There was a badger, but we didn’t know what a badger was: some special big pig. The dogs chased him, and we ran, we wanted to catch him, teach him to live together. But they didn’t catch him - he ran away. He went straight into the ground and disappeared. Wonderful life...

Korovin’s works amaze with their uniqueness: brush strokes, colors, choice of composition. I wanted to know as much as possible about the artist. From Konstantin Korovin’s book “My Life” I selected a number of quotes from the period of his youth (before entering the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture), which, it seems to me, tell about the formation of the artist.

Korovin loved nature very much; he spent his childhood in his parents’ house at Rogozhskaya Zastava and in the village where the artist spent his summers.

Valentin Serov, portrait of Konstantin Korovin, 1891

“I also loved to see when my mother had boxes of different paints on her table. Such pretty boxes and colorful printing inks. And she, spreading them on a plate, used a brush to draw such pretty pictures into the album - winter, the sea - such that I flew away somewhere to heaven. My father also drew with a pencil. “Very good,” everyone said - both Kamenev and Pryanishnikov. But I liked the way my mother drew better.”

Early spring, 1870

“Doctor Ploskovitsky comes. I was always glad to see him. He prescribes me medicine: pills in these pretty boxes, with pictures. Such pictures that no one would draw like that, I thought. ... There are such mountains, fir trees, gazebos. Tanya told me that these grow not far from Moscow. And I thought: as soon as I recover, I’ll go there to live. There's the Cape of Good Hope."

The Last Snow, 1870

"Winter. The garden was covered in frost from the frost. I looked: really, it was so good - everything was white and fluffy. Something native, fresh and clean. Winter.
And then my mother painted this winter. But it didn’t work out. There were patterns of branches covered in snow. It is very difficult.
“Yes,” my mother agreed with me, “these patterns are difficult to make.”
Then I started drawing too, and nothing came of it.”

Bridge, 1880

“In the summer, with my father and mother, I quite often went near Moscow, to Petrovsky Park, to my aunt Alekseeva’s dacha. She was a fat woman with a red face and dark eyes. The dacha was elegant, painted yellow, and so was the fence. The dacha was full of carved trinkets; In front of the terrace there was a curtain of flowers, and in the middle was a painted iron crane: raising its nose upward, it let out a fountain. And on some pillars there were two bright, bright silver balls in which the garden was reflected. The paths, covered with yellow sand, with a border - it all looked like a sponge cake. It was nice at my aunt’s dacha, elegant, but for some reason I didn’t like it. When I had to turn off Petrovskoye Highway into the park alley, the highway seemed like a distant blue distance, and I wanted to go not to my aunt’s dacha, but there, into that distant blue distance. And I thought: there must be the Cape of Good Hope...
And at my aunt’s dacha everything is painted, even the fire barrel is also yellow. I wanted to see something completely different: somewhere there are forests, mysterious valleys... And there, in the forest, there is a hut - I would go there and live alone in this hut.”

Nasturtiums, 1888

“I have been waiting for this happiness for a long time (note: trip to the village). Summer and winter passed, and then one fine day, when the birch trees were just blooming, my father went with me by rail. What a beauty. What you can see through the window - forests, fields - everything is in spring. And we arrived in Bolshie Mytishchi. On the edge there was a house - a large hut. Some woman showed her to us and with her the boy Ignatka. How nice it is in the hut: two wooden rooms, then a stove, a yard, in the yard there are two cows and a horse, a small dog, wonderful, barks all the time. And when you step out onto the porch, you see a big blue forest. The meadows sparkle in the sun. The forest is Losiny Ostrov, huge. That is, so good that I have never seen it. All of Moscow is no good, it’s so beautiful...”

Mallows, 1889

“Behind the bend of the river, through the pine trees, the distance turned blue, and there was a large reach of the river. No, this is not the Cape of Good Hope, but it is where the blue distance is. Therefore, I will definitely go there... there is a hut there, I will live there. Well, what is Moscow, what is our Rogozhsky house with columns, that it stands in front of these flowers - purple plumes that stand near the alder trees... And these green alder trees are reflected in the water, as in a mirror, and there is a blue sky, and above, in the distance, distant ones turn blue forests."

In the summer house, 1895

“Life in the village was a pleasure for me, a boy. It seemed that there was no and could not be better than my life. I've been in the forest all day, in some sandy ravines, where tall grasses and huge spruce trees have fallen into the river. There I and my comrades dug a house for myself in a cliff, behind the branches of fallen fir trees. Which house! We reinforced the yellow sand walls, the ceiling with sticks, laid fir branches, made a lair and stove like animals, laid a pipe, caught fish along with gooseberries that we stole from the garden. There was no longer one dog, Druzhok, but four whole ones. The dogs are wonderful. They guarded us, and it seemed to the dogs, like us, that this was the best life that could be, for which we could praise and thank the Creator. What a life! Swimming in the river; What kind of animals we saw, there are no such animals. Pushkin said it right: “There are traces of unprecedented animals on unknown paths...”

Failure, 1880

“The environment, nature, contemplation of it were the most significant in my childhood. Nature captured my entire being, giving me a mood as if its changes were fused with my soul. Thunderstorms, gloomy weather, darkness, stormy nights - everything impressed me... This was the most important thing for my life and feelings.”

Black cat on the windowsill, 1902

“Writing from life is completely different. And it was difficult to write the rapidly changing motif of looming clouds before a thunderstorm. It was changing so quickly that I couldn't even grasp the color of the passing moment. It didn’t work out - and so I started writing just sun, gray day. But it's incredibly difficult. It is unthinkable to comprehend all the fineness of nature's design. For example, small forest. How to make this whole bead of branches with leaves, this grass in flowers...
I suffered terribly. I noticed that in the picture I saw, it was not close objects of nature that were painted, but somehow at a distance, and I also tried to do it in general. It came out easier."

Summer, 1895

“What could be more disgusting than a stone sidewalk with bollards, dust, some houses, boring windows. That's not how they live. Everyone must live near a forest, where there is a river, a vegetable garden, a picket fence, a cow, horses, dogs. You have to live there. So silly. Wonderful rivers of Russia - what a beauty. What distances, what evenings, what mornings. The dawn always changes, everything is for people. You have to live there. How much space. And they are here... where there are garbage pits in the yards, everyone is somehow angry, preoccupied, everyone is looking for money and chains - I said, remembering Pushkin’s “Gypsies”. And I loved Pushkin so much, I kept crying while reading it. This was the man. He said everything and told the truth.”

Northern idyll, 1886

Bashkiria village Sakhanovka 1958-1968

It was a long time ago, back in 1958, it was this year, after finishing the first grade of a comprehensive school, that I went to the village for the first time in my life.

Those post-war years were difficult for everyone, we just had to survive, our parents worked six days a week. On weekends they grew potatoes, planted some vegetables, fed pigs, my father even managed to grow millet, here he was original, his rural childhood and several years of living in occupied Germany taught him a lot. Be that as it may, considering that my mother worked in a bacteriological laboratory (sometimes they brought edible meat for testing), and my father rolled felt boots at home, our small family, father, mother, me and my younger brother, lived relatively tolerably. But leaving me in the city for the summer was not very wise, I was quite a hooligan (once I even almost burned down the barracks in which we lived), and for this reason I required supervision.

Dad’s sister lived in the village where he was born; she didn’t have a husband, she raised her son alone, who was five years older than me; by village standards, he was already an adult man capable of doing certain work, and even more so looking after such a blockhead like me.
In general, I was immediately baptized (by that time I was an “unchrist” and my mother was against sending me out of the house in this situation) and taken to the village.

The village was located forty kilometers from the city and six kilometers from the road along which one could hitch a ride, but six kilometers had to be walked along the outskirts of the forest. For me, a city boy, this was a decent distance, but for a village boy, as it turned out later, this was not considered a distance, especially in the summer. The first time I was lucky, we got to the village in a cart, which accidentally turned out to be a passing cart drawn by a horse. And this was the first time in my life.

Aunt Valya greeted us cordially and even with undisguised joy, by that time I already knew her, several times she came to the city on business and spent the night with us, Sashka and I became friends instantly, later I realized that there was no urban affectation in village people, especially in boys.

This is how I first found myself in the village; for the next ten years of schooling, I spent almost all school holidays in Aunt Valya’s village. “Almost”, because sometimes I spent several weeks a summer in pioneer camps, my father had the opportunity to get vouchers, at the factory where he worked, he was considered a party activist.
And yet I spent most of the summer holidays in the village.

The village was called Sakhanovka and was large, I think that by my first visit there were about a hundred courtyards. I have no doubt that before the war and later even more families lived in it, but the surnames can be counted on one hand, the most common was the Berdinsky “clan,” many families bore the surname Chernov, several families were Zykov, and somehow the Vagins lived separately. Perhaps that’s all, it’s worth adding that all these families were intertwined in an unimaginable way. It would be interesting to understand this mixture of people and families, but due to my youth, this was of little interest to me.

Sakhanovka was located, one street, in a lowland, between a decent hillock (rather a long and high hill, overgrown with small bushes and grass) which was called “paskotina” and a very deep ravine, located along the entire village from North to South. The village stretched for two or three kilometers; in extreme cases, there was a cemetery at both ends of the village. In the northern part, in front of the village, there was a wooden school that looked more like a log house. There was only one teacher there, I don’t remember her name, she taught until the fourth grade, all the students, regardless of age, studied in the same room, after the fourth grade the children went to school in a neighboring village five kilometers away. Sometimes in winter, they were taken there on horseback, but more often they covered this path on foot. Later, when the school in our village was closed, a boarding school was set up at a neighboring school, the youngsters lived there for weeks at a time, coming home only on weekends. In general, rural education is a complete hassle, I’m still surprised, because these schools produced very literate boys and girls.

Not far from the school there was a decent lake, about forty meters in diameter, absolutely circular in shape with a cone-shaped bottom, the depth in the center of which no one knew. They said that the men tried to measure its depth with the reins, but they didn’t succeed, they called these lakes sinkholes.
There were several of them in the area, two were located on the pascotina, one was completely dry and deep, overgrown with bushes and bird cherry trees, at the bottom of the cone-shaped funnel there were large blocks of mica, we enjoyed cutting out all sorts of figures from it, but it was difficult to get to it, it was deep and the slopes were very steep. The second was flooded with water and almost completely silted up, the water there was dirty and smelly, even cattle did not drink from this lake. The fourth lake was deeper and the water in it was cleaner; it was located outside the southern outskirts of the village and was used to water the numerous herds grazing in the area, but people rarely swam there, unlike the lake in the northern part of the village.

They said that in these places there were many underground rivers, which eroded the underground “banks”, forming these same “sinkholes”. Some of them were flooded with water, and in some, the collapsed arch blocked the riverbed, and the water flowed in the other direction, leaving large craters in the ground dry. How true this is, or whether it’s just a legend, no one knows for sure, just as no one knows when it happened. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else in my life.

On three sides the village was surrounded by mixed forests, different trees grew in them, but mostly they were lindens and oaks, there were also birches, elms and other deciduous trees, so in many farmsteads there were beehives, bees brought honey directly to the houses, it was very comfortable. Once upon a time, these forests were cleared and these places were densely overgrown with raspberries, the villagers collected them with pleasure and in large quantities. The slopes of the paskotina were strewn with strawberry berries, and given the presence of bird cherry trees around every house, the villagers had plenty of berries.
For some reason, apple trees did not take root in village gardens, and very few vegetables were planted; large, forty-acre gardens were sown with potatoes and beets. I can only explain this by difficulties with watering, the water in these places was very deep, so there were not many wells and they dug them at the bottom of that very deep ravine, you can imagine the difficulties with which drinking water was delivered. There were no pumps in those days, just as there was no electricity with all the now familiar household amenities.

It should be noted that this did not really bother the villagers; they were illuminated by kerosene lamps and were not very worried about the lack of radios; well, in those days there were no televisions in the city either.
The way of life was built according to village rules, they got up at dawn, went to bed at sunset, speaking of water, it was practically impossible to get to wells in winter, people provided water for themselves and their cattle by melting the snow, there was always a lot of it, and he was exceptionally clean.

Behind the ravine, almost in the middle of the village, there was a horse yard; it could be reached by a dam built through the ravine; every spring it was washed away by the flood, and it was filled up again. Sometimes the horse yard was called the collective farm, I will explain why. Well, of course, there was a whole row of stables, there were quite a lot of horses, probably more than fifty, all of them were used for agricultural needs, every morning the foreman assigned them to work. With their help, they were taken out of the fields sleepily; during harvesting, the wolves turned over the wheat on horses. There were no combine harvesters in their current form at that time; a mower was pulled separately with a tractor, which mowed and placed the wheat in the drags, and then, after drying, the same tractor was used to drag the unit, which picked up and threshed the grain. From the bunker of this unit, the grain was reloaded either into cars or into bags and transported to the horse yard on the same horses.
In the same place, something like a current was equipped, where the brought grain was sifted and put into barns for storage; they were located right there, probably this was already a collective farm yard. Some of the grain was transported and delivered to the elevator. What remained in the barns was subsequently used for sowing the next year, part was used as fodder, and part was distributed to collective farmers as payment for workdays.
Collective farmers transported grain to mills, ground it, and baked bread from flour for a whole year. This is about wheat, but they also gave out rye, which was also used as fodder, steamed and fed to livestock in the yards.

At this point I would like to talk about my cousin, Sashka, for some reason everyone, including me, called him Shurka.
I already wrote that this teenager was brought up without a father, Aunt Valya found it quite difficult to raise him, in those days it was not easy to survive, she was faced with the task of simply feeding him. She could not help him with his studies at all, since she herself was illiterate, and instead of a signature, she put a cross on the statements. They didn’t have much livestock; they kept a few sheep and a dozen chickens, and very rarely fed a pig. And even with these living creatures it was difficult, the sheep had to be grazed, the chickens had to be protected from foxes and ferrets, the pig required a lot of food.
In general, Shurka lived on his own, on the collective farm they understood this and gave him some kind of work, his main occupation in the summer was to look after the breeding collective farm stallion, he had to be fed, walked, cleaned and taken to the lake for a swim, the stallion was not stressed with work, so Shurka coped with him quite well. Shurka’s accompanying workload was to organize grazing of horses at night; as a rule, teenagers did this; everyone went to the “night” with pleasure.
And another collective farm job that my brother did with pleasure was dressage of young horses; he had to accustom them to the saddle, and subsequently to the harness. The whole village crowd was jealous of him, he did it masterfully, there was no fear in him at all, and none of the adults wanted to take on this work.
For this activity, he himself wove a bridle out of horsehair, and he had an abundance of all kinds of whips prepared; he wove them from belts and cord threads, constantly, and used them masterfully, in my opinion, better than anyone in the village.
He put me in the saddle in the very first summer of my stay, and he put me on an unbroken horse. I have a hard time remembering how I held on to her, clutching her mane. The only thing that saved me was that, having lashed her with a whip, Shurka, in an unimaginable way, sent her galloping up the “paskotine”, naturally I could not control the horse, and she rushed up the hill until she got tired, out of breath, she stopped and gave me the opportunity to get off her slide down, Shurka just grinned. If his aunt had seen this, she would have killed him.
Be that as it may, after that I treated horses calmly, rode a lot with and without a saddle, and learned to harness horses while working with my brother.

Upon request, horses with harnesses were given and, simply, to the yards of collective farmers, on the farm it was necessary to prepare and bring to the yard firewood for the winter, hay for livestock, take grain to the mill, plow the garden and do a bunch of other things with the help of a horse. The management of the collective farm, in this regard, always met halfway, realizing that otherwise people simply would not survive.
Perhaps it would be appropriate to say what else Shurka taught me during my first summer in the village. For example, I didn’t know how to swim, although I lived in a city between two rivers, I was probably still young and my parents didn’t allow me to go to the river alone.

In the village lake, as long as I can remember, a large oak log floated, it was shaped like the letter Y, the outside was black and slippery, and at the same time it did not sink for years. All the village children gladly used it as a swimming pool. means for swimming, they swam on it, dived from it, generally fooled around, it easily turned over if desired. On this log, Shurka, together with me, swam to the middle of the lake (I wrote about its depth) and simply turned the log over. When he swam to the shore, he didn’t pay attention to all my floundering and cries for help; in general, as best he could, he had to swim out himself. Much later, I realized that in all such situations, he looked after me, and nothing would have happened to me, but he taught me everything exactly like that, and by and large I am grateful to him.
After my first visit to the village, upon returning to the city, among my peers, I was the coolest.

Naturally, there was also a negative part of his upbringing: at night we, together with him, stole from the neighbors. The fact is that living on bread and eggs, even taking into account the berries, was somehow not very good; I wanted something else.
Shurka knew that most of the villagers who kept cows kept milk, cream, sour cream and butter in those same deep wells; naturally there were no refrigerators, and the coldest place was the bottom of the wells. Here on ropes, after the evening milking, all these goodies were lowered there. We, quite at night, got to these wells, took out what was drained, and ate our fill, never taking anything with us, we just wanted to eat. If this had been discovered, my aunt would have killed both of us, but we got caught doing something.
My brother really wanted to have a bicycle (he didn’t have enough horses), and this was a rarity in the city in those days, but someone gave him a bicycle that was broken to pieces, he repaired what he could, and some spare parts. I tried to remove parts from neighbors' bicycles at night. This was naturally determined instantly, in villages where there were no locks on the front doors, it was not customary to steal, so they caught us, took away the stolen goods, and our aunt beat us with rods, so that we ran away for two days and did not come home. She always had these rods (for some reason she called them whigs) in stock, and we were afraid of them, but it was my brother who got the worst of it.

I'll tell you how it was to work on the collective farm.
The foreman distributed work, he was a significant person in the village, literally everything depended on him, his power extended to almost all collective farmers, the only ones he did not control were machine operators, they were assigned work on the central estate, and to some extent the village blacksmith , he, as a rule, knew what to do.
Well, for the rest, every morning, at dawn, he rode around the entire village on horseback, knocking on the windows with the shaft of his whip, driving people out to work, and at the same time determining the type of work that one or another should perform.
Refusal to work meant falling out of favor with the foreman, and this meant a reduction in the workdays he had counted, and a bunch of other troubles. For example, he will refuse a request for a horse, or will allocate an inconvenient plot for collecting firewood. It may simply not provide meadows for hay cutting, in which case your domestic animals will be left without food for the winter.

This was real slavery, a little later, as soon as the collective farmers began to be issued passports, people fled en masse from the villages. But that was later, but for now everyone went to work, regardless of age and illness, they gave work even to us teenagers, which is what my brother did, I already wrote, but even I, a stranger to the collective farm, also had to do something. I had to, being in the dusty hopper of a thresher, push grain into the hole in the hopper, when loading it, for some reason it itself got stuck. Given my successful horse management skills, I worked on a team harnessed to large “rakes”, raking up windrows of straw and sometimes hay, then the men collected all this into stacks for winter storage. I sifted grain in the collective farm yard; it did not require much physical effort, and most often teenagers did this.

In general, there was a lot of things, you can’t remember everything, but it was not customary to refuse work, although Aunt Valya, feeling sorry for me, sometimes left me at home, and I did household chores, mainly cleaning the house (it was about twelve square meters) and watering the garden. and preparing dinner for the evening, my aunt praised me, saying that I could do it.

I would also like to say something about working in the beets; it was real hard labor. Allotments were counted, without asking, according to the number of people in the family, and even Aunt Valya and Shurka’s allotment was, by my standards, a whole field, without end and without edge.
It was done like this: the collective farm plowed and planted beets in the field, it was at least somehow mechanized, and then the collective farmers went to weeding and thinning the field with hoes; they had to weed their plots twice during the summer. Many simply physically could not do this, and if they had relatives somewhere, they invited city residents to do this hard labor.
Later, as a rule, in late autumn, already from under the snow, the grown beets had to be pulled out of the ground, cleaned of dirt and handed over to a collection point; this took a couple of weeks. It was simply impossible not to do this, firstly, sugar was given out based on the weight of the beets delivered; in winter it was impossible to do without it.
The most important thing is that the rest of what they earned was given in money, this was the only way to earn money, it was simply impossible to do without it, there was nothing to buy salt for the winter, and they also needed clothes. It was absolutely necessary to pay taxes, God, they also tore three skins from these slaves, for the cattle, for the house, for the apple tree in the garden, and for everything.
So everyone, without exception, hunched over the beets. And your humble servant, too.

Salt, sugar, flour were imported in the fall, at that time a truck shop appeared in the village, they sold everything from shovels, rubber boots to canned food, herring and various sweets, they even brought “city” bread, the villagers tried it with pleasure. And everything that there was enough money for was prepared in the fall; in winter it was impossible to get close to the village, the only connection with the outside world was a horse-drawn sleigh, and even then it was not always possible to move around on it. So the villagers knew that if something happened in winter, God forbid you get sick or there was a fire, no one would help.

I just mentioned the house where my relatives lived, I’ll write a little about it. This is how the majority lived, in a village where there were no men in the family (many of them remained on the fronts of the Patriotic War) and even where there were men, the houses were not much different. So, the houses were naturally made of wood, made mainly of aspen, the dimensions were really three by four meters, and a third of this area was occupied by a Russian stove, on which, by the way, one of the household members slept. The house was roofed with straw; when there was a shortage of food, they removed it from the roofs and fed it to the cattle, then they covered it, but this did not happen with me.
Across the passage from the stove, by the door, there was another bed, my aunt’s had an iron bed, I saw wooden beds, some had large chests, you could also sleep on them, in the center of the house, by the windows there was a table with several stools . In the “red” corner there was always a small iconostasis; it was a holy place; behind the icons they kept the most valuable things, documents, letters from relatives and from the front (they were never thrown away), some kind of money, if any.
On holidays, a candle burned there, some had a lamp.
In the opposite corner, as a rule, there was a shelf with dishes, the walls between the windows were occupied by photographs in wooden frames, they were also very much valued in village houses.
That’s all the “standard” decoration of a village house; they attached a “three-walled wall” to it, also chopped, but they used it for household needs, they stored food supplies and valuable rural equipment there, and sometimes they also set up a sunbed there. But this part of the house, although it was made of logs, was not heated; we slept there only in the summer; my brother and I generally slept in the hayloft, like most of the boys in the village.

It should be noted that in the summer (and I mostly spent this time of year there), few people used the main house; periodically, once every two or three weeks, women fired up the oven to bake bread in it. We loved these days, for some reason we baked bread early in the morning, we, Potsanva, were still sleeping, and we woke up from the smell of cookies, and the smell spread throughout the entire area, and into the hayloft too. Women, after baking the bread, still baked all sorts of buns, cheesecakes, sometimes pies, and most importantly, sour dough pancakes in a hot oven.
We were “swept away” from the hayloft to the table instantly, the table was already set, pastries, butter and sour cream, fresh milk, boiled eggs, there was jam in the saucers, some had honey. In general, it was a “royal” breakfast. Never again have I had to eat sour dough pancakes baked in a Russian oven. The dough for them was not specially fermented, it was the same dough as for baking bread, in my opinion, it was only slightly sweetened, but the pancakes came out of the oven bubbly, tender and incredibly tasty.

But on weekdays everything was much simpler, on a taganka, (this is a metal tripod with a cast iron ring) on ​​the street, in cast iron, a simple soup with some kind of millet or with pasta and seasoned with a beaten egg was prepared, sometimes (if there was something) fried potatoes, and more often they simply baked them on coals. I somehow didn’t suffer too much from culinary simplicity; we didn’t eat very well in the city either, but that was only the case during my two summers, in the village. In the third year, Aunt Valya got a cow, she called her Daughter, and in terms of food, a completely different life began for us.

About the cow, it was a unique animal, firstly, it was small, a little larger than a goat, much smaller than ordinary cows, secondly, based on the first, it ate little, and it was not difficult to feed it, thirdly, it did not give much a lot of milk. Three to four liters in the morning and five to six in the evening, and this milk contained half of the cream.
Accordingly, Aunt Vili always had unlimited amounts of sour cream, cottage cheese and, if necessary, butter. This suited my aunt’s family perfectly; she herself didn’t drink milk at all, maybe only with tea, but Shurka couldn’t even drink that much. In general, there was no need to climb other people’s wells. And one more thing, this cow had either an advantage or a disadvantage: she calved only as heifers. Everyone in their village, and those nearby, knew about the merits of her aunt’s cows, and they lined up to purchase her next heifer.

Well, we, me in particular, had enough time to rest.
We went for berries, naturally we ate more than we picked, we swam as much as we wanted, I loved to cut out all kinds of figures from mica (a soft, pliable material), among other things, for example, I cut several sets of chess. This passion became my hobby for the rest of my life.

In the evenings, after milking the cows and dinner, they gathered for “get-togethers,” there were a lot of young people, they came there, in my opinion, from five to fifteen years old and it was quite fun, they stayed until dawn. Once or twice a week we went to the cinema, it was in a neighboring village, about five kilometers away, but that didn’t bother us. The main thing is that we found out in advance what the film was about; for us, all films were divided into three categories: about love, about war and about intelligence officers, we especially loved the latter. Movie tickets cost pennies; we begged them from adults. Shurka himself, and me, accompanied us for free; the projectionist was his friend. My brother was dashing; he had countless friends in all the villages in the area. By the way, he not only taught me to swim, ride a horse, with him I learned to ride a bicycle, a little later, with him I tried mead for the first time, with which, as it seemed to me, I almost died. We drank it at the collective farm apiary, it stood in the forest, not far from Sakhanovka, and Aunt Valina’s friend was in charge of it. We often ran to her to eat honey, helped her with something, and she treated us with pleasure.

This is roughly how the village lived in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century, in some places it was not much better, in others it was worse, but in principle everything was the same for everyone. Life was probably a little easier in the central estates. They already had electricity, small shops, more schools, and it was easier for the kids.
But for sure, they did not have such a rich and unique nature, the earth was less polluted, the smell of forbs alone was worth it. Auntie, inviting me to her place once again, used the phrase “we smell like perfume” as an argument, meaning that she smelled like perfume.

In general, I understand my father’s request to bury him after his death in one of the Sakhanovka cemeteries. Let me remind you that he was born in this village. To my shame, I could not fulfill his last will, he died in February 2000, it was not possible to get to these places at that time, I am very sorry.

No matter how sad it was, I witnessed how this Russian village was fading away.
For the first time I noticed, on my next visit, that the village herd had become so small that the shepherds refused to hire them. The residents who continued to keep cattle took turns herding them, I helped Aunt Valya with this as much as I could, Shurka was serving in the Army at that time, so this burden fell on me, I tried to get Aunt Valya’s turn as much as possible.
The village school closed, those children who were still left in the village studied at the school of the central estate. Within two years there was no longer any need for the horse and collective farm yard, everything was broken, and the residents stole the remains. Young people dispersed, went to study in the city or joined the Army and never returned. The old people gradually died out, or their children took them to the city.
So by 1969, in just ten years, only my aunt remained to spend the winter in the village, the village was empty.
Having to spend the winter alone, Aunt Valya got scared and my father and I dismantled her house and found her a house in the city. At this time I was called to serve in the Army. Returning two years later, they told me that Aunt Valya could not live in the city and asked to buy her a house in a neighboring village, her father fulfilled her request, and until her death, Aunt Valya and Shurka, for almost forty years, lived in the village of Trudovka, three kilometers from Sakhanovka.
This village has been partially preserved, although it is now inhabited by summer residents, so in winter Trudovka is almost empty. It, unlike Sakhanovka, at least has electricity.

Well, Sakhanovka is gone, like thousands of other similar villages; all that remains of it are two cemeteries overgrown with grass and a ravine. The lake turned into a puddle, but on the “paskotin” they found sand suitable for the production of silicate bricks; in general, this entire mountain consisted of this sand.
So, for the last forty-odd years, sand has been removed from this place. The once beautiful hill turned into continuous quarries, there was nothing left there, no lakes, no sinkholes, no forests, no berries, a continuous “lunar” landscape.

Part of the name of the village remained, the quarry was called “Sakhan”, a sign with such an inscription can be seen on the Orenburg highway, fifty kilometers from Ufa.

I grew up and was formed in a Russian village. Hereditary peasant. He absorbed all the basics of Russian peasant life from infancy. When a child is born in a village, his appearance is perceived not only by his immediate relatives, but also by the entire village, the entire society. The village lives like a big family, where everyone is a close or distant relative of each other (in many cases this is the case). The birth of a child is perceived as a new addition to a huge village family. And the attitude towards a small fellow villager is not built out of nowhere, but first for the merits of his family. The village knows what kind of family this person is from, and, therefore, what can potentially be expected from him. And then, as a person grows up, he earns his own authority in the village.

In general, in the village it is customary to be interested in fellow villagers, their successes, joys and sorrows. And this is not idle curiosity, but sincere participation. For every person living in a village, the life of his fellow villagers is of genuine interest. It is curious that the village is sincerely interested in a person, even who left it a long time ago. Still, he maintains an invisible spiritual connection with her. I remember when my grandmother’s sisters came to us - relatives, cousins, second cousins, and other relatives. Back then, the talk about village life was endless! Absent for some time, these relatives seemed to be completing their picture of village life, filling in the gaps - who was born, who got married, who died, who works where, who does what. Often these conversations went well after midnight. What a pleasure it was to fall asleep listening to these conversations! It was as if the whole village history was passing before my eyes. Sometimes I inserted my word. Only now, when this has practically disappeared, is all this perceived as an integral part of peasant life. And then I just lived in this atmosphere and didn’t analyze anything.

It’s interesting that even today, when I come once a year in the summer to the Stavropol Territory to visit the last surviving sister of my grandmother’s eight sisters and brothers (she is already 85 years old), she and I begin to remember and talk about village life. And she left the village in 1941. A man has not lived in a village for almost 70 years, but spiritually continues to dwell in it!

Often villagers remember their previous life and the present organically connected with it. Some are remembered with fond memories, others are treated with great respect, and others are condemned for their bad lifestyle. And a person, knowing this, strives to live according to his conscience. He cares about “what people will say.” In the village, everything is always done with an eye on fellow villagers. I remember how often my grandmother hurried me, for example, to dig potatoes. One of the arguments was that many had already started. And if we dig later than others, it will be a shame; they will think that we are lazy. In the village, the personal has always been subordinate to the collective. No one would dare to commit an act that would offend all fellow villagers. But in recent years, apostasy has reached the villages. With a feeling of deep embarrassment, I discovered in my village a house built by one of the summer residents (and summer residents, as you know, Chekhov said, it’s so vulgar) - this house is not located on the sunny side, so that the sun shines in the house, these summer residents “turned” its back onto the road, and its windows into the field. What a bright image! They “turned their backs” on the entire 500-year history of my village! For 500 years, not a single person in the village thought of building a house like this!

What an amazing and, I would say, archaic manifestation of conciliarity - helping neighbors and fellow villagers with big, hard work: building a house, planting potatoes, chopping cabbage. It’s an amazing thing: as soon as someone starts this kind of work, you don’t even need to call for help – they will come on their own.

Until very recently, how touching it is to see, when we begin to plant potatoes with a horse, old, almost 80-year-old neighbors each come with their own bucket and help us in this matter. And then we go to help one of the neighbors. I remember how some of our neighbors were drying hay. It was almost dry, and at that time a rain cloud appeared at the edge of the sultry July sky. So, my mother and I didn’t think twice about it – we ran to help save the hay. They quickly swept away the haystack. The neighbors were very grateful.

If lonely old people live in a village, they always try to help them - do something around the house, bring them milk or a piece of meat for the holiday (Christmas, Easter), and just for no reason. Be sure to wash them in the bathhouse - this is a sacred duty!

Some lonely old men and women, who cannot afford to heat a bathhouse, have been bathing with their neighbors for years. And it wouldn’t even occur to anyone to hint that someone owes someone.
I remember when I was a boy, with what joy I ran to the well to bring water to the weak old women - this was also a sacred duty!

If someone gets sick, many neighbors come to visit the sick person, cheer them up, and support them. This remains today. True, when there are only 15 old men and women left in the village, how sad it is to see them come to the sick who are dying, and some time passes and they themselves die. When my grandmother fell ill shortly before her death, one of her distant relatives came to visit her with a can of fresh goat milk and hot, freshly baked pancakes. How touching it was!

If a fellow villager dies, then during the two days that the coffin with the body of the deceased is at home, the whole village comes to say goodbye to him. They sit at the coffin, remember his life, good events from his life. On the day of the funeral, many people go to the cemetery. Those who cannot travel say goodbye to the deceased at home. And the whole village also gathers for the wake, for 9, 40 days, for the anniversary.

And the memory of the person lives for years in the hearts of fellow villagers. Even if many years have passed and there are no living witnesses, the memory continues to live in stories and legends. Thus, in our modern everyday life the names of some fellow villagers who were born in the mid-19th century appear.

Thus, the conciliarity of the Russian people, the Russian peasants is such an organic quality, as if innate, that even today, in an era of general spiritual decline and degradation, a person lives in its categories, sometimes without realizing it. And I think that this quality will be one of the main ones in the revival of the Russian people, about which we talk so much.

Children's novel-newspaper No. 11, 2011

Konstantin Korovin

My life

Memories of childhood

K. A. Korovin. 1890s

At my grandfather's house

I was born in Moscow in 1861, November 23, on Rogozhskaya Street, in the house of my grandfather Mikhail Emelyanovich Korovin, a Moscow merchant of the first guild. My great-grandfather, Emelyan Vasilyevich, was from the Vladimir province, Pokrovsky district, the village of Danilova, which stood on the Vladimir highway. There were no railways then, and these peasants were coachmen. It was said that they were “driving the yamshchina,” and they were not serfs.

When my great-grandfather was born, according to the custom of the villages and hamlets located along the Vladimirsky Highway, at the birth of a child, the father went out onto the road and asked the name of the first one who was driven into exile along this road, Vladimirka. This name was given to the born child. As if they did it for happiness - that was the sign. The one born was named after a criminal, that is, an unfortunate person. This was the custom.

K. Korovin. Landscape with a hedge. 1919

Alexey Mikhailovich Korovin. 1860s

Sergei and Konstantin Korovin. 1860s

When my great-grandfather was born, Pugachev’s “Emelka” was transported around Vladimirka in a cage with a large convoy, and my great-grandfather was named Emelyan. The son of a coachman, Emelyan Vasilyevich was later the manager of the estate of Count Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who was executed by Nicholas I of the Decembrist. Countess Ryumina, deprived of the rights of the nobility, after the execution of her husband gave birth to a son and died in childbirth, and her son Mikhail was adopted by Count Ryumin's manager Emelyan Vasilyevich. But he also had another son, also Mikhail, who was my grandfather. They said that my grandfather's enormous wealth came to him from Count Ryumin.

My grandfather, Mikhail Emelyanovich, was huge, very handsome, and he was almost a fathom tall. And my grandfather lived until he was 93 years old.

I remember my grandfather’s beautiful house on Rogozhskaya Street. A huge mansion with a large yard; behind the house there was a huge garden that overlooked another street, Durnovsky Lane. And the neighboring small wooden houses stood in spacious courtyards; the residents of the houses were coachmen. And in the courtyards there were stables and carriages of various styles, dorms, carriages, in which they carried passengers from Moscow along the roads rented from the government by my grandfather, along which he drove the pitman from Moscow to Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod.

I remember a large columned hall in the Empire style, where at the top there were balconies and round niches in which musicians played at dinner parties were placed. I remember these dinners with dignitaries, elegant women in crinolines, military men wearing orders. I remember a tall grandfather, dressed in a long frock coat, with medals around his neck. He was already a gray-haired old man. My grandfather loved music, and it used to be that my grandfather would sit alone in the big hall, and a quartet was playing upstairs, and my grandfather would only allow me to sit next to him. And when the music played, the grandfather was thoughtful and, listening to the music, cried, wiping his tears with a large handkerchief, which he took out of his robe pocket. I sat quietly next to my grandfather and thought: “Grandfather is crying, so that means it’s necessary.”

My father, Alexey Mikhailovich, was also tall, very handsome, and always well dressed. And I remember he was wearing checked trousers and a black tie that covered his neck high.

I rode with him in a carriage that looked like a guitar: my father sat astride this guitar, and I sat in front. My father held me while we were driving. Our horse was white, its name was Smetanka, and I fed it sugar from the palm of my hand.

I remember an evening in the summer when the coachmen sang songs in the nearby yard. I liked it when the coachmen sang, and I sat with my brother Sergei and my mother on the porch, with my nanny Tanya, and listened to their songs, sometimes sad, sometimes dashing, whistling. They sang about my love, about robbers.

Girls and girls once told me,
Isn't there an old fable...

A birch tree stands near a pine forest,
And under that birch tree lies a fine fellow...

Evening bells, evening bells,
How many thoughts does he inspire?
About the father's land, about the native land...

More than one path in the field ran wide...

I remember well when late evening came and the sky was covered in the darkness of the night, a large beautiful comet, the size of half the moon, appeared above the garden. She had a long tail, bent down, which emitted luminous sparks. She was red and seemed to be breathing. The comet was terrible. They said it was heading for war. I loved looking at her and every evening I waited and went to look at the yard from the porch. And I loved listening to what they said about this comet. And I wanted to know what it was, and where it came from to scare everyone, and why it was.

Through the large windows of the house, I sometimes saw a scary cart, drawn by four horses, driving along Rogozhskaya Street, tall, with wooden wheels. Scaffold. And at the top sat two people in gray prison robes, with their hands tied back. They were transporting prisoners. On each person’s chest hung a large black board tied around the neck, on which was written in white: Thief-Killer. My father sent with a janitor or coachman to deliver bagels or rolls to the unfortunate people. This was probably done out of mercy for the suffering. The escort soldiers put these gifts in a bag.

In the summer they drank tea in the garden gazebo. Guests arrived. My father often had his friends: Doctor Ploskovitsky, forensic investigator Polyakov and another young man Latyshev, the artist Lev Lvovich Kamenev and the artist Illarion Mikhailovich Pryanishnikov, a very young man, whom I loved very much, as he arranged for me in the hall, overturning the table and covering it tablecloths, the ship “Frigate “Pallada””. And I climbed there and rode in my imagination across the sea, to the Cape of Good Hope. I really liked this.

I also loved to see when my mother had boxes of different paints on her table. Such pretty boxes and colorful printing inks. And she, spreading them on a plate, used a brush to draw such pretty pictures into the album - winter, the sea - such that I flew away somewhere to heaven. My father also drew with a pencil. “Very good,” everyone said - both Kamenev and Pryanishnikov. But I liked the way my mother drew better.

K. Korovin. At the tea table. 1888

My grandfather Mikhail Emelyanovich was ill. He sat by the window in the summer, and his legs were covered with a fur blanket. My brother Sergei and I also sat with him. He loved us very much and combed me with a comb. When a peddler walked along Rogozhskaya Street, the grandfather called him with his hand, and the peddler came. He bought everything: gingerbread, nuts, oranges, apples, fresh fish. And the ofeni 1) , who carried large white boxes with toys and laid them out in front of us, placing them on the floor, grandfather also bought everything. This was a joy for us. What the ofeni didn’t have! And hares with a drum, and blacksmiths, bears, horses, cows that mooed, and dolls that covered their eyes, a miller and a windmill. There were toys with music too. Then my brother and I broke them - we so wanted to know what was inside them.

My sister Sonya fell ill with whooping cough, and my mother took me to my nanny Tanya. That's where it was good... For her it was completely different. Small wooden house. I was lying sick in bed. Log walls and ceiling, icons, lamps. Tanya and her sister are near me. Wonderful, kind... Through the window you can see the frosty garden in winter. The stove is heating up. Everything is somehow simple, as it should be. Doctor Ploskovitsky arrives. I was always glad to see him. He prescribes me medicine: pills in these pretty boxes, with pictures. Such pictures that no one would draw like that, I thought. My mother often came too. In a hat and crinoline, elegant. She brought me grapes and oranges. But she forbade me to give me much to eat and she herself brought only jelly soup and grainy caviar. The doctor did not order me to feed me because I had a high fever.

But when my mother left, my nanny Tanya said:

So the killer whale (that’s me, the killer whale) will be killed.

And they gave me roast pig, goose, cucumbers to eat, and they also brought me a long candy from the pharmacy, called “maiden skin”, for cough. And I ate all this. And “virgin skin” for coughs without counting. Only Tanya didn’t tell me to tell my mother that they were feeding me a pig, and not a word about “girl skin.” And I didn't say anything. I believed Tanya and was afraid, as her sister Masha said, that without eating I would be completely killed. I didn't like it.

And on the boxes there are pictures... There are such mountains, fir trees, gazebos. Tanya told me that these grow not far from Moscow. And I thought: as soon as I recover, I’ll go there to live. There is the Cape of Good Hope. How many times have I

Father's strength to go! No, no luck. I'll leave on my own - wait. And Tanya says that the Cape of Good Hope is not far, behind the Intercession Monastery.

But suddenly my mother arrived, completely out of her mind. Cries bitterly. It turned out that sister Sonya died.

What is this: how did you die, why?

And I roared. I didn’t understand how this could be so. What is it: died. Such a pretty little Sonya died. It is not necessary. And I thought and became sad. But when Tanya told me that she now has wings and flies with the angels, I felt better.

When summer came, I somehow made an agreement with my cousin, Varya Vyazemskaya, to go to the Cape of Good Hope, and we went out through the gate and walked along the street. We walk, we see a large white wall, trees, and behind the wall below is a river. Then again the street. A store with fruit in it. They came in and asked for candy. They gave it to us and asked whose we were. We said and moved on. Some kind of market. There are ducks, chickens, piglets, fish, shopkeepers. Suddenly some fat woman looks at us and says:

Why are you alone?

I told her about the Cape of Good Hope, and she took us by the hands and said:

Let's go.

And she led us into some dirty yard. She took me to the porch. Her house is so bad and dirty. She sat us down at the table and placed in front of us a large cardboard box containing threads and beads. I really liked the beads.

She brought other women, everyone looked at us. She gave us some bread for tea. It was already dark in the windows. Then she dressed us in warm knitted scarves, took me and my sister Varya out into the street, called a cab driver, sat us in and went with us. We arrived at a large house, dirty, scary, with a watchtower, and a man walking at the top - a soldier. Very scary. My sister was crying. We entered this house along the stone stairs. There are some scary people there. Soldiers with guns, with sabers, shouting, swearing. A man is sitting at the table.

Seeing us, he left the table and said:

Here they are.

I was afraid. And a man with a saber - wonderful, like a woman - led us outside, and the woman went too. They put us in cabs and off we went.

Look, the arrows are gone... unheard of, I heard the man with the saber say to the woman.

They brought us home. Father and mother, there are a lot of people in the house, Doctor Ploskovitsky, Pryanishnikov, many strangers. Here are my aunts, the Zanegins, the Ostapovs, everyone is happy to see us.

Where did you go, where were you?..

The man with the saber drank from a glass. The woman who found us said something a lot. When the man with the saber left, I asked my father to leave him and asked him to give me the saber, or at least take it out and look. Eh, I wanted to have such a saber! But he didn’t give it to me and laughed. I heard that people were talking a lot around in excitement, and everything was about us.

Well, Kostya, have you seen the Cape of Good Hope? - my father asked me.

Saw. Only it’s across the river, there. “I haven’t gotten there yet,” I said.

I remember everyone was laughing.

K. Korovin. Mistress. 1896

Notes

1) Sellers and peddlers of small haberdashery goods, as well as popular popular prints.

At home and at grandma's

Grandma Ekaterina Ivanovna’s house was so good. Carpeted rooms, flowers in baskets by the windows, pot-bellied mahogany chests of drawers, heaps of porcelain, golden vases with flowers under glass. Everything is so beautiful. Pictures... The cups are gold inside. Delicious Chinese apple jam. Such a garden behind a green fence. These Chinese apples grew there. The outside of the house is green, with shutters. The grandmother is tall, wearing a lace cape and a black silk dress. I remember how my aunts, the Sushkins and Ostapovs, beautiful, in lush crinolines, and my mother played large golden harps. There were a lot of visitors. All dressed up guests. And at the table the food was served by servants wearing gloves, and the women had large hats with elegant ribbons. And they drove away from the entrance in carriages.

K. Korovin. Flowers and fruits. 1911–1912

In the yard of our house, behind the well near the garden, there lived a dog in a dog house - such a small house, and there was a round loophole in it. That's where a big shaggy dog ​​lived. And she was tied to a chain. This is what I liked. And the dog is so good, his name was Druzhok. At every dinner I left her bones and begged for pieces of something, and then took her away and fed Druzhka. And let him off the chain. I let him into the garden and gazebo. My friend loved me and when we met, he put his paws on my shoulders, which made me almost fall. He licked my face with his tongue. My friend also loved my brother Seryozha. Buddy always sat with us on the porch and laid his head on my lap. But as soon as someone walked through the gate, the friend flew headlong and barked so hard that it scared everyone.

In winter, Druzhku was cold. I quietly, without telling anyone, led him through the kitchen to my room upstairs. And he slept next to my bed. But I was forbidden to do this, no matter how much I asked my father or mother, nothing worked. They said: it’s impossible. I told this to my friend. But I still managed to take Buddy into my room and hid him under the bed.

The friend was very shaggy and big. And one summer my brother Seryozha and I decided to cut his hair. And they shaved him so that they made him into a lion: they shaved him halfway. My friend turned out to be a real lion, and they began to fear him even more. The baker who came in the morning, who was carrying bread, complained that it was impossible to walk, why were they letting Druzhka down: after all, a pure lion rushes. I remember my father laughing - he also loved dogs and all kinds of animals.

Once he bought a bear cub and sent it to Borisovo - very close to Moscow, near Tsaritsyn, across the Moscow River. There was little

My grandmother’s estate, there was a house-dacha where we lived in the summer. Verka the Bear - why was it called that? - she soon grew up on me and was remarkably kind. She played with my brother and me in a wooden ball on the meadow in front of the dacha. She was tumbling, and we were together. And at night she slept with us and bawled in a special way, with a special sound that seemed to be coming from afar. She was very affectionate, and it seems to me that she thought about us that we were bear cubs. We played with her all day and evening near the dacha. We played hide-and-seek and rolled head over heels down a hill near the forest. By the fall, Verka had grown taller than me, and one day my brother and I went to Tsaritsyn. And there she climbed a huge pine tree. Some summer residents, seeing the bear, became worried. But Verka, no matter how much I called her, did not leave the pine tree. Some people, bosses, came with a gun and wanted to shoot her. I burst into tears, begged not to kill Verka, called her in despair, and she climbed down from the pine tree. My brother and I took her home to ourselves, and the bosses also came to us and forbade us to keep a bear.

I remember it was my grief. I hugged Verka and cried fervently. And Verka gurgled and licked my face. It’s strange that Verka never got angry. But when they nailed her into a box to take her on a cart to Moscow, Verka roared like a terrible beast and her eyes were small, bestial and angry. Verka was brought to Moscow to a house and placed in a large greenhouse in the garden. But then Buddy went completely crazy: he barked and howled incessantly. “How can we reconcile this Friend with Verka?” - I thought. But when my brother and I took Druzhka and took him into the garden to the greenhouse where Verka was, Verka, seeing Druzhka, got desperately scared, rushed up onto the long brick stove of the greenhouse, knocked over the flower pots and jumped onto the window. She was beside herself. The friend, seeing Verka, howled and screamed desperately, throwing himself at our feet. “That’s the story,” I thought. “Why were they afraid of each other?” And no matter how hard my brother and I tried to calm Verka and Druzhka, nothing worked. The friend rushed to the door to get away from Verka. It was obvious that they didn't like each other. Verka was almost twice the size of Druzhka, but she was afraid of the dog. And this went on all the time. The friend was concerned that a bear lived in the garden in the greenhouse.

One fine day, in the morning, a police supervisor came to his father and told him that he had received orders to arrest the bear and send him to the kennel by order of the governor. It was a desperate day for me. I came to the greenhouse, hugged and stroked Verka, kissed her face and cried bitterly. Verka looked intently with animal eyes. I was thinking about something and was worried. And in the evening the soldiers came, tied her legs and face and took her away.

I cried all night and didn’t go into the garden. I was scared to look at the greenhouse in which Verka was no longer there.

K. Korovin. Bridge. 1890s

Outdoors

After the death of my grandfather, everything gradually changed in the house on Rogozhskaya Street.

There are few coachmen left. Their songs were no longer heard in the evening, and the stables were empty. There were huge dormezes covered with dust; the coachmen's yards were sad and empty. The clerk Echkin was not visible in our house. My father was concerned. Many people came to the house. I remember how my father paid them a lot of money, and he folded some long white pieces of paper, bills of exchange, together in the evening, tied them with string and put them in a chest, locking them. Somehow he was leaving. In the front porch, my mother saw him off. The father looked thoughtfully at the window covered with frost. The father held the key in his hands and, lost in thought, put the key to the glass. A key shape formed there. He moved it to a new place and said to his mother:

I'm broke. This house will be sold.

The Nikolaevskaya railway had already passed and was completed to Trinity-Sergius, and a road was also built to Nizhny Novgorod. So the yamshchina was over. Few people rode horses on these roads anymore: the pitting was not needed... This means that the father said: “I’m ruined,” because the matter was over. The Trinity Railway was built by Mamontov and Chizhov, friends of my grandfather. Soon my mother and I moved to my grandmother, Ekaterina Ivanovna Volkova. I really liked my grandmother's place. And then from there we moved to Dolgorukovskaya Street, to the mansion of the manufacturer Zbuk. It seems - I don’t remember well - my father was a justice of the peace. There was a large courtyard at Zbuk’s house and a large garden with fences, and beyond there were clearings. Moscow and Sushchevo were not yet well rebuilt. Factory chimneys were visible in the distance, and I remember how during the holidays workers, first young, then older, came out into these clearings, shouting at each other: “come out,” “give back what’s ours,” and fought with each other. This was called the "wall". Until the evening, shouting could be heard: these were fighting games. I've seen these fights many times.

The furniture in the Zbuk mansion was transported from our Rogozh house, which had already been sold. But this life in Moscow was short-lived.

In the summer, with my father and mother, I quite often went to Moscow, to Petrovsky Park, to my aunt Alekseeva’s dacha. She was a fat woman with a red face and dark eyes. The dacha was elegant, painted yellow, and so was the fence. The dacha was full of carved trinkets; In front of the terrace there was a curtain of flowers, and in the middle was a painted iron crane: with its nose raised, it was letting out a fountain. And on some pillars there were two bright, bright silver balls in which the garden was reflected. The paths, covered with yellow sand, with curbs - it all looked like a sponge cake. It was nice at my aunt’s dacha, elegant, but for some reason I didn’t like it. When I had to turn from Petrovskoye Highway into the park alley, the highway seemed like a distant blue distance, and I wanted to go not to my aunt’s dacha, but there, into that distant blue distance. And I thought: there must be the Cape of Good Hope...

K. Korovin. St. Brook Tryphon in Pechenga. 1894

And at my aunt’s dacha everything is painted, even the fire barrel is also yellow. I wanted to see something completely different: somewhere there are forests, mysterious valleys... And there, in the forest, there is a hut - I would go there and live alone in this hut. I would take my dog ​​Druzhka with me there and live with him; there is a small window, a dense forest - I would catch a deer, milk it, and a wild cow... Only one thing: she is probably butting. I would saw off her horns, we would live together. My father has a fishing rod - I would take it with me, put some meat on the hook and throw it out of the window at night. There are wolves there, if a wolf came, he would grab the meat and get caught. I would have dragged him to the window and said: “What, gotcha? Now you won’t leave... There’s no point in baring your teeth, give up, live with me.” He’s not a fool: if he understood, we’d live together. And what about your aunt... Well, ice cream, well, the dacha - it’s nonsense, wherever you go there’s a fence, yellow paths, nonsense. And I would like to go to a dense forest, to a hut... That’s what I wanted.

Returning from my aunt, I told my father:

How I would like to go into the dense forest. Only my gun, of course, is not real, it shoots like peas, nonsense. Please buy me a real gun, I will hunt.

My father listened to me, and then one morning I saw: on the table next to me there was a real gun. Small single-barreled gun. The trigger is new. I grabbed it - how it smells, what kind of locks, some kind of striped trunks. I threw myself on my father’s neck to thank him, and he said:

Kostya, this is a real gun. And here is a box of caps. But I won’t give you gunpowder - it’s too early. Look, the barrel is Damascus.

I walked around the yard with a gun all day. There is an elderberry growing in the yard near the fence; the fence is old, with cracks in it. And on the other side lives a friend - the boy Levushka. I showed him the gun, he didn’t understand anything. He has a wheelbarrow, he carries sand, a big heavy wheel - in a word, nonsense. No, a gun is completely different.

I’ve already seen how I shot ducks, geese, a peacock, and a wolf while running with Druzhko... Oh, how could I go into a dense forest. And here - this dusty courtyard, cellars, yellow stables, church domes - what to do?

I sleep with my gun and clean it twenty times a day. The father put a candle on the table and lit it, set the piston, raised the trigger, shot at the candle five steps - the candle went out. I shot three boxes of caps, put out a candle without a miss - everything was wrong. You need gunpowder and a bullet.

Wait,” said the father, “soon we will go to the village of Mytishchi, we will live there.” There I will give you gunpowder and shot, you will shoot game.

K. Korovin. Village. 1902

I have been waiting for this happiness for a long time. Summer and winter passed, and then one fine day, when the birch trees were just blooming, my father went with me by rail. What a beauty! What you can see through the window - forests, fields - everything is in spring. And we arrived in Bolshie Mytishchi. On the edge there was a house - a large hut. Some woman showed it to us and with her was the boy Ignatka. How nice it is in the hut: two wooden rooms, then a stove, a yard, in the yard there are two cows and a horse, a small dog, wonderful - barks all the time. And when you step out onto the porch, you see a big blue forest. The meadows sparkle in the sun. The forest is Elk Island, huge. That is, as good as I have ever seen. All of Moscow is no good, such beauty...

A week later we moved there. Somewhere my father got a job at a factory nearby. But what kind of Mytishchi is this? There is a river there - the Yauza, and it goes from a large forest to Losiny Island.

I immediately became friends with the boys. My friend went with me. At first I was afraid to walk far, but beyond the river I could see the forest and the blue distance. That’s where I’ll go... And I went. Ignashka, Senka and Seryozhka are with me - wonderful people, instant friends. Let's go hunting. My father showed me how to load a gun: he put in very little gunpowder, I hung some newspaper, made a circle and shot, and the shot fell into the circle. That is, this is not life, but heaven. River bank, grass, alder bushes. Either it is very small, shallow, then it turns into wide, dark barrels of incredible depth. Fish splash on the surface. My friends and I go further and further.

Look,” says Ignashka, “there, you see, ducks are swimming behind the bushes.” These are wild ones.

We sneak quietly in the bushes. Swamp. And I came close to the ducks. He took aim and shot at those that were closer. A whole flock of ducks flew up screaming, and the duck I shot at lay on the surface and beat its wings. Ignashka quickly undressed and threw himself into the water, swimming fathoms towards the duck. My friend was barking on the shore. Ignashka grabbed the wing with his teeth and returned with the duck. A big duck crawled ashore. The head is blue with a pink tint. It was a celebration. I walked on tiptoes with delight. And we moved on. The place became more swampy, it was difficult to walk, the earth was shaking. But the entire bottom of the river is visible, and I saw: near the bushes, in the depths, large fish were walking and breathing with their mouths. God, what fish! They need to be caught. But very deep. To the side there was a huge pine forest into which we came. This is the Cape of Good Hope. Green moss. Ignashka and Seryoga collected brushwood and made a fire. Wet, we warmed ourselves near the fire. The duck was lying nearby. What will father say? And beyond the bend of the river, through the pine trees, the distance turned blue, and there was a large stretch of the river.

K. Korovin. Hunters' rest. 1911

No, this is not the Cape of Good Hope, but it is where the blue distance is. Therefore, I will definitely go there... there is a hut there, I will live there. Well, what about Moscow, what about our Rogozhsky house with columns, that it stands in front of these barrels of water, in front of these flowers - purple plumes that stand near the alder trees... And these green alder trees are reflected in the water, as in a mirror, and there is a blue sky, and above, in the distance, distant forests turn blue.

We must return home. My father told me: “Go hunting,” and my mother almost cried, saying: “Is this possible, he’s still a boy.” It's me. I shot a duck. And now I’ll swim across this river whenever you want. What is she afraid of? He says: “He’ll go into the thickets.” Yes, I’ll get out, I’m a hunter, I shot a duck.

And I walked home proudly. And over my shoulder I carried an overweight duck.

When I came home, there was a celebration. My father said: “Well done” and kissed me, and my mother said: “This nonsense will lead to the point that he will get lost and disappear...”

“Don’t you see,” the mother said to the father, “that he is looking for the Cape of Good Hope?” “Eh,” she said, “where is this cape... Don’t you see that Kostya will always look for this cape. This is impossible. He doesn’t understand life as it is, he still wants to go here and there. Is this possible? Look, he won't learn anything.

Every day I went hunting with my friends. Mainly, everything is to get further away, to see new places, more and more new. And then one day we went far away along the edge of a large forest. My comrades took a wicker basket with them, climbed into the river, placed it near the coastal bushes in the water, clapped their feet, as if driving fish out of the bushes, lifted the basket, and small fish fell into it. But one day a big fish splashed up, and in the basket lay two large dark burbots. It was a surprise. We took a pot that was for tea, made a fire and cooked burbot. There was an ear. “This is how you have to live,” I thought. And Ignashka tells me:

Look, there, you see, at the edge of the forest there is a small hut.

K. Korovin. Arkhangelsk. 1897

Indeed, when we approached, there was a small empty hut with a door and a small window on the side with glass. We walked around the hut and then pushed the door. The door opened. There was no one there. Earthen floor. The hut is low, so that an adult could reach the ceiling with his head. And just right for us. Well, what a hut this is, beauty. There is straw at the top and a small brick stove. Now we have lit the brushwood. Amazing. Warm. Here is the Cape of Good Hope. I'll move here to live...

And we lit the stove so much that it became unbearably hot in the hut. The door was opened. It was autumn time. It was already getting dark. Everything turned blue outside. It was twilight. The forest nearby was huge. Silence...

And suddenly it became scary. Somehow lonely, lonely. It’s dark in the hut, and all the month goes out on the side above the forest. I think: “My mother has gone to Moscow, she won’t worry. We’ll leave here in a little while.” It’s very nice here in the hut. Well, it's absolutely wonderful. As grasshoppers chirp, there is silence all around, tall grass and a dark forest. Huge pine trees are dozing in the blue sky, in which the stars have already appeared. Everything freezes. A strange sound in the distance by the river, as if someone was blowing into a bottle: woo-oo, woo-oo...

Ignashka says:

This is a woodsman. It's okay, we'll show him.

And something is creepy... The forest is getting dark. The trunks of the pine trees were illuminated by the mysterious moon. The stove went out. We are afraid to go out to get brushwood. The door was locked. The door handle was tied with belts from shirts to the crutch, so that it was impossible to open the door in case the forester came. Baba Yaga still exists, it’s such disgusting.

We fell silent and looked out the small window. And suddenly we see: some huge horses with white chests and huge heads are walking... and they suddenly stop and look. These huge monsters with horns like tree branches were illuminated by the moon. They were so huge that we all froze in fear. And they were silent... They walked smoothly on thin legs. Their butts were down. There are eight of them.

These are moose... - Ignashka said in a whisper.

We looked at them without stopping. It never occurred to me to shoot at these monstrous beasts. Their eyes were big, and one elk came close to the window. His white chest glowed like snow under the moon. Suddenly they immediately rushed and disappeared. We heard the sound of their feet cracking, as if they were cracking nuts. That's the thing...

We didn't sleep all night. And as soon as the light dawned, in the morning we went home.

School. Impressions from Moscow and village life

Life in the village was a pleasure for me, a boy. It seemed that there was no and could not be better than my life. I've been in the forest all day, in some sandy ravines, where tall grasses and huge spruce trees have fallen into the river. There I and my comrades dug a house for myself in a cliff, behind the branches of fallen fir trees. Which house! We reinforced the yellow walls of sand, the ceiling with sticks, laid fir branches, made a lair and a stove like animals, laid a pipe, caught fish, took out a frying pan, fried this fish along with gooseberries that we stole from the garden. There was no longer one dog, Druzhok, but four whole ones. The dogs are wonderful. They guarded us, and the dogs thought, like us, that this was the best life that could be... What a life! Swimming in the river; What kind of animals we saw, there are no such animals. Pushkin said it right: “There on unknown paths there are traces of unprecedented animals...” There was a badger, but we didn’t know what a badger was: some special big piglet. The dogs chased him, and we ran, we wanted to catch him, teach him to live together. But they didn’t catch him - he ran away. He went straight into the ground and disappeared. Wonderful life...

Summer has passed. It's raining and autumn. The trees have fallen. But it was good in our house, which no one knew. We lit the stove - it was warm. But my father came one day with a teacher, a tall, thin man with a small beard. So dry and strict. He pointed at me: go to school tomorrow. It was scary. School is something special. And what is scary is unknown, but the unknown is scary.

In Mytishchi, on the highway, right next to the outpost, in a large stone house, it is written: “Volost government.” In the left half of the house there was a school in a large room.

The desks are black. The students are all assembled.<...>We sit down at our desks.

The teacher gives us pens, pens, pencils and notebooks and a book - a wonderful book: “Native Word”, with pictures.

We, already literate, are placed on one side of the desks, and the younger ones - on the other.

The first lesson begins with reading. Another teacher comes, ruddy, short, cheerful and kind, and orders him to sing after him.

Oh, my will, my will,
You are my golden one.
Will is a falcon in heaven,
Will is a bright dawn...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Great song. The first time I heard. Nobody was scolded here.

The second lesson was arithmetic. I had to go to the board and write the numbers and how many would be one with the other. We were wrong.

And so began the teaching every day. There was nothing terrible at school, just wonderful. And I liked school so much.

How strange, I went to Moscow with my father several times, visited my grandmother, Ekaterina Ivanovna, was in a large restaurant, and I didn’t like anything: neither Moscow, nor my grandmother’s, nor the restaurant. I didn’t like it so much, like this miserable apartment in the village, like this dark night in winter, where dark huts sleep in a row, where there is a deaf, snowy, boring road, where it shines all month long and the dog howls in the street. What heartfelt melancholy, what beauty in this melancholy, what peace

Oh, what beauty there is in this modest life, in black bread, sometimes in a bagel, in a mug of kvass. What sadness in the hut when the lamp is shining, how I like Ignashka, Seryozhka, Kiryushka. What bosom friends. What a delight they are, what friendship. How affectionate the dog is, how I like the village. What kind aunties, strangers, undressed. I was already disgusted by the luxury of my elegant aunts - the Ostapovs, Aunt Alekseeva, where are these crinolines, this exquisite table, where everyone sits so decorously. What a bore. How I like the freedom of meadows, forests, poor huts. I like to light the stove, chop brushwood and mow grass - I already knew how, and Uncle Peter praised me, telling me: “Well done, you mow too.” And I drank, tired, kvass from a wooden ladle.

In Moscow I will go out - stone pavements, strangers. And here I’ll go out - grass or snowdrifts, far away... And my family, my own people. Everyone is kind, no one scolds me. Everyone will pat you on the head or laugh... How strange. I will never go to the city.<...>Seryoga is so good. There the soldier tailor sews a fur coat for him. So he told me... How he got lost in the forest, how the robbers attacked and how he drowned them all... That's how good it is to listen to. And how he drove the devil into a swamp and tore off his tail. So he begged him to be released. And he holds him by the tail and says “no,” and says what a ransom is: “Take me,” he says, “to Petersburg to the Tsar.” He sat on his neck, went straight to the king and came. The king says: “Well done, soldier!” And he gave him a silver ruble. He showed the ruble.... It was such a big, old-fashioned ruble. These are the people. Not fools.

There is a lot of interesting things in the village. Wherever you go, everyone tells you something that doesn’t happen. What can I tell you, what happens, like in Moscow. In Moscow they tell everything that happens. But here - no. It’s like this here now, but in an hour, no one knows what will happen. This is, of course, a remote village. And how beautiful log houses are! The new hut... oh, it smells like pine. I would never leave. But my boots are thin, the soles need to be repaired. They tell me that the boots are asking for porridge, they turned around. I told my father that they were asking twenty kopecks for the repair. Father ordered to give it. “I,” he says, “will pay.” But they don’t give it back for a week. I wear felt boots.

K. Korovin. Russia. Holiday festivities. 1930s