The Vremya publishing house has published a new edition of Alexander Chudakov’s book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps...” What is the name of the city referred to in the book by Chebachinsky? Why does the author call a novel about the life of exiled migrants an idyll? Is it easy for an applicant from the Siberian hinterland to enter MSU? This and much more was discussed at the presentation of the book, which last year won the Booker of the Decade Award.

Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov died in 2005. He is known primarily as a researcher literary creativity Chekhov, publisher and critic. Since 1964 he worked at the Institute of World Literature, taught at Moscow State University, the Literary Institute, and lectured on Russian literature at European and American universities. Member of the International Chekhov Society. Alexander Pavlovich published more than two hundred articles on the history of Russian literature, prepared for publication and commented on the works of Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov. The novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps...” was first published in 2000 in the magazine “Znamya”. In 2011, the book was awarded.

The presentation of the new edition of Alexander Chudakov’s book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps...”, published by the Vremya publishing house in 2012, took place in the Moscow bookstore Biblio-Globus. In addition to the writer’s widow Marietta Chudakova, his sister Natalya Samoilova was present at the event.

The book is subtitled “an idyll novel.” And this definition suits her very well. There is no contradiction here. You should not, having read in the annotation: “the book tells about the life of a group of “exiled settlers” on the border of Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan,” imagine a gloomy and harsh biography in the spirit of “The Pit” or “ Kolyma stories" On the border of Kazakhstan and Siberia there lies a small town, which someone “at the top” mistakenly considered a suitable place to exile prisoners. And the town, called Chebachinsk in the novel, turned out to be a real oasis. During Stalin's time, Alexander Pavlovich's family moved here from Moscow on their own, without waiting for exile. Several generations of one big family lived and worked together, trying to preserve what was left of the country called Russia. Reading this unique Robinsonade, written in real Russian, lively, flexible and moving, is incredibly interesting. Post-war life in a small town with one-story houses, where teachers live next to students, a blacksmith and a shoemaker are figures known throughout the city, where all layers of life are mixed, and thanks to the constant influx of fresh people from all over the country, it is possible to learn a lot first-hand.

Marietta Chudakova:“No one who starts reading the book will be disappointed. Alexander Pavlovich managed to see such a success of his novel. For many years persuaded him to write about his childhood. But he doubted whether to write or not. How much did he doubt his scientific concepts, so he doubted whether to write a novel. And I, from the very first months of our living together“I was shocked by Alexander Pavlovich’s stories about the town in Northern Kazakhstan where he spent his childhood, an exiled place where life was completely different from the one I imagined, a Muscovite born on the Arbat in the Grauerman maternity hospital.”

For me, as a student in my second year, Khrushchev’s report became a spiritual revolution. Literally - I entered the Communist Auditorium on Mokhovaya as one person, and came out three and a half hours later as a completely different person. The words rang in my head: “I will never support ideas that require millions of dead.” But for Alexander Pavlovich there was nothing surprising in this report; this was his childhood, and his whole life. His grandfather main character this novel, always called Stalin a bandit. He was not imprisoned, he remained free and died a natural death only because in this small town with twenty thousand people, Alexander Pavlovich’s grandfather and parents studied two-thirds of the city. The level of teaching in this town was unexpectedly high. The local school was taught by associate professors from Leningrad University. In general, exiles were forbidden to teach, but due to the complete absence of other personnel, this prohibition had to be violated.”

Alexander Pavlovich and Marietta Omarovna Chudakov met in the first year of the philological department of Moscow State University and lived together most of their lives.

Marietta Chudakova:“Alexander Pavlovich entered Moscow State University on the first try, without any cronyism. He came to Moscow with two friends (“the three musketeers,” as they were called), they arrived alone, without their parents. Alexander Pavlovich entered the philology department, one friend entered the physics department, and the second entered the Mining Institute. Wherever they wanted, they went there. When people tell me how difficult it is to enroll now, I can’t say that I feel sympathy for today’s applicants. Because in the year when Alexander Pavlovich and I entered, the competition for medalists was 25 people per place. And I don’t know how many people were in place on a general basis. We had a head start - first the interview, if we had failed it, we would have acted on a general basis, but both of us, he and I, passed after the interview.

The preparation of an applicant from a Siberian town turned out to be no worse than that of Muscovites. Six months after admission, when it became clear who was who, Alexander Pavlovich took his place in the top five of the course, the rest were Muscovites, and he was from the outback.”

Without giving your portrait

According to representatives of the Vremya publishing house, a circulation of 5,000 copies of the new edition of the book, which arrived in Moscow in February 2012, was sold out in three working days. This is a unique case. In the new edition of the book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps...”, edits were made, photographs were added, and it also included excerpts from the diaries and letters of Alexander Pavlovich, prepared by his widow. This addition allows you to trace the history of the book's creation.

Marietta Chudakova: “About a year ago I decided to take the first notebook of Alexander Pavlovich’s diary from his early student years, and saw that the idea for the novel arose in him even then: “ Try to write a story young man our era, using autobiographical material, but without giving a portrait of yourself" But this plan was soon postponed scientific work, into which we plunged, as they say, “up to our ears.”

While working on the afterword to the book, I set myself three tasks: to show the reader who the author was, what his profession was, and what he did in it; as far as possible to give an idea of ​​his personality through the diary; show the history of the idea.

Alexander Pavlovich was naturally a modest person, which is very rare in the humanitarian environment. And he could not get used to the fact that the reading public appreciated his novel so highly. And he was stopped at the book fair, even on the street, by women with real, as they say today, tears in their eyes. He was a little upset that the novel was mistaken for a memoir, but there are entire chapters there that are fictional (for example, the first), but they cannot be distinguished from truly autobiographical ones.

I had no doubt about the success of this book. This is one of those rare books that contains Russia as such. I have always been especially partial and demanding towards my own people, and Alexander Pavlovich, laughing, told me that “after my praises - only Nobel Prize" But in this case, I think this novel is worthy of the Booker of the Decade.”

Language as a tool

Marietta Omarovna said that she had to have long conversations with the translator of the novel, a man with Russian roots, an excellent expert on the Russian language, who turned to her in search of English equivalents of Russian words unfamiliar to him. Here, for example, is a “pesky road” - a road with potholes.

Marietta Chudakova:"The richness of the Russian language in Soviet era was leveled by all editors: “This word should not be used, the reader will not understand this, it is rarely used.”

In this book, the richness of the Russian language is used organically, as a tool, and not, as happens now, - inlay, decorating the text with rare words. We ourselves used these words at home. Sasha once wrote memoirs about his teacher, Academician Vinogradov, and used the word “disrespected” and about this I had a long argument with our classmate, a famous linguist. He said: “How can you use a word unknown to the majority? For example, I don’t know such a word.” Sasha grew up in Siberia, I grew up in Moscow, we met and used this word easily! And in this dispute, I derived a law, which I then checked with the best linguist in Russia, Andrei Zaliznyak, and he confirmed it for me. And this is the law: “If a native speaker of the Russian language uses a certain word... then this word exists in the Russian language! If another Russian speaker doesn’t know this word, that’s his problem.” We don’t invent words, so he heard this word from a person of another generation.

My younger comrade and I, he is an “Afghan”, traveled around a third of Russia, delivering books to libraries. And at every meeting with schoolchildren in grades 1-11 and students, I give quizzes on the Russian language and literature. When asked what the difference is between the words “ignoramus” and “ignoramus,” neither schoolchildren nor students can answer! This is something we need to seriously think about. I am not as concerned about the influx of foreign words as I am concerned about the leakage of Russian words. If we preserve the soil of the Russian language, then everything will take root and everything will take its place. And I believe that Alexander Pavlovich’s novel will successfully serve to preserve the soil.”

Through the eyes of a sister

The presentation of the book was attended by the younger and only sister of Alexandra Chudakova, Natalya Pavlovna Samoilova: “I really liked the book. But some places, especially last chapter, in which we're talking about about death, it’s hard for me to read. It's been six years since my brother died, and I can't calmly read this. The book is partly autobiographical, partly fiction, but everything is intertwined and fiction cannot be distinguished from memories.

Were your family believers?

Yes. But this was carefully hidden. Grandfather received a spiritual education, but due to various reasons did not become a priest. My grandmother kept icons all her life, sometimes she hid them, and sometimes she displayed them. When they told her that she would be imprisoned, she replied: “Plant her along with the icons.”

What was the real name of the city?

Shchuchinsk. This is Northern Kazakhstan. There is a giant lake of volcanic origin. Such an oasis. The places there are wonderful.

Distinguishing between good and evil

At the end of the meeting, we asked M. O. Chudakova several questions.

- What for you? main meaning books by Alexander Pavlovich?

We must acutely feel that Russia is our country. For me, this is the main point of the book. Secondly, strive for the truth. Don’t let your head be clouded by lies coming from above, from the authorities. It is important to maintain clarity of consciousness. In the book, the grandfather teaches this to his grandson. In this book, Alexander Pavlovich also describes his other grandfather, who gilded the domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He was from the village of Voskresenskoye, Bezhetsk district, Tver province, and only the very best were hired as dome gilders, especially as foremen. honest people. And when in November 1931 he saw how the temple was being destroyed, he came home, lay down, and in the next few days he became seriously ill, it turned out that he had stomach cancer, and soon died.

What did these people rely on in their movement against the tide?

To the sense of conscience and truth, the sense of distinguishing between good and evil, which is implanted in us by God. A person may follow the path of evil, but he always knows that he is following the path of evil. It is about this sense of distinction, of boundaries, that Chesterton said through the lips of Father Brown: “You can stay at the same level of good, but no one has ever managed to stay at the same level of evil: this path leads down.” These are absolutely wonderful words, everyone should remember them. We must strive to fight evil. With corruption, for example, which has gripped the entire country like a shell...

How can an ordinary person fight corruption?

Well, I won’t be able to give a lecture on this topic now... It’s enough that you set yourself such a task, then you will find ways.

Title: Darkness falls on the old steps

Publisher: Vremya, Moscow, 2018, 640 pp.

« Darkness falls on the old steps" - the only one art book the outstanding philologist and Czech scholar Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov. Roman received prestigious award"Russian Booker of the Decade" and recognized best work the beginning of this century. The novel is strange, a friend told me when she started reading. The novel is amazing, she told me when she finished reading it. It was the inconsistency in assessments, as well as the bizarre genre of “idyll novel” and Blok’s line in the title that made me pay attention to this book. I bought it. I started reading. And she disappeared.

And now I’m sitting and trying to write a review of a book whose plot cannot be described in two words or even two sentences. Because he doesn't exist. Yes, yes, there is no coherent plot, no rapidly developing events, no usual for the novel love line. And there is not even a single form of narration: the author constantly switches from the first person to the third and vice versa. This is really surprising at first, even somehow annoying. But as soon as you delve deeper into reading, you completely stop noticing this feature. It is a feature, and not a drawback, as some readers believe, who do not share the decision of the Russian Booker jury.

The author's idea was to write the story of a modern young man based on autobiographical facts. But still this work of art. And we are not allowed to forget about this by the fictitious North Kazakhstan city of Chebachinsk, instead of the real Shchuchinsk, and by the boy Anton, about whom Chudakov writes in the third person, but sometimes suddenly introduces the author’s “I” into the text.

The events described in the novel take place in the time period from the end of the Great Patriotic War until the mid-eighties. The small town of Chebachinsk is something like a little Switzerland in the north of Kazakhstan. A heavenly place, where, however, no one from the union capital goes of their own free will. A city of migrants, evacuees and those who wisely chose, without waiting for exile, to leave the heart of their homeland of their own free will. The whole book is a collection of stories about these people, who in one way or another entered the lives of the main characters.

There are two of them at the center of the novel. The first one is grandfather. The work begins with his appearance, and ends with the story of how he died. According to the author, my grandfather knew two worlds. One - understandable and familiar - collapsed with the advent of chaos in life and a change in values. In its place came an unreal world, which the grandfather could neither understand nor accept. But old world remained in his soul, and he built his life and the life of his family, based on the postulates of that real world. Every day he led internal dialogue with his spiritual and secular writers, with his seminary mentors, with friends, father, brothers, although he never saw any of them again.

The second character placed at the center of the novel, although not as striking as the grandfather, is the narrator himself, “the smart boy Anton Stremoukhov.” Child new era, having absorbed the values ​​of his grandfather’s world. Can you imagine how difficult it is for him to get along with the absurdity of the surrounding reality? He doesn't find common language with most of his classmates and classmates at the university, women leave him because of his almost manic love for the reasonable, rational structure of the world. The annotation to the novel states that “ New newspaper"Called him an intellectual Robinsonade. This is probably the most precise definition to describe those life vicissitudes that influenced the development of the hero’s personality.

If you think about it, grandfather, he’s also like that same Robinson, thrown onto the outskirts of life, but not giving up. Inner rod. Strength of spirit. Loyalty to convictions. Isn't this best protection from destructive external circumstances.

It would seem that since we are talking about the life of immigrants, the stories should be dominated by minor notes full of drama. But no. That's the beauty of it, that the book is surprisingly kind, light and delightfully bright. Life is not easy, but the outlook on it is bright. That's right. There is no evil or resentment. The pain did not break me, did not embitter me. There is only light sadness.

You know how it happens. You're on the bus. Stop. The door doesn’t even have time to open when some kind of brute bursts in from the street, screaming and making demands. He wants to sit down. And it splashes its anger in all directions. I just don’t want to give up such a place at all.
Or here's another story. An old woman of about eighty will get on the bus. Everything is so intelligent, light, transparent. It seems like a blow and it will disappear. He will stand modestly in a corner so that God forbid he disturbs anyone. And you immediately want to give up your seat. Not because she is older, but because she is like this. There is some special light coming from her. You jump off: “Sit down, please.” And she: “What are you, what are you! Don't worry." He will be embarrassed. She doesn't understand why this is happening. I’ve endured so much in my life, standing on a bus is a mere trifle.

So it is in the book. Special light on every page. Quiet radiance of Life.

And how much gentle humor there is in the novel! Reading the chapter about the spelling genius Vaska Eighty-Five, I laughed out loud. Now, every time I see a brick, I will remember this Vaska with his “kerdpich”. That’s right - “kerdpich”, and also “honestnog” and many, many others funny words, because Vaska has firmly grasped the main orthographic postulate: words are written differently from how they are heard.
And you can’t tell at all about how he recited poetry - just read!

When talking about a book, I would like to quote at least a few pages. And then again and again. But, perhaps, I’ll limit myself to the usual phrase: the book is written in beautiful Russian, where every line evokes real philological ecstasy. The main character himself is the prototype of the author of the novel; he was fascinated by in beautiful words, titles, surnames. The syllables were especially tricky and I repeated them with pleasure before going to bed in order to remember them better. Here is an unusual “childhood” - from a novel.

I love books where the essence is in the details. And here I simply enjoyed these endless little things that allow me to visibly touch my memory. To history. The novel is filled with the rules of ancient etiquette, all kinds of recipes and life hacks of that time. How to make soap, melt a candle, make sugar from beets, live in times of famine on carrots and starch jelly.
Also: what were condoms made from? Louis XIV, how Ford invented car glass, where “Evening Bells” came from.

The novel is a discovery. The novel is nostalgic. With tears on the last pages and understanding, it seems to me, of the main message:

Life changes. Some people leave, others appear. But departed people are alive as long as we remember and love them. That's the point. The meaning of this life.

It would be silly to say that I highly recommend reading the book. A powerful piece. Strong emotions. People of the older generation will definitely find in the novel something to remember and think about. And for young people - a wonderful excursion into the life of peers from the last century. Read 640 pages of the book in one breath. Just open it... And then you will tell your friend: “Be sure to read it!” She's so weird and so amazing."

...my soul will look at you from there, and you, whom I loved, will drink tea on our veranda, talk, pass a cup or bread with simple earthly movements; you will become different - more mature, older, older. You will have another life, a life without me; I will look and think: do you remember me, my dearest?

In the photo from the book: A.P. Chudakov (1938 - 2005) at his dacha in Alyokhnovo.

Have you read the book? Share your impressions in the comments below!

© Alexander Chudakov, 2012

© “Time”, 2012

* * *

1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

Grandfather was very strong. When he, in his faded shirt with the sleeves turned up high, was working in the garden or whittling a handle for a shovel (while resting, he always whittled cuttings; in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said to himself something like: “Balls of muscles rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he hardly reached out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

-Are you laughing? - said the grandfather. – Have I become weak? He became old, but he was young before. Why don’t you tell me, like the hero of your tramp writer: “What, are you dying?” And I would answer: “Yes, I’m dying!”

And before Anton’s eyes that old hand from the past floated up as he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand is on the edge festive table with a tablecloth and dishes shifted - could it really be more than thirty years ago?

Yes, it was at the wedding of Pereplyotkin’s son, who had just returned from the war. On one side of the table sat the blacksmith Kuzma Pereplyotkin himself, and from him, smiling in embarrassment but not in surprise, the slaughterhouse fighter Bondarenko, whose hand had just been pinned to the tablecloth by the blacksmith in a competition that is now called arm wrestling, but was not called anything then, walked away from him. There was no need to be surprised: in the town of Chebachinsk there was no person whose hand Perepletkin could not lay. They said that earlier his younger brother, who died in the camps and worked as a hammerman in his forge, could have done the same thing.

Grandfather carefully hung on the back of the chair a black English Boston jacket, left over from a three-piece suit, sewn before the first war, twice faced, but still looking good (it was incomprehensible: even my mother did not exist in the world yet, and grandfather was already sporting this jacket), and rolled up the sleeve of a white cambric shirt, the last of two dozen exported from Vilna in 1915. He firmly placed his elbow on the table, closed his own with his opponent’s palm, and it immediately sank in the blacksmith’s huge, clawed hand.

One hand is black, with ingrained scale, all intertwined not with human, but with some kind of oxen (“The veins swelled like ropes on his hands,” Anton thought habitually). The other was twice as thin, white, and that blueish veins were slightly visible under the skin in the depths, only Anton knew, who remembered these hands better than his mother’s. And only Anton knew the iron hardness of this hand, its fingers, without a key unscrewing the nuts from the cart wheels. Only one other person had such strong fingers - the second grandfather's daughter, Aunt Tanya. Finding herself in exile during the war (as a Czech woman, a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) in a remote village with three young children, she worked on a farm as a milkmaid. Electric milking was unheard of at that time, and there were months when she milked twenty cows a day by hand, twice each.

Anton’s Moscow friend, a meat and milk specialist, said that these were all fairy tales, this was impossible, but it was true. Aunt Tanya’s fingers were all twisted, but their grip remained steely; when a neighbor, greeting him, jokingly squeezed her hand tightly, she responded by squeezing his hand so hard that it became swollen and hurt for a week.

The guests had already drunk the first few bottles of moonshine, and there was noise.

- Come on, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

– Is this Pereplyotkin the proletarian?

Pereplyotkin - Anton knew this - was from a family of exiled kulaks.

– Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

- This is their grandmother from the nobility. And he is one of the priests.

A volunteer judge checked that the elbows were on the same line. Let's start.

The ball from grandfather’s elbow rolled first somewhere deep into his rolled up sleeve, then rolled back a little and stopped. The blacksmith's ropes emerged from under the skin. Grandfather's ball stretched out a little and became like a huge egg (“ostrich egg,” thought the educated boy Anton). The blacksmith's ropes stood out more strongly, and it became clear that they were knotted. The grandfather's hand began to slowly bend towards the table. For those who, like Anton, stood to the right of Pereplyotkin, his hand completely covered his grandfather’s hand.

- Kuzma, Kuzma! - they shouted from there.

“Delight is premature,” Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped bowing. Perepletkin looked surprised. Apparently he pushed hard, because another rope swelled up - on his forehead.

The grandfather's palm began to slowly rise - again, again, and now both hands stood vertically again, as if these minutes had never happened, this swollen vein on the blacksmith's forehead, this perspiration on the grandfather's forehead.

The hands vibrated subtly, like a double mechanical lever connected to some powerful motor. Here and there. Here - there. A little here again. A little there. And again stillness, and only a barely noticeable vibration.

The double lever suddenly came to life. And he began to bow again. But grandfather’s hand was now on top! However, when it was just a trifle away from the tabletop, the lever suddenly moved back. And froze for a long time in a vertical position.

- Draw, draw! - they shouted first from one and then from the other side of the table. - Draw!

“Grandfather,” Anton said, handing him a glass of water, “and then, at the wedding, after the war, you could have put Pereplyotkin in?”

- Perhaps.

- So what?..

- For what. For him, this is professional pride. Why put a person in an awkward position.

The other day, when my grandfather was in the hospital, before a doctor and his retinue of students were on a round, he took off and hid it in the nightstand. pectoral cross. He crossed himself twice and, looking at Anton, smiled faintly. Grandfather's brother, Fr. Pavel said that in his youth he liked to boast about his strength. They are unloading the rye - he will move the worker aside, put his shoulder under a five-pound sack, the other under a second one of the same kind, and walk, without bending, to the barn. No, it was impossible to imagine my grandfather being so boastful.

My grandfather despised any kind of gymnastics, seeing no benefit in it either for himself or for the household; It’s better to split three or four logs in the morning and throw in the manure. My father agreed with him, but summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics provides such a versatile load as chopping wood - all muscle groups work. Having read a lot of brochures, Anton said: experts believe that during physical labor not all muscles are engaged, and after any work it is necessary to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only we could put these specialists at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything there is in public - has he seen at least one miner doing exercises after a shift? Vasily Illarionovich has never seen such a miner.

- Grandfather, well, Pereplyotkin is a blacksmith. Where did you get so much strength from?

- You see. I come from a family of priests, hereditary, to Peter the Great, and even further.

- So what?

– And the fact that – as your Darwin would say – is artificial selection.

Upon admission to the theological seminary there was unspoken rule: do not accept weak or short people. The boys were brought by the fathers and the fathers were also looked at. Those who were to bring the word of God to people must be beautiful, tall, strong people. In addition, they often have a bass or baritone voice – this is also an important point. They selected such people. And - a thousand years, since the time of St. Vladimir.

Yes, and oh. Pavel, Archpriest of Gorkovsky cathedral, and another brother of my grandfather, who was a priest in Vilnius, and another brother, a priest in Zvenigorod - they were all tall, strong people. O. Pavel served ten years in the Mordovian camps, worked there in logging, and even now, at ninety years old, was healthy and vigorous. "Pop's bone!" - Anton’s father said, sitting down to smoke, when his grandfather continued to slowly and somehow even silently destroy birch logs with a cleaver. Yes, the grandfather was stronger than his father, but his father was not weak either - wiry, hardy, one of the peasant peasants (in whom, however, there was still a remnant of noble blood and a dog's eyebrow), who grew up in Tver rye bread, - was not inferior to anyone either in mowing or skidding the forest. And for years he was half his age, and then, after the war, my grandfather was over seventy, he was dark brown-haired, and gray hair was just barely visible in his thick hair. And Aunt Tamara, even before her death, at ninety, was like a raven’s wing.

Grandfather was never sick. But two years ago, when youngest daughter, Anton's mother, moved to Moscow, his toes on his right foot suddenly began to turn black. My grandmother and older daughters persuaded me to go to the clinic. But in lately The grandfather listened only to the youngest, she was not there, he did not go to the doctor - at ninety-three it is stupid to go to the doctors, and he stopped showing his leg, saying that everything had passed.

But nothing passed, and when the grandfather finally showed his leg, everyone gasped: the blackness reached the middle of the shin. If they had captured him in time, it would have been possible to limit himself to amputation of the fingers. Now I had to cut off my leg at the knee.

Grandfather did not learn to walk on crutches and ended up lying down; knocked out of the half-century rhythm of all-day work in the garden, in the yard, he became sad and weak, and became nervous. He got angry when grandma brought breakfast to bed and moved, grabbing chairs, to the table. The grandmother, out of forgetfulness, served two felt boots. The grandfather shouted at her - this is how Anton learned that his grandfather could scream. The grandmother timidly stuffed the second felt boot under the bed, but at lunch and dinner it all started again. For some reason, they didn’t immediately realize to remove the second felt boot.

IN last month the grandfather became completely weak and ordered to write to all the children and grandchildren to come say goodbye and “at the same time resolve some inheritance issues” - this formulation, said granddaughter Ira, who wrote letters under his dictation, was repeated in all the messages.

– Just like in the story of the famous Siberian writer “ Deadline“, she said. Librarian district library, Ira followed modern literature, but had trouble remembering the names of the authors, complaining: “There are so many of them.”

Anton was amazed when he read in his grandfather’s letter about inheritance issues. What inheritance?

A cabinet with a hundred books? A hundred-year-old, still from Vilnius, sofa, which the grandmother called a chaise longue? True, there was a house. But it was old and shabby. Who needs it?

But Anton was wrong. Of those who lived in Chebachinsk, three claimed the inheritance.

2. Applicants for inheritance

He did not recognize his aunt Tatyana Leonidovna in the old woman who met him on the platform. “The years have left an indelible imprint on her face,” thought Anton.

Among her grandfather's five daughters, Tatyana was considered the most beautiful. She married the railway engineer Tataev, an honest and ardent man, before anyone else. In the middle of the war, he punched the head of the movement in the face. Aunt Tanya never specified why, saying only: “well, it was a scoundrel.”

Tataev was stripped of his armor and sent to the front. He ended up in a searchlight team and one night he mistakenly illuminated not an enemy plane, but his own. The Smershevites did not sleep - he was arrested right there, he spent the night in their arrest dugout, and in the morning he was shot, accusing him of deliberate subversive actions against the Red Army. Having first heard this story in the fifth grade, Anton could not understand how it was possible to invent such nonsense, that a man, being in the disposition of our troops, among his own, who would immediately grab him, would do such a stupid thing. But the listeners - two soldiers of the Great Patriotic War - were not at all surprised. It’s true that their remarks were “the order?”, “Didn’t they get to the numbers?” - were even more incomprehensible, but Anton never asked questions and, although no one warned him, he never recounted conversations at home - maybe that’s why they spoke without hesitation in front of him. Or they thought that he still didn’t understand much. And there is only one room.

Soon after Tataev’s execution, his wife and children: Vovka, six years old, Kolka, four, and Katka, two and a half, were sent to a transit prison in the Kazakh city of Akmolinsk; She waited four months for the verdict and was sent to the Smorodinovka state farm in the Akmola region, where they traveled by passing cars, carts, oxen, on foot, splashing in felt boots through the April puddles, there were no other shoes - they were arrested in the winter.

In the village of Smorodinovka, Aunt Tanya got a job as a milkmaid, and it was luck, because every day she brought milk to the children in a heating pad hidden on her stomach. As a ChSIR, she was not entitled to any cards. They settled them in a calf barn, but were promised a dugout - its occupant, a fellow exile-settler, was about to die; Every day they sent Vovka, the door was not locked, he came in and asked: “Auntie, are you not dead yet?” “Not yet,” answered the aunt, “come tomorrow.” When she finally died, they were moved in on the condition that Aunt Tanya would bury the deceased; with the help of two neighbors, she took the body to the cemetery on a handcart. The new nun harnessed herself to the handles, one neighbor pushed the cart, which kept getting stuck in the rich steppe black soil, the other held the body wrapped in burlap, but the cart was small, and it kept rolling into the mud, the bag soon became black and sticky. Behind the hearse, stretched out, moved the funeral procession: Vovka, Kolka, and Katka, who was lagging behind. However, the happiness was short-lived: Aunt Tanya did not respond to the claims of the farm manager, and she was again evicted from the dugout to the calf barn - however, another, better one: newborn heifers were admitted there. It was possible to live: the room turned out to be large and warm, the cows did not calve every day, there were breaks for two or even three days, and on the seventh of November there was a holiday gift - not a single calving for five whole days, all this time there was no one in the room strangers They lived in the calf barn for two years, until the loving manager was stabbed with a three-pronged pitchfork near a dung heap by a new Chechen milkmaid. The victim, in order not to make a fuss, did not go to the hospital, and the pitchfork was covered in manure; a week later he died from general sepsis - penicillin appeared in these places only in the mid-fifties.

Throughout the war and ten years after, Aunt Tanya worked on the farm, without days off or holidays, it was scary to look at her hands, and she herself became thin to the point of transparency - the light had passed.

In the hungry 1946, my grandmother sent the eldest, Vovka, to Chebachinsk, and he began to live with us. He was silent and never complained about anything. Having once severely cut his finger, he crawled under the table and sat, collecting the dripping blood into a handful; when it was full, he carefully poured the blood into the gap. He was sick a lot, he was given red streptocide, which is why his streak in the snow was scarlet, which I was very jealous of. He was two years older than me, but he only went to the first grade, while I, having entered the second immediately, was already in the third, which Vovka wondered about terribly. Having been taught by his grandfather to read so early that he did not remember himself as illiterate, he ridiculed his brother, who was a poor reader. But not for long: he learned to read quickly, and by the end of the year he could add and multiply in his head better than me. “Father,” sighed the grandmother. “He did all the calculations without a slide rule.”

There were no notebooks; The teacher told Vovka to buy some book with whiter paper. Grandma bought “A Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” - in a store that sold kerosene, decanters and glasses produced by a local glass factory, wooden rakes and stools from a local industrial plant, there was also this book - a whole shelf. The paper in it was the best; Vovka drew his hooks and “letter elements” directly on top of the printed text. Before the text disappeared forever behind the poisonous purple elements, we read it carefully, and then examined each other: “Who had an English uniform?” - “At Kolchak’s.” - “What kind of tobacco?” - “Japanese.” - “Who went into the bushes?” - “Plekhanov.” Vovka titled the second part of this notebook “Rykhmetika” and solved examples there. It began on the famous fourth – philosophical – chapter “ Short course" But the teacher said that it was necessary to have a special notebook for arithmetic - for this, Vovka’s father gave Vovka the brochure “Criticism of the Gotha Program”, but it turned out to be uninteresting, only the preface - by some academician - began well, with poems, however, not written in a column: "A ghost is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."

Vovka studied at our school for only a year. I wrote letters to him in Smorodinovka. Apparently, there was something offensive and boastful in them, because Vovka soon sent me an acrostic letter in response, which deciphered as follows: “Antosha is an English braggart.” The central word was made up of verses: “But you still wonder, You need to imagine less, You speak, although you laugh, Just don’t call me names. And although you learn English, Don’t write this often, But when you get it, Write to me from the heart,” etc.

I was shocked. Vovka, who just a year before my eyes read syllables, now wrote poetry - and even acrostics, the existence of which I did not even suspect in nature! Much later, Vovka’s teacher said that she couldn’t remember another such capable student in thirty years. In his Smorodinovka, Vovka graduated from seven classes and a school for tractor and combine operators. When I arrived based on my grandfather’s letter, he was still living there, with his milkmaid wife and four daughters.

Aunt Tanya moved with the rest of the children to Chebachinsk; their father took them out of Smorodinovka on a truck along with a cow, a real Simmental cow, which could not be abandoned; All the way she mooed and banged her horns on the side. Then he got the middle one, Kolka, into a projectionist school, which was not so easy - after poorly treated otitis in childhood, he turned out to be deaf, but his father’s former student sat on the commission. Having started working as a projectionist, Kolka showed extraordinary resourcefulness: he sold some counterfeit tickets, which were secretly printed for him in a local printing house, and charged patients for sessions in tuberculosis sanatoriums. He turned out to be a first-rate swindler. He was only interested in money. I found a rich bride - the daughter of a famous local speculator, Mani Delets. “He’ll lie down under the blanket,” the young woman complained to her mother-in-law. honeymoon, – and turns to the wall. I press my breasts and everyone, and put my foot on him, and then I also turn away. So we lie there, ass to ass.” After getting married, I bought myself a motorcycle - my mother-in-law didn’t give me money for a car.

Katya lived with us for the first year, but then we had to refuse her - from the first days she was stealing. She very cleverly stole money, which there was no way to hide from her - she found it in a sewing box, in books, under the radio; I took only a part, but a tangible one. Mom began carrying both her and her father’s salaries in her school bag, where it lay safely in the teacher’s lounge. Having lost this income, Katka began to carry silver tea spoons, stockings, and once stole three-liter jar sunflower oil, for which Tamara, the grandfather’s other daughter, stood in line for half a day. Her mother enrolled her in a medical school, which was also not easy (she was a bad student) - again through a former student. Having become a nurse, she cheated no worse than her brother. She gave some stupid injections, stole medicines from the hospital, arranged fake certificates. Both were greedy, constantly lied, always and everywhere, in big things and in small things. Grandfather said: “They are only half to blame. Honest poverty– always poverty to certain limits. There was poverty here. Scary - from infancy. Beggars are not moral." Anton believed his grandfather, but did not like Katka and Kolka. When the grandfather died, his younger brother, a priest in Lithuania, in Siauliai, where their father’s estate had once been, sent him for burial a large sum. Kolka met the postwoman and didn’t say anything to anyone. When from Fr. A letter arrived from Vladimir, everything was opened, but Kolka said that he had put the money on the window. Now Aunt Tanya lived with him, in a government-owned apartment next to the cinema. Apparently, Kolka had his eye on the house.

The eldest daughter Tamara, who lived with old people all her life, never married, is a kind, unrequited creature, and had no idea that she could lay claim to something. She lit the stove, cooked, washed, washed the floors, and herded the cow to the herd. The shepherd drove the herd in the evening only to the outskirts, where the cows were sorted by the housewives, and the cows, which were smart, went further on their own. Our Zorka was smart, but sometimes something came over her and she ran across the river to Kamenukha or even further - into the izlogs. The cow had to be found before dark. It happened that Uncle Lenya, grandfather, even mother were looking for her, I tried three times. No one has ever found it. Tamara always found it. This ability of hers seemed supernatural to me. The father explained: Tamara knows that a cow necessary find. And he finds it. It wasn't very clear. She was at work all day long, only on Sundays did her grandmother let her go to church, and sometimes late in the evening she took out a notebook, where she clumsily copied Tolstoy’s children’s stories, texts from any textbook that happened to be on the table, something from a prayer book, most often one evening prayer : “And grant me, Lord, to pass away this dream in peace this night.” The children teased her “Shosha” - I don’t know where that came from - she was offended. I didn’t tease, I gave her notebooks, then brought her blouses from Moscow. But later, when Kolka grabbed her apartment and shoved her into a nursing home in distant Pavlodar, I only sent parcels there occasionally and was still planning to visit - only a three-hour flight from Moscow - but I didn’t visit. Nothing remained of her: neither her notebooks, nor her icons. Just one photo: turning to the camera, she is wringing out the laundry. For fifteen years she did not see a single face of her own, none of us whom she loved so much and to whom she addressed in letters: “Dearest all.”

The third contender was Uncle Lenya, the youngest of his grandfather’s children. Anton recognized him later than his other uncles and aunts - in 1938 he was drafted into the army, then the Finnish war(he got there as a good skier - he was the only one of the entire battalion of Siberians who admitted this), then - domestic, then - Japanese, then with Far East he was transferred to the far west to fight Bendera; from the last military expedition he took out two slogans: “Long live Pan Bender and his wife Paraska” and “Long live the twenty-eighth fate of the Zhovtnevo revolution.” He returned only in '47. They said: Lentya is lucky, he was a signalman, but he wasn’t even wounded; True, I was shell-shocked twice. Aunt Larisa believed that this affected his mental abilities. What she meant was that he enthusiastically played with his young nephews and nieces in sea ​​battle and at cards, he was very upset when he lost, and therefore he often cheated, hiding the cards behind the tops of his tarpaulin boots.

An amazing novel. It is surprising in that by the decision of the jury of the Russian Booker competition it was recognized best novel first decade of the new century. What, then, in the opinion of this jury, was Russian literature during this rather long period of time? Black hole? Dontsova's kingdom? For what merits did they honor the idyll novel with such a sonorous title?

Does the book convey the spirit of the times? To some extent, any book conveys it. In the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,” the author offers to look at the world through the “eyes” of one family (or rather, a clan), individual destiny which should be projected throughout the country. There is, of course, some truth in this approach, since “It is impossible to live in society and be free from society" Only here attention is focused on the second part of this formula and, through the lack of freedom of the family, the reader is led to the conclusion about total lack of freedom in society as a whole. (More precisely, using the example of a family and its environment, but the environment is just a background for the main characters).

I understand the specifics of both the Kazakh town of Chebachinsk, where the main part of the novel’s action takes place, and that time, but still, reading about the almost one hundred percent coverage of the book’s characters by direct or indirect repression, you feel a sense of distrust in the picture that the artist paints. It turns out to be some kind of “Red Pashechka”. Distrust intensifies when you come across “facts” generously scattered throughout the pages of a book, such as these: the capture of Berlin Soviet troops cost us five hundred thousand lives, or what Stalin had an idea - at the beginning of the Victory Parade “to stone the Russians already delivered to Moscow who fought in the German army”. But one of intelligence officer Kuznetsov’s teachers talks about his training at intelligence school and mentions the German who taught the intelligence officer German language: “Then, of course, they shot him...”. Why " It's clear"? Then why didn't they shoot the narrator? Or does the author believe that all Germans were shot? But Zhukov, wishing to preserve the tanks, sends infantry to the minefield - they supposedly don’t feel sorry for them, the equipment is more expensive. I wonder if, to solve this problem, he announced a special recruitment of such heavy soldiers, whose weight would trigger anti-tank mines? I cannot explain such inclusions otherwise than by using manipulative technologies. Or this strange thesis - “such a society, such a strange era as the Soviet one, put forward and created talents that corresponded only to it: Marr, Sholokhov, Burdenko, Pyryev, Zhukov - whose very talent was special, not corresponding to universal moral standards”. The spirit that burned on the pages of perestroika's Ogonyok hovers in the novel, breaking through every now and then between the lines. Too often reality is distorted, too often lies are laid on the old steps.

In general, the book reminded me of a tear-off calendar. Remember when you hung one on the wall and tore off a leaf every day? Typically, calendars had a cross-cutting theme (women's, for example, or dedicated to health). There on every page one could find or useful advice, or fun fact. So is the novel dedicated to unfreedom and torment. good people, is filled with some recipes, rules of ancient etiquette and other trinkets. How to make soap as it should be nice houses there is a melon, as the mushroom is called, which, when pressed, emits a cloud of stinking dust, from which condoms were made under Louis XIV, and so on, so on, so on... If anyone is interested in this, let them ask themselves the question - how reliable is the information given? I have already given some examples of “inaccuracies”, what if the same is the case here?

Although “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” is written in an autobiographical style and, as they say, is based on real facts from the life of the author and his loved ones, the book is defined as an idyll novel. As for the novel, the book clearly lacks character development to fit this genre. Faces are erased, colors are dull, either people or dolls, as one cook singer of the last century sang. Except that the author’s grandmother looks like a living person who found herself in the wrong time and is floundering in it, and the grandfather, central character novel, is too one-dimensional and predictable in his desires and opinions.

But this is not just a novel, but also an idyll. Perhaps this is irony, or even sarcasm - this is unknown to me, and not interesting. As far as I understand, the idyllic motifs relate both to the author’s family and to tsarist times, the golden age of Russia, as it was imagined by the grandfather and passed on to the grandson. The longing for the destroyed world resulted in hostility towards the new world. They did not accept this world, but the world did not accept them either. And so they went through history, finding themselves involved in the fate of the Motherland only under duress, due to external circumstances and for the sake of satisfying the physical needs of the body. A closed little world, a fragment of the royal empire. Even the war, which turned the life of the country in half, did not evoke empathy in my grandfather: “Die for this power? Why on earth? And the grandson treats this war with detachment, calling it, first of all, the Second World War, and only in the second - the Great Patriotic War. Well, now you won’t surprise anyone with such views; now they are considered advanced, bringing us closer to the civilized world. Well, well.

I consider the novel’s advantage to show the process of formation of a fig in the pocket of a Soviet intellectual. One of many. And I'll leave it at this.

P.S. I rarely put books down without finishing them. I overcame this fortress only after the second attack, and during the first attack my strength left me on page 53. Of the famous names whose works turned out to be equally overwhelming and unloved, I will name Ulitskaya and Rubina.

Grandfather was very strong. When he, in his faded shirt with the sleeves turned up high, was working in the garden or whittling a handle for a shovel (while resting, he always whittled cuttings; in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said to himself something:

something like: “Balls of muscles rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he hardly reached out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

Are you laughing? - said the grandfather. -Have I become weak? He became old, but he was young before. Why don’t you tell me, like the hero of your tramp writer: “What, are you dying?” And I would answer: “Yes, I’m dying!” And before Anton’s eyes that old hand from the past floated up as he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand is on the edge of the festive table with a tablecloth and dishes pushed together - could it really be more than thirty years ago? Yes, it was at the wedding of Pereplyotkin’s son, who had just returned from the war. On one side of the table sat the blacksmith Kuzma Pereplyotkin himself, and from him, smiling in embarrassment but not in surprise, the slaughterhouse fighter Bondarenko, whose hand had just been pinned to the tablecloth by the blacksmith in a competition that is now called arm wrestling, but was not called anything then, walked away from him. There was no need to be surprised: in the town of Chebachinsk there was no person whose hand Perepletkin could not lay. They said that earlier his younger brother, who died in the camps and worked as a hammerman in his forge, could have done the same thing. Grandfather carefully hung on the back of the chair a black English Boston jacket, left over from a three-piece suit, sewn before the first war, twice faced, but still looking good, and rolled up the sleeve of a white cambric shirt, the last of two dozen exported from Vilna in 1915. He firmly placed his elbow on the table, closed his own with his opponent’s palm, and it immediately sank in the blacksmith’s huge, clawed hand.

One hand is black, with ingrained scale, all intertwined not with human, but with some kind of oxen veins (“The veins swelled like ropes on his hands,” Anton thought habitually). The other was twice as thin, white, and only Anton knew that under the skin in the depths the bluish veins were slightly visible, he remembered these hands better than his mother’s. And only Anton knew the iron hardness of this hand, its fingers, without a key unscrewing the nuts from the cart wheels. Only one other person had such strong fingers - my grandfather’s second daughter, Aunt Tanya. Finding herself in exile during the war (as ChSIR - a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) in a remote village with three young children, she worked on a farm as a milkmaid. Electric milking was unheard of then, and there were months when she hand-milked twenty cows a day - twice each. Anton’s Moscow friend, a meat and milk specialist, said that these were all fairy tales, this was impossible, but it was true. Aunt Tanya’s fingers were all twisted, but their grip remained steely; when a neighbor, greeting him, jokingly squeezed her hand tightly, she responded by squeezing his hand so hard that it became swollen and hurt for a week.

The guests had already drunk the first few bottles of moonshine, and there was noise.

Come on, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

Is this Pereplyotkin the proletarian? Perepletkin - Anton knew this - was from a family of exiled kulaks.

Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

This is their grandmother from the nobility. And he is one of the priests.

A volunteer judge checked that the elbows were on the same line. Let's start.

The ball from grandfather’s elbow rolled first somewhere deep into his rolled up sleeve, then rolled back a little and stopped. The blacksmith's ropes emerged from under the skin. Grandfather's ball stretched out a little and became like a huge egg (“ostrich egg,” thought the educated boy Anton). The blacksmith's ropes stood out more strongly, and it became clear that they were knotted. The grandfather's hand began to slowly bend towards the table. For those who, like Anton, stood to the right of Pereplyotkin, his hand completely covered his grandfather’s hand.

Kuzma, Kuzma! - they shouted from there.

Delights are premature,” Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped bowing. Perepletkin looked surprised. Apparently he pushed hard, because another rope swelled up - on his forehead.

The grandfather's palm began to slowly rise - again, again, and now both hands stood vertically again, as if these minutes had never happened, this swollen vein on the blacksmith's forehead, this perspiration on the grandfather's forehead.

The hands vibrated subtly, like a double mechanical lever connected to some powerful motor. Here and there. Here - there. A little here again. A little there. And again stillness, and only a barely noticeable vibration.

The double lever suddenly came to life. And he began to bow again. But grandfather’s hand was now on top! However, when it was just a trifle away from the tabletop, the lever suddenly moved back. And froze for a long time in a vertical position.

Draw, draw! - they shouted first from one and then from the other side of the table. - Draw!

“Grandfather,” Anton said, handing him a glass of water, “and then, at the wedding, after the war, you could have put Pereplyotkin in?”

Perhaps.

So what?..

For what. For him, this is professional pride. Why put a person in an awkward position. The other day, when my grandfather was in the hospital, before visiting the doctor with a retinue of students, he took off and hid his pectoral cross in the nightstand. He crossed himself twice and, looking at Anton, smiled faintly. Grandfather's brother, Fr. Pavel said that in his youth he liked to boast about his strength. They are unloading the rye - he will move the worker aside, put his shoulder under a five-pound sack, the other under a second one of the same kind, and walk, without bending, towards the barn. No, it was impossible to imagine my grandfather being so boastful.