Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin

Black lightning

Now I can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter into this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “county town such and such,” without giving any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. You can get from the station to the city only in deep winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then you have to drive ninety miles among potholes and snowstorms, often hearing wild wolf howls and for hours without seeing a sign of human habitation. And most importantly, there is nothing to bring from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.

So the little town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without imports and exports, without mining and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand people, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with an inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, unnavigable and fishless river Vorozhi - lives in the winter covered with snowdrifts, in the summer buried in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and stunted forest.

There is nothing here for the mind or the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no live paintings, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and Maslenitsa booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it last time six years ago, which residents still remember with affection.

Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a market in the town. A dozen and a half men come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but hang out all day near the breech, patting themselves on the shoulders with hands dressed in yellow leather mittens with one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.

The local townspeople are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and how they live is beyond comprehension. In the summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream in rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and stare out of the windows onto the street all day, imprinting flattened noses and smeared lips on the glass with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after lunch they sleep. And at seven o’clock in the evening all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally releases from the chain an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until the morning in hot, dirty feather beds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, upon waking up, they itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.

The inhabitants say this about themselves: in our city, houses are made of stone, but hearts are made of iron. The literate old-timers, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol copied his “The Inspector General”. “The late father of Prokhor Sergeich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they passed through the city.” Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first and patronymic names. If you tell the cab driver: “To Churbanov (local Muir-Meriliz), ten kopecks,” he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, ask: “What?” - “To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks.” - “A-ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.”

There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with many unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, red, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf fur coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all these cruel Modest Nikanorychs and Doremidont Nikiforichs, sit outside their shops, on the porches, pulling from a saucer liquid tea and play checkers and giveaways. They look at a random buyer like a sworn enemy: “Hey, boy, let him go.” The purchase is not handed to him, but thrown onto the counter without being wrapped, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tested for so long by touch, by light, by ringing and even by tooth, and they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: “But now, the scoundrel, he’ll call the police.”

In winter, on holidays, after lunch, and in the late afternoon, on the main Dvoryanskaya Street there is a merchant ride. In a line, one after another, huge dapple-gray gingerbread stallions swim, shaking with their fatty flesh, eating their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in a small sleigh sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their butts half hang from the seat both on the left and on the right side. Sometimes, disrupting this decorous movement, suddenly the merchant son Nozdrunov, in a smart coachman's jacket, with a boyar's cap askew, will gallop down the street, whistling and whooping, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girls' hearts.

A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after arriving in the city they all descend into an amazingly fast state, drink a lot, play cards for two days at a time, gossip, live with other people’s wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive at all, because it is carried along a long, roundabout route, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamboat, and in winter on horseback and Finally, they drag her north again, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and leaky bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged, frozen coachmen.

In the city, several newspapers are pooled together: “Novoe Vremya”, “Svet”, “Petersburgskaya Gazeta” and only “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, or, as they are called here, “Birzhevik”. Previously, “Birzhevik” was also issued in two copies, but one day the head of the city school very sharply declared to the geography teacher and historian Kipaitulov that “one of two things is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else”...

It was in this town, at the end of January, on a stormy, snowy evening, that I sat at my desk in the Eagle Hotel, or Cockroach Gap, where I was the only guest. It was blowing from the windows, and the wind was howling in the night chimney, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A thin candle, drooping on one side, shone with a dull, wavering flame. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls, red, serious, motionless cockroaches contemplated me, moving their whiskers importantly. Damned, dead, green boredom wrapped a web around my brain and paralyzed my body. What was there to do before nightfall? I had no books with me, and I read the numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped so many times that I memorized them.

And I sadly thought about what I should do: should I go to the club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical book from the city doctor, or for a statute on the imposition of punishments to a magistrate, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.

But who doesn’t know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civic meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs covered with flies, a spit-stained floor; in all the rooms there was the smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited building and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied by preference, and right next to it, on small tables, there are vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players hold the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help, because every minute exclamations are heard: “I beg you, Sysoy Petrovich, please don’t launch the eyeball, sir.”

In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge balls, jagged by time, rattling as they go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles with special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise guards, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist are drinking Caucasian cognac, drinking on a first-name basis, hugging, kissing with wet, furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and frock coats, singing randomly “Not a fine autumn rain” and at the same time each conducting , and by eleven o’clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other’s heads.

“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”

But just at that moment, the barefoot corridor boy Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly, cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his place for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a little home entertainment, assuring that it would only be his own, that In general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats need not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from a mother from Belozersk a wonderful salmon, from which the pie will be made. “Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!

“Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter into this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “district town such and such,” without giving any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. You can get from the station to the city only in deep winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then you have to drive ninety miles among potholes and snowstorms, often hearing wild wolf howls and for hours without seeing a sign of human habitation. And most importantly, there is nothing to bring from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there ... "

Now I can’t even remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for the whole winter into this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “county town such and such,” without giving any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. You can get from the station to the city only in deep winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then you have to drive ninety miles among potholes and snowstorms, often hearing wild wolf howls and for hours without seeing a sign of human habitation. And most importantly, there is nothing to bring from the city to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.

So the little town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without imports and exports, without mining and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand people, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with an inevitable dusty boulevard on the banks of the winding, unnavigable and fishless river Vorozhi - lives in the winter covered with snowdrifts, in the summer buried in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and stunted forest.

There is nothing here for the mind or the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no live paintings, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and Maslenitsa booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which residents still remember with affection.

Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a market in the town. A dozen and a half men come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but hang out all day near the breech, patting themselves on the shoulders with hands dressed in yellow leather mittens with one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.

The local townspeople are God-fearing, stern and suspicious people. What they do and how they live is beyond comprehension. In the summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream in rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and stare out of the windows onto the street all day, imprinting flattened noses and smeared lips on the glass with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after lunch they sleep. And at seven o’clock in the evening all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally releases from the chain an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until the morning in hot, dirty feather beds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, upon waking up, they itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.

The inhabitants say this about themselves: in our city, houses are made of stone, but hearts are made of iron. The literate old-timers, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol copied his “The Inspector General”. “The late father of Prokhor Sergeich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they passed through the city.” Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first and patronymic names. If you tell the cab driver: “To Churbanov (local Muir-Meriliz), ten kopecks,” he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, ask: “What?” - “To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks.” - “A-ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.”

There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with many unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, red, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf fur coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all these cruel Modest Nikanorychs and Doremidont Nikiforichs, sit outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaway. They look at a random buyer as a sworn enemy: “Hey, boy, let him go.” The purchase is not handed to him, but thrown onto the counter without being wrapped, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tested for so long by touch, by light, by ringing and even by tooth, and they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: “But now the scoundrel will call the police.”

In winter, on holidays, after lunch, and in the late afternoon, on the main Dvoryanskaya Street there is a merchant ride. In a line, one after another, huge dapple-gray gingerbread stallions swim, shaking with their fatty flesh, eating their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in a small sleigh sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their butts half hang from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, disrupting this decorous movement, suddenly the merchant son Nozdrunov, in a smart coachman's jacket, with a boyar's cap askew, will gallop down the street, whistling and whooping, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girls' hearts.

A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after arriving in the city they all descend into an amazingly fast state, drink a lot, play cards for two days at a time, gossip, live with other people’s wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive at all, because it is carried along a long, roundabout route, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamboat, and in winter on horseback and Finally, they drag her north again, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and leaky bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged, frozen coachmen.

In the city, several newspapers are pooled together: “Novoe Vremya”, “Svet”, “Petersburgskaya Gazeta” and only “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, or, as they are called here, “Birzhevik”. Previously, “Birzhevik” was also issued in two copies, but one day the head of the city school very sharply declared to the geography teacher and historian Kipaitulov that “one of two things is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else”...

It was in this town, at the end of January, on a stormy, snowy evening, that I sat at my desk in the Eagle Hotel, or Cockroach Gap, where I was the only guest. It was blowing from the windows, and the wind was howling in the night chimney, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A thin candle, drooping on one side, shone with a dull, wavering flame. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls, red, serious, motionless cockroaches contemplated me, moving their whiskers importantly. Damned, dead, green boredom wrapped a web around my brain and paralyzed my body. What was there to do before nightfall? I had no books with me, and I read the numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped so many times that I memorized them.

And I sadly thought about what I should do: should I go to the club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical book from the city doctor, or for a statute on the imposition of punishments to a magistrate, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.

But who doesn’t know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civic meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs covered with flies, a spit-stained floor; in all the rooms there was the smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited building and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied by preference, and right next to it, on small tables, there are vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players hold the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help, because every minute exclamations are heard: “I beg you, Sysoy Petrovich, please don’t launch the eyeball, sir.”

In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge balls, jagged by time, rattling as they go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles with special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise guards, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist are drinking Caucasian cognac, drinking on a first-name basis, hugging, kissing with wet, furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and frock coats, singing randomly “Not a fine autumn rain” and at the same time each conducting , and by eleven o’clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other’s heads.

“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”

But just at that moment, the barefoot corridor boy Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly, cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his place for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a little home entertainment, assuring that it would only be his own, that In general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats need not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from a mother from Belozersk a wonderful salmon, from which the pie will be made. “Sic! - exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, - and the mother-in-law is useful for something!

I quickly washed my face, changed my clothes and went to see dear Pyotr Vlasovich. Now it was no longer the wind, but a ferocious hurricane that rushed with terrible force through the streets, driving clouds of snow pellets in front of them, painfully whipping into the face and blinding the eyes. I am a person, like most modern people, almost an unbeliever, but I had to travel a lot along country winter roads, and therefore on such evenings and in such weather I mentally pray: “Lord, save and preserve the one who has now lost his way and is spinning in field or in the forest with mortal fear in my soul.”

The evening at the doctor's was exactly what family evenings are like all over the world. provincial Russia, from Obdorsk to Kryzhopol and from Lodeynoye Pole to Temryuk. First, we were given warm tea with homemade cookies, stinking rum and raspberry jam, the small seeds of which stuck so annoyingly in our teeth. The ladies sat at one end of the table and with false animation, coquettishly singing the ends of sentences under their noses, talked about the high cost of food supplies and firewood, about the depravity of the servants, about dresses and embroidery, about methods of pickling cucumbers and chopping cabbage. When they sipped tea from their cups, each one certainly stuck out the little finger of her right hand to the side in the most unnatural way, which, as is known, is considered a sign of secular tone and graceful effeminacy.

The men huddled at the other end. Here the conversation was about the service, about the stern and disrespectful governor to the nobility, about politics, and mainly they recounted to each other the contents of today's newspapers, which they had all already read. And it was funny and touching to listen to how they soulfully and perspicaciously discussed the events that took place a month and a half ago, and were excited about news that had long been forgotten by everyone in the world. Really, it turned out as if we all lived not on earth, but on Mars, on Venus, or on some other planet, where visible earthly affairs reach after huge intervals of weeks, months and years.

Then, according to the ancient custom, the owner said:

– Do you know what, gentlemen? Let's leave this labyrinth and sit down in the screw. Alexey Nikolaevich, Evgeny Evgenievich, would you like a card?

And immediately someone responded with a phrase from a thousand years ago:

– Really, why waste precious time?

There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, me and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner spent a long time persuading There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, me and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner spent a long time trying to persuade us to get comfortable leaving and, finally, with an air of hypocritical condolences, decided to leave us alone. True, several times, in those moments when it was not his turn to hand over, he hurriedly ran to us and, rubbing his hands, asked: “Well, what? How are you here? Are you really bored? Maybe I should send you some wine or beer here?.. Not good. Anyone who does not drink, gamble or smoke is a suspicious element in society. Why don’t you take your lady’s time?”

We tried to keep her busy. We first started talking about the weather and the sleigh ride. The fat lady smiled meekly at us and answered that, however, when she was younger, she played fly, or, in today’s terms, rams, but now she has forgotten and even doesn’t understand the figures well. Then I roared something in her ear about the health of her grandchildren, she nodded her head affectionately and said sympathetically: “Yes, yes, yes, it happens, it happens, my lower back ache when it rains,” and took some kind of food from the bag. then knitting. We did not dare to pester the kind old lady anymore.

The doctor had a beautiful, huge sofa, upholstered in soft yellow leather, in which it was so comfortable to lounge. Turchenko and I were never bored when we stayed together. We were closely connected by three things: the forest, hunting and love of literature. I have already been with him fifteen times on bear, fox and wolf hunts and on hunts with hounds. He was an excellent shooter and once, in my presence, he knocked a lynx down from the top of a tree with a rifle shot at a distance of more than three hundred paces. But he only hunted animals, and even hares, for which he even set traps, because from the bottom of his heart he hated these pests of young forest plantations. His secret and, of course, unattainable dream was to hunt a tiger. He even collected a whole library about this noble sport. He never hunted birds and strictly forbade all spring hunting in his forest. “The bird is my first assistant on my farm,” he said seriously. He was disliked for such excessive severity.

End of introductory fragment.

Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for a whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “district I now won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me to the whole winter to this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “county town of such and such,” without giving any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event did not at all affect the life of the city. You can get from the station to the city only in deep winter, when the impassable swamps freeze over, and even then you have to drive ninety miles among potholes and snowstorms, often hearing wild wolf howls and for hours without seeing a sign of human habitation. And most importantly, there is nothing to transport from the city to the capital, etc. there is no one and no reason to go there.

So the little town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without imports and exports, without mining and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand people, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with an inevitable dusty boulevard on the bank of the winding, unnavigable and fishless river Vorozhi - lives in the winter covered with snowdrifts, in the summer buried in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and stunted forest.

There is nothing here for the mind or the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no live paintings, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and Maslenitsa booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which residents still remember with affection.

Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a market in the town. A dozen and a half men come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but hang out all day near the breech, patting themselves on the shoulders with hands dressed in yellow leather mittens with one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.

The local philistines are a God-fearing people, stern and suspicious. What they do and how they live is beyond comprehension. In the summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream in rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and stare out of the windows onto the street all day, imprinting flattened noses and smeared lips on the glass with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after lunch they sleep. And at seven o’clock in the evening all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally releases from the chain an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until the morning in hot, dirty feather beds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, upon waking up, they itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.

The inhabitants say this about themselves: in our city, houses are made of stone, but hearts are made of iron. The literate old-timers, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol copied his “The Inspector General”. “The late father of Prokhor Sergeich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they passed through the city.” Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first and patronymic names. If you say to the cab driver: “To Churbanov (local Muir-Meriliz), ten kopecks,” he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, ask: “What?” - “To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks.” - “A-ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.”

There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with many unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, red, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf fur coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all these cruel Modest Nikanorychs and Doremidont Nikiforichs, sit outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaways. They look at a random buyer as a sworn enemy: “Hey, boy, let him go.” The purchase is not handed to him, but thrown onto the counter without being wrapped, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tested for so long by touch, by light, by ringing and even by tooth, and they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: “But now, the scoundrel, he’ll call the police.”

In winter, on holidays, after lunch, and in the late afternoon, on the main Dvoryanskaya Street there is a merchant ride. In a line, one after another, huge dapple-gray gingerbread stallions swim, shaking with their fatty flesh, eating their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in a small sleigh sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their butts half hang from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, disrupting this decorous movement, suddenly the merchant son Nozdrunov, in a smart coachman's jacket, with a boyar's cap askew, will gallop down the street, whistling and whooping, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girls' hearts.

A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after arriving in the city they all descend into an amazingly fast state, drink a lot, play cards for two days at a time, gossip, live with other people’s wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive at all, because it is transported along a long, roundabout route, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamship, and in winter on “horses.” and finally, they drag her north again, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and leaky bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged, frozen coachmen.

In the city, several newspapers are pooled together: “Novoe Vremya”, “Svet”, “Petersburgskaya Gazeta” and only “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, or, as they are called here, “Birzhevik”. Previously, “Birzhevik” was also issued in two copies, but one day the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaitulov that “one of two things is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else.” ..

It was in this town, at the end of January, on a stormy, snowy evening, that I sat at my desk in the Eagle Hotel, or Cockroach Gap, where I was the only guest. It was blowing from the windows, and the wind was howling in the night chimney, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A thin candle, drooping on one side, shone with a dull, wavering flame. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls, red, serious, motionless cockroaches contemplated me, moving their whiskers importantly. Damned, dead, green boredom wrapped a web around my brain and paralyzed my body. What was there to do before nightfall? I had no books with me, and I read the numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped so many times that I memorized them.

And I sadly thought about what I should do: should I go to the club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical book from the city doctor, or for a statute on the imposition of punishments to a magistrate, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.

But who doesn’t know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civic meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs covered with flies, a spit-stained floor; in all the rooms there was the smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited building and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied by preference, and right next to it, on small tables, there are vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players hold the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help, because every minute exclamations are heard: “I beg you, Sysoy Petrovich, please don’t launch the eyeball, sir.”

In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge balls, jagged by time, rattling as they go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles with special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise guards, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist are drinking Caucasian cognac, drinking on a first-name basis, hugging, kissing with wet, furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and frock coats, singing randomly “Not an autumn petty one. "Rain" and at the same time each conducts, and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's heads.

“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”

"Black Lightning"

Now I won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me for a whole winter in this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “district I now won’t even be able to remember what business or what whim of fate threw me to the whole winter to this small northern Russian town, about which geography textbooks speak briefly: “the district town of such and such,” without providing any further information about it. Very recently a railway was built near it from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, but this event had no impact at all. on the life of the city. You can get from the station to the city only in deep winter, when the impassable swamps freeze, and even then you have to travel ninety miles among potholes and snowstorms, often hearing a wild wolf howl and for hours without seeing a sign of human habitation. And most importantly, from the city. there is nothing to bring to the capital, and there is no one and no reason to go there.

So the little town lives in sleepy silence, in peaceful obscurity without imports and exports, without mining and manufacturing industries, without monuments to famous fellow citizens, with its sixteen churches for five thousand people, with boardwalks, with pigs, cows and chickens on the street, with an inevitable dusty boulevard on the bank of the winding, unnavigable and fishless river Vorozhi - lives in the winter covered with snowdrifts, in the summer buried in mud, all surrounded by swampy, gnarled and stunted forest.

There is nothing here for the mind or the heart: no gymnasium, no library, no theater, no live paintings, no concerts, no lectures with a magic lantern. The worst traveling circuses and Maslenitsa booths run around this city, and even the undemanding parsley passed through it for the last time six years ago, which residents still remember with affection.

Once a week, on Saturdays, there is a market in the town. A dozen and a half men come from the surrounding wild villages with potatoes, hay and firewood, but they, it seems, do not sell or buy anything, but hang out all day near the breech, patting themselves on the shoulders with hands dressed in yellow leather mittens with one finger. And returning home drunk at night, they often freeze on the way, to the considerable profit of the city doctor.

The local philistines are a God-fearing people, stern and suspicious. What they do and how they live is beyond comprehension. In the summer, some of them still swarm around the river, driving the forest downstream in rafts, but their winter existence is mysterious. They get up late, later than the sun, and stare out of the windows onto the street all day, imprinting flattened noses and smeared lips on the glass with white spots. They have lunch, in the Orthodox way, at noon, and after lunch they sleep. And at seven o’clock in the evening all the gates are already locked with heavy iron bolts, and each owner personally releases from the chain an old, angry, shaggy and gray-faced dog, hoarse from barking. And they snore until the morning in hot, dirty feather beds, among mountains of pillows, under the peaceful glow of colored lamps. And they scream wildly in their sleep from terrible nightmares and, upon waking up, they itch and champ for a long time, making a deliberate prayer against the brownie.

The inhabitants say this about themselves: in our city, houses are made of stone, but hearts are made of iron. The literate old-timers, not without pride, assure that it was from their city that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol copied his “The Inspector General”. “The late father of Prokhor Sergeich personally saw Nikolai Vasilyevich when they passed through the city.” Here everyone calls and knows people only by their first and patronymic names. If you say to the cab driver: “To Churbanov (local Muir-Meriliz), ten kopecks,” he will immediately be dumbfounded and, as if suddenly waking up, ask: “What?” - “To Churbanov, to the shop, ten kopecks.” - “Ah-ah! To Porfir Alekseich. Please, merchant, sit down.”

There are city rows here - a long wooden barn on Cathedral Square, with many unlit, dirty cells, like dark holes, from which there is always a smell of rats, red, tanned sheepskins, kerosene and allspice. In huge wolf fur coats and straight warm caps, gray-bearded, corpulent and important, the shopkeepers, all these cruel Modest Nikanorychs and Doremidont Nikiforichs, sit outside their shops, on the porches, pulling liquid tea from a saucer and playing checkers, giveaways. They look at a random buyer as if they were a sworn enemy: “Hey, boy, let him go.” The purchase is not handed to him, but thrown onto the counter without being wrapped, and every silver, gold or paper coin is tested for so long by touch, by light, by ringing and even by tooth, and they look at you so piercingly and maliciously that you involuntarily think: “But now, the scoundrel, he’ll call the police.”

In winter, on holidays, after lunch, and in the late afternoon, on the main Dvoryanskaya Street there is a merchant ride. In a line, one after another, huge dapple-gray gingerbread stallions swim, shaking with their fatty flesh, eating their spleens all over the street and cackling loudly. And in a small sleigh sit solemnly, like Buddhist statues, in festive fur coats, a merchant and a merchant's wife - so voluminous that their butts half hang from the seat on both the left and right sides. Sometimes, disrupting this decorous movement, suddenly the merchant son Nozdrunov, in a smart coachman's jacket, with a boyar's cap askew, will gallop down the street, whistling and whooping, the beauty of merchant youth, the winner of girls' hearts.

A small handful of intellectuals live here, but soon after arriving in the city they all descend into an amazingly fast state, drink a lot, play cards for two days at a time, gossip, live with other people’s wives and maids, read nothing and are not interested in anything. . Mail from St. Petersburg sometimes arrives after seven days, sometimes after twenty, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive at all, because it is carried along a long, roundabout route, first to the south, to Moscow, then to the east, to Rybinsk, by steamship, and in winter on horses and finally, they drag her north again, two hundred miles through forests, swamps, slopes and leaky bridges, drunk, sleepy, hungry, ragged, frozen coachmen.

In the city, several newspapers are pooled together: “Novoye Vremya”, “Svet”, “Petersburgskaya Gazeta” and only “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, or, as they are called here, “Birzhevik”. Previously, Birzhevik was also issued in two copies, but one day the head of the city school very sharply told the geography teacher and historian Kipaitulov that “one of two things is either to serve in the school entrusted to me, or to indulge in reading revolutionary newspapers somewhere else.” ..

It was in this town, at the end of January, on a stormy, snowy evening, that I sat at my desk in the Orel Hotel, or as it was called the Cockroach Gap, where I was the only guest. It was blowing from the windows, and the wind was howling in the night chimney, now in a bass voice, now in a shrill soprano. A thin candle, drooping on one side, shone with a dull, wavering flame. I looked gloomily at the fire, and from the log walls, red, serious, motionless cockroaches contemplated me, moving their whiskers importantly. Damned, dead, green boredom wrapped a web around my brain and paralyzed my body. What was there to do before nightfall? I had no books with me, and I read the numbers of newspapers in which my things and travel provisions were wrapped so many times that I memorized them.

And I sadly thought about what I should do: should I go to the club, or send to one of my casual acquaintances for a book, at least for a special medical book from the city doctor, or for a statute on the imposition of punishments to a magistrate, or to a forester for guide to dendrology.

But who doesn’t know these provincial city clubs, or otherwise civic meetings? Shabby wallpaper hanging in tatters; mirrors and oleographs covered with flies, a spit-stained floor; in all the rooms there was the smell of sour dough, the dampness of an uninhabited building and carbolic acid from the closet. In the hall, two tables are occupied by preference, and right next to it, on small tables, there are vodka and snacks, so that it is convenient to hold cards with one hand and reach into a bowl for a cucumber with the other. The players hold the cards under the table or in a handful, covering them with both palms, but this does not help, because every minute exclamations are heard: “I beg you, Sysoy Petrovich, please don’t launch the eyeball, sir.”

In the billiard room, the clerk of the zemstvo chief plays pyramid with a marker with huge balls, jagged by time, rattling as they go, blows vodka with his partner and sprinkles with special billiard sayings. In the hallway, under a lamp with a faceted reflector, sitting on a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach and his mouth wide open, a serving boy snores sweetly. In the buffet, two excise guards, a veterinarian, an assistant bailiff and an agronomist are drinking Caucasian cognac, drinking on a first-name basis, hugging, kissing with wet, furry mouths, pouring wine on each other’s necks and frock coats, singing randomly “Not a fine autumn rain,” and at the same time each conducts, and by eleven o'clock two of them will certainly fight and pull a bunch of hair out of each other's heads.

“No,” I decided, “I’d better send to the city doctor for a book.”

But just at that moment, the barefoot corridor boy Fedka entered the room with a note from the doctor himself, who, in a friendly, cheerful spirit, asked me to come to his place for the evening, that is, for a cup of tea and a little home entertainment, assuring that it would only be his own, that In general, everything is simple with them, without ceremony, that regalia, ribbons and tailcoats need not be worn, and, finally, that the doctor’s wife received from a mother from Belozersk a wonderful salmon, from which the pie will be made. “Sic!” exclaimed the joker doctor in the postscript, “and the mother-in-law is useful for something!”

I quickly washed my face, changed my clothes and went to see dear Pyotr Vlasovich. Now it was no longer the wind, but a ferocious hurricane that rushed with terrible force through the streets, driving clouds of snow pellets in front of them, painfully whipping into the face and blinding the eyes. I am a person, like most modern people, almost an unbeliever, but I had to travel a lot along country winter roads, and therefore on such evenings and in such weather I mentally pray: “Lord, save and preserve the one who has now lost his way and is spinning in field or in the forest with mortal fear in my soul."

The evening at the doctor's was exactly the same as these family evenings are everywhere in provincial Russia, from Obdorsk to Kryzhopol and from Lodeynoye Pole to Temryuk. First, we were given warm tea with homemade cookies, stinking rum and raspberry jam, the small seeds of which stuck so annoyingly in our teeth. The ladies sat at one end of the table and with false animation, coquettishly singing the ends of sentences under their noses, talked about the high cost of food supplies and firewood, about the depravity of servants, about dresses and embroidery, about methods of pickling cucumbers and chopping cabbage. When they sipped tea from their cups, each one certainly stuck out the little finger of her right hand to the side in the most unnatural way, which, as is known, is considered a sign of secular tone and graceful effeminacy.

The men huddled at the other end. Here the conversation was about the service, about the stern and disrespectful governor to the nobility, about politics, and mainly they recounted to each other the contents of today's newspapers, which they had all already read. And it was funny and touching to listen to how they soulfully and perspicaciously discussed the events that took place a month and a half ago, and were excited about news that had long been forgotten by everyone in the world. Really, it turned out as if we all lived not on earth, but on Mars, on Venus, or on some other planet, where visible earthly affairs reach after huge intervals of weeks, months and years.

Then, according to the ancient custom, the owner said:

Do you know what, gentlemen? Let's leave this labyrinth and sit down in the screw. Alexey Nikolaevich, Evgeny Evgenievich, would you like a card?

And immediately someone responded with a phrase from a thousand years ago:

Indeed, why waste precious time?

There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, me and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf, the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner spent a long time persuading. There were only three non-players: the forester Ivan Ivanovich Gurchenko, me and an old fat lady, very respectable and good-natured, but completely deaf - the mother of the zemstvo chief. The owner spent a long time trying to persuade us to get comfortable leaving and, finally, with an air of hypocritical condolences, decided to leave us alone. True, several times, in those moments when it was not his turn to hand over, he hurriedly ran to us and, rubbing his hands, asked: “Well, what? How are you here? Are you really bored? Maybe we should send you some wine or beer here.” ?.. It’s not good. Anyone who doesn’t drink, doesn’t gamble, and doesn’t smoke is a suspicious element in society. Why don’t you take your lady’s interest?”

We tried to keep her busy. We first started talking about the weather and the sleigh ride. The fat lady smiled meekly at us and answered that, however, when she was younger, she played fly, or, in today’s terms, rams, but now she has forgotten and even doesn’t understand the figures well. Then I roared something in her ear about the health of her grandchildren, she nodded her head affectionately and said sympathetically: “Yes, yes, yes, it happens, it happens, my lower back aches when it rains,” and took some kind of food from the bag. then knitting. We did not dare to pester the kind old lady anymore.

The doctor had a beautiful, huge sofa, upholstered in soft yellow leather, in which it was so comfortable to lounge. Turchenko and I were never bored when we stayed together. We were closely connected by three things: the forest, hunting and love of literature. I have already been with him fifteen times on bear, fox and wolf hunts and on hunts with hounds. He was an excellent shooter and once, in my presence, he knocked a lynx down from the top of a tree with a rifle shot at a distance of more than three hundred paces. But he only hunted animals, and even hares, for which he even set traps, because from the bottom of his heart he hated these pests of young forest plantations. His secret and, of course, unattainable dream was to hunt a tiger. He even collected a whole library about this noble sport. He never hunted birds and strictly forbade all spring hunting in his forest. “The bird is my first assistant on my farm,” he said seriously. He was disliked for such excessive severity.

He was a strong, small, dark-skinned, bilious bachelor, with hot and mocking black eyes, with strong gray streaks in his black disheveled hair. He was completely alone, a real idiot, who had long ago lost all his relatives and childhood friends, and he still retained in him a lot of those careless and beautiful, rude and comradely qualities by which it is so easy to recognize former student Forestry, now abolished, faculty of the once famous Petrovsky Academy, which flourished in the village of Petrovsko-Razumovsky near Moscow.

He very rarely appeared in the district light, because he spent three quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his a real family and, it seems, the only passionate attachment to life. In the city above him, He very rarely appeared in the county light, because he spent three quarters of his life in the forest. The forest was his real family and, it seems, his only passionate attachment to life. In the city they laughed at him behind his back and considered him an eccentric. Having the complete and uncontrolled opportunity to trade in his favor with forest plots allocated for felling, he lived only on his one and a half ruble salary, a salary that was truly beggarly, if we take into account the cultural, responsible and deeply important work that he selflessly carried on his shoulders for twenty years. years old this amazing Ivan Ivanovich. Really, only among the ranks of the forestry corps, in this most forgotten of all forgotten departments, and even among the zemstvo doctors, driven like mail nags, did one encounter these eccentrics, fanatics of the cause and unmercenary people.

Many years ago, Turchenko filed a War Ministry a memorandum stating that in the event of a defensive war, foresters, thanks to their excellent knowledge of the terrain, can be very useful to the army as scouts and as guides partisan detachments, and therefore proposed to staff the local guard with people who had completed special six-month courses. Of course, as usual, they didn’t answer him. Then, at his own risk and in good conscience, he trained almost all of his foresters in compass and visual surveying, reconnaissance service, the construction of stakes and wolf pits, the system of military reports, signaling with flags and fire, and many other basics of guerrilla warfare. Every year he organized shooting competitions for his subordinates and gave out prizes from his meager pocket. In the service, he introduced discipline more severe than that of the navy, although at the same time he was godfather and the appointed father of all foresters.

Under his supervision and protection there were twenty-seven thousand acres of state-owned forest, and even, at the request of the millionaire Solodayev brothers, he looked after their huge, perfectly preserved forests in the southern part of the district. But this was not enough for him: he arbitrarily took under his protection all the surrounding, adjacent and interstitial peasant forests. Carrying out various boundary work and forest surveys for peasants for a pittance, and more often free of charge, he gathered gatherings, spoke passionately and simply about the great importance of large forest areas in agriculture and implored the peasants to protect the forest more than their eyes. The men listened to him attentively, nodded their beards sympathetically, sighed, as if at a sermon from a village priest, and assented: “You are right... what can I say... your truth, Mr. Lesnitsyn... What are we? We are men, dark people ..."

But it has long been known that the most beautiful and useful truths coming from the lips of Mr. Lesnitsyn, Mr. Agronomist and other intelligent guardians... represent for the village only a simple shock of air.

The next day, good villagers let livestock into the forest, which had completely eaten the young animals, stripped bast from tender, fragile trees, felled spruce trees for some kind of fence or window, drilled birch trunks to extract spring sap for kvass, smoked in the dead forest and threw matches on the gray dried moss, flaring up like gunpowder, left the fires unextinguished, and the shepherd boys senselessly set fire to hollows and cracks in the pine trees, overflowing with resin, only to see with what a cheerful, seething flame the amber resin burned.

He begged rural teachers to instill in their students respect and love for the forest, encouraged them, together with the village priests - and, of course, fruitlessly - to organize afforestation festivals, pestered police officers, zemstvo chiefs and justices of the peace about predatory logging, and at zemstvo meetings he He got so tired of everyone with his passionate speeches about protecting forests that they stopped listening to him. “Well, the philosopher spoke his usual nonsense,” the Zemstvo people said and went off to smoke, leaving Turchenka to rant, like the preacher Bede, in front of empty chairs. But nothing could break the energy of this stubborn Ukrainian, who did not suit the sleepy town. He, on his own initiative, strengthened the river banks with bushes, planted coniferous trees on sandy wastelands and afforested ravines. We talked about this topic with him, curled up on the doctor’s spacious sofa.

There is now so much snow in my ravines that the horse will run away with an arc. And I rejoice like a child. At the age of seven, I raised the spring water height in our filthy Vorozha by four and a half feet. Oh, if only I had working hands! If only I were given greater, unlimited power over these forests. In a few years, I would make Mologa navigable to its very source and raise grain yields throughout the region by fifty percent. I swear to God, in twenty years you can make the Dnieper and Volga the deepest rivers in the world - and it will cost a penny! The most waterless provinces can be moistened with forest plantings and irrigated with ditches. Just plant a forest. Take care of the forest. Drain the swamps, but really...

What is your ministry looking at? - I asked slyly.

Our ministry is a ministry of non-resistance to evil,” Turchenko answered bitterly. - Nobody cares. When I travel by rail and see hundreds of trains loaded with timber, and see endless stacks of firewood at the stations, I just want to cry. And if I now made our forest rivers accessible to rafts - all these Zvani, Izhins, Kholmenki, Vorozhi - do you know what will happen? In two years the county will become a barren place. The landowners will instantly float all the timber to St. Petersburg and abroad. Honestly, sometimes my hands give up and my head hurts. The most living, the most beautiful, the most fruitful thing is in my power, and I am bound, I dare not undertake anything, I am not understood by anyone, I am funny, I am a restless person. Tired of it. Hard. Look at what they are all interested in: eating, sleeping, drinking, playing spin. They love nothing: neither their homeland, nor service, nor people - they only love their snotty children. You won’t wake anyone up, you won’t interest anyone. There is vulgarity all around. You know in advance who will say what under any circumstances. Everyone has become impoverished in their minds, feelings, even simple human words...

We fell silent. From the living room, from four tables, we could hear the exclamations of the players:

“I’ll say, perhaps, tiny little clubs.”

“Details in a letter, Evgraf Platonich.”

"Five no trumps?"

"Are you screwing it up?"

"Our business, sir."

“Let’s take a risk... Baby, wearing a helmet.”

"Your game. We're in the bushes."

“Yes, it was bought. Not a single human face. It will be as it was bought.”

"High Pressure Game"

"What? Has she begun to think about herself?"

“Vasil Lvovich, you’re not supposed to think for more than a quarter of an hour. Come in.”

“Your Excellency, the cards are closer to the orders. I see your jack of diamonds.”

"Don't you look..."

“I can’t, it’s been a habit since childhood, if someone holds cards with a fan.”

“Would you like to bite into this date?”

Turchenko leaned towards me, smiling, and said:

Now someone will say: “Don’t go alone, go with your mother,” and another will remark: “That’s right, like in a pharmacy.”

“What kind of hearts did you show me? Jack is third with fosques? Is this support, in your opinion?”

"I thought..."

“The Indian rooster was thinking, and even he died from thoughtfulness.”

“Why did you pickle your ace? Are you thinking of marinating it?”

“No problem, just a tambourine!”

"What do you think of this beautiful lady?"

"And we are her trump card."

“That’s right,” the cathedral priest approved in a thick baritone voice, “don’t go alone, go with a guide.”

“Excuse me, excuse me, it seems you didn’t give a trump card just now?”

“Leave it alone, my friend... Send the child, we won’t shortchange you... It’s true here, like in the Chamber of Weights and Measures.”

Listen, Ivan Ivanovich,” I turned to the forester, “shouldn’t we run away?” You know, in English, without saying goodbye.

What are you, what are you, my dear. Leaving without dinner, and without even saying goodbye. It's hard to think of a worse insult for the owner. You will never be forgotten. You will be known as ignorant and arrogant.

But fat Pyotr Vlasovich, even more swollen and bluish-red from the heat, the long sitting and the happy game, had already stood up from the cards and said, walking around the players:

Gentlemen, gentlemen... The pie is getting cold, and the wife is angry. Gentlemen, last batch.

Guests left the tables and, in cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. The card conversations were still not subsiding: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? I think the Guests were coming out from behind the tables and, in cheerful anticipation of drinks and snacks, noisily crowded in all the doors. The card conversations were still not subsiding: “How is it that you, benefactor, did not understand me? I, it seems, told you as clearly as a finger from the first hand of the tambourines. You have a queen, a ten - a quarter." - "You, my precious, were obliged to support me. And you climb without trump cards! Do you think I didn’t know your aces?” “Excuse me, they didn’t let me talk, that’s how they worked things up.” “And you are tearing them apart. That's what the screw is for. Cowards don't play cards...

Finally the hostess said:

Gentlemen, you are welcome to have a bite,

Everyone flocked to the dining room, laughing, making jokes, rubbing their hands excitedly. They began to take their seats.

Husbands and wives are separated,” the merry owner commanded. “They’re tired of each other at home too.”

And with the help of his wife, he shuffled the guests so that couples inclined to flirt or connected by a long-standing connection known throughout the city found themselves together. This kind courtesy is always accepted at family evenings, and therefore often, bending over to pick up a fallen napkin, a lone observer will see intertwined legs under the table, as well as hands lying on someone else’s lap.

They drank a lot - men “simple”, “tear”, “state”, ladies - rowan; they drank over appetizers, pie, hare and veal. From the very beginning of dinner they started smoking, and after the pie it became noisy and smoky, and hands with knives and forks flashed in the air.

They talked about snacks and various amazing dishes with the air of distinguished gastronomes. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about theater and, finally, about snacks and various amazing dishes with the air of honored gastronomes. Then about hunting, about wonderful dogs, about legendary horses, about archdeacons, about singers, about theater and, finally, about modern literature.

Theater and literature are the inevitable highlights of all Russian lunches, dinners, zhurfixes and fieflocks. After all, every man in the street has at one time or another played in an amateur performance, and in the golden days of his student days he went on a rampage in the gallery of the capital’s theater. In the same way, everyone at one time wrote an essay in the gymnasium on the topic “A comparative essay on education according to Domostroi” and according to Eugene Onegin, and who did not write poetry in childhood and did not contribute to student newspapers? What lady does not speak with a charming smile : “Imagine, last night I wrote a huge letter to my cousin - sixteen sheets of mail all around and finely, like beads. And this, imagine, in just one hour, without a single blot! A wonderfully interesting letter. I will specifically ask Nadya to send it to me and I will read it to you. It was as if inspiration struck me. My head was burning somehow strangely, my hands were trembling, and the pen seemed to be running on the paper itself." And which of the provincial ladies and girls did not trust you to read aloud, together, their class diaries, constantly snatching your notebook from you and exclaiming that it is forbidden here read?

Speaking, walking on the stage and writing - everyone seems to be such an easy, trivial matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently due to their simplicity, but therefore also the most difficult, complex and painful of Speaking, walking on the stage and writing - it seems to everyone such an easy, trivial matter that these two, the most accessible, apparently due to their simplicity, but therefore the most difficult, complex and painful of the arts - theater and fiction - find everywhere the harshest and captious judges, the most obstinate and disdainful critics , the most evil and arrogant detractors.

Turchenko and I sat at the end of the table and just listened with boredom and irritation to this chaotic, self-confident, noisy conversation, constantly veering into slander and gossip, and peeking into other people’s bedrooms. Turchenko’s face was tired and as if it had turned yellow and brown.

Not feeling well? - I asked quietly.

He winced.

No... so... I'm really tired... They keep hammering away at the same thing... woodpeckers.

The justice of the peace, located on the right hand of the mistress, was distinguished by very long legs and an unusually short body. Therefore, when he sat, only his head and half of his chest rose above the table, like museum busts, and the ends of his magnificent forked beard were often dipped in the sauce. Chewing a piece of hare in sour cream sauce, he spoke with significant pauses, like a person accustomed to general attention, and convincingly emphasized the words with the movements of a fork clenched in his fist:

I don’t understand today’s writers... Sorry. I want to understand but I can’t... I refuse. Either a farce, or pornography... Some kind of mockery of the public... You, they say, pay me a ruble or a ruble of your hard-earned money, and for this I will show you shameful nonsense.

Horror, horror, what they write! - moaned, clutching her temples, the wife of the excise overseer, the district Messalina, who did not ignore even her coachmen. “I always wash my hands with cologne after their books.” And to think that such literature falls into the hands of our children!

Absolutely right! - the judge exclaimed and drowned his sideburns in the red cabbage. - And most importantly, what does creativity have to do with it? inspiration? Well, this, what’s his name...flight of thought? That’s how I’ll write... that’s how each of us will write... that’s how my clerk will cook it up, which is a complete idiot. Take all your close and distant relatives, shuffle them like a deck of cards, and throw them out in pairs. A brother falls in love with his sister, a grandson seduces his own grandfather... Or suddenly mad love for an Angora cat, or a janitor's boot... Nonsense and nonsense!

“And it’s all the lousy revolution’s fault,” said the zemstvo chief, a man with an unusually narrow forehead and a long face, who was nicknamed “mare’s head” for his appearance in the regiment. - Students don’t want to study, workers are rioting, debauchery is everywhere. Marriage is not recognized. "Love must be free." So much for free love.

And most importantly - Jews! - the gray-haired landowner Dudukin, suffocating from asthma, croaked with difficulty.

I don’t know the Masons, but I know the Jews,” Dudukin angrily insisted. - They have kagal. For them: one climbed through and dragged the other. They always sign with Russian surnames, and deliberately write abominations about Russia in order to descri... deskri... descrit... well, what's his name!.. in a word, to sully the honor of the Russian people.

And the judge continued to hammer out his point, spreading his hands with a fork and knife clutched in them and knocking back his glass with his beard:

I don't understand and I don't understand. Some kind of twists... Suddenly, out of the blue, “Oh, close your pale legs.” What is this, I ask you? What does this dream mean? Well, okay, and I’ll take it and write: “Oh, hide your red nose!” and period. That's all. What's worse, I ask you?

Or else: he launched a pineapple into the sky,” someone supported.

Yes, sir, exactly pineapple,” the judge got angry. - But the other day I read from the most fashionable of them: “A petrel is flying, like black lightning.” How? Why? Where, may I ask, does black lightning happen? How many of us have seen black lightning? Nonsense!

I noticed that when last words Turchenko quickly raised his head. I looked back at him. His face lit up with a strange smile - ironic and defiant. It seemed that he wanted to object to something. But he remained silent, his dry cheekbones trembled and his eyes lowered.

And most importantly, what are they writing about? - the silent insurance agent suddenly became agitated, like instantaneously boiled milk. - There, symbol is symbol, that’s their business, but I’m not at all interested in reading about drunken tramps, about thieves, about... excuse me, ladies, about various prostitutes and so on...

About the hanged, too,” suggested the excise overseer, “and about the anarchists, and also about the executioners.”

That’s right,” the judge approved. - They definitely don’t have other topics. They wrote before... Pushkin wrote, Tolstoy, Aksakov, Lermontov. Beauty! What a language! "Quiet Ukrainian night, the sky is transparent, the stars are shining..." Oh, damn, what a language, what a syllable!..

Marvelous! - said the inspector of public schools, sparkling with tender eyes from under gold glasses and shaking his sharp red beard. - Amazing! And Gogol! Divine Gogol! Remember he...

And suddenly he began to hum in a dull, sepulchral, ​​howling voice, and after him the zemstvo chief also began to chant:

- “Chu-uden Day-epr in quiet weather, when it’s free and smooth...” Well, where else will you find such beauty and music of words!..

The cathedral priest squeezed his thick gray beard into a fist, walked along it to the very end and said, focusing on the “o”.

Among the clergy there were also venerable writers: Levitov, Leskov, Pomyalovsky. Especially the last one. He denounced, but with love... ho-ho-ho... universal grease... in the air... But he wrote about spiritual singing in such a way that even to this day, when you read, you involuntarily shed a tear.

Yes, our Russian literature,” the inspector sighed, “has fallen!” And before? And Turgenev? A? “How beautiful, how fresh the roses were.” Now they won't write like that.

Where! - nobleman Dudukin wheezed. “Before, the nobles wrote, but now the commoner has gone.”

The timid head of the post office suddenly began to lisp:

However, now they are making some money! Ay-ay-ay... it’s scary to say... My student nephew told me this in the summer. A ruble per line, he says. Like a new line - ruble. For example: “The count entered the room” - ruble. Or just start with a new line “yes” - and the ruble. Fifty dollars per letter. Or even more. Let's say the hero of a novel is asked: "Who is the father of this lovely child?" And he briefly answers with pride, “I” - And welcome: the ruble is in his pocket.

The postmaster's insertion certainly opened the floodgates to a stinking swamp of gossip. The most reliable information about the lives and earnings of writers poured in from all sides. So-and-so bought an old princely estate on the Volga of four thousand dessiatinas with an estate and a palace. Another married the daughter of an oil industrialist and took a four million dowry. The third always writes drunk and drinks a quarter of vodka a day, and only snacks on marshmallows. The fourth beat off his wife best friend, and the two decadents simply swapped wives by mutual agreement. A group of modernists formed a close Sodom circle, known throughout St. Petersburg, and one famous poet travels through Asia and America with a whole harem consisting of women of all nations and colors.

Now everyone was talking at once, and nothing could be understood. Dinner was coming to an end. Cigarette butts stuck out from half-drunk glasses and plates of half-eaten lemon jelly. The guests filled themselves with beer and wine. The priest poured red wine on the tablecloth and tried to cover the puddle with salt so that there would be no stain, and the hostess persuaded him with a sweet smile, curving the right half of her mouth up and the left down:

Leave it alone, father, why do you bother yourself? This will wash off.

The inevitable heels and hints have already flashed several times between the ladies, who have drunk rowan wine and liqueur. The police officer praised the insurance agent’s wife for freshening up her last year’s dress with great taste - “it’s completely impossible to recognize.” The insurance woman replied with a gentle smile that, unfortunately, she could not order new dresses from Novgorod twice a year, that she and her husband were poor, but honest people, and that they had nowhere to take bribes from. “Oh, bribes are terrible vulgarity!” the police officer readily agreed. “And in general there is a lot of nasty stuff in the world, but it also happens that some married ladies are supported by other people’s men.” This remark was interrupted by the excise matron and she started talking about the governor’s galoshes. A storm was brewing in the air, and the usual tragic cry was already hanging over our heads: “I will no longer set foot in this house!” - but the resourceful hostess quickly prevented disaster by getting up from the table and saying:

Please excuse me, gentlemen. There is nothing else.

There was a commotion. The ladies kissed the hostess with ardent swiftness, the men kissed her hand with fat lips and squeezed the doctor's hand. Most of the guests went into the living room to play cards, but a few people remained in the dining room to finish their cognac and beer. A few minutes later they sang out of tune and in unison, “Not a fine autumn rain,” and each controlled the choir with both hands. The forester and I took advantage of this gap and left, no matter how kind Pyotr Vlasovich delayed us.

By nightfall the wind had completely died down, and the clear, moonless, blue sky played with silver eyelashes bright stars. It was ghostly light from that bluish phosphorescent glow that fresh, just settled snow always emits.

The forester walked next to me and muttered something to himself. I had long known of his habit of talking to himself, characteristic of many people who live in silence - fishermen, forest rangers, night guards, as well as those who have endured long-term solitary confinement - and I stopped paying attention to this habit.

Yes, yes, yes... - he said abruptly from the collar of his fur coat. - Stupid... Yes... Hm... Stupid, stupid... And rude... Hm...

A lantern was burning on the bridge over Vorozha. With the always strange feeling of a slightly exciting, pleasant care, I stepped onto the smooth, beautiful, unstained snow, softly, elastically and creakingly beneath my feet. Suddenly Turchenko stopped near the lantern and turned to me,

Stupid! - he said loudly and decisively. “Believe me, my dear,” he continued, lightly touching my sleeve, “believe me, it is not the government regime, not the scarcity of the land, not our poverty and darkness that are to blame for the fact that we Russians are trailing behind the whole world.” And all this is a sleepy, lazy, indifferent to everything, loving nothing, knowing nothing province, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an employee, noble, merchant or bourgeois. Look at them today. How much aplomb, how much contempt for everything that is outside their chicken horizons! So, casually, they hang up labels: “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, fool...” Parrots! And most importantly, you see, he doesn’t understand this and that, and, therefore, this is already bad and funny. So he doesn’t understand differential calculus, so that means it’s nonsense too? And they didn’t understand Pushkin. And Chekhov was not recently understood. They talked about his “Steppe”: what nonsense - sheep’s thoughts! Do sheep really think? “The flowers smiled at me in silence, half asleep...” Nonsense! Do flowers ever laugh? And today too. “I’ll write it myself,” he says...”

What about black lightning? - I asked.

Yes, yes... "Where does black lightning happen?" This judge is a nice man, but what has he seen in his life? He is a school and office product... And I’ll tell you that I myself, with my own eyes, saw black lightning, even ten times in a row. It was scary.

That’s how it is,” I said incredulously.

That's right. Since childhood I have been in the forest, on the river, in the field. I saw and heard amazing things that I don’t like to talk about, because they won’t believe it anyway. For example, I watched not only the love dances of the cranes, where they all dance and sing in a huge circle, and a couple dances in the middle, - I saw their judgment of the weak before the autumn departure. As a realist boy, living in Polesie, I saw hail the size of a large man’s fist, smooth ice, but not round shape, and in the form of a young hat porcini mushroom, and the flat side is layered. In five minutes, this hail broke all the windows in the large landowner's house, exposed all the poplars and linden trees in the garden, and in the field killed a lot of small livestock and two forests. In the depths of winter, on the day of the terrible Messinian earthquake, in the morning, I was with the hounds in my place on Bildin. And then at about ten or eleven o'clock a rainbow suddenly blossomed in a completely cloudless sky. It touched the horizon at both ends, was unusually bright and was forty-five degrees wide and twenty to twenty-five degrees high. Beneath it, just as bright, another rainbow curved, but somewhat fainter in color, and then a third, fourth, fifth, and paler and paler - some kind of fabulous seven-color corridor. This lasted for about fifteen minutes. Then the rainbows melted, came instantly, God knows where the clouds came from, and a solid sheet of snow fell.

I've seen forest fires. I saw how a hurricane felled five fathoms of dead wood. Yes, I was then in the forest with a ranger, foresters and workers, and before my eyes hundreds of huge trees fell like matchsticks. Then the patrolman Nelidkin knelt down and took off his hat. And everyone did the same. And I. He read the Lord's Prayer and we were baptized, but we did not hear his voice because of the crash of falling trees and breaking branches. This is what I saw in my life. But I also saw black lightning, and that was the most terrifying thing. Wait,” Turchenko interrupted himself, “we are at my house.” Let's come to my place. Mikheevna will swear, but nothing. For this I will treat you to three-year-old kvass. Today, with blessings, let us rest.

Mikheevna, the forester's stern old maid, and his wonderful apple kvass were known throughout the city. The old woman received us sternly and grumbled for a long time, wandering around the rooms with a candle and climbing through the cabinets: “Useless, night owls, the day is not enough for them, they wander at night, good people they don't let you sleep." But the kvass was above all praise. It fermented for a long time, first in an oak barrel with hops and yeast, with raisins, cognac and some kind of liqueur, then it stood for three years in bottles and now it was strong, played like champagne , and fun" and dried coldly in the mouth, a little intoxicating and at the same time refreshing.

That’s how it was,” Turchenko said, walking around his office in a bunny jacket, hung with paintings of tigers. - I came as a student on vacation to the very wilderness of the Tver province to see my cousin Nikolai - to Koke - that’s what we called him. He was once a brilliant young man, with a lyceum education, with great connections and a magnificent career ahead, and danced beautifully at real social balls, adored actresses from French operettas and Novoderevensk gypsies, drank champagne, in his words, like a crocodile, and was the soul of society. But in an instant, literally in an instant, all of Koka’s well-being collapsed. One morning he woke up and was horrified to realize that the entire right side of his body was paralyzed. Out of vanity and pride, he doomed himself to voluntary exile and settled in the village.

But he did not at all lose his clarity and good spirits and with slight irony he called himself a cyclist, because he was forced to move around, sitting in a three-wheeled chair, which was rolled behind by his servant Yakov. He ate and drank a lot, slept a lot, wrote funny obscene letters in verse on a typewriter and often changed village mistresses, to whom he gave big names of royal favorites, like La Vallière, Montespan and Pompadour.

One day, while loading or unloading the Browning gun that Koka never parted with, he shot his Yakov in the leg. Luckily, the bullet hit very well, passing through the flesh of the thigh and, in addition, breaking through two doors. For some reason, this event brought the master and servant into close friendship. They positively could not live without each other, although they often quarreled: Koka, angry, poked Yakov in the stomach with a crutch, and Yakov then ran away from home for several hours and did not show up when called, leaving Koka in a helpless state.

Yakov was a wonderful hunter at heart: tireless, despite his limp, with a good memory of the area, with a great knowledge of those elusive reasons by which you guess the quality and quantity of game. He and I often went on a simple peasant hunt, a very difficult hunt, that is, without a dog, but with sneaking, requiring a lot of attention and patience. I must say that Koka was reluctant to let Yakov go with me - without him he was like without his only arms and legs. Therefore, in order to beg Yakov, he had to resort to tricks. Nothing pleased Coca's generosity more than questions about his former cheerful life, when he was considered the lion of living rooms and a sweet regular at chic restaurants.

And so one day, having started this Kokina organ-organ and flattered him beyond measure, I managed to kidnap Yakov for a whole week. We went with him to the distant village of Burtsevo, where Koka had forest plots and glorious swamps. Burtsevsky man Ivan, who is also Kokin’s forester, said that on Vysokoe, in Ramenye and on Blinov there were so many capercaillie, grouse, hazel grouse, snipe, great snipe and ducks that it was simply visible and invisible. “At least hit me with a stick, or even cover me with a hat.”

We got ready for a long time, left late and arrived in Burtsevo at dawn. Ivan was not there, he, it turns out, went to his brother-in-law in Okunevo, where the throne was celebrated. We were received by his wife Avdotya, a thin, bug-eyed woman with a fish-like face and such freckles that white skin only here and there rare glimpses appeared on her cheeks through the brown mask.

The hut was stuffy, a lot of flies were buzzing and there was a smell of something disgustingly sour. In the unsteadiness the child squealed incessantly. Avdotya began to fuss.

Mine still, I don’t know, will come back or not. Very good beer is brewed in Okunev. And where there is beer, there is Ivan. Just wait, breadwinners, I’ll give you my beer to drink. I brewed it for rescue... The beer wasn’t much thick, we topped it up, but it was tasty and sweet.

She lifted the heavy lid of the cellar by the ring, went down there and a minute later came out with a large ladle of home-made beer. While she was pouring it for us, I asked, pointing to the screaming baby:

How many months is the baby?

Months? - the woman was surprised. - What are you, breadwinner, God bless you. I just gave birth last night. What months are there? Yesterday I gave birth at exactly this time. Eat up, breadwinners, I don’t know what to call you... I just gave birth yesterday. Here's how.

I involuntarily said:

That's a pound.

But Yakov remarked indifferently and contemptuously:

It doesn't matter to them. They are familiar. They're like sneezing.

Ivan still didn’t come, he must have been on a spree. The beer was warm and there were flies swimming in it. Cockroaches crawled onto the walls from all corners for the sake of unseen guests. We looked, sat and went to sleep in the barn for hay. I don't like sleeping on swamp hay. Some twigs and thick stems are sticking in your back, your head is numb, your nose is churning from the fine hay dust, you can’t smoke. For a long time I could not fall asleep and kept listening to the sounds of the night: cows and horses somewhere sighed strongly and heavily, stepped their feet, tossed and turned and from time to time splashed heavily and thickly, quails screamed in the distant dewy oats, a tireless twitch creaked with its wooden creaking.

I fell asleep before dawn, and we got up very late, at nine o’clock. It was already hot. The day promised to be sultry. The sky stretched out pale, languid, exhausting, similar in color to faded and faded blue silk.

Ivan was still not there. We went alone. The village - or rather, settlement - Burtsevo consisted of only three courtyards and was located on the top of a large hill, along the slopes of which arable land and fields descended. And the foot of the hill abutted a swamp, stretching God knows how many hundreds, maybe even thousands, of acres. Three versts in the distance a wavy blue ridge could be seen - a pine forest on the island of Vysokoye, where a narrow, winding, impassable path led. The rest of the surrounding area was completely covered with small bushes, among which here and there the bends of local swampy rivers: Tristenki, Kholmenki and Zvani sparkled in the sun, like drops of scattered mercury.

It was a difficult day for us. The steam was unbearable, and after an hour we were so wet from sweat that we could barely squeeze it out. The annoying microscopic midges hovered in heaps above your head, crawled into your eyes, nose, ears and drove you into an impotent frenzy, when you furiously slap your cheeks, smearing the insects over your face like porridge,

Many times Yakov and I lost each other in the dense, sometimes impenetrable bush. Once a twig touched the pawl of my gun, and it unexpectedly fired. From the instant fright and from the loud shot, my head immediately ached and it never stopped hurting all day, until the evening. The boots were wet, water was squelching in them, and the heavy, tired legs were stumbling over bumps every second. The blood was beating heavily under the skull, which seemed huge to me, as if swollen, and I felt pain in every beat of my heart.

Every now and then we had to wade across small rivers or across lavas, which are nothing more than two or three thin trees tied with bast or twigs, thrown across the river and secured with several pairs of rickety stakes driven into the bottom. But most unpleasant of all were the walks through open areas, completely blue from countless forget-me-nots, which gave off such a pungent, herbaceous and cloying smell. Here the soil moved and swayed underfoot, and black, stinking water gurgled out from under my feet in fountains.

We got lost and only reached Vysokye well after noon. The sky was now all heavy, motionless, puffy clouds. We ate cold meat and bread, drank water that smelled of rust and swamp gas, then made a fragrant fire out of juniper to kill mosquitoes and - I don’t know how it happened - fell into a sudden, heavy sleep.

I woke up first. Everything around was scary, menacing and terribly dark, and the greenery of the swamp bushes swayed and shone with gray steel. The entire sky was covered with bulky lilac and violet clouds with torn gray edges. Thunder began to muffle in the distance. I was in a hurry.

Well, Yakov, go home. May God get you there. I'm on my way!

But, having left the island, rising in the middle of the swamp, we immediately got lost and began to wander uselessly zigzags through the bushes, retreating away from the rivers, avoiding swamps and dense thickets, losing each other, hurrying, getting confused and angry.

It had already become completely dark, and the thunder was still rumbled far away, but did not subside for a moment, when Yakov, who was walking ahead and seemed to me from a distance like a dark, long, unclear, swaying pillar, friend shouted:

There is a road!

Yes, it was a narrow, swampy road, reinforced in some places with brushwood, with traces of horse droppings. And to our joy, we immediately heard the sound of a cart not far away. Very quickly, quite noticeably to the eye, darkness was approaching. Only in the west, low above the ground, glowed a long, narrow strip of blood, edged on top with a braid of molten gold.

The cart arrived. There were two people sitting in it: the woman was driving, jerking her elbows and stretching her legs straight out in front of her, as only village women can sit, and the old man, a little tipsy, was dozing behind. He woke up when the horse, frightened of us, began to snore, balk and crawl sideways into the swamp. We began to ask the old man about the road to Burtsevo. But he delayed and mumbled:

Are you going to Burtsevo, my dears? Whose will you be?

Draws. From Demtsyn. From Nikolai Vsevolodych.

We know, we know. Only you, my dears, are not going there. You need to go somewhere now, right towards sunrise. Straight to shooting. Are you going to be renters in Demtsyn?

No, I’m a traveler, a relative of Demtsin’s gentleman.

Oh, so, so, so... A relative, then? You're right in the middle of Burtsev. So just shoot and hit it. So you went willingly?..

But we didn’t have time to answer. From the bushes we heard a timid croaking sound, the flapping of powerful wings, and ten steps from us a large brood of grouse rose noisily, blackening in the scarlet streak of dawn. Yakov and I fired almost simultaneously, without aiming, over and over again from both barrels and, of course, missed. And the cart was already rushing away from us, jumping and sideways on potholes. In vain we ran after her, shouting to the old man to stop. He, without a hat, standing and whipping a horse, was long, skinny, awkward, and, turning back in fear, shouted something in an angry, muttering voice.

Again we were left alone. I suggested not to leave the road, but Yakov convinced me that it was two steps to Burtsev, and that the old man’s road led to Chentsovo, which was still a good fifteen miles away - and I agreed with him. And again we climbed into the black, damp swamp. As I left the road, I turned back. The red stripe was no longer in the sky, as if it had been drawn with a curtain; and I suddenly felt sad and sad. Nothing was visible anymore: no clouds, no bushes, no Yakov walking next to me - there was just wet, thick darkness. The first lightning flashed - it rumbled above and ended with a dry crack, followed by another, and a third. Then it went on and on without a break.

It was one of those terrible thunderstorms that sometimes break out over large lowlands. The sky did not flash with lightning, but as if everything was shining with their tremulous blue, indigo, etc. bright white shine. And the thunder did not stop for a moment. It seemed that there was some kind of demonic game of skittles going on up there, reaching to the sky. With a dull roar, balls of incredible size rolled there, getting closer, louder, and suddenly - bang-ta-ta-bang - gigantic pins fell at once.

And then I saw black lightning. I saw how the sky in the east swayed from lightning, not extinguishing, but all the time expanding, then contracting, and suddenly in this blue sky fluctuating with lights, I saw with extraordinary clarity instantaneous and dazzling black lightning. And immediately, along with it, a terrible thunderclap seemed to tear heaven and earth in half and threw me down onto the hummocks. When I woke up, I heard Yakov’s trembling, weak voice behind me.

Master, what is this, Lord... We will perish, Queen of Heaven... Lightning... black... Lord, Lord...

I ordered him sternly, gathering all last resort will:

Get up. Let's go. Don't spend the night here.

Oh, what a terrible night it was! These black lightning filled me with an inexplicable animal fear. I still cannot understand the reasons for this phenomenon: was there an error in our vision, strained by the incessant play of lightning throughout the sky, was the random arrangement of the clouds of particular significance, or I still cannot understand the reasons for this phenomenon: was there an error here? Of our vision, strained by the incessant play of lightning across the entire sky, was the random arrangement of the clouds, or the properties of this damned swamp basin, of particular significance? But sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind and self-control with every passing second. I remember I kept wanting to scream in a wild, shrill voice, like a hare. And I kept walking forward, babbling to God like a frightened child, incoherent, absurd prayers: “Dear God, kind, good God, save me, forgive me. I never will.” And then, catching a bump, he flew with his elbow into the liquid mud and furiously swore in the worst words.

Master, I’m drowning... Save me, for Christ’s sake... I’m drowning... A-ah-ah!..

I rushed to hear him and, in the unbearable blinding light of black lightning, I saw not him, but only his head and torso sticking out of the quagmire. I will never forget those bulging eyes, deadened from insane horror. I would never have believed that a person’s eyes could become so white, huge and monstrously scary.

I handed him the barrel of the gun, holding the butt with one hand and with the other several branches of a nearby bush clamped together. I was unable to pull it out. "Get down! Crawl!" - I shouted in despair. And he, too, answered me with a high-pitched animal screech, which I will remember with horror until my death. He couldn't get out. I heard him splashing his hands in the dirt, with the flash of lightning I saw his head lower and lower at my feet and those eyes... eyes... I couldn’t tear myself away from them...

By the end, he had stopped screaming and was just breathing quickly. And when black lightning opened the sky again, nothing was visible on the surface of the swamp. How I walked through the swaying, gurgling, stinking bogs, how I climbed waist-deep into small rivers, how I finally reached the haystack, and how Ivan Burtsevsky, who heard my shots, found me in the morning, needless to say...

Turchenko was silent for several minutes, bending low over his glass and ruffling his hair. Then he suddenly quickly raised his head and straightened up. His wide eyes were angry.

What I just told you,” he shouted, “was not a random anecdote about the stupid word of the average person. You yourself saw today the swamp, the stinking human quagmire! But black.lightning! Black Lightning! Where is she? Oh! When will she sparkle?

He slowly closed his eyes, and after a minute, in a tired voice, he said affectionately:

Sorry, my dear, for the verbosity. Well, let's have a bottle of my cider.

Alexander Kuprin - Black Lightning, read the text

See also Kuprin Alexander - Prose (stories, poems, novels...):

Black fog
Petersburg incident I remember very well how he came to Pete for the first time...

Wonderful doctor
The following story is not the fruit of idle fiction. Everything I described...

Biography of Alexander Kuprin

Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin was born on September 7 (August 26, old style) 1870 in the city of Narovchat, Penza province, into the family of a minor official. The father died when his son was two years old.

In 1874, his mother, who came from an ancient family of Tatar princes Kulanchakov, moved to Moscow. From the age of five due to severe financial situation the boy was sent to the Moscow Razumovsky orphanage, famous for its harsh discipline.

In 1888, Alexander Kuprin graduated from the cadet corps, in 1890 from the Alexander Military School with the rank of second lieutenant.

After graduating from college, he was enrolled in the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment and sent to serve in the city of Proskurov (now Khmelnitsky, Ukraine).

In 1893, Kuprin went to St. Petersburg to enter the Academy of the General Staff, but was not allowed to take the exams due to a scandal in Kyiv, when, in a barge restaurant on the Dnieper, he threw overboard a tipsy bailiff who was insulting a waitress.

In 1894, Kuprin left military service. He traveled a lot in the south of Russia and Ukraine, tried himself in various fields of activity: he was a loader, storekeeper, forest walker, land surveyor, psalm-reader, proofreader, estate manager and even a dentist.

The writer's first story, "The Last Debut," was published in 1889 in the Moscow "Russian Satirical Sheet."

He described army life in the stories of 1890-1900 “From the Distant Past” (“Inquiry”), “Lilac Bush”, “Overnight”, “Night Shift”, “Army Ensign”, “Hike”.

Kuprin's early essays were published in Kyiv in the collections "Kyiv Types" (1896) and "Miniatures" (1897). In 1896, the story "Moloch" was published, which brought to the young author wide fame. This was followed by "Night Shift" (1899) and a number of other stories.

During these years, Kuprin met writers Ivan Bunin, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky.

In 1901, Kuprin settled in St. Petersburg. For some time he headed the fiction department of the Magazine for Everyone, then became an employee of the World of God magazine and the Znanie publishing house, which published the first two volumes of Kuprin’s works (1903, 1906).

Into history Russian literature Alexander Kuprin entered as the author of the stories and novels "Olesya" (1898), "Duel" (1905), "The Pit" (part 1 - 1909, part 2 - 1914-1915).

He is also known as a great master of storytelling. Among his works in this genre are “At the Circus”, “Swamp” (both 1902), “Coward”, “Horse Thieves” (both 1903), “Peaceful Life”, “Measles” (both 1904), “Staff Captain Rybnikov " (1906), "Gambrinus", "Emerald" (both 1907), "Shulamith" (1908), "Garnet Bracelet" (1911), "Listrigons" (1907-1911), "Black Lightning" and "Anathema" ( both 1913).

In 1912, Kuprin traveled through France and Italy, the impressions of which were reflected in the series of travel essays “Côte d'Azur”.

During this period, he actively mastered new activities that were previously unknown to anyone - he ascended in a hot air balloon, flew on an airplane (almost ending tragically), and went underwater in a diving suit.

In 1917, Kuprin worked as editor of the newspaper Free Russia, published by the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party. From 1918 to 1919, the writer worked in the publishing house " World literature", created by Maxim Gorky.

After the arrival of white troops in Gatchina (St. Petersburg), where he had lived since 1911, he edited the newspaper "Prinevsky Krai", published by Yudenich's headquarters.

In the fall of 1919, he emigrated with his family abroad, where he spent 17 years, mainly in Paris.

During the emigrant years, Kuprin published several collections of prose: “The Dome of St. Isaac of Dolmatsky”, “Elan”, “The Wheel of Time”, the novels “Zhaneta”, “Junker”.

Living in exile, the writer lived in poverty, suffering both from lack of demand and from isolation from his native soil.

In May 1937, Kuprin returned with his wife to Russia. By this time he was already seriously ill. Soviet newspapers published interviews with the writer and his journalistic essay “Native Moscow.”

On August 25, 1938, he died in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) from esophageal cancer. He was buried on the Literary Bridge of the Volkov Cemetery.

Alexander Kuprin was married twice. In 1901, his first wife was Maria Davydova (Kuprina-Iordanskaya), adopted daughter publisher of the magazine "World of God". She subsequently married the editor of the magazine " Modern world" (which replaced "The World of God"), publicist Nikolai Iordansky, and she herself worked in journalism. In 1960, her book of memoirs about Kuprin, "Years of Youth", was published.

In 1907, Kuprin married sister of mercy Elizaveta Heinrich.

From his first marriage the writer had a daughter, Lydia (1903-1924), and from his second, daughters Ksenia (1908-1981) and Zinaida (1909-1912).

His daughter from his second marriage, Ksenia, lived in France in 1919-1956, was a fashion model and film actress. In 1958 she returned to the USSR and worked at the A.S. Theater. Pushkin, playing mainly in crowd scenes. She wrote a book about Kuprin "My Father". She is the founder of the Kuprin house-museum in the city of Narovchat, Penza region.

Museum of A.I. Kuprin in Narovchat, a branch of the State Literary Association memorial museums(OGLM) Penza region, was opened on September 6, 1981.

Monuments to the writer were erected in Narovchat and Gatchina. In May 2009, a bronze monument to Alexander Kuprin was unveiled on the Balaklava embankment in Sevastopol.

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