Do you want to look at the world through the eyes of a cunning and lively boy who lives under the strict rules of his grandmother? Read Pavel Sanaev's extraordinary story "Bury me behind the baseboard." Isn't it a tempting name? This book was nominated for the Booker Prize. The book market simply exploded with the appearance of this story. The summary of “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” will show you how difficult it can be with loved ones. Adults do not think about their words and actions, which affect the state of mind and the formation of the child’s character.

Autobiographical book

Sanaev wrote the story “Bury me behind the baseboard” for a reason. She conveys the story of his childhood. His mother and father divorced, Pavel had to live with his grandmother Lida. At this time, my mother was trying to improve her life with a new man, who turned out to be the famous director and actor Rolan Bykov.

The grandmother had a very domineering character and in every possible way prevented her grandson from meeting his mother and stepfather. The tyrannical upbringing was unbearable. One day, a mother accidentally ran in to see her son when he was alone at home and took him home. Throughout this month, Pavel was simply happy in the family of his mother and stepfather. But his grandmother took him back by force. The boy had to live with her for another four long years. Rolan Bykov greatly influenced the development of Pavel’s character, so Sanaev dedicated his book to him.

Main characters

Sanaev’s book “Bury me behind the baseboard” had many theatrical productions and film adaptations. The main characters of the story are associated with real people. Meet the main characters:

• eight-year-old boy Sasha Savelyev;
• Olga - Sasha's mother;
• Nina Antonovna - the boy's grandmother;
• Semyon Mikhailovich - Sasha's grandfather;
• Uncle Tolya is my stepfather.

Summary of "Bury me behind the baseboard"

The story is told from the perspective of a little boy, Sasha Savelyev. He lives with his grandmother and grandfather, an actor. The grandmother protects the boy from his mother, whom she considers frivolous. Sasha's mother lives with another man. Nina Antonovna in every possible way incites her grandson against his mother and stepfather in order to completely subjugate him to herself.

In the book “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard,” Sanaev shows Sasha as a cunning and cheerful boy, but a little frail. Grandmother is overprotective. One of the chapters of the story is called “Bathing,” where a whole ceremony of grandmother’s care unfolds. Sasha is afraid of his grandmother and constantly runs away to the construction site. This is his most peaceful place.

Nina Antonovna did not stand on ceremony with expressions, calling her grandson offensive words. He often heard that he was an idiot or a bastard. A very rude relationship developed between the grandson and grandmother. The boy was very afraid of his grandmother’s curses and dreamed of escaping from this place. Hence the title of the story - “Bury me behind the baseboard.” The summary of the book cannot convey the full depth of the world of a frightened child who is confused in his feelings.

Images of grandparents

The drama of life is shown with humor by Sanaev in the book “Bury me behind the baseboard.” The summary only superficially touches on the problems of the story. In the image of Sasha's grandmother, Sanaev showed an underdeveloped personality who cannot make his life and those around him happy. Psychological and other problems in the family were solved through the grandson.

Nina Antonovna and Semyon Mikhailovich married without love. She dreamed of being an actress, but her father forbade her - she became a prosecutor. During the war, she had to bury her son Alyosha, this left an imprint on her character. The woman poured out her unrealized temperament on her family and friends. An atmosphere of verbal sadism reigned in the house.

Grandfather did not have such a temperament, which is why this marriage lasted for so many years. Semyon Mikhailovich resigned himself and went with the flow. Often his patience ran out, and scandals broke out in the house.

Little Sasha Savelyev and his mother

Sasha’s mother, Olga, got married for the first time in order to escape from an unbearable home environment and to escape control. Olya did not have the will to resist her mother's temperament. Then she met Anatoly, her mother condemned her for this and took her grandson by force. Nina Antonovna tells her daughter that she has no right to raise a child.

Since then, the grandmother brought all her ardor down on her grandson. Her love for her child can only be compared to emotional vampirism. Sasha became intimidated, development slowed down. The boy has become weak and is tormented by fears of death and the loss of his mother. Sasha doesn't love his grandmother. Meetings with his mother were a real inspiration for the child. How many times Olga tried to return her son, so many times he was taken away from her (rudely and persistently). Dating with his mother became for Sasha a path that led him from fear to love.

A wonderful book for all parents and those who plan to become one.

Pavel Sanaev. "Bury Me Behind the Baseboard"

As a human being who was once a child (and by the way, more recently), I want to appeal to all parents: be careful with your children. Don’t offend unnecessarily, don’t make them feel insignificant, watch your language, don’t allow assault. Otherwise, when the child grows up, he will return everything to you. Or maybe write a book about you. And even a good one.

When you read Pavel Sanaev’s story “Bury me behind the baseboard,” the stories of Yuri Sotnik and Fazil Iskander involuntarily come to mind, and this is an undoubted compliment to the man who wrote his first book. There are many similarities: wonderful language and humor. The passion of the main character, the seven-year-old boy Sasha, for inventing and constructing unimaginable technical means (like a spaceship from two bathtubs thrown into a landfill) is reminiscent of the equally young character Sotnik, who tried to make a submarine. Paradoxical, but at the same time not devoid of logic, Sasha’s reflections on life echo the philosophizing of Iskander’s Chick. There is only one difference: “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” is not a book for children. If only for very adult children who are ready to become parents themselves.

The story allows an adult to see himself through the eyes of a child. The boy Sasha lives with his grandparents, because the grandmother does not trust her daughter to raise the child. She doesn’t trust because she loves her grandson very much - but at the same time she becomes not only a second mother for him, but also a tyrant. Sasha gets sick a lot, his grandmother sincerely cares about his health, and at the same time goes too far, as they say, forcing the lively, inquisitive boy to lead the life of a greenhouse plant. The main thing is that for every smallest offense he spreads rot on him in vain, without mincing words. He doesn’t hit, but rather presses psychologically: he screams, humiliates, teases, but at the same time continues to sincerely love. The grandmother has lost her mind, her feelings and actions are the feelings and actions of a normal parent, only multiplied by one hundred.

Every normal parent loves his child and at least once was a tyrant for him, so in the image of a grandmother, as in a kind of magnifying mirror, he can see himself through the eyes of a child. Every parent is sure that a child should gratefully accept the good that comes from mom and dad and forgive all the bad, but the truth is that the child perceives the bad much more sharply. And here is the result: the grandmother does not sleep at night for her grandson, runs around Soviet Moscow in search of expensive medicines and talented doctors, carries out complex medical procedures with her own hands, but the boy still loves his mother much more, whom he sees very rarely. She loves him at least because she doesn’t call him a bastard and a hateful scum.

This is the first reason why “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” is not a children's book. Second: the book is evil, towards the end - gloomy and tragic. This anger and darkness strangely coexists with many humorous scenes that will make any reader burst out laughing. Although a sad story is hidden behind the superficial layer of humor: the boy is really seriously ill and may not live to see sixteen, the grandmother experienced a lot in her youth, which resulted in her madness. The quiet and almost wordless grandfather, another victim of grandmother's tyranny, was largely the cause of grandmother's suffering - we can say that he is now serving a well-deserved punishment. Sasha’s mother is a failure in life, and on top of that, she got involved with an equally loser, a heavy-drinking artist. Each hero of this story has his own truth. And, regardless of whether the mother returns the child to herself or he stays with the grandmother, the ending will be sad.

The story caused a lot of noise (quite deservedly so) and was filmed in 2009. The director was faced with a difficult task: to make something whole from a set of completed short story chapters, scattered in time and space, to fit it into a single plot. To do this, I had to give up side lines - including all the wonderful stories about how Sasha made gas masks and then tested them in combat conditions, how he went to the park with his grandmother and tried to persuade her to ride at least some attraction, how once he scared the whole yard with a homemade firecracker... In a word, almost no trace of the humor of the story remained in the film, only the melodramatic component. As a result, the center of the film is not the boy himself (as in the book), but the confrontation between his grandparents on the one hand, and his mother and her lover on the other. The last two were episodic characters in the story, but in the film they became almost the main characters.

Although the main one, of course, is the grandmother played by Svetlana Kryuchkova. The choice of actress is surprising at first: when reading the story, you involuntarily imagine Baba Yaga, and Kryuchkova is a pretty and even youthful grandmother. But everything quickly falls into place: this actress does not know how to play poorly and she got into the role of an elderly vixen perfectly well. Great actor Alexey Petrenko played the grandfather, also a great actor - respectable, arrogant. In the book he is completely different, but the director deliberately simplified a lot of things. In the book, for example, it is unclear whether Tolya, my mother’s new friend, is really an alcoholic, but in the film he is a caricatured drunk. But they perfectly managed to convey the tragedy of Sasha’s grandmother: she loves her grandson to tears, and cannot help but bully him - simply because she is broken by life, she is used to living with wolves and howling like a wolf.

The film, like the book, is not at all for children. It even smacks of that half-forgotten film language that is contemptuously called “chernukha.” There are both rude expressions and naturalistic scenes - fortunately, there are few of them, but this only means that the director softened the text of the story as best he could. The fact that the plot has been reworked also speaks rather in favor of the film: it would hardly be interesting to watch a literal reconstruction.

The filmmakers can be especially praised for some of their discoveries. For example, in the book, the death and funeral of the grandmother took up only one small paragraph, without details. In the film, during the funeral, Sasha innocently asks her mother if she really planned to kill her grandmother and take over her property, and trustingly tells her where exactly her grandmother hides her savings. A strange expression appears on the mother’s face: either she is shocked by such statements from her son, or she is already figuring out where to spend her small, but still, wealth. Most likely, both. Life is a cynical thing.

MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY
them. M.V. LOMONOSOV
Faculty of Philology
Department of History of Russian Literature of the XX – XI centuries

Adults and children: the psychological aspect of the problem of relationships in the context of P. Sanaev’s story “Bury me behind the baseboard”

Course work
Second year students
Russian branch
Belikova Natalia
Scientific director
prof. N.M. Solntseva

Moscow
2011
Table of contents

Bibliography 29

Introduction
The topic of my course work is “Adults and children: the psychological aspect of the problem of relationships in the context of P. Sanaev’s story “Bury me behind the baseboard.” Subject The analysis carried out was the nature of personal relationships between the characters: the course work will briefly examine interpersonal conflicts, their causes and consequences, the phenomenon of education and its role in the family of the main character; important source for analysis turned out to be the so-called “eternal problems” raised in the work, which will be discussed later. Material My research was based directly on P. Sanaev’s story “Bury Me Behind the Skirting Board” and an interview with the author. In general, the study of this work of art is mainly based on psychology, which determines relevance topics - after all, in the work, as mentioned above, the problems of the psychological nature of relationships in the family and their, so to speak, literary embodiment in the story will be considered - of course, similar experiments in the field of interaction between literature and psychology were relevant a decade ago, and are no less interesting to contemporaries due to the always topical problems they analyze (after all, in essence, the work examines the relationship of the “fathers-children” coordinate system (in this context, it would still be more correct to sound this pair as “adult-child”) and "adult-adult"). Concerning novelty the problem itself, it is worth noting that in this case, novelty as such is compensated by relevance, because it is obvious that the problem posed is not new (it has existed, roughly speaking, since the existence of the family as a concept in literature in principle), but as for novelty degree of research question, then we can say with confidence that in the context of Sanaev’s work, almost no one has dealt with it, so we can a priori hope for something new in my work.
Indeed, if we talk about the degree of research on this issue, then, strange as it may sound, no one was seriously interested in it - not philologists, not sociologists, not even journalists. And almost the only thing I could find as literary material for my analysis was an interview with Sanaev himself; In addition, I directly used scientific and psychological literature, about the character and role of which I will talk later. Purpose of my work, I intend to determine the meaning, methods of their expression, as well as the place and role of psychological conflicts and the concept of “love” in the work and conduct their comparative and comparative analysis (also based on a comparison of this text with other works, which will be discussed below), while tasks studies are:

analysis of the causes of conflicts identified by the author in the context of the “problem of psychological relationships between heroes”
comparative analysis with other works of art of Russian literature, in which there are similar problems of psychological family relationships, as well as educational, conflict and, as a consequence, even existential contexts
comparative analysis of educational models in the film (based on the work of the same name) and the book
identification of the typology of motives and analysis of their collision

The course work will present research by psychologists such as Kozlov, P.V. Simonov, Jean Piaget, Leontiev, Gortsevsky, Freud and others; psychological articles were analyzed, various interviews were considered not only with Sanaev himself, but also with his immediate audience; examples of comparative analyzes with the works of Shmelev, Mohr, L.N. Tolstoy, Bunin, Foer are given.
Chapter first

History of the book

Preface

At the beginning I would like to say a few words about the author, the book itself and the autobiographical contexts in the story. Pavel Sanaev born in 1969 in Moscow. In 1992 he graduated from the screenwriting department of VGIK and at 93 he wrote the story “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard,” which was published in 2003 and immediately became a bestseller. To date, the book's circulation is approaching half a million copies, and it is still selling out. In 1996, she was published in October magazine, and in the same year she was awarded the October magazine prize for best debut. For several years the story lived on magazine pages as “widely known in very narrow circles.” In 2007, the largest Russian publishing house ASTREL began publishing the book, and from that moment on, a real stir began around Plinth. In three years, about half a million copies have been sold, and the book continues to be in demand. Interestingly, the new edition also publishes three previously unpublished chapters as additional materials:"On Ribbons", "Speed" and "Idiot's Dream Come True".

main problems: the relationship between autobiography and literary fiction, the concept of education

If we briefly talk about the presence of an element of autobiography in the text, then it would be most correct to quote the author himself about this: “It’s 60 percent fiction, there’s quite a lot of it, and that’s what you need” 1 . It is important to note that when I was working on my coursework, my main research material, in addition to the text itself, was interviews, and if all of Sanaev’s quotes about the novel are reduced to a few of the most important, you get the following: 1) “this is a novel about love, I wrote a story about love and forgiveness" 2, 2) "my story about the rightness of all the wrong and the wrongness of all the right" 3, 3) "according to Freud, I should have grown up as a clinical idiot with a deep-seated inferiority complex" 4. Actually, based on these quotes alone, one can build a concept and structure of analysis, because in them Sanaev contained the entire essence of the book, and all the problems of psychological relationships between the characters are really built on love (albeit not only in its beautiful, but also in its ugly form), conflicts, forgiveness and education. It is important to note that the reason for any relationship at all, at first glance (at least between the grandmother and Sashenka Savelyev) is upbringing, from which everything, in fact, begins, even from the point of view of composition. The author emphasizes as clearly as possible that upbringing with a grandmother always turns into some kind of insoluble conflict situation, but it arises solely because of love (Sanaev himself in one of his interviews spoke about his grandmother this way: “My grandmother in the book is a symbol of an ugly but after all, love, she breathes this love” 5, in addition, we can find examples in the text: (grandmother tells the doctor about Sasha) “... Such love of punishment is worse, only pain from it, but what to do if she howled? from this love, but without it why should I live") 6, but nevertheless, any attempt at communication ends in a conflict situation. It is significant that the source of all conflicts turns out to be the grandmother (after all, it is because of her that the boy is torn between his mother and his second home, it is because of her that scandals occur with his grandfather), but at the same time she is also the main teacher. The Polish psychologist Jan Komensky in his work “Selected Pedagogical Works” writes that “education is necessary for people to be people, and not wild animals, not senseless beasts” 7, and a little lower he writes that education should be essentially a combination of “intelligent guidance” and “easy encouragement.” Another psychologist – S.V. Kovalev - defines education as something between “motivation” and “persuasion” 8. We don’t see anything like this in the relationship between grandmother and grandson - this is overshadowed by maximalism and sick suffocating love, we don’t see it in the relationship between mother and son - mother embodies the type of soft, irresponsible, self-centered and at the same time infantile love, we don’t see this and in the relationship between grandfather and child - here the helplessness before someone else’s will, the impossibility of one’s own actions, is obvious. That is, in essence, education as a phenomenon is absent as such, and only despotic love remains, generating conflicts between “the boy who wants the best” 9 and the world of adults.

Chapter two

Comprehensive comparative analysis: I.A. Bunin “The Life of Arsenyev”, I.S. Shmelev “Summer of the Lord”, P. Sanaev “Bury me behind the plinth”

2.1. The problem of education and the aspect of autobiography in the context of a comparative analysis of the novels “The Life of Arsenyev” and “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard”
If we return to the problem of autobiography, then it is impossible not to mention another work about childhood - “The Life of Arsenyev” by I.S. Bunina. “At all times and centuries,” wrote Bunin, “from childhood to the grave, each of us is tormented by a persistent desire to talk about ourselves - to capture our life in words and at least in a small part - and this is the first thing that I must testify about my life: it is an inextricably linked need, full of deep meaning, to express and prolong oneself on earth... Yes, the Book of my life is a book without any beginning.” 10 (“Through the mouth of the Bunins: Diaries.” In 3 vols. / Edited by Militsa Green. – Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1979-1982.) Some contemporaries considered “The Life of Arsenyev” as a biography of the author himself. However, it should be noted that this infuriated Bunin himself. He argued that his book is autobiographical only insofar as any work of art in general is autobiographical, in which the author certainly invests himself, a part of his soul. Already at this stage, it will be interesting to draw a parallel with Sanaev, who, claiming that his book is 60 percent fiction, still considers it autobiographical, and not literary-autobiographical (which is the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” in the eyes of its author), but autobiographical in the truest sense of the word.
Bunin himself called “The Life of Arsenyev” “the autobiography of a fictional person” 11. Rightly asserting that “a human life cannot be written in its entirety” 12, the writer, before starting the next part of his book, each time stopped at the problem of selecting the most important. He wrote his book by compressing time, combining several years into one year. The writer accomplished this compaction of time not only in the sense that he connected events that happened at different times - the main thing was that the internal, spiritual experiences of the hero, who was growing up very quickly, were compressed and merged. Simply put: in terms of the intensity of feelings and thoughts, an “Arsenyev” year is several “Bunin” years, and Alexey Arsenyev himself is, as it were, a “concentrated” author, in the main features of his personality. Bunin endowed Arsenyev, first of all, with the traits of an artist and a poet (it is known that Bunin himself considered himself all his life mainly as a lyrical poet and only then as a prose writer). And it is clear that the idea of ​​the book about Alexei Arsenyev was precisely the idea to write “the life of an artist” - a poet, in whose soul, from childhood, “all the impressions of being” are melted, in order to subsequently be translated into words. Thus, indeed, “The Life of Arsenyev,” on the one hand, is the autobiography of a fictional person, a certain collective “born poet,” and not just Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. On the other hand, this book is the most frank, lyrical and confessional of Bunin’s creations.
Starting to talk about the motives of education in one and another novel, it would be appropriate to conduct a small analysis of the autobiographical aspect: Bunin is of great interest in the image and character of Arsenyev’s father. It is known that its prototype was the writer’s father, Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin 13 . In the book, this is a man who is irresistible in his charm, although “sinful”, quick-tempered and easy-going, carefree and life-loving, spreading around himself a feeling of joy in life, a talented artistic nature. Bunin very restrainedly shows the so-called other side of the coin: the promiscuity, irresponsibility of the father towards the family, which led it to complete ruin. All this is only briefly hinted at in “The Life of Arsenyev”; there is no talk of condemnation, not even of judgment; in the book there reigns a bright and festive man - the one to whom the son owes many of the bright traits of his character - the poet's father.
It is interesting that in some ways Bunin adheres to almost one hundred percent autobiographical accuracy. For example, the experiences of the boy Arsenyev associated with the death of his sister Nadya are close to what little Vanya Bunin experienced after the death of his younger sister Sasha. Or when Bunin describes young Arsenyev’s love “in a poetic old way” with Liza Bibikova and decides not to sleep at night, then this is again closely connected with Ivan Alekseevich’s memories of his youth: about falling in love with a neighbor’s relative, a beautiful girl with blue “ hair-eyed eyes.
Continuing the comparative study of educational and psychological behavioral models of the main characters of the two novels, we need to remember, in addition to Arsenyev’s father, one more character - Baskakov. He, Baskakov’s home teacher, a freedom-loving eccentric and romantic who put his independence above all else in life, greatly influenced the formation of Arsenyev’s character in his early years. In Baskakovo, Bunin brought out his home pre-gymnasium teacher N. O. Romashkov 14. Alyosha Arsenyev was, as they say, wax in the hands of Baskakov, who “for his stories... most often chose... everything, it seems, that was the most bitter and caustic of what he experienced, testifying to human baseness and cruelty, and for reading - that something heroic, sublime, speaking about the beautiful and noble passions of the human soul" 15. Baskakov “infected” the boy with this indifference to existence. The pages of “The Life of Arsenyev,” which talk about Baskakov’s influence on the mind and heart of the young hero, are extremely autobiographical.
The entire environment, starting with family and friends, right down to the “dissolute” neighbors squandering their last income, left a mark on Alyosha Arsenyev’s soul and, in one way or another, influenced his internal development. But people were only part of the vast world that entered the hero’s mind and heart, and first of all, of course, nature. Bunin endowed Arsenyev with his passionate love for nature and hypersensitivity to it. A philosophical and contemplative attitude towards nature and reflection on its mysteries prompted Arsenyev to think (not mature enough, it should be noted) about the mysteries and meaning of existence itself. It is significant that the main character of Sanaev’s novel, Sashenka, also thinks about the meaning of life, non-existence, and also at a fairly early age: “...I saw that light as something like a kitchen garbage chute, which was the border where the existence of things ceased. What happened next?<…>I will ask my mother to bury me behind the baseboard of the house, I once thought. There will be no worms, there will be no darkness" 16. It turns out that already in the very title of the novel the author introduced a very complex and important problem of human existence and the other world. Thus, we see how two completely different writers - Bunin and Sanaev - in small works about childhood, pose existential questions to child heroes.

2.2. The worldview (worldview) of the main characters of three works by I.A. Bunina, I.S. Shmeleva, P. Sanaev, respectively, as a result of the system of relationships “adult-child” in novels
A complete comparative analysis of the novel “The Summer of the Lord” by Shmelev and the story “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard,” which will be presented below, would be very appropriate, but now I will only touch on some key points: 1) the education system (in fact, for Vanya, they themselves are role models adults - cf. lack of education) 2) ideals of educators’ pedagogy (Mikhail Pankratievich and grandmother) 3) concept of love of life 4) comparative analysis of vocabulary (“darling”, “Murasha”, “dove”, “darling”, “cat” - interesting that sometimes the vocabulary is the same: “cat”, “legs”, “darling”) 5) religious motives. But at the same time, there is a feeling that only Shmelev has love, affection and beauty, but this is not so: in “The Summer of the Lord” there is a certain idealization, in “Bury me behind the baseboard” there is also love - it’s just different - rude, crazy, not spiritual. It would be interesting to conduct a comparative analysis of the “teacher-child” (read “adult-child”) relationship in two works by Bunin and Shmelev, respectively. The main creative force in the spiritual formation of personality in Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev” and in I. Shmelev’s story “The Summer of the Lord” is the family and its head – the father. The most important role in the development and formation of personality is played by the environment in which the main characters Shmelev and Bunin are brought up. The author of the story “The Summer of the Lord” conveyed the life of a merchant family, spiritualized and filled with Orthodox light. Little Vanya’s life is naturally built according to the Orthodox commandments, which are the basis of his spiritual formation and determine the meaning of his existence. Such education for a hero is the only possible one. The question of searching for God does not arise in his mind, since he perceives faith in Him as something naturally given from birth. The example of Vanya’s father is indicative. He is a quick-tempered and hot-tempered nature, but at the same time quick-witted and extremely conscientious. This is evidenced by an episode on the first morning of Lent, when the father runs out into the cold in only a jacket and asks Vasil Vasilich for forgiveness for yesterday’s unexpected anger, in which he strongly cursed the manager. “Do just that, take your dad’s example... Never offend people. And especially when you need to take care of your soul... care,” Gorkin instructs Vanya 17 .
Unlike Shmelev's Vanya, Bunin's Alexey Arsenyev lives in a world with which relations are not entirely simple and far from harmony. And although the hero feels himself to be a part of this endless and eternally existing world, at the same time a constant feeling of loneliness prevails in his soul, and not a communal principle in relations with the people around him. And if for Shmelev’s Vanya everything in the world was harmoniously arranged and had its own meaning, then for Bunin’s Alexei “everything in the world was aimless, it was unknown why it existed” 18. Here again it would be appropriate to recall Sashenka Savelyev, for whom his life was far from an example of an ideal harmonious existence (daily quarrels with his grandmother, internal displeasure (“... I was very envious and terribly envious of those who can do what I can’t. Since I didn’t know how to do anything, there was a lot of reason for envy...” 19).
When considering the works of Shmelev and Sanaev, the most fruitful will be a comparative analysis of a different nature - more external, lexical, syntactic, compositional. “Summer of the Lord” is practically a memoir, unlike “Plinth,” which is still 60 percent fiction. “The Summer of the Lord” is constructed as a combination of a number of stories dedicated to the writer’s childhood, and consists of three compositional parts: “Holidays”, “Joys”, “Sorrows”. It is interesting that first-person narration is typical for most completely autobiographical works of the 19th-20th centuries. By analyzing the two types of narration and the authors’ vocabulary directly, one can find some common elements despite the apparent absolute difference in language and style. For example, researcher N.A. Nikolina in her book “Philological Analysis of Text” writes that “the originality of I. S. Shmelev’s narrative lies in the combination of elements of two types of tales: a “children’s” tale and the tale of an adult narrator” 20 . The narrative thus turns out to be heterogeneous. With the dominant point of view of the little hero, in some contexts the “voice” of the adult narrator can be traced. These are, first of all, the beginnings of chapters, lyrical digressions, and endings. In addition, Nikolina says that I. S. Shmelev’s novel “The Summer of the Lord” is constructed as a “possible” story of a child into whom the adult narrator is reincarnated. Such a transformation is motivated by the ideological and aesthetic content of the story: “The author cares about a clear child’s voice, revealing a complete soul in a free and joyful feeling of love and faith” 21 . In our opinion, the same can be said about Sanaev’s narration style: a certain synthesis of children’s and adult voices (and not only in the obvious comparisons of the dialogues of grandmother and Sasha, mother and Sasha, but also in the boy’s speech itself (“... I was very envious and terribly envious of those who can do what I can’t do. Since I couldn’t do anything, there were many reasons for envy. I didn’t know how to climb trees, play football, fight or swim...” 22 - using this as an example. excerpt, we see how the hero worries about complex, as it seems to him, problems, he is faced with universal human issues of envy and anger, but at the same time, reflecting, he speaks about them with such childish spontaneity and so naively simply that the reader cannot help but not believe it already in the seriousness of the issue itself).

Chapter Three

Religious issues and its place in the works of I.A. Bunin, I.S. Shmelev and P. Sanaev

3.1. The nature of the “mother-son” relationship in the works of I.A. Bunin and P. Sanaev
Various aspects of comparing the works of Sanaev, Bunin and Shmelev are interesting in the light of my research work. So, for example, if you analyze the behavioral models of the characters and the educational nature of their relationships only in Sanaev and Bunin, then you need to focus not on some external phenomena, but compare precisely the relationships between the characters. In this sense, the figure of the mother in one work and in another is extremely important for analysis. A striking example of the embodiment of the ideal of the “poor in spirit,” in contrast to Alexei’s father, is the figure of Bunin’s mother. What is striking is the ability of a mother, possessing a deep Christian consciousness, to remain above worldly vanity, to “melt” everything external in her soul, gaining even greater strength and harmony, while the father only “tried in vain to be sad and fast,” “began to drink more and more often.” " The origins of this consciousness are in submission to God's Providence, in trust in it: “Among my relatives and friends, one could still understand one of our mothers with her tears, sadness, fasting and prayers, with her thirst for renunciation from life: her soul was in constant and high tension, she believed that the Kingdom of God was not of this world and believed with all her being that a sweet, short and sad earthly life was only a preparation for another, eternal and blissful one” 23. The image of the poor in spirit is revealed in its entirety in the mother - in alienation from this world. The only thing in which her connection with the world is revealed is inexhaustible love for her neighbors. Including my son. Here we can draw a parallel in Sanaev’s “mother-son” relationship, where there is also a mother’s absolute love for her child, complete dedication, but at the same time for her this feeling is childish love, she is not independent and irresponsible (remember the mother’s behavior towards Sasha : the mother is afraid of the child’s grandmother, she is not able to make decisions, she is afraid even to take the child to live with her).

3.2. Religious overtones in the works of I.S. Shmelev and P. Sanaev
There is no doubt that Sashenka is the main value of the family and all love and care are directed towards him, and in this context one cannot help but remember I.S. Shmelev, who generally saw the universal function of man in caring for the younger generation by the older generation. In Shmelev, the divine motif plays a huge role - starting from the composition and ending with church vocabulary, each chapter is imbued with religious notes, an abundance of Orthodox holidays, folk proverbs with religious themes (“a nun sings, and there are a hundred cups in him” 24), even the title of the work itself; it seems that literally every line contains Christian values, and every relationship is an example of Orthodox brotherly ties. “The Summer of the Lord” is a church calendar read through the eyes of a child. “Bury me behind the baseboard” seems to mirror literally every positive point of the previous analysis, however, it seems so only at first glance. It is obvious that Sanaev’s story is also aimed at religious themes (the title of the story, the biblical leitmotif “children will pay for the sins of their parents” 25, frequent motifs of “truth and holy lies”, an appeal to the Lord not in vain “Send me, Lord, part of his torment "26 and so on), so it turns out that what differs mainly is the nature of love and, as a consequence, the atmosphere and upbringing in homes and families with a child of approximately the same age.
Obviously, “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” was the first and almost the only novel not about a happy childhood. The myth of the beautiful and cloudless infantile has disappeared, and only real memories remain, which can only be gotten rid of at the age of 25. Again, comparing “The Summer of the Lord” and “Plinth” one cannot help but notice how very different the whole pathos of the work is - every line of Shmelev is imbued with Christian love and the rough, piercingly hopeless reality of Sanaev - a reality without God. The expression “happy childhood” has practically become a phraseological unit and a kind of tradition in Russian literature. Even if childhood was not perceived as completely happy (“Tom Sawyer” by Twain, “To Kill a Mockingbird...” by Lee, “Childhood” by Tolstoy), it was still bright and joyful - exactly the opposite of the concept of childhood in “Plinth.” In our opinion, the phenomenon of “happy” or “unhappy” childhood directly depends on the relationship between the child and parents (or adults surrounding him at that moment), on any interaction between the child and adults. Here it would be appropriate to again recall Thomas More with his Utopia, where he talks about how adults treat children with respect and trust, and that they are considered junior members of the Utopian society. They are prepared for life not only by learning and observing the work of adults, but also by participating in their work. “Everyone learns agriculture from childhood, partly at school by mastering theory, partly in the fields closest to the city, where children are taken out as if to play.” 27. Through direct communication with adults, other virtues are also learned, which in their totality constitute the moral foundations of a given society. This is the desire of everyone to serve for the benefit of other people, this is hatred of war, which is resorted to only if necessary to protect their country or if they want to help peoples oppressed by tyranny, this is the love of science. All these traits begin to be nurtured by the environment itself and educators from childhood. And in this case, we can talk about a “happy childhood” - when there is proper upbringing and interaction between adults and children. When the phenomenon of education is generally present as such.
In my opinion, it would be appropriate to emphasize the religious motif in all three works - it is interesting that Vanya’s father made the center of existence not his personality and not earthly wealth, but God and his neighbor, thereby embodying the high Christian ideal of the “poor in spirit.” The father of Bunin's protagonist appears completely different to us. The origins of the formation of the character of the main character Bunin are connected with Arsenyev’s father. In many ways, he was an attractive person, “not dark, not inert, and far from timid in all respects,” 28 although hot-tempered, he was unusually easy-going and generous. However, the father very soon gave up on everything: “I began to take an interest in him and have already learned something about him: that he never does anything...” 29. He tries to justify his idle lifestyle by his noble origin: “With my father, everything depended on his lordly mood” 30. In Sanaev, the motive of religion sounds very dry and one-sided, on the one hand (the author does not reveal it directly), and on the other, the motive of God is the leitmotif of the entire novel. As mentioned above, the very title of the work already contains the theme of religion; moreover, the leitmotif of the story is the phrase “children pay for the sins of their parents” 31, which is constantly repeated in different contexts, and the author also presents the boy’s own thoughts about the existence of God (“I asked, what the railway looks like, my mother described it, and then I said that I’m afraid of God. Why are you such a coward, you’re afraid of everything? - Mom asked, looking at me with cheerful surprise. Now I thought Grandma was scary again? God will never punish a child for anything” 32). Formally, all the troubles of the main characters of the three works occur due to the lack of light and religion in their lives. A child has ideal harmony with himself, with people and with the outside world only in “The Summer of the Lord,” where the main character is surrounded by Christian love (and not the unhealthy love-care presented in Sanaev), whose upbringing is based on the inherent values ​​(in in the work there are practically no violations of the 10 commandments (cf. “Plinth”: fornication, murder in essence, lies), where reason prevails over feelings and emotions (cf. Sashenka’s grandmother, unable to even restrain anger). that in the novel “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” one of the reasons for constant conflicts, communicative and educational failures in the relationship between adults and children is the lack of faith in God, and, as a consequence, the correct worldview and correct upbringing.
Chapter Four

Comparative analysis of the film by S. Snezhkin, the novel by P. Sanaev “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” and the novel by J. S. Foer “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”
It is impossible not to mention the film based on the book by Pavel Sanaev “Bury me behind the baseboard” by Sergei Snezhkin, released in 2008, which caused very different reactions and which was even equated by some to “chernukha”. The most acute problem in this context is the problem of ethics, which one way or another arises in cinema and books - and it is absolutely clear that if a film is perceived by the mass audience as “black stuff”, then there can be no talk of ethics in it at all. Moreover, the film does not capture the most important thought and idea of ​​the book - the love of a grandmother for her grandson. In the book, the grandmother was dying because the boy was taken away from her, at the very end there was her monologue under the door with the words “Leave him, let the air be for me” 33, but in the film the grandmother simply began to rush around the table and died. Pavel Sanaev spoke about the film this way: “The film turned out to be about tyranny and the absence of good people, and not about love and forgiveness, as I would like” 34. In addition, Sanaev made some specific claims, which, highlighting the main ones, can be roughly reduced to the following: 1) “the film did not convey the spirit of my book. Firstly, the grandmother in the book is a more multifaceted character. She is a symbol of ugly, but still love. And we must see this love. There are scenes in the book where she treats a boy during an illness, where she quite sincerely calls him “kitty”, “darling”, says “let me wipe your little feet”, “eat some porridge”. At this moment she really loves him, she breathes this love. In the film we see complete tyranny, and love is shown with a few affectionate words, which still sound insincere. Grandma is a real monster there, a monster without other facets.” 35 2) “The grandmother finally redeemed everything with her death, because they took the boy, took away the air, took away the opportunity to love. In the film, she just started running around the table, got a stroke, and died.” 36 3) Tolya – “a frowning character” 37 4) “...at the end of the book there was a reunion. At the cost of his grandmother's life, the boy and mother found happiness in being together. And in the film it turns out that the main thing for the boy is the money hidden in his grandmother’s books. My story was about the rightness of all the wrong and the wrongness of all the right. Everyone in the film turned out to be moral monsters.” 38. Thus, we see that the director’s digressions, dictated by the need to carry out the action of the literary text, did not preserve the literary meaning. It is interesting that Sanaev gives the example of a St. Petersburg play (the production of “The Baltic House”), which has its own liberties, where the boy is generally played by an adult man. But the spirit of the book was preserved there and the grandmother, played by Era Ziganshina, turned out to be as it was written - tragic, and comic, and light, and dark, and a tyrant, and a loving person. In the Krasnoyarsk play (staged by the Krasnoyarsk Drama Theater named after A.S. Pushkin), the scene of a quarrel between the grandmother and mother was done so accurately by the actor and director that even if I wanted to, I could not have done it more accurately.” 39 Indeed, the film turned out to be about tyranny and the absence of good people. It is interesting that the director in the film was deliberately trying to show the concept of education - in an exaggerated, grotesque and fundamentally wrong way. All attempts at relationships between the characters come down to education, and in its worst manifestations, when moral monsters teach moral monsters to live.

It is interesting that what is not visible in the film fits absolutely perfectly into the plot of the novel, which will be discussed below. Analyzing the film, one cannot help but recall the brilliant work of the American writer Foer “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” where the main character, a nine-year-old boy Oscar, whose father died in one of the towers on September 11, is trying to live, trying to love his grandfather, grandmother, and mother. Composition: from one point in time and space (New York, ~2002), the destinies of two generations unfold in parallel. The first is the generation of the protagonist’s grandparents, whose lives were ruined by the bombing of Dresden, where they lived in their youth. In the form of letters to an unborn/born/dead son or grandson, they talk about their attempt
etc.................

It was nominated for the Booker Prize and at the beginning of 2003 it was published as an independent publication in the series “Modern Library for Reading” by the publishing house “MK-Periodika”. In 2009, the story was filmed by Sergei Snezhkin
The story of a 9-year-old boy Sasha Savelyev. He lives with his grandparents because the grandmother does not trust her daughter to raise the child. The grandmother condemns the “dissolute” daughter who has found a new husband; the grandmother considers him a “mediocre artist”, a “bloodsucker dwarf” and a “drunk”. At first glance, the grandmother appears to us as a real tyrant, but, moving deeper into the story, we understand that this is not at all the case...
“My name is Savelyev Sasha. I'm in second grade and live with my grandparents. Mom exchanged me for a blood-sucking dwarf and hung me around my grandmother’s neck with a heavy cross. This is how I have been hanging since I was four years old. I decided to start my story with a story about swimming, and have no doubt that this story will be interesting. Bathing with grandma was a significant procedure, as you will see now.”

Interesting Facts:
The characters are based on real people:

Director: Sergey Snezhkin
Cast: Alexander Drobitko, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Alexey Petrenko, Maria Shukshina, Konstantin Vorobiev

About the film:
A film about an 8-year-old boy Sasha Savelyev. He lives with his grandmother because she does not trust raising the child to her daughter, who has a new husband and who, according to the grandmother, is dissolute. Granny, a real tyrant, and mother tear the child apart.

Released: Russia
Duration: 01:50:50

Psychological analysis

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It seems to me that this film is about the psychopathology of everyday life. A few years ago I read a book of the same name and was very impressed. I put off analyzing this film for a long time because I was scared by the complexity of the volume problem. But all the same, we have to start sometime, and I made up my mind. The material is forgotten over time; you should not delay the article. It seems to me that the author, through this film and book, addresses us, the audience, and says that we ourselves are turning our lives into hell. Why? Who forced it? How does this happen?

Pavel Sanaev showed us the complex multi-layered (like a sandwich) psychological reality of the Soviet family. Love turns into hatred because the boundaries of the Ego are violated. In general, family members crossed certain boundaries between good and evil. Love is primary, but it has absorbed so much hatred and malice that it doesn’t really look like love. When you watch this film, you find something from your childhood. Then everything was as shown there. Everything is two-faced, everything is complex, ambiguous. When there is a clinical component, the situation worsens. The reader understands that we are talking about grandmother. She is the unconditional and indisputable leader in the family, victim and saw, alpha and omega. She had the opportunity to develop between the + and - paths and she chose the latter. During her life, she put so many destructive things on herself, turned her life and the lives of her loved ones into hell, that when you think about how not to live, that’s how you remember her. Every appearance of her in the frame brings me some shock, and my mind turns to clinical psychology - to figure out what the diagnosis could be? But in a purely psychological sense, the grandmother is a victim, but not one who has accepted her fate. Therefore, she hurts loved ones who are not to blame for her choice. The grandmother feels like a betrayed woman and is engaged in psychological racketeering, collecting grievances into one big Resentment against everyone and against life. She is lonely, does not believe in God - and her mind cannot stand it, she indulges in all serious things... what a terrible fate! My grandmother had her own talent - she was an actress, but devoted herself to her family. An unrealized gift manifests itself in the family, look, listen to grandmother’s monologues!! It’s as if she’s playing her role on stage, even her curses are reminiscent of something from Ostrovsky. She was never able to forgive everyone for giving up the theater. Although no one kicked her out of there, she left on her own because... what follows is a set of erroneous beliefs of the grandmother.

The film begins with the funeral of a mouse. What the grandmother feels about his death is called self-pity; this was the first minus, the first mistake in the grandmother’s spiritual choice. In all seriousness, she asks Sasha to throw her a handful of earth on her grave when she is buried. At a deep level, it was not about the mouse, but about his life. The grandmother actually made the child sick; more and more terrible diseases are constantly being found in him. The child understands that it is impossible to be healthy in this family, that only when he is sick he is interesting and will be taken care of. But, let's give him his due, the boy did not break in his soul. He courageously confronts his grandmother, in some places he tries to manipulate her, but he does not break.

In this family there is no respect for the individual, mutual understanding between family members is broken, there is no tact or attention to each other. How could this happen? I think that my grandmother ruined her life, and then the lives of her loved ones. She always lived as if she had no choice, based on the position “I MUST”, she ignored her true desires, but loneliness, despair and self-pity set in.

About mom. She and her friend remind me of children who survived a nuclear disaster. If there was a futuristic film in which children survived a nuclear war, then grew up and adapted to the world as best they could - this is the impression they leave. As a child, she did not know love, her whole life was a struggle, but there is a core of light and goodness in her soul.

Review of the film by Olga Korobova

I don’t want to write about the fact that the film “Bury...” is realistic to the point of real horror, and that Count Dracula, in comparison with the heroes, looks like a cardboard dummy. Watching the film, you come across the idea that we create hell on earth with our own hands. I would like to draw attention to the fact that the heroes do not have material problems - they have a beautiful house, there is money, there is a living room with a round (? - I don’t remember) table in the middle, but no one gathers around this table for Sunday tea parties... there is a piano - no one plays music , there is a library, but no one reads books, although the family belongs to the creative intelligentsia, but the life of the soul and mind cannot be traced. There is minced meat, cutlets sizzling in a frying pan, the head of the family in an ironed shirt. But there is no soul life, and there is no love either. The lack of internal culture among the creative intelligentsia, and among its best part - do we understand the author correctly? Or is this just revenge for a crippled childhood?

The main character is undoubtedly the grandmother - we admire her psychosis throughout the entire film, this terrifying monster that scares everyone and cripples everyone's fate - all the other characters are just waiting for her death, and we understand what the life of her family members will become after her death easier. Through the mouth of a baby, as they say, ... - the grandson, over the open grave, reports where the grandmother hid the money. But was it just her choice that crippled her fate? Yes, she had a choice - whether to become an actress or go to another city and build a family there, and it doesn’t matter that her marriage turned out to be accidental - if not for this incident, she would still have made a choice in favor of marriage, albeit with someone else person. But then the PROGRAM is turned on - a program of voluntary self-sacrifice of the woman’s personality. This line of behavior seems to us to be taken for granted, and we think that if she had not married a selfish person, everything would have turned out differently. This is the usual line of behavior of a Russian woman, who has had the idea of ​​the prerogative of family values ​​hammered into her head since childhood, the wives of the Decembrists being cited as an example for a snack - and she does not dare to disobey. But one’s own self cannot be so easily twisted into a donut – and now the energy of this indomitable personality, unspent in life, breaks free in the flames of evil hysteria, and everyone to whom she sacrificed herself gets to be a victim too. The victim and the executioner cannot, as we know, live without each other, and in this hellish round dance it is difficult to make out who is who.

It is unlikely that this film will be appreciated in Europe and America, I think so. What is so valued in a Russian woman—sacrifice in the name of family—has long been rejected by emancipated and practical foreign women. Because harmony requires a share of reasonable egoism - concern for the development of one’s own personality, one’s own dignity. It is easy and pleasant to love such a person, and freedom of personal space among reasonable egoists goes without saying. Whether there is a spiritual community in the families of reasonable egoists, whether they drink tea on Sundays at a round table and discuss problems, and whether they have these problems at all, and what kind - that’s a completely different story. Here’s another thought about the plinth - the heroes don’t have God, they don’t think about the commandments, they don’t see the image and likeness of God in their loved ones, they don’t recognize people as loved ones and they themselves cease to be people... how this is combined with reasonable egoism, I really don’t know, also a topic for thought...

The story of Pavel Sanaev(1994)does not leave indifferent any reader who touches it. This work is about the fate of a child who is shared among his relatives. The story is told from the perspective of second-grader Sasha Savelyev; he openly talks about the difficult relationship between his grandmother Nina and mother Olya. In the work, all events are given in the perception of a child, but in his statements the expressions of adults are constantly heard, striving to form their own concept of events: "My name is Savelyev Sasha. I'm in second grade and live with my grandparents. Mom exchanged me for a blood-sucking dwarf and hung me around my grandmother’s neck with a heavy cross. This is how I’ve been hanging since I was four years old.”In this quote, the first two sentences are remarks from Sasha himself, the second two are statements from the grandmother, constantly repeated in her apartment in the presence of the child.

The little hero understands everything in a non-childish way, comments on events, expresses his attitude towards the participants in the drama: "You will probably find it strange why you didn’t wash yourself. The fact is that a bastard like me cannot do anything on his own. The mother abandoned this bastard, and the bastard is constantly rotting, and that’s how it happened. You, of course, have already guessed that this explanation was compiled from the words of the grandmother."

The work consists of several chapters: “Bathing”, “Morning”, “Cement”, “White Ceiling”, “Salmon”, “Culture Park”, “Birthday”, “Zheleznovodsk”, “Bury me behind the baseboard”, “Quarrel” ", "Chumochka". In a strong position of the text, at the end there is a chapter, the title of which includes the mother’s nickname given by Sasha himself: “My grandmother and I called my mother Chumochka. Or rather, my grandmother called it the bubonic plague, but I remade this nickname in my own way, and it turned out to be Chumochka. (...) I loved Chumochka, I loved her alone and no one else but her. If she were gone, I would irrevocably part with this feeling, and if she weren’t there, then I wouldn’t know what it was at all..."

This is realistic prose, where the tragedy of more than one family is reproduced in artistic form: the situation of the conflict between “fathers and children” is so convincingly and in detail depicted, in which the child becomes a bargaining chip.

I was struck by the title of the work, the deep meaning of which can only be understood by reading the last lines. This is a boy’s declaration of love for his mother, who, in spite of everything, is the closest and dearest being for the little hero.

"— Mother!— I pressed myself in fear.— Promise me one thing. Promise that if I suddenly die, you will bury me at home behind the baseboard.

— What?— Bury me behind the baseboard in your room. I want to always see you. I'm afraid of the cemetery! You promise?"

Scattered throughout the pages of the story are declarations of the boy Sasha’s love for his mother: “I remembered how I ran at night in response to his screams, and suddenly imagined what would have happened if my mother had been hurt in the same way. The thought made my throat tighten. I was always ready to cry if I imagined that something bad had happened to my mother. And then my grandfather’s words sounded in my memory that I love not him, but his gifts. Is this really true?! I thought and decided that, of course, I love grandfather not gifts, but just much less than my mother. Would I love my mother if she didn’t give me anything?
Almost everything I had was given to me by my mother. But I didn’t love her for these things, but I loved these things because they were from her. Every thing my mother gave me was like a piece of my Chumochka, and I was very afraid of losing or breaking something from her gifts. Having accidentally broken one of the parts of the building set she gave me, I felt as if I had hurt my mother, and I was torn all day, although the part was not important and even often remained superfluous." In fact, the title of the story is a kind of cry: "Give me be close to your mom!"

The author managed to show how difficult it is for a little person to understand the intricacies of intrigue, how difficult it is to preserve his soul in a situation when he needs to adapt to the oddities of his grandmother’s character and simply survive.

The work is a mosaic of episodes from the life of a little hero who is deprived of joy and freedom: a despotic grandmother, suffering from the fact that she could not realize herself in life as a professional, as an actress, acts out a story of sacrificial love in front of her grandson. Naturally, in her own way she loves Sasha, but her feeling is distorted by egoism and a thirst for power; this is a vivid image of a family despot who strives to dominate at least at home.

The conflict in the work is the clash between the grandmother Nina Antonovna and the mother of the hero Olya, the confrontation between defenselessness and despotism. This is at the same time the child’s opposition to the usurper grandmother, which is expressed in the violation of prohibitions (chapter “Cement”). This external conflict gives rise to an internal protest in the child’s soul, which he is simply afraid to express: it depends entirely on the whims of his peculiar grandmother. In the work, the image of this heroine is ambiguous: it would seem that it should only evoke a negative assessment, but it was Nina Antonovna who took care of the child during a difficult period in her daughter’s life, and took care of her grandson as best she could. But, of course, one cannot justify her rudeness and cruelty towards Sasha, on whom she splashes out her hatred towards her daughter. In the work, the reasons for this attitude of the heroine towards Olya are not entirely clear. Is it worth taking revenge like that for the fact that a child did not live up to the hopes once placed on him?

From the memories of the heroes we learn that Nina Antonovna was always cruel to her daughter: "I didn't break your legs! I hit you because you started harassing me! “We’re walking with her along Gorky Street,” my grandmother began to tell me, funnyly showing how capricious my mother was, “we pass by shop windows, there are some mannequins standing there. So this one will fill the entire street with: “Koo-oopi! Koo-oopi!” I tell her: “Olenka, we don’t have much money right now. Daddy will come, we’ll buy you a doll, a dress, and everything you want...” “Whoop-up!” That's when I hit her on the leg. And she didn’t knock, she just shoved her to keep her quiet.”(Chapter "Chumochka").

This is a story about the growing up of a little person, about the relativity of any assessments, about the complexity of the relationship between parents and children.

In the situation depicted in the story, everyone suffers: grandmother and grandfather, their daughter Olya, her son Sasha, Olya’s new husband. But it is precisely this kind of universal suffering that satisfies Nina Antonovna, so she is not ready for discussion and dialogue: " I am ugly in this love, but whatever it is, let me live a little longer. Let there still be air for me. Let him look at me once more with relief, maybe he’ll say “baby” again... Open up to me. Let him go..."

The purpose of Pavel Sanaev’s work “Bury me behind the baseboard” is to remind parents and grandmothers: love not your love for the child, but the child himself, do not force the little person to suffer because of his mistakes and ambitions.

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I quote from http://www.litmir.net/br/?b=266

© Elena Isaeva