He was happily convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was still the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of fir and pine trees in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning to evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful fussiness, as they shout only in the early in the spring, rooks were screaming in the bare century-old birches in the neighboring landowner's garden, and the view of the village on the slopes was still wild, gray, and only some more vines were covered with yellowish green... He walked into the garden: and the garden was still low and bare, transparent , - only the meadows turned green, all dotted with small turquoise flowers, and the akatnik along the alleys became pubescent and one cherry tree bloomed pale white, finely in the ravine, in the southern, lower part of the garden... He went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, The stubble still stuck out like a brush, the dried field roads were still ringed and purple... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the time of expectation - and all this was Katya. And it just seemed that the distractions were the charwoman doing this and that in the estate, workers in the people's quarters, reading, walks, going to the village to see peasant friends, conversations with mother, trips with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in a field on a racing droshky... Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into its own, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around before our eyes began to change by leaps and bounds. They began to plow open the stubble and turn it into black velvet, the field boundaries turned green, the grass in the yard became juicier, the sky became thicker and brighter, the garden quickly began to be dressed in fresh, even soft-looking greenery, the gray clusters of lilacs began to turn purple and smell, and many black ones had already appeared, the metallic blue shine of large flies on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot spots of light on the paths. The branches of the apple and pear trees were still visible, they were barely touched by the small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, spreading networks of their crooked branches everywhere under other trees, were all already curled with milky snow, and every day this color became more and more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blossoming along with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxuriously whitening garden and an ever darker blue sky. Yabluchansky Electronic Library .

...In Moscow, Mitya's last happy day was March 9th. So, at least, it seemed to him. She and Katya walked up Tverskoy Boulevard at twelve o’clock in the morning. Winter suddenly gave way to spring, it was almost hot in the sun. It was as if the larks had really arrived and brought with them warmth and joy. Everything was wet, everything was melting, drops were dripping from the houses, street cleaners were chipping ice from the sidewalks, throwing sticky snow from the roofs, everything was crowded and lively. High clouds dispersed into thin white smoke, merging with the damp blue sky. In the distance, Pushkin towered with blissful thoughtfulness, and the Passion Monastery shone. But the best thing was that Katya, especially pretty that day, was all breathing with simplicity and closeness, often with childish trustfulness she took Mitya by the arm and looked down into his face, happy even as if a little arrogantly, walking so widely that she could barely keep up with him. Near Pushkin, she unexpectedly said: “How funny you are, with some sweet boyish awkwardness you stretch your big mouth when you laugh.” Don’t be offended, it’s for this smile that I love you. Yes, and for your Byzantine eyes... Trying not to smile, overpowering both secret contentment and slight resentment, Mitya answered friendly, looking at the monument, now rising high in front of them: “As for boyishness, in this respect we seem to be not far from each other. And I resemble a Byzantine just as much as you resemble the Chinese Empress. You are all simply obsessed with these Byzantiums, Renaissances... I don’t understand your mother! - Well, if you were her, would you lock me in the tower? - Katya asked. “Not in the mansion, but simply on the threshold, I would not let all this supposedly artistic bohemia, all these future celebrities from studios and conservatories, from theater schools,” answered Mitya, continuing to try to be calm and friendly casual. - You yourself told me that Bukovetsky already invited you to dinner in Strelna, and Egorov offered to sculpt a naked woman in the form of some dying woman sea ​​wave, and, of course, I am terribly flattered by such an honor. “I still won’t give up art even for your sake,” said Katya. “Maybe I’m disgusting, as you often say,” she said, although Mitya never told her this, “maybe I’m spoiled, but take me as I am.” And let’s not quarrel, stop being jealous of me even today, on such a wonderful day! How can you not understand that you are still the best for me, the only one? - she asked quietly and persistently, already looking into his eyes with feigned seduction, and thoughtfully, slowly recited: There is a dormant secret between us, The soul has given the soul a ring... This last, these poems have already really hurt Mitya. In general, many things even on that day were unpleasant and painful. The joke about boyish awkwardness was unpleasant: this was not the first time he had heard such jokes from Katya, and they were not accidental - Katya often showed herself in one thing or another to be more mature than he was, often (and involuntarily, that is quite naturally) showed her superiority over him, and he painfully perceived this as a sign of her some secret, vicious experience. What was unpleasant was “after all” (“you are still better than everyone for me”) and the fact that for some reason this was said in a suddenly lowered voice, but the poems and their mannered reading were especially unpleasant. However, even poetry and this reading, that is, the very thing that most reminded Mitya of the environment that robbed him of Katya, sharply aroused his hatred and jealousy, he endured relatively easily on this happy day of March 9, his last happy day in Moscow, as it often seemed to him later. That day, on the way back from Kuznetsky Most, where Katya bought several Scriabin things from Zimmerman, she casually started talking about his, Mitya’s, mother and said, laughing: “You can’t imagine how afraid I am of her in advance!” For some reason, not once in the entire time of their love did they touch on the question of the future, about how their love would end. And suddenly Katya started talking about his mother and spoke like this. It was definitely obvious that her mother was her future mother-in-law.

Then everything went on as before. Mitya accompanied Katya to the studio of the Art Theater, to concerts, to literary evenings, or sat with her in Kislovka and stayed up until two o'clock in the morning, taking advantage of the strange freedom that her mother, always smoking, always wearing rouge, a lady with crimson hair, dear, gave her. kind woman (who lived separately from her husband, who had a second family, for a long time). Katya also ran to Mitya’s student rooms on Molchanovka, and their dates, as before, almost entirely proceeded in a heavy haze of kisses. But Mitya stubbornly felt that something terrible had suddenly begun, that something had changed, began to change in Katya. That unforgettable, easy time flew by quickly when they had just met, when they, having barely met, suddenly felt that they were most interested in talking (even from morning to evening) only with each other - when Mitya so unexpectedly found himself in that fairy-tale world love, which he had been secretly waiting for since childhood, since adolescence. This time was December - frosty, fine, day after day decorating Moscow with thick frost and a dull red ball of low sun. January and February swirled Metya’s love in a whirlwind of continuous happiness, already, as it were, realized, or at least about to be realized. But even then something began (and more and more often) to confuse, to poison this happiness. Even then, it often seemed as if there were two Katyas: one, whom from the first minute of his acquaintance Mitya began to persistently desire and demand, and the other, genuine, ordinary, painfully different from the first. And yet Mitya did not experience anything like this then. Everything could be explained. Spring women's worries began, shopping, orders, endless alterations of this or that, and Katya really had to often visit the dressmakers with her mother: in addition, she had an exam ahead at the private theater school where she studied. It was therefore quite natural for her to be preoccupied and absent-minded. And so Mitya consoled himself every minute. But the consolations did not help; what the suspicious heart said in spite of them was stronger and was confirmed more and more obviously: Katya’s inner inattention to him grew, and at the same time his suspiciousness and his jealousy grew. The director of the theater school turned Katya's head with praise, and she could not resist telling Mitya about these praises. The director told her: “You are the pride of my school,” he said “you” to all his students - and, in addition to general classes, he also began to practice fasting with her separately, in order to especially show off her in exams. It was known that he corrupted students, every summer he took one with him to the Caucasus, Finland, and abroad. And it began to occur to Mitya that now the director has designs on Katya, who, although not to blame for this, still probably feels it, understands it, and therefore is already, as it were, in a vile, criminal relationship with him. And this thought tormented me all the more since it was too obvious that Katya’s attention was decreasing. It seemed as if something had begun to distract her from him. He couldn't calmly think about the director. But what a director! It seemed that in general some other interests began to prevail over Katya’s love. To whom, to what? Mitya didn’t know, he was jealous of Katya for everyone, for everything, most importantly, for that common thing, imagined by him, with which she supposedly began to live in secret from him. It seemed to him that she was irresistibly drawn somewhere away from him and, perhaps, towards something that was scary to even think about. Once Katya, half jokingly, said to him in the presence of her mother: “You, Mitya, generally talk about women according to Domostroy.” And you will become a perfect Othello. I would never have fallen in love with you and married you! The mother objected: “I can’t imagine love without jealousy.” Whoever is not jealous, in my opinion, does not love. “No, mom,” said Katya with her constant tendency to repeat other people’s words, “jealousy is disrespect for the one you love.” That means they don’t like me if they don’t believe me,” she said, deliberately not looking at Mitya. “But in my opinion,” the mother objected, “jealousy is love.” I even read this somewhere. There this was very well proven and even with examples from the Bible, where God himself is called a jealous and avenger... As for Mitya’s love, it was now almost entirely expressed only in jealousy. And this jealousy was not simple, but something, as it seemed to him, special. She and Katya had not yet crossed the last line of intimacy, although they allowed themselves too much in those hours when they were alone. And now, at these hours. Katya was even more passionate than before. But now even this began to seem suspicious and sometimes aroused a terrible feeling. All the feelings that made up his jealousy were terrible, but among them there was one that was the most terrible of all and which Mitya did not know how, could not define and even understand. It consisted in the fact that those manifestations of passion, the very thing that was so blissful and sweet, higher and more beautiful than anything in the world when applied to them, Mitya and Katya, became unspeakably disgusting and even seemed something unnatural when Mitya thought about Katya and about another man. Then Katya aroused intense hatred in him. Everything that he himself did with her, eye to eye, was full of heavenly charm and chastity for him. But as soon as he imagined someone else in his place, everything instantly changed - everything turned into something shameless, arousing the desire to strangle Katya and, above all, her, and not his imaginary rival.

On the day of Katya’s exam, which finally took place (in the sixth week of Lent), the entire truth of Mitya’s torment seemed especially confirmed. Here Katya no longer saw him at all, didn’t notice him, she was all a stranger, all public. She was a great success. She was dressed all in white, like a bride, and her excitement made her look lovely. They applauded her unanimously and warmly, and the director, a smug actor with impassive and sad eyes, sitting in the front row, just for the sake of greater pride, sometimes made comments to her, speaking quietly, but somehow in a way that was heard throughout the entire hall and sounded unbearable. “Less reading,” he said gravely, calmly and so authoritatively, as if Katya was his complete property. “Don’t play, but worry,” he said separately. And it was unbearable. Yes, the reading itself was unbearable, causing applause. Katya was burning with a hot blush, embarrassment, her voice sometimes broke, she couldn’t breathe, and it was touching, charming. But she read with that vulgar melodiousness, falseness and stupidity in every sound, which were considered the highest art of reading in that environment that Mitya hated, in which Katya already lived with all her thoughts: she did not speak, but exclaimed all the time with some annoying languor passion, with an immoderate, unfounded in its insistence, plea, and Mitya did not know where to turn his eyes from shame for her. The most terrible thing was the mixture of angelic purity and depravity that was in her, in her flushed face, in her white dress, which seemed shorter on the stage, since everyone sitting in the hall looked at Katya from below, in her white shoes and tight-fitting silk white stockings on her legs. “The girl sang in the church choir,” Katya read with feigned, immoderate naivety about some seemingly angelically innocent girl. And Mitya felt a heightened closeness to Katya - as you always feel in a crowd towards someone you love - and evil hostility, he felt pride in her, the consciousness that after all, she belonged to him, and at the same time a heart-tearing pain : no, it doesn’t belong anymore! After the exam there were happy days again. But Mitya no longer believed them as easily as before. Katya, remembering the exam, said: “How stupid you are!” Didn’t you feel that I read so well only for you alone! But he could not forget what he felt during the exam, and could not admit that these feelings had not left him now. Katya also felt his secret feelings and one day, during a quarrel, she exclaimed: “I don’t understand why you love me if, in your opinion, everything is so bad in me!” And what do you finally want from me? But he himself did not understand why he loved her, although he felt that his love not only did not decrease, but was increasing along with the jealous struggle that he waged with someone, with something because of her, because of this love, because of its straining force of ever-increasing demands. - You love only my body, not my soul! - Katya said bitterly one day. Again these were someone else’s, theatrical words, but they, for all their nonsense and hackneyedness, also touched on something painfully insoluble. He didn’t know why he loved, he couldn’t say exactly what he wanted... What does it even mean to love? It was all the more impossible to answer this because neither in what Mitya heard about love, nor in what he read about it, there was not a single word that accurately defined it. In books and in life, everyone seemed to have agreed once and for all to talk either only about some kind of almost ethereal love, or only about what is called passion, sensuality. His love was unlike either one or the other. What did he feel for her? What is called love, or what is called passion? Katya's soul or body brought him almost to the point of fainting, to some kind of dying bliss, when he unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her breasts, heavenly lovely and virginal, revealed with some kind of soul-shattering humility, the shamelessness of pure innocence?

She was changing more and more. Success in the exam meant a lot. And yet there were some other reasons for this. Somehow, with the onset of spring, Katya immediately turned into some kind of young society lady, dressed up and always in a hurry to get somewhere. Mitya was now simply ashamed of her dark corridor when she arrived - now she didn’t come, but always came - when she, rustling silk, quickly walked along this corridor, lowering her veil over her face. Now she was invariably tender with him, but she was invariably late and cut short the dates, saying that she again had to go with her mother to the dressmaker. - You see, we're daring recklessly! - she said, her eyes sparkling roundly, cheerfully and in surprise, fully understanding that Mitya did not believe her, and yet she spoke, since now there was absolutely nothing to talk about. And now she almost never took off her hat, and did not let go of the umbrella, sitting on Mitya’s bed upon departure and driving him crazy with her calves covered in silk stockings. And before you leave and say that she won’t be home again this evening, you need to see someone with your mother again! - she invariably did the same thing, with a clear purpose. to fool him, to reward him for all his “stupid”, as she put it, torment: she looked at the door with a feigned thief, slid off the bed and, wagging her hips along his legs, said in a hasty whisper: “Well, kiss me!”

And at the end of April, Mitya finally decided to give himself some rest and go to the village. He completely tormented both himself and Katya, and this torment was all the more unbearable because there seemed to be no reason for it: what really happened, what was Katya’s fault? And one day Katya, with the firmness of despair, told him: “Yes, leave, leave, I can’t do it anymore!” We need to separate temporarily and sort out our relationship. You have become so thin that your mother is convinced that you have consumption. I can not do it anymore! And Mitya’s departure was decided. But Mitya left, to his great surprise, although not remembering himself from grief, still almost happy. As soon as the departure was decided, everything suddenly returned to the way it was. After all, he still passionately did not want to believe anything terrible that gave him no peace day or night. And the slightest change in Katya was enough for everything to change again in his eyes. And Katya again became tender and passionate without any pretense - he felt this with the unmistakable sensitivity of jealous natures - and again he began to sit with her until two o’clock in the morning, and again there was something to talk about, and the closer the departure became, the more The separation seemed more absurd, the need to “sort things out.” Once Katya even cried - and she never cried - and these tears suddenly made the wasps terribly dear to him, pierced him with a feeling of acute pity and as if some kind of guilt before her. At the beginning of June, Katya’s mother left for the Crimea for the whole summer and took her with her. We decided to meet in Miskhor. Mitya was also supposed to come to Miskhor. And he got ready, made preparations for departure, walked around Moscow in that strange intoxication that happens when a person is still cheerfully on his feet, but is already sick with some serious illness. He was painfully, drunkenly unhappy and at the same time painfully happy, touched by Katya’s returned closeness, her thoughtfulness towards him - she even went with him to buy travel belts, as if she were his bride or wife - and in general the return of almost everything that reminiscent of the first time of their love. And in the same way he perceived everything around him - houses, streets, people walking and driving along them, the weather, which was always gloomy like spring, the smell of dust and rain, the church smell of poplars blooming behind fences in the alleys: everything spoke of the bitterness of separation and about the sweetness of hope for the summer, for a meeting in Crimea, where nothing will interfere and everything will come true (although he did not know what exactly everything would be). On the day of departure, Protasov came to say goodbye. Among high school students and students, there are often young men who have adopted a manner of behaving with good-natured, gloomy mockery, with the air of a man who is older and more experienced than anyone else in the world. Such was Protasov, one of Mitya’s closest friends, his only true friend, who, despite all Mitya’s secrecy and silence, knew all the secrets of his love. He watched as Mitya tied up his suitcase, saw how his hands were shaking, then with sad wisdom he grinned and said: “You are pure children, God forgive me!” And behind all this, my dear Werther from Tambov, it’s still time to understand that Katya is, first of all, the most typical feminine nature and that the police chief himself can’t do anything about it. You, male nature, climb the wall, make the highest demands of the instinct of procreation, and, of course, everything is completely legal, even in a sense sacred. your body there is a higher mind, as Herr Nietzsche rightly noted. But it is also legal that you can break your neck on this sacred path. There are individuals in the animal world who, even according to the state, are supposed to pay the price of their own existence for their first and last love act. But since this state is probably not entirely necessary for you, then keep your eyes open and take care of yourself. In general, don't rush. "Junker Schmitt, honestly, summer will return!" The light is not like a bastard, it is not like a wedge on Katya. I see from your efforts to strangle the suitcase that you completely disagree with this, that this wedge is very kind to you. Well, forgive me for the unsolicited advice - and may Nikola the saint bless you with all his companions! And when Protasov, squeezing Mitya’s hand, left, Mitya, strapping the pillow and blanket into his belts, heard through his window open to the courtyard, how the student who lived opposite, who had studied singing and practiced from morning to evening, began to sing, testing his voice, “ Azru." Then Mitya hurried with his belts, fastened them at random, grabbed his cap and went to Kislovka to say goodbye to Katya’s mother. The motive and words of the song that the student sang sounded and repeated so persistently in him that he did not see either the streets or oncoming people, he walked even more drunk than he had been walking all the last days. In fact, it looked as if the world had converged like a wedge, that Junker Schmit wanted to shoot himself with a pistol! Well, well, it came together, it came together, he thought and again returned to the song about how, walking through the garden and “shining with her beauty,” she met the Sultan’s daughter in the garden of a black slave who stood by the fountain “paler than death,” as once She asked him who he was and where he was from, and how he answered her, beginning ominously, but humbly, with gloomy simplicity: I am called Mohammed... - and ending with an enthusiastic and tragic cry: - I am from the family of poor Azrov, Having fallen in love, we die ! Katya was getting dressed to go to the station to see him off, and called out to him affectionately from her room - from the room where he spent so many unforgettable hours! - that she will arrive at the first bell. A sweet, kind woman with crimson hair sat alone, smoked and looked at him very sadly - she probably understood everything for a long time, guessed about everything. He, all scarlet, trembling internally, kissed her tender and flabby hand, bowing his head like a son, and with maternal affection she kissed him several times on the temple and crossed himself. “Oh, dear,” she said with a timid smile in the words of Griboyedov, “live your life laughing!” Well, Christ is with you, go, go...

Having done all the last things that needed to be done in the rooms, packing his things into the crooked cab with the help of the bellhop, he finally awkwardly sat down next to them, set off and immediately felt that special feeling that overcomes upon departure - the end (and forever) of the known lifespan! - and at the same time sudden lightness, hope for the beginning of something new. He calmed down somewhat and became more cheerful, as if he began to look around with new eyes. The end, goodbye to Moscow and everything that was experienced in it! It was drizzling and gloomy, the alleys were empty, the cobblestones were dark and glittered like iron, the houses were sad and dirty. The cab driver drove with painful slowness and every now and then forced Mitya to turn away and try not to breathe. We passed the Kremlin, then Pokrovka and again turned into the alleys, where in the gardens a crow screamed hoarsely for the rain and towards evening, and yet it was spring, the spring smell in the air. But finally we got there, and Mitya ran after the porter through the crowded station, onto the platform, then onto the third track, where the long and heavy Kursk train was already ready. From all the huge and ugly crowd that besieged the train, because of all the porters, rolling carts with things with a roar and warning shouts, he instantly singled out and saw something that, “shining with its beauty,” stood alone in the distance and seemed like a completely special creature not only in this whole crowd, but throughout the whole world. The first bell had already rung, and this time he was late, not Katya. Touchingly, she arrived before him, she was waiting for him and rushed to him again with the solicitude of a wife or bride: - Darling, quickly take your place! Now is the second call! And after the second bell, she stood even more touchingly on the platform, looking down at him, standing in the doorway of the third-class carriage, already crowded and smelly. Everything about her was charming - her sweet, pretty face, her small figure, her freshness, her youth. where femininity was still mixed with childishness, her upturned shining eyes, her modest blue hat, in the curves of which there was some graceful playfulness, and even her dark gray suit, in which Mitya felt with charm even the material and silk of the lining. He stood thin, awkward, for the road he put on high, rough boots and an old jacket, the buttons of which were worn, reddened with copper. And yet Katya looked at him with an unfeignedly loving and sad look. The third bell hit my heart so unexpectedly and sharply that Mitya rushed from the carriage platform like crazy, and just as madly, with horror, Katya rushed to meet him. He fell to her glove and, jumping back into the carriage, through his tears, waved his cap at her with frantic delight, and she grabbed her skirt with her hand and floated back along with the platform, still not taking her eyes off him. She swam faster and faster, the wind ruffled the hair of Mitya, who was leaning out of the window, more and more strongly, and the locomotive moved faster and faster, more and more mercilessly, demanding paths with an insolent, threatening roar - and suddenly both her and the end of the platform seemed to be torn off...

The long spring twilight had long arrived, dark from rain clouds, the heavy carriage rumbled in a bare and cool field - spring was still early in the fields - the conductors walked along the corridor of the carriage, asking for tickets and inserting candles into the lanterns, and Mitya was still standing near the rattling window, feeling the smell of the Rolled Glove that remained on his lips, still all ablaze with the sharp fire of the last moment of separation. And the whole long Moscow winter, happy and painful, which transformed his whole life, appeared entirely and completely in some new light before him. In a new light, again in a new light, Katya now stood before him... Yes, yes, who is she, what is she? What about love, passion, soul, body? What is it? There is nothing of this, there is something else, completely different! This smell of a glove - isn’t that also Katya, not love, not the soul, not the body? I am men, workers in a carriage, a woman leading her ugly child to the latrine, dim candles in rattling lanterns, twilight in empty spring fields - all love, all soul, and all torment, and all unspeakable joy. In the morning there was Oryol, a transfer, a provincial train near the far platform. And Mitya felt: what a simple, calm and native world this is in comparison with the Moscow one, which had already moved somewhere into the thirtieth kingdom, the center of which was Katya, now as if lonely, pitiful, loved only tenderly! Even the sky, here and there smeared with the pale blue of rain clouds, even the wind here is simpler and calmer... The train from Orel moved slowly, Mitya slowly ate Tula printed gingerbread, sitting in an almost empty carriage. Then the train dispersed and took him away, put him to sleep. He woke up only in Verkhovye. The train stopped, it was quite crowded and bustling, but also somehow provincial. There was a pleasant smell of the station kitchen. Mitya happily ate a plate of cabbage soup and drank a bottle of beer, then dozed off again as deep fatigue came over him. And when he woke up again, the train was rushing through the spring birch forest, already familiar, before the last station. It was getting dark again like spring, and through the open window there was a smell of rain and something like mushrooms. The forest was still completely bare, but still the rumble of the train could be heard in it more clearly than in the field, and in the distance the sad lights of the station were already flashing like spring. Here comes the high green light of the semaphore - especially charming in such twilight in the bare birch forest - and the train began to clatter onto another track... God, how pathetic and sweet the worker is in a rustic way, waiting for the barchuk on the platform! Twilight and clouds were thickening as we drove from the station through a large village, also still dirty in spring. Everything was drowning in this unusually soft twilight, in the deepest silence of the earth, a warm night, merging with the darkness of vague, low-hanging rain clouds, and again Mitya marveled and rejoiced: how calm, simple, wretched the village was, these fragrant smoke-filled huts, already long asleep, - from Annunciation good people they don’t blow up the fire - and how good it is in this dark and warm steppe world! The tarantas dived over potholes and mud; the oak trees behind the rich man's yard stood still completely naked, unfriendly, blackened with rooks' nests. A strange man, as if from ancient times, stood at the hut and peered into the darkness: bare feet, a torn overcoat, a sheepskin cap on his long straight hair... And the warm, sweet, fragrant rain began to fall. Mitya thought about the girls, about the young women sleeping in these huts, about all the feminine things that he had come close to during the winter with Katya, and everything merged into one - Katya, girls, night, spring, the smell of rain, the smell of plowed land, ready for fertilization of the earth, the smell of rain, the smell of horse sweat and the memory of the smell of a kid glove.

Life in the village began with peaceful, charming days. At night, on the way from the station, Katya seemed to fade and dissolve in everything around her. But no, it only seemed so and it seemed for several more days while Mitya slept off, came to his senses, got used to the novelty of the familiar impressions from childhood of his home, the village, village spring, spring nakedness and the emptiness of the world, again pure and young, ready for a new blossoming . The estate was small, the house was old and simple, the farming was simple and did not require a lot of housekeeping - life began quietly for Mitya. Sister Anya, a second-grader at the gymnasium, and brother Kostya, a teenage cadet, were still in Orel, studying, and were supposed to arrive no earlier than the beginning of June. Mom, Olga Petrovna, was, as always, busy with the housework, in which she was helped only by the order - the current - the headman, as the servants called him - she was often in the field, going to bed as soon as it got dark. When Mitya, the next day after his arrival, having slept for twelve hours, washed, in everything clean, left his sunny room - it had windows to the garden, to the east - and walked through all the others, he vividly experienced the feeling of their kinship and peaceful, simplicity that soothes both soul and body. Everywhere everything stood in its usual places, as it had many years ago, and it smelled just as familiar and pleasant; Everything was tidied up everywhere before his arrival, the floors in all the rooms were washed. They only cleaned the hall adjoining the hallway, the servant's room, as it was still called. A freckled girl, a charwoman from the village, stood on the window near the door to the balcony, reaching for the upper glass, wiping it with a whistle and reflecting in the lower glass a blue, as if distant, reflection. The maid Parasha, having pulled out a large rag from a bucket of hot water, barefoot, white-legged, walked along the flooded floor on small heels and said in a friendly, cheeky patter, wiping the sweat from her flushed face with the crook of her rolled-up hand: “Go and eat tea, mother left for the station with the headman, you probably haven’t even heard... And immediately Katya imperiously reminded herself: Mitya caught himself lusting for this rolled-up female hand and to the feminine curve of the girl stretching upward at the window, to her skirt, under which her bare legs stretched like strong bedside tables, and with joy I felt Katya’s power, that I belonged to her, I felt her secret presence in all the impressions of that morning. And this presence was felt more and more alive with each new day and became more and more beautiful as Mitya came to his senses, calmed down and forgot the ordinary Katya, who in Moscow so often and so painfully did not merge with the Katya created by him. desire.

For the first time, he now lived at home as an adult, with whom even his mother behaved somehow differently than before, and most importantly, he lived with the first true love in his soul, already realizing the very thing that his whole being had secretly been waiting for since childhood, since adolescence. Even in infancy, something marvelously and mysteriously stirred within him, inexpressible in human language. Once and somewhere, probably also in the spring, in the garden, near the lilac bushes, - I remember the pungent smell of Spanish flies, - he, very small, stood with some young woman, - probably with his nanny, - and suddenly something seemed to illuminate before him with a heavenly light - either her face or a sundress on her full chest - and something passed through him like a hot wave, leaped within him, truly like a child in her mother’s womb... But that was like in a dream. Everything that happened later was like a dream - in childhood, adolescence, in the high school years. There was some special, unique admiration for one or the other of those girls who came with their mothers to his children's holidays, a secret greedy curiosity for every movement of this charming, also unlike anything, little creature in a dress , in shoes, with a silk ribbon bow on his head. There was (this was later, in the provincial town) a much more conscious admiration for the schoolgirl, who often appeared in the evenings on the tree behind the fence of the neighboring garden, which lasted almost the entire autumn: her playfulness, mockery, brown dress, round comb in her hair, dirty hands, laughter , a ringing cry - everything was such that Mitya thought about her from morning to evening, was sad, sometimes even cried, insatiably wanting something from her. Then this too somehow ended by itself, was forgotten, and there were new, more or less long - and again secret - admirations, there were sharp joys and sorrows of sudden love at gymnasium balls... there were some kind of longing in body, in his heart there are vague premonitions, expectations of something... He was born and raised in the village, but as a high school student he inevitably spent the spring in the city, with the exception of one year before last, when, having arrived in the village for Maslenitsa, he fell ill and, while recovering, , stayed at home for March and half of April. It was an unforgettable time. For two weeks he lay and only through the window saw the sky, snow, garden, its trunks and branches changing every day with the increase in warmth and light in the world. He saw: here it is morning, and in the room it is so bright and warm from the sun that reviving flies are already crawling on the glass... here is the afternoon hour the next day: the sun is behind the house, on the other side, and in the window it is already pale to blue spring snow and large white clouds in the blue, in the tops of the trees... and here, another day, there are such bright clearings in the cloudy sky, and such a wet shine on the bark of the trees, and so much dripping from the roof above the window that you can’t get enough of it, you can’t get enough of it. .. Afterwards came warm fogs, rains, the snow dissolved and was eaten up in a few days, the river began to move, began to turn black joyfully and new, the earth was exposed in the garden and in the yard... And Mitya remembered for a long time one day at the end of March, when he I rode horseback into the field for the first time. The sky is not bright, but it shone so vividly, so youthfully in the pale, colorless trees garden There was still a fresh breeze in the field, the stubble was wild and red, and where they plowed - they were already plowing for oats - the shoots were oily and black with primeval power. And he rode entirely through these stubbles and rises to the forest and from afar saw it in the clear air - naked, small, visible from end to end - then he descended into its hollows and rustled with his horse’s hooves through last year’s deep foliage, in places completely dry, fawn , wet and brown in places, he crossed the ravines filled with it, where hollow water still flowed, and from under the bushes, with a crash, dark-golden woodcocks burst out right from under the horse’s feet... What was this whole spring and especially this day for him? when it blew so freshly towards him in the field, and the horse, negotiating the moisture-saturated stubble and black arable fields, breathed so noisily with wide nostrils, snoring and roaring from the inside with magnificent wild power? It seemed then that this particular spring was his first true love, the days of continuous falling in love with someone and something, when he loved all the schoolchildren and all the girls in the world. But how far away that time seemed to him now! How he was then just a boy, innocent, simple-hearted, poor in his modest sorrows, joys and dreams! His pointless, ethereal love was then a dream, or rather a memory of some wonderful dream. Now there was Katya in the world, there was a soul that embodied this world in itself and triumphed over it all.

Only once during this first time did Katya ominously remind herself. One day, late in the evening, Mitya went out onto the back porch. It was very dark, quiet, and smelled of a damp field. From behind the night clouds, over the vague outlines of the garden, small stars were tearing up. And suddenly, somewhere in the distance, something hooted wildly, devilishly, and started barking and squealing. Mitya shuddered, became numb, then carefully stepped off the porch, entered a dark alley that seemed to be guarding him hostilely on all sides, stopped again and began to wait and listen: what is it, where is it - what so unexpectedly and terribly announced the garden ? An owl, a forest scarecrow, making his love, and nothing more, he thought, but he froze as if from the invisible presence of the devil himself in this darkness. And suddenly there was again a booming howl that shook Mitya’s entire soul, somewhere nearby, at the top of the alley, there was a crackling and rustling sound - and the devil silently moved somewhere else in the village. There he first barked, then began to whine pitifully, pleadingly, like a child, whine, cry, flap his wings and squeal with painful pleasure, began to squeal, roll up with such an ironic laugh, as if he were being tickled and tortured. Mitya, trembling all over, stared into the darkness with both eyes and ears. But the devil suddenly broke down, choked and, cutting through the dark garden with a dying cry, seemed to fall through the ground. Having waited in vain for a few more minutes for the resumption of this love horror, Mitya quietly returned home - and all night he was tormented in his sleep by all those painful and disgusting thoughts and feelings into which his love had turned in March in Moscow. However, in the morning, in the sun, his nightly torment quickly dissipated. He remembered how Katya cried when they firmly decided that he should leave Moscow for a while, remembered with what delight she seized on the idea that he would also come to Crimea at the beginning of June, and how touchingly she helped him in his preparations to leave, as she saw him off at the station... He took out her photographic card, peered for a long, long time at her little elegant head, amazed at the purity, clarity of her direct, open (slightly round) look... Then he wrote her a particularly long and especially a heartfelt letter, full of faith in their love, and again returned to the incessant feeling of her loving and bright presence in everything in which he lived and rejoiced. He remembered what he had experienced when his father died, nine years ago. This was also in the spring. The day after this death, timidly, with bewilderment and horror, walking through the hall, where his father, dressed in a noble uniform, lay on the table with his chest raised high and his large pale hands folded on it, Mitya went out onto the porch. , looked at the huge coffin lid, upholstered in gold brocade, standing near the door, and suddenly felt: there is death in the world! She was in everything: in the sunlight, in the spring grass in the yard, in the sky, in the garden... He went into the garden, into the linden alley, dappled with light, then into the side alleys, even sunnier, looking at the trees and at the first white butterflies, listened to the first birds singing sweetly - and recognized nothing: there was death in everything, a terrible table in the hall and a long brocade cover on the porch! Not as before, somehow the sun was shining differently, the grass was not so green, the butterflies froze on the spring, only still hot grass on top - everything was not the same as a day ago, everything was transformed as if by the proximity of the end of the world , and the beauty of spring, its eternal youth, has become pitiful, sad! And this lasted for a long time and then, lasted all spring, as for a long time a terrible, vile, sweetish smell was felt - or imagined - in the washed and many times ventilated house... The same obsession - only of a completely different order - Mitya experienced now : this spring, the spring of his first love, was also completely different from all previous springs. The world was again transformed, again filled as if with something extraneous, but not hostile, not terrible, but on the contrary, wonderfully merging with the joy and youth of spring. And this stranger was Katya, or rather, the most beautiful thing in the world that Mitya wanted and demanded from her. Now, as we walked spring days, he demanded more and more from her. And now, when she was not there, there was only her image, an image that did not exist, but was only desired, she seemed to do nothing to violate that immaculate and beautiful that was required of her, and every day she felt more and more alive in everything, no matter what Mitya looks at.

He was happily convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was still the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of fir and pine trees in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning to evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful fussiness, as they shout only in the early in the spring, rooks were screaming in the bare century-old birches in the neighboring landowner's garden, and the view of the village on the slopes was still wild, gray, and only some more vines were covered with yellowish green... He walked into the garden and the garden was still low and bare, transparent, - the meadows were just turning green, all speckled with small turquoise flowers, and the akatnik along the alleys had become pubescent and one cherry tree was pale white and small in blossom in the ravine, in the southern, lower part of the garden... He went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, still the stubble stuck out like a brush, the dried field roads were still ringed and purple... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the time of expectation - and all this was Katya. And it just seemed that the distractions were the charwoman doing this and that in the estate, workers in the people's quarters, reading, walks, going to the village to see peasant friends, conversations with mother, trips with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in the field on treadmills. Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into its own, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around before our eyes began to change by leaps and bounds. They began to plow open the stubble and turn it into black velvet, the field boundaries turned green, the grass in the yard became juicier, the sky became thicker and brighter, the garden quickly began to be dressed in fresh, even soft-looking greenery, the gray clusters of lilacs began to turn purple and smell, and many black ones had already appeared, the metallic blue shine of large flies on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot spots of light on the paths. The branches of the apple and pear trees were still visible, they were barely touched by the small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, spreading networks of their crooked branches everywhere under other trees, were all already curled with milky snow, and every day this color became more and more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blossoming along with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxuriously whitening garden and an ever darker blue sky.

And then one day, going out into the hall full of late afternoon sun for tea, Mitya unexpectedly saw mail near the samovar, which he had been waiting in vain all morning. He quickly walked up to the table - Katya should have answered at least one of the letters that he sent her long ago - and a small, elegant envelope with an inscription on it in a familiar pathetic handwriting flashed brightly and terribly into his eyes. He grabbed it and walked out of the house, then through the garden, along the main alley. He went to the farthest part of the garden, to where the ravine ran through it, and, stopping and looking around, quickly tore the envelope. The letter was short, just a few lines, but Mitya needed to read them five times to finally understand, so his heart was pounding. "My beloved, my only one!" - he read and re-read - and the earth swam under his feet from these exclamations. He raised his eyes: the sky was shining solemnly and joyfully above the sala, the garden was shining with its snowy whiteness all around, the nightingale, already sensing the early evening chill, clearly and strongly, with all the sweetness of a nightingale’s self-forgetfulness, clicked in the fresh greenery of the distant bushes - and the blood drained from his face, goosebumps ran through his hair... He walked home slowly - the cup of his love was full to the brim. And just as carefully, he carried it with him for the next few days, quietly, happily waiting for a new letter.

The garden was dressed in various ways. The huge old maple tree, towering over the entire southern part of the garden, visible from everywhere, became even larger and more visible - it was dressed in fresh, thick greenery. The main alley, which Mitya constantly looked at from his windows, became higher and more visible: the tops of its old linden trees, also covered, although still transparently, with the pattern of young foliage, rose and stretched over the garden in a light green ridge. And below the maple tree, below the alley, lay something solid, curly, fragrant, creamy in color. And all this: the huge and lush top of the maple, the light green ridge of the alley, the wedding whiteness of apple, pear, bird cherry trees, the sun, the blue of the sky and everything that grew in the bottom of the garden, in the ravine, along the side alleys and paths and under the foundation of the southern wall of the house , - lilac, acacia and currant bushes, burdock, nettle, Chernobyl. - everything amazed with its density, freshness and novelty. In the clean green yard the vegetation seemed to be crowding in from everywhere, the house seemed to become smaller and more beautiful. It was as if he was waiting for guests - for whole days the doors and windows were open in all the rooms: in the white hall, in the blue old-fashioned living room, in the small sofa, also blue and hung with oval miniatures, and in the sunny library, a large and empty corner room with old icons in the front corner and low ash bookcases along the walls. And everywhere, various green trees, sometimes light, sometimes dark, with bright blue between the branches, looked festively into the rooms as they approached the house. But there was no letter. Mitya knew Katya’s inability to write letters and how difficult it was for her to always get ready to sit down at her desk, find a pen, paper, envelope, buy a stamp... But rational considerations again began to be of little help. The happy, even proud confidence with which he had been waiting for several days for the second letter disappeared - he was languishing and worried more and more. After all, a letter like the first should have been immediately followed by something even more beautiful and joyful. But Katya was silent. He began to visit the village and go to the fields less often. He sat in the library, leafing through magazines that had been yellowing and drying in the cabinets for decades. The magazines contained many beautiful poems by old poets, wonderful lines that almost always spoke about one thing - about what all the poems and songs from the beginning of the world are full of, what his soul now lived with, and what he could invariably attribute to himself in one way or another , to my love, to Katya. And he sat for hours in a chair near the open wardrobe and tormented himself, reading and re-reading: People are sleeping, my friend, let's go to the shady garden! People are sleeping, only the stars are looking at us... All these enchanting words, all these calls were as if his own, they were now addressed as if only to one, to the one whom he, Mitya, relentlessly saw in everything and everywhere. sometimes sounded almost menacing: Over the mirror waters Swans flap their wings - And the river sways: Oh, come! The stars are shining, the leaves are slowly trembling, and clouds are found... He, closing his eyes, growing cold, repeated this call several times in a row, the call of a heart overflowing with the power of love, yearning for its triumph, blissful resolution. Then he looked in front of him for a long time, listened to the deep village silence that surrounded the house, and shook his head bitterly. No, she did not respond, she silently shone somewhere out there, in the alien and distant Moscow world! And again tenderness flowed from the heart - again this menacing, ominous, conjuring word grew, expanded: Oh, come! The stars are shining, the leaves are slowly trembling, and the clouds are...

One day, after taking a nap after lunch—they had lunch at noon—Mitya left the house and slowly walked into the garden. The girls often worked in the garden, digging up the apple trees, and they still worked today. Mitya went to sit next to them and chat with them - this was already becoming a habit. The day was hot and quiet. He walked in the through shadow of the alley and far away he saw curly snow-white branches around him. The color on the pear trees was especially strong and dense, and the mixture of this whiteness and the bright blue of the sky gave a purple tint. And the pear and apple trees bloomed and fell off, the dug up ground under them was all strewn with faded petals. Their sweetish, delicate smell was felt in the warm air, along with the smell of heated and rotting manure in the barnyard. Sometimes a cloud would appear, the blue sky would turn blue and warm air and these decaying smells became even more tender and sweeter. And all the fragrant warmth of this spring paradise hummed drowsily and blissfully from the bees and bumblebees burrowing into its honey curly snow. And all the time, blissfully bored, as in the daytime, here and there one nightingale, then another, tutted. The alley ended in the distance with the gate to the threshing floor. In the distance to the left, in the corner of the garden rampart, a black spruce forest loomed. Near the spruce grove, two girls were dappling among the apple trees. Mitya, as always, turned from the middle of the alley towards them - bending down, he walked among the low and spreading branches that femininely touched his face and smelled of both honey and, as it were, lemon. And, as always, one of the girls, red-haired, thin Sonya, as soon as she saw him, laughed wildly and screamed. - Oh, the owner is coming! - she screamed with feigned fear and, jumping off the thick branch of the pear tree on which she was resting, rushed to the shovel. Another girl, Glashka, pretended, on the contrary, that she did not notice Mitya at all, and, slowly, firmly placing her foot in a soft chun made of black felt, behind which white petals were packed, firmly planting the shovel into the ground and turning over the cut piece , sang loudly in a strong and pleasant voice: “You are a garden, you are my garden, for whom are you blooming!” She was a tall girl, courageous and always serious. Mitya came up and sat down in Sonya’s place, on an old pear branch lying on a dry patch. Sonya looked at him brightly and loudly, with feigned swagger and gaiety, asked: “Did you just get up?” Be careful not to oversleep! She liked Mitya, and she tried in every possible way to hide it, but she couldn’t, she behaved awkwardly around him, said random things, always, however, hinting at something, vaguely guessing that the absent-mindedness with which Mitya constantly came and went, not simple. She suspected that Mitya was living with Parasha, or at least coveting this, she was jealous and spoke to him sometimes tenderly, sometimes harshly, looked sometimes languidly, making her feelings clear, sometimes coldly and hostilely. And all this gave Mitya strange pleasure. There was no letter and there never was, he no longer lived, but only existed day after day in constant expectation, increasingly tormented by this expectation and the inability to share the secret of his love and torment with anyone, to talk about Katya, about his hopes for the Crimea, and therefore Sonya’s hints about some kind of love of his were pleasant to him: after all, these conversations seemed to touch on that innermost thing that his soul was yearning for. He was also worried by the fact that Sonya was in love with him, and therefore was partly close to him, which made her, as it were, a secret accomplice in the love life of his soul, and sometimes even gave a strange hope that in Sonya he could find either a confidante of his feelings, or some kind of replacement for Katya. Now Sonya, without suspecting it herself, again touched on his secret: “Make sure you don’t sleep through it!” He looked around. The solid dark green thicket of the spruce forest that stood in front of him seemed almost black from the brightness of the day, and the sky showed through its sharp tops with a particularly magnificent blue. The young greenery of lindens, maples, elms, completely bright from the sun that penetrated it everywhere, formed a light, joyful canopy throughout the garden, scattering a variety of shadows and bright spots on the grass, on the paths, on the clearings; the hot and fragrant color that whitened under this canopy seemed porcelain, shone, glowed where the sun also penetrated it. Mitya, smiling against his will, asked Sonya: “Why can I sleep through it?” It’s just a shame that I don’t have anything to do. - Shut up, don’t be afraid, and I’ll believe it! - Sonya shouted in response cheerfully and rudely, again giving him pleasure with her distrust of Mitya’s lack of love affairs, and suddenly she screamed again, waving away a red calf with white curly fur on his forehead, who slowly came out of the spruce forest, approached her from behind and began to chew the frill of her chintz dress: “Oh, you faint!” God sent another son! - Is it true that they say they are wooing you? - said Mitya, not knowing what to say, but wanting to continue the conversation. “They say the yard is rich, the little guy is handsome, but you refused, you don’t listen to your father...” “Rich, but stupid, it gets dark early in the head,” Host answered smartly, somewhat flattered. - I may have someone else on my mind... The serious and silent Glashka, without interrupting her work, shook her head: - You’re talking, girl, both from the Don and from the sea! - she said quietly. - You're making all sorts of noise here, but fame will spread throughout the village... - Be quiet, don't cackle! - Sonya shouted. - Maybe I’m not a crow, there is a defense! - Who else are you thinking about? - asked Mitya. - So I admitted it! - said Sonya. - I fell in love with your shepherd grandfather. I'll see, it's so hot to the toes! “I, no worse than you, ride old horses,” she said defiantly, obviously hinting at twenty-year-old Parasha, who in the village was already considered an old wench. And, suddenly throwing down the shovel, with boldness, to which she seemed to have some right due to her secret love for the barchuk, she sat down on the ground, stretched out and slightly spread her legs in old rough ankle boots and piebald woolen stockings, and helplessly dropped her hands. - Oh, I didn’t do anything, but I was exhausted! - she shouted, laughing. “My boots are thin,” she sang shrilly, “My boots are thin.” Lacquered socks,” and again she screamed, laughing: “Come with me to the salash to relax, I agree to everything!” This laughter infected Mitya. Smiling widely and awkwardly, he jumped off the branch and, going up to Sonya, lay down and laid his head on her lap. Sonya threw it off - he put it down again, again thinking about the poems that he had read in recent days: I see, a rose, - the power of happiness Opened its bright scroll And moistened it with dew - The immense, incomprehensible, Fragrant, gracious World of love is in front of me... - Not touch me! - Sonya screamed with sincere fear, trying to lift his head and throw it away. - Otherwise, if I scream, all the wolves in the forest will howl! I don’t have anything for you, it was on fire and went out! Mitya closed his eyes and was silent. The sun, splitting through the foliage, branches and pear blossoms, dappled with hot spots and tickled his face. Sonya gently and angrily pulled at his black, coarse hair - “clean from the horse!” - she shouted and covered his eyes with her cap. Under the back of his head he felt her legs - the worst thing in the world, female legs! - touched her stomach with it, heard the smell of a cotton skirt and blouse, and all this mixed with blooming garden and with Katya; the languid clatter of nightingales far and near, the incessant voluptuous and drowsy buzz of countless bees, the honey-like warm air and even the simple feeling of the earth under my back tormented me, tormented me with a thirst for some kind of superhuman happiness. And suddenly something rustled in the spruce forest, laughed cheerfully and maliciously, then echoed loudly: “Kuk-ku! Kuk-ku!” - and so terribly, so prominently, so close and so clearly that one could hear the wheezing and trembling of a sharp tongue, and Katya’s desire and desire, the demand that she immediately give this superhuman happiness at any cost, gripped so violently, that Mitya, to Sonya’s extreme surprise, impulsively jumped up and big steps walked away. Together with this frantic desire, the demand for happiness, under this booming voice, which suddenly rang out with such terrible clarity right above his head in the spruce forest and as if it had opened the bosom of this entire spring world to the bottom, he suddenly imagined that there would not be and could not be a letter. that something had happened or was about to happen in Moscow and that he was dead, missing!

In the house, he stopped for a minute in front of the mirror in the living room. “She’s right,” he thought, “my eyes, if not Byzantine, are at least crazy. And this thinness, rough and bony awkwardness, gloomy charcoal eyebrows, coarse black hair, really almost horse-like, as Sonya said ?" But behind him he heard the rapid clatter of bare feet. He became embarrassed and turned around: “That’s right, you’ve fallen in love, look in the mirror,” Parasha said with affectionate playfulness, running past with a boiling samovar in her hands onto the balcony. “They were looking for you, mother,” she added, placing the samovar on the table set for tea with a flourish and, turning around, quickly and keenly looked at Mitya. "Everyone knows, everyone guesses!" - thought Mitya and asked through force: - Where is she? - In my room. The sun, having gone around the house and already moving to the western sky, looked mirror-like under the pines and firs, which shaded the balcony with their coniferous branches. The euonymus bushes beneath them also sparkled like a glassy summer. The table, covered with light shadow and here and there hot spots of light, shone with a tablecloth. Wasps hovered over a basket of white bread, over a cut vase with jam, over cups. And this whole picture spoke of a wonderful country summer and how one could be happy and carefree. To prevent his mother from leaving, who, of course, understood his situation no less than others, and to show that he had no grave secrets in his soul, Mitya went from the hall into the corridor into which the doors of his room, his mother’s and two others opened. where Anya and Kostya lived in the summer. It was gloomy in the corridor, and bluish in Olga Petrovna’s room. The whole room was cramped and comfortably cluttered with the most ancient furniture in the house: wardrobes, chests of drawers, a large bed and a shrine, in front of which, as usual, a lamp burned, although Olga Petrovna never showed much religiosity. Behind the open windows, on a neglected flower garden in front of the entrance to the main alley, lay a wide shadow; behind the shadow, the illuminated garden was festively green and white. Without looking at all this long-familiar appearance, her glasses lowered her eyes to her knitting, Olga Petrovna, a large and lean, black and serious forty-year-old woman, sat by the window in an armchair and quickly picked at her crochet. - Did you ask me, mom? - said Mitya, entering and stopping at the threshold. - No, I just wanted to see you. Nowadays, I almost never see you, except for lunch,” Olga Petrovna answered, without interrupting her work and somehow especially, excessively calm. Mitya remembered how on March 9 Katya said that for some reason she was afraid of his mother, he remembered the secret charming meaning that, undoubtedly, was in her words. .. he muttered awkwardly: “But maybe you wanted to tell me something?” - Nothing. Besides, it seems to me that you’ve been bored for some reason the last few days,” said Olga Petrovna. “Maybe I could go somewhere... to the Meshcherskys, for example... The house of brides is full,” she added, smiling, “and in general, in my opinion, a very sweet and hospitable family.” “One of these days I’ll be happy to go,” Mitya answered with difficulty. “But let’s go and drink tea, it’s so nice there on the balcony... We’ll talk there,” he said, knowing full well that mother, by her insightful mind and her restraint, would no longer return to this useless conversation. They sat on the balcony until almost sunset. After tea, mom continued to knit and talk about the neighbors, about the household, about Anya and Kostya - Anya is having foster care again in August! Mitya listened, sometimes answered, but all the time he experienced something similar to what he experienced before leaving Moscow - that again he seemed to be drunk from some serious illness. And in the evening he walked non-stop for two hours around the lady back and forth, passing through the hall, the living room, the sofa and the library, right up to her south window, open to the garden. Through the windows of the hall and living room, the sunset softly blushed between the branches of pines and fir trees, and the voices and laughter of workers were heard, gathering for dinner near the people's room. Across the flight of rooms, through the window of the library, looked out the smooth and colorless blue of the evening sky with a motionless pink star above it; Against this blue, the green top of the maple and the whiteness, as if winter, of everything that bloomed in the garden were picturesquely depicted. And he walked and walked, no longer caring at all about how this would be interpreted in the house. His teeth were clenched until his head hurt.

From that day on, he stopped following all the changes that the coming summer was making around him. He saw and even felt them, these changes, but they lost their independent value to him, he enjoyed them only painfully: the better it was, the more painful it was for him. Katya has already become a true obsession; Katya was now in everything and behind everything to the point of absurdity, and since every new day confirmed more and more terriblely that for him, for Mitya, she no longer existed, that she was already in someone else’s power, giving herself to someone else and his love, which should belong entirely to him. Mitya, then everything in the world began to seem unnecessary, painful, and the more unnecessary and painful, the more beautiful it was. At night he hardly slept. The beauty of these moonlit nights was incomparable. The milky garden stood quietly at night. Carefully, exhausted from bliss, the nightingales sang, competing with each other in the sweetness and subtlety of their songs, in their purity, thoroughness, and sonority. And the quiet, gentle, very pale moon stood low over the garden, and was invariably accompanied by a small, indescribably lovely swell of bluish clouds. Mitya slept with the windows uncurtained, and the garden and the moon looked out of them all night. And every time he opened his eyes and looked at the moon, he immediately mentally said, like one possessed: “Katya!” - and with such delight, with such pain that he himself felt wild: how, in fact, could the moon remind him of Katya, but she did remind him, she reminded him with something and, what is most surprising, even with something visual! And sometimes he simply didn’t see anything: Katya’s desire, the memories of what happened between them in Moscow, overwhelmed him with such force that he trembled all over with feverish trembling and prayed to God - and, alas, always in vain! - to see her with you, on this bed, even in a dream. One winter he was with her at the Bolshoi Theater to see Faust with Sobinov and Chaliapin. For some reason, this evening everything seemed especially delightful to him: the light, already sultry and fragrant from the crowds, the abyss that yawned beneath them, and the red-velvet, gold-studded floors of the boxes, overflowing with shiny outfits, and the pearly glow above this abyss of a giant chandelier , and the sounds of the overture flowing far below under the waving of the conductor, now thundering, devilish, now infinitely tender and sad: “Once upon a time there was a good king in Fula...” After this performance, after this performance, through the bitter frost of the moonlit night, Katya to Kislovka, Mitya he stayed up especially late with her, was especially exhausted from kisses, and took with him the silk ribbon with which Katya tied her braid at night. Now, in these painful May nights, he had reached the point where he could not even think about this tape lying in his desk without shuddering. And during the day he slept, then rode off on horseback to the village where he was railroad station and mail. The days continued to be fine. It rained, there were thunderstorms and downpours, and again the hot sun shone, constantly doing its hasty work in the gardens, fields and forests. The garden faded and crumbled, but continued to grow wildly thick and dark. The forests were already drowning in countless flowers, in tall grasses, and the sonorous fool was silently calling them into her green depths with nightingales and cuckoos. The nakedness of the fields has already disappeared - they were completely covered with variously rich seedlings of grain. And Mitya disappeared for whole days in these forests and fields. He became too ashamed to hang around every morning on the balcony or in the middle of the yard, fruitlessly waiting for the headman or worker to arrive from the post office. And the headman and the workers did not always have time to travel eight miles for trifles. And so he began to go to the post office himself. But he himself invariably returned home with one issue of the Oryol newspaper or a letter from Anya or Kostya. And his torment began to reach its extreme limit. The fields and forests through which he rode overwhelmed him so much with their beauty, their happiness, that he began to feel even physical pain somewhere in his chest. One day, before evening, he was driving from the post office through an empty neighbor’s estate, which stood in an old park that merged with the birch forest that surrounded it. He was driving along Time Avenue, as the men called the main alley of this estate. It consisted of two rows of huge black spruce trees. Magnificently gloomy, wide, all covered with a thick layer of red slippery needles, it led to old house, standing at the very end of her corridor. The red, dry and calm light of the sun, descending to the left behind the park and forest, obliquely illuminated the bottom of this corridor between the trunks, glistening along its golden pine flooring. And such an enchanted silence reigned all around - only nightingales thundered from end to end of the park - the smell of spruce and jasmine, the bushes of which surrounded the house from everywhere, was so sweet, and such a great - someone else's, long-standing - happiness was felt by Mitya in all this and she suddenly appeared so terribly clearly to him on a huge shabby balcony, among the jasmine bushes. Katya in the image of his young wife, that he himself felt how deathly pallor was tightening his face, and he firmly said out loud, for the whole alley to hear: “If there is no letter in a week, I will shoot myself!”

The next day he got up very late. After dinner, he sat on the balcony, held a book on his lap, looked at the pages covered with printing, and thought stupidly: “Should I go to the post office or not?” It was hot, white butterflies hovered in pairs one after another over the hot grass, over the glassy glittering euonymus. He watched the butterflies and again asked himself: “Should I go or should I cut off these shameful trips at once?” From under the mountain, at the gate, the headman appeared riding a stallion. The headman looked at the balcony and drove straight towards it. Having arrived, he stopped his horse and said: - Good morning! Are you reading everything? And he grinned and looked around. - Mommy are asleep? - he asked quietly. “I think he’s sleeping,” Mitya answered. - And what? The headman paused and suddenly said seriously: “Well, barchuk, the book is good, but you need to know it all the time.” Why do you live like a monk? Oh, not enough women, girls? Mitya did not respond and lowered his eyes to the book. - Where have you been? - he asked without looking. “I was at the post office,” said the headman. - And, of course, there are no letters there, except for one newspaper. - Why “of course”? “Because it means they are still writing, they haven’t finished writing,” the headman answered rudely and mockingly, offended that Mitya did not support his conversation. “Please get it,” he said, handing Mitya a newspaper, and, touching the horse, he rode away. "I'll shoot myself!" - Mitya thought firmly, looking at the book and seeing nothing.

Mitya himself could not help but understand that it was impossible to imagine anything more savage than this: to shoot yourself, to crush your skull, to immediately stop the beating of a strong young heart, to cut off thoughts and feelings, to go deaf, to go blind, to disappear from that unspeakably beautiful world which is just now. for the first time everything was revealed to him, instantly and forever deprived of any participation in that very life, where Katya and the coming summer, where the sky, clouds, sun, warm wind, grain in the fields, villages, villages, girls, mother, estate, Anya, Kostya , poems in old magazines, and somewhere there - Sevastopol, Baydarskis Gate, lilac sultry mountains in pine and beech forests, a dazzling white, stuffy highway, the gardens of Livadia and Alupka, hot sand by the shining sea, tanned children, tanned bathers - and again Katya, in a white dress, under a white umbrella, sitting on the pebbles right next to the waves, blinding with their brilliance, causing an involuntary smile of causeless happiness... He understood this, but what could he do? How and where to break out of that vicious circle, where it was the more painful, the more unbearable, the better it was? It was precisely this that was unbearable - the very happiness with which the world suppressed him and which lacked something most necessary. So he woke up in the morning, and the first thing that hit his eyes was the joyful sun, the first thing he heard. there was the joyful ringing of the village church, familiar from childhood - there, behind the dewy garden, full of shadow and shine, birds and flowers; Even the yellow wallpaper on the walls was joyful and cute, the same one that had turned yellow in his childhood. But immediately, with delight and horror, the thought pierced my whole soul: Katya! The morning sun shone with her youth, the freshness of the garden was her freshness, everything cheerful, playful that was in the ringing of the bells also played with the beauty, the grace of her image, her grandfather’s wallpaper demanded that she share with Mitya all that native village antiquity, that life, in which his fathers and grandfathers lived and died here, in this estate, in this house. And Mitya would throw away the blanket, jump out of bed in only his shirt, with his collar open, long-legged, thin, but still strong, young, warm from sleep, quickly pull out the desk drawer, grab the treasured photographic card and fall into a tetanus, greedily and questioningly looking at her. All the charm, all the grace, all that inexplicable, shining and inviting that is in a girl, in a woman, everything was in this slightly snake-like head, in her hairstyle, in her slightly defiant and at the same time innocent gaze! But mysteriously and with an indestructible, cheerful silence, this gaze shone - and where could one find the strength to bear it, so close and so distant, and now, perhaps, even forever alien, who had discovered such an unspeakable happiness to live and so shamelessly and terribly deceived? That evening, when he was driving from the post office through Shakhovskoye, through this old empty estate with a black spruce alley, he very accurately expressed with his exclamation, unexpected even for himself, the extreme exhaustion that he had achieved. Standing under the post office window, looking from the saddle as the postman rummaged in vain through a pile of newspapers and letters, he heard behind him the noise of a train approaching the station, and this noise and the smell of locomotive smoke shook him with happy memories of the Kursk station and Moscow in general. Driving through the village from the post office, in every small girl walking in front, in the movement of her hips, he caught something from Katino with fear. In the field, he met someone's troika - in the tarantass, which she was quickly carrying, two hats flashed, one a girl's, and he almost shouted: “Katya!” The white flowers on the border were instantly associated with the thought of her white gloves, the blue bear ears with the color of her veil... And when, with the setting sun, he drove into Shakhovskoye, the dry and sweet smell of fir trees and the luxurious smell of jasmine gave him such a keen feeling summer in someone's ancient summer life in this rich and beautiful estate, that, looking at the red-golden evening light in the alley, at the house standing in its depths, in the evening shadow, he suddenly saw Katya coming down, in all the flowering of her feminine charms, from the balcony into the garden, almost as clearly as I saw the house and the jasmine. He had long ago lost his vital understanding of her, and every day she appeared to him more and more unusual, more and more transformed - that same evening her transformation reached such strength, such triumphant victory that Mitya was horrified even more than on that afternoon when suddenly a cuckoo crowed above him.

And he stopped going to the post office, forced himself to cut these trips short with a desperate, extreme effort of will. I stopped writing myself. After all, everything has already been tried, everything has been written: frantic assurances of his love, such as has never happened on earth, and humiliating pleas for her love or at least “friendship,” and shameless inventions that he is sick, that he writes , lying in bed, - with the aim of arousing at least pity for himself, at least some attention - and even threatening hints that he would have only one thing left: to rid Katya and his “happier rivals” from his presence on earth . And, having stopped writing and striving for an answer, forcing himself with all his might not to wait for anything (and still secretly hoping that the letter will arrive precisely when you either deceive fate by pretending to be indifferent very well, or when you actually achieve indifference), trying in every possible way not to think about Katya, looking in every possible way for salvation from her, he again began to read whatever came to hand, travel with the headman to the neighboring villages on economic matters and internally tirelessly repeat to himself: “It doesn’t matter, let what will be!” And then one day they were returning with the headman from the farm, riding on runners and, as always, very fast. Both were sitting on horseback, the headman in front - he was driving - and Mitya behind, and both jumped from the jolts, especially Mitya, who held tightly to the pillow and looked first at the red head of the headman, then at the fields jumping before his eyes. Approaching the house, the headman lowered the reins, rode at a walk, began to twirl his cigarette and, grinning into his open pouch, said: “Then you, barchuk, were offended at me, but in vain.” Didn't I tell you the truth? The book is good, why not read it at parties, but it won’t go away, you need to know it all the time. Mitya flushed and, unexpectedly for himself, answered with feigned simplicity and an awkward grin: “Yes, there’s no one in mind...” “How so?” - said the headman. - How many women, girls! “The girls are just beckoning,” answered Mitya, trying to speak in the tone of the headman. - There is little hope for girls. “They’re not beckoning, but you don’t know the address,” said the headman, already instructively. - And again, be stingy. And the dry spoon hurts my mouth. “I wouldn’t skimp on anything if it were worthwhile and true,” Mitya suddenly answered shamelessly. - If you don’t, everything will be fine. at its best“, - said the headman, lighting a cigarette, and continued, as if somewhat offended: “I don’t value your gift, not a ruble, but I want to give you a pleasure.” I’ll look, I’ll look: the barchuk is bored! No, I think this matter cannot be left like this. I always take my masters into account. I’ve been living with you for two years now, and, thank God, I haven’t heard a bad word from either you or the lady. To others, for example, what is a lord's cattle? If you're full - good, if you're not - to hell with it. But I don’t have that. Cattle are dearer to me than anything else. I tell the guys: whatever you want, I want my cattle to be fed! Mitya was already beginning to think that the headman was drunk, but the headman suddenly dropped an offended, sincere tone and said, looking questioningly at Mitya over his shoulder: “But what’s better than Alenka?” The woman is poisonous, young, her husband is in the mines... Only, of course, she needs to slip some trifle. Well, spend, say, five dollars on everything. A ruble, say, for her treat, two - for her hands. Well, I need some tobacco... “That won’t be the case,” Mitya answered, again against his will. - Just which Alenka are you talking about? “I see, about the forester,” said the headman. - Oh, you don’t know her? Daughter-in-law of the new forester. I think you saw her last Sunday in church... I immediately thought then: this would be just right for our barchuk! She’s only been married for two years, she walks cleanly... “Well, then,” Mitya answered, grinning, “well, arrange it.” “Then I’ll try,” said the headman, taking the reins. - So I’ll try her one of these days. And you yourself are not dozing yet. Tomorrow she and the girls will straighten the shaft in the garden, so you come to the garden... But this book will never go away, maybe you’ll read it in Moscow... And he started the horse, and the droshky shook and jumped again. Mitya held tightly to the pillow and, trying not to look at the red thick neck of the headman, looked into the distance, through the trees of his garden and the vines of the village, which lay on the slope to the river, to the river meadows. Something wildly unexpected, absurd, and at the same time something that sent a chilling languor throughout the body, was already half done. And somehow differently than before, the bell tower, familiar from childhood, stuck out in front of him from behind the tops of the garden and glittered like a cross in the late afternoon sun.

Because of his thinness, the girls called Mitya Borzoi; he was one of that breed of people with black, seemingly constantly widened eyes, who almost never grow a mustache or beard even in their mature years - only something rare and tough curls up. However, the next day, after talking with the headman, he shaved in the morning and put on a yellow silk shirt, which strangely and beautifully illuminated his emaciated and seemingly inspired face. At eleven o'clock, he slowly, trying to give himself a slightly bored, strolling look with nothing to do, went into the garden. He came out from the main porch facing north. To the north, over the roofs of the coach house and barnyard and over that part of the garden from behind which the bell tower always looked, there was a slate haze. And everything was dim, there was a hover in the air and the smell of a human chimney. Mitya turned behind the house and headed towards the linden alley, looking at the tops of the garden and the sky. From under vague clouds setting behind the garden, a weak hot wind blew from the southeast. The birds did not sing, even the nightingales were silent. Some bees, in great numbers, silently rushed through the garden from the bribe. The girls, straightening the shaft, worked again near the spruce grove, sealed holes trampled by cattle in the shaft, filled them with earth and steamy, pleasantly smelling manure, which the workers from time to time brought from the barnyard through the alley - the entire alley was strewn with wet and shiny shmats , there were about six girls. Sonya was no longer there - she had been matched, and now she was sitting at home, preparing something for the wedding. There were several very thin girls, there was fat, pretty Anyutf, there was Glashka, who seemed to have become even more stern and courageous, and Alenka. And Mitya immediately saw her among the trees, immediately realized that it was her, although he had never seen her before, and he was struck, like lightning, unexpectedly and sharply in his eyes by something common that was, or only seemed to him, - in Alenka with Katya. It was so surprising that he even paused, dumbfounded for a moment. Then he walked resolutely straight towards her, not taking his eyes off her. She was also small and mobile. Despite the fact that she had come to do dirty work, she was wearing a pretty (white with red specks) chintz jacket, belted with a black patent leather belt, a matching skirt, a pink silk handkerchief, red woolen stockings and black soft tunics, of which (or, rather, in her whole small light leg) there was again something Catino, that is, feminine, mixed with something childish. And her head was small and dark eyes stood and shone almost the same as Katya’s. When Mitya approached, she was not working alone, as if feeling some kind of specialness among others, she stood on the shaft, putting her right foot on the pitchfork and talking with the headman. The headman, leaning his elbows, lay under the apple tree on his jacket with a torn lining and smoked. Mitya approached - he politely moved onto the grass, giving him space on his jacket. “Sit down, Mitry Palych, light a cigarette,” he said in a friendly and casual manner. Mitya glanced briefly, surreptitiously at Alenka - her pink handkerchief illuminated her face very well - he sat down and, lowering his eyes, began to light a cigarette (he had given up smoking many times over the winter and spring, but now he started smoking again). Alenka didn’t even bow to him, as if she hadn’t even noticed him. The headman continued to tell her something that Mitya did not understand, not knowing the beginning of the conversation. She laughed, but somehow, as if neither her mind nor her heart were involved in this laughter. The headman disdainfully and mockingly inserted obscene allusions into each of his sentences. She answered him easily and also mockingly, making it clear that in some of his intentions he was acting stupidly, too impudently, and at the same time cowardly, afraid of his wife. “Well, you can’t get over it,” the headman finally said, stopping the argument, as if in view of its annoying uselessness. - You better come and sit with us. Master they want to say a word to you. Alenka looked somewhere to the side, tucked dark ringlets of hair at her temples and did not move from her place. - Go, I say, you fool! - said the headman. And, after thinking for a moment, Alenka suddenly easily jumped off the shaft, ran up and squatted down two steps from Mitya, who was lying on his jacket, cheerfully and curiously looking into his face with dark, wide eyes. Then she laughed and asked: “Is it true, you, gentleman, don’t live with women?” What kind of sexton? - How do you know that they don’t live? - asked the headman. “Yes, I know,” said Alenka. - I heard. No, they don't smear. They have one in Moscow,” she said, suddenly sparkling with her eyes. “There are no people suitable for them, so they don’t live,” answered the headman. - You understand a lot about their business! - Why not? - Alenka said, laughing. - How many women, girls! There’s Anyutka, what’s better? Anyutk, come here, there’s something to do! - she shouted loudly. Anyutka, wide and soft in the back, short-armed, turned around - did she have a pretty face? a kind and pleasant smile,” she shouted something back in a melodious voice and began to earn even more. - They tell you, go! - Alenka repeated even louder. “There’s no need for me to go, I’m not trained in these things,” Anyutka sang joyfully. “We don’t need Anyutka, we need something cleaner, more noble,” the headman said instructively. - We ourselves know who we need. And he looked at Alenka very expressively. She was slightly embarrassed and blushed a little. “No, no, no,” she answered, hiding her embarrassment with a smile, “you won’t find anyone better than Anyutka.” If you don’t want Anyutka, “Nastka, she also walks cleanly, she lived in the city...” “Well, it will be, keep quiet,” the headman suddenly said rudely. - Mind your own business, I’ll talk and it’ll be fine. The lady is already scolding me, they say, they are only making fun of you... Alenka jumped up - and again took up the pitchfork with extraordinary ease. But the worker, who had dumped the last cart of manure at that time, shouted: “Have breakfast!” - and, twitching the reins, the empty cart box rattled briskly down the alley. - Breakfast, breakfast! - the girls shouted in different voices, throwing shovels and pitchforks, jumping over the shaft, jumping off it, flashing bare legs and multi-colored stockings and running under the spruce tree to their bundles. The headman glanced sideways at Mitya, winked at him, wanting to say that things were going well, and, getting up, he authoritatively agreed: “Well, let’s have breakfast like that.” The girls, colorful under the dark wall of fir trees, happily and haphazardly sat down on the grass and began to untie their knots. , took out the flatbreads and laid them on the hems between their straight-lying legs, they began to chew, washing down some with milk, some with kvass from bottles and continuing to talk loudly and randomly, laughing at every word and constantly looking at Mitya with curious and defiant eyes. Alenka, leaning towards Anyutka, said something in her ear. Apyutka, unable to contain her charming smile, pushed her away with force (Alenka, choking with laughter, fell headfirst into her lap) and with feigned outrage shouted to the entire spruce forest in her melodious voice: “Fool!” Why are you cackling idle? What a joy? “Let’s get away from sin, Mitriy Palych,” said the headman, “look, the devils are taking them apart!”

The next day they didn’t work in the garden; it was a holiday, Sunday. At night it poured rain, there was a wet noise on the roof, and every now and then the garden was illuminated palely, but widely, fabulously. By morning, however, the weather cleared up again, everything became simple and prosperous again, and Mitya was awakened by the cheerful, sunny ringing of bells. He slowly washed himself, got dressed, drank a glass of tea and went to mass. “Mom has already left,” Parasha affectionately reproached him, “and you are like some kind of Tatar...” You could go to the church either along the pasture, leaving the estate gate and turning right, or through the garden, along the main alley, and then along the road between the garden and the threshing floor, to the left. Mitya walked through the garden. Everything was already quite summer-like. Mitya walked along the alley directly into the sun, which glittered dryly on the threshing floor and in the field. And this shine and the ringing of the bells, somehow merging very well and peacefully with him and with all this village morning, and the fact that Mitya had just washed himself, combed his wet, glossy black hair and put on a student’s cap, everything suddenly seemed so good that Mitya, who again did not sleep all night and again went through many different thoughts and feelings at night, was suddenly overcome with hope for some kind of happy resolution to all his torments, for salvation, liberation from them. The bells were playing and calling, the threshing floor ahead was shining hotly, the woodpecker, pausing, raising its crest, quickly ran up the gnarled trunk of the linden tree to its light green, sunny top, velvet black and red bumblebees carefully buried themselves in the flowers in the meadows, in the sunshine, birds poured in everywhere the garden was sweet and carefree... Everything was as it had happened many, many times in childhood, in adolescence, and I remembered so vividly all the lovely, carefree times of the past that suddenly there was a certainty that God was merciful, that perhaps it was possible to live on light and without Katya. “Indeed, I’ll go to the Meshcherskys,” Mitya suddenly thought. But then he raised his eyes - and twenty steps away from him he saw Alenka passing by the gate just at that moment. She was again wearing a pink silk scarf, a blue elegant dress with frills, and new shoes with horseshoes. She walked quickly, wagging her back, without seeing him, and he impulsively moved to the side, behind the trees. Having let her disappear, he, with his heart beating, hurriedly walked back to the house. He suddenly realized that he had gone to church with the secret purpose of seeing her, and that it was impossible and unnecessary to see her in church.

During lunch, a messenger from the station brought a telegram - Anya and Kostya informed that they would be there tomorrow evening. Mitya was completely indifferent to this. After lunch, he lay supine on the wicker sofa on the balcony, closing his eyes, feeling the hot sun reaching the balcony, listening to the summer buzz of flies. My heart was trembling, an insoluble question stood in my head: what would happen next with Alenka? When will it be finally decided? Why didn’t the headman ask her directly yesterday: did she agree, and, if so, where and when? And next to this, I was tormented by something else: should I or should I break my firm decision not to go to the post office anymore? Shouldn't we go again today, for the last time? A new and senseless mockery of your own pride? A new and senseless tormenting of oneself with a pathetic hope? But what can this trip (essentially a simple walk) add to his torment? Isn’t it now completely obvious that there, in Moscow, everything is over for him forever? What should he even do now? “Barchuk!” a quiet voice suddenly rang out near the balcony. - Barchuk, are you sleeping? He quickly opened his eyes. The headman stood in front of him in a new cotton shirt and a new cap. His face was festive, well-fed, and slightly sleepy, intoxicated. “Barchuk, let’s quickly go into the forest,” he whispered. - I told the lady that I need to see Tryphon about the bees. Let's go quickly, while they're sleeping, otherwise they'll wake up and change their minds... Let's grab something to treat Tryfon, he'll get drunk, you'll talk to him, and I'll manage to whisper a word to Alenka. Come out quickly, I’ve already stopped you... Mitya jumped up, ran through the footman’s room, grabbed his cap and quickly went to the carriage house, where a hot young stallion stood harnessed to a racing droshky.

The stallion carried him out of the gate like a whirlwind. Opposite the church, we stopped for a minute near a shop, took a pound of lard and a bottle of vodka and rushed on. A hut at the exit flashed by, where Anyutka stood dressed up and didn’t know what to do. The headman jokingly, but rudely shouted something to her and with drunken, senseless and evil daring, he firmly jerked the reins and lashed them across the stallion’s rump. The stallion still pushed. Mitya, sitting and jumping, held on with all his might. The back of his head felt pleasantly hot, the heat of the field blew warmly into his face, smelling of already blooming rye, road dust, and wheel ointment. The rye moved, casting a silver-gray, like some kind of wonderful fur, swelled, over it the larks constantly soared, sang, swooped and fell, far ahead the forest softly turned blue... A quarter of an hour later we were already in the forest and still very vibrant , knocking on stumps and crusts, rushed along its shady road, joyful from sun spots and countless flowers in the thick and tall grass on both sides. Alenka, in her blue dress, with her feet straight and straight in ankle boots, sat in the oak trees blossoming near the guardhouse and embroidered something. The headman flew past her, threatening her with a whip, and immediately besieged her at the threshold. Mitya was struck by the bitter and fresh aroma of the forest, young oak leaves, and was deafened by the ringing barking of the little dogs that surrounded the droshky and filled the entire forest with responses. They stood and howled furiously in every way, and their furry faces were kind and their tails wagged. They got down, tied the stallion to a dry tree scorched by a thunderstorm under the windows and entered through the dark entryway. The guardhouse was very clean, very cozy and very cramped, hot both from the sun shining through both of its windows from behind the forest, and from the fact that the stove was heated - in the morning the rushes were baking. Fedosya, Alenka’s mother-in-law, a clean and pretty-looking old lady, was sitting at the table, with her back to the sunny window strewn with small flies. Seeing the barchuk, she stood up and bowed low. After saying hello, we sat down and began to smoke. - Where is Tryphon? - asked the headman. “He’s resting in the cage,” said Fedosya, “I’ll go and call him now.” - Things are going on! - the headman whispered, blinking both eyes as soon as she left. But Mitya hasn’t seen anything done yet. While it was only unbearably awkward, it seemed that Fedosya already understood perfectly well why they had come. Again the thought that had been terrifying for the third day flashed: “What am I doing? I’m going crazy!” He felt like a sleepwalker, subjugated by someone else's will, moving faster and faster towards some fatal, but irresistibly enticing abyss. But, trying to look simple and calm, he sat, smoked, and looked around the guardhouse. I was especially ashamed at the thought that Tryfon would now come in, a man, as they say, an angry, smart man who would immediately understand everything even better than Fedosya. But at the same time there was another thought: “Where does she sleep? On these bunks or in the cage?” Of course, in a cage, he thought. A summer night in the forest, the windows in the cage are without frames, without glass, and all night long the drowsy forest whisper is heard, and she sleeps...

Tryphon, entering, also bowed low to Mitya, but silently, without looking into his eyes. Then he sat down on the bench in front of the table and spoke dryly and hostilely to the headman: what’s the matter, why did you come here? The headman hastened to say that the lady had sent him, that she was asking Tryfon to come and look at the apiary, that their beekeeper was old, a deaf fool, and that he, Tryfon, might be the first beekeeper in the entire province in his own mind and concept - and immediately pulled out of one a bottle of vodka in his pants pocket, and from another there was lard in rough gray paper, already thoroughly oiled. Tryphon glanced sideways coldly and mockingly, but rose from his seat and took a teacup from the shelf. The headman brought it first to Mitya, then to Tryfon, then to Fedosya - she happily pulled the cup to the bottom - and, finally, he poured it for himself. Having drunk, he immediately began to pass around the second one, chewing rush and flaring his nostrils. Tryphon quickly became tipsy, but did not lose his dryness and hostile mockery. The headman became seriously stupefied after the second cup. The conversation took on a friendly character in appearance, but both of them had distrustful and angry eyes. Fedosya sat silently, looking politely, but displeased. Alenka did not show up. Having lost all hope that she would come, clearly seeing that it was a completely stupid dream to now count on the fact that the headman would be able to whisper a “word” to her even if she came, Mitya stood up and sternly said that it was time to go. - Now, now, there will be time! - the headman responded gloomily and insolently. - I still need to tell you a word in confidence. “Well, dear,” Mitya said restrainedly, but even more sternly. - Let's go. But the headman slammed his palm on the table and repeated with drunken mystery: “And I’m telling you that you can’t say that on the road!” Come out to me for a minute... And, rising heavily from his seat, he opened the door to the entryway. Mitya followed him out. - Well, what's the matter? - Be silent! - the headman whispered mysteriously, closing the door behind Mitya and staggering. - Why remain silent about? - Be silent. - I don't understand you. - Be silent! Ours will be! True word! Mitya pushed him away, came out of the entryway and stopped on the threshold, not knowing what to do: wait a little longer or leave alone, or just leave on foot? Ten steps away from him stood a dense green forest, already in the evening shadow and therefore even more fresh, clean and beautiful. The clear, fine sun set behind its peaks, and its red gold fell radiantly through them. And suddenly a woman’s melodious voice rang out loudly and rolled through the depths of the forest, somewhere, as it seemed, far on the other side, behind the ravines, and so invitingly, so charmingly, as it sounds only in the forest, in the summer evening dawn. - Aw! - this voice shouted drawlingly, apparently amused by the forest responses. - Aw! Mitya jumped off the threshold and ran through the flowers and grass into the forest. The forest descended into a rocky ravine. Alenka stood in the ravine and ate lambs. Mitya ran onto the cliff and stopped. She looked at him from below with surprised eyes. - What are you doing here? - Mitya asked quietly. - I’m looking for our Maruska and her cow. And what? - She answered also quietly. - Well, you'll come, or what? - Why should I go for nothing? - she said. - Who told you it was for nothing? - Mitya asked almost in a whisper. - Don't worry about it. - And when? - asked Alenka. - Yes, tomorrow... When can you? Alenka thought. “Tomorrow I’ll go to my mother’s to shear a sheep,” she said, after a pause, carefully looking around the forest on the hill behind Mitya. - In the evening, when it gets dark, I’ll come. And where to? You can’t go to the threshing floor, someone will come in... Do you want to go to the salash in the hollow in your garden? Just look, don’t deceive me, - I don’t agree for nothing... This is not Moscow for you, - she said, looking at him from below with laughing eyes, - there, they say, the women pay their own way...

They came back ugly. Tryfon did not remain in debt, he put a bottle on his side, and the headman got so drunk that he did not immediately get into the droshky, but first fell on it, and the frightened stallion rushed and almost galloped off alone. But Mitya was silent, looked at the headman emotionlessly, waited patiently for him to sit down. The headman again drove with absurd fury. Mitya was silent, held tightly, looked at the evening sky, at the fields that were quickly trembling and jumping in front of him. Over the fields towards sunset the larks were finishing their meek songs, in the east, already turning blue by night, those distant, peaceful lightning flashes that promise nothing but good weather. Mitya understood all this evening charm, but now it was completely alien to him. There was only one thing in my thoughts and soul: tomorrow evening! At home, news awaited him that a letter had been received confirming that Anya and Kostya would be there tomorrow on the evening train. He was horrified - they would arrive, they would run into the garden in the evening, they could run to a hut, into a hollow... But he immediately remembered that they would be brought from the station no earlier than ten o’clock, then they would be fed and given tea... - Are you going to meet them? - Olga Petrovna asked. He felt that he was turning pale. - No, I don’t think so... I don’t feel like it... And there’s nowhere to sit... - Well, suppose you could go on horseback... - No, I don’t know... Actually, why? At least now, I don’t want to... Olga Petrovna looked at him intently. - You are healthy? “Absolutely,” said Mitya almost rudely. - I just really want to sleep... And he immediately went to his room, lay down on the sofa in the dark and fell asleep without undressing. At night he heard distant, slow music and saw himself hanging over a huge, dimly lit abyss. It became lighter and brighter, became more bottomless, more golden, more and more bright, more and more populous, and already quite clearly, with unspeakable sadness and tenderness, it sounded and sang in it: “Once upon a time, there was a good king in Fula...” He trembled. out of emotion, turned over on the other side and fell asleep again.

The day seemed endless. Mitya went out like a piece of wood to tea, to dinner, then went back to his room and went to bed again, took from the desk the volume of Pisemsky that had been lying on it for a long time, read without understanding a word, looked at the ceiling for a long time, listened to the smooth, summer, satin noise sunny garden outside the window... One day he got up and went to the library to change his book. But this room, charming with its antiquity, its tranquility, the view from one window of the treasured maple tree, and from the others of the bright western sky, so keenly reminded him of those spring (now infinitely distant) days when he sat in it, reading poetry in old magazines , and seemed so Katina that he turned and quickly walked back. “To hell!” he thought with irritation. “To hell with all this poetic tragedy of love!” He indignantly remembered his intention to shoot himself if there was no letter from Katya, and again lay down and again took up Pisemsky. But as before, he did not understand anything while reading, and sometimes, looking at the book and thinking about Alenka, he began to tremble all over from the ever-growing trembling in his stomach. And the closer the evening approached, the more often I began to tremble. Voices and footsteps around the house, voices in the yard - they were already harnessing the carriage to the station - everything was heard as during illness, when you lie alone, and around you ordinary, everyday life flows, indifferent to you and therefore alien, even hostile. Finally, somewhere Parasha shouted: “Mistress, the horses are ready!” - the dry muttering of bells was heard, then the clatter of hooves, the rustle of a carriage rolling up to the porch... “Oh, when will all this end!” - Mitya muttered, beside himself with impatience, without moving, but eagerly listening to the voice of Olga Petrovna, who was giving the last orders in the footman's room. Suddenly the bells began to mutter and, muttering more and more together to the sounds of the carriage rolling downhill, they began to stall... Quickly getting up from his seat, Mitya went out into the hall. The hall was empty and bright from the clear yellowish sunset. The whole house was empty and somehow strangely, terribly empty! With a strange, as if farewell feeling, Mitya looked into the passage of dissolved silent rooms - into the living room, into the sofa room, into the library, through the window of which the southern sky was blue in the evening, the picturesque top of the maple tree was green and Antares stood above it like a pink dot... Then he looked in to the servant's room to see if Parasha is there. Making sure that it was empty there too, he grabbed a cap from the hanger, ran back to his room, and jumped out the window, throwing his long legs far out onto the flower bed. In the flower garden he froze for a moment, then, bending over, ran into the garden and immediately turned into a remote side alley, densely overgrown with acacia and lilac bushes.

There was no dew, so the smells of the evening garden could not be particularly audible. But Mitya, despite all the unconsciousness of all his actions that evening, still seemed to him that never in his life - with the possible exception of early childhood - had he encountered such strength and such a variety of smells as now. Everything smelled - acacia bushes, lilac leaves, currant leaves, burdocks, Chernobyl, flowers, grass, earth... Quickly taking a few steps with a terrible thought: “What if she deceives, doesn’t come?” - now it seemed that all life depended on whether Alenka would come or not, - catching among the smells of vegetation also the smell of evening smoke from somewhere in the village, Mitya stopped again, turned around for a moment: the evening beetle was slowly floating and humming somewhere - then near him, as if sowing silence, calm and twilight, but it was still light from the dawn, which had covered half the sky with its even, long-lasting light of the first summer dawns, and above the roof of the house, in some places visible from behind the trees, it shone high in the transparent in the heavenly emptiness the steep and sharp sickle of the newly born month. Mitya glanced at him, quickly and finely crossed himself under his stomach and stepped into the acacia bushes. The alley led into the ravine, but not to the hut - you had to go diagonally to it, take a left. And Mitya, stepping through the bushes, ran completely, among the wide and low outstretched branches, now bending down, now moving them away from him. A minute later he was already at the appointed place. With fear, he poked his head into the hut, into its darkness, smelling of dry, rotten straw, looked around it vigilantly and was almost joyfully convinced that there was no one there yet. But the fateful moment was approaching, and he stood near the hut, turning entirely into sensitivity, into intense attention. All day, almost not for a minute, his extraordinary bodily excitement did not leave him. Now it has reached higher power. But it’s strange - both during the day and now, it was somehow independent, did not penetrate him all, controlled only the body, without capturing the soul. My heart, however, was beating terribly. And it was so amazingly quiet all around that he heard only one thing - the beating. Silently, tirelessly, soft, colorless moths hovered and twirled in the branches, in the gray foliage of the apple trees, which were painted in various patterns in the evening sky, and from these moths the silence seemed even quieter, as if the moths were bewitching and bewitching it. Suddenly, somewhere behind him, something crunched and the sound struck him like thunder. He turned around impulsively, looked between the trees towards the rampart - and saw something black rolling towards him under the branches of the apple trees. But before he had time to figure out what it was, this dark thing, running towards him, made some kind of wide movement - and it turned out to be Alenka. She threw back the hem from her head short skirt made of black homespun wool, and he saw her frightened face beaming with a smile. She was barefoot, wearing only a skirt and a simple, harsh shirt tucked into the skirt. Her girlish breasts stood under her shirt. The wide-cut collar revealed her neck and part of her shoulders, and the sleeves rolled up above the elbow revealed her rounded arms. And everything about her, from her small head, covered with a yellow scarf, to her small bare feet, feminine and at the same time childish, was so good, so clever, so captivating that Mitya, who had previously only seen her dressed up, saw her for the first time in all the charm of this simplicity, I gasped internally. “Well, rather,” she whispered cheerfully and thievishly and, looking around, dived into the hut, into its fragrant darkness. There she paused, and Mitya, clenching his teeth to stop their chatter, hurried to put his hand in his pocket - his legs were tense, hard as iron - and thrust a crumpled five-ruble note into her palm. She quickly hid it in her bosom and sat down on the ground. Mitya sat down next to her and hugged her neck, not knowing what to do - whether to kiss her or not. The smell of her scarf, her hair, the onion smell of her whole body, mixed with the smell of the hut, smoke - everything was dizzyingly good, and Mitya understood and felt it. And yet everything was the same as before: the terrible power of bodily desire, which did not turn into spiritual desire, into bliss, into delight, into the languor of the whole being, she leaned back and lay on her back. He lay down next to her, leaned against her, and extended his hand. Laughing quietly and nervously, she caught it and pulled it down. “No way,” she said, either jokingly or seriously. She took his hand away and tenaciously held it with her small hand, her eyes looked at the triangular frame of the hut on the branches of apple trees, at the already darkened blue sky behind these branches and at the motionless red point of Antares, still alone standing in it. What did those eyes express? What should have been done? Kiss on the neck, on the lips? Suddenly she hurriedly said, taking hold of her short black skirt: “Well, hurry up, or what?” When they got up, - Mitya stood up, completely overwhelmed by disappointment, - she, covering the scarf, straightening her hair, asked in an animated whisper, “How is it already?” a close person, like a lover: - They say you went to Subbotino. There the pope sells piglets cheaply. Really oh no? Haven't you heard?

This same week, on Saturday, the rain, which began on Wednesday, poured from morning until evening, poured like buckets. Every now and then he became particularly stormy and gloomy on this day. And all day Mitya tirelessly walked around the garden and cried so terribly all day that sometimes even he himself was amazed at the strength and abundance of his tears. Parasha looked for him, shouted in the yard, in the linden alley, calling him to dinner, then to drink tea - he did not respond. It was cold, piercingly damp, dark with clouds; against their blackness, the dense greenery of the wet garden stood out especially thick, fresh and bright. The wind that blew in from time to time brought down another downpour from the trees - a whole stream of spray. But Mitya didn’t see anything, didn’t pay attention to anything, his white cap hung down and turned dark gray, his student jacket turned black, his boots were covered in mud up to his knees. All drenched, completely wet, without a single spot of blood on his face, with tear-stained, crazy eyes, he was scary. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, walked widely through the mud of the alleys, and sometimes just anywhere, entirely, through the tall wet grass among the apple and pear trees, bumping into their crooked, gnarled branches, mottled with gray-green soggy lichen. He sat on swollen, blackened benches, went into a ravine, lay on damp straw in a hut, in the very place where he lay with Alenka. From the cold, from the icy dampness of the air big hands his lips turned purple, his deathly pale face with sunken cheeks took on a violet hue. He lay on his back, legs crossed and hands under his head, staring wildly at the black thatched roof, from which large rusty drops were falling. Then his cheekbones clenched, his eyebrows began to jump. He impulsively jumped up, pulled out from his pants pocket a letter that had already been read a hundred times, stained and crumpled, received late yesterday evening - brought by a land surveyor who had come to the estate for several days on business - and again, for the hundred and first time, greedily devoured it: " Dear Mitya, don't make a bad memory, forget, forget everything that happened! I'm bad, I'm disgusting, spoiled, I'm unworthy of you, but I love art madly! I've made up my mind, the die has been cast, I'm leaving - you know with whom... "You are sensitive, you are smart, you will understand me, I beg you, don't torture yourself and me! Don't write anything to me, it's useless!" Having reached this place, Mitya crumpled the letter and, burying his face in the wet straw, furiously clenching his teeth, choked with sobs. This unexpected you, which so terribly reminded and even seemed to restore their closeness again and filled the heart with unbearable tenderness - it was beyond human strength! And next to this you are a firm statement that even writing to her is now useless! Oh, yes, yes, he knew it: it’s useless! It's over and over forever! Before evening, the rain, which fell on the garden with tenfold force and with unexpected thunderclaps, finally drove him into the house. Wet from head to toe, unable to touch the teeth from an icy shiver all over his body, he looked out from under the trees and, making sure that no one could see him, ran under his window, lifted the frame from the outside - the frame was an old one, with a lifting half,” and, jumping into the room, locked the door and threw himself on the bed. And it began to get dark quickly. The rain was noisy everywhere - on the roof, around the house, and in the garden. Its noise was double, different - one in the garden, another near the house, under the continuous murmur and splash of gutters pouring water into puddles. And this created for Mitya, who instantly fell into a lethargic stupor, an inexplicable anxiety and, together with the heat with which his nostrils, his breathing, his head were blazing, plunged him as if into anesthesia, created what seemed like another world, some other evening time in what seemed like a strange, different house, in which there was a terrible premonition of something. He knew, he felt that he was in his room, already almost dark from the rain and the approaching evening, that there, in the hall, at the tea table, the voices of his mother, Anya, Kostya and the land surveyor could be heard, but at the same time he was already walking along some... then to someone else's house after his young nanny was leaving him, and he was seized by an inexplicable, ever-growing horror, mixed, however, with lust, with a premonition of the closeness of someone with someone, a closeness in which there was something unnaturally disgusting, but in which he himself somehow participated. All this was felt through the medium of a child with a large white face, who, bent over backwards, was carried in her arms and rocked by a young nanny. Mitya was in a hurry to overtake her, overtook her and was about to look into her face to see if it was Alenka, but he suddenly found himself in a gloomy gymnasium classroom with chalk-smeared windows. The one who stood in it in front of the chest of drawers, in front of the mirror, could not see him - he suddenly became invisible. She was wearing a yellow silk petticoat that tightly fit her rounded hips, high-heeled shoes, and thin fishnet black stockings through which her body was visible, and she, sweetly timid and ashamed, knew what was about to happen. She had already managed to hide the child in a dresser drawer. Throwing her braid over her shoulder, she quickly braided it and, glancing sideways at the door, looked in the mirror, which reflected her powdered face, bare shoulders and milky blue, small breasts with pink nipples. The door swung open - and, looking around cheerfully and terribly, a gentleman in a tuxedo, with a bloodless shaved face, and black and short curly hair, entered. He took out a flat gold cigarette case and began to light it cheekily. She, finishing her braid, timidly looked at him, knowing his purpose, then threw the braid on her shoulder, raised it bare hands... He condescendingly hugged her waist - and she grabbed his neck, showing her dark armpits, clung to him, hid her face on his chest...

And Mitya woke up, covered in sweat, with a stunningly clear consciousness that he was dead, that the world was so monstrously hopeless and gloomy, as it could not be in the underworld, beyond the grave. There was darkness in the room, there was noise and splashing outside the windows, and this noise and splashing were unbearable (even with just its sound) for a body that was completely trembling with chills. What was most intolerable and terrible was the monstrous unnaturalness of human intercourse, which it was as if he had just shared with the shaved gentleman. Voices and laughter were heard from the hall. And they were terrible and unnatural in their alienation from him, the rudeness of life, its indifference, mercilessness towards him... - Katya! - he said, sitting up on the bed, swinging his legs off it. - Katya, what is this! - he said out loud, absolutely sure that she heard him, that she was here, that she was silent, did not respond only because she was crushed, she herself understood the irreparable horror of everything that she had done. “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Katya,” he whispered bitterly and tenderly, wanting to say that he would forgive her everything, if only she would still rush to him, so that they could be saved together, – to save their beautiful love in that most beautiful spring world , which so recently was like paradise. But, whispering: “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Katya!” - he immediately realized that no, it doesn’t matter, that there was no longer any salvation, a return to that wondrous vision that was once given to him in Shakhovskoye, on the balcony overgrown with jasmine, and he quietly cried in pain , tearing his chest. She, this pain, was so strong, so unbearable that, without thinking about what he was doing, without realizing what would come of it all, passionately wanting only one thing - to get rid of her at least for a minute and not end up again in that terrible world, where he had spent the whole day and where he had just been in the most terrible and disgusting of all earthly dreams, he fumbled and pushed aside the drawer of the night table, caught the cold and heavy lump of a revolver and, sighing deeply and joyfully, opened his mouth and with force, with pleasure shot. September 14, 1924 Maritime Alps.

IX

For the first time, he now lived at home as an adult, with whom even his mother behaved somehow differently than before, and most importantly, he lived with the first true love in his soul, already realizing the very thing that his whole being had secretly been waiting for since childhood, since adolescence.

Even in infancy, something marvelously and mysteriously stirred in something inexpressible in human language. Once and somewhere, probably also in the spring, in the garden, near the lilac bushes, - I remember the pungent smell of Spanish flies, - he, very small, stood with some young woman, - probably with his nanny, - and suddenly something seemed to illuminate before him with a heavenly light - either her face, or a sundress on her full chest - and something passed through him like a hot wave, leaped within him, truly like a child in her mother’s womb... But it was like in dream. Everything that happened later was like a dream - in childhood, adolescence, in the high school years. There was some special, unique admiration for one or the other of those girls who came with their mothers to his children's holidays, a secret greedy curiosity for every movement of this charming, also unlike anything, little creature in a dress , in shoes, with a silk ribbon bow on his head. There was (this was later, in the provincial town) a much more conscious admiration for the schoolgirl, who often appeared in the evenings on the tree behind the fence of the neighboring garden, which lasted almost the entire autumn: her playfulness, mockery, brown dress, round comb in her hair, dirty hands, laughter , a ringing cry - everything was such that Mitya thought about her from morning to evening, was sad, sometimes even cried, insatiably wanting something from her. Then this too somehow ended by itself, was forgotten, and there were new, more or less long - and again intimate - admirations, there were sharp joys and sorrows of sudden love at gymnasium balls... there was some kind of yearning in the body, in the heart there are vague premonitions, expectations of something...

He was born and raised in the village, but as a high school student he inevitably spent the spring in the city, with the exception of one year, the year before, when, having arrived in the village for Maslenitsa, he fell ill and, recovering, spent March and half of April at home. It was an unforgettable time. For two weeks he lay and only through the window saw the sky, snow, garden, its trunks and branches changing every day with the increase in warmth and light in the world. He saw: here it is morning, and in the room it is so bright and warm from the sun that reviving flies are already crawling on the glass... here is the afternoon hour the next day: the sun is behind the house, on the other side, and in the window there is already pale spring snow and large white clouds in the blue, in the tops of the trees... and here, another day, there are such bright clearings in the cloudy sky, and there is such a wet shine on the bark of the trees, and so much dripping from the roof above the window that you can’t get enough of it, you can’t get enough of it... Then the warm weather came fogs, rains, snow dissolved and ate away in a few days, the river began to move, joyfully and new began to turn black, the earth in the garden and in the yard was exposed... And Mitya will remember for a long time one day at the end of March, when he rode horseback into the field for the first time. The sky was not bright, but it shone so vividly, so youthfully in the pale, colorless trees of the garden. There was still a fresh breeze in the field, the stubble was wild and red, and where they plowed - they were already plowing for oats - the shoots were oily and black with primeval power. And he rode entirely through these stubbles and rises to the forest and from afar saw it in the clear air - naked, small, visible from end to end - then he descended into its hollows and rustled with his horse’s hooves through last year’s deep foliage, in places completely dry, fawn , wet and brown in places, he moved through the ravines filled with it, where hollow water still flowed, and from under the bushes, with a crash, dark-golden woodcocks burst out right from under the horse’s feet... What was this whole spring and especially this day for him, when so was there a fresh breeze blowing towards him in the field, and the horse, negotiating the moisture-saturated stubble and black arable fields, was breathing so noisily with wide nostrils, snoring and roaring from the inside with magnificent wild power? It seemed then that this particular spring was his first true love, the days of continuous falling in love with someone and something, when he loved all the schoolchildren and all the girls in the world. But how far away that time seemed to him now! How he was then just a boy, innocent, simple-hearted, poor in his modest sorrows, joys and dreams! His pointless, ethereal love was then a dream, or rather a memory of some wonderful dream. Now there was Katya in the world, there was a soul that embodied this world in itself and triumphed over it all.

X

Only once during this first time did Katya ominously remind herself.

One day, late in the evening, Mitya went out onto the back porch. It was very dark, quiet, and smelled of a damp field. From behind the night clouds, over the vague outlines of the garden, small stars were tearing up. And suddenly, somewhere in the distance, something hooted wildly, devilishly, and started barking and squealing. Mitya shuddered, became numb, then carefully stepped off the porch, entered a dark alley that seemed to be guarding him hostilely on all sides, stopped again and began to wait and listen: what is it, where is it - what so unexpectedly and terribly announced the garden ? An owl, a forest scarecrow, making his love, and nothing more, he thought, but he froze as if from the invisible presence of the devil himself in this darkness. And suddenly there was again a booming howl that shook Mitya’s entire soul, somewhere nearby, at the top of the alley, there was a crackling and rustling sound - and the devil silently moved somewhere else in the garden. There he first barked, then began to whine pitifully, pleadingly, like a child, whine, cry, flap his wings and squeal with painful pleasure, began to squeal, roll up with such an ironic laugh, as if he were being tickled and tortured. Mitya, trembling all over, stared into the darkness with both eyes and ears. But the devil suddenly broke down, choked and, cutting through the dark garden with a death-languorous cry, seemed to fall through the ground. Having waited in vain for a few more minutes for the resumption of this love horror, Mitya quietly returned home - and all night he was tormented in his sleep by all those painful and disgusting thoughts and feelings into which his love had turned in March in Moscow.

However, in the morning, in the sun, his nightly torment quickly dissipated. He remembered how Katya cried when they firmly decided that he should leave Moscow for a while, remembered with what delight she seized on the idea that he would also come to Crimea at the beginning of June, and how touchingly she helped him in his preparations to leave, as she saw him off at the station... He took out her photographic card, peered for a long, long time at her little elegant head, amazed at the purity, clarity of her direct, open (slightly round) look... Then he wrote a particularly long and especially heartfelt letter, full of faith in their love, and again returned to the constant feeling of her loving and bright presence in everything in which he lived and rejoiced.

He remembered what he had experienced when his father died, nine years ago. This was also in the spring. The day after this death, timidly, with bewilderment and horror, walking through the hall, where his father, dressed in a noble uniform, lay on the table with his chest raised high and his large pale hands folded on it, his black beard and white nose, Mitya went out onto the porch , looked at the huge coffin lid, upholstered in gold brocade, standing near the door, and suddenly felt: there is death in the world! She was in everything: in the sunlight, in the spring grass in the yard, in the sky, in the garden... He went into the garden, into the linden alley, dappled with light, then into the side alleys, even sunnier, looking at the trees and at the first white butterflies , listened to the first birds singing sweetly - and recognized nothing: there was death in everything, a terrible table in the hall and a long brocade cover on the porch! Not as before, somehow the sun was shining differently, the grass was not so green, the butterflies froze on the spring, only still hot grass on top - everything was not the same as a day ago, everything was transformed as if by the proximity of the end of the world , and the beauty of spring, its eternal youth, has become pitiful, sad! And this lasted for a long time and then, lasted all spring, how for a long time a terrible, vile, sweetish smell was felt - or imagined - in the washed and many times ventilated house...

Mitya was experiencing the same obsession - only of a completely different order - now: this spring, the spring of his first love, was also completely different from all the previous springs. The world was again transformed, again filled as if with something extraneous, but not hostile, not terrible, but on the contrary, wonderfully merging with the joy and youth of spring. And this stranger was Katya, or rather, the most beautiful thing in the world that Mitya wanted and demanded from her. Now, as the spring days passed, he demanded more and more from her. And now, when she was not there, there was only her image, an image that did not exist, but was only desired, she seemed to do nothing to violate that immaculate and beautiful that was required of her, and every day she felt more and more alive in everything, no matter what Mitya looks at.

XI

He was happily convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was still the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of fir and pine trees in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning to evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful fussiness, as they shout only in the early in the spring, rooks were screaming in the bare century-old birches in the neighboring landowner's garden, and the view of the village on the slopes was still wild, gray, and only some more vines were covered there with yellowish green... He walked into the garden: and the garden was still low and bare, transparent, - only the meadows were green, all dotted with small turquoise flowers, and the akatnik along the alleys was pubescent and one cherry tree was pale white, small in bloom in the hollow, in the southern, lower part of the garden... He went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, the stubble still stuck out like a brush , the dried field roads were still ringed and purple... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the time of expectation - and all this was Katya. And it just seemed that the distractions were the charwoman doing this and that in the estate, workers in the people's quarters, reading, walks, going to the village to see peasant friends, conversations with mother, trips with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in a field on a racing droshky...

Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into its own, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around before our eyes began to change by leaps and bounds. They began to plow open the stubble and turn it into black velvet, the field boundaries turned green, the grass in the yard became juicier, the sky became thicker and brighter, the garden quickly began to be dressed in fresh, even soft-looking greenery, the gray clusters of lilacs began to turn purple and smell, and many black ones had already appeared, the metallic blue shine of large flies on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot spots of light on the paths. The branches of the apple and pear trees were still visible, they were barely touched by the small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, spreading networks of their crooked branches everywhere under other trees, were all already curled with milky snow, and every day this color became more and more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blossoming along with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxuriously whitening garden and an ever darker blue sky.

The concept of an act of communication. Components of the act of communication. Taxonomy of speech messages. The concept of a speech act (primary speech genre) and secondary speech genre. Generalization of the concept of speech genre to the type of speech activity in the understanding of F. Saussure. Classification of types of speech activity based on extralinguistic features (components of the act of communication): functional styles, colloquial speech, literary works. Interaction of extralinguistic and linguistic features in different types of speech activity. The concept of text and functional-textual norm, the difference between text and discourse. Style as a general semiotic and linguistic concept. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of style. Definition of linguistic style in the stylistic concept of V.V. Vinogradov. Language styles as intralingual multilingualism. Individual author's style as a manifestation linguistic personality. Individual author's style in literary works.

Stylistics of speech (stylistics of text). Functional style

Basic functional styles of the Russian language. Common features of functional styles in terms of extralinguistic characteristics. Characteristics of functional styles based on tightness - permeability. Functional styles in relation to colloquial and artistic speech. Linguistic means of functional styles in colloquial speech and literary texts. Scientific style. Extralinguistic features of scientific style. Scientific language as a special linguistic subsystem. The relationship between extralinguistic and linguistic characteristics in a scientific text. Homogeneity of stylistic space in a scientific text. “Picture of the world” in a scientific text. Typology of scientific genres. The evolution of scientific genres and functional textual norms. Stylistic means of scientific language in a literary text. Official business style. Extralinguistic characteristics. Features of vocabulary, morphology, word formation and syntax. Structure of stylistic space. Typology of genres of official business style. “Picture of the World” in an official business style. Means of official business style in literary text. Oratorical and journalistic style. Extralinguistic features. Language characteristics. Style dominant. Genres of journalism. Evolution of genres and functional text norms. The pragmatic meaning of linguistic requirements for oratorical discourse. Extralinguistic characteristics of colloquial speech. Colloquial speech as a subsystem of the literary language. Language especially colloquial speech. “Picture of the world” in colloquial speech. Genres of colloquial speech. The structure of a coherent message in colloquial speech.

Stylistics of speech (stylistics of text). Stylistics of artistic speech

Extralinguistic characteristics literary text. Two contexts of speech of a literary work in the understanding of V. V. Vinogradov. The concept of the language of verbal art (artistic language) and its two main forms: artistic prose words and poetic language. Methods of linguistic-stylistic analysis of literary text. “Microscopic” analysis of V. V. Vinogradov, structural-semiotic and intertextual approaches. Poetic language and poetic text as an object of linguistic poetics. The category of the author's image as a constitutive category of a literary text. Descriptive, typological and diachronic aspects of the author’s image category. Structural parameters of the category of the author's image. The concept of the narrator and the narrator's positions in a literary text. Local position and its subtypes. Epistemic position and its subtypes. The narrator's evaluative position. Compositional and speech structures of literary text. Criteria for identifying compositional speech structures. Characteristics of the author's monologue, artistic dialogue, internal monologue and improperly direct speech as the main compositional speech structures. Structural, quantitative and qualitative transformations of compositional speech structures. Russian artistic language in comparison with the literary language and its stylistic system in the 19th-20th centuries: general processes, rapprochement, mutual enrichment.

***Revzina O.G. Stylistics of the Russian language: Course program//

Russian language and its history. Programs of the Russian Language Department for students of philological faculties state universities. M., 1997. - P.94 - 102.

1.5 Educational and methodological support of the discipline

Plans for seminar (practical) classes

Lecture topics

1. The subject of stylistics, main problems and methods. Classification of stylistic disciplines.

2. The structure of the Russian stylistic system. The concept of stylistic meaning, meaning, linguistic expressiveness.

3. Functional style. Common features of functional styles in terms of extralinguistic characteristics.

4. Scientific style. Typology of scientific genres. Evolution of functional textual norms.

5. Official business style. Features of vocabulary, morphology, word formation and syntax. Typology of genres of official business style.

6. Genres of journalism. Style dominant. Functional-textual norms.

7. Colloquial speech as a subsystem of the literary language. Language features and genres.

8. Stylistics of artistic speech.

9. Poetic language and poetic text as an object of linguistic poetics.

10. Stylistic concepts in domestic and world scientific literature.

Seminar lesson plan

Lesson 1. Stylistics in a number of philological disciplines

1. Subject and tasks of stylistics.

2. Structure and use of language.

3. Three levels of language study.

5. Style, stylistic coloring, style norm.

6.Synonymy and correlation of methods of linguistic expression.

Lesson 2. Stylistics and culture of speech

1. Language, speech, culture.

2. Speech culture as a component of culture as a whole.

3. Speech culture as a culture of speech activity.

4. Speech culture of society and speech culture of the individual.

5. Criteria for assessing speech culture.

6. Normalization as a mechanism of speech culture. Types of norms

7. Levels of speech culture.

Lesson 3. Functional style.

1. Functional styles of the Russian language.

2. Extralinguistic characteristics of functional styles.

3. Language tools of functional styles.

4. Functional styles in relation to colloquial and artistic speech.

5. Functional styles based on tightness - permeability.

6. “Picture of the world” in functional styles.

Lesson 4. Text as a phenomenon of language use (text stylistics)

1. Different approaches to the text.

2. Text features.

3. Defining text

4. The term "discourse"

5. Fiction and non-fiction texts.

7.Intertextual connections.

Lesson 5. Subjectivization of the narrative and linguistic constructions with a focus on the image of “someone else’s word” (text stylistics).

1. The concept of subjectivation of narrative.

2. Verbal techniques of subjectification.

3. Compositional techniques of subjectivization.

4. “Objectification” of the narrator’s narrative.

5. The concept of linguistic constructions with a focus on the image of “someone else’s word.”

6. Stylization. Tale Parody.

Lesson 6. The structure of the text and its stylistic analysis.

1. Approaches to the concept of text structure.

2. Problems of text structure.

3. Stylistic analysis of the text.

4. Problems, ways and techniques of stylistic analysis.

5. Practical tasks on stylistic analysis of text.

Lesson 7. Phonics and orthoepy (practical stylistics)

1. The concept of phonics.

2. The importance of the sound organization of speech.

3. Phonetic means of language that have a stylistic meaning.

4. Russian orthoepy from a stylistic perspective.

5. Stylistic meanings of pronunciation options.

6. Sound recording in artistic speech.

7. Stylistic shortcomings in the sound organization of prose speech.

Lesson 8. Lexical and phraseological stylistics (practical stylistics)

1. Stylistic use of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, ambiguous words in speech.

2. Paronymy and paronomasia.

3. Stylistic coloring of words.

4. Vocabulary that has a limited scope

5. Outdated words, new words.

6. Stylistic assessment of borrowed words.

7. Features of the use of phraseological units in speech.

8. Phraseological innovation of writers.

9. Speech errors associated with the use of phraseological units.

10. Lexical figurative means.

Lesson 9. Stylistics of word formation (practical stylistics)

1. Creation of evaluative meanings by means of word formation.

2. Expressive word formation in artistic and journalistic speech.

3. Functional and stylistic fixation of word-forming means.

4. Stylistic use of bookish and colloquial word-formation means by writers.

5. Word-formative archaisms.

6. Occasional word formation.

7. Elimination of shortcomings and errors in word formation during stylistic editing.

Lesson 10. Stylistics of parts of speech (practical stylistics)

1. Stylistics of a noun.

2. Stylistics of the adjective and numeral.

3. Stylistics of the verb.

4. Stylistics of the pronoun.

5. Stylistics of the adverb.

6. Elimination of morphological and stylistic errors.

Lesson 11. Syntactic stylistics (practical stylistics)

1. Stylistic use of various types of simple and complex sentences.

2. Stylistic use of word order.

3. Elimination of speech errors in the structure of a simple sentence.

4. Stylistic assessment of the main members of the proposal and options for harmonizing definitions and applications, management options.

5. Stylistic use of homogeneous members of the sentence, addresses, introductory and plug-in constructions.

6. Syntactic means of expressive speech.

Lesson 12. The language of fiction.

1. Fiction and non-fiction. The language of fiction and literary language.

2. The language of fiction and functional styles.

3. The question of “poetic” language.

4. Imagery of a literary text. Image in art. Word and image. The nature of imagery and image. "Ugly" imagery.

5. The structure of a verbal image.

1..5.2 Educational and methodological support for students’ independent work

Abstract topics

1. Stages of development of the stylistic system.

2. Language policy and the active position of the philologist during periods of instability and decline in speech culture norms.

3. Interaction of literary language and the language of fiction.

4. Norms of the modern Russian language.

6. Culture of Russian speech.

7. Russian orthoepy and stylistics.

8. Features of colloquial speech.

9. Concept by V.V. Vinogradov.

10. Text stylistics.

11. Methods of linguistic-stylistic analysis.

12. Emotional-evaluative components.

13. Stylistic scale and its structure.

15. Stylistic signs.

16. Linguistic expressiveness.

17. Russian artistic language.

18. Concept of Sh. Bally.

19. Concept by G.O. Vinokur.

20. Linguistic poetics.

21.Modern terminology.

22. Scientific and professional speech.

Tasks for independent work*

Exercise 1. Distribute the words into three groups: 1) pronunciation of E after soft consonants; 2) pronunciation of O after soft consonants; 3) variant pronunciation of E and O after soft consonants.

Option 1.

Scam, being, wandering, guardianship, sedentary, fade, maneuverable, nonsense, obscene.

Option 2.

Stiffened, sharp, eponymous, maneuver, faded, pomp, nonsense, perfect appearance, glitter.

Option 3.

Whitish, bile, successor, lattice, firebrand, pompous, foreign, named, swollen.

Option 4.

Hopeless, faded, multi-temporal, this, crypt, ridge, transferred, humble, brought.

Exercise 2. Distribute words of foreign language origin into two groups: 1) with a soft consonant before E, 2) with a hard consonant before E. Note cases of variant pronunciation.

Option 1.

Vernissage, chapel, beefsteak, interior, pince-nez, thesis, toaster, decoration, remark, annexation, Flaubert, terror.

Option 2.

Version, caravel, sandwich, muffler, polonaise, pace, tunnel, incident, reprise, bacteria, session, terrorism.

Option 3.

Bearing, coupe, genesis, motorcade, rendezvous, trend, citadel, clarinet, summary, decadent, maxim, track.

Option 4.

Abwehr, resume, genetics, hotel, sideboard, thermos, masterpiece, component, dean, claim, therapy, fashionable.

Task 3. Place the emphasis in the following words. Pay special attention to words that have variant stress.

Option 1.

Pamper, seal, exorbitant prices, lighten, soar, more beautiful, dowry, convocation, catalogue, cake, heavy, large, curved.

Option 2.

Pampered, sealed, utterly, vulgarize, chased, quarter, intention, spark, rubles, beetroot, thick, sweet, touched.

Option 3.

Dividing, sparkling, from ancient times, molding, busy, rusting, slumber, illness, thinking, about stamps, tablecloths, fit, curved.

Option 4.

Frost, mark, masterfully, force, began, chunk, sign, stroke, stalls, about positions, thin, college.

Task 4. Find the error (underline), determine its type as accurately as possible, and provide the corrected version.

Option 1.

1) Kuprin’s story “The Duel” was prepared by a whole galaxy of stories dedicated to the life of the army.

2) Everyone listened intently to the performance of the famous artist, who performed in our city for the first time.

3) Proper organization of work plays an important role.

4) Tolstoy’s work excites readers in a variety of languages.

5) Rainwater should be boiled well before use due to the presence of contaminants in it.

6) I don’t trust a politician who sprinkles beautiful phrases with pearls.

7) We brainstormed for a long time and finally found the right solution,
which should be followed.

8) How do they show patriotism towards their Motherland?

9) This was an innovation in literature that had not taken place
previously.

10) We must be patient with people’s shortcomings.

11) Every night, patrol boats vigilantly guard our border.

12) The boy grew up an orphan.

Option 2.

1) The poet’s love for his homeland often revived him from decadent moods.

2) The scientist stood at the sources of aircraft construction.

3) Kuprin is an amazing writer of his time.

4) A drug den has been identified in the city.

5) The institute has developed new methods and developments on this problem.

6) The nobles remained faithful to the beauty of the cherry orchard, and therefore

they are so insignificant.

7) All students should be aware of changes in the lesson schedule.

8) Speakers and speakers noted serious defects and shortcomings in the complex automation of the plant.

9) The situation of these young people has become difficult.

10) Bazarov loves and understands the people, he himself has been in their shoes.

11) Fedorov deliberately tried to refrain from commenting on the merits of the experiments.

12) Chief accountant Ivanova came to work.

Option 3.

1) But before I use the material and lightly vibrate it, I want to express my thoughts about Bazarov.

2) When Rus' was fragmented, it was able to be conquered by the Tatar-Mongol yoke.

3) The patient was immediately admitted to the hospital.

4) Trofimov’s speech, like other characters in the play, is characterized by
lyricism.

5) “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” will be understood by every person who
truly loves his homeland.

6) These traffic violators look unsightly.

7) Rumors have begun in Hollywood about what will be filmed
biographical film about Liz Taylor.

8) The factors cited by the speaker did not convince anyone.

9) The above mentioned students did not appear for the exam.

10) The bullet fired by Dantes stuck deep in Lermontov’s heart.

11) The sown area in the region is 43 thousand hectares.

12) Finally I was able to buy 5 meters of beautiful tulle.

Option 4.

1) Speakers usually appear in such expressions as “takes place”, “provides assistance.” and so on.

2) The artist won the gratitude of the audience.

3) A nourishing mask nourishes the skin.

4) There is a shortage of educational literature in the library.

5) There is a great desire to get the next edition of this book.

6) For the whole school, this student became a legend.

7) Yesenin knew how to overcome his melancholy, various gloomy feelings, and conquer himself.

8) It is impossible not to say a few hospitable words about our guests.

9) The part of the Countess from this opera cannot be reduced to the type of buffoon characters.

10) Defects in the preparation of graduates will be revealed during exams.

11) The useful capacity of the scraper is 1500 kilograms.

12) The speaker focused on the most basic problems.

Task 5. Describe the options: what this group is, what are the differences between the options (gender, case, plural).

Option 1.

A row of people sat - a row of people sat

You can't buy matches - you can't buy matches

Gorges - gorges

Option 2.

Dear Comrade Ivanova - Dear Comrade Ivanova

Towels - towels

In the workshop - in the workshop

Option 3.

About a million people are on strike - about a million people are on strike

This crybaby is a crybaby

Because of an error - by mistake - due to an error

Option 4.

The driver and assistant have gone - the driver and assistant have gone

Work in the village - work in the village

Windy - windier

Task 6. Find figurative and expressive means of language (tropes, stylistic figures) in the proposed text, characterize them, show their function in creating an image.

Option 1.

Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into its own, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything before our eyes began to change by leaps and bounds. They began to plow open the stubble and turn it into black velvet, the field boundaries turned green, the grass in the yard became juicier, the sky became thicker and brighter, the garden quickly began to be dressed in fresh, even soft-looking greenery, the gray clusters of lilacs began to turn purple and smell, and many black ones had already appeared, large flies shining metallic blue on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot spots of light on the paths. The branches of the apple and pear trees were still visible, they were barely touched by the small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, spreading networks of their crooked branches everywhere under other trees, were all already curled with milky snow, and every day this color became more and more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blossoming along with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxuriously whitening garden and an ever darker blue sky.

Option 2.

In Oreanda they sat on a bench, not far from the church, looked down at the sea and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning fog; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain tops. The leaves did not move on the trees, the cicadas screamed, and the monotonous, dull sound of the sea coming from below spoke of peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. It was so noisy below, when there was neither Yalta nor Oreanda here, now it is noisy and will be noisy just as indifferently and dully when we are not there. And in this constancy, in complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, lies, perhaps, the guarantee of our eternal salvation, the continuous movement of life on earth, continuous perfection. Sitting next to the young woman, who at dawn seemed so beautiful, calm and enchanted in view of this fabulous setting - the sea, mountains, clouds, wide sky, Gurov thought about how, in essence, if you think about it, everything is beautiful in this world, everything except what we ourselves think and do when we forget about the highest goals of existence, about our human dignity.

Option 3.

The forest road also rustles - it is also all under leaves - and this rustling can be heard far away through the forest, still through, open, but still no longer winter. The forest is silent, but this silence is not the same, but alive, waiting. The sun has set, but the evening is bright and long. And Tamara feels all this spring beauty no less than me - she walks especially easily. Raising his neck and looking forward, into the far visible and still spacious grayish bowl of trunks coming towards us, peeking out from behind each other. Suddenly, like a stake, a shaggy owl fell from the old aspen tree, smoothly darted and landed with a flourish on a birch stump - waking up, jerked its eared head and with its sighted eye burst out all around: hello, they say, forest, hello, evening, even I now the one before is ready for spring and love! And as if approving of her, somewhere nearby the triumphant clattering and crackling of a nightingale echoed throughout the entire forest. And under the old birches, showing their lacy nakedness against the grayish, but light and deep evening sky, tight and sharp, glossy dark green tubes of lilies of the valley are already sticking out.

Russian is one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn. Why?

To answer this question, analyze statements about the Russian language.

• “You marvel at the preciousness of our language: every sound is a gift: everything is grainy, large, like the pearl itself.”
N.V.Gogol
• “Rich, sonorous, lively, distinguished by the flexibility of stress and infinitely varied in onomatopoeia, capable of conveying the finest shades, the Russian language seems to us created for poetry.”
P. Mermier

Indeed, the Russian language is unique; everything in it is important: the pronunciation of a word, its spelling, lexical meaning, order in a sentence, and its morphemic composition.

It, our language, is like a light cobweb, its threads are invisible, but try, pull one of them - you will immediately change the entire pattern. But! If you have learned not only know , understand him, but also feel , then such a unique world opens up before you that you no longer want to leave it.

Until today you looked through the keyhole, but today you will receive a key in your hands, which is called linguistic text analysis. The topic of our lesson : “Linguistic text analysis.”

What is the practical goal of our lesson?

Preparation for the Unified State Exam.

Everyone has a text on their desk. Read it and think about how you could title it.

Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain and then the hot sun suddenly suddenly burst in, spring came into force, lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around before our eyes began to change by leaps and bounds. They began to plow open the fields...they turned the stubble into black velvet, the field boundaries turned green, the ants in the yard became thicker and more cheerful, the sky quickly began to dress in fresh, soft greenery, gray tassels with...rain and already a lot of black meta... ...like large flies shining with blue on (dark green gloss...twisted foliage and on hot spots of light on the paths. On the apple and pear trees their branches were still visible, their small grayish and especially soft foliage was barely touched, but these apple and pear trees are everywhere the networks of their crooked branches stretching out under other trees were already curled with milky snow, and every day this color became whiter, thicker and more fragrant.

M.A. Alekseev.

- The arrival of spring.

What is the idea of ​​the text?

- The swift joy of spring renewal.

We will answer this question after linguistic analysis of the text.

We will work in pairs and groups.

Before you begin, pay attention to the text.

Does it have paragraphs?

Then tell me, what style does this text belong to?

Towards the artistic.

Determine the type of speech?

Connecting narration and description.

Work in groups.

1 group.

What does the expression “bummer rain” mean? What is his role? Why does the author use it?

Interpretation of the words “meekness” and “fragrance”. Choose synonyms and antonyms for them.

Find phraseological units in the text. What is his role?

Artistic and visual means used in the text. What is their role?

Heavy rain - sudden, strong, powerful, breaking off tree branches. It surged with such force that spring suddenly lost its meekness and pallor.

Meekness - gentleness, humility, humility.

Synonyms: obedience, lack of arrogance, even disposition.

Antonyms: anger, disobedience, disobedience, arrogance, violence, lack of calm.

Incense is an aroma, a pleasant smell.

Antonyms: bad smell, stench.

Not by business, but by the hour - quickly, lightning fast, swiftly, instantly.

Epithets

Personification

• the sun came into force
• spring has lost its meekness and pallor
• the sky shone more cheerfully
• the garden began to dress up
• the foliage touched the branches
• apple and pear trees curled up

Nature becomes alive and speaking, creating a poetic picture of living nature.

Alliteration

The emphasis [р], , [л], [л’] creates the image of a seething stream of life.

What spring month do you think the author describes?

Beginning of May (last offer).

Conclusion: The lexical features of the text are subordinated to the idea: the author shows the rapid inevitability of spring renewal.

1. Insert the missing spellings and explain them, group them.
2. What parts of speech words are used most often in the text? Why?
3. Indicate the type of verbs. Which ones predominate? Explain this species relationship.
4. Find comparative adjectives. What is their role?
5. Find adverbs in comparative degree. What is their role?

1. Unstressed vowels, checked by stress: lost (loss)

appeared (will appear)

2. Unverifiable vowels and consonants:

• transform
• lilac
• metallic

3. o, ё after sibilants in the root and suffix:

• black
• glossy

4. n and nn in the suffix:

• especially

5. pre- and at-:

• transform

6. Writing complex adjectives:

• dark green

What parts of speech words are used most often in the text? Why?

Nouns (39) denoting an object. The author shows what changes in spring (sun, spring, boundaries, grass, garden, greenery, foliage, trees, apple trees, pears, etc.).

Adjectives and participles (24) help to more clearly convey the renewal in nature that occurs in spring.

Verbs (19) – the action of the subject.

Perfective verbs alternate with imperfective verbs. Perfective verbs predominate, which convey the speed of action and the completeness of the process. Using imperfective verbs, it is important for the author to show that the action is happening here and now.

Adjectives and adverbs in the comparative degree.

Conclusion: Morphological features of the text also help to reveal the idea.

1. Place punctuation marks and explain them.
2. Highlight the sentence stems.
3. Find all types of sentence complications.
4. Analyze the first sentence for structure. How is it different from the others?
5. What is the role of homogeneous members of the sentence and isolated definitions expressed by participial phrases?
6. Why are repetitions used in the text?

2 people at the board.

The first sentence is simple in structure, since it is a chord, an introduction. All other sentences are complex, but they are connected only by coordinating and non-conjunctive connections. There is no subordinating connection here, because it is important for the author to show the swiftness and sequence of actions.

Homogeneous subjects, predicates, objects, definitions and circumstances “expand” the scope of the arrival of spring.

• then it passed
• then it came in
• soft greens
• soft foliage
• hot spots
• hot sun

strengthen the process of the onset of spring.

Conclusion: Through syntactic and punctuation features, the author conveys to the reader the rapid flows of spring. He doesn’t even want to pause (he doesn’t narrate in simple sentences, except for the first one). Everything is in one breath, inextricably united.

So, we have in our hands the key with which we can write a miniature essay. This is your homework.