Читать книгу The dark side of Russia - Лара Шапиро - Страница 4

Our generation is a generation of mammoths. We will die out soon. And there will not be those who grew up and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that is no longer on the map. Lev Nikolayevich Kassil has such a novel, “three countries that are not on the map,” you know? No, the modern generation no longer knows. They did not read Cassil; they do not even know whether he was a writer or a poet. They would not give Gogol’s first name or patronymic, they would not remember a single Ukrainian poet, and if they remember, by chance, Taras Shevchenko, they will undoubtedly google in search of his middle name. His middle name was Grigoryevich. Eh, what will you do if Google is turned off? It is not as if they read little; they do not read at all, in our understanding.

But we read. Oh, how we read! We were the most readable nation in the world! We knew all the classical literature of Russia, England, France, Germany and America, better than all these nations combined. A person who did not read Dickens was not considered an intellectual among us.

We did not have Internet; there were no mobile phones, TV only showed congresses of the CPSU, harvesting, and smelting steel. Therefore, to know the world, we read. We read passionately, recklessly, binge, forgetting about food and sleep, and even forgive me such a gastronomic detail, enduring to the last to tear away from the book and go out of need. I am afraid that the current generation will not even understand what I mean.

Kindergarten, we are five years old, we still do not know how to read, so the teacher arranges the chairs in a circle, in the centre herself, reads to us Agnia Barto, about the bear, who was dropped to the floor, and her paw was torn off. Now he has cotton sticking out of a hole, and he is unattractive. The teacher read about the horse, who combed the hair smoothly, about Tanya the muddler, who dropped the ball into the river. Oh, probably the ball was beautiful, yellow, with blue stripes. Slumber you, Tanya! I would not lose such a ball. Now here you are, standing still and roaring like a fool, instead of running, grabbing a stick and get a ball from the river! And the teacher continues to read about the unfortunate bunny, his painful fate and the evil owner; about a fat bull, who only knows that he is puffing and sighing, he broke all the boards and now he is going to fall somewhere.

But most of all I liked Gianni Rodari’s poems “What the handicrafts smell like” – the whole book is one odorous sweet roll, then the brain was already disconnected and thought only about the roll. Maybe, with raisins. Or with poppy seeds. Or with jam.

Still terribly liked Berestov’s poems, isn’t it magical:

“How we study the life of sharks?

Their nature, customs and habits?

And here is how – we cry out “guards!”

And run away as little rabbits.”

You run, yell, the shark is on its tail is jumping after you – an intrigue, not a verse.

Or here:

“if you take all these puddles

and combine it into one,

it turns out that the puddles

Almost like the ocean.”

Imagine what a turn of events, however! Everyone wants to go to the Black sea, they wait a whole year, they save up money, and it is not always possible, but you do not need to go anywhere, you need to collect all the puddles after the rain and, voila, the black sea under the windows!

Then, we learned to read ourselves. And there was a mysterious poet ASPUSHKIN and the moon. Now I do not remember what was before – ASPUSHKIN or the moon. But then it was just some kind of magic spell:

“Through the wavy mists

the moon is sneaking.

To the sad glades

sadly, it pours light.”

And I read this spell to the moon, in winter, standing on the summer terrace, on the cold floor, barefoot, sticking my nose to the window and standing on tiptoe to be closer to the moon. I read it every night, before going to bed, so that the moon was not so lonely there, in a black sky. And I learned all the available verses of ASPUSHKIN and howled at the TV, in romances, I was grateful to him for the fact that he also loved the moon and did not leave it alone. True, ASPUSHKIN then turned out to be A.S. Pushkin, but that was no longer important.

He also liked to drink tea in the winter with his old nanny, when “the storm covers the sky with darkness, twirling snow whirls”. Even all the time, he asked: “where is the mug? The heart will be more cheerful.” Our winters, too, always “howled and cried from the storm”. And I also liked to drink tea from a large mug at such moments. From this, indeed, the heart became more cheerful, especially if tea is with raspberry or currant jams.

I loved to read fairy tales to my little sister. She was only three years old, and she could not read yet, but she liked the large varnished books, with colourful pictures. Very remarkable people wrote tales. One of them, for sure, had a big hat with a huge ball-point pen, with which he wrote his fairy tales. His name was Charles Pierrot. Or something like that. The other two were jolly brothers, laughing all the time, making faces, they were Brothers Grimm.

Then it became more serious. After reading my entire library, my curious nose was stuffed into my mother’s closet. And what am I discovering there? Shocking names! “Woe from the Wit,” “Going through the agony,” “How the steel was tempered.” My curiosity knew no bounds: how there can be woe from the mind? How can metal be tempered? People run barefoot and dousing themselves with water. Why should iron be attributed to human qualities? And who went through the agony and why?

No matter how I tried, I still could not understand who went trough agony and torture. I just liked that there were two beautiful women in the book, with completely unsonorous names: Katya and Dasha. I loved reading about beautiful women. In my mother’s room, there was a huge portate of a beautiful woman in black, with sad eyes. Her name was Nina Chavchavadze. She was the widow of Alexander Sergeyevich Griboedov, the one who wrote “Woe from the wit.” Mom said she was sad because her husband was brutally killed by angry Iranians when Alexander Sergeyevich worked there with a diplomatic mission. What a fierce, cruel death, I thought. And how could the Iranians tear such a holy man: smart and intelligent? They were probably real barbarians. And I was wildly afraid of the Iranians.

I liked “Woe from the wit”, although I didn’t understand anything there either, in my eight years. But there were many expressions that mother often used in her speech: “is it possible to choose back streets for walks”, “when you wander, you return home, and the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us.” Ah, that is where it all came from, I thought. I considered Griboedov to be a member of our family, and Nina Chavchavadze – the ideal of a woman to strive.

Unlike “Going through the agony” and “woe from the wit”, “How the steel was tempered” was read by me in one breath, except love scenes, which were stupid and annoying, and I skipped from them. The book was understood by me, as it seemed to me then. I bowed before the courage and stamina of Pavka Korchagin, the strength, courage and endurance of the people who built the narrow gauge railway. From this book, I understood what is the meaning of willpower, determination, betrayal, meanness. To be able to respect and appreciate the work of others, you need to be able to work yourself, be prepared to overcome difficulties, and hardships. Pavka Korchagin will become my ideal for many-many years. And only with the time comes the awareness of unnecessary and absurdity of all these victims, deprivations and the narrow gauge railway itself.

But further, reading on the school curriculum, so to speak, joined my reading, out-of-class reading. For example, “Song of the Prophetic Oleg”: “as Prophetic Oleg is now climbing, to avenge the unreasonable Khazars.” This immediately raises the question: who are the Khazars, and why does Oleg want to take revenge on them? But this is not about that; there is an entirely different intrigue. This Oleg had a horse, beloved. Faithful was a horse; Oleg was taken out of many battles; he was saved from many troubles. But then they say to him that “you will get death from your horse.” Imagine the injustice in the structure of life, dishonesty and even somehow smacks of betrayal. Or maybe it was said out of jealousy, or out of envy, now no one already knows, but only Oleg ordered his horse to be taken away. He became sad, sad; imagine if you were told so.

Years passed, Oleg forgot to think about his horse, when he was informed that the horse had died. He died in sorrow, unable to withstand separation and did not say goodbye to the master. Oleg, of course, was very saddened that he was so stupidly fooled. He went to take a look at his favourite horse, dead and harmless. And so he stands over his horse, thinking about the injustice of life, and then a serpent crawls out of the horse’s head, stings Oleg, and he dies.

Of course, we a little incomprehensed and even offended, why Prince Oleg died such a ridiculous death. Still, he was an experienced person, suffered many battles. He could wave off this snake with a stick or a stone. The author somehow did not think of this moment, somehow he hurried to finish his work, or maybe he was afraid of Green Peace’s anger, or he loved animals and felt sympathy for them. Only we are not aware of this. Shota Rustaveli has a more straightforward plan in this regard, in his poem “The Knight in the Tiger Skin” – in grief – everyone is crying, in joy – everyone is crying too.

However, for the current generation, to realize the importance of reading, it’s better to start not with “The Knight in the Tiger Skin”, but with Fonvizin’s play “Undergrowth,” where the young man is asked: “Is the door a noun or an adjective?”: if it exists by itself, then it is a noun, and if it is attached to the jamb, then the adjective”. “Why does the gentleman need to know geography? What for is the cabman?” Cab is the type of taxi used to be.

And since we were talking about Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, do you, young reader, know that Fonvizin wrote his first draft version of the “Undergrowth” when he was fifteen years old? That he lived a short life, only 47 years old, was persecuted by Catherine 2, paralyzed, but even paralyzed, he continued to write, it was so important for him.

Speaking about the importance of literary work in the life of a writer, it is worth mentioning Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, who wrote his Dead Souls for almost 17 years, burned and rewritten twice the second volume, which brought himself to exhaustion and died at the age of 43 years. The same can be said about the already mentioned earlier Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko, sent to the army, because of his books, where he was forbidden to write.

Almost all writers and poets somehow paid for their books severe price, were lonely, persecuted, suffered from diseases and poverty. But they continued to write, dear reader, for you and me.

Or here is Conan Doyle. Well, how can you compare modern Hollywood detectives with Sherlock Holmes? You are alone, in a vast empty apartment, half-dark and half-gloomy, where everything creaks, cries and drips, and you sit and read. You are afraid to lower your legs to go to the kitchen to drink some water, to moisten your throat, which was dry from fear. It seems to you that undoubtfully colourful ribbons will crawl out from under all sofas, beds, ventilation systems; and evil muzzles of the Baskervilles dogs will climb on you.

And when we found out that Edgar Allan Poe was the mentor oof Conan Doyle, we certainly read his story about a rabid gorilla who had escaped from the zoo, cut into pieces an adult, and put him in a drain pipe. And for a long time later we hid prickly-cutting objects and tried to turn off the lights early, so as not to attract wild monkeys “by the light”.

And the hit of Yesenin:

“I am a Moscow mischievous, reveller

throughout the Tverskaya gate,

Every dog in the alley

knows my light gait.”

Every tattered horse

by head nods towards me

I am a good buddy for animals.

Every my verse heals the soul of the beast.”

Something like this, I’m writing as a keepsake without looking at Google. This hit, in our time, was much more popular than “Twenty dollars in my pocket.”

For lovers of nature was Prishvin. Prishvin, what a surname! Cherries have come! And then I immediately recall Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich: “The Cherry Orchard.” Blossoming of apple trees and cherries in the spring. Inexpressible aroma. There are also recalled “Three Sisters”, “Chestnut”, “Horse’s surname”, “Chameleon”. Ah, no one from the current generation will remember that Chekhov’s pseudonym was “Antosha Chekhonte”, that the words belong to him: “Everything should be beautiful in a person: face, clothes, soul, thoughts…” “Chestnut” – was the name of a dog. I recommend it to young animal lovers.

And this is the tragic story of little Nellie, from the novel by Charles Dickens’s “The Shop of Antiquities”? Her death is shocking much more when you are 12 years old. At this age, the girls read out “Dinka” and “Fourth Height” and compared themselves with Dinka and Gulya, or Seraphim from “The Great Confrontation of Mars” and many girls certainly wanted to be like the heroines of these books. The boys preferred science fiction, or, at worst, Robin Hood, The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Aivengo, and Richard the Lionheart. Girls also liked those novels, because they were written about the valiant knights and their “Ladies of Heart”, for the sake of which feats were accomplished.

The current generation will no longer recognize the “Secret of the Bronze Bird”, “Mishkin Childhood”, the feat of Alexei Meresyev, and from where the phrases came to us: “We are responsible for those we tamed”, “friendship does not need documents”, “Friendship and trust is not bought or sold.” They will not travel the uninhabited islands of the Caribbean with the White Jaguar. They will not invent the “hyperboloid” together with engineer Garin. They will not go across the space and time with Herbert Wells and Alexander Belyaev, will not penetrate mysterious caves together with Tom Sawyer, will not dive to the bottom of the ocean with Jules Verne. They do not read.

But we read. We got lost in home libraries; we collected bottles and wastepaper to exchange them for books. In the libraries, we enrolled in a queue for Maupassant and the three-volume Dumas, because there were too many people who wanted to read, but too few books, and the Internet had not yet been invented. We were punished for excessive curiosity, but even in our detention room, we always hid an enchanting set of books for all occasions.

We read hard. By the age of 12, we had read the entire regional library and were sent to the central libraryies without clarifying that they were only allowed from the age of 16. And now we, the generation of mammoths, will soon die out as the ancestors of the elephants. And together with us, these unique, inexhaustible, rare, magical knowledge will go to the grave, and there will be only Mister Google, and it makes me a little sad.