Part 1. St. Petersburg. Neva
My grandfather was born in Kronstadt, my wife is from Leningrad, so in St. Petersburg I feel not quite a stranger. However, in Russia it is difficult to find a person in whose life this city would mean nothing. We are all connected in one way or another with him, and through him with each other.
There is little greenery in St. Petersburg, but there is a lot of water and sky. The city is spread out on a plain, and the sky above it is immense. You can enjoy the performances played on this stage by clouds and sunsets for a long time. The actors are controlled by the best director in the world - the wind. The scenery of roofs, domes and spiers remains unchanged, but never gets bored.
In 1941, Hitler decided to starve out Leningraders and wipe the city off the face of the earth. “The Fuhrer did not understand that the order to blow up Leningrad was tantamount to an order to blow up the Alps,” noted writer Daniil Granin. St. Petersburg is a stone bulk, which in its unity and power has no equal among European capitals. It has preserved over eighteen thousand buildings built before 1917. This is more than in London and Paris, not to mention Moscow.
The Neva with its tributaries, channels and canals flows through an indestructible labyrinth carved from stone. Unlike the sky, the water here is not free, it speaks of the power of the empire, which managed to forge it in granite. In summer, fishermen with fishing rods stand by the parapets on the embankments. Under their feet are plastic bags in which caught fish tremble. The same roach and smelt fishermen stood here under Pushkin. The bastions of the Peter and Paul Fortress turned gray then, and the Bronze Horseman reared his horse. Except that the Winter Palace was dark red, not green, as it is now.
It seems that nothing around reminds us that in the twentieth century a crack in Russian history passed through St. Petersburg. His beauty allows us to forget about the unimaginable trials he endured.
Part 2. Perm. Kama
When from the left bank of the Kama, on which my native Perm lies, you look at the right bank with its forests turning blue to the horizon, you feel the fragility of the border between civilization and the primordial forest element. Only a strip of water separates them, and it also unites them. If as a child you lived in a city on a large river, you were lucky: you understand the essence of life better than those who were deprived of this happiness.
In my childhood, sterlet was still found in Kama. In the old days, it was sent to St. Petersburg to the royal table, and in order not to deteriorate on the way, cotton wool soaked in cognac was placed under the gills. As a boy, I saw a small sturgeon on the sand with a jagged back stained with fuel oil: the whole Kama was then covered in fuel oil from tugboats. These dirty hard workers dragged rafts and barges behind them. Children ran on the decks and clothes dried in the sun. Endless strings of stapled, slimy logs vanished along with the tugs and barges. Kama became cleaner, but the sterlet never returned to it.
It was said that Perm, like Moscow and Rome, lay on seven hills. It was enough to feel the breath of history blowing over my wooden city, studded with factory pipes. Its streets run either parallel to the Kama or perpendicular to it. Before the revolution, the first ones were called by the churches that stood on them, such as, for example, Voznesenskaya or Pokrovskaya. The latter bore the names of the places where the roads flowing from them led: Siberian, Solikamsk, Verkhoturskaya. Where they intersected, the heavenly met the earthly. Here I realized that sooner or later converges with the mountain, you just need to be patient and wait.
Permians argue that it is not the Kama that flows into the Volga, but, on the contrary, the Volga flows into the Kama. It does not matter to me which of these two great rivers is a tributary of the other. In any case, Kama is the river that flows through my heart.
Part 3. Ulan-Ude. Selenga
The names of the rivers are older than all other names on maps. We do not always understand their meaning, so the Selenga keeps the secret of its name. It came either from the Buryat word "sel", which means "spill", or from the Evenki "sele", that is, "iron", but I heard in it the name of the Greek goddess of the moon, Selena. Squeezed by forested hills, often shrouded in mist, the Selenga was for me a mysterious “moon river”. In the noise of its current, I, a young lieutenant, seemed to be a promise of love and happiness. It seemed that they were waiting for me ahead as immutably as Baikal was waiting for the Selenga.
Maybe she promised the same to the twenty-year-old lieutenant Anatoly Pepelyaev, the future white general and poet. Shortly before the First World War, he secretly married his chosen one in a poor rural church on the banks of the Selenga. The noble father did not give his son a blessing for an unequal marriage. The bride was the granddaughter of the exiles and the daughter of a simple railroad worker from Verkhneudinsk, as Ulan-Ude used to be called.
I found this city almost the same as Pepelyaev saw it. In the market, Buryats who came from the outback in traditional blue robes traded lamb and women in museum sundresses walked around. They sold circles of frozen milk strung on their hands like rolls. They were “family”, as the Old Believers, who used to live in large families, are called in Transbaikalia. True, something appeared that did not exist under Pepelyaev. I remember how the most original of all the monuments to Lenin I have seen was placed on the main square: on a low pedestal, a huge granite head of the leader, without a neck and torso, was rounded, similar to the head of a giant hero from Ruslan and Lyudmila. It still stands in the capital of Buryatia and has become one of its symbols. Here history and modernity, Orthodoxy and Buddhism do not reject or suppress each other. Ulan-Ude gave me hope that this is possible in other places.
Total dictation: examples of texts.
War and Peace (L.N. Tolstoy). 2004 text
The next day, having said goodbye to only one count, without waiting for the ladies to leave, Prince Andrei went home.
It was already the beginning of June, when Prince Andrei, returning home, drove again into that birch grove in which this old, gnarled oak struck him so strangely and memorable. The bells rang even more muffled in the forest than a month and a half ago; everything was full, shady and dense; and young spruce trees scattered throughout the forest did not disturb the general beauty and, imitation of the general character, tenderly turned green with fluffy young shoots.
The whole day was hot, a thunderstorm was gathering somewhere, but only a small cloud splashed on the dust of the road and on the succulent leaves. The left side of the forest was dark, in shadow; the right one, wet and glossy, shone in the sun, slightly swaying in the wind. Everything was in bloom; the nightingales chirped and rolled now close, now far away.
“Yes, here, in this forest, there was this oak, with which we agreed,” thought Prince Andrei. “Yes, where is he,” thought Prince Andrei again, looking at the left side of the road and without knowing it, not recognizing him, admired the oak he was looking for. The old oak tree, all transformed, stretched out in a tent of juicy, dark greenery, was thrilled, slightly swaying in the rays of the evening sun. No clumsy fingers, no sores, no old distrust and grief - nothing was visible. Juicy, young leaves broke through the tough, hundred-year-old bark without knots, so that it was impossible to believe that this old man had produced them. “Yes, this is the same oak tree,” thought Prince Andrei, and a causeless, spring feeling of joy and renewal suddenly came over him. All the best moments of his life were suddenly remembered to him at the same time. And Austerlitz with a high sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and the girl, excited by the beauty of the night, and this night, and the moon, - and he suddenly remembered all this.
“No, life is not over at the age of 31, suddenly, Prince Andrei decided completely, without change. Not only do I know everything that is in me, it is necessary that everyone knows this: both Pierre and this girl who wanted to fly into the sky, it is necessary that everyone knows me, so that my life goes not for me alone, so that they do not live so independently of my life, so that it is reflected on everyone and that they all live with me together!
Volokolamsk Highway (Alexander Beck, text 2005)
In the evening we set out on a night march to the Ruza River, thirty kilometers from Volokolamsk. A resident of southern Kazakhstan, I am used to late winter, but here, in the Moscow region, in early October it was already freezing in the morning. At dawn, along the frost-bitten road, along the hardened mud uprooted by wheels, we approached the village of Novlyanskoye. Leaving the battalion near the village, in the forest, I went with the company commanders for reconnaissance. My battalion was measured seven kilometers along the coast of the winding Ruza. In battle, according to our regulations, such a sector is large even for a regiment. This, however, did not disturb. I was sure that if the enemy ever really came here, he would be met at our seven kilometers not by a battalion, but by five or ten battalions. With such a calculation, I thought, it is necessary to prepare fortifications.
Don't expect me to paint nature. I don't know if the view before us was beautiful or not. On the dark mirror of the narrow, sluggish Ruza, large, as if carved leaves were spread out, on which, probably, white lilies bloomed in summer. Maybe it's beautiful, but I noticed for myself: a crappy little river, it is shallow and convenient for the enemy to cross. However, the coastal slopes on our side were inaccessible to tanks: gleaming with freshly cut clay, keeping traces of shovels, a sheer ledge, called in the military language an escarp, fell down to the water.
Beyond the river one could see the distance - open fields and individual massifs, or, as they say, wedges, forests. In one place, somewhat obliquely from the village of Novlyanskoye, the forest on the opposite bank almost immediately adjoined the water. In it, perhaps, there was everything that an artist who painted a Russian autumn forest would wish for, but this ledge seemed disgusting to me: here, most likely, the enemy, hiding from our fire, could concentrate for an attack. To hell with these pines and firs! Cut them out! Move the forest away from the river! Although none of us, as it was said, did not expect battles here soon, we were given the task of equipping a defensive line, and we had to carry it out with complete conscientiousness, as it should be for officers and soldiers of the Red Army.
Lake Taimyr (Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, text 2006)
Almost in the very center of the polar station of the country there is a huge Taimyr lake. It stretches from west to east in a long shining strip. Blocks of stone rise to the north, black ridges looming behind them. Until recently, people did not look at all here. Only along the course of the rivers can one find traces of human presence. Spring waters sometimes bring torn nets, floats, broken oars and other simple fishing accessories from the upper reaches.
At the swampy shores of the lake, the tundra is bare, only in some places snow spots turn white and glisten in the sun. Driven by the force of inertia, a huge ice field presses against the shores. The permafrost, bound by an ice shell, still firmly holds its legs. Ice at the mouth of rivers and small rivers will stand for a long time, and the lake will be cleared in ten days. And then the sandy shore, flooded with light, will turn into a mysterious glow of sleepy water, and then - into solemn silhouettes, vague outlines of the opposite shore.
On a clear windy day, inhaling the smells of the awakened earth, we wander through the thawed patches of the tundra and observe a lot of curious phenomena. The combination of the high sky with the cold wind is unusual. Every now and then a partridge runs out from under the feet, falling to the ground; breaks off and immediately, like a shot, a tiny little knick-knack falls to the ground. Trying to lead the uninvited visitor away from its nest, the little sandpiper begins to tumble at its very feet. At the base of the stone placer, a voracious arctic fox, covered with shreds of faded wool, makes its way. Having caught up with the fragments of stones, the arctic fox makes a well-calculated jump and presses down the mouse that has jumped out with its paws. Farther on, a stoat, holding a silver fish in its teeth, gallops towards the heaped boulders.
Near slowly melting glaciers, plants will soon begin to revive and bloom. The first to bloom are kandyk and Goryanka, which develop and fight for life even under a transparent cover of ice. In August, the first mushrooms will appear among the polar birch creeping on the hills.
The tundra overgrown with miserable vegetation has its own wonderful aromas. Summer will come, and the wind will shake the corollas of flowers, the buzz will fly by and the bumblebee will sit on the flower.
The sky is overcast again, the wind starts to whistle furiously. It's time to return to the wooden house of the polar station, where it smells deliciously of baked bread and the comfort of human habitation. Tomorrow we will start reconnaissance work.
Sotnikov (Vasil Bykov, text 2007)
All the last days Sotnikov was as if in prostration. He felt badly: he was exhausted without water and food. And he silently, half-consciously, sat among a close crowd of people on thorny, dry grass without any special thoughts in his head, and, probably, therefore, he did not immediately understand the meaning of the feverish whisper next to him: “At least one, but I will kill. Doesn't matter…". Sotnikov cautiously glanced aside: that same lieutenant of his neighbor, unnoticed by others, was pulling out an ordinary penknife from under dirty bandages on his leg, and such determination lurked in his eyes that Sotnikov thought: you can’t keep this.
Two escorts, having come together, lit a cigarette from a lighter, one on a horse, a little further away, vigilantly examined the column.
They sat still in the sun, maybe fifteen minutes, until some command was heard from the hill, and the Germans began to raise the column. Sotnikov already knew what the neighbor had decided on, who immediately began to take him away from the column, closer to the escort. This escort was a strong, squat German, like everyone else, with a machine gun on his chest, in a tight tunic sweating under his arms; from under the wet bed, from the edges of the cloth cap, something completely different from Aryan was knocked out - a black, almost resin forelock. The German hurriedly finished smoking his cigarette, spat through his teeth and, apparently intending to drive some prisoner, impatiently took two steps towards the column. At the same instant, the lieutenant, like a kite, rushed at him from behind and plunged the knife up to the handle into his tanned neck.
With a short grunt, the German donkey sank to the ground, someone at a distance shouted: “Polundra!” - and several people, as if they were thrown by a spring from the column, rushed into the field. Sotnikov also rushed away.
The confusion of the Germans lasted about five seconds, no more, immediately bursts hit in several places - the first bullets passed over his head. But he ran. It seems that never in his life he raced with such frantic speed, and in several wide leaps he ran up a hillock with pines. The bullets were already densely and randomly piercing the pine thicket, he was showered with needles from all sides, and he rushed on, not making out his way, as far as possible, now and then repeating to himself with joyful amazement: “Alive! Alive!
Naulaka: A Story of West and East (Rudyard Kipling, 2008 text)
After about ten minutes Tarvin began to guess that all these tired, exhausted people represented the interests of half a dozen different firms in Calcutta and Bombay. Like every spring, they besieged the royal palace without any hope of success, trying to get at least something in the accounts from the debtor, which was the king himself. His Majesty ordered everything in a row, indiscriminately, and in huge quantities - he really did not like to pay for purchases. He bought guns, travel bags, mirrors, expensive mantelpieces, embroideries, rainbow-colored Christmas decorations, saddles and harnesses, post-chaises, four-horse carriages, perfumes, surgical instruments, candlesticks, Chinese china—by the piece or in bulk, for cash or on credit, as His Royal Majesty pleased. Losing interest in the acquired things, he immediately lost his desire to pay for them, since there was little that occupied his jaded imagination for more than twenty minutes. Sometimes it happened that the very purchase of a thing satisfied him in full, and the boxes with precious contents that arrived from Calcutta remained unpacked. The peace that reigned in the Indian Empire prevented him from taking up arms and directing them against his fellow kings, and he lost the only joy and fun that had entertained himself and his ancestors for millennia. And yet he could play this game even now, though in a slightly modified form - fighting with the clerks, who were trying in vain to get a bill from him.
So, on one side stood the political resident of the state himself, planted in this place in order to teach the king the art of government, and most importantly, economy and frugality, and on the other side - more precisely, at the palace gates, there was usually a traveling salesman, in whose soul contempt for the malicious non-payer and the reverence inherent in every Englishman for the king fought.
Nevsky Prospekt (Nikolai Gogol, text 2009)
There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospekt, at least in St. Petersburg; for him he is everything. What does not shine this street - the beauty of our capital! I know that none of its pale and bureaucratic inhabitants would exchange for all the benefits of Nevsky Prospekt. Not only someone who is twenty-five years old, has a beautiful mustache and a wonderfully tailored frock coat, but even someone who has white hair popping up on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish, and he is delighted with Nevsky Prospekt. And ladies! Oh, Nevsky Prospekt is even more pleasant for ladies. And who doesn't like it? As soon as you ascend Nevsky Prospekt, it already smells of one festivities. Even if you have some necessary, necessary business, but, having ascended it, you will surely forget about every business. Here is the only place where people are shown not out of necessity, where their need and mercantile interest, embracing the whole of St. Petersburg, have not driven them.
Nevsky Prospekt is the general communication of St. Petersburg. Here, a resident of the Petersburg or Vyborg part, who for several years has not been to his friend at Sands or at the Moscow outpost, can be sure that he will certainly meet him. No address-calendar and reference place will deliver such true news as Nevsky Prospekt. Almighty Nevsky Prospekt! The only entertainment of the poor in the festivities of St. Petersburg! How cleanly its sidewalks are swept, and, God, how many feet have left their footprints on it! And the clumsy, dirty boot of a retired soldier, under the weight of which, it seems, the very granite is cracking, and the miniature, light as smoke, slipper of a young lady, turning her head towards the shiny windows of the store, like a sunflower towards the sun, and the rattling saber of a hopeful ensign, drawing a sharp scratch on him - everything takes out on him the power of strength or the power of weakness . What a quick phantasmagoria takes place on it in just one day!
What is the reason for the decline of the Russian language and does it exist at all? (Boris Strugatsky, text 2010)
There is no decline, and there cannot be. It’s just that censorship was softened, and in part, thank God, it was completely abolished, and what we used to hear in pubs and gateways now delights our ears, coming from the stage and from television screens. We tend to consider this the onset of lack of culture and the decline of the Language, but lack of culture, like any devastation, is not in books and not on the stage, it is in the souls and in the heads. And with the latter, in my opinion, nothing significant has happened in recent years. Unless our bosses, again, thank God, diverted from ideology and got carried away more by sawing the budget. So the languages have blossomed, and the Language has been enriched with remarkable innovations in the widest range - from “hedging the GKO portfolio with the help of futures” to the emergence of Internet jargon.
Talk about the decline in general and Language in particular is, in fact, the result of the lack of clear instructions from above. Appropriate indications will appear - and the decline will stop as if by itself, immediately giving way to some kind of "new flourishing" and universal sovereign "good air".
Literature is flourishing, finally remaining almost without censorship and in the shadow of liberal laws concerning book publishing. The reader is spoiled to the limit. Every year, several dozen books of such a level of significance appear that, if any of them appeared on the shelves 25 years ago, it would immediately become a sensation of the year, and today it causes only condescendingly approving grumbling of criticism. Talk about the notorious “crisis of literature” does not subside, the public demands the immediate appearance of new Bulgakov, Chekhov, thick ones, forgetting, as usual, that any classic is necessarily a “product of the time”, like good wine and, in general, like all good things. Do not pull the tree up by the branches: it will not grow faster from this. However, there is nothing wrong with talking about a crisis: there is little benefit from them, but there is no harm either.
And Language, as before, lives its own life, slow and incomprehensible, constantly changing and at the same time always remaining itself. Anything can happen to the Russian language: perestroika, transformation, transformation, but not extinction. It is too big, powerful, flexible, dynamic and unpredictable to take and suddenly disappear. Unless - together with us.
Spelling as a law of nature (Dmitry Bykov, text 2011)
The question of why literacy is needed is widely and passionately discussed. It would seem that today, when even a computer program is able to correct not only spelling, but also meaning, the average Russian does not need to know the countless and sometimes meaningless subtleties of his native spelling. I'm not talking about commas that are unlucky twice. At first, in the liberal nineties, they were placed anywhere or ignored altogether, claiming that this was an author's sign. Schoolchildren still widely use the unwritten rule: "If you don't know what to put, put a dash." No wonder it is called so - "a sign of despair." Then, in the stable zero, people began to fearfully play it safe and put commas where they were not needed at all. True, all this confusion with signs does not affect the meaning of the message. Why then write well?
I think this is something like those necessary conventions that replace our specific canine scent when sniffing. A somewhat developed interlocutor, having received an electronic message, identifies the author by a thousand little things: of course, he does not see the handwriting, unless the message came in a bottle, but a letter from a philologist containing spelling errors can be erased without finishing.
It is known that at the end of the war, the Germans, who used Russian labor, threatened to extort a special receipt from the Slavic slaves: "Someone treated me wonderfully and deserves indulgence." The soldiers-liberators, having occupied one of the suburbs of Berlin, read a letter proudly presented by the owner with a dozen gross errors, signed by a student of Moscow University. The extent of the author's sincerity became immediately apparent to them, and the philistine slave owner paid the price for his vile forethought.
Today we have almost no chance to quickly understand who is in front of us: the methods of disguise are cunning and numerous. You can imitate the mind, sociability, even, perhaps, intelligence. It is impossible to play only literacy - a refined form of politeness, the last identification mark of humble and memoryful people who respect the laws of language as the highest form of the laws of nature.
Part 1. Do you care? (Zakhar Prilepin, text 2012)
Recently, one often hears peremptory statements, for example: "I don't owe anything to anyone." They are repeated, considering it good form, by a considerable number of people of all ages, especially young people. And the older and wiser are even more cynical in their judgments: “There is no need to do anything, because while the Russians, forgetting about the greatness that has fallen under the bench, quietly drink, everything goes on as usual.” Have we become more inert and emotionally passive today than ever? Now it is not easy to understand, eventually time will tell. If a country called Russia suddenly discovers that it has lost a significant part of its territory and a significant proportion of its population, it will be possible to say that at the beginning of the 2000s we really had nothing to do and that in these years we were engaged in more important things than preserving statehood, national identity and territorial integrity. But if the country survives, then the complaints about the indifference of citizens to the fate of the Motherland were at least groundless.
Nevertheless, there are grounds for a disappointing forecast. Quite often there are young people who perceive themselves not as a link in an unbroken chain of generations, but nothing less than the crown of creation. But there are obvious things: life itself and the existence of the earth on which we walk are possible only because our ancestors treated everything differently.
I remember my old people: how beautiful they were and, my God, how young they were in their military photographs! And how happy they were that we, their children and grandchildren, were tangled among them, thin-legged and tanned, blooming and overcooked in the sun. For some reason, we decided that previous generations owed us, and we, as a new subspecies of individuals, are not responsible for anything and do not want to be indebted to anyone.
There is only one way to preserve the land given to us and the freedom of the people - to gradually and persistently get rid of the mass paroxysms of individualism, so that public statements about independence from the past and non-participation in the future of their homeland become at least a sign of bad taste.
Part 2. I care
Recently, categorical statements such as: "I owe nothing to anyone" are often heard. They are repeated by many, especially young people who consider themselves the crown of creation. It is no coincidence that the position of extreme individualism is a sign of almost good taste today. But first of all, we are social beings and live according to the laws and traditions of society.
Most often, traditional Russian plots are stupid: a pipe has habitually burst there, something has ignited here - and three districts were left either without heat, or without light, or without one or the other. No one is surprised for a long time, because this seems to have happened before.
The fate of society is directly related to the state as such and the actions of those who govern it. The state can ask, strongly recommend, order, in the end force us to do something.
A reasonable question arises: who and what needs to be done with people so that they are concerned not only with their own fate, but also with something more?
Now there is a lot of talk about the awakening of civic consciousness. It seems that society, regardless of someone else's will and orders from above, is recovering. And in this process, as we are convinced, the main thing is to “start with yourself”. I personally started: I screwed in a light bulb in the entrance, paid taxes, improved the demographic situation, provided several people with jobs. And what? And where is the result? It seems to me that while I am busy with small things, someone is doing their own, huge ones, and the vector of application of forces is completely different for us.
Meanwhile, everything that we have: from the land we walk on to the ideals we believe in, is not the result of “small deeds” and cautious steps, but of global projects, huge achievements, and selfless devotion. People are transformed only when they burst into the world with all their might. A person becomes a person in a search, in a feat, in labor, and not in petty introspection, turning the soul inside out.
It is much better to start to change the world around you, because you finally want a big country, big cares for it, big results, big earth and sky. Give a map with a real scale so that at least half a globe can be seen!
Part 3. And we care!
There is a quiet, like an itch, feeling that the state on this earth owes nothing to anyone. Maybe that's why lately we hear so often from people that I, they say, don't owe anything to anyone. And now I don’t understand: how can we all survive here and who will defend this country when it collapses?
If you seriously believe that Russia has exhausted the resources of resilience and we have no future, then, the right word, maybe it’s not worth worrying about? We have good reasons: the people are broken, all empires fall apart sooner or later, and therefore we have no chance.
Russian history, I do not argue, provoked such declarations. Nevertheless, our ancestors never believed in these skeptical nonsense. Who decided that we no longer have a chance, and, for example, the Chinese have more than enough of them? After all, they also have a multinational country that has survived revolutions and wars.
In fact, we live in a funny state. Here, in order to realize your elementary rights - to have a roof over your head and daily bread, you need to perform somersaults of extraordinary beauty: change your native places and jobs, get an education in order to work outside your specialty, go over your heads, and preferably on your hands. You can't just be a peasant, a nurse, an engineer, just a military man - it's not recommended at all.
But for all the, so to speak, "unprofitability" of the population, tens of millions of adult men and women live in Russia - capable, enterprising, enterprising, ready to plow and sow, build and rebuild, give birth and raise children. Therefore, a voluntary farewell to the national future is not at all a sign of common sense and balanced decisions, but a natural betrayal. You can’t give up positions, throw flags and run wherever your eyes look, without even making an attempt to protect your home. This, of course, is a figure of speech inspired by history and the smoke of the fatherland, in which the spiritual and cultural upsurge, the mass desire for reorganization has always been associated with great upheavals and wars. But they were crowned with Victories, which no one can achieve. And we must earn the right to be the heirs of these Victories!
Part 1. Gospel from the Internet (Dina Rubina, text 2013)
Once, many years ago, I got into a conversation with a familiar programmer and, among other remarks, I remember his phrase that a kind of ingenious thing was invented, thanks to which all the knowledge of mankind will become available to any subject - the World Wide Web.
This is amazing,” I said politely, always bored with the word “humanity” and hating the word “individual”.
Imagine,” he continued, “that for a dissertation on the production of pottery among the Etruscans, for example, you no longer need to dig into the archives, but just type in a certain code, and everything you need to work will appear on your computer screen.
But this is wonderful! I exclaimed.
Meanwhile he continued:
Unheard-of opportunities are opening up before mankind - in science, in art, in politics. Everyone will be able to convey their word to the attention of millions. At the same time, any person, he added, will become much more accessible to special services and not protected from all sorts of intruders, especially when hundreds of thousands of online communities emerge.
But it's terrible ... - I thought.
Many years have passed, but I remember this conversation very well. And today, having changed a dozen computers, corresponding - to the accompaniment of the keyboard - with hundreds of correspondents, running another request from Google to Yandex and mentally blessing the great invention, I still can’t unequivocally answer myself: is the Internet “great” or “terrible”?
Thomas Mann wrote: “...Where you are, there is the world - a narrow circle in which you live, learn and act; the rest is fog…”
The Internet - for good or for evil - dispelled the fog, turning on its merciless searchlights, piercing countries and continents with cutting light to the smallest grain of sand, and at the same time the fragile human soul. And what, by the way, has happened over the past twenty years with this notorious soul, before which dazzling opportunities for self-expression have opened up?
The Internet for me is the third turning point in the history of human culture - after the appearance of the language and the invention of the book. In ancient Greece, a speaker speaking in a square in Athens was heard by no more than twenty thousand people. This was the sonic limit of communication: the geography of the language is the tribe. Then came a book that expanded the circle of communication to the geography of the country. With the invention of the World Wide Web, a new stage of human existence in space arose: the geography of the Internet is the globe!
Part 2: The Dangers of Paradise
The Internet for me is the third turning point in the history of human culture - after the appearance of the language and the invention of the book. In ancient Greece, a speaker speaking in a square in Athens was heard by no more than twenty thousand people. This was the sonic limit of communication: the geography of the language is the tribe. Then came a book that expanded the circle of communication to the geography of the country.
And now there was a dizzying, unprecedented opportunity to instantly deliver the word to countless people. Another change of spaces: the geography of the Internet is the globe. And this is another revolution, and a revolution always breaks quickly, only it builds slowly.
Over time, a new hierarchy of mankind will arise, a new humane civilization. In the meantime ... while the "reverse side" of this grandiose breakthrough discovery dominates the Internet - its destructive power. It is no coincidence that the World Wide Web becomes a tool in the hands of terrorists, hackers and fanatics of all stripes.
The most obvious fact of our time is that the Internet, which has unthinkably expanded the ability of the common man to speak and act, is at the heart of the current "uprising of the masses." This phenomenon, which arose in the first half of the twentieth century, caused by the vulgarization of culture - material and spiritual - gave rise to both communism and Nazism. Today it is turned to the "mass" in any person, feeds on it and satisfies it in all respects - from linguistic to political and consumer, because it brought the desired "bread and circuses" incredibly close to the people, including the lowest ones. This confidant, preacher and confessor of the crowds turns into “noise” everything he touches, everything that life gives; breeds vulgarity, ignorance and aggression, giving them an unheard of, bewitching way out not just outside, but to the whole world. The most dangerous thing is that this playful and very intelligent "child" of the new civilization destroys the criteria - the spiritual, moral and behavioral codes of the existence of human society. What to do, in the Internet space everyone is equal in the most common sense of the word. And I think: is it not too high a price we pay for a great opportunity to talk with a distant friend, read a rare book, see a brilliant picture and hear a great opera? Was this grandiose discovery too early? In other words, has mankind grown up to itself?
Part 3. Evil for good or good for evil?
Questions relating to the mighty Internet are quite existential, as is the question of what we do in this world.
There is no instrument that can determine the obvious benefit and the equally obvious evil that all great inventions bring us, just as there is no way to separate one from the other.
I would not be in a hurry to criticize the Internet too sharply for all the sins of mankind, - objected my friend, a famous physicist who has lived in Paris for a long time (by the way, we met him via the Internet). - From my point of view, this is a wonderful thing, if only because talented and smart people got the opportunity to communicate, unite and thereby contribute to the great discoveries of modern times. Think, for example, about polar explorers in Antarctica: isn't Internet communication a great boon for them? And the plebs will remain plebs, with or without the Internet. At one time, monsters of the style of Hitler or Mussolini, with only radio and the press, managed to influence the masses with murderous influence. Yes, and the book has always been a very powerful tool: on paper, you can print Shakespeare's poetry and Chekhov's prose, or you can print manuals on terrorism and calls for pogroms - paper will endure everything, just like the Internet. This invention does not in itself fall into the categories of good or evil, just like fire, dynamite, alcohol, nitrates or nuclear energy. It all depends on who is using it. It's so obvious that it's even boring to discuss. Write better about how difficult it is to become an adult in our age, how entire generations are doomed to eternal and irreversible immaturity ...
That is all the same about the World Wide Web? I bluntly stated. - Just there I read the other day: "The best thing that life has given me is a childhood without the Internet."
So what? we, in fact, do in this world, I think, penetrating deeper and deeper into its secrets, trying to get to the bottom of the innermost spring, whose crystal power will quench our thirst for immortality? And does it exist, this spring, or does each next generation, which has removed another veil from the great mystery, only be able to muddy the pure waters of being, given to us by the unknowable genius of the Universe?
Train Chusovskaya - Tagil (Alexey Ivanov, text 2014)
Part 1. On the train through childhood
"Chusovskaya - Tagil" ... I traveled by this train only in the summer.
A string of wagons and a locomotive - angular and massive, it smelled of hot metal and, for some reason, tar. Every day this train departed from the old Chusovoy station, which no longer exists, and the conductors stood in the open doors, putting out yellow flags.
The railway turned decisively from the Chusovaya River into a hollow between the mountains, and then for many hours in a row the train beat fractionally through the dense ravines. From above, the motionless summer sun was roasting, and the Urals were swaying around in the blue and haze: either some taiga plant would put up a thick pipe of red brick over the forest, or a gray-gray rock above the valley would sparkle with mica, or in an abandoned quarry, like a rolled coin, a quiet lake would flash. The whole surrounding world outside the window could suddenly fall down - this car raced along a short, like a sigh, bridge over a flat river, riddled with boulders. More than once the train was carried out onto tall embankments, and it flew with a howl at the level of the spruce tops, almost in the sky, and around in a spiral, like circles in a whirlpool, the horizon unfolded with sloping ridges, on which something strange flashed.
The semaphore switched scale, and after grandiose panoramas, the train slowed down at modest sidings with dead ends, where the red-hot wheels of forgotten cars stuck to the red rails. Here, the windows of wooden stations were decorated with architraves, signs “Do not walk along the tracks!” rusted, and under them dogs slept in dandelions. Cows grazed in the weeds of the drainage ditches, and stray raspberries grew behind the creviced plank platforms. The hoarse whistle of the train floated over the station like a local hawk that had long since lost the greatness of a predator and was now stealing chickens from the front gardens, snatching sparrows from the gable slate roof of the sawmill.
Going through the details in my memory, I no longer know and don’t even understand what kind of magical country this train is traveling through - through the Urals or through my childhood.
Part 2. Train and people
"Chusovskaya - Tagil" ... Solar train.
Then, in childhood, everything was different: the days were longer, and the land was larger, and the bread was not imported. I liked my fellow travelers, I was fascinated by the mystery of their life, revealed to me by chance, as if in passing. Here is a clean old woman unfolding a newspaper in which onion feathers, cabbage pies and hard-boiled eggs are neatly folded. Here is an unshaven dad rocking his little daughter sitting on his lap, and there is so much tenderness in that cautious movement with which this man, clumsy and awkward, covers the girl with the skirt of his tattered jacket ... Here the demobilized demobilized men are drinking vodka: they seem to be stunned with happiness, they cackle in discord, fraternize, but suddenly, as if remembering something, they start to fight, then cry from the inability to express what they do not understand suffering, embrace again and sing songs. And only after many years I realized how stale the soul is when you live away from home for a long time.
Once, at some station, I saw how all the conductors went to the buffet and chatted, and the train suddenly slowly floated along the platform. The aunts flew out onto the platform and, cursing the jockey driver who didn’t give a whistle, they rushed after him in a crowd, and from the doors of the last car the head of the train shamelessly whistled with two fingers, like a fan at the stadium. Of course, the joke is rude, but no one was offended, and then they all laughed together.
Here, bewildered parents taxied their children to the train on motorcycles with sidecars, kissed and had bitter fun, played harmonicas and used to dance. Here, the conductors told the passengers to calculate how much the ticket costs and bring them “without change”, and the passengers honestly rummaged through their wallets and wallets, looking for a change. Here everyone was involved in the general movement and experienced it in their own way. You could go out into the vestibule, open the door outside, sit on the iron steps and just look at the world, and no one would scold you.
"Chusovskaya - Tagil", the train of my childhood ...
Part 3. When the train returns
My mom and dad worked as engineers, they couldn’t afford the Black Sea, so during the summer holidays they united with friends and on the Chusovskaya - Tagil train they left in cheerful companies for family hikes along the Ural rivers. In those years, the very order of life was as if specially adapted for friendship: all the parents worked together, and all the children studied together. Perhaps this is what is called harmony.
Our dashing and powerful dads threw backpacks with padded sleeping bags and canvas tents heavy as if they were made of sheet iron onto the luggage racks, and our naive mothers, fearing that the children would not find out about the plans of adults, asked in a whisper: “Did you take it for the evening?” My father, the strongest and most cheerful, not at all embarrassed and not even smiling, answered: “Of course! A loaf of white and a loaf of red.
And we, the children, rode towards wonderful adventures - where there are merciless suns, impregnable rocks and fiery dawns, and we had wonderful dreams while we slept on hard wagon shelves, and these dreams are the most amazing! - have always come true. A hospitable and friendly world opened up before us, life went off into the distance, into a blinding infinity, the future seemed beautiful, and we rolled there in a creaky, shabby carriage. In the railway schedule, our train was listed as a suburban one, but we knew that it was an ultra-long-distance train.
And now the future has become real - not beautiful, but the way it seems to be. I live in it and get to know the homeland through which my train travels better, and it is getting closer to me, but, alas, I remember my childhood less and less, and it is farther and farther away from me - this is very, very sad. However, my present will also soon become the past, and then the same train will take me not to the future, but to the past - the same way, but in the opposite direction of time.
"Chusovskaya - Tagil", the solar train of my childhood.
Magic lantern. (Evgeny Vodolazkin, text 2015)
Part 1. Dacha
Professor's dacha on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. In the absence of the owner, a friend of my father, our family was allowed to live there. Even decades later, I remember how, after a tiring road from the city, the coolness of a wooden house enveloped me, how the body, shaken and disintegrated in the carriage, gathered up. This coolness was not associated with freshness, rather, oddly enough, with an intoxicating mustiness, in which the aromas of old books and numerous ocean trophies merged, it was not clear how the law professor got it. Dried starfish, mother-of-pearl shells, carved masks, a pith helmet, and even a pipefish quill lay on the shelves, spreading a salty smell.
Gently pushing aside the seafood, I took books from the shelves, sat Turkish-style in an armchair with boxwood armrests and read. He leafed through the pages with his right hand, while his left clutched a piece of bread with butter and sugar. I ate thoughtfully and read, and the sugar creaked on my teeth. These were Jules Verne novels or magazine descriptions of exotic countries bound in leather - an unknown world, inaccessible and infinitely far from jurisprudence. At his dacha, the professor obviously collected what he had dreamed of since childhood, which was not provided for by his current position and was not regulated by the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire. In the countries dear to his heart, I suspect there were no laws at all.
From time to time I raised my eyes from the book and, watching the fading of the bay outside the window, tried to understand how lawyers become. Have you dreamed about it since childhood? Doubtful. As a child, I dreamed of being a conductor or, say, a fire chief, but never a lawyer. I also imagined that I stayed in this cool room forever, I live in it, as if in a capsule, and outside the window there are changes, coups, earthquakes, and there is no more sugar, no butter, not even the Russian Empire - and only I sit and read, read ... Later life showed that I guessed right with sugar and butter, but to sit and read - this, alas, did not work out.
Part 2. Park
We are in Polezhaevsky Park, mid-June. The river Ligovka flows there, it is quite small, but in the park it turns into a lake. On the water - boats, on the grass - checkered blankets, fringed tablecloths, samovars. I watch as a company sitting nearby starts a gramophone. I don’t remember who exactly is sitting, but I can still see the handle turning. After a moment there is music - hoarse, stuttering, but still music.
A box full of small, cold, singing, even from the outside and invisible - I did not have such a thing. And how I wanted to have it: take care of it, cherish it, put it by the stove in the winter, but most importantly, wind it up with regal carelessness, as they do a long-familiar thing. The rotation of the handle seemed to me a simple and at the same time non-obvious cause of flowing sounds, a kind of universal master key to beauty. There was something Mozartian in this, something like a wave of a conductor's baton, reviving dumb instruments and also not quite explainable by earthly laws. I used to conduct by myself, humming the tunes I heard, and I did pretty well. If it weren't for the dream of becoming a firemaster, then I would like to be, of course, a conductor.
On that June day we also saw the conductor. With an orchestra obedient to his hand, he slowly moved away from the shore. It was not a park orchestra, not a wind orchestra - a symphony one. He stood on a raft, not knowing how to fit in, and his music spread over the water, and the rest listened to it half-heartedly. Boats and ducks floated around the raft, now the creak of the oarlocks, now the quacking were heard, but all this easily grew into the music and was received by the conductor favorably on the whole. Surrounded by musicians, the conductor was at the same time lonely: there is an incomprehensible tragedy in this profession. He, perhaps, is not expressed as clearly as that of the firemaster, since he is not connected either with fire or with external circumstances in general, but this inner, hidden nature of him burns hearts all the more.
Part 3. Nevsky
I saw how they drove along the Nevsky to put out a fire - in early autumn, at the end of the day. Ahead on a black horse is a “leap” (as the advanced rider of the fire wagon was called), with a pipe at his mouth, like an angel of the Apocalypse. The leap trumpets, clearing the way, and everyone rushes in all directions. The cab drivers whip the horses, press them to the side of the road and freeze, standing half-turned towards the firemen. And now, along the seething Nevsky in the resulting void, a chariot carrying firefighters rushes: they sit on a long bench, back to back, in copper helmets, and the banner of the fire department flutters over them; at the banner - the fireman, he rings the bell. In their dispassion, the firefighters are tragic, on their faces there are reflections of a flame that has already flared up somewhere, already somewhere waiting for them, invisible for the time being.
Fiery yellow leaves from the Catherine's Garden, where there is a fire, sadly fly down on those who are traveling. My mother and I are standing by the wrought-iron grate and watching how the weightlessness of the leaves is transferred to the convoy: it slowly breaks away from the paving stones and flies over the Nevsky Prospect at a low altitude. A wagon with a steam pump floats behind the line with firefighters (steam from the boiler, smoke from the chimney), followed by a medical van to rescue the burnt. I cry, and my mother says that I should not be afraid, but I am crying not from fear - from an excess of feelings, from admiration for the courage and great glory of these people, because they float so majestically past the frozen crowd to the sound of bells.
I really wanted to become a fireman, and every time I saw firefighters, I turned to them with a silent request to accept me into their ranks. She, of course, was not heard, but now, years later, I do not regret it. Then, driving along the Nevsky on the imperial, I invariably imagined that I was heading for a fire: I behaved solemnly and a little sadly, and did not know how things would still turn out there when extinguishing, and caught enthusiastic glances, and to the greetings of the crowd, slightly throwing my head to one side, answered with my eyes.
This ancient-ancient-ancient world! (Alexander Usachev, text 2016)
Part 1. Briefly about the history of the theater
It is said that the ancient Greeks were very fond of grapes and after harvesting they held a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of grapes. The retinue of Dionysus was made up of goat-footed creatures - satyrs. Depicting them, the Hellenes put on goat skins, galloped wildly and sang - in a word, they selflessly indulged in fun. Such performances were called tragedies, which in ancient Greek meant "singing goats." Subsequently, the Hellenes thought about what else to dedicate such games to?
Ordinary people have always been interested in knowing how the rich live. The playwright Sophocles began to write plays about kings, and it immediately became clear: kings often cry and their personal lives are unsafe and by no means simple. And in order to make the story entertaining, Sophocles decided to attract actors who could play his works - this is how the theater appeared.
At first, art lovers were very unhappy: only those who sat in the front row saw the action, and since tickets were not yet provided then, the strongest and tallest occupied the best seats. Then the Hellenes decided to eliminate this inequality and built an amphitheater, where each next row was higher than the previous one, and everything that happened on the stage became visible to everyone who came to the performance.
The performance usually involved not only actors, but also the choir, broadcasting on behalf of the people. For example, a hero entered the arena and said:
"I'm going to do something bad now!"
- To do bad shamelessly! howled the choir.
“All right,” the hero agreed reluctantly on reflection. "Then I'll go and do something good."
“Doing good is good,” the choir approved of him, thus, as if inadvertently pushing the hero to death: after all, as it should be in tragedy, retribution inevitably comes for good deeds.
True, sometimes a “god from the machine” appeared (a machine was called a special crane on which the “god” was lowered onto the stage) and unexpectedly saved the hero. Whether it was really a real god or still an actor is still unclear, but it is known for certain that both the word “machine” and theatrical cranes were invented in ancient Greece.
Part 2. Briefly about the history of writing
In those ancient times, when the Sumerians came to the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates, they spoke an incomprehensible language: after all, the Sumerians were the discoverers of new lands and their language was like that of real scouts - secret, encrypted. No one had and does not have such a language, except perhaps for other intelligence officers.
Meanwhile, the people in Mesopotamia were already using wedges with might and main: young men knocked wedges under the girls (this is how they courted them); swords and knives forged from Damascus steel were wedge-shaped; even cranes in the sky - and they flew in a wedge. The Sumerians saw so many wedges around them that they invented writing - wedges. This is how cuneiform writing, the oldest writing system in the world, was born.
During the lessons in the Sumerian school, students squeezed out wedges on clay tablets with wooden sticks, and therefore everything around was smeared with clay - from floor to ceiling. The cleaners eventually became furious, because such study at school is nothing but dirt, and they have to keep it clean. And in order to maintain cleanliness, it must be clean, otherwise there is nothing to maintain.
But in ancient Egypt, writing consisted of drawings. The Egyptians thought: why write the word "bull" if you can just draw this bull? The ancient Greeks (or Hellenes, as they called themselves) later called such words-drawings hieroglyphs. Writing lessons in ancient Egyptian were more like drawing lessons, and drawing hieroglyphs was a real art.
“Well, no,” said the Phoenicians. – We are hard-working people, artisans and sailors, and we do not need sophisticated calligraphy, let us have simpler writing.
And they came up with letters - this is how the alphabet turned out. People began to write in letters, and the further, the faster. And the faster they wrote, the uglier they got. Doctors wrote the most: they wrote prescriptions. Therefore, some of them still have such a handwriting that they seem to write letters, but hieroglyphs come out.
Part 3. Briefly about the history of the Olympic Games
The ancient Greeks came up with the Olympic Games while they were waging one of their never-ending wars. There were two main reasons: firstly, during battles, soldiers and officers had no time to go in for sports, but the Hellenes (as the ancient Greeks called themselves) tried to train all the time not busy with exercises in philosophy; secondly, the soldiers wanted to return home as soon as possible, and vacation in the war was not provided. It was clear that the troops needed a truce and that the only way to declare it could be the Olympic Games: after all, an indispensable condition for the Olympics is an end to the war.
At first, the Hellenes wanted to hold the Olympic Games annually, but later they realized that frequent breaks in hostilities endlessly lengthen wars, so the Olympic Games began to be announced only once every four years. Of course, there were no Winter Games in those days, because there were no ice arenas or ski slopes in Hellas.
Any citizen could participate in the Olympic Games, but the rich could afford expensive sports equipment, while the poor could not. To prevent the rich from defeating the poor just because their sports equipment is better, all athletes measured their strength and agility naked.
Why were the games called the Olympic Games? - you ask. - Did the gods from Olympus also take part in them?
No, the gods, apart from quarrels among themselves, did not engage in any other sport, but they loved to follow sports competitions from the skies with undisguised excitement from mortals. And to make it more convenient for the gods to observe the ups and downs of the competition, the first stadium was built in the sanctuary, which was called Olympia - this is how the games got their name.
The gods, even for the time of the games, concluded a truce between themselves and swore not to help their chosen ones. Moreover, they even allowed the Hellenes to consider the winners as gods - however, temporary, only for one day. Olympic champions were awarded olive and laurel wreaths: medals had not yet been invented, and laurel in ancient Greece was worth its weight in gold, so a laurel wreath then was the same as a gold medal today.
City on the river (Leonid Yuzefovich, text 2017)
Part 1. St. Petersburg. Neva
My grandfather was born in Kronstadt, my wife is from Leningrad, so in St. Petersburg I feel not quite a stranger. However, in Russia it is difficult to find a person in whose life this city would mean nothing. We are all connected in one way or another with him, and through him with each other.
There is little greenery in St. Petersburg, but there is a lot of water and sky. The city is spread out on a plain, and the sky above it is immense. You can enjoy the performances played on this stage by clouds and sunsets for a long time. The actors are controlled by the best director in the world - the wind. The scenery of roofs, domes and spiers remains unchanged, but never gets bored.
In 1941, Hitler decided to starve out Leningraders and wipe the city off the face of the earth. “The Fuhrer did not understand that the order to blow up Leningrad was tantamount to an order to blow up the Alps,” noted writer Daniil Granin. St. Petersburg is a stone bulk, which in its unity and power has no equal among European capitals. It has preserved over eighteen thousand buildings built before 1917. This is more than in London and Paris, not to mention Moscow.
The Neva with its tributaries, channels and canals flows through an indestructible labyrinth carved from stone. Unlike the sky, the water here is not free, it speaks of the power of the empire, which managed to forge it in granite. In summer, fishermen with fishing rods stand by the parapets on the embankments. Under their feet are plastic bags in which caught fish tremble. The same roach and fish catchers stood here under Pushkin. The bastions of the Peter and Paul Fortress turned gray then, and the Bronze Horseman reared his horse. Except that the Winter Palace was dark red, not green, as it is now.
It seems that nothing around reminds us that in the twentieth century a crack in Russian history passed through St. Petersburg. His beauty allows us to forget about the unimaginable trials he endured.
Part 2. Perm. Kama
When from the left bank of the Kama, on which my native Perm lies, you look at the right bank with its forests turning blue to the horizon, you feel the fragility of the border between civilization and the primordial forest element. Only a strip of water separates them, and it also unites them. If as a child you lived in a city on a large river, you were lucky: you understand the essence of life better than those who were deprived of this happiness.
In my childhood, sterlet was still found in Kama. In the old days, it was sent to St. Petersburg to the royal table, and in order not to deteriorate on the way, cotton wool soaked in cognac was placed under the gills. As a boy, I saw a small sturgeon on the sand with a jagged back stained with fuel oil: the whole Kama was then covered in fuel oil from tugboats. These dirty hard workers dragged rafts and barges behind them. Children ran on the decks and clothes dried in the sun. Endless strings of stapled, slimy logs vanished along with the tugs and barges. Kama became cleaner, but the sterlet never returned to it.
It was said that Perm, like Moscow and Rome, lay on seven hills. It was enough to feel the breath of history blowing over my wooden city, studded with factory pipes. Its streets run either parallel to the Kama or perpendicular to it. Before the revolution, the first ones were called by the churches that stood on them, such as, for example, Voznesenskaya or Pokrovskaya. The latter bore the names of the places where the roads flowing from them led: Siberian, Solikamsk, Verkhoturskaya. Where they intersected, the heavenly met the earthly. Here I realized that sooner or later converges with the mountain, you just need to be patient and wait.
Permians argue that it is not the Kama that flows into the Volga, but, on the contrary, the Volga flows into the Kama. It does not matter to me which of these two great rivers is a tributary of the other. In any case, Kama is the river that flows through my heart.
Part 3. Ulan-Ude. Selenga
The names of the rivers are older than all other names on maps. We do not always understand their meaning, so the Selenga keeps the secret of its name. It came either from the Buryat word "sel", which means "spill", or from the Evenki "sele", that is, "iron", but I heard in it the name of the Greek goddess of the moon, Selena. Squeezed by forested hills, often shrouded in mist, the Selenga was for me a mysterious “moon river”. In the noise of its current, I, a young lieutenant, seemed to be a promise of love and happiness. It seemed that they were waiting for me ahead as immutably as Baikal was waiting for the Selenga.
Maybe she promised the same to the twenty-year-old lieutenant Anatoly Pepelyaev, the future white general and poet. Shortly before the First World War, he secretly married his chosen one in a poor rural church on the banks of the Selenga. The noble father did not give his son a blessing for an unequal marriage. The bride was the granddaughter of the exiles and the daughter of a simple railroad worker from Verkhneudinsk, as Ulan-Ude used to be called.
I found this city almost the same as Pepelyaev saw it. In the market, Buryats who came from the outback in traditional blue robes traded lamb and women in museum sundresses walked around. They sold circles of frozen milk strung on their hands like rolls. They were “family”, as the Old Believers, who used to live in large families, are called in Transbaikalia. True, something appeared that did not exist under Pepelyaev. I remember how the most original of all the monuments to Lenin I have seen was placed on the main square: on a low pedestal, a huge granite head of the leader, without a neck and torso, was rounded, similar to the head of a giant hero from Ruslan and Lyudmila. It still stands in the capital of Buryatia and has become one of its symbols. Here history and modernity, Orthodoxy and Buddhism do not reject or suppress each other. Ulan-Ude gave me hope that this is possible in other places.
Language teacher.
Part 1. Morning
Every morning, still by the light of the stars, Yakob Ivanovich Bach woke up and, lying under a thick quilted duck down feather bed, listened to the world. Quiet discordant sounds of someone else's life flowing somewhere around him and above him calmed him down. Winds blew over the rooftops - heavy in winter, densely mixed with snow and ice grains, resilient in spring, breathing moisture and heavenly electricity, sluggish, dry in summer, mixed with dust and light feather grass seed. Dogs barked, welcoming the sleepy owners who came out onto the porch, and cattle roared in a bass voice on their way to the watering place. The world breathed, crackled, whistled, mooed, clattered its hooves, rang and sang in different voices.
The sounds of his own life were so meager and blatantly insignificant that Bach forgot how to hear them: he isolated them in the general sound stream and let them pass by his ears. The glass of the only window in the room rattled under the gusts of wind; That, perhaps, is all. It was much more interesting to listen to the great life. Sometimes, having listened, Bach even forgot that he himself was a part of this world, that he could, having gone out onto the porch, join the polyphony: sing something perky, or slam the door loudly, or, at worst, just sneeze. But Bach preferred to listen.
At six in the morning, carefully dressed and combed, he was already standing at the school bell tower with a pocket watch in his hands. After waiting for both hands to merge into a single line (hours at six, minutes at twelve), he pulled the rope with all his strength - and the bronze bell resounded. Over many years of practice, Bach achieved such mastery in this matter that the sound of a blow was heard exactly at the moment when the minute hand touched the zenith of the dial, and not a second later. A moment later, everyone in the village turned towards the sound and whispered a short prayer. A new day has dawned...
Part 2. Day
... Over the years of teaching, each of which resembled the previous one and did not stand out in anything special, Yakob Ivanovich was so used to pronouncing the same words and reading the same tasks that he learned to mentally split inside his body: his tongue muttered the text of the next grammatical rule, his hand clamped in it with a ruler languidly slapped the overly talkative student on the back of the head, his legs sedately carried the body through the class from the department to back wall, then back, back and forth. And the thought dozed, lulled by his own voice and measured shaking of his head in time with unhurried steps.
German speech was the only subject during which Bach's thought regained its former freshness and vivacity. We started the lesson with oral exercises. The students were asked to tell something, Bach listened and translated: he turned short dialect turns into elegant phrases of literary German. They moved slowly, sentence by sentence, word by word, as if they were walking somewhere in deep snow, trail after trail. Yakob Ivanovich did not like to delve into the alphabet and calligraphy and, having finished with conversations, hastily rushed the lesson to the poetic part: verses poured generously on young shaggy heads, like water from a pelvis on a bath day.
Bach's love for poetry burned even in his youth. Then it seemed that he did not eat potato soup and sauerkraut, but only ballads and hymns. It seemed that he could feed everyone around with them - that's why he became a teacher. Until now, reciting his favorite stanzas in class, Bach still felt a cool flutter of delight in his chest. The children did not share the teacher's passion: their faces, usually playful or concentrated, acquired a submissive somnambulistic expression with the very first sounds of poetic lines. German romanticism had an effect on the class better than sleeping pills. Perhaps the reading of poetry could be used to calm the naughty audience instead of the usual screams and hits with a ruler ...
Part 3. Evening
... Bach descended from the porch of the school and found himself on the square, at the foot of the majestic church with a spacious prayer hall in the lace of lancet windows and a huge bell tower resembling a sharpened pencil. I walked past neat wooden houses with sky-blue, berry-red and corn-yellow architraves; past planed fences; past overturned in anticipation of the flood boats; past front gardens with rowan bushes. He walked so swiftly, loudly crunching his boots in the snow or squelching his boots in the spring mud, that one might think that he had a dozen urgent matters that should certainly be settled today ...
Passers-by, noticing the mincing figure of the teacher, sometimes called out to him and talked about the school successes of their offspring. However, he, out of breath from a quick walk, answered reluctantly, in short phrases: time was running out. In confirmation, he took out a watch from his pocket, threw a contrite glance at them and, shaking his head, ran on. Where he fled, Bach himself could not explain.
I must say, there was another reason for his haste: when talking with people, Yakob Ivanovich stuttered. His trained language, which worked steadily and without fail during the lessons and without a single hesitation uttered the multi-component words of literary German, easily gave out such complex subordinating knees that some student would forget even the beginning until he listened to the end. The same language suddenly began to refuse the owner when Bach switched to a dialect in conversations with his fellow villagers. To read by heart passages from Faust, for example, the tongue desired; to tell the neighbor: “But your dunce has been mischievous again today!” didn’t want to in any way, stuck to the palate and interfered between the teeth, like an oversized and poorly cooked dumpling. It seemed to Bach that stuttering intensified over the years, but it was difficult to verify this: he talked with people less and less often ... So a life flowed in which there was everything except life itself, calm, full of penny joys and meager anxieties, in some way even happy.
Sailing regatta from "Russian Seven". Rafting on the main rivers of Russia!
Volga. River flows
The main water brand of Russia is the Volga. Insanely popular river, though not the longest, not the most abundant. Why? The answer is simple: the Volga basin occupies about 1/3 of the European territory of Russia. By the way, the length of the river is 3530 km. It's like from Moscow to Berlin and back.
The Volga is dedicated not only to a song known without exaggeration to all Russians and a film with the title title. The action of A. Ostrovsky's plays takes place, as a rule, in cities on the Volga. A particularly strong image of the river was created in the film "Cruel Romance"!
Detail: Lotuses - flowers that are associated with the exotic and the East, have long lived in our Volga.
Oka. Not only a small car
The Oka River is the Great Russian River, and it is not in vain that we write this word with a capital letter! Almost all of Central Russia lies on the banks, the area of the river basin (245,000 sq. Km) is equal to the territory of the whole of Great Britain, and the length is 1,500 km.
In many respects (navigation, basin area, etc.) for Russia, the Oka exceeded the value of the Nile for Egypt. It is no coincidence that in the 9th-10th centuries, foreigners called the Oka River "Russian River", "River Rus".
By the way, the name of the river "Oka" supposedly comes from the Proto-European "aqva" - "water", it is so ancient! There is a hypothesis that even the word "ocean" (understood as "a great river bordering the world") in Russian comes from the word "Oka".
Don. Millennium Witness of Russian History
Don is a thousand-year-old witness of Russian history. This river appeared on Earth - scary to say! - about 23 million years ago. And according to scientists, the Paleo-Don collected the waters of the entire Russian Plain.
Among the ancient Greeks and Romans, the lower reaches of the Tanais (Don) were reputed to be the habitat of the legendary Amazons. These women-warriors also got into our epics, which often tell about the fights of Russian heroes with daring riders - "glade".
Detail: Our "father-Don" has two younger namesakes in England: the river Don in the Scottish county of Aberdeen and the river of the same name in the English county of York.
Dnieper. A rare bird will fly to its middle
The Dnieper has been known since ancient times! Even Herodotus called him in his historical treatises Borisfen (which means "river flowing from the north").
Here is what the ancient Greek historian wrote: "Borisfen is the most profitable river: beautiful fat pastures for cattle stretch along its banks; the best fish is found in large quantities in it; the water is pleasant to drink and transparent (compared to the water of other muddy rivers of Scythia)."
During the period of Kievan Rus, the river was called Slavutich ("river of the Slavs"), at that time a waterway "from the Varangians to the Greeks" passed through it, connecting the Baltic (Varangian) Sea with the Black (Russian) Sea.
Detail: "A rare bird will fly to the middle of the Dnieper," wrote N. Gogol. The birds have enough strength to fly to the middle and fly over the river. And a rare bird meant a parrot, which is really difficult to meet in these parts.
Yenisei. Natural border between Eastern and Western Siberia
On the left bank of the Yenisei, the West Siberian plains end, and on the right bank, the mountain taiga begins. Therefore, in its upper reaches you can meet camels, and going downstream to the Ocean - polar bears.
Until now, there are legends about the origin of the word Yenisei: either it is the Tungus word "enesi" ("big water"), converted into Russian, or the Kyrgyz "enee-Sai" (mother river).
Detail: The Yenisei and other Iberian rivers bring as much heat to the Arctic Ocean as burning 3 billion tons of fuel would give. If not for the rivers, the climate of the North would be more severe.
Last Saturday, about 200,000 people from 866 cities around the world joined the international literacy campaign. The text for it this year was written by the famous writer, screenwriter and historian Leonid Yuzefovich. It consists of 250 words and three parts. Each is dedicated to cities that played a big role in life - Perm, where he spent his childhood and youth, Ulan-Ude, where he served in the army, and, finally, St. Petersburg, where the writer lives now.
In Vladivostok, the participants of the event were invited aboard the Pallada frigate. And in the homeland of the "Total Dictation" in Novosibirsk, there were not even free places in the classrooms, so many had to write it, sitting on the windowsills. In Crimea, a voluntary "exam" in the Russian language could be combined with a trip - paper and pens were handed out to passengers of an intercity trolley bus.
The capital of Buryatia was no exception: over a thousand citizens decided to test their literacy this year - twice as many as last year. The number of sites has increased from six to nine. "Total dictation" for Ulan-Ude residents was read by well-known presenters and journalists. Among them are Irina Ermil, Sarzhana Merdygeeva (Badmatsyrenova) and Alexei Fishev (ArigUs TV company), Tatyana Nikitina (Moskovsky Komsomolets in Buryatia), Tatyana Migotskaya (GTRK Buryatia), Bulat Tsydenesheev (ATV TV channel) and Daria Belousova (Tivik TV company).
Residents of the Buryat capital got the story of Yuzefovich about St. Petersburg and the Neva River, on which he stands. Before starting the dictation, the participants were shown the message of the organizers and the author himself.
“I did well at your age!”
But Petersburgers and Muscovites wrote a text about Ulan-Ude and the Selenga. A Moskovsky Komsomolets correspondent watched the process at the My Russia VDNKh site, where two people dictated at once - Vice-Miss World 2015 Sofia Nikitchuk and singer and composer Yuri Loza. The journalist shared his impressions with readers in an article published on the publication's website two days ago.
At first it seems that the vice-miss of the world dictates about the former Verkhneudinsk, and now - Ulan-Ude - too slowly. I gather with malicious thoughts about it, but then I see: only we, the elders, scratch our texts quite quickly, and the majority of the audience barely has time. Everything is clear: the generation of “thumbs” has no equal in typing speed, but they are not masters of handwriting. And they don’t read much: they obviously don’t know words like “Evenki” or “exiled” and ask again, - writes the MK correspondent.
Vine, who took the place of Sophia, promised the participants of the action that now it will "be easier" for them.
Because beautiful girls are always a distraction. What about looking at me? he said.
Alas, it didn't get any easier. Rather, on the contrary: the pop singer drove so fast that only the elders could keep up with him, and the rest of the audience began to grumble.
How can you not make it? he wondered. - I did well at your age!
After the proposal for a monument to Lenin in Ulan-Ude in the form of the head of the leader, Loza again could not stand it.
I saw this head, guys, it's something! he told the audience. - Only the monument to Lenin in Orenburg is funnier: they put a huge pedestal there, and the money ended there. And a tiny figurine with an outstretched handle was installed on it. Laughter!
Alas, the audience is not funny: carried away by Leniniana, Loza skipped part of the text and read the rest, and did not know what to do with it.
- Yoperny babai! he said. - I stared at you and missed a piece! What do they do in such cases? Can you correct your text?
We will warn the inspectors, they assured.
Nothing, but your dictation will be the most original, - Vine consoled the participants. But then he got upset himself: “Damn, they invited the old man!”.
From Sergey Lazarev to Mick Jagger
As Loza later admitted to reporters, “the text of the dictation was complex: many unexpected turns, rarely used words, geographical and ethnic terms that a Muscovite is unlikely to understand.” As it turned out, he himself had a "troika" in Russian at school - however, as in all other subjects:
But then I was the champion of the school in four sports, he boasted.
Loza explained to Moskovsky Komsomolets his decision to become a "dictator" at a literacy test.
It's nice to know that in the fulfillment of the main task - the restoration of the Russian language and culture, which, unfortunately, are now being knocked out from under us, there is also my drop of work, - the musician noted.
80% of what is sung by "Led Zeppelin" is impossible to listen to because it is played and sung badly. At that time, everything was perceived, everything was liked. The Rolling Stones never tuned their guitar in their entire lives, and Jagger never hit a single note. Well, what can you do. Keith Richards couldn't play then, and he can't play now. But there is a certain drive in this, some kind of buzz. Many project their youth onto these groups, but they were very weak, the singer said on the air of the Salt program with Zakhar Prilepin.
He did not like the song of Andrei Makarevich "My country has gone crazy."
Andrei did not write the song itself, but read the verse to the guitar strings, which he has been doing lately with annoying constancy. This is a very popular way of self-expression with us, but I don’t work in this genre, remaining an adherent of melody, harmony, arrangement and singing, ”wrote Loza in his column in the Reedus publication.
The master of the Russian stage spoke unflatteringly about Sergey Lazarev, who took third place at Eurovision 2016.
We have a very talented people, but everything is organized incorrectly. Take, for example, Eurovision. We buy a song from the Swedes, then our girl sings it and takes second place, so what? Sergey Lazarev is going there this year. I'm sure he'll sing another bought crap. Frenchwoman Patricia Kaas takes eighth place at Eurovision and immediately goes on tour throughout Europe, and our Dima Bilan wins and goes on tour to Kazan. Nobody needs him in Europe, - the singer retorted.
And the favorite of all women, Stas Mikhailov, Loza even dubbed "a pie with nothing."
Sometimes popularity comes for no reason. I liked the man, that's all. And it's impossible to explain. If we could manage this process, there would not be so many unhappy marriages. After all, there are cases when a girl marries such an idiot that it can be seen by everyone except her. So it is here: from the side you look at the artist and you understand: a pie with nothing. Well, he’s no, there’s nothing to catch on, but he has fans. There's a chain reaction going on. They get into the company of fans for the company: the girlfriend went, and I went, - Yuri Loza spoke out.
It should be noted that the results of the Total Dictation will become known after April 12. By the way, the text about Ulan-Ude has already appeared in the public domain on the Internet.
Ulan-Ude. Selenga
The names of the rivers are older than all other names put on maps. We do not always understand their meaning, so the Selenga keeps the secret of its name. It came not either from the Buryat word "sel", which means "spill", or from the Evenki "sele", that is, "iron", but I heard in it the name of the Greek goddess of the moon, Selena. Squeezed by forested hills, often shrouded in mist, the Selenga was for me a mysterious “moon river”. In the noise of its current, I, a young lieutenant, seemed to be a promise of love and happiness. It seemed that they were waiting for me ahead as immutably as Baikal was waiting for the Selenga.
Maybe she promised the same to the twenty-year-old lieutenant Anatoly Pepelyaev, the future white general and poet. Shortly before the First World War, he secretly married his chosen one in a poor rural church on the banks of the Selenga. The noble father did not give his son a blessing for an unequal marriage. The bride was the granddaughter of the exiles and the daughter of a simple railroad worker from Verkhneudinsk, as Ulan-Ude used to be called.
I found this city almost the same as Pepelyaev saw it. In the market, Buryats who came from the outback in traditional blue robes traded lamb and women in museum sundresses walked around. They sold circles of frozen milk strung on their hands like rolls. They were “family”, as the Old Believers, who used to live in large families, are called in Transbaikalia. True, something appeared that did not exist under Pepelyaev. I remember how the most original of all the monuments to Lenin I have seen was placed on the main square: on a low pedestal, a huge granite head of the leader, without a neck and torso, was rounded, similar to the head of a giant hero from Ruslan and Lyudmila. It still stands in the capital of Buryatia and has become one of its symbols. Here history and modernity, Orthodoxy and Buddhism do not reject or suppress each other. Ulan-Ude gave me hope that this is possible in other places.
How was the Total Dictation in 2018? First, they showed a recording of the author of this year's text - the writer Guzel Yakhina, who spoke about its creation, and also read part of the text. After the author's reading, silence reigned in the hall, and then the young people began vying to express doubt that they would be able to write the dictation, since it seemed to them very difficult.
This year's "Total Dictation" consists of three texts - "Morning", "Day" and "Evening". All of them are part of Guzel Yakhina's new book "My Children" about the literature teacher Jacob Bach. You can get into the ranks of the Total Dictation testers in different ways: you can sign up as a volunteer, or you can, for example, be an excellent student last year - they receive a mailing list with an invitation to fill out a questionnaire and get the opportunity to rise one step higher to take part in the test this year.
Last year, an employee of the Internet promotion department of the AST publishing house decided to see with her own eyes how the verification of written work goes. Like all the colossal work on the preparation of the dictation, the verification is carried out only on a volunteer basis, payment for it is not provided. But the sea of excellent impressions and interesting communication is provided. For example, in 2017, all papers written in Moscow were checked at the Russian State University for the Humanities under the guidance of several members of the Total Dictation expert council - in one of the classrooms it was Vladimir Markovich Pakhomov, PhD in Philology and editor-in-chief of the Gramota.ru portal.
This year, the Sunday working day of the inspection did not start at 9 in the morning, as before, but at 10 - they gave a little indulgence. First, the experts analyzed the text. In Moscow last year they wrote the third part of Leonid Yuzefovich's text “Ulan-Ude. Selenga" (full text of "Total Dictation" 2017 already available on the official website).
The assessment of "Total Dictation" is very different from our school memories. Firstly, because this dictation is, first of all, a celebration of the Russian language, and not a harsh test of knowledge, after which you can get a bad mark from your parents. And secondly, because the authors of the texts are writers, creative people, in many places a large choice of punctuation marks is allowed. The same applies to "dictators" - those who read the text of the dictation on the sites: there were cases when the actors read the text in such a way that after each sentence they wanted to put an exclamation mark.
Absolutely all acceptable options are provided in the “Inspector's Memo” and are analyzed by an expert before starting the check. Before compiling a memo to the text, the committee makes a selection of random entries to see which passages caused the most discrepancy and to anticipate any opportunities for reading and punctuation. After all, even when it seems that everything is unambiguous, it means that you do not have enough imagination - anything can happen at the "Total Dictation"!
In 2017, the Muscovites who wrote the dictation had to figure out the etymology of the name of the Buryat river Selenga, find out what the city of Ulan-Ude used to be called and why, according to the writer Leonid Yuzefovich, the most original monument to Lenin he saw resembles the hero from Ruslan and Lyudmila. Appeared in the text and Anatoly Pepelyaev, the hero of the novel.
Even after analyzing all the acceptable options, questions may remain - for this, an expert is constantly on duty in the audience (and also checks the work in parallel). The leaders of the dictation expect that each participant must master at least 50 works - then they will be able to do everything on time. It does not do without curiosities - they are collected in a special "piggy bank". For example, this year the phrase "hero-giant" in some works appeared as "hero from Pauline." To take their mind off the test, the participants sat and fantasized about what kind of place this was.
In the middle of the day there is a break for lunch - the organizers treat. Checking the work lasts up to about 18 hours, although, of course, you can leave at any time - it is better to check less work, but of high quality. And as a keepsake for all inspectors, there is an excellent red pen with the inscription: “Total Dictation 2017 was tested with this pen.”