Then another week passed. Speech style (text style). Introduction to the style of speech. Educational and methodological support of discipline

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

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

• “You marvel at the jewels of our language: every sound is a gift: everything is grainy, large, like pearls themselves.”
N.V. Gogol
• “Rich, sonorous, lively, distinguished by the flexibility of stresses and infinitely diverse in onomatopoeia, capable of conveying the finest shades, the Russian language seems to us created for poetry.”
P.Mermie

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

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

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

What is the practical purpose of our lesson?

Preparation for the exam.

Everyone has a text on the table. Read it and think about how you can title it.

Then another week passed. One night there was a heavy rain and then the hot sun somehow immediately burst in quickly, spring came into force ... it lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around began to transform before our eyes ... by leaps and bounds. They began to plow the field ... to turn the stubble into black velvet, the field borders turned green, the ant in the yard became thicker and more cheerful, the sky turned blue, the garden quickly began to dress with fresh, soft, even seemingly greenery, gray brushes with ... rheni and already appeared ... a lot of black ... black meta ... large flies that shine with blue on (dark_ green gloss ... twisted foliage and on hot spots of light on the paths. On apple pear trees, their branches were still barely touched by small grayish and especially (n; n) soft foliage, but these apple trees and pears are everywhere the nets of their crooked branches under other trees were already curled up with milky snow, and every day this color became whiter, thicker and more fragrant.

M.A. Alekseev.

- The arrival of spring.

What is the idea of ​​the text?

- The impetuous joy of spring renewal.

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

We will work in pairs and groups.

Before you get started, pay attention to the text.

Does it have paragraphs?

Then tell me what style this text belongs to?

To the artistic.

Determine the type of speech?

Combination of narrative and description.

Group work.

1 group.

What does the expression "bull rain" mean? What is its role? Why does the author use it?

Interpretation of the words "meekness" and "incense". Find synonyms and antonyms for them.

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

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

Breaking rain - sudden, strong, powerful, breaking off tree branches. He gushed with such force, as the spring at once lost its meekness and pallor.

Meekness - gentleness, humility, humility.

Synonyms: obedience, lack of arrogance, even disposition.

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

Incense - aroma, pleasant smell.

Antonyms: unpleasant smell, stench.

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

epithets

personification

• the sun came into power
• spring has lost its meekness and pallor
• the sky shone brighter
• the garden began to dress
• leaves touched the branches
• curled apple and pear trees

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

Alliteration

Highlighting [p], [l], [l '] creates an image of a seething stream of life.

What spring month do you think the author describes?

Early May (last offer).

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

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

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

appeared (will appear)

2. Unchecked vowels and consonants:

• transform
• lilacs
• metallically

3. o, e after hissing in the root and suffix:

• black
• glossy

4. n and nn in the suffix:

• especially

5. pre- and pre-:

• turn

6. Writing compound adjectives:

• dark green

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

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

Adjectives and participles (24) help to convey more vividly those renewals in nature that occur in spring.

Verbs (19) - the action of the subject.

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

Adjectives and adverbs in the comparative degree.

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

1. Put punctuation marks, explain them.
2. Highlight the basics of the proposals.
3. Find all kinds of complication sentences.
4. Analyze the first sentence for structure. How is it different from the rest?
5. What is the role of homogeneous members of the sentence and separate definitions expressed by participial phrases?
6. Why are repetitions used in text?

2 people at the board.

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

Homogeneous subjects, predicates, additions, definitions and circumstances "expand" the scope of the arrival of spring.

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

enhance the onset of spring.

Conclusion: Through syntactic and punctuation features, the author conveys to the reader the swift spring streams. He does not even want to pause (does not speak in simple sentences, except for the first). All in one breath, inextricably one.

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

He was happy to be convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was like the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of firs and pines in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning till evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful bustle, as they yell only at early in the spring, rooks were bellowing in the bare age-old birches in the neighboring landowner's garden, and still wild, gray was the view of the village on the slopes, and only one more vines were covered there with yellowish greens ... He walked into the garden: and the garden was still low and bare, transparent , - only the glades turned green, all dotted with small turquoise flowers, but the katnik pubescent along the alleys and turned pale white, one cherry blossomed finely in the hollow, in the southern, lower part of the garden ... It went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, the stubble was still sticking out like a brush, the dry field roads were still rough and purple... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the pores of expectation—and all this was Katya. And it only seemed to be distracted by day laborers doing this and that on the estate, workers in the servants' quarters, reading, walking, going to the village to the peasants they knew, talking with my mother, traveling with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in the field on a cross-country droshky... Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into force, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around us began to change by leaps and bounds before our eyes. They began to plow up, turn the stubble into black velvet, the field borders turned green, the ants in the yard became juicier, the sky turned bluer and thicker, the garden quickly began to dress with fresh, even seemingly soft greenery, gray lilac brushes began to flood and smell, and already a lot of black ones appeared, large flies of metallic blue gleaming on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot patches of light on the paths. Branches were still visible on apple and pear trees, they were barely touched by small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, stretching everywhere the nets of their crooked branches under other trees, were already curled up with milky snow, and every day this color became more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blooming with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxurious whitening garden and ever darker blue sky.

IX

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

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

He was born and raised in the countryside, but as a high school student he involuntarily spent the spring in the city, with the exception of one year before last, when, having arrived in the village for Shrovetide, he fell ill and, recovering, stayed at home in March and half of April. It was an unforgettable time. For two weeks he lay and only through the window he saw every day the sky, snow, the garden, its trunks and branches changing along with the increase in the world of warmth and light. He saw: it’s morning, and the sun is so bright and warm in the room that reviving flies are already crawling on the glass ... here is the afternoon hour of the next day: the sun is behind the house, on its other side, and in the window pale spring snow is already blue and large white clouds in the blue, in the tops of the trees ... but, a day later, in the cloudy sky there are such bright clearings, and on the bark of the trees there is such a wet sheen, and it drips from the roof above the window so that you can’t get enough, you can’t see enough ... After that, warm fogs, rains, snow melted and ate up in a few days, the river started, joyfully and again blackened, the earth was exposed both in the garden and in the yard ... And for a long time Mitya remembered one day at the end of March, when he rode for the first time in the field. The sky is not bright, but it shone so brightly, so young in the pale, colorless trees of the garden. The wind was still fresh in the field, the stubbles were wild and red, and where they plowed, they were already plowed under oats, black uplifts were oily, with primitive power. And he rode entirely along these stubbles and ups to the forest and from afar saw him in clean air, - naked, small, visible from end to end, - then descended into its hollows and rustled with the horse's hooves through last year's deep foliage, in places completely dry, fawn, in places wet, brown, crossed the ravines covered with it, where there was still hollow water, and dark-golden woodcocks burst out from under the bushes right from under the horse’s feet ... What was all this spring and especially this day for him, when it was so freshly blowing towards him in the field, and the horse, overcoming moisture-saturated stubble and black arable land, breathing so noisily through wide nostrils, snoring and roaring inside with magnificent wild strength? It seemed then that it was this spring that was his first true love, the days of complete love for someone and something, when he loved all the schoolgirls and all the girls in the world. But how distant that time seemed to him now! What a boy he was then, innocent, simple-hearted, poor in his modest sorrows, joys and dreams! A dream, or rather a memory of some wonderful dream, was then his objectless, incorporeal love. Now Katya was in the world, there was a soul that embodied this world in itself and triumphed over everything over it.

X

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

One day, late in the evening, Mitya went out onto the back porch. It was very dark, quiet, and smelled of a damp field. From behind the night clouds, over the vague outlines of the garden, small stars were tearing. And suddenly, somewhere in the distance, something wildly, devilishly hummed and rolled with barking, screeching. Mitya shuddered, froze, then cautiously descended from the porch, entered the dark alley, as if guarding him from all sides with hostility, stopped again and began to wait, listen: what is it, where is it - that which so unexpectedly and terribly announced the garden ? An owl, a forest scarecrow, making his love, and nothing else, he thought, and his whole body froze as if from the invisible presence of the devil himself in this darkness. And suddenly there was again a booming howl that shook Mitya's whole soul; There, at first, he barked, then began piteously, imploringly, like a child, whining, crying, flapping his wings and screaming with painful pleasure, began to squeal, roll with such scurrilous laughter, as if he were being tickled and tortured. Mitya, trembling all over, stared into the darkness with both eyes and ears. But the devil suddenly broke loose, choked and, cutting through the dark garden with a deathly-languishing cry, as if he fell through the ground. Having waited in vain for the resumption of this love horror for a few more minutes, Mitya quietly returned home - and all night he was tormented through sleep by all those painful and disgusting thoughts and feelings into which his love had turned in March in Moscow.

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

He remembered what he had experienced when his father died, nine years ago. It was also in the spring. The next day after this death, timidly, with bewilderment and horror, walking through the hall, where with his chest held high and his big pale hands folded on it, he lay on the table, his father turned black with his through beard and his nose turned white, dressed in a noble uniform, Mitya went out onto the porch , looked at the huge lid of the coffin, upholstered in gold brocade, standing near the door, and suddenly felt: there is death in the world! She was in everything sunlight, in the spring grass in the yard, in the sky, in the garden ... He went into the garden, into the linden alley motley from the light, then into the side alleys, even more sunny, looked at the trees and at the first white butterflies, listened to the first sweetly flooding birds - and did not recognize anything: there was death in everything, a terrible table in the hall and a long brocade cover on the porch! The sun didn’t shine as before, somehow the sun didn’t shine like that, the grass didn’t turn green like that, the butterflies didn’t freeze on the spring, only still hot grass on top - everything was different from how it was a day ago, everything changed, as it were, from the proximity of the end of the world , and pitiful, sad has become the beauty of spring, her eternal youth! And it lasted for a long time and then, it lasted all spring, how for a long time one felt - or imagined - in a washed and many times ventilated house a terrible, vile, sweetish smell ...

The same delusion - only of a completely different order - was experienced by Mitya now: this spring, the spring of his first love, was also completely different from all previous springs. The world was again transformed, again full as if with something extraneous, but only not hostile, not terrible, but on the contrary, wonderfully merging with the joy and youth of spring. And this outsider was Katya, or rather, that prettiest thing in the world, which Mitya demanded of her. Now, as the spring days wore on, he demanded more and more of her. And now, when she was gone, there was only her image, an image that did not exist, but only a desired one, it seemed that she did not violate in any way that immaculate and beautiful that was demanded of her, and every day she felt more and more alive in everything, no matter what Mitya looks at.

XI

He was happy to be convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was like the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of firs and pines in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning till evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful bustle, as they yell only at early in the spring, the rooks yelled in the bare age-old birch trees in the neighboring landowner's garden, and still wild, gray was the view of the village on the slopes, and only one more vines were covered there with yellowish greenery ... He walked into the garden: and the garden was still low and bare, transparent, - only the glades turned green, all dotted with small turquoise flowers, but the katnik grew down along the alleys and paled white, one cherry blossomed finely in the hollow, in the southern, lower part of the garden ... It went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, the stubble was still sticking out with a brush , the dry field roads were still kolchevaty and purple ... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the pores of expectation - and all this was Katya. And it only seemed to be distracted by day laborers doing this and that on the estate, workers in the servants' quarters, reading, walking, going to the village to the peasants they knew, talking with my mother, traveling with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in the field on a cross-country droshky ...

Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into force, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around us began to change by leaps and bounds before our eyes. They began to plow up, turn the stubble into black velvet, the field borders turned green, the ants in the yard became juicier, the sky turned bluer and thicker, the garden quickly began to dress with fresh, even seemingly soft greenery, gray lilac brushes began to flood and smell, and already a lot of black ones appeared, large flies of metallic blue gleaming on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot patches of light on the paths. Branches were still visible on apple and pear trees, they were barely touched by small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, stretching everywhere the nets of their crooked branches under other trees, were already curled up with milky snow, and every day this color became more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blooming with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxurious whitening garden and ever darker blue sky.

Electronic Library of Yabluchansky .

... In Moscow, Mitya's last happy day was the ninth of March. So, at least, it seemed to him. He and Katya walked at twelve o'clock in the morning up Tverskoy Boulevard. Winter suddenly gave way to spring, it was almost hot in the sun. As if the larks really flew in and brought with them warmth, joy. Everything was wet, everything was melting, drops were dripping from the houses, windshield wipers were chipping ice off the sidewalks, throwing sticky snow off the roofs, everywhere was crowded and lively. High clouds parted with thin white smoke, merging with the wet blue sky. Pushkin towered in the distance with blissful thoughtfulness, the Passion Monastery shone. But the best thing was that Katya, who was especially pretty that day, breathed all simplicity and closeness, often with childish trustfulness took Mitya by the arm and looked down into his face, happy even, as if a little arrogantly, striding so wide that she could hardly keep up with him. Near Pushkin, she suddenly said: - How funny you are, with some kind of cute boyish awkwardness, you stretch your big mouth when you laugh. Do not be offended, for this smile I love you. Yes, here's another for your Byzantine eyes ... Trying not to smile, overpowering both secret contentment and slight offense , Mitya answered amiably, looking at the monument, now raised high in front of them: - As for boyishness, in this respect we seem to have not gone far from each other. And I look like a Byzantine just like you look like a Chinese empress. You're all just crazy about these Byzantiums, Revivals... I don't understand your mother! - Well, if you were her, would you lock me up in the tower? - asked Katya. - Not in the tower, but simply on the threshold would not let all this supposedly artistic bohemia, all these future celebrities from studios and conservatories, from theater schools, - Mitya answered, continuing to try to be calm and friendly casual. - You yourself told me that Bukovetsky already invited you to dine in Strelna, and Yegorov offered to sculpt naked, in the form of some kind of dying sea wave, and, of course, you are terribly flattered by such an honor. “I still won’t give up art even for you,” Katya said. “Maybe I'm ugly, as you often say,” she said, although Mitya never told her this, “maybe I'm spoiled, but take me the way I am. And let's not quarrel, stop being jealous of me even today, on such a wonderful day! How can you not understand that you are still the best for me, the only one? she asked softly and insistently, already looking into his eyes with feigned seductiveness, and thoughtfully, slowly recited: There is a dormant secret between us, The soul has given a ring to the soul ... This last, these verses have already hurt Mitya quite painfully. In general, many things even that day were unpleasant and painful. The joke about boyish awkwardness was unpleasant: it was not the first time he had heard such jokes from Katya, and they were not accidental - Katya often showed herself first in one, then in another more adult than he, often (and involuntarily, that is, quite naturally) showed her superiority over him, and he painfully perceived this as a sign of some secret vicious experience of her. It was unpleasant “after all” (“you are still the best for me”) and the fact that for some reason this was said in a suddenly lowered voice, especially unpleasant were the verses, their mannered reading. However, even poetry and this reading, that is, the very thing that most of all reminded Mitya of the environment that took Katya away from him, sharply arousing his hatred and jealousy, he endured relatively easily on this happy day of March 9, his last happy day in Moscow, as often seemed to him afterwards. On that day, on her way back from the Kuznetsky Most, where Katya had bought some of Scriabin's things from Zimmermann, she spoke among other things about his mother, Mitina, and said, laughing: "You can't imagine how afraid I am of her in advance!" For some reason, never once in all the time of their love did they touch the question of the future, of how their love would end. And then suddenly Katya started talking about his mother and started talking like this. as if by itself it was implied that my mother was her future mother-in-law.

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

On the day of Katya's examination, which finally took place (on the sixth week of the Lent), it was as if the whole truth of Mitya's torments was especially confirmed. Here Katya no longer saw him at all, did not notice him, she was all a stranger, all public. She was a great success. She was dressed in all white, like a bride, and her excitement made her charming. She was clapped warmly and enthusiastically, and the director, a self-satisfied actor with impassive and sad eyes, who was sitting in the front row, only for the sake of greater pride, sometimes made remarks to her, speaking in a low voice, but somehow so that it was audible throughout the hall and sounded unbearable. “Less reading,” he said weightily, calmly and so authoritatively, as if Katya was his complete property. - Do not play, but worry, - he said separately. And it was unbearable. Yes, even the reading itself, which evoked applause, was unbearable. Katya burned with a hot blush, embarrassment, her voice sometimes broke, her breath was not enough, and it was touching, charming. But she read with that vulgar melodiousness, falseness and stupidity in every sound, which were considered the highest art of reading in that environment, hated by Mitya, in which Katya already lived with all her thoughts: she did not speak, but all the time exclaimed with some importunate languid passionately, with an immoderate plea, unjustified in its insistence, and Mitya did not know what to do with his eyes from shame for her. Worst of all was that mixture of angelic purity and depravity that was in her, in her flushed face, in her white dress, which seemed shorter on the stage, since everyone sitting in the hall looked at Katya from below, in her white shoes and tight-fitting silky white stockings on her legs. "The girl sang in the church choir," Katya read with feigned, immoderate naivety about some supposedly angelically innocent girl. And Mitya felt both a heightened closeness to Katya - as you always feel in a crowd for the one you love - and evil hostility, he also felt pride in her, the consciousness that after all she belongs to him, and at the same time heart-rending pain : no, no longer belongs! After the exam, there were again happy days. But Mitya no longer believed them with the same ease as before. Katya, remembering the exam, said: - What a fool you are! Didn't you feel that I read so well only for you alone! But he could not forget what he felt at the exam, and could not admit that these feelings had not left him even now. Katya also felt his secret feelings, and one day, during a quarrel, she exclaimed: “I don’t understand why you love me if, in your opinion, everything is so bad in me!” And what do you finally want from me? But he himself did not understand why he loved her, although he felt that his love not only did not decrease, but was increasing along with the jealous struggle that he waged with someone, with something because of her, because of this love, because of its tensing force of ever-increasing demands. - You love only my body, not my soul! Katya once said bitterly. Again these were someone else's, theatrical words, but for all their absurdity and hackneyedness, they also touched on something painfully insoluble. He did not know why he loved, he could not say exactly what he wanted ... What does it mean to love at all? It was all the more impossible to answer this because neither in what Mitya heard about love, nor in what he read about it, there was not a single word accurately defining it. In books and in life, everyone seems to have agreed once and for all to talk either only about some kind of almost incorporeal love, or only about what is called passion, sensuality. His love was like no other. What did he feel for her? What is called love, or what is called passion? Did Katya's soul or body bring him almost to fainting, to some kind of near-death bliss, when he unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her breasts, heavenly lovely and virgin, opened with some kind of soul with amazing humility, the shamelessness of the purest innocence?

She changed more and more. Success in the exam meant a lot. And yet there were other reasons as well. Somehow, Katya immediately turned with the onset of spring, as if into some kind of young secular lady, smart and always in a hurry somewhere. Mitya was now simply ashamed of her dark corridor when she came—now she didn’t come, but always came—when she, rustling silk, quickly walked along this corridor, lowering her veil over her face. Now she was invariably gentle with him, but she was invariably late and shortened her visits, saying that she again had to go with her mother to the dressmaker. - You understand, frantim recklessly! she said, her eyes twinkling round, cheerfully and in surprise, realizing perfectly well that Mitya did not believe her, and yet she spoke, since there was now absolutely nothing to talk about. And now she almost never took off her hat, and never let go of her umbrella, sitting on Mitya's bed on the fly and driving him crazy with her calves covered in silk stockings. And before you leave and say that this evening she will not be at home again - again you need to go to someone with your mother! - she invariably did the same thing, with a clear purpose. to fool him, to reward him for all his "stupid", as she put it, torments: she looked thievishly at the door, slipped off the bed and, waving her hips at his legs, said in a hasty whisper: - Well, kiss me!

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

Having done all the last things that needed to be done in the rooms, having packed his things into a crooked cab with the help of a bellboy, he finally awkwardly sat down beside them, started off and immediately felt that special thing that grips upon departure, - the famous life span! - and at the same time a sudden lightness, hope for the beginning of something new. He somewhat calmed down and more cheerfully, as if with new eyes he began to look around. The end, goodbye Moscow and everything that has been experienced in it! It was dripping, frowning, the lanes were empty, the cobblestones were dark and shone like iron, the houses stood gloomy and dirty. The driver was driving with painful slowness and every now and then forced Mitya to turn away and try not to breathe. We passed the Kremlin, then Pokrovka, and again turned into lanes, where in the gardens a crow was hoarsely screaming in the rain and in the evening, and yet it was spring, the spring smell of the air. But finally they arrived, and Mitya ran after the porter along the crowded station, onto the platform, then onto the third track, where the long and heavy Kursk train was already ready. From all the huge and ugly crowd that besieged the train, from all the porters, with a roar and warning shouts rolling carts with things, he instantly singled out, saw that, "shining with its beauty", stood alone in the distance and seemed to be a completely special creature not only in this whole crowd, but all over the world. The first bell had already rung - this time he was late, not Katya. She touchingly arrived before him, she was waiting for him and rushed to him again with the solicitude of a wife or bride: - Darling, take your seat as soon as possible! Now the second call! And after the second ring, she stood on the platform even more touchingly, looking down at him, standing in the door of a third-class carriage, already packed and smelly. Everything about her was lovely—her sweet, pretty face, her little figure, her freshness, her youth. where femininity still interfered with childishness, her upturned shining eyes, her modest blue hat, in the curves of which there was a certain graceful perkyness, and even her dark gray suit, in which Mitya with charm even felt the fabric and the silk of the lining. He stood thin, ungainly, on the road he put on high, coarse boots and an old jacket, the buttons of which were frayed, reddened with copper. And yet Katya looked at him with an unfeignedly loving and sad look. The third bell struck so unexpectedly and sharply at the heart that Mitya rushed off the platform like a madman, and just as madly, with horror, Katya rushed to meet him. He clung to her glove and, jumping back into the carriage, through his tears waved his cap at her with furious delight, and she took up her skirt with her hand and swam back with the platform, still not taking her raised gaze off him. She swam faster and faster, the wind ruffled the hair of Mitya, who had leaned out of the window, more and more strongly, and the engine moved faster and faster, more and more mercilessly, demanding ways with an insolent, threatening roar - and suddenly both it and the end of the platform seemed to be torn off ...

The long spring twilight, dark from rain clouds, had long since come, the heavy carriage rumbled in the bare and cool field—it was still early spring in the fields—the conductors were walking along the corridor of the carriage, asking for tickets and inserting candles into the lanterns, and Mitya was still standing near the rattling the windows, smelling the smell of the Katana glove that remained on his lips, was still all burning with the sharp fire of the last moment of separation. And the whole long Moscow winter, happy and tormenting, which had transformed his whole life, rose before him entirely and completely in some new light. In a new light, again in a new one, Katya now stood before him too... Yes, yes, who is she, what is she? What about love, passion, soul, body? What is it? There is none of this, there is something else, something completely different! This smell of a glove - isn't it Katya, not love, not soul, not body? I am men, workers in a carriage, a woman who leads her ugly child to a latrine, dim candles in rattling lanterns, twilight in empty spring fields - all love, all soul, and all torment, and all unspeakable joy. In the morning there was an Eagle, a transfer, a provincial train near the far platform. And Mitya felt: what a simple, calm and native world it was compared to Moscow, which had already retreated somewhere into the thirtieth kingdom, the center of which was Katya, now she seemed so lonely, miserable, loved only dearly! Even the sky, in some places smeared with pale blue rain clouds, even the wind here is simpler and calmer ... The train from Orel was moving slowly, Mitya was slowly eating Tula printed gingerbread, sitting in empty wagon. Then the train broke up and exhausted, put him to sleep. He woke up only in Verkhovye. The train stopped, it was quite crowded and bustling, but also somehow provincial. It smelled pleasantly of the station kitchen. Mitya ate a plate of cabbage soup with pleasure and drank a bottle of beer, then dozed off again, a deep fatigue attacked him. And when he woke up again, the train raced through the spring birch forest, already familiar, in front of the last station. Again it was gloomy, like spring, and through the open window there was a smell of rain and something like mushrooms. The forest was still completely bare, but still the rumble of the train was more distinct in it than in the field, and in the distance the sad lights of the station were already flickering in the spring. Here was the high green light of the semaphore - especially lovely at such twilight in a bare birch forest - and the train began to clatter to another track ... God, how rurally miserable and sweet the worker waiting for the barchuk on the platform! Twilight and clouds were getting thicker as we drove from the station through a large village, also still in spring, dirty. Everything was drowning in this unusually soft twilight, in the deepest silence of the earth, the warm night, merged with the darkness of indefinite, low-hanging rain clouds, and again Mitya was amazed and rejoiced: how calm, simple, wretched the village is, these smelly chicken huts, long asleep, - Since the Annunciation, good people do not blow fire, - and how good it is in this dark and warm steppe world! The tarantass dived over potholes, through mud, the oaks outside the rich peasant's yard rose still completely naked, unfriendly, blackened with rook nests. At the hut, a strange peasant, as if from antiquity, stood and peered into the dusk: bare feet, a tattered coat, a ram's hat on long, straight hair ... And a warm, sweet, fragrant rain fell. Mitya thought about the girls, about the young women sleeping in these huts, about all the feminine things that he had approached during the winter with Katya, and everything merged into one thing - Katya, girls, night, spring, the smell of rain, the smell of plowed up, ready for the fertilization of the earth, the smell of rain, the smell of horse sweat and the memory of the smell of a kid glove.

Life in the village began with peaceful, charming days. At night, on the way from the station, Katya seemed to have faded, dissolved in everything around her. But no, it only seemed that way and it seemed like a few more days, while Mitya slept off, came to his senses, got used to the novelty of familiar impressions from childhood home, villages, rural spring, spring nakedness and emptiness of the world, again pure and young, ready for a new flourishing. The estate was small, the house was old and unpretentious, the household was simple, not requiring a large household, - life for Mitya began to be quiet. Sister Anya, a second-grader, a gymnasium student, and brother Kostya, a teenage cadet, were still in Orel, they were studying, they were supposed to arrive no earlier than the beginning of June. Mom, Olga Petrovna, was, as always, busy with the household, in which she was helped only by the order - the current, - the headman, as they called him in the household, - she often went to the field, went to bed as soon as it got dark. When Mitya, the next day after his arrival, having slept for twelve hours, washed up, in everything clean, left his sunny room - it was the windows to the garden, to the east - and walked through all the others, he vividly experienced the feeling of their kinship and peace, soothing and soul and body simplicity. Everywhere everything stood in its usual place, as it had many years ago, and smelled just as familiar and pleasant; everything was tidied up for his arrival, the floors were washed in all rooms. Only the hall adjoining the hallway, the lackey's, as it was called even to this day, was washed. A freckled girl, a day laborer from the village, stood at the window near the door to the balcony, reaching for the top pane, wiping it with a whistle, and reflecting in the lower panes as a blue, as if distant, reflection. The maid Parasha, having pulled out a large rag from a bucket of hot water, barefooted, white-legged, walked across the flooded floor on small heels and said in a friendly, cheeky patter, wiping the sweat from her flushed face with the fold of her rolled up hand: station with the headman, you probably never heard ... And immediately Katya imperiously reminded of herself: Mitya caught himself lusting for this rolled up female hand and for the feminine curve of the girl stretching upwards at the window, for her skirt, under which strong nightstands went bare legs, and gladly felt the power of Katya, his belonging to her, felt her secret presence in all the impressions of this morning. And this presence was felt more and more alive with each new day and became more and more beautiful as Mitya came to his senses, calmed down and forgot that ordinary Katya, who in Moscow so often and so painfully did not merge with Katya, created by him. desire.

For the first time he now lived at home as an adult, with whom even his mother behaved somehow differently than before, and most importantly, he lived with the first true love in his soul, already realizing the very thing that his whole being secretly expected from childhood, from adolescence. Even in infancy, something miraculously and mysteriously stirred in him, something inexpressible in human language. Sometime and somewhere, it must have been also in the spring, in the garden, near the lilac bushes, - I remember the sharp smell of Spanish flies, - he, quite small, stood with some young woman, probably with his nanny, - and suddenly something seemed to illumine in front of him with a heavenly light - either her face, or a sundress on her full chest - and something passed in a hot wave, jumped in him, truly like a child in the womb ... But it was like in a dream. As in a dream, everything that happened later was in childhood, adolescence, in the gymnasium years. There were some special, unlike anything, admiration of one or the other of those girls who came with their mothers to his children's holidays, a secret greedy curiosity for every movement of this charming, also unlike anything, little creature in a dress , in slippers, with a bow of silk ribbon on the head. There was (this was already later, in the provincial town) lasting almost the entire autumn and already much more conscious admiration for the schoolgirl, who often appeared in the evenings on a tree behind the fence of a neighboring garden: her playfulness, mockery, brown dress, round comb in her hair, dirty hands, laughter , a ringing cry - everything was such that Mitya thought about her from morning to evening, was sad, sometimes even cried, insatiably wanting something from her. Then it somehow ended of itself, it was forgotten, and there were new, more or less long, - and again secret, - admirations, there were sharp joys and sorrows of sudden falling in love at gymnasium balls ... there were some kind of languishing in in his body, in his heart there are vague forebodings, expectations of something ... He was born and raised in the village, but as a high school student he involuntarily spent the spring in the city, with the exception of one year before last, when, having arrived in the village for Shrovetide, he fell ill and, recovering , stayed at home March and half of April. It was an unforgettable time. For two weeks he lay and only through the window he saw every day the sky, snow, the garden, its trunks and branches changing along with the increase in the world of warmth and light. He saw: it’s morning, and the room is so bright and warm from the sun that reviving flies are already crawling on the glass ... here is the afternoon of the next day: the sun is behind the house, on the other side of it, and in the window the pale spring light is already blue snow and large white clouds in the blue, in the tops of the trees. .. and here, a day later, there are such bright clearings in the cloudy sky, and such a wet sheen on the bark of trees, and it drips from the roof above the window so much that you can't get enough of it, you can't see enough ... After that, warm fogs came, rains, snow melted and ate it up in a few days, the river started, it began to joyfully and again blacken, to be exposed both in the garden and in the yard, the earth ... And for a long time Mitya remembered one day at the end of March, when he rode for the first time on horseback into the field. The sky is not bright, but it shone so brightly, so young in the pale, colorless trees of the garden. The wind was still fresh in the field, the stubbles were wild and red, and where they plowed, they were already plowed under oats, black uplifts were oily, with primitive power. And he rode entirely through these stubbles and upswings to the forest and from afar saw him in the clear air - naked, small, visible from end to end - then he descended into its hollows and rustled with his horse's hooves through last year's deep foliage, in places completely dry, pale yellow. , in places wet, brown, he crossed the ravines covered with it, where there was still hollow water, and dark-golden woodcocks burst out from under the bushes right from under the feet of the horse ... What was all this spring and especially this day for him, when it blew so freshly towards him in the field, and the horse, overcoming moisture-saturated stubble and black arable land, breathed so noisily through its wide nostrils, snoring and roaring inside with magnificent wild strength? It seemed then that it was this spring that was his first true love, the days of complete love for someone and something, when he loved all the schoolgirls and all the girls in the world. But how distant that time seemed to him now! What a boy he was then, innocent, simple-hearted, poor in his modest sorrows, joys and dreams! A dream, or rather a memory of some wonderful dream, was then his objectless, incorporeal love. Now Katya was in the world, there was a soul that embodied this world in itself and triumphed over everything over it.

Only once during this first time did Katya remind herself ominously. One day, late in the evening, Mitya went out onto the back porch. It was very dark, quiet, and smelled of a damp field. From behind the night clouds, over the vague outlines of the garden, small stars were tearing. And suddenly, somewhere in the distance, something wildly, devilishly hummed and rolled with barking, screeching. Mitya shuddered, froze, then cautiously descended from the porch, entered the dark alley, as if guarding him from all sides with hostility, stopped again and began to wait, listen: what is it, where is it - that which so unexpectedly and terribly announced the garden ? An owl, a forest scarecrow, making his love, and nothing else, he thought, and his whole body froze as if from the invisible presence of the devil himself in this darkness. And suddenly there was again a booming howl that shook Mitya's whole soul; There, at first, he barked, then began piteously, imploringly, like a child, whining, crying, flapping his wings and screaming with painful pleasure, began to squeal, roll with such scurrilous laughter, as if he were being tickled and tortured. Mitya, trembling all over, stared into the darkness with both eyes and ears. But the devil suddenly broke loose, choked, and, cutting through the dark garden with a deathly-crying cry, as if he fell through the ground. Having waited in vain for the resumption of this love horror for a few more minutes, Mitya quietly returned home - and all night he was tormented through sleep by all those painful and disgusting thoughts and feelings into which his love had turned in March in Moscow. However, in the morning, with the sun, his nightly torment quickly dissipated. He remembered how Katya had wept when they firmly decided that he must leave Moscow for a while, remembered with what delight she seized upon the idea that he, too, would come to the Crimea at the beginning of June, and how touchingly she helped him in his preparations. to his departure, as she saw him off at the station ... He took out her photographic card, looked at her little smart head for a long, long time, marveling at the purity, clarity of her direct, open (slightly round) look ... Then he wrote to her a particularly long and especially a heartfelt letter, full of faith in their love, and again returned to the constant feeling of her loving and bright presence in everything that he lived and rejoiced at. He remembered what he had experienced when his father died, nine years ago. It was also in the spring. The next day after this death, timidly, with bewilderment and horror, walking through the hall, where with his chest held high and his big pale hands folded on it, he lay on the table, blackened with his see-through beard and white nose, his father dressed in a noble uniform, Mitya went out onto the porch , looked at the huge lid of the coffin, upholstered in gold brocade, standing near the door, and suddenly felt: there is death in the world! She was in everything: in the sunlight, in the spring grass in the yard, in the sky, in the garden... white butterflies, listened to the first, sweetly flooding birds - and did not recognize anything: there was death in everything, a terrible table in the hall and a long brocade cover on the porch! The sun didn’t shine as before, somehow the sun didn’t shine like that, the grass didn’t turn green like that, the butterflies didn’t freeze on the spring, only still hot grass on top - everything was different from how it was a day ago, everything changed, as it were, from the proximity of the end of the world , and pitiful, sad has become the beauty of spring, her eternal youth! And this lasted for a long time and then, it lasted all spring, how for a long time one felt - or imagined - in a washed and many times ventilated house a terrible, vile, sweetish smell ... The same obsession - only of a completely different order, - Mitya experienced now : this spring, the spring of his first love, was also completely different from all previous springs. The world was again transformed, again full as if with something extraneous, but only not hostile, not terrible, but on the contrary, wonderfully merging with the joy and youth of spring. And this outsider was Katya, or rather, that prettiest thing in the world, which Mitya demanded of her. Now, as the spring days wore on, he demanded more and more of her. And now, when she was gone, there was only her image, an image that did not exist, but only a desired one, it seemed that she did not violate in any way that immaculate and beautiful that was demanded of her, and every day she felt more and more alive in everything, no matter what Mitya looks at.

He was happy to be convinced of this in the first week of his stay at home. Then it was like the eve of spring. He sat with a book near the open window of the living room, looked between the trunks of firs and pines in the front garden at the dirty river in the meadows, at the village on the slopes beyond the river: from morning till evening, tirelessly, exhausted from blissful bustle, as they yell only at early in the spring, the rooks yelled in the bare age-old birches in the neighboring landowner's garden, and still wild, gray was the view of the village on the slopes, and only one more vines were covered there with yellowish greens ... He walked into the garden and the garden was still low and bare, transparent, - only the glades turned green, all dotted with small turquoise flowers, but the katnik pubescent along the alleys and turned pale white, one cherry blossomed finely in the hollow, in the southern, lower part of the garden ... It went out into the field: it was still empty, it was gray in the field, still The stubble stuck out like a brush, the dry field roads were still rough and purple... And all this was the nakedness of youth, the pores of expectation - and all this was Katya. And it only seemed to be distracted by day laborers doing this or that on the estate, workers in the servants' quarters, reading, walking, going to the village to the peasants they knew, talking with my mother, traveling with the headman (a tall, rude retired soldier) in the field on treadmills. Then another week passed. One night there was heavy rain, and then the hot sun somehow immediately came into force, spring lost its meekness and pallor, and everything around us began to change by leaps and bounds before our eyes. They began to plow up, turn the stubble into black velvet, the field borders turned green, the ants in the yard became juicier, the sky turned bluer and thicker, the garden quickly began to dress with fresh, even seemingly soft greenery, gray lilac brushes began to flood and smell, and already a lot of black ones appeared, large flies of metallic blue gleaming on its dark green glossy foliage and on the hot patches of light on the paths. Branches were still visible on apple and pear trees, they were barely touched by small, grayish and especially soft foliage, but these apple and pear trees, stretching everywhere the nets of their crooked branches under other trees, were already curled up with milky snow, and every day this color became more whiter, thicker and more fragrant. During this wonderful time, Mitya joyfully and intently watched all the spring changes taking place around him. But Katya not only did not retreat, did not get lost among them, but on the contrary, she participated in them all and gave herself to everything, her beauty, blooming with the blossoming of spring, with this ever more luxurious whitening garden and ever darker blue sky.

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

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

One day, having dozed off after dinner - they dined at noon - Mitya left the house and slowly went into the garden. The girls often worked in the garden, dug in the apple trees, and they still work today. Mitya went to sit next to them, to chat with them - this was already becoming a habit. The day was hot and quiet. He walked in the shadow of the alley, and far away saw curly snow-white branches around him. The color on the pears was especially strong and thick, and the mixture of this whiteness and the bright blue of the sky gave a violet tint. And the pear and apple trees blossomed and crumbled, the dug-up earth beneath them was all strewn with faded petals. In the warm air one could feel their sweetish, delicate smell, along with the smell of manure heated and decaying in the barnyard. Sometimes there was a cloud, the blue sky turned blue and warm air, and these perishable smells became even more tender and sweeter. And all the fragrant warmth of this spring paradise buzzed drowsily and blissfully from bees and bumblebees burrowing into its honey-curly snow. And all the time, blissfully bored, day by day, here and there, one or another nightingale chirped. The alley ended in the distance with a gate to the threshing floor. In the distance to the left, in the corner of the garden rampart, was a black spruce forest. Near the spruce forest, two girls were full of apple trees. Mitya, as always, turned from the middle of the alley towards them - bending down, he walked among the low and spreading branches, femininely touching his face and smelling of both honey and, as it were, lemon. And, as always, one of the girls, red-haired, thin Sonya, as soon as she saw him, laughed wildly and screamed. - Oh, the owner is coming! she screamed with feigned fright, and, jumping off the thick bough of the pear tree on which she was resting, she rushed to the shovel. The other girl, Glashka, on the contrary, pretended not to notice Mitya at all, and, slowly, firmly placing her foot on the iron shovel in a soft chuna made of black felt, behind which white petals were stuffed, energetically slamming the shovel into the ground and turning the cut piece , sang loudly in a strong and pleasant voice: "You are already a garden, you are my garden, for whom are you blooming!" She was a tall, courageous and always serious girl. Mitya came up and sat down in Sonya's place, on an old pear bough that was lying in the dry patches. Sonya looked at him brightly and asked loudly, with feigned swagger and gaiety: "Did you just get up?" Look, do not oversleep! She liked Mitya, and she did her best to hide it, but she did not know how, she behaved awkwardly in his presence, saying whatever she liked, always, however, hinting at something, vaguely guessing that the absent-mindedness with which Mitya constantly came and went, not simple. She suspected that Mitya was living with Parasha, or at least coveting it, she was jealous and spoke to him now tenderly, now sharply, looked languidly, making her feelings clear, now coldly and hostilely. And all this gave Mitya a strange pleasure. There was no letter and there wasn’t, he didn’t live now, but only existed from day to day in incessant expectation, more and more languishing with this expectation and the inability to share the secret of his love and torment with anyone, to talk about Katya, about his hopes for the Crimea, and therefore Sonya's hints of some kind of love for him were pleasant to him: after all, all the same, these conversations, as it were, touched on that innermost thing that languished in his soul. He was also agitated by the fact that Sonya was in love with him, and therefore, partly close to him, which made her, as it were, a secret accomplice in the love life of his soul, even gave sometimes a strange hope that in Sonya one could find either a confidante of one's feelings, or some replacement for Katya. Now Sonya, without suspecting it herself, again touched on his secret: "Look, don't oversleep things!" He looked around. The solid dark green thicket of spruce that stood in front of him seemed almost black from the brightness of the day, and the sky shone through in its sharp tops with a particularly magnificent blue. The young greenery of lindens, maples, elms, bright through and through from the sun that penetrated it everywhere, formed a light, joyful canopy throughout the garden, poured a variegated shade and bright spots on the grass, on the paths, on the clearings; the hot and fragrant color, whitening under this canopy, seemed porcelain, shone, shone where the sun also penetrated it. Mitya, smiling against his will, asked Sonya: - What business can I oversleep? It's a shame that I don't have anything to do. - Be silent already, do not swear, and so I will believe! - Sonya shouted in response cheerfully and rudely, again giving him pleasure with her distrust of Mitya’s lack of love affairs, and suddenly she yelled again, waving a red calf with white curly hair on her forehead, which slowly came out of the spruce forest, approached her from behind and began to chew on the frill of her cotton dress: Here is another son God sent! - Is it true they say they marry you? - said Mitya, not knowing what to say, but wanting to continue the conversation. “They say the court is rich, the small one is beautiful, but you refused, you don’t obey your father ...” - I may be thinking about someone else ... Serious and silent Glashka, without interrupting her work, shook her head: - You are already carrying, girl, both from the Don and from the sea! she said softly. - You're lying about anything here, and glory will go around the village ... - Shut up, don't cackle! Sonya screamed. - Maybe I'm not a crow, there is a defense! - And about whom is it about the other you think about? - asked Mitya. - So I confessed! Sonya said. - I fell in love with your grandfather the shepherd. I see, it's so hot to the toes! I, no worse than yours, ride old horses all the time,” she said defiantly, obviously alluding to the twenty-year-old Parasha, who in the village was already considered an old girl. And, suddenly throwing down the shovel, with boldness, to which she seemed to have some right due to her secret love for the barchuk, she sat down on the ground, stretched out and slightly spread her legs in her old rough half-boots and woolen piebald stockings, and helplessly dropped her hands. - Oh, I didn’t do anything, but I was tired! she shouted, laughing. - My boots are thin, - she sang piercingly, - My boots are thin. Lacquered socks, - and again she shouted, laughing: - Come with me to rest in salash, I agree to everything! This laughter infected Mitya. Smiling broadly and awkwardly, he jumped off the bough and, going up to Sonya, lay down and laid his head on her knees. Sonya threw it off - he laid it down again, again thinking in verses that he had read in recent days: I see, a rose, - the power of happiness has opened its bright scroll And moistened with dew - The vast, incomprehensible, Fragrant, gracious World of love is in front of me ... - Not touch me! - Sonya screamed with sincere fright, trying to lift and throw away his head. “I’ll scream like that, all the wolves in the forest will howl!” I don’t have anything for you, it burned, but it went out! Mitya closed his eyes and remained silent. The sun, splitting through the foliage, branches and pear blossom, was full of hot spots and tickled his face. Sonya gently and angrily pulled him into his black coarse hair, - "it's clean at the horse!" she shouted and covered his eyes with a cap. Under the back of his head, he felt her legs - the worst thing in the world, women's legs! - touched her belly with it, heard the smell of a cotton skirt and blouse, and all this interfered with the flowering garden and with Katya; the languid clatter of nightingales far and near, the incessant, voluptuous, drowsy buzzing of innumerable bees, the honey-like warm air, and even the simple sensation of the earth under one's back tormented, tormented by the thirst for some kind of superhuman happiness. And suddenly something rustled in the spruce forest, laughed merrily and maliciously, then boomed: "ku-ku! ku-ku!" - and so terribly, so prominently, so close and so clearly that a wheezing and trembling of a sharp tongue were heard, and Katya's desire and desire, the demand that she immediately give this superhuman happiness at all costs, seized so violently, that Mitya, to Sonya's extreme surprise, jumped up impetuously and walked away with long strides. Together with this frantic desire, the demand for happiness, to this booming voice, which suddenly resounded with such terrible clarity over his very head in the spruce forest and seemed to open the bosom of this whole spring world to the bottom, he suddenly imagined that there would not be and could not be a letter. that something happened in Moscow or is about to happen, and that he died, disappeared!

In the house, he stopped for a moment in front of the mirror in the hall. "She's right," he thought, "my eyes are, if not Byzantine, then, in any case, crazy. And this thinness, coarse and bony awkwardness, gloomy angular eyebrows, coarse black hair, really almost horse-like, as Sonya said ?" But behind him came the rapid clatter of bare feet. He was embarrassed, turned around: - It's true, you fell in love, everyone looks in the mirror, - Parasha said with gentle playfulness, running past with a boiling samovar in her hands to the balcony. "Your mother was looking for you," she added, putting the samovar on the table that had been set for tea with a flourish, and, turning round, glanced at Mitya sharply and quickly. "Everyone knows, everyone guesses!" - thought Mitya and through force asked: - And where is she? - In my room. The sun, having bypassed the house and already passing into the western sky, looked like a mirror under the pines and fir trees, which overshadowed the balcony with their coniferous branches. The euonymus bushes under them also shone quite like summer, glassy. The table, covered with a slight shadow and here and there with hot spots of light, shone like a tablecloth. Wasps hovered over a basket of white bread, over a faceted vase of jam, over cups. And this whole picture spoke of a wonderful country summer and how one could be happy, carefree. In order to prevent the exit of his mother, who, of course, understands his situation no less than others, and to show that he does not have any grave secrets in his soul, Mitya went from the hall into the corridor, into which the doors of his room, mother's and two others, opened. where Anya and Kostya lived in the summer. It was gloomy in the corridor, and bluish in Olga Petrovna's room. The whole room was crowded and comfortably cluttered with the most antique furniture in the house: chiffonieres, chests of drawers, a large bed and a shrine, in front of which, as usual, a lamp was burning, although Olga Petrovna never showed any particular religiosity. Behind the open windows, on the neglected flower garden in front of the entrance to the main avenue, lay a broad shadow; Without looking at all that long-familiar view, her eyes lowered in her spectacles at her knitting, Olga Petrovna, a large and lean, black and serious woman of forty, was sitting in an armchair by the window and quickly picking with a crochet hook. - Did you ask me, mom? - said Mitya, entering and stopping at the threshold. No, I just wanted to see you. I hardly ever see you now, except for dinner,' replied Olga Petrovna, without interrupting her work, and somehow especially, unreasonably calmly. Mitya remembered how on the ninth of March Katya had said that for some reason she was afraid of his mother, he remembered the secret charming meaning that was undoubtedly in her words. .. he muttered awkwardly: - But maybe you wanted to say something to me? - Nothing. besides the fact that it seems to me that you have been bored for some reason the last few days,” said Olga Petrovna. “Maybe I could take a ride somewhere ... to the Meshcherskys, for example ... The house of brides is full,” she added, smiling, “and in general, in my opinion, a very sweet and hospitable family. “One of these days I’ll go with pleasure,” Mitya answered with difficulty. “But let’s go and drink tea, it’s so nice on the balcony there ... We’ll talk there,” he said, knowing full well that mother, in her penetrating mind and in her restraint, would not return to this useless conversation. They sat on the balcony almost until sunset. After tea, Mom continued to knit and talk about the neighbors, about the household, about Anya and Kostya - Anya again had an overexposure in August! Mitya listened, sometimes answered, but all the time he experienced something similar to what he experienced before leaving Moscow - that again he seemed to be drunk from some serious illness. And in the evening, for two hours, he non-stop paced the lady back and forth, passing through the hall, the living room, the sofa and the library, right up to her south window, open to the garden. Through the windows of the hall and the drawing-room the sunset blushed softly between the branches of the pines and firs, and the voices and laughter of the workers were heard as they gathered for supper near the servants' quarters. Through the span of rooms, through the window of the library, looked the even and colorless blue of the evening sky with a fixed pink star above it; on this blue, the green top of the maple and the whiteness, as if winter, of everything that bloomed in the garden were picturesquely drawn. And he walked and walked, no longer caring about how this would be interpreted in the house. His teeth were clenched until his head hurt.

From that day on, he ceased to follow all the changes that the coming summer was making around him. He saw and even felt them, these changes, but they lost their independent value for him, he enjoyed them only painfully: the better it was, the more painful it was for him. Katya has already become a true obsession; Katya was now in everything and behind everything already to the point of absurdity, and since every new day more and more terrible confirmed that for him, for Mitya, she no longer exists, that she is already in someone else's power, giving herself to someone else and his love, which should entirely belong to him. Mitya, then everything in the world began to seem unnecessary, painful, and all the more unnecessary and painful, the more beautiful it was. At night he hardly slept. The charm of these moonlit nights was incomparable. Quietly stood the milky garden at night. Cautiously, exhausted from bliss, the nightingales sang, competing with each other in the sweetness and subtlety of the songs, in their purity, thoroughness, sonority. And the quiet, gentle, quite pale moon stood low over the garden, and was invariably accompanied by a small, unspeakably charming swell of bluish clouds. Mitya slept with uncurtained windows, and the garden and the moon looked through them all night. And every time he opened his eyes and looked at the moon, he immediately mentally pronounced, as if possessed: "Katya!" - and with such delight, with such pain, that he himself felt wild: what, in fact, could the moon remind him of Katya, but she reminded him, reminded him with something and, most surprisingly, even with something visual! And sometimes he simply didn’t see anything: Katya’s desire, the memories of what happened between them in Moscow, seized him with such force that he trembled all over with a feverish shudder and prayed to God - and, alas, always in vain! - to see her with you, here on this bed, even in a dream. One winter, he was with her at the Bolshoi Theater on "Faust" with Sobinov and Chaliapin. For some reason, everything seemed especially delightful to him that evening: both the bright abyss, already sultry and fragrant from the crowd, gaping under them, and the red-velvet, with gold, floors of the boxes, overflowing with brilliant dresses, and the pearly radiance above this abyss of a giant chandelier , and the sounds of the overture pouring far below under the waving of the bandmaster, now thundering, diabolical, now infinitely tender and sad: "There once was a good king in Fula ..." he sat up especially late at her place, became especially exhausted from the kisses, and took with him the silk ribbon with which Katya tied her braid at night. Now, in those tormenting May nights, he had reached the point where he could not think without a shudder even about this tape that lay in his desk. And during the day he slept, then he rode away on horseback to the village where there was a railway station and a post office. The days continued to be fine. Rains fell, thunderstorms and downpours ran through, and again the hot sun shone, incessantly doing its hasty work in gardens, fields and forests. The garden faded, crumbled, but continued to thicken and darken violently. The forests were already drowning in innumerable flowers, in tall grasses, and the sonorous silly woman silently called them into her green bowels like nightingales and cuckoos. The nakedness of the fields has already disappeared - they are completely covered with variously rich seedlings of bread. And Mitya would disappear for whole days in these forests and fields. He became too ashamed to hang around every morning on the balcony or in the middle of the yard, fruitlessly waiting for the arrival of the headman or worker from the post office. And besides, the headman and the workers did not always have time to travel eight miles for trifles. And so he began to go to the post office himself. But he himself invariably returned home with one issue of the Oryol newspaper or a letter from Anya, Kostya. And his torment began to reach the extreme limit. The fields and forests through which he rode so overwhelmed him with their beauty, their happiness, that he began to feel pain somewhere in his chest, even bodily pain. One day, towards evening, he was driving from the post office through an empty neighbor's estate, which stood in an old park that merged with the birch forest that surrounded it. He was driving along the service avenue, as the peasants called the main avenue of this estate. It was made up of two rows of huge black firs. Magnificently gloomy, wide, all covered with a thick layer of red slippery needles, it led to an old house that stood at the very end of its corridor. The red, dry and calm light of the sun, descending to the left behind the park and the forest, obliquely illuminated the bottom of this corridor between the trunks, shone on its golden coniferous flooring. And such an enchanted silence reigned all around - only nightingales thundered from end to end of the park - there was such a sweet smell of both firs and jasmine, the bushes of which surrounded the house from everywhere, and such great - someone else's, long-standing - happiness was felt by Mitya in all this and so terribly clearly she suddenly presented herself to him on a huge dilapidated balcony, among the jasmine bushes. Katya, in the form of his young wife, that he himself felt a deathly pallor constrict his face, and said firmly aloud, to the whole alley: - If there is no letter in a week, I will shoot myself!

The next day he got up very late. After dinner, he sat on the balcony, holding a book on his knees, looking at the pages covered with print, and stupidly thinking: "Should I go to the post office or not?" It was hot, white butterflies hovered in pairs one after another over the hot grass, over the glassy shining euonymus. He watched the butterflies and again asked himself: "Should I go or cut off these shameful trips at once?" From under the mountain, at the gate, the headman appeared riding a stallion. The headman looked at the balcony and rode straight towards it. Arriving, he stopped the horse and said: - Good morning! Do you all read? And he smiled and looked around. - Mom sleep? he asked softly. “I think he is asleep,” Mitya answered. - And what? The headman was silent for a while and suddenly said seriously: - Well, the barchuk, the book is good, but you need to know it all the time. Why are you living as a monk? Ay few women, girls? Mitya did not answer and lowered his eyes to the book. - Where have you been? he asked without looking. “I was at the post office,” said the headman. - And, of course, there are no letters there, except for one newspaper. Why "of course"? “Because, that means they are still writing, they haven’t finished writing,” the headman answered rudely and mockingly, offended that Mitya did not support his conversation. “Please get it,” he said, holding out a newspaper to Mitya, and, touching the horse, rode away. "I'll shoot myself!" Mitya thought firmly, looking into the book and seeing nothing.

Mitya himself could not but understand that it was impossible to imagine anything wilder than this: to shoot himself, crush his skull, immediately cut off the beating of a strong young heart, cut off thought and feeling, go deaf, go blind, disappear from that inexpressibly beautiful world that only now. for the first time everything opened up before him, instantly and forever to lose all participation in that very life, where Katya and the coming summer, where the sky, clouds, sun, warm wind, bread in the fields, villages, villages, girls, mother, estate, Anya, Kostya , poems in old magazines, and somewhere there - Sevastopol, Baidarskis gates, sultry lilac mountains in pine and beech forests, dazzling white, stuffy highway, gardens of Livadia and Alupka, hot sand by the shining sea, tanned children, tanned bathers - and again Katya, in a white dress, under a white umbrella, sitting on the pebbles by the very waves, blinding with their brilliance, causing an involuntary smile of causeless happiness ... He understood this, but what was to be done? How and where to break out of that vicious circle, where it was the more painful, the more unbearable, the better it was? It was precisely this that was unbearable - the very happiness with which the world suppressed him and which lacked something of the most necessary. So he woke up in the morning, and the first thing that struck his eyes was the joyful sun, the first thing he heard. there was the joyful, familiar from childhood chime of the village church - there, behind the dewy garden, full of shadow and brilliance, birds and flowers; even the yellow wallpaper on the walls was joyful, sweet, the same that had turned yellow in his childhood. But immediately, with delight and horror, the thought pierced my whole soul: Katya! The morning sun shone with her youth, the freshness of the garden was her freshness, all that cheerful, playful thing that was in the ringing of bells also played with beauty, the elegance of her image, grandfather's wallpaper demanded that she share with Mitya all that native village antiquity, that life, in which his fathers and grandfathers lived and died here, in this estate, in this house. And Mitya threw the blanket away, jumped out of bed in one shirt, with the collar open, long-legged, thin, but still strong, young, warm from sleep, quickly pulled out the desk drawer, grabbed the treasured photographic card and fell into tetanus, greedily and inquiringly looking at her. All the charm, all the grace, all that inexplicable, radiant and inviting that is in the girlish, in the feminine, everything was in this little snake head, in her hairstyle, in her slightly defiant and at the same time innocent look! But mysteriously and with indestructible cheerful silence shone this look - and where could one get the strength to endure it, so close and so far, and now, perhaps, even forever a stranger, who discovered such an inexpressible happiness to live and so shamelessly and terribly deceived? That evening, when he was driving from the post office through Shakhovskoye, through this old empty estate with a black spruce alley, he very accurately expressed with his exclamation, unexpected even for himself, the extreme exhaustion that he had reached. Standing under the post office window, looking from his saddle as the postman rummages in vain in a pile of newspapers and letters, he heard behind him the noise of a train approaching the station, and this noise and the smell of locomotive smoke shook him with happiness, memories of the Kursk railway station and Moscow in general. Riding through the village from the post office, in every short girl walking in front, in the movement of her hips, he was frightened to catch something of Katino. In the field he met someone's troika, - in the tarantass, which she carried very fast, two hats flashed, one girl's, and he almost cried out: "Katya!" The white flowers on the border instantly connected with the thought of her white gloves, blue bear ears- with the color of her veil ... And when, at the setting sun, he drove into Shakhovskoye, the dry and sweet smell of firs and the luxurious smell of jasmine gave him such a sharp feeling of summer in someone's old summer life in this rich and beautiful estate that Glancing at the red-gold evening light in the alley, at the house standing in its depths, in the evening shadow, he suddenly saw Katya descending, in all the bloom of feminine charm, from the balcony into the garden, almost exactly as clearly as he saw the house and jasmine. He had long since lost the idea of ​​life about her, and every day she appeared to him more and more unusual, more and more transformed, - that very evening her transformation reached such strength, such triumphant victoriousness, that Mitya was even more horrified than on that afternoon, when suddenly a cuckoo chirped over him.

And he stopped going to the post office, forced himself to cut these trips off with a desperate, extreme effort of will. I stopped writing myself. After all, everything has already been tried, everything has been written: both frantic assurances of his love, such as has never happened on earth, and humiliating pleas for her love, or at least for "friendship", and shameless fictions that he is ill, that he writes , lying in bed - in order to arouse at least pity for himself, at least some attention - and even threatening hints that he seems to have only one thing left: to save Katya and his "happier rivals" from his presence on earth . And, ceasing to write and soliciting an answer, with all his strength forcing himself not to expect anything (but still secretly hoping that the letter would arrive exactly when you either deceive fate, pretending to be indifferent very well, or when you really achieve indifference), trying in every possible way not to think about Katya, seeking salvation from her in every possible way, he again began to read what came to hand, to go with the headman on economic matters to neighboring villages and inwardly repeat to himself tirelessly: "It doesn't matter, let it be what will be!" And then one day they were returning with the headman from the farm, riding on runners and, as always, very fast. Both sat on horseback, the headman in front - he ruled - and Mitya behind, and both jumped up from the shocks, especially Mitya, who held tightly to the pillow and looked now at the red head of the headman, then at the fields jumping before his eyes. Approaching the house, the headman lowered the reins, rode off at a pace, began to twirl his cigarette and, grinning into an unfolded pouch, said: Didn't I tell you the truth? The book is good, why not read it at parties, but it won’t go away, you need to know for all the time. Mitya flared up and, unexpectedly for himself, answered with feigned simplicity and an awkward grin: - Yes, there is nobody in mind ... - How so? - said the elder. - How many women, girls! - The girls only beckon, - Mitya answered, trying to match the elder's tone. - There is little hope for girls. “They don’t beckon, but you don’t know the address,” the headman said already instructively. - And again, be stingy. A dry spoon tears up your mouth. “I wouldn’t skimp on anything if it were a good and right thing,” Mitya suddenly answered shamelessly. - And if you don’t, everything will be in at its best- said the headman, lighting a cigarette, and continued as if somewhat offended: - I don’t have a ruble, your gift is dear, but I want to make you a pleasure. I'll look, I'll look: the barchuk is bored! No, I don't think we can leave it like this. I always take my masters into account. I've been living with you for the second year, but thank God, I haven't heard a bad word from you or from the mistress. Others, for example, what is the lord's cattle? Sat - good, no - to hell with her. And I don't have that. I value livestock the most. I say to the guys: as you wish, but so that my cattle are full! Mitya had already begun to think that the headman was drunk, but the headman suddenly dropped an offended, sincere tone and said, looking inquiringly at Mitya over his shoulder: - But what is better than Alenka? A poisonous, young woman, her husband is in the mines ... Only she, of course, needs to slip some trifle. Well, spend, say, on everything about all five. A ruble, say, for a treat, two - in her arms. Well, I'll have some tobacco for some... - This won't be the case, - Mitya answered, again against his will. - Just what Alenka are you talking about? - It's clear, about Lesnikova, - said the headman. - Oh, you don't know her? The daughter-in-law of the new forester. I think you saw her last Sunday in the church ... Then I immediately thought: our barchuk would be just right! Married for only two years, she walks clean... - So what, - answered Mitya, grinning, - well, arrange it. “Then I, then, will try,” said the headman, taking up the reins. - I mean, one of these days I'll try it. And you yourself do not doze off yet. Tomorrow she and the girls will straighten the shaft in the garden with us, so you come to the garden ... But this book will never go away, perhaps you read a lot in Moscow ... And he touched the horse, and the droshky again shook and jumped. Mitya held tightly to the pillow and, trying not to look at the headman's red thick neck, looked into the distance, through the trees of his garden and the vines of the village, which lay on the slope to the river, to the river meadows. Something wildly unexpected, absurd, and at the same time such that it caused a chilling languor to pass through the whole body, was already half done. And already somehow differently than before, sticking out in front of him from behind the tops of the garden and shining like a cross in the evening sun, the familiar bell tower from childhood.

The girls called Mitya a greyhound for thinness, he was from that breed of people with black, as if constantly dilated eyes, in whom neither a mustache nor a beard almost grows even in adulthood - only something rare and harsh curls. However, the next day, after talking with the headman, he shaved in the morning and put on a yellow silk shirt, which strangely and beautifully lit up his haggard and, as it were, inspired face. At eleven o'clock, he slowly, trying to give himself a little bored, having nothing to do to make a walk, went into the garden. He came out of the main porch facing north. To the north, over the roofs of the coach house and barnyard, and over that part of the garden from behind which the belfry always looked, there was a slate haze. And everything was dim, the air hovered and smelled from the human pipe. Mitya turned behind the house and headed for the linden alley, looking at the tops of the garden and at the sky. From under the indefinite clouds setting behind the garden, from the southeast, a weak hot wind was blowing. The birds did not sing, even the nightingales were silent. Some bees in a multitude silently rushed through the garden with a bribe. The girls, straightening the rampart, worked again near the spruce forest, patching up the manholes trodden by cattle in the rampart, filling them up with earth and steamy, pleasantly smelly manure, which workers from time to time brought from the barnyard through the alley - the whole alley was dotted with wet and shiny shmats There were six girls. Sonya was no longer there - she was still betrothed, and now she was sitting at home, preparing something for the wedding. There were several very thin girls, there was a fat, pretty Anyutf, there was Glashka, who seemed to have become even more severe and courageous - and Alenka. And Mitya immediately saw her among the trees, immediately realized that it was she, although he had never seen her before, and he was struck like lightning by something in common that suddenly and sharply hit him in the eyes, which was, or only seemed to him, - in Alenka with Katya. It was so surprising that he even paused for a moment, dumbfounded. Then he resolutely walked straight at her, never taking his eyes off her. She was also small, mobile. Despite the fact that she came to dirty work, she was in a pretty (white with red speckles) calico jacket, girded with a black patent leather belt, in the same skirt, in a pink silk handkerchief, in red woolen stockings and in black soft chuny, in which (or rather, in her whole small light leg) was again something of Catino, that is, feminine, mixed with something childish. And her head was small and her dark eyes stood and shone almost the same as Katya's. When Mitya approached, she did not work alone, as if feeling her own peculiarity among others, she stood on the rampart, putting her right foot on the pitchfork and talking with the headman. The headman, leaning on his elbows, lay under the apple tree on his jacket with a torn lining and smoked. Mitya came up - he politely moved to the grass, giving him a place on his jacket. "Sit down, Mitriy Palych, smoke," he said in a friendly and careless manner. Mitya glanced quickly, stealthily at Alyonka—her pink handkerchief illuminated her face very well—sat down and, lowering his eyes, began to smoke (he had quit smoking many times during the winter and spring, now he lit up again). Alenka did not even bow to him, as if she had not noticed him. The headman continued to tell her something that Mitya did not understand, not knowing the beginning of the conversation. She laughed, but somehow, as if neither her mind nor her heart took part in this laughter. In each of his phrases, the headman scornfully and mockingly inserted obscene allusions. She answered him easily and also mockingly, making it clear that in some of his intentions towards someone he behaved stupidly, too impudently, and at the same time cowardly, fearing his wife. “Well, you won’t be outdone,” the headman said at last, ending the argument, as if in view of its boring uselessness. - You'd better come sit with us. Barin wants to say a word to you. Alenka turned her eye somewhere to the side, tucked dark ringlets of hair at her temples and did not move. - Go, I say, fool! - said the elder. And after thinking for a moment, Alyonka suddenly jumped lightly off the rampart, ran up and squatted down on her haunches a couple of paces from Mitya, who was lying on his jacket, gazing merrily and curiously into his face with her dark, widened eyes. Then she laughed and asked: “Is it true, you, barchuk, don’t live with women?” What a deacon? - And how do you know that they do not live? - asked the elder. “Yes, I know,” Alenka said. - I heard. No, they don't rub. They have it in Moscow,” she said, suddenly playing with her eyes. “There are no suitable ones for them, so they don’t live,” the headman answered. - You know a lot about them! - How not? - said Alenka, laughing. - How many women, girls! There Anyutka, what is better? Annie, come here, there is work! she called loudly. Anyutka, broad and soft in the back, short-armed, turned around, - was her face pretty? a kind and pleasant smile, - she shouted something in response in a melodious voice and earned even more. - They tell you to go! Alyonka repeated even louder. “There’s no need for me to go, I’m not taught these things by heart,” Anyutka sang joyfully. “We don’t need Anyutka, we need something cleaner, more noble,” the headman said admonishingly. - We know who we need. And very expressively looked at Alenka. She was a little embarrassed, a little blushed. - No, no, no, - she answered, hiding her embarrassment with a smile, - you won't find Anyutka better. But if you don't want Anyutka, - Nastya, she also walks cleanly, she lived in the city ... - Well, it will be, be quiet, - the headman said unexpectedly rudely. - Mind your own business, swear, and it will be. The lady scolds me anyway, they say they are only being rude with you ... Alenka jumped up - and again took up the pitchfork with unusual ease. But the worker, who at that time dumped the last wagon of manure, shouted: "Breakfast!" - and, pulling the reins, briskly thundered down the alley with an empty cart box. - Breakfast, breakfast! - the girls shouted in different voices, throwing spades and pitchforks, jumping over the rampart, jumping off it, flashing their bare legs and multi-colored stockings and running under the spruce forest to their bundles. The headman glanced sideways at Mitya, winked at him, wanting to say that things were going on, and, getting up, bossily agreed: , taking out the cakes and laying them on the hem between straight lying legs, they began to chew, washing down from bottles some with milk, some with kvass and continuing to speak loudly and randomly, laughing at every word and constantly looking at Mitya with curious and defiant eyes. Alenka, leaning towards Anyutka, said something in her ear. Apyutka, unable to hold back her charming smile, forcefully pushed her away (Alenka, choking on laughter, fell headlong into her knees) and, with feigned indignation, shouted to the whole spruce forest in her melodious voice: - Fool! What are you talking about doing nothing? What a joy? - Let's get away from sin, Mitriy Palych, - said the headman, - look at them the devils are dismantling!

The next day they did not work in the garden, it was a holiday, Sunday. It rained at night, it rustled wetly on the roof, the garden every now and then was pale, but widely, fabulously lit up. By morning, however, the weather cleared up again, everything became simple and safe again, and Mitya was awakened by the cheerful, sunny ringing of bells. He slowly washed himself, dressed, drank a glass of tea and went to Mass. “Mom’s already gone,” Parasha affectionately reproached him, “and you’re like a Tatar ...” You could go to the church either along the pasture, leaving the gate of the estate and turning right, or through the garden, along the main alley, and then along the road between the garden and the threshing floor, to the left. Mitya went through the garden. Everything was quite summery. Mitya walked along the alley straight into the sun, which shone dryly on the threshing floor and in the field. And this glitter and ringing of bells, somehow very well and peacefully merging with him and with all this village morning, and the fact that Mitya had just washed himself, combed his wet, glossy black hair and put on a student cap, everything suddenly seemed so good that Mitya, who again did not sleep all night and again passed through the night through many of the most diverse thoughts and feelings, was suddenly seized with hope for some kind of happy resolution of all his torments, for salvation, liberation from them. The bells played and called, the threshing floor ahead shone hotly, the woodpecker, stopping, raising his tuft, quickly ran up the gnarled trunk of a linden tree to its light green, sunny top, velvet black and red bumblebees carefully burrowed into the flowers in the clearings, in the sun, the birds flooded all over sweet and carefree garden ... Everything was as it had happened many, many times in childhood, in adolescence, and all the charming, carefree old times were remembered so vividly that suddenly there was a certainty that God was merciful, that perhaps one could live on light and without Katya. "Indeed, I'll go to the Meshcherskys," thought Mitya suddenly. But then he raised his eyes - and twenty paces away he saw Alenka passing by the gate just at that moment. She was again in a pink silk handkerchief, in a smart blue dress with frills, in new shoes with horseshoes. She walked quickly, wagging her back, without seeing him, and he impulsively leaned aside, behind the trees. Letting her escape, he, with a beating heart, hurriedly walked back to the house. He suddenly realized that he had gone to church with the secret purpose of seeing her, and that it was not necessary to see her in church.

During dinner, a messenger from the station brought a telegram - Anya and Kostya announced that they would be there tomorrow evening. Mitya was completely indifferent to this. After dinner, he lay supine on the wicker sofa on the balcony, eyes closed, feeling the hot sun reaching the balcony, listening to the summer buzzing of flies. My heart was trembling, an insoluble question stood in my head: what about the next deal with Alenka? When will it be finally decided? Why didn't the headman ask her directly yesterday: did she agree, and, if so, where and when? And next to this, something else was tormenting: should or not violate your firm decision not to go to the post office anymore? Wouldn't you like to go again today, the last one? A new and senseless mockery of your own vanity? A new and senseless tormenting oneself with miserable hope? But what can now add this trip (in fact, a simple walk) to his torment? Isn't it now quite obvious that there, in Moscow, everything is over for him forever? What should he do now? - Barchuk! - suddenly there was a soft voice near the balcony. - Barchuk, are you sleeping? He quickly opened his eyes. In front of him stood the headman in a new cotton shirt, in a new cap. His face was festive, well-fed, and slightly sleepy, intoxicated. - Barchuk, let's go to the forest, - he whispered. - I told the lady that I need to see Tryphon about the bees. Let's go quickly, while they are resting, otherwise they will wake up and think it over ... Let's grab something to treat Tryphon, he will get tipsy, you will speak to him, and I will contrive to whisper a word to Alyonka. Come out quickly, I already forbade ... Mitya jumped up, ran through the servant's room, grabbed his cap and quickly went to the carriage house, where stood a hot young stallion harnessed to a racing droshky.

The stallion carried him out of the gate with a whirlwind right from the spot. Opposite the church, we stopped for a minute near a shop, took a pound of bacon and a bottle of vodka, and rushed on. A hut flashed by at the exit, near which Anyutka, dressed up and not knowing what to do, stood. The headman jokingly, but rudely, shouted something to her and, with drunken, senseless and malicious daring, firmly twitched the reins, whipped them on the colt's rump. The stallion gave more. Mitya, sitting and jumping, held on with all his might. The back of his head felt pleasantly hot, his face warmly blew with the heat of the field, smelling of already blooming rye, road dust, wheel ointment. The rye walked, cast a silvery-gray, like some kind of wonderful fur, swell, over it every minute soared, sang, rushed askew and fell larks, far ahead the forest was softly blue ... A quarter of an hour later they were already in the forest and still very fast , knocking on stumps and crusts, rushed along its shady road, joyful from sunspots and countless flowers in the thick and tall grass on the sides. Alyonka, in her blue dress, with her legs straight and straight in her half-boots, was sitting in the oak trees that were blossoming near the guardhouse and embroidering something. The headman flew past her, threatening her with a whip, and immediately reined in at the threshold. Mitya was struck by the bitter and fresh aroma of the forest, young oak leaves, deafened by the sonorous barking of the little dogs that surrounded the droshky and filled the entire forest with responses. They stood and roared furiously in every way, and their furry muzzles were kind and their tails wagged. They climbed down, tied the stallion to a dry, scorched tree under the windows, and entered through the dark passage. It was very clean in the guardroom, very comfortable and very crowded, it was hot both from the sun that shone from behind the forest in both of its windows, and because the stove was heated - in the morning the rushes were baked. Fedosya, Alyonka's mother-in-law, a clean and fine-looking old woman, was sitting at the table with her back to the sunny window strewn with small flies. Seeing the barchuk, she stood up and bowed low. After saying hello, they sat down and began to smoke. - And where is Trifon? - asked the elder. - He is resting in the cage, - said Fedosya, - I will now go and call him. - It's going on! the headman whispered, blinking both eyes as soon as she left. But Mitya has not yet seen any case. As long as it was only unbearably awkward, it seemed that Fedosya already perfectly understood why they had come. Again flashed the thought that had been terrifying for the third day: "What am I doing? I'm going crazy!" He felt like a sleepwalker, subjugated by someone else's will, going faster and faster towards some fatal, but irresistibly enticing abyss. But, trying to look simple and calm, he sat, smoked, looked around the guardhouse. It was especially embarrassing at the thought that Tryphon would now enter, a muzhik, as they say, an evil, clever man, who at once would understand everything even better than Fedosya. But at the same time there was another thought: "But where does she sleep? On these bunks or in a cage?" Of course, in the crate, he thought. Summer night in the forest, the windows in the cage without a frame, without glass, and all night long a drowsy forest whisper is heard, and she sleeps ...

Tryphon, entering, also bowed low to Mitya, but silently, without looking into his eyes. Then he sat down on a bench in front of the table and spoke dryly and hostilely to the headman: what's the matter, why did you complain? The headman hurried to say that the lady had sent him, that she was asking Tryphon to come see the apiary, that their beekeeper was an old, deaf fool, and that he, Tryphon, might be the first beekeeper in the whole province, but to his mind and understanding, - and immediately pulled out of one from one pocket of his pants a bottle of vodka, and from the other lard in rough gray paper, already soaked through with oil. Tryphon squinted coldly and mockingly, but got up and took a teacup from the shelf. The headman brought it first to Mitya, then to Tryphon, then to Fedosya, - she pulled the cup to the bottom with pleasure, - and, finally, poured himself a glass. After drinking, he immediately began to carry around the second, chewing rush and flaring his nostrils. Tryphon quickly got tipsy, but did not lose his dryness and hostile mockery. The headman became seriously stupefied after the second cup. The conversation assumed a friendly character in appearance, but both of them had incredulous, malicious eyes. Fedosya sat in silence, looking politely but displeased. Elena didn't show up. Having lost all hope that she would come, seeing clearly that it was a completely stupid dream to count now on the fact that the headman would be able to whisper a “word” to her even if she came, Mitya got up and sternly said that it was time to go. - Now, now, have time! - the headman answered sullenly and impudently. - I still need to tell you a word in secret. “Well, you can say dear,” Mitya said with restraint, but even stricter. - Let's go. But the headman slammed his palm on the table and repeated with drunken mystery: “But I tell you that you shouldn’t say that dear! Come out to me for a minute... And, having risen heavily from his seat, he flung open the door to the entrance hall. Mitya followed him. - Well, what's the matter? - Shut up! the headman whispered mysteriously, closing the door behind Mitya and staggering. - What to be silent about? - Shut up. - I don't understand you. - Shut up! Ours will! True word! Mitya pushed him away, left the porch and stopped on the threshold, not knowing what to do: wait a little longer, or leave alone, or just leave on foot? Ten paces from him stood a dense green forest, already in the evening shade and therefore even fresher, purer and more beautiful. The pure, serene sun was setting behind its peaks, its pure gold radiantly pouring through them. And suddenly a woman’s melodious voice resounded and swept through the depths of the forest, somewhere, as it seemed, far on the other side, beyond the ravines, and so invitingly, so charmingly, as it sounds only in the forest, in the summer evening dawn. - Ay! - drawled this voice, apparently amused by the forest responses. - Ay! Mitya jumped off the threshold and ran through the flowers and grasses into the forest. The forest descended into a rocky ravine. Alenka stood in the ravine and ate rams. Mitya ran up the cliff and stopped. She looked down at him with surprised eyes. - What are you doing here? Mitya asked softly. - I'm looking for our Maruska with a cow. And what? She answered softly too. - Well, you're coming, right? - Why should I go for nothing? - she said. - Who told you that for nothing? Mitya asked almost in a whisper. - Don't worry about it. - And when? - asked Alenka. - Yes, tomorrow ... When can you? Elena thought. "Tomorrow I'll go to my mother's to shear the sheep," she said after a pause, cautiously looking around the forest on the hill behind Mitya. - In the evening, when it gets dark, I'll come. And where to? You can’t go to the threshing floor, someone will come in ... Do you want a salad in the hollow in your garden? Only you look, don’t deceive me - I don’t agree for nothing ... This is not Moscow for you, ”she said, looking at him from below with laughing eyes,“ there, they say, the women themselves carve ...

They returned awkwardly. Trifon did not remain in debt, put down a bottle on his side, and the headman got so drunk that he did not immediately sit on the droshky, first fell on them, and the frightened stallion rushed and almost galloped off alone. But Mitya was silent, looked at the headman insensibly, waited patiently for him to sit down. The headman again drove with absurd fury. Mitya was silent, holding on tightly, looking at the evening sky, at the fields, rapidly trembling and jumping in front of him. Above the fields, by sunset, the larks sang their meek songs, in the east, already blue by night, those distant, peaceful lightning flared up that promise nothing but good weather. Mitya understood all this evening charm, but now she was completely alien to him. In my thoughts, in my soul, there was one thing: tomorrow evening! At home, news awaited him that a letter had been received confirming that Anya and Kostya would be there tomorrow, with the evening train. He was horrified - they will come, they will run to the garden in the evening, they can run to the hut, into the hollow ... But he immediately remembered that they would not be brought from the station before ten o'clock, then they would feed them, give them tea ... - Will you go to meet them? - Olga Petrovna asked. He felt that he was turning pale. - No, I don't think so... I don't feel like it... And there's nowhere to sit... - Well, suppose you could ride... - No, I don't know... Actually, why? Now, at least, I don't feel like it... Olga Petrovna looked intently at him. - You're healthy? "Absolutely," Mitya said almost rudely. - I just want to sleep very much ... And he immediately went to his room, lay down in the dark on the sofa and fell asleep without undressing. At night, he heard distant, slow music and saw himself hanging over a huge, dimly lit abyss. She brightened and brightened, became bottomless, golden, brighter, more and more crowded, and quite clearly, with unspeakable sadness and tenderness, it sounded and sang in her: "There lived, there was a good king in Fula ..." He trembled from emotion, turned on the other side and fell asleep again.

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

There was no dew; therefore, the smells of the evening garden could not be especially audible. But for all the unconsciousness of all his actions that evening, it still seemed to Mitya that he had never before in his life - with the possible exception of early childhood - met such a force and such a variety of smells as now. Everything smelled - acacia bushes, lilac leaves, currant leaves, burdock, Chernobyl, flowers, grass, earth ... Taking a few steps quickly with a terrible thought: "What if she deceives, does not come?" - now it seemed that all life depended on whether Alenka came or not, - catching among the smells of vegetation also the smell of evening smoke from somewhere in the village, Mitya stopped again, turned around for a moment: the evening beetle slowly swam and buzzed somewhere then next to it, as if sowing silence, calm and twilight, but it was still light from the dawn, which engulfed half the sky with its even, long-lasting light of the first summer dawns, and above the roof of the house, visible in some places from behind the trees, it shone high in a transparent in the void of heaven, the sharp and sharp sickle of the newly born month. Mitya glanced at him, quickly and smallly crossed himself under the spoon, and stepped into the acacia bushes. The alley led to a hollow, but not to a hut - you had to go obliquely to it, take it to the left. And Mitya, stepping through the bushes, ran in full, among the wide and low branches, now bending down, now pushing them away from him. A minute later he was already at the appointed place. Fearfully, he poked his head into the hut, into its darkness, smelling of dry, rotten straw, vigilantly looked around it and almost gladly made sure that no one was still there. But the fateful moment was drawing near, and he stood near the hut, all turned into sensitivity, into the most intense attention. All day, almost for a minute, his unusual bodily excitement did not leave him. Now it has reached higher power . But it is strange - both during the day and now, it was somehow independent, did not penetrate it all, owned only the body, not capturing the soul. My heart, however, was beating terribly. And all around it was so amazingly quiet that he heard only one thing - it was a beating. Silently, unceasingly, soft colorless moths whirled and twirled in the branches, in the gray foliage of apple trees, which were variously and patterned in the evening sky, and from these moths the silence seemed even quieter, as if the moths were bewitching and bewitching her. Suddenly, somewhere behind him, something crunched, and this sound, like thunder, struck him. He turned around impetuously, looked between the trees in the direction of the rampart - and saw that something black was rolling towards him under the boughs of the apple trees. But before he had time to figure out what it was, how this dark one, running into him, made some kind of wide movement - and it turned out to be Alyonka. She threw back the hem of a short skirt made of black self-woven wool, and he saw her frightened and beaming face with a smile. She was barefoot, wearing only a skirt and a simple, stern shirt tucked into her skirt. Under the shirt were her girlish breasts. A wide-cut collar revealed her neck and part of her shoulders, and the sleeves rolled up above the elbow were rounded arms. And everything in her, from her small head covered with a yellow handkerchief, to her small bare feet, feminine and at the same time childish, was so good, so deft, so captivating that Mitya, who had only seen her dressed up until now, saw her for the first time. in all the charm of this simplicity, gasped inwardly. - Well, rather, or something, - she whispered merrily and thievishly, and, looking around, dived into the hut, into its fragrant twilight. There she paused, and Mitya, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering, hurried to put his hand into his pocket - his legs were tense, hard as iron - and thrust a crumpled five-ruble note into her palm. She quickly hid it in her bosom and sat down on the ground. Mitya sat down beside her and put his arm around her neck, not knowing what to do, whether to kiss her or not. The smell of her handkerchief, hair, the onion smell of her whole body, mixed with the smell of the hut, smoke - everything was dizzyingly good, and Mitya understood, felt it. And yet everything was the same as before: the terrible force of bodily desire, not passing into spiritual desire, into bliss, into delight, into the languor of her whole being, she leaned back and lay down on her back. He lay down next to her, leaning against her, holding out his hand. Laughing softly and nervously, she caught it and pulled it down. “No way,” she said, half in jest, half seriously. She took his hand away and tenaciously held it with her small hand, her eyes looked into the triangular frame of the hut on the branches of apple trees, at the already darkened blue sky behind these branches and the motionless red dot of Antares, still standing alone in it. What did those eyes express? What should have been done? Kiss on the neck, on the lips? Suddenly she said hurriedly, taking hold of her short black skirt: "Well, hurry up, or something ... When they got up," Mitya got up, completely stricken with disappointment, - she, covering her scarf, straightening her hair, asked in an animated whisper, - how a close person, like a mistress: - You, they say, went to Subbotino. There pop sells piglets cheaply. Really oh no? Haven't you heard?

In the same week, on Saturday, the rain, which began on Wednesday, poured from morning until evening, poured like a bucket. Every now and then he let out that day especially violently and gloomily. And all day long Mitya paced the garden tirelessly, and all day long wept so terribly that at times he himself marveled at the strength and abundance of his own tears. Parasha looked for him, shouted in the yard, in the linden alley, called him to dinner, then to drink tea - he did not respond. It was cold, piercingly damp, dark from the clouds; against their blackness, the dense greenery of the wet garden stood out especially densely, freshly and brightly. The wind that blew from time to time threw another downpour from the trees - a whole stream of spray. But Mitya did not see anything, did not pay attention to anything, his white cap hung down, turned dark gray, the student's jacket turned black, the tops were covered with mud up to the knees. All drenched, all soaked through, without a single blood in his face, with tearful, insane eyes, he was terrible. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, strode broadly along the muddy alleys, and sometimes just anywhere, entirely, along the tall wet grass among apple and pear trees, bumping into their crooked, gnarled boughs, speckled with gray-green soaked lichen. He sat on swollen, blackened benches, went into a hollow, lay on damp straw in a hut, in the very place where he lay with Alenka. From the cold, from the icy dampness of the air, his big hands turned blue, his lips turned purple, his deadly pale face with sunken cheeks took on a purple hue. He lay on his back with his legs crossed and his hands under his head, staring wildly at the black thatched roof, from which large rusty drops fell. Then his cheekbones clenched, his eyebrows began to jump. He jumped up impetuously, pulled out from his pants pocket a letter already read a hundred times, soiled and crumpled, received late last night - brought by a surveyor who had come to the estate for a few days on business - and again, for the hundred and first time, greedily devoured it: " "Dear Mitya, don't remember it dashingly, forget it, forget everything that happened! I'm bad, I'm nasty, spoiled, I'm unworthy of you, but I'm madly in love with art! I've made up my mind, the die is cast, I'm leaving - you know with whom..." You are sensitive, you are smart, you will understand me, I beg you, do not torture yourself and me! Do not write me anything, it is useless!" Having reached this place, Mitya crumpled up the letter and, burying his face in the wet straw, clenching his teeth furiously, choked with sobs. This unexpected you, which so terribly reminded and even seemed to restore their closeness again and flooded the heart with unbearable tenderness - it was beyond human strength! And next to that, you are a firm statement that even writing to her is now useless! Oh, yes, yes, he knew it: useless! It's all over and over forever! Before evening, the rain, which fell upon the garden with tenfold force and with unexpected thunderclaps, drove him at last into the house. Wet from head to toe, tooth to tooth from the icy shiver in his whole body, he looked out from under the trees and, making sure that no one saw him, ran under his window, lifted the frame from the outside - the frame was old, with a lifting half, - and, jumping into the room, locked the door with a key and threw himself on the bed. And it got dark fast. The rain was noisy everywhere - and on the roof, and around the house, and in the garden. His noise was double, different - in the garden one, near the house, under the continuous murmur and splash of gutters pouring water into puddles - another. And this created for Mitya, who instantly fell into a lethargic stupor, inexplicable anxiety, and together with the heat that burned his nostrils, his breath, his head, immersed him as if in anesthesia, created some kind of another world, some other evening time. in some kind of strange, different house, in which there was a terrible premonition of something. He knew, he felt that he was in his room, already almost dark from the rain and the approaching evening, that there, in the hall, at the tea table, the voices of his mother, Anya, Kostya and the land surveyor were heard, but at the same time he was already walking along some then to a strange house after the young nanny who was leaving him, and he was seized by an inexplicable, ever-growing horror, mixed, however, with lust, with a premonition of the closeness of someone to someone, intimacy in which there was something unnaturally disgusting, but in which he himself somehow participated. All this was felt through the medium of a child with a large white face, who, leaning back, was carried in her arms and rocked by a young nurse. Mitya was in a hurry to overtake her, overtook her and already wanted to look into her face - was it Alenka - but suddenly he found himself in a gloomy gymnasium classroom with chalked windows. The one who stood in front of the chest of drawers, in front of the mirror, could not see him - he suddenly became invisible. She was in a yellow silk underskirt, tightly fitting rounded hips, in high-heeled shoes, in thin fishnet black stockings through which her body shone through, and she, sweetly shy and ashamed, knew what would happen next. She had already hidden the baby in the chest of drawers. Throwing her braid over her shoulder, she quickly braided it and, squinting at the door, looked in the mirror, which reflected her powdered face, bare shoulders and milky blue, with pink nipples, small breasts. The door swung open - and, looking around cheerfully and eeriely, a gentleman in a tuxedo, with a bloodless shaved face, with black and short curly hair, entered. He took out a flat gold cigarette case and began to light up a cigarette. She, finishing her braid, timidly looked at him, knowing his purpose, then threw the braid over her shoulder, raised her bare hands ... He condescendingly hugged her waist - and she grabbed his neck, showing her dark armpits, clung to him, hid her face on his chest...

And Mitya woke up, covered in sweat, with a shockingly clear consciousness that he was dead, that the world was so monstrously hopeless and gloomy, as it could not be in the underworld, beyond the grave. The room was dark, there was noise and splashing outside the windows, and this noise and splashing were unbearable (even by its own sound) for the body, completely trembling with chills. Most unbearable and terrible was the monstrous unnaturalness of human intercourse, which, as if he had just shared with a shaven gentleman. Voices and laughter were heard from the hall. And they were terrible and unnatural in their alienation from him, the rudeness of life, its indifference, mercilessness towards him ... - Katya! - he said, sitting up on the bed, kicking off her legs. - Katya, what is it! he said aloud, quite sure that she heard him, that she was here, that she was silent, that she did not respond only because she herself was crushed, she herself understood the irreparable horror of all that she had done. “Ah, it doesn’t matter, Katya,” he whispered bitterly and tenderly, wanting to say that he would forgive her everything, if only she would still rush to him so that they could be saved together, “to save her beautiful love in that most beautiful spring world , which until recently was like paradise. But, whispering: "Oh, it's all the same, Katya!" - he immediately realized that there was no, it didn’t matter that salvation, a return to that wondrous vision that had once been given to him in Shakhovsky, on a balcony overgrown with jasmine, was no longer, could not be, and quietly wept from pain tearing at his chest. She, this pain, was so strong, so unbearable that, not thinking what he was doing, not realizing what would come out of all this, passionately desiring only one thing - to get rid of her at least for a minute and not fall back into that terrible world, where he had spent the whole day and where he had just been in the most terrible and disgusting of all earthly dreams, he groped and pushed away the drawer of the bedside table, caught the cold and heavy lump of the revolver and, sighing deeply and joyfully, opened his mouth and with force, with pleasure fired. September 14, 1924 Maritime Alps.