Runny nose

“The novel “Sukhodol” is a family chronicle of the pillar nobles of the Khrushchevs. Reflections on Russia “Village” “Sukhodol” by I.A. Bunin

He draws the crazy Russian reality, which gives rise to the Russian soul, full of bizarre contrasts: sometimes generous and responsive, sometimes unbridled and passionate.

As Ivan Alekseevich himself later wrote, “Sukhodol” refers to works that “sharply depicted the Russian soul, its peculiar interweavings, its light and dark, but almost always tragic foundations.”

It’s amazing how passionate Sukhodol’s inhabitants were. So, the yard girl Natalya “rested for eight whole years... from Sukhodol, from the fact that he made her suffer,” but still returns there at the first opportunity. “The young lady” Aunt Tonya vegetated in poverty, in a poor peasant hut, but did not even allow the thought of life in another place, although “Sukhodol deprived her of happiness, and reason, and human appearance.” Carefree and frivolous Arkady Petrovich deeply misses his native place. “Alone, only Khrushchev remains in the world now. And even that one is not in Sukhodol!” - he says.

What is the reason for this? strong attachment to this remote place, to “...the bare pasture, to the huts and ravines, and the ruined estate of Sukhodol”? The writer explains this by the peculiarity of the “Sukhodolsk” soul, over which memories, the charm of the steppe open spaces and ancient nepotism have enormous power. The story shows the blood and secret ties that “illegally” connect servants and gentlemen. Everyone is, in essence, relatives in Sukhodol. “...The blood of the Khrushchevs has been mixed with the blood of the servants and the village since time immemorial.” According to family legends, not only the blood of noble and legendary ancestors, “people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princes” flows in the veins of Pyotr Kirillovich’s grandfather. The lackey Gervaska is his illegitimate son, and Natalya, the nanny of the young gentlemen Khrushchev, is perceived by them as truly dear person. Maybe that’s why the character of the Sukhodol residents is so intricately intertwined with hot temper, reaching the point of frenzy, and easygoingness, extreme cruelty and gentleness, sentimentality, and dreaminess. Life also had its influence on state of mind people. Even the Sukhodolsky house was gloomy and scary: dark log walls, dark floors and ceilings, dark heavy doors, black icons that were terribly illuminated by flashes and reflections of lightning on stormy stormy nights. “It was scary in the house at night. And during the day it’s sleepy, empty and boring.” Even the treasured grandfather’s icon of Saint Mercury, a “noble man,” beheaded by his enemies, evokes fear: “And it was terrible to look at the Suzdal image of a headless man, holding in one hand a deathly bluish head in a helmet, and in the other an icon of the Guide - at this, as they said, the treasured image of the grandfather, which survived several terrible fires, was split in the fire, thickly bound with silver and kept on the reverse side of its genealogy of the Khrushchevs, written under the titles.”

A village spreads widely around the manor's house - “big, poor and carefree.” Its inhabitants are “all masters” - they are not distinguished by their thriftiness and practicality. They were also influenced by the decline and degeneration of landowner life, its abnormality. Sukhodol's life - ugly, idle and slack, could only lead to madness. Thus, the descendants of the Khrushchevs learn from the stories of their nanny Natalya that “... our crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillich was killed in this house by his illegitimate son Gervaska, a friend of our father and cousin Natalia; they found out that Aunt Tonya had also gone crazy a long time ago - from unhappy love; ...they found out that Natalya was also going crazy, that as a girl she fell in love with her late uncle Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life, and he sent her into exile, to the Soshki farm...”

It is not surprising that Gorky called Sukhodol one of the most terrible Russian books. This is a story about crushing passions, secret and open, sinless and vicious. Any arguments of reason are powerless against these passions; they always destroy lives.

“Love in Sukhodol was unusual. Hatred was also unusual.” Here is grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich, who has fallen into childhood and is living out his days in quiet insanity. Romantics from the courtyards explained his dementia as a love longing for his dead, beautiful wife. Pyotr Kirillovich dies suddenly and absurdly at the hands of his illegitimate son Gervaska, scary person, whom both the courtiers and the gentlemen themselves are afraid of. “The masters had the same character as the slaves: either to rule or to be afraid.”

The next victim of fatal passions was the daughter of Pyotr Kirillovich - young lady Tonechka. Having fallen in love with her brother’s friend, she was “moved” and “doomed herself to be the bride of the sweetest Jesus.” She lived, moving from dull indifference to bouts of frantic irritability. But even in her madness, everyone saw something mystical and terrible. “Everyone now understood: at night the devil himself moves into the house. Everyone understood what, in addition to thunderstorms and fires, drove the young lady crazy, what made her moan sweetly and wildly in her sleep, and then jump up with such terrible screams, compared with the most deafening thunderclaps.”

The young lady lived out her days in a peasant hut, littered with fragments of old furniture, littered with shards of broken dishes, and cluttered with a piano that had fallen on its side.” On this piano young Tonechka, dark-skinned and black-eyed, in a dress made of orange lye, once played for Him...

Natalia, the yard girl, also had a tragic life. Not surprising - after all, Sukhodol dried out her soul and took over her entire life. And the most beautiful and amazing thing in her life was her love for master Pyotr Petrovich, which she carried until the end of her days. Natalya herself compares her to a fairy-tale scarlet flower. But the scarlet flower is not destined to bloom in Sukhodol. ended very quickly, ended in shame and disgrace: “ A scarlet flower, blooming in fairy gardens, was her love. But to the steppe, to the wilderness, even more reserved than the wilderness of Sukhodol, she took her love, so that there, in silence and solitude, she could overcome her first, sweet and burning torments, and then bury her for a long time, forever, right up to the gravestone. the depths of your Sukhodolsk soul.”

Bunin calls Natalya’s soul “beautiful and pitiful.” Perhaps the beauty of her inner world is that she is capable of deep and noble feelings. Although Pyotr Petrovich treated her cruelly, she did not harbor anger, but carried her love throughout her life. She also has no grudge against the young lady who “tortures” her: she either speaks as if she were an equal, or attacks her for the slightest offense, “cruelly and with pleasure,” tearing out her hair. But Natalya does not hate her tormentor. Moreover, she “dotes on her,” feels sorry for her, considers herself responsible for her, her nanny and friend. Natalya is ready to share the unfortunate fate of the young lady: “... apparently it was written in her family to die together with the young lady,” “... God himself marked them and the young lady with his destructive finger.” This is probably one of the features of the Slavic soul - the desire for self-sacrifice, for passionate selfless love, humility and even adoration for one’s offenders. In the same way, grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich and Arkady Petrovich love Gervaska, who mocks them and behaves rudely and impudently.

These feelings are difficult to explain. They defy logic and common sense. A German, Englishman or Frenchman could not behave like this, perhaps that is why the myth about the mysterious Russian soul arose.

The inhabitants of Sukhodol are also characterized by fatalism - “what will happen, will not escape” - and religiosity.

Young lady Antonina's religiosity has a hysterical connotation, somewhat reminiscent of hysteria. For Natalya, faith in God brings obedience and humility before fate: “God has a lot of everything.” From passing praying mantises she learned patience and hope, and resigned acceptance of all life's trials. After what she had to endure, she willingly takes on the role of “the blueberry, the humble and simple servant of everyone”: “And since the Sukhodol people love to play roles, to inspire themselves with the immutability of what supposedly should be, although they themselves invent this is due, then Natasha took on the role.” It is probably because of this resigned submission, lack of will, and non-resistance to fate that Bunin considers the soul of this woman pathetic.

According to the writer, the ugliness of Russian reality brings to life the abysses of the Russian soul. Bunin does not impose this idea, it suggests itself. Why do the inhabitants of Sukhodol have to endure so much suffering, why do their fates turn out so absurdly and tragically and why do they die just as absurdly and horribly? According to the writer, the centuries-old backwardness of Russia, and Russian impenetrable laziness, and the habit of savagery are to blame for this. Later he wrote: “What an old Russian disease this is, this languor, this boredom, this spoilage - the eternal hope that some frog will come with magic ring and he will do everything for you: you just have to go out onto the porch and throw the ring from hand to hand! This is a kind of nervous disease...”

The Sukhodol residents, descendants of the steppe nomads, turned out to be weak and “ready for reprisals.” Their family quickly became poor, degenerated and began to disappear from the face of the earth. Their children and grandchildren no longer saw life, but legends and memories of it. The steppe region became alien to them, and the connection with life and the class from which they came weakened. Perhaps this is for the best. They, the young ones, contained all the hopes of Russia, the desire for change and a better life.

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"Sukhodol" - family chronicle pillar nobles of the Khrushchevs. In the center of the work, in addition, is the fate of Natalya, a servant who lived with the Khrushchevs as if she were her own, being her father’s foster sister.

The narrator repeatedly repeats the idea of the closeness of the Sukhodolsky gentlemen to his servants. He himself first came to the estate only in his adolescence and noted the special charm of the ruined Sukhodol. Natalya tells the history of the family, as well as the history of the estate itself. Grandfather, Pyotr Kirillovich, went crazy with melancholy after early death wives. He is in conflict with the servant Gervaska, rumored to be his illegitimate son. Gervaska is rude to the master, pushes him around, feeling her power over him, and over the rest of the inhabitants of the house.

Pyotr Kirillovich arranges French teachers for his son Arkady and daughter Tony, but does not let the children go to study in the city. Only son Peter (Petrovich) receives education. Peter resigns to improve his household affairs. He arrives at the house with his friend Voitkevich. Tonya falls in love with the latter, and the young couple spends a lot of time together.

Tonya sings romances to the piano, Voitkevich reads poetry to the girl and, in all likelihood, has serious intentions towards her. However, Tonya flares up so much at any attempt by Voitkevich to explain himself, which, apparently, thereby repels young man, and he unexpectedly leaves. Tonya loses her mind from melancholy, becomes seriously ill, becomes irritable, cruel, unable to control her actions.

Natalya falls hopelessly in love with the handsome Petra Petrovich. Overflowing with a new feeling, happy from the fact that she can be close to the object of her passion, she, completely unexpectedly for herself, steals a mirror in a silver frame from Pyotr Petrovich and for several days enjoys the possession of her beloved’s thing, looking in the mirror for a long time in the insane hope of pleasing the young man. master. However, her short-lived happiness ends in shame and shame. The loss is discovered, Pyotr Petrovich personally orders Natalya’s head to be shaved and sends her to a distant farm. Natalya obediently sets off on her journey, on the way she meets an officer who vaguely resembles Pyotr Petrovich, the girl faints.

“Love in Sukhodol was unusual. Hatred was also unusual." Pyotr Petrovich, having settled in the family estate, decides to make “necessary” acquaintances, and for this he organizes a dinner party. The grandfather involuntarily prevents him from showing that he is the first person in the house. “Grandfather was blissfully happy, but tactless, talkative and pitiful in his velvet cap... He also imagined himself to be a hospitable host and was fussing around from early morning, arranging some kind of stupid ceremony of receiving guests.” Grandfather constantly gets in everyone’s way, at dinner he says stupid things to the “right” people, which irritates Gervaska, who is recognized as an irreplaceable servant, with whom everyone in the house is forced to reckon. Gervaska insults Pyotr Kirillovich right at the table, and he asks for protection from the leader. The grandfather persuades the guests to stay overnight. In the morning he goes out into the living room and begins rearranging the furniture. Gervaska, who appears silently, shouts at him. When the grandfather tries to resist, Gervaska simply hits him in the chest, he falls, hits his temple card table and dies. Gervaska disappears from Sukhodol, and the only person The person who saw him from that moment turns out to be Natalya.

At the request of “young lady” Tony, Natalya is returned from exile in Soshki. Over the past time, Pyotr Petrovich got married, and his wife Claudia Markovna rules the house in Sukhodol. She's expecting a baby. Natalya is assigned to Tonya, who takes out her difficult character on her - throws objects at the girl, constantly scolds her for something, mocks her in every possible way. However, Natalya quickly adapts to the young lady’s habits and finds love with her common language. From a young age, Natalya considers herself an old woman and refuses to get married (she dreams scary dreams, as if she is marrying a goat and as if she is being warned about the impossibility of marriage for her and the inevitability of a catastrophe after that). Tonya constantly experiences causeless horror, expects trouble from everywhere and infects Natalya with her fears. The house is gradually filled with “God’s people”, among whom a certain Yushka appears. “He never crossed a finger, but lived wherever God would send, paying for bread and salt with stories about his complete idleness and his “delinquency.” Yushka is ugly, “looks like a hunchback,” lustful and unusually insolent. Arriving in Sukhodol, Yushka settles there, calling himself a “former monk.” He puts Natalya in front of the need to give in to him, because he “liked” her. Thus, she is convinced that her dream about the goat was “prophetic.” A month later, Yushka disappears, and Natalya discovers that she is pregnant. Soon her second dream comes true: the Sukhodol house catches fire, and she loses her child out of fear.

They try to cure Tonya: they take her to the holy relics, invite a sorcerer, but everything is in vain, she becomes even more picky. One day, when Pyotr Petrovich is going to his mistress, on the way back he is killed by a horse’s hoof. The house is deteriorating, and “the past becomes more and more legendary.” The women living out their days here - Klavdia Markovna, Tonya, Natalya - while away their evenings in silence. Only in the churchyard does the young narrator still feel his closeness to his ancestors, but he can no longer confidently find their graves.

Bunin entered literature with another topic that was relevant at the beginning of the century - the theme of the nation as a single family. In 1910 he created the story “ Village”, which, according to M. Gorky, “for the first time made me think about Russia...”. “No one has taken a village so deeply, so historically,” Gorky wrote to Bunin in 1920. Is it the fault or misfortune of the Russian people that they live such an inhuman life? The author's plan was answered by a special genre - a chronicle story that brings men to the fore and leaves the stories of witnesses "from the outside" in the background. The plot of the work, devoid of intrigue, unexpected turns, clearly defined plot, plot development, climax and denouement, also corresponded to the task. Everything in “The Village” is immersed in the elements of ossified everyday life, but each of the compositional parts of the story revealed facts village life(background and history of the Krasov family, the fate of the peasants). “Speaking” is the name of the village - Durnovka. There is a lot of illogical and meaningless things in Durnova’s life. Social and family ties are being severed, the established way of life is collapsing. The village is quickly dying. The revolt of the peasants is unable to stop the dying of Durnovka and even accelerates this process. That is why the ending of the story is so gloomy.

For Bunin, the question is extremely difficult: who is to blame? The hero of the story, Kuzma Krasov, struggles painfully over him. “...Who should we collect it from? - he asks. “An unhappy people, first of all, unhappy!..” Doubts do not leave him: “Slavery was abolished only forty-five years ago, so what should we exact from this people? Yes, but who is to blame for this? The people themselves!” It was he, and not the government and not the difficult story (“Tatars, you see, they were crushed!”). Tikhon Krasov reproaches his brother for contradictions: “Well, you don’t know the measure of anything. You say it yourself: unhappy people, unhappy people! And now - an animal! Kuzma is truly confused (“Now I don’t understand anything: I’m either unfortunate or not…”), but he is still inclined—and with him the author—to the conclusion that the people are “guilty.”

The main characters of the story are the brothers Tikhon and Kuzma Krasov. Tikhon used all his extraordinary strength and his mind for acquisitiveness, enrichment, exploitation of men, and ultimately came to spiritual devastation. He represents the type of “thoughtful” merchant who came to the idea that “man does not live by bread alone.” Kuzma, with his thirst for spiritual life and humanity, seems to be the opposite of Tikhon: he is “the most positive type” in “The Village.” But it also dominates and enslaves him with “Durnov’s” blood, gives rise to inertia and powerlessness, and does not allow him to escape from the vicious circle. With vigilance and psychological insight, the writer depicted both the appearance of the new village owner and the drama of the people's intellectual. But so different characters are called upon to demonstrate the difficult common heritage of the “motley soul” (Tikhon’s words) of the Russian person.

In a story depicting a village in revolutionary times, Bunin showed that the renewal of Russian life did not take place, that the revolution did not change the national psychology. The ending of the story can be interpreted symbolically: beauty perishes under the onslaught of ugliness (Evdokia, nicknamed Young, marries the most depraved man in the village), a blizzard sweeps up housing, and the Russian village disappears under the snow.

In the next big story " Sukhodol"(1911) Bunin turned to the past, to those sources that explain the present. In the history of the noble family of the Khrushchevs, the writer sees the fate of all noble Russia. The intonations here are more complex than in “The Village”. The poetry of Russian antiquity, individual features of the simple way of life of the fathers, “ancient family life that merged both the village and the servants,” and a sense of closeness to the ancestors, “ancestors,” retain power over the author. In general, there is no idealization of the patriarchal way of life in the story. Gloomy pictures of the cruel tyranny of the masters and the slavish obedience of the serfs are at the center of the story. However, ineradicable passivity, slavish fear of life and a sense of doom are also inherent in masters.

With all authenticity, without abandoning any hopes, Bunin spoke about the degradation of someone close to him. social world, who turned out to be incapable “neither for work nor for community life.” As in “The Village,” socio-historical generalizations come down to national characteristics Russian people. In Bunin’s work during this period, the main thing became, according to him, in my own words, “the soul of a Russian person in a deep sense, images of the traits of the Slavs’ psyche.” Polemicizing with his contemporaries, for example with Gorky, Bunin tried to “outline a general historical perspective in the life of the entire huge country, which had just experienced the upheavals of 1905-1907” (O.N. Mikhailov).

Social upheavals sharpened the writer's rejection of the inhumanity of human relations and the feeling of the general catastrophic nature of reality.

Since the mid-1910s, the main idea in Bunin’s work has been the idea of suffering that any contact with life brings. This shows the influence of Buddhist philosophy, with which the writer became acquainted in India and Ceylon. The stories “Brothers” (1914), “Dreams of Chang” (1916) are about this; this idea is also contained in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco”.

Ivan Bunin

What always struck us about Natalya was her affection for Sukhodol.

Our father's foster sister, who grew up with him in the same house, lived with us in Lunev for eight whole years, lived as her own, and not as ex-slave, simple courtyard. And for eight whole years she rested, in her own words, from Sukhodol, from what he made her suffer. But it’s not without reason that they say that no matter how you feed the wolf, he always looks into the forest; leaving, having raised us, she returned to Sukhodol again.

I remember excerpts from our childhood conversations with her:

– You’re an orphan, Natalya?

- Orphan, sir. All in their masters. Your grandmother Anna Grigorievna folded her white hands so early! No worse than my father and mother.

- Why did they die early?

“Death came, so we died, sir.”

- No, why is it early?

- So God gave it. The Lord gave the father up as a soldier for misdeeds, and Mother did not live to live because of the Lord’s turkey poults. Of course, I don’t remember, sir, where I was, but the servants said: she was a poultry farmer, there were countless turkey poults under her command, a hailstorm captured them in the pasture and killed every single one of them... She rushed to run, ran, looked - Yes, and the spirit is out of horror!

- Why didn’t you get married?

- Yes, the groom has not grown up yet.

- No, no jokes?

- Yes, they say that madam, your auntie, ordered it. That’s why I, a sinner, was glorified as a young lady.

- Well, what a young lady you are!

- Exactly, young lady! - Natalya answered with a thin smile that wrinkled her lips, and wiped them with a dark old woman’s hand. - I’m Arkady Petrovich’s dairy, your second auntie...

Growing up, we listened more and more attentively to what was said in our house about Sukhodol: the previously incomprehensible became more and more clear, the strange features of Sukhodol life became more and more pronounced. Didn’t we feel that Natalya, who lived almost the same life with our father for half a century, was truly dear to us, the pillar gentlemen Khrushchev! And so it turns out that these gentlemen drove her father into a soldier, and her mother was in such trepidation that her heart broke at the sight of the dead turkey chicks!

“It’s true,” said Natalya, “how could you not fall dead from such an opportunity?” Gentlemen would have driven her beyond Mozhai!

And then we learned something even stranger about Sukhodol: we learned that there were no simpler, kinder Sukhodol gentlemen “in the whole universe,” but we also learned that there were none “hotter” than them; we learned that the old Sukhodolsky house was dark and gloomy, that our crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillich was killed in this house by his illegitimate son, Gervaska, a friend of our father and cousin of Natalya; they learned that Aunt Tonya, who lived in one of the old courtyard huts near the impoverished Sukhodol estate and enthusiastically played the ecosaise on the humming and ringing piano from old age, had long ago gone crazy - from unhappy love; We found out that Natalya was also going crazy, that as a girl she fell in love with her late uncle Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life, and he sent her into exile, to the Soshki farm... Our passionate dreams about Sukhodol were understandable. For us, Sukhodol was only a poetic monument of the past. And for Natalia? After all, it was she who, as if answering some thought of her own, once said with great bitterness:

- Well! In Sukhodol they sat down at the table with the Tatars! It’s even scary to remember.

– That is, with the arapniks? – we asked.

“Yes, it’s all one, sir,” she said.

- Why?

- And in case of a quarrel, sir.

– Did everyone quarrel in Sukhodol?

- Boron God! Not a day passed without war! They were all hot – pure gunpowder.

We were thrilled at her words and looked at each other enthusiastically: for a long time we then imagined a huge garden, a huge estate, a house with oak log walls under a heavy and black thatched roof - and lunch in the hall of this house: everyone is sitting at the table, everyone is eating, throwing dice on the floor hunting dogs, look sideways at each other - and each has a raspberry on his knees; We dreamed of that golden time when we would grow up and also dine with arapniks on our knees. But we understood well that it was not Natalya who brought joy to these arapniks. And yet she left Lunev for Sukhodol, to the source of her dark memories. She had neither her own corner nor close relatives there; and she now served in Sukhodol no longer to her former mistress, not to Aunt Tonya, but to the widow of the late Pyotr Petrovich, Claudia Markovna. Yes, Natalya could not live without this estate.

“What to do, sir: habit,” she said modestly. “Where there is a needle, there is apparently a thread.” Where he was born, he was good enough...

And she was not the only one who suffered from attachment to Sukhodol. God, what passionate lovers of memories, what ardent adherents of Sukhodol were all the other Sukhodolians!

Aunt Tonya lived in poverty in a hut. Sukhodol deprived her of happiness, reason, and human appearance. But she never even allowed the thought, despite all our father’s persuasion, to leave her native nest and settle in Lunev:

- Yes, it’s better to hit a stone in the mountain!

The father was a carefree man; for him, it seemed, there were no attachments. But deep sadness was heard in his stories about Sukhodol. A long time ago he moved from Sukhodol to Lunevo, the field estate of our grandmother Olga Kirillovna. But he complained almost until his death:

- Alone, only Khrushchev remains in the world now. And even that one is not in Sukhodol!

True, it often happened that, following such words, he began to think, looking out the windows, into the field, and suddenly smiled mockingly, taking the guitar off the wall.

- And Sukhodol is good, to hell with him! - he added with the same sincerity with which he had spoken a minute before.

But he also had a Sukhodol soul - a soul over which the power of memories is so immeasurably great, the power of the steppe, its inert way of life, that ancient family life that united the village, the servants, and the house in Sukhodol. True, we, the Khrushchevs, are pillars, included in the sixth book, and among our legendary ancestors there were many noble people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princes. But the blood of the Khrushchevs has been mixed with the blood of the servants and the village since time immemorial. Who gave life to Pyotr Kirillich? Legends say different things about this. Who was the parent of Gervaska, his killer? WITH early years we heard that Pyotr Kirillich. Where did such a sharp dissimilarity in the characters of the father and uncle come from? They also say different things about this. His father’s foster sister was Natalya, and he traded crosses with Gervaska... It’s long, long ago, time for Khrushchev to consider his kin to his servants and the village!

My sister and I lived for a long time in an attraction to Sukhodol, in the seduction of his old times. The household, the village and the house in Sukhodol constituted one family. Our ancestors still ruled this family. But this can be felt for a long time in the offspring. The life of a family, clan, or clan is deep, knotty, mysterious, and often scary. But it is strong in its dark depth and also in its legends and past. Sukhodol is no richer in written and other monuments than any ulus in the Bashkir steppe. In Rus' they are replaced by legend. And legend and song are poison for the Slavic soul! Our former servants, passionate lazy people, dreamers - where could they unwind their souls, if not in our house? Our father remained the only representative of the Sukhodolsk gentlemen. And the first language we spoke was Sukhodolsky. The first stories, the first songs that touched us are also Sukhodolsky’s, Natalya’s, father’s. And could anyone sing like his father, a student of the servants, - with such carefree sadness, with such gentle reproach, with such weak-willed sincerity about “his faithful, mannered lady”? Could anyone tell the story like Natalya? And who was dearer to us than the Sukhodol men?

Feuds, quarrels - this is what the Khrushchevs, like any family that has lived closely and closely together for a long time, have been famous for since time immemorial. And during our childhood there was such a quarrel between Sukhodol and Lunev that for almost ten years my father did not set foot on his native threshold. We didn’t see Sukhodol that way when we were children: we were there only once, and then only on our way to Zadonsk. But dreams are sometimes stronger than reality. And we vaguely but indelibly remembered a long summer day, some undulating fields and a stalled high road, which charmed us with its spaciousness and here and there the surviving hollow willows; we remembered a beehive on one of these branches, which had moved far away from the road into the grain - a beehive left to the will of God, in the fields, when the road had stalled; we remembered the wide turn under the sloping road, the huge bare pasture on which the poor chicken huts looked, and the yellowness of the rocky ravines behind the huts, the whiteness of the pebbles and rubble along their bottoms... The first event that horrified us was also from Sukhodolsk: the murder of grandfather Gervaskaya. And, listening to the stories about this murder, we endlessly dreamed of these yellow ravines going somewhere: it all seemed that Gervaska was running along them, having done his terrible deed and “sank like a key to the bottom of the sea.”

The Sukhodolsk peasants visited Lunevo not for the same purposes as the courtyard servants, but more about the land; but they also entered our house as if they were their own. They bowed to their father on the waist, kissed his hand, then, shaking their hair, kissed him, Natalya, and us on the lips three times. They brought gifts of honey, eggs, and towels. And we, who grew up in the fields, sensitive to smells, greedy for them no less than for songs and legends, forever remembered that special, pleasant, hemp-like smell that we felt when kissing the dry lands; They also remembered that their gifts smelled of the old steppe village: honey - of blooming buckwheat and rotten oak hives, towels - punka, chicken huts from the time of grandfather... The Sukhodolsk men did not tell anything. What was there to tell them! They didn’t even have legends. Their graves are unmarked. And lives are so similar to each other, so meager and without a trace! For the fruits of their labors and worries were only bread, the real bread that is eaten. They dug ponds in the rocky bed of the Kamenka River, which had long dried up. But the ponds are unreliable - they dry up. They built houses. But their dwellings are short-lived: at the slightest spark they burn to the ground... So what drew us all even to the bare pasture, to the huts and ravines, to the ruined estate of Sukhodol?

I

What always struck us about Natalya was her affection for Sukhodol.

Our father's foster sister, who grew up with him in the same house, lived with us in Lunev for eight whole years, lived as her own, and not as a former slave, a simple servant. And for eight whole years she rested, in her own words, from Sukhodol, from what he made her suffer. But it’s not without reason that they say that no matter how you feed the wolf, he always looks into the forest; leaving, having raised us, she returned to Sukhodol again.

I remember excerpts from our childhood conversations with her:

– You’re an orphan, Natalya?

- Orphan, sir. All in their masters. Your grandmother Anna Grigorievna folded her white hands so early! No worse than my father and mother.

- Why did they die early?

“Death came, so we died, sir.”

- No, why is it early?

- Why didn’t you get married?

- Yes, the groom has not grown up yet.

- No, no jokes?

- Yes, they say that madam, your auntie, ordered it. That’s why I, a sinner, was glorified as a young lady.

- Well, what a young lady you are!

- Exactly, young lady! - Natalya answered with a thin smile that wrinkled her lips, and wiped them with a dark old woman’s hand. - I’m Arkady Petrovich’s dairy, your second auntie...

“It’s true,” said Natalya, “how could you not fall dead from such an opportunity?” Gentlemen would have driven her beyond Mozhai!

- Well! In Sukhodol they sat down at the table with the Tatars! It’s even scary to remember.

– That is, with the arapniks? – we asked.

“Yes, it’s all one, sir,” she said.

- Why?

- And in case of a quarrel, sir.

– Did everyone quarrel in Sukhodol?

- Boron God! Not a day passed without war! They were all hot – pure gunpowder.

We were thrilled at her words and looked at each other enthusiastically: for a long time we then imagined a huge garden, a huge estate, a house with oak log walls under a heavy and black thatched roof - and lunch in the hall of this house: everyone is sitting at the table, everyone is eating, Throwing bones on the floor, the hunting dogs look sideways at each other - and each has an arapnik on his knees; We dreamed of that golden time when we would grow up and also dine with arapniks on our knees. But we understood well that it was not Natalya who brought joy to these arapniks. And yet she left Lunev for Sukhodol, to the source of her dark memories. She had neither her own corner nor close relatives there; and she now served in Sukhodol no longer to her former mistress, not to Aunt Tonya, but to the widow of the late Pyotr Petrovich, Claudia Markovna. Yes, Natalya could not live without this estate.

“What to do, sir: habit,” she said modestly. “Where there is a needle, there is apparently a thread.” Where he was born, he was good enough...

And she was not the only one who suffered from attachment to Sukhodol. God, what passionate lovers of memories, what ardent adherents of Sukhodol were all the other Sukhodolians!

- Yes, it’s better to hit a stone in the mountain!

- Alone, only Khrushchev remains in the world now. And even that one is not in Sukhodol!

True, it often happened that, following such words, he began to think, looking out the windows, into the field, and suddenly smiled mockingly, taking the guitar off the wall.

- And Sukhodol is good, to hell with him! - he added with the same sincerity with which he had spoken a minute before.

But he also had a Sukhodol soul - a soul over which the power of memories is so immeasurably great, the power of the steppe, its inert way of life, that ancient family life that united the village, the servants, and the house in Sukhodol. True, we, the Khrushchevs, are pillars, included in the sixth book, and among our legendary ancestors there were many noble people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princes. But the blood of the Khrushchevs has been mixed with the blood of the servants and the village since time immemorial. Who gave life to Pyotr Kirillich? Legends say different things about this. Who was the parent of Gervaska, his killer? From an early age we heard that Pyotr Kirillich. Where did such a sharp dissimilarity in the characters of the father and uncle come from? They also say different things about this. His father’s foster sister was Natalya, and he traded crosses with Gervaska... It’s long, long ago, time for Khrushchev to consider his kin to his servants and the village!

My sister and I lived for a long time in an attraction to Sukhodol, in the seduction of his old times. The household, the village and the house in Sukhodol constituted one family. Our ancestors still ruled this family. But this can be felt for a long time in the offspring. The life of a family, clan, or clan is deep, knotty, mysterious, and often scary. But it is strong in its dark depth and also in its legends and past. Sukhodol is no richer in written and other monuments than any ulus in the Bashkir steppe. In Rus' they are replaced by legend. And legend and song are poison for the Slavic soul! Our former servants, passionate lazy people, dreamers - where could they unwind their souls, if not in our house? Our father remained the only representative of the Sukhodolsk gentlemen. And the first language we spoke was Sukhodolsky. The first stories, the first songs that touched us are also Sukhodolsky’s, Natalya’s, father’s. And could anyone sing like his father, a student of the servants, - with such carefree sadness, with such affectionate reproach, with such weak-willed sincerity about “his faithful, mannered lady”? Could anyone tell the story like Natalya? And who was dearer to us than the Sukhodol men?