In the second half of the 1920s, many recent heroes of the civil war become criminals. And their image is romanticized, because. by going into crime, they expressed their protest against the fact that the revolution did not justify their hopes (they fought for prosperity, and the country was in ruins). Critics called them "new extra people”, “criminals involuntarily”. These people did not find a place in Soviet reality, although they fought for it.

Olga Zotova ("Viper") a refined girl from a merchant family who survived the murder of her parents, who became a Red Army fighter with a saber unsheathed. She was even awarded a brooch. After the war, she ended up in the Far East and did not know how to continue to live. She got used to the male environment, became a "tomboy", she only knew that "we need to defeat the whites." She arrived in Moscow in a ridiculous skirt made from a tablecloth. The bourgeois Moscow public called her the Squadron Whore, although she was simply a model of chastity. She realized that she needed to fall in love, she changed, they began to pester her - she kept fighting back, and in order to save one "man" she confessed her love. He escaped. Her neighbor Lyalechka then began to poke her in the face with a marriage certificate, Olga grabbed a revolver and killed her. The story begins at the end, when a pale, trembling woman comes to the police and confesses to the murder.

Buzheninov ("Blue Cities") also kills his rival, sets fire to his hometown, but as if they were unwilling criminals.

Tolstoy was reproached for choosing some exceptional people. In fact, Tolstoy chooses just very typical phenomena. He says that this is the acceleration of history, a revolution that called millions of people under its banner, and they came at a spontaneous level. They did not understand very much, and they were not ready for everyday work. Therefore, when peaceful life came, they simply turned out to be tragic victims of these events.

EXAMINATION TICKET No. 2

The lyrical heroine of the first books of Akhmatova

Akhmatova's first poems are love lyrics. In these verses, love is not always bright, often it brings grief. General theme: parting, or rather, the girl's feelings about parting with her loved one. The presence of two who were once together is an integral feature.

The poems contain dialogues (typical of epic works rather than poetry) that convey the intensity of passions:

It seemed that many steps

And I knew there were only three of them!

Autumn whisper between the maples

He asked: "Die with me!

I'm deceived by my despondent,

Changeable, evil fate."

I said, "Darling, dear!

And me too. I'll die with you..."

In the poem “She squeezed her hands under a dark veil ...” the heroine runs after the hero leaving her house through the gate - the door from the enclosed space to the big world - forever.

How can I forget? He walked out, staggering
Mouth twisted painfully...

I ran away without touching the railing

I followed him to the gate.

Breathless, I shouted: "Joke

All that has gone before. If you leave, I'll die."

Smiled calmly and creepily

And he said to me, "Don't stand in the wind."

In both cases, the detachment of the heroine and the hero from each other is emphasized. She feels deceived, unfairly offended.

At the moment of climax, it sounds: “leave, I will die”, “die with me!” The aura of death gives a special sound to the motive of separation: the experiences of the heroine become as dramatic as possible, bring the whole situation described in the poem to a completely new emotional level.

It is absolutely clear that, despite the possibility of a variety of interpretations of these poems, all of them are possible only within the framework of a single plot, which is beyond doubt, and come from the mystery of the female character, the mystery of life itself. But this mystery is not mystical, but ordinary, characteristic of life in general and women's life in particular, the mystery of love, which no one denies or questions.

In the first book "Evening", which is considered to be St. Petersburg through and through, there are a lot of southern, maritime themes. Akhmatova recreates the poetic atmosphere of the Black Sea region. Heroine - burnt by the sun, turned black, with a burnt scythe, the Tsarsko-Rural schoolgirl with pleasure threw off the mannered conventions of Tsarskoye Selo, all these curtsy, ceremoniality, good manners, becoming, as she called herself in the poem, "a seaside girl." The South, which gave her a sense of will, freedom; understanding of both eternity and short duration of human life.

2. Composition and style of Yu. Olesha's novel "Envy".

Composition and style of Y. Olesha "Envy"

The story "Envy" put Olesha in the forefront of Soviet writers. Later, Olesha remade it into the play "Conspiracy of Feelings".

Olesha in a sharp form reflects the struggle of two worlds, two cultures, which he unfolds in terms of the struggle of ideological and psychological principles. He poses problems specific to the intelligentsia, which emerged from the petty bourgeoisie and, in its development, approaches the proletariat building socialism, but approaches not immediately, not directly, but with certain waverings and deviations in its path.

Main heroes Olesha - petty-bourgeois intellectuals, brought up by the "old world" and inherited it cultural traditions. Main subject O.'s works - the collision of such an intellectual with the "new world". The need for an ideological and psychological restructuring for an individualist-romantic who has diverged from the new reality.

Two directions in creativity: romantic and satirical, realistic. Romantically idealizes some aspects of the inner world of his characters, at the same time recognizes their experiences and aspirations as illusory, not corresponding to objective reality, and ironically over them, moving on to a realistic image. The ironic-satirical moment in Olesha's work is explained by a repulsion from the past, the romantic stream is largely associated with the remnants of individualism and subjectivism that have not been overcome to the end.

O. has a tendency not only to "ancient", "small" feelings, but also to attribute all the variety of human feelings and experiences to the old person, and to leave the new to bare logic, a "technical attitude" to life.

In "Envy" Cavaliers- a typical petty-bourgeois intellectual in post-revolutionary reality. His features: individualism, striving for personal glory, anti-socialism, are opposed to Soviet reality. And under these conditions, Kavalerov's anarchist rebelliousness slides down to direct philistinism, he refuses to join the ranks of the philistinism, from which he repelled at first (falls into the arms of the vulgar Anechka Prokopovich).

Babichev - exaggeration of Kavalerov, but also a link between him and the frank layman. The tragicomic figure of the defender of the selfish philistine - the "king of the vulgar".

Olesha leads these two heroes to defeat. They "envy" the new world, but have no real ground under their feet to deal with it. Depicting their defeat, O. at the same time colors the inner world of these heroes with all colors. The world of fantasy, dreams, art is the property of them, and not of the impersonal and “unimaginative” people of the new world. This introduces notes of pessimism into the basically optimistic story about the death of the old world, reflecting O.'s fear for the fate of the individual, spiritual culture, and artistic creativity under socialism.

Olesha is a bright, colorful artist, a great master of form. He knows how to notice and picturesquely convey this or that detail, the sensual appearance of the phenomena of reality. Metaphors and comparisons widely used by the author are distinguished by their freshness and sharpness; Olesha conveys the shades of the characters' moods, his author's attitude towards life. His style is characterized by a combination of ideological content with saturation of emotions. Along with this, O.'s work still suffers from some sketchiness, one-linearity in the construction of images of goodies.

EXAMINATION TICKET No. 3

1. Poetics of the modernist novel (Andrey Bely, Petersburg).

Tolstoy Alexey Nikolaevich

blue cities

Alexey Nikolaevich TOLSTOY

blue cities

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS

NADEZHDA IVANOVNA

COUNTY TOWN

SOLES CONTACT THE GROUND

LIFE, MORALS AND OTHER

INDICATIONS TOV. KHOTYAINTSEVA

SMALL EVENTS

HOT DAYS

FROM THE SURVEY OF HOPE IVANOVNA

THE MURDER OF UTEVKIN

BOX OF MATCHES

NIGHT FROM THE THIRD TO THE FOURTH OF JULY

________________________________________________________________

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

One of the witnesses, a student of the engineering school Semyonov, gave unexpected testimony on the most vague, but, as it turned out later, the main issue in the entire investigation. The fact that at the first acquaintance with the circumstances of the tragic night (from the third to the fourth of July) seemed to the investigator an incomprehensible, insane trick, or, perhaps, a cunningly conceived simulation of madness, has now become the key to all the clues.

The course of the investigation had to be restructured and led from the finale of the tragedy from this piece of cloth (three arshins by one and a half), nailed at dawn on the fourth of July on the square of the county town to the telegraph pole.

The crime was not committed crazy - it was established by interrogation and examination. Most likely, the offender was in a state of extreme insanity. While nailing a cloth to the pole, he jumped awkwardly, sprained his leg and fainted. This saved his life - the crowd would have torn him to pieces. During the interrogation of the preliminary investigation, he was extremely excited, but already the investigator of the Gubernia Court found him calmed down and aware of what had happened.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to form a clear picture of the crime from his answers - it fell apart into pieces. And only the story of Semenov blinded all the pieces into one whole. A passionate tale of agonizing, impatient and feverish fantasy unfolded before the investigator.

FIRST INFORMATION ABOUT VASILY ALEKSEEVICH BUZHENINOV

Away from the Bezenchuk station, now Pugachevsky district, a Red Army convoy stretched across a wide muddy area. Around the brown steppe, wet clouds above it, in the distance - dull, like three hundred years of melancholy of the Russian land, a gap in the gap above the edge of the steppe and telegraph poles with props aside from the road. It was in the autumn of 1919.

The lead cavalry unit, which accompanied the convoy, stumbled in this windy desert on the traces of a recent battle: several dead horses, an overturned cart, a dozen human corpses without overcoats and boots. The lead detachment, squinting, rode past, but the commander suddenly turned in his saddle and pointed with a wet mitten at the telegraph pole. The squad stopped.

A man with a crimson-red face sat leaning against a post and, without moving, looked at the approachers. A bloody rag hung from his shaved skull. His parched lips moved as if he were whispering to himself. Apparently, he made terrible efforts to get up, but he sat like lead. He had a red star sewn on his sleeve.

When two horsemen heavily dismounted from their horses and went towards him, riding through the mud, he quickly moved his lips, his beardless face wrinkled, his eyes widened, white with horror, with anger.

I don’t want, I don’t want, - this man muttered in a barely audible, hurried manner, move away, don’t cover up ... You interfere with watching ... Well, to hell with you ... We destroyed you a long time ago ... Don’t trample before your eyes, don’t interfere. .. Here again... From that hill across the river... Look, you White Guard dogs, turn around... You see - a bridge over half the city, an arch, a span - three kilometers... From the air? No, no, it's aluminum. And lanterns in an arc on the thinnest pillars, like needles...

The man was delirious in a cruel typhus and, apparently, mistook his own for enemies. They never got from him what kind of detachment it was, ten of which were lying along the road. He himself survived only because during the battle he lay wounded in a cart, which is now lying upside down with wheels.

They put him on a cart with oats. In the evening, at the Bezenchuk station, they made a dressing and sent to Moscow with the next ambulance train. His documents were in the name of Vasily Alekseevich Buzheninov, a native of the Smolensk province, twenty-one years old.

This man survived. By spring, he was on his feet, and in the summer he was again thrown to the front. With hundreds of others like him, Buzheninov entered and left the devastated cities of Ukraine; he buried himself in hazel and cherry groves, shooting back at whites and greens; sat in starry nights by the fire over the Don; kneaded the dirt in the steppes under the autumn wind howling dejectedly between the ears of the horse and along the telegraph wires; fought in a fever in the scorching sands of Turkestan; went to Perekop and to Poland.

He later recalled all this as a dream: skirmishes, songs of a hungry belly, tied with a Red Army sash, half-ruined cars rushing across the plains, flaming village roofs on the horizon, comrades - now loud and carefree, then furiously angry in battle, then subdued from fatigue and hunger . Comrades, like poles and trees running past the carriage, were leaving memory, sight, leaving "home", into the ground. There were no different people in those years - there were brothers. Here he is, little brother, wrapped in pieces of carpet around his legs - instead of boots, he drags porridge from the cauldron with a spoon so that the jaws roll on his cheekbones, and in the evening, look, he lies with his head buried, running his stiff fingers into the ground.

That is why those years were remembered as a dream.

Information about the life of Vasily Alekseevich blurs in the fog of these years. He was not sick or wounded, he was not on vacation. Once Semenov met him in a border town, in a tavern, and spent several hours over moonshine in a heated conversation. Subsequently, Semenov spoke about this meeting as follows:

Vasily Buzheninov and I graduated from the same school, he was a class older. Then he entered the architectural course in the sixteenth year, and I entered the engineering course in the seventeenth.

In the tavern we began to remember the past. Suddenly Buzheninov jumped up and grimaced. “Why turn over the junk, let's talk about something else. A hundred years have passed since then. I remember how my grandmother in our house, in the province, pricked matches together with the head into four parts to save money - she drove four boxes out of one box. Here So save! Two and a half thousand steam locomotives are lying under the slopes. I ask: the war is over, so now again to chop matches into four parts? There is no return, the old one is derailed! Either we perish for the devil, or we build our brothers are rotting, - we will build luxurious cities, mighty factories, we will plant lush gardens ... Now we are building for ourselves ... And for ourselves - magnificently, in a grandiose ... "

Yu. V. Revich, 1998

M.: Institute of Oriental Studies RAS, 1998.- S. 47-68.

The text of the book was kindly provided by Yu. V. Revich - Layout Yu. Zubakin, 2002

You probably won't flinch
crushing a man,
Well, martyrs of dogma,
You, too, are victims of the century. B.Pasternak

M Many people read books without knowing or wanting to know about their authors. Especially in childhood. But if we do know something, then a ghostly cloud appears around the pages we read, which colors the words printed on them with an unusual color. There are books with special destinies - the figure of the author, the place or circumstances that accompany their creation can be almost more important than a direct text. We are free to consider Nikolai Ostrovsky an exalted fundamentalist with a mutilated body and psyche, but it is impossible to blame him for the fact that he wrote "How the Steel Was Tempered" in the order of the state order, with a desire to please, to get into the stream. And when reading "Kolyma Tales" by Varlam Shalamov, one cannot forget that the author experienced the horror of concentration camps not only in his imagination ...

In recent years, our attitude towards Alexei Tolstoy has changed dramatically. smashed to smithereens long years the erected image of the imposing elder of the writing workshop, the former count, who put the pen at the service of the working people, by what, and not just by talent, and who won universal love. A different figure emerges: an opportunist, comfortably settled in the ecological niche of the official classic, who quite consciously supported the crimes of the Stalinist regime.

An aristocrat from such a glorious family did not have the civic courage to simply remain silent. He diligently finished hammering nails driven into the hands and feet of already crucified people. "Sabotage organization of hunger, cynical mockery of the population, infection of seed funds, mass poisoning of livestock, sabotage in industry, agriculture, mining, forestry, sabotage in science, in schools, in literature, in finance, in trade, harassment and the murder of honest workers, espionage ... "-" all this was done by the serfs of our mortal enemy - world fascism: Trotsky, Yenukidze, berries, Bukharins, Rykovs and other mercenaries, murderers, provocateurs and spies ..." (From the article "Fair sentence", 1938). The count diligently popularized Stalin's teachings regarding the aggravation of the class struggle under socialism. He steadily demanded the highest measure and in writing testified to his deep satisfaction with the execution of sentences, not forgetting to end almost every article with a toast in honor of the great Stalin. The literary critic V. Shcherbina assessed these speeches as follows: "Tolstoy in his articles propagated the humanistic essence of the Soviet system." Picking up the baton from Gorky, Tolstoy is trying to convince the world around him that he is telling the truth about a happy country where cheerful, courageous people, not knowing about the future, build wings to fly higher than anyone in the world.

The frenzied style at any mention of "enemies of the people" was an indispensable component of Soviet etiquette, which, however, does not paint those who used it. Now they cut off the cataracts from our eyes, someone will think, you would have tried to reason like that in those days. It's hard to argue with this. Yes, they were afraid. I do not demand from anyone manifestations of heroism. But I modestly assume that it was not necessary to climb out of the skin. Especially those who did not risk anything. Small consolation for Tolstoy is that he was not alone. "In their savagery and fall, the writers excelled everyone," testified Nadezhda Mandelstam. At the same time, there is nothing to reproach, for example, Prishvin, who trusted true thoughts only to the diary, or Paustovsky, who, pretending not to notice anything around, enthusiastically sang the beauty of Meshchera. The zeal of serving the inquisitors is what kills.

According to the division of material prosperity and state recognition, Tolstoy achieved the maximum of what one could wish for in earthly life. However, do not forget that there is a court of descendants (Lermontov called it God's court), and any writer must figure out which cup is heavier before selling his soul to the devil.

But dialectics, although not according to Hegel, we taught, and there is reason to recall it. Simultaneously with the knavery cries, Tolstoy wrote the beautiful fairy tale "The Golden Key", beloved by all children, which tells you to be quick-witted, kind, fair and not to submit to the Karabas-Barabas, even when the forces are desperately unequal.

O. Davydov belongs to the original hypothesis: as if in the figurative system of the Golden Key, the author's rejection of Marxist ideology is encrypted. Papa Carlo is Papa Karlo Marx, the squeaking log is the proletariat, and Pinocchio cut out of it is already an organized proletariat, so to speak, structured, although still unconscious. Malvina, with her pedagogical manners, personifies party discipline, and the fox Alice and the cat Basilio - you yourself understand - the vile bourgeoisie ... Using the proposed methodology, I undertake to play out no less convincingly, for example, the fairy tales "Terem-Teremok", the Russian imperial idea, collapsed today. Such, sometimes funny, interpretations are not at all as far-fetched as they might seem. Any wise fairy tale, like its closest relative, science fiction, is always fraught with unknown depths, which the author himself sometimes does not even know about. We can speak on behalf of the author only when he himself confirms our assumptions. Most often, the artist creates generalized philosophical or poetic symbols, and it's up to us how to use them. One can say firmly about "Pinocchio": this fairy tale is kind. However, some of Tolstoy's words differed painfully far from others, which, I repeat, no one forced him to write.

How should the new generations regard the works of Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy? Push them away in disgust, or ignore his moral character? They say, what do we care about the fact that Tolstoy wrote the servile story "Bread", because he also created the excellent novel "Peter the Great", in which, by the way, the thought of an enlightened ruler latently leaks. The merits of the novel were recognized even by Bunin, who sent a note from Paris through Izvestia: "Alyosha! Although you are ... but a talented writer" ... Probably, the most correct thing is to know who wrote the book, and if you really read it, then today's eyes.

T Tolstoy owns two science fiction novels, which for many years were considered the golden fund of Soviet science fiction. Do they continue to remain in the authorized capital of this fund after the bankruptcy of the old system of values?

For the first time Tolstoy turned to science fiction in the novel "Aelita" (1923), with the exception of the story "Count Calliostro" published a year earlier, which, however, with provincial-estate devilry, does not really get out of the usual writer's channel, which cannot be said about " Aelita". It was written at a turning point, the transition from pre-revolutionary Tolstoy to Soviet Tolstoy, and contradictions already made themselves felt in it, which distorted many pages of domestic creators: an undoubted artistic talent, a keen vision of reality turned out to be inseparably intertwined with ideological dogmas, partly assimilated, partly imposed. Lenin spoke of the glaring contradictions in the work of Leo Tolstoy. Among the talented writers of the Soviet era, the contradictions "shouted" much louder. Figuratively speaking, it was a scream that had not stopped for decades.

The circumstances in which "Aelita" was created were primarily associated with the return of the writer from a short absence. His return created a stir in émigré circles; perhaps Tolstoy himself stirred the coals in the fire (an open letter to N.V. Tchaikovsky, etc.) in order to give himself more respectability in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. From today's standpoint, there is a temptation to explain his return as a calculated opportunistic act. But this is still not the case. Tolstoy of those years is not a high-ranking academician, not a deputy of the Supreme Council of all convocations, not the chairman of the State Commission for Investigating the Crimes of the Nazi Occupiers, but a young Russian writer looking for his place in the maelstrom of events. There is no doubt that both his departure from Soviet Russia in 1919 and his return in 1923 were hard-won deeds. There are at least three reasons for Tolstoy's return. It is unlikely that he was cunning when he wrote to Chukovsky: “Emigration, of course, assured itself and others that emigration is a highly cultured thing, the preservation of culture, the non-extinguishing of the sacred fire. the feeling is obviously unfamiliar to you ... Many people have committed suicide. I don’t know if you feel with such piercing sharpness what a homeland is, your sun over the roof ... "Even the implacable enemy of Soviet power, the already mentioned Stepun, believed in the purity of his motives: "Maybe I idealize Tolstoy, but I still believe that his return was not only a marriage of convenience with the Bolsheviks, but also a marriage of love with Russia." So it is, but we have the right to assume that Bunin loved Russia no less, but preferred to die in a foreign land. Apparently, additional incentives worked for Tolstoy. He was not just a patriot, but a state patriot, he saw - and, by the way, not without reason - that it was the Bolsheviks who became the legal successors of the Russian great-power idea. And perhaps this destructive idea served as the basis for his moral decline. Many returned. Not everyone went into service.

But there was another reason. We have already spoken about the post-revolutionary euphoria among some of the intelligentsia. So Tolstoy saw in the revolution not only the bloody Moloch. He assured himself that the Cheka, the surplus appropriation, war communism, even overlaps, hostages, torture, and terror were temporary evils, and underneath the superficial ripples lurked enormous creative energy. In recent years, many publicists have appeared who furiously prove that there were no positive moments in the October Revolution from the very beginning, that it was just an outbreak of an acutely contagious disease that could not be eliminated in the bud solely because of the softness of the generally nice tsar-priest and his humanist generals. But there is no doubt that before the Stalinist coup, and for many later, and for the especially backward even now, a perhaps romanticized, but sincere conviction reigned in their minds: an unprecedented social experiment is going on in Russia, which in a short time is capable of producing phenomenal results. results. For this belief I do not reproach either Tolstoy or any of his contemporaries. My only condition is sincerity.

"Aelita" was just written when its author changed Berlin for Moscow, she reflected his throwing. In October 1922, Tolstoy informed Chukovsky about the completion of work on a novel about a "pretty and strange woman". But just Chukovsky was the first to be struck by such sharp turn: “We don’t know what happened to him, he all of a sudden changed. Having changed, he wrote Aelita; Aelita, among his books, is an unprecedented and unexpected book ... It doesn’t contain Pig Ravines, but Mars. Not Prince Serpukhov, but Budyonnovist Gusev. And the theme in it is not similar to the traditional themes of the writer: the uprising of the proletarians on Mars. In a word, "Aelita" is a complete rejection of Alexei Tolstoy from the manor creativity that he has served until now. "

One can see in Tolstoy's unexpected appeal to Mars the desire to declare himself as a revolutionary writer, at the same time protecting himself from accusations of insufficient knowledge of modernity. Mars is unusual, and the unusual was in vogue. However, the vigilant ideological Vokhrovites did not allow any evasions: “It can be recognized as a general rule that a revolutionary writer is taken to depicting the class struggle in a fantastic or utopian form if he does not fully understand the reality surrounding him or if he subjectively stands in ... a sharp contradiction with the ideology consciously adopted by him "(I. Matsa. "Literature and the proletariat in the West", 1927). As you can see, not only is any writer forbidden to fantasize, but he is also a priori suspected of counter-revolutionary encroachments.

On the one hand, the very idea of ​​flying to Mars from a hungry, unsettled St. Petersburg reflected the enthusiastic moods of those years. They are akin to the same canal from the Arctic to India. But - on the other hand - something resists the attempt to record the flight of the Elk in the asset of the Soviet government. Not a grandiose, national show, which we have seen more than once in the future, but an ordinary, almost ordinary event - the rocket was launched almost secretly from an ordinary courtyard. A private initiative of an ordinary Petersburg engineer, who cannot even be called a typical representative of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Random people fly to Mars. But this is a natural coincidence. The revolution stirred up different social strata, they mixed up and did not fuse. It is strange, isn't it, that Elk does not have not only associates, but also assistants, and he is forced to invite an unfamiliar soldier with him on a flight? For Los, this is an escape from reality, from longing for his dead wife, an attempt to overcome mental confusion, even disappointment in life. (And why would it be - in our battle storm, ebullient?) In a chaotic, incoherent pre-flight speech, he correctly evaluates himself: “I was not the first to fly. I should not be the first to penetrate into the heavenly secret. What will I find there? - Forgetting myself ... No, comrades, I am not a brilliant builder, not a daredevil, not a dreamer, I am a coward, I am a fugitive ..." In subsequent editions, the author picked up the pessimistic moods of the hero, but nevertheless his Elk decidedly not he looks like star captains, reminiscent of the lack of spirituality of the metal monument to Yuri Gagarin, which was erected in Moscow on the square named after him. True, the monuments were thrown into science fiction a little later, but the heroic epic of space exploration also began Soviet people some neurasthenics would not be supposed to, which, again, was not ignored by the criticism of the 1920s and 1930s. Commentators urged the author to introduce other characters into the book. So, L. Zhukov would like to improve Elk. "The reader has the right to think that engineer Los will once again fly to Mars. This volitional activity charges the reader, awakens in him an active desire to move forward and forward." (Already someone, but Elk cannot awaken energy in readers, and is not going to. He was not enough even for one Aelita). And M. Charny expresses the opposite regret: if Tolstoy left the guest in the arms of Aelita, then the engineer would rather "expose" himself.

However, the best, unbiased critical forces also met the novel coolly, though for other reasons.

Viktor Shklovsky, as always, is lapidary and categorical: "Aelita is, first of all, an undisguised imitation of Wales ... Of course, nothing has been invented on Mars ... In Aelita it is boring and not filled ...", "The novel is not good", "Not it was worth writing Martian stories," Chukovsky and Tynyanov said out loud. But even critical reviewers highly appreciated the image of Elk's companion, the Red Army soldier Gusev. Chukovsky, after a thorough scolding, pronounced the verdict: “Nevertheless, Aelita is an excellent thing, since it serves as a pedestal for Gusev. You don’t notice either the plot or other characters, you see only this monumental figure obscuring the entire horizon. to the size of a national type. If a foreigner wants to understand what kind of people made the revolution in our country, he will first of all need to be given this book. Millions of Russian rank-and-file leaders of the Russian revolution were embodied in this one person ... "

The rating seems to me incredibly high. No, Gusev did not enter the ranks of revolutionary miraculous heroes. Foreigners were given other books. But at the same time, I want to agree with Korney Ivanovich, although I'm not sure that this is exactly the meaning he put into his assessment. (Or maybe he implicitly invested). It is true: the revolution won thanks to the support of the Gusevs. But I affirm this without the former reverence. Gusev is a lumpen, a marginal, nothing connects him with the earth, or with the sky, or with water, or with the city, or with the village. For him, both the revolution and the flight to Mars are just an amusing adventure. Gusev casually established four republics, as the author thought it necessary to inform us, not without admiration, and once, having gathered hundreds of four of the same " wild geese", went to liberate India, but now, the mountains prevented ... So after all, not only Gusev was going to liberate unfortunate India. The point of view of the book character was shared, for example, by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council L.D. Trotsky: "The road to India may turn out to be for us at this a moment more passable and shorter than the road to Soviet Hungary ... "Surprisingly, the Indian theme has surfaced in our days, both in an odious phrase about boots that a Russian soldier for some reason must wash in the Indian Ocean, and in a new novel" The Great March for the Liberation of India" by Valery Zalotukha (1995), who used the idea of ​​Gusev-Tolstoy-Trotsky.

G Usev's attempt was only an initiative of the field commander, which, nevertheless, testified that the idea of ​​joining ... excuse me, the liberation of India was ripening among the masses, who had already liberated themselves. In Zalotukha's novel, a command is given from the very top. As usual, a responsible decision is made in an extremely narrow circle - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. A regular unit is sent - thirty thousand sabers. True, she also moved to fight India in secret, without declaring war. But who was to announce it? India? So we gathered to liberate her from the colonialists. (Switch to real story- and to whom was war declared during the invasion of Afghanistan?) Is it even more stupid to declare war on England? Then it would be necessary to start with an attack on the Tower, and not on the Taj Mahal. It was assumed that the oppressed peoples would meet the horsemen with red banners and hugs, and thus the failure of Tukhachevsky near Warsaw would be compensated; for some reason, the ungrateful Poles did not support the liberation ideas that he carried to Poland at the ends of his sabers. This time they made sure: everything will go like clockwork, it will be possible to announce it publicly. Unprepared impromptu sometimes succeeded: the October uprising, the flight to Mars...

But what is there in common between events that differ not only in scale and consequences, but also in the degree of their, so to speak, transcendence? The word "adventure" unites them. Each of them left a trail in the form of fascinating novels and mountains of real corpses.

Zalotukha's novel is a life-size model of bloody and failed adventures. To conquer countries and peoples, people of a special mentality are needed, as we would say now. It's time to remember Alexei Ivanovich Gusev.

Zalotukha has its direct analogue - Novikov's squadron commander, nicknamed Novik. Also a tumbleweed - with Lenin in his head and a revolver in his hand. Of course, he is eager to liberate the oppressed with all his heart, but he is not averse to grabbing a necklace for his mistress or ordering one concubine from the "liberated" harem to be brought to him, just like Gusev, in parallel with the leadership of the Martian revolution, exchanges gold for trinkets from the natives . Brother Novik is not going to be satisfied with India. True, he was not invited to Mars; it doesn't matter - the next target is Australia, in which, as he was told, not only all the animals with sacks on their stomachs, but "people also live, I suppose they also toil from capital" ... Approximately the same idea as Gusev about Mars.

It’s not so bad if Gusevs and Noviks were limited in rank from private to squadron commander ... The trouble is (it’s not the author’s misfortune - our misfortune) that in all other actors occupying higher command posts we can easily detect Gusev traits. Not only in the "iron" commander Lapinsh (of course, a Latvian), not only in the typical commissar Bruskin (of course, a Jew), but also in Kobe-Stalin, and in Lev Trotsky, and in Lenin himself. The old swindler Shishkin, who has wormed his way into their company by chance, immediately realizes that he is in front of intermediate people, transitional people who undertake global restructuring, not realizing their responsibility for the fate of millions of befuddled people who trust them, and who are ready to destroy the lives of other peoples in which they they really don't understand anything.

In Gusev and others like him, a genetic relationship with Bulgakov's Sharikov is clearly visible. In a sense, Gusev is also a new man, a homunculus of the revolution. The reactions of the gusevs are predetermined and completely predictable - "We know these things!", "Give it to your soul, arsenal!", "You fool, Igoshka, you don't understand real life ..." These are the reactions of people brainwashed by the class terminology. (This type is incomparably more fully described by Platonov, who, of course, knew them better than Tolstoy). Perhaps the mysterious and at first glance meaningless actions of Tolstoy, who, after "Aelita" for no reason, undertook to rewrite the famous play by Chapek about robots "RUR" and published it under the title "Riot of Machines", without fundamentally changing anything, are explained the fact that in 1924 the writer still felt an instinctive fear of hundreds of thousands of serial geese marching under red flags. Later, he himself joined their ranks. But Tolstoy's intuition allowed him to guess - in many respects it was these foolish, irresponsible guys who made the revolution. We have been disentangling the results of their selfless efforts for seventy-five years. Subsequently, Tolstoy began to strengthen the conscious principle in his heroes (at least in Telegin from "Walking Through the Torments"), but perhaps in "Aelita" he was closer to the truth.

All this has long been irrelevant, and if only Gusev and Los acted in the book, it would hardly have survived on the shelves. The novel survived thanks to an image that Chukovsky and others did not notice. When we start looking for a symbol of the eternally feminine, the Martian Aelita certainly comes to mind. Aelita - grace, intelligence, beauty, love. On the last pages of the novel, the image of Aelita expands to universal proportions, to the image of an ideal woman in general: "... The voice of Aelita, the voice of love, eternity, the voice of longing, flies throughout the universe ..."

There is some secret hidden in the book, which is difficult to dissect in literary criticism. Why is the image of Aelita so poetic? After all, the author did not seem to let us penetrate into her soul, did not share her thoughts or feelings. We look at it all the time from the outside. Even the portrait is sketched - the fragility, the ashy color of the hair, and the bluish-white skin are constantly emphasized. But this does not prevent us from seeing it quite clearly, much more clearly than, say, a blurry Elk. Any illustrator will draw Aelita without difficulty, and for everyone she will turn out to be different, but similar.

In fantasy literature, Mars is in high demand. Starting from Wells, the imagination of earthly writers populated him with all conceivable and unthinkable creatures. The American science fiction writer E. Hamilton has a story " Incredible world", which comes to mind more than once when reading Martian fiction.

Two astronauts, having arrived on Mars, refuse to believe their eyes: they are surrounded by living creatures of incredible colors and configurations - beetle-eyed people, abscessed octopuses, ugly creatures with claws, trunks, tentacles ... It turns out that these are materialized creatures of earthly fantasy, very dissatisfied with their appearance, they have a lot of inconvenience. The most witty observation of Hamilton: women walking among the monsters, every single one is a model of earthly beauty. This rule is observed both in the most serious works and in the most frivolous ones. The thing, one must think, is that the authors of most books are men, for whom it turns out to be psychologically impossible to attribute deformities to the fair sex. But the ridicule that accompanies another Martian beauty does not stick to Aelita. But the task that the author set himself is extremely difficult: it was necessary to create an attractive image of an unearthly creature - alien to us, but at the same time close and understandable.

Guys, look for Aelita,
Aelita is the best of bab...

With deliberately rude vocabulary, M. Ancharov emphasizes that Tolstoy created an ideal and real image at the same time. Venerable literary critics can claim as much as they want that the highest success is Gusev. But for some reason, neither the pioneer detachments, nor the circles of science fiction lovers named after Comrade A.I. Gusev are remembered. But the melodious name of the Martian is called small planets, youth cafes, vocal and instrumental ensembles, even hair dryers and washing machines. It is probably no coincidence that the author named the book after a "pretty and strange" woman. There were many people like Gusev in literature, Aelita remains in splendid isolation to this day.

Criticism has always seen the main advantage artistic images in their connection to their time, country, class. There is nothing like this in Aelita. That's what Aelita is good for, a free daughter of ether, a woman in general, for all times and, as we see, for all planets. Maybe that's why the fragile Martian girl ran away from decay. I do not want to say anything bad about the characteristic national types. But, apparently, there is a need for ideal images. Perhaps, in the reader's love for this unearthly creature, a subconscious protest against the excessive politicization of the Komsomol members playing "brook" manifested itself. I admit that Tolstoy also invented it out of longing for another, lost, remembered life.

D making Mars habitable, Tolstoy followed the beliefs prevailing in those days. In 1877, during the great confrontation between the two planets, the Italian astronomer D. Schiaparelli saw a network of straight lines on Mars. Without any ulterior motives, he called them "canali", which in Italian means channels of both natural and artificial origin. But in other languages, "canal" implies a man-made structure, so the public had no doubts. The most ardent supporter of the assumption that these channels were dug, relatively speaking, by the hands of intelligent beings, was the American P. Lowell. He believed that water flowed through these arteries after the melting of the polar snow caps, thus making possible the existence of vegetation, and therefore other life. Aleksey Tolstoy and Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles and many others used the blue water Lowell Canals.

It was one of the most sensational hypotheses in the world. Disputes on this subject have been going on for almost a century and were the immediate predecessors of the current talk about UFOs. Unfortunately, further developments in space exploration did not support Lowell's bold assumptions. The channels turned out to be the brainchild of the earthly, and not the alien mind. But in those days, Lowell's hypothesis was not yet completely buried. This, of course, does not mean that Tolstoy made any attempt to imagine the true appearance of the hypothetical Martians.

According to his assumption, the inhabitants of the Red Planet are the descendants of the Atlanteans, mahacitles who managed to fly away from the Earth during the death of Atlantis and mixed with local tribes. (The author did not experience any difficulties with rocket technology and genetics). It remained unclear: why was it necessary to fly so far and why would they not take their own women with them? However, the legend about the flight of the Atlanteans beyond the boundaries of the Earth is not the discovery of Tolstoy, we can find such a legend in V. Kryzhanovskaya. And in terms of the sociology of Martian society, Tolstoy - Shklovsky was right - really did not come up with anything original, following the universal Marxist scheme. "Mars is boring, like the Field of Mars," Yu. Tynyanov complained. True, the bourgeoisie has been replaced by the aristocracy, but all the same - the oppressors, all the same - the class struggle, all the same - the proletarian revolution, indisputably just, indisputably highly moral ...

By giving the first edition the subtitle "The Decline of Mars," Tolstoy tossed another bone at the commentators. In those days, the work of the German philosopher O. Spengler "The Decline of Europe" was popular. The prevalence of this treatise can be judged by the following fact - the Russian translation of 1922 was made from the 32nd German edition. The next Russian edition had to wait 70 years, and the translation of the second volume has not appeared to this day. (By the way, due to the tautology of two Russian words, we traditionally translate the title of Spengler’s book inadequately. After all, it is called not “The Sunset of Europe”, but “Untergang des Abendlandes”, i.e. “The Sunset of the West”) . According to Spengler, Western culture has outlived its own and is heading towards the abyss. At the beginning of the 21st century, it will be finished with: the inexorable law of the successive change of great cultures and civilizations operates in historical processes. The new formation that arose on the ruins of an old civilization has nothing to do with the past. Who now understands Greek lyrics, asked Spengler; in the same way, Beethoven's music will be alien to future generations. And, looking at the raging crowds of rock fans at the deafening, like a steam engine, "heavy metall" concerts, you think: maybe the meticulous German was right. What is Beethoven to them, what are they to Beethoven?

Of course, in the Land of Soviets, Spengler's concepts were rejected from the threshold, because they did not correspond with the Histmatist five-term system - a class-limited bourgeois thinker, by definition, was obliged to be mistaken, and a Soviet writer, by the same definition, had to debunk his anti-scientific studies. And we commentators found this "debunking" in abundance in Tolstoy. In fact, in the novel there is neither following Spengler nor opposing him. You can drag Spengler's scheme by the ears: a great civilization ends on Mars (which happens in the book for natural, not social reasons), but ruling classes continue to cling to this power. But what about Spengler? Those in power always behave in the same way, both in the Roman Empire and in the Soviet.

On the actual literary arena, "Aelita" competed with low-quality translated reading material, which spread during the years of the New Economic Policy through the efforts of private publishers. The same thing, but on an even larger scale, is happening now. By the way, many bestsellers of the 20s are still successfully sold today. Burroughs, the author of the infamous Tarzan, was then (and still is) the true standard-bearer for the service of the spiritual needs of society. He put a whipping hand to the invasion of Mars, composing a series of novels ("Princess of Mars", "Gods of Mars", "Lord of Mars", etc.), the Russian publication of which was begun in the time of Aelita, and completed in our days. Relay of generations... Fiction of this kind has earned the Americans the ironic nickname "space opera" - "space opera". Experiments on the creation of a space opera were also carried out here. In 1925, for example, "The Burning Abyss" by N. Mukhanov appeared, a story about the war of the Earth with the same Mars, in which both planets beat each other with beam weapons, until, finally, the Earth wins, slowing down the rotation of the hostile planet with the help of interplanetary brake. An attempt was made to turn "Aelita" into an opera, or rather into an operetta: an anonymous film novel "Aelita on Earth" was composed. After the defeat of the uprising on her native planet, our heroine goes to Earth, where, in the guise of a pop singer, she fights with dad Tuskub, who heads the counter-revolutionary "Golden Union". Fortunately, nothing can be said about the further fate of the characters, since out of the eight announced issues, only one saw the light of day.

Tolstoy Burroughs undoubtedly knew and for some reason borrowed flying ships from him. This is where the similarity ends: unlike the absolutely unprincipled Burroughs (literally, without ideas, without thoughts), Tolstoy still had ideas. It is easy to see that these ideas were not even remotely anti-Soviet or anti-communist. True, there was no directness. For example, none of the participants in the expedition was a member of the party, which deprived the reviewers of the opportunity to speak "for" the images of the communists. Tolstoy had not yet fully mastered the rules of the game. His attempt to take a small step away from orthodoxy did not remotely suggest a criminal intent. But even Tolstoy's official status, growing stronger every year, did not save him. When Aelita appeared on the field, critical judges immediately pulled out a red card. So, for example, in the journal "Revolution and Culture" one could find such assessments of adventure literature: "... the imperialist tendencies of their authors (J. millions of their young readers hid and corrupted with the poison of misanthropic propaganda... The traditions of adventure in literature are tenacious. During the Soviet period, a number of novels were written, similar in spirit to their mine-ridovism. Even the venerable Alexei Tolstoy had a hand in this kind of creativity. And the harm from these there are hardly fewer novels than from all previous adventurous literature ... These novels have a sin that they excite the reader's purely individualistic moods ... and divert his attention from reality either into interplanetary space, then into the bowels of the earth, then into the depths of the seas ..." (And it is impossible to understand what kind of natural environment would suit the author of the article?) And here is another state prosecutor from the same journal: "In relation to Tolstoy's ideology, the situation is so sad that his rum ana only conditionally (according to the place and time of appearance) can be attributed to Soviet science fiction "...

Post-war criticism made a turn "all of a sudden." Since Tolstoy was recognized as a classic, then it became expedient to declare "Aelita" a model socialist realism. And although the masters of Russian literary criticism did not recognize science fiction, did not read and did not understand, nevertheless they began to consider it their duty to speak something like this: “The science fiction plot in the works of A.N. socio-fiction theme, the versatility and subtlety of the socio-psychological characteristics of the characters" (V. Shcherbina). Or: "The theme of the Soviet man, his revolutionary enthusiasm, his creative burning, courage and activity, his daring dreams and powerful mind develops in "Aelita" into the theme of a person in general, a person of unlimited possibilities ... a conqueror of starry spaces" (L. Polyak) . Since there are no images of communists, then the theme of the Soviet man and his impudent mind has to be found in Los and Gusev. I must admit with vexation that I myself took part in the unbridled praise of Tolstoy. And he took such nonsense seriously.

"Aelita" was given the green light in the publishing plans established from above, and our publishing houses took advantage of this permission beyond any reasonable limits, because it was some kind of, but still a commercial book. In 1977, for example, it was published in Moscow, Perm, Ulyanovsk, Dnepropetrovsk and Kyiv with a total circulation of almost a million copies.

Simultaneously and automatically, "Aelita" was enrolled in the rank of science fiction. Could Soviet science fiction have been different? Although there is nothing particularly scientific in Tolstoy. Such fiction can be called adventure, partly social, but in no way scientific. True, it is known that Tolstoy, by the way, an engineer by training, was familiar with the works of Tsiolkovsky, and, perhaps, borrowed the idea of ​​a rocket from him, but this is a purely literary rocket, and does not pretend to be any plausibility. Scientific authenticity did not bother Tolstoy at all. An excellent example is the passage of a ship over the head of a comet. Gusev stands at the porthole and shouts: "Easier - a block on the right ... Come on full! .. Mountain, mountain flies ... We drove ... Go, go, Mstislav Sergeyevich ..." Such lines do not give the impression of helplessness or falsehood They don't deserve the irony with which Tynyanov attacked them: "To fly to Mars, of course, is not difficult - all you need for this is ultraliddite (probably it's something like gasoline) ...". Only what the author himself takes seriously should be sentenced to ridicule.

"BUT elite" is difficult to compare with anything in Russian science fiction. The author himself believed that "in Russian literature this is the first such science fiction novel." On the contrary, the Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, published two years later, has numerous interest.

The first thread to it stretched out from the outlandish literary variety that arose in those years, a hybrid of science fiction and detective, which began to be called the ear-cutting phrase - "red Pinkerton"; this expression was launched by N.I. Bukharin.

We have seen examples of how party criticism gouged innocent writings and found misanthropic notes in J. Verne. And then suddenly, from the pages of Pravda, a call is heard to imitate Pinkerton, who was regarded not only by dogmatists as a symbol of boulevardism. According to his model, writers were recommended to create fascinating literature for young people on such material as revolution, civil war, international solidarity of workers, the struggle against nascent fascism ... Propaganda-opportunistic considerations were mixed with a sincere desire to give readers new literature. This group was indistinguishably adjoined by "catastrophe novels", which told about a major, preferably (of course, only for the plot) global natural disaster. Even better (again, just for the plot) if the disaster was caused by human hands, however, aliens were also good. The attractiveness of the "catastrophic" theme is understandable: at the moment of mortal danger, at the moment of maximum exertion of strength, people reveal themselves to the fullest, both from the best and the worst side, selflessness, courage, resourcefulness triumph, meanness, cowardice, selfishness come out into the light ...

Many responded to the call, or, as they liked to say then, to the social order. But literature is not a fashionable suit and is not made to order. Even if experiments of this kind were written by respected people, they most often produced funny exercises. Of course, there was also an element of literary play, even mischief. In the 1920s, this could still be done.

We have the testimony of L. Uspensky about how he and a friend composed a similar novel. “It never made it difficult for us to imagine what was there, in the darkness of the inky night: something unthinkable was always found there. We rained down a radioactive meteorite from outer space on Baku. We forced the “gang of a certain Bregadze” to hunt for him. scoundrel in the closet, and the dog was entrusted to rescue him from there ... It was an unheard-of dog, a Great Dane, sewn into the skin of St. Bernard, so that between these two skins it was possible to smuggle precious stones and encrypted reports of scoundrels abroad. that in one of the chapters of the novel, the hair on the back of this dog stood on end with anger - hair on someone else's skin! .. "(The novel "The Color of Lemon" was published in 1928 under the pseudonym L. Rubus).

But even before Rubus, a similar abracadabra called "Iprit" was created in 1925 by two famous writers - Vsevolod Ivanov and Viktor Shklovsky. It is impossible to determine the genre of their book, as well as to briefly describe what it is about, because it contains a huge number of scenes, scenes, cross-cutting and fragmentary storylines without any logical connection and in an arbitrary sequence: episodes of a chemical war between the Soviets and the world of imperialism, the fate of two German engineers who invented a way to make gold cheaply and saved humanity from sleep, a self-proclaimed god, his brother, sent to the USSR on a spy mission, a Chinese (borrowed from Ivanov's play "Armored Train 14-69"), who suddenly turns out to be a woman, and then returns to male nature and much, much more. The sailor Slovokhotov, either a Bolshevik or a deserter, is darting about in this macrocosmos, with a trained bear named Rocambole... Of course, the authors, writing such rubbish, laughed out loud, but nevertheless, the mood of "Iprit" is not at all funny: all the same the inevitability of a bloody battle between socialism and capitalism, given the absolute moral superiority of the former. We can pour mustard gas on Paris, Moscow is an outrageous villainy for them. The outstanding literary critic Shklovsky never thought about his early novel, although he could be proud of it: it captures the main trends and even themes of early Soviet fiction. The direct coincidence of some episodes (for example, the stock market panic and the economic collapse due to the huge amount of gratuitous gold) with Tolstoy's "Hyperboloid ..." speaks not so much about borrowing, but about the unity of the atmosphere that the newly minted prophets breathed.

Marietta Shaginyan's novel "Mess-Mend, or Yankees in Petrograd" (1923) was written in a similar stylistic vein. This fairy tale on "working" topics may be the first anti-fascist work in our country. And this note will be picked up by "Hyperboloid..."

In the article "As I Wrote" Mess-Mend ", the writer somewhat exaggerated the role of the novel in the history of literature, but, apparently, she truly described the atmosphere of upsurge in which such books were created. Komsomol enthusiasm burned in them (both in writers and in books). The fight against imperialism was waged in science fiction for seven decades.The forcedness of this scheme in the books of the 20s was not yet felt with such force as in the post-war epigones, but the initiative was laid.The scheme was followed, for example, in two of Valentin Kataev's early novels "Lord of Iron" (1925) and "Ehrendorf Island" (1926) Again, unshakable class attitudes, again frank arrogance. The second hypostasis and retains a certain interest in the works. So, in "Lord ...", the image of Stanley, the nephew of Sherlock Holmes, turned out to be successful who (the nephew) strives to imitate the great uncle in everything and constantly gets into trouble Holmes, Stanley and the class struggle are connected as follows: Stanley is sent to India to catch the leader of the Indian communes nists, masquerading as him, but he comes across himself and with a gag in his mouth for a lot of money is handed over to the police ... In the second novel, the title is already a parody: "Ehrendorf" is formed from "Ehrenburg". The novel depicts the image of a prolific prose writer who is about to organize a nursery for his readers, "chosen from among the hardiest varieties of the unemployed"... However, Kataev's mockery of his colleague is quite friendly, even a little flattering... The author regularly included "Ehrendorf Island" in collected works in unlike the "Lord of Iron", although one could do the opposite. And Marietta Sergeevna, having republished "Mess-Mend" in the 60s, never remembered that this book had two "continuations". Out of respect for the merits of Marietta Sergeevna, we will not commemorate them either.

Ilya Ehrenburg, who was mentioned in vain, did not remain aloof from depicting the horrors that the crazed imperialism brings to mankind. He wrote in the same 23rd novel "Trust D.E. History of the death of Europe." "D.E." means "Destruction of Europe" - "Destruction of Europe". Of course, the blasphemous business was started by the American tycoon in order to do away with competitors and with the red infection. In the post-war memoirs People, Years, Life, Ehrenburg will say about his old book: “I could write it now with the subtitle “Episodes of the Third World War.” No, Ilya Grigoryevich could not have done this. In fact, he turned out to be unimportant a prognostic who did not guess the tendencies of the world rivalry of the 20th century, except that the military horrors described in the novel coincided with the reality of the past world war, but any war is terrible, and in their madness they are similar.

"G The hyperboloid of the engineer Garin, whose publication began in 1925, fits into this circle completely. , which preceded some of the ideas of the "Hyperboloid ..." Scientists argue that a mathematical formula should also have inner beauty, especially a fantastic hypothesis should look logically and artistically harmonious, which can hardly be said about the attempt of a crazed billionaire to split the Moon with rockets in order to cause general panic and on the sly to seize sole power. It is unlikely that the most rabid magnates will encroach on natural luminaries. It is impossible to believe in such undertakings even within the framework of a conditional fantasy game. And when reading the best pages of the Hyperboloid ... what is written there, happened or could actually happen, the details are so convincing, detailed awns, episodes, for example, the scene of Garin's reprisal against sent assassins or the chapter on the destruction of chemical plants in Germany. After all, Tolstoy was an artist.

It was not by chance that I made a reservation - on the "best pages". Compared to the whole "Aelita", the "Hyperboloid..." is not so tightly assembled. Along with successful lines, it contains a lot of undigested pieces of Western adventure novel, the influence of not so much cinema as "movie" is noticeably manifested: an incredible gallop of events, their docking and undocking in unexpected places, chases, pursuits, pirate raids of the elegant yacht Arizona "and exquisite gangster-gentleman's conversations ... There is no unity in the appearance of the main character. In the first parts, Garin is more tangible, but more shallow than later, when he is overwhelmed by the destructive mania of world dictatorship.

Less was written about "Hyperboloid..." than about "Aelita", and less scolded. Neither Chukovsky nor Shklovsky honored him with attention. Writers, as a rule, noted the anti-imperialist orientation of the novel, which soon acquired an anti-fascist character. The author began to strengthen such accents. In one version of the chapter "Garin the Dictator", the portrait of the protagonist contained a direct indication: a strand of hair pulled down on his forehead - Hitler liked to comb his hair so much. However, later the writer refused specifics, apparently claiming broader generalizations. Again, there is a temptation to suspect that Tolstoy, too, put into the subtext the rejection of totalitarianism, about which he did not dare to speak openly. Maybe this is today's projection, but there really are such motives in the novel, however, in order to become one of the main books of the twentieth century, books that saw its main danger, such as Zamyatin's "We" or J. Orwell's "1984" , Tolstoy did not have enough gunpowder - the scale of thinking. He tied his hands too tightly with socialist obligations. To create great books, one must have inner independence. Oh, it is no coincidence that Sholokhov was accused of the fact that The Quiet Flows the Don is a kulak, non-Soviet book. As soon as the novelist completely switched to the position of the party, a biased "Virgin Soil Upturned" arose.

Pyotr Petrovich Garin causes not fear, but a smile. A typical action adventure hero, a blond beast, a supervillain. His ambition, lust for power, immorality are presented with such overlaps that he is simultaneously perceived as a parody of himself. Being in line with the mentioned tradition, Tolstoy allowed himself to play the fool, and as a result, "Hyperboloid ..." remained a children's book.

This does not mean that in the novel, as in the image of Garin, there is nothing remarkable. The question of the scientific and technical ideas of the "Hyperboloid..." is solved most simply. Probably the most written about them. Dreams of a burning ray have long haunted militant natures. The patent application was made by an unknown author of the legend about the mirrors of Archimedes, with which he allegedly burned the enemy fleet in Syracuse. Unfortunately, the legend appeared in the Middle Ages, when it was somewhat difficult to verify its authenticity. And science fiction writers see the weapons of the future exclusively in the form of beam lighting and blasters.

References to Tolstoy's novel became more frequent after the appearance of quantum generators - lasers, which in some respects really resemble Garin's hyperboloids, primarily with a non-expanding, thin, like a thread, beam of enormous power, capable of burning and cutting. Scientists themselves were the first to notice this similarity. "For lovers of science fiction, I want to note that the needle beams of nuclear radio stations are a kind of implementation of the idea of ​​the "Hyperboloid of engineer Garin," said Academician L.A. Artsimovich. Aleksei Tolstoy, and Irina Radunskaya named a book about this outstanding discovery - "The Adventures of the Hyperboloid Engineer Garin".

Such a recognition, of course, caresses the heart of a science fiction writer, especially since in those days strictly parallel, non-diverging rays were considered fundamentally impossible, which was brilliantly proved in the book "On the Possible and Impossible in Optics" by Professor G. Slyusarev, published two decades later. He categorically called Tolstoy's fiction unacceptable. Scientists willingly take on the role of the supreme judges of science fiction. And it is instructive to note that the truth turned out to be on the side of bold fantasy rather than dry formulas.

You can talk in detail about whether or not there is an olivine belt in the bowels of the Earth, incidentally outlining modern views on the structure of the earth's crust. Such an analysis of fantastic works is quite widespread, open, for example, the accompanying articles to the collected works of J. Verne. But these comments, in themselves, perhaps not useful, are of secondary importance, we must not forget that despite the specificity of science fiction, we are dealing with a work of literature, not science, and first of all we should try to understand: why does the author figured out what the intrinsic function of the proposed hypothesis is.

Any literature, including science fiction, is valuable primarily for its human, "human" side, its socio-philosophical essence; it explores human behavior in unusual conditions. A science fiction hypothesis is by no means an end in itself. At least that's how it should be. I will have to repeat this idea more than once, the authors stubbornly strive to lose sight of it, because "working" with the most intricate design is incomparably easier than with the most primitive human soul. Tolstoy needed to find a weapon of extraordinary destructive power, but at the same time compact, which he could put into the hands of one person, so that this small one began to threaten the whole world - a hyperboloid appears. The writer needed a lot of gold to use it to crush the world economy. Where to get? J. Verne with similar goals delivered the precious metal from outer space ("In pursuit of a meteorite"). And at Tolstoy, an olivine belt appears and an ultra-deep shaft is drilled. Judge for yourself whose invention is more elegant. Again, in Tolstoy, the Russian engineer Mantsev discovers the olivine belt because the author needed a huge amount of gold, and not because Tolstoy decided to popularize one of the existing hypotheses about the interior of his native planet. And if he wanted to send the heroes of "Aelita" to Mars with the help of some local cavorite or even from a cannon, little would change in the novel, although each time we note with satisfaction that Tolstoy was familiar with the principles of Tsiolkovsky's astronautics.

But try to remove, replace Aelita, Gusev, Los or Garin, Zoya Monroz and there will be nothing left of the books. There is a lot of pompous nonsense about the role of science in science fiction. It is absurd, of course, to discard (as something insignificant) a curious, bold, accurate prediction or a beautiful notion that can really inspire another eccentric to discover. It is only a question of what is considered the main thing in science fiction.

The novel clearly states the thesis: too powerful toys should not be left in the hands of maniacs. Great discoveries in the history of mankind were often conceived for peaceful purposes and immediately began to serve the war. Already the first stick, taken in hand by our distant ancestor, could be both a hoe and a club. And what is atomic energy - a curse or a blessing? What about space travel? And the laser?.. Dangerous weapons must be wrested by any means from irresponsible governments or extremist parties, primarily those that encourage terrorism or are obsessed with overvalued ideas, such as a world revolution, not necessarily socialist, maybe Islamic; in the event of an inevitable collapse, the last trump card will certainly be used, just as Tolstoy's hero would have played it. (Both Hitler and Stalin). Of course, the hyperboloid is not a hydrogen bomb, but the moods and inclinations of their owners are the same. Fundamentalists (I mean not only religious content in this concept) will not spare anyone. But in order to do away with all the children of the Earth, you need only a few kilograms of plutonium or a few barrels of sarin. Good or bad "Hyperboloid ...", but he directly pointed out the danger of absolute dictatorships and fanatical personalities.

Garin's desire to become a world dictator is not taken from the ceiling. There were many types with such modest manners in human history, they were not created by the twentieth century. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan or Napoleon could conquer foreign countries, but they were powerless to destroy the planet. The 20th century has made such lunatics infinitely more dangerous to people than ever before. I don't know whose example comes to mind first - Hitler or Stalin; although Stalin did not openly speak of a world socialist state, there is no doubt that such dreams wandered in his cloudy brain. Although I will not claim that Tolstoy invested special meaning in the Russian origin of the ruler of the world, even if he is a caliph for an hour.

Garin does not stop at personal dictatorship, his ambitions stretch further, and further - pure fascism, the desire to put an elite bunch over the rest of the subhumans (a term not from the novel), who will be led to uncomplaining obedience and hopeless work with the help of a small operation on the brain. (This humane event was carried out in E. Zamyatin's novel "We" (. Garin is immoral, he does not put people's lives in a penny, and sends twin friends to death with a light heart. The author would remember this propensity of his hero in ten years.

Of course, Garin will not be on a par with the named and unnamed princes of darkness. He is smaller, if only because he does not quite accurately imagine why he needs world domination. "Their" dictatorship was worse than Garin's. They would not have faded away at the moment of the highest triumph, what an embarrassment happened to Pyotr Petrovich. He, who successfully grappled with entire fleets, was unable to resist the prejudices of the society that he longed to rule. He rages, howls with anguish, but is forced to obey conventions, rituals and etiquette. Here Garin cannot do anything, he is not going to revolutionize this society, change its structure. And his future prototypes (is it possible to allow such a turn?) most likely would not have noticed such trifles. They were stronger in spirit.

The scenes of the stock market panic should be considered the most curious in the novel - Garin derailed the world economy with the help of cheap gold. And really - what would happen in such a case? Imagine a theoretical possibility: someone invents cheap filters that automatically strain the precious metal out of sea water. The situation was seriously analyzed by A.V. Anikin in the book "Gold". “From the point of view of an economist,” he writes, “an interesting question is: if we transfer the fantasy of A.N. Tolstoy to the modern world, what consequences for the capitalist economy could be expected from a sudden drop in the price of gold to the price of copper or aluminum? .. Perhaps, some turbulent events would occur: crowds of people would initially besiege places where gold would be sold at a few dollars per 1 kg; organized gold markets would close; shares of gold mining companies would roll down, which might even cause a stock market panic .. .

But all this is far from an economic and socio-political catastrophe, from the collapse of the system. The general (absolute) level of commodity prices and wage rates would not have shifted either... Although gold would have ceased to play the role of a currency asset, the international monetary system would probably not have experienced sudden catastrophic shifts either. In particular, the ratio between currencies, which now plays a decisive role, would hardly have changed dramatically under the influence of this factor as such ... "

The fact is that now the so-called "gold standard" has ceased to operate, and gold has ceased to play the role of a universal equivalent of value, so the current pretender to world domination would not have been able to manage in the Garin way. If Anikin had written the book in perestroika times, he might have added: Garin's adventure would have failed also because the real economic and political forces that rule the world are not exactly the same, or rather, not at all the same as they are presented in novel: the author took Soviet views on the world order too close to his heart. In particular, this affected the depiction of the chemical king of the billionaire Rolling.

We, Soviet commentators, were touched most of all by the fact that Rolling was an American billionaire and that, as befits representatives of this variety of imperialist sharks, he also aspired to world domination. His aggressive aspirations ("The American flag will encircle the earth like a bombonniere, along the equator and from pole to pole ...") make Mayakovsky recall again, although when creating Rolling, Tolstoy did not so much follow the stencils as he himself created them. This also applies to the image of the Soviet agent Shelga, whom Garin, contrary to logic, drags around the world, probably in order to be able to spread the peacock's tail in front of a mortal enemy. Acting ambitions in the spirit of the Nerones of all time. Garin has no other connections with his homeland; at the time of the crisis, Russia seems to disappear from the world map, which, of course, simplifies the task for the author. And Shelga ... Shelga becomes the ancestor of an endless series of our heroic scouts, who found the maximum point in the notorious Stirlitz.

There was a plan for the third book of the novel: the matter was supposed to end in chemical warfare, already with the participation of Russia and, of course, the European revolution, after the victory of which utopian "pictures of a peaceful, luxurious life, the realm of labor, science and grandiose art" were to follow. No, whatever you say, but in those years there still lived in Alexei Nikolaevich a longing for the ideal, a longing that drove the hero of his story "Blue Cities" to insanity. And, probably, it would be interesting to know how the aristocrat Tolstoy imagines mature communism, but, perhaps, not only distraction with other activities - his saving instinct told him not to write such a book. In depicting a future war, he would inevitably doom himself to repeating fakes, which will be discussed later, and what a dangerous business it was in the 30s to compose too specific utopias, we have already seen in the example of Larry ...

Alexey Nikolaevich TOLSTOY

blue cities

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS

NADEZHDA IVANOVNA

COUNTY TOWN

SOLES CONTACT THE GROUND

LIFE, MORALS AND OTHER

INDICATIONS TOV. KHOTYAINTSEVA

SMALL EVENTS

HOT DAYS

FROM THE SURVEY OF HOPE IVANOVNA

THE MURDER OF UTEVKIN

BOX OF MATCHES

NIGHT FROM THE THIRD TO THE FOURTH OF JULY

________________________________________________________________

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

One of the witnesses, a student of the engineering school Semyonov, gave unexpected testimony on the most vague, but, as it turned out later, the main issue in the entire investigation. The fact that at the first acquaintance with the circumstances of the tragic night (from the third to the fourth of July) seemed to the investigator an incomprehensible, insane trick, or, perhaps, a cunningly conceived simulation of madness, has now become the key to all the clues.

The course of the investigation had to be restructured and led from the finale of the tragedy from this piece of cloth (three arshins by one and a half), nailed at dawn on the fourth of July on the square of the county town to the telegraph pole.

The crime was not committed crazy - it was established by interrogation and examination. Most likely, the offender was in a state of extreme insanity. While nailing a cloth to the pole, he jumped awkwardly, sprained his leg and fainted. This saved his life - the crowd would have torn him to pieces. During the interrogation of the preliminary investigation, he was extremely excited, but already the investigator of the Gubernia Court found him calmed down and aware of what had happened.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to form a clear picture of the crime from his answers - it fell apart into pieces. And only the story of Semenov blinded all the pieces into one whole. A passionate tale of agonizing, impatient and feverish fantasy unfolded before the investigator.

FIRST INFORMATION ABOUT VASILY ALEKSEEVICH BUZHENINOV

Away from the Bezenchuk station, now Pugachevsky district, a Red Army convoy stretched across a wide muddy area. Around the brown steppe, wet clouds above it, in the distance - dull, like three hundred years of melancholy of the Russian land, a gap in the gap above the edge of the steppe and telegraph poles with props aside from the road. It was in the autumn of 1919.

The lead cavalry unit, which accompanied the convoy, stumbled in this windy desert on the traces of a recent battle: several dead horses, an overturned cart, a dozen human corpses without overcoats and boots. The lead detachment, squinting, rode past, but the commander suddenly turned in his saddle and pointed with a wet mitten at the telegraph pole. The squad stopped.

A man with a crimson-red face sat leaning against a post and, without moving, looked at the approachers. A bloody rag hung from his shaved skull. His parched lips moved as if he were whispering to himself. Apparently, he made terrible efforts to get up, but he sat like lead. He had a red star sewn on his sleeve.

When two horsemen heavily dismounted from their horses and went towards him, riding through the mud, he quickly moved his lips, his beardless face wrinkled, his eyes widened, white with horror, with anger.

I don’t want, I don’t want, - this man muttered in a barely audible, hurried manner, move away, don’t cover up ... You interfere with watching ... Well, to hell with you ... We destroyed you a long time ago ... Don’t trample before your eyes, don’t interfere. .. Here again... From that hill across the river... Look, you White Guard dogs, turn around... You see - a bridge over half the city, an arch, a span - three kilometers... From the air? No, no, it's aluminum. And lanterns in an arc on the thinnest pillars, like needles...

The man was delirious in a cruel typhus and, apparently, mistook his own for enemies. They never got from him what kind of detachment it was, ten of which were lying along the road. He himself survived only because during the battle he lay wounded in a cart, which is now lying upside down with wheels.

They put him on a cart with oats. In the evening, at the Bezenchuk station, they made a dressing and sent to Moscow with the next ambulance train. His documents were in the name of Vasily Alekseevich Buzheninov, a native of the Smolensk province, twenty-one years old.

This man survived. By spring, he was on his feet, and in the summer he was again thrown to the front. With hundreds of others like him, Buzheninov entered and left the devastated cities of Ukraine; he buried himself in hazel and cherry groves, shooting back at whites and greens; sat on starry nights by the fire over the Don; kneaded the dirt in the steppes under the autumn wind howling dejectedly between the ears of the horse and along the telegraph wires; fought in a fever in the scorching sands of Turkestan; went to Perekop and to Poland.

He later recalled all this as a dream: skirmishes, songs of a hungry belly, tied with a Red Army sash, half-ruined cars rushing across the plains, flaming village roofs on the horizon, comrades - now loud and carefree, then furiously angry in battle, then subdued from fatigue and hunger . Comrades, like poles and trees running past the carriage, were leaving memory, sight, leaving "home", into the ground. There were no different people in those years - there were brothers. Here he is, little brother, wrapped in pieces of carpet around his legs - instead of boots, he drags porridge from the cauldron with a spoon so that the jaws roll on his cheekbones, and in the evening, look, he lies with his head buried, running his stiff fingers into the ground.

That is why those years were remembered as a dream.

Information about the life of Vasily Alekseevich blurs in the fog of these years. He was not sick or wounded, he was not on vacation. Once Semenov met him in a border town, in a tavern, and spent several hours over moonshine in a heated conversation. Subsequently, Semenov spoke about this meeting as follows:

Vasily Buzheninov and I graduated from the same school, he was a class older. Then he entered the architectural course in the sixteenth year, and I entered the engineering course in the seventeenth.

In the tavern we began to remember the past. Suddenly Buzheninov jumped up and grimaced. “Why turn over the junk, let's talk about something else. A hundred years have passed since then. I remember how my grandmother in our house, in the province, pricked matches together with the head into four parts to save money - she drove four boxes out of one box. Here So save! Two and a half thousand steam locomotives are lying under the slopes. I ask: the war is over, so now again to chop matches into four parts? There is no return, the old one is derailed! Either we perish for the devil, or we build our brothers are rotting, - we will build luxurious cities, mighty factories, we will plant lush gardens ... Now we are building for ourselves ... And for ourselves - magnificently, in a grandiose ... "

Tolstoy Alexey Nikolaevich

blue cities

Alexey Nikolaevich TOLSTOY

blue cities

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS

NADEZHDA IVANOVNA

COUNTY TOWN

SOLES CONTACT THE GROUND

LIFE, MORALS AND OTHER

INDICATIONS TOV. KHOTYAINTSEVA

SMALL EVENTS

HOT DAYS

FROM THE SURVEY OF HOPE IVANOVNA

THE MURDER OF UTEVKIN

BOX OF MATCHES

NIGHT FROM THE THIRD TO THE FOURTH OF JULY

________________________________________________________________

TWO WORDS INTRODUCTION

One of the witnesses, a student of the engineering school Semyonov, gave unexpected testimony on the most vague, but, as it turned out later, the main issue in the entire investigation. The fact that at the first acquaintance with the circumstances of the tragic night (from the third to the fourth of July) seemed to the investigator an incomprehensible, insane trick, or, perhaps, a cunningly conceived simulation of madness, has now become the key to all the clues.

The course of the investigation had to be restructured and led from the finale of the tragedy from this piece of cloth (three arshins by one and a half), nailed at dawn on the fourth of July on the square of the county town to the telegraph pole.

The crime was not committed crazy - it was established by interrogation and examination. Most likely, the offender was in a state of extreme insanity. While nailing a cloth to the pole, he jumped awkwardly, sprained his leg and fainted. This saved his life - the crowd would have torn him to pieces. During the interrogation of the preliminary investigation, he was extremely excited, but already the investigator of the Gubernia Court found him calmed down and aware of what had happened.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to form a clear picture of the crime from his answers - it fell apart into pieces. And only the story of Semenov blinded all the pieces into one whole. A passionate tale of agonizing, impatient and feverish fantasy unfolded before the investigator.

FIRST INFORMATION ABOUT VASILY ALEKSEEVICH BUZHENINOV

Away from the Bezenchuk station, now Pugachevsky district, a Red Army convoy stretched across a wide muddy area. Around the brown steppe, wet clouds above it, in the distance - dull, like three hundred years of melancholy of the Russian land, a gap in the gap above the edge of the steppe and telegraph poles with props aside from the road. It was in the autumn of 1919.

The lead cavalry unit, which accompanied the convoy, stumbled in this windy desert on the traces of a recent battle: several dead horses, an overturned cart, a dozen human corpses without overcoats and boots. The lead detachment, squinting, rode past, but the commander suddenly turned in his saddle and pointed with a wet mitten at the telegraph pole. The squad stopped.

A man with a crimson-red face sat leaning against a post and, without moving, looked at the approachers. A bloody rag hung from his shaved skull. His parched lips moved as if he were whispering to himself. Apparently, he made terrible efforts to get up, but he sat like lead. He had a red star sewn on his sleeve.

When two horsemen heavily dismounted from their horses and went towards him, riding through the mud, he quickly moved his lips, his beardless face wrinkled, his eyes widened, white with horror, with anger.

I don’t want, I don’t want, - this man muttered in a barely audible, hurried manner, move away, don’t cover up ... You interfere with watching ... Well, to hell with you ... We destroyed you a long time ago ... Don’t trample before your eyes, don’t interfere. .. Here again... From that hill across the river... Look, you White Guard dogs, turn around... You see - a bridge over half the city, an arch, a span - three kilometers... From the air? No, no, it's aluminum. And lanterns in an arc on the thinnest pillars, like needles...

The man was delirious in a cruel typhus and, apparently, mistook his own for enemies. They never got from him what kind of detachment it was, ten of which were lying along the road. He himself survived only because during the battle he lay wounded in a cart, which is now lying upside down with wheels.

They put him on a cart with oats. In the evening, at the Bezenchuk station, they made a dressing and sent to Moscow with the next ambulance train. His documents were in the name of Vasily Alekseevich Buzheninov, a native of the Smolensk province, twenty-one years old.

This man survived. By spring, he was on his feet, and in the summer he was again thrown to the front. With hundreds of others like him, Buzheninov entered and left the devastated cities of Ukraine; he buried himself in hazel and cherry groves, shooting back at whites and greens; sat on starry nights by the fire over the Don; kneaded the dirt in the steppes under the autumn wind howling dejectedly between the ears of the horse and along the telegraph wires; fought in a fever in the scorching sands of Turkestan; went to Perekop and to Poland.

He later recalled all this as a dream: skirmishes, songs of a hungry belly, tied with a Red Army sash, half-ruined cars rushing across the plains, flaming village roofs on the horizon, comrades - now loud and carefree, then furiously angry in battle, then subdued from fatigue and hunger . Comrades, like poles and trees running past the carriage, were leaving memory, sight, leaving "home", into the ground. There were no different people in those years - there were brothers. Here he is, little brother, wrapped in pieces of carpet around his legs - instead of boots, he drags porridge from the cauldron with a spoon so that the jaws roll on his cheekbones, and in the evening, look, he lies with his head buried, running his stiff fingers into the ground.

That is why those years were remembered as a dream.

Information about the life of Vasily Alekseevich blurs in the fog of these years. He was not sick or wounded, he was not on vacation. Once Semenov met him in a border town, in a tavern, and spent several hours over moonshine in a heated conversation. Subsequently, Semenov spoke about this meeting as follows:

Vasily Buzheninov and I graduated from the same school, he was a class older. Then he entered the architectural course in the sixteenth year, and I entered the engineering course in the seventeenth.

In the tavern we began to remember the past. Suddenly Buzheninov jumped up and grimaced. “Why turn over the junk, let's talk about something else. A hundred years have passed since then. I remember how my grandmother in our house, in the province, pricked matches together with the head into four parts to save money - she drove four boxes out of one box. Here So save! Two and a half thousand steam locomotives are lying under the slopes. I ask: the war is over, so now again to chop matches into four parts? There is no return, the old one is derailed! Either we perish for the devil, or we build our brothers are rotting, - we will build luxurious cities, mighty factories, we will plant lush gardens ... Now we are building for ourselves ... And for ourselves - magnificently, in a grandiose ... "

After demobilization, Vasily Alekseevich entered the architectural courses again and stayed in Moscow until the spring of 1924. Semyonov says that all this time Buzheninov worked with a kind of frenzy. Ate from hand to mouth. At one time, he said, he spent the night in a crypt at the Donskoy cemetery. The women, of course, were shy. And he wore on his bony, stooped shoulders the same Red Army overcoat, shot through, with brown spots, in which he was once found in the steppes of the Pugachev district.

In early April, Buzheninov fell ill with nervous exhaustion. Semyonov sheltered him on his sofa. At the same time, Buzheninov received a letter from the county town, from his homeland, and often reread it, as if it were written in a language he did not understand well. The letter worried him terribly. Several times he said that he must visit his homeland, otherwise he would not forgive himself for the rest of his life. Obviously, his imagination was also not in order.

Semyonov collected money between his comrades and bought a railway ticket for Buzheninov. Two days before his departure, on the occasion of spring days, there was a party at which Buzheninov, tipsy, in extreme excitement, told his comrades an amazing story.

His story is given here in the exact form in which it was perceived by the comrades who had crowded tightly into Semyonov's room, when behind an open window over the Moscow rooftops, over the narrow streets striped with advertising tapes, over the ancient towers, over the transparent branches of the boulevard lindens, the bluish light of the evening spilled and neglected by the poets of the whole Union spring month stood like a narrow sickle of ice in the evening desert.

IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS

“On April 14, 2024, I turned one hundred and twenty-six years old ... Wait a minute, comrades, I’m talking very seriously ... I was neither old nor young: gray-haired, which was considered very beautiful, ivory shimmer hair; angular fresh face ; strong body, confident in movements; light clothing, without seams, made of wool and silk; elastic shoes made from the skin of artificial organisms - the so-called "shoe culture", bred in the nurseries of Central Africa.

All morning I worked in the workshop, then I received friends, and now, at dusk, I went out onto the terrace of a terraced house, leaned on my elbows and looked at Moscow.