M. Prishvin raises the problem of the importance of love in human life.

To draw readers' attention to this problem, the author asks the question: "What is love?" There is no exact answer to this question, but the writer is convinced that love "contains the desire for immortality and eternity", "the ability of a being to leave behind more or less durable things." The publicist brings us to the idea that love evokes new emotions in a person, makes you think in a new way, look at the world with different eyes.

M. Prishvin compares love with "an unknown country in which each person sails on his own ship, is a captain and leads him in his own way."

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According to the author, love is the highest value in a person's life, which awakens the best feelings in him. One cannot but agree with this, because it makes our life filled with meaning and allows us to look at the world with completely different eyes, reveals the most best qualities in a person.

Many domestic writers understand the importance of love in human life. An indelible impression on me was made by the novel by A.S. Pushkin " Captain's daughter". We are witnessing how in the background historical events sincere and tender love is born. Petr Grinev and Masha Mironova fell in love with each other. This love helped them with honor to go through all the trials of life.

Using the example of Pyotr Grinev and Masha Mironova, Pushkin shows the ideal of human relationships. True love, faithful and devoted, has great value In human life. It is she who helps to find the meaning of existence, to reveal the best human qualities, to preserve honor and dignity, even in the most difficult situations.

No one can remain indifferent to the novel - the epic L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace". One of the main characters is Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. Starting to read this work, it is difficult to guess that a little girl, whose birthday is celebrated at the very beginning, will fall in love with an adult married man. And later, these feelings will be mutual.

Throughout the work, Andrei Bolkonsky goes through many life trials, does not feel love for his wife, suffers, and after her death is completely saddened. Everything changed when Natasha and Andrei met at the ball. Bolkonsky, who has not seen Rostov for a long time, falls in love with her during the dance. This relationship was long-awaited for Natasha, she arrived in seventh heaven with happiness. Bolkonsky also changed, became kinder, softer, smiled more. Love has a huge impact on people, reveals the best qualities in them.

Love is the highest spiritual value in a person's life, which awakens the best feelings, makes you look at the world around you differently.

Updated: 2017-07-24

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7 chose

“Now there were two stars in my life - the morning star (29 years old) and the evening star (67 years old),” Mikhail Prishvin admitted to his diary. Between these meetings there were 36 years of waiting ...

Striving for durable things

"Hunger for love or poisonous food of love? I got love hunger." To him, who personified love with poetry and saw only in it the true justification of both creativity and life itself ...

But love did not appear, did not grow in the heart. He languished, he wanted, he called and - no response. This deaf silence hit not only the heart, but also creativity, because it is precisely in love, according to Prishvin, that "contains the desire for immortality and eternity." And "who thinks more about eternity, more durable things come out of his hands."

early morning

Mikhail Prishvin had to wander for a long time "in a haze, like a" poor child ", endure both imprisonment and exile, before ending up in Paris in 1902 and finding his Morning Star there.

The Russian student of the French Sorbonne Varvara Izmalkova turned Prishvin's head so that even after separation for the first four years he literally raved about her and kept wondering why he was still not in a madhouse?

It is difficult to judge who Mikhail was for Varya. In general, then she was going to marry a German professor, with whom she constantly quarreled. And during these strife, she preferred to flirt with a challenge, inflaming the feelings of poor Prishvin. And he looked at Izmalkova from the bottom up, as a knight on a horse looks at the balcony of his beautiful lady. The writer's attitude towards Varvara was sublime, not allowing even an admixture of ordinary carnal passion. “It is not given to have children from the Beautiful Lady,” Prishvin realized to himself. But Varya did not understand. After a short romance, full of idealistic enthusiasm, she left Mikhail's life.

But it remained in my memory. For a long 36 years of life before the Evening Star, Prishvin kept wondering: isn’t she, isn’t Barbara, still the same one, special? .. He asked: “Come!” - let not Izmalkov, but a woman destined for him alone. And he vaguely remembered the image of Varya - but he asked. And he got married, and asked for everything. And 40 years of marriage, calm, but unhappy - he asked. And even on the verge of despair, approaching the age of 70, he cried out: "Come!"

And was heard.

evening dawn

A lot has changed since the first love. Now Mikhail Prishvin lived in a huge Moscow apartment, separately from his wife Efrosinya Pavlovna, from the forty years of his life with whom he could not remember a single year of happiness. Prishvin left Pavlovna (he called his wife so detachedly) with two sons in the Zagorsk estate in the position of a "straw widow", and he himself moved to Moscow. And led a lonely life famous writer, immersed in work on manuscripts and compiling an archive.

For this archive, an economic female hand was needed to help. Prishvin invited Valeria Lebedeva, a 40-year-old woman with a difficult fate, to work, who did not bother him at all. At first he didn’t like Valeria at all, and he planned to build purely business relationships.

Meanwhile, Lebedeva needed warmth - ordinary, human. She was looking for a friend. Continuing to selflessly love the tragically deceased husband. He was a man of a high soul, so unearthly that one day he threw away everything earthly and took the tonsure. And in 1930, he, a hieromonk, was shot. Valeria barely recovered from this pain. And she continued to live, rather, by inertia.

She went to the first meeting with Prishvin on a January evening, when an unprecedented frost hit - 49 degrees! And during a business conversation with the writer, she tried not to think about frostbitten legs. But the pain was so strong that it was impossible to hide it. Lebedeva was put on the master's thick socks, drunk with tinctures and decoctions, went out and ... fell in love.

flowers of heaven

Having ceased to hide, Prishvin doomed himself to the universal condemnation of friends who are sincerely attached to Pavlovna: a series of visits began with the invariable goal of "reason". After the decision of the lovers to move in together - scenes and threats from the lawful wife. The lonely life in Zagorsk did not bother Efrosinya, but she considered her husband’s intention to settle her beloved with her a terrible blasphemy. The general nervousness of the situation was reinforced by the fact that Lera lived in a small room with her sick mother. Hence the inevitable suspicion: "she coveted fame and wealth" ... It even reached the point of dying together - like Romeo and Juliet ...

They endured everything: the riot of Euphrosyne, and the daily "raids" of friends who reproach an elderly lover, and the guilt of the "sinner", Lera, which Prishvin dismissed as absurd - for him it was a sin that he once allowed himself to rush into marriage from longing, not waiting for true love ...

"Love is like the sea, sparkling with the colors of heaven. Happy is he who comes to the shore and, enchanted, harmonizes his soul with the greatness of the whole sea."

They lived on the promised shore for 14 years, and then Prishvin died ... But he died in the radiance of a fulfilled dream - the Star that he managed to beg from the sky.

Elena SANDETSKAYA

Mikhail Prishvin: “... I affirm that people have great love on earth”

The mother seeks permission for her son to leave for Germany, where Mikhail continued his education at the University of Leipzig. And shortly before receiving his diploma, he goes to friends in Paris, where his “fatal” meeting with the Russian student of the Sorbonne Varvara IZMALKOVA took place. Love falls on him. The relationship began swiftly, passionately and ... just as quickly ended.

The flame of unfulfilled love ignited him as a writer, and he carried him to old age, to the hour when, at the age of 67, he met a woman about whom he could say: “This is She! The one I've been waiting for so long." Together they lived for 14 years. These were years of real happiness in complete unanimity and unanimity. Valeria Dmitrievna and Mikhail Mikhailovich told about this in their book “We are with you”.

All his life, PRISHVIN kept a diary, which absorbed everything that the writer experienced. Here are some of his thoughts on love:

“... There is such a special fear of closeness to a person, based on the general experience that everyone is fraught with some kind of personal sin and is trying with all his might to hide it from prying eyes with a beautiful veil. When meeting a stranger, we also show ourselves to him on the good side, and so, little by little, a society of hiders of personal sins from prying eyes is created.

There are naive people here who believe in the reality of this conventionality between people; there are pretenders, cynics, satyrs who know how to use conventionality as a sauce for delicious dish. And there are very few who, not satisfied with the illusion that hides sin, are looking for ways to sinless rapprochement, believing in the secrets of the soul that there is such He or She, who can unite sinlessly and forever and live on earth as forefathers before the fall.

In truth, heavenly history repeats itself and still countless: almost every love begins with paradise.

“... If a woman interferes with creativity, then it is necessary with her, like Stepan Razin, and if you don’t want to, like Stepan, then you will find your own Taras Bulba, and let him shoot you.

But if a woman helps create life, keeps a house, gives birth to children, or participates in creativity with her husband, then she should be revered as a queen. It is given to us by severe struggle. And maybe that's why I hate weak men."

“... When people live in love, they don’t notice the onset of old age, and even if they notice a wrinkle, they don’t attach any importance to it: that’s not the point. So, if people loved each other, then they would not do cosmetics at all.

“... So, every love is a connection, but not every connection is love. True love is moral creativity.

“... Do you know that love when you yourself don’t have anything from it and won’t, but you still love through it everything around you, and you walk through the field and meadow, and pick up colorful, one to one, blue cornflowers smelling of honey , and blue forget-me-nots.

“... I affirm that on earth people have a great love, one and boundless. And in this world of love, destined for man to nourish the soul in the same measure as air for blood, I find the only one that corresponds to my own unity, and only through this correspondence, unity, from one side and the other, do I enter the sea of ​​\u200b\u200buniversal love human.

That is why even the most primitive people, starting their short love, certainly feel that it is not only for them, but for everyone to live well on earth, and even if it is obvious that good life does not work out, then it is still possible for a person and should be happy. So, only through love can one find oneself as a person, and only through a person can one enter the world of human love: love is virtue.

“... Every untempted young man, every uncorrupted and not overwhelmed by need man contains his own fairy tale about the woman he loves, about the possibility of impossible happiness. And when, it happens, a woman appears, then the question arises:

“Is it not SHE who came, the one I was waiting for?”

Then the responses follow:

- It's like she is!

- No, not her!

And then, it happens, very rarely, a person, not believing himself, says:

- Is she?

And every day, confident in his actions and easy communication during the day, he exclaims: “Yes, this is SHE!”

And at night, touching, he enthusiastically accepts the miraculous current of life and is convinced of the phenomenon of a miracle: the fairy tale has become reality - this is SHE, undoubtedly SHE!

“... Oh, how trivialized the French “look for a woman”! In the meantime, this is the truth. All the Muses are vulgarized, but the sacred fire continues to burn in our time, as it has been burning since time immemorial in the history of man on earth. So my writing, from beginning to end, is a timid, very bashful song of some creature singing in the spring choir of nature the only word: “Come!”

Love is an unknown country, and we all sail there each on our own ship, and each of us is a captain on our own ship and leads the ship in our own way.

“... It seems to us, inexperienced and learned from novels, that women should strive for lies, etc. Meanwhile, they are sincere to such an extent that we cannot even imagine it without experience, only this sincerity, sincerity itself, is not at all similar to our concept of it, we mix it with the truth.

“... At night I thought that love on earth, that same ordinary love for a woman, specifically for a woman, is everything, and here God, and any other love within its boundaries: love-pity and love-understanding - from here.

“... I think with love about the absent Lyalya. It is now becoming clear to me, as it has never been, that Lyalya is the best thing that I have ever met in my life, and any thought about some kind of personal “freedom” must be discarded as absurdity, because there is no freedom greater than that which is given love. And if I always be at my height, she will never stop loving me. In love, you have to fight for your height and win this. In love, you need to grow and grow yourself.

I said:

- I love you more and more.

“After all, I told you from the very beginning that you would love more and more.

She knew it, but I didn't. I brought up in myself the idea that love passes, that it is impossible to love forever, and that it is not worth the trouble for a while. This is where the division of love and our common misunderstanding lies: one love (some kind) is passing, and the other is eternal. In one, a person needs children in order to continue through them; the other, intensifying, unites with eternity.

“In love, you can reach everything, everything will be forgiven, but not a habit ...”.

“... The woman stretched out her hand to the harp, touched it with her finger, and from the touch of her finger to the string, a sound was born. So it was with me: she touched - and I sang.

The most surprising and special thing was my complete absence of that teasing image of a woman that impresses at the first meeting. I was impressed by her soul - and her understanding of my soul. Here there was a contact of souls, and only very slowly, very gradually passing into the body, and without the slightest rupture into soul and flesh, without the slightest shame and reproach. It was the embodiment."

"- My friend! You are my only salvation when I am in misfortune ... But when I am happy in my deeds, then, rejoicing, I bring you my joy and love, and you answer - what kind of love is dearer to you: when I am in misfortune or when I am healthy rich and famous, and I come to you as a conqueror?

“Of course,” she replied, “that love is higher when you are a winner.” And if in misfortune you cling to me in order to be saved, then you love it for yourself! So be happy and come to me a winner: it's better. But I myself love you equally - in sorrow and in joy.

“... What is love? Nobody really said this. But only one thing can be truly said about love, that it contains the striving for immortality and eternity, and at the same time, of course, as something small and self-evident and necessary, the ability of a being, embraced by love, to leave behind more or less durable things. from small children to Shakespeare's lines."

How much tenderness and light in these wise thoughts of Mikhail PRISHVIN. It is a pity that the truth of true love is not revealed to everyone.

LOVE

When a person loves, he penetrates into
the essence of the world.

The white hedge was covered with needles of frost, red and golden bushes. The silence is such that not a single leaf will move from the tree. But the bird flew by, and a flap of the wing was enough for the leaf to break off and, whirling, fly down.

What happiness it was to feel the golden leaf of the hazel tree, covered with white lace of frost! And this cold running water in the river ... and this fire, and this silence, and the storm, and everything that exists in nature and that we don’t even know, everything entered and united in my love, embracing the whole world.

Love is an unknown country, and we all sail there each on our own ship, and each of us is a captain on our own ship and leads the ship in our own way.

I missed the first powder, but I do not repent, because before the light a white dove appeared to me in a dream, and when I then opened my eyes, I realized such joy from white snow and morning star, which you do not always recognize on the hunt.

That's how gently, blowing his wing, he hugged the face of the warm air of a flying bird, and a delighted person stands up in the light of the morning star, and asks how Small child: stars, month, white light, take the place of the white dove that has flown away! And the same in this morning hour was the touch of understanding my love, as the source of all light, all the stars, the moon, the sun and all the illuminated flowers, herbs, children, all life on earth.

And at night it seemed to me that my charm was over, I no longer love. Then I saw that there was nothing else in me, and my whole soul was like a devastated land in the deep autumn: the cattle were stolen, the fields were empty, where it was black, where there was snow, and on the snow - traces of cats.

What is love? Nobody really said this. But only one thing can truly be said about love, that it contains the striving for immortality and eternity, and at the same time, of course, as something small and in itself incomprehensible and necessary, the ability of a being seized by love to leave behind more or less durable things. ranging from small children to Shakespearean lines.

A sportswoman in trousers and a white coat, her eyebrows are shaved into a thread, her eyes are beautiful, like those of rams. She arrives exactly at 8 1/2, measures the pulse and begins the exercises. In the morning I always think well, and I think about my own, and I do the exercises without thinking, I look at her and, like she, so am I, like she, so am I.

That's what I was thinking today, spreading my hands over the score, clenching my fists and crouching. I thought that L. in the spiritual world was for me the same as this athlete in gymnastics. I, gradually looking at L., noticing the methods of her service to me, almost mechanically began to serve her as well as I could.

So she teaches me love, but I must say that, of course, it came to me a little late, and that's why she is so impressed. Generally speaking, this is not a new thing: good families have long been brought up through mutual service.

And perhaps, among all nations, and even among the most savage, in their own way, in a savage way, there has always been the same physical culture of goodness or service of one person to another.

My friend! You are my only salvation when I am in misfortune ... But when I am happy in my deeds, then, rejoicing, I bring you my joy and love. And you answer - what kind of love is dearer to you: when I am in misfortune or when I am healthy, rich, and glorious, and I come to you as a winner?

Of course, - she answered, - that love is higher when you are a winner. And if in misfortune you cling to me in order to be saved, then you love it for yourself! So be happy and come to me a winner: it's better. But I myself love you equally - in sorrow and in joy.

A small ice floe, white on top, green on top, swam quickly, and a seagull swam on it. While I was climbing the mountain, it became, God knows where, in the distance, where you can see the white church in curly clouds under the magpie kingdom of black and white.

Large water overflows its banks and spreads far. But even a small stream hurries to the big water and even reaches the ocean.

Only stagnant water remains for itself to stand, go out and turn green.

So is the love of people: a big one embraces the whole world, it makes everyone feel good. And there is simple, family love, running in streams in the same beautiful direction.

And there is love only for oneself, and in it a person is also like stagnant water.

THE IMAGINARY END OF THE NOVEL. They were so indebted to each other, so delighted with their meeting that they tried to give away all their wealth stored in their souls, as if in some kind of competition: you gave, and I gave more, and again the same on the other side, and until neither of them had anything left of their stocks. In such cases, people who have given everything of their own to another consider this other to be their property and this torment each other for the rest of their lives.

But these two, beautiful and free people Having once found out that they had given everything to each other, and there was nothing more for them to change, and there was nowhere higher for them to grow in this exchange, they embraced, kissed each other tightly, and parted without tears and without words.

So be blessed beautiful people!

The death of a current man. The lead hit him in the side and hit his heart, but he must have thought that it was his opponent who had hit him, because he jumped up and fell, and his wings were already flapping in agony, and he, tearing out the sound of love from his throat, was current ...

In her everything was found for me, and through her everything came together in me.

The woman stretched out her hand to the harp, touched it with her finger, and from the touch of her finger to the string sound was born.

So it was with me: she touched - and I sang.

A change in the life of a birch since the first bright and still cold pre-spring ray shows the virgin whiteness of its bark.

When a warm beam heats up the bark and a large sleepy black fly sits on a white birch bark and flies on; when the inflated buds create such a chocolate-colored crown density that the bird sits down and hides; when, in a brown density on thin twigs, occasionally some buds open like surprised birds with green wings; when an earring appears, like a fork with two or three horns, and when suddenly on a good day the earrings become golden and the whole birch is golden; and when you finally enter birch grove and a green transparent canopy will embrace you, - then, from the life of one beloved birch, you will understand the life of the whole spring and the whole person in his first love, which determines his whole life.

No, friends, I will never agree with this that the first man in paradise was Adam. The first person in Paradise was a woman, and it was she who planted and made the garden. And after in arranged garden Adam came with his dream.

We often see that a man is something and a woman is excellent. This means that we do not know the hidden dignity of this man, appreciated by a woman: this love is selective and, probably, is true love.

If a woman interferes with creativity, then you need to work with her, like Stepan Razin, and if you don’t want to, like Stepan, then you will find your own Taras Bulba, and let him shoot you.

But if a woman helps create life, keeps a house, gives birth to children, or participates in creativity with her husband, then she should be revered as a queen. It is given to us by severe struggle. And maybe that's why I hate weak men.

The person you love in me is, of course, better than me: I'm not like that. But you love, I will try to be better than myself.

Do you know that love when you yourself don’t have anything from it and won’t, but you still love everything around you through this, and you walk through the field and meadow, and pick up colorful, one to one, blue cornflowers smelling of honey, and blue forget-me-nots.

If you think about her, looking straight into her face, and not somehow from the side, or "about", then poetry runs straight to me like a stream. Then it seems as if love and poetry are two names for the same source. But this is not entirely true: poetry cannot replace all love and only flows out of it like a lake.

Love is like big water: a thirsty one comes to her, gets drunk or scoops up a bucket and carries it away in his measure. And the water keeps running.

For some reason, it seems to us that if these are birds, then they fly a lot, if they are fallow deer or tigers, then they continuously run and jump. In fact, birds sit more than fly, tigers are very lazy, fallow deer graze and only move their lips.

So are people too.

We think that people's lives are filled with love, and when we ask ourselves and others - who loved how much, and it turns out - that's so little! That's how lazy we are too!

Everyone is doing something...

Isn't it a matter of putting two lives into one?

The beginning of love is in attention, then in election, then in achievement, because love without work is dead.

At last he came, my unknown friend, and never left me again. Now I no longer ask where he lives: in the east, in the west, in the south or in the north.

Now I know: he lives in the heart of my beloved.

Russian Soviet writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin was born in the village of Khrushchevo, Yelets district, on February 4, 1873, into a merchant family. Despite his origin, Prishvin was not a rich man, since his father lived in grand style and squandered his fortune when Mikhail was just a child.

At the age of six, thanks to the efforts of his mother, Mikhail entered the Yelets gymnasium, but after studying there for 4 years, he was expelled for insolence towards the teacher (some sources claim that Prishvin was not only a notorious hooligan, but also a loser).
Thanks to the petition of his uncle, a wealthy steamship owner, Misha went to finish his studies at the Tyumen real school: he was taken there "with a wolf ticket" on his uncle's recommendation.
Then, from 1893 to 1897, the future writer becomes a student at the Riga Polytechnic University, who also does not finish due to arrest. Prishvin began to take an active part in the Marxist circle, at the next meeting of which he was discovered by the police. Mikhail was greatly influenced by his university friend V.D. Ulrich, who actively promoted Marxism.
Prishvin was caught red-handed when he was distributing leaflets and was imprisoned for a year for rebellious thoughts, and after another two years he was exiled to his native Yelets.
In 1900, young Prishvin decides to end politics and goes to study as an agronomist at the University of Leipzig, after graduating from which, in 1902, he works in his specialty, and writes in the evenings. creative path the writer and his becoming a "tramp" begins in 1906 with a move to St. Petersburg.

The year of the beginning of creative activity Mikhail Mikhailovich considers 1906, then his first work "Sashok" is published. But famous name Prishvin became after the publication of his "Travel Notes", which he publishes after completing a trip to the far north, Karelia and the Volga region. Prishvin becomes a real traveler-local historian. He traveled all over the Crimea, Kazakhstan, visited Norway, was on Far East... The writer takes a forced break in his work only with the advent of the First World War. Since 1918 - he is a war correspondent, since 1919 - a rural teacher in Smolensk. Before moving to Moscow and settling in the house of writers (next to Tretyakov Gallery), a long 15 years have passed. This happened only in 1937.

Since 1940, Prishvin has been publishing his diary of observations in stories and essays. After the war, the writer travels "closer to nature", he acquires a dacha and works tirelessly there.

The writer died on January 16, 1954. His body was interred at the Moscow Vvedensky cemetery.

The main achievements of Prishvin

In our country, Prishvin is known as the creator of natural philosophy, as a writer who keenly observed what was happening in nature and kept diaries called "Notes of a Hunter".

- The name of Prishvin is associated with works that describe nature so clearly and naturally, where Mikhail Mikhailovich himself found so much artistic natural philosophy. During his lifetime, he was called a "singer of nature", who was able to clothe his diary entries in real art. Among his literary heritage are essays, novellas, and, most importantly, stories, those that our parents read to us in early childhood. The most significant, according to literary critics, are: collections of essays “In the land of fearless birds” (1907) and “Behind the magic bun” (1908), phenological notes “Calendar of Nature” (1935), story “Spring of Light” (1940), novel "Undressed Spring" (1940), the lyric-philosophical book "Forest Drop" (1940) and a cycle of miniatures of the same name, published in 1943, the fairy tale novel "The Tsar's Road" (1957) and the autobiographical novel "Kashcheev's Chain", published after the writer's death. Prishvin was also fond of writing articles on agronomy, of which he had more than a hundred in publication alone.

Important dates in Prishvin's biography

In 1897, Prishvin was sentenced to three years in prison for his political beliefs. In prison and exile, the writer decides to completely change his attitude to power and no longer engage in politics. Last years the end of the 19th century can be considered a turning point in the life of the young Prishvin.
- Since Mikhail was forbidden to live in large cities after prison and exile, he asks for permission to go abroad and continue his studies. And at the beginning of 1900, he receives it, after which he moves to Germany and "learns to be a useful person for his homeland." In 1902, the writer returned to Russia and settled in Klin, where he worked as an agronomist's assistant: now he brings advanced ideas to agronomy and agriculture.

- Agronomy has become his specialty forever. 1904 - Prishvin was offered a job in Moscow, in the laboratory of the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy under the guidance of the famous professor D.M. Pryanishnikov. In 1905, Prishvin published his first article "Potatoes in garden and field culture." He begins to write after the first positive review of his story "Sashok", which was published in 1906.
- Prishvin believed that a person's personal life should develop. At the age of 25, he married a simple peasant woman from the Smolensk region, from whose marriage he had three sons, two of whom also became famous in literature.

- Since 1906, Prishvin has been working in St. Petersburg, where he publishes his favorites: “In the land of fearless birds” and “Kolobok”. It was during this period that the writer begins to keep his notes, which he does not interrupt throughout his life. Their volume in total amounted to 25 volumes!
- In September 1917, Prishvin, working in the newspaper "Will of the People", is preparing his first collection for publication.
In 1937, the writer moved to Moscow and published his most significant works there until the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War.


- In September 1941, the writer's family moved with him to the remote village of Usolye near the city of Pereslavl Zalessky and remained there until the end of the war. In 1943, Mikhail Prishvin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.
- From 1946 to 1954, Mikhail Mikhailovich lives at his dacha near Zvenigorod, where the Prishvin Museum now operates.

Interesting facts from the life of Prishvin

Having left for training in Leipzig, young Prishvin fell in love with an Englishwoman. It was student love, which the poet needed not for marriage, but rather for flight. But the girl was strict manners and refused reciprocity to the future writer. From such bitter disappointment, Prishvin began to write poetry, and then completely returned to his homeland. But the girl withered away in some bank office. But Prishvin suffers no less, so he agrees to an "unequal marriage", he marries a semi-literate simpleton Efrosinya Pavlovna, in whom he looks for the features of a lost Englishwoman until old age. Efrosinya bore him three sons, never interfered in her husband's affairs and devoted thirty years of her life to him. After her death, he suddenly ... married again. This happened in 1950, when the writer was looking for a secretary. A certain Valeria Lebedeva got a job with him, who promised the writer that not a single line from his manuscripts would be lost. He looked at the woman with a fixed gaze and offered her his hand and heart. So Prishvin married a second time.
- In 1919, Prishvin was almost shot by pure chance: he was confused with a Jew when Mamontov's Cossacks came to the city.
- In the early 1930s, it was very fashionable to have a passion for cars. Michael, not afraid, got behind the wheel of a car, which he bought one of the first in Moscow. He did not let anyone drive his Moskvich, Mikhail Mikhailovich’s dogs were also accustomed to the car, with whom he set off on his four-legged horse off-road into the forest for inspiration.

Love stories. From the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin.

All his life, Prishvin kept a diary that absorbed everything that the writer experienced in his homeland: the revolution and wars, writing under the tsar and the Bolsheviks, the search for God by the intelligentsia of the beginning of the century and the destructive atheism of the transformers of nature, the difficulties of his own life, loneliness, despite many years of family ties ...

There is such a special fear of closeness to a person, based on the general experience that everyone is fraught with some personal sin and tries with all his might to hide it from prying eyes with a beautiful veil. When meeting a stranger, we also show ourselves to him on the good side, and so, little by little, a society of hiders of personal sins from prying eyes is created.

There are naive people here who believe in the reality of this conventionality between people; there are pretenders, cynics, satyrs who know how to use conventionality as a sauce for a tasty dish. And there are very few who, not satisfied with the illusion that hides sin, are looking for ways to sinless rapprochement, believing in the secrets of the soul that there is such He or She, who can unite sinlessly and forever and live on earth as forefathers before the fall.

In truth, heavenly history repeats itself and still countless times: almost every love begins with paradise.

* The beginning of love is in attention, then in election, then in achievement, because love without work is dead.

* Love is like the sea, sparkling with the colors of heaven. Happy is he who comes to the shore and, enchanted, harmonizes his soul with the majesty of the whole sea. Then the boundaries of the soul of a poor person expand to infinity, and then the poor person understands that there is no death either ... You can’t see “that” shore in the sea, and there are no shores for love at all.

But another comes to the sea not with a soul, but with a jug, and, having scooped up, brings only a jug from the whole sea, and the water in the jug is salty and worthless.

Love is a lie, - such a person says and does not return to the sea anymore.

* Who is deceived in someone, he deceives the other. So you can't cheat, but you can't cheat either.

* The garden blossoms, and everyone is loaded with fragrance in it. So a person is like a flowering garden: he loves everything, and everyone enters into his love.

* It was during the rain: two drops rolled towards each other along the telegraph wire. They would meet and fall to the ground in one big drop, but some bird, flying, touched the wire, and the drops fell to the ground before meeting each other.

That's all about the drops, and their fate for us disappears into the damp earth. But by ourselves, we people know that the disturbed movement of the two towards each other continues there, in this dark earth.

And so many exciting books have been written about the possibility of meeting two beings striving for one another, that two raindrops running along a wire are enough to take care of new opportunity meetings in human destiny.

* A woman knows that to love is worth her whole life, and that is why she is afraid and runs away. Do not catch up with her - so you will not take her: new woman knows his own worth. If you need to take it, then prove that it is worth giving your life for you.

* If a woman interferes with creativity, then it’s necessary with her, like Stepan Razin, and if you don’t want to, like Stepan, then you will find your own Taras Bulba, and let him shoot you.

But if a woman helps create life, keeps a house, gives birth to children, or participates in creativity with her husband, then she should be revered as a queen. It is given to us by severe struggle. And maybe that's why I hate weak men.

* Imaginary end of the novel. They were so indebted to each other, so delighted with their meeting that they tried to give away all their wealth stored in their souls, as if in some kind of competition: you gave, and I gave more, and again the same on the other side, and until neither of them had anything left of their stocks. In such cases, people who have given everything of their own to another consider this other to be their property and this torment each other for the rest of their lives. But these two, beautiful and free people, having once found out that they had given everything to each other, and there was nothing more for them to exchange, and there was nowhere higher for them to grow in this exchange, hugged, kissed each other tightly and parted without tears and without words. Be blessed, wonderful people!

* So, love, as creativity, is the embodiment of each of those who love in the other perfect image. The one who loves, under the influence of the other, finds himself, as it were, and both of these found, new beings unite into a single person: there is, as it were, a restoration of the divided Adam.

* The person you love in me is, of course, better than me: I'm not like that. But you love, and I will try to be better than myself ...

* When people live in love, they do not notice the onset of old age, and even if they notice a wrinkle, they do not attach importance to it: this is not the point. So, if people loved each other, then they would not do cosmetics at all.

* Love - as understanding or as a way to unanimity. Here, in love, there are all shades of understanding, starting from physical touch, similar to how water understands the earth on the flood in spring, and from this a floodplain remains. When the water leaves, the muddy land remains, ugly at first, and how quickly the land understood by water, this floodplain, begins to decorate, grow and bloom!

So we see every year in nature, as in a mirror, our own human way of understanding, unanimity and rebirth.

* To understand the essence of marriage itself, as the path of love unanimity, in which the Third is born, all the same, let it be a human child or a qualitative thought (image).

And this is the general law of life, otherwise why, according to universal recognition, it is in babies that the best image of a person is seen!

It is in this way that the direction of our human culture must be determined.

What are the fish with their caviar, aspens with their fluff! And a person, the further he improves in his human being, the more difficult it is for him to multiply, and, finally, he is born in his ideal.

When Rafael still knew this, - when! - and I'm only now ... And this can only be learned in the rarest, most difficult experience for men of love.

* In its depths, it seems to me, it knows everything and it contains the answer to every question of deep consciousness. If I could ask about everything, she would answer everything. But I rarely have the strength to ask her. Life often passes so-so, as if you are riding a cart, having the opportunity to fly on an airplane. But only this is a great wealth, to realize that everything is from myself, and if I just want to, then I will transfer from the cart to the plane or ask Lyalya any question and get any answer from her.

Lala remains to me an inexhaustible source of thought, the highest synthesis of what is called nature.

* Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna were childless. Children born in the light of both loves: in one case, love for children is a particular of general love, in the other, love for children excludes all other love: the most vicious, predatory creature can have love for children.

So, all love is a connection, but not all connection is love. True love is moral creativity.

* Art is essentially a male affair, or rather, one of the fields of purely male action, like the song of male birds. A woman's business is direct love.

* How many thousands of times from morning to night you need to chirp your call signs to the female in order to awaken a vital response in her. The sparrow starts with the first warm ray, and the female will respond, well, if in a month, with the first swollen pregnant kidney.

For some reason, it seems to us that if these are birds, they fly a lot, if they are fallow deer or tigers, then they constantly run and jump. In fact, birds sit more than fly, tigers are very lazy, fallow deer graze and only move their lips. So are people too. We think that people's lives are filled with love, and when we ask ourselves and others - who loved how much, and it turns out - that's so little! That's how lazy we are too!

* Do you know that love when you yourself don’t have anything from it and won’t, but you still love everything around you through it, and walk through the field and meadow, and pick up colorful, one to one, blue cornflowers smelling of honey, and blue forget-me-nots.

* ...I affirm that on earth people have a great love, one and boundless. And in this world of love, destined for man to nourish the soul in the same measure as air for blood, I find the only one that corresponds to my own unity, and only through this correspondence, unity, from one side and the other, do I enter the sea of ​​\u200b\u200buniversal love human.

* That is why even the most primitive people, starting their short love, will certainly feel that it is not only for them, but for everyone to live well on earth, and even if it is obvious that a good life does not come out, then it is still possible for a person and should be happy. So, only through love can one find oneself as a person, and only through a person can one enter the world of human love: love is virtue.

Otherwise: only through personal love can one join universal human love.

* Every untempted young man, every uncorrupted and unencumbered man contains his own fairy tale about the woman he loves, about the possibility of impossible happiness.

And when, it happens, a woman appears, then the question arises:

Isn't she the one I've been waiting for?

Then the responses follow:

As if she!

No, not her!

And it happens, very rarely, a person, not believing himself, says:

Is she?

And every day, confident in his deeds and easy communication during the day, he exclaims: “Yes, it’s her!”

And at night, touching, he enthusiastically accepts the miraculous current of life and is convinced of the phenomenon of a miracle: the fairy tale has become reality - this is it, undoubtedly it!

* Oh, how trivialized the French "look for a woman"! And yet it is true. All the Muses are vulgarized, but the sacred fire continues to burn in our time, as it has been burning since time immemorial in the history of man on earth. So my writing, from beginning to end, is a timid, very bashful song of some creature singing in the spring choir of nature a single word:

"Come!"

* Love is an unknown country, and we all sail there each on our own ship, and each of us is a captain on our own ship and leads the ship in our own way.

* It seems to us, inexperienced and learned from novels, that women should strive for lies, etc. Meanwhile, they are sincere to such an extent that we cannot even imagine it without experience, only this sincerity, sincerity itself, is not at all similar to our concept of it, we confuse it with the truth.

* How to call that joyful feeling when it seems as if the river is changing, floating into the ocean - freedom? love? I want to embrace the whole world, and if not everyone is good, then the eyes meet only with those who are good, and therefore it seems that everyone is good. Rarely has anyone not had such joy in life, but rarely has anyone coped with this wealth: one squandered it, the other did not believe it, and most often he quickly grabbed from this great wealth, stuffed his pockets and then sat down to guard his treasures for life, began their owner or slave.

* At night I thought that love on earth, that same ordinary love for a woman, specifically for a woman, is everything, and here God, and any other love within its boundaries: love-pity and love-understanding - hence.

* I think with love about the absent Lyalya. It is now becoming clear to me, as it has never been, that Lyalya is the best thing that I have met in my life, and any thought about some kind of personal “freedom” must be discarded as absurd, because there is no greater freedom than that which is given love. And if I always be at my height, she will never stop loving me. In love, you have to fight for your height and win this. In love, you need to grow and grow yourself.

* I said: - I love you more and more.

And she: - After all, I told you from the very beginning that you will love more and more.

She knew it, but I didn't. I brought up in myself the idea that love passes, that it is impossible to love forever, and that it is not worth the trouble for a while. This is where the division of love and our common misunderstanding lies: one love (some kind) is passing, and the other is eternal. In one, a person needs children in order to continue through them; the other, intensifying, unites with eternity.

* I, creating joy for a distant unknown reader, did not pay attention to my neighbor and did not want to be an ass for him. I was a horse for the distant and did not want to be a donkey for the near.

But Lyalya came, I fell in love with her and agreed to be a "donkey" for her. The ass's business with a person consists not only in carrying burdens, like a simple donkey, but in that special attention to one's neighbor, revealing shortcomings in him with an obligation to overcome them.

This overcoming of the shortcomings of one's neighbor is the whole morality of mankind, all its "donkey" work.

* Motherhood, as a force that creates a bridge from the present to the future, has remained the only driving force of life ...

The new time is characterized by the greatness of motherhood: this is the victory of a woman.

Today we came to the forest, I laid my head on her knees and fell asleep. And when I woke up, she was sitting in the same position when I fell asleep, looking at me, and I recognized in those eyes not a wife, but a mother ...

* Today, this being suddenly became very clear to me - more than my scope, and most of all, and best of all, known to me, this being is a mother.

You say love, but all I see is patience and pity.

So this is what love is: patience and pity.

God is with you! But where is joy and happiness, are they condemned to remain outside love?

Joy and happiness are the children of love, but love itself, like strength, is patience and pity. And if you are now happy and enjoy life, then thank your mother for this: she pitied you and endured a lot so that you would grow up and become happy.

A woman is by nature compassionate, and every unfortunate person finds consolation in her. It all comes down to motherhood, they drink from this source, and then brag: you can take everyone! How many tears have been shed from this deceit!

*Undressed in the lobby beautiful woman and at that moment her boy cried. The woman leaned towards him, took him in her arms and kissed him, but how she kissed him! Not only didn’t she smile, didn’t look back at people, but all, as if into music, entirely, serious and sublime, went into these kisses. And I got to know her soul intimately.

To die means to surrender to the end, as a woman gives herself to the work of giving birth and through this becomes a mother ... And the death of a mother is not death, but dormancy.

*I feel like living water I take her soul out of the deep well, and from this I find in the face, I discover some kind of correspondence to this depth.

From this, too, her face in my eyes is forever changing, forever agitated, like a star reflected in deep water.

* It was close to love in my youth - two weeks of kisses - and forever ... So I never had love in my life, and all my love turned into poetry, poetry enveloped me and closed me in solitude. I am almost a child, almost chaste. And he himself did not know this, being satisfied with the discharge of mortal anguish or intoxicated with joy. And perhaps a little more time would have passed, and I would have died without knowing at all the power that moves all the worlds.

* If you think about her, looking straight into her face, and not somehow from the side, or "about", then poetry runs straight to me like a stream. Then it seems as if love and poetry are two names for the same source. But this is not entirely true: poetry cannot replace all love and only flows out of it, like from a lake.

* We have not yet been as happy as now, we are even at the limit of possible happiness, when the essence of life - joy - passes into infinity (merges with eternity) and death scares little. How can you be happy when... Impossible! And then a miracle happened - and we are happy. So, it is possible under any conditions.

* He will look at you, smile and illuminate everything so brightly that the evil one has nowhere to go, and everything evil crawls behind your back, and you stand face to face, delivered, powerful, clear.

* In love, you can reach everything, everything will be forgiven, but not a habit ...

* At that distant time, I did not even dream of writing, but when I fell madly in love, then in the midst of feelings, somewhere in the car on a piece of paper, I tried to write down successively the stages of my love: I wrote and cried, for what, for whom, why did I write down? My God! And five years ago, when the affair with Lyalya began, wasn’t it the same, joining the soul to the secrets of life, didn’t I drive the same with my gray paw over paper?

She wrote me letters without thinking about whether they were well written or bad. I tried my best to turn my feelings for her into poetry. But if our letters were judged, it would turn out that my letters are beautiful, and her letters on the scales weigh more and that I, thinking about poetry, will never write such a letter as she, thinking nothing about poetry.

So, it turns out, there is an area in which, with all the talent in poetry, nothing can be done. And there is "something" that means more than poetry. And not just me, but Pushkin, and Dante, and greatest poet cannot enter into an argument with this "something".

All my life I have been vaguely afraid of this "something" and many times I swore to myself not to be tempted by "something" greater than poetry, as Gogol was. I thought that my humility, the consciousness of the modesty of my place, my favorite prayer would help from this temptation:

"Thy will be done (and I am a humble artist)." And so, in spite of everything, I approached the fatal line between poetry and faith.

He wrote intimate pages about a woman, something was missing in them ... She corrected it a little, just touched it, and these same pages became beautiful. This is what I have been missing all my life for a woman to touch my poetry.

* The woman stretched out her hand to the harp, touched it with her finger, and from the touch of her finger to the string sound was born. So it was with me: she touched - and I sang.

* The most surprising and special thing was my complete absence of that teasing image of a woman that impresses at the first meeting. I was impressed by her soul - and her understanding of my soul. Here there was a contact of souls, and only very slowly, very gradually passing into the body, and without the slightest rupture into soul and flesh, without the slightest shame and reproach. It was an incarnation.

I can almost remember how her beautiful eyes were created in my Psyche, a smile blossomed, the first life-giving tears of joy, and a kiss, and a fiery contact, in which our different flesh was fused into unity.

It seemed to me then that ancient god who punished a person with exile, returned his favor to him and transferred into my hands the continuation of the ancient creation of the world, interrupted by disobedience.

In her everything was found for me, and through her everything came together in me.

* The hygiene of love consists in never looking at a friend from the outside and never judging him along with someone else.

* Mikhail, be happy that your lily of the valley stood behind some leaf and the whole crowd passed by him. And only at the very end, only one woman behind that leaf opened you, and did not pluck, but she leaned towards you.

* How much a person is measured in width - so much happiness, how much in depth - so much misfortune. So, happiness or misfortune is our envy of one person before another. And so there is nothing: happiness and unhappiness are only two measures of fate: happiness - in breadth, unhappiness - in depth.

* A young couple is walking: it seemed that it had passed a long time ago, but here she is, and it is so clear that this is eternal: an eternal insane attempt to make the whole world happy with her personal happiness.

* And at night it seemed to me that my charm was over, I no longer love. Then I saw that there was nothing else in me, and my whole soul, like a devastated land in the deep autumn: the cattle were stolen, the fields were empty, where it was black, where there was snow, and on the snow - traces of cats.

I thought about love, that it is, of course, one, and if it breaks up into sensual and platonic, then this is how the very life of a person breaks down into spiritual and physical: and this is, in essence, death.

When a person loves, he penetrates the essence of the world.

* I remembered my old thought, somewhere happily printed in Soviet time. I said then: “Whoever among us thinks more about eternity, more durable things come out of his hands.”

And now, probably, approaching old age, I begin to think that not from eternity, but everything from love: each of us can rise high by all possible means, but to stay at a height for a long time is possible only with a strong radiation of love.

* Love is like big water: a thirsty one comes to it, gets drunk or scoops it up with a bucket and carries it away in its measure. And the water keeps running.

* The step is not heard, the heart does not knock, the eye is comforted by the blue radiance of the sky through the trunks of undressed trees, the grateful heart recognized the beloved in the first lemongrass - a butterfly, in the first yellow - radiant flower, in the splash of the stream and the golden earring of the alder and in the sprawling song of the finch on the willow .

I hear the whisper of my beloved, a gentle touch and such confidence in the truth of this my being that if death were approaching now, it seems to me that I would find the strength in myself to bring my beloved closer, hugging her, painlessly shedding my body that I no longer need.

* So it seemed to happen, and in me, in my boundless joy of complete possession, there was even a place for a little sadness about the eternal deceit in which death is: she wants to get herself a beautiful human soul, but instead, as an evil mockery, she receives the ugly altered, worthy only of worms, the remains of what man was on earth.

At the heart of love there is an unoffended place of complete confidence and fearlessness. If there is an encroachment on my part in this, then I have a means of fighting against myself: I put myself entirely at the disposal of a friend and through this I will find out what I am right about, what I am wrong about. If I see that my friend has encroached on my shrine, I will check him as myself. And if the worst and last happens: my friend becomes indifferent to what I am burning with, then I will take my travel stick and leave the house, and my shrine will still remain untouched.

* The most surprising thing about our relationship turned out to be that my cultivated disbelief in the reality of love, the poetry of life and everything that is considered invalid, but only inherent in people as an age experience, turned out to be false. In fact, there is a much greater reality than the usual general certainty.

This is confidence in the existence of something for which it has become impossible to get by with worn-out conditional concepts that turn into emptiness the usual words spoken by everyone about truth, God, and especially what is given to us in the word “mysticism”.

Without words, without mysticism, but in reality: there is something precious on earth, because of which it is worth living, working and being cheerful and joyful.

* - My friend! You are my only salvation when I am in misfortune ... But when I am happy in my deeds, then, rejoicing, I bring you my joy and love, and you answer - what kind of love is dearer to you: when I am in misfortune or when I am healthy rich and famous, and I come to you as a conqueror?

Of course, - she answered, - that love is higher when you are a winner. And if in misfortune you cling to me in order to be saved, then you love it for yourself! So be happy and come to me a winner: it's better. But I myself love you equally - in sorrow and in joy.

* Love is knowledge... There is a side in man and in the whole world that can only be known through the power of love.

* Last truth that the world exists as beautiful as it was seen by children and lovers. Disease and poverty do the rest.

* Each family is surrounded by its own secret, which is incomprehensible not only to others, but, perhaps, even more incomprehensible to the family members themselves. This happens because marriage is not a “grave of love”, as people think, but a personal one, which means a holy war. Getting married this person with his will meets another that limits his will, and thus the "mystery" of the two, who are in a struggle with an unknown end, appears.

In this struggle, collapses occur, as it were, in which life crumbles, and strangers can read the secret of the family from the wreckage. Such a collapse was in the family of L. Tolstoy.

* What is love? Nobody really said this. But only one thing can be truly said about love, that it contains the striving for immortality and eternity, and at the same time, of course, as something small and self-evident and necessary, the ability of a being, embraced by love, to leave behind more or less durable things. ranging from small children to Shakespearean lines.

* Only love paints a person, starting from the first love for a woman, ending with love for the world and a person - everything else disfigures a person, leads him to death, that is, to power over another person, understood as violence.

Any weakness of a man in relation to a woman must be justified by the power of action (courage): and this is the whole dialectic of Man and Woman.

* In deceit, relying on the power of their collected cheerfulness, there are almost all men striving for a woman. And in almost every woman lurks a terrible deceit, returning the self-deluded to his insignificance.

Close, close, I approached happiness, and now, it seems, if only I could take it with my hand, but here, instead of happiness, there is a knife in the very place where happiness lives. Some time passed, and I got used to this sore spot of mine: not that I reconciled, but somehow I began to understand everything in the world - not in breadth, as before, but in depth. And the whole world changed for me, and people began to appear completely different.

Love hunger or poisonous food of love? I got love hunger.

* Beauty avoids those who chase after it: a person loves his something, works, and because of love, beauty sometimes appears. It grows for nothing, like rye or like happiness. We cannot make beauty, but we can sow and fertilize the earth for this...

* Today my thought was about the fear of death, that this fear passes, if only it turns out that you have to die together with your friend. From this I conclude that death is the name of loneliness not overcome by love, and that a person is not born with loneliness, but gradually, aging, in the struggle, acquires it like a disease. So the feeling of loneliness and the fear of death that accompanies it is also a disease (selfishness) cured only by love.

* Today, during a walk, I looked around and suddenly found a group of undressed young people in the green bark of tall trees in communion with the sky. I immediately remembered the trees in the Bois de Boulogne 47 years ago. Then I was thinking about a way out of the situation created by my novel, and I also looked at the trees spread out across the burning sky, and suddenly the whole movement of the worlds, all kinds of suns, stars became clear to me, and from there I spread into my confused relationship with the girl, and the solution came out so logically correct that it had to be immediately revealed to her. I rushed to the exit from the forest, found a mail booth, bought a blue piece of paper, asked my beloved to come on a date immediately, because everything was decided.

Probably, she could not understand me: nothing came of the meeting, and I completely forgot the system of my proofs, borrowed from the stars.

Was it my madness? No, it was not madness, but, of course, it became madness when it did not meet what it was supposed to be incarnated into.

Exactly the same thing happened to me ten years ago. A woman came to me, I began to reveal one of my thoughts to her. She didn't understand me, considering me crazy. Then another woman soon came, I told her the same thing, and she immediately understood me, and soon we entered into unanimity.

So, probably, it would have been in that explanation 47 years ago: I would have understood - and that's it! And then, after almost half a century, I thought of myself as crazy, trying to write in such a way that everyone understood me, until I finally achieved my goal: a friend came, understood me, and I became just as good, simple and smart person like most people on earth.

Here it is interesting that the action of sex was closed by the state of mind: it was necessary that they (in the spirit) converge, so that thereby the possibility of action here (in the flesh, in ordinary experiences) would be opened.

* ...Soon the train brings me to Zagorsk. The spring of light is so strong here that tears flow from the pain in the eyes and shines through the very soul, and penetrates beyond the soul, somewhere, perhaps, into paradise, and further beyond paradise, into such a depth where only saints live ... Saints ... And here for the first time I think that the saints come from the light and that, perhaps, at the beginning of everything, somewhere, beyond paradise, there is only light, and all the best comes from the light, and if I know this, no one my love will not be taken away from me, and my love will be a light for all...

* There was no trace of what people call love in the life of this old artist. All his love, everything that people live for themselves, he gave to art. Wrapped in his visions, shrouded in a veil of poetry, he survived as a child, satisfied with outbursts of deadly anguish and intoxicated joy from the life of nature. Maybe a little time would pass, and he would die, confident that such is all life on earth ...

But one day a woman came to him, and he murmured his “I love” to her, and not to his dream.

Everyone says so, and Phacelia, expecting a special and unusual expression of feeling from the artist, asked:

And what does it mean, "I love"?

This means, - he said, - that if I have the last piece of bread left, I will not eat it and give it to you, if you are sick, I will not leave you, if you have to work, I will harness like a donkey. ..

And he told her a lot of things that people endure because of love.

Phacelia waited in vain for the unprecedented.

To give away the last piece of bread, to look after the sick, to work as a donkey,” she repeated, “but it’s the same for everyone, everyone does it ...

And this is what I want, - the artist replied, - so that I can now have it, like everyone else. This is exactly what I am talking about, that I finally feel great happiness not to consider myself a special, lonely person and to be like all good people.

* I stand mute with a cigarette, but still I pray at this morning hour, I don’t know how and to whom, I open the window and hear: in the impregnable guinea grouse, the black grouse is still muttering, the crane is calling the sun, and now even here, on the lake, now before my eyes, the catfish moved and launched a wave like a ship.

I stand dumb and only after I write down:

“On the coming day, enlighten, Lord, our past and preserve in the new everything that was before good, our protected forests, the sources of mighty rivers, preserve the birds, multiply the fish many times, return all the animals to the forests and free our soul from them” .

* In late autumn it sometimes happens just like in early spring: there is white snow, there is black earth. Only in spring from the thawed patches it smells of earth, and in autumn of snow. It certainly happens: we get used to the snow in winter, and in the spring the earth smells to us, and in the summer we sniff the earth, and in late autumn it smells of snow to us.

It rarely happens that the sun peeps through for an hour, but what a joy it is! Then a dozen of already frozen, but surviving from the storm leaves on a willow, or a very small blue flower under our feet, gives us great pleasure.

I lean towards the blue flower and with surprise recognize Ivan in it: this is Ivan alone left from the former double flower, the well-known Ivan da Marya.

In truth, Ivan is not a real flower. It is made up of very small curly leaves, and only its color is purple, for which it is called a flower. A real flower with pistils and stamens is only yellow Marya. It was from Marya that seeds fell on the autumn earth in order to again cover the earth with Ivans and Maryamis in the new year. Marya's case is much more difficult, that's right, that's why she fell out of favor before Ivan.

But I like that Ivan endured frosts and even turned blue. Following the blue flower of late autumn with my eyes, I say quietly:

Ivan, Ivan, where is your Marya now?

According to the book "Almost every love begins with paradise." © L.A. Ryazanova. Compilation. Preface. 1998.