Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov - On the warm earth (collection). The last years of the writer's life

“There’s nothing to regret” - and yet it’s a pity

“I was born and raised in the middle part of Russia, between the Oka and Dnieper rivers, in a simple, working family, my great-grandfathers and grandfathers are forever connected with the land” (Quoted hereinafter from: I. Sokolov-Mikitov. Collected works in four volumes. L., 1985; vol. 4. P. 130), wrote Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov in his 1964 “Memoirs”.

He was born on May 17, 1892 in the village of Oseki, Kaluga province; lived a long life, 82 years; died on February 20, 1975, leaving behind books that were highly valued by many of his contemporaries - among them were A. Remizov, I. Bunin, M. Gorky, M. Prishvin, A. Tolstoy, K. Fedin, A. Tvardovsky, K .Paustovsky. He was lucky to have good, loyal friends in life and literature. But I would like to believe that it belongs not only to the history of Russian literature, but also to today.

In one of his favorite works - the story "Childhood" (1931) - the writer lovingly and deeply poetically reproduced the world of childhood, which remained in his memory for the rest of his life and in which he rightly saw the very origins of both his character and his creativity. The image of the young hero in the story is, of course, an artistic generalization in which personal impressions were melted down like wax, illuminated by later life experiences, and, willingly or unwillingly, were subject to the laws of creativity. And yet there is a lot here that is deeply personal and autobiographical; Sokolov-Mikitov wrote about his hero, but thought about himself...

The beauty of Russian nature, the customs and traditions of the Russian village, a kaleidoscope of Russian characters, types that are imprinted in children's consciousness, the most diverse - ordinary, ordinary and extraordinary - events of those distant years, be it a strong thunderstorm on the way or reading books, the death of Uncle Akim, - all this was laid in the foundation of the writer’s personality, determined his view of the world, and was later reflected in his artistic work... An unaccountable feeling of the fullness of life served as the basis of his natural optimism, which then helped him in the most difficult cases of life.

However, childhood is not only a time of happiness and fullness of life; This is also a time of childhood fears, grievances, disappointments, a time when not only teeth and bones erupt and grow, but also personality, soul - and this process is not always easy and simple, often painful, complex, disharmonious. The hero of the story - and, of course, the author - is familiar with despair, and the awareness of his weakness, and the inability to understand many things that sometimes baffle him.

Sokolov-Mikitov’s childhood occurred at a time when a lot was already changing and disappearing in Russia: the poetic “Larinsky” estates were disappearing, the ancient landowner life of Turgenev’s novels, Chekhov’s cherry orchards were being cut down with might and main. Practical Lopakhins came to the village, to Russia, and the “iron” city, with its strict orders and laws, was advancing. The centuries-old way of life of the Russian village and Russian peasant life was being destroyed. “Everything changed in the village then. More and more often, suffering from unemployment and landlessness, men went to work in the cities, moved to mines, to factories. The youth returning from the city, having drank a different life, brought new words, new speeches were heard in the village ..." (p. 47). And yet - “there was still a lot of old, almost untouched in the remote Smolensk village...” (p. 48).

“I have nothing to regret from this past,” we read at the end of the story. “I only feel sorry for the broods of grouse, village songs and sundresses, I feel sorry for the childhood feeling of joy and love that once filled me, which no force can now return...” (p. 96 ).

“There is nothing to regret” - and yet it’s a pity... It’s a pity for the past, fleeting childhood, for those moments of happiness and fullness of life that he knew, for that world of Russian life, established way of life, customs, pity for parents, friends, pity for everything that “ cannot be returned by any means,” - it’s a pity for the past, no matter how wonderful the future may be... With this feeling of slight sadness and love-pity - here it is, his saving “raft” - and the writer says goodbye to his childhood.

We also find many motifs and themes of “Childhood” in the story “Helen” (1929), in which we also see an island of endless Russian space, Russian cosmos. The plot of the story develops slowly, as if gradually. Its chronological framework is the Russo-Japanese War, the first Russian revolution of 1905. We learn how Khludov made his capital, how his son squandered his father's inheritance. In parallel with the line of the Khludovs, the theme of the Russian peasantry and its fate resounds in the story, gaining a crescendo. The author tells us about simple Russian peasants, such as the forester Frol, his father nicknamed Okunek, and other residents of the village. At the same time, the writer does not idealize them; he does not hide the fact that village people often turn out to be indifferent to the misfortune of their fellow countrymen. Poverty makes people callous and separates them; What unites them is their joint, friendly work. The chapter “Rafts” sounds like a true hymn to free collective labor - about raftsmen rafting timber down the river┘

The image of Eleni is poetic and realistic at the same time - a quiet river and a small Russian village of the same name, which is located in the forest, in the swamps, in the very heart of Russia. Its middleness, its root essence is confirmed by the fact that it is the focus of many traditions of Russian life, with all its specificity, originality, and uniqueness. This world is dominated by respect for the distant and recent past, for the traditions of our ancestors. Slowly the sprouts of something new are breaking through here - something that comes from the city, from the outside world, with war and revolution. Despite all the isolation and hermeticity of this island of Russian space, it turns out to be vitally connected, united with all of Russia, with its historical soil, destiny.

The story "Elen" was conceived as a novel; it feels a certain incompleteness, lack of development of plot lines, atomic compression of images and individual scenes. However, the material underlying the story and the realistic skill of the artist make it a completely valuable, self-sufficient work. His relevance is not striking, it is not declared, but is an organic component of his artistic world. All this constitutes the characteristic features of the artist’s creative style that had already developed in the late 20s and early 30s.

Writer at 25

The formation of the writer took place in conditions of a sharp revolutionary breakdown of the traditional foundations of Russian national life. He witnessed and took part in the revolution of 1905, the February revolution, and finally the October 1917 revolution. I. Sokolov-Mikitov was drawn to his native land, to the village; he was in love with Russian nature with its open spaces and silence, Levitan's peace. At the same time, by his own admission, he “never experienced an attraction to settled life, property and home life” (p. 136). And therefore, from his youth, his life turned out to be filled with many different events.

He often changed professions (he was a doctor, aircraft mechanic, sailor, etc.), traveled a lot, participated in the First World War, and, as already mentioned, was not just an outside observer in revolutionary events. But, finding himself far from home, he yearned for his homeland, he was again and again drawn to his native places of “middle Russia.” All this was reflected in his work, in which the motifs of the road, partings and meetings, the motifs of distant travels and unquenchable love for the Motherland - as if in a symphony, complemented and enriched each other...

Already at the age of ten, I. Sokolov-Mikitov experienced the first “turning point” in his life, when he and his family moved from the village to the city (Smolensk), where a complex and contradictory world, previously unfamiliar, opened up to him.

At school, he especially did not get along with the law teacher - the class teacher, “who, for some unknown reason, disliked me” (p. 133). From the fifth grade of a real school he was “expelled with a wolf ticket” on suspicion of belonging to student revolutionary organizations.” “The expulsion from the school was preceded by a search in my room on Zapolnaya Street, in the presence of a gendarmerie captain and two policemen. As it turned out later, the reason for the search was the denunciation of a provocateur who served as a clerk in a tobacco shop, behind the partition of which we sometimes gathered" (p. 134). This became the second "turning point" in his life, introducing him to the revolutionary events in Russia.

One of the brightest, “stunning” impressions in the writer’s life was, by his own admission, the impression of the sea, which “conquered” him. He served as a sailor on ships of the merchant fleet, visited many cities and countries, and saw many seas. I. Sokolov-Mikitov recalled that the events of the First World War found him far from his homeland, on the shores of the Aegean Sea, where he wandered around the Chalcedonian Peninsula, near the legendary Olympus, without a penny in his pocket. “He returned to Russia by sea when the First World War was already raging over the world. This First World War, which shook the foundations of the old world, became the third test of life” (p. 137).

Then, after living for a short time in the village, he went to the front as a volunteer, served in medical units, flew on the first Russian heavy bomber "Ilya Muromets", whose commander was Smolensk fellow countryman G.V. Alekhnovich is one of the first famous pilots in Russia. During the war years, Ivan Sergeevich continued to write and occasionally published in literary collections and magazines.

He met the February revolution at the front. Later, Sokolov-Mikitov recalled how, as a deputy from the front-line soldiers, he came “to revolutionary Petrograd, flooded with red flags.” Here I met the October Revolution; in the hall of the Tauride Palace he listened to Lenin's speech; Here, in the editorial office of Novaya Zhizn, I met A.M. Gorky and other writers who responded kindly to his creative experiences, for the first time began to think seriously about what soon determined his life, became his destiny... “The revolution became my fourth and final turning point in my life: I became a writer” (Memoirs, p. 137, vol. 4). At that time he was twenty-five years old.

Origins: folklore and “Russian nature”

I. Sokolov-Mikitov himself admitted that one of the main and first sources of his work was Russian folklore, Russian folk tales, which he knew well from childhood, loved, and from which he drew inspiration. Over the years, he created the cycle “Mischievous Tales”, in which the writer “in his own language” told some well-known fairy-tale motifs, developed them, used well-known ones and created new images of fairy-tale characters. Working on fairy tales was a school for him, in which he learned the beautiful figurative Russian language, the ability to tell an artless and simple story, build a plot, combine fantasy, fiction with subtle and deep observations of life, human psychology, with his wise attitude towards genuine moral and spiritual values.

At the same time, Sokolov-Mikitov definitely and unequivocally declared himself as a follower of the realistic school. During these years, he created a series of stories about the war. He writes about what he knows well, what he has seen and heard himself, so his stories are often similar to sketches, essays, and correspondence. The author's commentary in them, as a rule, is minimal, philosophical reflections are rare and sparing. At the same time, the main thing for a writer is to convey the state of mind.

The nerve of war stories by I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov - thoughts about Russia, about the Russian character. There is pain and pride, but behind all this is the desire for truth. In the story “Here and There,” the writer reflects on “Russian nature”: “to say God knows what, but to be firm in action”; “to scold and curse the cause, but at the same time to pursue it uncompromisingly to the end, despite troubles and misfortunes” (p. 13).

In the stories “Cuckoo's Children”, “Winged Words”, “Whisper of Flowers”, “The Calm Before the Storm” there are many episodes in which the spiritual generosity of the Russian person, his dedication, and irresistible craving for beauty are revealed.

"No people"

While on long sea voyages, on the fronts of the First World War, Ivan Sergeevich listened to what was happening in Russia. He accepted the revolution - first the February, and then the October - with enthusiasm, realizing the necessity and beneficialness of change, but also well understanding the difficulties facing the new government... The story “Desolation” is about one of these difficulties. “There are no people - that’s what I understood. Conscientious, conscientious people who understand the threatening situation of the country and the revolution.” “The great misfortune of Russia, worse than hunger, is desolation” (pp. 45, 47).

In 1923, his “Letters from the Village” were published in the magazine “Russia”, which contained interesting observations about the village in the first post-revolutionary years. “The ends are strangely mixed up: the twenty-first century is mixed up with the sixteenth century,” notes Sokolov-Mikitov (p. 70). In this mixture there is inevitably a lot of superficial, superficial things, which, in turn, negatively affects the language itself. “Time has filled the village with verbal rubbish - and the woman in the consumer shop, choosing chintz, no longer says to the godfather clerk: “Godfather Arsenya, give me better chintz”; the woman says: “It is advisable to take an energetic chintz.” In the volost executive committee, the chairman says to secretary Kuzka, to a smart guy: “Edit, Kuzka, a piece of paper" (p. 70). “New life, old life - where can I find words?!” - the author exclaims (p. 71). When reading “Letters┘” one involuntarily recalls the characters of satirical works by V Mayakovsky, D. Bedny, stories and stories by M. Zoshchenko, M. Bulgakov.

"Sea" stories

In the same 1920s, I. Sokolov-Mikitov developed a whole layer of stories and works of other genres, which reflected the “sea” period of his life, numerous wanderings around the world, and travels.

He is concerned about distant countries, he admires the beauty and landscapes; he is shocked by such simple and eternal values as the sun, earth, sea, birds; he never tires of admiring all the changing splendor of nature day and night, at sunrise and sunset...

The world of sea stories is both romantic and realistic at the same time. Romance emanates from the heroes’ desire to travel, during which the world expands, surprises with its diversity, beauty - a real discovery and comprehension of the world occurs.

Sokolov-Mikitov's heroes are simple working people, sailors, loaders, men and women, Russians and English, Greeks and Turks - a whole gallery of artistic images created with varying degrees of expressiveness, memorable either for their unusualness, originality, or for their specificity and typicality. Most of the scenes are visible and tangible, the portraits are in relief, as if engraved on a medallion.

The author of the stories shows a deep and keen interest in those countries and peoples that pass before his eyes, which he meets when entering foreign ports - these are the ports of Africa, the Mediterranean countries, with their midday heat, the spicy smells of oriental bazaars, and the ports of England, Holland, other countries.

The hero spends years sailing away from his native shores, walking through the streets and squares of foreign ports and cities - and the dream of returning to Russia always remains a longed-for dream for the author himself and his heroic compatriots. Memories of childhood and youth, of parents and friends draw one back to one’s homeland; in his dreams he sees Russian fields and gardens, the river where he fished, roads, forests - the whole world of peace and quiet that is stored in the soul and serves as an inexhaustible reservoir during the difficult years of wandering. Events, both alarming and joyful, draw you home.

True to his creative manner and style, Sokolov-Mikitov, as a rule, does not build complex plots, intricacies, or go into deep philosophical reasoning and the psychological depths of his characters. He is limited to a restrained, meager recording of events, a brief author's commentary; here, it seems, a lot remains behind the scenes... But in the very manner of narration, devoid of external showiness and significance, there is hidden the internal energy and tension of the unsaid, which pushes the reader’s imagination, helps him “complete” a lot of things himself, as if participating in the process of creating an artistic image, a slightly planned plot.

Restraint of intonation, leisurely external action, keen observation, fullness of words, harmony of the hidden and realized in what is depicted - these are just some of the characteristic features of I. Sokolov-Mikitov’s prose and his style, without understanding which it is impossible to have a meaningful attitude towards the artist and the real value of his work.

Ivan and the fog

The most notable work of Sokolov-Mikitov in the 1920s was the story “Chizhikov Lavra” (1926); it is also fundamentally autobiographical. The story has several time layers that interpenetrate one another, enrich the narrative, help penetrate into the hero’s spiritual world, and better understand the very origins of his character, his worldview. And here the hero’s memories of his childhood, youth, and those years that preceded his emigrant odyssey play an important role. These memories of the past as a lost paradise torment him, but also help him to withstand and survive in a foreign country. They are the solid foundation on which the building of his personality and his relationship with the world are built. They are like a litmus test that determines the most important life values that guide the hero in his adult life.

Most of the story is devoted to the life of the main character, Ivan, in England. He is upset that the British know offensively little about Russia. Peering at his surroundings, noticing the new, unusual, Ivan becomes even more acutely aware of himself, his belonging to Russia, to everything Russian. And now he is even more convinced: “there is something about a Russian person - no matter how he dresses, from a distance it is clear that he is Russian” (p. 157).

Homesickness is perhaps the hero’s most important, persistent pain. She constantly reminds of herself, strangles him - sometimes worse, more evil than “consumption” - truly “even with her head on the doorframe.” This melancholy devalues and distorts everything “here”; from this, sometimes the most ordinary things give rise to inappropriate feelings, unexpected irritation...

With the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia, the attitude towards Russians abroad worsened even more: “┘they threw us out of the yard like skinny cattle” (p. 159). There was no permanent job, there was not enough money to pay for housing, they ate “naked bread”... A feeling of complete homelessness, almost doom, visits him on the streets of the city, where he spends whole days looking for food and work. “And suddenly it was like a hoof hit me in the forehead: “I’m lost!”... I didn’t really realize myself, there was only one thing in front of me: that there were people, houses, shops - and walls, walls, walls here, and that a person would die here, like where somewhere in the Siberian taiga... No one will even notice, not a single point will move. It became so scary for me then that I could even hit my head on a stone" (185).

The key here is the image of a wall that fences a person off from the world, from society, from his own kind; this is a symbol of a person’s complete alienation from the world around him, the inability to resist circumstances, to simply survive in these conditions. In many ways, a similar function is performed by another image that is often found on the pages of the story - the image of fog. It becomes a capacious artistic metaphor, meaning the vagueness, opacity of the surrounding world, the vagueness of the life goals of a person cut off from his homeland, who has lost touch with the root system of his people. “It was so foggy! People walked around like fish in a muddy pond. And the city was terrible, invisible and deathly yellow” (p. 186).

“Ours” and “theirs”, “ours” and “theirs” is one of the constant, cross-cutting motifs of the narrative, the principles of identification of a person in exile. With his mind, Ivan notes a lot of useful, reasonable things in the orders and customs of foreigners, he is ready to accept a lot, but his soul and heart rebel and reject. Memory colors the entire past in nostalgic tones, preventing it from fitting into “here”...

Various Russian people ended up abroad. The writer creates a whole gallery of types, characters, talks about human destinies - all of them in one way or another are connected with the revolution, with the changes that have recently occurred in Russia. Often the author only sketches a colorful portrait with a few strokes, without developing in detail this or that storyline, this or that drawing of the image. However, these few touches are enough to outline a unique character. Almost each of them has its own “eccentricity”, its own peculiarity - attractive or repulsive, but in the end we are presented with a rather motley and in many ways characteristic “mixture” of persons, a kind of panopticon of the types that made up the Russian emigration of those distant years.

Quiet classic

There were still years and decades of hard creative work ahead, moments of insight and ups, hours and days of doubt and despair - everything that the life of a Russian artist, living one life with the people, with his country, is full of.

I. Sokolov-Mikitov did not shy away from pressing topics and current problems; he often wrote on the “living trail” of events in the center of which he found himself. But at the same time, he retained a special, quiet tone of voice; artificial, superficial pathos was alien to him. He was often criticized for the passivity of the hero, for the insufficiently clear and precise author’s position, for the fact that his work allegedly lies away from the main, “main path” of Soviet literature...

30 years have passed since the death of Sokolov-Mikitov, the previous reproaches have become a thing of the past and have lost their relevance, but our time does not show due interest in this “quiet”, “forgotten classic”. To read it you need silence, peace of mind, faith in man, his purpose on earth, you need a non-vain, persistent love for the homeland, for Russia - I.S. had all this. Sokolov-Mikitov in full. And one can only believe that his time will definitely come.

Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov

On warm ground

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I. S. SOKOLOV-MIKITOV

Sixty years of active creative activity in the turbulent 20th century, full of so many events and shocks - this is the result of the life of the remarkable Soviet writer Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov.

He spent his childhood in the Smolensk region, with its sweet, truly Russian nature. In those days, the village still preserved its ancient way of life and way of life. The boy's first impressions were festive festivities and village fairs. It was then that he became one with his native land, with its immortal beauty.

When Vanya was ten years old, he was sent to a real school. Unfortunately, this institution was distinguished by bureaucratic behavior, and the teaching went poorly. In spring, the smells of awakened greenery irresistibly attracted the boy beyond the Dnieper, to its banks, covered with a gentle haze of blossoming foliage.

Sokolov-Mikitov was expelled from the fifth grade of the school “on suspicion of belonging to student revolutionary organizations.” It was impossible to go anywhere with a “wolf ticket”. The only educational institution where a certificate of trustworthiness was not required was the St. Petersburg private agricultural courses, where a year later he was able to get, although, as the writer admitted, he did not feel a great attraction to agriculture, just as, indeed, he never felt an attraction to settledness, property, domesticity...

Boring coursework soon turned out to be not to the liking of Sokolov-Mikitov, a man with a restless, restless character. Having settled in Reval (now Tallinn) on a merchant ship, he wandered around the world for several years. I saw many cities and countries, visited European, Asian and African ports, and became close friends with working people.

The First World War found Sokolov-Mikitov in a foreign land. With great difficulty, he made it from Greece to his homeland, and then volunteered for the front, flew on the first Russian bomber “Ilya Muromets”, and served in medical detachments.

In Petrograd I met the October Revolution, listened with bated breath to the speech of V. I. Lenin in the Tauride Palace. At the editorial office of Novaya Zhizn I met Maxim Gorky and other writers. During these critical years for the country, Ivan Sergeevich became a professional writer.

After the revolution, he worked briefly as a teacher at a unified labor school in his native Smolensk region. By this time, Sokolov-Mikitov had already published the first stories, noticed by such masters as I. Bunin and A. Kuprin.

“Warm Earth” - this is what the writer called one of his first books. And it would be difficult to find a more accurate, more capacious name! After all, the native Russian land is really warm, because it is warmed by the warmth of human labor and love.

The stories of Sokolov-Mikitov date back to the time of the first polar expeditions about the voyages of the flagships of the icebreaker fleet “Georgy Sedov” and “Malygin”, which marked the beginning of the development of the Northern Sea Route. On one of the islands of the Arctic Ocean, a bay was named after Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov, where he found the buoy of the lost Ziegler expedition, the fate of which was unknown until that moment.

Sokolov-Mikitov spent several winters on the shores of the Caspian Sea, traveling through the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas, Transcaucasia, the Tien Shan Mountains, the Northern and Murmansk Territories. He wandered through the dense taiga, saw the steppe and the sultry desert, and traveled all over the Moscow region. Each such trip not only enriched him with new thoughts and experiences, but was also imprinted by him in new works.

This man of good talent gave people hundreds of stories and tales, essays and sketches. The pages of his books are illuminated with the wealth and generosity of his soul.

The work of Sokolov-Mikitov is close to Aksakov’s, Turgenev’s, and Bunin’s style. However, his works have their own special world: not outside observation, but live communication with the surrounding life.

The encyclopedia says about Ivan Sergeevich: “Russian Soviet writer, sailor, traveler, hunter, ethnographer.” And although there is a full stop next, this list could be continued: teacher, revolutionary, soldier, journalist, polar explorer.

Sokolov-Mikitov's books are written in a melodious, rich and at the same time very simple language, the same language that the writer learned in his childhood.

In one of his autobiographical notes, he wrote: “I was born and grew up in a simple working Russian family, among the forest expanses of the Smolensk region, its wonderful and very feminine nature. The first words I heard were bright folk words, the first music I heard were folk songs, which the composer Glinka was once inspired by.”

In search of new visual means, back in the twenties of the last century, the writer turned to a unique genre of short (not short, but short) stories, which he successfully dubbed epics.

To an inexperienced reader, these tales may seem like simple notes from a notebook, made on the fly, as a reminder of the events and characters that struck him.

We have already seen the best examples of such short, non-fictional stories in L. Tolstoy, I. Bunin, V. Veresaev, M. Prishvin.

Sokolov-Mikitov in his epic stories comes not only from the literary tradition, but also from folk art, from the spontaneity of oral stories.

His tales “Red and Black”, “On Your Coffin”, “Terrible Dwarf”, “Bridegrooms” and others are characterized by extraordinary capacity and accuracy of speech. Even in his so-called hunting stories, man is in the foreground. Here he continues the best traditions of S. Aksakov and I. Turgenev.

Reading Sokolov-Mikitov’s short stories about Smolensk places (“On the Nevestnitsa River”) or about bird wintering grounds in the south of the country (“Lenkoran”), you involuntarily become imbued with sublime sensations and thoughts, the feeling of admiration for your native nature turns into something else, more noble - into feeling of patriotism.

“His creativity, having its source in a small homeland (that is, the Smolensk region), belongs to the big Motherland, our great land with its vast expanses, innumerable riches and varied beauty - from north to south, from the Baltic to the Pacific coast,” said about Sokolov-Mikitov A. Tvardovsky.

Not all people are able to feel and understand nature in organic connection with human mood, and only a few can simply and wisely paint nature. Sokolov-Mikitov had such a rare gift. He knew how to convey this love for nature and for people living in friendship with it to his very young readers. Our preschool and school children have long loved his books: “The Body”, “The House in the Forest”, “Fox Evasion”... And how picturesque his stories about hunting are: “On the Wood Grouse Current”, “Pulling”, “The First Hunt” and others. You read them, and it seems that you yourself are standing on the edge of a forest and, holding your breath, watching the majestic flight of a woodcock or in the early, pre-dawn hour listening to the mysterious and magical song of a wood grouse...

The writer Olga Forsh said: “You read Mikitov and wait: a woodpecker is about to knock overhead or a little hare is going to jump out from under the table; how great it is, how he really told it!”

Sokolov-Mikitov’s work is autobiographical, but not in the sense that he wrote only about himself, but because he always talked about everything as an eyewitness and participant in certain events. This gives his works a vivid persuasiveness and that documentary authenticity that so attracts the reader.

“I was lucky enough to become close to Ivan Sergeevich in the early years of his literary work,” recalled K. Fedin. – It was shortly after the Civil War. For half a century, he devoted me so much to his life that sometimes it seems to me that it has become mine.

He never set out to write his biography in detail. But he is one of those rare artists whose life seemed to combine everything that was written by him.”

Kaleria Zhekhova

ON THE NATIVE LAND

Sunrise

Even in early childhood I had the opportunity to admire the sunrise. Early in the spring morning, on a holiday, my mother sometimes woke me up and carried me to the window in her arms:

- Look how the sun plays!

Behind the trunks of old linden trees, a huge flaming ball rose above the awakened earth. He seemed to swell, shine with a joyful light, play, and smile. My childish soul rejoiced. For the rest of my life I will remember my mother’s face, illuminated by the rays of the rising sun.

In loving memory of Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-
Dedicated to Mikitova

February 20, 2015 marks forty years since the wonderful writer, truly the singer of nature and the man in it, Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov, has been gone from us. His contemporary and fellow writer M. Prishvin argued that the storehouse of the sun is nature and man in it. And after many years, we can rightfully say that the work of Ivan Sergeevich is a real storehouse of the sun, it is so filled with love, warmth and comfort of his native country, his native land - the small and large Motherland.
A native of the Kaluga province, Ivan Sergeevich grew up in the Smolensk region, but his advanced years since 1952 were associated with our Konakovsky district, the village of Karacharovo, where he lived in a house he built with his own hands.
Ivan Sergeevich was born on May 17 (30), 1892 in the small village of Oseki near Kaluga in the family of Sergei Nikitich Sokolov, who managed the forest estate of the millionaire Konshin. It is interesting that Ivan Sergeevich kept the second part of the surname - Mikitov - from his grandfather. In the story “Childhood” he wrote: “The Mikitovs began to call us after my grandfather, the deacon of the Shchekino church. Until his old age, people in the village said about him: “You, Nikita, are like a ruff, you have no peace, you are always fussing.”
In his autobiographical notes, Ivan Sergeevich notes: “I was born and raised in a simple working Russian family, among the forest expanses of the Smolensk region, its wonderful and very feminine nature... I owe the lyrical quality of my talent to my native Russian nature... From my mother I borrowed a flair for words and restlessness of character, from his father - love of nature, lyrical soul. My father also awakened in me a passion for hunting.”
In the story “On the Warm Earth” he writes: “Even in my early childhood I kept the secret confidence to see and get around the world. I devoted myself to reading books with the greatest enthusiasm... I lived joyfully, moved in the sunny, joyful world that surrounded me, I myself was a part of this happy world...
Talking to people, I began to think about a lot of things. The words were vividly remembered, and I was amazed by the talent of the common people, the wealth, and the imagery of the people's language. With youthful ardor, he painfully experienced the injustice of people’s inequality, felt the sharpness of contrasts: poverty and wealth, hunger and contentment. And I became more and more familiar with and saw a diverse, very complex and multifaceted life...”
“The sea conquered me,” wrote Ivan Sergeevich. In 1913, his sea wanderings around the world began as a merchant marine sailor, and later they formed the basis of his collection “Sea Stories.” Ivan Sergeevich experienced ordeals in a foreign land from his own experience. He spoke about this in the story “Chizhikov Lavra” (1925). What are these confessions worth here: “In Germany, then in England, I realized all my hopelessness... I was very homesick for Russia...” And further - “I have long noticed that many Russians, having lived in America, have worn an American collar , somehow they become empty, as if their soul is leaving, and everything they do is for the sake of money...” Or this: “Everything is beautiful on the Bosphorus, but I remember my native small river Gordota, overgrown with willow and alder trees.”
From a young age he had to go through a harsh school of life, including the trenches of the First World War. And already during the years of the revolution, Sokolov-Mikitov became a travel writer and essayist. He travels and walks a lot around the country. He is the author of more than two hundred literary works. “Little stories”, “On the Nevestnitsa River,” noted Ivan Sergeevich, “I wrote in the distant twenties, living in the wilderness of the village. In one of the stories we read: “Russian wonderful rivers are like sisters: that’s why the little Nevestnitsa River is so similar to the neighboring river Gordota, Gordota - to the Ugra, Ugra - to the Oka, Oka - to the great Russian mother river Volga. And isn’t that why the cities, small and large, located on these rivers are so similar to each other...”
Or here is his collection “Hunter Stories” (1935-1953). These are lyrical sketches, a poetic depiction of nature. And the story “Sounds of Spring” from this collection, this “beautiful symphony” of a spring morning, became one of the examples of poetic prose in Russian literature and was included in the collection of school dictations and presentations.
“While living in Karacharovo,” Ivan Sergeevich modestly noted, “I wrote several short stories that depict nature close to my heart.” We know that the stories “Childhood” (1953), “On the Warm Earth” (1954), “Sounds of the Earth” (1962), “Karacharov’s Notes” (1968) were published here.
Ivan Sergeevich himself, in the preface to the book “On the Warm Land” (Gosizdat, 1954, Moscow) writes: “The general theme of the works - from the story “Childhood” to stories about travel around their native country - is determined by the title of the book.” And we, indeed, here see with what heartfelt trembling the author conveys the warmth of his native land - be it the muddy banks of the Bride or the high bank of the Volga, the hot Astrakhan and Caspian flood plains, the inaccessible mountains of the Caucasus, the tundra of Taimyr or the ice fields of Severnaya Zemlya, where he and on the instructions of the editors of central newspapers, and at the call of the heart.
Reading and pondering his works, it is impossible not to notice that their main background is space - be it the sea, or a small forest clearing with a grouse or capercaillie lek, or a small swamp overgrown with emerald moss.
With full right, in one of his works “Spring in Chun” he exclaims: “Motherland! This word especially resonates with me, full of deep meaning. I see its vast fields, agitated by the harvest. A warm wind flies over them, raising flower dust. The country that gave birth to us is vast and diverse. The rivers that cross its spaces are inexhaustible and full of water. Vast, green forests, high mountains, shining with eternal glaciers. The light of the bright sun is reflected in their snowy peaks. The sultry steppes are wide, the remote Siberian taiga, stretched by the ocean, is impassable. The cities scattered throughout our country are crowded and numerous. Many languages are spoken by the people who inhabit this majestic country. The blue distances are spacious, the sounds and wonderful are the songs of the people living in it.”
Ivan Sergeevich conveyed everything he saw and experienced, his understanding of his native land, the work of people, the fullness of life to his readers. He saw, in his own words, how “the old rustic Rus' left, carried its grief in a knapsack, for eternity, now it will not return!” How I want to believe this. God willing.
Ivan Sergeevich shares his most intimate things with us: “From an early age, I was irresistibly attracted to simple people close to nature. In my long and distant wanderings across the land that joyfully accepted me, I met and happily became acquainted with such people who filled my heart with sympathy and love.” In the story “A Date with Childhood” we read: “I felt an inextricable connection with living Russia, I saw good and evil... I knew and saw Russia with the blood of my heart. I felt the cruel tragic shortcomings, the vices that afflicted the people in myself... Russia was for me the very world in which I lived, moved, and breathed... I myself was Russia, a person with a sad, joyless fate.”
All this allowed him to say so accurately about Russian nature: “...say God knows what, but be firm in action. After all, each of us is capable of verbally refusing a cause a thousand times, scolding the cause and cursing everyone and everything, but at the same time, pursuing it uncompromisingly to the end, despite troubles and misfortunes” (story “Here and There”).
In a short newspaper article, it is difficult, of course, to convey the whole range of feelings and thoughts that arise when reading the works of I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov. This can be clearly conveyed and illustrated by the paintings of the wonderful Russian painter Arkady Aleksandrovich Rylov (1870-1939) “River Subbotikha”, “Green Noise”, “In the Blue Space”, “Flower Meadow”, “Field Rowan”, etc. Take a closer look at these paintings, and you will be imbued with what was close and dear to Ivan Sergeevich as a writer, Arkady Alexandrovich as an artist, and therefore, without a doubt, to their compatriots.
During the Karacharov period of his life, Sokolov-Mikitov also turned to the memoir genre. Here he wrote “Autobiographical Notes” (1954), “A Date with Childhood” and a book of memoirs “Old Meetings”, on which the author worked until his last days. The book “Old Meetings” contains portrait sketches of writers with whom Ivan Sergeevich had to communicate, M. Gorky, I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, M. Prishvin, K. Fedin, A. Green, A. Tvardovsky, O. Forsh, V. Shishkov, polar explorer P. Svirnenko, artist and scientist N. Pinegin.
Ivan Sergeevich died on February 20, 1975 in Moscow. The urn with his ashes was buried in the family cemetery in Gatchina. (Ivan Sergeevich and his family lived in Gatchina and Leningrad, Karacharovo from 1929 to 1967, then in Moscow and Karacharovo).
Each new generation of people faces the question: how to instill in young people and teenagers a love for the Motherland, their Fatherland? On this issue, Ivan Sergeevich notes: “In the fate, tastes, character of each person, his childhood, the environment in which he lived, was brought up and grew up are of great importance. The words we hear from our mothers, the color of the sky we saw for the first time, the road running into the distance, the overgrown river bank, the curly birch tree under the window of our home forever remain in our memory...”
And here, as the author of this short article, I would like to add that one of the moments, one of the facets of education is reading, getting to know the world around us through examples of Russian literature. Read it for yourself, delve into the philosophy of Sokolov-Mikitov’s works, let your children read his works. And this is a whole block of works accessible to children’s perception. For example, the collections “In the Forest” and “Kuzovok”, other stories and fairy tales for children. Fortunately, our city library has all this; visit the house-museum of Sokolov-Mikitov in Karacharovo and the exhibition dedicated to him in our city local history museum. This will give you and your children and grandchildren the opportunity to come into contact with your soul and heart with the artistic, life heritage of one of the true masters of Russian literature.
I am sure: years and decades will pass, but Ivan Sergeevich’s work will attract and excite more and more new readers, thereby preserving the memory of one of the patriots of the Russian land, who possessed the gift of literary style.
Y. MAKAROV. Konakovo, 2015

Current page: 13 (book has 13 pages total) [available reading passage: 8 pages]

The most amazing thing is that the bear lay, without a real den, under a tree, in the snow. Perhaps she was disturbed in the fall, and she left the first, real den she had prepared. She lay several fathoms from the railway line; the noise of passing trains did not disturb her.

Which hunter has not experienced this joyful feeling! When you wake up in the morning, you see a special, soft light in the windows.

Powder fell out!

Even as children, we unforgettably rejoiced at the first snow. You used to run out onto the field behind the gate - such a sparkle, dazzling whiteness would sparkle all around! Fields, roads, and sloping river banks are covered with a festive tablecloth. Forest edges are clearly visible on the white veil of snow. White fluffy hats hang on the trees. The sounds and distant voices seem special and pure. If you go out into an open field, the snowy sparkling whiteness hurts your eyes. The white tablecloth of snow is painted with hare, fox, and bird tracks. At night, brown hares fed and “fattened” on winter fields. In many places the snow has been trampled almost to the ground, and fresh greenery is visible under the icy crust. A hare leisurely trampled through the winter night. Scattering round nuts of droppings along the trail, he sat down every now and then, ears pricked, listening sensitively to the silence of the night, to the distant sounds of the night.

Even an experienced hunter finds it difficult to understand the confusing text of night tracks. In order not to waste time, he passes by the edge of a winter field. Here, at the forest edge, along the slope of the ravine, a neat fox trail stretches in a long line. Black grouse roam in a clearing overgrown with juniper bushes and surrounded by birches. Crumbs of fluffy clean snow are scattered along the crossed chains of their fresh tracks. Heavy birds took off noisily and, dropping crumbly snow caps from the branches, hastily settled on distant bare birches...

When leaving to lie down, the brown hare is cunning, meanders, doubles and builds tracks, and makes cunning estimates. An experienced hunter vigilantly looks at the terrain, at the hare's loops and marks, at the bushes covered with snow and the forest edge. An alert hunter almost unmistakably guesses the place where the hare is hiding. From its hidden bed, with its long ears pressed to its back, the hare watches the movements of the person. In order not to spoil the matter, the hunter should not go straight to the bed, but should walk to the side and keep a sharp eye on both sides. It often happens that a hare will imperceptibly “fly away” from its resting place, and from the cold “rutting” trail the unlucky hunter will guess that the cunning hare has deceived him and got away from right under his nose.

I have always considered tracking hares in fresh soft powder to be the most interesting winter hunt, requiring endurance, great observation and patience from the hunter. It is better for impatient, fussy and greedy hunters not to undertake such a hunt. Such amateur hunting is rarely productive - sometimes you have to walk for a long time to track down and shoot a hare. And now there are few mining places left where many unafraid russians remain. For a real, that is, non-greedy and non-fussy hunter, hunting through the first winter powder brings a lot of pleasure. A winter day is wonderful, the powder is light and clean, on which the traces of birds and animals are clearly imprinted, the winter air is transparent and fresh. You can wander for a long time through fields and forest edges, understanding the sophisticated literacy of night tracks. If the hunt turns out to be unsuccessful and the tired hunter returns home without any prey, the unforgettable day of winter powder will still remain joyful and bright in his memory.

FISHING

My first hunting trips taught me to see and hear well, to walk silently and secretly through the forest, to eavesdrop on forest sounds and voices. Hiding behind a tree trunk, I saw nimble hazel grouse running across the moss hummocks, and a heavy wood grouse noisily bursting from under my feet. In a pond overgrown with sedges and water lilies, I observed broods of ducks and saw small fluffy ducklings swimming and diving.

There were a lot of all kinds of fish in the pond. In the mornings, with a fishing rod in my hands, I sat on the shore, watching a small float made of a goose feather. By the movement of the float I knew what kind of fish was biting. It was a pleasure to pull out of the water golden crucian carp, spiny perch, thick-backed silver chub, redfin raft, and fat little minnows fluttering on a hook from the water. Together with my father, we put girders on pikes. Sometimes we came across large, almost pound-sized pikes. The father was pulling the prey to the punt boat. We carefully pulled out and put into the boat a squirming strong pike, its toothy mouth opening wide. There were fat tenches in the pond. In the thick underwater grass, we placed wicker tops – “norota” – on the lines. I myself took out golden heavy fish covered with mucus from the raised top and threw them to the bottom of the punt. Almost every day we returned with rich booty.

I knew well all the treasured corners of the familiar mill pond, its quiet creeks and backwaters, overgrown with blooming pinkish water porridge, over which bees hummed, transparent dragonflies flew and hung in the air. I saw the mysterious bottom, pitted with pond shells, along which the shadows of quietly swimming fish slid. A wonderful underwater world unfolded before my eyes. On the mirror surface, reflecting the white high clouds, shuttle spiders quickly ran. Swimming beetles swam beneath the dark green algae leaves.

On hot summer days, we caught fish in open creeks in a small way. It was pleasant to wade in the warm water, drag wooden wet “nags” to the shore, and pull out the drags covered with algae. Large and small fish fluttered and fluttered in the wide wet motley. We pulled a reel filled with fish ashore, selected large fish, and threw small fish into the water. Fish soup was cooked over a fire. Sitting down in the shade of the green coastal foliage, they slurped it with round wooden spoons. A simple fish soup made from fresh fish caught with your own hands, fragrant and smelling of fire smoke, is amazingly tasty.

In the summer, when the flax blossomed like blue stars in the fields, we went at night to a distant river to catch crayfish. At this time, the molted, hungry crayfish greedily went for the bait. The bait was frogs and small fish roasted over a fire. We tied frogs and fish to the ends of long sticks and lowered the baits near the shore to the bottom of the river. From time to time, after sitting by the fire, we walked around the placed baits, to which hungry crayfish were sucking. With a lantern in hand, we carefully lifted the bait, placed a small net under it and shook off the crayfish that had stuck to the bait into it. Night fishing for crayfish has been very productive. We returned home with bags filled with live whispering crayfish.

There were a lot of crayfish in both the pond and the river. They caught them with their hands under the bank in deep caves, under stones at the bottom of a shallow river that quickly ran along a rocky, slippery bottom. I vividly remember how, having rolled up my porticoes, I walked through the running water and, having carefully rolled away a flat stone at the bottom, in a cloud of rising light turbidity I saw a lurking tick-borne crayfish. I quietly bring my hand up, grab with my fingers the strong black back of the angrily splayed crayfish, and put it in the bag.

On dark summer nights we caught crayfish on the sandbanks of the pond. With a bunch of flaming dry birch splinters, we carefully walked around the shallows, with our hands we picked up crayfish crawling towards the shore on the illuminated bottom. This night hunt gave us great and joyful pleasure.

In late autumn, when the water in the pond becomes clear and the autumn nights are long and dark, my father sometimes took me hunting with “lights”. With prisons in our hands, we went out on a punt boat. At the bow of the boat, in an iron horned “goat,” resinous pine firewood burned brightly. The boat glided quietly along the motionless surface of the water. A fire blazed and smoked on the bow of the boat, illuminating the branches of bushes and trees hanging over the water, and the bottom of the pond overgrown with algae. An underwater fairy-tale kingdom opened up to our eyes. Near the sandy bottom, lit by a fire, we saw long shadows of large sleeping fish. You need good judgment and an accurate eye to spear a sleeping fish in the water. The stabbed fish were shaken from the spear to the bottom of the boat. There were wide breams, long pikes, ides, and slippery burbots. I will forever remember this night hunt. The familiar pond seemed unrecognizable. After traveling all night, we returned with the loot. It was not so much the loot as the fabulous picture of the bottom lit by a fire that delighted and excited me.

I. S. SOKOLOV-MIKITOV

Sixty years of active creative activity in our turbulent times, which have witnessed so many events and upheavals, is the result of the life of the remarkable Soviet writer Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov.

He spent his childhood in the Smolensk region, with its sweet, truly Russian nature. In those days, the village still preserved its ancient way of life and way of life. The boy's first impressions were festive festivities and village fairs. It was then that he organically merged with his native land, with its immortal beauty.

When Vanya was ten years old, he was sent to a real school. Unfortunately, this institution was distinguished by bureaucratic behavior and the teaching went poorly. In spring, the smells of awakened greenery irresistibly attracted the boy beyond the Dnieper, to its banks, covered with a gentle haze of blossoming foliage.

Sokolov-Mikitov was expelled from the fifth grade of the school “on suspicion of belonging to student revolutionary organizations.” It was impossible to go anywhere with a “wolf ticket”. The only educational institution that did not require a certificate of trustworthiness was the St. Petersburg private agricultural courses, where a year later he was able to get, although, as the writer admitted, he did not feel a great attraction to agriculture, just as, indeed, he never felt an attraction to settledness, property, domesticity...

The First World War found Sokolov-Mikitov in a foreign land. With great difficulty, he got from Greece to his homeland, and then volunteered for the front, flew on the first Russian bomber “Ilya Muromets”, and served in the medical detachments.

“Warm Earth” - this is what the writer called one of his first books. And it would be difficult to find a more accurate, more capacious name! After all, this native Russian land is really warm, because it is warmed by the warmth of human labor and love.

His stories about the voyages of the flagships of the icebreaker fleet “Georgiy Sedov” and “Malygin”, which marked the beginning of the development of the Northern Sea Route, date back to the time of the first polar expeditions. It was then that a bay named after the writer Sokolov-Mikitov appeared on one of the islands of the Arctic Ocean. The bay was also named after Ivan Sergeevich, where he found the buoy of Ziegler’s lost expedition, the fate of which was unknown until that moment.

He spent several winters on the shores of the Caspian Sea, traveling through the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas, Transcaucasia, the Tien Shan Mountains, the Northern and Murmansk Territories. He wandered through the dense taiga, saw the steppe and the sultry desert, and traveled all over the Moscow region. Each such trip not only enriched him with new thoughts and experiences, but was also imprinted by him in new works.

This man of good talent gave people hundreds of stories and tales, essays and sketches. The pages of his books are illuminated with the wealth and generosity of his soul.

The famous Bolshevik, editor of the newspaper Izvestia I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov told his employees: “As soon as you receive anything from Ivan Sergeevich, forward it to me immediately. I love reading him, an excellent writer.”

The work of Sokolov-Mikitov is close to Aksakov’s, Turgenev’s, and Bunin’s style. However, his works reveal their own special world: not outside observation, but live communication with the surrounding life.

Sokolov-Mikitov's books are written in a melodious, rich and at the same time very simple language, the same language that the writer learned in his childhood.

In search of new visual means, back in the twenties, the writer turned to a unique genre of short (not short, but short) stories, which he successfully dubbed “fiction tales.”

To an inexperienced reader, these “tales” may seem like simple notes from a notebook, made on the fly, as a reminder of the events and characters that struck him.

We have already seen the best examples of such short, non-fictional stories in Leo Tolstoy, Bunin, Veresaev, Prishvin.

Sokolov-Mikitov in his “bylitsy” comes not only from the literary tradition, but also from folk art, from the spontaneity of oral stories.

His “fairy tales” “Red and Black”, “On Your Coffin”, “Terrible Dwarf”, “Grooms” and others are characterized by extraordinary capacity and accuracy of speech. Even in the so-called “hunting stories” he puts people in the foreground. Here he continues the best traditions of Aksakov and Turgenev.

Reading his short stories about Smolensk places (“On the Nevestnitsa River”) or about bird wintering grounds in the south of the country (“Lenkoran”), you involuntarily become imbued with sublime sensations and thoughts that the feeling of admiration for one’s native nature turns into something else, more noble - into a feeling patriotism.

“His creativity, having its source in a small homeland (i.e., the Smolensk region), belongs to the big Motherland, the great Soviet land with its vast expanses, innumerable riches and varied beauty - from north to south, from the Baltic to the Pacific coast,” said Sokolov- Mikitove A. T. Tvardovsky.

Not all people are able to feel and understand nature in organic connection with human mood, and only a few can simply and wisely paint nature. Sokolov-Mikitov had such a rare gift. He was able to convey this feeling of love for nature and for people living in friendship with it to his very young readers. Our preschool and school children have long loved his books: “The Body”, “The House in the Forest”, “Fox Dodges”... And how picturesque are his stories about hunting: “On the Capercaillie Current”, “On the Traction”, “The First Hunt” etc. You read them, and it seems that you yourself are standing on the edge of a forest and, holding your breath, watching the majestic flight of a rare bird, the woodcock, or in the early, pre-dawn hour, listening to the mysterious and magical song of the wood grouse...

Writer Olga Forsh once said: “You read Mikitov and wait: a woodpecker is about to knock over your head or a little bunny will jump out from under the table: how great it is, truly told!”

When we talk about the world of animals and plants, each line is permeated with wise simplicity, a happy combination of the psychological drawing of the hero’s image. In depicting nature, Sokolov-Mikitov undoubtedly inherited and developed the wonderful traditions of Russian art - the art of Levitan and Shitkin, Turgenev and Bunin.

Sokolov-Mikitov’s work is autobiographical, but not in the sense that he wrote only about himself, but because he always talked about everything as an eyewitness and participant in certain events. This gives his works an almost documentary persuasiveness and that poetic authenticity that so attracts the reader.

“I was lucky enough to become close to Ivan Sergeevich in the early years of his literary work,” recalls K. A. Fedin. “This was soon after the Civil War. For half a century, he devoted me so much to his life that sometimes it seems to me that it has become mine.

He never set out to write his biography in detail. But he is one of those rare artists whose life seemed to combine everything that was written by him.”

K a l e r i a Z h ekh o v a

His name is undeservedly forgotten. In school programs (even for extracurricular reading) in literature, the name of Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov, unfortunately, is not mentioned. Meanwhile, his numerous stories and tales, imbued with love for the Motherland, for its nature and people, contain such lessons in moral, aesthetic and patriotic education that acquaintance with them cannot but enrich the human soul. The starting point for a new acquaintance with the personality and work of this writer can be the material published below.

One and a half kilometers from the village of Andreevskoye, near Kaluga, there was once the Oseki tract: a spacious residential building, the management office of the famous Kaluga and Smolensk timber merchant millionaire N. Konshin, and several utility rooms.

Oseki is the small homeland of the 20th century Russian writer Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov (1892-1975). Here May 17(30), 1892 he was born and received his first impressions of the world around him, of rural life, which he would later describe with such love in his works. Later, he would call his childhood years the happiest in his long and difficult life, and define their influence on his own work as follows: “I owe the lyrical quality of my talent to the rural estate world, the simple people around me, and Russian nature.”

The future writer grew up and was brought up in a strong economic family, where advice and love reigned. His father, Sergei Nikitich Sokolov, served as manager of the Konshin forests. Mother, Maria Ivanovna Novikova, is a Kaluga peasant woman from the village of Khvalovo, Babyninsky district. Like her husband, Maria Ivanovna loved nature, rural life and work, and was an extraordinary storyteller. Many years later, Ivan Sergeevich would write in autobiographical notes: “From my mother, a Kaluga hereditary peasant woman, I borrowed a flair for words, restlessness of character, from my father - a love of nature, a lyrical cast of soul.”

Fiction became another important source of understanding national life, the beauty and richness of the native word for the future writer. Reading books from the age of six was one of his favorite pastimes; the works of Pushkin, S. Aksakov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol became reference books. In the essay “The Book in My Life” (1972), Sokolov-Mikitov wrote: “My affection began with Pushkin, a vigilant passion for reading awakened<...>And today I cannot imagine life without a book. In the blindness that has befallen me, I rejoice in every page read aloud to me.”

In 1895, the Sokolov family (they were called Mikitovs by the name of their paternal grandfather, hence the writer’s pseudonym, which became the second part of the surname) moved to live in the homeland of Sergei Nikitich, in the village of Kislovo, Dorogobuzh district, Smolensk province. But I. S. Sokolov-Mikitov did not forget his small homeland until the end of his days. In his adolescence, he and his parents more than once visited Babynin’s relatives and his father’s friends in Andreevsky and Kaluga, and in the 1930s-50s. He repeatedly came to Optina Pustyn, where he worked on his works. The writer visited K. Paustovsky in Tarusa more than once, with whom he developed friendly relations.

But the formation and development of Sokolov-Mikitov as a writer and citizen was connected not only with the Kaluga and Smolensk regions. His life is replete with trips, travels, acquaintances, friendships with dozens of interesting people, communication with whom enriched the inner world of the artist of words. I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov did not belong to the type of armchair writer. His creative development was due to his deep knowledge of life, many human characters and destinies.

In 1910, Sokolov-Mikitov came to study in St. Petersburg. Meeting with the then famous prose writer A.M. Remizov, who warmly approved of his literary debut - a fairy tale for children “The Salt of the Earth” (1911), and then his acquaintance with A. Kuprin, I. Bunin, M. Prishvin, V. Shishkov helped to finally determine his future path in life - artistic creativity. From the end of 1912, Sokolov-Mikitov, at the invitation of the owner of the Revelsky Leaflet, began to collaborate in this newspaper, publishing reports, notes, stories, feuilletons, and poems.

The thirst for knowledge of the world forces him to enlist as a sailor in the merchant fleet, which enriched the aspiring writer with knowledge about the countries of Europe and the Middle East, and communication with the inhabitants of Old Athos, where Sokolov-Mikitov lived for several weeks in 1914, brought him closer to Orthodoxy. From 1916 until the February Revolution, the writer was in the active army, first as a medical orderly, and then as a mechanic on one of the first Russian aircraft under the command of the famous pilot Gleb Alekhnovich.

During the years of the civil war, fate throws I. Sokolov-Mikitov to the Crimea, where he meets the writer I. Shmelev, who experienced terrible months of hunger, devastation, terror in Alushta, and then abroad, to England, then to Berlin, where he is warm hosted by Russian emigrant writers, including Gorky, Bunin, A. Tolstoy. After returning home, Sokolov-Mikitov worked as a teacher in the Smolensk region, then as part of an Antarctic expedition he visited Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land, and took part in the work to rescue the famous icebreaker "Malygin", which crashed off the coast of Spitsbergen.

Sokolov-Mikitov visited the Urals, Karelia, the Caspian Sea, the Crimea and the Caucasus more than once; he lived for several years on the Volga, in the village of Karacharovo in the Tver region and in Leningrad. He sailed on the famous icebreakers "Krasin" and "Georgiy Sedov", and on distant Novaya Zemlya one of the bays was named in memory of him. The writer completed his earthly works and days in Moscow on February 20, 1975.

Fate did not spoil Ivan Sergeevich at all. At different times, he buried all three of his beloved daughters: Lida (1928-1931), Irina (1924-1940) and Elena (1926-1951). In the last years of his life, the writer was completely blind, and was forced to dictate his new works.

But despite all this, he never fell into despair, and until the end of his days he remained a man of a bright soul, sensitive and attentive to people. Everyone who knew him, and he was on friendly terms with dozens of people, answered him in the same way. A. Tvardovsky, A. Remizov, K. Fedin, S. Voronin, P. Dudochkin, G. Goryshin, M. Dudin, F. Abramov, V. Soloukhin left heartfelt memories of him; his creative gift was highly valued by Bunin, Kuprin, Shishkov, Prishvin, Paustovsky, V. Bianchi, A. Green and other writers and cultural figures.

The work of Sokolov-Mikitov is a very noticeable phenomenon in Russian literature of the 1910-1970s. Already the first works of the prose writer were perceived as a promising phenomenon in Russian literature. Here is just one of the authoritative opinions: “I really appreciate your gift of writing for your vivid depiction, true knowledge of people’s life, for your short, lively and truthful language. Most of all, I like that you have found your own, exclusively your style, “your own form”; both do not allow you to be mixed up with someone, and this is the most precious thing,” A.I. Kuprin wrote to Sokolov-Mikitov from Paris in June 1921. Kuprin was not mistaken in his assessment of Sokolov-Mikitov’s work. The features of the writer’s works he noted - “bright imagery”, “living and truthful language”, “true knowledge of folk life”, “own style” - became stable distinctive features of Sokolov-Mikitov’s poetics.

An excellent connoisseur of folk life and Russian nature, Sokolov-Mikitov traveled far and wide across the vast expanses of Russia and with great artistic insight captured the appearance of his native land in his works.

Creativity of I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov is thematically very diverse. He is the author of stories about the First World War. Criticism of those years noted that such works as “Forward”, “With a Stretcher”, “Terror”, “Calm before the Storm” and others were created by a writer who “looked up to the best literary prose of L.N. Tolstoy." Impressions from meetings with G. Alekhnovich and from flying on the Ilya Muromets plane gave the writer material for the artistic essays “Glebushka”, “Bird Happiness”, “New Ship”, “On Ilya Muromets”, which were among the first in Russian literature works on aviation topics.

Sokolov-Mikitov’s stay in exile led to the appearance of the story “Chizhikov Lavra” (1926) - a reverent story about the suffering and fortitude of the Russian people, cut off from their homeland. Written on behalf of a warrant officer in the Russian army, this story is the confession of a man who went through the crucible of war, German captivity and subsequent ordeals in a foreign and alien England. Together with the novels and stories of Kuprin, Shmelev, Balmont and other writers, this work opens up an extensive list of works about the sad fate of Russian emigrants, thrown out of their beloved Motherland by the tornado of the World War and the October Revolution.

The writer’s contribution to Russian marine studies is obvious: his works “Sea Stories”, “Distant Shores”, “The Path of the Ship”, “The Rescue of the Ship” are read with keen interest. Equally interesting and picturesque are his numerous hunting stories (“Summer in the Forest”, “Green Land”, “On Hunting Paths”, “First Hunt”, “Swans Are Flying”) and works about the life, habits, zoopsychology of forest animals and domestic animals (“Found Meadow”, “Fursik”, the series “Forest Pictures” and many others).

Sokolov-Mikitov devoted a lot of time and effort to creating stories and fairy tales for children, compiling the collections “Bodywork”, “Fox Dodges”, “Friendship of Animals”, in which he introduced young readers to the world of wildlife. One of the central places in his work is occupied by the theme of the village, the image of Russian nature, the life and destinies of the peasantry. Such are his stories “Helen”, cycles of stories and artistic essays “On the Warm Land”, “On the Nevestnitsa River”, “On His Own Land” and especially the story “Childhood”.

The autobiographical story “Childhood” (1931) accumulated many years of artistic quest of the writer, his desire to comprehend the causes and origins of the formation of the moral and spiritual world of the individual. It absorbed many of the problems that worried Sokolov-Mikitov throughout his creative career: problems of ancestral and historical memory, love and death, the past, present and future of Russia, the relationship between man and nature, the peculiarities of life and character of the inhabitants of the Russian village, and others. In this sense, “Childhood” is closely related to such outstanding works of Russian autobiographical prose about childhood, the formation of personality, such as the trilogy of L. Tolstoy and Gorky, “The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson” by S.T. Aksakov, “The Life of Arsenyev” by Bunin, “Childhood Nikita" by A. Tolstoy, "The Summer of the Lord" by I. Shmelev, "The Journey of Gleb" by B. Zaitsev.

I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov was destined to become the author of one of the last works in the history of Russian literature about the life of the Russian pre-revolutionary village.

The story “Childhood” covers a period of time of approximately ten years in the life of its main character, little Vanya. However, the essentially chronological framework of the work is much wider. They are expanded by excursions into history.

Just as the hero of I. Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev” is rightfully proud of his noble ancestry, the autobiographical hero of Sokolov-Mikitov tells with undisguised sympathy about the ancestry of a peasant family. The story “Childhood” is the first work in our literature that poetizes the peasant dynasty, emphasizes the role of “peasant nests” in Russian history, in the life of Russia, and affirms the idea of the interconnection of generations in a simple peasant environment.

The autobiographical hero of the work is rightfully proud of his ancestors. The Sokolov and Novikov families are hardworking, economic, strong peasant families, connected by blood ties with the life of the village of root, deep Russia. His great-grandfather was a sexton, who, like many village men, walked in bast shoes, “picking up the earth with a plow”, his grandfather was a deacon of a provincial church, who fed “like Adam, on earth: bees and a garden” and managed to “go out and raise” all his nine children. Here everyone worked earnestly, sacredly revered traditions and rituals, “on the great twelve holidays, even before meals, we usually prayed in Grandfather’s large room with the whole family... Grandfather read the prayer out loud, frowning sternly and moving his honey-colored beard.” These noble traditions were passed on from generation to generation: from grandfathers to fathers, from fathers to children and further along the steps of memory.

The family of the autobiographical hero of the story is the center of creative deeds, habits and moral rules that gracefully enter the boy’s mind and soul. The writer lovingly paints the image of his mother, “a rare Russian woman” who knew how “until the last day of her life, give people the remnants of her strength.” She introduced the boy to the wonderful world of fairy tales, taught him to feel the beauty and sonority of the Russian word.

In almost every chapter of the story there is an image of his father, and the older Vanya becomes, the closer and dearer his father is to him. He discovered for the boy the inexhaustible world of his native nature, its discreet, but full of inexplicable meaning beauty: “... My father took me in his arms, and from the height of his height I saw fields, a familiar river, the edge of a green forest, and joyfully pressed me to his chest.. Through my father’s eyes I saw the majestic world of my native Russian nature unfolding before me... Now, when I remember my father, his simple, clear soul, I still feel with all my strength how significant the indestructible and bright world of our mutual love was that connected us.”

“Childhood” is not only a poignantly bright story, imbued with the warmth of the author’s love and memory, about the family and relatives of the autobiographical hero. Other villagers, poeticized by the author, also come into the writer’s field of vision: the honest and good-natured strongman Pankrat, the village holy fool Obroska, the clever Pronka the shepherd... For the writer, the people are not a dark, ignorant, oppressed mass. This is a worker, a creator, a bearer of deep, soil culture, a faithful guardian from century to century of passing spiritual and moral traditions, rituals, and customs. The representatives of rural Rus' depicted by the authors are strictly individualized - with their own destinies, affections, and characters. But they all share common features: hard work, respect for elders, deep, unostentatious love for their native land. In communication with them, in close unity with nature, descriptions of which are generously scattered on the pages of all the writer’s works without exception, the worldview and moral ideals of the autobiographical hero are formed: “In early childhood, I did not know or see the grave grievances that harden the human heart. Tender hands supported me and took care of me. And I thank fate, which rewarded me with the bright days of childhood - those happy days when springs of love are laid in the untouched hearts of people.”

There are also negative characters from among the common people in Sokolov-Mikitov’s works. Such are the inactive, landless peasant Obroska and his dissolute son, the drunkard Boris from the story “The Son,” who remind Denis of Sery and Yegor from Bunin’s stories “The Village” and “The Cheerful Yard.” These are also the sons of old man Yegor, depicted in one of the writer’s sketches, who beat their own father to death, demanding a family division.

However, in Sokolov-Mikitov’s stories there are immeasurably more images of peasants that are covered in the author’s undisguised sympathy. It tells about conscientious, talented people who are in love with their native land, living a difficult but morally meaningful, honest working life. The author's sympathy permeates, for example, the story about blind people earning a piece of bread by singing at fairs and bazaars (“Blind People”). In the story “Dudar”, in the image of the old man Semyon, a singer and self-taught musician, “the talent living in the Russian common man” is poeticized. Similar examples can easily be multiplied.

Sokolov-Mikitov wrote many works about the life of the post-revolutionary village. However, it is not social contrasts that attract his attention, but above all the way of life and morals, the deep spiritual generosity of the Russian peasant, the breadth of his soul, his unostentatious inner nobility and understanding of beauty. In the story “Gypsy,” for example, the men, enraged by the theft of a horse, are ready to first kill the young horse thief. But captivated by his virtuoso playing of the accordion, they not only let him go, but also generously treat him: “Eh, for such a game it would not be a pity to forget two horses!”

The village peasants are sympathetic to young Almazov, the son of a landowner from a neighboring estate, who lost everything during the revolution: wealth, a calm, well-established life, happiness (story “Dust”).

With enlightened sadness, the writer narrates in the story “Honey Hay” about the last days of the young peasant girl Tonka, who overstrained herself at hard work and is now slowly passing away from life. The last wish of this meek, hard-working beauty is for her beloved friends to carry the coffin with her body to the graveyard. This wish is sacredly fulfilled. The writer paints Tonka's funeral against the backdrop of a sunny spring landscape, symbolizing the triumph of life over death.

The writer was clearly aware of the threat lurking in the country’s policy of forced de-peasantization of the countryside. A faint hint of these destructive processes comes through in his stories “On the Stumps”, “Kamchatka”, and in fragments of the unfinished novel “Kochany-Petersburg”. However, the writer’s faith in the positive principles inherent in the Russian peasant invariably prevailed in his forecasts regarding the future of Russia. This hope for the indestructibility of the national, soil roots of the Russian people is contained both in his artistic works and in his letters. “Here we have,” he wrote, for example, to the poetess M. Shkapskaya on February 18, 1924, “we come across nice people, “in Russia there are people like candles over which a storm passed and did not blow out...”

An analysis of Sokolov-Mikitov’s creativity also involves raising the question of his attitude to religion. His “Records of Old Years” contains many notes about the life of the rural clergy in the harsh 1920s. “Somehow it happened that of all the falls that the former ruling classes suffered, the rural clergy turned out to be the deepest,” the writer believes, clearly not saying, for censorship reasons, that this fall was a consequence of the most severe persecution of the revolutionary authorities against the Church.

Sokolov-Mikitov was not a churchgoer. However, he undoubtedly understood the role and significance of the Church in the existence of the Russian people well. The writer Vadim Chernyshev left a very eloquent testimony on this matter: “... A mutual friend, talking animatedly about her trip, called some church “lousy” in the sense that it was small and did not represent any historical or architectural value . Ivan Sergeevich, who was listening to her silently, immediately interrupted, getting angry:

You can't say that. There are no “lousy churches.”

There was confusion. And Ivan Sergeevich, in silence, repeated once again dryly and firmly:

A church cannot be “lousy.”

More than once he noted with pain how churches were being destroyed, graves in the church fences were being overgrown with burdocks and nettles. Therefore, Sokolov-Mikitov was convinced, “a writer-artist needs to say his word about the Russian people, about his native land - about our fields and forests, about large and small rivers, about their sweet poetic beauty. We should remember our grandfathers and fathers living on Russian soil.”

Russia is the starting point of Sokolov-Mikitov’s large-scale landscape thinking. It is not for nothing that the writer is called the singer of Russian nature. He truly was one of the outstanding landscape painters. The pictures of nature in his works are amazingly picturesque, accurate and flexible. “We leave the city at dawn. Below, over the river, a milky white fog spreads. The walls of the city cathedral rise from the silver sea of fog, and the roofs of the houses darken. Far, far across the river, out of the fog - as in ancient times - the shepherd's horn is heard<...>

Silence, morning, space. We drive out onto the highway - a wide, brisk road lined with old spreading birch trees covered with cracked bark. There are few of these ancient birches left - they are decrepit, hollow and seem to be sleeping soundly, having lowered their weeping branches to the very ground” (I, 302-303). This is how the story “Roads” begins, and this landscape overture sets the tone for the entire narrative, the thoughtful plot aspiration of the work. It lies in the focus on a lyrical, unconstrained perception of the surrounding world, on melancholy-pacified contemplation, on the free running of associations caused by changing impressions on the road.

Sokolov-Mikitov’s descriptions of nature are often lengthy and, at first glance, too detailed. But a careful reading of them invariably reveals that they are thoughtfully and accurately “weighed”, that every word in them is strictly verified and sensitively correlated with the main idea of the work. All this demonstrates the great talent and impeccable aesthetic taste of the master of words.

The artist's eye is attentive and precise, and his ear is extremely sensitive. It would seem what kind of life can be seen and heard at night in the winter forest. But the writer easily, simply and convincingly, with the grace inherent in true talent, shows that life in the forest continues even on frosty winter nights. A frozen branch crunched and broke - it was a white hare running under the trees, softly bouncing. “Something hooted and suddenly laughed terribly: it was an owl shouting somewhere. The wolves howled and fell silent.

Light weasels run across the diamond tablecloth of snow, leaving patterns of footprints, ferrets hunt for mice, and owls silently fly over the snowdrifts. Like a fairy-tale sentry, a big-headed gray owlet sat on a bare branch. In the darkness of the night, he alone hears and sees how life, hidden from people, goes on in the winter forest.”

Sokolov-Mikitov's prose is very musical and gravitates towards poetry. Many of his micronovels can be called, without exaggeration, prose poems: “A flowing white fog hung over the river and meadow. The tops of their heads turned golden, - a strong and cheerful someone screamed in the forest - and a dazzling sun rose above the earth.

The sun laughs and plays with its rays. I don’t have the strength to restrain myself looking at him.

Sun! Sun! Sun! - birds are singing.

Sun! Sun! Sun! - the flowers are blooming".

Sokolov-Mikitov had a magnificent gift for hearing and depicting the music of silence and captivating the reader with this feeling. It is no less important that landscape paintings do not live separately in many of the writer’s works, but are firmly fused with the life and inner world of man. Recreated by the generous and precise hand of an artist in love with the sounds, colors and smells of the surrounding world, the paintings of nature are filled with lyrical, philosophical and moral and ethical meaning. Russian nature appears under the pen of Sokolov-Mikitov as the substance of national existence. Behind the seemingly simple landscape sketches there arises a thought about the Motherland, about the strength and unfading of life, about its complex paths and crossroads. Here is a note from Sokolov-Mikitov’s notebook dated June 10, 1967: “... Yesterday I went out on the road to the field. He stopped shocked. Close by I heard a familiar, wet, cheerful, joyful sound: the jerk was screaming. Something distant and irrevocable rushed into my soul. I stood, listened and cried, tears flowed. And again I felt like that side of life. The jerks shouted just as joyfully a thousand and ten thousand years ago, when there were no vile, stinking and noisy human cities on earth. There were no wars, and there were no slaves and cruel violence. I stood, listened to the jerk, and tears flowed down my cheeks.”

This small, psychologically capacious sketch embodies a whole philosophy of existence, the artist’s view of the relationship between times, the earthly and heavenly worlds.

In the writer’s nature paintings, it is no coincidence that the same epithet, natural and organic for his figurative system, is often repeated "warm". “On the Warm Earth” is the title of one of his short story cycles. And this name is very symptomatic and symbolic. Healing warmth that heals the human soul is one of the most important leitmotif images in Mikitov’s work. “Light, warmth, birch trees are putting on clothes,” “the native land is warm,” “the earth was breathing with a warm breath,” “I wanted to cuddle up to my native warm land,” - this is the image of native nature in his works. Whether depicted in bloom or in decline, she invariably radiates the life-giving currents necessary for man. Awareness of the high unity of nature and man, the conjugation of all living things in the created world is one of the most essential signs of true humanity for the writer. Nature in the works of Sokolov-Mikitov is an active catalyst for the best moral qualities of man. It is in natural communication with her, in spiritual relaxation and awareness of his involvement in her fate, in her wise strength and beauty, that the lyrical hero of the writer’s works acquires the fullness of being.

The theme of man and nature was perceived and recreated by Sokolov-Mikitov as a natural continuation and development of one of the main themes of Russian classical literature. In terms of its worldview, themes, genre features, and manner of artistic writing, the work of I.S. Sokolov-Mikitov is organically integrated into Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries, inheriting many traditions of S. Aksakov, I. Turgenev, L. Tolstoy, A. Kuprin, I. Bunin, I. Shmelev. Here is a typical example. In 1964, in his memoir essay “Bunin,” I. Sokolov-Mikitov cited lines from a letter to him from V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina: “Ivan Alekseevich always spoke well of you both as a person and as a writer.” This Bunin-style restrained praise was very dear to Sokolov-Mikitov. This circumstance cannot be bypassed in any way when studying the artistic originality of the work of the writer, who, not without reason, considered himself a student of Bunin. The point here is not at all a matter of imitation of Bunin, although the problem-thematic and genre-style lessons of the Nobel laureate are palpable in Sokolov-Mikitov’s cycle of travel essays and short stories “Sea Stories”, in the stories “Childhood” and “Chizhikov’s Lavra”, in the stories “Son” , “Ava”, “Blind”, “Dudar”, “Dust” and others.

Another small example: in his autobiography, Sokolov-Mikitov writes that in 1922 fate threw him to hungry, dilapidated Alushta, where he “met and became close friends with I.S. Shmelev." These writers became close friends because they sensed in each other the kinship of human and creative traits. Their creative closeness is captured, in particular, when comparing Shmelev’s story “Rosstani” (1913) and Sokolov-Mikitov’s story “Honey Hay” (1928), which deal with the wise and natural acceptance of death by their main characters. Both writers impeccably conveyed the psychological state of two people - a very old man and a young girl, who honestly walked their earthly paths. This is how writers depict the funeral of these characters: “It was sunny, hot, quiet. Everyone sang, and the prayer was sung in women’s voices. And it looked like in the sunny grove that this was not the last funeral, but the festive hubbub of a village religious procession” (“Rosstani”). “The morning was golden, like an endless blue sea, the earth was smoking and waking up... and as if in order to express the full power of this brilliant, spacious and forever indestructible world, all the way over the girls the larks, invisible in the high sky, were pouring over the girls” (“Honey Hay” "). The above quotes testify to the common worldview of both literary artists. In particular, in their approach to the problem of death, which in their works is devoid of a mystical aura and fatal mystery. It is natural and necessary in the general cycle of existence. Life triumphs immeasurably over death - this is the writers’ view of this problem, their eschatological optimism.

The same can be said about Sokolov-Mikitov’s overlap with the creative practice of Aksakov, Turgenev, Prishvin and some other literary artists. This is not about epigonism, but about a creative school, i.e. about the richest traditions of Russian literature, repeatedly refracted in the works of Sokolov-Mikitov, traditions that he consciously followed from the first to the last steps of his creative path. A. Tvardovsky said this well in 1959 in the preface to a two-volume set of selected works of the writer: “The nature of his writing - leisurely without marking time, thorough without petty excesses of detail, melodious without deliberate rhythmic “voice” - most of all he owes to the classical Russian tradition - S.T. Aksakov with his “Family Chronicle”, I.S. Turgenev with “Notes of a Hunter”, I.A. Bunin...”

Many of Sokolov-Mikitov’s works clearly demonstrated his artistic skill and creative originality. The overwhelming majority of his stories, short stories, micro-novels, and sketches tell of events and facts taken directly from life, often personally experienced. To write about life in the forms of life itself - this was the most important aesthetic principle of the writer. The plot, language, images, architectonics of his stories and stories are like an artistic analogue of reality itself. He saw fidelity to real life as the basis of the emotional effectiveness of works of art, a means of bridging the gap between the author’s and the reader’s worldview. In the article “Pure Word”, dedicated to the work of S. Aksakov, one of his favorite authors, Sokolov-Mikitov wrote: “A deeply truthful writer, S.T. Aksakov did not know how and was chastely ashamed to “invent”, “compose”, he never stood in verbally beautiful and spectacular poses that attracted empty onlookers. He did not resort to verbal tricks, replacing the expressive features of the author’s language with bad and far-fetched literature, and the genuine, clear author’s wisdom with crafty and vulgar philosophizing.” These words can fully characterize the creative principles of Sokolov-Mikitov himself.

His works, simple in plot, are expressive in language, flexible and clear in embodying the author’s view of the world and man. Sokolov-Mikitov's best stories combine the most difficult things - simplicity of narration, accuracy and poetry of the literary word, depth and uniqueness of the author's view - the view of a citizen writer passionately in love with Russia and his people.

No matter what I.S. talks about. Sokolov-Mikitov - about the life of the Kaluga and Smolensk villages or about the Arctic, about Russian people suffering in the night shelters of London, or about the habits of forest animals and birds, about the exotic countries of the Middle East, or about the discreet beauty of the nature of central Russia - in his works invariably there is an image of the Motherland. “I knew and saw Russia with the blood of my heart,” wrote Sokolov-Mikitov, “I felt in myself the cruel tragic shortcomings, the vices that afflicted the people. But, like, perhaps, many Russians who have not lost the ability to give their hearts to love, Russia was for me the very world in which I lived, moved, and which I breathed. I didn’t notice this environment, Russia, like a fish doesn’t notice the water in which it lives. I myself was Russia, a man with a sad, joyless fate.”

« I myself was Russia,” - Very few people have the right to say that about themselves. Sokolov-Mikitov suffered in full for this right. He did not need to look for “paths to the people”, to the Motherland. He organically felt himself to be an integral part of them: “When I talk about the life and fate of a boy with an open blond head, this image merges with the idea of my homeland and nature,” he will write about himself in the story “A Date with Childhood.”

“The feeling of homeland” was the most important thing that supported him in the difficult moments of his life, when his daughters died one after another, when blindness forced him to move from a life full of movement to immobility and cruel darkness. It is no coincidence that one of the writer’s closest friends, A. Tvardovsky, called him “a real human being,” and K. Fedin, who had been friends with him since the late 20s, admitted in one of his letters: “I envied you: what kind of man are you, old man?” Russian how you know how to live well.”