M bitter how I learned to read. How I learned to read

When I was six or seven years old, my grandfather began to teach me to read and write. It was like that.
One evening he took out a thin book from somewhere, slapped his palm with it, me on the head, and said cheerfully:
- Well, Kalmyk cheekbone, sit down to learn the alphabet! Do you see the figure? This is “az”. Say: “az”! This is “buki”, this is “lead”. Understood?
- Understood.
- You're lying.
He pointed his finger at the second letter.
- What's this?
- “Buki.”
- This?
- “Lead.”
- And this? – He pointed to the fifth letter.
- Don't know.
- “Good.” Well, what is this?
- “Az.”
- Got it! Say – “verb”, “good”, “is”, “live”!
He hugged me by the neck with a strong, hot hand and poked his fingers at the letters of the alphabet that lay under my nose, and shouted, raising his voice:
- "Earth"! "People"!
It was interesting for me to see that familiar words - good, eat, live, earth, people - were depicted on paper with simple, small signs, and I easily remembered their figures. For two hours my grandfather was teaching me the alphabet, and at the end of the lesson I could name more than ten letters without error, completely not understanding why this was necessary and how one could read, knowing the names of the alphabetic characters of the alphabet.
How much easier it is to learn to read and write now, using the sound method, when “a” is pronounced like that - “a”, not “az”, “v” - so it is “v”, and not “lead”. The learned people who came up with the sound method of teaching the alphabet deserve great gratitude - how much children’s strength is preserved thanks to this and how much faster the acquisition of literacy goes! Thus, everywhere science strives to facilitate human labor and save his energy from unnecessary waste.
I memorized the entire alphabet in three days, and now the time has come to learn syllables, to compose words from letters. Now, according to the sound method, this is done simply, a person pronounces the sounds: “o”, “k”, “n”, “o” and immediately hears that he said a certain word familiar to him - “window”.
I learned differently: in order to say the word “window,” I had to utter a long nonsense: “he’s like ours, he’s a window.” Polysyllabic words were even more difficult and incomprehensible, for example: to form the word “floorboard”, you had to pronounce “peace-on=po=po”, “people-on=lo=polo”, “vedi-ik=vi=polovi”, “tsy-az=tsa=floorboard”! Or “worm”: “worm-is=che”, “rtsy-lead-yaz=tear=worm”, “what-er=k=worm”!
This confusion of meaningless syllables tired me terribly, my brain quickly got tired, my reasoning did not work, I said ridiculous nonsense and laughed at it myself, and my grandfather beat me on the back of the head or flogged me with rods for this. But it was impossible not to laugh, saying such nonsense as, for example: “think-he=mo=mo”, “rtsy-good-lead-ivin=rdvin=mordvin”; or: “buki-az=ba=ba, “sha-kako-izhe-ki=shki=bashki”, “artsy-er=bashkir”! It is clear that instead of “Mordvin” I said “mordin”, instead of “Bashkirs” “shibir”, once I said “bolt-like” instead of “god-like”, and “skopid” instead of “bishop”. For these mistakes, my grandfather severely flogged me with rods or pulled my hair until I had a headache.
And mistakes were inevitable, because in such reading the words are difficult to understand, you had to guess their meaning and say not the word that you read but did not understand, but one that sounds similar to it. You read “handicrafts”, but you say “mukosey”, you read “lace”, you say “chew”.
For a long time - about a month or more - I struggled with studying syllables, but it became even more difficult when my grandfather forced me to read the psalter written in Church Slavonic. Grandfather read this language well and fluently, but he himself poorly understood its difference from the civil alphabet. New letters “dog” and “xi” appeared for me, my grandfather could not explain where they came from, he hit me on the head with his fists and said:
- Not “peace”, little devil, but “dog”, “dog”, “dog”!
It was torture, it lasted for four months, in the end I learned to read both “in the civil” way and “in the church way,” but I received a decisive aversion and hostility towards reading and books.
In the fall I was sent to school, but a few weeks later I fell ill with smallpox and my studies were interrupted, to my great joy. But a year later I was sent back to school - a different one.
I came there in my mother’s shoes, in a coat altered from my grandmother’s jacket, in a yellow shirt and untucked pants, all this was immediately ridiculed, for the yellow shirt I received the nickname “ace of diamonds.” I soon got along with the boys, but the teacher and priest disliked me.
The teacher was yellow, bald, his nose was constantly bleeding, he would come to class with cotton wool plugged into his nostrils, sit down at the table, nasally ask questions about the lessons and suddenly, falling silent mid-sentence, pull the cotton wool out of his nostrils and look at it, shaking his head. His face was flat, copper, oxidized, there was some kind of green in the wrinkles, what made this face especially ugly were his completely unnecessary pewter eyes, which stuck so unpleasantly to my face that I always wanted to wipe my cheeks with my palm.
For several days I sat in the first department, on the front desk, almost right up to the teacher’s desk - it was unbearable, it seemed he didn’t see anyone but me, he muttered all the time:
- Pesko-ov, change your shirt! Pesko-ov, don’t mess around with your feet! Peskov, your shoes are leaking again!
I paid him for this with wild mischief: one day I took out half of a watermelon, hollowed it out and tied it on a thread to a door block in a dimly lit hallway. When the door opened, the watermelon rode up, and when the teacher closed the door, the watermelon landed with its cap right on his bald head. The watchman took me home with the teacher’s note, and I paid for this prank with my own skin.
Another time, I poured snuff into his desk drawer, he sneezed so much that he left the class, sending in his place his son-in-law, an officer, who forced the whole class to sing “God Save the Tsar” and “Oh, you, my will, my will.” " He clicked those who sang incorrectly on the heads with a ruler in a particularly sonorous and funny way, but not painfully.
The teacher of the law, a handsome and young, bushy-haired priest, disliked me because I did not have the “Sacred History of the Old and New Testaments” and because I imitated his manner of speaking.
When he came to class, the first thing he asked me was:
- Peshkov, did you bring the book or not? Yes. A book?
I answered:
- No. I didn't bring it. Yes.
- What "yes?
- No.
- Well, go home. Yes. Home. Because I don’t intend to teach you. Yes. I don't intend to.
This did not upset me very much, I left and until the end of classes wandered through the dirty streets of the settlement, taking a closer look at its noisy life.
Despite the fact that I studied tolerably, I was soon told that I would be expelled from school for misbehavior. I became depressed - this threatened me with great trouble.
But help came - Bishop Chrysanthos unexpectedly came to the school.
When he, small, in wide black clothes, sat down at the table, he pulled his hands out of his sleeves and said:
“Well, let's talk, my children!” – the class immediately became warm, cheerful, and had an unfamiliarly pleasant air.
Having called me to the table after many, he asked seriously:
- How old are you? Only about? How long are you, brother, huh? It rained a lot, huh?
Placing his withered hand with large, sharp nails on the table, taking his bushy beard in his fingers, he stared into my face with kind eyes, suggesting:
- Well, tell me from sacred history, what do you like?
When I said that I don’t have a book and I’m not studying sacred history, he straightened his hood and asked:
- How is this possible? After all, this needs to be taught! Or maybe you know or heard something? Do you know the Psalter? This is good! And prayers? You see now! And even lives? Poems? Yes, you know me.
Our priest appeared, red-faced, out of breath, the bishop blessed him, but when the priest began to talk about me, he raised his hand, saying:
- Allow me a minute... Well, tell me about Alexei, the man of God?..
- Very good poems, brother, huh? - he said when I paused, having forgotten some verse. – Anything else?.. About King David? I'll really listen!
I saw that he really listens and likes poetry; he asked me for a long time, then suddenly stopped, quickly inquiring:
– Did you study from the psalter? Who taught? Good grandfather? Wicked? Really? Are you very naughty?
I hesitated, but said yes! The teacher and the priest confirmed my consciousness in many words; he listened to them with his eyes downcast, then said, sighing:
- That's what they say about you - have you heard? Come on, come on!
Placing his hand on my head, from which came the smell of cypress wood, he asked:
- Why are you being naughty?
– It’s very boring to study.
- Boring? This, brother, is something wrong. If you were bored with studying, you would study poorly, but the teachers testify that you study well. So there is something else.

Maksim Gorky

How I studied

When I was six or seven years old, my grandfather began to teach me to read and write. It was like that.

One evening he took out a thin book from somewhere, slapped his palm with it, me on the head, and said cheerfully:

- Well, Kalmyk cheekbone, sit down to learn the alphabet! Do you see the figure? This is “az”. Say: “az”! This is “buki”, this is “lead”. Understood?

He pointed his finger at the second letter.

- What's this?

- “Buki.”

- “Lead.”

- And this? – He pointed to the fifth letter.

- Don't know.

- “Good.” Well, what is this?

- Got it! Say – “verb”, “good”, “is”, “live”!

He hugged me by the neck with a strong, hot hand and poked his fingers at the letters of the alphabet that lay under my nose, and shouted, raising his voice:

- "Earth"! "People"!

It was interesting for me to see that familiar words - good, eat, live, earth, people - were depicted on paper with simple, small signs, and I easily remembered their figures. For two hours my grandfather was teaching me the alphabet, and at the end of the lesson I could name more than ten letters without error, completely not understanding why this was necessary and how one could read, knowing the names of the alphabetic characters of the alphabet.

How much easier it is to learn to read and write now, using the sound method, when “a” is pronounced like that - “a”, not “az”, “v” - so it is “v”, and not “lead”. The learned people who came up with the sound method of teaching the alphabet deserve great gratitude - how much children’s strength is preserved thanks to this and how much faster the acquisition of literacy goes! Thus, everywhere science strives to facilitate human labor and save his energy from unnecessary waste.

I memorized the entire alphabet in three days, and now the time has come to learn syllables, to compose words from letters. Now, according to the sound method, this is done simply, a person pronounces the sounds: “o”, “k”, “n”, “o” and immediately hears that he said a certain word familiar to him - “window”.

I learned differently: in order to say the word “window,” I had to utter a long nonsense: “he’s like ours, he’s a window.” Polysyllabic words were even more difficult and incomprehensible, for example: to form the word “floorboard”, you had to pronounce “peace-on=po=po”, “people-on=lo=polo”, “vedi-ik=vi=polovi”, “tsy-az=tsa=floorboard”! Or “worm”: “worm-is=che”, “rtsy-lead-yaz=tear=worm”, “what-er=k=worm”!

This confusion of meaningless syllables tired me terribly, my brain quickly got tired, my reasoning did not work, I said ridiculous nonsense and laughed at it myself, and my grandfather beat me on the back of the head or flogged me with rods for this. But it was impossible not to laugh, saying such nonsense as, for example: “think-he=mo=mo”, “rtsy-good-lead-ivin=rdvin=mordvin”; or: “buki-az=ba=ba, “sha-kako-izhe-ki=shki=bashki”, “artsy-er=bashkir”! It is clear that instead of “Mordvin” I said “mordin”, instead of “Bashkirs” “shibir”, once I said “bolt-like” instead of “god-like”, and “skopid” instead of “bishop”. For these mistakes, my grandfather severely flogged me with rods or pulled my hair until I had a headache.

And mistakes were inevitable, because in such reading the words are difficult to understand, you had to guess their meaning and say not the word that you read but did not understand, but one that sounds similar to it. You read “handicrafts”, but you say “mukosey”, you read “lace”, you say “chew”.

For a long time - about a month or more - I struggled with studying syllables, but it became even more difficult when my grandfather forced me to read the psalter written in Church Slavonic. Grandfather read this language well and fluently, but he himself poorly understood its difference from the civil alphabet. New letters “dog” and “xi” appeared for me, my grandfather could not explain where they came from, he hit me on the head with his fists and said:

- Not “peace”, little devil, but “dog”, “dog”, “dog”!

It was torture, it lasted for four months, in the end I learned to read both “in the civil” way and “in the church way,” but I received a decisive aversion and hostility towards reading and books.

In the fall I was sent to school, but a few weeks later I fell ill with smallpox and my studies were interrupted, to my great joy. But a year later I was sent back to school - a different one.

I came there in my mother’s shoes, in a coat altered from my grandmother’s jacket, in a yellow shirt and untucked pants, all this was immediately ridiculed, for the yellow shirt I received the nickname “ace of diamonds.” I soon got along with the boys, but the teacher and priest disliked me.

The teacher was yellow, bald, his nose was constantly bleeding, he would come to class with cotton wool plugged into his nostrils, sit down at the table, nasally ask questions about the lessons and suddenly, falling silent mid-sentence, pull the cotton wool out of his nostrils and look at it, shaking his head. His face was flat, copper, oxidized, there was some kind of green in the wrinkles, what made this face especially ugly were his completely unnecessary pewter eyes, which stuck so unpleasantly to my face that I always wanted to wipe my cheeks with my palm.

For several days I sat in the first department, on the front desk, almost right up to the teacher’s desk - it was unbearable, it seemed he didn’t see anyone but me, he muttered all the time:

- Pesko-ov, change your shirt! Pesko-ov, don’t mess around with your feet! Peskov, your shoes are leaking again!

I paid him for this with wild mischief: one day I took out half of a watermelon, hollowed it out and tied it on a thread to a door block in a dimly lit hallway. When the door opened, the watermelon rode up, and when the teacher closed the door, the watermelon landed with its cap right on his bald head. The watchman took me home with the teacher’s note, and I paid for this prank with my own skin.

Another time, I poured snuff into his desk drawer, he sneezed so much that he left the class, sending in his place his son-in-law, an officer, who forced the whole class to sing “God Save the Tsar” and “Oh, you, my will, my will.” " He clicked those who sang incorrectly on the heads with a ruler in a particularly sonorous and funny way, but not painfully.

The teacher of the law, a handsome and young, bushy-haired priest, disliked me because I did not have the “Sacred History of the Old and New Testaments” and because I imitated his manner of speaking.

When he came to class, the first thing he asked me was:

- Peshkov, did you bring the book or not? Yes. A book?

I answered:

- No. I didn't bring it. Yes.

- What "yes?

- Well, go home. Yes. Home. Because I don’t intend to teach you. Yes. I don't intend to.

This did not upset me very much, I left and until the end of classes wandered through the dirty streets of the settlement, taking a closer look at its noisy life.

Despite the fact that I studied tolerably, I was soon told that I would be expelled from school for misbehavior. I became depressed - this threatened me with great trouble.

But help came - Bishop Chrysanthos unexpectedly came to the school.

When he, small, in wide black clothes, sat down at the table, he pulled his hands out of his sleeves and said:

“Well, let's talk, my children!” – the class immediately became warm, cheerful, and had an unfamiliarly pleasant air.

Having called me to the table after many, he asked seriously:

- How old are you? Only about? How long are you, brother, huh? It rained a lot, huh?

Placing his withered hand with large, sharp nails on the table, taking his bushy beard in his fingers, he stared into my face with kind eyes, suggesting:

- Well, tell me from sacred history, what do you like?

When I said that I don’t have a book and I’m not studying sacred history, he straightened his hood and asked:

- How is this possible? After all, this needs to be taught! Or maybe you know or heard something? Do you know the Psalter? This is good! And prayers? You see now! And even lives? Poems? Yes, you know me.

Our priest appeared, red-faced, out of breath, the bishop blessed him, but when the priest began to talk about me, he raised his hand, saying:

- Allow me a minute... Well, tell me about Alexei, the man of God?..

- Very good poems, brother, huh? - he said when I paused, having forgotten some verse. – Anything else?.. About King David? I'll really listen!

I saw that he really listens and likes poetry; he asked me for a long time, then suddenly stopped, quickly inquiring:

– Did you study from the psalter? Who taught? Good grandfather? Wicked? Really? Are you very naughty?

I hesitated, but said yes! The teacher and the priest confirmed my consciousness in many words; he listened to them with his eyes downcast, then said, sighing:

- That's what they say about you - have you heard? Come on, come on!

Placing his hand on my head, from which came the smell of cypress wood, he asked:

- Why are you being naughty?

– It’s very boring to study.

- Boring? This, brother, is something wrong. If you were bored with studying, you would study poorly, but the teachers testify that you study well. So there is something else.

End of introductory fragment.

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The article is printed in abbreviation, headings are included for the convenience of readers

Comrades!

In all the cities where I was able to talk with you, many of you asked verbally and in notes: how did I learn to write? Workers' correspondents, military correspondents, and generally young people starting literary work asked me about this in letters from all over the USSR. Many suggested that I write a book about how to write fictional stories, develop a theory of literature, and publish a literature textbook. I can’t, I won’t be able to make such a textbook, and besides, such textbooks - although not very good, but still useful - already exist.

History of literature

It is necessary for beginners to write knowledge of the history of literature; for this, the book by V. Keltuyal “History of Literature”, published by “Gosizdat”, is useful; it well depicts the process of development of oral folk art and written literature. In every business you need to know the history of its development. If the workers of every branch of production, and even better - every factory, knew how it arose, how it gradually developed, improved production, the workers would work better than they work, with a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical significance of their work, with greater passion .

Foreign literature

You also need to know the history of foreign literature, because literary creativity, in its essence, is the same in all countries, among all peoples. The point here is not only a formal, external connection, not that Pushkin gave Gogol the theme of the book “Dead Souls”, but Pushkin himself took this theme, probably from the English writer Stern, from the book “Sentimental Journey”; the thematic unity of “Dead Souls” with Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” is not important - it is important to make sure that for a long time, everywhere, a network has been and is being woven to capture the human soul, that there have always been, everywhere, people who set and They set the goal of their work to free people from superstitions, prejudices, and prejudices. It is important to know that everywhere they wanted and want to reassure a person in trifles that are pleasant to him and everywhere, there have always been and are rebels who sought and are seeking to raise a rebellion against the dirty and vile reality.

Science and literature

The fabulous successes of science and the speed of its growth are explained precisely by the fact that the scientist knows the history of the development of his specialty. There is much in common between science and fiction: in both cases observation, comparison, and study play the main role; An artist, just like a scientist, needs to have imagination and guesswork - intuition.

Imagination and conjecture complement the missing, not yet found links in the chain of facts, allowing the scientist to create hypotheses and theories that guide more or less accurately and successfully the search for reason, which studies the forces and phenomena of nature and, gradually subordinating them to the mind and will of man, creates a culture, which is our second nature, created by our will, created by our mind.

Conjectures of Mendeleev and Balzac

This is best confirmed by two facts: the famous chemist Dmitry Mendeleev created, based on the study of well-known elements - iron, lead, sulfur, mercury, etc. - the Periodic Table of Elements, which argued that many other elements should exist in nature, by no one else not found, not discovered; He also indicated the characteristics - the specific gravity - of each of these elements, unknown to anyone. Now all of them have been discovered, and besides them, using Mendeleev’s method, some others have been found, the existence of which he did not even imagine.

Another fact: Honorius Balzac, one of the greatest artists, a Frenchman, a novelist, observing the psychology of people, indicated in one of his novels that some powerful juices, unknown to science, probably operate in the human body, which explain the various psychophysical properties of the body . Several decades have passed, science has discovered several previously unknown glands in the human body that produce these juices - hormones - and has created a deeply important doctrine of internal secretion. There are many such coincidences between the creative work of scientists and major writers. Lomonosov and Goethe were both poets and scientists, just like the novelist Strindberg - he was the first to talk about the possibility of extracting nitrogen from the air in his novel Captain Kohl.

Ability to create a character

The art of verbal creativity, the art of creating characters and types, requires imagination, conjecture, and invention. Having described one shopkeeper, official, worker he knows, the writer will take a more or less successful photograph of just one person, but it will only be a photograph devoid of social and educational significance, and it will do almost nothing to expand, deepen our knowledge about man, about life .

But if a writer manages to abstract from each of twenty to fifty, out of a hundred shopkeepers, officials, workers the most characteristic class features, habits, tastes, gestures, beliefs, course of speech, etc., distract and unite them in one shopkeeper, official , working, with this technique the writer will create a type - it will be art. The breadth of observations and the wealth of everyday experience often arm the artist with a strength that overcomes his personal attitude to facts and his subjectivism. Balzac was subjectively a supporter of the bourgeois system, but in his novels he depicted the vulgarity and meanness of the philistinism with amazing, merciless clarity. There are many examples when an artist is an objective historian of his class, his era. In these cases, the significance of the artist’s work is equivalent to the work of a natural scientist who studies the conditions of existence and nutrition of animals, the causes of reproduction and extinction, and depicts pictures of their fierce struggle for life.

Cognition and imagination

In the struggle for life, the instinct of self-defense developed in man two powerful creative forces: knowledge and imagination. Cognition is the ability to observe, compare, study natural phenomena and facts of social life, in short: cognition is thinking. Imagination, too, in its essence, is thinking about the world, but thinking primarily in images, artistic; we can say that imagination is the ability to give natural phenomena and things human qualities, feelings, even intentions.

Romanticism and realism

There are two main “trends” or directions in literature: romanticism and realism. Realism is a truthful, unvarnished portrayal of people and their living conditions. Several formulas of romanticism have been given, but there is no exact, completely exhaustive formula with which all literary historians would agree; it has not yet been developed. In romanticism, it is also necessary to distinguish between two sharply different directions: passive romanticism - it tries either to reconcile a person with reality, embellishing it, or to distract him from reality to a fruitless delving into his inner world, to thoughts about the “fatal mysteries of life”, about love , about death - to mysteries that cannot be solved by “speculation” or contemplation, but can only be resolved by science. Active romanticism strives to strengthen a person’s will to live, to arouse in him a rebellion against reality, against any oppression of it.

But in relation to such classic writers as Balzac, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, Leskov, Chekhov, it is difficult to say with sufficient accuracy - who are they, romantics or realists? In major artists, realism and romanticism always seem to be combined. Balzac is a realist, but he also wrote novels such as “Shagreen Skin” - a work very far from realism. Turgenev also wrote things in a romantic spirit, just like all our other major writers, from Gogol to Chekhov and Bunin. This fusion of romanticism and realism is especially characteristic of our great literature; it gives it that originality, that strength, which is increasingly noticeably and deeply influencing the literature of the whole world.

Why does the desire to write arise?

The mutual relationship between realism and romanticism will be clearer for you, comrades, if you focus your attention on the question: “Why does the desire to write arise?” There are two answers to this question, one of them is given by my correspondent, the daughter of a worker, a girl of fifteen years old. She says in her letter:

I am 15 years old, but at such an early youth a talent for writing appeared in me, the reason for which was a painfully poor life.

It would, of course, be more correct if she said not “writing talent”, but “the desire to write in order to decorate with her “invention”, to enrich her “languorously poor life” with it.” Here the question arises: what can you write about while living a “poor life”?

The peoples of the Volga region, the Urals, and Siberia respond to it. Many of them did not have writing just yesterday, but tens of centuries before our days they enriched and embellished their “painfully poor life” in deep forests, swamps, in the desert steppes of the East and the tundras of the North with songs, fairy tales, legends about heroes, and fiction. about the gods; These inventions are called “religious creativity,” but in their essence they are also artistic creativity.

The desire to enrich a painfully poor life

If my fifteen-year-old correspondent really had talent - which I, of course, wish with all my heart - she would probably write so-called “romantic” things, try to enrich her “languorously poor life” with beautiful inventions, would portray people better than they are. Gogol wrote “On how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”, “Old World Landowners”, “Dead Souls”, he also wrote “Taras Bulba”. In the first three works he depicts people with “dead souls” and this is a terrible truth; such people lived and live to this day; depicting them, Gogol wrote as a “realist.”

There is nothing wrong with wanting to embellish reality.

In the story “Taras Bulba” he portrayed the Cossacks as God-loving knights and strongmen who lift the enemy on a pike, although the shaft of the pike cannot withstand the five-pound weight and breaks. In general, there were no such Cossacks, and Gogol’s story about them is a beautiful lie. Here, as in all the stories of “Rudy Panka” and in many others, Gogol is a romantic and, probably, a romantic because he was tired of observing the “painfully poor” life of “dead souls”.

Comrade Budyonny denounced Babel’s “Cavalry” - it seems to me that this was done in vain: Comrade Budyonny himself likes to decorate not only his fighters, but also his horses from the outside. Babel decorated his fighters from the inside and, in my opinion, better, more truthfully than the Gogol of the Cossacks.

Man is still in many ways a beast, but at the same time he is - culturally - still a teenager, and embellishing him, praising him is very useful: it increases his self-respect, it helps him develop confidence in his creative powers. In addition, there is something to praise a person for - everything good, socially valuable is created by his strength, his will.

Does it mean that by what is said above, I affirm the necessity of romanticism in literature? Yes, I defend it, but on the condition of a very significant addition to “romanticism.”

Another of my correspondents, seventeen years old, a worker, shouts to me:

I have so many impressions that I can’t help but write.

In this case, the desire to write is no longer explained by the “poverty” of life, but by its richness, the overload of impressions, and the inner urge to talk about them. The overwhelming majority of my young correspondents want to write precisely because they are rich in the impressions of life, “they cannot remain silent” about what they have seen and experienced. They will probably produce quite a few “realists,” but I think that in their realism there will also be some signs of romanticism, which is inevitable and legitimate in an era of healthy spiritual upsurge, and we are experiencing just such an upsurge.

Why did I start writing?

So, to the question: why did I start writing? - I answer: due to the force of pressure on me from a “languorously poor life” and because I had so many impressions that “I could not help but write.” The first reason forced me to try to bring into the “poor” life such fictions, “fictions” as “The Tale of the Falcon and Already”, “The Legend of the Burning Heart”, “Petrel”, and due to the strength of the second reason I began to write “realistic” stories. character - “Twenty-Six and One”, “The Orlov Spouses”, “The Mischievous Man”.

Fear of life

The fear of life was well experienced by me; Now I call this fear the fear of the blind. Living - as I told about this - in a very difficult environment, since childhood I saw the senseless cruelty and incomprehensible enmity of people, I was struck by the severity of the work of some and the animal well-being of others; I realized early on that the “closer to God” religious people consider themselves, the further they are from those who work for them, the more merciless their demands on working people; In general, I have seen much more of all the abominations of life than you see. In addition, I saw it in more disgusting forms, because in front of you dangles a tradesman, frightened by the revolution and no longer very confident in his right to be what he is by nature; and I saw the philistinism absolutely confident that they were living well and that this good, calm life of theirs was firmly established, forever.

Little misfortunes

At that time, I was already reading translations of foreign novels, among which I came across books by such magnificent writers as Dickens and Balzac, as well as historical novels by Ensworth, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dumas. These books told me about people of strong will, sharply defined character; about people who live with different joys, suffer differently, and quarrel over major disagreements. And around me the little people were greedy, envious, embittered, fighting and suing because the neighbor’s son broke a chicken’s leg with a stone or broke the glass in the window; due to the fact that the pie was burnt, the meat in the cabbage soup was overcooked, and the milk turned sour. They could spend hours lamenting the fact that the shopkeeper had added another penny to a pound of sugar, or the dry goods merchant to add another penny to a yard of calico. The little misfortunes of their neighbors caused them sincere joy; they hid it behind false sympathy. I saw clearly that it was the penny that served as the sun in the heavens of philistinism and that it was the penny that kindled petty and dirty enmity in people. Pots, samovars, carrots, chickens, pancakes, masses, name days, funerals, fullness to the ears and drinking until disgusting, until vomiting - this was the content of the life of the people among whom I began to live. This disgusting life caused me either a soporific, dulling boredom, or a desire to play mischief in order to wake myself up. Probably one of my correspondents, a man of nineteen, recently wrote to me about the same boredom:

With all my trepidation I hate this boredom with primus stoves, gossip, and dog squealing.

Hooliganism out of boredom

And sometimes this boredom exploded into furious mischief; at night, climbing onto the roof, I plugged the chimneys with rags and garbage; he threw salt into boiling cabbage soup, blew dust from a paper tube into the mechanism of the wall clock, and generally did a lot of things that are called hooliganism; I did this because, wanting to feel like a living person, I did not know, I did not find any other ways to verify this. It seemed that I was lost in the forest, in a thick windfall, tangled with tenacious bushes, in humus, where my leg went knee-deep.

Prisoners

I remember this incident: on the street where I lived, prisoners were taken from prison to a ship that took them along the Volga and Kama to Siberia; these gray people always gave me a strange attraction to them; Maybe I was jealous that they were under guard, and some were in shackles, but still going somewhere, while I had to live like a lonely rat in a basement, in a dirty kitchen with a brick floor. One day a large party was walking, convicts rattling their shackles; the outermost ones, towards the panel, were two men chained at the hand and at the leg; one of them was large, black-bearded, with horse eyes, with a deep, red scar on his forehead, with a mutilated ear - he was terrible. Looking at him, I walked along the panel, and he suddenly cheerfully and loudly shouted to me:

Aida, boy, take a walk with us!

With these words, it was as if he took me by the hand.

I immediately ran up to him, - the guard cursed me and pushed me away. And if I hadn’t pushed him away, I would have followed, as in a dream, this terrible man, I would have followed precisely because he was extraordinary, unlike the people I knew; let him be terrible and in shackles, just to go to another life. For a long time I remembered this man and his cheerful, kind voice.

Poems from the comedy about Robin Hood

I have another, also very strong, impression associated with his figure: I came across a thick book with the beginning torn off; I began to read it and did not understand anything except a story on one page about a king who offered a simple shooter the title of nobleman, to which the shooter responded to the king in verse:

Ah, let me live and end my life as a free peasant,

My father was a simple man - the man will be my son.

After all, there is more glory when our brother, a commoner,

He will turn out to be bigger in business than the noble gentleman.

I copied these heavy verses into a notebook, and for many years they served me as something like a wanderer’s staff, and perhaps a shield that protected me from the temptations and nasty teachings of the bourgeoisie - the “noble gentlemen” of that time. Probably in the lives of many young men there are words that fill the young imagination with driving force, like a tailwind filling a sail.

About ten years later I learned that these were verses from “The Comedy of the Jolly Gunman George Greene and Robin Hood,” a comedy written in the 16th century by Shakespeare’s predecessor, Robert Greene. I was very happy to learn this, and fell even more in love with literature, which has been a faithful friend and helper to people in their difficult lives since ancient times.

Fear of illiteracy and one's own insignificance

Yes, comrades, the fear of the vulgarity and cruelty of life was well experienced by me; I even went so far as to try to kill myself, and then for many years, remembering this stupidity, I felt burning shame and contempt for myself.

I got rid of this fear after I realized that people are not so evil as they are ignorant, and that it is not they and not life that frightens me, but I am frightened by my social and all kinds of illiteracy, my defenselessness, my lack of weapons in the face of life.

Exactly. And it seems to me that you should think especially carefully about this, because the fears, groans and complaints of some of you among you are also nothing more than the result of the complainants’ perceived lack of weapons in the face of life and their distrust in their ability to fight against everything from the outside , - and also from the inside, - the “old world” oppresses a person.

I answer the question: how did I learn to write?

I received impressions both directly from life and from books. The first order of impressions can be compared to raw materials, and the second to a semi-finished product, or, to put it roughly, in order to say it more clearly, in the first case there was cattle in front of me, and in the second, the skin removed from it and perfectly processed. I owe a lot to foreign literature, especially French.

Books help you understand loved ones

My grandfather was cruel and stingy, but I didn’t see him, I didn’t understand him as well as I saw and understood him after reading Balzac’s novel “Eugenie Grande.” Eugenia's father, old Grande, is also stingy, cruel and generally similar to my grandfather, but he is stupider and not as interesting as my grandfather. From comparison with the Frenchman, the Russian old man, whom I did not like, benefited and grew. It didn't make me change my attitude towards my grandfather, but it was a big discovery - a book has the ability to prove to me about a person what I don’t see, don’t know about him.

Foreign books

George Elliott's boring book "Middlemarch", the books of Auerbach, Spielhagen showed me that in the English and German provinces people do not live quite the same as in Nizhny Novgorod, on Zvezdinskaya Street, but not much better. They talk about the same thing, about their English and German pennies, about the need for fear of God and love for him; however, they, just like the people on my street, do not like each other, and especially do not like peculiar people who, in one way or another, are not like the majority of those around them. I didn’t look for similarities between foreigners and Russians, no, I looked for differences, but I found similarities.

Grandfather’s friends, bankrupt merchants Ivan Shchurov and Yakov Kotelnikov, talked about the same thing and in the same way as the people in Thackeray’s famous novel “The Bazaar of Everyday Vanity.” I learned to read and write from the psalter and loved this book very much - it speaks in beautiful musical language. When Yakov Kotelnikov, my grandfather and the old people in general complained to each other about their children, I remembered King David’s complaints to God about his son, the rebel Absalom, and it seemed to me that the old people were telling lies, proving to one another that people in general, and young people in particular , their lives are getting worse, they are becoming stupider, lazier, obstinate, and not fearing God. Dickens's hypocritical characters said exactly the same thing.

Listening attentively to the disputes between sectarian lecturers and priests, I noticed that both of them hold on to the word just as tightly as churchmen in other countries, that for all churchmen the word is a bridle on a person, and that there are writers very similar to churchmen. In this similarity I soon felt something suspicious, although interesting.

Lack of system in reading

Of course, there was no system or consistency in my reading; everything happened by chance. My host’s brother, Viktor Sergeev, loved to read French “boulevard” novels by Xavier de Montepin, Gaboriau, Lawnet, Bouvier, and after reading these authors, he came across Russian books that mockingly and hostilely described “nihilistic” revolutionaries. I also read “Panurgovo Herd” by Sun. Krestovsky, “Nowhere” and “On Knives” by Stebnitsky-Leskov, “Marevo” by Klyushnikov, “The Churned Sea” by Pisemsky. It was interesting to read about people who were almost nothing like the people among whom I lived, but rather relatives of the convict who invited me to “walk” with him. The “revolutionary nature” of these people remained, of course, not understood by me, which was part of the task of the authors who wrote “revolutionaries” in soot.

By chance I came across Pomyalovsky’s stories “Molotov” and “Pittish Happiness”. And so, when Pomyalovsky showed me the “agonizing poverty” of bourgeois life, the beggarliness of bourgeois happiness, I, although vaguely, still felt that the gloomy “nihilists” were somehow better than the prosperous Molotov. And soon after Pomyalovsky I read Zarubin’s most boring book “Dark and Bright Sides of Russian Life”; I didn’t find the bright sides in it, but the dark sides became clearer and more disgusting to me.

The benefits of bad books

I have read countless bad books, but they were also useful to me. The bad in life must be known as well and accurately as the good. You need to know as much as possible. The more varied the experience, the higher it lifts a person, the wider the field of vision becomes.

Foreign literature, providing me with abundant material for comparison, surprised me with its remarkable skill. She painted people so vividly and plastically that they seemed physically tangible to me, and besides, I always saw them more active than the Russians - they spoke less, did more.

French literature

“Great” French literature - Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert - had a real and deep educational influence on me as a writer; I would highly recommend reading these authors to “beginners.” These are truly brilliant artists, the greatest masters of form; Russian literature does not yet have such artists. I read them in Russian, but this does not prevent me from feeling the power of the verbal art of the French. After many “tabloid” novels, after Main-Reed, Cooper, Gustav Aimard, Ponson du Terrail, the stories of great artists gave me the impression of a miracle.

Feeling a miracle

I remember reading Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” on Trinity Day, in the evening, sitting on the roof of a barn, where I climbed to hide from festively inclined people. I was completely amazed by the story, as if I had gone deaf, blind - the noisy spring holiday was obscured before me by the figure of an ordinary woman, a cook who had not committed any feats, no crimes. It was difficult to understand why simple, familiar words, put by a man into a story about the “uninteresting” life of a cook, excited me so much? There was an incomprehensible trick hidden in this, and - I am not making this up - several times, mechanically and like a savage, I examined the pages in the light, as if trying to find the answer to the trick between the lines.

I was familiar with dozens of books that described mysterious and bloody crimes. But now I’m reading Stendhal’s “Italian Chronicles” and again I can’t understand - how was this done? A man describes cruel people, vengeful murderers, and I read his stories, like “the lives of the saints,” or I hear “The Dream of the Virgin Mary” - the story of her “walking through the torment” of people in hell.

And I was already completely amazed when in Balzac’s novel “Shagreen Skin” I read those pages where a banker’s feast is depicted and where dozens of people are talking at the same time, creating a chaotic noise, the polyphony of which I seem to hear. But the main thing is that I not only hear, but also see who says what, I see people’s eyes, smiles, gestures, although Balzac did not depict either the faces or figures of the banker’s guests.

Image art

In general, the art of depicting people with words, the art of making their speech alive and audible, the perfect mastery of dialogue, has always amazed me with Balzac and the French. Balzac's books are written as if in oil paints, and when I first saw Rubens' paintings, I remembered Balzac. Reading Dostoevsky's crazy books, I can't help but think that he owes a lot to this great master of the novel. I also liked the dry, clear, pen-drawing books of the Goncourts and the gloomy, dark-colored paintings of Zola. Hugo’s novels did not captivate me, I even read “The Ninety-Third Year” with indifference; The reason for this indifference became clear to me after I became acquainted with Anatole France’s novel “The Gods Thirst.” I read Stendhal’s novels after I had learned to hate a lot, and his calm speech and skeptical smile greatly confirmed my hatred.

From everything that has been said about books, it follows that I learned to write from the French. It happened by accident, but I think it turned out well, and therefore I strongly advise young writers to study French in order to read the great masters in the original and learn the art of words from them.

Great Russian literature

I read “great” Russian literature - Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Leskov - much later. Leskov undoubtedly influenced me with his amazing knowledge and richness of language. In general, he is an excellent writer and a keen expert on Russian life, a writer who is still not appreciated for his merits in our literature. A.P. Chekhov said that he owes him a lot. I think A. Remizov could say the same thing.

I point out these mutual connections and influences in order to repeat:

Knowledge of the history of the development of foreign and Russian literature is necessary for a writer.

Around the age of twenty, I began to understand that I had seen, experienced, and heard a lot of things that should and even need to be told to people. It seemed to me that I knew and felt something differently from others; this confused me and made me restless and talkative. Even reading books by such masters as Turgenev, I sometimes thought that, perhaps, I could tell, for example, about the heroes of “Notes of a Hunter” differently, not in the same way as Turgenev did. During these years, I was already considered an interesting storyteller; I was listened to attentively by porters, bakers, “tramps,” carpenters, railway workers, “wanderers in holy places,” and in general the people among whom I lived. While talking about the books I read, I increasingly caught myself telling it incorrectly, distorting what I read, adding to it something from myself, from my experience. This happened because the facts of life and literature merged into a single whole for me. A book is the same phenomenon of life as a person, it is also a living, speaking fact, and it is less a “thing” than all other things created and being created by man.

The intellectuals listened to me and advised:

Write! Try writing!

Often I felt as if I was drunk and experienced fits of verbosity, verbal violence from the desire to utter everything that burdened and pleased me, I wanted to tell it in order to “unload.” There were moments of such painful tension when, like a hysteric, I had a “lump in my throat” and I wanted to scream that the glazier Anatoly - my friend, a most talented guy - would die if I didn’t help him; that the prostitute Teresa is a good person and it is unfair that she is a prostitute, and the students, using her, do not see this, just as they do not see that Matica, the old beggar woman, is smarter than the young, well-read midwife Yakovleva.

Poetry

Secretly, even from my close friend, student Guriy Pletnev, I wrote poems about Teresa, Anatoly, that the snow melts in the spring not to flow dirty water from the street into the basement where the bakers work, that the Volga is a beautiful river, a pretzel maker Cousin is Judas the Traitor, and life is sheer disgusting and melancholy that kills the soul.

I wrote poetry easily, but I saw that they were disgusting, and I despised myself for my inability, for my lack of talent. I read Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, translations of Kurochkin from Beranger and saw very well that I was nothing like any of these poets

Prose

I didn’t dare write prose, it seemed to me more difficult than poetry, it required a particularly sophisticated vision, a perspicacious ability to see and note what was invisible to others, and some kind of unusually dense, strong arrangement of words. But nevertheless, I began to try myself in prose, however, choosing the style of “rhythmic” prose, finding simple - beyond my strength. Attempts to write simply led to sad and funny results. In rhythmic prose I wrote a huge “poem”, “The Song of the Old Oak.”

V. G. Korolenko, in a dozen words, completely destroyed this wooden thing, in which I, it seems, set out my thoughts on the article “Circle of Life”, published, if I’m not mistaken, in the scientific journal “Znanie” - the article spoke about the theory of evolution . Only one phrase from it remains in my memory:

“I came into the world to disagree,” and, it seems, I really did not agree with the theory of evolution.

But Korolenko did not cure me of my addiction to “rhythmic” prose and, after another five years, praising my story “Grandfather Arkhip”, he said that it was in vain that I had flavored the story with “something similar to poetry.” I didn’t believe him, but at home, after looking through the story, I was sadly convinced that an entire page - a description of a rainstorm in the steppe - was written by me precisely with this damned “rhythmic”.

Attempts to write beautifully

It haunted me for a long time, sneaking into stories unnoticed and inappropriately. I started stories with some singing phrases, for example:

The rays of the moon passed through the dogwood branches and the tenacious bushes of the tree,

and then, in print, I was ashamed to see that “the rays of the moon” were read like splinters, and “passed” was not the word that should have been used. In another story, “the cab driver took a pouch out of his pocket” - these three “from” next to each other did not really decorate the “painfully poor life.” In general, I tried to write “beautifully.”

“The drunk man, clinging to the lantern post, looked, smiling, at his shadow, it shuddered,” and the night - in my own words - was quiet, moonlit, on such nights they did not light lanterns, the shadow could not shudder if there was no wind and fire burns calmly. Such “misprints” and “slips of the tongue” occurred in almost every story I wrote, and I severely scolded myself for it.

“The sea laughed,” I wrote, and for a long time I believed that this was good.

In pursuit of beauty, I constantly sinned against the accuracy of descriptions, placed things incorrectly, and illuminated people incorrectly.

Criticism

“But your stove is not set up like that,” L.N. Tolstoy remarked to me, speaking about the story “Twenty-Six and One.” It turned out that the fire of the pretzel oven could not illuminate the workers as I had written.

A.P. Chekhov told me about Medynskaya in “Foma Gordeev”:

She, my friend, has three ears, one on her chin, look!

It was true - so unsuccessfully did I place the woman in the light.

Search for exact words

Such seemingly small mistakes are of great importance because they violate the truth of art. In general, it is extremely difficult to find exact words and put them in such a way that a few say a lot, “so that the words are cramped, the thoughts are spacious,” so that the words give a vivid picture, briefly note the main feature of the figure, and immediately strengthen in the reader’s memory the movements, course and tone speech of the person depicted. It’s one thing to “color” people and things with words, it’s another thing to depict them so “plastically,” vividly, that you want to touch what is depicted with your hand, as you often want to touch the heroes of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

I needed to write in a few words the appearance of a district town in central Russia. I probably sat for about three hours before I managed to find and arrange the words in this order:

The undulating plain is all crisscrossed with gray roads, and the colorful town of Okurov in the middle of it is like an intricate toy on a wide, wrinkled palm.

It seemed to me that I wrote well, but when the story was printed, I saw that I had made something similar to a painted gingerbread or a beautiful box for chocolates.

In general, words must be used with the strictest precision. Here is an example from another area: it was said: “Religion is opium.”

But doctors give opium to patients as a pain reliever, which means opium is useful to a person. But the fact that opium is smoked like tobacco, and that people die from smoking opium, that opium is a poison much more harmful than vodka-alcohol, is unknown to the general public.

Failures

My failures always make me remember the poet’s sad words:

There is no torment in the world stronger than the torment of words.

But A. G. Gornfeld speaks about this much better than I do in his book “The Torment of the Word,” published by Gosizdat in 1927.

“Our poor language is cold and pitiful,” Nadson seems to have said, and it was rare among the poets who did not complain about the “poverty” of the language.

Russian language

I think that these are complaints about the “poverty” not of Russian, but of human language in general, and they are caused by the fact that there are feelings and thoughts that are elusive, inexpressible in words. This is exactly what Gornfeld’s book speaks about perfectly. But, bypassing the “elusive in words,” the Russian language is inexhaustibly rich and everything is enriched with an amazing speed. To be convinced of the rapid growth of the language, one only has to compare the vocabulary - lexicons - of Gogol and Chekhov, Turgenev and, for example, Bunin, Dostoevsky and, say, Leonid Leonov. The latter himself stated in print that he comes from Dostoevsky, he could say that in some respects - I will point out the assessment of reason - he is also dependent on Leo Tolstoy. But both of these dependencies are such that they only testify to the significance of the young writer and do not at all hide his originality. In the novel "The Thief" he absolutely undeniably discovered that his linguistic richness is amazing; he has already given a whole series of his very apt words, not to mention the fact that the construction of his novel is amazing in its difficult and intricate construction. It seems to me that Leonov is a man of some kind of “his own song,” very original, he just started singing it, and neither Dostoevsky nor anyone else can stop him.

Faust and Parsley

I have already spoken above about how words “types” and characters are created by masters, but perhaps two interesting examples should be pointed out.

Goethe's "Faust" is one of the most excellent products of artistic creativity, which is always a "fiction", a fiction, or rather a "conjecture" and the embodiment of a thought in an image. I read “Faust” when I was about twenty years old, and after a while I learned that two hundred years before the German Goethe, the Englishman Christopher Marlowe wrote about Faust, that the Polish “popular” novel “Pan Twardowski” is also “Faust”, as well as like the novel by the Frenchman Paul Musset “The Seeker of Happiness”, and that the basis of all books about “Faust” is a medieval folk tale about a man who, in a thirst for personal happiness and power over the secrets of nature, over people, sold his soul to the devil. This legend grew out of observations of the life and work of medieval scientists “alchemists” who sought to make gold and develop an elixir of immortality. Among these people there were honest dreamers, “fanatics of the idea,” but there were also charlatans and deceivers. It is the futility of these units’ efforts to achieve “higher power” that was ridiculed in the story of the adventures of the medieval Doctor Faustus, whom the devil himself did not help achieve omniscience and immortality.

And next to the unfortunate figure of Faust, a figure was created, also known to all nations: in Italy it is Pulcinello, in England it is Ponch, in Turkey it is Karapet, in our country it is Parsley. This is the invincible hero of the folk puppet comedy, he defeats everyone and everything: the police, the priests, even the devil and death, but he himself remains immortal. In this crude and naive image, the working people embodied themselves and their belief that in the end it would be they who would overcome everything and everyone.

These two examples once again confirm what was said above: “anonymous” creativity, that is, the creativity of some people unknown to us, also obeys the laws of abstraction, abstraction of the characteristic features of a particular social group, and concretization, generalization of these features in one person of this group. The artist's strict obedience to these laws helps him create “types.”

So Charles de Coster made “Till Eulenspiegel” - the national type of the Flemish, Romain Rollan - the Burgundian “Cola Brugnon”, Alphonse Daudet - the Provencal “Tartarin”. It is possible to create such vivid portraits of “typical” people only if you have well-developed powers of observation, the ability to find similarities, see differences, and only if you study, study and study. Where there is no exact knowledge, there are guesses, and out of ten guesses, nine are errors.

Merchant's sons

I do not consider myself a master capable of creating characters and types artistically equivalent to the types and characters of Oblomov, Rudin, Ryazanov, etc. But still, in order to write “Foma Gordeev,” I had to see more than a dozen merchant sons, not satisfied with the life and work of their fathers, they vaguely felt that there was little meaning in this monotonous, “painfully poor life.” From those like Foma, condemned to a boring life and offended by boredom, thoughtful people, drunkards, “wasters of life”, hooligans came out in one direction, and “white crows” flew to the other, like Savva Morozov, whose funds were used to publish Lenin’s “ Iskra”, like the Perm steamboatman N.A. Meshkov, who supplied funds to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Kaluga factory owner Goncharov, the Muscovite N. Shmit and many more.

From here also came such cultural figures as the Cherepovets mayor Milyutin and a number of Moscow, as well as provincial merchants, who worked very skillfully and a lot in the field of science, art, etc. The godfather of Foma Gordeev, Mayakin, is also made of small dash, from the “proverbs”, and I was not mistaken: after 1905 - after the workers and peasants paved the road to power for the Mayakins with their bodies - the Mayakins, as you know, played a significant role in the struggle against the working class, and even now They still dream of returning to their old nests.

Young people ask me a question: why did I write about “tramps”?

Because, living in an environment of petty philistinism, seeing before me people whose only desire was the desire to fraudulently suck out a person’s blood, condense it into kopecks, and make rubles out of kopecks, I, too, like my nineteen-year-old correspondent, “with all my trepidation” began to hate this mosquito life of ordinary people, similar to each other, like copper coins minted from the same year.

The tramps appeared to me as “extraordinary people.” What was unusual about them was that they, “déclasse” people - cut off from their class, rejected by it - had lost the most characteristic features of their class appearance. In Nizhny, in “Millionka”, among the “golden company”, former wealthy burghers lived amicably with my cousin Alexander Kashirin, a meek dreamer, with the Italian artist Tontini, the gymnasium teacher Gladkov, Baron B., with an assistant police officer who had been sitting for a long time in prison for robbery, and with the famous thief “Nikolka the General,” whose real name was Fander-Fleet.

Tramps

In Kazan, at the Glass Factory, there lived about twenty people of the same motley variety. “Student” Radlov or Radunov; an old rag picker who served ten years of hard labor; former lackey of Governor Andreevsky Vaska Grachik; machinist Rodzievich, son of a priest, Belarusian; veterinarian Davydov. For the most part, these people were unhealthy, alcoholics, they lived not without fights among themselves, but they had a well-developed sense of comradely mutual assistance, everything that they managed to earn or steal was drunk and eaten together. I saw that although they live worse than “ordinary people,” they feel and recognize themselves better than them, and this is because they are not greedy, do not strangle each other, and do not hoard money. And some of them could save, they still have signs of “thrift” and a love for a “decent” life. They could save because Vaska Grachik, a clever and successful thief, often brought them his loot and handed it over to the “treasurer” Rodzievich, who managed the “management” of the plant without control and was a surprisingly soft, weak-willed person.

I remember several scenes of this kind: someone stole and brought good hunting boots, and it was decided to drink them away. But Rodzievich, a sick man who had been beaten by the police a few days before, said that only the tops should be drunk, and the heads should be cut off and given to “Student”; he walks around with the legs falling apart.

If his feet get cold, he will die, but he is a good person.

The heads were cut off, but the old convict offered to sew two pairs of bast shoes from the tops, one for himself, the other for Rodzievich. They never drank the boots. Grachik explained his friendship with these people and generous help to them with his love for the “educated”.

“I, brother, love an educated man more than a beautiful woman,” he told me.

He was a strange man, black-haired, with a thin, handsome face, and a good smile; always thoughtful, taciturn, he suddenly exploded with wild, almost frantic joy, danced, sang, talked about his successes, hugged everyone, as if he were going to war, to death.

At his expense, in the Back Mokra Street, where the Moscow Station is now, in the basement of the Butov tavern, about eight beggars, old men and old women, were fed, and among them was a young crazy woman with a one-year-old child. This is how he became a thief: being the governor’s lackey, he spent the night with his beloved, and in the morning, returning home, hungover, he snatched a rack of milk from a milkmaid and began to drink; he was grabbed and began to fight; the strict magistrate Kolontaev, a great liberal, put him in prison. Vaska, having served his sentence, climbed into Kolontaev’s office, tore up his papers, stole his alarm clock and binoculars and ended up in prison again.

I met him when, after an unsuccessful theft in the Tatar settlement, he was pursued by night watchmen, I tripped one of them, thereby helping Vasily escape, and I ran with him.

Strange people

The people among the tramps were strange, and I didn’t understand much about them, but what really won me over in their favor was that they didn’t complain about life, and spoke mockingly and ironically about the prosperous life of the “philistines,” but not out of a sense of hidden envy, not because “the eye sees, but the tooth is numb,” but as if out of pride, from the consciousness that they live badly, but in themselves are better than those who live “well.”

I saw the owner of the rooming house Sledgehammer, whom I depicted in the “former people,” for the first time in the cell of the magistrate Kolontaev. I was struck by the dignity with which this man in rags answered the judge's questions, the contempt with which he objected to the policeman, the prosecutor, and the victim innkeeper, beaten by the Sledgehammer. I was also amazed at the good-natured mockery of the Odessa tramp who told me the incident I described in the story “Chelkash.” I was in a hospital in the city of Nikolaev (Kherson) with this man. I remember well his smile, revealing his magnificent white teeth - the smile with which he concluded the story about the treacherous act of the guy he hired: “So I let him in with the money; go, you idiot, eat some porridge!”

He reminded me of the “noble” heroes of Dumas. We left the hospital together and, sitting with me in the lunettes of the camp outside the city, treating me to melon, he suggested:

Maybe you can do something good with me? I think it will do you some good.

I was very flattered by this offer, but at that time I already knew that there was something more useful than smuggling and theft.

Desire to portray extraordinary people

So this is what explains my passion for “tramps” - the desire to portray “extraordinary” people, and not people of the poor, bourgeois type. Here, of course, the influence of foreign and, first of all, French literature, more colorful and vibrant than Russian, was also felt. But what was mainly at work here was the desire to embellish at one’s own expense with “fiction” the “languorously poor life” that the fifteen-year-old girl is talking about.

This desire, as I already said, is called “romanticism.” Some critics considered my romanticism a reflection of philosophical idealism. I think it's wrong.

Philosophy and literature

Philosophical idealism teaches that “ideas” exist and dominate over man, animals and all things that man creates; they serve as the most perfect examples of everything created by people, and a person, in his activities, is completely dependent on them, all his work comes down to imitation of models, “ideas”, the existence of which he supposedly vaguely senses. From this point of view, somewhere above us there exists the idea of shackles and the internal combustion engine, the idea of the tuberculosis bacillus and rapid-fire weapons, the idea of the toad, the tradesman, the rat and, in general, everything that exists on earth and that is created by man. It is absolutely clear that this implies the inevitability of recognizing the existence of the creator of all ideas, some kind of creature who for some reason creates the eagle and the louse, the elephant and the frog.

For me there is no idea outside of man, for me it is he who is the creator of all things and all ideas, it is he who is the miracle worker and in the future the ruler of all the forces of nature. The most beautiful thing in our world is what was created by labor, by an intelligent human hand, and all our thoughts, all ideas arise from the labor process, as the history of the development of art, science, and technology convinces us of. The thought comes after the fact. I “bow” before man because, apart from the embodiments of his mind, his imagination, his conjecture, I do not feel or see anything in our world. God is the same human invention as, for example, “light painting”, with the difference that “photography” captures what really exists, and God is a snapshot from man’s invention of himself as a being who wants - and can - be omniscient , omnipotent and completely fair.

And if we really need to talk about “sacred”, then only a person’s dissatisfaction with himself and his desire to be better than he is is sacred; sacred is his hatred of all everyday rubbish created by himself; sacred is his desire to destroy envy, greed, crime, disease, war and all hostility among people on earth, sacred is his work.

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Maksim Gorky
How I studied