Alexander Green is an autobiographical story. Autobiographical story

It fully, although somewhat paradoxically, demonstrates the insignificance of modern so-called “democracy” - and it doesn’t matter which one - Russian, European, American, etc. In fact, we are witnessing a permanent diminution of purely personal rights; at the same time, all the abominations previously inherent in civilization are preserved.

1. Dad buys 10-year-old Grinevsky a gun, and he freely wanders with it through the forests and meadows, shooting at anything. Undoubtedly, modern Russian readers should immediately fall to the floor in exhaustion from colicky laughter. Will they sell any firearms to a drinking dad? Ha ha! Never! Will a 10 year old boy run with him? His dad will immediately be deprived of parental rights and his son will be sent to an orphanage (I almost wrote - a brothel) in which, undoubtedly, the child is much better off than in the family. It is there that the talent of a writer may well develop. And in general, shoot outside the hunting season? Fine for dad. Shoot in the forest? In which you can’t collect anything except dead wood (you can’t even pick mushrooms). A secondary fine for the father deprived of parental rights, or even criminal liability.

2 And what kind of money did the oppressed population deprived of democracy operate at that time? The most common ones are gold Nicholas imperials and semi-imperials, silver rubles and so on. Oh, yes, there is also paper money... which can be exchanged for gold without restrictions. Not funny? We, true democrats, only know paper that is subject to hyperinflation (which is equivalent to counterfeiting, in my opinion). But this is not the end of degradation. They force plastic on us. Well, the one that is being watched by the Eye of Sauron. It's very democratic, yes. Complete freedom, just report for the transfer, otherwise the Bank will appropriate the money for itself.

3. In the fourth part of the book, Grinevsky suddenly wanted to engage in mining. Problems? None. Found - yours; the main thing is to find it (although you need to hand it over where it should be, but for a reasonable price). Well, if you, reading these lines somewhere in Magadan, accidentally find a nugget, you will not receive anything. And if you go to purposefully wash the spot gold, then you’ll sit down. This is the same freedom that we all dreamed of.

On the other side.

1. Here the author describes how the sanitary inspectorate of that time rejected several pounds of sausage and threw it away, dousing it with kerosene. The tramps immediately ran up and began to devour her; The author also tried, but couldn’t. Not only that, stores are still engaged in a similar process (which I equate to defecation of the brain) - that is, they deliberately spoil the product being written off on the formal grounds of expiration. The worst thing is that, just like a hundred years ago, the descendants of Grinov’s tramps also run to store bins and take out a product from there, which they partly devour, and partly, they immediately resell (!) for a small bribe to more shy citizens. Why shouldn’t the “democrats”, instead of banning them from doing anything, eradicate poverty! But no! They always preserve it.

2. The trampiness itself, lovingly described by Green. It's all here; it hasn't gone away; it hasn't decreased. No smartphones or, at worst, space flights had any effect on this dark side of life. Tramps “shoot” money in ABSOLUTELY the same way, even the name of this trade has been preserved (!), although now for different reasons; they fight in the same way, even to the point of self-mutilation and murder; and they drink just as much – if not more, then no less. Thanks to the gentlemen Democrats for their hundred years of dominance.

3. It’s downright inconvenient to write about this - but even Green’s transparent hint at stories where young boys give their butts to rich Caucasians for money (!) - and I can’t say about that - yes, civilization has outlived this vileness. Please note that I do not write anything about similar voluntary amusements (although in my opinion this is not much less of an abomination).

For everything, since the theme is humanoid and very expressive for the drunk that I am, I give Green a 10.

P.S. I liked the sausage.

Flight to America

Is it because the first book I read, as a five-year-old boy, was “Gulliver’s Travels to the Land of the Lilliputians” - a children’s edition by Sytin with colored pictures, or because the desire for distant lands was innate - but only I began to dream of a life of adventure from the age of eight.

I read haphazardly, uncontrollably, voraciously.

In the magazines of that time: “ Children's reading”, “Family and School”, “Family Holidays” - I read mainly stories about travel, swimming and hunting.

After Lieutenant Colonel Grinevsky, my paternal uncle, was killed in the Caucasus by orderlies, among other things, my father brought three huge boxes of books, mainly in French and Polish; but there were quite a few books in Russian.

I spent days rummaging through them. Nobody bothered me.

Search interesting reading were a kind of journey for me.

I remember Draper, where I obtained information on the alchemical movement of the Middle Ages. I dreamed of discovering the “philosopher’s stone” and making gold, so I brought apothecary bottles into my corner and poured something into them, but did not boil them.

I remember well that children's books specifically did not satisfy me.

In books “for adults” I disdainfully skipped the “conversation”, trying to see the “action”. Mine Reed, Gustav Aimard, Jules Verne, Louis Jacolliot were my necessary, urgent reading. The rather large library of the Vyatka Zemstvo Real School, where I was sent at the age of nine, was the reason for my poor success. Instead of studying lessons, at the first opportunity, I collapsed into bed with a book and a piece of bread; He gnawed on the crust and reveled in the heroic, picturesque life in tropical countries.

I am describing all this so that the reader can see what type of guy subsequently went to look for a place as a sailor on the ship.

In history, the law of God and geography, I had marks of 5, 5-, 5+, but in subjects that required not memory and imagination, but logic and intelligence, I got twos and ones: mathematics, German and French fell victims to my passion for reading the adventures of Captain Hatteras and the Noble Heart. While my peers were briskly translating such tricky things from Russian into German: “Did you receive your brother’s apple, which my mother’s grandfather gave him?” “No, I didn’t get an apple, but I have a dog and a cat,” I knew only two words: kopf, gund, ezel and elephant. WITH French things were even worse.

Problems assigned to be solved at home were almost always solved for me by my father, an accountant at the zemstvo city hospital; sometimes I got slapped on the wrist for lack of understanding. My father solved problems with enthusiasm, staying up late on a difficult task until the evening, but there was never a time when he did not give the correct solution.

I quickly read the rest of the lessons in class before the lesson started, relying on my memory.

The teachers said:

- Grinevsky is a capable boy, he has an excellent memory, but he is... mischievous, tomboyish, naughty.

Indeed, hardly a day passed without the remark being written in my class notebook: “Left without lunch for one hour”; this hour dragged on like an eternity. Now the hours fly too fast, and I wish they could go as quietly as they did then.

Dressed, with a knapsack on my back, I sat in the recreation room and sadly looked at the wall clock with a pendulum that loudly struck the seconds. The movement of the arrows pulled the veins out of me.

Mortally hungry, I began to look for the remaining pieces of bread in the desks; sometimes he found them, and sometimes he clicked his teeth in anticipation of home punishment, which was finally followed by dinner.

At home they put me in a corner and sometimes beat me.

Meanwhile, I did not do anything beyond the usual pranks of boys. I was simply unlucky: if I dropped a paper jackdaw during a lesson, either the teacher noticed my message, or the student near whom the jackdaw fell stood up and helpfully reported: “Franz Germanovich, Grinevsky is throwing jackdaws!”

The German, tall, elegant blond, with a beard combed in two, blushed like a girl, got angry and said sternly: “Grinevsky! Come out and stand at the board."

Or: “Move to the front desk”; “Get out of the classroom” - these punishments were assigned depending on the personality of the teacher.

If I ran, for example, along the corridor, I would definitely bump into either the director or the class teacher: punishment again.

If I played “feathers” during a lesson (an exciting game, a kind of carom billiards!), my partner got off with nothing, and I, as an incorrigible repeat offender, was left without lunch.

The mark of my behavior was always 3. This number brought me a lot of tears, especially when 3 appeared as annual behavior mark. Because of her, I was expelled for a year and lived through this time without really missing the class.

I liked to play more alone, with the exception of the game of grandmas, which I always lost.

I whittled wooden swords, sabers, daggers, chopped nettles and burdocks with them, imagining myself as a fairy-tale hero who alone defeats an entire army. I made bows and arrows, in the most imperfect, primitive form, of heather and willow, with string; the arrows, whittled from a splinter, had tin tips and did not fly further than thirty steps.

In the courtyard I placed logs in ranks and hit them with stones from afar in a battle with an army unknown to anyone. I pulled out stamens from the garden fence and practiced throwing them like darts. Before my eyes, in my imagination, there were always the American forest, the wilds of Africa, the Siberian taiga. The words “Orinoco”, “Mississippi”, “Sumatra” sounded like music to me.

What I read in books, be it the cheapest fiction, has always been a painfully desired reality for me.

I also made pistols from empty soldier cartridges that fired gunpowder and shot. I was fond of fireworks, I made sparklers myself, made rockets, wheels, cascades; I knew how to make colored paper lanterns for illumination, I was fond of bookbinding, but most of all I loved whittling something with a penknife; my products were swords, wooden boats, guns. Many pictures for gluing houses and buildings were spoiled by me, because, being interested in many things, grasping at everything, not finishing anything, being impatient, passionate and careless, I did not achieve perfection in anything, always making up for the shortcomings of my work with dreams .

Other boys, as I saw, did the same thing, but in their own way it all came out clearly and efficiently. For me - never.

In my tenth year, seeing how passionately I was attracted to hunting, my father bought me an old ramrod gun for a ruble.

I began to disappear in the forests all day long; did not drink, did not eat; In the morning I was already tormented by the thought of whether they would “let me go” or “not let me go” to “shoot” today.

Knowing neither the customs of game birds, nor the technology, or what, hunting in general, and not even trying to find out the real places for hunting, I shot at everything I saw: sparrows, jackdaws, songbirds, thrushes, fieldfares, waders, cuckoos and woodpeckers

All my catch was fried for me at home, and I ate it, and I can’t say that the meat of a jackdaw or a woodpecker differed in any way from a sandpiper or a blackbird.

In addition, I was an avid angler - solely for shekelier, a fidgety, well-known fish of large rivers, greedy for a fly; collected collections of bird eggs, butterflies, beetles and plants. All this was favored by the wild lake and forest nature of the surroundings of Vyatka, where there was no railway at that time.

Upon returning to the bosom of the real school, I stayed there for only one more academic year.

I was ruined by writing and denunciation.

While still in preparatory class, I became famous as a writer. One fine day one could see a boy being dragged in his arms along the entire corridor by the tall boys of the sixth grade and forced to read his work in every grade, from the third to the seventh.

These were my poems:

When I suddenly get hungry
I run to Ivan before everyone else:
I buy cheesecakes there,
How sweet they are - oh!

During the big break, the watchman Ivan sold pies and cheesecakes in the Swiss shop. I, in fact, loved pies, but the word “pies” did not fit into the verse that I vaguely felt, and I replaced it with “cheesecakes.”

The success was colossal. All winter they teased me in class, saying: “What, Grinevsky, are the cheesecakes sweet - eh?!!”

In the first grade, having read somewhere that schoolchildren were publishing a magazine, I myself compiled an issue of a handwritten magazine (I forgot what it was called), copied several pictures from the “Picturesque Review” and other magazines into it, and composed some stories and poems myself. - stupidity, probably extraordinary - and showed it to everyone.

My father, secretly from me, took the magazine to the director - a plump, good-natured man, and then one day I was called to the director's office. In the presence of all the teachers, the director handed me a magazine, saying:

- Now, Grinevsky, you should do more of this than pranks.

I didn’t know what to do with pride, joy and embarrassment.

They teased me with two nicknames: Green-pancake and Sorcerer. The last nickname occurred because, having read Debarol’s book “Secrets of the Hand,” I began to predict the future for everyone based on the lines of the palm.

In general, my peers did not like me; I didn't have any friends. The director, the watchman Ivan and the class teacher Kapustin treated me well. I offended him, but it was a mental, literary task that I solved at my own expense.

In the last winter of my studies, I read Pushkin’s comic poems “Collection of Insects” and wanted to imitate them.

It went like this (I don’t remember everything):

Inspector, fat ant,
Proud of his thickness...
. . . . . .
Kapustin, skinny booger,
Dried blade of grass,
which I can crush
But I don’t want to get my hands dirty.
. . . .
Here is a German, a red wasp,
Of course, pepper, sausage...
. . . . .
Here is Reshetov, the beetle gravedigger...

Everyone was mentioned, in a more or less offensive form, with the exception of the director: I spared the director.

I was stupid enough to let anyone who was curious about what else the Sorcerer wrote read these poems. I did not allow them to be copied, and therefore a certain Mankovsky, a Pole, the son of a bailiff, one day snatched the sheet from me and said that he would show it to the teacher during the lesson.

The evil game lasted for two weeks. Mankovsky, who was sitting next to me, whispered to me every day: “I’ll show you now!” I was pouring out cold sweat, begging the traitor not to do this, to give me the piece of paper; many students, outraged by the daily bullying, asked Mankovsky to leave his idea, but he, the strongest and most evil student in the class, was implacable.

Every day the same thing was repeated:

- Grinevsky, I’ll show you now...

At the same time, he pretended to want to raise his hand.

I lost weight and became gloomy; at home they couldn’t get me to ask what was wrong with me.

Having finally decided that if I was expelled completely, then I would be beaten by my father and mother, ashamed of the shame of being the laughing stock of my peers and our acquaintances (by the way, feelings of false shame, vanity, suspiciousness and the desire to “go out into the public eye” were very strong in the remote city) , I began to get ready for America.

It was winter, February.

I sold one of my late uncle’s books, “Catholicism and Science,” to a second-hand bookseller for forty kopecks, because I never had pocket money. For breakfast I was given two or three kopecks, which was used to buy one meat pie. Having sold the book, I secretly bought a pound of sausage, matches, a piece of cheese, and grabbed a penknife. Early in the morning, having packed provisions in my backpack with books, I went to the school. I felt bad at heart. My premonitions were justified; when the German language lesson began, Mankovsky, whispering “I’ll serve it now,” raised his hand and said:

- Allow me, Mr. Teacher, to show you Grinevsky’s poems.

The teacher allowed it.

The class fell silent. Mankovsky was pulled from the side, pinched, and hissed at him: “Don’t you dare, you son of a bitch, you scoundrel!” - but, having carefully pulled off his blouse, the thick, black Mankovsky came out from behind his desk and handed the teacher the fatal piece of paper; blushing modestly and looking triumphantly at everyone, the informer sat down.

The teacher at that hour of the day was German. He began to read with an interested look, smiling, but suddenly blushed, then turned pale.

- Grinevsky!

– Did you write this? Do you write libels?

– I... This is not a libel.

From fright, I did not remember what I muttered. As if in a bad dream, I heard the ringing of words reproaching and thundering at me. I saw how a handsome German with a double beard swayed with anger and grace, and thought: “I am lost.”

- Go out and wait until they call you to the staff room.

I came out crying, not understanding what was happening.

The corridor was empty, the parquet floor glittered, and the measured voices of teachers could be heard behind the high, varnished doors of the classrooms. I was erased from this world.

The bell rang, the doors opened, a crowd of students filled the corridor, cheerfully making noise and shouting; only I stood there like a stranger. Class teacher Reshetov led me to the teacher's room. I loved this room - it had a beautiful hexagonal goldfish tank.

The entire synclite sat at a large table with newspapers and glasses of tea.

“Grinevsky,” the director said, worried, “you’ve written a libel... Your behavior has always... have you thought about your parents?.. We, teachers, wish you only the best...

He spoke, and I roared and repeated:

- I won’t do it again!

With general silence, Reshetov began to read my poems. The famous Gogol scene of the last act of The Inspector General took place. As soon as the reading touched one of those ridiculed, he smiled helplessly, shrugged his shoulders and began to look at me point-blank.

Only the inspector - a gloomy elderly brunette, a typical official - was not embarrassed. He coldly executed me with the shine of his glasses.

Finally the difficult scene was over. I was ordered to go home and declare that I was temporarily expelled, pending further notice; also tell my father to report to the director.

Almost without thoughts, as if in a fever, I left the school and wandered to the country garden - that was the name of the semi-wild park, five versts square in size, where in the summer there was a buffet and fireworks displays. The park was adjacent to a copse. Behind the copse there was a river; Further on there were fields, villages and a huge, real forest.

Sitting on a fence near a coppice, I paused: I had to go to America.

Hunger took its toll - I ate sausage, part of the bread and began to think about the direction. It seemed completely natural to me that nowhere, no one would stop a realist in uniform, in a knapsack, with a coat of arms on his cap!

I sat for a long time. It began to get dark; a dull winter evening unfolded around. They ate and snow, ate and snow... I was chilled, my feet were frozen. The galoshes were full of snow. My memory told me that there would be apple pie for lunch today. No matter how much I had previously persuaded some of my students to flee to America, no matter how much I had destroyed with my imagination all the difficulties of this “simple” matter, now I vaguely felt the truth of life: the need for knowledge and strength, which I did not have.

When I arrived home, it was already dark. Oxo-xo! Even now it’s creepy to remember all this.

Mother's tears and anger, father's anger and beatings; shouts: “Get out of my house!”, kneeling in the corner, punishment by hunger until ten o’clock in the evening; drunk father every day (he drank heavily); sighs, sermons about how “you only have to herd pigs”, “in your old age they thought that your son would be a help”, “what will such and such say”, “it’s not enough to kill you, you bastard!” - just like that, it went on for several days.

Finally the storm subsided.

My father ran around, begged, humiliated himself, went to the governor, looked everywhere for patronage so that I would not be expelled.

The school council was inclined to look at the matter not very seriously, so that I would ask for forgiveness, but the inspector did not agree.

I was expelled.

They refused to admit me to the gymnasium. The city, behind the scenes, gave me a wolfish, unwritten passport. My fame grew day by day.

In the fall of next year I entered the third department of the city school.

Hunter and sailor

Perhaps it should be mentioned that I did not attend primary school, as I was taught to write, read and count at home. My father was temporarily dismissed from service in the zemstvo, and we lived for a year in county town Slobodsky; I was four years old then. My father served as assistant manager of the Alexandrov brewery. My mother began to teach me the alphabet; I soon memorized all the letters, but could not comprehend the secret of merging letters into words.

One day my father brought the book “Gulliver with the Lilliputians” with pictures, in large print, on thick paper. He sat me on his knees, unfolded the book and said:

- Right. How to say them right away?

The sounds of these letters and the following suddenly merged in my mind, and, not understanding how it happened, I said: “sea.”

I also read the following words with relative ease, I don’t remember which ones, and so I began to read.

Arithmetic, which they began to teach me in the sixth year, was a much more serious matter; however, I learned subtraction and addition.

The city school was a dirty two-story stone house. It was also dirty inside. The desks are cut up, streaked, the walls are gray and cracked; the floor is wooden, simple - not like the parquet and paintings of a real school.

Here I met many injured realists, expelled for failure and other arts. It's always nice to see fellow sufferers.

Volodya Skopin, my second cousin on my mother’s side, was here; red-haired Bystrov, whose surprisingly laconic essay: “Honey, of course, is sweet” - I was terribly jealous at one time; puny, stupid Demin, and someone else.

In the beginning, how fallen Angel, I was sad, and then I began to like the lack of languages, greater freedom and the fact that teachers told us “you” and not the shy “you”.

In all subjects, with the exception of the law of God, teaching was conducted by one teacher, moving with the same students from class to class.

They, that is, the teachers, sometimes, however, moved, but the system was like that.

In the sixth grade (there were four classes in total, only the first two were each divided into two sections) among the students were “bearded men”, “old men”, who stubbornly traveled around the school for a period of two years for each class.

There were battles that we, little ones, looked at with awe, as if it were a battle of the gods. The “bearded men” fought, growling, jumping around the desks like centaurs, inflicting crushing blows on each other. Fighting was generally a common occurrence. In real life, fighting existed as an exception and was prosecuted very strictly, but here they turned a blind eye to everything. I also fought several times; in most cases, of course, they beat me.

The mark of my behavior continued to stand in the norm that fate had determined for me back in real school, rarely rising to 4. But they left me “without lunch” much less often.

The crimes are known to everyone: running around, fussing in the corridors, reading a novel during class, giving hints, talking in class, passing some kind of note, or being absent-minded. The intensity of life in this establishment was so great that even in winter, through the double glazing, a roar like the roar of a steam mill burst out into the street. And in the spring, with the windows open... Derenkov, our inspector, put it best of all.

“Shame on you,” he admonished the noisy and galloping crowd, “the schoolgirls have long stopped walking past the school... Even a block away from here, the girls hastily mutter: “Remember, Lord, King David and all his meekness!” - and run to the gymnasium in a roundabout way.

We did not like schoolchildren for their stiffness, foppishness and strict form, shouted to them: “Boiled beef!” (V.G. - Vyatka gymnasium - letters on the belt buckle), they shouted to the realists: “Alexandrovsky Vyatka broken urinal!” (A.V.R.U. - letters on buckles), but for the word “schoolgirl” they felt a secret, unquenchable tenderness, even reverence.

Derenkov left. After pausing for half an hour, the hubbub continued until the end of the day.

With the transition to the fourth department, my dreams about life began to be determined in the direction of loneliness and, as before, travel, but in the form of a definite desire for naval service.

My mother died of consumption at the age of thirty-seven; I was thirteen years old then.

The father remarried, taking the widow of the psalmist to her son from her first husband, nine-year-old Pavel. My sisters grew up: the eldest studied at the gymnasium, the youngest at the elementary zemstvo school. The stepmother gave birth to a child.

I didn't know a normal childhood. I was insanely, exclusively pampered only until I was eight years old, then it got worse and worse.

I experienced the bitterness of beatings, floggings, and being on my knees. In moments of irritation, for my willfulness and unsuccessful teaching, they called me “swineherd”, “golden miner”, they predicted for me a life full of groveling among successful and successful people.

Already sick, exhausted from homework, my mother teased me with a strange pleasure with a song:

The wind has knocked the coat down,
And not a penny in my pocket,
And in captivity -
Involuntarily -
Dance entrechat!
Here he is, mama's boy,
Shalopai - his name is;
Like a lap puppy, -
Here's something for him to do!
Philosophize here as you please,
Or, argue as you wish, -
And in captivity -
Involuntarily -
Vegetate like a dog!

I was tormented hearing this because the song related to me, predicting my future. How sensitive I was can be seen from the fact that, when I was very little, I burst into bitter tears when my father jokingly told me (I don’t know where this came from):

And she waved her tail
And she said: don’t forget!

I didn’t understand anything, but I roared.

In the same way, it was enough to show me the finger, saying: “Drip, drip!”, as my tears began to fall, and I also roared.

The father's salary continued to remain the same, the number of children increased, the mother was ill, the father drank heavily and often, the debts grew; everything taken together created a difficult and ugly life. In a miserable environment, without any proper guidance, I grew up during my mother’s life; with her death things got even worse... However, it’s enough to remember the unpleasant. I had almost no friends, with the exception of Nazaryev and Popov, about whom, especially Nazaryev, we will talk further; There were troubles at home, I loved hunting passionately, and therefore every year, after Peter’s Day - June 29 - I began to disappear with a gun through the forests and rivers.

By that time, under the influence of Cooper, E. Poe, Defoe and Jules Verne’s “80 Thousand Miles Under the Sea,” I began to develop the ideal of a lonely life in the forest, the life of a hunter. True, at the age of twelve I knew Russian classics up to and including Reshetnikov, but the above authors were stronger not only than Russian, but also other, classical European literature.

I walked far away with a gun, to lakes and forests, and often spent the night in the forest, near the fire. In hunting I liked the element of play, chance; That's why I didn't try to get a dog.

At one time I had old hunting boots that my father bought for me; when they wore off, I came to the swamp, took off my ordinary boots, hung them over my shoulder, rolled up my pants to my knees, and hunted barefoot.

As before, my prey was waders of various breeds: blackbirds, carriers, turukhtans, curlews; occasionally - water chickens and ducks.

I didn’t know how to shoot straight yet. An old ramrod gun - a single-barreled gun, costing three rubles (the previous one exploded, almost killing me), the very method of loading prevented me from shooting as often and quickly as I would like. But it wasn’t just the prey that attracted me.

I liked to walk alone through the wild places where I wanted, with my thoughts, to sit where I wanted, to eat and drink when and how I wanted.

I loved the sound of the forest, the smell of moss and grass, the diversity of flowers, the thickets of swamps that excite the hunter, the crackling of the wings of a wild bird, shots, creeping gunpowder smoke; loved to search and unexpectedly find.

Many times I built, in my mind, a wild house of logs, with a fireplace and animal skins on the walls, with a bookshelf in the corner; nets were hung from the ceiling; in the pantry hung bear hams, bags of pemmican, maize and coffee. Clutching a cocked gun in my hands, I squeezed through the thick branches of the thicket, imagining that an ambush or pursuit awaited me.

As a summer vacation, my father was sometimes sent to the large Sennaya Island, three miles from the city; there was a hospital zemstvo mowing there. The mowing lasted about a week; mowed down by quiet lunatics or test subjects from the hospital pavilions. My father and I then lived in a good tent, with a fire and a kettle; slept on fresh hay and fished. In addition, I walked further up the river, about seven miles, where there were lakes in the willow forest, and shot ducks. We cooked ducks using the hunting method, in buckwheat porridge. I rarely brought them. My most important and plentiful prey in the fall, when the haystacks and stubble remained in the fields, were pigeons. They flocked in flocks of thousands from the city and villages to the fields, let them get close, and from one shot, several of them would fall at once. Roasted pigeons are tough, so I boiled them with potatoes and onions; the food was good.

My first gun had a very tight trigger, which severely broke the primer, and putting a piston on the splintered primer was a task. He could barely hold on and sometimes fell over, canceling the shot, or misfired. The second gun had a weak trigger, which also caused misfires.

If I didn’t have enough caps while hunting, I, with little hesitation, took aim, holding the gun with one hand at my shoulder, and with the other bringing a burning match to the primer.

I leave it to the experts to judge how successful this method of shooting can be, since the game had plenty of time to decide whether it should wait for the fire to heat up the primer.

Despite my real passion for hunting, I have never had the care and patience to properly equip myself. I carried gunpowder in an apothecary bottle, pouring it into my palm when loading - by eye, without measuring; shot was in his pocket, often the same number for all kinds of game - for example, a large one, No. 5, went through both a sandpiper and a flock of sparrows, or, conversely, a small one, like a poppy, No. 16 flew at a duck, only burning it, but without dumping.

When a poorly made wooden cleaning rod broke, I cut off a long branch and, having cleared it of knots, drove it into the trunk, with difficulty pulling it back out.

Instead of a felt wad or a tow, I very often filled the charge with a wad of paper.

It is not surprising that I had little booty given this attitude to business.

Subsequently, in the Arkhangelsk province, when I was there in exile, I hunted better, with real supplies and a cartridge gun, but negligence and haste affected me there too.

I will tell you about this one of the most interesting pages of my life in the following essays, but for now I will add that only once was I completely satisfied with myself - as a hunter.

I was taken hunting with young adults, our former landlords, the Kolgushin brothers. Already dark night we were returning from the lakes to the fire. Suddenly, the duck whistled with its wings, quacked, and, splashing through the water, sat down on a small lake, about thirty paces away.

Causing laughter from my companions, I took aim at the sound of a duck landing in the black darkness splashing and fired. I could hear the duck huddling in the reeds: I was hit.

Two dogs could not find my prey, which even confused and angered their owners. Then I undressed, climbed into the water and, neck-deep in the water, found the dead bird by its body, which was vaguely blackening in the water.

From time to time I managed to earn a little money. One day, the zemstvo needed a drawing of a city plot with buildings... My father arranged this order for me, I walked around the plot with a tape measure, then drew, ruined several drawings, and finally, with a shame, did what was needed, and received ten rubles for it.

Four times my father gave me the opportunity to copy out sheets of annual estimates for zemstvo charitable institutions, ten kopecks per sheet, and I also earned a few rubles from this task.

At the age of twelve I became addicted to bookbinding and made my own stitching machine; the role of the press was played by bricks and boards, kitchen knife was a pruning knife. Colored paper for bindings, morocco for corners and spines, calico, paints for sprinkling the edges of the book and books of false (leaf) gold for embossing letters on the spines - I acquired all this gradually, partly with my father’s money, partly with my own earnings.

At one time I had a fair amount of orders; If my products had been made more carefully, I could have earned fifteen to twenty rubles a month while studying, but the old habit of carelessness and haste took its toll here too - after two months my work ended. I bound about a hundred books - including volumes of sheet music for an old music teacher. My bindings were uneven, the edge was incorrect, the whole book wobbled, and if it didn’t wobble along the stitching, then the spine would come off or the binding itself would warp.

For the day of the coronation of Nicholas II, the hospital was preparing illumination, and through my father, an order was placed for two hundred paper lanterns made of colored paper at four kopecks apiece, with ready-made material.

I worked very hard for two weeks, producing, as was my custom, not very important items, for which I received eight rubles.

Previously, when I happened to earn a ruble or two, I spent the money on gunpowder, shot, and in winter on tobacco and cartridges. I was allowed to smoke from the age of fourteen, and I smoked secretly from the age of twelve, although I had not yet “inhaled”! I started taking drugs in Odessa.

The receipt of these eight rubles coincided with the allegri lottery held at the city theater. Pyramids of things, both expensive and cheap, were arranged in the orchestra. The main prize, according to the strange direction of provincial minds, was, as usual, a cow, along with the cow were small jewelry, samovars, etc.

I went to play, and soon my drunken father appeared there. I put five rubles on the tickets, taking all the empty tubes. My capital was melting, I was sad, but suddenly I won a velvet sofa cushion embroidered with gold.

My father was lucky: having first put down half his salary, he won two brooches, worth, say, fifty rubles.

I still can’t forget how a girl as bad as sin came up to the wheel, took two tickets, and both of them turned out to be winning: the samovar and the watch.

I got ahead of myself, but I had to say everything about my earnings. Therefore, I will add that in the last two winters of my life at home, I also earned extra money by rewriting roles for a theater troupe - first the Little Russian one, then the dramatic one. For this they paid five kopecks per sheet, written in a circle, and I wrote not neatly, but perhaps more quickly. In addition, I enjoyed the right to attend all performances for free, enter backstage and play weekend roles where, for example, I had to say: “He’s come!” or “We want Boris Godunov!”

Sometimes I wrote poems and sent them to Niva and Rodina, never receiving a response from the editors, although I attached stamps to the response. The poems were about hopelessness, hopelessness, broken dreams and loneliness - exactly the same poems that weeklies were full of then. From the outside, one might think that a forty-year-old Chekhov hero was writing, and not a boy of eleven to fifteen years old.

For my age, I started drawing quite well at the age of seven, and my drawing grades were always 4–5. I copied drawings well and taught myself how to paint in watercolors, but these were also copies of drawings, not independent works; I only made flowers in watercolors twice. I took the second drawing - a water lily - with me to Odessa, and also took paints, believing that I would paint somewhere in India, on the banks of the Ganges...

Green, in his last completed book, is occupied not so much with autobiography as with an analysis of the very type of emerging romantic romantic personality. "All" Autobiographical story” is built on the contrast between “ideal”, romantic ideas about life and its harsh real pictures, which are depicted with naturalistic mercilessness..."

* * *

The given introductory fragment of the book Autobiographical story (Alexander Green, 1932) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

Flight to America

I read haphazardly, uncontrollably, voraciously.

In the magazines of that time: “Children's Reading”, “Family and School”, “Family Vacation” - I read mainly stories about travel, swimming and hunting.

I spent days rummaging through them. Nobody bothered me.

The search for interesting reading was a kind of journey for me.

I remember well that children's books specifically did not satisfy me.

I am describing all this so that the reader can see what type of guy subsequently went to look for a place as a sailor on the ship.

I quickly read the rest of the lessons in class before the lesson started, relying on my memory.

The teachers said:

- Grinevsky is a capable boy, he has an excellent memory, but he is... mischievous, tomboyish, naughty.

At home they put me in a corner and sometimes beat me.

The German, tall, elegant blond, with a beard combed in two, blushed like a girl, got angry and said sternly: “Grinevsky! Come out and stand at the board."

Or: “Move to the front desk”; “Get out of the classroom” - these punishments were assigned depending on the personality of the teacher.

If I ran, for example, along the corridor, I would definitely bump into either the director or the class teacher: punishment again.

If I played “feathers” during a lesson (an exciting game, a kind of carom billiards!), my partner got off with nothing, and I, as an incorrigible repeat offender, was left without lunch.

I liked to play more alone, with the exception of the game of grandmas, which I always lost.

What I read in books, be it the cheapest fiction, has always been a painfully desired reality for me.

I also made pistols from empty soldier cartridges that fired gunpowder and shot. I was fond of fireworks, I made sparklers myself, made rockets, wheels, cascades; I knew how to make colored paper lanterns for illumination, I was fond of bookbinding, but most of all I loved whittling something with a penknife; my products were swords, wooden boats, and cannons. Many pictures for gluing houses and buildings were spoiled by me, because, being interested in many things, grasping at everything, not finishing anything, being impatient, passionate and careless, I did not achieve perfection in anything, always making up for the shortcomings of my work with dreams .

Other boys, as I saw, did the same thing, but in their own way it all came out clearly and efficiently. For me - never.

In my tenth year, seeing how passionately I was attracted to hunting, my father bought me an old ramrod gun for a ruble.

All my catch was fried for me at home, and I ate it, and I can’t say that the meat of a jackdaw or a woodpecker differed in any way from a sandpiper or a blackbird.

Upon returning to the bosom of the real school, I stayed there for only one more academic year.

I was ruined by writing and denunciation.

These were my poems:

When I suddenly get hungry

I run to Ivan before everyone else:

I buy cheesecakes there,

How sweet they are - oh!

The success was colossal. All winter they teased me in class, saying: “What, Grinevsky, are the cheesecakes sweet - eh?!!”

- Now, Grinevsky, you should do more of this than pranks.

I didn’t know what to do with pride, joy and embarrassment.

In the last winter of my studies, I read Pushkin’s comic poems “Collection of Insects” and wanted to imitate them.

It went like this (I don’t remember everything):

Inspector, fat ant,

Proud of his thickness...

Kapustin, skinny booger,

Dried blade of grass,

which I can crush

But I don’t want to get my hands dirty.

Here is a German, a red wasp,

Of course, pepper, sausage...

Here is Reshetov, the beetle gravedigger...

Everyone was mentioned, in a more or less offensive form, with the exception of the director: I spared the director.

Every day the same thing was repeated:

- Grinevsky, I’ll show you now...

At the same time, he pretended to want to raise his hand.

I lost weight and became gloomy; at home they couldn’t get me to ask what was wrong with me.

It was winter, February.

- Allow me, Mr. Teacher, to show you Grinevsky’s poems.

The teacher allowed it.

The teacher at that hour of the day was German. He began to read with an interested look, smiling, but suddenly blushed, then turned pale.

- Grinevsky!

– Did you write this? Do you write libels?

– I... This is not a libel.

- Go out and wait until they call you to the staff room.

I came out crying, not understanding what was happening.

The corridor was empty, the parquet floor glittered, and the measured voices of teachers could be heard behind the high, varnished doors of the classrooms. I was erased from this world.

The entire synclite sat at a large table with newspapers and glasses of tea.

“Grinevsky,” the director said, worried, “you’ve written a libel... Your behavior has always... have you thought about your parents?.. We, teachers, wish you only the best...

He spoke, and I roared and repeated:

- I won’t do it again!

Only the inspector - a gloomy elderly brunette, a typical official - was not embarrassed. He coldly executed me with the shine of his glasses.

Finally the difficult scene was over. I was ordered to go home and declare that I was temporarily expelled, pending further notice; also tell my father to report to the director.

Sitting on a fence near a coppice, I paused: I had to go to America.

When I arrived home, it was already dark. Oxo-xo! Even now it’s creepy to remember all this.

Finally the storm subsided.

My father ran around, begged, humiliated himself, went to the governor, looked everywhere for patronage so that I would not be expelled.

The school council was inclined to look at the matter not very seriously, so that I would ask for forgiveness, but the inspector did not agree.

I was expelled.

They refused to admit me to the gymnasium. The city, behind the scenes, gave me a wolfish, unwritten passport. My fame grew day by day.

In the fall of next year I entered the third department of the city school.

Hunter and sailor

Perhaps it should be mentioned that I did not attend primary school, as I was taught to write, read and count at home. My father was temporarily dismissed from service in the zemstvo, and we lived for a year in the district town of Slobodsky; I was four years old then. My father served as assistant manager of the Alexandrov brewery. My mother began to teach me the alphabet; I soon memorized all the letters, but could not comprehend the secret of merging letters into words.

One day my father brought the book “Gulliver with the Lilliputians” with pictures, in large print, on thick paper. He sat me on his knees, unfolded the book and said:

- Right. How to say them right away?

The sounds of these letters and the following suddenly merged in my mind, and, not understanding how it happened, I said: “sea.”

I also read the following words with relative ease, I don’t remember which ones, and so I began to read.

Arithmetic, which they began to teach me in the sixth year, was a much more serious matter; however, I learned subtraction and addition.

Here I met many injured realists, expelled for failure and other arts. It's always nice to see fellow sufferers.

At first, like a fallen angel, I was sad, and then I began to like the lack of languages, greater freedom and the fact that teachers told us “you” and not the shy “you”.

In all subjects, with the exception of the law of God, teaching was conducted by one teacher, moving with the same students from class to class.

They, that is, the teachers, sometimes, however, moved, but the system was like that.

The mark of my behavior continued to stand in the norm that fate had determined for me back in real school, rarely rising to 4. But they left me “without lunch” much less often.

We didn’t like high school students for their stiffness, dapperness and strict uniforms, we shouted to them: “Boiled beef!” (V.G. - Vyatka gymnasium - letters on the belt buckle), they shouted to the realists: “Alexandrovsky Vyatka broken urinal!” (A.V.R.U. - letters on buckles), but for the word “schoolgirl” they felt a secret, unquenchable tenderness, even reverence.

Derenkov left. After pausing for half an hour, the hubbub continued until the end of the day.

My mother died of consumption at the age of thirty-seven; I was thirteen years old then.

I didn't know a normal childhood. I was insanely, exclusively pampered only until I was eight years old, then it got worse and worse.

Already sick, exhausted from homework, my mother teased me with a strange pleasure with a song:

The wind has knocked the coat down,

And not a penny in my pocket,

And in captivity -

Involuntarily -

Dance entrechat!

Here he is, mama's boy,

Shalopai - his name is;

Like a lap puppy, -

Here's something for him to do!

Philosophize here as you please,

Or, argue as you wish, -

And in captivity -

Involuntarily -

Vegetate like a dog!

And she waved her tail

And she said: don’t forget!