Winter scent of wildflowers. The winter smell of wild flowers The midday sun was overhead

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Water infusion of nettle has long been used for hemorrhoidal, uterine and intestinal bleeding.

In recent years, nettles have also been used in scientific medicine for uterine and intestinal bleeding in the form of a liquid extract. Clinical testing has shown that it does not cause any harmful effects. The liquid extract also has diuretic, anti-febrile and anti-inflammatory effects. To increase blood clotting, it is recommended to use a mixture of liquid extracts of nettle and yarrow. The hemostatic effect of nettle is explained by the presence of a special anti-hemorrhagic vitamin K in it, as well as vitamin C and tannins.

A decoction of rhizomes and roots of stinging nettle in folk medicine is used orally for furunculosis, hemorrhoids and swelling of the legs, and an infusion of roots is used as a heart remedy. Sugared nettle rhizomes are also used for coughing.

An infusion of stinging nettle roots is used to treat tuberculosis. An infusion of nettle flowers in the form of tea is drunk for suffocation and coughing for expectoration and resorption of sputum.

Nettle is not only an internal, but also an external hemostatic and wound healing agent. Infected wounds are more likely to be freed from pus and heal faster if they are sprinkled with nettle powder or fresh leaves are applied to them. A decoction of the whole plant is used externally for washing and compresses for tumors. Dried and crushed leaves are used for nosebleeds, and fresh leaves destroy warts.

In France, nettle infusion is rubbed into the scalp to grow and strengthen hair when it falls out.

Even in remote times, nettles were used in folk medicine as a skin irritant (that is, a reflex therapy factor).

Nettle leaves, due to the content of phytoncides in them, have the ability to preserve perishable food products (for example: gutted fish, stuffed and lined with nettles, lasts a very long time).

Young nettle shoots (stems and leaves) are used to prepare green cabbage soup. In the Caucasus, boiled chopped nettle leaves mixed with crushed walnuts and spices are used to prepare delicious national dishes.

Nettle is also a very valuable pet food. It stimulates their growth and development. Cows receiving nettles give more milk and better quality. Chickens increase their egg production.

Nettle bast fibers can be used to make coarse fabrics and ropes (and have been cooked before. - V.S.).

Nettle has a multifaceted effect on the human body and deserves wide application in medicine.” Phew!

EXTRACTS

M. Maeterlinck

“They are interesting and incomprehensible. They are vaguely called "weeds". They don't need anything. Here and there, in the wilderness of old villages, some of them are still waiting at the bottom of the jars of the apothecary or herbalist for the arrival of the sick, faithful to the traditional tinctures. But unbelieving medicine neglects them. They are no longer collected according to the rites of antiquity, and the science of "healers" is erased from the memory of good women. A merciless war was declared against them. The peasant is afraid of them, the plow pursues them; the gardener hates them and armed himself against them with resonant weapons: a shovel, a rake, scrapers, a pick, a hoe and a spade. On the high roads, where they wait for their last refuge, a passer-by crushes them, a cart crushes them. Despite everything - here they are, constant, confident, teeming, calm, and all of them are ready to respond to the call of the sun. They follow the seasons without a single hour being wrong. They do not know a man who exhausts his strength in order to subdue them, and as soon as he rests, they grow on his tracks.

They continue to live - daring, immortal, rebellious. They filled our baskets with wonderful reborn daughters, but the poor mothers themselves are the same as they were hundreds of thousands of years ago. They did not add a single wrinkle to their petals, they did not change the shape of the pistil, they did not change the shade, they did not renew the fragrance. They hold the secret of some stubborn power. These are eternal prototypes.

The earth has been theirs since the beginning of the world. In general, they personify an unchanging thought, a stubborn desire, the main smile of the earth. That's why they should be asked. They obviously want to tell us something. In addition, let us not forget that they were the first, together with dawn and autumn, with spring and sunsets, with the song of birds, curls, eyes and divine movements of a woman, taught our fathers that there are useless but beautiful things on the globe.

* * *

For those who come to visit me in Alepino, I give them to fill out a questionnaire. Not a hotel, not a service one: year and place of birth, nationality and education, but his own, invented questionnaire - sixty-six questions. It is interesting both to me and to the person who fills it. Because you have to sit down at least once in your life over a white sheet of paper and think about what your favorite flowers, tree, natural phenomenon are; what historical feat do you most admire, what book do you value more than others, what fate of a historical person seems to you the most tragic, or what do you see as an ideal state system…

So, about flowers. Most often, friends answer the questionnaire: chamomile, cornflower, lily of the valley, rose. There is forget-me-not, there are pansies, there is gladiolus, carnation, sweet clover ... If we continue this questionnaire, we will probably meet jasmine, lilac, bird cherry, chrysanthemum, poppy ... Naturally, there is a more or less established circle of popular and favorite flowers.

But once, over a cup of tea in Moscow, the conversation turned to flowers, in particular, about loved ones. I remember that this is how the question was posed: if you ordered a painting from an artist to hang in the house, which flowers would you prefer to see depicted in the painting?

– Buttercup! exclaimed Tatyana Vasilievna. - I would like a buttercup!

Her exclamation sounded unexpected. Why buttercup? But on the other hand, why not?

I began to remember buttercups, their glossy, lacquered petals, I wanted to imagine what they would look like, painted by an artist, but it was not a bouquet of buttercups that presented itself to me, but our summer meadow. After all, it is by these flowers that you can find out in the summer where and how the muddy spring waters flowed through our meadow. At first they flow along the bottom of the ravine in a narrow and turbulent stream, then, falling into a flat meadow, they overflow in a shallow expanse, but still do not lose the face of the stream. Always, even on level ground, there is a hollow a little deeper than the rest of the place, and water will always find such a hollow. So, either overflowing, then narrowing again, then splitting into several lanes, then again gathering into one, the water reaches the steep bank of the river. Here she again appears as a muscular whipping stream and falls noisily into the big river water to get lost in it, but in the end to reach the sea. Water will flow to the distant Caspian, a particle of it (well, at least a glass), perhaps by the notorious Volga-Don, will also fall into the Black Sea, and, having become salty and blue, walking there in the white-foamy expanse, the water will forget our green meadow, and how it flowed through it , made her way to the river, and how Seryoga Toreev walked along it in rubber boots, and how your humble servant jumped over it, leaning on a juniper ornate stick, and how she managed to cut off and hold a steep hillock with dark Christmas trees on it with an oblique reflection, and how it smelled of the April meadow land over which it flowed.

But the meadow will not forget her until autumn. Where it flowed in dark streams, grass will thicken, buttercups will bloom in golden streams. And it turns out that buttercups are the memory of the earth about spring water.

Of course: these friendly lacquer flowers bloom not only in the meadow, in the place of muddy spring streams, but also in the garden, and near the road, and in forest glades. They, to put it formally, are actively involved in the creation of the summer floral range and yet somehow manage not to be evident. You will pass by a meadow blooming with buttercups without paying special attention to it, just as you would never pass by a meadow blooming with bathing suits, daisies and even dandelions. But Tatyana Vasilievna exclaimed: “Buttercup! I'd like a buttercup!" - and there's nothing you can do about it. Got to favorites.

The same thing happened to me several times with poems and stories. You think about some of them: to include them in the collection or not to include them? Not very far away. Without them, the collection seems to be more solid, stronger. Greedy and leave, do not throw away. And then comes the reader's letter. It turns out that one poem, which I did not want to include, was liked by someone (even if at least one person) more than others.

The same thing happens with people. You look - a nondescript, ugly girl, you will even pity her, and she, looking, is married before the beauty. So, for the ugly girl herself, the matter is not hopeless. There will always be a person who will see in her a certain, only visible beauty to him and fall in love.

And at all ugly flowers, as you know, do not exist.

* * *

Dandelions bloom from spring to autumn. During the whole summer you will not choose a day when you would not see this flower. But still, there is a time in May when their first, most friendly, brightest wave spills over the earth.

Muscovites, go to Kolomenskoye! In the late morning hours, the sun looks there from the side of the Moscow River, from the side of the famous "Ascension", and you will first have to go through the entire green meadow to the museum, to the second gate, and then look back.

To the right you will see an old meadery built of incredibly thick logs, dark, as if saturated with honey, with which the grass washing them with green surf is so successfully combined.

Directly, at the opposite end of a flat meadow from you, on its other, as it were, lake shore, stands the Kazan Church, white-sugar, with very blue (in any case, bluer than the May sky) domes. The whole space between you and her (and on the right is the log meadery) will softly and affectionately blind you with the pure warmth of the gold of dandelions.

It is not surprising to see blooming dandelions in other places, and even in such a quantity and in such, I would say, even distribution, but not everywhere a fragrant log honey factory and a sugar-blue church look into their golden lake. It seems that dandelions did not bloom here yesterday, but remained together with Kolomensky himself from the seventeenth century.

From all sides, from behind the cherry orchards, from behind the oak park, from behind the Moskva River and from the side of the highway, the noise and rattle of the advancing city is approaching, which every year tightens the ring tighter. And the dandelion silence of Kolomna is already trembling and crackling from this roar. Soon, unable to withstand the pressure, it will crack, shatter into smithereens. A triumphant and gloating noise will surge and bury her under them, perhaps along with the dandelions.

One of my acquaintances expressed the idea in a conversation that every flower in one way or another stylizes the sun with its appearance or at least with its scheme. As if millions of small children undertook to draw him, as best they could. Everyone gets it differently, but at the heart of each drawing is a round center, and rays from it in different directions. The round center is sometimes small, sometimes large, the rays are sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, semicircular, sometimes there are many of them, sometimes five or six, sometimes they are white, sometimes red, sometimes blue, sometimes like the sun itself.

Thought approximate, but you can have fun. Although there is nowhere to put either a clover hat, or orchids, or all the so-called moths, or cereals, or some kind of cat's paw. But what is true is true - the dandelion is copied from the sun.

Let's not now think that, having picked and holding the stem, we are holding not one flower at all, but an inflorescence, a basket, as botanists say, and that one flower is a thin tube with jagged edges (can you really send me to study the forget-me-not! ). But, looking at the clearing and seeing it all golden, it is impossible to get rid of the impression that some giant artist dipped his brush directly into the sun and sprinkled it on the green earth.

Even more it looks like countless mirrors, each of which reflects the sun. The similarity is complemented by the fact that when the sun goes down for a long time or at night, dandelions close their flowers, go out, the meadow now reflects only the monotonous darkened sky.

Almost all flowers turn behind the sun during a long day, but very rare ones close in the absence of the sun, including, and first of all, dandelions.

No one knows (and probably will never know) why the dandelion needed a stem in the form of a thin-walled tube instead of an ordinary, green, rough stem. But everyone knows why it will then have a rounded fluffy head. This plant enters the human consciousness, perhaps more with this fluffy head than with the flower itself. He also has a name not for a flower (say, it could be yellow, sunflower, sunflower, etc.). A is a dandelion.

When Alexander Tvardovsky needed to find a sign of life, earthly existence and earthly joy for the poem “House by the Road”, then on behalf of a newborn person he uttered the following words:

Why should I know that white light
Not fit for life?
I don't care about anything
I want to live first.
I want to live and drink and eat
I want warmth and light
And I don't care what's here
You have winter, not summer ...
I did not move a chair on the floor,
Walking awkwardly,
I didn't blow the dandelion
Fluffy head.
I did not crawl out onto the porch
Through the threshold stubbornly
I didn't even say "mom"
For you to hear, mother!

As you can see, our modest "protégé" alone was honored to stand next to such significant eternal values ​​as light, warmth, the first step, the first word, and even mother.

In fact, at the word "dandelion" will not the majority see with their mind's eye not a yellow flower (even with a bee diligently crawling over it), but a white fluffy ball, and some of the most attentive ones will also see a white swollen cake, in black holes, which remains after you blow on a dandelion and a whole paratrooper will slowly descend to the ground from the height of your height, your raised hand.

Parachute landing. We invented the parachute in the twentieth century. Dandelion invented it millions of years ago. It can be argued that nature found it by touch, blindly, but first you need to put a single parachute on your palm or on a piece of paper and examine it, if possible with a magnifying glass.

We will see that all the graphics of this amazing device are worthy of the most accurate and beautiful drawing. Not to mention engineering, mathematical calculations. The weight of the seed, the length of the stem, the area of ​​the umbrella, everything is in strict mathematical correspondence, and if modern engineers, using slide rulers and calculating machines, undertook to calculate such an aeronautical apparatus from the point of view of the optimality of its proportions, then they would come to the proportions and shapes of the apparatus, which you hold in the palm of your hand and which fly through the air in multitudes on a windy summer day.

However, there are options. The mother-stepmother also has a parachute, but her villi start right from the seed and diverge in a cone, which is why the whole device looks like a badminton ball, also called a shuttlecock. The goatbeard is closer to the dandelion, but since its seed is heavier and larger, the entire parachute, according to design recalculations, is correspondingly increased in size. There are also completely “lazy” options - a shapeless piece of fluff, and a seed is hidden in the middle. Compared to this lump of fluff, a dandelion parachute is like a bicycle wheel sparkling with clear nickel-plated spokes next to a round sawn-off log, which can also roll on the ground and rolled, it happened, by putting it on a nail and attaching it to a stick.

I can imagine a conversation when, having developed a project and calculated everything, the design engineer brought the drawings for approval to some designer more important than him.

- Everything is fine, - said the chief designer, - but if the seed, having flown away in the wind, has already fallen to the ground, should it rise again and fly further?

- Understood. I'll fix it now. In the new drawing, the seed, which was smooth in the first case, was provided with small, sharp notches in order to hold on tighter in the soil.

- You see, a trifle, but because of it, the balance in nature could be disturbed. Good. I approve. Let it be so.

And billions of cheerful white fluffs flew in the wind over the green earth, so that more and more flowers would endlessly light up on it, like little suns.

By the way, a salad made from young dandelion leaves, as they say in many books, is really edible and probably nutritious. To remove their bitter taste from the leaves, the French recommend putting them in salt water for half an hour. It's a matter of taste. From onions, for example, we do not try to remove bitterness, but only soften it with sour cream, butter, other vegetables and herbs.

* * *

Take three hearts, as they are drawn when they want to pierce them with an arrow on a postcard, or as they indicate the suit of hearts on playing cards, and connect these three hearts with points at one point. Make these connected hearts pale green, plant them on a thin stalk five to seven centimeters high - and you will get sour, or rabbit cabbage, an elegant, cute plant that adorns shady, mostly coniferous, and even more predominantly spruce forests.

In other herbs, the leaves sit on the stem along the entire length (like nettle) or are located in a rosette near the ground itself (like dandelion), but here - especially. The stalk is smooth, like glass, translucent, pinkish, and closer to the ground it is dark pink to red. There are no scales or hairs on it. He's like copper wire. It is crowned with three leaves, which were discussed.

The leaves, under the influence of a secret mechanism that pumps elasticity and strength into them, then straighten and hold horizontally to the ground, soar, then all three droop and hang along the stalk.

Thickets of undrooping oxalis most of all look like a pond covered with duckweed, because all the leaves are kept flat, on the same level and form an even green surface, light green, luminous green, contrasting green in the realm of dark, almost black tones of a mossy spruce forest. In fact, where it looks black; tree trunks are dark brown, the needles are dark, gloomy, the air itself is twilight. Only oxalis glows near the ground, as if a hidden electric illumination had been arranged from below.

Taking the leaves, it is easy to pull out the plant along with a long stem, which is lower, the redder, but, on the other hand, more transparent, glassy. After pulling on a few pieces, you roll them into a ball and put them in your mouth, you begin to chew. Sorrel acid will seem rough and somehow rough after thin, spicy, with an admixture of distinct sweetness of hare cabbage acid. But like sorrel, you can’t eat much. Yes, they say, and you do not need to eat it in large quantities.

It is believed that this herb is a barometer, and very accurate. By the rain folds its leaves. Knowing this, I began to look at her in the forest. I see the leaves are folded. Here's the trouble. Tomorrow the weather would be good. I walked a hundred steps - the leaves are unfolded. What a parable!

For several days, sorrel fooled me in this way. Then one day, going out into its vast thickets, I guessed what was the matter. On a flat, green plane lay an even forest shadow. But there were also bright spots, from the sun breaking through the spruce branches. And now it was clearly visible that in the shade the leaves of the oxalis were straightened and blissful, and in the sun spots they drooped, as if afraid of being burned. Well, the truth is, this grass is very tender. She should not be exposed to bright and hot sunlight.

In May, oxalis pushes out another stem, thinner than its main stem. It rises above the green plane of the leaves, but all the same, in the forest shade it would be almost invisible if it did not bloom a charming white bell.

White, it is white, but if you pick it up and see it in the light, it will turn out to be all in lilac veins and, as usual, yellowish stamens in the depths of the bell.

Thus, here is a picture in a spruce forest: an even “duckweed” of oxalis, and above it, on invisible stems, myriads of small bells hang in the dark air.

It’s not worse at all when, near an old rotten stump, you sometimes meet a separate flock of oxalis, the size of a cap, but bright, fresh, and several bluebells hovering above it. Then you regret that only you saw this little forest fairy tale.

* * *

The grass that will be discussed is so unsightly and inconspicuous that, of course, no one, except for specialist botanists and healers (and in the Middle Ages alchemists were also very interested in it), would have singled it out from the common summer grass, if not for a small feature, not just its wonderful property.

She doesn't seem to have any flowers. Even having gathered several pieces into one ball, they do not give the impression of a flower. The glomerulus is obtained the size of a wild strawberry, and the color is greenish-yellowish. Such an ugly bug. What can we say about each individual flower, a green match head. Meanwhile, the Rosaceae family.

You look and think, is this literally a colorless creature (green is not a color for a flower) direct and close relatives of the queen of flowers, and not just relatives, but from the same family with her.

In one curious book (it is not in Russian), I subtracted a more poetic than scientific consideration that all flowers are divided into two main spheres and are built according to two main schemes: five-ray and six-ray.

At the head of the first group (regardless of the accepted botanical classification) stands a rose (five petals), at the head of the second - a lily (six petals), and so they reign, the two queens of the flower kingdom. And no matter how small another flower (forget-me-not, for example, or lily of the valley), it is still either one or another scheme, one or another citizenship.

I will try to quote in an approximate translation from German:

“The culmination of these two classes is Rose and Lily who lead them. They are queens in their kingdom. Like the Sun and the Moon, Rose and Lily rule in the plant kingdom. They carry the radiance of ancient cultures. The sages of the East tried their best to introduce them into culture. All lilies bear in their flower the six-pointed star of Zarathustra. But all fruits and berries come from the rose. Of these, our cereals are also isolated ... "

It is difficult to take seriously such arguments, which gravitate towards the cosmic origin of terrestrial plants and even all life on Earth, but the idea of ​​two magnificent queens in itself is involuntarily attractive and beautiful.

However, speaking of our little grass, we had in mind a dry scientific classification, according to which, without any additional and almost metaphysical ideas, the common cuff unconditionally belongs to the Rosaceae family.

Let's imagine that a family of roses gathers, well, at least at an exhibition, if people wanted to arrange such an exhibition. Of course, a rose would take an honorary throne place - seven thousand varieties and the same number of color shades. Velvet, silk, translucent by the sun, with a dark shadow lying in the folds of the petals, snow-white, yellowish, yellow, purple, crimson, burgundy, scarlet, black, lilac ... A rose does not want to be only blue. Well, that's her business.

Standing aside modestly, having come to the collection of rosaceous, wild rose, called, however, in botany a dog rose, but from which, in fact, all seven thousand terry varieties originated. It is as if city beauties in fashionable outfits have gathered, they dazzle and fascinate, but, keeping their dignity, a village grandfather dressed up for the holiday is sitting on the sidelines, from whom all this bright, magnificent offspring has gone.

The apple tree will not lose its face at the festival of rosaceae, when it rises as a white bride at a quiet spring dawn and glows pinkish and beckons bees.

Not a poor relative on the river bank, over the dark forest water, looking into the black mirror, the bird cherry will be covered with white.

Bright pink peach (flowering tree), almond, cherry and plum - each tree has its own become, each flower has its own time, its place in the sun, its quiet silent pride.

Let's go down below. A bush of wild strawberries, which came to the review of rosaceae, is more modest, of course, than blossoming almonds, but it appeared with dignity before the bright eyes of the queen herself: if you want, drive away, but I am yours. But in general, if you look at how my five white and pure petals differ from the same white petals of cherry blossoms? There are more of them. They lie like white clouds among the spring earth, decorating and transforming the appearance of villages, small towns, the whole landscape. But when you enter a pine forest, won't you rejoice when you see whole glades in our white color?

It's like that. But what is that nondescript grass on the threshold? A slut and a slut? How dare she enter here, among the rose-flowers? Get the hell out!

“It’s not my fault,” the nondescript weed would have answered in a barely audible voice. - I am your family. I am rosaceous, look in any book.

“You don’t even have a flower.”

- What can you do. There is a flower, but it is very small. I'm already trying, collecting several flowers in one ball, but my ball does not look like a real flower, but like a green, still tough berry of my distant sister of the wild strawberry. But I must say that people know me, distinguish me from other herbs and love me in their own way.

- For what? Is it for kinship with them?

- Not. The thing is… That I have leaves.

- Well, show me what kind of special leaves you have?

- In scientific books they are called multi-lobed, town-acicular, but this does not mean anything yet. You better see for yourself.

If we bend down or raise it up to ourselves, we would see a leaf that is not only familiar to us, but which more than once aroused a spark of delight in us. Moreover, this delight did not refer to the leaf, not to the plant as a whole, but to the meadow, through which we walked to the slope, which we looked at, to the morning dawn, and, finally, simply to life.

The leaf carved along the edges is assembled into an accordion and folded into a funnel. Covered with fine hairs.

- Well, what is special about your sheet? - perhaps, noble relatives would ask a modest cuff. - A leaf is like a leaf. The whole thing is like a funnel.

- On a handful. Moisture collects in my leaf. Medieval alchemists believed that this was the purest moisture that could be on earth. They hoped that it was with the help of her that they would learn to turn simple substances into noble gold. Sometimes it's my own moisture, sometimes it's the dew of heaven, sometimes it's raindrops. As you know, water rolls off all your leaves, but collects in my leaf. Therefore, when people walk on dewy ground, they see large rounded drops of light moisture, sometimes so large that you can even swallow with your lips. My villi keep the dew from spreading all over the leaf and making it just wet. I have this: the whole leaf is dry, and the middle, at the bottom of the funnel, is a rounded elastic ball, which, due to its own gravity, becomes flat, flattened, but still round and silvery. I don’t say anything, a drop of heavenly moisture is beautiful and just on a stem, on an ear, and even more so on a pink petal, but still, without the sparkle of my full-weight and precious drops, the earth would lose in its beauty.

If there is dew in the world, then someone must collect it so that everyone can enjoy the taste. But even dew is not yet a drink compared to the moisture that I myself emit and give to the world. And the birds drink from my leaves, and children, and some adults, for whom everything has not yet become emaciated and stalled in the soul, for whom not everything has yet come down to a faceted glass, for whom the forest is not just building material and firewood, the meadow is not just centners of hay, the sky is not just a place where planes and satellites fly. And most importantly - who are not lazy and are not ashamed to kneel before a small blade of grass that holds a drop of moisture in itself, by the way, a meadow, and a forest, and the sky itself.

EXTRACTS

M. Maeterlinck "The Mind of Flowers"

“If unlucky and clumsy plants and flowers are encountered, it does not follow from this that they are completely devoid of wisdom and ingenuity. Everyone is zealously striving to do their job: everyone has a magnificent, proud dream of filling and conquering the surface of the globe, multiplying on it to infinity the kind of existence that they represent. In order to achieve this goal, they have to overcome greater difficulties, due to the law that attaches them to the soil, than those that prevent the reproduction of animals. Therefore, most of them resort to tricks, to combinations, to devices that, in terms of mechanics, ballistics, movement, observations, even, for example, on insects, often preceded the inventions and knowledge of people.

“If it is difficult for us to discover among the laws that burden us with the one that weighs heavily on our shoulders, then there is no doubt for plants in this regard: this is the law that condemns them to immobility from the day they are born until their death. They know much better than we, who disperse our forces, what to rebel against in the first place ... We will see that the flower gives a person a heroic example of defiance, courage, perseverance and ingenuity. If we were to apply half of the energy that the little flower of our garden has developed in order to free ourselves from various inevitability pressing on us ... then we must believe that our destiny would be very different from what it is now.

“... the propeller of the maple, the bracts of the linden, the aeronautical projectile of the thistle, dandelion, goat-beard, bursting boxes of euphorbia, unusual devices of the donkey cucumber, fibrous trails of cotton grass and thousands of other unexpected and amazing mechanisms ... there is not a single seed that would not have invented some completely a peculiar way to avoid the mother's shadow...

There is in this kind, thick head (we are talking about a poppy. - V.S.) caution and foresight, worthy of the greatest praise. It is known that it contains thousands of small black seeds, extremely small. It is necessary to scatter these seeds as far and as conveniently as possible. If the box containing them burst, fell, or opened from below, the precious black dust would form a useless heap at the foot of the stem. But it can only come out through holes pierced at the top of the shell. The head, when ripe, bends down on its footboard, “censes” at the slightest breeze and literally scatters, even with the movements of the sower, the seeds in space.

“When the time comes for flowering (we are talking about one aquatic plant. - V.S.), the axial sacs are filled with air: the more this air tends to escape, the tighter it closes the valve. Finally, it lightens the specific gravity of the plant and brings it to the surface of the water. Only then do lovely little yellow flowers bloom... But then the fertilization is over, the fetus develops, and the roles change; the surrounding water presses on the valves of the sacs, presses them in, penetrates into the cavity, aggravates the plant and forces it to descend to the bottom again.

Catherine wanted to arrange a waterfall on the Neglinka, near the Kuznetsk bridge, and put her statue over it, but nothing came of it.

In winter, there were fierce fistfights on the ice of the Neglinka. Schoolchildren of the Greek-Slavic Academy folded cartilage to students. In the twelfth year, the Napoleonic guards washed boots in Neglinka. In the twenties of the last century, Neglinka was driven into an underground pipe. And now we are driving under Neglinka in this shiny carriage.

“But for us,” the girl said unexpectedly and was embarrassed, “but because of this Neglinka, it was very difficult for us: quicksand here. Water constantly broke through, the fasteners cracked like matches, the lintels were blown away with one blow. Sometimes they worked waist-deep in water. We were afraid of this Neglinka, but nothing, we overcame it.

- You see! – reproachfully said the scientist to the writer. - You see! You are a blind person.

- What should I see? The scientist shrugged.

- Yes, you look at her, finally!

The writer looked at the girl. She laughed, and he laughed, and suddenly felt the joy of the rapid progress of the train, the river of lights pouring outside the windows, the rumble of wheels.

They came out on Krymskaya Square. The silver light of snow stood over the Park of Culture and Leisure. In some places, transparent, sharp fires still burned.

The girl ran down the river on skis. Skis rustled and rang on the crust. The girl looked back and waved goodbye.

When the word "motherland" was uttered in front of Berg, he grinned. He didn't understand what that meant. The homeland, the land of the fathers, the country where he was born - in the end, it does not matter where a person was born. One of his comrades was even born in the ocean on a cargo ship between America and Europe.

Where is this man's home? Berg asked himself. - Is the ocean really this monotonous plain of water, black from the wind and oppressing the heart with constant anxiety?

Berg saw the ocean. When he studied painting in Paris, he happened to be on the banks of the English Channel. The ocean was not like him.

Fatherland! Berg did not feel any attachment either to his childhood or to the small Jewish town on the Dnieper, where his grandfather went blind for the fight and the shoe awl.

The native city was always remembered as a faded and poorly painted picture, densely infested with flies. He was remembered as dust, the sweet stink of garbage heaps, dry poplars, dirty clouds over the outskirts, where soldiers - defenders of the fatherland - drilled in the barracks.

During the civil war, Berg did not notice the places where he had to fight. He shrugged his shoulders mockingly when the fighters with a special light in their eyes said that, they say, we will soon recapture our native places from the whites and give the horses water to drink from the native Don.

- Chatter! Berg said. “People like us do not and cannot have a homeland.

“Oh, Berg, you crackling soul! - the fighters answered with heavy reproach. - What a fighter and creator of a new life you are when you don’t love your land, eccentric. And also an artist.

Maybe that's why Berg did not succeed in landscapes. He preferred the portrait, the genre, and finally the poster. He tried to find the style of his time, but these attempts were full of failures and ambiguities.

Years passed over the Soviet country like a wide wind - wonderful years of work and overcoming. Years accumulated experience, traditions. Life turned, like a prism, with a new facet, and in it old feelings were freshly and at times not quite clear for Berg - love, hatred, courage, suffering and, finally, a sense of homeland.

One early autumn, Berg received a letter from the artist Yartsev. He called him to come to the Murom forests, where he spent the summer. Berg was friends with Yartsev and, moreover, did not leave Moscow for several years. He went.

At a dead station behind Vladimir, Berg boarded a narrow-gauge train.

August was hot and windless. The train smelled of rye bread. Berg sat on the footboard of the carriage, breathing greedily, and it seemed to him that he was breathing not air, but amazing sunlight.

Grasshoppers screamed in clearings overgrown with dried white carnations. The stop-stations smelled of unwise wildflowers.

Yartsev lived far from the deserted station, in the forest, on the shore of a deep lake with black water. He rented a hut from a forester.

Berg was taken to the lake by the forester's son Vanya Zotov, a stooped and shy boy.

The cart thumped on the roots, creaked in the deep sands. Orioles whistled sadly in the woods. A yellow leaf occasionally fell on the road. Pink clouds stood high in the sky above the tops of mast pines.

Berg was lying in the cart, and his heart was beating dull and heavy.

“It must be from the air,” thought Berg.

Lake Berg suddenly saw through a thicket of thinned forests. It lay obliquely, as if rising to the horizon, and behind it, thickets of golden birches shone through the thin haze. Haze hung over the lake from recent forest fires. Fallen leaves floated in the clear, black as tar water. Berg lived on Lake Berg for about a month. He did not intend to work and did not take oil paints with him. He brought only a small box of French watercolors by Lefranc, still preserved from Parisian times. Berg valued these colors very much.

For whole days he lay in the glades and looked at the flowers and herbs with curiosity. He was particularly struck by the euonymus - its black berries were hidden in a corolla of carmine petals. Berg collected rose hips and fragrant juniper, long needles, aspen leaves, where black and blue spots were scattered across the lemon field, brittle lichen and withering cloves. He carefully examined the autumn leaves from the inside, where the yellowness was slightly touched by a light lead hoarfrost.

Olive swimming beetles ran in the lake, fish played with dull lightning, and the last lilies lay on the still surface of the water, as on black glass.

On hot days, Berg heard a soft trembling ringing in the forest. The heat rang, dry grasses, beetles and grasshoppers. At sunset, flocks of cranes flew over the lake to the south with a cooing, and each time Vanya said to Berg:

- It seems that birds are throwing us, flying to the warm seas.

For the first time, Berg felt a stupid insult - the cranes seemed to him traitors. They abandoned without regret this deserted, forested and solemn region, full of nameless lakes, impassable thickets, dry leaves, the measured rumble of pines and air smelling of resin and marsh mosses.

- Freaks! - Berg noticed, and the feeling of resentment for the forests emptying every day no longer seemed to him ridiculous and childish.

In the forest, Berg once met grandmother Tatiana. She dragged herself from afar, from the Fence, picking mushrooms.

Berg wandered more often with her and listened to Tatyana's unhurried stories. From her, he learned that their region - the wilderness of the forest - was famous for its painters from ancient times. Tatyana told him the names of famous handicraftsmen who painted wooden spoons and dishes with gold and cinnabar, but Berg never heard these names and blushed.

Berg spoke little. Occasionally he exchanged a few words with Yartsev. Yartsev spent whole days reading, sitting on the shore of the lake. He didn't want to talk either.

It rained in September. They rustled in the grass. They warmed the air, and the coastal thickets smelled wild and pungent, like a wet animal skin.

At night the rains rustled unhurriedly in the forests, along deaf roads leading to no one knows where, along the boarded roof of the gatehouse, and it seemed that it was destined for them to drizzle all autumn over this forest country.

Yartsev was about to leave. Berg got angry. How could one leave in the midst of this extraordinary autumn. Berg felt Yartsev's desire to leave now just as the cranes had once departed - it was treason. What? Berg could hardly answer this question. A betrayal of forests, lakes, autumn, and finally, a warm sky that drizzled with frequent rain.

"I'm staying," Berg said sharply. - You can run, it's your business, but I want to write this autumn.

Yartsev left. The next day, Berg woke up from the sun. There was no rain. The light shadows of the branches trembled on the clean floor, and behind the door shone a quiet blue.

The word "radiance" Berg met only in the books of poets, he considered it lofty and devoid of a clear meaning. But now he understood how accurately this word conveys that special light that comes from the September sky and the sun.

One winter evening in 1786, on the outskirts of Vienna, in a small wooden house, a blind old man, the former cook of Countess Thun, was dying. As a matter of fact, it was not even a house, but a dilapidated gatehouse, which stood in the depths of the garden. The garden was littered with rotten branches blown off by the wind. With every step the branches crunched, and then the watchdog began to grumble softly in his booth. He, too, was dying, like his master, of old age and could no longer bark.

A few years ago, the cook went blind from the heat of the ovens. The Countess's steward has since lodged him in a lodge, and has given him a few florins from time to time.

Together with the cook lived his daughter Maria, a girl of about eighteen. The entire decoration of the gatehouse was a bed, lame benches, a rough table, faience dishes covered with cracks, and, finally, a harpsichord - Mary's only wealth.

The harpsichord was so old that its strings sang long and softly in response to all the sounds that arose around. The cook, laughing, called the harpsichord "the watchman of his house." No one could enter the house without the harpsichord meeting him with a trembling, senile rumble.

When Mary washed the dying man and put on a cold, clean shirt, the old man said:

I have always disliked priests and monks. I cannot call a confessor, meanwhile I must clear my conscience before I die.

What to do? - scared asked Maria.

Go out into the street, - said the old man, - and ask the first person you meet to come into our house to confess the dying. Nobody will refuse you.

Our street is so deserted ... - Maria whispered, put on a scarf and left.

She ran through the garden, pushed open the rusty gate with difficulty, and stopped. The street was empty. The wind carried leaves along it, and cold drops of rain fell from the dark sky.

Mary waited and listened for a long time. At last it seemed to her that a man was walking along the fence and singing. She took a few steps towards him, collided with him and screamed. The man stopped and asked:

Who's here?

Okay, the man said calmly. - Although I'm not a priest, but it's all the same. Come on.

They entered the house. By candlelight, Maria saw a thin little man. He dropped his wet coat onto the bench. He was dressed with sophistication and simplicity, the candlelight gleaming on his black coat, crystal buttons and lace jabot.

He was still very young, this stranger. Quite boyishly he shook his head, straightened his powdered wig, quickly drew a stool to the bed, sat down and, bending down, gazed intently and cheerfully into the face of the dying man.

Speak! - he said. “Perhaps, with the power given to me not from God, but from the art that I serve, I will ease your last moments and remove the burden from your soul.

I worked all my life until I went blind, the old man whispered. - And whoever works has no time to sin. When my wife fell ill with consumption - her name was Martha - and the doctor prescribed various expensive medicines for her and ordered her to be fed with cream and wine berries and drink hot red wine, I stole a small golden dish from the service of Countess Thun, broke it into pieces and sold it. And it’s hard for me now to remember this and hide it from my daughter: I taught her not to touch a single speck of dust from someone else’s table.

Did any of the Countess's servants suffer for this? - asked the stranger.

I swear, sir, no one, - the old man answered and began to cry. - If I knew that gold would not help my Martha, how could I steal!

What is your name? - asked the stranger.

Johann Meyer, sir.

So, Johann Meyer, - said the stranger and put his hand on the old man's blind eyes, - you are innocent before people. What you have done is not a sin and is not theft, but, on the contrary, can be credited to you as a feat of love.

Amen! whispered the old man.

Amen! repeated the stranger. - Now tell me your last will.

I want someone to take care of Maria.

I will do it. What else do you want?

Then the dying man suddenly smiled and said loudly:

I would like to see Martha again the way I met her in my youth. To see the sun and this old garden when it blooms in the spring. But that's impossible, sir. Don't get mad at me for stupid words. Illness must have taken me completely by surprise.

Okay, said the stranger and stood up. “Good,” he repeated, went up to the harpsichord and sat down on a stool in front of it. - Good! he said loudly for the third time, and suddenly a quick ringing sounded through the gatehouse, as if hundreds of crystal balls had been thrown on the floor.

Listen, said the stranger. - Listen and watch.

He played. Maria later recalled the stranger's face when the first key sounded under his hand. An unusual pallor covered his forehead, and the tongue of a candle dangled in his darkened eyes.

The harpsichord sang in full voice for the first time in many years. He filled with his sounds not only the gatehouse, but the whole garden. The old dog crawled out of the booth, sat with his head tilted to one side, and, alert, quietly wagged his tail. Wet snow began to fall, but the dog only shook his ears.

I see, sir! - said the old man and sat up on the bed. - I see the day when I met Martha and she broke a jug of milk out of embarrassment. It was winter, in the mountains. The sky was as clear as blue glass, and Martha laughed. Laughing,” he repeated, listening to the murmur of the strings.

The stranger was playing, looking out the black window.

Now, he asked, do you see anything?

The old man was silent, listening.

Can't you see, - the stranger said quickly, without ceasing to play, - that the night turned from black to blue, and then blue, and warm light is already falling from somewhere above, and white flowers are blooming on the old branches of your trees. I think they are apple blossoms, although from here in the room they look like big tulips. You see: the first beam fell on the stone wall, heated it, and steam rises from it. It must be drying moss filled with melted snow. And the sky is getting higher, bluer, more magnificent, and flocks of birds are already flying north over our old Vienna.

I see it all! shouted the old man.

The pedal creaked softly, and the harpsichord sang solemnly, as if it was not he who sang, but hundreds of jubilant voices.

No, sir, said Mary to the stranger, these flowers are not at all like tulips. The apple trees blossomed in just one night.

Yes, - the stranger answered, - these are apple trees, but they have very large petals.

Open the window, Maria, the old man asked.

Mary opened the window. Cold air rushed into the room. The stranger played very softly and slowly.

The old man fell on the pillows, breathed greedily and rummaged through the blanket with his hands. Maria rushed to him. The stranger stopped playing. He sat at the harpsichord without moving, as if bewitched by his own music.

Maria screamed. The stranger got up and walked over to the bed. The old man said breathlessly:

I saw everything as clearly as many years ago. But I wouldn't want to die and not know... the name. Name!

My name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the stranger replied.

Maria stepped back from the bed and bowed low, almost touching her knee to the floor, in front of the great musician.

When she straightened up, the old man was already dead. The dawn flared up outside the windows, and in its light stood a garden covered with flowers of wet snow.

When the word "motherland" was uttered in front of Berg, he grinned. He didn't understand what that meant. The homeland, the land of the fathers, the country where he was born - in the end, it does not matter where a person was born. One of his comrades was even born in the ocean on a cargo ship between America and Europe.

Where is this man's home? Berg asked himself. – Is the ocean really this monotonous plain of water, black from the wind and oppressing the heart with constant anxiety?

Berg saw the ocean. When he studied painting in Paris, he happened to be on the banks of the English Channel. The ocean was not like him.

Fatherland! Berg did not feel any attachment either to his childhood or to the small Jewish town on the Dnieper, where his grandfather went blind for the fight and the shoe awl.

The native city was always remembered as a faded and poorly painted picture, densely infested with flies. He was remembered as dust, the sweet stink of garbage heaps, dry poplars, dirty clouds over the outskirts, where soldiers - defenders of the fatherland - drilled in the barracks.

During the civil war, Berg did not notice the places where he had to fight. He mockingly shrugged his shoulders when the fighters, with a special light in their eyes, said that, they say, we will soon recapture our native places from the whites and give the horses water to drink from the native Don.

- Chatter! Berg said gloomily. “People like us do not and cannot have a homeland.

“Oh, Berg, you crackling soul! - the soldiers answered with heavy reproach. - What a fighter and creator of a new life you are when you don’t love the earth, eccentric. And also an artist!

Maybe that's why Berg did not succeed in landscapes. He preferred the portrait, the genre, and finally the poster. He tried to find the style of his time, but these attempts were full of failures and ambiguities.

Years passed over the Soviet country like a wide wind - wonderful years of work and overcoming. Years accumulated experience, traditions. Life turned, like a prism, with a new facet, and in it old feelings were freshly and at times not quite clear for Berg - love, hatred, courage, suffering and, finally, a sense of homeland.

One early autumn, Berg received a letter from the artist Yartsev. He called him to come to the Murom forests, where he spent the summer. Berg was friends with Yartsev and, moreover, did not leave Moscow for several years. He went.

At a dead station behind Vladimir, Berg boarded a narrow-gauge train.

August was hot and windless. The train smelled of rye bread. Berg sat on the footboard of the carriage, breathing greedily, and it seemed to him that he was breathing not air, but amazing sunlight.

Grasshoppers screamed in clearings overgrown with dried white carnations. The stop-stations smelled of unwise wildflowers.

Yartsev lived far from the deserted station, in the forest, on the shore of a deep lake with black water. He rented a hut from a forester.

Berg was taken to the lake by the forester's son Vanya Zotov, a stooped and veiled boy.

The cart thumped on the roots, creaked in the deep sands.

Orioles whistled sadly in the woods. A yellow leaf occasionally fell on the road. Pink clouds stood high in the sky above the tops of mast pines.

Berg was lying in the cart, and his heart was beating dull and heavy.

"Must be from the air"? thought Berg.

Lake Berg suddenly saw through a thicket of thinned forests.

It lay obliquely, as if rising to the horizon, and behind it, thickets of golden birches shone through the thin haze. Haze hung over the lake from recent forest fires. Fallen leaves floated in the clear, black as tar water.

Berg lived on Lake Berg for about a month. He did not intend to work and did not take oil paints with him. He brought only a small box of French watercolors by Lefranc, still preserved from Parisian times. Berg valued these colors very much.

For whole days he lay in the glades and looked at the flowers and herbs with curiosity. He was particularly struck by the euonymus - its black berries were hidden in a corolla of carmine petals.

Berg collected rose hips and fragrant juniper, long needles, aspen leaves, where black and blue spots were scattered across the lemon field, brittle lichen and withering cloves. He carefully examined the autumn leaves from the inside, where the yellowness was slightly touched by a light lead hoarfrost.

Olive swimming beetles ran in the lake, fish played with dull lightning, and the last lilies lay on the still surface of the water, as on black glass.

On hot days, Berg heard a soft trembling ringing in the forest.

The heat rang, dry grasses, beetles and grasshoppers. At sunset, flocks of cranes flew over the lake to the south with a cooing, and each time Vanya said to Berg:

- It seems that birds are throwing us, flying to the warm seas.

For the first time, Berg felt a stupid insult - the cranes seemed to him traitors. They abandoned without regret this deserted, forested and solemn region, full of nameless lakes, impassable thickets, dry leaves, the measured rumble of pines and air smelling of resin and marsh mosses.

- Freaks! - Berg noticed, and the feeling of resentment for the forests emptying every day no longer seemed to him ridiculous and childish.

In the forest, Berg once met grandmother Tatiana. She dragged herself from afar, from the Fence, picking mushrooms.

Berg wandered through the thickets with her and listened to Tatyana's unhurried stories. From her, he learned that their region - the wilderness of the forest - was famous for its painters from ancient times. Tatyana told him the names of famous handicraftsmen who painted wooden spoons and dishes with gold and cinnabar, but Berg never heard these names and blushed.

Berg spoke little. Occasionally he exchanged a few words with Yartsev. Yartsev spent whole days reading, sitting on the shore of the lake. He didn't want to talk either.

It rained in September. They rustled in the grass. They warmed the air, and the coastal thickets smelled wild and pungent, like a wet animal skin. At night the rains rustled unhurriedly in the forests, along deaf roads leading to no one knows where, along the boarded roof of the gatehouse, and it seemed that it was destined for them to drizzle all autumn over this forest country.

Yartsev was about to leave. Berg got angry. How could one leave in the midst of this extraordinary autumn. Berg felt Yartsev's desire to leave now just as the cranes had once departed - it was treason. What? Berg could hardly answer this question. A betrayal of forests, lakes, autumn, and finally, a warm sky that drizzled with frequent rain.

“I'm staying,” Berg said sharply. - You can run, it's your business, but I want to write this autumn.

Yartsev left. The next day, Berg woke up from the sun.

There was no rain. The light shadows of the branches trembled on the clean floor, and behind the door shone a quiet blue.

The word "radiance" Berg met only in the books of poets, he considered it lofty and devoid of a clear meaning. But now he understood how accurately this word conveys that special light that comes from the September sky and the sun.

A web flew over the lake, each yellow leaf on the grass burned with light like a bronze ingot. The wind carried the smell of forest bitterness and withering herbs. Berg took paints and paper and, without even drinking tea, went to the lake. Vanya took him to the far shore.

Berg was in a hurry. The forests, obliquely illuminated by the sun, seemed to him heaps of light copper ore. The last birds whistled thoughtfully in the blue air, and the clouds dissolved in the sky, rising to the zenith.

Berg was in a hurry. He wanted to give all the power of colors, all the skill of his hands and a keen eye, all that was trembling somewhere in his heart, to give this paper in order to depict at least a hundredth of the splendor of these forests, dying majestically and simply.

Berg worked like a man possessed, singing and shouting. Vanya had never seen him like this. He followed Berg's every move, changed the paint water for him, and handed him china cups of paint from a box.

A dull twilight passed in a sudden wave through the foliage. The gold faded. The air dimmed. A distant, menacing murmur swept from edge to edge of the forests and died away somewhere above the burnt areas. Berg didn't look back.

- The storm is coming! Vanya shouted. - We must go home!

“Autumn thunderstorm,” Berg answered absently and began to work even more feverishly.

Thunder split the sky, the black water shuddered, but the last reflections of the sun still wandered in the forests. Berg was in a hurry.

Vanya pulled his hand:

- Look back. Look, what fear!

Berg didn't turn around. With his back he felt that wild darkness and dust were coming from behind - already the leaves were flying in a downpour, and, fleeing from a thunderstorm, frightened birds were flying low over the undergrowth.

Berg was in a hurry. There were only a few strokes left.

Vanya grabbed his hand. Berg heard a rapid rumble, as if the oceans were coming at him, flooding the forests.

Then Berg looked back. Black smoke fell on the lake. The forests swayed. Behind them, the downpour rumbled like a leaden wall, cut by cracks of lightning. The first heavy drop hit my hand.

Berg quickly hid the study in a drawer, took off his jacket, wrapped the drawer around it, and grabbed a small box of watercolors. Water spray hit my face. Wet leaves swirled like a blizzard and blinded their eyes.

Lightning split a nearby pine tree. Berg is deaf. A downpour fell from the low sky, and Berg and Vanya rushed to the canoe.

Wet and shivering from the cold, Berg and Vanya reached the lodge an hour later. In the gatehouse, Berg discovered the loss of a box of watercolors. The colors were lost - the magnificent colors of Lefranc. Berg searched for them for two days, but of course found nothing.

Two months later, in Moscow, Berg received a letter written in large, clumsy letters.

“Hello, Comrade Berg,” Vanya wrote, “write down what to do with your paints and how to deliver them to you. After you left, I looked for them for two weeks, searched everything until I found it, only got a bad cold - because it was already raining, but now I walk, although still very weak. Dad says that I had pneumonia in my lungs. So don't be angry.

Send me, if possible, a book about our forests and all sorts of trees and colored pencils - I really want to draw. We already had snow falling, but it melted, and in the forest, where under some kind of Christmas tree, you look, and a hare is sitting. In the summer we will be waiting for you in our native places. I remain Vanya Zotov.

Along with Vanya's letter, they brought a notice about the exhibition - Berg was supposed to participate in it. He was asked to tell how many of his things and under what name he will exhibit.

Berg sat down at the table and quickly wrote:

"I am exhibiting only one study in watercolor, made by me this summer - my first landscape."

It was midnight. Shaggy snow fell outside on the window sill and glowed with magical fire - the reflection of street lamps. In the next apartment, someone was playing Grieg's sonata on the piano.

The clock on the Spasskaya Tower chimed steadily and far away. Then they played "The Internationale".

Berg sat for a long time smiling. Of course, he will give Lefranc paints to Vanya.

Berg wanted to trace the intangible ways in which he developed a clear and joyful sense of his homeland. It has matured for years, decades of revolutionary years, but the last impetus was given by the forest region, autumn, the cries of cranes and Vanya Zotov. Why? Berg could not find an answer, although he knew that it was so.

“Oh, Berg, you crackling soul! he remembered the words of the soldiers. - What a fighter and creator of a new life you are when you don’t love your land, eccentric!

The fighters were right. Berg knew that now he was connected with his country not only with his mind, not only with his devotion to the revolution, but with all his heart, as an artist, and that love for his homeland made his intelligent, but dry life warm, cheerful and a hundred times more beautiful, than before.
1936

The numbness of the calm seizes the shores of ancient Cimmeria - Eastern Crimea. They say that the heads of marble goddesses, the patronesses of sleep and the light wind of Aeolus, were recently found in the red local silica.

I lay, listened to the murmur of the waves, thought about the stone goddesses and felt like a happy part of this southern world.

Not far from me, an unfamiliar girl of about fifteen, probably a schoolgirl, was sitting on the beach, and she was learning Pushkin's poems aloud. She was thin, like a seaside boy-boy. There were white scars on her tanned knees. In her palms, she absentmindedly fingered the sand.

I saw fragments of shells and crab legs, tiny shards of green glass and Marseille tiles falling between her thin fingers. In these places, for some reason, the sea throws out a lot of fragments of this orange and sonorous, like copper, tiles.

The girl often fell silent and looked at the sea, screwing up her bright eyes. She must have wanted to see the sail. But the sea was deserted, and the girl, sighing, again began to read Pushkin's poems in a patter:

I listened to her mumbling for a long time, then I said:

You are misreading these verses.

The girl crawled closer to me on her knees and, resting her palms on the hot sand, asked:

- Why?

She looked at me demandingly with her big gray eyes and repeated:

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships to the middle:
This long brood, this crane train,
That over Hellas once rose ...

Insomnia... Homer... A flash of lightning broke into the darkness. Blind woman... Homer was blind! Life existed for him only in a multitude of sounds.

Homer created the hexameter.

And suddenly it became clear to me that blind Homer, sitting by the sea, was composing verses, subordinating them to the measured sound of the surf. The strongest evidence that this was indeed so was the caesura in the middle of the line. Basically, it was unnecessary. Homer brought it in, exactly following the stop that the wave makes halfway through its roll.

Homer took the hexameter from the sea. He sang the siege of Troy and the campaign of Odysseus with a solemn chant of sea spaces invisible to him.

Have I found the solution to the hexameter? Don't know. I wanted to tell someone about my discovery, but there was no one around who could be interested in this. Who cares about Homer!

I wanted to convince someone that the birth of the Homeric hexameter is only a special case in a series of still unrealized possibilities of our creative beginning, that a living thought is often born from a collision of things that at first glance have nothing in common with each other. What does flint have in common with iron, and yet their collision strikes fire.

What do the sound of waves and poetry have in common? And their collision brought to life a majestic poetic meter.

In the end, I had the opportunity to tell about Homer only to the girl Lila, offended by me. I met her at Dead Bay with that boy who sometimes cried at night.

Getting to the Dead Bay was difficult. I had to climb over a sheer cliff above the sea. In some places it was necessary to climb, grabbing the bushes. Then the earth turned out to be a few centimeters from the eyes, and spangles of sulfur pyrite and red ants were clearly visible on it - so small that a person could not notice them from a height of his height.

If Robber's Bay was a haven for smugglers, then Dead Bay was a shipwreck.

The sand was littered with bottlenecks, wreckage from boats with peeling blue paint, bent German helmets, depth charge shells, and bits of ribbed rubber tubes. Crabs lived in them.

Lily didn't surprise me at all. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and said:

- Ah, it's you!

And then she started talking:

- And I left at home the carnelian that I wanted to give you. I didn't know you were coming here. Bear, don't hit the water with your feet. You splattered all over me. Impossible type! You know, a huge fish just jumped out of the water. Must be a mullet. Will you fish here? There's no one here, it's scary. Only once passed the border patrol. The bear asked them, and they shot into the water. It was such an echo - all the way to Koktebel. Look what I found - a seahorse.

Lily rummaged in a light dress that had been thrown onto the sand and pulled out a dry seahorse in prickly armor from her pocket.

- Why is he? the boy asked.

"It's a figure," Lily replied. - Understand? Crabs play chess with them. They sit under a rock and play. And who cheats, he is beaten with a claw on the head.

Without ceasing to chat, Lily put the seahorse back into the pocket of her dress, then suddenly frowned, squinted her eyes, slowly pulled her hand out of the pocket and carefully unclenched it. In Lily's palm lay a carnelian with smoky veins.

“It turns out that he is here,” Lilya said and made big eyes. “I thought he was at home. How did I not lose it. Take it please. This is for you. I'm not sorry at all. I'll still find them as much as you want.

I took the carnelian. Lily followed me.

- Ouch! she suddenly cried out. “Don’t you see that it has a wave pattern on it?” There he is, as if from smoke. Now you can see better.

She licked the carnelian. It darkened, and indeed, a pattern of a sea wave appeared on it.

"It's salty," the boy said. - I tried.

“I hear a silent sound,” Lily suddenly said solemnly, made a caesura and laughed, “divine Hellenic speech ...

- Do you want to listen? – I asked, – a story about the mystery of the hexameter?

I told Leela about the blind man Homer and how he discovered the hexameter. Lily lay on the sand, her chin in her hands, and listened. The boy lay down next to her and also rested his chin on his hands.

He watched Lily and repeated all her movements. She raised her eyebrows - and he raised his eyebrows, she shook her head - and he shook his head, she shook her heels a little in the air - and he also shook his heels a little.

Lily slapped him on the back.

- Stop it, monkey!

- Well, how? I asked her. - Interesting?

- Yes! Aunt Olya is blind. Maybe she, too, will hear, like Homer, something that we do not hear, because we are sighted. Can I talk about this at my school in Leningrad in a lesson about Pushkin? He also wrote in hexameter.

- Well, tell me.

- Even if they give me a deuce, and I will certainly tell you, - said Lily with a selfless look.

We returned to Koktebel along the steep rocks. Lilya firmly held the boy's hand, got angry when he stumbled, and in dangerous places she silently held out her hand to me, and I pulled her and the boy upstairs.

A week later I left and almost forgot about Koktebel, Homer and Lila. But still, fate once again pushed me against Homer and her.

This was three years after what is described above.

Our steamer left the concrete forts on her port side and the houses of Gallipoli, yellowed like burnt paper, and left the Dardanelles for the Aegean Sea.

The usual notion of the sea has disappeared. We did not go out to sea, but into purple flames. The steamer even slowed down, as if not daring to disturb this luminous region of the earth. He cautiously approached her, arching a long, foamy trail astern.

The burnt shores of Asia Minor, the barren hills of the fabulous Homeric Troy, still stretched along the port side. There, in the bay, as in reddish bowls of petrified clay, the living water azure swayed and rustled and broke foam on low headlands.

By evening, a calm fell on the sea, and a slow procession along the horizon of the ancient islands began: Imros, Tenedos, Lesvos, Milos.

The islands passed like waves of the sea. Each island loomed in the fading sky with a gentle rise, a peak, and an equally gentle fall. It resembled a titanic stone hexameter that lay on the sea in a continuous stanza - from Hellas to the coast of Asia Minor.

Then the islands approached. One could already make out greyish-green olive groves and villages in small coastal bays. Above all this rose the steeps of ore and lilac mountains. On their peaks, like smoke from giant censers, clouds were smoking, illuminated by the evening sun. They threw a reddish glow on the sea, mountains and people's faces.

The first beacon blinked. A breath of wind brought the smell of lemon from the islands and some other smell, bitter and pleasant, like dried chamomile.

At night I went up on deck. The ship sailed through the Saronic Gulf. Two piercing lights, green and red, lay on the low horizon of the night. These were the leading lights of Piraeus.

I looked to where Athens lay, and felt a chill under my heart: far in the sky, in the dense darkness of the Attic night, the Acropolis shone, illuminated by the streaming light of searchlights. Its thousand-year-old marbles shone with imperishable, inexplicable beauty.

The steamer was slowly drawn into the roadstead of Piraeus.

In the autumn after this trip, I came to Leningrad for a few days and got to a concert by Mravinsky at the Philharmonic.

A thin girl was sitting next to me, and next to her was a blind woman in black glasses.

The girl quickly turned around, screwed up her gray eyes, and grabbed my arm.

- Not! I even got an A. And, you know, I'm glad you're here.

She introduced me to a blind woman - aunt Olya, shy and silent, then she said that in the story with the hexameter and Homer there was something that she could not convey, just like poems that you could not remember in a dream.

I was surprised by this comparison.

We went out and I walked the blind woman and Lilya home. They lived on Tuchkova embankment. On the way, I talked about the Aegean Sea and the islands. Lily listened to me quietly, but sometimes she interrupted and asked the blind woman: “Do you hear, Aunt Olya?” “I hear, don’t worry,” the blind woman answered. “I can see it all very clearly.”

Near the old dark house we said goodbye.

- Well, - said Lily, - we only do what we say goodbye. Even funny. Write me when you are back in Leningrad, and I will show you one painting in the Hermitage. Nobody notices her. Just a great picture.

They entered the front door. I stood on the embankment for a while. The greenish light of river lamps fell on black barges moored to wooden pipes. Dry leaves flew past the lanterns.

And I thought that, after all, it is tiring and sad to meet new people all the time and then lose them for who knows how long - maybe forever.
Yalta, 1957

song, lark. Full of a sense of indefinite danger, Alexei looked around the cutting area. The felling was fresh, not started, the needles on the uncut trees had not yet had time to turn and turn yellow ... The lumberjacks might just about come. Alexei felt like an animal that someone was carefully and inseparably watching him. The branch cracked. He looked back and saw that several branches were living some kind of special life, not in time with the general movement. And it seemed to Alexei that an excited human whisper could be heard from there. "What is this Beast, man?" thought Alexei, and it seemed to him that someone in the bushes was speaking Russian. From this, he felt crazy joy ... Without thinking at all who was there - friend or foe, Alexei uttered a triumphant cry, rushed forward with his whole body and immediately fell with a groan like a hacked-off

1. Determine the style of speech 2. draw up a sentence scheme in the first paragraph 3. tell about spelling not with participles using sentences from the text as an example 4. find isolated circumstances in the text and explain the punctuation marks 5. perform a morphological analysis of the word in an animal way

1) This is an artistic style of speech, because there are words in a figurative meaning. 2) I think that, in 1 sentence, the scheme of the adverbial turnover (sun) is a definite word, and choking in my own simple song (this is a adverbial turnover). 3) It is not written together when it is a prefix, when it is a single full participle, and with participles that are not used without, in this case it is not written together as it is a single and full participle, and a word that is not used without (no wonder). 4) there was a thick smell of tar, and somewhere high up, the clearing was fresh, choking on its own simple song, without thinking at all, adverbial phrases are also isolated circumstances. Separate circumstances and adverbial phrases we always single out with commas on both sides. 5) In an animal way - the definitive adverb of the image and mode of action (how?), unchangeable, in the sentence is a circumstance, underlined by a dash with a dot.

The apartment greeted him with a draft and a soft smell of wildflowers. He weaned from this smell only two years after that incident. Eyes met in horror with the red twenty on the calendar... Time passes so quickly! He has lived alone for exactly two years. Exactly two years ago, he lost her ... Without pulling off his shoes, he ran into the kitchen. Liquor bottles took over the table and sink. The half-eaten breakfast was still standing on the stove, where it was put to cool and forgotten in a hurry ... Bread crumbs littered the floor of the room. She would have quarreled with him for a long time because of this mess, and she would have thrown a tantrum for not taking off her shoes. She would sulk at him for a whole week and not cook her favorite pancakes for breakfast, thereby showing that she was terribly offended. That's just it's not there ... Brushing off a couple of bottles from the table, which crashed into thousands of fragments when they met with a cold tile, he fell into a chair and stared blankly out the window. A cloudy November sky appeared before his eyes. It was raining overnight, threatening to drag on until morning. A single star peeked out from behind the clouds. Their star...

Volume! Volume! Tom, look what a star! Beautiful, right? - her big brown eyes for a few seconds looked at him, then at the sky, beaming with childish imperceptible joy. A gentle smile crept onto her lips. She was filled with sudden happiness. - Yes. Bright. But what if the little - little people living on this star, just now turned on thousands of searchlights for you? And why is the star so bright? Tom asked, burying his face in her soft, wildflower-scented hair. - Well, you figure it out! - she exclaimed. - Not. In fact, a sea of ​​snow-white flowers grows there. That's why the star is so bright, - she smiled again and, turning her head, kissed him on the cheek. From the touch of her warm lips to his skin, somewhere in his stomach, a huge, heavy and scaldingly hot beast woke up, slowly moving into the chest, squeezing the lungs so that it becomes hard to breathe in, and even harder to breathe out. His lips stretched into a smile, he presses her even tighter to him and suddenly begins to tickle. She squirms, moves her legs quickly and quickly and laughs loudly, loudly, burstingly ...

They walk down a dimly lit street late at night. In the evening it became sharply cold and so that she would not catch a cold, he wrapped her in his jacket. They walk in silence, they don’t need words, at this moment it’s enough just to be near ... Then the even clatter of her heels goes astray, two young people suddenly appear from behind a dark corner. - And it's not scary to walk alone in such dark alleys so late? the first one asks caustically, approaching the couple with an imposing gait. Angie was frightened and clung to Tom's arm, seeking protection from him. The guy blocked the girl and crossed his arms over his chest. - I have a counter question for you, gentlemen, - Tom retorts rather sharply. The young people looked at each other displeasedly, and the first nodded to his partner. They acted quickly and harmoniously, apparently, not the first time they lay in wait for someone late in the evening. But Tom did not differ in slow reaction and quite quickly hit the first robber in the face with force. The guy could not stand the blow and settled on the asphalt. The main disadvantage was that there were two attackers, and while Tom dealt with one, the second insolent quickly crept up to the girl and was about to steal her handbag, when Angie sharply stepped on his foot with her heel and tangibly put her elbow on his neck. - Dreaming! By the way, this is a gift! - exclaimed the girl and proudly threw up her nose. - You will answer me for this! one croaked from the asphalt. “Look, no matter how you answer us for this,” Angie said threateningly. - Well done, dear. And now I propose to leave them and let them enjoy the fresh evening air, - Tom grinned ...

She called him and asked him to carry the bags from the store. He quickly packed up and within five minutes was loaded with five bags of food. - And where are you so much? he wondered. - Not to me, dear, but to you. It's you who eats a week's supply of food in an hour, - she grinned. - Yeah, and your yogurts, - he supported. - Exactly! Yoghurts! How could I forget?! Wait here, I'm quick.” She turned around and ran across the street to the store… It all happened too fast, he didn't have time to realize it! A small foreign car of blue color crashes into her at full speed... The screech of brakes, a thud of the body on the asphalt, the screams of people, his own deafening cry... He runs to her, falls to his knees, calls her, tries to bring her to her senses, but nothing helps ... Then everything is like through the water: an ambulance, a coffin, a funeral ... Everything is blurry and muffled, like an old film stored in the back of memory ... He got up from his chair and went to the window. He was shaking with anger and despair. - Why did you take her? What she is did you?! – he shouted like a madman. Emotions and nerves were out of control, his eyes darkened, his own body turned out to be too heavy, he fell to his knees with a dull thud. - For what? She was innocent and blameless. Why are you like this? he whispered, hot tears streaming down his cheeks, leaving wet tracks on his skin. Suddenly, a light breeze blew, and the smell of wild flowers enveloped him, intoxicating his mind. "I'm here," whispered a gentle voice. He could not understand whether it seemed to him or it was in fact, but suddenly it became much easier, his head cleared up, the tension subsided, peace replaced the raging emotions. "I'll get back to you," he whispered, grinning.