Read a short retelling of the thick river Okkervil. Tatyana Tolstaya - Okkervil River
Tatiana Tolstaya
Okkervil River
When the zodiac sign changed to Scorpio, it became very windy, dark and rainy. The wet, flowing, wind-beating city behind the defenseless, uncurtained, bachelor window, behind the processed cheeses hidden in the cold between the windows, seemed then to be the evil intent of Peter the Great, the revenge of the huge, bug-eyed, gaping-mouthed, toothed carpenter king, who was catching up with everything in nightmares, with a ship's hatchet in his raised hand, his weak, frightened subjects. The rivers, having reached the swollen, terrifying sea, rushed back, snapped cast-iron hatches with a hissing pressure and quickly raised their watery backs in museum basements, licking fragile collections falling apart with damp sand, shaman masks made of rooster feathers, curved overseas swords, beaded robes, sinewy legs angry employees woken up in the middle of the night. On days like these, when the white, curdled face of loneliness emerged from the rain, the darkness, and the bending glass of the wind, Simeonov, feeling especially big-nosed, balding, especially aware of his old age around his face and the cheap socks far below, on the border of existence, put the kettle on, He wiped the dust off the table with his sleeve, cleared the space of books with their white bookmarks sticking out, set up the gramophone, selecting a book of the right thickness to slip under its lame corner, and in advance, blissfully in advance, extracted Vera Vasilievna from the torn, yellow-stained envelope - an old, heavy, anthracite-shimmering circle, not split into smooth concentric circles - one romance on each side.
- No, not you! so ardent! I! I love! – jumping, crackling and hissing, Vera Vasilyevna quickly twirled under the needle; hissing, crackling and whirling curled like a black funnel, expanded with a gramophone pipe, and, triumphant in victory over Simeonov, rushed from the scalloped orchid divine, dark, low, at first lacy and dusty, then swelling with underwater pressure, rising from the depths, transforming, swaying with lights on the water , - psch-psch-psch, psch-psch-psch, - a voice puffing like a sail, - ever louder, - breaking the ropes, rushing uncontrollably, psch-psch-psch, like a caravel across the night water splashing with lights - ever stronger, - spreading its wings, picking up speed, smoothly breaking away from the lagging thickness of the stream that gave birth to it, from the small one remaining on the bank of Simeonov, who raised his balding, barefoot head to a gigantically grown, shining, eclipsing half of the sky voice, emanating in a victorious cry - no, it was not him that Vera Vasilievna loved so passionately , and yet, in essence, only him, and this was mutual between them. H-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch.
Simeonov carefully removed the silent Vera Vasilievna, rocked the disk, clasping it with straightened, respectful palms; looked at the old sticker: eh, where are you now, Vera Vasilievna? Where are your white bones now? And, turning her over on her back, he set the needle, squinting at the prune reflections of the swaying thick disk, and again listened, languishing, about the long-faded chrysanthemums in the garden, where they met her, and again, growing in an underwater flow, throwing off dust, lace and years, Vera Vasilievna crackled and appeared like a languid naiad - an unsportsmanlike, slightly overweight naiad of the beginning of the century - oh sweet pear, guitar, sloping champagne bottle!
And then the kettle began to boil, and Simeonov, having fished out processed cheese or ham scraps from the interwindow, put the record on from the beginning and feasted like a bachelor, on a spread newspaper, enjoying himself, rejoicing that Tamara would not overtake him today and would not disturb his precious date with Vera Vasilievna . He felt good in his solitude, in a small apartment, alone with Vera Vasilyevna, and the door was tightly locked from Tamara, and the tea was strong and sweet, and the translation of an unnecessary book from a rare language was almost finished - there would be money, and Simeonov would buy it from one crocodile for a high price a rare record where Vera Vasilievna yearns that spring will not come for her - a male romance, a romance of loneliness, and the disembodied Vera Vasilievna will sing it, merging with Simeonov into one yearning, heartbroken voice. O blissful solitude! Loneliness eats from a frying pan, fishes a cold cutlet out of a cloudy liter jar, brews tea in a mug - so what? Peace and freedom! The family rattles the china cabinet, sets traps for cups and saucers, catches the soul with a knife and fork, grabs it under the ribs on both sides, strangles it with a teapot cap, throws a tablecloth over its head, but the free, lonely soul slips out from under the linen fringe and passes snake through the napkin ring and - hop! catch it! she is already there, in a dark magic circle filled with lights, outlined by the voice of Vera Vasilievna, she runs out after Vera Vasilievna, following her skirts and fan, from the bright dancing hall to the night summer balcony, to a spacious semicircle above the garden fragrant with chrysanthemums, however, their the smell, white, dry and bitter - this is an autumn smell, it already foreshadows autumn, separation, oblivion, but love still lives in my sick heart - this is a sick smell, the smell of decay and sadness, somewhere you are now, Vera Vasilievna, perhaps in Paris or Shanghai, and what kind of rain - the blue of Paris or the yellow of China - is drizzling over your grave, and whose soil is chilling your white bones? No, it’s not you that I love so passionately! (Tell me! Of course, me, Vera Vasilievna!)
BULLETIN OF PERM UNIVERSITY
2016 RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN PHILOLOGY Issue 4(36)
UDC 821.161.1.09-32
doi 10.17072/2037-6681-2016-4-150-155
“PETERSBURG TEXT” by TATYANA TOLSTOY (motivic complex of the story “Okkervil River”)
Olga Vladimirovna Bogdanova
d. philol. Sc., leading researcher, Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University
199034, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaya embankment, 11. [email protected]
Ekaterina Anatolyevna Bogdanova
K. philol. Sc., junior researcher, Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University
199034, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaya embankment, 11. [email protected]
In the article, devoted to the analysis of Tatyana Tolstaya’s story “The Okkervil River,” a complex of plot motifs is identified and interpreted, referring the reader to the leading motifs of Russian classical literature, but their semantics is rethought by a modern prose writer and played with other connotations. The St. Petersburg chronotope is studied, its simplification and the displacement of spatial landmarks are considered. The ironic reduction in the image of St. Petersburg-Leningrad sets the overall playful (mocking) tone for the story about the “little hero” Simeonov, a descendant of poor Eugene from Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and the “little heroes” of Gogol and Dostoevsky.
One of the leading motifs of the narrative - the motif of the circle, closely interacting with the image-motive of the alluring “silver voice”, makes it possible to detect musical allusions that served as the impetus for the creation of the “romantic” intertext of the story.
Key words: Tatiana Tolstaya; modern Russian literature; prose; postmodernism; tradition; intertext; motive; story.
Tatyana Tolstoy’s story “The Okkervil River” was first published in the third issue of Aurora magazine in 1985 and was subsequently included in all the writer’s collections.
Interpreting the story “The Okkervil River”, researchers, as a rule, say that the main thing in the text is “the traditional theme of the relationship between art and life” (see for more details: [Goshchilo 2000: 103-104; Zholkovsky 2005: 246]). And in the most general sense this is true. However, the motive complex of Tolstoy’s story is much wider and deeper, more complex and subtle.
It is a known fact that the idea for the story “The Okkervil River” arose from Tolstoy during her “walk around the city with Alexander Kushner, who pointed to the house of his friend, to whom Akhmatova went to take a bath” [Zholkovsky 2005: 563, 564]. Then “Tolstaya thought: “This is what connections with a great poet are like!”
And indeed, the invisible image of Akhmatova seems to fill the text of the story - if not with the lines of the poet, then with the sounds of the poems of her contemporaries, with the aroma of the Silver Age. According to Tolstoy herself, “the only direct text [Akhmatova] deliberately... used” in the story “Okkervil River” was the poem “Listening to Singing.”
Anna Akhmatova, guessed by researchers in the image of Vera Vasilievna, and the name of a small river flowing through St. Petersburg, the hydronym “Okkervil,” lead to the idea of Tolstoy writing another page of the “Petersburg text,” which began at the end of the 19th century - beginning of the 19th century. (see for more details: [Toporov 1995]).
Already the first lines of “The Okkervil River” immerse the events of the story within the boundaries of St. Petersburg-Leningrad, correlating the image of the city with the face of its great founder: “When the sign
© Bogdanova O. V., Bogdanova E. A., 2016
The zodiac changed to Scorpio, it became very windy, dark and rainy. Wet, flowing, the wind beating on the glass, the city behind the defenseless, uncurtained, bachelor window<...>seemed then to be the evil intent of Peter the Great, the revenge of the huge, bug-eyed, gaping-mouthed, toothy Tsar-Carpenter<...>"[Tolstaya, 1999: 332]1.
St. Petersburg is a city-quote, a city-intertext, an attempt to project Europe onto the banks of the Neva, to build New Amsterdam, to architecturally replicate Rome in the central part, and to outline Venice with canals on Vasilyevsky Island. St. Petersburg is a literary-centric city, thoroughly permeated with historiosophical projections, poetic allusions and theatrical reminiscences. Creating her own image of the city-text, Tolstaya relies on the leading motifs of Russian classical literature, forming her city intertextually, from the first paragraph introducing Pushkin’s image of the “Bronze Horseman” into the narrative and at the same time reproducing Benoit’s watercolor illustration for it: “The Bronze Horseman rushes behind him with a ringing sound.” -a galloping horse."
However, the quotation of St. Petersburg is rethought by Tolstoy and played with other connotations. Unlike his predecessors, Tolstoy’s Peter is not Peter the Great, not a sovereign city planner, but “a bug-eyed, gaping-mouthed, toothy carpenter king” (332). In contrast to the generally accepted tradition, Tolstaya builds her St. Petersburg not around the famous Bronze Horseman on the granite thunder stone, but around another monument - the monument to the Tsar Carpenter, opened in 1910 on the Admiralty Embankment of St. Petersburg. Thus, the writer, on the one hand, seems to point to a different time of textual boundaries, emphasizes a different historical period within which imaginary events take place, on the other hand, he means different hereditary roots of today's urban workers. Her city is no longer St. Petersburg. Maybe Petrograd (the time of her heroine Vera Vasilievna). Or Leningrad (the modern chronotope of the main character Simeonov). The rings of time, recorded in the name of the city (Petersburg ^ Petrograd ^ Leningrad), are outlined by Tolstoy at the very beginning of the story, closing and at the same time differentiating the St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad distant past and the near present.
In Tolstoy’s story, the St. Petersburg chronotope is reduced and simplified; the modern Leningrad chronotope lacks its former greatness. Contrary to the established literary tradition, the city of Tolstoy (with any of its names) is not an embodiment of
a symbol of the height of spirit and power of the Russian people, but appears as the “evil intent of Peter the Great,” the “revenge” of a huge and toothy carpenter-builder. The metamorphosis of the city, which in the story takes on frightening anthropomorphic features, gives rise to an ironic decline, sets a humorous tone in which the subsequent serious story about a man will be conducted - about the “little hero” Simeonov, a descendant of the noble Eugene from Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and the “little heroes” » Gogol and Dostoevsky (see for more details: [Altman 1961: 443-461; Mann 1988]).
The artistic “joint” in the naming of the hero is another feature of the historical (temporal) transformation: today, a “little” hero named Simeonov in the past could come from the Grand Duke Simeon the Proud (Simeonov is the son of Simeon), whose steadfastness and pride are firmly united by national consciousness in his nickname. Today’s “little” Simeonov is an alloy of the incompatible, an “oxymoronic” image that absorbs contradictory opposite principles.
The main character of the story is a “little man”, an amateur collector, a fan of the formerly famous singer Vera Vasilievna, whose love for her voice, for the sounds of ancient romances generated by the gramophone, lifts him high, lifting him above the bustle of the world, and for a short moment muffles pain and gives birth to sweetness his loneliness. Living in Leningrad in the 1970s and doing practical work (the hero is a translator), Simeonov largely lives in another world - foggy and beautiful, sound-musical, imaginary and desired. A lonely bachelor, involved in Russian literature, realizes that “there is no happiness in the world,” but, listening to the voice of Vera Vasilievna, he is consoled by the “peace and freedom” available to him (334).
Tolstoy's hero exists in several dimensions. The writer seems to create for him a time funnel (“black funnel”, 333), which either carries him into the past, or brings him to the surface of modernity. For Simeonov, the scalloped trumpet of the gramophone becomes the “pipe of time” that connects the visible and the invisible, the dreamed and the manifested. And the gramophone itself (not even a gramophone, and even in the age of cassette recorders) becomes a conventional point in space, a portal where, according to Tolstoy, the transition from the present to the past, from reality to dream, from loneliness to mutual and eternal love takes place. "On days like these<...>Simeonov,<...>especially feeling his old years around his face and cheap socks far below, on the border of existence, he put the kettle on, wiped the dust off the table with his sleeve, cleared away the books, dried
removed the white tabs of the bookmarks, space, installed the gramophone,<...>and in advance, blissfully in advance, he took Vera Vasilyevna from a torn, yellowishly stained envelope - an old, heavy, anthracite-cast circle, not split into smooth concentric circles - on each side, one romance” (332-333).
The image of a black vinyl record spinning on a gramophone draws circles, which in their rotation acquire a leitmotif character, permeating the entire fabric of the story, returning the plot action to the same episode - the situation of Simeonov’s dreams played out three times in the text to the sounds of ancient romances performed by his beloved Vera Vasilievna. Gramophone disc-circles multiply and grow, overlapping each other, giving rise to new rings and circles, turning the entire fabric of the story into lace and festoons, orchids and nasturtiums, cherries and fish scales, semicircles of balconies, etc.
The musical genre of the romance performed by Vera Vasilyevna, based on a poetic repetition-refrain, sets new structural and compositional rings in the narrative, permeating the text with a romantic lyrical mood, coloring it with the love experiences of the performer (past) and the hero listening to her (present), allowing them to merge into a single flow of feelings, in the community of sounds of melody and verse. It is at this level of merging of melodic sound and poetic sound that character substitution becomes possible: the poetess Anna Andreevna turns out to be represented in the text by the singer Vera Vasilyevna, Akhmatov’s AA is replaced by Tolstoy’s BB.
Critics have already drawn attention to the similarity of the monogrammatic names AA and BB [Zholkovsky 2005: 250]. However, for Tolstoy, not only the roll call of initials is important, but also the semantic (metaphorical) meaning of the heroine’s name. “Vera Vasilievna” means for the hero “faith, hope and love”, a single triad in its almost divine essences, giving rise to the possibility of overcoming everyday life with being, music and poetry - earthly gravity.
Along with the heroine’s name, imbued with faith, her patronymic - Vasilievna - is also “speaking”: through it, the writer “settles and registers” the heroine on Vasilievsky Island, making her house (apartment) part of the St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad) topography. The heroine's patronymic turns out to be part of the “St. Petersburg space”, connecting her name with the city, and her voice with the water element, covering the city island on which she lives.
It seems that in Simeonov’s love for Vera Vasilievna, the writer wants to show the overcoming of his own smallness by a modern character who is able to rise above himself in touching the beautiful. It seems that art is truly capable of lifting a hero above the crowd, revealing his sublime soul. However, this traditional motif of Russian literature seems to be overturned in Tolstoy’s text: the ironic tone of the narrative is not overcome even in the most touching episodes of Simeonov’s dreams, at the moment of his merging with the voice of Vera Vasilievna.
“Aesthete”, “lover”, “eccentric” (337), the hero’s profession is associated with literature. It seems that the high “literary” component in the character’s characterology should traditionally distinguish him, but in Tolstoy the opposite happens
The book term gives rise to an ironic “decrease”. According to the hero, the “boring” books he translates “are of no use to anyone”, they are scattered on his table in dust and disorder and serve the owner only as a support - not spiritual-intellectual, but subject-physical: he selected “the book of the required thickness so that slip<ее>under the lame<...>corner" of the gramophone (332). Books in Simeonov’s world are objective and evil. They are zoomorphic and, coming to life, either offended, or ironically laughing at the owner, as if they were clowning around - they disdainfully show the hero their “white tongues of bookmarks” (332).
The sublime component of Simeonov’s dates with Vera Vasilievna, which in literature traditionally ennobles and poetizes the hero, is discredited by the fact that, along with installing a gramophone and clearing space for the singer’s voice, Simeonov invariably and regularly outlines another circle
Everyday, everyday: he “put the teapot” (with a round bottom, a round lid and a semicircular handle) and took out a mug (the root is “circle”), combining and mixing the musical and the edible, the spiritual and the carnal. The highest moment of the meeting, the apotheosis of the meeting with Vera Vasilyevna, turns out to be the moment when “the kettle was boiling, and Simeonov, having fished out processed cheese or ham scraps from the window, put the record on from the beginning and feasted like a bachelor, on a spread newspaper, enjoying, rejoicing that<никто>will not disturb the precious meeting with Vera Vasilyevna” (334).
The classic motif of Russian literature - the opposition of external and internal, spiritual and physical, everyday and existential - in the image of Simeonov is shaded and acquires an ironic reflection. Because it's a poetic metaphor
- "white<...>the face of loneliness" (332) - receives from Tolstoy an additional epithet corresponding to the hero: "the white, curdled face of loneliness."
And Vera Vasilievna appears in Simeonov’s dreams not as an ideal romanticized ethereal vision, alluring with the sound of a divine voice, but as an almost corporeal being who can be hugged, pressed, rocked, and turned over on her back (333). Simeonov takes out from the yellowed envelope not a record, but “Vera Vasilievna” (332), under the needle it is not the “anthracite disk” that is spinning, but “Vera Vasilievna” (333), it is not the voice that falls silent, but “Vera Vasilievna”, which has come to life in Simeonov’s dreams ( 333). Simeonov “swayed the disk, clasping it with straightened, respectful palms” (333), but also, “swaying<...>in heels” (337), Vera Vasilievna herself passes through the hero’s dreams. The ghostly image takes on the features of an almost real woman, her proportions and shape - “oh sweet pear, guitar, sloping champagne bottle!” (334) - reduced density.
The duality of the image of the protagonist and heroine, the duality of feelings that Simeonov experiences for Vera Vasilievna, give rise to two plots in Tolstoy’s story, which organize two plot lines of the story. On the one hand, this is a visible plot core: three stages of acquaintance with the real singer Vera Vasilievna (the voice on the record - the rumor of an antique dealer that the singer is alive - direct acquaintance with the “old woman”), on the other hand, three stages in the spiritual (extra-worldly) communication with the singer (her settlement in a built-up town on the banks of Okkervil - thunderclouds over a doll-porcelain town - settlement of red houses with tiled roofs by strangers). These plots are parallel, but at the same time intersect: sounds, words and images of one plot series unexpectedly appear in another.
The artistic hierarchy of the story organizes not only the horizontal of place, but also the vertical of time. The “name/city” motif outlined above is developed by Tolstoy in the historical change of eras, not only socio-political, but also literary, recorded in “precious” symbolism - the golden age of Russian literature (St. Petersburg), silver (Petrograd), bronze (Leningrad) ). If the first romance that Simeonov listens to, “No, it’s not you I love so ardently.”, is written to the words of M. Lermontov (1841), i.e., it represents the golden age of Russian poetry (the time of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol), then the next one is “The chrysanthemums in the garden have long since bloomed.” (1910) -
read as a sign of the Silver Age, the time of Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Blok. And the gramophone with a scalloped pipe from the Art Nouveau era, on the one hand, becomes a recognizable sign of the Art Nouveau era, on the other, with its copper-brass essence, it seems to indicate the Bronze Age (copper, brass - modern).
The transition in the story “Okkervil River” from the poetic level (AA) to the musical level (BB) entails a change in symbolic imagery and motifs. If Akhmatova in the poem “Listening to Singing” compares a woman’s voice with the wind (this motif is present at the beginning of Tolstoy’s narrative), then gradually the melodious melodic voice of Vera Vasilievna acquires in Tolstoy the features of an element not of air, but of water, and is compared not with the wind, but with a river stream . Akhmatov's poetic airiness is replaced by the melody and smoothness of the river - both the mysterious Okkerville, the banks of which Simeonov mentally built up, and the Neva, which embraced Vasilievsky Island with its sleeves. And Vera Vasilievna herself is compared not with a poetically light and tremulous (butterfly or) bird, but with a “languid naiad” (333), with a sonorous-voiced siren. The forgotten singer's voice is "divine, dark, low<...>underwater swelling<...>an inflated voice like a sail,<...>uncontrollably rushing<...>caravel on the night water splashing with lights<...>picking up speed, smoothly breaking away from the lagging thickness of the flow that gave birth to it” (333). Moreover, the figurative comparison used by Tolstoy reveals its literary origins: if the “voice // air flow” was generated by the poems of Akhmatova, then the “voice // naiad” comes from the poetry of Gumilyov. In Gumilyov’s poem “Venice” (and St. Petersburg, as we remember, is the Venice of the north), the lines sound: “The city, like the voice of a naiad, / In a ghostly bright past, / Lace like a patterned arcade, / The waters are frozen like glass.” The image of the naiad voice acquires a strong genetic connection with the “St. Petersburg space.” Even Tolstoy’s image of the caravel, “rushing uncontrollably<...>over the night water splashing with lights” and “spreading its wings,” comes from Gumilyov: “At the evening hour, at the hour of sunset / Petrograd floats by like a winged caravel.” [Gumilev 1989: 117]. The motivic series “city - voice - naiad” turns out to be the product of the “St. Petersburg text”, precisely dated to the Silver Age.
“Akhmatov-Gumilev” motifs permeate the text of Tolstoy’s story with allusions to the Silver Age and are supported by references to the moods and realities of that time. Yes, reduction
definitions of the century and voice gives rise to a single and integral image-motive - the “silver voice” (339), which contains an idea of both the properties of the singer’s performance of ancient romances, and the time of her birth and reign. In this context, there is almost folklore rhetoric: “...uh, where are you now, Vera Vasilyevna? Where are your white bones now? (333) - acquires the features of decadent aestheticism of the early twentieth century: “white bone” as a sign of noble origin, related in its semantics to the “white guard” or “white army”. In the same row are the black and white - Blok - coloring of the painted picture, and the “barefoot” (balding or shaved) elongated head of the character, reminiscent of the photographic appearance of Gumilyov from 1912-1914. And even translations of “an unnecessary book from a rare language” resurrect the image of V. Shileiko, an oriental philologist, Akhmatova’s second husband.
Tolstoy’s tram becomes a powerful image that connects the past and the modern, the visible and the non-existent. Like Gumilyov’s “lost tram”, which on one route slipped “across the Neva, across the Nile and the Seine,” Tolstoy’s tram transports the hero from the present to the past, from reality to a dream. “Trams passed by the Simeonovsky window<...>the red-sided, solid carriages with wooden benches died and the carriages began to run round, silent, hissing at stops, you could sit down, plop down on the soft chair that gasped, giving up the ghost under you, and roll into the blue distance, to the final stop, which beckoned with the name: “Okkervil River” "(335). For Tolstoy, like for Gumilyov, the tram pierced eras and “got lost in the abyss of times.” (335).
The mysterious hydronym “Okkervil”, which is of Swedish origin and is now poorly understood even by specialists, gives Tolstoy not only the name of “almost not a Leningrad river,” but also the opportunity to “imagine anything you want” (335). The hero Simeonov does not allow himself to take the tram route to the final stop called “Okkervil River”. He guesses that there, at the “end of the world,” “there are probably warehouses, fences, some nasty little factory spitting out pearlescent toxic waste, a landfill smoking with stinking smoldering smoke, or something else, hopeless, outlying, vulgar” (335) . He is afraid of reality, afraid of being disappointed. Therefore, it is easier and better for him “mentally<...>pave the Okkerville embankments with paving stones, fill the river with clean gray water, build bridges with turrets and chains. place tall gray towers along the embankment
ma with cast iron gateway gratings<...>settle young Vera Vasilievna there, and let her walk, pulling on a long glove, along the cobblestone pavement, placing her feet narrowly, stepping narrowly in black, blunt-toed shoes with round, apple-like heels, in a small round hat with a veil, through the quiet drizzle of the St. Petersburg morning.” (335-336).
References, allusions and reminiscences give rise to depth and volume in Tolstoy’s text. Without reproducing the quote, but only pointing to it, the writer touches and awakens the background context, which is composed of well-known texts of poetry and especially romances. And, even without being reproduced in the work, poetic and romantic-musical sounds fill the “lace” of Tolstoy’s story, giving rise to its three-dimensionality and spatiality.
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"PETERSBURG TEXT" BY TATYANA TOLSTAYA (motifs in the story "The Okkervil River")
Olga V. Bogdanova Leading Researcher
Ekaterina A. Bogdanova Junior Researcher
Institute of Philological Research of Saint Petersburg State University
In the article devoted to the analysis of "The Okkervil River", a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya, a variety of motifs are distinguished and interpreted. Those refer the reader to the main motifs of Russian classical literature, however, their semantics is reconsidered by the contemporary writer and presented with different connotations. Saint Petersburg chronotope is analyzed, its simplification and shifts of spatial frameworks are considered. The ironic depreciation of the image of Saint Petersburg - Leningrad sets a playful (derisive) tone of the narration about the "little hero", Simeonov, a descendant of poor Eugene from "The Bronze Horseman" by Pushkin, as well as Gogol"s and Dostoevsky's "little heroes".
One of the leading motifs of the narration is that of a circle, closely interacting with the image-motif of the luring "silver voice". It allows for revealing musical allusions, encouraging the development of the "romancing" intertextuality of the story.
Key words: Tatyana Tolstaya; modern Russian literature; prose; postmodernism; tradition; intertext; motif; novel.
One of the collections of works by Tatyana Tolstoy contains a short story about love - “The Okkervil River”, a brief summary of which is described below. In a nutshell, the plot can be described as follows: Simeonov, a balding and aging bachelor, lives in St. Petersburg. He has a gray, ordinary life - a small apartment, translations from a foreign language, and in the evening - tea and cheese. However, his life is not as boring as it seems at first glance, since Vera Vasilievna is nearby.
Argument with the soul
Summary of the story “Okkervil River”: her voice flows every evening from an old gramophone. Vera Vasilyevna sings about love in a beautiful, gentle voice. Although not specifically for Simeonov, it seemed to him that only for him alone. It was the height of bliss when he was left alone with the gramophone turned on. Neither a possible family nor the comfort of a home could compare with these moments.
Although ethereal, Vera Vasilievna in his dreams was always a real beauty, leisurely strolling along the river embankment. Okkervil. There was the last tram stop. Simeonov had never seen the landscapes of that place, had not been there, and did not want to be there. He lived his dreams.
However, one autumn, while purchasing another gramophone record from a speculator, I learned that the singer was still alive, but already in old age and was somewhere in the city. She used to be rich, beautiful and wore diamonds. One day, heavenly life ended, husband, lovers, son and apartment became a thing of the past. Now the singer lives in poverty. The speculator's story touched Simeonov's soul and an internal dispute flared up within him with his own “I”.
One half offered to continue their usual life, forget the singer and let Tamara into the house - a woman who was real and nearby. The other part of the soul demanded to find ethereal love and surround it with attention and care, delight and admiration. Simeonov imagined that he would see the joyful and happy eyes of Vera Vasilievna, full of tears.
Meeting
It was this half of the soul that won. Simeonov found out the singer’s address for just five kopecks. Then I bought yellow chrysanthemums at the market. I bought a fruit cake at the bakery, although it had a fingerprint on it, but I decided that the old lady wouldn’t notice it.
Finally Simeonov reached the desired address and rang the doorbell. He was deafened by laughter, noise and singing. The table was littered with a variety of salads, fish and other foods. There were bottles of wine on it, and the huge, rosy-cheeked Vera Vasilievna was telling those present a hilarious joke. It turned out it was her birthday.
Simeonov found himself immediately squeezed into the table. The guests took the flowers and cake from him and forced him to drink in honor of the birthday girl. He raised toasts and ate purely automatically, and smiled at those present mechanically. His soul was devastated and crushed. The “magic” singer turned out to be an ordinary woman, and who exchanged him, the prince, for 15 ordinary people.
As it turned out, on the 1st, the singer’s fans gathered in her communal apartment. They listened to her records and helped as best they could. Simeonov was asked if he had a separate bath. The singer loved to swim, but this was impossible to do in a communal apartment. Simeonov, instead of answering, thought that his ethereal love had died, he needed to return home and marry the real Tamara and return to the life of a simple man in the street.
At the center of T. Tolstoy’s stories is a modern man with his emotional experiences, life’s experiences, and the peculiarities of everyday life. The story “Okkervil River”, written in 1987, raises the topic of “Man and Art”, the influence of art on a person, relationships between people in the modern world, and is a reflection on the relationship between dreams and reality.
The story is built on the principle of “linking associations”, “stringing images”. Already at the beginning of the work, a picture of a natural disaster - a flood in St. Petersburg - is combined with a story about a lonely Simeonov, who is beginning to grow old, and his life. The hero enjoys the freedom of solitude, reading and listening to rare gramophone recordings of the once famous, but today completely forgotten singer Vera Vasilievna.
In the story, three time layers can be distinguished: present, past and future. Moreover, the present is inseparable from the past. The author reminds us that time is cyclical and eternal: “When the zodiac sign changed to Scorpio, it became very windy, dark and rainy.”
Petersburg is animated, its image is woven from metaphors, an abundance of epithets, romantic and realistic details, where the central one was the creative, but terrible Peter the Great and his weak, frightened subjects: “the city beating on the glass with the wind behind the defenseless, uncurtained bachelor window seemed then to be Peter’s evil intent. The rivers, having reached the swollen, terrifying sea, rushed back, raising their watery backs in museum basements, licking fragile collections falling apart with damp sand, shamanic masks made of rooster feathers. Crooked overseas swords, sinewy legs of angry employees awakened in the middle of the night.” St. Petersburg is a special place. Time and space store masterpieces of music, architecture, and painting. The city, the elements of nature, art are fused together. Nature in the story is personified, it lives its own life - the wind bends glass, rivers overflow their banks and flow backwards.
Simeonov's bachelor life is brightened up by reading and enjoying the sounds of an old romance. T. Tolstaya masterfully conveys the sound of the old, “anthracite-cast circle”:
No, not you! so ardent! I love! - jumping, crackling and hissing, Vera Vasilievna quickly spun under the needle; a divine, dark, low, first lacy and dusty, then swelling with underwater pressure, swaying with lights on the water, rushed from the scalloped orchid, - psch - psch - psch, an inflated voice like a sail - no, it was not him that Vera Vasilievna loved so ardently, but still, in essence, only him alone, and this was mutual between them. Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” The singer’s voice is associated with a caravel rushing through “the night water splashing with lights, the radiance blooming in the night sky. And the details of modest life fade into the background: “processed cheese fished out of the window pane or ham scraps,” a feast on a spread newspaper, dust on the work table.
The inconsistency present in the hero’s life is emphasized by the details of the hero’s portrait: “On days like these, Simeonov installed the gramophone, feeling especially big-nosed, balding, especially feeling his old age around his face.”
Simeonov, like the hero of T. Tolstoy’s story “Blank Slate” Ignatiev, rests his soul in another, associative world. Creating in his imagination the image of the young, Blok-like beautiful and mysterious singer Vera Vasilievna, Simeonov tries to distance himself from the realities of modern life, brushing aside the caring Tamara. The real world and the imagined one are intertwined, and he wants to be only with the object of his dreams, imagining that Vera Vasilievna will give her love only to him.
The title of the story is symbolic. “Okkervil River” is the name of the final tram stop, a place unknown to Simeonov, but which occupies his imagination. It may turn out to be beautiful, where there is a “greenish stream” with a “green sun”, silvery willows”, “wooden humpbacked bridges”, or maybe there is “some nasty little factory splashing out pearlescent poisonous waste, or something else, hopeless , outlying, vulgar.” The river, symbolizing time, changes its color - at first it appears to Simeonov as a “muddy green stream”, later as “already blooming poisonous greenery”.
Having heard from a gramophone record seller that Vera Vasilievna is alive, Simeonov decides to find her. This decision is not easy for him - two demons are fighting in his soul - a romantic and a realist: “one insisted on throwing the old woman out of his head, locking the doors tightly, living as he lived before, loving in moderation, languishing in moderation, listening in solitude to the pure sound of the silver trumpet , another demon - a crazy young man with a consciousness darkened from translating bad books - demanded to go, run, look for Vera Vasilievna - the blind, poor old woman, shout to her after years and hardships that she was a wondrous peri, destroyed and raised him - Simeonov, the faithful knight, - and, crushed by her silver voice, all the frailty of the world fell down,”
The details surrounding the preparation of the meeting with Vera Vasilievna predict failure. The yellow color of the chrysanthemums bought by Simeonov means some kind of disharmony, some kind of sick beginning. The same thing, in my opinion, is evidenced by the transformation of the green color of the river into poisonous green.
Another trouble awaits Simeonov - someone’s fingerprint imprinted on the jelly surface of the cake. The following detail also speaks of the disharmony of the upcoming meeting: “The sides (of the cake) were sprinkled with fine confectionery dandruff.”
The meeting with the dream, with the living but different Vera Vasilievna, completely crushed Simeonov. When he attended the singer’s birthday, he saw the routine, the lack of poetry, and even vulgarity in the face of one of the singer’s many guests, Potseluev. Despite the romantic surname, this character has his feet firmly on the ground, is purely businesslike and enterprising. A feature of T. Tolstoy’s style is the use of sentences of complex construction, an abundance of tropes when describing the stream of consciousness of the characters and their experiences. Simeonov's conversation with Potseluev is written in short phrases. Potseluev’s efficiency and down-to-earth nature are conveyed in abrupt phrases and reduced vocabulary: “Uh, muzzle. His voice is still like that of a deacon.” He combines his search for a rare recording of the romance “Dark Green Emerald” with the search for an opportunity to get smoked sausage.
At the end of the story, Simeonov and other fans help brighten up the singer’s life. This is humanly very noble. But poetry and charm have disappeared, the author emphasizes this with realistic details: “Bent over in his lifelong obedience,” Simeonov rinses the bath after Vera Vasilievna, washing away “gray pellets from the dried walls, scooping out gray hairs from the drain hole.”
A distinctive feature of T. Tolstoy’s prose is that the author empathizes with his characters and takes pity on them. She also sympathizes with Simeonov, who is looking for true beauty and does not want to accept reality. Vera Vasilyevna, who so early lost the main thing in life - her son, her job, who does not have basic household amenities in her old age, Tamara, who brings her beloved cutlets in a jar and is forced to “forget” either his hairpins or a handkerchief.
The story ends, as it began, with the image of a river. “The gramophone started the kisses, one could hear a wondrous, growing thunderous voice soaring over the steamed body of Verunchik, drinking tea from a saucer, over everything that cannot be helped, over the approaching sunset, over nameless rivers flowing backwards, overflowing their banks, raging and flooding the city, like Only rivers can make things.”
The unbearable grayness of existence. Where to run? How to hide from her? Or maybe dispel it with the help of a colorful dream? Everyone has their own recipe, which, however, does not guarantee complete healing and is accompanied by a lot of side effects, such as even more viscous, deep disappointment. As they say, we treat one thing, and another appears, no less serious. This kind of grief-treatment is discussed in the story of the modern writer Tatyana Tolstoy “The Okkervil River” (A summary of the work follows).
Storybook
1999 The publishing house "Podkova" is publishing a new collection of short stories by Tatyana Tolstoy under the rather unusual title "The Okkervil River", a brief summary of which is given in this article. Needless to say, the book was a great success among a wide range of readers. Why? As they say, the reason does not like to walk alone and takes a myriad of friends with him. Therefore, there are many reasons why the book so quickly found its reader and fell in love with him for many years, and one of them is the undoubted talent of the author, Tatyana Tolstoy, her poetic style, a little willful, full of epithets, metaphors, and unexpected comparisons, her peculiar humor, her mysterious, romantically sad, magical world, which either comes into violent conflict with the mortal world, somewhere meaningless, oozing with melancholy, then gets along with it quite amicably and peacefully, prompting philosophical reflection.
Summary: “River Okkervil”, Fat Tatyana
The collection also includes the story of the same name “The Okkervil River”. In short, the plot of the story is simple. Lives in the large, “wet, flowing, wind beating on the windows” city of St. Petersburg, someone named Simeonov - a big-nosed, aging, balding bachelor. His life is simple and lonely: a small apartment, translations of boring books from some rare language, and for dinner - processed cheese fished from between the windows and sweet tea. But is she really as lonely and joyless as she might seem at first glance? Not at all. After all, he has Vera Vasilievna...
In the story “The Okkervil River,” a brief summary of which cannot convey all the beauty of the work, her radiant voice, eclipsing half the sky, coming from the old gramophone, spoke words of love to him every evening, or rather not to him, she did not love him so passionately, but in essence , only to him, only him, and her feelings were mutual. Simeonov's loneliness with Vera Vasilievna was the most blissful, the most long-awaited, the most peaceful. No one and nothing could compare with him: neither his family, nor the comfort of home, nor Tamara, lying in wait for him here and there, with her matrimonial snares. He only needs the ethereal Vera Vasilievna, beautiful, young, pulling on a long glove, in a small hat with a veil, mysteriously and leisurely walking along the embankment of the Okkervil River.
The Okkervil River (you are currently reading a summary of the work) is the final stop of the tram. The name is alluring, but Simeonov had never been there, did not know its surroundings, landscapes and did not want to know. Maybe this is a “quiet, picturesque world, slowed down like in a dream,” or maybe... This “maybe,” probably gray, “outskirts, vulgar,” seen once, will freeze and poison him with its hopelessness.
One day in the fall
The summary of the work “Okkervil River” does not end there. One autumn, while buying another rare record with Vera Vasilievna’s enchanting romances from a “crocodile” speculator, Simeonov learns that the singer is alive and well, despite her advanced years, and lives somewhere in Leningrad, albeit in poverty. The brightness of her talent, as often happens, quickly dimmed and soon went out, and with her, diamonds, a husband, a son, an apartment and two lovers flew into oblivion. After this heartbreaking story, two demons started a serious argument in Simeonov’s head. One preferred to leave the old woman alone, lock the door, occasionally opening it slightly for Tamara, and continue to live “without unnecessary expenses”: love in moderation, languor in moderation, work in moderation. The other, on the contrary, demanded to immediately find the poor old woman and make her happy with his love, attention, care, but not for free - in return, he would finally look into her eyes full of tears and see in them only immeasurable joy and long-awaited love.
Long-awaited meeting
No sooner said than done. The street address booth suggested the desired address, albeit in a casual and even somehow insulting manner - for only five kopecks. The market helped with flowers - small ones, wrapped in cellophane. The bakery offered a fruit cake, decent, although with a thumbprint on the jelly surface: it’s okay, the old lady doesn’t see well and probably won’t notice... He called. The door swung open. Noise, singing, laughter, a table littered with salads, cucumbers, fish, bottles, fifteen laughing people and a white, huge, rouged Vera Vasilievna, telling a joke. It's her birthday today. Simeonov was unceremoniously squeezed into the table, took away the flowers and cake, and forced him to drink to the health of the birthday girl. He ate, drank, smiled mechanically: his life was crushed, his “magical diva” was stolen, or rather, she gladly allowed herself to be stolen. Who did she exchange him for, a handsome, sad, albeit bald, but prince? For fifteen mortals.
Life goes on
It turns out that on the first day of every month, Vera Vasilievna’s amateur fans gather in her communal apartment, listen to old records and help as much as they can. They asked if Simeonov had his own bath, and if so, they would bring a “magical diva” to him to bathe, because here it was shared, and she loved bathing with a passion. And Simeonov sat and thought: Vera Vasilievna died, we must return home, marry Tamara and eat hot food every day.
The next day in the evening they brought Vera Vasilievna to Simeonov’s house for a swim. After long ablutions, she came out all red, steamy, barefoot in a dressing gown, and Simeonov, smiling and lethargic, went to rinse the bath, wash off the gray pellets and pull out the clogged gray hair from the drain hole...
Conclusion
Have you read the summary of “The Okkervil River” (Tolstaya T.)? Fine. Now we advise you to open the first page of the story and start reading the text itself. About a dark, cold city, about a bachelor's feast on a spread newspaper, about ham scraps, about precious dates with Vera Vasilyevna, which Tamara so brazenly and unceremoniously sought to destroy... The author does not spare paints, makes savory strokes, sometimes even too much, drawing every detail, capturing the smallest details, fully and prominently. It's impossible not to admire!
Tatyana Tolstoy's work "The Okkervil River" tells the story of an aging, bald bachelor Simeonov living in St. Petersburg. His life is boring and monotonous. He lives in a small apartment, where he sometimes translates books.
Every day he enthusiastically listened to Vera Vasilievna’s records about love and took her kind words personally. In principle, that’s how it was. Simeonov's feelings for her were mutual. The relationship with this lady suited him; nothing could compare with them.
One autumn day, a bachelor was purchasing another Vera record, and learned from the seller that she was already old and lived somewhere in Leningrad, but already in poverty. Her popularity quickly faded, and along with her money, her husband, jewelry and other blessings of life disappeared. At this moment, Simeonov was tormented by doubts about how to live further. On the one hand, he wanted peace, he did not intend to let anyone into his established life, except perhaps Tamara. But, on the other hand, he dreamed of finding the old woman and showing her how much he loved her, and as a result, receiving boundless gratitude and love in return.
Nevertheless, the hero got hold of the address of the object of his affection, and, armed with flowers and a cake, went to the meeting. Ringing the doorbell and entering the apartment, Simeonov was stunned by what he saw. Vera Vasilievna was well made up and sat at a table surrounded by a crowd, she was celebrating her birthday. It turned out that every month fans visited her and helped in any way they could. They asked Simeonov if he had a bath. Having received a positive answer, the crowd joyfully offered to bring Vera to him for a swim. His world was destroyed, the bachelor finally decided to return home and marry Tamara. Vera Vasilievna died for him on this day.
The next evening she was brought to wash with a depressed bachelor. After the bath procedures, she came out to him in a robe, steamed and satisfied. And he went to wash off the pellets and take out her gray hair from the drain hole.
Picture or drawing Tolstaya - Okkervil River
Other retellings for the reader's diary
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The events take place in the Carpathian village of Tukhlya, whose residents live freely and do not depend on anyone. There is no power over them, and the people live together. Boyar Tugar Volk comes to this village
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The story tells about a boy named Vanya. Vanya had an old bicycle. The bike previously belonged to his father. My father gave it back in a broken state and said that he had once bought it at a flea market.
- Sasha Black Prisoner of the Caucasus summary
It was fun in the garden. Spring was in full swing: bird cherry trees and peonies were blooming, sparrows were jumping in the trees, starlings were basking in the sun, a black dachshund and the mongrel Tuzik were running around the estates. Off the coast of Elagin stretched a spit lined with bird cherry trees, in the middle of which
- Belov
The book of short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya “The Okkervil River” was published in 1999 by the publishing house “Podkova” and immediately had great reader success.
The writer solves a difficult artistic task - to record the very moment of one or another human sensation, impression, experience, to look at everyday life from the point of view of eternity. To do this, she turns to fairy tale and mythological-poetic traditions.
T. Tolstoy’s extended metaphors turn everyday life into a fairy tale, take them away from the problems of everyday life and thereby allow the reader to give free rein to their imagination, indulge in nostalgic memories and philosophical reflections.
However, the fairy tale is destroyed when confronted with harsh reality, as happens, for example, in the story “Date with a Bird.” For the boy Petya, the mysterious sorceress Tamila turns into a degenerate girl with the most prosaic problems. The “mysterious, sad, magical world” becomes for him “dead and empty, saturated with sulfur, dull, oozing melancholy.”
The conflict in Tolstoy's stories is often the clash of the characters with themselves, with their own existence in its problems and contradictions. “The world is finite, the world is curved, the world is closed, and it is closed on Vasily Mikhailovich” (“Circle”). “Time flows and rocks dear Shura’s boat on its back, and splashes wrinkles on her unique face” (“Dear Shura”). “... Locked in his chest, gardens, seas, cities were tossing and turning, their owner was Ignatiev...” (“Clean Slate”).
The author's special interest in the images of children and old people attracts attention, since both of them do not feel time and live in their own special closed world. At the same time, the soul of a child is closer to a fairy tale, the soul of an old man is closer to eternity.
T. Tolstaya creates a wide variety of metaphors for childhood and old age. For example, in the story “The Most Beloved,” childhood is depicted as the fifth season of the year: “... it was childhood in the yard.” In the story “They were sitting on the golden porch...” it is defined as the beginning of the countdown of time: “In the beginning there was a garden.
Childhood is a golden time, when it seems that “life is eternal. Only birds die."
Old age is portrayed by the author as the end of the countdown of time, the loss of the idea of the sequence of events and the changeability of life forms. Thus, time in the house of Alexandra Ernestovna from the story “Dear Shura” “lost its way, got stuck halfway somewhere near Kursk, stumbled over the nightingale rivers, got lost, blind, on the sunflower plains.”
In T. Tolstoy's stories there are generally many characters who have no future, because they live at the mercy of the past - their childhood impressions, naive dreams, old fears. Such are, for example, Rimma (“Fire and Dust”), Natasha (“The Moon Came Out of the Fog”), and Petere from the story of the same name.
However, there are also heroes who live forever - in their love for people and their memory (Sonya from the story of the same name, Zhenechka from the story “The Most Beloved”); in his work (Grisha from “The Poet and the Muse”, the artist from “The Mammoth Hunt”); in the world of his vivid fantasies (Owl from the story “Fakir”). All these are people who know how to convey their life energy to others in its most varied manifestations - through self-sacrifice, art, and the ability to live beautifully.
However, almost all of T. Tolstoy’s images paradoxically bifurcate, life situations are depicted as ambiguous. For example, it is difficult to come to an unambiguous conclusion about who the Owl from the story “The Fakir” really is. Is this a “giant”, an “omnipotent master” of the world of dreams or a slave of his fantasies, a “pathetic dwarf, a clown in a padishah’s robe”?
Another example of such a split image is found in the story “Dear Shura.” Here, the narrator’s bright impressions from communicating with Anna Ernestovna sharply contrast with the derogatory descriptions of the old woman: “Stockings are pulled down, legs are in the gateway, the black suit is greasy and worn out.”
The story “Sonya” also creates an ambiguous image of a naive “fool”, which the author is clearly ironic about.
Thus, the connection between T. Tolstoy’s prose and the traditions of postmodern literature is revealed, in which there is a constant splitting of images and a change in the tone of the narrative: from compassion to evil irony, from understanding to ridicule.
Many of the heroes of her stories are losers, loners, and sufferers. Before us appears a kind of gallery of failed “princes” and deceived “Cinderellas”, for whom the “fairy tale of life” did not work out. And the greatest tragedy for a person occurs when he is “excluded from the game,” as happens with one of Tolstoy’s most famous characters, Peters, with whom “nobody wanted to play.”
However, do the characters always find the author’s sympathy?
T. Tolstaya rather does not sympathize with man, but regrets the transience of life, the futility of human efforts. This is probably why she is ironic about Vasily Mikhailovich from the story “The Circle”, who, in search of personal happiness using the numbers on the linen handed over to the laundry, “simply fumbled around in the dark and grabbed the usual next wheel of fate.”
The writer also laughs at Ignatiev - “the ruler of his world, struck by melancholy”, who wants to start life with a “clean slate” (“Clean Slate”). She also mocks Zoya’s pursuit of family happiness, in which all means are good (“Hunting for the Mammoth”).
Moreover, the author takes such irony to the point of grotesqueness. So, Ignatiev doesn’t just want to change his life. He seriously decides to undergo an operation to remove his soul. Zoya, in her struggle for her husband, goes so far as to throw a noose around the neck of her chosen one.
In this regard, in Tolstoy’s work a symbolic image of a “corridor of life” appears: from the corridor of a communal apartment to the image of the path of life.
This image also appears in the story “Dear Shura”: “the way back is long along the dark corridor with two teapots in hands.”
Towards the end of life, “the corridor of light closes” (“Heavenly Flame”). It narrows down to a “tight pencil case called the universe,” “a cold tunnel with frost-covered walls” (“Circle”), where every human action is strictly defined and pre-written in the “book of eternity.” In this closed space, “a person struggles, waking up, in the unambiguous grip of his today” (“The month has come out of the fog”). This is the time when “life is gone, and the voice of the future sings for others” (“Fire and Dust”).
However, such characters as the angelic Seraphim from the story of the same name, who hated people, “tried not to look at pig snouts, camel mugs, hippopotamus cheeks,” do not meet with the author’s understanding. At the end of the story he turns into the ugly Serpent Gorynych.
Probably, the author’s position is most accurately formulated in the words of Owl, the hero of the story “Fakir”: “Let us sigh about the fleetingness of existence and thank the creator for allowing us to taste this and that at the feast of life.”
This idea largely explains the writer’s close attention to the world of things and its detailed depiction in her work. Therefore, another problem of T. Tolstoy’s stories is the relationship between man and thing, the inner world of the individual and the external world of objects. It is no coincidence that detailed descriptions of interiors often appear in her works: for example, Filin’s apartment (“Fakir”), Alexandra Ernestovna’s room (“Dear Shura”), Zhenechka’s things (“The Most Beloved”), Tamila’s dacha (“Date with a Bird”).
Unlike L. Petrushevskaya, who most often depicts repulsive objects that reveal the “animality” of human nature, T. Tolstaya expresses the idea of the value of a thing. In her stories, special objects appear that “seeped through the years” and did not fall “into the meat grinder of time.”
On that day,” “an encrypted pass there, to the other side.”
Such is Sonya’s enamel dove, “after all, fire does not take doves” (“Sonya”); old photographs from Maryivanna’s reticule (“If you love, you don’t love”); an unused train ticket to visit a loved one (“Dear Shura”); Sergei’s burnt hat (“Sleep well, son”), etc.
The originality of T. Tolstoy’s artistic techniques is determined by the problems of her work. Thus, the theme of memories, the power of the past over the present determines the photographic principle of the image: the writer strives to capture a fleeting impression, a short moment of life. This is directly stated in the story “Sonya”: “...suddenly the sunny room will open up, as if in the air, as a bright, living photograph.
Okkervil River
When the zodiac sign changed to Scorpio, it became very windy, dark and rainy. The wet, flowing, wind-beating city behind the defenseless, uncurtained, bachelor window, behind the processed cheeses hidden in the cold between the windows, seemed then to be the evil intent of Peter the Great, the revenge of the huge, bug-eyed, gaping-mouthed, toothed carpenter king, who was catching up with everything in nightmares, with a ship's hatchet in his raised hand, his weak, frightened subjects. The rivers, having reached the swollen, terrifying sea, rushed back, snapped cast-iron hatches with a hissing pressure and quickly raised their watery backs in museum basements, licking fragile collections falling apart with damp sand, shaman masks made of rooster feathers, curved overseas swords, beaded robes, sinewy legs angry employees woken up in the middle of the night. On days like these, when the white, curdled face of loneliness emerged from the rain, the darkness, and the bending glass of the wind, Simeonov, feeling especially big-nosed, balding, especially aware of his old age around his face and the cheap socks far below, on the border of existence, put the kettle on, He wiped the dust off the table with his sleeve, cleared the space of books with their white bookmarks sticking out, set up the gramophone, selecting the right thickness of the book to slip under its lame corner, and in advance, blissfully in advance, extracted Vera Vasilyevna from the torn, yellow-stained envelope - an old, heavy, anthracite-shimmering circle, not split into smooth concentric circles - one romance on each side.
- No, not you! so ardent! I! I love! – jumping, crackling and hissing, Vera Vasilyevna quickly twirled under the needle; hissing, crackling and whirling curled like a black funnel, expanded with a gramophone pipe, and, triumphant in victory over Simeonov, rushed from the scalloped orchid divine, dark, low, at first lacy and dusty, then swelling with underwater pressure, rising from the depths, transforming, swaying with lights on the water , - psch-psch-psch, psch-psch-psch, - a voice inflating like a sail - getting louder, - breaking the ropes, rushing uncontrollably, psch-psch-psch, like a caravel on the night water splashing with lights - ever stronger, - spreading its wings, gaining speed, smoothly breaking away from the lagging thickness of the stream that gave birth to it, from the small one that remained on the bank of Simeonov, who raised his balding, barefoot head to the gigantically grown, shining, eclipsing half of the sky voice, emanating in a victorious cry - no, it was not him that Vera Vasilievna loved so passionately, and yet, in essence, only him, and this was mutual between them. H-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch-sch.
Simeonov carefully removed the silent Vera Vasilievna, rocked the disk, clasping it with straightened, respectful palms; looked at the old sticker: eh, where are you now, Vera Vasilievna? Where are your white bones now? And, turning her over on her back, he set the needle, squinting at the prune reflections of the swaying thick disk, and again listened, languishing, about the long-faded chrysanthemums in the garden, where they met her, and again, growing in an underwater flow, throwing off dust, lace and years, Vera Vasilievna crackled and appeared as a languid naiad - an unsportsmanlike, slightly overweight naiad of the turn of the century - oh sweet pear, guitar, sloping champagne bottle!
And then the kettle began to boil, and Simeonov, having fished out processed cheese or ham scraps from the interwindow, put the record on from the beginning and feasted like a bachelor, on a spread newspaper, enjoying himself, rejoicing that Tamara would not overtake him today and would not disturb his precious date with Vera Vasilievna . He felt good in his solitude, in a small apartment, alone with Vera Vasilyevna, and the door was tightly locked from Tamara, and the tea was strong and sweet, and the translation of an unnecessary book from a rare language was almost finished - there would be money, and Simeonov would buy it from one crocodile for a high price for a rare record, where Vera Vasilievna yearns that spring will not come for her - a male romance, a romance of loneliness, and the ethereal Vera Vasilievna will sing it, merging with Simeonov into one yearning, heartbroken voice. O blissful solitude! Loneliness eats from a frying pan, fishes a cold cutlet out of a cloudy liter jar, brews tea in a mug - so what? Peace and freedom! The family rattles the china cabinet, sets traps for cups and saucers, catches the soul with a knife and fork, grabs it under the ribs on both sides, strangles it with a teapot cap, throws a tablecloth over its head, but the free, lonely soul slips out from under the linen fringe and passes snake through the napkin ring and - hop! catch it! - she is already there, in a dark magic circle filled with lights, outlined by the voice of Vera Vasilievna, she runs out after Vera Vasilievna, following her skirts and fan, from the bright dancing hall to the night summer balcony, to a spacious semicircle above the garden fragrant with chrysanthemums, however, their smell, white, dry and bitter, is an autumn smell, it already foreshadows autumn, separation, oblivion, but love still lives in my sick heart - it’s a sick smell, the smell of decay and sadness, somewhere are you now, Vera Vasilyevna, perhaps in Paris or Shanghai, and what kind of rain - the blue of Paris or the yellow of China - is drizzling over your grave, and whose soil is chilling your white bones? No, it’s not you that I love so passionately! (Tell me! Of course, me, Vera Vasilievna!)
Trams passed by Simeonov's window, once shouting their bells, swinging with hanging loops like stirrups - Simeonov kept thinking that there, in the ceilings, there were horses hidden, like portraits of the tram's great-grandfathers, taken out into the attic; then the bells fell silent, only the knocking, clanging and grinding at the turn could be heard, finally the red-sided solid carriages with wooden benches died, and rounded, silent carriages began to run, hissing at stops, you could sit down, plop down on the gasping, soft chair giving up the ghost under you and ride into the blue distance, to the final stop, which beckoned with the name: “Okkervil River”. But Simeonov never went there. The end of the world, and he had nothing to do there, but that’s not even the point: without seeing, without knowing this distant, almost no longer Leningrad river, he could imagine anything he wanted: a muddy greenish stream, for example, with a slow, muddy the green sun floating in it, silvery willows, quietly hanging branches from the curly bank, red brick two-story houses with tiled roofs, wooden humpbacked bridges - a quiet, slow-motion world, as in a dream; but in reality there are probably warehouses, fences, some nasty little factory spitting out pearlescent toxic waste, a landfill smoking with stinking smoldering smoke, or something else, hopeless, outlying, vulgar. No, don’t be disappointed, go to the Okkervil River, it’s better to mentally line its banks with long-haired willows, arrange steep-topped houses, let in leisurely residents, maybe in German caps, in striped stockings, with long porcelain pipes in their teeth... Or better yet, pave paving the Okkerville embankments, filling the river with clean gray water, building bridges with turrets and chains, leveling granite parapets with a smooth pattern, placing tall gray houses along the embankment with cast-iron gateway bars - let the top of the gate be like fish scales, and nasturtiums peeking out from the forged balconies, settling there is young Vera Vasilievna, and let her walk, pulling on a long glove, along the cobblestone pavement, placing her feet narrowly, stepping narrowly in black, blunt-toed shoes with round, apple-like heels, in a small round hat with a veil, through the quiet drizzle of the St. Petersburg morning, and the fog For this occasion, serve blue.
Bring on the blue fog! The fog has set, Vera Vasilyevna passes, tapping her round heels, the entire paved section, specially prepared, held by Simeonov’s imagination, this is the border of the scenery, the director has run out of funds, he is exhausted, and, tired, he dismisses the actors, crosses out the balconies with nasturtiums, gives the lattice to those who wish with a pattern like fish scales, snaps granite parapets into the water, stuffs bridges with turrets into his pockets - the pockets are bursting, chains hang like from an grandfather's watch, and only the Okkervil River, convulsively narrowing and widening, flows and cannot choose a stable appearance for itself. .
Simeonov ate processed cheese, translated boring books, sometimes brought women in the evenings, and the next morning, disappointed, sent them away - no, not you! - he blocked himself from Tamara, who kept coming up with washing clothes, fried potatoes, colorful curtains on the windows, who all the time carefully forgot important things at Simeonov’s, then hairpins, then a handkerchief - by the night she urgently needed them, and she came across the whole city, - Simeonov put out the light and stood breathless, pressed against the ceiling in the hallway while it was bursting, and very often gave up, and then he ate hot food for dinner and drank strong tea from a blue and gold cup with homemade powdered brushwood, and Tamara went back it was, of course, late, the last tram had left, and it certainly couldn’t get to the foggy river Okkervil, and Tamara fluffed the pillows while Vera Vasilievna, turning her back, not listening to Simeonov’s excuses, walked away along the embankment into the night, swaying on her round, like an apple, in heels.
Autumn was thickening when he bought from another crocodile a heavy disc chipped from one edge - they haggled, arguing about the flaw, the price was very high, and why? - because Vera Vasilyevna has been completely forgotten, her short, sweet last name will not be heard on the radio, nor will her short, gentle surname flash through in quizzes, and now only sophisticated eccentrics, snobs, amateurs, aesthetes, who want to throw money away on the ethereal, chase after her records, catch , they string her onto the pins of gramophone turntables, and record her low, dark voice, shining like expensive red wine, onto tape recorders. But the old woman is still alive, said the crocodile, she lives somewhere in Leningrad, in poverty, they say, and ugliness, and she did not shine for long in her time, she lost diamonds, her husband, an apartment, a son, two lovers and, finally , voice - in this exact order, and managed to cope with these losses until the age of thirty, since then she has not sung, but she is still alive. That’s how Simeonov thought, his heart heavy, and on the way home, across bridges and gardens, across tram tracks, he kept thinking: that’s how... And, having locked the door, made some tea, he put the purchased chipped treasure on the turntable and, looking into window onto the heavy colored clouds gathering on the sunset side, built, as usual, a piece of granite embankment, threw a bridge - and the turrets were now heavy, and the chains were too heavy to lift, and the wind rippled and wrinkled, agitated the wide, gray surface of the Okkervil River, and Vera Vasilyevna, stumbling more than expected on her uncomfortable heels, invented by Simeonov, wrung her hands and bowed her small, smoothly combed head to the sloping shoulder, - quietly, so quietly the moon shines, and your fatal thoughts are full of you, - the moon did not give in, slipped out of her hands like soap, rushed through the torn Okkervil clouds - in this Okkervil there is always something alarming with the sky - how restlessly the transparent, tamed shadows of our imagination rush about when the puffing and smells of living life penetrate their cool, foggy world!
Looking at the sunset rivers, from where the Okkervil River began, already blooming with poisonous greenery, already poisoned by the living old woman’s breath, Simeonov listened to the arguing voices of two fighting demons: one insisted on throwing the old woman out of his head, locking the doors tightly, occasionally opening them for Tamara, living, as before he lived, to the extent of loving, to the extent of languishing, listening in moments of loneliness to the pure sound of a silver trumpet singing over an unknown foggy river, but another demon - a mad young man with a consciousness darkened from translating bad books - demanded to go, run, find Vera Vasilievna - to find a blind, poor, emaciated, hoarse, withered-legged old woman, bow to her almost deaf ear and shout to her through the years and hardships that she is the only one, that he always loved her, only her so ardently, that love still lives on in his sick heart, that she, a wondrous feather, rising with a voice from the underwater depths, filling the sails, swiftly sweeping through the fiery night waters, soaring up, eclipsing half the sky, destroyed and raised him - Simeonov, the faithful knight - and, crushed by her silver voice , trams, books, processed cheese, wet pavements, bird cries of Tamara, cups, nameless women, passing years, all the frailty of the world fell like small peas in different directions. And the old woman, stunned, looks at him with eyes full of tears: how? You know me? can't be! My God! Does anyone else really need this? and could I think! - and, confused, she will not know where to put Simeonov, and he, carefully supporting her dry elbow and kissing her hand, which is no longer white, all stained with age, leads her to the chair, peering into her faded, anciently sculpted face. And, looking with tenderness and pity at the parting in her weak white hair, she will think: oh, how we missed each other in this world! How crazy the time passed between us! (“Ew, don’t,” the inner demon grimaced, but Simeonov was inclined to do what was necessary.)
He casually, insultingly simply - for a nickel - got Vera Vasilievna’s address in a street address booth; my heart began to pound: isn’t it Okkerville? of course not. And not the embankment. He bought chrysanthemums at the market - small, yellow, wrapped in cellophane. They have bloomed a long time ago. And at the bakery I chose a cake. The saleswoman, having removed the cardboard cover, showed the chosen item on her outstretched hand: is it good? - but Simeonov did not realize what he was taking, he pulled back, because there was a glimpse of a bakery outside the window - or did it seem? – Tamara, who was going to take it from the apartment, it was warm. Then on the tram I untied the purchase and inquired. That is OK. Fruit. Decent. Under the glassy jelly surface, lonely fruits slept in the corners: there was an apple slice, there - a more expensive corner - a slice of peach, here half a plum frozen in the permafrost, and here - a playful, ladies' corner, with three cherries. The sides are sprinkled with fine confectionery dandruff. The tram shook, the cake trembled, and Simeonov saw on the jelly surface, which shone like a water mirror, a clear imprint of a thumb - whether it was a careless cook or a clumsy saleswoman. It’s okay, the old woman doesn’t see well. And I'll cut it right away. (“Come back,” the guardian demon sadly shook his head, “run, save yourself.”) Simeonov tied it up again, as best he could, and began to look at the sunset. Okkervil was noisy (noisy? noisy?) with a narrow stream, rushing into the granite banks, the banks crumbled like sand and slid into the water. He stood at Vera Vasilievna’s house, transferring gifts from hand to hand. The gate through which he was to enter was decorated with patterned fish scales on top. Behind them is a scary yard. The cat scurried. Yes, that's what he thought. A great forgotten artist should live in just such a yard. Back door, garbage cans, narrow cast-iron railings, uncleanliness. The heart was beating. They have bloomed a long time ago. In my heart is sick.
He called. (“Fool,” spat the inner demon and left Simeonov.) The door swung open under the pressure of noise, singing and laughter gushing from the depths of the dwelling, and immediately Vera Vasilievna flashed, white, huge, rouged, black and thick-browed, flashed there, at the set table, in the illuminated doorway, over a pile of spicy-smelling snacks reaching the door, over a huge chocolate cake topped with a chocolate bunny, a woman laughing loudly, laughing loudly, flashed - and was taken away by fate forever. And I had to turn around and leave. Fifteen people at the table laughed, looking into her mouth: Vera Vasilievna had a birthday, Vera Vasilievna was telling a joke, choking with laughter. She began to tell him, even when Simeonov was climbing the stairs, she was cheating on him with these fifteen, even when he was toiling and hesitating at the gate, shifting the defective cake from hand to hand, even when he was riding on the tram, even when he locked himself in the apartment and cleared on the dusty table there was space for her silver voice, even when for the first time, with curiosity, I took out a heavy, black disk, shimmering with a lunar path, from a yellowed, torn envelope, even when there was no Simeonov in the world, only the wind stirred the grass and there was silence in the world. She was not waiting for him, thin, at the lancet window, peering into the distance, into the glass streams of the Okkervil River, she laughed in a low voice at the table piled high with dishes, at the salads, cucumbers, fish and bottles, and she drank dashingly, enchantress, and dashingly turned there -here with a fat body. She betrayed him. Or was it he who betrayed Vera Vasilyevna? Now it was too late to figure it out.
- Another one! – someone shouted with a laugh, whose last name, as it turned out right there, was Potseluev. - Penalty! “And the cake with the imprint and the flowers were taken away from Simeonov, and they squeezed him into the table, forcing him to drink to Vera Vasilievna’s health, health, which, as he was convinced with hostility, she simply had nowhere to put. Simeonov sat, smiled mechanically, nodded his head, grabbed a salted tomato with a fork, looked, like everyone else, at Vera Vasilievna, listened to her loud jokes - his life was crushed, moved in half; you yourself are a fool, now you won’t get anything back, even if you run; the magical diva was kidnapped by the mountain people, but she gladly allowed herself to be kidnapped, did not care about the beautiful, sad, bald prince promised by fate, did not want to hear his steps in the noise of the rain and the howling of the wind behind the autumn windows, did not want to sleep, pricked by a magic spindle, enchanted by a hundred years, surrounded herself with mortal, edible people, brought this terrible Potseluev closer to her - especially, intimately close to the very sound of his last name - and Simeonov trampled the tall gray houses on the Okkervil River, destroyed bridges with turrets and threw chains, covered the light gray waters with garbage , but the river again made its way, and houses stubbornly rose from the ruins, and carriages drawn by a pair of bay horses galloped across indestructible bridges.
- Do you want to smoke? – asked Potseluev. “I gave it up, I don’t carry it around with me.” - And he robbed Simeonov of half a pack. - Who are you? Amateur fan? This is good. Do you have your own apartment? Is there a bath? Gut. And then here it’s only general. You will take her to your place to wash. She loves to wash herself. On the first day we gather and listen to recordings. What do you have? Is there a “dark green emerald”? It's a pity. We've been looking for years, it's just some kind of misfortune. Well, literally nowhere. And these of yours were widely replicated, it’s not interesting. You are looking for “Emerald”. Do you have connections to get smoked sausage? No, it’s harmful for her, I’m just... so. You couldn't have brought smaller flowers, could you? I brought roses, literally the size of my fist. – A hairy fist showed close kisses. – You are not a journalist, are you? There should be a program about her on the radio, our little Verunchik keeps asking. Uh, muzzle. The voice is still like that of a deacon. Give me your address and I'll write it down. “And, pressing Simeonov with his big hand to the chair, “sit, sit, don’t see him off,” Kisses got out and left, taking with him Simeonov’s cake with a fingerprint mark.
Strangers instantly populated the foggy Okkerville shores, dragging their belongings that smelled of a long-ago home - pots and mattresses, buckets and red cats, it was impossible to squeeze through on the granite embankment, here they were already singing their own, sweeping garbage onto the paving stones laid by Simeonov, giving birth, multiplying, walking around to visit a friend, a fat, black-browed old woman pushed, dropped a pale shadow with sloping shoulders, stepped on, crushing, a hat with a veil, crunched under her feet, round old heels rolled in different directions, Vera Vasilyevna shouted across the table: “Pass the mushrooms!” - and Simeonov handed it over, and she ate the mushrooms.
He watched how her big nose and the mustache under her nose moved, how she moved her large, black, age-clouded eyes from face to face, then someone turned on the tape recorder, and her silver voice floated, gaining strength - nothing, nothing, – thought Simeonov. I'll get home now, nothing. Vera Vasilievna died, died a long time ago, was killed, dismembered and eaten by this old woman, and the bones have already been sucked, I would have celebrated the wake, but Kissing took away my cake, nothing, here are chrysanthemums for the grave, dry, sick, dead flowers, very appropriate , I paid tribute to the memory of the deceased, you can get up and leave.
At the door of Simeonov’s apartment, Tamara was hovering - my dear! – she picked him up, carried him in, washed him, undressed him and fed him hot food. He promised Tamara to marry, but in the morning, in a dream, Vera Vasilievna came, spat in his face, called him names and walked off along the damp embankment into the night, swaying on imaginary black heels. And in the morning Potseluev rang and knocked on the door, coming to inspect the bathroom and prepare for the evening. And in the evening he brought Vera Vasilyevna to Simeonov to wash, smoked Simeonov’s cigarettes, ate sandwiches, said: “Yes-ah... Verunchik is strength! How many men have left in my time - my God!” And against his will, Simeonov listened to how Vera Vasilievna’s heavy body groaned and swayed in the cramped bathtub, how her tender, fat, full side lagged behind the wall of the wet bath with a squelching and smacking sound, how the water went into the drain with a sucking sound, how they slapped on the floor bare feet, and finally, having thrown back the hook, a red, steaming Vera Vasilyevna comes out in a dressing gown: “Ugh. Fine". Kisses hurried with the tea, and Simeonov, sluggish and smiling, went to rinse after Vera Vasilievna, wash off the gray pellets from the dried walls of the bathtub with a flexible shower, and pick out gray hairs from the drain hole. The gramophone started the kisses, a wondrous, growing, thunderous voice was heard, rising from the depths, spreading its wings, soaring over the world, over the steaming body of Verunchik, drinking tea from a saucer, over Simeonov, bent in his lifelong obedience, over the warm, kitchen Tamara, over everything , which cannot be helped, over the approaching sunset, over the gathering rain, over the wind, over nameless rivers flowing backwards, overflowing their banks, raging and flooding the city, as only rivers can do.
Sarkizov-serazini Ivan Mikhailovich “sports massage I m sarkizov serazini therapeutic physical culture