What an interesting idea – I read here recently: in literary criticism, no one perceived Ostap Bender as a direct continuation of Onegin, Pechorin, Chatsky and Bazarov, and even Stavrogin, that is, a classic “superfluous person”. Russian literature was rich in them, but no one called Bender to this chain.
This means that no one sees the fact that Bender, as the “extra man” of Russian literature, is the progenitor of the European hero of the “lost generation”.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Remarque, poet Eliot who once wrote without punctuation:
Who is the third person who is always with you?
I’ll count the two of us, you and me
But I’ll look ahead on a snowy road
Here’s the third move next to you
In a dark cloak with a hood
And I don’t know if it’s male or female
– Who’s next to you?
Thomas Stearns Eliot did not know who was walking next to him. I probably thought: one of the important people, one of the writers. I thought: there is only a lost generation in literature.
There’s also a missing grandmother. A kind of frog traveler.
Recently, a friend told me that there is a Varvarushka in their family. A fragile little old woman who, when she was not yet an old woman, bore and raised ten children during her rather monotonous life.
And there would be nothing to say about this old woman. If only a passion for travel had not flared up in this ordinary woman in her old age. (There he is, Bender, there is Chatsky with his car, there is Eliot with the “third person walking with you”, well, the second in our case.)
Already grown-up grandchildren called their grandmother, and some children were still pulling “great-grandmother” from the ground, and suddenly one spring, pick her up and pack it up: she put aside her shabby apron, announced to her bewildered sons, and her bride, whom she was considering going on a pilgrimage to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra – and went there .
Relatives, of course, wept, groaned, but our old traveler quickly packed his things and intensively went first in a car, then on a train – to golden Moscow.
We will no longer know what he saw there, what he thought on the way. But the grandmother returned from her pilgrimage gracefully and silently, and everything seemed to flow again as usual, but exactly one year later, in the new spring, grandmother Varvara once said while drinking tea (and she loved tea passionately, up to seven cups at a time) sitting down and always with a bagel), that he would not die in peace without looking at the monkeys in the Sukhum Reserve.
No Thomas Eliot can help here.
The brides began to call again, but again their voices were not heard. In a car, and then on a train (and then another train), my grandmother went to Sukhumi. Well, of course he’s back.
And so he lived – calmed down in the autumn, diligently raising his grandchildren on long winter evenings – and suddenly in the spring he will wake up again and fly: touching bagels, drinking tea before a long journey, flying to some distant land that he dreamed of all his colorless life.
Hurry, hurry, listen to the sparrow’s song,
At dawn, at sunset, the field sparrow sings,
Water sparrow. look how it turns
The goldfinch dances at noon. maybe we meet
Shy thrush sings. ringing in the sky
Quail high whistle. the partridge sits
Hiding in the reeds. Follow in Merman’s footsteps
thrush.
This is Eliot again – here is our old traveler, and he had never heard of Eliot, but followed his principles. Following in the footsteps of a water thrush, he asked the migratory ducks to take him to far, unseen lands. He promised not to open his mouth so as not to fall to the ground, not to interrupt his journey.
Grandmother-frog, grandmother-Onegin (in the original eighth chapter, which was never included in the canonical text about her wanderings).
traveling grandmother. Grandma is an extra person.
… I love stories like this, you are told so you don’t miss them, don’t let these random people fall into the darkness of time, at least write them “on the edge”. Maybe later someone will tell us – “in the margins”, in parentheses or in notes – about us.
(Interesting, I thought now, do today’s kids know what’s on the “edges”? Or are they just writing electronically anyway, without our previous notebooks and fine-lined paper?)
By the way, this wandering grandmother also had a story with the children.
When she was about to give birth to her last, unlucky youngest son, Gelka, who is still a relatively young woman, the party leadership in the region suddenly attacked her and her still unnamed son to award her the Heroic Mother Insignia (and as I said earlier, there are a lot of children, ten there are people, none of the neighbors could count).
And now the party bosses come to him, everyone congratulates him, people pour into the room, he says “ugh” to the baby (nine more children of different ages are running there) – but district officials give a hint: they say, if this event was somehow worthy of Mark it would be fine. No, no, not moonshine. And, for example, a loud and proud name.
Tired after giving birth, the lethargic grandmother, who had followed the Old Believer canons all her life, immediately told them in a weak voice that she had decided to name her son Kensorin. In honor of the martyr Kensorin, who worked miracles in a Roman dungeon and converted many people to Christianity, and was beheaded during the reign of Emperor Claudius. And now he is in heaven.
The authorities, of course, were horrified, and yet they were ordered to name their son Engels.
Actually, that’s why he was called that in the village back then: Gelka.
…there should probably be some kind of conclusion, a global idea, a generalizing conclusion. But I just want this old traveler, this “extra person”, this lost grandmother, to live a little longer in our memories, before our eyes, on this slowly fading day of May. Also, I think he was born in May. Otherwise, why did he try so hard, he had strange dreams that beckon him to the road (“who walks next to you?”), In the barren and fertile land, first in a car, then on a train, then again on a train, to monkeys and Eliot, a wrinkled neck with bunches of bagels, either in search of heavenly tea or earthly paradise – but only forward, forward.