As he died, a terrible summer storm broke out outside the windows.
There were a lot of thunderstorms in the texts.
And Petrel soars through the clouds and sometimes roars in prose.
As in the same story “Grandpa Arkhip and Lenka”.
Two beggars, grandfather and grandson, die in a storm after a fight – and if the grandfather thief dies, apparently after an unexpected stroke, then it is not clear about the boy who escaped from his grandfather during the fight: he either fell into a lightning or lower steppe beam.
But the thunder roars there: “The thunder that shook the steppe and the sky now roared loudly and hastily, as if each of them wanted to tell the world something necessary for him, and they all caught each other and almost roared. without pauses. The sky, shattered by lightning, trembled, and the steppe trembled, sometimes shining with blue fire, sometimes plunged into a cold, heavy and cramped darkness, strangely constricting. Sometimes lightning lit up the distance. It seems that this distance is hastily fleeing from the noise and roar … “.
But even if there is no storm in the text, it still crackles, shoots, screams – Gorky likes it. (I read somewhere that he was a fire maniac: he couldn’t resist not putting little “firemen” in an ashtray. He loved fire, rejoiced with it. Like a child.)
Here is a grandmother from the first part of her trilogy in “Childhood”: she did not lose her head alone at the time of a house fire. She rushes to a burning house to carry a “bucket bottle” of vitriol oil filled with even bigger flames. Just as fearlessly, the grandmother stops the frightened horse and persuades him with kind and affectionate words. (Of course, here we immediately “read” Nekrasov – with his galloping horse and burning hut. But interesting, did Gorky notice that he was “walking” directly along the reader?)
Then other fires and other thunderstorms began. The Stormtrooper has done its job. And its author again went to Italy in 1921, occasionally and briefly returning to his homeland.
But he still had to return definitively to Soviet Russia.
There was even an almost anecdotal event in these visits and districts: in 1928, Alexei Maksimovich received a letter from a Soviet worker, there was an urgent request that he no longer go to Italy. And also to leave the villa there.
Gorky replied to the vigilant citizen through the newspaper Rabochaya Moskva: “By the way, I do not have my own villa there. I have never had and never will be my own home, my own “property”.
He was not mistaken.
One day, in the famous Shekhtel mansion, where Gorky settled, a proud guest offered the owner of the house a drink.
Gorky turned purple and interrupted the speaker: “For which master? I do not own this house. It is owned by the Moscow City Council! Then he got up from the table and left the room.
They say that on one of the platforms there is a large bugging device disguised as a closet or a large closet. (However, they may be lying.)
In general, there are many uncertainties and rumors about this “last” Gorky life.
For example, an almost spectacular (but with dark horror spots) legend about his death. According to one version of the researchers, the great proletarian writer may have been poisoned by the chocolates. Which Trotsky ordered to give it to him.
However, this was clearly a late release, while it was already necessary to unload Yagoda. Also, Gorky did not like sweets. At first, no one argued about the cause of death in the first place: the great writer caught a cold, and it all turned into pneumonia.
The house killed him.
Returning from the Crimea to Moscow on May 27, 1936, he leaves the station, already cold, for his magnificent mansion, which will soon become “old”. Gorky really wants to see his grandchildren and they just got the flu.
But even here he can not stop: he himself fell ill, went to the already sick girls, but takes the third step – the next day he goes to the grave of his son. And it stays there for a long time. Cold May air, treacherous-wind throughout the spring.
And then Gorky has been lying in Gorky for three weeks.
And on the night of June 18, 1936, a great storm came to Gorky. Before this non-random storm in her life – she will tell her nurse: “You know, I just had an argument with the Lord God. Wow, how it was discussed. Do you want me to tell you?”
But she didn’t want to.
Either he was embarrassed or it was embarrassing to hear about God. (Well, how is that possible? After all, we never learned what he was arguing with God like Jacob did at night. What did God answer him?)
In the last storm of his life, the last storm of his life, which he once so evoked, like his grandfather Arkhip, Gorky began to suffer. “Grandpa waved his hand in the air and continued to mutter something, already tired and out of breath. Looking at his face, Lenka screamed with fear. He was dead with the blue glow of the lightning, and the dull eyes that rolled over him were mad.
“A similar black lightning bird flies with pride.” Only the old bird was no longer flying, it was looking for air. The sky and the sea were not enough: Gorky was always given oxygen.
The same nurse Chertkova writes about this morning: “She died at 11 o’clock. He died silently. I just drowned. The autopsy was done in the bedroom, on the table. They invited me. I did not go. For me to watch her go? It turned out that her pleura had grown like a corset. And when they disassembled it, it broke, very calcified. Not without reason, “Don’t touch me, it hurts!” she said.
When the lion is gone, the hunter doctors looking for the cause of death treat the lion like a normal corpse. The storm has passed, the sun is already in the garden, or just a nice boring rain. For us, our lover’s breakup is hell, but for a pathologist, it’s work. So we better not see it.
“They treated him very badly. Emir began to change and turned him left and right like a log. The autopsy began … Then they began to wash the insides. The incision was somehow sutured with a simple twine. The brain was put in a bucket … “.
This is how Gorky’s secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov remembers.
I read and thought: After all, death is salvation. From the listening device, from the bucket on the floor, from the roar of events, from the firefighters that turned into a fire. From thunderstorms and roses and all the golden candies of the world you don’t eat. But most importantly – from all the secretaries, nurses, spies, leaders, penguins, vagrants, commanders-in-chief and the best writers in the world.
“You know, I was arguing with the Lord God just now. Wow, how it was discussed. Do you want me to tell you?”
Of course we do, Alexei Maksimovich. Tell me.
Source: Gazeta
