Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin / Love Stories. From the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin.

08.06.2021

Russian Soviet writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin was born in the village of Khrushchevo, Yelets district, on February 4, 1873, into a merchant family. Despite his origin, Prishvin was not a rich man, since his father lived in grand style and squandered his fortune when Mikhail was just a child.

At the age of six, thanks to the efforts of his mother, Mikhail entered the Yelets gymnasium, but after studying there for 4 years, he was expelled for insolence towards the teacher (some sources claim that Prishvin was not only a notorious hooligan, but also a loser).
Thanks to the petition of his uncle, a wealthy steamship owner, Misha went to finish his studies at the Tyumen real school: he was taken there "with a wolf ticket" on his uncle's recommendation.
Then, from 1893 to 1897, the future writer becomes a student at the Riga Polytechnic University, who also does not finish due to arrest. Prishvin began to take an active part in the Marxist circle, at the next meeting of which he was discovered by the police. Mikhail was greatly influenced by his university friend V.D. Ulrich, who actively promoted Marxism.
Prishvin was caught red-handed when he was distributing leaflets and was imprisoned for a year for rebellious thoughts, and after another two years he was exiled to his native Yelets.
In 1900, young Prishvin decides to end politics and goes to study as an agronomist at the University of Leipzig, after graduating from which, in 1902, he works in his specialty, and writes in the evenings. The creative path of the writer and his becoming a "tramp" begins in 1906 with a move to St. Petersburg.

Mikhail Mikhailovich considers 1906 the year of the beginning of his creative activity, then his first work “Sashok” is published. But Prishvin's name became famous after the publication of his "Travel Notes", which he publishes after completing his journey in the far north, Karelia and the Volga region. Prishvin becomes a real traveler-local historian. He traveled all over the Crimea, Kazakhstan, visited Norway, was in the Far East ... The writer takes a forced break in his work only with the advent of the First World War. Since 1918 - he is a war correspondent, since 1919 - a rural teacher in Smolensk. Before moving to Moscow and settling in the house of writers (next to the Tretyakov Gallery), a long 15 years passed. This happened only in 1937.

Since 1940, Prishvin has been publishing his diary of observations in stories and essays. After the war, the writer travels "closer to nature", he acquires a dacha and works tirelessly there.

The writer died on January 16, 1954. His body was interred at the Moscow Vvedensky cemetery.

The main achievements of Prishvin

In our country, Prishvin is known as the creator of natural philosophy, as a writer who keenly observed what was happening in nature and kept diaries called "Notes of a Hunter".

- The name of Prishvin is associated with works that describe nature so clearly and naturally, where Mikhail Mikhailovich himself found so much artistic natural philosophy. During his lifetime, he was called a "singer of nature", who was able to clothe his diary entries in real art. Among his literary heritage are essays, novellas, and, most importantly, stories, those that our parents read to us in early childhood. The most significant, according to literary critics, are: collections of essays “In the land of fearless birds” (1907) and “Behind the magic bun” (1908), phenological notes “Calendar of Nature” (1935), story “Spring of Light” (1940), novel Naked Spring (1940), the lyric-philosophical book Forest Drop (1940) and a cycle of miniatures of the same name, published in 1943, the fairy tale novel The Tsar’s Road (1957) and the autobiographical novel Kashcheev’s Chain, published after the writer's death. Prishvin was also fond of writing articles on agronomy, of which he had more than a hundred in publication alone.

Important dates in Prishvin's biography

In 1897, Prishvin was sentenced to three years in prison for his political beliefs. In prison and exile, the writer decides to completely change his attitude to power and no longer engage in politics. The last years of the late 19th century can be considered a turning point in the life of the young Prishvin.
- Since Mikhail was forbidden to live in large cities after prison and exile, he asks for permission to go abroad and continue his studies. And at the beginning of 1900, he receives it, after which he moves to Germany and "learns to be a useful person for his homeland." In 1902, the writer returned to Russia and settled in Klin, where he worked as an agronomist's assistant: now he brings advanced ideas to agronomy and agriculture.

- Agronomy has become his specialty forever. 1904 - Prishvin was offered a job in Moscow, in the laboratory of the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy under the guidance of the famous professor D.M. Pryanishnikov. In 1905, Prishvin published his first article "Potatoes in garden and field culture." He begins to write after the first positive review of his story "Sashok", which was published in 1906.
- Prishvin believed that a person's personal life should develop. At the age of 25, he married a simple peasant woman from the Smolensk region, from whose marriage he had three sons, two of whom also became famous in literature.

- Since 1906, Prishvin has been working in St. Petersburg, where he publishes his favorites: “In the land of fearless birds” and “Kolobok”. It was during this period that the writer begins to keep his notes, which he does not interrupt throughout his life. Their volume in total amounted to 25 volumes!
- In September 1917, Prishvin, working in the newspaper "Will of the People", is preparing his first collection for publication.
In 1937, the writer moved to Moscow and published his most significant works there until the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

- In September 1941, the writer's family moved with him to the remote village of Usolye near the city of Pereslavl Zalessky and remained there until the end of the war. In 1943, Mikhail Prishvin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.
- From 1946 to 1954, Mikhail Mikhailovich lives at his dacha near Zvenigorod, where the Prishvin Museum now operates.

Interesting facts from the life of Prishvin

Having left for training in Leipzig, young Prishvin fell in love with an Englishwoman. It was student love, which the poet needed not for marriage, but rather for flight. But the girl was strict manners and refused reciprocity to the future writer. From such bitter disappointment, Prishvin began to write poetry, and then completely returned to his homeland. But the girl withered away in some bank office. But Prishvin suffers no less, so he agrees to an "unequal marriage", he marries a semi-literate simpleton Efrosinya Pavlovna, in whom he looks for the features of a lost Englishwoman until old age. Efrosinya bore him three sons, never interfered in her husband's affairs and devoted thirty years of her life to him. After her death, he suddenly ... married again. This happened in 1950, when the writer was looking for a secretary. A certain Valeria Lebedeva got a job with him, who promised the writer that not a single line from his manuscripts would be lost. He looked at the woman with a fixed gaze and offered her his hand and heart. So Prishvin married a second time.
- In 1919, Prishvin was almost shot by pure chance: he was confused with a Jew when Mamontov's Cossacks came to the city.
- In the early 1930s, it was very fashionable to have a passion for cars. Michael, not afraid, got behind the wheel of a car, which he bought one of the first in Moscow. He did not let anyone drive his Moskvich, Mikhail Mikhailovich’s dogs were also accustomed to the car, with whom he set off on his four-legged horse off-road into the forest for inspiration.

Love stories. From the diaries of Mikhail Prishvin.

All his life, Prishvin kept a diary that absorbed everything that the writer experienced in his homeland: the revolution and wars, writing under the tsar and the Bolsheviks, the search for God by the intelligentsia of the beginning of the century and the destructive atheism of the transformers of nature, the difficulties of his own life, loneliness, despite many years of family ties ...

There is such a special fear of closeness to a person, based on the general experience that everyone is fraught with some personal sin and tries with all his might to hide it from prying eyes with a beautiful veil. When meeting a stranger, we also show ourselves to him on the good side, and so, little by little, a society of hiders of personal sins from prying eyes is created.

There are naive people here who believe in the reality of this conventionality between people; there are pretenders, cynics, satyrs who know how to use conventionality as a sauce for a tasty dish. And there are very few who, not satisfied with the illusion that hides sin, are looking for ways to sinless rapprochement, believing in the secrets of the soul that there is such He or She, who can unite sinlessly and forever and live on earth as forefathers before the fall.

In truth, heavenly history repeats itself and still countless times: almost every love begins with paradise.

* The beginning of love is in attention, then in election, then in achievement, because love without work is dead.

* Love is like the sea, sparkling with the colors of heaven. Happy is he who comes to the shore and, enchanted, harmonizes his soul with the majesty of the whole sea. Then the boundaries of the soul of a poor person expand to infinity, and then the poor person understands that there is no death either ... You can’t see “that” shore in the sea, and there are no shores for love at all.

But another comes to the sea not with a soul, but with a jug, and, having scooped up, brings only a jug from the whole sea, and the water in the jug is salty and worthless.

Love is a lie, - such a person says and does not return to the sea anymore.

* Who is deceived in someone, he deceives the other. So you can't cheat, but you can't cheat either.

* The garden blossoms, and everyone is loaded with fragrance in it. So a person is like a flowering garden: he loves everything, and everyone enters into his love.

* It was during the rain: two drops rolled towards each other along the telegraph wire. They would meet and fall to the ground in one big drop, but some bird, flying, touched the wire, and the drops fell to the ground before meeting each other.

That's all about the drops, and their fate for us disappears into the damp earth. But by ourselves, we people know that the disturbed movement of the two towards each other continues there, in this dark earth.

And so many exciting books have been written about the possibility of a meeting of two beings striving for one another, that two raindrops running along a wire are enough to occupy themselves with a new possibility of meeting in the destiny of man.

* A woman knows that to love is worth her whole life, and that is why she is afraid and runs away. You should not catch up with her - you won’t take her like that: the new woman knows her worth. If you need to take it, then prove that it is worth giving your life for you.

* If a woman interferes with creativity, then it’s necessary with her, like Stepan Razin, and if you don’t want to, like Stepan, then you will find your own Taras Bulba, and let him shoot you.

But if a woman helps create life, keeps a house, gives birth to children, or participates in creativity with her husband, then she should be revered as a queen. It is given to us by severe struggle. And maybe that's why I hate weak men.

* Imaginary end of the novel. They were so indebted to each other, so delighted with their meeting that they tried to give away all their wealth stored in their souls, as if in some kind of competition: you gave, and I gave more, and again the same on the other side, and until neither of them had anything left of their stocks. In such cases, people who have given everything of their own to another consider this other to be their property and this torment each other for the rest of their lives. But these two, beautiful and free people, having once found out that they had given everything to each other, and there was nothing else for them to exchange, and there was nowhere higher for them to grow in this exchange, hugged, kissed each other tightly and parted without tears and without words. Be blessed, wonderful people!

* So, love, as creativity, is the embodiment of each of the lovers in the other of his ideal image. The one who loves under the influence of the other, as it were, finds himself, and both of these found, new beings unite into a single person: there is, as it were, a restoration of the divided Adam.

* The person you love in me is, of course, better than me: I'm not like that. But you love, and I will try to be better than myself ...

* When people live in love, they do not notice the onset of old age, and even if they notice a wrinkle, they do not attach importance to it: this is not the point. So, if people loved each other, then they would not do cosmetics at all.

* Love - as understanding or as a way to unanimity. Here, in love, there are all shades of understanding, starting from physical touch, similar to how water understands the earth on the flood in spring, and from this a floodplain remains. When the water leaves, the muddy land remains, ugly at first, and how quickly the land understood by water, this floodplain, begins to decorate, grow and bloom!

So we see every year in nature, as in a mirror, our own human way of understanding, unanimity and rebirth.

* To understand the essence of marriage itself, as the path of love unanimity, in which the Third is born, all the same, let it be a human child or a qualitative thought (image).

And this is the general law of life, otherwise why, according to universal recognition, it is in babies that the best image of a person is seen!

It is in this way that the direction of our human culture must be determined.

What are the fish with their caviar, aspens with their fluff! And a person, the further he improves in his human being, the more difficult it is for him to multiply, and, finally, he is born in his ideal.

When Rafael still knew this, - when! - and I'm only now ... And this can only be learned in the rarest, most difficult experience for men of love.

* In its depths, it seems to me, it knows everything and it contains the answer to every question of deep consciousness. If I could ask about everything, she would answer everything. But I rarely have the strength to ask her. Life often passes so-so, as if you are riding a cart, having the opportunity to fly on an airplane. But only this is a great wealth, to realize that everything is from myself, and if I just want to, then I will transfer from the cart to the plane or ask Lyalya any question and get any answer from her.

Lala remains to me an inexhaustible source of thought, the highest synthesis of what is called nature.

* Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna were childless. Children born in the light of both loves: in one case, love for children is a particular of general love, in the other, love for children excludes all other love: the most vicious, predatory creature can have love for children.

So, all love is a connection, but not all connection is love. True love is moral creativity.

* Art is essentially a male affair, or rather, one of the fields of purely male action, like the song of male birds. A woman's business is direct love.

* How many thousands of times from morning to night you need to chirp your call signs to the female in order to awaken a vital response in her. The sparrow starts with the first warm ray, and the female will respond, well, if in a month, with the first swollen pregnant kidney.

For some reason, it seems to us that if these are birds, they fly a lot, if they are fallow deer or tigers, then they constantly run and jump. In fact, birds sit more than fly, tigers are very lazy, fallow deer graze and only move their lips. So are people too. We think that people's lives are filled with love, and when we ask ourselves and others - who loved how much, and it turns out - that's so little! That's how lazy we are too!

* Do you know that love when you yourself don’t have anything from it and won’t, but you still love everything around you through this, and you walk through the field and meadow, and pick up colorful, one to one, blue cornflowers smelling of honey, and blue forget-me-nots.

* ...I affirm that on earth people have a great love, one and boundless. And in this world of love, destined for man to nourish the soul to the same extent as air for blood, I find the only one that corresponds to my own unity, and only through this correspondence, unity from one side and the other, do I enter the sea of \u200b\u200buniversal love human.

* That is why even the most primitive people, starting their short love, will certainly feel that it is not only for them, but for everyone to live well on earth, and even if it is obvious that a good life does not come out, then it is still possible for a person and should be happy. So, only through love can one find oneself as a person, and only through a person can one enter the world of human love: love is virtue.

Otherwise: only through personal love can one join universal human love.

* Every untempted young man, every uncorrupted and unencumbered man contains his own fairy tale about the woman he loves, about the possibility of impossible happiness.

And when, it happens, a woman appears, then the question arises:

Isn't she the one I've been waiting for?

Then the responses follow:

As if she!

No, not her!

And it happens, very rarely, a person, not believing himself, says:

Is she?

And every day, confident in his deeds and easy communication during the day, he exclaims: “Yes, it’s her!”

And at night, touching, he enthusiastically accepts the miraculous current of life and is convinced of the phenomenon of a miracle: the fairy tale has become reality - this is it, undoubtedly it!

* Oh, how trivialized the French "look for a woman"! And yet it is true. All the Muses are vulgarized, but the sacred fire continues to burn in our time, as it has been burning since time immemorial in the history of man on earth. So my writing, from beginning to end, is a timid, very bashful song of some creature singing in the spring choir of nature a single word:

"Come!"

* Love is an unknown country, and we all sail there each on our own ship, and each of us is a captain on our own ship and leads the ship in our own way.

* It seems to us, inexperienced and learned from novels, that women should strive for lies, etc. Meanwhile, they are sincere to such an extent that we cannot even imagine it without experience, only this sincerity, sincerity itself, is not at all similar to our concept of it, we confuse it with the truth.

* How to call that joyful feeling when it seems as if the river is changing, floating into the ocean - freedom? love? I want to embrace the whole world, and if not everyone is good, then the eyes meet only with those who are good, and therefore it seems that everyone is good. Rarely has anyone not had such joy in life, but rarely has anyone coped with this wealth: one squandered it, the other did not believe it, and most often he quickly grabbed from this great wealth, stuffed his pockets and then sat down to guard his treasures for life, began their owner or slave.

* At night I thought that love on earth, that same ordinary love for a woman, specifically for a woman, is everything, and here God, and all other love within its boundaries: love-pity and love-understanding - hence.

* I think with love about the absent Lyalya. It is now becoming clear to me, as it has never been, that Lyalya is the best thing that I have met in my life, and any thought about some kind of personal “freedom” must be discarded as absurdity, because there is no freedom greater than that which is given love. And if I always be at my height, she will never stop loving me. In love, you have to fight for your height and win this. In love, you need to grow and grow yourself.

* I said: - I love you more and more.

And she: - After all, I told you from the very beginning that you will love more and more.

She knew it, but I didn't. I brought up in myself the idea that love passes, that it is impossible to love forever, and that it is not worth the trouble for a while. This is where the division of love and our common misunderstanding lies: one love (some kind) is passing, and the other is eternal. In one, a person needs children in order to continue through them; the other, intensifying, unites with eternity.

* I, creating joy for a distant unknown reader, did not pay attention to my neighbor and did not want to be an ass for him. I was a horse for the distant and did not want to be a donkey for the near.

But Lyalya came, I fell in love with her and agreed to be a "donkey" for her. A donkey's business consists in a person not only in carrying burdens, like a simple donkey, but in that special attention to one's neighbor, revealing shortcomings in him with an obligation to overcome them.

This overcoming of the shortcomings of one's neighbor is the whole morality of mankind, all its "donkey" work.

* Motherhood, as a force that creates a bridge from the present to the future, has remained the only driving force of life ...

The new time is characterized by the greatness of motherhood: this is the victory of a woman.

Today we came to the forest, I laid my head on her knees and fell asleep. And when I woke up, she was sitting in the same position when I fell asleep, looking at me, and I recognized in those eyes not a wife, but a mother ...

* Today, this being suddenly became very clear to me - more than my scope, and most of all, and best of all, known to me, this being is a mother.

You say love, but all I see is patience and pity.

So this is what love is: patience and pity.

God is with you! But where is joy and happiness, are they condemned to remain outside love?

Joy and happiness are the children of love, but love itself, like strength, is patience and pity. And if you are now happy and enjoy life, then thank your mother for this: she pitied you and endured a lot so that you would grow up and become happy.

A woman is by nature compassionate, and every unfortunate person finds consolation in her. It all comes down to motherhood, they drink from this source, and then brag: you can take everyone! How many tears have been shed from this deceit!

* A beautiful woman was undressing in the lobby, and at that time her boy began to cry. The woman leaned towards him, took him in her arms and kissed him, but how she kissed him! Not only didn’t she smile, didn’t look back at people, but all, as if into music, entirely, serious and sublime, went into these kisses. And I got to know her soul intimately.

To die means to surrender to the end, as a woman gives herself to the work of giving birth and through this becomes a mother ... And the death of a mother is not death, but dormancy.

* It’s like I’m getting living water from the deep well of her soul, and from this I find in the face, I open some kind of correspondence to this depth.

From this, too, her face in my eyes is forever changing, forever agitated, like a star reflected in deep water.

* I was close to love in my youth - two weeks of kisses - and forever ... So I never had love in my life, and all my love turned into poetry, poetry enveloped me and closed me in solitude. I am almost a child, almost chaste. And he himself did not know this, being satisfied with the discharge of mortal anguish or intoxicated with joy. And perhaps a little more time would have passed, and I would have died without knowing at all the power that moves all the worlds.

* If you think about her, looking straight into her face, and not somehow from the side, or "about", then poetry runs straight to me like a stream. Then it seems as if love and poetry are two names for the same source. But this is not entirely true: poetry cannot replace all love and only flows out of it, like from a lake.

* We have not yet been as happy as now, we are even at the limit of possible happiness, when the essence of life - joy - passes into infinity (merges with eternity) and death scares little. How can you be happy when... Impossible! And then a miracle happened - and we are happy. So, it is possible under any conditions.

* He will look at you, smile and illuminate everything so brightly that the evil one has nowhere to go, and everything evil crawls behind your back, and you stand face to face, delivered, powerful, clear.

* In love, you can reach everything, everything will be forgiven, but not a habit ...

* At that distant time, I did not even dream of writing, but when I fell madly in love, then in the midst of feelings, somewhere in the car on a piece of paper, I tried to write down successively the stages of my love: I wrote and cried, for what, for whom, why did I write down? Oh my God! And five years ago, when the affair with Lyalya began, wasn’t it the same, joining the soul to the secrets of life, didn’t I drive the same with my gray paw over paper?

She wrote me letters without thinking about whether they were well written or bad. I tried my best to turn my feelings for her into poetry. But if our letters were judged, it would turn out that my letters are beautiful, and her letters on the scales weigh more and that I, thinking about poetry, will never write such a letter as she does, thinking nothing about poetry.

So, it turns out, there is an area in which, with all the talent in poetry, nothing can be done. And there is "something" that means more than poetry. And not only me, but also Pushkin, and Dante, and the greatest poet cannot enter into an argument with this “something”.

All my life I have been vaguely afraid of this "something" and many times I swore to myself not to be tempted by "something" greater than poetry, as Gogol was. I thought that my humility, the consciousness of the modesty of my place, my favorite prayer would help from this temptation:

"Thy will be done (and I am a humble artist)." And so, in spite of everything, I approached the fatal line between poetry and faith.

He wrote intimate pages about a woman, something was missing in them ... She corrected it a little, just touched it, and these same pages became beautiful. This is what I have been missing all my life for a woman to touch my poetry.

* The woman stretched out her hand to the harp, touched it with her finger, and from the touch of her finger to the string sound was born. So it was with me: she touched - and I sang.

* The most surprising and special thing was my complete absence of that teasing image of a woman that impresses at the first meeting. I was impressed by her soul - and her understanding of my soul. Here there was a contact of souls, and only very slowly, very gradually passing into the body, and without the slightest rupture into soul and flesh, without the slightest shame and reproach. It was an incarnation.

I can almost remember how her beautiful eyes were created in my Psyche, a smile blossomed, the first life-giving tears of joy, and a kiss, and a fiery contact, in which our different flesh was fused into unity.

It seemed to me then that the ancient god, who punished man with exile, returned his favor to him and transferred into my hands the continuation of the ancient creation of the world, interrupted by disobedience.

In her everything was found for me, and through her everything came together in me.

* The hygiene of love consists in never looking at a friend from the outside and never judging him along with someone else.

* Mikhail, be happy that your lily of the valley stood behind some leaf and the whole crowd passed by him. And only at the very end, only one woman behind that leaf opened you, and did not pluck, but she leaned towards you.

* How much a person is measured in width - so much happiness, how much in depth - so much misfortune. So, happiness or misfortune is our envy of one person before another. And so there is nothing: happiness and unhappiness are only two measures of fate: happiness - in breadth, unhappiness - in depth.

* A young couple is walking: it seemed that it had passed a long time ago, but here she is, and it is so clear that this is eternal: an eternal insane attempt to make the whole world happy with her personal happiness.

* And at night it seemed to me that my charm was over, I no longer love. Then I saw that there was nothing else in me, and my whole soul was like a devastated land in the deep autumn: cattle were stolen, fields were empty, where it was black, where there was snow, and on the snow - traces of cats.

I thought about love, that, of course, it is one, and if it breaks up into sensual and platonic, then this is how the very life of a person breaks down into spiritual and physical: and this is in essence death.

When a person loves, he penetrates the essence of the world.

* I remembered my old thought, somewhere happily printed in Soviet times. I said then: “Whoever among us thinks more about eternity, more durable things come out of his hands.”

And now, probably, approaching old age, I begin to think that not from eternity, but everything from love: each of us can rise high by all possible means, but to stay at a height for a long time is possible only with a strong radiation of love.

* Love is like big water: a thirsty one comes to it, gets drunk or scoops it up with a bucket and carries it away in its measure. And the water keeps running.

* The step is not heard, the heart does not knock, the eye is comforted by the blue radiance of the sky through the trunks of undressed trees, the grateful heart recognized the beloved in the first lemongrass - a butterfly, in the first yellow - radiant flower, in the splash of the stream and the golden earring of the alder and in the sprawling song of the finch on the willow .

I hear the whisper of my beloved, a gentle touch and such confidence in the truth of this my being that if death were approaching now, it seems to me that I would find the strength in myself to bring my beloved closer, hugging her, painlessly throw off my body that I no longer need.

* So it seemed to happen, and in me, in my boundless joy of complete possession, there was even a place for a little sadness about the eternal deceit in which death is: she wants to get herself a beautiful human soul, but instead, as an evil mockery, she receives ugly altered, worthy only of worms, the remains of what man was on earth.

At the heart of love there is an unoffended place of complete confidence and fearlessness. If there is an encroachment on my part in this, then I have a means of fighting against myself: I put myself entirely at the disposal of a friend and through this I will find out what I am right about, what I am wrong about. If I see that my friend has encroached on my shrine, I will check him as myself. And if the worst and last happens: my friend becomes indifferent to what I am burning with, then I will take my travel stick and leave the house, and my shrine will still remain untouched.

* The most surprising thing about our relationship turned out to be that my cultivated disbelief in the reality of love, the poetry of life and everything that is considered invalid, but only inherent in people as an age experience, turned out to be false. In fact, there is a much greater reality than the usual general certainty.

This is confidence in the existence of something for which it has become impossible to get by with worn-out conditional concepts that turn into emptiness the usual words spoken by everyone about truth, God, and especially what is given to us in the word “mysticism”.

Without words, without mysticism, but in reality: there is something precious on earth, because of which it is worth living, working and being cheerful and joyful.

* - My friend! You are my only salvation when I am in misfortune ... But when I am happy in my deeds, then, rejoicing, I bring you my joy and love, and you answer - what kind of love is dearer to you: when I am in misfortune or when I am healthy rich and famous, and I come to you as a conqueror?

Of course, - she answered, - that love is higher when you are a winner. And if in misfortune you cling to me in order to be saved, then you love it for yourself! So be happy and come to me a winner: it's better. But I myself love you equally - in sorrow and in joy.

* Love is knowledge... There is a side in man and in the whole world that can only be known through the power of love.

* The last truth is that the world exists as beautiful as it was seen by children and lovers. Disease and poverty do the rest.

* Each family is surrounded by its own secret, which is incomprehensible not only to others, but, perhaps, even more incomprehensible to the family members themselves. This happens because marriage is not a “grave of love”, as people think, but a personal one, which means a holy war. Entering into marriage, this person with his will meets another, limiting his will, and thus is the "secret" of the two, who are in a struggle with an unknown end.

In this struggle, collapses occur, as it were, in which life crumbles, and strangers can read the secret of the family from the wreckage. Such a collapse was in the family of L. Tolstoy.

* What is love? Nobody really said this. But only one thing can be truly said about love, that it contains the striving for immortality and eternity, and at the same time, of course, as something small and self-evident and necessary, the ability of a being, embraced by love, to leave behind more or less durable things. ranging from small children to Shakespearean lines.

* Only love paints a person, starting from the first love for a woman, ending with love for the world and a person - everything else disfigures a person, leads him to death, that is, to power over another person, understood as violence.

Any weakness of a man in relation to a woman must be justified by the power of action (courage): and this is the whole dialectic of Man and Woman.

* In deceit, relying on the power of their collected cheerfulness, there are almost all men striving for a woman. And in almost every woman lurks a terrible deceit, returning the self-deluded to his insignificance.

Close, close, I approached happiness, and now, it seems, if only I could take it with my hand, but here, instead of happiness, there is a knife in the very place where happiness lives. Some time passed, and I got used to this sore spot of mine: not that I reconciled, but somehow I began to understand everything in the world - not in breadth, as before, but in depth. And the whole world changed for me, and people began to appear completely different.

Love hunger or poisonous food of love? I got love hunger.

* Beauty avoids those who chase after it: a person loves his something, works, and because of love, beauty sometimes appears. It grows for nothing, like rye or like happiness. We cannot make beauty, but we can sow and fertilize the earth for this...

* Today my thought was about the fear of death, that this fear passes, if only it turns out that you have to die together with your friend. From this I conclude that death is the name of loneliness not overcome by love, and that a person is not born with loneliness, but gradually, aging, in the struggle, acquires it like a disease. So the feeling of loneliness and the fear of death that accompanies it is also a disease (selfishness) cured only by love.

* Today, during a walk, I looked around and suddenly found a group of undressed young people in the green bark of tall trees in communion with the sky. I immediately remembered the trees in the Bois de Boulogne 47 years ago. Then I was thinking about a way out of the situation created by my novel, and I also looked at the trees spread out across the burning sky, and suddenly the whole movement of the worlds, all kinds of suns, stars became clear to me, and from there I spread into my confused relationship with the girl, and the solution came out so logically correct that it had to be immediately revealed to her. I rushed to the exit from the forest, found a mail booth, bought a blue piece of paper, asked my beloved to come on a date immediately, because everything was decided.

Probably, she could not understand me: nothing came of the meeting, and I completely forgot the system of my proofs, borrowed from the stars.

Was it my madness? No, it was not madness, but, of course, it became madness when it did not meet what it was supposed to be incarnated into.

Exactly the same thing happened to me ten years ago. A woman came to me, I began to reveal one of my thoughts to her. She didn't understand me, considering me crazy. Then another woman soon came, I told her the same thing, and she immediately understood me, and soon we entered into unanimity.

So, probably, it would have been in that explanation 47 years ago: I would have understood - and that's it! And then, after almost half a century, I thought of myself as crazy, trying to write in such a way that everyone would understand me, until I finally got my way: a friend came, understood me, and I became as good, simple and intelligent a person as most people on earth.

It is interesting here that the action of sex was closed by the state of mind: it was necessary that they (in the spirit) converge, so that the possibility of action here (in the flesh, in ordinary experiences) would open up.

* ...Soon the train brings me to Zagorsk. The spring of light is so strong here that tears flow from the pain in the eyes and shines through the very soul, and penetrates beyond the soul, somewhere, perhaps, into paradise, and further beyond paradise, into such a depth where only saints live ... Saints ... And here for the first time I think that the saints come from the light and that, perhaps, at the beginning of everything, somewhere, beyond paradise, there is only light, and all the best comes from the light, and if I know this, no one my love will not be taken away from me, and my love will be a light for all...

* There was no trace of what people call love in the life of this old artist. All his love, everything that people live for themselves, he gave to art. Wrapped in his visions, shrouded in a veil of poetry, he remained a child, satisfied with outbursts of mortal anguish and intoxication with the joy of the life of nature. Maybe a little time would pass, and he would die, confident that such is all life on earth ...

But one day a woman came to him, and he murmured his “I love” to her, and not to his dream.

Everyone says so, and Phacelia, expecting a special and unusual expression of feeling from the artist, asked:

And what does it mean, "I love"?

This means, - he said, - that if I have the last piece of bread left, I will not eat it and give it to you, if you are sick, I will not leave you, if I have to work for you, I will harness like a donkey. ..

And he told her a lot of things that people endure because of love.

Phacelia waited in vain for the unprecedented.

To give away the last piece of bread, to look after the sick, to work as a donkey,” she repeated, “but it’s the same for everyone, everyone does it ...

And this is what I want, - the artist replied, - so that I can now have it, like everyone else. This is exactly what I am talking about, that I finally feel great happiness not to consider myself a special, lonely person and to be like all good people.

* I stand mute with a cigarette, but still I pray at this morning hour, I don’t know how and to whom, I open the window and hear: in the impregnable guinea grouse, the black grouse is still muttering, the crane is calling the sun, and now even here, on the lake, now before my eyes, the catfish moved and launched a wave like a ship.

I stand dumb and only after I write down:

“On the coming day, enlighten, Lord, our past and preserve in the new everything that was before good, our protected forests, the sources of mighty rivers, preserve the birds, multiply the fish many times, return all the animals to the forests and free our soul from them” .

* In late autumn it sometimes happens just like in early spring: there is white snow, there is black earth. Only in spring from the thawed patches it smells of earth, and in autumn of snow. It certainly happens: we get used to the snow in winter, and in the spring the earth smells to us, and in the summer we sniff the earth, and in late autumn it smells of snow to us.

It rarely happens that the sun peeps through for an hour, but what a joy it is! Then a dozen of already frozen, but surviving from the storm leaves on a willow, or a very small blue flower under our feet, gives us great pleasure.

I lean towards the blue flower and with surprise recognize Ivan in it: this is Ivan alone left from the former double flower, the well-known Ivan da Marya.

In truth, Ivan is not a real flower. It is made up of very small curly leaves, and only its color is purple, for which it is called a flower. A real flower with pistils and stamens is only yellow Marya. It was from Marya that seeds fell on the autumn earth in order to again cover the earth with Ivans and Maryamis in the new year. Marya's case is much more difficult, that's right, that's why she fell out of favor before Ivan.

But I like that Ivan endured frosts and even turned blue. Following the blue flower of late autumn with my eyes, I say quietly:

Ivan, Ivan, where is your Marya now?