Astafiev Viktor Petrovich
Victor Astafiev
Last bow
A story within stories
Sing, little bird,
Burn, my torch,
Shine, star, over the traveler in the steppe.
Al. Domnin
Book one
A fairy tale far and near
Zorka's song
Trees grow for everyone
Geese in the wormwood
The smell of hay
Horse with a pink mane
Monk in new pants
Guardian angel
Boy in a white shirt
Autumn sadness and joy
A photo where I'm not in it
Grandmother's holiday
Book two
Burn, burn clearly
Stryapukhina's joy
The night is dark, dark
The legend of the glass jar
Motley
Uncle Philip - ship mechanic
Chipmunk on the cross
Karasinaya death
Without shelter
Book three
Premonition of ice drift
Zaberega
War is raging somewhere
Love potion
Soy candy
Feast after the Victory
Last bow
Damaged little head
Evening thoughts
Comments
* BOOK ONE *
A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If the house burns down. even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread out along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter as a quiet park under the snow and a ridge over the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut. and so that no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. -Your fate is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
Was early autumn. The delivery gates are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. Because of the shadows they began to circle the bats, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of importation, catch flies there and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
One of the works related to Russian classical literature was the story by V. P. Astafiev “The Last Bow”. Summary of this work of art quite small. However, it will be presented in this article as fully as possible.
Brief summary of Astafiev’s “Last Bow”
Despite the fact that even in the original the work can be read in just a few minutes, the plot can still be described in a nutshell.
Main character summary of “Last Bow” Astafiev is a young guy who spent several years in the war. The text is narrated on his behalf.
In order for everyone to understand what and how, we will divide this work into several individual parts which will be described below.
Homecoming
The first thing he decides to do is visit his grandmother, with whom he spent a lot of time as a child. He doesn't want her to notice him, so he walked around the back of the house to enter through the other door. While the main character walks around the house, he sees how much it needs repairs, how everything around is neglected and requires attention. The roof of the bathhouse had completely collapsed, the garden was completely overgrown with weeds, and the house itself was leaning on its side. Grandma didn't even keep a cat, because of this all the corners are in small house chewed by mice. He is surprised that during his absence everything fell apart so much.
Meeting with grandma
Entering the house, the main character sees that everything in it remains the same. For several years the whole world was shrouded in war, some states were wiped off the face of the Earth, others appeared, but in this small house everything was the same as the young military man remembered. Still the same tablecloth, still the same curtains. Even the smell - and it was the same as the main character remembered it as a child.
As soon as the main character steps outside the threshold, he sees his grandmother, who, just like many years ago, sits by the window and winds yarn. The old woman immediately recognizes her beloved grandson. Seeing his grandmother's face, the main character immediately notices that the years have left their mark on her - she has aged very much during this time. For a long time, the grandmother does not take her eyes off the guy who has a Red Star shining on his chest. She sees how grown up he has become, how he matured during the war. Soon she says that she is very tired, that she feels death is approaching. She asks the protagonist to bury her when she passes away.
Death of a beloved grandmother
Very soon the grandmother dies. At this time the main character found workplace at a plant in the Urals. He asks to be released for just a few days, but he is told that he is only released from work if it is necessary to bury his parents. The main character has no choice but to continue working.
The main character's feelings of guilt
At the neighbors deceased grandmother he learns that the old woman has not been able to carry water home for a long time - her legs hurt badly. She washed the potatoes in the dew. In addition, he learns that she went to pray for him at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, so that he would return from the war alive and healthy, so that he would create his own family and live happily, without knowing any trouble.
Many such little things are told to the main character in the village. But all this can't satisfy young guy, because life, even if it consists of little things, includes something more. The only thing that the main character understands well is that the grandmother was very lonely. She lived alone, her health was fragile, her whole body ached, and there was no one to help. So the old woman managed somehow on her own, until on the eve of her death she saw her grown and matured grandson.
Awareness of the loss of a loved one
The main character wants to know as much as possible about the time when he was at war. How did the old grandmother cope here alone? But there was no one to tell, and what he heard from his fellow villagers could not really tell about all the difficulties that the old woman had.
The main character is trying to convey to every reader the importance of the love of grandparents, all their love and affection for the young people whom they raised from an early age. The main character is unable to express his love for the deceased in words; he is left with only bitterness and a feeling of guilt that she waited for him for so long, and he could not even bury her, as she asked.
The main character catches himself thinking that his grandmother - she would forgive him anything. But the grandmother is no more, which means there is no one to forgive.
May 13, 2015Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is a famous Russian writer and prose writer who lived from 1924 to 2001. The main theme in his work was the preservation of the national dignity of the Russian people. Astafiev’s famous works: “Starfall”, “Theft”, “War is thundering somewhere”, “Shepherdess and the Shepherd”, “The Fish Tsar”, “Sighted Staff”, “Sad Detective”, “The Cheerful Soldier” and “The Last Bow” ", which, in fact, will be discussed further. In everything that he described, one could feel love and longing for the past, for his native village, for those people, for that nature, in a word, for the Motherland. Astafiev’s works also told about the war, which ordinary village people saw with their own eyes.
Astafiev, “Last bow”. Analysis
Astafiev devoted many of his works to the theme of the village, as well as to the theme of war, and “The Last Bow” is one of them. It is written in the form of a large story, composed of individual stories, of a biographical nature, where Viktor Petrovich Astafiev described his childhood and life. These memories are not arranged in a sequential chain, they are captured in separate episodes. However, it is difficult to call this book a collection of short stories, since everything there is united by one theme.
Viktor Astafiev dedicates “Last Bow” to the Motherland in his own understanding. This is his village and native land with wildlife, harsh climate, powerful Yenisei, beautiful mountains and dense taiga. And he describes all this in a very original and touching way, in fact, this is what the book is about. Astafiev created “The Last Bow” as an epoch-making work that touches on the problems ordinary people more than one generation in very difficult turning points.
Plot
The main character, Vitya Potylitsyn, is an orphan boy raised by his grandmother. His father drank a lot and partied, eventually abandoned his family and went to the city. And Vitya’s mother drowned in the Yenisei. The boy's life, in principle, was no different from the life of other village children. He helped his elders with housework, went mushroom picking and berry picking, fishing, and had fun like all his peers. This is how you can start your summary. Astafiev’s “last bow,” it must be said, embodied in Katerina Petrovna the collective image of Russian grandmothers, in whom everything is native, inherited, forever given. The author does not embellish anything about her, he makes her a little menacing, grumpy, with a constant desire to know everything first and dispose of everything at her own discretion. In a word, “a general in a skirt.” She loves everyone, looks after everyone, wants to be useful to everyone.
She constantly worries and suffers, either for her children or her grandchildren, because of this, anger and tears burst out alternately. But if the grandmother begins to talk about life, it turns out that no hardships existed for her at all. The children were always a joy. Even when they were sick, she skillfully treated them with various decoctions and roots. And none of them died, isn’t that happiness? Once, in the arable land, she dislocated her arm and immediately set it back, but she could have remained with a braided arm, but she didn’t, and that’s also a joy.
This is what it's all about common feature Russian grandmothers. And in this image lives something fertile for life, dear, lullaby and life-giving.
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Twist of fate
Then it becomes not as fun as the summary initially describes the village life of the main character. Astafiev’s “last bow” continues with Vitka suddenly going through a bad streak in his life. Since there was no school in the village, he was sent to the city to live with his father and stepmother. And then Viktor Petrovich Astafiev remembers his torment, exile, hunger, orphanhood and homelessness.
Could Vitka Potylitsyn then realize anything or blame someone for his misfortunes? He lived as best he could, escaping death, and even managed to be happy at some moments. The author here pities not only himself, but the entire young generation of that time, which was forced to survive in suffering.
Vitka later realized that he got out of all this only thanks to the saving prayers of his grandmother, who at a distance felt his pain and loneliness with all her heart. She also softened his soul, teaching him patience, forgiveness and the ability to discern at least a small grain of goodness in the black darkness and be grateful for it.
School of survival
In the post-revolutionary period Siberian villages were subject to dispossession. There was devastation all around. Thousands of families found themselves homeless, many were taken to hard labor. Having moved in with his father and stepmother, who lived on odd incomes and drank a lot, Vitka immediately realizes that no one needs him. Soon he experiences conflicts at school, his father's betrayal and the oblivion of his relatives. This is the summary. Astafiev’s “Last Bow” further tells us that after the village and his grandmother’s house, where perhaps there was no wealth, but comfort and love always reigned, the boy finds himself in a world of loneliness and heartlessness. He becomes rude and his actions become cruel, but his grandmother’s upbringing and love of books will bear fruit later.
In the meantime he is waiting Orphanage, and that just sums up the summary in just a nutshell. Astafiev’s “Last Bow” illustrates in great detail all the hardships of the life of a poor teenager, including his studies at a factory school, going to war and, finally, returning.
Return
After the war, Victor immediately went to the village to visit his grandmother. He really wanted to meet her, because she became for him the only and dearest person in the whole world. He walked through the vegetable gardens, picking up burrs, his heart squeezing strongly in his chest with excitement. Victor made his way to the bathhouse, where the roof had already collapsed, everything had long been without the owner’s attention, and then he saw under kitchen window a small woodpile of firewood. This indicated that someone lived in the house.
Before entering the hut, he suddenly stopped. Victor's throat was dry. Having gathered his courage, the guy quietly, timidly, literally on tiptoe, went into his hut and saw his grandmother, just like in the old days, sitting on a bench near the window and winding threads into a ball.
Minutes of oblivion
The main character thought to himself that during this time a whole storm had flown over the whole world, millions of human destinies were confused, there was a mortal struggle against hated fascism, new states were formed, and here everything was as always, as if time had stood still. Still the same speckled chintz curtain, neat wooden wall cabinet, cast iron pots for the stove, etc. Only there was no longer the smell of the usual cow's drink, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut.
Grandmother Ekaterina Petrovna, seeing her long-awaited grandson, was very happy and asked him to come closer to hug and cross him. Her voice remained as kind and affectionate, as if her grandson had returned not from the war, but from fishing or from the forest, where he could linger with his grandfather.
Long-awaited meeting
The soldier returning from the war thought that perhaps his grandmother might not recognize him, but that was not the case. Seeing him, the old woman wanted to stand up sharply, but her weakened legs did not allow her to do this, and she began to hold onto the table with her hands.
My grandmother has grown quite old. However, she was very happy to see her beloved grandson. And I was glad that I had finally waited. She looked at him for a long time and couldn’t believe her eyes. And then she let slip that she prayed for him day and night, and in order to meet her beloved granddaughter, she lived. Only now, having waited for him, could grandmother die peacefully. She was already 86 years old, so she asked her grandson to come to her funeral.
Oppressive melancholy
That's all the summary. Astafiev’s “last bow” ends with Victor leaving to work in the Urals. The hero received a telegram about the death of his grandmother, but he was not released from work, citing the company's charter. At that time, they were only released for the funeral of their father or mother. The management didn’t even want to know that his grandmother replaced both his parents. Viktor Petrovich never went to the funeral, which he later regretted very much throughout his life. He thought that if this happened now, he would simply run away or crawl from the Urals to Siberia, just to close her eyes. So this guilt lived in him all the time, quiet, oppressive, eternal. However, he understood that his grandmother forgave him, because she loved her grandson very much.
FINAL BOW
VIKTOR ASTAFYEV
* BOOK ONE
* A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artillery equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If the house burns down. even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter as a quiet park under the snow and a ridge over the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut. and so that no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
- Lord, Lord! - Grandma sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. -Your fate is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The delivery gates are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokinskaya River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin. to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left there was a cemetery, in front there was a ridge with a hut, on the right there was a terrible place behind the village, where there were a lot of white bones lying around and where a long time ago, the grandmother said, a man was strangled, behind there was a dark imported plant, behind it there was a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black clouds of smoke.
I’m alone, alone, there’s such horror all around, and there’s also music – a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she doesn’t threaten at all. Complains. And there's nothing creepy at all. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool, fool! Is it possible to be afraid of music? Fool, fool, I never listened alone, so...
The music flows quieter, more transparent, I hear, and my heart lets go. And this is not music, but a spring flowing from under the mountain. Someone put his lips to the water, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so dry.
For some reason I see the Yenisei, quiet in the night, with a raft with a light on it. An unknown man shouts from the raft: “Which village? " - For what? Where is he going? And you can see the convoy on the Yenisei, long and creaking. He also goes somewhere. Dogs are running along the side of the convoy. The horses walk slowly, drowsily. And you can still see a crowd on the bank of the Yenisei, something wet, washed away with mud, village people all along the bank, a grandmother tearing out the hair on her head.
This music speaks about sad things, about illness, it speaks about mine, how I was sick with malaria the whole summer, how scared I was when I stopped hearing and thought that I would forever be deaf, like Alyosha, my cousin, and how she appeared to me in fever dream mom applied cold hand with blue nails to the forehead. I screamed and did not hear myself scream.
A screwed-up lamp burned in the hut all night, my grandmother showed me corners, shone a lamp under the stove, under the bed, saying that there was no one there.
I also remember the sweaty little girl, white, laughing, her hand was drying up. Transport workers took her to the city to treat her.
And again the convoy appeared.
He keeps going somewhere, walking, hiding in the icy hummocks, in the frosty fog. There are fewer and fewer horses, and the last one was stolen away by the fog. Lonely, somehow empty, ice, cold and motionless dark rocks with motionless forests.
But the Yenisei, neither winter nor summer, was gone; the living vein of the spring began to beat again behind Vasya’s hut. The spring began to grow fat, and not just one spring, two, three, a menacing stream was already gushing out of the rock, rolling stones, breaking trees, uprooting them, carrying them, twisting them. He is about to sweep away the hut under the mountain, wash away the imported goods and bring everything down from the mountains. Thunder will strike in the sky, lightning will flash, and mysterious fern flowers will flash from them. The forest will light up from the flowers, the earth will light up, and even the Yenisei will not be able to drown this fire - nothing will stop such a terrible storm!
“What is this?!” Where are the people? What are they looking at?! They should tie up Vasya! »
But the violin itself extinguished everything. Again one person is sad, again he feels sorry for something, again someone is traveling somewhere, maybe on a convoy, maybe on a raft, maybe on foot to distant places.
The world didn't burn, nothing collapsed. Everything is in place. The moon and star are in place. The village, already without lights, is in place, the cemetery is in eternal silence and peace, the guardhouse under the ridge, surrounded by burning bird cherry trees and the quiet string of a violin.
Everything is in place. Only my heart, filled with grief and delight, trembled, jumped, and beats at my throat, wounded for life by the music.
What was this music telling me? About the convoy? About a dead mom? About a girl whose hand is drying up? What was she complaining about? Who were you angry with? Why am I so anxious and bitter? Why do you feel sorry for yourself? And I feel sorry for those who sleep soundly in the cemetery. Among them, under a hillock, lies my mother, next to her are two sisters, whom I have not even seen: they lived before me, they lived little, - and my mother went to them, left me alone in this world, where high up in the window an elegant mourning table is beating something heart.
The music ended unexpectedly, as if someone had laid an imperious hand on the violinist’s shoulder: “Well, that’s enough! “The violin fell silent mid-sentence, fell silent, not shouting, but exhaling pain. But already, besides her, of its own free will, some other violin soared higher, higher, and with a dying pain, a groan squeezed between its teeth, broke off into the sky...
I sat for a long time in the corner of the importation, licking large tears that rolled onto my lips. I didn't have the strength to get up and leave. I wanted to die here, in a dark corner, near rough logs, abandoned and forgotten by everyone. The violin could not be heard, the light in Vasya’s hut was not on. “Isn’t Vasya dead? “- I thought and carefully made my way to the guardhouse. My feet kicked in the cold and sticky black soil, soaked by the spring. The tenacious, always chilly leaves of hops touched my face, and pine cones, smelling of spring water, rustled dryly above my head. I lifted the intertwined strings of hops hanging over the window and looked out the window. A burnt-out iron stove was burning in the hut, flickering slightly. With its fluctuating light it indicated a table against the wall and a trestle bed in the corner. Vasya was reclining on the trestle bed, covering his eyes with his left hand. His glasses lay upside down on the table and flickered on and off. A violin rested on Vasya’s chest, the long stick-bow was clamped and right hand.
I quietly opened the door and stepped into the guardhouse. After Vasya drank tea with us, especially after the music, it wasn’t so scary to come here.
I sat down on the threshold, not looking away from my hand, which held a smooth stick.
- Play again, uncle.
- What should you play, boy?
I guessed from the voice: Vasya was not at all surprised that someone was here, someone had come.
- Whatever you want, uncle.
Vasya sat down on the trestle bed, turned the wooden pins of the violin, and touched the strings with his bow.
- Throw some wood into the stove.
I fulfilled his request. Vasya waited, did not move. The stove clicked once, twice, its burnt sides were outlined by red roots and blades of grass, the reflection of the fire swayed and fell on Vasya. He raised his violin to his shoulder and began to play.
It took a long time for me to recognize the music. She was the same as I had heard at the importation station, and at the same time completely different. Softer, kinder, anxiety and pain were only visible in her, the violin no longer groaned, her soul did not ooze blood, the fire did not rage around and the stones did not crumble.
The light in the stove flickered and flickered, but maybe there, behind the hut, on the ridge, a fern began to glow. They say that if you find a fern flower, you will become invisible, you can take all the wealth from the rich and give it to the poor, steal Vasilisa the Beautiful from Koshchei the Immortal and return her to Ivanushka, you can even sneak into the cemetery and revive your own mother.
The wood of the cut dead wood - pine - flared up, the elbow of the pipe became purple, there was a smell of hot wood, boiling resin on the ceiling. The hut was filled with heat and heavy red light. The fire danced, the overheated stove clicked merrily, shooting out large sparks as it went.
The musician’s shadow, broken at the waist, darted around the hut, stretched along the wall, became transparent, like a reflection in water, then the shadow moved away into the corner, disappeared into it, and then a living musician, a living Vasya the Pole, appeared there. His shirt was unbuttoned, his feet were bare, his eyes were dark-rimmed. Vasya lay with his cheek on the violin, and it seemed to me that he was calmer, more comfortable, and he heard things in the violin that I would never hear.
When the stove died down, I was glad that I could not see Vasya’s face, the pale collarbone protruding from under his shirt, and his right leg, short, stubby, as if bitten by tongs, eyes tightly, painfully squeezed into the black pits of the eye sockets. Vasya’s eyes must have been afraid of even such a small light as splashed out of the stove.
In the semi-darkness, I tried to look only at the trembling, darting or smoothly sliding bow, at the flexible shadow swaying rhythmically along with the violin. And then Vasya again began to seem to me like something like a wizard from a distant fairy tale, and not a lonely cripple about whom no one cared. I watched so much, listened so much, that I shuddered when Vasya spoke.
Year of publication of the story: 1967
V. Astafiev’s story “The Last Bow” is included in the collection of stories of the same name, published in 1982. Throughout the entire collection, the author carries emotions about childhood in the village, love for the Motherland and nature, deep respect for people and the horrors of war. Many stories from this autobiographical collection by Astafiev, which is still included in the collection, are included in the school curriculum.
The story “The Last Bow” summary
In the story “The Last Bow” by Asafiev, you can read about events, as in, unfolding after the war. The grandson returns to his native village to see his grandmother. He makes his way through overgrown paths to the house where he spent his childhood. When he meets his grandmother on the porch, he cannot help but notice how much she has changed during the war. The only thing that remained unchanged in the house was the wall scarf and the chintz curtain on it. The rest of the house was unrecognizable: the paint had peeled off the walls, the floor had become decrepit, and mice had eaten through the corners of the rooms.
But the grandmother sat in her usual place and studied commonplace– knitting. Seeing the narrator, she immediately recognized him and began to kiss him. The old woman admitted that she feels weak at eighty-six years old, her legs no longer obey her. Her whole life now is an expectation of death. The only thing that, as she assumed, kept her from death was the expectation of the main character of Astafiev’s work “The Last Bow” from the war. Looking at the narrator again, she said that during the time that they had not seen each other, he had matured, and it was a pity that his late mother could not admire her son. But, since young man I didn’t want to continue talking about my mother, the old woman fell silent. The only thing she asked was for her grandson to come to her funeral and close her eyes.
Further in the work of V.P. Astafiev “The Last Bow” we learn that soon after their separation the grandmother passed away. But, alas, they couldn’t let the narrator go to the funeral at work. They justified this by saying that grandma is not like that and close relative, “mother or father is another matter, but grandmothers, grandfathers and godfathers...”. They did not know that for him his grandmother was the dearest person in the world, and that for many years the guilt for not fulfilling his personal promise would torment the man.
Further in the story “The Last Bow” by Astafiev summary you learn that guilt towards his grandmother prompted the narrator to find out more about her. They told him how, when her legs completely gave out, she washed the potatoes with dew and washed them with rainwater, because she could no longer carry water from the Yenisei. And when his aunt Apraksinya died, aunt Dunya brought incense to the house, which was already difficult to find. The narrator asked where she got it from, to which he heard a story about how his grandmother walked to Kiev-Pechersk Lavra(which she for some unknown reason called the Carpathians). She did not tell anyone about this because she was afraid that her grandson might be expelled from school for this.
And the narrator wants to hear more stories about his grandmother, but there are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses in the village. But he believes that his grandmother is not angry with him for his unrestrained word. She always forgave him. But it’s sad that she can’t be returned.