Armored hull and deckhouse. Prerequisites for the creation of a self-propelled gun based on the IS tank

Lina Miroshnikova

16.10.2015 | 321

The first memory is a kind of test that will tell you a lot about your current life.

Over the years, childhood “dissipates” from our memory, but some memories live in the heart. This is very valuable information, says psychotherapist from Kyiv Irina Podolyak. They will help you get to know yourself and deal with many adult problems.

Rekindling Memories

How to refresh a memory in your memory? Start the “countdown”: imagine yourself at five years old. If several situations come to mind at once, focus on more early age: four years, three... Continue until you feel: this is the very first thing you remember about yourself.

Write down everything that comes to mind in as much detail as possible. Don't neglect even the little things. Now let's analyze the memory.

Psychologists say: this is how we can discern our life scenario. And the point is not in the event itself, but in the fact that it is carefully stored in memory. This means that we unconsciously chose for ourselves exactly this beginning of our autobiography, the starting point of life. That is why it is possible to understand a person’s assessment of himself, his usual actions, and level of activity.

We analyze the memorable event and draw conclusions

Let’s say, compare the memories of two psychologists’ clients about the age of three: “I woke up at night and was crying in the dark. I'm scared. It seems like someone is climbing through the window, I hear scratching. But then my mother comes, hugs and calms me down. Shows that it is a tree branch knocking on the glass. Now I'm glad it's all over."
“Mom is cooking in the kitchen, and I’m playing with cereal. Suddenly my attention is attracted by a butterfly flying into the window. I try to catch it, it flies out the window. I run after her into the yard, I’m happy. She has bright, beautiful wings.”

Can you guess which of these women suffers from depression from time to time? That's right, the first one. From her recollection we can say: she tends to focus more on problems than on joys, hence the lack of self-confidence. She sees herself as a person who is unable to deal with difficulties on her own and expects support from others (“mom will calm you down”). Her hope that everything will end successfully is connected with the presence of loved ones.

If she is lonely, the future is seen in black colors. She is frightened by strangers who might come too close and encroach on her personal space (“Someone is climbing through the window”).

The second client is an active person. She relies on her own strength and believes that her activities can bring joy. The main pleasure for her is knowledge (“watching a butterfly”). She remembers herself both in contact with others (with her mother) and at the moment of independence. This is the best variant.

If in your memories you are always with someone, this indicates a desire to psychologically “merge” with others, forgetting about yourself. If, on the contrary, you are alone, it is obvious that it is difficult for you to establish close, trusting relationships with people.

Questions for analyzing the first memory

To better understand how your first memory affects your adult life, ask yourself the following questions.

1. Where does the action take place?

If this is a small space (for example, a room), it means that you do not like new places, you prefer the motto: “My home is my fortress.” If it is an open space (street, yard), you easily get used to moving and changes in life. Don't be afraid to move forward.

2. How many people are mentioned?

The more characters you have, the more sociable you are and the easier it is to make contact. The least favorable situation is a lonely child.

3. Are relatives present?

The absence of a mother should alert you: this often happens to people who feel abandoned. But dad is remembered much less often, usually by those for whom the relationship with him was more important than with mom. This often happens in men who follow the example of their father from childhood.

If brothers or sisters are mentioned, it is important how. They may appear in history as friends or rivals, as well as a “support group” - if a person remembers himself as helpless, dependent on the help of elders.

4. Are people close to each other in memories?

Do they have a joint activity or do they each have their own? Position in space is also important: the closer people are to you, the closer the communication.

5. Are you active or passive?

Do you act yourself or become the object of someone else’s actions.

6. What is the theme of the experience?

This is what worries you to this day. Let's say, if we are talking about the first visit to kindergarten, the attention of teachers and peers, situations where new people evaluate you are important to you.

Answer the questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible to better understand yourself and your life.

We all come from childhood... It’s hardly possible to come up with a more precise phrase than this! We left there, not yet knowing where fate would lead us, what trials life was preparing. And maybe that’s why we walked into it boldly, with our heads held high, confident that we could handle all the great and important things. Naive, funny.

We wanted to seem like adults, not yet realizing that the best and brightest was already behind us!

Childhood cannot be compared with youth or youth. They also have their charms, but childhood is different in that...

Childhood. There is so much in this word that is bright, good, kind and truly sincere.

After all, only when we are small do we love and be friends sincerely. We don’t try to use each other for any of our own purposes; we don’t need anything other than friendship. The concept of "using" will come later, when we grow up.

He and she were in the same group in kindergarten. Then life brought them together at school, in the second grade. They were friends. We went to school together, walked outside, played with a ball, visited each other for days...

There are moments in life when you want to return to the past, go somewhere far away, to the land of childhood - the land of lived moments; a country of crazy, carefree, sometimes not very fun life; a country where you have already been and are still drawn there... But all these are dreams, or they have not yet invented a time machine, or a reverse process in metabolism, which, although it would not return there, would make our body forever young. Almost all teenagers and children strive to grow up quickly, not understanding what they have in their...

1 - Don't pay attention to anyone - RUN!
- And the ball?! - But what does the ball have to do with it - the main goal! The ball itself will stick to your feet...

2 ...if you want a girl to like you, smile mysteriously from afar and run away... if she chases you, it’s YOURS!

3 ...if you sneak to the toilet at the end of a movie show, you can watch the next one

4...if you drink a lot of water, you won’t want to eat

5...if they scold you for a long time for studying, you have to flinch and shake yourself off like a dog - then they understand that it’s unpleasant for you!

Each of us had favorite books in childhood, which we read and reread many times, whose characters we lived with and they remained in our memory for the rest of our lives, like people who still live nearby.

I remember how, as a child, I had an irresistible passion for books.

Maybe because I was very timid and shy and lacked communication.

I remember how in the early evening, as soon as the lights went out in the apartment, I approached the window, the windows of which looked out onto a large hotel, where there was a lot of light...

The world of childhood, big and beautiful, we all lived in this world, we all walked through the world of childhood. There is nothing more wonderful and more beautiful than the world Togo. In the world of childhood there is eternal carelessness, kindness, the lightness of an airy cloud, naivety and childish spontaneity, carelessness. A happy childhood will never leave the soul and heart of everyone. Probably every person lives with memories of a carefree childhood.

But all children dream and want to be adults and imitate adults. I really want them to be big...

August 17, 1927
My name is Katarina. We live in England, or rather on the very edge of it, in the city of Carlisle. I love my parents very much, because they are the best on the whole planet.

My mother's name is Elizabeth, and my father's name is Christopher. They love each other.

They always help those who come to them for help, be it a person or an animal. Dad and his brother Freud work on grandpa's farm. Grandfather died 20 years ago. I didn't even know him.

And my mother is a nurse at the hospital, I don’t remember her name, but this is...

How quickly time flies... sometimes we only notice it when looking back... far, far into the past. When we remember events that happened a long time ago, but it seems to us that it was just yesterday. And then, as if waking up from a dream, we understand that this cannot be returned, we understand how far time has gone.

I look back and see a child... a girl, and a moment from childhood flashes before my eyes. For some reason I see this picture so clearly, but it was a long time ago...

I look around and understand... old age has come.

It’s not that I swore never to write memoirs, but I simply always treated my past with some amazing carelessness. I never kept diaries, was not very interested in genealogy, did not remember family dates, and almost did not maintain family relationships. I also did not accumulate impressions about historical events, of which quite a lot have happened in my already rather long life, and I did not strive for personal acquaintance with famous people, with whom, on the contrary, my life was not at all rich. In short, I didn’t prepare for writing memoirs in any way.

Until recently, I still felt young, and it somehow went without saying that my main achievements were ahead and I would live for a long time. But last years suddenly rushed with such rapidity that suddenly a moment came when I felt like an old man. No, I’m not weak and I’m still quite firmly on my feet, but suddenly they started giving up my seat in public transport, and at first this really offended me. Meanwhile, people very close to me passed away one after another. And, as happens with everyone, my past suddenly began to remind itself more and more sharply every year - either happy moments and noble deeds, or, much more often, unrepentant sins involuntarily surfaced in my memory.

“You need to write memoirs,” said a thoughtful person several years ago, after my speech at a philosophical seminar, probably referring to my frequent excursions into the past. I, as it seemed to me then, reasonably answered him that I had met few celebrities in my life. And I forgot about this advice for a while.

I must say that in my student years, almost every second philologist secretly cherished in the depths of his soul the dream of becoming a writer or poet, and, I admit, I also dreamed then that I was born to write some kind of extraordinary philosophical novel (certainly novel), which will reveal the hidden essence of our dramatic times. Over the years, this confidence faded away - I realized that my writing talent was clearly lacking. And now, in old age, suddenly a “second wind” has erupted, and the whole life that has flown by in an instant spins in my head as a multi-colored kaleidoscope of entertaining and instructive, funny and sad stories from the past. I, one might say, following Vasily Rozanov, lived my life “behind the curtain,” more indulging in dreams and reflections on books than caring about my career or participating in the bustle of society. But now, despite this, no, no, and I’m returning to my previous temptations: why not try to write not a novel, but something at least vaguely reminiscent of this desired personal a book in the form of memoirs? And having recently read a volume of his memoirs given to me by a philosopher I knew, almost the same age, I realized that my humble life was much more varied and its vicissitudes could be of interest not only to my relatives and descendants. In addition, the aphorism of the same Rozanov has long sunk into my soul: any of us is capable and even obliged to write the book of our own life, for the life of each person is a one-of-a-kind fairy tale.

I want to warn the reader right away that he will have to get used to my special style of narration. As with oral storytelling, I like to jump by association from one event to another, suddenly moving from the distant past to more recent memories and back again. Such a spontaneous, somewhat chaotic manner, although it does not contribute to the coherence of the presentation, allows us to embroider a more multifaceted and lively, relief pattern according to the usual chronological outline of memories, and most importantly, it is more consistent with my character. So let's get started.

Life has left me a lot on our Russian land, and when they ask me where I come from, I experience some difficulty - you can’t say it briefly, in a nutshell. There was never any doubt about one thing: we all come from childhood. And that’s why I usually call the Oryol village my homeland, where I lived for the first eight years of my life, although in fact I was born into the light of God in the forty-first year, just before the war, in Kursk, that is, I am a fellow countryman of St. Seraphim. However, I don’t consider myself a Kursk resident, because because of the war, I only had the chance to live among them for three months, and then I had to quickly go with my mother to my parents’ homeland. Both my father and mother were born, raised and married in the Oryol region, near ancient Mtsensk. They were from neighboring villages; father, Alexander Petrovich, was born in 1916, still under the Tsar Father, in Protasov, and mother, Olga Ivanovna, was born only two years later, but already under Soviet power, in Spassky. True, both of them grew up in a country of militant atheism and were, of course, completely Soviet people by upbringing.

When I was finally ready to be baptized (about fifteen years after graduating from university), just in case, I asked my mother if I had been baptized. Her answer was short: “What does it matter, son?” This means, I thought, I was not baptized as a child. But about my elder brother Vladimir, who was born in the village of Spassky in 1938, three years before me, we knew for sure that he was baptized as a child. The fact is that both of our grandmothers did not forget about prayer even in the atheistic Soviet times, and it was they, of course, who organized the baptism of their newborn grandson. This seemed almost insulting to me: although my elder brother grew up to be very smart and became a venerable professor of pharmacology in Riga, he was always distinguished by the rationalism inherent in most doctors. This is not surprising: for a person who has been engaged in vivisection since a young age, that is, cutting up frogs, or even dissecting corpses, and then implanting electrodes in rats for scientific purposes, of course, it is difficult to come to faith. But, like any profound scientist, Volodya understood that the world did not happen without the miraculous intervention of higher powers, although from his youth he preferred the materialistic substitution of religion in the form of aliens as an explanation. Nevertheless, every year he more and more willingly supported philosophical conversations about God - it was interesting to him. And when a couple of years ago Volodya was visiting our dacha, that is, in the Pskov village near Gdov, where we have been spending the summer for a long time, one day my wife and I inspired my learned brother to go to church. At first he hesitated, but then he succumbed to persuasion and became bolder - apparently, he himself wanted to. And in the church, of course, they stood in line with him for confession. When my brother was the first, he hesitated and tried to leave the line of confessors, but we, standing behind, did not allow him to back down. I don’t know what happened behind the partition during confession, but Volodya left Father stunned and, it seems, for a long time he could not recover from the shock he had experienced...

I never had the chance to learn the secrets of this shock, just as I was not given the opportunity to continue introducing my older brother to the faith. I had already sketched out this entire essay about my childhood years, including what was written just above, in 2013, when suddenly the stunning news came that my older brother Volodya (to those around him long ago, Vladimir Alexandrovich) unexpectedly died of a heart attack, being, it seemed, in in full health and several months short of reaching seventy-five. And what concerns here the last years of my brother’s life, I have already stated in the present tense, and I only had to make changes in order to describe everything as events of the past.

That summer we were expecting our brother to visit us again at the dacha. Having found himself abroad in his old age, although only a few hours away from us by car, Volodya willingly came to us on his summer vacation. Despite some external Europeanness, which he acquired (unlike his brother), living for more than fifty years among an ethnic group offended by Russians and gravitating towards Europe, he never became a citizen of Latvia. He, of course, could easily pass the Latvian language exam, which is necessary to apply for citizenship. After all, he gave lectures in Latvian to students, including “Russian-speaking” ones (Russian has been banned as a lecture language in Latvia for the last decades). But he found it humiliating to submit a petition, and he remained, like other “occupiers,” with a special “non-citizen” passport. However, who knows, perhaps it was precisely this integrity that allowed him to work for many years and in retirement, until his death - he was apparently kept at the department mainly as an example, to show that in Latvia there are even Russian professors and there is no discrimination does not exist based on nationality. Moreover, with his excellent knowledge and flexible character, my brother could teach pharmacology, in addition to Latvian, in English and German, and teaching visiting rich foreigners brought the much-needed educational institution currency.

It is clear that a person who showed such adherence to principles on the issue of citizenship was far from indifferent to the radical changes taking place both in Latvia and in Russia. Changes even affected my brother’s views. If in Soviet times it was still possible to notice in him, like most of our fellow tribesmen who lived in the Baltics, a touch of cosmopolitanism, albeit barely perceptible, then after the appearance of state borders between us and well-known problems on national grounds, he clearly again I felt like a Russian person. It was noticeable that while relaxing with us, Volodya seemed to be fueling the newly heightened national feeling. What especially pleased him in the Pskov region was that everyone around, as he put it, spoke Russian. We were expecting him to visit us again in July that year, but he died suddenly at the beginning of May...

Among all my vacation plans, I also had the intention of walking with my brother through these memories of my childhood in order to extract from the abyss of oblivion some more soul-stirring details in order to give greater integrity and add color to my description. After all, my brother is three years older than me, and when I left the Oryol village I was only eight years old, while he was eleven. Nothing foreshadowed a tragic outcome: at seventy-four he looked like a very strong man, he still taught his pharmacology, took care of himself, and kept fit by playing tennis. But, as they say, man proposes, but God disposes. My brother was a worthy man, and he truly fulfilled his destiny on earth, as popular wisdom says, since the Lord took him to Himself, moreover, without prolonged illness and great suffering. I will remember my brother more than once in the course of the story about my life, but here I will only note that, it seems, the very communion to which we slightly encouraged him two years ago turned out to be the only one in his life...

I was baptized consciously, of my own free will, after that conversation with my mother, and, living in Leningrad myself, I did it almost in the center of Moscow. The priest from the Temple of St. John the Warrior on Yakimanka, now deceased, baptized me in an ordinary basin near a rich home icon case with ancient icons at the window overlooking the most picturesque church in the apartment of one very pious woman, a zealous parishioner of this temple. She became a deeply religious person after the untimely death of her son, a friend of my youth from the Suvorov Military School, and specifically bartered for herself an apartment in this house next to the temple. The reason for my “home” baptism was quite banal: I worked in a publishing house, and in those almost forgotten times, priests were obliged to hand over to the KGB lists of everyone they baptized in the church. “Organizational conclusions” at the publishing house would probably follow immediately. The priest who baptized me at home noted that the name “Valery”, which my parents gave me, although rare for Christians, is included in the calendar - that was the name of one of the forty Roman soldier-martyrs who were given over to torture in the cold on Lake Sebaste for their unwillingness to refuse from the Christian faith. I always believed that I got this name (I admit, I don’t really like it) because just at the turn of the thirties and forties the fame of the dashing pilot Valery Chkalov spread across Russia - it was not for nothing that there were as many as five Valerievs among my classmates. But here’s what’s surprising: when in recent years I began to celebrate not only my date of birth, but also the day of the Angel, I suddenly noticed that between the day of my birth and my name day there was a little more than two weeks, and if we take both dates according to the new style, then they almost match. And I thought: either this coincidence is accidental, or it means that my name was chosen according to the calendar and, perhaps, the sacrament of baptism did not escape me in childhood...

Be that as it may, my father was a typical Komsomol member. According to his mother’s fragmentary stories, he, like everyone else, admired the film “Volga-Volga”, and together with his young peers sang the simple optimistic song of Lebedev-Kumach: “An amazing question: / Why am I a water carrier? / Because without water - / Neither here nor here!” I myself, however, don’t remember my father at all, who died in the war in 1943. I know that in his youth he worked part-time as a shepherd in the village, but he was a capable young man, and for his good studies at school he was sent to the workers' school. Upon graduation, around 1937 or 1938, he entered the Kursk Pedagogical Institute.

His wife, my mother, who had completed only four classes and worked in the city as a seamstress, also came to Kursk from the village. My father studied excellently and even better than anyone else, as my mother once told me with the simplicity of a woman from the people and with some kind of old resentment, but the Jewish teachers kept putting forward their own. There, in Kursk, I was born to them in March 1941. The life of a young, growing family with bright prospects was, it seems to me, very happy.

And three months later the war broke out, and everything ended. My father went to the front, and my mother hurried to take me to a “quiet place,” to her homeland, but, as it turned out later, to an area of ​​fierce fighting. So earlier my childhood fell on a terrible wartime with bombings, massive shelling and German occupation, with hunger, devastation and constant threats to life. But I know about the terrible war times only from stories, and I myself experienced the happy oblivion of infancy - the Germans were driven out of the Oryol region in the summer of 1943, so even my very first, vague memories relate to the post-war times and are colored, despite all the hardships and hardships experienced, in romantic tones.

Thus, my entire early childhood, at first unconscious, and then imprinted in my memory with some vague visions and pictures, was spent in the Oryol village, which I consider my homeland. But it so happened that I left my native land forever at the age of eight. Apart from my mother, I only had a real blood connection with my older brother, who not only happened to settle far from our native places, like me, but also ended up in another country by the end of his life. However, my brother, who is three years older, did not remember much more about the village than I did, judging by the answers to my questions during meetings. And when my mother died, the last one, besides my brother, close person, whose stories mainly fueled my memories of childhood, relatives and ancestors, I suddenly began to remember my early village years more and more often. Alas, I could only regret that I knew very little about them and did not have time to ask my mother in more detail. At one time I even wanted to go back to my homeland, but I didn’t go for fear that probably nothing had been preserved there. All the village relatives left there long ago, and now, in the current devastation, I’m not at all sure that anything remains of the village itself...

Now, in my old age, when my older brother unexpectedly died, all connection with my childhood was severed. It’s both sad and shameful, but this is already a thing of the past, it can’t be corrected - that’s the way it is. Our era was difficult, chaotic, changeable, and the lives of many, including mine, were spent in different places, with a lot of moving, and the loss of previous connections. But the further I go, the more dear my native Oryol places become to me - when I remember my childhood years, a painful feeling arises, and sometimes a tear wells up. Our poor, even beggarly, post-war childhood! It is still covered in memory with some kind of fairy-tale aura, like the most joyful time in life, despite all the hardships...

Of course, my childhood was full of deprivation and hunger, but it did not pass just anywhere, but in the Oryol region, and from a young age, having entered the philological faculty at Moscow State University, I experienced an exciting feeling of my almost tribal connection to the most dear Russian names. After all, how many writers and philosophers, the pride of the Russian land, came from our places! Every piece of this land, which is not very remarkable in appearance, is connected with Russian history and especially literature. Zhukovsky, Granovsky, Turgenev, Tyutchev, Apukhtin, Leskov, Leonid Andreev, Prishvin, Bunin, Boris Zaitsev, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the Kireyevsky brothers, Danilevsky, Pogodin... - all these are my fellow countrymen. And our village was not called anything, but the village of Spasskoye (which means that before the revolution there was a church there). This, however, is not Turgenev’s Spasskoye-Lutovinovo - the famous estate-museum is located 25 kilometers from my home village. I also remember the wonderful magician of Russian literature Nikolai Leskov, who wrote, for example, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” And our village administratively belongs to the Mtsensk district, and Mtsensk itself is also a stone’s throw from our Spassky. Or here’s something else about our places: I remember that the same Leskov writes somewhere that he was robbed at the Otrada station. And these are very native places, I can say with full right that it is our people who “distinguished themselves.” Otrada is the closest station to our Spassky, some ten kilometers away, if not less.

And this landscape on the way from the station to the village remained in my memory as an image of my childhood, my Russia. A hilly, open area with a well-worn country road stretching beyond the horizon and a string of pillars along it. And from the side - a view of the undulating valley, stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see, and cut in the distance by a winding ribbon of highway.

Man is strange, after all. The impressions of external life are the same, for the most part very mundane and not very encouraging, but in the human soul there is its own, different hierarchy of values. The worst things are easily forgotten, and even what inspires little in everyday life is stored in the memory as bright poetic moments, from which, in spite of everything, grows an awareness of the high meaning of human existence. This is especially true of childhood, of course.

My brother and I later visited our native village only once, in 1959. Needless to say, the scale of all dimensions seemed to have decreased significantly compared to what was stored in memory. The river so dear to me actually looked almost like a stream, and the fields on the other side of the ravine, where we saw wolves more than once, turned out to be very close to my childhood home. We reached the school, the journey to which seemed so long to me, in a matter of minutes. My mother’s relatives lived in our former house, and they gave us the most cordial, warm welcome, as Russian peasants of the Soviet era imagined it. The main treat was, of course, moonshine, which literally flowed like a river. I was especially unpleasantly struck by the fact that even a little boy of about five years old, who was spinning under his feet, was given quite a large glass, he vomited, and very soon he was already lying somewhere under the table... My brother and I wanted to arrange a feast of the soul for ourselves, but it didn’t work out. Everyone, of course, got too drunk, and it was not possible to talk properly or remember the distant past. And then, in the barn where we were sleeping and recovering, a friend of our childhood, now a cadet at a military school, suddenly appeared and began to utter such obscenity that I felt uneasy. There was, however, some kind of holiday, and we attended a folk festival, where we saw a real, and not theatrical, Russian round dance. But still, we left the village in upset feelings, stunned by the prose of modern rural life. We were, after all, completely urban, and what we saw for a long time discouraged us from coming again. And neither my brother nor I ever had the opportunity to visit our homeland again. But here’s what’s surprising: for me, the places of my poor, hungry, but full of poetry childhood, despite the sad and dull impressions of later years, this is “my” Russia and, as I feel (although I don’t quite understand why), there are the sources of my ineradicable Russophilia.

Now it is customary (derived from the official press) to call the place of birth “ small homeland" I never felt my homeland as “small”. In childhood, the earth seems huge, and the world around us seems like the universe. My perception of the world then was truly planetary, and all things, hills, bushes on the horizon and people near and far seemed large, significant, full of meaning. I remember, already in my student days or even later, when reading “Khlynovsk” and especially “The Space of Euclid” by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin with his cosmic perception and when contemplating his delightfully curved, spherical images of the earth and the vault of heaven, these childhood memories of the enormity of what was revealed to me then peace washed over me...

I don’t know what exactly could have contributed to the emergence of so many writers in the Oryol region. The area, it would seem, is the most ordinary, prosaic, discreet. Fields, meadows, hills and often ravines washed away by streams - distinctive feature southern Russian semi-steppe regions. There were few forests left in these parts; they had been cut down long ago, and in our area there were almost none. Here and there there were only copses, mostly oak trees. I remember, in search of mushrooms, berries and generally anything edible, we wandered around among the low oak bushes. In our village itself, located on a hill, it was somehow bare: there seemed to be no tall oaks, maples or birches, which usually grow in abundance around villages, for example, in the Pskov region. That’s why the trees with small oblong leaves seemed very tall to me - brooms, perhaps, or elms - which grew here and there below, near a small winding river with low banks. Sparse groves, still occasionally encountered at some distance from the village, were perceived as paradise... The area around the village is hilly, and in the absence of forests one could see far, far away. I remember most of all these endless Oryol expanses, filled with inexpressible charm, lifting above everyday life, which opened up among the hills on sunny summer days. A high, blue sky without a single cloud over the village smoldering from the heat and the fields with ears of corn; the solemn, sonorous singing of larks sounding from heaven; roads and paths stretching into the distance, evoking thoughts about wanderings, about the future and the past... From the soul-stirring spaces unfolding in breadth and height, perhaps that mysterious feeling of harmony of spirit and matter arose, which forced my fellow countrymen to take up the pen.

This is how Turgenev, for example, describes his native place: “It was a quiet summer morning. The sun was already quite high in the clear sky; but the fields still glistened with dew, fragrant freshness wafted from the recently awakened valleys, and in the forest, still damp and not noisy, the early birds sang merrily. At the top of a gentle hill, covered from top to bottom with newly blooming rye, a small village was visible... All around, on the high, unsteady rye, shimmering with silver-green, then reddish ripples, long waves ran with a soft rustle; the larks were ringing in the heights.”

Bunin no less reverently conveys this feeling of landscape that makes Oryol residents akin: “The terrain is flat, you can see far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun sparkles from the side, and the road, rolled by carts after the rains, is oily and shines like rails. Lush green winter crops are scattered around in wide schools. A hawk will fly up from somewhere in the transparent air and freeze in one place, fluttering its wings. And clearly visible telegraph poles run into the clear distance...”

Here, in the modest, even poor, but piercingly poetic Oryol landscape are the roots of my unconscious, visceral love for Russia.

The school we went to was located in a low area. The path to it ran past our cute narrow river, the name of which I did not remember. My brother told me later about our school building that it used to be a manor’s house. Quite recently I found out that this was the estate of the Shenshin landowners.

As a child, of course, I didn’t know anything about the manor’s estate or about Shenshin-Fet, and we didn’t study his poetry at school. In general, my understanding of the geography of those places is still very vague, poetically colored. Then, only after graduating from university, I suddenly remembered that my mother, who herself had only just graduated primary school, fourth grade, in her stories about our rural childhood, she often mentioned some neighboring village “Shinshinu”. And since I already knew about Fet and his residence in the Oryol and Kursk regions, one day it dawned on me that this, of course, should be Shenshino, and this name was somehow clearly connected with the family of Oryol landowners, the Shenshins. As I read in the pre-revolutionary multi-volume reference book “Russia”, they previously owned many lands in the district. And the Shenshin family estate was located behind the village of Otrada, on the other side railway. It was there, in the now defunct village of Novoselki, that the poet Afanasy Fet was born by the grace of God, and nearby, in the family estate of Kleymenovo, 8 miles from the station, there is a crypt with his grave. By an amazing coincidence, my future wife, a teacher by profession and an enthusiast of educational trips, in her youth made a trip with her students from Leningrad to the forgotten grave of Fet, who was not very revered in those years. Having reached the Otrada station, the travelers set off in the direction opposite to my village. As for our school, my brother confirmed that the “Shinshin” mentioned by my mother was the place where we studied. Thus, my ancestors were probably serfs of Shenshin-Fet’s closest relatives.

We lived in Spassky, in the house of my mother’s grandparents, and my father, who died in 1943 in the war, was, as I already wrote, from the neighboring village of Protasovo. There were three of them, the Fateev brothers, but having left the Oryol region a few years after the war, we did not maintain strong ties with our paternal relatives. One of my father’s brothers, Viktor Petrovich, I remember, later sent me from some nearby town, Shchekino, it seems, a letter and a photograph of himself with his brother - my father. Because I was young, I didn’t answer the letter, although now I really regret it: it would be very interesting to know at least something about my paternal ancestors. My brother said that already at the time of teaching, some impudent young man by the name of Fateev came to him from his native place and asked him to arrange for a relative to go to a medical institute, but he left without a slurp.

Our paternal great-grandfather, according to family legends that somehow reached me, and judging by my slightly slanted eyes and skinny bushy beard, was a Tatar, who by that time had apparently already settled in these Russian regions. I don’t know how and where he came from in the Oryol region. It is known that his paternal grandfather’s name was Peter, which means he was already Russified, although his nickname was “Mongol.” Our father, whose appearance I don’t remember at all and can only imagine from two surviving photographs, was already, apparently, completely Russian, and my late mother, by the way, was offended by my attempts to find out something about Tatar roots.

The image of my father’s mother was more clearly etched in my memory - she was both in appearance and behavior a typical Russian grandmother, a believer, Orthodox. I especially remember how she, in a village scarf, leaning on a stick, escorted us in 1949 from the village along the road leading to Otrada station. Looking back, I saw how she crossed herself after us, her two grandchildren, who were leaving with their mother into the distance forever. Most likely, it was about her that the family legend came to me that our grandmother made a pilgrimage on foot to the distant Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, walking, as Leskov wrote in “Levsha” about the Tula pilgrims, “beyond Orel to Kyiv again another good five hundred miles "

The mother had four sisters and no brothers. Rodikovs. Our house had a stone bottom and wooden walls, and was covered with straw; The floor in the hut is made of earth, in the middle of the room there is a Russian stove. They cooked food and baked bread there, and, I remember slightly, they bathed us in it. I was surprised later to see it again, as soon as it was placed in the oven. We slept on the stove. Already in my adult years, I more than once had a dream about how I was lying on a stove, covering myself with a blanket, but it was not a stove, but a pit, and the Nazis were burying me alive, covering me with earth. I wake up terrified and very happy that I am actually alive...

I remember that to the right of the entrance to the hut there was an extension, or a yard, in which a cow was once kept. During the war, one day this extension caught fire. For some reason, for a long time I was sure that it was I who set the house on fire when I was a child. But my older brother debunked my Herostratus claims: in fact, I simply ended up on the straw in the very outbuilding where the fire started. The grandmother hurriedly began to take out the goods, forgetting about her grandson. My temple, left arm and left leg were burned - not too noticeable traces of scars remained for life.

Opposite the house, across the road, there was a barn, or, more precisely, a barn. Especially memorable are some indescribable sensations of contact with the cool earth of a half-naked body (from spring to autumn we walked almost undressed and barefoot - we took care of our clothes, and especially precious shoes), some thick, pungent smells under the barn, where we often crawled around in their simple games. I remember very well by the smell, but more by the touch, the soft, curly grass in front of the house - how much we crawled on it, and trampled on it with our bare heels: we ran barefoot until the cold. We examined the natural world around us, one might say, in all its clarity, intently, almost as if under a microscope. Like primitive people, we were, if we recall the science of ethnography, with which I came into contact, wandering “gatherers”.

I was hungry all the time. Our children's games alternated with the search for food. If we were to reconstruct the impressions of childhood by days, hours and minutes, then most of the time would be devoted to searching for something edible.

From homemade food For some reason I especially remember chibriks - perhaps because the word is very expressive. These are pancakes made from last year’s frozen potatoes, collected from a field that had thawed after the winter. It seems to me that I have never tasted anything tastier than chibriks in my life. However, no, they also brought cake from somewhere, and we got a piece once or twice. This yellow pressed seed was used to fatten domestic animals, but in those hungry years children were very happy with it. I got a rather large tile, and, crunching deliciously, I was at the height of bliss.

We spent whole days on the street, where we looked for and took into our mouths everything that could constitute our sustenance. We grew up, one might say, on pasture. There were no real mushrooms in our area - we came across only those with a bitter taste, “conditionally edible” mushrooms, which mushroom pickers in forest-rich regions do not take at all. The wild strawberries were fabulously good, similar to garden strawberries in shape and larger in size than the berries we call wild strawberries. Strawberries ripened in the summer on the sun-baked slopes, but there were very few of them.

Due to the lack of forest products, all kinds of plants, especially tubular ones, were used. We tasted everything, some stems were bitter, others were sweeter. They ate them without thinking too much about the danger. We didn’t even pass by the famous henbane - in the spring its young sprouts have a sweetish taste, but God was merciful - neither I nor my brother were poisoned to death, although this happened in the village. True, as Tanya, his daughter, remembered after the death of her brother, he told her that he and I once ate too much henbane, and he was delirious, imagining himself as a pilot, and climbed the wall.

There were also some small “cakes”, the fruits of a faceless plant unknown to me, which we picked out of the “clothes” that covered them and greedily ate to satisfy our hunger, despite the lack of taste in them, since these plants grew in abundance near the house . We also got to the roots, searching among them for the tastier ones using the same trial and error method. But of all the wild edible plants, for some reason I especially remember the “lambs”, the sweetish flowering stems that we feasted on in the spring. I found out not very long ago that this is the most common primrose, or primrose - a plant that is not only not dangerous to health, but even medicinal! However, how delicious these lambs were back then! When I now see some grass familiar from childhood in the forest or field, my soul lights up with memories...

Grandfather Ivan, the mother’s father, according to stories, was a zealous, tight-fisted owner. They lived, they say, in abundance after the revolution. It is no coincidence that the family's nickname was Mamonov. My grandfather died towards the end of the war, when I was three years old, and I don’t remember him. And my brother remembered every time, when the conversation came up about the village, that my grandfather carried into the house every thing, rope, wire or piece of iron that he found somewhere - everything would be useful on the farm, they say. He was apparently a man of remarkable strength and courage. Another family legend has been preserved - the story of how men went to the forest in winter to get firewood and our grandfather Ivan saved them from death. In the forest, the men were attacked by wolves. The grandfather grappled with the leader of the pack and showed ingenuity: he put his hand into his mouth and, clinging to the base of his tongue, held it until the wolf suffocated. And the rest of the wolves, left without a leader, ran away.

A long time ago, before the war, the family lived, if not richly, then prosperously, and the grandfather was going to be dispossessed at the appropriate times. But he was friends with the chairman of the collective farm, and he warned him the day before. Grandfather Ivan secretly left home at night, went to Ukraine, to work in a mine, where everyone was taken, even without documents. He returned from Donbass a few years later sick with silicosis and did not live long - he died during the war, in 1944. My brother, remembering that grandfather kept coughing next to us on the stove, was amazed that we didn’t get infected from him.

I know the story of our father, Alexander Petrovich Fateev, only from stories. They say he was very smart. When people sometimes wondered how my brother and I, originally from the village, both “made it into the people,” Volodya, with the confidence of a medical scientist who had mastered the theory of heredity, which was not very encouraged in Soviet times, “without false modesty” used to say that our intellect is from father.

My father was taken to the front straight from college. He was killed “in battle for the Socialist Motherland, faithful to the military oath, showing heroism and courage,” as it was written in the death notice received by his mother, on December 8, 1943 in the Nevelsky district of the Kalinin (now Pskov) region and was buried 500 m southwest village of Ruditsy. It is quite symbolic that at the same time, in December 1943, the Kalinin Suvorov Military School was created, where I later studied. When the film “I’m Twenty Years Old” was released in 1965, I, as a student, really thought for the first time about the fact that my father, who died at twenty-seven, was almost my age, and I felt like an adult. Many years later, already living in Leningrad, I went to my father’s grave using the “funeral” order my mother received. With the help of the residents of a neighboring village, I found two nameless mounds on the edge of the forest and honored the memory of my father on this conventional grave - the person dearest to me, whom I don’t remember, but thanks to whom I was born.

The war as such, of course, did not leave the slightest trace in my memory due to age. But in the post-war period, signs of recent battles were still visible all around, and they were deposited in my memory. Before my eyes, I immediately see, for example, some kind of deep hole near a well, and in it there is a pile of twisted metal left over from a crashed plane.

I remember another story from my mother, a very extraordinary one. I once asked her how we lived during the war. “In the summer of '41, our troops began to retreat when the grain was ripe. Our soldiers are gone, but the bread is standing. The Germans arrived on motorcycles, but did not stop in the village, they drove on. We waited a little, and then we became bolder and began to remove the bread. And the Germans only occupied the village later. Only that year we had bread and ate plenty.” She must have had in mind not only the war years.

My brother also told me that he once tried to steal a machine gun from a gaping German. They could have shot him, but the German was caught understanding, and only laughed, snatching the dangerous toy from the hands of the four-year-old “avenger.” The Germans went from house to house, demanding what they had learned by heart: “Uterus, cock, eggs,” but when they saw small children, they did not commit atrocities.

Another funny story happened to my young brother, which he recalled more than once. Some German, having heard that he was calling the sparrows, addressing them: “Jew” (that’s what sparrows were usually called in our village), taught him to say: “Jew, criminal, communist.” And the brother later, after the liberation of the village from the Germans, somewhere in a public place, seeing a sparrow, gave out a memorable phrase. After that, my mother, as he said, was in big trouble.

The Oryol region was liberated after fierce battles in the summer of 1943. Traces of these historical battles remained in the Oryol region, of course, for many years. In addition to the plane crashing near the village well, I remember some worried faces and snatches of conversations about how one of the children died trying to either dismantle the shell or put it on the fire. My brother and I were obedient children and did not explode shells. But my favorite pastime was, as I remember well now, the construction of tracks from rings of gunpowder the size of a small coin, obtained, it seems, from the same shells, and then setting them on fire in a chain. Moreover, I settled down for this exciting activity not just anywhere, but right under the porch of my home. I watched with interest as the flame flared up, spreading from one ring of gunpowder to another and, looping, crawling along the complex direction I had set. I don’t know how I didn’t set the house on fire.

I was a frail, puny child - what could be expected from someone who grew up in a hungry age? war time! I remember everyone was surprised during some illness that I was alive at all. However, when trying to recreate rural childhood years in memory, they merge into a stream of captivatingly lyrical, rainbow scenes, in which bright, happy events predominate.

But, despite the integrity of the general impression, specific memories more often represent some kind of series of hazy, scattered visions, blurry pictures. I remember, for example, a snowy winter. As usual, I sit by the window and watch the snow sparkle in the rays of the sun. Suddenly, my mischievous peer, Vovka the Little Russian, runs out of the neighbor’s hut and rushes headlong barefoot through the snow to the barn, and from the porch his father shouts something after him and waves a broom...

Now I see myself in the summer. My brother and I climb up the steep slope of the ravine to get to particularly rich clay, from which we can sculpt all sorts of interesting figures. You can fall high, but the thirst for creativity turns out to be stronger than fear...

I'm lying on the green grass in front of the house, it smells like chamomile. It's hot, very hot. “I’d like to take a swim,” I think, but sweet languor chains me to the grass. The bug slowly crawls along the stem towards the yellow cap, and when I extend my hand, it quickly disappears into one of the countless passages dug in the ground...

After lunch everyone lay down to rest. The windows are curtained, and only a sharp ray of light that finds a loophole cuts through the thick darkness. I hear my brother snoring sweetly and occasionally muttering something in his sleep. Complete silence, and only somewhere near the window a fly buzzes from time to time. I'm thirsty, and I step down from the stove, stamping my bare feet on the cool earthen floor...

I still remember the exchange of money. Therefore, this memory dates back to 1948 (the exchange with the aim of streamlining the financial system after the war and strengthening the ruble exchange rate was announced on December 14, 1947). Money could be exchanged in full, but for ten old-style rubles they only gave a ruble. It’s unlikely that I got the family “pot” - where did we get the big money? Only a week was given for the exchange, and information apparently reached someone in our remote, war-drained village late, and not everyone had time to exchange their savings. I remember how, shocked by the abundance and size of the bills I received, I ran around the village with them and boasted of my wealth. From whom I got this “capital”, and whether the amount was actually large, I don’t remember. It is quite possible that I simply picked up out-of-circulation banknotes on the street...

Here I am standing on the porch and intensely peering at the opposite edge of the ravine. There are some gray shadows against the background of a snow-white field. “Look, wolves, wolves!” - someone nearby exclaims. My soul is anxious, but there is no fear - I am left with the impression that dangerous predators were still looming far, far away. And then, when I saw these places as an adult, I was amazed: from the porch to the wolves it was only a couple of hundred meters.

From the same porch and in the same place, but already in the summer, we watched with great interest the elk, which were then also occasionally found in our area, despite all the treelessness. Sokhaty walked rhythmically on his long legs across the collective farm field, towering over the yellowing field. I was struck by its enormous size and, of course, its impressive branched horns.

One of the very first taste impressions that I remember, oddly enough, was the taste of moonshine. Mom made moonshine, I think, to pay some workers for help in household matters. For some reason, the fiery drink was poured into the samovar standing in the middle of the table - perhaps they hid it there under the guise of tea. But I turned off the tap and took a light sip of this “seagull.” I remembered the burning taste forever, and maybe that’s why I was never drawn to drinking.

As for politics, my mother once casually said briefly about the main mood of the post-war years: “We are all were afraid" Another time she told a story about how she once received a letter from a distant relative on her father’s side from exile asking her to vouch for him - then he would be allowed to return. But the mother, who had two small children in her arms, was afraid and did not answer. And due to extreme poverty, she could not provide any help to this man.

Dogs and cats, without which it is difficult to imagine rural life, I don't remember something. It seems there were chickens - apparently towards the end of our life in the village. I remember them only because the unsuccessfully killed chicken, to our amazement, ran around the yard for a long time without a head (however, it is quite possible that this chilling scene could have happened not here, but somewhere else).

For some reason, I remember more not domestic animals or birds, but gophers, which my brother and I “hunted.” They found shell casings, carried water from the river in them and poured them into the holes. While one of us was pouring, the other kept his hands ready and grabbed the jumping animal by the neck from behind, avoiding sharp teeth... Such cruel extermination of animals by modern standards was encouraged by the village authorities - these were pests. It seems that my mother even received extra work days for this.

I also remember, of course, our fast, babbling river between the gentle banks, where we spent many hours in the summer. It was possible to swim only near the dam - in other places it was too shallow. The dam was destroyed from time to time, and we participated in recreating it from stones, branches, sand, turf, and whatever else we had. They splashed in the river for hours, showering each other with splashes sparkling in the sun. We crawled ashore just to keep warm. Another popular pastime was catching the occasional char we came across. These small whiskered fish hid under the stones, and when we pulled out the fluttering bodies from under the water, we received indescribable pleasure.

From the depths of childhood, the sharp smell of diesel fuel or gasoline from tractors and cars also comes to mind, contrasting with the clean country air. In general, there was little equipment in the village, which had not yet recovered from the war. The only car trip of all time remains in my memory: someone gave us a whirlwind ride in a truck - an American Studebaker, probably received through lend-lease (the brand of the car was clearly remembered forever precisely because of the unusual-sounding word).

Here I am sitting by the window and watching how a thunderstorm is gathering, how the roar in the sky rolls in the distance, how the rain begins to rustle on the grass and intensifies. Then suddenly there was a deafening blow somewhere very close - a powerful clap of thunder. And a bright flash of light - it was lightning that struck the garden between our house and the neighboring house, leaving a small depression in the ground, literally five meters from my window.

I also really remember the blessed one running around the village, seemingly barefoot and wailing something. I don’t remember a church nearby, not a single one remained - they were all destroyed under the godless government, but the blessed one in the village was welcomed, fed, and given lodging for the night.

I also visited “paradise” then - my brother and I visited some relative. I don’t know where it was. Maybe very close, according to Volodya’s assumptions, in Protasov or Kamenka. Curiously enough, the event that struck me was not at all imprinted in his memory. To me, this estate, distinguished by its prosperity, seemed like some kind of wonderful mirage, a magical oasis among the general devastation and monotonous vegetable gardens with potatoes and vegetables. The world expanded for me, and perhaps for the first time I realized that not everywhere and not everyone’s life is as poor and hungry as ours. I had never seen real gardens before, and, of course, there was no smell of Bunin’s famous “Antonov apples” in our village. I remember we had cherries, and for some reason I remember not how I ate them - apparently the harvest was not rich, but how in the spring I picked out the sticky, tasty, half-frozen juice from a crack in the cherry trunk.

In the same “paradise” garden, in my opinion, real abundance reigned. Perhaps the unearthly, magical impression was created by the luxurious, fragrant flowers. But the main wealth was, of course, the apple trees. All of them were hung with fragrant fruits, and their diversity dazzled the eyes. I remember that we received a lot of incredibly tasty, large ripe apples with a red barrel, the likes of which we had never seen in our poor village. We ate plenty of them then, and, of course, took some to take with us. Surely there were “white filling”, and “Antonovka”, and “paradise apples” in that garden - what would Rus' be like without them. There were also other wonderful fruits unknown to me hanging from the branches - probably pears and plums. Even the abundance of fruit trees and bushes in itself seemed like a fairy tale to me.

Our garden was an ordinary one, planting was carried out for one practical purpose - to survive. There were no trees near the house, except for the cherries I mentioned, and there was nothing to say about flowers. After the war, they mostly planted potatoes so that they would last the whole winter. Since childhood, I remember how my mother taught us to cut each potato when planting, not even in half, but into several parts - into as many as there were sprouts. But since I remember more the pancakes made from last year’s potatoes - chibriki, it means that such savings did not help much, and by spring the potato reserves were drying up. For some reason, the thick, tart smell of hemp remained in my memory: we also grew it for some economic purposes, then it was not forbidden, and no one had any idea about its narcotic properties.

I learned to read at the age of five, although no one specifically taught me at all. I kept watching and watching how my older brother, who started going to school, was doing his homework, and so quietly he learned all the letters. The first thing I remember reading was a thin book with a strange title for Russian ears: “Pepe”. For some time, under the impression of this book, out of spite, I teased my kind, gentle-hearted brother, whom my mother called all his life by his childhood name Vova, with the ridiculous nickname “Pepa.” Over the years, it turned out that this is a story by Maxim Gorky about an Italian boy.

I remember when I was a little over five years old, some guests came and I was shown off as a “prodigy” who could read the newspaper fluently. It was very nice. And when I came to school at the age of seven, I was sure that I was already a great literate person. I couldn’t wait to demonstrate to the teacher and the high school students sitting at the back desks that I had known the alphabet for a long time and could write. Having received the task, I began to dashingly write letters at random - no one had taught me before that I should write evenly, placing the letters along the line of the line, and for some reason I myself had not thought of this before. I was very surprised when the teacher, coming up to me, made a remark instead of praise, and I was upset to the point of tears. There were no lined notebooks at all back then. I don’t remember what they wrote on, but getting a brand new notebook was a dream for each of us. Despite failure in the first lesson, I studied well, and at the end of the first grade I was rewarded with a thin school notebook - at that time it was a luxurious gift: there was a very shortage of paper, and I had to write on anything, even newspapers .

When I finished first grade, my mother decided to leave the village. We lived, like so many peasant families without fathers, very poorly. In addition, my mother was suddenly diagnosed with tuberculosis of the throat glands - an incurable disease at that time. It seems that it was for this reason that she was allowed to leave the collective farm with her children legally (at that time peasants in villages lived without passports and no one was allowed to leave them willfully). Mom decided to go with us to distant Latvia, where her older sister Praskovya Ivanovna had settled shortly before. Now I am not so much surprised by the fact that my mother managed to leave the village, to escape from collective farm serfdom, as by the nobility of our Aunt Pasha: how she decided to agree to the arrival of village “refugees”, three extra mouths to feed, and, moreover, with her sister’s dangerous illness, into their own, as we imagined, mansions. A hidden additional reason, in addition to her positive qualities clearly manifested here, as my brother told me, was that, according to his assumption, she was in love with our father.

Concluding the story about my village life, it is impossible not to mention another important event. It could have happened that my whole life would have gone in a completely different direction. The fact is that we did not leave the village right away. While my mother was making arrangements and filling out documents to leave for Latvia, after graduation I school activities in the summer of 1949 they were sent to Kursk, to another mother’s sister, Aunt Anya, who also did not have children of her own. Before leaving, my sister persuaded my mother to give the youngest, that is, me, to her and her husband for adoption. Mom, having suffered with us in rural poverty, and even being sick with an incurable disease at that time, succumbed to persuasion that in this quite wealthy family, moreover, in big city, it will only get better. So I spent the summer after first grade in Kursk.

I remember we lived on Zolotarevskaya Street. My impressions of this period are also not very rich, but I was still eight years old. I remember how some hooligan street guys took patronage over me and taught me how to smoke at a construction site. Memory primarily stores smells and tastes. In Kursk, in addition to the specific taste of tobacco and the pungent smell of head-intoxicating cigarette smoke, I especially remember the pungent smells of slaked lime or carbide and planed wood that prevailed at the construction site - then the city was undergoing vigorous restoration work after several years of destructive battles. There were also ruins of houses, but peaceful life was already in full swing. A painful sight was presented by legless disabled people - ugly stumps of bodies with stumps instead of legs. The unfortunates moved with the help of some hastily made scooter boards on bearings, pushing off the ground with pieces of wood. Still in my memory are columns of despondent German prisoners wandering dejectedly from the construction site for the night.

For some reason, I didn’t really like my aunt’s place, and I didn’t really like Kursk itself, although there, of course, they fed me plenty and there were a lot of new entertainments for me, for example, exotic animals that had never been seen before - either a zoo or a circus... Meanwhile, before the long journey, my mother could not stand it and decided to take one last look at her “native little one,” at her “son,” whom she, like her eldest, managed to raise to her feet in such terrible, hungry years. And when I saw my mother, I clung to her and roared, not letting go, until she agreed to take me with her to Latvia.

Aunt Anya later told me that she and her husband tried more than once to adopt someone else, but everything was unsuccessful. “Somehow our good, smart children didn’t fit in well,” she lamented. I remember her story about one such unsuccessful adoption. The baby was quite cute, with a luxurious cap of curls on his head, and his adoptive parents could not get enough of him. He showed a special talent for music early on. He sang well, and then he asked for a guitar. His parents, who doted on him, of course, bought their beloved the desired instrument. And one day, when the boy was already grown up, a gypsy camp set up camp near the house. The aunt and her husband noticed that their curly-haired son was somehow very drawn to the gypsies, and then they did not notice how he disappeared along with the camp. The call of blood turned out to be stronger than the worries of the adoptive parents...

Having returned with my mother from Kursk to Spasskoye, the three of us soon set off by train to an unknown land in search of a happier life. And so my rural childhood ended. My entire subsequent life took place in cities, large and small, but I always remembered that I came from a real Russian village. Not only have I never been ashamed, as happens, of my peasant roots, but, on the contrary, I have always been happy with my rural origin, and this feeling of blood connection with the Russian land and the common people is still my main support in difficult times of life.

Dulevo, Pskov region. - St. Petersburg

Vera Razorenova
"Memories of Childhood"

Childhood This is a unique period in a person’s life. Having worked as a teacher for many years, I especially understand this. Childhood- this is something so amazing, joyful, amazing.

And it will never come back! Sometimes you want to ask yourself a question: “Why do all children want to grow up and mature faster?” Only over time, when you become an adult, do you begin to understand how carefree and wonderful this time is - childhood! This is the time when dreams come true, when Santa Claus gives gifts on New Year when you are loved and the people closest to you are nearby - your parents.

What is it like childhood? I have many wonderful, warm memories of this wonderful time! Remembering my childhood, I clearly see my mother, who loved me and constantly took care of me. I was a quiet and modest child. In kindergarten I was always praised and set as an example. My teacher said that I would study well.

Here I am a little girl, I’m probably four years old. They bought me a new sled. I remember how my dad took me on this sled to kindergarten. I sat very proud, it seemed to me that everyone was admiring my new sled. The picture remained very vivid in my memory.

Here are the next memories. Summer, I'm already 6 years old, I'm learning to ride a two-wheeled bicycle, which used to be called "Schoolboy". I fall many times and my older sister holds me up behind the bike seat.

Here's another memory. Home yard, I’m about seven years old. My friends and I are looking for colored pieces of glass to look through the world. You look, and everything around is very beautiful, colorful, and our joy knows no bounds.

I think everyone wants to return to cloudless childhood, ride a bike on summer evenings, run through warm puddles after rain, sled down a hill and roll around in the snow with friends, ask adults endless questions, learning about the world around them...

Childhood– this is a wonderful time, but for some reason it passes very quickly and unnoticed. Like a dream... Our life flows measuredly, without special changes, when suddenly one fine moment you wake up and realize that childhood is over, it will no longer return to you, but you will always remember it...