Variants of the word: AQUAMARINE, AQUAMARINE

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Part of the text: This is not entirely true. In its transparent depth there are shades of soft greenish color and pale blue. But all the uniqueness of aquamarine lies in the fact that it is brightly lit from the inside with a completely silver (namely, silver, not white) fire. It seems that if you look closely at the aquamarine, you will see a calm sea with water the color of the stars. Obviously, these color and light features of aquamarine and other gemstones give us a sense of mystery. Their beauty still seems inexplicable to us. It is relatively easy to explain the origin of the "poetic radiation" of many of our words. Obviously, a word seems poetic to us when it conveys a concept filled with poetic content for us. But the effect of the word itself (and not the concept that it expresses) on our imagination, even if, for example, such a simple word as "lightning", is much more difficult to explain. The very sound of this word, as it were, conveys the slow night glare of distant lightning. Of course, this sense of words is very subjective. You cannot insist on it and do ...

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Part of the text: the power of "remnants of the damned past." I have already written about some of these vestiges. And then the NEP began, and whole hordes of “NEPs” with their golden-haired maidens moved to Batum, where there was a tempting “free port”, in other words, duty-free trade with abroad. Offices of foreign firms - Sosifros, John Vittol and Sons, Loyd Triestino, Paquet and all sorts of others - were opened in all, even in the narrowest and dusty crevices on the embankment. Most of these were speculative firms. They traded in saccharin, vanilla powder, ladies' garters, lighter stones, playing cards, condoms, pressed figs rancid from age, hair dye, dried olives and fake jewelry. They bought, but only from under the floor, gold and currency, and to divert their eyes - dried fruits and handicrafts. Representatives of these firms, regardless of nationality, were as similar to each other as siblings. Most of them were dark-haired and nosy young men. They wore heavy amber beads, rainbow socks, and patent leather shoes as sharp as shuttles. Their hair, smeared with brilliantine, reflected, like black convex mirrors, distorted objects, mainly electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Chachikov called these youths Levantines and descendants of the Phoenicians. They all spoke decent Russian. But Chachikov preferred to communicate with them in a mixed Russian-Greek-French-Georgian dialect and even tried to write humorous poetry in this dialect. Far from abandoning his chivalrous adoration of Lucienne, Chachikov sometimes got lipstick or mascara from the descendants of the Phoenicians and gallantly offered it to Lucienne. Lucien, having tried ...

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Part of the text: If there was no memory, we would live like blind moles. For a writer, memory is almost everything. She not only stores the accumulated material. It delays, like a magic sieve, all the most valuable. Dust and dust are woken up and carried away by the wind, and golden sand remains on the surface. From it, and should, apparently, create works of art. It was not by chance that I started talking about notebooks. Several years ago I was given a notebook to read by a deceased writer. I began to read it and was convinced that these were not separate short entries, as is always the case in notebooks and diaries, but a rather coherent description of an unknown seaside town. Below I will try to reproduce this description as accurately as possible. The further I read this notebook, the clearer the forgotten colors and smells, some familiar places appeared in my memory. But I could not immediately remember where I saw these places and when it was. They appeared as if from a fog or from an old dream, which you try to restore piece by piece, like a broken statue is glued together. What was in these recordings? First of all, there was an accurate description of the trees and flowers of the acacia. "These flowers are touched by a yellowish and pink bloom and seem a little dry. The shade of feathery acacia leaves falls on the white walls and vibrates even from an imperceptible wind. It is enough to look at this living shadow to understand that you are in the south and not far from the sea. crumbling, the wind carries a heap of flowers through the streets. They roll noisily, like a dry surf, along the pavement and run over ...

Aquamarine (from Latin aquamarina - sea ​​water ) - a transparent variety of beryl, greenish-blue. The color is compared to the shade sea ​​wave in tropical latitudes. The greenish tint becomes noticeable only near the blue or blue reference. Green beryls - emeralds - are most appreciated. Crystals of aquamarine (elongated prismatic) are found more often than emerald, therefore its prices are moderate.

The most famous deposits of this mineral in Brazil, South Africa, Russia (in the Urals). Ukraine is also not deprived of them. There are well-known deposits in the Zhytomyr region, where beryl was mined in parallel with piezoquartz. Unfortunately, these mines have now fallen into disrepair.

Largest crystal found in Brazil. As often happens - completely by accident. It was a lump about half a meter long and forty centimeters thick. The find weighed about a centner. In the same area, a stone weighing 23 kilograms was mined, which was estimated at a million dollars.

Aquamarine is in perfect harmony with any precious metal and diamonds... There is nothing better for a center stone pendant than exquisite aquamarine in a deep greenish blue color.

This - march stone, but astrologers claim that he is the main gem of the sign of Pisces. Why? Because astrologers, unlike jewelers, have not developed a common position in relation to minerals.

Depending on the psychological state human he is believed to be changes color: shines with a pouring of blue tones, when the owner has peace of mind, and dims when love passes, but sadness remains.

In the old days, aquamarine served as a talisman who pacified storms, made sea voyages safe, helped to win naval battles. It is not for nothing that it is called "sea water". Connoisseurs of talismans claim: this is the stone of humanity, contributing to unity in marriage. In France, newlyweds exchange wedding rings with aquamarine, hoping for a life of mutual love and respect. This mineral has an amazing power to convey the thoughts of the owner to the person from whom he received the stone.

The purer and more uniform the color of the crystal, the more actively it promotes the pursuit of science and philosophy. The stone is endowed with the ability to heal diseases of the throat and teeth. Anyone who has such ailments should wear aquamarine beads framed in silver.

Ancient Greeks, and then the Romans, carved on aquamarines sea ​​gods ... And the philosopher of the Middle Ages Abelard and his student, the beautiful and wise Heloise, leaving Paris, exchanged rings with aquamarines. In her letters, Eloise wrote that the stone keeps the memory of better times her life and keeps her warm.

Most interesting mention of aquamarine found in modern literature from the writer and scientist Ivan Efremov. In the story "On the Edge of the Oycumene" he describes a huge crystal of aquamarine with masterfully carved figures of Hellene, Etruscan and Negro. A wonderful image - different peoples are united by the ocean! Indeed, the seas have always united distant civilizations in the history of mankind.

They also say that contemplation of aquamarine gives peace of mind and grace... He teaches not to rush. You will definitely get what you deserve, and deception, vanity, ambition are not the best companions in this life.

Konstantin Paustovsky Diamond tongue

You marvel at the jewels of our language:
every sound is a gift; everything is grainy, large,
like the pearl itself, and, rightly, a different name
even more precious than the thing itself.

Gogol

SPRING IN THE SHALLOWS

Many Russian words themselves radiate poetry, just as precious stones radiate a mysterious brilliance. I understand, of course, that there is nothing mysterious in their brilliance and that any physicist can easily explain this phenomenon by the laws of optics. Still, the brilliance of the stones evokes a sense of mystery. It is difficult to come to terms with the idea that inside the stone, from where the shining rays are pouring, there is no own source of light.

This applies to many stones, even as humble as aquamarine.

Its color cannot be accurately determined. They haven't found the right word for him yet. Aquamarine is considered by its name (aqua marin - sea water) a stone that conveys the color of the sea wave. This is not entirely true. In its transparent depth there are shades of soft greenish color and pale blue. But all the uniqueness of aquamarine lies in the fact that it is brightly lit from the inside with a completely silver (namely, silver, not white) fire. It seems that if you look closely at the aquamarine, you will see a calm sea with water the color of the stars.

Obviously, these color and light features of aquamarine and other gemstones give us a sense of mystery. Their beauty still seems inexplicable to us.

It is relatively easy to explain the origin of the "poetic radiation" of many of our words. Obviously, a word seems poetic to us when it conveys a concept filled with poetic content for us. But the effect of the word itself (and not the concept that it expresses) on our imagination, even if, for example, such a simple word as "lightning", is much more difficult to explain. The very sound of this word, as it were, conveys the slow night glare of distant lightning.

Of course, this sense of words is very subjective. You cannot insist on it and do it general rule... This is how I perceive and hear this word. But I am far from thinking of imposing this perception on others.

What is indisputable is that most of these poetic words are associated with our nature.

The Russian language opens up to the end in its truly magical properties and wealth only to those who deeply love and know "to the bone" their people and feel the intimate charm of our land.

For everything that exists in nature - water, air, sky, clouds, sun, rain, forests, swamps, rivers and lakes, meadows and fields, flowers and grasses - there is a great many good words and names in the Russian language.

To be convinced of this, in order to study a capacious and apt vocabulary, we have, in addition to the books of such connoisseurs of nature and the folk language as Kaigorodov, Prishvin, Gorky, Alexey Tolstoy, Aksakov, Leskov, Bunin and many other writers, the main and inexhaustible source of language - the language of the people themselves, the language of collective farmers, ferrymen, shepherds, beekeepers, hunters, fishermen, old workers, forest rangers, buoy keepers, handicraftsmen, rural painters, artisans and all those experienced people who have gold at every word.

These thoughts became especially clear to me after meeting with one forester.

It seems to me that I have already talked about this somewhere. If this is true, then I beg your pardon, but I will have to repeat the old story. It is important for talking about Russian speech.

We walked with this forester through the small forest. In times immemorial, there was a large swamp here, then it dried up, overgrown, and now only deep, age-old moss, small windows-wells in this moss and an abundance of wild rosemary reminded of it.

I do not share the common disdain for small forests. There is a lot of charm in the small forest. Young trees of all breeds - spruce and pine, aspen and birch - grow together and closely. It is always light and clean there, as in a peasant room tidied up for a holiday.

Every time I find myself in a small forest, it seems to me that it was in these places that the artist Nesterov found the features of his landscape. Here, each stalk and twig live its own separate picturesque life and therefore are especially noticeable and cute.

In some places in the moss, as I said, there were small round well windows. The water seemed motionless in them. But if you look closely, you could see how a quiet stream rises from the depths of the window all the time and dry lingonberry leaves and yellow pine needles are spinning in it.

We stopped at one such window and drank some water. She smelled of turpentine.

Spring! - said the forester, looking as a beetle, floundering furiously, emerged from the window and immediately went to the bottom. - The Volga must also start from such a window?

Yes, it must be, I agreed.

I am a big fan of understanding words, ”the forester said unexpectedly and smiled embarrassedly. - And so, please tell me! It so happens that one word will stick to you and haunt you.

The forester paused, adjusted his hunting rifle on his shoulder and asked:

You, they say, write like a book?

Yes, I'm writing.

This means that you must have a deliberate understanding of words. But no matter how I figure it out, I rarely find an explanation for any word. You walk through the woods, go over in your head word by word, and you will count them this way and that way: where did they come from? Nothing happens. I have no knowledge. Not trained. And it happens that you find an explanation for the word and rejoice. Why rejoice? I don’t teach the guys. I am a forest man, a simple lineman.

What word is attached to you now? I asked.

Yes, this is the very spring. I noticed this word long ago. All courting him. Presumably, it turned out because water is born here.

The spring will give birth to a river, and the river flows and flows through all our mother earth, through the whole motherland, feeding the people. You see how it comes out smoothly - a spring, homeland, people. And all these words seem to be related to each other. As if relatives! he repeated and laughed.

These simple words have revealed to me the deepest roots of our language. The entire centuries-old experience of the people, the entire poetic side of its character were contained in these words.

LANGUAGE AND NATURE

I am sure that in order to fully master the Russian language, in order not to lose the feeling of this language, you need not only constant communication with ordinary Russian people, but communication with pastures and forests, waters, old willows, with the whistling of birds and with every flower, that nods his head from under the hazel bush.

Every person must have their own happy time of discovery. I also had one such summer of discoveries in the wooded and meadow side of Central Russia - a summer full of thunderstorms and rainbows.

This summer has passed in the rumble of pine forests, crane cries, in white heaps of cumulus clouds, the play of the night sky, in the impassable fragrant thickets of meadowsweet, in warlike rooster cries and songs of girls among evening meadows, when the sunset gilded girls' eyes and the first fog gently smokes over the pools ...

That summer I learned anew - to the touch, to the taste, to the smell - many words that were up to that time, although known to me, but distant and not experienced. Previously, they only evoked one common lean image. But now it turned out that in each such word there is an abyss of living images.

What are these words? There are so many of them that it is not even known what words to start with. The easiest way, perhaps, with the "rain".

I, of course, knew that there are drizzling, blind, heavy, mushroom, spore rains, rains coming in stripes - striped, oblique, heavy round rains and, finally, showers (downpours). But it is one thing to know speculatively, and another thing is to experience these rains on yourself and understand that each of them contains its own poetry, its own signs, which are different from the signs of other rains.

Then all these words that define the rains come to life, get stronger, fill with expressive power. Then behind each such word you see and feel what you are talking about, and do not pronounce it mechanically, out of habit.

By the way, there is a kind of law of the influence of the writer's word on the reader. If the writer, while working, does not see behind the words what he is writing about, then the reader will not see anything behind them. But if a writer sees well what he writes about, then the simplest and sometimes even erased words acquire novelty, act on the reader with striking power and evoke in him those thoughts, feelings and states that the writer wanted to convey to him.

This, obviously, is the secret of the so-called subtext.

But back to the rains. There are many signs associated with them. The sun sets in clouds, smoke falls to the ground, swallows fly low, roosters crow without time, clouds stretch across the sky in long misty strands - all these are signs of rain. And shortly before the rain, although the clouds have not yet drawn, a gentle breath of moisture is heard. It must be brought from where the rains have already fallen. But then the first drops begin to drip. The popular word “speck” well conveys the occurrence of rain, when still rare drops leave dark specks on dusty roads and roofs. Then the rain drifts off. It is then that the wonderful cool smell of the earth, first wetted by rain, arises. It does not last long. It is replaced by the smell of wet grass, especially nettle.

It is characteristic that no matter what kind of rain it will be, as soon as it starts, it is always called very affectionately - rain. "The rain is going," "the rain has started," "the rain washes the grass."

Let's look at several types of rain in order to understand how a word comes to life, when direct impressions are associated with it, and how this helps a writer to use it accurately. How, for example, is a controversial rain different from a mushroom rain? The word "controversial" means - fast, fast. The controversial rain pours down steeply, strongly. He always approaches with oncoming noise. The spore rain on the river is especially good. Each drop of it knocks out a round depression in the water, a small water bowl, jumps, falls again and for a few moments, before disappearing, is still visible at the bottom of this water bowl. The drop shines and looks like pearls. At the same time, there is a glass ringing throughout the river. By the height of this ringing, you can guess whether the rain is gaining strength or is subsiding.

A fine mushroom rain falls sleepily from the low clouds. The puddles from this rain are always warm. He does not ring, but whispers something of his own, lulling, and fidgets slightly in the bushes, as if touching one leaf or another with a soft paw. Forest humus and moss absorb this rain slowly and thoroughly. Therefore, after him, mushrooms begin to climb violently - sticky boletus, yellow chanterelles, boletus, ruddy mushrooms, mushrooms and countless toadstools. During mushroom rains, the air smells of smoke and is well taken by a cunning and careful fish - roach.

People say about the blind rain falling in the sun: "The princess is crying." The drops of this rain sparkling in the sun look like large tears. And who can cry such shining tears of grief or joy, if not the fabulous beauty princess!

You can follow the play of light during the rain for a long time, for a variety of sounds - from the measured knocking on the plank roof and the liquid ringing in the drainpipe to the continuous, intense hum when the rain pours, as they say, like a wall.

All of this is only a tiny fraction of what can be said about rain. But even this is enough to be indignant at the words of one writer, who told me with a sour grimace:

I prefer living streets and houses to your tiresome and dead nature. Except for troubles and inconveniences, rain, of course, brings nothing. You are just a dreamer!

How many excellent words exist in the Russian language for the so-called celestial phenomena! Summer thunderstorms pass over the ground and fall over the horizon. People like to say that the cloud did not pass, but fell. Lightning strikes the ground with a direct blow, then blaze on black clouds like branchy golden trees uprooted. Rainbows sparkle over the smoky, damp distance. Thunder rolls, rumbles, grumbles, rumbles, shakes the ground.

Recently in the village, during a thunderstorm, a little boy came to my room and, looking at me with big eyes with delight, said:

Let's go watch the thunder!

He was right to say this word in the plural: the thunderstorm was overwhelming, and thundered from all sides at once. The boy said "watch the thunder", and I remembered the words from Dante's "Divine Comedy" that "the sun's ray was silent." And here and there there was a shift in concepts. But it gave a sharp expressiveness to the word.

I have already mentioned the lightning. Most often, lightning occurs in July, when the bread is ripe. That is why there is a popular belief that the lightnings "will bury bread" - they light it up at night - and from this the bread is poured faster. Next to the lightning is in the same poetic row the word "dawn" - one of the most beautiful words in the Russian language. This word is never spoken aloud. It is impossible even to imagine that it could be shouted. Because it is akin to that settled silence of the night, when a clear and faint blue grows over the thickets of the village garden. "Razvidnoe", as they say about this time of day among the people. In this glowing hour, the morning star glows low above the earth itself. The air is as pure as spring water. At dawn, at dawn, there is something girlish, chaste. At dawn, the grass is washed with dew, and in the villages it smells of warm fresh milk. And the shepherds sing in the fogs beyond the outskirts.

Day dawns quickly. In a warm house there is silence, darkness. But then squares of orange light fall on the log walls, and the logs light up like layered amber. The sun is rising.

Autumn dawns are different - gloomy, slow. The day is reluctant to wake up - all the same, you will not warm the chilled earth and return the waning sunlight. Everything disappears, only the person does not give up. Since dawn, the stoves in the huts have already been burning, the smoke dangles over the villages and spreads along the ground. And then, you see, and early rain drummed on the misted windows.

Dawn happens not only in the morning, but also in the evening. We often confuse two concepts - sunset and dawn. Evening dawn begins when the sun has already set over the end of the earth. Then she takes possession of the fading sky, pours many colors over it - from red gold to turquoise - and slowly passes into late twilight and night. Corncrake shrieks in the bushes, quails beat, the bittern hums, the first stars burn, and the dawn smothers for a long time over the distances and mists.

Northern white nights, summer nights of Leningrad - this is a continuous evening dawn or, perhaps, a combination of two dawns, evening and morning.

No one said this with such amazing accuracy as Pushkin:

I love you, Peter's creation,
I love your strict, slender look,
The sovereign current of the Neva,
Coastal granite.
The pattern of your fences is cast-iron,
Of your brooding nights
Transparent dusk, moonless shine,
When I'm in my room
I write, I read without an icon lamp,
And the sleeping masses are clear
Deserted streets, and light
Admiralty needle,
And, not letting the darkness of the night
To the golden skies
One dawn to change another
Hurries, giving the night half an hour.

These lines are not only the heights of poetry. They are not only accurate, spiritual clarity and silence. They still contain all the magic of Russian speech.

If one could imagine that Russian poetry would disappear, that the Russian language itself would disappear, and only these few lines remained of it, then the wealth and melodious power of our language would be clear to everyone. Because in these poems of Pushkin are collected, as in a magic crystal, all the extraordinary qualities of our speech.

The people who created such a language are truly a great and happy people.

DICTIONARIES

All sorts of thoughts sometimes come to mind. For example, the idea that it would be nice to compile several new dictionaries of the Russian language (except, of course, the already existing general dictionaries).

In one such dictionary it is possible, for example, to collect words related to nature, in another - good and apt local words, in the third - the words of people of different professions, in the fourth - garbage and dead words, all the bureaucracy and vulgarity that litter the Russian language. This last vocabulary is needed in order to wean people from meager and broken speech.

The thought of collecting words related to nature came to my mind that day, when, on a meadow lake, I heard a husky girl list various herbs and flowers.

This dictionary will, of course, be descriptive. Each word should be explained, and after it should be placed several excerpts from the books of writers, poets and scientists who have a scientific or poetic relationship to this word. For example, after the word "icicle" you can print an excerpt from Prishvin:

“Hanging under the steep, frequent long roots of trees have now turned into icicles under the dark arches of the bank and, growing more and more, reached the water. And when the breeze, even the most gentle, spring one, stirred the water and small waves reached the ends of the icicles under the steep, they excited them, they swayed, knocking against each other, ringing, and this sound was the first sound of spring, the aeolian harp. "

And after the word "September" it would be nice to print an excerpt from Baratynsky:

And now September! Slowing down your sunrise
The sun shines with a cold radiance,
And his ray in the mirror of unsteady waters
It trembles like an obscure gold.

Thinking about these dictionaries, especially about the dictionary of "natural" words, I divided it into sections: the words "forest", "field", "meadow", words about the seasons, about meteorological phenomena, about water, rivers and lakes, plants and animals. I understood that such a dictionary should be composed so that it could be read like a book. Then he would give an idea of ​​both our nature and the vast riches of language.

Of course, this work would not be within the power of one person. He would not have had enough for her whole life. Every time I thought about this dictionary, I wanted to lose twenty years from the count, so that, of course, not to compile such a dictionary myself - for this I had no knowledge - but at least to participate in the work on it.

I even started making some notes for this dictionary, but, as usual, I lost it. It is almost impossible to restore them from memory.

Once, most of the summer, I was picking herbs and flowers. I recognized their names and properties from the old identifier of plants and entered all this in my notes. It was an exciting experience. Until then, I had never imagined the expediency of everything that happens in nature, of all the complexity and perfection of each leaf, flower, root or seed.

This expediency sometimes reminded itself of itself purely outwardly and even

painful. One fall, my friend and I spent several days fishing in the deaf, old channel of the Oka. It lost its connection with the river several centuries ago and turned into a deep and long lake. It was surrounded by such thickets that it was difficult to get to the water, and in other places it was impossible.

I was in a woolen jacket, and a lot of thorny seeds of a string (similar to flat two-teeth), burdock and other plants adhered to it. The days were clear and cold. We slept in a tent without undressing. On the third day it rained lightly, my jacket was damp, and in the middle of the night I felt a sharp pain in several places on my chest and arms, as if from a pin prick. It turned out that the round flat seeds of some kind of grass, saturated with moisture, moved, began to unfold in a spiral and screwed into my jacket. They screwed her through and through, then they pierced my shirt and in the middle of the night they finally got to my skin and began to gently tingle it.

This was perhaps one of the most striking examples of expediency. The seed fell to the ground and lay there motionless until the first rains. It made no sense for him to break into the dry soil. But as soon as the ground became wet with rain, the seed, twisted in a spiral, swelled, revived, screwed into the ground like a drill, and began to germinate at the appointed time.

Once again, I digress from the "main thread of the story" and started talking about seeds. But while I was writing about seeds, I remembered another amazing phenomenon. I can't help but mention it. Moreover, it has some, albeit very distant, I would say - a purely comparative relation to literature, in particular to the question of which books will live a long time, and which will not stand the test of time and will die, like that sentimental flower that "Did not bloom and bloomed in the morning of cloudy days."

It is about the spicy scent of linden flowers - the romantic tree of our parks. This smell is audible only at a distance. It is almost invisible near a tree. Linden stands as if surrounded at a great distance by a closed ring of this smell.

There is expediency in this, but we have not yet fully figured out it.

Real literature is like a lime blossom. It often takes a distance in time to check and evaluate her strength and the degree of her perfection, in order to feel her breath and undying beauty. If time can extinguish love and all other human feelings, as well as the very memory of a person, then for genuine literature it creates immortality.

It is worth remembering the words of Saltykov-Shchedrin that literature has been removed from the laws of decay. And the words of Pushkin: "The soul in a hundred-sounding lyre, my ashes will survive and decay will run away." And the words of Fet: "This leaf that has dried up and fell down burns with eternal gold in the song."

You can cite many of the same sayings of writers, poets, artists and scientists of all times and peoples. This thought should motivate us to "improve our favorite thoughts", to constant restlessness, to conquering new heights of skill. And to the consciousness of the immeasurable distance lying between the genuine creations of the human spirit and that gray, sluggish and ignorant literature that is completely unnecessary for the living human soul.

Yes, that's how far a conversation about the properties of linden blossom can go! Obviously, everything can be an accomplice of human thought and nothing can be neglected. After all, fairy tales are born with the modest help of such unnecessary things as a dry pea or a neck from a broken bottle.

I shall nevertheless try to briefly reconstruct from memory some of the entries that I have made for supposed (almost fantastic) dictionaries.

Some of our writers, as far as I know, have such "personal" dictionaries. But they do not show them to anyone and are reluctant to mention them. What I recently said about the spring, rains, thunderstorms, dawn, "fresh" and the names of various herbs and flowers are also renewed in my memory "entries for the dictionary."

My first notes were about forests. I grew up in the treeless south, and therefore, perhaps, most of all in the Central Russian nature I fell in love with forests. The first "forest" word that completely mesmerized me was wilderness. True, it refers not only to the forest, but for the first time I heard it (as well as the word glushnyak) from the foresters. Since then, in my opinion, it has been associated with a dense, mossy forest, damp thickets littered with windbreaks, with an iodine smell of decay and rotten stumps, with a greenish gloom and silence. "Is my side, you side, my age-old wilderness!"

And then there were real forest words: ship grove, aspen grove, small forest, sandy forest, chapyga, mshary (dry forest swamps), burning, black forest, wasteland, forest edge, forest cordon, birch forest, felling, bark, sap, clearing, condo pine , oak grove and many others simple words filled with pictorial content.

Even such a dry technical term as "forest boundary pole" or "picket" is full of elusive charm. If you know forests, then you will agree with this. Low boundary pillars stand at the intersection of narrow glades. There is always a sandy hillock near them, overgrown with dried tall grass and strawberries. This bump was formed from the sand that was thrown out of the hole when they dug it for the post. On the chiselled top of the pillar, there are burned out numbers - the number of the “forest quarter”. Almost always, butterflies warm themselves on these pillars, folding their wings, and ants run anxiously.

Near these pillars it is warmer than in the forest (or, perhaps, it only seems so). Therefore, here you always sit down to rest, leaning your back against the post, listening to the quiet hum of the peaks, looking at the sky. It can be clearly seen above the glades. Clouds with silver edges float slowly over it. It must be possible to sit like this for a week or a month and not see a single person.

In the sky and in the clouds - the same midday peace as in the forest, in the blue dry bell cup leaning towards the podzolic earth, and in your heart. Sometimes after a year or two you recognize an old familiar pillar. And every time you think how much water has flowed under the bridge, where you have been during this time, how much grief and joy you have experienced, and this pillar stands here for nights and days, and winter and summer, as if waiting for you, like a resigned friend. Only more yellow lichens appeared on him and dodder braided him to the very top. It blooms and is bitter, smells like an almond, warmed up by the warmth of the forest.

The best view of the forests is from the fire towers. Then you can clearly see how they go beyond the horizon, rise to the ridges, descend into the hollows, stand as fortress walls above the sandy holes. Here and there water gleams - a mirror of a quiet forest lake or a whirlpool of a forest river with reddish "harsh" water. From the tower, one can gaze at the entire dense woodland, the entire solemn forest land - immeasurable and unknown, imperiously calling a person into its mysterious thickets.

This call cannot be resisted. You need to immediately take a backpack, a compass and go into the forests to get lost in this green coniferous ocean<…>.

The Russian language is very rich in words related to the seasons and to natural phenomena associated with them.

Take early spring, for example. She, this spring girl still chilling from the last frosts, has many good words in her knapsack. Thaws, thaws, drops from the roofs begin. The snow becomes grainy, spongy, settles and turns black. Mists eat it. Gradually spreads the roads, there comes a thaw, impassable roads. The first gullies with black water appear in the ice on the rivers, and thawed patches and bald patches on the hillocks. Mother-and-stepmother is already turning yellow on the edge of the packed snow.

Then, on the rivers, the first movement of ice occurs (namely, movement, not movement), when the ice begins to split and shift obliquely and water protrudes out of the holes, vents and ice holes. For some reason, ice drift begins most often on dark nights, after "ravines" and hollow, melt water, ringing the last pieces of ice, "shards", will merge from meadows and fields.

It is impossible to list everything. Therefore, I skip summer and move on to autumn, to its first days, when it is already beginning to "September". The earth is withering, but the "Indian summer" is still ahead with its last bright, but already cold, like the glitter of mica, the radiance of the sun, from the thick blue sky, washed with cool air, with a flying web ("yarn of the Mother of God", as it is sometimes called still earnest old women) and a fallen, withered leaf that falls asleep in the empty waters. Birch groves stand like crowds of beautiful girls, in half-shirts embroidered with gold leaf. "Autumn time - the charm of the eyes."

Then - bad weather, heavy rains, the icy northern wind "siverko" plowing lead waters, coldness, coldness, pitch nights, icy dew, dark dawns.

This is how everything goes, until the first frost seizes and binds the earth, the first powder falls out and the first path is established. And there is already winter with blizzards, blizzards, drifting snow, snowfall, gray frosts, landmarks in the fields, creak of undercuts on the sleds, gray, snowy skies.

We have a lot of words associated with fogs, winds, clouds and waters. Rivers with their stretches, barrels, ferries and rifts are especially richly represented in the Russian dictionary, where steamers hardly pass during low-water periods and, in order not to run aground, one must keep only along the “main stream”.

I knew several ferrymen and carriers. This is who you need to learn Russian from!

The ferry is a noisy collective farm bazaar. It replaces folk gatherings and collective farm teahouses. Where to talk, if not on the ferry, while women, pretending to scold the idlers-men, slowly fiddle with the wire rope, while shaggy and obedient to their fate horses pull hay from the neighboring carts and hastily chew it, looking sideways at the truck, where they screech and flounder to death. piglets in sacks until they are smoked to the nails of a poisonous green self-infused cigarette!

To find out all the collective farm - and not only collective farm - news, in order to listen to all sorts of wise and unexpected maxims and incredible stories, one has to go to the crackling steam littered with hay dust and just sit there, smoke and listen, crossing from coast to coast.

Almost all ferrymen are talkative people, sharp-tongued and experienced. They especially love to talk in the evening, when the people stop wandering back and forth across the river, when the sun calmly descends behind a steep - a high bank - and pushes in the air and itches midges. Then, sitting on a bench near the hut, you can delicately take a cigarette from a stray person who is not in a hurry with your fingers, which have become coarse from the ropes, say that, of course, "light tobacco is just self-indulgence, it does not reach our hearts", but still with pleasure to light a cigarette, squint at the river and start a conversation.

In general, all the noisy and varied life on the river banks, on the marinas (they are called landing stages, or "counters"), near the pontoon bridges with many river people crowding there, with their special customs and traditions, provides rich food for learning the language.

The Volga and Oka are especially linguistically rich. We cannot imagine the life of our country without these rivers, just as we cannot imagine it without Moscow, without the Kremlin, without Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Chaliapin, without Bronze Horseman in Leningrad and Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Yazykov, who possessed, according to Pushkin, an amazing fire of language, in one of his poems, described the Volga and Oka perfectly. Oka is especially well given. Languages ​​brings in this poem a bow to the Rhine from the great Russian rivers, including from the Oka:

Poor, oak,
In the expanse of the Murom sands
Flowing regal, brilliant and glorious
In view of the venerable shores.

Well, let us remember the "venerable shores" and we will be grateful to Yazykov for that.

No less than "natural" words, our country is rich in local sayings and dialects. The overuse of local words usually speaks of the immaturity and lack of artistic literacy of the writer. Words are taken indiscriminately, little understandable, or even completely incomprehensible to the general reader, they are taken more out of panache than out of a desire to give a pictorial power to their thing.

There is a summit - the pure and flexible Russian literary language. Enriching it with local words requires strict selection and great taste. Because there are many places in our country where in the language and pronunciation, along with words - genuine pearls, there are many words that are clumsy and phonetically unpleasant<…>.

A local word can enrich a language if it is figurative, euphonious and understandable. To make it understandable, no boring explanations or footnotes are needed at all. It's just that this word should be put in such a connection with all neighboring words so that its meaning is clear to the reader at once, without author's or editorial remarks. One incomprehensible word can destroy the most exemplary construction of prose for the reader.

It would be absurd to argue that literature exists and functions only as long as it is understood. Incomprehensible, obscure or deliberately abstruse literature is needed only by its author, but not by the people.

The more transparent the air, the brighter the sunlight. The more transparent the prose, the more perfect its beauty and the stronger it resonates in the human heart.

Briefly and clearly this idea was expressed by Leo Tolstoy: "Simplicity is a necessary condition for beauty."

Of the many local words that I heard, for example, in the Vladimir and Ryazan regions, some, of course, are incomprehensible and of little interest. But one comes across words that are excellent in their expressiveness - for example, the old, still prevalent in these areas, the word "okoy" - the horizon.

On the high bank of the Oka, from where a wide horizon opens up, there is the small village of Okoyomovo. From Okoyemov, as its residents say, "half of Russia is visible."

The horizon is everything that our eye on earth can grasp, or, in the old-fashioned way, everything that “eats the eye”. Hence the origin of the word "okoy".

The word "Stozhary" is also very euphonious - this is how people call the Pleiades in these areas (and not only in them). By consonance, this word evokes the idea of ​​a cold heavenly fire. (The Pleiades are very bright, especially in the fall, when they blaze in the dark sky really like a silver fire)<…>.

Nothing can be neglected in the search for words. You never know where you will find the real word. Studying the sea, maritime affairs and the language of sailors, I began to read sailing directions - reference books for captains. They collected all the information about a particular sea: a description of the depths, currents, winds, shores, ports, lighthouses, underwater rocks, shoals and everything you need to know for a safe sail. There are sailing directions for all seas.

The first pilot that fell into my hands was the pilot of the Black and Azov Seas. I began to read it and was amazed at its magnificent language, precise and elusively peculiar.

Soon I learned the reason for this peculiarity: nameless sailing directions were published with early XIX centuries after an equal interval of years, and each generation of sailors made their own amendments. Therefore, the whole picture of the change in language for more than a hundred years is clearly reflected in the sailing guide. Near modern language the language of our great-grandfathers and grandfathers exists peacefully.

From the sailing direction, one can judge how dramatically some concepts have changed. For example, about the most cruel and destructive wind - Novorossiysk nord-ost (bore) - the sailing guide says:

"During the northeast, the shores are covered with thick gloom."

For our great-grandfathers, "gloom" meant a black fog, for us it is our state of mind.

All nautical terminology, as well as colloquial sailors, gorgeous. It is possible to write poems about almost every word, starting from the "wind rose" and ending with the "thundering forties latitudes" (this is not a poetic liberty, but the name of these latitudes in naval documents).

And what kind of winged romance lives in all these frigates and barcantines, schooners and clippers, guys and yards, capstans and admiralty anchors, "dog" watches, ringing of bottles and logs, hum of engine turbines, sirens, stern flags, full storms, typhoons, fogs , dazzling calm, floating lighthouses, "deep" shores and "stubby" capes, knots and cables - in all that Alexander Grin called "the picturesque labor of navigation."

The sailors' language is strong, fresh, full of calm humor. It deserves a separate study, just like the language of people in many other professions.

K.G. Paustovsky. Golden Rose. 1956

Current page: 6 (total of the book has 17 pages) [available passage for reading: 12 pages]

Diamond tongue

You marvel at the jewels of our language: every sound is a gift; everything is grainy, large, like the pearl itself, and, really, another name is even more precious than the thing itself.

Gogol

Spring in the woodland

Many Russian words themselves radiate poetry, just as precious stones radiate a mysterious brilliance.

I understand, of course, that there is nothing mysterious in their brilliance and that any physicist can easily explain this phenomenon by the laws of optics.

Still, the brilliance of the stones evokes a sense of mystery. It is difficult to come to terms with the idea that inside the stone, from where the shining rays are pouring, there is no own source of light.

This applies to many stones, even as humble as aquamarine. Its color cannot be accurately determined. They haven't found the right word for him yet.

Aquamarine is considered by its name ("aquamarine" - sea water) a stone that conveys the color of the sea wave. This is not entirely true. In its transparent depth there are shades of soft greenish color and pale blue. But all the uniqueness of aquamarine lies in the fact that it is brightly lit from the inside with a completely silver (namely, silver, not white) fire.

It seems that if you look closely at the aquamarine, you will see a calm sea with water the color of the stars.

Obviously, these color and light features of aquamarine and other gemstones give us a sense of mystery. Their beauty still seems inexplicable to us.

It is relatively easy to explain the origin of the "poetic radiation" of many of our words. Obviously, a word seems poetic to us when it conveys a concept filled with poetic content for us.

But the effect of the word itself (and not the concept that it expresses) on our imagination, even if, for example, such a simple word as "lightning", is much more difficult to explain. The very sound of this word, as it were, conveys the slow night glare of distant lightning.

Of course, this sense of words is very subjective. You cannot insist on it and make it a general rule. This is how I perceive and hear this word. But I am far from thinking to impose this perception on others.

What is indisputable is that most of these poetic words are associated with our nature.

The Russian language opens up to the end in its truly magical properties and wealth only to those who deeply love and know "to the bone" their people and feel the intimate charm of our land.

For everything that exists in nature: water, air, sky, clouds, sun, rain, forests, swamps, rivers and lakes, meadows and fields, flowers and grasses, there is a great variety of good words and names in the Russian language.

To be convinced of this, in order to study our capacious and accurate vocabulary, we have, in addition to the books of such connoisseurs of nature and the folk language as Kaigorodov, Prishvin, Gorky, Alexey Tolstoy, Aksakov, Leskov, Bunin and many other writers, the main and inexhaustible source language - the people themselves: peasants, ferrymen, shepherds, beekeepers, hunters, fishermen, old workers, forest rangers, buoy keepers, handicraftsmen, rural painters, artisans and all those experienced people who have every word, gold.

These thoughts became especially clear to me after meeting with one forester.

It seems to me that I have already talked about this somewhere. If this is true, then I beg your pardon, but I will have to repeat the old story. It is important for talking about Russian speech.

We walked with this forester through the small forest. In times immemorial, there was a large swamp here, then it dried up, overgrown, and now only deep, age-old moss, small windows-wells in this moss and an abundance of wild rosemary reminded of it.

I do not share the common disdain for small forests. There is a lot of peculiar charm in the small forest. Young trees of all breeds - spruce and pine, aspen and birch - grow together and closely. It is always light and clean there, as in a peasant room tidied up for a holiday.

Every time I find myself in a small forest, it seems to me that it was in these places that the artist Nesterov found many features of his landscape. Here, each stalk and twig live its own separate picturesque life and therefore are especially noticeable and beautiful.

In some places, over the moss, as I have already said, we came across small round windows-wells. The water seemed motionless in them. But if you look closely, you could see how a quiet stream rises from the depths of the window all the time and dry lingonberry leaves and yellow pine needles are spinning in it.

We stopped at one such window and drank some water. She smelled of turpentine.

- Spring! - said the forester, looking as a beetle, floundering furiously, emerged from the window and immediately went to the bottom. - The Volga must also start from such a window?

“Yes, it must be,” I agreed.

“I’m a big fan of understanding words,” the forester said unexpectedly and smiled embarrassedly. - And so please tell me! It so happens that one word will stick to you and haunt you.

The forester paused, adjusted his hunting rifle on his shoulder and asked:

- You, they say, write like a book?

- Yes, I'm writing.

- So, you should have a deliberate understanding of words. But no matter how I figure it out, I rarely find an explanation for any word. You walk through the woods, sorting out word by word in your head - and you will count them this way and that way: where did they come from? Nothing happens. I have no knowledge. Not trained. And it happens that you find an explanation for the word and rejoice. Why rejoice? I don’t teach the guys. I am a forest man - a simple lineman.

- And what word is attached to you now? I asked.

- Yes, this is the "spring". I noticed this word long ago. All courting him. Presumably, it turned out because water is born here. The spring will give birth to a river, and the river flows and flows through our whole mother earth, through our entire homeland, feeding the people. You see how it comes out smoothly - a spring, homeland, people. And all these words seem to be related to each other. As if relatives! He repeated and laughed.

These simple words have revealed to me the deepest roots of our language.

The entire centuries-old experience of the people, the entire poetic side of its character were contained in these words.

Language and nature

I am sure that in order to fully master the Russian language, in order not to lose the feeling of this language, you need not only constant communication with ordinary Russian people, but also communication with pastures and forests, waters, old willows, with the whistling of birds and with every flower, that nods his head from under the hazel bush.

Every person must have their own happy time of discovery. I also had one such summer of discoveries in the wooded and meadow side of Central Russia - a summer full of thunderstorms and rainbows.

This summer has passed in the rumble of pine forests, crane cries, in white heaps of cumulus clouds, the play of the night sky, in the impassable fragrant thickets of meadowsweet, in warlike rooster cries and songs of girls among evening meadows, when the sunset gilded girls' eyes and the first fog gently smokes over the pools ...

That summer I learned anew - to the touch, to the taste, to the smell - many words that were up to that time, although known to me, but distant and not experienced. Previously, they only evoked one common lean image. But now it turned out that in each such word there is an abyss of living images.

What are these words? There are so many of them that it is difficult to decide even which words to start with. The easiest way, perhaps, with the "rain".

I, of course, knew that there are drizzling, blind, heavy, mushroom, spore rains, rains coming in stripes - striped, oblique, heavy round rains and, finally, showers (downpours).

But it is one thing to know speculatively, and another thing is to experience these rains on yourself and understand that each of them contains its own poetry, its own signs, which are different from the signs of other rains.

Then all these words that define the rains come to life, get stronger, fill with expressive power. Then behind each such word you see and feel what you are talking about, and do not pronounce it mechanically, out of habit.

By the way, there is a kind of law of the influence of the writer's word on the reader.

If the writer, while working, does not see behind the words what he is writing about, then the reader will not see anything behind them.

But if a writer sees well what he writes about, then the simplest and sometimes even erased words acquire novelty, act on the reader with striking power and evoke in him those thoughts, feelings and states that the writer wanted to convey to him.

This, obviously, is the secret of the so-called subtext.

But back to the rains.

There are many signs associated with them. The sun sets in clouds, smoke falls to the ground, swallows fly low, roosters crow without time, clouds stretch across the sky in long misty strands - all these are signs of rain. And shortly before the rain, although the clouds have not yet drawn, a gentle breath of moisture is heard. It must be brought from where the rains have already fallen.

But then the first drops begin to drip. The popular word “speck” well conveys the occurrence of rain, when still rare drops leave dark specks on dusty roads and roofs.

Then the rain drifts off. It is then that the wonderful cool smell of the earth, first wetted by rain, arises. It does not last long. It is replaced by the smell of wet grass, especially nettle.

It is characteristic that no matter what kind of rain it will be, as soon as it starts, it is always called very affectionately - rain. "The rain is going," "the rain has started," "the rain washes the grass."

Let's look at several types of rain in order to understand how a word comes to life, when direct impressions are associated with it, and how this helps a writer to use it accurately.

How, for example, is a controversial rain different from a mushroom rain?

The word "controversial" means - fast, fast. The controversial rain pours down steeply, strongly. He always approaches with oncoming noise.

The spore rain on the river is especially good. Each drop of it knocks out a round depression in the water, a small water bowl, jumps, falls again and for a few moments, before disappearing, is still visible at the bottom of this water bowl. The drop shines and looks like pearls.

At the same time, there is a glass ringing throughout the river. By the height of this ringing, you can guess whether the rain is gaining strength or is subsiding.

A fine mushroom rain falls sleepily from the low clouds. The puddles from this rain are always warm. He does not ring, but whispers something of his own, lulling, and fidgets slightly in the bushes, as if touching one leaf or another with a soft paw.

Forest humus and moss absorb this rain slowly, thoroughly. Therefore, after him, mushrooms begin to climb violently - sticky boletus, yellow chanterelles, boletus, ruddy mushrooms, mushrooms and countless toadstools.

During mushroom rains, the air smells of smoke and is well taken by a cunning and careful fish - roach.

People say about the blind rain falling in the sun: "The princess is crying." The drops of this rain sparkling in the sun look like large tears. And who can cry such shining tears of grief or joy, if not the fabulous beauty princess!

You can follow the play of light during the rain for a long time, for a variety of sounds - from the measured knocking on the plank roof and the liquid ringing in the drainpipe to the continuous, intense hum when the rain pours, as they say, like a wall.

All of this is only a tiny fraction of what can be said about rain. But even this is enough to be indignant at the words of one writer, who told me with a sour grimace:

“I prefer living streets and houses to your tiresome and dead nature. Except for troubles and inconveniences, rain, of course, brings nothing. You are just a dreamer!

How many excellent words exist in the Russian language for the so-called celestial phenomena!

Summer thunderstorms pass over the ground and "overwhelm" the horizon. People like to say that the cloud did not pass, but fell.

Lightning strikes the ground with a direct blow, then blaze on black clouds like branchy golden trees uprooted.

Rainbows sparkle over the smoky, damp distance. Thunder rolls, rumbles, grumbles, rumbles, shakes the ground.

Recently in the village, during a thunderstorm, a little boy came to my room and, looking at me with big eyes with delight, said:

- Let's go watch the thunder!

He was right to say this word in the plural: the thunderstorm was overwhelming, and thundered from all sides at once.

The boy said "watch the thunder", and I remembered the words from Dante's "Divine Comedy" that "the sun's ray was silent." And here and there there was a shift in concepts. But it gave the word extraordinary expressiveness.

I have already mentioned the lightning.

Most often, lightning occurs in July, when the bread is ripe. That is why there is a popular belief that the lightning "will bury bread" - illuminate it at night - and from this the bread is poured faster. In the Kaluga region, lightning is called "hlebozar".

Next to the lightning is in the same poetic row the word "dawn" - one of the most beautiful words in the Russian language.

This word is never spoken aloud. It is impossible even to imagine that it could be shouted. Because it is akin to that settled silence of the night, when a clear and faint blue grows over the thickets of the village garden. "Razvidnoe", as they say about this time of day among the people.

In this glowing hour, the morning star glows low above the earth itself. The air is as pure as spring water.

At dawn, at dawn, there is something girlish, chaste. At dawn, the grass is washed with dew, and in the villages it smells of warm fresh milk. And the shepherds sing in the fogs beyond the outskirts.

Day dawns quickly. In a warm house there is silence, darkness. But then squares of orange light fall on the log walls, and the logs light up like layered amber. The sun is rising.

Autumn dawns are different - gloomy, slow. The day is reluctant to wake up: you still cannot warm the chilled earth and return the smiling sunlight.

Everything disappears, only the person does not give up. Since dawn, the stoves in the huts have already been burning, the smoke dangles over the villages and spreads along the ground. And then, you see, and early rain drummed on the misted windows.

Dawn happens not only in the morning, but also in the evening. We often confuse two concepts - sunset and dawn.

Evening dawn begins when the sun has already set over the end of the earth. Then she takes possession of the fading sky, pours many colors over it - from red gold to turquoise - and slowly passes into late twilight and night.

The corncrake screams in the bushes, and quails beat, the bittern hums, the first stars burn, and the dawn smothers for a long time over the distances and fogs.

Northern white nights, summer nights of Leningrad - this is a continuous evening dawn or, perhaps, a combination of two dawns, evening and morning.

No one said this with such amazing accuracy as Pushkin:

I love you, Peter's creation,
I love your strict, slender look,
The sovereign current of the Neva,
Coastal granite.
The pattern of your fences is cast-iron,
Of your brooding nights
Transparent dusk, moonless shine,
When I'm in my room
I write, I read without an icon lamp,
And the sleeping masses are clear
Deserted streets, and light
Admiralty needle.
And, not letting the darkness of the night
To the golden skies
One dawn to change another
Hurries, giving the night half an hour.

These lines are not only the heights of poetry. They are not only accurate, spiritual clarity and silence. They still contain all the magic of Russian speech.

If one could imagine that Russian poetry would disappear, that the Russian language itself would disappear, and only these few lines remained of it, then the wealth and melodious power of our language would be clear to everyone. Because in these poems of Pushkin are collected, as in a magic crystal, all the extraordinary qualities of our speech.

The people who created such a language are truly a great and happy people.

Piles of flowers and herbs

The forester was not alone in looking for an explanation of the words. Many people are looking for them. And they don't calm down until they find it.

I remember how I was struck once by the word "svei" in the poetry of Sergei Yesenin:

And me in the wind,
On that sand,
Lead with a rope around your neck
Fall in love with melancholy.

I didn’t know what “svei” meant, but I felt that this word had a poetic content. This word seemed to radiate it by itself.

For a long time I could not find out the meaning of this word, and all the guesses did not lead to anything. Why did Yesenin say "windy svei"? Obviously, this concept had something to do with the wind. But how?

I learned the meaning of this word from the local lore writer Yurin.

Yurin was meticulously curious about everything that had even the slightest relation to nature, way of life and history of Central Russia.

In this way, he reminded of those connoisseurs and lovers of his land, painstaking researchers and gatherers by the grains and droplets of all sorts of interesting features from the regional, or even regional, geography, flora, fauna and history that are still preserved in small Russian cities.

Yurin came to my village, and we went with him into the meadows, across the river. We walked to the footbridge over the clean river sand. There had been a wind the day before, and, as always happens after the wind, there were ripples on the sand.

- Do you know what it's called? - Yurin asked me and pointed to the sandy ripples.

- No, I do not know.

- Svei, - answered Yurin. - The wind blows the sand into these ripples. That is why such a word.

I was delighted, as the forester was obviously delighted when he found an explanation for a word.

That is why Yesenin wrote "wind svei" and mentioned sand ("by that sand ..."). Most of all I was glad that this word expressed, as I expected, a simple and poetic phenomenon of nature.

Yesenin's homeland - the village of Konstantinovo (now Yesenino) was located not far beyond the Oka.

The sun always set on that side. And since then, Yesenin's poetry seems to me the best expression of wide sunsets beyond the Oka and twilight in damp meadows, when either fog or bluish smoke from forest burns falls on them.

In these seemingly deserted meadows, I had a lot of all sorts of incidents and unexpected encounters.

Once I was fishing on a small lake with high steep banks overgrown with tenacious blackberries. The lake was surrounded by old willows and sedge trees. Therefore, it was always calm and gloomy, even on a sunny day.

I was sitting right next to the water, in such strong thickets that I could not be seen at all from above. Yellow irises bloomed along the edge of the coast, and further in the silty, but deep water, air bubbles were constantly streaming from the bottom - the crucian carp must have been digging in the silt, looking for food.

Above, above me, where flowers stood up to the waist, the village children were gathering sorrel. Judging by the voices, there were three girls and a little boy.

Two girls portrayed in conversations among themselves village women with many children. Each must have imitated her mother. This was their game. The third girl kept silent and only sang in a thin voice:

A beautiful daughter was born ...

- Tryavoga, tryavoga! The girl with a hoarse voice said angrily. - You wander all day to get them to school, all this crowd, all the brethren, and what do they learn at school? They don't know how to say a word in a human way! “Alarms” should be said, not “jitters”! I'll tell my father, he will teach you a lesson.

- And my Petka andadys, - said the other girl, - dragged the deuce. Arithmetic. I've already ironed it, ironed it. Already my hands were covered.

- You're lying, Nyurka! Said the little boy in a bass voice. - Mamma ironed Petka. And then a little.

- Look snotty! - shouted Nyurka. - Talk to me!

- Listen, girls! - hoarsely exclaimed joyfully. - Oh, what am I going to tell you now! A bush grows somewhere here near the Bird's ford. As the night, so it is all, to the very top of the head, how it dies to burn with a blue fire! How will it be! And so it burns and does not burn until dawn. And it's scary to approach him.

- Why is he burning, Klava? - Nyurka asked fearfully.

- The treasure shows, - answered Klava. - The treasure is buried under it. Gold pencil. Whoever takes that pencil, writes down his ardent desires - they will come true right there.

- Give! The boy demanded.

- What can I give you?

- Pencil!

- Get rid of you from me!

- Give! - shouted the boy and suddenly roared in a disgusting, deafening bass. - Give me a pencil, bad one!

- Oh, are you so? - Nyurka shouted, and immediately there was a resounding slap. - My misfortune! What only did I give birth to you!

The boy did not understand why, but immediately fell silent.

- And you, dear, - said Klava in a feigned, sweet voice, - don't hit your kids. It won't take long to beat off the dumplings. You, like me, act - teach them reason. And then they will grow up stunned - neither themselves nor people of any self-interest.

- What should I teach him? - answered Nyurka with heart. - Try to teach him! He give those!

- How not to teach! - objected Klava. - They need to be taught everything. Here he followed us, whining, and all around, look, one color does not look like another. There are hundreds of them, these flowers. What does he know? He doesn't know a thing. Even what is the name of this color - and that does not know.

"Kuroslep," said the boy.

- Yes, this is not a little blind man, but a lungwort. You yourself are blind!

- Myadunitsa! The boy even repeated with some admiration.

- Yes, not "meadunitsa", but "meadunitsa". Tell it right.

- Myadunitsa, - the boy hastily repeated and immediately asked: - And what is this, pink?

- It's mint. Repeat after me: mint!

- Well, mint! - agreed the boy.

- You do not nuke, but repeat after me. But this is meadowsweet. So smelly, smelly! So gentle, gentle! Do you want to rip it off?

The boy apparently liked this game. He, snorting, conscientiously repeated the names of flowers after Klava. And she poured them with them:

- Look, this is a bedstraw. And this is kupava. Here is the one with white bells. And these are cuckoo tears.

I listened and was only surprised. The girl knew many colors. She called a nap, a night beauty, a carnation, a shepherd's bag, a hoof, a soap root, a skewer, valerian, thyme, St. John's wort, celandine and many other flowers and herbs.

But this amazing botany lesson was unexpectedly thwarted.

- I obstrukalsi-and-and! - suddenly the boy roared thickly again. - Where did you take me, you bad ones ?! Into the very thorns! Now I won't get home!

- Hey girls! An old man's voice shouted from afar. - Why are you offending little?

- Yes, he, grandfather Pakhom, obstrukalsi himself! - Klava, a champion of pure pronunciation, shouted in response and added in an undertone: - Ooh, shameless! You yourself will offend everyone!

The old man could be heard approaching the children. He looked down at the lake, saw my fishing rods and said:

- Here a man lures a fish, and you raised a galangal to the whole world. It's not enough for you, perhaps, meadows!

- Where is it? The boy asked hastily. - Let me get some food!

- Where did you go? - shouted Nyurka. - You will still plunge into the water, you accursed inaudible!

The children soon left, and I never saw them. And the old man stood on the shore, thought, coughed delicately and asked in an uncertain voice:

- Do you, citizen, have a smoke?

I replied that there would be, and the old man with a terrible noise, clinging to the loops of the blackberry, breaking down on the slope and swearing, came down to me for a cigarette.

The old man turned out to be frail, small, but with a huge knife in his hand. The knife was in a leather case. Realizing that I, what good, would be worried about this knife, the old man hastily said:

- I came to cut the vine. For baskets and vents. Little by little.

I told the old man that she was a wonderful girl here - she knows all the flowers and herbs.

- Is this Klavka? - he asked. - Yes, this is the daughter of the collective farm groom Karnaukhov. And why should she not know when her grandmother is the first herbalist in the entire region! You will talk to your grandmother. Listen. Yes, ”he said after a pause, and sighed. - Each color has its own name ... Certification, then.

I looked at him in surprise. The old man asked for another cigarette and left. Soon I left too.

When I got out of the thickets onto the meadow road, I saw three girls far ahead. They carried huge armfuls of flowers. One of them was dragging a little barefoot boy in a large cap by the hand.

The girls walked quickly. You could see their heels flickering. Then a tiny voice came:

So during the air shake
A beautiful daughter was born ...

The sun was already setting behind the Oka, behind the village of Yesenin, and illuminated the forests with a slanting reddish light in the east.

You marvel at the jewels of our language, every sound is a gift; everything is grainy, large, like the pearl itself, and, really, another name is even more precious than the thing itself.

Spring in the woodland

Many Russian words themselves radiate poetry, just as precious stones radiate a mysterious brilliance.

I understand, of course, that there is nothing mysterious in their brilliance and that any physicist can easily explain this phenomenon by the laws of optics.

Still, the brilliance of the stones evokes a sense of mystery. It is difficult to come to terms with the idea that inside the stone, from where the shining rays are pouring, there is no own source of light.

This applies to many stones, even as humble as aquamarine. Its color cannot be accurately determined. They haven't found the right word for him yet.

Aquamarine is considered by its name (aqua marin - sea water) a stone that conveys the color of the sea wave. This is not entirely true. In its transparent depth there are shades of soft greenish color and pale blue. But all the uniqueness of aquamarine lies in the fact that it is brightly lit from the inside with a completely silver (namely, silver, not white) fire.

It seems that if you look closely at the aquamarine, you will see a calm sea with water the color of the stars.

Obviously, these color and light features of aquamarine and other gemstones give us a sense of mystery. Their beauty still seems inexplicable to us.

It is relatively easy to explain the origin of the "poetic radiation" of many of our words. Obviously, a word seems poetic to us when it conveys a concept filled with poetic content for us.

But the effect of the word itself (and not the concept that it expresses) on our imagination, even if, for example, such a simple word as "lightning", is much more difficult to explain. The very sound of this word, as it were, conveys the slow night glare of distant lightning.

Of course, this sense of words is very subjective. You cannot insist on it and make it a general rule. This is how I perceive and hear this word. But I am far from thinking of imposing this perception on others.

What is indisputable is that most of these poetic words are associated with our nature.

The Russian language opens up to the end in its truly magical properties and wealth only to those who deeply love and know "to the bone" their people and feel the intimate charm of our land.

For everything that exists in nature - water, air, sky, clouds, sun, rain, forests, swamps, rivers and lakes, meadows and fields, flowers and grasses - there is a great many good words and names in the Russian language.

To be convinced of this, in order to study a capacious and apt vocabulary, we have, in addition to the books of such connoisseurs of nature and the folk language as Kaigorodov, Prishvin, Gorky, Alexey Tolstoy, Aksakov, Leskov, Bunin and many other writers, the main and inexhaustible source of language - the language of the people themselves, the language of collective farmers, ferrymen, shepherds, beekeepers, hunters, fishermen, old workers, forest rangers, buoy keepers, handicraftsmen, rural painters, artisans and all those experienced people who have gold at every word.

These thoughts became especially clear to me after meeting with one forester.

It seems to me that I have already talked about this somewhere. If this is true, then I beg your pardon, but I will have to repeat the old story. It is important for talking about Russian speech.

We walked with this forester through the small forest. In times immemorial, there was a large swamp here, then it dried up, overgrown, and now only deep, age-old moss, small windows-wells in this moss and an abundance of wild rosemary reminded of it.

I do not share the common disdain for small forests. There is a lot of charm in the small forest. Young trees of all breeds - spruce and pine, aspen and birch - grow together and closely. It is always light and clean there, as in a peasant room tidied up for a holiday.

Every time I find myself in a small forest, it seems to me that it was in these places that the artist Nesterov found the features of his landscape. Here, each stalk and twig live its own separate picturesque life and therefore are especially noticeable and cute.

In some places in the moss, as I said, there were small round well windows. The water seemed motionless in them. But if you look closely, you could see how a quiet stream rises from the depths of the window all the time and dry lingonberry leaves and yellow pine needles are spinning in it.

We stopped at one such window and drank some water. She smelled of turpentine.

- Spring! - said the forester, looking as a beetle, floundering furiously, emerged from the window and immediately went to the bottom. - The Volga must also start from such a window?

“Yes, it must be,” I agreed.

“I’m a big fan of understanding words,” the forester said unexpectedly and smiled embarrassedly. - And so, please tell me! It so happens that one word will stick to you and haunt you.

The forester paused, adjusted his hunting rifle on his shoulder and asked:

- You, they say, write like a book?

- Yes, I'm writing.

- So, you should have a deliberate understanding of words. But no matter how I figure it out, I rarely find an explanation for any word. You walk through the woods, go over in your head word by word, and you will count them this way and that way: where did they come from? Nothing happens.

I have no knowledge. Not trained. And it happens that you find an explanation for the word and rejoice. Why rejoice? I don’t teach the guys. I am a forest man, a simple lineman.

- And what word is attached to you now? I asked.

- Yes, this is the very spring. I noticed this word long ago. All courting him. Presumably, it turned out because water is born here. The spring will give birth to a river, and the river flows and flows through all our mother earth, through the whole motherland, feeding the people. You see how it comes out smoothly - a spring, homeland, people. And all these words are like rhodium among themselves. As if relatives! He repeated and laughed.

These simple words have revealed to me the deepest roots of our language.

The entire centuries-old experience of the people, the entire poetic side of its character were contained in these words.

Language and nature

I am sure that in order to fully master the Russian language, in order not to lose the feeling of this language, you need not only constant communication with ordinary Russian people, but communication with pastures and forests, waters, old willows, with the whistling of birds and with every flower, that nods his head from under the hazel bush.

Every person must have their own happy time of discovery. I also had one such summer of discoveries in the wooded and meadow side of Central Russia - a summer full of thunderstorms and rainbows.

This summer has passed in the rumble of pine forests, crane cries, in white heaps of cumulus clouds, the play of the night sky, in the impassable fragrant thickets of meadowsweet, in warlike rooster cries and songs of girls among evening meadows, when the sunset gilded girls' eyes and the first fog gently smokes over the pools ...

That summer I learned anew - to the touch, to the taste, to the smell - many words that were up to that time, although known to me, but distant and not experienced. Previously, they only evoked one common lean image. But now it turned out that in each such word there is an abyss of living images.

What are these words? There are so many of them that it is not even known what words to start with. The easiest way, perhaps, with the "rain".

I, of course, knew that there are drizzling, blind, heavy, mushroom, spore rains, rains coming in stripes - striped, oblique, heavy round rains and, finally, showers (downpours).

But it is one thing to know speculatively, and another thing is to experience these rains on yourself and understand that each of them contains its own poetry, its own signs, which are different from the signs of other rains.

Then all these words that define the rains come to life, get stronger, fill with expressive power. Then behind each such word you see and feel what you are talking about, and do not pronounce it mechanically, out of habit.

By the way, there is a kind of law of the influence of the writer's word on the reader.

If the writer, while working, does not see behind the words what he is writing about, then the reader will not see anything behind them.

But if a writer sees well what he writes about, then the simplest and sometimes even erased words acquire novelty, act on the reader with striking power and evoke in him those thoughts, feelings and states that the writer wanted to convey to him.

This, obviously, is the secret of the so-called subtext.

But back to the rains.

There are many signs associated with them. The sun sets in clouds, smoke falls to the ground, swallows fly low, roosters crow without time, clouds stretch across the sky in long misty strands - all these are signs of rain. And shortly before the rain, although the clouds have not yet drawn, a gentle breath of moisture is heard. It must be brought from where the rains have already fallen.

But then the first drops begin to drip. The popular word “speck” well conveys the occurrence of rain, when still rare drops leave dark specks on dusty roads and roofs.

Then the rain drifts off. It is then that the wonderful cool smell of the earth, first wetted by rain, arises. It does not last long. It is replaced by the smell of wet grass, especially nettle.

It is characteristic that no matter what kind of rain it will be, as soon as it starts, it is always called very affectionately - rain. "The rain is going," "the rain has started," "the rain washes the grass."

Let's look at several types of rain in order to understand how a word comes to life, when direct impressions are associated with it, and how this helps a writer to use it accurately.

How, for example, is a controversial rain different from a mushroom rain?

The word "controversial" means - fast, fast. The controversial rain pours down steeply, strongly. He always approaches with oncoming noise.

The spore rain on the river is especially good. Each drop of it knocks out a round depression in the water, a small water bowl, jumps, falls again and for a few moments, before disappearing, is still visible at the bottom of this water bowl. The drop shines and looks like pearls.

At the same time, there is a glass ringing throughout the river. By the height of this ringing, you can guess whether the rain is gaining strength or is subsiding.

A fine mushroom rain falls sleepily from the low clouds. The puddles from this rain are always warm. He does not ring, but whispers something of his own, lulling, and fidgets slightly in the bushes, as if touching one leaf or another with a soft paw.

Forest humus and moss absorb this rain slowly, thoroughly. Therefore, after him, mushrooms begin to climb violently - sticky boletus, yellow chanterelles, boletus, ruddy mushrooms, mushrooms and countless toadstools.

During mushroom rains, the air smells of smoke and is well taken by a cunning and careful fish - roach.

People say about the blind rain falling in the sun: "The princess is crying." The drops of this rain sparkling in the sun look like large tears. And who can cry such shining tears of grief or joy, if not the fabulous beauty princess!

You can follow the play of light during the rain for a long time, for a variety of sounds - from the measured knocking on the plank roof and the liquid ringing in the drainpipe to the continuous, intense hum when the rain pours, as they say, like a wall.

All of this is only a tiny fraction of what can be said about rain. But even this is enough to be indignant at the words of one writer, who told me with a sour grimace:

“I prefer living streets and houses to your tiresome and dead nature. Except for troubles and inconveniences, rain, of course, brings nothing. You are just a dreamer!

How many excellent words exist in the Russian language for the so-called celestial phenomena!

Summer thunderstorms pass over the ground and fall over the horizon. People like to say that the cloud did not pass, but fell.

Lightning strikes the ground with a direct blow, then blaze on black clouds like branchy golden trees uprooted.

Rainbows sparkle over the smoky, damp distance. Thunder rolls, rumbles, grumbles, rumbles, shakes the ground.

Recently in the village, during a thunderstorm, a little boy came to my room and, looking at me with big eyes with delight, said:

- Let's go watch the thunder ?!

He was right to say this word in the plural: the thunderstorm was overwhelming, and thundered from all sides at once.

The boy said "watch the thunder", and I remembered the words from Dante's "Divine Comedy" that "the sun's ray was silent." And here and there there was a shift in concepts. But it gave a sharp expressiveness to the word.

I have already mentioned the lightning.

Most often, lightning occurs in July, when the bread is ripe. That is why there is a popular belief that the lightning "will bury bread" - they light it up at night - and from this the bread is poured faster.

Next to the lightning is in the same poetic row the word "dawn" - one of the most beautiful words in the Russian language.

This word is never spoken aloud. It is impossible even to imagine that it could be shouted. Because it is akin to that settled silence of the night, when a clear and faint blue grows over the thickets of the village garden. "Razvidnoe", as they say about this time of day among the people.

In this glowing hour, the morning star glows low above the earth itself. The air is as pure as spring water.

At dawn, at dawn, there is something girlish, chaste. At dawn, the grass is washed with dew, and in the villages it smells of warm fresh milk. And the shepherds sing in the fogs beyond the outskirts.

Day dawns quickly. In a warm house there is silence, darkness. But then squares of orange light fall on the log walls, and the logs light up like layered amber. The sun is rising.

Autumn dawns are different - gloomy, slow. The day is reluctant to wake up - all the same, you will not warm the chilled earth and return the waning sunlight.

Everything disappears, only the person does not give up. Since dawn, the stoves in the huts have already been burning, the smoke dangles over the villages and spreads along the ground. And then, you see, and early rain drummed on the misted windows.

Dawn happens not only in the morning, but also in the evening. We often confuse two concepts - sunset and dawn.

Evening dawn begins when the sun has already set over the end of the earth. Then she takes possession of the fading sky, pours many colors over it - from red gold to turquoise - and slowly passes into late twilight and night.

Corncrake shrieks in the bushes, quails beat, the bittern hums, the first stars burn, and the dawn smothers for a long time over the distances and mists.

Northern white nights, summer nights of Leningrad - this is a continuous evening dawn or, perhaps, a combination of two dawns, evening and morning.

No one said this with such amazing accuracy as Pushkin:

I love you, Peter's creation,

I love your strict, slender look,

The sovereign current of the Neva,

Coastal granite.

The pattern of your fences is cast-iron,

Of your brooding nights

Transparent dusk, moonless shine,

When I'm in my room

I write, I read without an icon lamp,

And the sleeping masses are clear

Deserted streets and light

Admiralty needle,

And, not letting the darkness of the night

To the golden skies

One dawn to change another

In a hurry, giving the night half an hour

These lines are not only the heights of poetry. They are not only accurate, spiritual clarity and silence. They still contain all the magic of Russian speech.

If one could imagine that Russian poetry would disappear, that the Russian language itself would disappear, and only these few lines remained of it, then the wealth and melodious power of our language would be clear to everyone. Because in these poems of Pushkin are collected, as in a magic crystal, all the extraordinary qualities of our speech.

The people who created such a language are truly a great and happy people.

Piles of flowers and herbs

The forester was not alone in looking for an explanation of the words. Many people are looking for them. And they don't calm down until they find it.

I remember how I was struck once by the word "svei" in the poetry of Sergei Yesenin:

And me in the wind,

On that sand

Lead with a rope around your neck

To fall in love with melancholy ...

I didn’t know what “svei” meant, but I felt that this word had a poetic content. This word seemed to radiate it by itself.

For a long time I could not find out the meaning of this word, and all the guesses did not lead to anything. Why did Yesenin say "wind svei"? Obviously, this concept had something to do with the wind. But how?

I learned the meaning of this word from the local lore writer Yurin.

Yurin was meticulously curious about everything that had even the slightest relation to nature, way of life and history of Central Russia.

In this way, he reminded of those connoisseurs and lovers of his land, painstaking researchers and gatherers by the grains and droplets of all sorts of interesting features from the regional, and even from the regional, geography, flora, fauna and history that are still preserved in small Russian cities.

Yurin came to my village, and we went with him into the meadows, across the river. We walked to the footbridge over the clean river sand. There had been a wind the day before, and, as always happens after the wind, there were ripples on the sand.

- Do you know what it's called? - Yurin asked me and pointed to the sandy ripples.

- No, I do not know.

- Svei, - answered Yurin. - The wind blows the sand into these ripples. That is why such a word.

I was delighted, as the forester was obviously delighted when he found an explanation for a word.

That is why Yesenin wrote "wind svei" and mentioned sand ("by that sand ..."). Most of all I was glad that this word expressed, as I expected, a simple and poetic phenomenon of nature.

Yesenin's homeland - the village of Konstantinovo (now Yesenine) was not far beyond the Oka.

The sun always set on that side. And since then, Yesenin's poetry seems to me the best expression of wide sunsets beyond the Oka and twilight in damp meadows, when either fog or bluish smoke from forest burns falls on them.

In these seemingly deserted meadows, I had a lot of all sorts of incidents and unexpected encounters.

Once I was fishing on a small lake with high, steep banks, overgrown with tenacious blackberries. The lake was surrounded by old willows and sedge trees. Therefore, it was always calm and gloomy, even on a sunny day.

I was sitting right next to the water, in such strong thickets that I could not be seen at all from above. Yellow irises bloomed along the edge of the coast, and further in the silty, but deep water, air bubbles were constantly streaming from the bottom - the crucian carp must have been digging in the silt, looking for food.

Above, above me, where flowers stood up to the waist, the village children were gathering sorrel. Judging by the voices, there were three girls and a little boy.

Two girls portrayed in conversations among themselves village women with many children. Each must have imitated her mother. This was their game. The third girl kept silent and only sang in a thin voice:

- Tryavoga, tryavoga! The girl with a hoarse voice said angrily. - You wander all day to get them to school, all this crowd, all the brethren, and what do they learn at school? They don't know how to say a word in a human way! “Alarms” should be said, not “jitters!” I'll tell my father, he will teach you a lesson.

- And my Petka andadys, - said the other girl, - dragged the deuce. Arithmetic. I've already ironed it, ironed it. Already my hands were covered.

- You're lying, Nyurka! Said the little boy in a bass voice. - Mamma ironed Petka. And then a little.

- Look, snotty! - shouted Nyurka. - Talk to me!

- Listen, girls! - hoarsely exclaimed joyfully. - Oh, what am I going to tell you now! A bush grows somewhere here near the Bird's ford. As the night, so it is all, to the very top of the head, how it dies to burn with a blue fire! How will it be! And so it burns and does not burn until dawn. And it's scary to approach him.

- Why is he burning, Klava? - Nyurka asked fearfully.

- The treasure shows, - answered Klava. - The treasure is buried under it. Gold pencil. Whoever takes that pencil, writes down his ardent desires - they will come true right there.

- Give! The boy demanded.

- What can I give you?

- Pencil!

- Get rid of you from me!

- Give! - shouted the boy and suddenly roared in a disgusting, deafening bass. - Give me a pencil, bad one!

- Oh, are you so? - Nyurka shouted, and immediately there was a resounding slap. - My misfortune! What did I give birth to you!

The boy did not understand why, but immediately fell silent.

- And you, dear, - said Klava in a feigned, sweet voice, - don't hit your kids. It won't take long to beat off the dumplings. This is how I act - teach them reason. And then they will grow up stunned - neither themselves nor people of any self-interest.

- What should I teach him? - answered Nyurka with heart. - Try to teach him! He give those!

- How not to teach! - objected Klava. - They need to be taught everything. Here he followed us, whining, and all around, look, one color does not look like another. There are hundreds of them, these flowers. What does he know? He doesn't know a thing. Even what is the name of this color - and that does not know.

"Kuroslep," said the boy.

- Yes, this is not a little blind man, but a lungwort. You yourself are blind!

- Myadunitsa! The boy even repeated with some admiration.

- Yes, not "meadunitsa", but "meadunitsa". Tell it right.

- Myadunitsa, - the boy hastily repeated and immediately asked: - And what is this, pink?

- It's mint. Repeat after me: mint!

“Well, mint,” the boy agreed.

- You do not nuke, but repeat after me. But this is meadowsweet. So smelly, smelly! So gentle, gentle! Do you want to rip it off?

The boy apparently liked this game. He, snorting, conscientiously repeated the names of flowers after Klava. And she poured them with them:

- Here, look, this is a bedstraw. And this is kupava. Here is the one with white bells. And these are cuckoo tears.

I listened and was only surprised. The girl knew many colors. She called dope, night beauty, carnation, shepherd's bag, hoof, soap root, skewer, valerian, thyme, St. John's wort, celandine and many other flowers and herbs.

But this amazing botany lesson was unexpectedly thwarted.

- I obstrukalsi-and-and! The boy suddenly roared thickly. - Where did you take me, you bad ones ?! Into the very thorns! Now I won't get home!

- Hey girls! An old man's voice shouted from afar. - Why are you offending little?

- Yes, he, grandfather Pakhom, obstrukalsi himself! - Klava, a champion of pure pronunciation, shouted in response and added in an undertone: - Ooh, shameless! You yourself will offend everyone!

The old man could be heard approaching the children. He looked down at the lake, saw my fishing rods and said:

- Here a man lures a fish, and you raised a galangal to the whole world. It's not enough for you, perhaps, meadows!

- Where is it? The boy asked hastily. - Let me get some food!

- Where did you go! - shouted Nyurka. - You will still plunge into the water, you accursed inaudible!

The children soon left, and I never saw them. And the old man stood on the shore, thought, coughed delicately and asked in an uncertain voice:

- Do you, citizen, have a smoke?

I replied that there would be, and the old man with a terrible noise, clinging to the loops of the blackberry, breaking down on the slope and swearing, came down to me for a cigarette.

The old man turned out to be frail, small, but with a huge knife in his hand. The knife was in a leather case. Realizing that I, what good, would be worried about this knife, the old man hastily said:

- I came to cut the vine. For baskets and vents. Little by little.

I told the old man that she was a wonderful girl here - she knows all the flowers and herbs.

- Is this Klavka? - he asked. - Yes, this is the daughter of the collective farm groom Karnaukhov. And why should she not know when her grandmother is the first herbalist in the entire region! You will talk to your grandmother. Listen. Yes, ”he said after a pause, and sighed. - Each color has its own name ... Certification, then.

I looked at him in surprise. The old man asked for another cigarette and left. Soon I left too.

When I got out of the thickets onto the meadow road, I saw three girls far ahead. They carried huge armfuls of flowers. One of them was dragging a little barefoot boy in a large cap by the hand.

The girls walked quickly. You could see their heels flickering. Then a tiny voice came:

So during the air shake

A beautiful daughter was born ...

The sun was already setting behind the Oka, behind the village of Yesenin, and illuminated the forests with a slanting reddish light in the east.

All sorts of thoughts sometimes come to mind. For example, the idea that it would be nice to compile several new dictionaries of the Russian language (except, of course, the already existing general dictionaries).

In one such dictionary it is possible, for example, to collect words related to nature, in another - good and apt local words, in the third - the words of people of different professions, in the fourth - garbage and dead words, all the bureaucracy and vulgarity that litter the Russian language.

This last vocabulary is needed in order to wean people from meager and broken speech.

The thought of collecting words related to nature came to my mind that day, when, on a meadow lake, I heard a husky girl list various herbs and flowers.

This dictionary will, of course, be descriptive. Each word should be explained, and after it should be placed several excerpts from the books of writers, poets and scientists who have a scientific or poetic relationship to this word.

For example, after the word "icicle" you can print an excerpt from Prishvin:

“Hanging under the steep, frequent long roots of trees have now turned into icicles under the dark arches of the bank and, growing more and more, reached the water. And when the breeze, even the most gentle, spring one, stirred the water and small waves reached the ends of the icicles under the steep, they excited them, they swayed, knocking against each other, ringing, and this sound was the first sound of spring, the aeolian harp. "

And after the word "September" it would be nice to print an excerpt from Baratynsky:

And now September! Slowing down your sunrise

The sun shines with a cold radiance,

And his ray in the mirror of unsteady waters

It trembles like an obscure gold.

Thinking about these dictionaries, especially about the dictionary of "natural" words, I divided it into sections: the words "forest", "field", "meadow", words about the seasons, about meteorological phenomena, about water, rivers and lakes, plants and animals.

I understood that such a dictionary should be composed so that it could be read like a book. Then he would give an idea of ​​both our nature and the vast riches of language.

Of course, this work would not be within the power of one person. He would not have had enough for her whole life.

Every time I thought about this dictionary, I wanted to lose twenty years from the count, so that, of course, not to compile such a dictionary myself - for this I had no knowledge - but at least to participate in the work on it.

I even started making some notes for this dictionary, but, as usual, I lost it. It is almost impossible to restore them from memory.

Once, most of the summer, I was picking herbs and flowers. I recognized their names and properties from the old identifier of plants and entered all this in my notes. It was an exciting experience.

Until then, I had never imagined the expediency of everything that happens in nature, of all the complexity and perfection of each leaf, flower, root or seed.

This expediency sometimes reminded of itself purely outwardly and even painfully.

One fall, my friend and I spent several days fishing in the deaf, old channel of the Oka. It lost its connection with the river several centuries ago and turned into a deep and long lake. It was surrounded by such thickets that it was difficult to get to the water, and in other places it was impossible.

I was in a woolen jacket, and a lot of thorny seeds of a string (similar to flat two-teeth), burdock and other plants adhered to it.

The days were clear and cold. We slept in a tent without undressing.

On the third day it rained lightly, my jacket was damp, and in the middle of the night I felt a sharp pain in several places on my chest and arms, as if from a pin prick.

It turned out that the round flat seeds of some kind of grass, saturated with moisture, moved, began to unfold in a spiral and screwed into my jacket. They screwed her through and through, then they pierced my shirt and in the middle of the night they finally got to my skin and began to gently tingle it.

This was perhaps one of the most striking examples of expediency. The seed fell to the ground and lay there motionless until the first rains. It made no sense for him to break into the dry soil. But as soon as the ground became wet with rain, the seed, twisted in a spiral, swelled, revived, screwed into the ground like a drill, and began to germinate at the appointed time.

Once again, I digress from the "main thread of the story" and started talking about seeds. But while I was writing about seeds, I remembered another amazing phenomenon. I can't help but mention it. Moreover, it has some, albeit very distant, I would say - a purely comparative relation to literature, in particular to the question of which books will live a long time, and which will not stand the test of time and will die, like that sentimental flower that "Did not bloom and bloomed in the morning of cloudy days."

It is about the spicy scent of linden flowers - the romantic tree of our parks.

This smell is audible only at a distance. It is almost invisible near a tree. Linden stands as if surrounded at a great distance by a closed ring of this smell.

There is expediency in this, but we have not yet fully figured out it.

Real literature is like a lime blossom.

It often takes a distance in time to check and evaluate her strength and the degree of her perfection, in order to feel her breath and undying beauty.

If time can extinguish love and all other human feelings, as well as the very memory of a person, then for genuine literature it creates immortality.

It is worth remembering the words of Saltykov-Shchedrin that literature has been removed from the laws of decay. And the words of Pushkin: "The soul in a hundred-sounding lyre, my ashes will survive and decay will run away." And the words of Fet: "This leaf that has dried up and fell down burns with eternal gold in the song."

You can cite many of the same sayings of writers, poets, artists and scientists of all times and peoples.

This thought should motivate us to "improve our favorite thoughts", to constant restlessness, to conquering new heights of skill. And to the consciousness of the immeasurable distance lying between the genuine creations of the human spirit and that gray, sluggish and ignorant literature that is completely unnecessary for the living human soul.

Yes, that's how far a conversation about the properties of linden blossom can go!

Obviously, everything can be an accomplice of human thought and nothing can be neglected. After all, fairy tales are born with the modest help of such unnecessary things as a dry pea or a neck from a broken bottle.

I shall nevertheless try to briefly reconstruct from memory some of the entries that I have made for supposed (almost fantastic) dictionaries.

Some of our writers, as far as I know, have such "personal" dictionaries. But they do not show them to anyone and are reluctant to mention them.

What I recently said about the spring, rains, thunderstorms, dawn, "fresh" and the names of various herbs and flowers are also renewed in my memory "entries for the dictionary."

My first notes were about forests. I grew up in the treeless south, and therefore, perhaps, most of all in the Central Russian nature I fell in love with forests.

The first "forest" word that completely mesmerized me was wilderness. True, it refers not only to the forest, but for the first time I heard it (as well as the word glushnyak) from the foresters. Since then, in my opinion, it has been associated with a dense, mossy forest, damp thickets littered with windbreaks, with an iodine smell of decay and rotten stumps, with a greenish gloom and silence. "Is my side, you side, my age-old wilderness!"

And then there were real forest words: ship grove, aspen grove, small forest, sandy forest, chapyga, mshary (dry forest swamps), burning, black forest, wasteland, forest edge, forest cordon, birch forest, felling, bark, sap, clearing, condo pine , oak grove and many other simple words filled with picturesque content.

Even such a dry technical term as "forest boundary pole" or "picket" is full of elusive charm. If you know forests, then you will agree with this.

Low boundary pillars stand at the intersection of narrow glades. There is always a sandy hillock near them, overgrown with dried tall grass and strawberries. This bump was formed from the sand that was thrown out of the hole when they dug it for the post. On the chiselled top of the pillar, there are burned out numbers - the number of the “forest quarter”.

Almost always, butterflies warm themselves on these pillars, folding their wings, and ants run anxiously.

Near these pillars it is warmer than in the forest (or, perhaps, it only seems so). Therefore, here you always sit down to rest, leaning your back against the post, listening to the quiet hum of the peaks, looking at the sky. It can be clearly seen above the glades. Clouds with silver edges float slowly over it. It must be possible to sit like this for a week or a month and not see a single person.

In the sky and in the clouds - the same midday peace as in the forest, in the blue dry bell cup leaning towards the podzolic earth, and in your heart.

Sometimes after a year or two you recognize an old familiar pillar. And every time you think how much water has flowed under the bridge, where you have been during this time, how much grief and joy you have experienced, and this pillar stands here for nights and days, and winter and summer, as if waiting for you, like a resigned friend. Only more yellow lichens appeared on him and dodder braided him to the very top. It blooms and is bitter, smells like an almond, warmed up by the warmth of the forest.

The best view of the forests is from the fire towers. Then you can clearly see how they go beyond the horizon, rise to the ridges, descend into the hollows, stand as fortress walls above the sandy holes. Here and there water gleams - a mirror of a quiet forest lake or a whirlpool of a forest river with reddish "harsh" water.

From the tower one can gaze at all the dense woodland, the entire solemn forest land - immeasurable and unknown, imperiously calling a person into its mysterious thickets.

This call cannot be resisted. You need to immediately take a backpack, a compass and go into the woods to get lost in this green coniferous ocean.

This is what we did once with Arkady Gaidar. We walked through the forests all day and almost all night without roads, under the stars shining through the crowns of the pine trees only for us (because everything around us was asleep), until before dawn we came out to a winding forest river. She was wrapped in fog.

We lit a fire on the shore, sat down beside it and were silent for a long time, listening to the water muttering somewhere under a snag, and then an elk sounded sadly. We sat in silence and smoked until the most tender dawn turned blue in the east.

- That would be a hundred years! - said Gaidar. - Would you have had enough?

- Unlikely.

- And I wouldn't have had enough. Come on the bowler hat. Let's put on the tea.

He went into the darkness towards the river. I heard him cleaning the pot with sand and scolded him for the wire handle that fell off. Then he began to sing to himself a song unfamiliar to me:

The dense forest, robber

Dark since ancient times.

Damask knife in bosom

There are many more words that are not forest ones, but they, with the same power as forest ones, infect us with the charm hidden in them.

The Russian language is very rich in words related to the seasons and to natural phenomena associated with them.

Take early spring, for example. She, this spring girl still chilling from the last frosts, has many good words in her knapsack.

Thaws, thaws, drops from the roofs begin. The snow becomes grainy, spongy, settles and turns black. Mists eat it. Gradually spreads the roads, there comes a thaw, impassable roads. The first gullies with black water appear in the ice on the rivers, and thawed patches and bald patches on the hillocks. Mother-and-stepmother is already turning yellow on the edge of the packed snow.

Then, on the rivers, the first movement of ice occurs (namely, movement, not movement), when the ice begins to split and shift obliquely and water protrudes out of the holes, vents and ice holes,

For some reason, ice drift begins most often on dark nights, after "ravines" and hollow, melt water, ringing with the last pieces of ice - "shards", will merge from meadows and fields.

It is impossible to list everything. Therefore, I skip summer and move on to autumn, to its first days, when it is already beginning to "September".

The earth is withering, but the "Indian summer" is still ahead with its last bright, but already cold, like the glitter of mica, the radiance of the sun, from the thick blue skies, washed with cool air, with a flying web ("yarn of the Mother of God", as it is called in some places still earnest old women) and a fallen, withered leaf that falls asleep in the empty waters. Birch groves stand like crowds of beautiful girls, in half-shirts embroidered with gold leaf. "Autumn time - the charm of the eyes."

Then - bad weather, heavy rains, the icy northern wind "siverko" plowing lead waters, coldness, coldness, pitch nights, icy dew, dark dawns.

This is how everything goes, until the first frost seizes and binds the earth, the first powder falls out and the first path is established. And there is already winter with blizzards, blizzards, drifting snow, snowfall, gray frosts, landmarks in the fields, creak of undercuts on the sleds, gray, snowy skies.

We have a lot of words associated with fogs, winds, clouds and waters.

Rivers with their stretches, barrels, ferries and rifts are especially richly represented in the Russian dictionary, where steamers hardly pass during low-water periods and, in order not to run aground, one must keep only along the “main stream”.

I knew several ferrymen and carriers. This is who you need to learn Russian from!

The ferry is a noisy collective farm bazaar. It replaces folk gatherings and collective farm teahouses.

Where to talk, if not on the ferry, while women, pretending to scold the idlers of men, slowly fiddle with the wire rope, while shaggy and obedient to their fate horses pull hay from neighboring wagons and hastily chew it, looking sideways at the truck, where they screech and flounder in sacks to their deaths piglets until they are smoked to the nails of a poisonous green samosad cigarette!

To find out all the collective farm - and not only collective farm - news, in order to listen to all sorts of wise and unexpected maxims and incredible stories, one has to go to the crevice steam filled with hay dust and just sit there, smoke and listen, crossing from coast to coast.

Almost all ferrymen are talkative people, sharp-tongued and experienced. They especially love to talk in the evening, when the people stop wandering back and forth across the river, when the sun calmly descends behind a steep - a high bank - and pushes in the air and itches midges.

Then, sitting on a bench near the hut, you can delicately take a cigarette from a stray person who is not in a hurry with your fingers, which have become coarse from the ropes, say that, of course, "light tobacco is just self-indulgence, it does not reach our hearts", but still with pleasure to light a cigarette, squint at the river and start a conversation.

In general, all the noisy and varied life on the river banks, on the marinas (they are called landing stages, or "counters"), near the pontoon bridges with many river people crowding there, with their special customs and traditions, provides rich food for learning the language.

The Volga and Oka are especially linguistically rich. We cannot imagine the life of our country without these rivers, just as we cannot imagine it without Moscow, without the Kremlin, without Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Chaliapin, without the Bronze Horseman in Leningrad and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Yazykov, who possessed, according to Pushkin, an amazing fire of language, in one of his poems, described the Volga and Oka perfectly. Oka is especially well given.

Languages ​​brings in this poem a bow to the Rhine from the great Russian rivers, including from the Oka:

... thriving, oak,

In the expanse of the Murom sands

Flowing regal, brilliant and glorious

In view of the venerable shores.

Well, let us remember the "venerable shores" and we will be grateful to Yazykov for that.

No less than "natural" words, our country is rich in local sayings and dialects.

The overuse of local words usually speaks of the immaturity and lack of artistic literacy of the writer. Words are taken indiscriminately, little understandable, or even completely incomprehensible to the general reader, they are taken more out of panache than out of a desire to give a pictorial power to their thing.

There is a summit - the pure and flexible Russian literary language. Enriching it with local words requires strict selection and great taste. Because there are many places in our country where in the language and pronunciation, along with words - genuine pearls, there are many clumsy and phonetically unpleasant words.

As for the pronunciation, then, perhaps, the pronunciation with the loss of vowels is most annoying - all these “happenings” instead of “happens”, “understand” instead of “understands”. And the notorious word "however." Writers writing about Siberia and the Far East consider this word a sacred part of the speech of almost all of their heroes.

A local word can enrich a language if it is figurative, euphonious and understandable.

To make it understandable, no boring explanations or footnotes are needed at all. It's just that this word should be put in such a connection with all neighboring words so that its meaning is clear to the reader at once, without author's or editorial remarks.

One incomprehensible word can destroy the most exemplary construction of prose for the reader.

It would be absurd to argue that literature exists and functions only as long as it is understood. Incomprehensible, obscure or deliberately abstruse literature is needed only by its author, but not by the people.

The more transparent the air, the brighter the sunlight. The more transparent the prose, the more perfect its beauty and the stronger it resonates in the human heart. Briefly and clearly this idea was expressed by Leo Tolstoy: "Simplicity is a necessary condition for beauty."

Of the many local words that I heard, for example, in the Vladimir and Ryazan regions, some, of course, are incomprehensible and of little interest. But one comes across words that are excellent in their expressiveness - for example, the old, still prevalent in these areas, the word "okoy" - the horizon.

On the high bank of the Oka, from where a wide horizon opens up, there is the small village of Okoyomovo. From Okoyemov, as its residents say, "half of Russia is visible."

The horizon is everything that our eye on earth can grasp, or, in the old-fashioned way, everything that “eats the eye”. Hence the origin of the word "okoy".

The word "Stozhary" is also very euphonious - this is how people call the Pleiades in these areas (and not only in them).

By consonance, this word evokes the idea of ​​a cold heavenly fire (the Pleiades are very bright, especially in autumn, when they really blaze in a dark sky like a silver fire).

Such words will also decorate the modern literary language, while, for example, the Ryazan word “left” instead of “drowned” is inexpressive, incomprehensible and therefore has no right to life in the common language. As well as the very interesting by virtue of its archaism, the word "lzya" instead of "you can."

In the Ryazan villages, you will even now hear approximately the following reproachful exclamations:

- Hey, kid, why shouldn't you be so indulgent! Absolutely not even possible.

All these words - and okoy, and Stozhary, and lzya, and the verb "september" (about the first autumn colds) - I heard in everyday speech from an old man with a completely childish soul, a zealous toiler and poor man, but not because of poverty, and therefore, that he was content in his life with the smallest - from the lonely peasant of the village of Solotchi, Ryazan region, Semyon Vasilyevich Yelesin. He died in the winter of 1954.

Grandfather Semyon was the purest example of the Russian character - proud, noble and generous, despite the outward meagerness of his life.

He spoke about everything in his own way and in such a way that it was remembered for a lifetime. He liked to talk about taverns where "the men were seething until the morning" in arguments, tea drinking and tobacco smoke. For a long time he did not recognize the collective farm teahouse, because there they are fed "on receipt" (on a check). It seemed to him wild: “Ours is it to me, this receipt! I paid - then give me a snack and that's it! "

Grandfather Semyon had his own golden and unfulfilled dream - to become a carpenter, but such a great artist-carpenter that the whole world marveled at his magical work.

But so far this dream boiled down to a long and heated debate about how to fit a window platband "flush" or fix a broken step. Here such an intricate terminology was used that it was unthinkable to remember it.

How a person illuminates the places where he lives! Semyon died, and since then these places have lost so much of their charm that it is difficult to gather the courage to go to the place where, on a sandy cemetery hill above the river, among weeping willows, lies, they say, a grainy gray millstone on his grave.

Nothing can be neglected in the search for words. You never know where you will find the real word.

Studying the sea, maritime affairs and the language of sailors, I began to read sailing directions - reference books for captains. They collected all the information about a particular sea: a description of the depths, currents, winds, shores, ports, lighthouses, underwater rocks, shoals and everything you need to know for a safe sail. There are sailing directions for all seas.

The first pilot that fell into my hands was the pilot of the Black and Azov Seas. I began to read it and was amazed at its magnificent language, precise and elusively peculiar.

Soon I learned the reason for this peculiarity: nameless sailing directions were published from the beginning of the 19th century at equal intervals of years, and each generation of sailors made their own amendments to them. Therefore, the whole picture of the change in language for more than a hundred years is clearly reflected in the sailing guide. The language of our great-grandfathers and grandfathers peacefully exists alongside the modern language.

From the sailing direction, one can judge how dramatically some concepts have changed. For example, about the most cruel and destructive wind - Novorossiysk nord-ost (bore) - the sailing guide says:

"During the northeast, the shores are covered with thick gloom."

For our great-grandfathers, "gloom" meant a black fog, for us it is our state of mind.

All nautical terminology, as well as the spoken language of sailors, is great. It is possible to write poems about almost every word, starting from the "wind rose" and ending with the "thundering forties latitudes" (this is not a poetic liberty, but the name of these latitudes in naval documents).

And what kind of winged romance lives in all these frigates and barcantines, schooners and clippers, guys and yards, capstans and admiralty anchors, "dog" watches, ringing of bottles and logs, hum of engine turbines, sirens, stern flags, full storms, typhoons, fogs , dazzling calmness, floating lighthouses, "deep" shores and "stubby" capes, junctions and cables - in all that Alexander Grin called "the picturesque labor of navigation."

The sailors' language is strong, fresh, full of calm humor. It deserves a separate study, just like the language of people in many other professions.