...I remember early fine autumn. August was with warm rains, as if on purpose for sowing, with rains at the very time, in the middle of the month, around the feast of St. Lawrence. And "autumn and winter live well, if the water is calm and raining on Lawrence." Then, in the Indian summer, a lot of cobwebs settled on the fields. This is also a good sign: “A lot of nett in Indian summer - vigorous autumn” ... I remember early, fresh, quiet morning... I remember a large, all golden, dried up and thinned garden, I remember maple alleys, the delicate aroma of fallen leaves and the smell of Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness. The air is so pure, as if it were not there at all, voices and the creak of carts are heard throughout the garden. These are tarkhans, philistine gardeners, who hired peasants and pour apples in order to send them to the city at night - certainly on a night when it is so nice to lie on a cart, look at the starry sky, smell tar in the fresh air and listen to the gentle creaking of in the dark a long convoy along the high road. A peasant pouring apples eats them with a juicy crackle one after another, but such is the establishment - the tradesman will never cut him off, but will also say: “Vali, eat your fill, there’s nothing to do!” At the drain, everyone drinks honey. And the cool silence of the morning is broken only by the well-fed clucking of thrushes on coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the booming clatter of apples poured into measures and tubs. In the thinned garden, the road to the big hut strewn with straw is far visible, and the hut itself, near which the townspeople acquired a whole household during the summer. There is a strong smell of apples everywhere, especially here. Beds were made in the hut, there was a single-barreled gun, a green samovar, and crockery in the corner. Mats, boxes, all sorts of tattered belongings are lying around the hut, an earthen stove has been dug. At noon, a magnificent kulesh with lard is cooked on it, in the evening the samovar is heated, and in the garden, between the trees, bluish smoke spreads in a long strip. On holidays, there is a whole fair near the hut, and red dresses constantly flash behind the trees. Lively odnodvorki girls in sundresses strongly smelling of paint are crowding, “masters” come in their beautiful and coarse, savage costumes, a young elder, pregnant, with a wide sleepy face and important, like a Kholmogory cow. On her head are “horns” - braids are placed on the sides of the crown and covered with several scarves, so that the head seems huge; legs, in half boots with horseshoes, stand stupidly and firmly; the sleeveless jacket is plush, the curtain is long, and the poneva is black-purple with brick-colored stripes and overlaid with a wide gold “groove” on the hem ... - Household butterfly! the tradesman says of her, shaking his head. - Now they are also transferring such ... And the boys in white slouchy shirts and short trousers, with open white heads, all fit. They walk in twos and threes, finely pawing their bare feet, and squinting at a shaggy shepherd dog tied to an apple tree. Of course, only one buys, because purchases are only for a penny or an egg, but there are many buyers, trade is brisk, and a consumptive tradesman in a long frock coat and red boots is cheerful. Together with his brother, a burry, nimble half-idiot who lives with him "out of mercy", he trades with jokes, jokes, and even sometimes "touches" on the Tula harmonica. And until evening, people crowd in the garden, laughter and talk are heard near the hut, and sometimes the clatter of dancing ... By night in the weather it becomes very cold and dewy. Breathing in the rye aroma of new straw and chaff on the threshing floor, you cheerfully walk home to dinner past the garden rampart. The voices in the village or the creaking of the gates resound through the icy dawn with unusual clarity. It's getting dark. And here is another smell: there is a fire in the garden, and it strongly draws the fragrant smoke of cherry branches. In the darkness, in the depths of the garden, there is a fabulous picture: just in a corner of hell, a crimson flame is burning near the hut, surrounded by darkness, and someone's black silhouettes, as if carved from ebony wood, move around the fire, while giant shadows from them walk through the apple trees. . Either a black hand several arshins in size will lie down all over the tree, then two legs will be clearly drawn - two black pillars. And suddenly all this slips from the apple tree - and the shadow falls along the entire alley, from the hut to the very gate ... Late at night, when the lights go out in the village, when the diamond constellation Stozhar is already shining high in the sky, you will once again run into the garden. Rustling through dry foliage, like a blind man, you will reach the hut. It is a little lighter in the clearing there, and the Milky Way is white overhead. - Is that you, barchuk? someone calls softly from the darkness. — Me. Are you still awake, Nikolai? - We can't sleep. And it must be too late? Look, there's a passenger train coming... We listen for a long time and distinguish the trembling in the ground, the trembling turns into noise, grows, and now, as if already beyond the very garden, the wheels are rapidly beating out the noisy beat of the wheel: rumbling and knocking, the train rushes ... closer, closer, louder and more angry .. And suddenly it starts to subside, to stall, as if sinking into the ground... "Where's your gun, Nikolai?" “But near the box, sir.” Throw up a heavy, like a crowbar, single-barreled shotgun and shoot with a flurry. A crimson flame with a deafening crackle will flash towards the sky, blind for a moment and extinguish the stars, and a cheerful echo will ring out and roll across the horizon, fading far, far away in the clear and sensitive air. - Wow, great! the tradesman will say. - Spend, spend, barchuk, otherwise it's just a disaster! Again, the whole muzzle on the shaft was shaken off ... And the black sky is drawn with fiery stripes of shooting stars. For a long time you look into its dark blue depth, overflowing with constellations, until the earth floats under your feet. Then you will start up and, hiding your hands in your sleeves, you will quickly run along the alley to the house ... How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!

II

"A vigorous Antonovka - for a merry year." Village affairs are good if Antonovka is born: it means that bread is born too ... I remember a harvest year. At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking black, you used to open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly in some places, and you can’t bear it - you order the horse to be saddled as soon as possible, and you yourself will run wash in the pond. The small foliage has almost completely flown from the coastal vines, and the branches show through in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. She instantly drives away the night's laziness, and, having washed and having breakfast in the servants' room with hot potatoes and black bread with coarse raw salt, you feel with pleasure the slippery leather of the saddle under you, driving through Vyselki to hunt. Autumn is the time for patronal holidays, and the people at this time are tidied up, satisfied, the view of the village is not at all the same as at another time. If the year is fruitful and a whole golden city rises on the threshing floors, and geese gaggle loudly and sharply in the morning on the river, then it’s not bad at all in the village. In addition, our Vyselki from time immemorial, since the time of my grandfather, were famous for their “wealth”. Old men and women lived in Vyselki for a very long time - the first sign of a rich village - and they were all tall, big and white as a harrier. You only hear, it happened: “Yes, - here Agafya waved her eighty-three years old!” or conversations like this: “And when will you die, Pankrat?” Will you be a hundred years old? - How would you like to say, father? How old are you, I ask! “But I don’t know, father. — Do you remember Platon Apollonitch? “Well, sir, father,” I distinctly remember. - You see now. You must be at least a hundred. The old man, who is standing in front of the master, stretched out, meekly and guiltily smiles. Well, they say, to do - guilty, healed. And he probably would have gotten even more rich if he hadn’t overate on Petrovka onions. I also remember his old woman. Everyone used to sit on a bench, on the porch, bent over, shaking his head, panting, and holding onto the bench with his hands—everyone was thinking about something. “I suppose about your good,” the women said, because, however, there was a lot of “good” in her chests. And she doesn't seem to hear; blindly looks somewhere into the distance from under sadly raised eyebrows, shakes his head and seems to be trying to remember something. There was a big old woman, all kind of dark. Paneva - almost from the last century, the chunks are mortuary, the neck is yellow and dried up, the shirt with canine jambs is always white and white - "just put it in the coffin." And near the porch there was a large stone: she herself bought a shroud for her grave, as well as a shroud - an excellent shroud, with angels, with crosses and with a prayer printed around the edges. The yards in Vyselki also matched the old people: brick, built by grandfathers. And the rich peasants - Savely, Ignat, Dron - had huts in two or three connections, because sharing in Vyselki was not yet fashionable. In such families, they kept bees, were proud of the gray-iron-coloured bityug stallion, and kept the estates in order. On the threshing floors thick and fat hemp-growers grew dark, barns and barns covered with hair stood in the dark; in punkas and barns there were iron doors, behind which canvases, spinning wheels, new short fur coats, typesetting harness, measures bound with copper hoops were stored. Crosses were burned on the gates and on the sledges. And I remember sometimes it seemed to me extremely tempting to be a peasant. When you used to ride through the village on a sunny morning, you all think about how good it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omets, and on a holiday to get up with the sun, under the thick and musical blasphemy from the village, wash yourself near the barrel and put on a clean suede shirt, the same trousers and indestructible boots with horseshoes. If, it was thought, to add to this a healthy and beautiful wife in festive attire, and a trip to mass, and then dinner with a bearded father-in-law, a dinner with hot lamb on wooden plates and with rushes, with honeycomb and mash, so much more to wish for. impossible! The warehouse of the average noble life even in my memory - very recently - had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in its homeliness and rural old-world prosperity. Such, for example, was the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, who lived about twelve versts from Vyselki. Until, it used to be, you get to this estate, it is already completely depleted. You have to walk with dogs in packs, and you don’t want to hurry - it’s so much fun in an open field on a sunny and cool day! The terrain is flat and can be seen far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun is shining from the side, and the road, rolled after the rains by carts, is oily and shines like rails. Fresh, lush green winters are scattered around in wide shoals. A hawk will fly up from somewhere in the clear air and freeze in one place, fluttering with sharp wings. And clearly visible telegraph poles run off into the clear distance, and their wires, like silver strings, slide along the slope of the clear sky. There are little cats sitting on them - completely black badges on music paper. I didn’t know and didn’t see serfdom, but I remember I felt it at my aunt Anna Gerasimovna’s. You will drive into the courtyard and immediately feel that it is still quite alive here. The estate is small, but all old, solid, surrounded by century-old birches and willows. There are many outbuildings - low, but homely - and they all seem to be merged from dark oak logs under thatched roofs. Only the blackened human one stands out for its size, or rather, the length, from which the last Mohicans of the court class look out - some kind of dilapidated old men and old women, a decrepit retired cook, similar to Don Quixote. All of them, when you drive into the yard, pull themselves up and bow low, low. The gray-haired coachman, heading from the carriage house to pick up a horse, takes off his hat at the barn and walks around the yard with his head bare. He traveled with his aunt as a postilion, and now he takes her to Mass, in the winter in a wagon, and in the summer in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those on which the priests ride. The aunt's garden was famous for its neglect, nightingales, doves and apples, and the house for its roof. He stood at the head of the yard, by the very garden—the branches of the lindens embraced him—he was small and squat, but it seemed that he would never live—he looked so thoroughly from under his extraordinarily high and thick thatched roof, blackened and hardened with time. Its front façade always seemed to me alive: it was as if an old face was looking out from under a huge cap with the hollows of its eyes—windows with mother-of-pearl glass from rain and sun. And on the sides of these eyes there were porches - two old large porches with columns. Fully fed pigeons always sat on their pediment, while thousands of sparrows rained from roof to roof ... And the guest felt comfortable in this nest under the turquoise autumn sky! You will enter the house and first of all you will smell apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried lime blossom, which has been lying on the windows since June ... In all rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is because the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Everywhere is silence and cleanliness, although it seems that armchairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames have never moved. And then a cough is heard: an aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. She wears a large Persian shawl over her shoulders. She will come out importantly, but affably, and now, under the endless talk about antiquity, about inheritances, treats begin to appear: first, "blowing", apples - Antonov, "bell lady", boletus, "prodovitka" - and then an amazing dinner : all pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, marinades and red kvass - strong and sweet-sweet ... The windows to the garden are raised, and from there it blows a cheerful autumn coolness.

III

Per last years one thing supported the fading spirit of the landowners - hunting. Previously, such estates as the estate of Anna Gerasimovna were not uncommon. There were also crumbling, but still living in grand style estates with a huge estate, with a garden of twenty acres. True, some of these estates have survived to this day, but there is no life in them ... like my late brother-in-law Arseny Semenych. Since the end of September, our gardens and threshing floor have been empty, the weather, as usual, has changed dramatically. The wind tore and ruffled the trees for whole days, the rains watered them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening, between the gloomy low clouds, the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west; the air became clean and clear, and sunlight shone dazzlingly between the foliage, between the branches, which moved like a living net and waved from the wind. The liquid blue sky shone coldly and brightly in the north above heavy lead clouds, and behind these clouds ridges of snowy mountain-clouds slowly floated up. You stand at the window and think: "Perhaps, God willing, the weather will clear up." But the wind did not let up. It agitated the garden, tore at the stream of human smoke continuously running from the chimney, and again brought up the ominous wisps of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. Its brilliance faded, the window closed into the blue sky, and the garden became deserted and dull, and the rain began to sow again ... at first quietly, carefully, then more and more thickly, and finally turned into a downpour with a storm and darkness. It's been a long, unsettling night... From such a beating, the garden came out almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow hushed, resigned. But on the other hand, how beautiful it was when the clear weather came again, the transparent and cold days of early October, the farewell holiday of autumn! The preserved foliage will now hang on the trees until the first winters. The black garden will shine through in the cold turquoise sky and dutifully wait for winter, warming itself in the sunshine. And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with overgrown winter crops... It's time to hunt! And now I see myself in the estate of Arseny Semenych, in big house, in a hall full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are a lot of people - all people are tanned, with weather-beaten faces, in undershirts and long boots. We just had a very satisfying lunch, flushed and excited by noisy talk about the upcoming hunt, but they don’t forget to finish their vodka after dinner. And in the yard a horn blows and dogs howl in different voices. The black greyhound, Arseny Semyonitch's favorite, climbs up on the table and begins to devour the remains of the hare with sauce from the dish. But suddenly he lets out a terrible squeal and, knocking over plates and glasses, falls off the table: Arseniy Semyonitch, who has come out of the office with a rapnik and a revolver, suddenly stuns the hall with a shot. The hall is even more filled with smoke, and Arseny Semyonitch is standing and laughing. "Sorry I missed it!" he says, playing with his eyes. He is tall, thin, but broad-shouldered and slender, and his face is a handsome gypsy. His eyes sparkle wildly, he is very dexterous, in a crimson silk shirt, velvet trousers and long boots. Having frightened both the dog and the guests with a shot, he playfully-importantly recites in a baritone:

It's time, it's time to saddle the nimble bottom
And throw a ringing horn over your shoulders! —

And says loudly:

- Well, however, there is nothing to waste golden time! I still feel how greedily and capaciously the young chest breathed in the cold of a clear and damp day in the evening, when, it happened, you were riding with a noisy gang of Arseniy Semenych, excited by the musical din of dogs thrown into the black forest, into some Red Hillock or Gremyachiy Island, Exciting hunter by its name alone. You ride on an evil, strong and squat "Kyrgyz", tightly restraining him with reins, and you feel almost one with him. He snorts, asks for a lynx, noisily rustles his hooves along the deep and light carpets of black crumbling leaves, and each sound resounds in the empty, damp and fresh forest. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third answered passionately and plaintively, and suddenly the whole forest rumbled, as if it were all made of glass, from stormy barking and screaming. Amidst this uproar, a shot rang out loudly - and everything “brewed up” and rolled somewhere into the distance. - Take care! someone yelled in a desperate voice throughout the forest. "Ah, take care!" An intoxicating thought flashed through my head. You will yell at the horse and, as if off the chain, you will rush through the forest, not understanding anything along the way. Only the trees flash before my eyes and sculpt in the face with mud from under the hooves of the horse. You will jump out of the forest, you will see a motley flock of dogs stretching along the ground on the greenery and you will push the "Kirghiz" even harder to cut off the beast - through the greenery, uplifts and stubbles, until, finally, you cross over to another island and the flock disappears from the eyes together with its furious barking and moaning. Then, all wet and trembling with exertion, you rein in the frothy, wheezing horse and greedily swallow the icy dampness of the forest valley. In the distance, the cries of hunters and the barking of dogs fade away, and all around you is dead silence. The half-opened timber stands motionless, and it seems that you have fallen into some reserved halls. There is a strong smell from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark. And the dampness from the ravines is becoming more and more noticeable, it is getting colder and darker in the forest ... It's time for an overnight stay. But it is difficult to collect the dogs after the hunt. The horns ring in the forest for a long and hopelessly-dreary ring, for a long time a scream, scolding and squealing of dogs is heard ... Finally, already completely in the dark, a gang of hunters tumbles into the estate of some almost unknown bachelor landowner and fills the entire courtyard of the estate with noise, which lights up lanterns, candles and lamps brought out to meet the guests from the house... It happened that such a hospitable neighbor had hunting for several days. At early morning dawn, in the icy wind and the first wet winter, they would leave for the forests and the fields, and at dusk they would return again, all covered in mud, with flushed faces, reeking of horse sweat, the hair of a hunted animal, and the drinking began. It is very warm in a bright and crowded house after a whole day in the cold in the field. Everyone walks from room to room in unbuttoned undershirts, drinking and eating randomly, noisily conveying to each other their impressions of the killed seasoned wolf, who, baring his teeth, rolling his eyes, lies with his fluffy tail thrown to the side in the middle of the hall and stains with his pale and already cold floor with blood After vodka and food, you feel such a sweet fatigue, such a bliss of a young dream, that you hear a conversation as if through water. The weather-beaten face burns, and if you close your eyes, the whole earth will float under your feet. And when you lie down in bed, in a soft featherbed, somewhere in an ancient corner room with a small icon and a lamp, the ghosts of fiery-colored dogs flash before your eyes, the feeling of a jump will ache all over your body, and you will not notice how you will drown along with all these images and sensations in a sweet and healthy dream, even forgetting that this room was once the prayer room of an old man, whose name is surrounded by gloomy fortress legends, and that he died in this prayer room, probably on the same bed. When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time. The whole house is silent. You can hear the gardener walking cautiously through the rooms, lighting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots. Ahead is a whole day of rest in the already silent winter estate. You will slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you'll get down to books—grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, resembling church breviaries, smell gloriously of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some kind of pleasant sourish mold, old perfume... Notes in their margins are also good, large and with round soft strokes made with a quill pen. You open the book and read: “A thought worthy of ancient and new philosophers, the flower of reason and feeling of the heart” ... And you will involuntarily be carried away by the book itself. This is “The Philosopher Nobleman”, an allegory published a hundred years ago by the dependency of some “cavalier of many orders” and printed in the printing house of the order of public charity, a story about how “the nobleman-philosopher, having time and the ability to reason, to what the mind of a person can ascend, once received a desire to compose a plan of light in the spacious place of his village ... Then you stumble upon the “satirical and philosophical writings of Mr. Voltaire” and for a long time you revel in the sweet and mannered syllable of the translation: “My lords! Erasmus composed in the sixth to tenth century a praise of tomfoolery (mannered pause - full stop); you order me to exalt reason before you ... ”Then you will move from Catherine’s antiquity to romantic times, to almanacs, to sentimental, pompous and long novels ... The cuckoo jumps out of the clock and mockingly sadly crows over you in an empty house. And little by little, a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into my heart... Here is "The Secrets of Alexis", here is "Victor, or the Child in the Forest": "Midnight strikes! Sacred silence takes the place of daytime noise and cheerful songs of the villagers. Sleep spreads its dark wings over the surface of our hemisphere; he shakes darkness and dreams from them ... Dreams ... How often they continue only the suffering of the evil one! roses and lilies, "leprosy and playfulness of young naughty ones", a lily hand, Lyudmila and Alina ... And here are magazines with the names of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin's lyceum student. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her clavichord polonaises, her languid recitation of poems from Eugene Onegin. And the old dreamy life will rise before you... Nice girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, aristocratically beautiful heads in ancient hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ...

IV

The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the landowners' estates. Those days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a whole century has passed since then. The old people died in Vyselki, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseniy Semenych shot himself ... The kingdom of small estates, impoverished to beggary! .. But this beggarly small estate life is good too! Here I see myself again in the village, in deep autumn. The days are bluish, cloudy. In the morning I sit in the saddle and with one dog, with a gun and a horn, I leave for the field. The wind is ringing and buzzing in the muzzle of a gun, the wind is blowing strongly towards you, sometimes with dry snow. The whole day I wander through the empty plains... Hungry and chilly, I return to the estate at dusk, and my soul becomes so warm and gratifying when the lights of the Settlement flicker and the smell of smoke and housing draws from the estate. I remember that in our house they liked to “twilight” at this time, not to light a fire and conduct conversations in the semi-darkness. When I enter the house, I find the winter frames already inserted, and this sets me up even more for a peaceful winter mood. In the valet's room a worker heats the stove, and, as in childhood, I squat down near a heap of straw, which already smells sharply of winter freshness, and look first into the blazing stove, then at the windows, behind which, turning blue, the twilight is sadly dying. Then I go to the people's room. It’s light and crowded there: the girls are chopping cabbage, the chaff is flashing, I listen to their fractional, friendly knock and friendly, sadly cheerful village songs ... Sometimes some small-town neighbor will call in and take me away for a long time ... The small-town life is good too ! The small man gets up early. Stretching hard, he rises from the bed and rolls a thick cigarette made of cheap, black tobacco or simply shag. The pale light of an early November morning illuminates a simple, bare-walled study, the yellow and rough skins of foxes over the bed and a stocky figure in trousers and an unbelted blouse, and the sleepy face of a Tatar warehouse is reflected in the mirror. There is dead silence in the half-dark, warm house. Behind the door in the corridor snores the old cook, who lived in the master's house as a girl. This, however, does not prevent the master from hoarsely shouting to the whole house: — Lukerya! Samovar! Then, putting on boots, throwing a coat over his shoulders and not fastening the collar of his shirt, he goes out onto the porch. There is a smell of dog in the locked hallway; lazily reaching out, yawning with a squeal and smiling, the hounds surround him. - Burp! he says slowly, in a condescending bass, and walks across the garden to the threshing floor. His chest breathes widely with the sharp air of dawn and the smells of a naked garden that has chilled during the night. Curled and blackened from frost, the leaves rustle under boots in a birch alley, already half-cut down. Looming in the low gloomy sky, ruffled jackdaws sleep on the crest of the barn... It will be a glorious day for hunting! And, stopping in the middle of the alley, the master looks for a long time into the autumn field, at the desert green winters, along which calves roam. Two hounds of females squeal at his feet, and Zalivay is already behind the garden: jumping over the prickly stubble, he seems to be calling and asking for the field. But what will you do now with the hounds? The beast is now in the field, on the rises, on the black trail, and in the forest he is afraid, because in the forest the wind rustles the leaves ... Oh, if only greyhounds! Threshing begins in the barn. Slowly dispersing, the threshing drum hums. Lazily pulling on the traces, resting their feet on the dung circle and swaying, the horses in the drive go. In the middle of the drive, revolving on a bench, sits a driver and shouts monotonously at them, always whipping with a whip only one brown gelding, which is the laziest of all and completely sleeps on the move, since his eyes are blindfolded. - Well, well, girls, girls! - the sedate waiter shouts sternly, dressing in a wide linen shirt. The girls hastily sweep the current, run around with stretchers and brooms. - With God! - says the waiter, and the first bunch of starnovka, put on trial, flies into the drum with a buzz and screech and rises up from under it like a disheveled fan. And the drum buzzes more and more insistently, the work begins to boil, and soon all sounds merge into a general pleasant noise of threshing. The master stands at the gates of the barn and watches how red and yellow scarves, hands, rakes, straw flash in its darkness, and all this moves and bustles measuredly to the rumble of the drum and the monotonous cry and whistle of the driver. The trunk flies in clouds to the gate. The master stands, all gray from him. Often he glances into the field... Soon, soon the fields will turn white, soon winter will cover them... Zimok, the first snow! There are no greyhounds, there is nothing to hunt in November; but winter comes, "work" with the hounds begins. And here again, as in the old days, small locals come to each other, drink on the last money, disappear for whole days in snowy fields. And in the evening, on some remote farmstead, the windows of the wing glow far away in the darkness of a winter night. There, in this little wing, clouds of smoke are floating, tallow candles are burning dimly, a guitar is being tuned ...

In the reading room, cozy, quiet and bright only above the tables, some gray-haired German, resembling Ibsen, in round silver glasses and crazy with astonished eyes. After examining him coldly, the gentleman from San Francisco sat down in a deep leather armchair in the corner, near a lamp under a green cap, put on his pince-nez, and, twitching his head from the collar that was choking him, covered himself with a sheet of newspaper. He skimmed through the titles of some of the articles, read a few lines about the never-ending Balkan war, with a habitual gesture, turned over the newspaper. Suddenly the lines flashed before him with a glassy sheen. neck it bounced back. The eyes bulged. The pince-nez flew off his nose.

He rushed forward, wanted to take a breath of air and wheezed wildly. His lower jaw fell off, illuminating his entire mouth with gold fillings. The head fell on his shoulder and shook. The chest of the shirt bulged out like a box. The whole body, writhing, lifting the carpet with its heels, crawled to the floor, desperately fighting with someone..

(I. Bunin)(134 words)

Exercise

1. Complete parsing selected offer.
2. Designate grammatical basis every offer.
3. Graphically indicate which member of the sentence are qualifying members.
4. Graphically mark:
   • isolated members of the proposal;
   • homogeneous members of the sentence.
5. Write out the real participles.
6. Complete morphemic parsing highlighted words.
7. Choose synonyms for the underlined word.
8. Underlined simple sentences change so that the sentence becomes complex.

Otherwise I see myself in the house, and again in summer evening and alone again. The sun disappeared behind the hushed garden, left the empty hall, the empty living room, where it shone joyfully all day. Now only the last ray blushes lonely in the corner on the parquet, between the high legs of some old table. And, God, how painful is his silent and sad charm! And late in the evening, when the garden was already turning black outside the windows with all its mysterious night blackness, and I was lying in a dark bedroom in my baby crib, some kind of quiet star was looking at me from the window from above ... What did she want from me? What did she say to me without words, where did she call, what did she remind me of?

(I. Bunin) (110 words)

Task (at the choice of students)

1. What lexical, morphological and syntactic means help the author to express his feelings, his attitude to what is being described?
2. Perform spelling and punctuation analysis of the text.
3. Underline the pronouns as part of the sentence. Define their category, explain the spelling.