Tolstoy's Sevastopol stories summary by chapters. Leo Tolstoy

In this article you will not read the entire work of Chekhov, but only his summary. "The Chameleon" is a witty short story, so you may want to read the whole thing. So let's begin.

Anton Chekhov. "Chameleon". Summary

Ochumelov, a police supervisor, is walking through the market square. A policeman walks behind him, carrying confiscated gooseberries in a sieve. There is not a soul in the square. Suddenly Ochumelov hears a scream and a dog squealing, and a few seconds later he sees a dog running from the wood warehouse of a merchant named Pichugin, limping on one paw. A man rushes after her. He catches up with her and grabs her by the hind legs. It turns out that this is none other than Khryukin, a goldsmith. A little drunk, he tries to catch a dog that bit his finger. A crowd of people is gathering. A frightened white greyhound puppy is in the center. Ochumelov asks about what happened, why everyone has gathered here. Khryukin says that he was talking about firewood with Mitriy Mitrich, and this vile dog, out of the blue, bit him on the finger. The warden asks whose dog this is, but no one knows. He says that he won’t leave it like that, that she needs to be exterminated, because she’s probably mad. The owner needs to be punished for not keeping his dog on a chain and thereby violating established order. Suddenly, someone from the crowd suggests that this puppy may be General Zhigalov's. Then Ochumelov asks Khryukin how the dog could bite him, since it is so small and does not reach his finger. He suspects the master of lying.

Summary. "Chameleon". Continuation

The policeman says that this is not the general’s dog, and Ochumelov immediately changes his mind. He tells Khryukin not to leave this matter so easily. But the policeman suggests that the dog could still be the general’s. Then the warden tells Eldyrin to take the puppy to the general and tell him not to let her out, since she is dear. And if everyone she meets pokes a cigarette in her face, then she can be ruined.

Summary. "Chameleon". Conclusion

Prokhor, the general's cook, appears. They ask him if he knows whose dog it is. He replies that it is not theirs. Ochumelov claims that she needs to be exterminated because she is a stray. But Prokhor says that this is not Zhigalov’s dog, but his brother, Vladimir Ivanovich, who came to visit them. The cook says that the owner does not like greyhounds. But the general's brother likes them, so he came to visit with his puppy. Ochumelov is surprised that Vladimir Ivanovich is in the city, and that he did not know this. He asks Prokhor to take the dog and admires its agility and how deftly it grabbed Khryukin’s finger. Prokhor walks from the woodshed and calls the puppy to follow him. The crowd laughs at Khryukin. And Ochumelov threatens that he will still get to him, and leaves the market square.

The story "Chameleon", a summary of which you have just read, has deep meaning. It reflects a flattering person who has no own opinion. He is dependent on the behavior of others and fawns over his superiors. Even a short summary can convey all this. “Chameleon” is a story that is very useful to read in full to see all the details described by Chekhov.

Of which the Russian people were the hero." This is an emphatically simple and matter-of-fact story from an eyewitness trying to tell the whole truth about the war. The heroes of the siege are shown as ordinary people, with all human weaknesses and shortcomings. Staff Captain Mikhailov is capable of going to save a comrade under enemy bullets, and during the walk he is vain about walking arm in arm with the “aristocrats.” The author mercilessly destroys romantic tradition"heroism"; war is not a beautiful, brilliant spectacle “with music and drums, with waving banners and prancing generals; its true expression is in blood, in suffering, in death.”

Tolstoy. The truth about the war in “Sevastopol Stories”

Tolstoy approached the subject of reproduction, which had previously been approached with a store of pompous words, with all sorts of rhetorical devices, glorifying inhuman valor and the beauty of battles, with completely different tools of depiction. He described the warriors in all their everyday everyday surroundings, discarding rhetorical embellishments and false pathos; and if romantic heroism and all the so-called “Marlinovism” disappeared in Tolstoy’s descriptions, then under his pen those modest exploits of unsung heroes emerged in relief, which speak louder than the romantic effects of false stories. The hard work of the soldiers, their courage under bullets and grenades, which has become a habit, the patriotic uplift of spirit among soldiers and officers, calm attitude to death - all this is subtly captured by the artist’s pencil. But characterizing general mood, with all the power of a realistic pencil, he depicts individual figures and types in the army, details in the character and behavior of people, features of their mental structure.

People with all their weaknesses, with traits both petty and heroic, pass here before us; The writer sets himself the task of impartially depicting what exists. We see what various motives are the source of heroism in different people: one has strict fulfillment of military duty, the other has ambition, etc. Having himself shared both labor and danger with the defenders of Sevastopol, Tolstoy knew well their life and all the living conditions of the besieged city. Finally, in depicting the war, the writer also remained true to his task - to be truthful - and instead of a brilliant picture full of false effects, he gave a life-like picture of murder, destruction, terrifying pools of blood, piles of corpses and the agony of the wounded. Describing the battle, the author recalls the irreconcilable contradiction between the precepts of Christian teaching and this terrible massacre of people.

« Sevastopol stories"are divided into three parts: "Sevastopol in December 1854", "Sevastopol in May 1855" and "Sevastopol in August 1855". The hero of the last essay, Volodya Kozeltsov, experiences much of what was experienced by the author himself in the besieged city.

The author of "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", the tireless destroyer of all beautiful lies, the crusher of idols and the exposer of "exalting deceptions" has already realized himself in "Sevastopol Stories". He contrasts elegant and false romanticism with harsh, sober realism. “The hero of my story,” he writes, “whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I tried to reproduce in all his beauty and who has always been, is and will be beautiful, is true.” This ascetic struggle for truth begins with the destruction of false art and ends with the destruction of art in general. Tolstoy enters fatal path, leading him to complete nihilism - aesthetic, cultural and social.

Lev Nikolaevich TOLSTOY

In 1851-53, Tolstoy took part in military operations in the Caucasus (first as a volunteer, then as an artillery officer), and in 1854 he went to the Danube Army. Soon after the start of the Crimean War, at his personal request, he was transferred to Sevastopol (in the besieged city, he fought on the famous 4th bastion). Army life and episodes of the war provided Tolstoy with material for the stories “Raid” (1853), “Cutting Wood” (1853-55), as well as for artistic essays “Sevastopol in December,” “Sevastopol in May,” “Sevastopol in August 1855.” of the year" (all published in Sovremennik in 1855-56). These essays, traditionally called “Sevastopol Stories,” boldly combined document, reportage and plot narration; they made a huge impression on Russian society. The war appeared ugly to them bloodbath, nasty human nature. Final words one of the essays, that its only hero is the truth, became the motto of all subsequent literary activity writer. Trying to determine the originality of this truth, N. G. Chernyshevsky insightfully pointed out two characteristic features Tolstoy's talent - “dialectics of the soul” as special form psychological analysis and "immediate purity moral sense"(Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 3, 1947, p. 423, 428).

SEVASTOPOL IN DECEMBER

In the North, daytime activity is gradually beginning to replace the tranquility of the night: where the shift of guards passed, rattling their guns; where the doctor is already rushing to the hospital; where the soldier climbed out of the dugout and washed himself with icy water tanned face and, turning to the blushing east, quickly crossing himself, he prays to God; where a tall, heavy majara on camels creakingly dragged itself to the cemetery to bury the bloody dead, with which it was almost piled to the top... You approach the pier - a special smell coal, manure, dampness and beef amazes you; thousands of different objects - firewood, meat, aurochs, flour, iron, etc. - lie in a heap near the pier; soldiers of different regiments, with bags and guns, without bags and without guns, crowd here, smoking, cursing, dragging loads onto the steamer, which, smoking, stands near the platform; free skiffs filled with all kinds of people - soldiers, sailors, merchants, women - moor and cast off from the pier.

- To Grafskaya, your honor? Please, - two or three retired sailors offer their services to you, getting up from their skiffs.

You choose the one that is closest to you, step over the half-rotten corpse of some bay horse, which is lying in the mud near the boat, and go to the helm. You set sail from the shore. All around you is the sea, already shining in the morning sun, in front of you is an old sailor in a camel coat and a young white-headed boy, who are silently working diligently with the oars. You look at the striped hulks of ships scattered near and far across the bay, and at the small black dots of boats moving across the brilliant azure, and at the beautiful light buildings of the city, painted with pink rays morning sun visible on the other side, and on the foaming white line booms and sunken ships, from which here and there the black ends of the masts sadly stick out, and at the distant enemy fleet looming on the crystal horizon of the sea, and at the foaming streams in which salt bubbles, lifted by the oars, jump; you listen to the uniform sounds of oar strikes, the sounds of voices reaching you across the water, and the majestic sounds of shooting, which, as it seems to you, is intensifying in Sevastopol.

It cannot be that, at the thought that you are in Sevastopol, feelings of some kind of courage, pride will not penetrate your soul, and that the blood will not begin to circulate faster in your veins...

- Your honor! keep straight under Kistentin,” the old sailor will tell you, turning back to check the direction you are giving the boat, “right rudder.”

“And it still has all the guns,” the white-haired guy will note, walking past the ship and looking at it.

“But of course: it’s new, Kornilov lived on it,” the old man will note, also looking at the ship.

- See where it broke! - the boy will say after a long silence, looking at the white cloud of diverging smoke that suddenly appeared high above the South Bay and was accompanied by the sharp sound of a bomb exploding.

“He’s the one firing from the new battery today,” the old man will add, indifferently spitting on his hand. - Well, come on, Mishka, we’ll move the longboat. “And your skiff moves forward faster along the wide swell of the bay, actually overtakes the heavy longboat, on which some coolies are piled and unevenly rowed by clumsy soldiers, and lands between many moored boats of all kinds at the Count’s pier.

Crowds of gray soldiers, black sailors and colorful women are noisily moving on the embankment. Women are selling rolls, Russian men with samovars are shouting hot sbiten, and right there on the first steps are lying rusty cannonballs, bombs, buckshot and cast-iron cannons of various calibers. A little further large area, on which some huge beams, cannons, and sleeping soldiers are lying; there are horses, carts, green guns and boxes, infantry boxes; soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children, merchants are moving; carts with hay, bags and barrels drive by; Here and there a Cossack and an officer on horseback will pass, a general on a droshky. To the right, the street is blocked by a barricade, on which there are some small cannons in the embrasures, and a sailor sits near them, smoking a pipe. To the left is a beautiful house with Roman numerals on the pediment, under which stand soldiers and bloody stretchers - everywhere you see the unpleasant traces of a military camp. Your first impression is certainly the most unpleasant: a strange mixture of camp and city life, beautiful city and a dirty bivouac is not only not beautiful, but seems a disgusting mess; It will even seem to you that everyone is scared, fussing, and doesn’t know what to do. But take a closer look at the faces of these people moving around you, and you will understand something completely different. Just look at this Furshtat soldier, who is leading some bay troika to drink and is so calmly purring something under his breath that, obviously, he will not get lost in this heterogeneous crowd, which does not exist for him, but that he is fulfilling his the business, whatever it may be - watering horses or carrying guns - is as calm, self-confident, and indifferent as if all this was happening somewhere in Tula or Saransk. You read the same expression on the face of this officer, who walks by in immaculate white gloves, and in the face of the sailor, who smokes, sitting on the barricade, and in the face of the working soldiers, waiting with a stretcher on the porch former Assembly, and in the face of this girl, who, afraid to get her pink dress wet, jumps across the street on the pebbles.

* * *

About "Sevastopol Stories"

In besieged Sevastopol in the winter, spring and summer of 1855 at the most remote points from one another defensive line They repeatedly noticed a short, lean officer, an ugly face, with deeply sunken, piercing eyes that greedily peered into everything.

He often appeared in places where he was not at all obliged to be on duty, and mainly in the most dangerous trenches and bastions. It was this very little-known young lieutenant and writer who was destined to glorify both himself and the Russian people who gave birth to him - Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. The people who observed him then later wondered how he managed to survive amid the continuous, terrible carnage, when he seemed to be deliberately running into danger every day.

In the young, starting his great life There were two people living in Leo Tolstoy at that time: the defender of a Russian city besieged by enemies and a brilliant artist who peered and listened attentively to everything that happened around him. But there was one feeling in him then, which guided his military and official actions and directed and inspired his gift as a writer: a feeling of love for his homeland, which was in grave trouble, a feeling of the most ardent patriotism in best value this word. Leo Tolstoy never expounded on how much he loved suffering Russia, but this feeling permeates all three Sevastopol stories and every page in each of them. Great artist at the same time, when describing people and events, talking about himself and other people, talking about Russians and the enemy, about officers and soldiers, he sets himself the direct goal of absolutely not embellishing anything, but of giving the reader the truth - and nothing but the truth.

“The hero of my story,” this is how Tolstoy ends his second story, “whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I tried to reproduce in all his beauty and who has always been, is and will be beautiful, is true.”

And now the heroic defense of Sevastopol is resurrected before us under the brilliant pen.

Only three moments were taken, only three pictures were snatched from the desperate, unequal struggle, which for almost a whole year did not subside and was not silent near Sevastopol. But how much these pictures give!

This small book is not only a great work of art, but also a truthful historical document, the testimony of an insightful and impartial eyewitness, and the testimony of a participant precious to the historian.

The first story speaks of Sevastopol in December 1854. This was a moment of some weakening and slowing down of military operations, the interval between the bloody battle of Inkerman (October 24/November 5, 1854) and the battle of Evpatoria (February 5/17, 1855).

But if the Russian field army stationed in the vicinity of Sevastopol could rest a little and recover, then the city of Sevastopol and its garrison did not know a respite even in December and forgot what the word “peace” means.

The bombardment of the city by French and English artillery did not stop. Supervisor engineering defense Sevastopol, Colonel Totleben was in a hurry with the earthworks, with the construction of more and more fortifications.

Soldiers, sailors, workers worked in the snow, in the cold rain without winter clothes, half-starved, and worked so hard that the enemy commander-in-chief French general Canrobert, forty years later, could not remember without delight about these Sevastopol workers, about their selflessness and fearlessness, about the indestructibly persistent soldiers, about these, finally, sixteen thousand sailors, who almost all died along with their three admirals - Kornilov, Nakhimov and Istomin , but did not yield to the lines assigned to them in the defense of Sevastopol.

Tolstoy talks about a sailor with a severed leg, who is being carried on a stretcher, and he asks to stop the stretcher in order to look at the volley of our battery. The original documents preserved in our archives cite any number of exactly the same facts. “Nothing, there are two hundred of us here on the bastion, We still have enough for two more days!“Such answers were given by soldiers and sailors, and none of them even suspected what a courageous person, despising death, one must be in order to talk so simply, calmly, businesslikely about one’s own inevitable death tomorrow or the day after tomorrow! And when we read that in these stories Tolstoy talks about women, then every line of his can be confirmed by a dozen irrefutable documentary evidence.

Every day the wives of workers, soldiers, and sailors brought lunch to their husbands in their bastions, and often one bomb ended the whole family, slurping cabbage soup from the brought pot. These friends, worthy of their husbands, endured terrible injuries and death without complaint. At the height of the assault on June 6/18, the wives of soldiers and sailors carried water and kvass to the bastions - and how many of them died on the spot!

The second story dates back to May 1855, and this story was dated June 26, 1855. Happened in May bloody battle garrison against almost the entire besieging enemy army, which wanted at all costs to capture three advanced fortifications advanced in front of the Malakhov Kurgan: the Selenga and Volyn redoubts and the Kamchatka lunette. These three fortifications had to be abandoned after a desperate battle, but on June 6/18, the Russian defenders of the city won a brilliant victory, repelling the general assault launched by the French and British with heavy losses for the enemy. Tolstoy does not describe these bloody May and June meetings, but it is clear to the reader of the story that quite recently, very large events have just taken place near the besieged city.

Tolstoy, by the way, describes one short truce and listens to peaceful conversations between the Russians and the French. Obviously, he means the truce that was declared by both sides immediately after the battle on May 26/June 7, in order to have time to remove and bury the many corpses that covered the ground near the Kamchatka lunette and both redoubts.

In this description of the truce, the current reader will probably be struck by the picture drawn here by Tolstoy. Can enemies, who have just cut and stabbed each other in a fierce hand-to-hand fight, speak so friendly, with such affection, treat each other so kindly and considerately?

But here, as elsewhere, Tolstoy is strictly truthful and his story is completely consistent with history. When I was working on documents on the defense of Sevastopol, I constantly came across such exact descriptions of truces, and there were several of them during the Crimean War.

Tolstoy's third story concerns Sevastopol in August 1855. This was the last, most terrible month of a long siege, a month of continuous, brutal, day and night bombing, a month that ended with the fall of Sevastopol on August 27, 1855. As in his previous two stories, Tolstoy describes the events as they unfold before the eyes of the two or three participants he selected and observers of everything that happens.

It fell to one of the greatest sons of Russia, Leo Tolstoy, to glorify two Russian national epics with his unsurpassed creations: first Crimean War in “Sevastopol Stories”, and subsequently the victory over Napoleon in “War and Peace”.

E. Tarle

Sevastopol in December

She creakingly dragged herself on camels to the cemetery to bury the bloody dead, with whom she was almost completely covered... You approach the pier - the special smell of coal, manure, dampness and beef strikes you; thousands of different items - firewood, meat, tours 2
Tu?ry – special device braids of twigs filled with earth.

Flour, iron, etc. are lying in a heap near the pier; soldiers of different regiments, with bags and guns, without bags and without guns, crowd here, smoking, cursing, dragging loads onto the steamer, which, smoking, stands near the platform; free skiffs filled with all kinds of people - soldiers, sailors, merchants, women - moor and cast off from the pier.

- To Grafskaya, your honor? Please, - two or three retired sailors offer their services to you, getting up from their skiffs.

And the sunken ships, from which here and there the black ends of the masts stick out sadly, and at the distant enemy fleet looming on the crystal horizon of the sea, and at the foaming streams in which salt bubbles, lifted by the oars, jump; you listen to the uniform sounds of oar strikes, the sounds of voices reaching you across the water, and the majestic sounds of shooting, which, as it seems to you, is intensifying in Sevastopol.

- Your honor! right below Kistentina 4
The ship "Constantine". ( Note L. N. Tolstoy.)

Keep,” the old sailor will tell you, turning back to check the direction you are giving the boat, “right rudder.”

“And it still has all the guns,” the white-haired guy will note, walking past the ship and looking at it.

“But of course: it’s new, Kornilov lived on it,” the old man will note, also looking at the ship.

- This He“It’s firing now from the new battery,” the old man will add, indifferently spitting on his hand. - Well, come on, Mishka, we’ll move the longboat. “And your skiff moves forward faster along the wide swell of the bay, actually overtakes the heavy longboat, on which some coolies are piled and unevenly rowed by clumsy soldiers, and lands between many moored boats of all kinds at the Count’s pier.

Crowds of gray soldiers, black sailors and colorful women are noisily moving on the embankment. Women are selling rolls, Russian men with samovars are shouting: sbiten hot5
Hot sbiten is a drink made from honey and spices.

And right there on the first steps there are rusted cannonballs, bombs, buckshot and cast iron cannons of various calibers. A little further there is a large area on which some huge beams, cannon machines, and sleeping soldiers are lying; there are horses, carts, green guns and boxes, infantry goats; soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children, merchants are moving; carts with hay, bags and barrels drive by; Here and there a Cossack and an officer on horseback will pass, a general on a droshky. To the right, the street is blocked by a barricade, on which there are some small cannons in the embrasures, and a sailor sits near them, smoking a pipe. To the left is a beautiful house with Roman numerals on the pediment, under which stand soldiers and bloody stretchers - everywhere you see the unpleasant traces of a military camp. Your first impression is certainly the most unpleasant: the strange mixture of camp and city life, a beautiful city and a dirty bivouac is not only not beautiful, but seems like a disgusting mess; It will even seem to you that everyone is scared, fussing, and doesn’t know what to do. But take a closer look at the faces of these people moving around you, and you will understand something completely different. Just look at this Furshtat soldier 6
Furshtat soldier is a soldier from the convoy unit.

Who is leading some bay troika to drink and is so calmly purring something under his breath that, obviously, he will not get lost in this heterogeneous crowd, which does not exist for him, but that he is doing his job, whatever it may be - watering horses or carrying guns - just as calmly, self-confidently, and indifferently as if all this was happening somewhere in Tula or Saransk. You read the same expression on the face of this officer, who walks past in immaculate white gloves, and in the face of the sailor, who smokes, sitting on the barricade, and in the face of the working soldiers, waiting with a stretcher on the porch of the former Assembly, and in the face of this girl , who, afraid to get her pink dress wet, jumps across the street on the pebbles.

Yes! you will certainly be disappointed if you are entering Sevastopol for the first time. In vain will you look for traces of fussiness, confusion or even enthusiasm, readiness for death, determination on even one face - there is none of this: you see everyday people, calmly busy with everyday business, so perhaps you will reproach yourself for being too enthusiastic, doubt a little the validity of the concept of the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol, which you formed from stories, descriptions and sights and sounds from the North side. But before you doubt, go to the bastions 7
Bastion - five-sided defensive fortification, consisting of two faces (front sides), two flanks ( sides) and gorzhi (back part).

Look at the defenders of Sevastopol at the very place of defense, or, better yet, go directly opposite to this house, which was formerly the Sevastopol Assembly and on the porch of which there are soldiers with stretchers - you will see the defenders of Sevastopol there, you will see there terrible and sad, great and funny, but amazing spectacles that elevate the soul.

You enter the large Assembly hall. As soon as you opened the door, the sight and smell of forty or fifty amputees and the most seriously wounded patients, alone in their beds, mostly on the floor, suddenly strikes you. Do not believe the feeling that keeps you on the threshold of the hall - this is a bad feeling - go forward, do not be ashamed of the fact that you seem to have arrived look to the sufferers, do not be ashamed to approach and talk to them: the unfortunate love to see a human sympathetic face, they love to talk about their suffering and hear words of love and sympathy. You walk through the middle of the beds and look for a less stern and suffering person, whom you decide to approach to talk.

-Where are you wounded? - you ask hesitantly and timidly of one old, emaciated soldier, who, sitting on a bed, watches you with a good-natured look and seems to invite you to come to him. I say, “You ask timidly,” because suffering, in addition to deep sympathy, for some reason inspires fear of offending and high respect for the one who endures it.

“In the leg,” the soldier answers; but at this very time you yourself notice from the folds of the blanket that his legs are not above the knee. “Thank God now,” he adds, “I want to be discharged.”

- How long have you been injured?

- Yes, the sixth week has begun, your honor!

- What, does it hurt you now?

- No, now it doesn’t hurt, nothing; It’s just that my calf seems to ache when there’s bad weather, otherwise it’s nothing.

- How were you wounded?

- On the fifth baksion, your honor, like the first bandit was: he aimed the gun, began to retreat, in a sort of manner, to another embrasure, like He will hit me on the leg, just like I stepped into a hole. Lo and behold, there are no legs.

“Didn’t it really hurt in that first minute?”

- Nothing; I just felt like they hit me in the leg with something hot.

- Well, what then?

- And then nothing; As soon as they began to stretch the skin, it felt as if it was raw. This is the first thing, your honor, don't think too much: no matter what you think, it’s nothing to you. Everything depends on what a person thinks.

At this time, a woman in a gray striped dress and a black scarf comes up to you; she intervenes in your conversation with the sailor and begins to tell about him, about his suffering, about the desperate situation in which he was for four weeks, about how, having been wounded, he stopped the stretcher in order to look at the volley of our battery, like the great The princes spoke to him and granted him twenty-five rubles, and he told them that he wanted to go to the bastion again in order to teach the young, if he himself could no longer work. Saying all this in one breath, this woman looks first at you, then at the sailor, who, turning away and as if not listening to her, is pinching lint on his pillow 8
Korpiya - threads plucked from clean rags, which were used for bandaging instead of cotton wool.

And her eyes sparkle with some special delight.

- This is my mistress, your honor! - the sailor remarks to you with such an expression as if he is saying: “Please excuse her. You know, it’s a woman’s thing to say stupid words.”

You begin to understand the defenders of Sevastopol; For some reason you feel ashamed of yourself in front of this person. You would like to say too much to him to express your sympathy and surprise; but you cannot find the words or are dissatisfied with those that come to your mind - and you silently bow before this silent, unconscious greatness and fortitude, this modesty before your own dignity.

“Well, God grant you to get well soon,” you tell him and stop in front of another patient who is lying on the floor and, as it seems, is awaiting death in unbearable suffering.

He is blond, with a plump and pale face Human. He lies on his back, thrown back left hand, in a position expressing severe suffering. The dry, open mouth hardly lets out wheezing breath; blue pewter eyes are rolled up, and the rest of his right hand, wrapped in bandages, sticks out from under the tangled blanket. Heavy smell dead body it strikes you more powerfully, and the consuming inner heat that penetrates all the members of the sufferer seems to penetrate you too.

- What?, is he unconscious? - you ask the woman who follows you and looks at you affectionately, as if you were a family member.

“No, he can still hear, but it’s very bad,” she adds in a whisper. “I gave him tea today - well, even though it’s a stranger, you still have to have pity - but he barely drank it.”

- How do you feel? – you ask him.

- My heart is burning.

A little further on you see an old soldier changing his linen. His face and body brown and thin as a skeleton. He has no arm at all: it is peeled off at the shoulder. He sits cheerfully, he has gained weight; but from the dead, dull look, from the terrible thinness and wrinkles of the face, you see that this is a creature that has already suffered the best part of its life.

On the other side, you will see on the bed the pained, pale and tender face of a woman, on which a feverish blush plays all over her cheek.

“It was our sailor girl who was hit in the leg by a bomb on the fifth,” your guidebook will tell you, “she was taking her husband to the bastion for dinner.”

- Well, they cut it off?

“They cut it off above the knee.”

Now, if your nerves are strong, go through the door to the left: dressings and operations are performed in that room. You will see doctors there with bloody hands up to the elbows and pale, gloomy faces, busy around the bed, on which, with with open eyes and speaking as if in delirium, meaningless, sometimes simple and touching words, lies wounded under the influence of chloroform. Doctors are engaged in the disgusting but beneficial business of amputations. You will see how a sharp curved knife enters the white healthy body; you will see how the wounded man suddenly comes to his senses with a terrible, tearing scream and curses; you will see the paramedic throw his severed hand into the corner; you will see how another wounded man lies on a stretcher in the same room and, looking at the operation of a comrade, writhes and groans not so much from physical pain as from the moral suffering of waiting - you will see terrible, soul-shattering sights; you will see the war not in a correct, beautiful and brilliant system, with music and drumming, with fluttering banners and prancing generals, but you will see the war in its true expression - in blood, in suffering, in death...

Leaving this house of suffering, you will certainly experience a joyful feeling, you will breathe more fully into yourself fresh air, you will feel pleasure in the consciousness of your health, but at the same time, in the contemplation of these sufferings, you will gain the consciousness of your insignificance and calmly, without hesitation, you will go to the bastions...

“What does the death and suffering of such an insignificant worm like me mean in comparison with so many deaths and so many sufferings? “But the sight of a clear sky, a brilliant sun, a beautiful city, an open church and military people moving in different directions will soon lead your spirit to normal condition frivolity, small worries and passion for the present.

You will come across, perhaps from the church, the funeral of some officer, with a pink coffin and music and fluttering banners; Perhaps the sounds of shooting from the bastions will reach your ears, but this will not lead you to your previous thoughts; the funeral will seem to you a very beautiful warlike spectacle, the sounds – very beautiful warlike sounds, and you will not connect with either this sight or these sounds a clear thought, transferred to yourself, about suffering and death, as you did at the dressing station.

The morning dawn is just beginning to color the sky above Sapun Mountain; the dark blue surface of the sea has already thrown off the darkness of the night and is waiting for the first ray to sparkle with a cheerful shine; it blows cold and fog from the bay; there is no snow - everything is black, but the sharp morning frost grabs your face and crackles under your feet, and the distant, incessant roar of the sea, occasionally interrupted by rolling shots in Sevastopol, alone disturbs the silence of the morning. On ships the eighth glass sounds dully. In the North, daytime activity is gradually beginning to replace the tranquility of the night: where the shift of guards passed, rattling their guns; where the doctor is already rushing to the hospital; where the soldier crawled out of the dugout, washed his tanned face with icy water and, turning to the blushing east, quickly crossed himself, praying to God; where the high is heavy Madjara she dragged herself creakingly on camels to the cemetery to bury the bloody dead, with whom she was almost completely covered... You approach the pier - the special smell of coal, manure, dampness and beef strikes you; thousands of different objects - firewood, meat, aurochs, flour, iron, etc. - lie in a heap near the pier; soldiers of different regiments, with bags and guns, without bags and without guns, crowd here, smoking, cursing, dragging loads onto the steamer, which, smoking, stands near the platform; free skiffs filled with all kinds of people - soldiers, sailors, merchants, women - moor and cast off from the pier. - To Grafskaya, your honor? Please, - two or three retired sailors offer their services to you, getting up from their skiffs. You choose the one that is closest to you, step over the half-rotten corpse of some bay horse, which is lying in the mud near the boat, and go to the helm. You set sail from the shore. All around you is the sea, already shining in the morning sun, in front of you is an old sailor in a camel coat and a young white-headed boy, who are silently working diligently with the oars. You look at the striped hulks of ships scattered near and far across the bay, and at the small black dots of boats moving across the brilliant azure, and at the beautiful light buildings of the city, painted with the pink rays of the morning sun, visible on the other side, and at the foaming white line booms and sunken ships, from which here and there the black ends of the masts sadly stick out, and at the distant enemy fleet looming on the crystal horizon of the sea, and at the foaming streams in which salt bubbles, lifted by the oars, jump; you listen to the uniform sounds of oar strikes, the sounds of voices reaching you across the water, and the majestic sounds of shooting, which, as it seems to you, is intensifying in Sevastopol. It cannot be that, at the thought that you are in Sevastopol, feelings of some kind of courage and pride do not penetrate your soul, and that the blood does not begin to circulate faster in your veins... - Your honor! keep straight under Kistentin,” the old sailor will tell you, turning back to check the direction you are giving the boat, “right rudder.” “But it still has all the guns,” the white-haired guy will note, walking past the ship and looking at it. “But of course: it’s new, Kornilov lived on it,” the old man will note, also looking at the ship. - See where it broke! - the boy will say after a long silence, looking at the white cloud of diverging smoke that suddenly appeared high above the South Bay and was accompanied by the sharp sound of a bomb exploding. “He’s the one firing from the new battery today,” the old man will add, indifferently spitting on his hand. - Well, come on, Mishka, we’ll move the longboat. “And your skiff moves forward faster along the wide swell of the bay, actually overtakes the heavy longboat, on which some coolies are piled and awkward soldiers are rowing unevenly, and lands between the many moored boats of all kinds at the Count’s pier.” Crowds of gray soldiers, black sailors and colorful women are noisily moving on the embankment. Women are selling rolls, Russian men with samovars are shouting: hot sbiten, and right there on the first steps there are rusted cannonballs, bombs, grapeshots and cast iron cannons of various calibers. A little further there is a large area on which some huge beams, cannon machines, and sleeping soldiers are lying; there are horses, carts, green guns and boxes, infantry goats; soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children, merchants are moving; carts with hay, bags and barrels drive by; Here and there a Cossack and an officer on horseback will pass, a general on a droshky. To the right, the street is blocked by a barricade, on which there are some small cannons in the embrasures, and a sailor sits near them, smoking a pipe. To the left is a beautiful house with Roman numerals on the pediment, under which stand soldiers and bloody stretchers - everywhere you see the unpleasant traces of a military camp. Your first impression is certainly the most unpleasant; the strange mixture of camp and city life, a beautiful city and a dirty bivouac is not only not beautiful, but seems a disgusting disorder; It will even seem to you that everyone is scared, fussing, and doesn’t know what to do. But take a closer look at the faces of these people moving around you, and you will understand something completely different. Just look at this Furshtat soldier, who is leading some bay troika to drink and is so calmly purring something under his breath that, obviously, he will not get lost in this heterogeneous crowd, which does not exist for him, but that he is fulfilling his the business, whatever it may be - watering horses or carrying guns - is as calm, self-confident, and indifferent as if all this was happening somewhere in Tula or Saransk. You read the same expression on the face of this officer, who walks past in immaculate white gloves, and in the face of the sailor, who smokes, sitting on the barricade, and in the face of the working soldiers, waiting with a stretcher on the porch of the former Assembly, and in the face of this girl , who, afraid to get her pink dress wet, jumps across the street on the pebbles. Yes! you will certainly be disappointed if you are entering Sevastopol for the first time. In vain will you look for traces of fussiness, confusion or even enthusiasm, readiness for death, determination on even one face - there is none of this: you see everyday people, calmly engaged in everyday affairs, so perhaps you will reproach yourself for being too enthusiastic, doubt a little the validity of the concept of the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol, which you formed from stories, descriptions and sights and sounds from the North side. But before you doubt, go to the bastions, see the defenders of Sevastopol at the very place of defense, or, better yet, go directly opposite to this house, which was formerly the Sevastopol Assembly and on the porch of which there are soldiers with stretchers - you will see the defenders of Sevastopol there, you will see terrible and sad, great and funny, but amazing, soul-elevating spectacles. You enter the large Assembly hall. As soon as you open the door, the sight and smell of forty or fifty amputation and most seriously wounded patients, alone on beds, mostly on the floor, suddenly strikes you. Don’t believe the feeling that keeps you on the threshold of the hall - this is a bad feeling - go forward, don’t be ashamed that you seem to have come to look at the sufferers, don’t be ashamed to come up and talk to them: the unfortunate love to see a human sympathetic face, they love to tell about your suffering and hear words of love and sympathy. You walk through the middle of the beds and look for a less stern and suffering person, whom you decide to approach to talk. -Where are you wounded? - you ask hesitantly and timidly of one old, emaciated soldier, who, sitting on a bed, watches you with a good-natured look and seems to be inviting you to come to him. I say, “You ask timidly,” because suffering, in addition to deep sympathy, for some reason inspires fear of offending and high respect for the one who endures it. “In the leg,” the soldier answers; but at this very time you yourself notice from the folds of the blanket that his legs are not above the knee. “Thank God now,” he adds, “I want to be discharged.” - How long have you been injured? - Yes, the sixth week has begun, your honor! - What, does it hurt you now? - No, now it doesn’t hurt, nothing; It’s just that my calf seems to ache when there’s bad weather, otherwise it’s nothing. - How were you wounded? - On the fifth baksion, your honor, it was like the first bandit: he aimed the gun, began to retreat, in a sort of manner, to another embrasure, when he hit me in the leg, it was exactly like he stepped into a hole. Lo and behold, there are no legs. “Didn’t it really hurt in that first minute?” - Nothing; I just felt like they hit me in the leg with something hot.- Well, what then? - And then nothing; As soon as they began to stretch the skin, it felt as if it was raw. This is the first thing, your honor, don't think too much: no matter what you think, it’s nothing to you. Everything depends on what a person thinks. At this time, a woman in a gray striped dress and a black scarf comes up to you; she intervenes in your conversation with the sailor and begins to tell about him, about his suffering, about the desperate situation in which he was for four weeks, about how, having been wounded, he stopped the stretcher in order to look at the volley of our battery, like the great The princes spoke to him and granted him twenty-five rubles, and he told them that he wanted to go to the bastion again in order to teach the young, if he himself could no longer work. Saying all this in one breath, this woman looks first at you, then at the sailor, who, turning away and as if not listening to her, is pinching lint on his pillow, and her eyes sparkle with some special delight. - This is my mistress, your honor! - the sailor remarks to you with such an expression as if he was saying: “Please excuse her. It’s common knowledge that it’s a woman’s business to say stupid things.” You begin to understand the defenders of Sevastopol; For some reason you feel ashamed of yourself in front of this person. You would like to say too much to him to express your sympathy and surprise; but you cannot find the words or are dissatisfied with those that come to your mind - and you silently bow before this silent, unconscious greatness and fortitude, this modesty before your own dignity. “Well, God grant you to get well soon,” you tell him and stop in front of another patient who is lying on the floor and, as it seems, is awaiting death in unbearable suffering. He is a blond man with a plump and pale face. He lies supine, with his left arm thrown back, in a position expressing severe suffering. The dry, open mouth hardly lets out wheezing breath; blue pewter eyes are rolled up, and the rest of his right hand, wrapped in bandages, sticks out from under the tangled blanket. The heavy smell of a dead body strikes you more strongly, and the consuming internal heat that penetrates all the members of the sufferer seems to penetrate you too. - What, is he unconscious? - you ask the woman who follows you and looks at you affectionately, as if you were a family member. “No, he can still hear, but it’s very bad,” she adds in a whisper. “I gave him tea today—well, even though he’s a stranger, you still have to have pity—but he barely drank.” - How do you feel? - you ask him. The wounded man turns his pupils towards your voice, but does not see or understand you. - My heart is burning. A little further on you see an old soldier changing his linen. His face and body are some kind of brown and thin, like a skeleton. He has no arm at all: it is peeled off at the shoulder. He sits cheerfully, he has gained weight; but from the dead, dull look, from the terrible thinness and wrinkles of the face, you see that this is a creature that has already suffered the best part of its life. On the other side, you will see on the bed the pained, pale and tender face of a woman, on which a feverish blush plays all over her cheek. “It was our sailor girl who was hit in the leg by a bomb on the fifth,” your guidebook will tell you, “she was taking her husband to the bastion for dinner.” - Well, they cut it off? — They cut it off above the knee. Now, if your nerves are strong, go through the door to the left: dressings and operations are performed in that room. You will see there doctors with bloody hands up to the elbows and pale, gloomy faces, busy around the bed on which, with open eyes and speaking, as if in delirium, meaningless, sometimes simple and touching words, lies a wounded man under the influence of chloroform. Doctors are engaged in the disgusting but beneficial business of amputations. You will see how a sharp curved knife enters a white healthy body; you will see how the wounded man suddenly comes to his senses with a terrible, tearing scream and curses; you will see the paramedic throw his severed hand into the corner; you will see how another wounded man lies on a stretcher in the same room and, looking at the operation of a comrade, writhes and groans not so much from physical pain as from the moral suffering of waiting - you will see terrible, soul-shattering sights; you will see war not in a correct, beautiful and brilliant system, with music and drumming, with fluttering banners and prancing generals, but you will see war in its true expression - in blood, in suffering, in death... Coming out of this house of suffering, you will certainly experience a joyful feeling, breathe in the fresh air more fully, feel pleasure in the consciousness of your health, but at the same time, in the contemplation of these sufferings, you will gain the consciousness of your insignificance and calmly, without hesitation, you will go to the bastions... “What is the death and suffering of such an insignificant worm like me, compared with so many deaths and so many sufferings?” But the sight of a clear sky, a brilliant sun, a beautiful city, an open church and military people moving in different directions will soon bring your spirit to a normal state of frivolity, small worries and passion for the present alone. You will come across, perhaps from the church, the funeral of some officer, with a pink coffin and music and fluttering banners; Perhaps the sounds of shooting from the bastions will reach your ears, but this will not lead you to your previous thoughts; the funeral will seem to you a very beautiful warlike spectacle, the sounds - very beautiful warlike sounds, and you will not connect either with this spectacle or with these sounds a clear thought, transferred to yourself, about suffering and death, as you did at the dressing station. After passing the church and the barricade, you will enter the busiest inner life part of the city. On both sides there are signs of shops and taverns. Merchants, women in hats and headscarves, dapper officers - everything tells you about the strength of spirit, self-confidence, and safety of the inhabitants. Go to the tavern on the right if you want to listen to the talk of sailors and officers: there are probably stories about this night, about Fenka, about the case of the twenty-fourth, about how expensive and bad the cutlets are served, and about how he was killed so-and-so comrade. - Damn it, how bad things are today! - says the blond, beardless man in a deep voice naval officer ik in a green knitted scarf. - Where are we? - another asks him. “On the fourth bastion,” the young officer answers, and you will certainly look at the fair-haired officer with great attention and even some respect when he says: “on the fourth bastion.” His too much swagger, waving of his arms, loud laughter and voice, which seemed impudent to you, will seem to you that special bratty mood of spirit that other very young people acquire after danger; but still you will think that he will tell you how bad it is on the fourth bastion from bombs and bullets: it hasn’t happened at all! It's bad because it's dirty. “You can’t go to the battery,” he will say, pointing to the boots, covered with mud above the calves. “And today my best gunner was killed, hit right in the forehead,” another will say. “Who is this? Mityukhin? - “No... But what, will they give me veal? Here are the rascals! - he will add to the tavern servant. - Not Mityukhin, but Abrosimova. Such a good fellow - he was in six sorties.” On the other corner of the table, behind plates of cutlets with peas and a bottle of sour Crimean wine called “Bordeaux,” sit two infantry officers: one, young, with a red collar and two stars on his overcoat, is telling the other, old, with and without a black collar asterisks, about the Alma case. The first one has already drunk a little, and judging by the stops that occur in his story, by the hesitant look expressing doubt that they believe him, and most importantly, that the role he played in all this is too great, and everything is too scary, noticeable, that it deviates greatly from the strict narrative of truth. But you have no time for these stories, which you will listen to for a long time in all corners of Russia: you want to quickly go to the bastions, specifically to the fourth, about which you have been told so much and in so many different ways. When someone says that he was on the fourth bastion, he says it with special pleasure and pride; when someone says: “I’m going to the fourth bastion,” a little excitement or too much indifference is certainly noticeable in him; when they want to make fun of someone, they say; “You should be placed on the fourth bastion”; when they meet a stretcher and ask: “Where from?” - for the most part they answer: “From the fourth bastion.” In general, there are two completely different opinions about this terrible bastion: those who have never been on it and who are convinced that the fourth bastion is a sure grave for everyone who goes to it, and those who live on it, like the fair-haired midshipman, and who, speaking about the fourth bastion , they will tell you whether it is dry or dirty there, warm or cold in the dugout, etc. In the half hour that you spent in the tavern, the weather managed to change: the fog spreading over the sea gathered into gray, boring, damp clouds and covered the sun; some kind of sad drizzle pours down from above and wets the roofs, sidewalks and soldiers' greatcoats... After passing another barricade, you exit the doors to the right and go up the large street. Behind this barricade, the houses on both sides of the street are uninhabited, there are no signs, the doors are closed with boards, the windows are broken, where the corner of the wall is broken, where the roof is broken. The buildings seem to be old, veterans who have experienced all kinds of grief and need, and seem to look at you proudly and somewhat contemptuously. Along the way, you stumble over strewn cannonballs and into holes with water dug in the stone ground by bombs. Along the street you meet and overtake teams of soldiers, soldiers, and officers; Occasionally a woman or child is seen, but the woman is no longer wearing a hat, but a sailor girl in an old fur coat and soldier’s boots. Walking further along the street and going down under a small curve, you notice around you no longer houses, but some strange piles of ruins - stones, boards, clay, logs; ahead of yourself by steep mountain you see some kind of black, dirty space, pitted with ditches, and it is in front that there is the fourth bastion... Here there are even fewer people, women are not visible at all, the soldiers are walking quickly, there are drops of blood along the road, and you will certainly meet four here a soldier with a stretcher and on the stretcher a pale yellowish face and a bloody overcoat. If you ask: “Where are you wounded?” - the bearers will angrily, without turning to you, say: in the leg or in the arm, if he is slightly wounded; or they will remain sternly silent if the head is not visible from behind the stretcher and he is already dead or seriously wounded. The nearby whistle of a cannonball or bomb, just as you are climbing the mountain, will give you an unpleasant shock. You will suddenly understand, and in a completely different way than you understood before, the meaning of those sounds of gunfire that you listened to in the city. Some quietly joyful memory will suddenly flash in your imagination; your own personality will begin to occupy you more than observations; you will become less attentive to everything around you, and some unpleasant feeling of indecision will suddenly take possession of you. Despite this petty voice at the sight of danger, which suddenly spoke inside you, you, especially looking at the soldier who, waving his arms and slipping downhill, through the liquid mud, trots and laughs, runs past you - you silence this voice, involuntarily straighten your chest, raise your head higher and climb up the slippery clay mountain. You have just climbed a little up the mountain, rifle bullets begin to buzz from right and left, and you may be wondering whether you should go along the trench that runs parallel to the road; but this trench is filled with such liquid, yellow, stinking mud above the knee that you will certainly choose the road along the mountain, especially since you see everyone is walking along the road. After walking about two hundred steps, you enter a pitted, dirty space, surrounded on all sides by aurochs, embankments, cellars, platforms, dugouts, on which large cast-iron guns stand and cannonballs lie in regular heaps. It all seems piled up without any purpose, connection or order. Where a bunch of sailors are sitting on the battery, where in the middle of the platform, half drowned in the mud, lies broken cannon, where an infantry soldier, with a gun, crosses the batteries and with difficulty pulls his feet out of the sticky mud. But everywhere, from all sides and in all places, you see shards, unexploded bombs, cannonballs, traces of the camp, and all this is submerged in liquid, viscous mud. It seems to you that you hear the impact of a cannonball not far from you, from all sides you seem to hear various sounds bullets - buzzing like a bee, whistling, fast or screeching like a string - you hear the terrible roar of a shot, stunning you all, and which seems to you something terribly terrible. “So here it is, the fourth bastion, here it is, this is a terrible, truly terrible place!” - you think to yourself, feeling a small sense of pride and great feeling suppressed fear. But be disappointed: this is not the fourth bastion yet. This is the Yazonovsky redoubt - a relatively very safe place and not at all scary. To go to the fourth bastion, take the right along this narrow trench along which an infantry soldier, bending down, wandered. Along this trench you will perhaps again meet stretchers, a sailor, soldiers with shovels, you will see mine conductors, dugouts in the mud, into which, bent over, only two people can fit, and there you will see the soldiers of the Black Sea battalions, who change their shoes there, eat, they smoke pipes, live, and you will again see everywhere the same stinking dirt, traces of the camp and abandoned cast iron in all kinds of forms. After walking another three hundred steps, you again come out to the battery - to an area dug with pits and furnished with tours filled with earth, guns on platforms and earthen ramparts. Here you will see maybe five sailors playing cards under the parapet, and a naval officer who, noticing a new, curious person in you, will be happy to show you his farm and everything that might be interesting to you. This officer so calmly rolls up a cigarette out of yellow paper while sitting on a gun, so calmly walks from one embrasure to another, speaks to you so calmly, without the slightest affectation, that, despite the bullets that are buzzing above you more often than before, you You yourself become cool-headed and carefully question and listen to the officer’s stories. This officer will tell you - but only if you ask him - about the bombardment on the fifth, he will tell you how on his battery only one gun could work, and out of all the servants there were eight people left, and how, nevertheless, on the next morning, on the sixth , He fired from all weapons; will tell you how on the fifth a bomb hit a sailor's dugout and killed eleven people; From the embrasure he will show you the enemy’s batteries and trenches, which are no more than thirty to forty fathoms away. I am afraid of one thing, that under the influence of the buzzing of bullets, leaning out of the embrasure to look at the enemy, you will not see anything, and if you see, you will be very surprised that this white rocky rampart, which is so close to you and on which white smoke flares, this -that white shaft is the enemy - as the soldiers and sailors say. It may even very well be that a naval officer, out of vanity or just to please himself, will want to shoot a little in front of you. “Send the gunner and the servant to the cannon,” and about fourteen sailors briskly, cheerfully, some putting a pipe in their pocket, some chewing a cracker, tapping their heeled boots on the platform, approached the cannon and loaded it. Look at the faces, at the posture and at the movements of these people: in every muscle, in the width of these shoulders, in the thickness of these legs, shod in huge boots, in every movement, calm, firm, unhurried, these main features are visible that make up the strength of the Russian, - simplicity and stubbornness; but here on every face it seems to you that the danger, anger and suffering of war, in addition to these main signs, have laid traces of consciousness of one’s dignity and high thoughts and feelings. Suddenly, a most terrible, shocking not only the ear organs, but your entire being, a rumble strikes you so that you tremble with your whole body. Following this, you hear the retreating whistle of a shell, and thick powder smoke obscures you, the platform and the black figures of the sailors moving along it. On the occasion of this shot of ours, you will hear various talk from the sailors and see their animation and the manifestation of a feeling that you did not expect to see, perhaps this is a feeling of anger, revenge on the enemy, which lurks in the soul of everyone. "At the very abrasion horrible; Looks like they killed two... there they are,” you will hear joyful exclamations. “But he’ll get angry: now he’ll let him come here,” someone will say; and indeed, soon after this you will see lightning and smoke ahead of you; the sentry standing on the parapet will shout: “Pu-u-ushka!” And after this, the cannonball will squeal past you, plop into the ground and throw up splashes of dirt and stones around itself like a funnel. The battery commander will be angry about this cannonball, order the second and third guns to be loaded, the enemy will also respond to us, and you will experience interesting feelings, hear and see interesting things. The sentry will shout again: “Cannon!” - and you will hear the same sound and blow, the same splashes, or shout: “Markela!” - and you will hear a uniform, rather pleasant and one with which the thought of the terrible is difficult to connect, the whistling of a bomb, you will hear this whistling approaching you and accelerating, then you will see a black ball, a blow to the ground, a tangible, ringing explosion of a bomb. With a whistle and a squeal, fragments will then fly away, stones will rustle in the air, and you will be splashed with mud. With these sounds you will experience a strange feeling of pleasure and fear at the same time. The minute a shell, you know, flies at you, it will certainly occur to you that this shell will kill you; but your sense of self-love supports you, and no one notices the knife that cuts your heart. But then, when the shell flew by without hitting you, you come to life, and some joyful, inexpressibly pleasant feeling, but only for a moment, takes possession of you, so that you find some special charm in danger, in this game of life and death ; you want the sentry to shout again and again in his loud, thick voice: “Markela!”, more whistling, a blow and a bomb exploding; but along with this sound you are struck by the groan of a man. You approach the wounded man, who, covered in blood and dirt, has some strange inhuman appearance, at the same time as the stretcher. Part of the sailor's chest was torn out. In the first minutes, on his mud-splattered face one can see only fear and some kind of feigned premature expression of suffering, human in this position; but while they bring him a stretcher and he lies down on his healthy side, you notice that this expression is replaced by an expression of some kind of enthusiasm and a lofty, unspoken thought: his eyes burn brighter, his teeth clench, his head rises higher with an effort; and while he is being lifted, he stops the stretcher and with difficulty, in a trembling voice, says to his comrades: “Sorry, brothers!” - he still wants to say something, and it’s clear that he wants to say something touching, but he only repeats again: “Sorry, brothers!” At this time, a fellow sailor approaches him, puts a cap on his head, which the wounded man holds out to him, and calmly, indifferently, waving his arms, returns to his gun. “It’s like seven or eight people every day,” the naval officer tells you, responding to the expression of horror on your face, yawning and rolling up a cigarette from yellow paper...

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So, you saw the defenders of Sevastopol at the very place of defense and you go back, for some reason not paying attention to the cannonballs and bullets that continue to whistle along the entire road to the destroyed theater - you walk with a calm, elevated spirit. The main, gratifying conviction that you received was the conviction of the impossibility of taking Sevastopol, and not only taking Sevastopol, but shaking the power of the Russian people anywhere - and you did not see this impossibility in this multitude of traverses, parapets, and intricately woven trenches , mines and guns, one on top of the other, of which you did not understand anything, but you saw it in the eyes, speeches, techniques, in what is called the spirit of the defenders of Sevastopol. What they do, they do so simply, with so little effort and effort, that you are convinced that they can still do a hundred times more... they can do everything. You understand that the feeling that makes them work is not the feeling of pettiness, vanity, forgetfulness that you yourself experienced, but some other feeling, more powerful, which made them people who also calmly live under the cannonballs, with one hundred accidents of death instead of the one to which all people are subject, and living in these conditions amid incessant labor, vigil and dirt. Because of the cross, because of the name, because of the threat, people cannot accept these terrible conditions: there must be another, higher motivating reason. And this reason is a feeling that is rarely manifested, bashful in a Russian, but lies in the depths of everyone’s soul - love for the homeland. Only now are stories about the first times of the siege of Sevastopol, when there were no fortifications, no troops, no physical ability hold him and yet there was not the slightest doubt that he would not surrender to the enemy - about the times when this hero, worthy ancient Greece, - Kornilov, going around the troops, said: “We will die, guys, and we will not give up Sevastopol,” and our Russians, incapable of phrase-mongering, answered: “We will die! hooray!" - only now the stories about these times have ceased to be wonderful for you historical legend, but became a certainty, a fact. You will understand clearly, imagine those people whom you saw now as the heroes who in those hard times They did not fall, but rose in spirit and prepared with pleasure to die, not for the city, but for their homeland. This epic of Sevastopol, of which the Russian people were the hero, will leave great traces in Russia for a long time...

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