The former ancient city of Origo and the present village of Rigovo are located on a high cliff beside the Oka River: besides the rushing water for drinking, the second favorite of Russians in those days was beauty.
Ingvar Igorevich miraculously escaped the knife stabbed by his brother, and built the rest monastery of Our Lady here to commemorate his rescue.
On a clear day, you can see the river beach from here, 35 miles away, on the same cliff, is the tall bell tower of John Abbey.
The superstitious Ba Dou did not destroy the two monasteries.
Yakov petrovich polonsky also took a fancy to this place and regarded it as the only place to go. His will buried him here. We always thought that our souls would fly above the grave and look around the quiet Yuan Ye.
But-there is no dome of the church, and there is no church. Half of the stone wall has been left, and a wooden fence wrapped with barbed wire has been built. On the whole monument, there are telephone poles and ugly scarecrows, all of which are very familiar ... The entrance of the monastery is the duty room. A poster: "For peace among all ethnic groups! -A Russian worker holds an African child in his hand.
we don't seem to understand anything. In the guard shed, an off-duty guard in a shirt explained to us:
"There was a monastery here, the second in the world. The first one seems to be in Rome, and the one in Moscow is the third. There was a children's reformatory here, and the children were ungrateful, tearing down the walls and smashing the icons. Later, the collective farm bought the two churches for 4, rubles. The picture was brick, because the farm wanted to build a 6-row cowshed. I still remember that a whole brick costs 5 kopecks, and a half brick costs 2 kopecks. It's just that those bricks are hard to pry open, and they are all glued together by concrete. An underground tomb was found under the church, where a monk lay. The monk was already a skeleton, but the robe was still good. The two of us tore at the robe, but we didn't tear it ... "
" Excuse me, this map is marked with the tomb of the poet polonsky. Where is this tomb? "
"polonsky can't go there. It's a restricted area. Don't go to his place. What's there to see? Look at the bare monument there? " The guard turned to his wife. "Does polonsky seem to have been poached?"
"Yes, I was dragged to Ryazan." The wife stood on the steps, nodding her head with melon seeds.
The guard himself felt ridiculous:
"That is to say, he was released ..."
At the beginning of the day
At sunrise, about 3 young people ran to the clearing in the forest, their faces facing the sun sparsely, and they began to bend over, wagging their heads and tails, stretching their arms and crossing their legs, and they were busy for a quarter of an hour.
from afar, I thought they were praying.
In our time, no one will be surprised to see a person patiently and attentively attending to his body every day.
However, if he serves his spirit in the same way, he may be * * *.
no, this is not a prayer. This is just morning exercises.
A log of elm
We were sawing firewood. We picked up a log of elm, and we couldn't help crying out: Last year, we cut down this tree, dragged it out with a tractor, cut its trunk into several sections, then carried it by car and boat, covered it with canvas and piled it on the ground, but today, this log of elm still won't surrender!
There are fresh buds on its body, which will be a complete tree or a dense branch.
We have put the log on the support, just like putting it on the guillotine, but we can't make up our mind to saw it around its neck: how can we have the heart to see it? It also wants to live! It wants to live even more than we do!
in Ye Saining's hometown
four similar villages lined up along the road. There is no garden. There is no forest nearby. Rows of slender fences. There are rough and bright colored wood carving window lintels in many places. A dignified pig, weighing several pints, was tickling the faucet in the middle of the street. The well-balanced formation of the geese was suddenly washed away by a speeding bicycle, and the geese made a battle cry to Qi Xin, the shadow of the car. Busy chickens pecked around the streets and backyards, looking for food.
The kiosk in Konstantinovo village is like a small chicken shed. Herring Department store A sticky rectangular candy with stuffing, which was not eaten anywhere else 15 years ago. Hard black bread, which is twice as heavy as that in the city, can't be cut with a knife, but with an axe.
In Ye Saining's cabin, the simple rooms are separated by wooden walls only one person high, and several small rooms, like storage rooms, are not even a room. The garden is a thatched hut without doors. There used to be a bathhouse here. Sergey often came here to hide in the darkness and wrote the first poem. Beyond the haystack is an ordinary wheat field.
I am walking in this village. There are many such villages, and even now, all the residents in these villages are still busy with food, savings and vanity in facing their neighbors. I was walking, suddenly excited: the flame in the sky suddenly descended here one day, and it is still burning my cheek. I walked to the high shore of the Oka River and looked into the distance. I was surprised: Can this long dark bush be magically described as "grouse crying in the forest"? Can the quiet grass by the Oka River be said to be "the accumulation of sunshine in the arms of water"?
What kind of genius did the creator throw here, into this cabin, into the heart of this fighting country boy, so that he found so many materials to express beauty in the fireside, in the corral, in the threshing floor and at the edge of the village, expressing the beauty that people have trampled on for thousands of years but have not found?
We will never die
We have become the most afraid of the dead and death.
If someone dies, we always try our best not to write or visit: we don't know how to talk about death ...
It's ashamed to even talk about the cemetery as a serious matter. No one at work will say, "I'm not free on Sunday. I may go to the cemetery to visit my relatives." Is it a thing to visit people who can't eat or drink?
want to transport the dead from one city to another? Don't be whimsical, no one will provide a carriage for this. Nowadays, there is no band funeral in the city. If you are a nobody, you just have to take a ride with a truck.
I don't know when it started. On Sundays, in our cemetery, people strolled among the graves, singing happily, and hand-held incense burners gave off a strong fragrance. The mood is calmer, and the sense of pain that is doomed to death no longer stirs the heart. The deceased seemed to smile at us through the green tombs: "Nothing! ..... Nothing! "
Now, if the cemetery is still open, a notice will be put up: "Grave owners! To avoid fines, please clean up last year's garbage! " More commonly, beside the stadium, beside the cultural park, graves were removed and bulldozed.
and those who died for the motherland-you and I may still die like this.
Previously, our church listed a festival for these people-Memorial Day for the Dead. The British mourn the martyrs on Mark's Day.
Every nation has such a festival to remember those who died for us. For us, for the people who died the most, but we don't have such a festival.
Take a look at all the victims, who will come to contribute? We lost countless husbands, sons and fiancé s in three wars-you disgusting people, just hide behind that painted stake and leave us alone!
and we, we will never die!
Travel along the Oka River
After walking through the rural roads in the hinterland of Russia, you begin to understand where the key to the quiet Russian scenery is.
the key is in the church. They climbed the hills, crossed the hills, and walked towards the wide rivers like white or red princesses. A well-proportioned and tall bell tower rises above the mediocre straw house and wooden house, and they greet each other from a distance, rising to the same sky from scattered villages that don't face each other. You will never be alone, whether you are walking slowly in the four fields or in a pasture far away from human habitation: on the thick-walled forest, on the piles of hay, on the Yuan Ye in April, there is always Lovecky Church, Ljubic Church or the round top of the bell tower of Gavrilovski Church beckoning to you.
but when you walk into the village, you will find that it is not the living, but the dead who meet you from a distance. The cross has long been pushed down or skewed; The scarred dome of the church exposed the rusty bracket; Weeds grow between the roof and the wall; The cemetery around the church is rarely preserved. Even if it still exists, the cross has been laid down and the grave has been dug. The icon behind the altar has been washed away by rain for decades and covered with obscene words.
There is a big oil drum on the steps in front of the church. Tractors come here to refuel. Or a truck, whose body is rubbing against the door, comes in and loads sacks. There is a machine tool tremor in that church; This seat is hung with an iron lock and silent. The other one, and the other one, became a club with the slogan "Seize the high yield of milk!" Slogans such as "Epic of Peace" and "Great Merit".
People are always selfish and often malicious. However, the bell rang in the evening and floated over the villages, fields and forests.
It reminds people that it's time to get rid of worldly trifles and devote some time or thinking to eternity. This bell is now the only ancient sound left for us, which can make people get rid of giving in to reality.
in these brick buildings and clock towers, our ancestors built all their good wishes and all their understanding of life.
dig, vichika! Come on, don't be afraid!
The movie will be shown at 6 o'clock, and the dance will start at 8 o'clock ...
The bonfire and the swarm of ants
I threw a dead branch into the bonfire and didn't notice that there was a nest full of ants living in the dead branch.
the branches were on fire and crackled. Swarms of ants emerged and ran in despair. They ran above the branches and were convulsed by the flames. I whipped the branch and put it at the edge of the fire. In this way, many ants can be saved. They can climb to the sand and the pine needles.
but strangely, they don't run away from the bonfire.
As soon as they overcome their fears, they turn around and turn in circles. An invisible force is dragging them backward and returning to their lost motherland! Many of them climbed up the burning branches again, ran on the branches, and finally died there.
Sarik
In our yard, a little boy keeps a dog named Sarik. It has been chained since it was a cub.
once, I brought him some chicken bones. The chicken bones were still hot and delicious-just then, the boy let the poor dog walk in the yard. The snow was thick in the yard, and Sarik jumped like a rabbit, with his front foot touching the ground for a while and his feet touching the ground for a while, running from one corner of the yard to another, making his head covered with snow.
furry, it ran to my side, touched my hand, sniffed the bone, and then ran away rubbing against the snow!
It seems to say: I don't need your bones, I just want freedom!
(translated by Liu Wenfei)
Note:
Ba Dou (128—1255), grandson of Genghis Khan, the first ancestor of China, led an expedition to Europe in the 13th century.
polonsky (1819-1898): Russian poet, member of the Communication Academy of Petersburg.
put: a unit of weight in Russia. A pute 16. 38 kilograms.
Sergei: the name of the Soviet poet Ye Saining (1895-1925).
The quotation is a poem by Ye Saining.
The quotation is a poem by Ye Saining.
There was another sentence at the end: "This is the pinnacle of philosophy in the 2th century." Later deleted by the author.
Appreciation
The Poet's Remains, a prose by Russian writer alexandr isayevich solzhenitsyn, is a microcosm of social changes in the Soviet Union. In the form of travel notes, it describes the changes of the former ancient city of Origo-the present village of Rigovo in the process of Russian social transformation, and focuses on two churches in this area. Solzhenitsyn visited the footprints of two local poets, polonsky and Ye Saining. With a lot of metaphors and symbols skillfully interspersed, he vividly outlined a picture that the traditional Russian religious spirit and poetic quality were being swallowed up by the secular values of pleasure and utility.
Political alienation enabled Solzhenitsyn to clear the fog of ideology, seek spiritual resources from Russian traditional religions, and look at all the absurd and cruel things that happened at that time with the poet's unique eyes-the church was destroyed and the sacred things were broken; Poetry is abandoned and poets are exiled; People indulge in material life, or just create more material wealth for enjoyment. This is a universal modern picture, regardless of the east or the west. Max Weber called this process "disenchantment of the world", the disintegration of religious interpretation of the integration of the world and the secularization of social spiritual structure. This process is widely felt in the west and has been explained by theorists countless times. In the Soviet Union, however, only a few outstanding writers like Solzhenitsyn can clearly feel it. When his sensitive Russian soul makes him face the reality, there are always a few nerves that will be touched. When he came to the countryside of Rigovo, he saw that only the ruins of the two monasteries that had stood there for thousands of years were left-people only wanted to tear them down for those solid bricks, saw the remains of the poet polonsky being dragged to other provinces at will, and saw the majestic pigs occupying the streets and the geese cooperating with Qi Xin. He deeply felt that the traditional Russian religious values were completely destroyed and people were completely occupied by the material needs of life itself. "In our time, no one will be surprised to see a person waiting patiently and paying attention to his body every day." "However, if he serves his spirit in the same way, he may be * * *." The "poet's remains" have been dug up and gone to other provinces, and where will the spiritual remains of the whole Russian religious tradition be placed?
Solzhenitsyn also broke people's general imagination of Soviet society. This is not the West, but it doesn't refuse or even have a hidden consciousness of welcoming naked materialism-the wife who is eating melon seeds, the people who do morning exercises, the pigs and chickens in the streets of the poet's hometown, being converted into a church in the workshop, "The movie will be shown at 6 o'clock, and the dance will start at 8 o'clock". There is a paragraph in the article titled "We are not going to die". If the value of life lies in material enjoyment itself, if people refuse his historical existence and freeze the meaning of life in eternal and happy moments.