Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev 1871-1919

Life of Basil of Thebes - Story (1903)

Like an ant - a grain of sand to a grain of sand - Father Vasily built his life: he married, became a priest, gave birth to a son and a daughter. Seven years later, life crumbled to dust. His son drowned in the river, his wife began to drink with grief. Father Vasily does not find peace in the temple either - people shun him, the headman openly despises him. Even on a name day, only the clergy come to him, respectable fellow villagers do not honor the priest with attention. At night, a drunken wife demands affection from him, imploring hoarsely: "Give me back my son, priest! Give me back, you damned one!" And her passion conquers a chaste husband.

A boy is born, in memory of his late brother they call him Vasily. It soon becomes clear that the child is an idiot; life becomes even more unbearable. Before, it seemed to Father Vasily: the earth is tiny, and on it he is alone, huge. Now this land is suddenly inhabited by people, they all go to him for confession, and he, ruthlessly and shamelessly demanding the truth from everyone, repeats with restrained anger: "What can I do? That I am God? Ask him!" He called grief to him - and grief comes and goes from all over the earth, and he is powerless to reduce earthly grief, but only repeats: "Ask him!" - already doubting the desire of God to alleviate human suffering.

One day during Great Lent, a crippled beggar confessed to him. He makes a terrible confession: ten years ago he raped a girl in the forest, strangled her and buried her. The villain told many priests his secret - and no one believed him; he himself began to think that this was an evil tale, and, telling it the next time, he came up with new details and changed the appearance of the poor victim. Father Vasily is the first to believe what he hears, as if he himself had committed a crime. Falling to his knees in front of the killer, the priest shouts: “There is hell on earth, there is hell in heaven! Where is heaven? Are you a man or a worm? Where is your God, why did he leave you? Don’t believe in hell, don’t be afraid! There will be no hell! heaven, with the righteous, with the saints, above all - I’m telling you this!..”

That night, on the eve of Good Friday, Father Vasily confesses to his wife that he cannot go to church. He decides to survive somehow the summer, and in the fall to take off his dignity and leave with his family wherever his eyes look, far, far away ...

This decision brings peace to the house. The soul rests for three months. And at the end of July, when Father Vasily was at the hayfield, a fire breaks out in his house and his wife burns alive.

He wandered for a long time in the garden of the old deacon, who served with him and sheltered with his daughter and son after the fire. And the thoughts of Father Vasily are wonderful: the fire - was it not the same fiery pillar as the one that showed the Jews the way in the desert? God decided to turn his whole life into a desert - is it not so that he, Basil of Thebes, would no longer wander along the old, well-trodden paths? ..

And for the first time in many years, bowing his head humbly, he says that morning: "Thy holy will be done!" - and the people who saw him that morning in the garden meet an unfamiliar, completely new, as from another world, person who asks them with a smile: "Why are you looking at me like that? Am I a miracle?"

Father Vasily sends his daughter to the city to his sister, builds a new house, where he lives alone with his son, reading the Gospel aloud to him and himself, as if for the first time hearing about the healing of the blind man, about the resurrection of Lazarus. In the church, he now serves daily (and before - only on holidays); imposed monastic vows on himself, a strict fast. And this new life of his is even more alarming for fellow villagers. When the peasant Semyon Mosyagin, appointed by Father Vasily as a worker to the church elder, dies, everyone agrees that the priest is to blame.

The headman enters Father Vasily at the altar and directly declares: “Get out of here! You’re causing only misfortune here. Even a chicken doesn’t dare kill itself for no reason, but people are dying because of you.” And then Father Vasily, who had been afraid of the elder all his life, who was the first to take off his hat when meeting him, expels him from the temple, like a biblical prophet, with anger and flame in his gaze...

The funeral service for Seeds takes place on Spirits Day. In the temple - the smell of decay, outside the windows it is dark, like at night. Anxiety runs through the crowd of worshipers. And a thunderstorm breaks out: interrupting the reading of the memorial prayers, Father Vasily laughs silently and triumphantly, like Moses, who has seen God, and, going up to the coffin where the ugly, swollen body lies, loudly proclaims: "I tell you - get up!"

The dead man does not obey him, does not open his eyes, does not rise from the grave. "Do not want?" - Father Vasily shakes the coffin, pushes the dead man out of it. The people run out of the temple in fear, believing that demons have taken possession of their quiet and absurd shepherd. And he continues to cry out to the dead man; but rather the walls will collapse than the dead man will obey him ... Yes, he is not fighting with the dead man - he is fighting with God, in whom he believed infinitely and therefore has the right to demand a miracle!

Seized with rage, Father Vasily runs out of the church and rushes through the village, into the open field, where he lamented more than once his bitter fate, his incinerated life. There, in the middle of the field, the next day the peasants will find him - sprawled in such a position, as if he continued to run even dead ...

The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men - (1906)

An old, corpulent, diseased man sits in a strange house, in a strange bedroom, in a strange armchair, and examines his body with bewilderment, listens to his feelings, tries hard and cannot fully master the thoughts in his head: "Fools! They think that, telling me about the impending assassination attempt on me, telling me the hour when I was to be torn to pieces by a bomb, they delivered me from the fear of death! They, fools, think that they saved me by secretly bringing me and my family to this strange house where I am saved, where I am safe and at peace! It is not death that is terrible, but the knowledge of it. If someone knew for sure the day and hour when he must die, he could not live with this knowledge. And they say to me: "At one o'clock in the afternoon, Your Excellency!.."

The minister, on whom the revolutionaries were preparing an assassination attempt, thinks on that night, which could be his last night, about the bliss of not knowing the end, as if someone had told him that he would never die.

The intruders, detained at the time set by the denunciation with bombs, infernal machines and revolvers at the entrance to the minister's house, spend the last nights and days before hanging, to which they will be hastily sentenced, in equally painful reflections.

How can it be that they, young, strong, healthy, will die? And is it death? “Am I afraid of her, the devil?” one of the five bombers, Sergei Golovin, thinks about death. “I feel sorry for my life! A magnificent thing, no matter what the pessimists say. It didn’t grow, it didn’t grow, but then it suddenly grew - why? .. "

In addition to Sergei, the son of a retired colonel (at the last meeting, his father wished him to meet death like an officer on the battlefield), there are four more in the prison cell. The son of a merchant, Vasya Kashirin, who gives all his strength not to show the horror of death crushing him to the executioners. An unknown named Werner, who was considered the instigator, who has his own mental judgment about death: it doesn’t matter at all whether you killed or didn’t kill, but when you are killed, thousands kill - you alone, they kill out of fear, which means that you won death for you no more. Unknown, nicknamed Musya, looking like a teenage boy, thin and pale, ready at the hour of execution to join the ranks of those bright, holy, best ones who from time immemorial go through torture and execution to the high sky. If she had been shown her body after death, she would have looked at it and said: "It is not me," and the executioners, scientists and philosophers would have retreated with a shudder, saying: "Do not touch this place. It is holy!" The last among those sentenced to hanging was Tanya Kovalchuk, who seemed like a mother to her like-minded people, so caring and loving were her eyes, smile, fears for them. She did not pay any attention to the trial and the sentence, she completely forgot about herself and thought only of others.

With five "politicals" waiting to be hanged on the same crossbar, Estonian Janson, a laborer who barely speaks Russian, convicted of murdering the owner and attempted rape of the mistress (he did all this foolishly, having heard that a similar thing happened on a neighboring farm), and Mikhail Golubets nicknamed Gypsy, the last in a series of atrocities of which was the murder and robbery of three people, and the dark past went into a mysterious depth. Misha himself, with complete frankness, calls himself a robber, flaunts both what he has done and what awaits him now. Janson, on the contrary, is paralyzed by both his deed and the verdict of the court, and repeats the same thing to everyone, putting into one phrase everything that he cannot express: "I don't need to be hanged."

Hours and days are passing. Until the moment when they are gathered together and then taken together out of town, into the March forest - to hang, the convicts, one by one, master the idea, which seems wild, absurd, incredible to everyone in their own way. The mechanical man Werner, who treated life as a complex chess problem, will instantly be cured of contempt for people, disgust even for their appearance: he will rise above the world, as if in a hot air balloon, and will be moved by how beautiful this world is. Musya dreams of one thing: so that people in whose kindness she believes do not feel sorry for her and do not declare her a heroine. She thinks of her comrades, with whom she is destined to die, as friends, into whose house she will enter with greetings on laughing lips. Seryozha exhausts his body with the gymnastics of the German doctor Müller, conquering fear with a keen sense of life in a young flexible body. Vasya Kashirin is close to insanity, all people seem to him like dolls, and, like a drowning man clutching at a straw, he clutches at the words that surfaced in his memory from somewhere in his early childhood: “Joy to all who mourn,” he pronounces them touchingly... but the tenderness immediately evaporates, he barely remembers the candles, the priest in a cassock, the icons and the hated father bowing in the church. And he becomes even more scared. Janson turns into a weak and stupid animal. And only Gypsy, until the very last step towards the gallows, swaggers and grins. He experienced horror only when he saw that everyone was being led to death in pairs, and he would be hanged alone. And then Tanechka Kovalchuk gives way to him in a pair with Musya, and Tsyganok leads her by the arm, warning her and feeling the way to death, as a man should lead a woman.

The sun is rising. They put the bodies in a box. The spring snow is just as soft and fragrant, in which the worn galosh lost by Sergey turns black.

Judas Iscariot - The Story (1907)

Among the disciples of Christ, so open, understandable at first glance, Judas from Carioth stands out not only for his notoriety, but also for his dual appearance: his face seems to be sewn from two halves. One side of the face is constantly moving, dotted with wrinkles, with a black sharp eye, the other is deadly smooth and seems disproportionately large from a wide-open, blind, thorn-covered eye.

When he appeared, none of the apostles noticed. What made Jesus draw him closer to himself and what attracts this Judas to the Teacher are also unanswered questions. Peter, John, Thomas look - and are unable to comprehend this closeness of beauty and ugliness, meekness and vice - the closeness of Christ and Judas sitting next to the table.

Many times the apostles asked Judas about what compels him to do bad deeds, he answers with a grin: every person has sinned at least once. The words of Jude are almost similar to what Christ tells them: no one has the right to condemn anyone. And the apostles faithful to the Teacher humble their anger at Judas: "It's nothing that you are so ugly. Not so ugly come across in our fishing nets!"

"Tell me, Judas, was your father a good man?" - "And who was my father? The one who whipped me? Or the devil, the goat, the rooster? How can Judas know everyone with whom his mother shared a bed?"

Jude's answer shakes the apostles: whoever glorifies his parents is doomed to perdition! "Tell me, are we good people?" - "Ah, they tempt poor Judas, offend Judas!" - the red-haired man from Karyota grimaces.

In one village they are accused of stealing a kid, knowing that Judas is walking with them. In another village, after the preaching of Christ, they wanted to stone Him and the disciples; Judas rushed to the crowd, shouting that the Teacher was not possessed by a demon at all, that He was just a deceiver who loves money, just like him, Judas, - and the crowd humbled himself: "These strangers are not worthy to die at the hands of an honest one!"

Jesus leaves the village in anger, moving away from it with long steps; the disciples follow him at a respectful distance, cursing Judas. “Now I believe that your father is the devil?” Foma throws him in the face. Fools! He saved their lives, but once again they did not appreciate him ...

Somehow, at a halt, the apostles decided to have fun: measuring their strength, they pick up stones from the ground - who is bigger? - and thrown into the abyss. Judas lifts the heaviest piece of rock. His face shines with triumph: now it is clear to everyone that he, Judas, is the strongest, most beautiful, best of the twelve. "Lord," Peter prays to Christ, "I don't want Judas to be the strongest. Help me to overcome him!" - "And who will help Iscariot?" Jesus replies sadly.

Judas, appointed by Christ to keep all their savings, hides a few coins - this is revealed. The students are outraged. Judas is brought to Christ - and He again stands up for him: "No one should count how much money our brother embezzled. Such reproaches offend him." In the evening at dinner, Judas is cheerful, but he is pleased not so much by reconciliation with the apostles, but by the fact that the Teacher again singled him out from the general row: “How can a man who was kissed so much today for stealing not be cheerful? John, what is love for one's neighbor? Isn't it fun to be a hook on which one hangs damp virtue to dry, and the other mind wasted by moths?

The mournful last days of Christ are approaching. Peter and John are arguing over which of them is more worthy to sit at the right hand of the Teacher in the Kingdom of Heaven - the cunning Judas points out to everyone his primacy. And then, when asked how he still thinks in good conscience, he proudly answers: "Of course, I!" The next morning, he goes to the high priest Anna, offering to bring the Nazarene to justice. Annas is well aware of the reputation of Judas and drives him away for several days in a row; but, fearing a rebellion and interference by the Roman authorities, he contemptuously offers Judas thirty pieces of silver for the life of the Teacher. Judas is outraged: “You don’t understand what they are selling you! He is kind, he heals the sick, he is loved by the poor! This price turns out that for a drop of blood you give only half an obol, for a drop of sweat - a quarter of an obol ... screams? And groans? And the heart, lips, eyes? You want to rob me!" "Then you won't get anything." Hearing such an unexpected refusal, Judas is transformed: he must not cede the right to the life of Christ to anyone, and in fact there will surely be a villain who is ready to betray Him for an obol or two ...

Judas surrounds the One whom he betrayed with caress in the last hours. Affectionate and helpful he is with the apostles: nothing should interfere with the plan, thanks to which the name of Judas will forever be called in the memory of people along with the name of Jesus! In the Garden of Gethsemane, he kisses Christ with such painful tenderness and longing that if Jesus were a flower, not a drop of dew would fall from His petals, he would not sway on a thin stalk from the kiss of Judas. Step by step, Judas follows in the footsteps of Christ, not believing his eyes when He is beaten, condemned, led to Golgotha. The night is thickening... What is the night? The sun is rising... What is the sun? Nobody shouts: "Hosanna!" No one defended Christ with weapons, although he, Judas, stole two swords from Roman soldiers and brought them to these "faithful disciples"! He is alone - to the end, to the last breath - with Jesus! His horror and dream come true. Iscariot rises from his knees at the foot of the Calvary cross. Who will wrest victory from his hands? Let all nations, all future generations flow here at this moment - they will find only a pillory and a dead body.

Judas looks at the ground. How small she suddenly became under his feet! Time no longer passes by itself, neither in front nor behind, but, obediently, it moves with all its bulk only together with Judas, with his steps on this small earth.

He goes to the Sanhedrin and throws them in the face, like a ruler: "I deceived you! He was innocent and pure! You killed a sinless one! It was not Judas who betrayed him, but you, betrayed him to eternal disgrace!"

On this day, Judas speaks like a prophet, which the cowardly apostles do not dare: "I saw the sun today - it looked at the earth with horror, asking:" Where are the people here? "Scorpions, animals, stones - everyone echoed this question. If you say the sea and the mountains, how much people valued Jesus, they will come down from their places and fall on your heads! .. "

“Which of you,” Iscariot addresses the apostles, “will go with me to Jesus? You are afraid! You say that it was His will? You explain your cowardice by the fact that He ordered you to carry His word on earth? But who will believe His word in your cowardly and unfaithful lips?"

Judas “climbs the mountain and tightens the noose around his neck in full view of the whole world, completing his plan. The news of Judas the traitor spreads throughout the world. Not faster or quieter, but with time this news continues to fly...

Authors of the retelling: Slava Yanko, Alexandra Vladimirova

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