Abstract: “A golden cloud spent the night. Methodological recommendations for conducting an extracurricular reading lesson based on story A
N. Loshkareva
Explaining the title of his new story, Anatoly Pristavkin speaks about people like him and his heroes, wartime orphanages, about their unprotected, unprotected lives: “We are clouds... A wet trail... We were and are not.” And in another place he is even more specific about the long-standing, undying pain: “We can forever sink into the unknown, and no one will ask either. No, that means it wasn't. So it’s not necessary.”
Why doesn’t anyone ask for these lives? Why are they so not protected, so not protected? Is the war only to blame? We usually say: childhood crippled by war, and as if at once we write everything off as one war. Or maybe there is some other guilt here - ours, human? This is not an idle question. Addressed to our conscience.
Pristavkin has the right to ask such a question. Having drank in full the orphan's hardship, he did not forget those who shared the last with him, who put them, wounded wartime wounded animals, on the wing. With words of gratitude to “these great and faithful people,” he entered literature. "Human corridor. A wall of big and loyal people. And a bright light in the distance... I then wandered around a lot, but it always seemed to me that I never stopped walking along this human corridor,” he wrote in one of his early stories. But these were only approaches to the main topic, predetermined by his fate. This theme is mercy and cruelty.
Now it sounded with great force.
Actually, literature has always thought about mercy and cruelty, their nature, and origins. Nowadays, interest in this topic has become even more intense. In fact, many serious books recent years about the same thing: “Live and Remember” by Rasputin, “Quarry” by Bykov, “The Scaffold” by Aitmatov. Pristavkin enters into this topic with his own sore points. He does not correct memory, selecting only what is convenient from the past, he tries to accurately restore events, without avoiding the dark, unsightly, which does not decorate either a person or society. Something about which it is customary to remain silent. Without sparing oneself, one worries about the unhealed. In the words of V. Kozko, this is a memory blown up by conscience.
The writer talks about the fate of five hundred children from orphanages in the Moscow region who were sent to the Caucasus in the fall of 1944. “Somewhere in the regional authorities, in a bright moment, an idea arose about unloading the orphanages near Moscow... In one fell swoop it was possible to solve all the issues: to get rid of extra mouths, to deal with crime, and to do a seemingly good deed for the children.” We will still appreciate the bitter sarcasm of these words. Especially about a good cause for the kids.
For the peoples of the Caucasus, this was a tragic year: the “supreme wrath” fell on the Ingush, Balkars, and Chechens (the story is about them), and by evil arbitrariness they were all expelled from their native land and sent under escort to Siberia. Only after the 20th Party Congress will the “Caucasian action” be called by its proper name - lawlessness, arbitrariness. The repressed peoples will be allowed to return to the lands of their fathers, and their autonomy will be restored again.
But this will be in 1957, and for now it was 1944.
One of the participants in the eviction operation recalls many years later:
“I remember they brought us to the village on holiday, sort of like on vacation. And they told the chairman of the village council: they say, there is a meeting at six in the morning, so that all the men near your village council will gather. Let's say it and let it go. Well, they gathered in the square, and we had already cordoned off the area since it was dark and immediately, without giving us time to come to our senses, we were in our cars and under escort! And then go home. Ten minutes to get ready and off to loading!..”
In the story we will also meet a strange freight train with barred windows, we will see children’s hands clinging to the bars, pleading with their eyes: “Drink! Drink!”... Eloquent details.
Injustice and cruelty inevitably give rise to even greater cruelty in response, a furious thirst for revenge among those who escaped, who managed to escape to the mountains - “oh, they were fierce” (“My winter! He comes to my winter! My home! My garden And I’m being bullied for that... I’m decreasing” - such is the motive for revenge).
The story traces the mechanism of inciting hostility and mutual bitterness. Soldiers and settlers are instilled with the primitive idea that all Chechens are traitors, enemies, and generally thugs, which means there can be no pity for them. Cruelty towards them is, as it were, sanctioned and justified.
And here is the result:
“Basmachi, you bastard! To the wall! Just as there were thieves for a hundred years, they remain thugs! ...Everyone, everyone to the wall!” - the wounded soldier shouts. The Chechens already see enemies in everyone, even civilians, and therefore they burn houses, kill, and do not spare children. The settlers, paralyzed by fear, approve of the most brutal reprisals against the mountaineers. “Better us them than they are us!” - argues one of the settlers, a good person in general.
The children from the orphanages are brought to this land saturated with hostility. According to inexorable logic, children will have to share the common fate. “Many then... began to disappear, to die on that new land,” testifies A. Pristavkin.
The events of the story are tragic, and sometimes the mind refuses to accept them. As if anticipating such a reaction, in the most tense moments, tearing the artistic fabric, the author himself enters the narrative. Not a storyteller, not even a writer, but Pristavkin, a former orphanage resident: I testify, this is how it happened.
This presence in the story of documentary evidence, as if the coexistence of two realities, fictional and real, sometimes skillfully transforming into one another, gives the work artistic credibility. “More than once when reading, the heart contracts with pain, but at the same time it does not leave some bright, cleansing feeling. This light comes from the surprisingly cute heroes of the story - the orphanage brothers Sashka and Kolka Kuzmenysh.
Homeless, beaten more than once, always hungry, when all dreams are concentrated around some frozen potato, they, despite everything, saved living soul. They are the ones who remind us of sacred, unshakable values - love, dedication, fidelity. Almost all events in the story are presented through the perception of the Kuzmenysh. This is a pure, unclouded look. It clearly shows how far life has deviated from the moral norm.
It would seem that what happened to the Chechens cannot but disturb the conscience: how can this be? How can you drive an entire people away from their native land? Declare everyone guilty - children, old people, and women whose husbands and brothers are at the front?
But in the story - isn't it strange? - none of the adults (with the exception of Regina Petrovna) asks such questions, does not discuss this action, its legality, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary in it. In general, people perceive her as somehow indifferent. They prefer to remain silent about everything that happens.
Why is this so?
“Literaturnaya Gazeta” (No. 16 of this year) wrote: “Everything that happens in the story is given through the prism of children’s perception, children’s consciousness, hence the plot structure, based on solving the mystery, on an attempt to penetrate into what is behind the remarks and omissions adults." I think, however, the omissions are explained not only by children’s perceptions - for adults there is no less secret and incomprehensible here. Pristavkin conveys the very atmosphere of those years: the fear of unnecessary words, the habit of not noticing what does not concern you. Aunt Zina, telling the Kuzmenysh about the Chechens who are “disgraceful in the mountains,” speaks in a whisper, looking around in fear. But only her fellow workers can hear her. After interrogation by the police (some word is interrogation, as if she is a criminal), Regina Petrovna is forced to promise not to tell anyone about what she saw (the Chechen attack on the colony).
And here is, perhaps, an even more eloquent scene. Kolka is puzzled by the meeting with a strange train, from which pleading voices are heard: “Drink! Drink!". When the train started moving, all the cars “screamed, screamed, and cried.” But, strangely, it turns out that no one except him heard this scream and cry (or pretended not to hear?): “And the gray-haired driver from their locomotive walked peacefully, and the people at the station moved calmly on business, and the radio heard the bravura march of a brass band..."
“Applaud all the verdicts,” as Tvardovsky will say bitterly. Although such external humility does not pass without a trace on the soul. Well, what about in your soul? Are they compassionate? Or are you also indifferent? What was happening in human soul?
As if answering these questions, Pristavkin introduces a number of episodes into the narrative, such as the story of Ilya Zverev and the memories of Demyan. In general, these stories do not affect the movement of the plot; you understand that their role in the story is different.
Here is Ilya Zverev. Along what crooked paths did fate lead him, often not by his own, but by someone else’s will! And it all started from the very moment when he was left an orphan: his parents were dispossessed, taken away from the village, “somewhere on the way to distant Siberia and laid down their bones.” The guy took a dashing sip, and became hardened, learned to snap back, defend himself, and not spare others.
Or Demyan. Why should he be so sad that Chechens are being evicted from their homes? He himself was evicted: “For a horse, he was sixteen years old. They wrote it down as fists. Nothing. He gave it away... But he’s alive.” And no one felt sorry for him. And now it would never occur to him to sympathize with the woman doctor who twice saved him from death, that she or her husband were repressed. It didn’t even stir within him: what could these people do, what kind of enemies are they? Exiles and exiles are commonplace.
Such human defenselessness whetted the appetite of others authorized to once again demonstrate their evil heartlessness towards people. Listen to the ingenuous story of Aunt Zina: “The plenipotentiary arrived and ordered us to pack our things... And my sister is sick and the girl-bride, but bad, her head is not right, the fascist raped her. So we tied the knots... and we ourselves are crying, and why are we crying... And the plenipotentiary said: “Enough, women, crying, I’m taking you to heaven...”
But we decided that going to heaven means being shot, which means that because everyone was looking for traitors, whoever slept with a fascist was a traitor. But my daughter was sleeping, albeit by force... Well, loudly! The car was already screaming..."
All this shifted the very ideas about good and evil, bringing confusion and confusion into souls. People endured evil, got used to not noticing the pain of others, weaned themselves from compassion, from protecting the weak, Mercy faded somewhere into the shadows.
“We were connected by the same fate,” says Pristavkin, referring to Chechen children taken under escort to Siberia and their peers - orphans from the Moscow region sent to the Caucasus.
It’s not just about what bloody dramas await them at the Caucasian peaks, it’s about the common fate of the children. Their suffering is perhaps the most bitter reproach to the adult world, an indisputable indicator of its moral distress: after all, protecting and protecting childhood is a holy, unshakable human law.
How the ideas of goodness and mercy had to be distorted in order to organize this search in the colony - the search for jars of jam taken from the factory and hidden for the winter by the same hungry children. Really carefully thought out military operation. They even took a mine detector. With such zeal to come to the aid of orphanages, so as not to force them to steal!
And when you read in a review of this story: “it is impossible to follow without sympathy the truly heroic struggle for survival waged by the twins, selflessly supporting each other. It would be hard to call it theft,” I would like to formulate more precisely: one cannot read without indignation at the cruelty of adults how they doomed children to theft, to a truly heroic struggle for survival.
In no case can one say that the orphanage residents were surrounded entirely by cruel or indifferent people. We see others too, but their efforts are clearly not enough, their capabilities are insignificant, and it is not they who ultimately determine the fate of children.
Keywords: Anatoly Pristavkin, A golden cloud spent the night, criticism of the works of Anatoly Pristavkin, criticism of the works of Anatoly Pristavkin, analysis of the works of Anatoly Pristavkin, download criticism, download analysis, download for free, Russian literature of the 20th century.
Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin is a representative of the generation of “children of war.” And not just those living in their families amid the devastation of war, but children from an orphanage, where everyone is for himself from an early age. The writer grew up in conditions in which it was easier to die than to survive.
This bitter childhood memory gave rise to a number of painfully truthful works describing poverty, vagrancy, hunger and the early adulthood of children and adolescents of that cruel time. One of them was the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis of which will be discussed below.
Prose of A. I. Pristavkin in world literature
Over the years, Pristavkin’s works were published in Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, France, the Czech Republic, and Finland. In December 2001, he became a presidential adviser Russian Federation. The writer is the USSR, as well as a number of literary Russian and foreign awards. Pristavkin was awarded the national German prize for youth literature.
His autobiographical prose is close and understandable to young readers. In modern schools, children are taught not only the analysis of the work “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” Other stories are included in the range of youth reading: “Portrait of a Father”, “Between the Lines”, “Stars”, “Shard”, “Baby Relatives”, “Doctor”, “Steps Behind You”, “Shurka”, etc. All of them poignant, lyrical, revealing a person from the deepest, sometimes most unexpected side.
Subject of the work
In 1981, A. Pristavkin created his own famous work, which reached the general reader only in 1987. Analysis of the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” is carried out in lessons; its study is included in many author’s literature programs for high school. Along with the general theme of war, the writer talks about the harsh and difficult childhood of the war generation, reflects on friendship and camaraderie, and love for his native land.
The most vivid feeling of the tragedy of life and the constant will to overcome it are visible precisely in the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin). The analysis of the work is carried out in the context of the drama of the difficult orphanage years, wartime, where, in spite of everything, lies a huge charge of optimism, faith in man, his strength, resilience, intelligence, faith in goodness. The story included the development of the theme of homeless orphanage childhood, which subsequently brought Pristavkin wide fame.
The main characters of the story
The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmin, are pupils of an orphanage. They go to the North Caucasus, where they subsequently find themselves drawn into the terrible, even tragic realities of the mass resettlement of North Caucasian peoples. It was undertaken in our country in 1943 - 1944. This is how the description of the boys begins in the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of which follows below: “... The brothers’ names were Kuzmenyshi, they were eleven years old, and they lived in an orphanage near Moscow. There, the children’s lives revolved around the frozen potatoes they found, rotten potato peelings and, as the pinnacle of desire and dream, a crust of bread, just to survive, to snatch an extra war day from fate.”
Theme of moving and roads
At the beginning of the story, the director of the orphanage invites the brothers to go to the Caucasus, which has just been liberated from the Germans. Naturally, the guys were attracted by adventure, and they did not miss this opportunity. And so the brothers travel through the war, completely destroyed and the land that has not yet had time to rise after the fascist raids on an amazing, insanely fun train.
It is not by chance that A. Pristavkin touches on the theme of the road in his work. “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis of which includes the problems of the road and life path heroes - this is a story-memory. The author complains: “There were half a thousand of us in that composition! Hundreds then, right before my eyes, began to disappear, simply die on that distant new land where we were brought at that time.”
Even on the road of the twin brothers to the Caucasus, a strange, ominous meeting took place - on the neighboring tracks at one of the stations Kolka Kuzmenysh discovered carriages. Black-eyed children's faces looked out from the barred windows, hands were stretched out, and incomprehensible screams were heard. Kolka, not really understanding that they are asking for something to drink, hands someone some blackthorn berries. Only a homeless boy abandoned by everyone is capable of such a touching, sincere impulse. The description of a child's soul torn to pieces runs through the entire story, complementing it literary analysis. “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin) is a story of contradiction, where parallels are drawn between essentially opposite phenomena.
The Science of Survival: The Realities of War Through the Eyes of Children
During the war years, hunger overtook both children and adults, but for people like Kuzmenyshi, orphans from the orphanage, food was the main dominant feature of life. Hunger drives the brothers’ actions, pushes them to steal, to desperate and cunning acts, and sharpens their senses and imagination.
Kuzmenysh comprehend the science of survival, so they have a special value system - it is counted “from food.” And contact with adults begins with this: he didn’t take away, but fed, which means he’s good, you can trust him. In the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis is based on seeing military reality and the people in it through children’s eyes.
A dramatic turn in the fate of the heroes
It was difficult for the Kuzmenis to understand what was happening around them, to which they were eyewitnesses. When the worst thing happened to Kolka (he saw the brother of the murdered man hanged by the armpits on the edge of a fence, and fell ill from the shock), Sashka’s place was taken by the same eleven-year-old orphan Alkhuzor - a Chechen.
Kolka calls him his brother, first to save him from Russian soldiers, and then out of deeper feeling, when Alkhuzor saved Kolka from a Chechen gun aimed at him. This brotherhood of children is what A. Pristavkin exalts.
“The golden cloud spent the night”: analysis
The main leitmotif of the work is the friendship of lonely children who are in danger from everywhere, but who with all the strength of their souls defend their right to love and affection. Kolka and Alkhuzor were not the only ones in the orphanage, where they were taken, having been picked up half-dead in the mountains. Already lived there and Crimean Tatar Musa, and the German Lida Gross “from the big river,” and the Nogai Balbek. They all had a common bitter and terrible fate.
Children from orphanages, abandoned by the war to Caucasian regions far from their native places, are tragically faced with something that they are not yet able to understand or comprehend - an attempt by a totalitarian system to exterminate the lives of entire peoples. This is what runs like a “red thread” through the story, complementing its analysis.
“The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin) is a story in which constantly hungry, ragged boys who do not know the warmth and comfort of home learn from their own bitter experience the price of severe social injustice. They learn the lessons of spiritual warmth, black human hatred and unexpected mercy, cruelty and great spiritual brotherhood. The history of the Tomilino orphanage is only a small part of this tragic and inhumane process. But even in such cruel conditions, the colonists received lessons in eternal values: morality, goodness, justice, compassion.
Connection of times
The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmina, go through many adventures and difficulties. They - street children - display the features of early maturation, so characteristic of the entire generation of children of the 1940s, who were faced with problems that were not at all childish. The story leaves a feeling of the indissoluble unity of the child with the adult world.
If we touch more deeply on the work “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of the story should be completed by indicating main idea. In his story, Anatoly Pristavkin tries to show that the war and everything connected with it have not become reality. “I won’t hide,” writes the author, “more than once the thought came to me that they were alive, that somewhere there existed all these people who, without thought or fear, did His will in His (Stalin’s) name.”
Conclusion
By expressing the truth, exposing it in all its terrible guise, the writer may have removed some of the burden from his own soul, but he certainly did not lighten the reader’s soul. Although this is the whole of A. Pristavkin (“The Golden Cloud Spent the Night”) - everyone has their own analysis of his works, this is what the author sought. According to the writer, the meaning of real literature is not to delight the ear, not to “inspire a golden dream,” but to urge the reader in every possible way to think, feel, sympathize and draw conclusions. The book encourages spiritual work, the birth of doubts within oneself, and a re-evaluation of the familiar world. It serves not just as a description of “that present,” but also as a warning to the future.
Lesson-conference
A call to Truth, Goodness and Justice in the story
A. Pristavkin “The golden cloud spent the night”
PREPARATORY WORK
1.Announcement of questions to A. Pristavkin’s story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night”
(in 2-3 weeks).
ISSUES FOR DISCUSSION
1. Anatoly Pristavkin and the fate of his story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.”
2. Problems of the story.
3. War and children.
4. Which heroes represent the world of evil in the story and who opposes this world? To whom are the writer’s words addressed: “to whom is war, to whom is mother dear?
5. Kuzmenysh... How do their destinies turn out in difficult inhuman conditions?
6. The brotherhood of Kolka and the Chechen Alkhuzur - is it symbolic?
8. The meaning of the title of the story.
Goals:
1. Show the peculiarity of the depiction of historical events in the story, trace the fate of the brothers during the difficult years of the war; consider the role of the state in the fate of an entire people and an individual; improve students’ skills and abilities when analyzing an episode work of art
2. Work on material on the topic, improving students’ independent work skills with reference and fiction literature.
3. Understand moral lessons Pristavkin, defining the eternal values of life.
Leading methods: heuristic, research, method creative reading, retelling.
Leading techniques: heuristic conversation, expressive reading, musical intros, analytical reading of the text, teacher’s word, independent work students.Equipment: multimedia projector for playing the presentation ;
PROGRESS OF THE CONFERENCE
I . introduction teachers.
Dear Guys! Today we will discuss A. Pristavkin’s story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” This is a revelation about what was kept silent for a long time: the deprivation of rights, the destruction of entire nations by the Stalinist regime. The desire to recreate the past, understand it, and draw moral lessons from it forced the writer to turn to the bitter pages of history of the 40s, to the resettlement of Chechens from the Caucasus.
a) “The truth is always a painful shock, but there is all hope for it. It should nourish our morality and ethics” (writing in a notebook)
b) “The truth is the only thing that will cure our society».
The main goal of the story is the truth about the past - confrontation with oblivion. A story about the war through the eyes of an orphanage child.
Song "Children of War"
Why did children become the main characters of A. Pristavkin’s story?
What events became historical basis stories?
How is the fate of the writer and the history of the country connected?
Tell us, using the example of facts from the biography of A. Pristavkin?
The history of the story
The story of how, at the end of the war, some of the orphanages from the hungry Moscow region were taken to the North Caucasus. This idea, seemingly humane, turned, alas, into unprecedented cruelty. After all, at the same time, by Stalin’s decree, entire peoples were expelled from the North Caucasus into eternal exile. Some of the indigenous people, who did not know any guilt and simply did not understand what was happening (and who would have understood!), desperately clung to their grandfather’s land...
The soldiers carried out the order, confident that they were punishing their enemies. The mountaineers defended themselves as best they could. And in this fratricidal madness, orphanage children from the Moscow region, who are sent to the Caucasus, swirled like chips in a pool
It is about the war against an entire people, seen through the eyes of an orphanage child who does not understand either the meaning or purpose of what is happening, that A. Pristavkin talks about in the story.
The story has been waiting for its reader for seven whole years, written in 1981, published in 1987, it is autobiographical. Anatoly Pristavkin is a participant and eyewitness of those distant events, this is an even greater value of the story
II . What are the problems of A. Pristavkin’s story? Discussion with students.
The fate of children during the war;
the problem of good and evil;
the problem of cruelty and mercy;
manifestation of a person’s character in difficult wartime situations;
problem of interethnic relations.
causes of interethnic conflicts;
the problem of memory as morally significant in understanding the history of a people.
Teacher's conclusions: Of all the problems that the author posed, we have three main ones - war and children, interethnic relations, the problem of memory as morally significant in understanding the history of a people. Let's move on to a detailed coverage of the first problem - 3rd question of the conference lesson.
III . War and children.
1. How the tragic world of a military, hungry, homeless childhood is illuminated in the story.
1 group
Orphan childhood of the Kuzmenyshs.(prepare a retelling, write out quotes)
1. Life in an orphanage near Moscow.
2. How children were saved from hunger.
3. How orphanages are depicted on their way to the Caucasus.
4.How do children feel on Chechen soil?
5.What role did the Chechen boy play in Kolka’s fate?
Students They give examples from the text about the living conditions of the orphanage residents, about their unprotected, unprotected life, about the hunger that enslaved a person physically and morally: “in the orphanage... for a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.”
Class work
How do the selected quotes characterize the situation of children in an orphanage at home?
1"The whole tense life of the boys took shape around frozen potatoes, peelings and, as the height of desires and dreams, a crust of bread to survive, to survive just one day of war.
2. The most cherished, and not unrealizable, dream of any of them was to at least once penetrate the holy of holies of the orphanage: BREAD SLICER, so we’ll highlight it in font, because it stood before the children’s eyes higher and unattainable than some Kazbek.
3..Saliva boiled in my mouth. My stomach tightened and my head became cloudy. I wanted to howl, scream and beat, beat on that iron door so that it would open. Then let him go to the punishment cell, wherever he wants. They will punish you, beat you, kill you. But first they will show, even from the door, how he, the bread, in a heap, in a heap, like a mountain of Kazbek, rises on a table mangled with knives. How it smells!
4..On a flat plank counter, not in the center where you can’t jump out, but on the edge, on a cloth there is displayed rye, home-baked bread, neatly cut into round slices. And next to it is absolutely wonderful, white, long. Kolka saw as if he had tripped while walking. Stared fascinated. Sashka lightly rustled him in the side: “Hey, it’s like a ram at the new gate... It’s a loaf! It’s a white bun like they showed in the movies...” He whispered, but it got stuck in his throat like a piece of clay, you couldn’t swallow it, you couldn’t swallow it. you'll spit it out...
5. I saw Sashka in one pre-war movie, as if there was a bakery right on the street, and someone came in and bought something white and said: “I bought a loaf of bread!” Was it really not for fun that they sold it? Yes without cards? Yes, completely!"
The meaning of the story's title.
Why is the story named with lines from a poem by M.Yu. Lermontov's "The Golden Cloud Spent the Night"? Which symbolic meaning has a name?
Page 209. Expressive reading of an excerpt from Chapter 28 and answering the question posed (reading against the background of music (for example, “Lacrimosa” by Mozart) of an excerpt from the words “Maybe this hill is a cliff..." to the end of the chapter
CLIFF
The golden cloud spent the night
On the chest of a giant rock;
In the morning she rushed off early,
Playing merrily across the azure;
But there was a wet trace in the wrinkle
Old cliff. Alone
He stands, deep in thought,
And he cries quietly in the desert . M. Lermontov
Student answers.
Lermontov’s lines are the leitmotif of the entire story. Students refer to the text where the author reveals Kolka’s thoughts, who thinks that the cloud is the train that took Sashka, or Sashka is the cloud, and Kolka is the cliff. “That’s why he cries because he has become stone, old, like the whole Caucasus. And Sashka turned into a cloud... We are clouds... A wet trail... There were and there weren’t.”
Golden cloud- this is the soul of a child, purity and insecurity.
Alexander Mezhirov: “Life is to blame for children, their Guardian Angel has a sad face, because there is no greater sadness when a child takes the grief of adults onto his shoulders.”
Teacher's conclusion
War and children. What could be scarier than the combination of these two words? The writer tells the harsh truth about 500 orphanages from the Moscow region who were sent to the Caucasus in the fall of 1944. A stunning picture of children gathering vegetables for food in empty fields. The words of the driver touch the heart, kind person, who said: “Russia will not decline if the kids eat enough to eat once in their lives...”. Yes, it will not decrease, because children are her future...
IV. THE WORLD OF ADULTS. THE PROBLEM OF CRUELTY AND MERCY
3 group
The world of adults in the story (retell examples and write down quotes) - 3 questions
1. Select examples of mercy and cruelty of adults.
2. How is the director of the Talovsky orphanage Vladimir Nikolaevich Bashmakov depicted?
3. The image of Regina Petrovna. What role did she play in the children's lives?
4. How does head Olga Khristoforovna protect children?
How is the world of adults shown in the story?
What characters represent the world of evil in the story and who opposes this world?
WORLD OF GOOD
Chapter 23-24
Regina
Petrovna
director Pyotr Anisimovich Meshkov, compassionate Aunt Zina from the cannery.
The events of the war years in the Caucasus demanded from every person the immediate manifestation of his civic qualities. Regina Petrovna shows great humanity, taking responsibility not only for her “men”, but also for Kuzmenyshe, when he arranges for the orphanage residents their first birthday in 11 years. One-legged Demyan at the moment of the attack, he managed to warn the Chechens: “Don’t run in a heap! Scatter... They’ll catch the worst!”
The war did not kill the good heart of these people.
WORLD OF EVIL
How do you understand the writer’s words: “To whom is war, to whom mother is dear”
The children's group teacher was removed swindler and scoundrel Viktor Viktorovich, who robbed the unfortunate and hungry:“And the most important part is taken for the director for his family and his dogs. But near the director, not only dogs, not only cattle feed, there are also relatives and caretakers crammed in there. And they are all dragged and dragged away from the orphanage.” Let us pay attention to the suffering of children: "And this onethe director sent the children on their way without rations. Where was his little conscience: he knew, he knew that he was sending two children on a hungry, multi-day journey! And notthat conscience stirred, not a single cell trembled in that stiff little soul.” And if Viktor Viktorovich was the only heartless director of his kind, the reader would simply sigh: “Unlucky guys.” Lifting the curtain on the mystery of children's homelessness, Pristavkin bitterly states that There are still many soulless people responsible for the fate of children.
This and Director of the Talovsky boarding school Vladimir Nikolaevich Bashmakov, conductor Ilya, who delivered orphanages to the Caucasus, etc.
This is something we are not familiar with yet. The orphanage residents knew one name for themselves - “jackals”, they agreed with it forcedly, because they really were always hungry: “ And suddenly... This “suddenly” made my intestines tingle. The smell was overwhelming, spreading through the shelves, throughout the carriage, throughout the train. And through those same guts - like a hacksaw! Sausage meat opened in an oblong-oval American jar with a golden glow. If only the bastards weren’t scraping the tin with a spoon, this sound would make a cramp in your stomach, as if it were you, you were being scraped out like a can with a spoon.”
The state allocated funds from the military budget for the preservation of generations, and healthy and well-fed uncles robbed children and profited from human misfortune. That's what it sounds like for them : "To whom is war, and to whom is mother."
The cruelty of adults, hunger, and a sense of self-preservation forced children to steal, hunt in markets, and devastate fields along the way, filling their starving stomachs for future use. How many lives have been crushed, how many destinies have been broken. The result of the lives of such people is human damnation.
CONCLUSION: WHAT ARE THE FEATURES OF THE WORLD OF ADULTS? (entry in table - 2 columns (world of adults, world of children) ENTRY IN NOTEBOOK
KINDNESS - Mercy, compassion, humanity, selflessness, kindness.
EVIL - hard-heartedness, sense of self-preservation, theft, callousness
A.Pristavkin « Evil begets evil and there is no end to it."
Teacher's conclusion
A childhood crippled by war - we all at once blame it on the war. And in the story we saw that adults do evil to children. Defenselessness and arbitrariness - all this brought confusion and confusion into the souls of children. Since childhood, we have been taught not to notice the pain of others, to have compassion, and to protect the weak. Only children are united in the story by a common grief, one fate.
A. Pristavkin writes: “Accept this unspoken, from my Kuzmenysh and from me personally, belated, unforgiveness from the distant 80s to you, fat rear rats, with which our house-ship was flooded with children picked up in the ocean of war.”
V. WORLD OF CHILDHOOD. KUZMENYSHY. (5 question)
What is the fate of the Kuzmin brothers? (2 questions)
2nd group
The world of childhood in the story. Kuzmenyshi (make a plan or table)
1. Similarities and distinctive features brothers.
2.Attitude towards each other.
3. The behavior of Kolka, left alone.
4. How Kolka comprehends the death of his brother.
5. What is the relationship between Kolka and the Chechen boy Alkhuzur.
1Kuzmenysh... How do their destinies turn out in difficult inhuman conditions?
« They have each other... So, no matter where they are taken, their home is themselves.”
2.. WHAT EXAMPLES FROM THE TEXT CONFIRM THE DISTINCTIVE PROPERTIES OF THE BROTHERS' CHARACTER?
3. HOW DID THEY RELATE TO EACH OTHER? (work on the episode “Sashka’s Illness”)
Chapter 6
CLASS
4 HOW DOES KOLKA CONCERN WITH THE DEATH OF HIS BROTHER?
The guys read:
“Two heads of Kuzmenysh... were cooked differently. Sashka as a world-contemplative person, calm, quiet, extracting ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know. Kolka, resourceful, tenacious, practical, figured out with lightning speed how to bring these ideas to life. To extract, that is, income.
It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see more keenly when you need to grab where something bad lies. While two eyes are busy, the other two watch over both.
And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers sings, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they looked at the first one, the second one sniffed, and he was gone. Both brothers are like nimble, slippery vines: once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.”
Kolka could not stand the monotonous turning of the millstone, Sashka turned it to the end. Sashka couldn’t see the dung, but Kolka collected it eagerly. Sashka trustingly crawled out of the corn thickets towards the Chechen, Kolka buried himself in the ground, “disappeared from this world.” We see how differently the Kuzmenysh treated individual problems.
They cannot imagine living without each other. As a single organism, they were never separated. In the story there is an episode of Sashka’s illness, when doctors had to forcefully separate him from his brother.
"Kolka realized, climbed under the carriage and from there through the floor tried to talk to his brother while the doctors were not there. Sashka answered somewhat deafly. By putting his ear to a piece of wood, he could make out. Then Kolka threw grass and burdocks between the rails and made himself a lounger, slept under it pestle, where Sashka was. And to know that Kolka was always with him, he tapped the bottom of the carriage with a pebble, and Sashka answered him."
At the age of eleven, they were already saving for a rainy day, making a stash, which included jars of jam and a sweatshirt. "Good" was suitable for future escape.
No. Kolka may die without his nest egg, and he, Sashka, will not go until he sees the teacher: “And he doesn’t care about the nest egg! He can’t leave without Regina Petrovna and her peasants! Otherwise it will turn out that the brothers are saving themselves, and such a person, like Regina Petrovna, they are left here to die! They must escape together, that’s what he understood.” Sashka cared more about others, he perceives himself as a part of the world around him, in which everything is reasonable, you just need to figure out how best to use everything in your life.ate.
“Kolka, like Sashka, could not calculate and lay out in advance. His brain is not structured that way. But he understood: if a thing is lying around, it needs to be picked up. And then think about what and why.” Kolka is more practical than his brother; he is able to comprehend an already accomplished fact.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CHILDREN IN THE CAUCASUS?
"He suddenly felt cold and painful, he couldn’t breathe. Everything in him was numb, to the very tips of his arms and legs. He couldn't even stand, but sank onto the grass. A terrible detachment possessed him. It was as if he was not himself, but at the same time he remembered and saw everything. He screamed, howled, screamed... He must have shouted a lot - he shouted to the whole village, to the whole valley; If there was even one living creature nearby, it would run in fear... But his voice dried up, he faltered and fell into the dust... He sat down, shaking off the dust from his head, wiping his face with his sleeve. Everything he did next seemed to be thought out and logical, although he did so without realizing much. Kolka headed along the road to the colony, not hiding from anyone or taking precautions.
The worst that could happen to him, he knew, had already happened."
Kolka does not bury his brother. He sends it, as he dreamed, on a journey, placing it in a box under the carriage. The adult thought of burial does not occur to the boy. The inflamed brain suggests the future to the living Sashka, but Kolka cannot think about the dead, talking to his brother’s body. The feeling of unity does not go away, and to Ilya’s question: “Are you Kolka or Sashka?” - answers: “I am wallpaper.”
Pristavkin writes dryly, even boringly, about the Kuzmenysh farewell scene. But you are taken aback as you imagine the last refuge of a boy and a man who discovers a small, tortured body.
Teacher's conclusion « The feeling of hopeless horror,” which came after realizing where they had arrived (emptiness, abandoned houses, gardens, vegetable gardens; settlers who were afraid of the retribution of their owners), forces the Kuzmenyshs to decide to flee. Children, finding themselves at the center of a fratricidal war between adults, became its victims.
Examples from the text: defeat of the colony, murder of Sashka. " Evil begets evil and there is no end to it,” Pristavkin sums up bitterly.
VI . The brotherhood of Kolka and the Chechen Alkhuzur - is it symbolic?
WHAT SAVED KOLKA FROM THE ILLNESS CAUSED BY THE TERRIBLE SHOCK?(chapters 29 – 30)
How does a Chechen boy look after Kolka?
WORK ON THE EPISODE “Kolka and Alkhuzur”
Why does a Chechen boy refuse his own name?
Students. The story of Kolka's meeting with Ahuzur. « All people are brothers"- Sashka’s words are symbolic. Only children in these inhuman conditions find the opportunity to understand each other. “I am Sask” - Alkhuzur’s words express the main philanthropic idea, the idea of friendship of peoples (chapters 29 – 30).
Brotherly love of a Chechen boy: “Kolka closed his eyes and again thought that it wasn’t Sashka. And where is Sashka then? And why did this alien, dark-haired Sashka take on Sashka’s new face and speak in Sashka’s new voice. And where is Sashka? He didn’t hear his own voice, but someone else's voice understood:
- Sask no. Eats Alkhuzur. That's my name. Alhuzur. Do you understand?
“Nope,” said Kolka. - Call me Sasha. Tell me I feel bad without him. Why is he playing the fool, he’s not going.”
The little Chechen feels how hard it is for Kolka, he is full of compassion, he eases the torment in any way he can, sharing the last crumbs like a brother. Only such familiar brotherly help helps Kolka return to life: “Then he slept again, he saw that the dark-haired, alien Alkhuzur was feeding him one grape berry at a time. And he put pieces of the nut in his mouth. First he chewed the nut itself, and then gave it to Kolka. One day he said, “I, I am Sask. Want, and call daek. I'll be Sask."
Not yet small man I intuitively was able to feel that only the Awareness of Sashka being alive could raise the patient. The boy's wisdom forces him to renounce his own name to save the perishing. Alkhuzur’s civil act performed the expected miracle: Kolka got up, but nothing would make him see the Chechen as an enemy.
CONCLUSION WHAT ARE THE FEATURES OF THE WORLD OF CHILDHOOD? (entry to table)
Kind-hearted, brotherly love, wise, compassionate, selfless
A. Pristavkin “All people are brothers” (entry in the table) - internationalism
Teacher's conclusions : The writer says: There are people - bad and good. As L. Zhukhovitsky wrote about the story, “adult citizens of the country of the Soviets different nationalities persecute and kill each other, and children of different nationalities fraternize. A Russian and a Chechen save each other and really become brothers; according to a naive and wise childhood custom, they cut their fingers and mix the blood...” And the Kuzmin brothers appeared in the orphanage again, one was white, the other was black.
VII. CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS
What are the causes of national conflicts? (give examples from the text)
QUESTIONNAIRE
- What do you think is the cause of national conflicts?
personal dislike - 12
Desire for the supremacy of nations - 5
interests, discrepancy between religions, revenge, resentment for the past, division of lands, disrespect for other nations, no tolerance
Note. only 2 students named it as guilt national conflict idea, remember the novel “ Crime and Punishment”, world history
What danger do selfish philosophical and political ideas?
How is the attitude of children and adults to the national issue depicted?
Group 4 The national question in the story
1. Relations between Russians and Chechens (select examples of cruelty and mercy)
2.What nationalities were the children in the reception center?
3. How did the Kuzmenysh treat children of other nationalities?
4. How does the little Chechen behave towards Kolka?
5.How the attitudes of adults and children to the national issue are contrasted.
Students. Examples from the text.
Ilya Zverev (Zverek) – guide (chapter 12), soldier Demyan about himself and the settlers (13, 25), Aunt Zina (chapter 15), death of Vera (chapter 19), Regina Petrovna’s story (chapter 21), robbery, death of all colonists (chapter 25), Kolka's reasoning (chapter 27), soldiers burning the harvest, surviving the Chechens (chapter 28), the destruction of the Dei Churt cemetery (chapter 29), Viktor Ivanovich (chapter 30).
The guys also talk about what Kolka saw at the Kuban station of an ominous carriage (children-immigrants). Adults and children have contradictory assessments of these events.
1. LET US REMEMBER WHAT NATIONALITIES WERE THE CHILDREN IN THE RECEIPT?
Cheerful, pimply, awkwardly long Tatar Musa. He loved to play pranks on everyone, but when he got angry and could kill them, he turned white and ground his teeth. Musa remembered his Crimea, huts in the distance of the sea, on the mountainside, and his mother and father who worked in the vineyard.
Balbek was a Nogai. Where his homeland, Nogaia, is located, none of us, and even Balbek himself, knew...
Lida Gross, who ended up in the boy's bedroom because she was the only girl, and it was impossible to live alone in a cold bedroom, asked us to call her in Russian: Grossova... All she remembered about her past was that she lived by a big river, but one night people came and told them to leave... In the room next to us lived Armenians, Kazakhs, Jews, Moldovans and two Bulgarians.”
2. LET’S FIND OUT HOW THE KUZMENYSH CHILDREN TREAT CHILDREN OF OTHER NATIONALITIES?
The first one is description of the ominous carriage: "He raised his head and saw eyes, only eyes at first: either a boy or a girl. Black shiny eyes, and then a mouth, tongue and lips. This mouth reached out and uttered only one terrible sound: “Hee.” Kolka was surprised and showed his palm with bluish hard berries: “This?” After all, it was clear that he was asked. And what to ask for if there was nothing except berries. Hee! Hee! - a voice shouted, and suddenly the wooden inside of the carriage came to life. Children's hands, other eyes, other mouths stuck into the bars, they changed, as if they were pushing each other away, and at the same time a strange roar of voices grew, as if there was a rumbling in the womb of an elephant. Only later did the boy realize that these were children taken from their homes asking for water. Not bread.
Then we pay attention onepisodes of an explosion in an orphanage , the death of the paramedic Vera, the relocation of Aunt Zina to this “paradise”. Reflections on these episodes allow us to notice that adults and children have different assessments of events related to with the resettlement of Chechens.
Naive Kuzmenysh's conversation brings the reader closer to the truth.
«- Fascists. Compare. What fascists they are!
- Who? Did you hear the fighter shout about them? All of them, he says, are traitors to the Motherland! Stalin ordered everyone to the wall!
- And the guy, well, who is outside the window. Is he also a traitor? - Kolka asked, Sashka did not answer.
WORK ON AN EPISODE
Chapter 32
WE READ THE DIALOGUE OF "SHTATSKY" WITH THE MANAGER OF THE CHILDREN'S CENTER
HOW DOES KOLKA TREAT THE CHECHEN BOY?
Let's have a list, please.
List of children? - asked the manager. He extended his hand, not trying to explain anything, and Olga Khristoforovna handed him a piece of paper. He quickly glanced and asked:
And this Musa? What is he, a Tatar?
Yes,” said Olga Khristoforovna. - He is seriously ill now.
Where? - asked the civilian, ignoring the disease.
Not from Crimea, by chance.
It seems from Kazan. - the manager answered.
It seems... And Gross? German?
Don't know. What does it matter? I'm German too!
That's what I'm saying. They are recruiting here.
We don't recruit them. We accept them.
You need to know who you are accepting! - the man said a little louder, and again there was no evil or threat in his words. But for some reason the adults shuddered. And only Olga Khristoforovna, although it was clear that she was sick and had difficulty speaking.
- We accept children. Only children,” she answered. She took the list and seemed to stroke it with her hand.
Children of any nationality have the same right to live in Russian state on equal terms. She, being a physically weak person, tries courageously defend these children's rights.
VIEWING A FRAGMENT
WHAT DOES KOLKA CALL FOR IN THE MONOLOGUE?
INTERNATIONALISM
Eleven-year-old Kolka, despite the horror he experienced, did not go wild, but tried to understand why Chechens killed his brother. He thought like a true internationalist t: “They are going to kill Chechens. And the one who crucified you will also be killed. But if I caught him, You know, Sashka, I wouldn’t kill him. I would just look into his eyes, is he an animal or a man? Is there anything living in it? And if I saw a living thing, I would ask him why he is robbing? Why does he kill everyone around him? What have we done to him? I would say: “Listen, Chechen, are you blind, or what? Don’t you see that Sashka and I are not fighting against you? We were brought here to live, then we live, and then we would have left anyway. And now you see, how it turns out. You killed Sashka and me, and the soldiers came, they will kill you... And you will start killing the soldiers. Isn’t it possible to make sure that no one bothers anyone, and all the people are alive, just like we live next to each other in a colony.”
Teacher's conclusions: the main idea author - the blame for the extermination and eviction of peoples lies with Stalin and his entourage. “Isn’t it possible to make sure that no one bothers anyone, and that all the people are alive, like us, gathered in a colony, living side by side?” - Kolka’s words are the words of the author himself. After all, human life is priceless! Nobody should bother anyone.OUTPUT. ENTRY IN A NOTEBOOK..
“There is no guilt of one people before another, just as there are no good and bad peoples.”
“There are no bad nations, there are only bad people”
“Children are always and invariably kinder and more international than adults.”
“Isn’t it possible to make sure that no one bothers anyone, and that all people are alive?”
Children are always and invariably kinder and more international than adults.”
This is a call to Truth, Goodness, Justice. “My story,” the author adds, “is a fact of resistance to ruthlessness and inhumanity.”
VIII/ Results of the lesson-conference.
What is the salvation from wars and ethnic conflicts?
Ozhegov's Dictionary
Humanism is humanity in general activities, in relation to people.
Internationalism is a policy of equality and solidarity of all peoples, regardless of nationality
Brotherhood of nations - commonwealth (mutual friendship, unity)
Tolerance -(Latin for “patience”) – tolerance for other people’s opinions, beliefs,
behavior
The children of the war turned out to be wiser than adults, more generous in soul, more far-sighted. Eleven-year-old Kolka, despite the horror he experienced, did not go wild, but tried to understand why the Chechens killed his brother. He thought like a true internationalist.
What does it mean to be tolerant and merciful?
Mercy- willingness to help someone or forgive someone out of compassion and philanthropy. (Show mercy)
“We are different, this is our wealth, we are together - this is our strength”
Teacher: There is something healing in A. Pristavkin’s bitter story - from meeting kind, humane people. Evil is not omnipotent, it is not capable of breaking everyone. Compassion is alive, despite the decades of Stalinism, when it was eradicated. And may this never happen again in our lives. -
The writer was asked a question: how would he define the main idea of the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night”?
The writer’s answer: “She appeals to mercy in people. It is also addressed to today's reader and is in tune with our today's demands; there is nothing more important than saving the world from self-destruction. You know - when a forest fire starts, the first thing to die is a teenager. We are a burnt teenager, the remnants of that generation. War hits where it hurts and most sensitively. In the name of this, a book was also written - as a memory of what happened and how it was, in the name of preventing it from happening again" (see "Week" No. 27, 1987)
8. Homework. Write an essay in which you need to consider and analyze one of the topics raised in the story by A. Pristavkin.
“There are no bad nations, there are only bad people”
Annex 1
Biographical information
Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin was born on October 17, 1931 in the city of Lyubertsy, Moscow region. When the war began, Pristavkin was in his 10th year. His father went to the front, and his mother soon died of tuberculosis. Pristavkin ends up in an orphanage, and everything that homeless children got during the war fell to his lot in full.
Since childhood, Anatoly Pristavkin was carried around different parts of the vast country - the Moscow region, Siberia, the North Caucasus, where in 1944, at the time of the deportation of the Chechens, Moscow street children were sent to populate the territories that had become empty. All his life, Anatoly Ignatievich kept an object left over from those times - a finca made for a child’s hand. About that time, Pristavkin will say some time later: “In the very middle of the war, the rear presented a fantastic picture: military personnel and refugees, speculators and disabled people, women and teenagers who stood several shifts at the machines, street children and swindlers... We were children of war and in this motley environment we felt like fish in water. We could do everything, understood everything and, in general, were not afraid of anything, especially when there were many of us.”
Pristavkin was prompted to become a writer by chance...
The children were transported in freight train cars for almost a month and were given a piece of bread a day. In Chelyabinsk, where they were brought, there was a canteen at the station, which was besieged by refugees, and the children could not get through this crowd of adults. Then their teacher Nikolai Petrovich began shouting to people to let the children through. And a miracle happened: they walked through the crowd along the vacated space, as if along a corridor - the children did not see their faces, they simply felt that they were protected, that no one would crush them. This theme formed the basis of Anatoly Pristavkin’s first story, “The Human Corridor.” Subsequently, this symbol of the “human corridor” accompanied the writer throughout his life, and he never stopped walking along it, feeling the support of people who were ready to lead him into the future.
Appendix 2
History of publication of the story.
In the early 1980s, Pristavkin wrote the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” The author tried to speak frankly about what he himself experienced and what painfully burned his nerves: the world is not worthy of existence if it kills children.
A. Pristavkin recalled his story: “My story lay for a long time in... the linen closet. I was afraid to take her out. You have raised questions that cannot be touched, my friends told me. It so happened that at first I made “Tuchka...” public in this way: I gathered my friends and offered to listen to two or three chapters. Sadness, sour agreement. Then everyone silently left. But at the end someone said: “Why did you write this? Hide it.” Then they began to reprint and copy. This means people need it.”
After the first collective reading of the story among friends, strange things began: first, a friend came to Pristavkin and asked for the manuscript to read at home, another friend asked for it for his son, and a third for a colleague.
By the time it was published in the Znamya magazine, the story had been read by at least 500 people. One day, a complete stranger from Leningrad came to Anatoly Ignatievich’s home and said that, at the request of his comrades, he must read the story in order to tell about it at home.
The story was published in 1987 by Georgy Baklanov, a front-line writer who had recently been appointed editor-in-chief of the Znamya magazine.
Readers were surprised, excited, stunned... They wrote about orphanages more than once and in different ways. But no one wrote the way Pristavkin wrote. His “orphanage” works are pictures of a terrible, inhuman reality.
It was planned to send two older children from the orphanage to the Caucasus, but they immediately disappeared into space. And the Kuzmina twins, in the orphanage Kuzmenysh, on the contrary, said that they would go. The fact is that a week before, the tunnel they had made under the bread slicer collapsed. They dreamed of eating their fill once in their lives, but it didn’t work out. Military sappers were called to inspect the tunnel, they said that without equipment and training it was impossible to dig such a metro, especially for children... But it was better to disappear, just in case. To hell is this Moscow region, devastated by the war!
The name of the station - Caucasian Waters - was written in charcoal on plywood nailed to a telegraph pole. The station building burned down during the recent fighting. During the entire multi-hour journey from the station to the village where the homeless children were housed, we did not come across a cart, a car, or a random traveler. Empty all around...
The fields are ripening. Someone plowed them, sowed them, someone weeded them. Who?.. Why is this beautiful land so deserted and deaf?
The Kuzmenys went to visit their teacher Regina Petrovna - they met again on the road, and they really liked her. Then we moved to the village. People, it turns out, live in it, but somehow secretly: they don’t go out into the street, they don’t sit on the rubble. There are no lights in the huts at night.
And there is news at the boarding school: the director, Pyotr Anisimovich, has agreed to work at a cannery. Regina Petrovna and the Kuzmenyshes enrolled there, although in general they only sent the older ones, fifth to seventh grades.
Regina Petrovna also showed them a hat and an old Chechen strap found in the back room. She gave the strap and sent the Kuzmenyshes to bed, and she sat down to sew winter hats for them from their fur hats. And she didn’t notice how the window sash quietly opened and a black barrel appeared in it.
There was a fire at night. In the morning, Regina Petrovna was taken somewhere. And Sashka showed Kolka numerous traces of horse hooves and a cartridge case.
The cheerful chauffeur Vera began taking them to the cannery. It's good at the factory. IDPs are working. Nobody is guarding anything. We immediately picked up apples, pears, plums, and tomatoes. Aunt Zina gives “blessed” caviar (eggplant, but Sashka forgot the name). And once she admitted: “We are so afraid... Damn Chechens! We were taken to the Caucasus, and they were taken to the Siberian paradise... Some didn’t want to... So they hid in the mountains!”
Relations with the settlers became very strained: the always hungry colonists stole potatoes from the gardens, then the collective farmers caught one colonist in the melon patch... Pyotr Anisimovich proposed holding an amateur concert for the collective farm. In the last number Mitek showed tricks. Suddenly, very close by, hooves began to clatter, a horse neighed and guttural cries were heard. Then it crashed. Silence. And a cry from the street: “They blew up the car! Our Faith is there! House is burning!"
The next morning it became known that Regina Petrovna had returned. And she invited the Kuzmenysh to go to the farm together.
The Kuzmenysh got down to business. We took turns going to the spring. They drove the herd to the meadow. They ground corn. Then the one-legged Demyan arrived, and Regina Petrovna begged him to give the Kuzmenyshs a ride to the colony to get food. They fell asleep on the cart, and at dusk they woke up and did not immediately understand where they were. For some reason, Demyan was sitting on the ground, and his face was pale. "Quiet! - tsked. - There is your colony! Only there… it’s… empty.”
The brothers entered the territory. Strange view: the yard is littered with junk. There are no people. The windows are broken. The doors are ripped off their hinges. And - quiet. Scary.
They rushed to Demyan. We walked through the corn, avoiding gaps. Demyan walked ahead, suddenly jumped somewhere to the side and disappeared. Sashka rushed after him, only the gift belt sparkled. Kolka sat down, tormented by diarrhea. And then a horse’s face appeared from the side, right above the corn. Kolka fell to the ground. Opening my eye slightly, I saw a hoof right next to the linden tree. Suddenly the horse jumped aside. He ran, then fell into some hole. And fell into unconsciousness.
The morning came blue and peaceful. Kolka went to the village to look for Sashka and Demyan. I saw my brother standing at the end of the street, leaning against the fence. I ran straight to him. But as he walked, Kolka’s pace began to slow down of its own accord: Sashka was standing strangely. He came close and froze.
Sashka was not standing, he was hanging, attached under his arms to the points of the fence, and a bunch of yellow corn was sticking out of his stomach. Another cob was stuffed into his mouth. Below his stomach, Sashka’s black entrails, clotted with blood, hung over his pants. Later it was discovered that he was not wearing a silver strap.
A few hours later, Kolka brought a cart, took his brother’s body to the station and sent it with the train: Sashka really wanted to go to the mountains.
Much later, a soldier came across Kolka, turning off the road. Kolka was sleeping in an embrace with another boy who looked Chechen. Only Kolka and Alkhuzur knew how they wandered between the mountains, where the Chechens could kill the Russian boy, and the valley, where the Chechen was already in danger. How they saved each other from death.
The children did not allow themselves to be separated and were called brothers. Sasha and Kolya Kuzmin.
The children were transferred from the children's clinic in Grozny to an orphanage. Street children were kept there before being sent to various colonies and orphanages.
You have read the summary of “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” We also invite you to visit the Summary section to read the summaries of other popular writers.
I re-read some books from time to time. But there are two works that I re-read not just after some time, but right there, without interruption. As soon as I reached the last page, I immediately returned to the first and re-read everything again, from word to word, in one breath.
One of these works is the story “The golden cloud spent the night” by Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin.
I haven't cried over many books. Moreover, reading it again: why shed tears, since everything is already known.
But re-reading A. I. Pristavkin’s story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (now carefully and thoroughly, since the first reading was more like a convulsive swallowing of the plot), with the same lump in my throat I crept up to this place:
“Kolka took a few more hesitant steps and stopped.
He suddenly felt cold and painful, and couldn’t breathe. Everything in him was numb, to the very tips of his arms and legs. He couldn’t even stand, but sank onto the grass, not taking his eyes off Sashka, wide with horror.”
The story of two eleven-year-old twins, taken in 1944 along with other pupils of orphanages near Moscow to the Caucasus - “to paradise,” as they were told - shocked me 20 years ago, when the story first came out. I was shocked all over, from start to finish. It was she who came to mind when I learned about the death of its author. I also remembered A.I. Pristavkin himself, who gave an interview to a television journalist two years ago. The face is so simple, peasant; checkered shirt.
How much this man went through as a child! Everything that he wrote in the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” about the Kuzmin brothers (Kuzmenysh) is also about him. At first I couldn’t understand why, in the middle of a third-person narrative, “I”, “we” suddenly broke through:
“Why at that moment, I remember, I remember exactly, it hurt so much inside me, and probably not only me, inside?
Perhaps from a terrible guess that no happiness awaits us in the new place. However, we didn’t even know what it was. We just wanted to live."
I thought stupidly: the editor looked through it.
But then this “we” was repeated more than once.
I still don’t know whether the author did this on purpose or, overwhelmed by a wave of memories, involuntarily switched to a first-person narration. But I know for sure that if I myself were the editor of such a story, I would not even dare to mention to the author about his “mistake”!
From the very first lines of the story, I was surprised that A.I. Pristavkin, even after decades, remembers everything down to the smallest detail: sayings, sayings, teases, orphanage songs, criminal songs. The story is literally permeated with this wartime “folklore”; it does not dry out until the end of the book.
Then, as I read, I was constantly amazed at the ingenuity of street children (not even teenagers yet!), who in this incomprehensible world of adults at war with each other were left alone with hunger and forced to get food with their own strength and their own minds so as not to die.
But aren’t there many such books about street children?
Probably quite a few, but, in my opinion, none like the one written by A.I. Pristavkin.
Because there is something in it that especially struck me and for which I do not find analogies in modern life. This is the relationship between brothers: their selfless care for each other, compassion, tenderness... Two boys, two little men live - each for the other!
Is it possible to imagine that insane grief when one of the brothers, Kolka, is left alone in the world?
A.I. Pristavkin wrote it in such a way that you not only imagine it, but also seem to experience it yourself. That’s why I cry every time when, together with Kolka, I discover the executed Sashka...
The story of A. I. Pristavkin “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” is about the terrible consequences of Stalin’s deportation of the inhabitants of Checheno-Ingushetia to foreign lands - to Siberia, Kazakhstan.
The action takes place in a village near the “Caucasian Waters”. It was quite recently Chechen, and now, after the Chechens were evicted from it and Russians and Ukrainians (and, in fact, also deported from their native places as “enemies of the people”) were resettled into empty houses, it is called the village of Berezovskaya. Sashka Kuzmin, one of the twins, is killed by Chechens who managed to escape Siberian exile and hide in the mountains. These people are taking revenge on those who are now occupying their homes and cultivating their land.
This sore subject - the tragedy of the deported peoples - vibrates in A. I. Pristavkin’s book with a special sound. In Kolka’s heart, the place of the murdered Sashka was taken by a Chechen boy. This is another one amazing story! Adults fight among themselves - children fraternize!
No, you just need to read the book “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” You can't retell it.