Alexander CHUDAKOV,
magazine "Znamya" 2002

Spelling Genius Vaska Eighty-five

Whenever Anton saw a brick or a word brick, he recalled Vaska Gagin, who wrote this word like this: kerdpich. The word was scribbled in red ink, displayed on the blackboard. Vaska peered, craned his neck, moved his lips. And then he wrote: kerpich. When the teacher corrected: cases are not bone, A indirect, Vaska frowned suspiciously, for he was firmly convinced that the name comes from the word bone; Klavdia Petrovna finally waved her hand. write correctly garlic it could not be forced by any human effort - other, more powerful forces led him with a pen and forced him to insert an extra letter again and again and to pronounce the ending warningly: honest.

From his spelling experience, he made an unshakable conclusion: in Russian, all words are spelled differently from how they are pronounced, and as far as possible from the real sound. All exceptions, unpronounceable consonants, voiced in place of pronounced deaf, unstressed vowels - all this floundered in his head, like water in an incomplete barrel that is being driven over potholes, and splashed out with unexpected force.

The exhausted Claudia Petrovna transferred Vaska to the fourth grade with a re-examination in the Russian language. Vaska's uncle (he had no parents) brushed him off with a crutch. And he promised to repeat the upbringing in the fall, if Vaska does not move to the next class.

Vaska had to be rescued. We began to write dictations with him. The result of the first was stunning. In a text of one hundred words, my student made one hundred and thirty mistakes. Grandfather advised, after working through them with Vaska, to repeat the same dictation. Vaska made one hundred and forty. Grandfather said that in thirty-five years of teaching he had never seen anything like this - even at the party school and at the workers' faculty. Since then, I also had to read various texts - by correspondence students, students of veterinary courses, Chinese, Vietnamese, students from the Shore Ivory, Koreans. Nothing like it was even close. I think it won't. Vaska was a genius of illiteracy, and, like any genius, he was unique. Where, whose sophisticated imagination would have thought of such masterpieces as pestmo, pejag, zoztezhka? When and who else could apricot turn into apprecosis?..

But the essay could go on forever. It was inevitable to turn to the grandfather. True, he could say: "It is incomprehensible, the writing is very long." Grandfather said that it was possible to confine oneself to one phrase of a general nature, and immediately offered such a phrase: “A friend also took a lively part in my affairs, providing me with all kinds of help, and in all the vicissitudes of fate I could completely rely on him.” At the same time, grandfather especially frowned - as always, when he tried not to laugh. But I was in a hurry, and I was not up to my grandfather's eyebrows.

Two days later, Klavdia Petrovna, handing out essays, asked:

- Anton, what vicissitudes of fate did you mean?

I was silent because fate in my mind was closely associated with the word court,- in this neighborhood they always appeared in the speeches of both grandfather and grandmother. It was difficult to explain. But I still squeezed out:

- This is when I will be judged.

- Judge? Klavdia Petrovna was amazed. - You?..

Well, when I grow up.

Klavdia Petrovna asked no more questions.

When Anton visited her on this visit, she, like her grandfather, was over ninety, she no longer remembered anything and Anton. But when he said: vicissitudes of fate, Something lit up in her watery eyes.

– Yes, it's you... and Vasya. How! The teacher perked up. - He also wrote pestmo, A in the second– with four errors: wa ftaromm. I had to invent! She clasped her hands in admiration. Only he could do it!

But Vasily became famous not for his spelling, with which only a narrow circle was familiar. Artistic reading of poetry, his main passion, brought him fame.

At the lessons, he thought about something, moving his lips, and turned on only when Klavdia Petrovna asked to read a poem at home.

- Nazust? - Vaska started up.

- You, Vasya, can learn by heart.

He performed at school olympiads and reviews. At rehearsals, he was corrected, he agreed. But on stage he still gave his own creative solution. No one could dissect a line of poetry so brilliantly and senselessly. Poems by Nekrasov

I will die soon. Pathetic legacy
O motherland, I will leave you...

Vasya read like this:

“I’ll die soon—a miserable legacy!” - and, making a pitiful muzzle, spread his arms wide and bowed his head.

An excerpt from "Eugene Onegin" "Already the sky was breathing in autumn", which was learned by heart in the second grade, sounded no less wonderful in Vasya's interpretation:

The sun shone less
In short: the day was coming!

After the word Briefly speaking Vasya frowned his dark brows in a businesslike manner and made a chopping gesture with his palm, like a manager. Rono Kryuchkov.

Vasya especially appreciated the energetic generalization in poetic speech. A line from the "Caucasus" "Wow! there is no food for him, no comfort, ”he first read without a pause after the first word (he naturally took it for at all). But Klavdia Petrovna said that Pushkin has an exclamation mark after it, and it reads like in vain, i.e. "in vain". Vasya, having listened to her suspiciously (he did not trust teachers), a remark about in vain ignored, accepted about the pause and at the Olympiad, adding one more homework, read like this: “ Vaasche - there is no food for him, no poison!».

In "Native speech" there were verses:

I am a Russian person, and Russian nature
Kind to me, and I sing it.
I am a Russian man, the son of my people,
I look at my homeland with pride.

Vasya, standing in a pose, recited with pathos:

I am a Russian person - and a Russian breed!

And beat his chest loudly. In terms of effect, this was comparable only to the performance at the regional Olympiad by Galia Ivanova, who, reading “Borodino”, with the verse “The Earth shook like our breasts”, lifted and shook her breasts on her palms - powerful, Rubensian, despite the young age of their owner .

Vasya's masterpiece was the poem "The Death of a Poet": " The poet-slave died! Chestipal! Maligned!- Vasya, like Ernst Telman, threw his fist forward. - Like lead!”.

It was impossible to make out the further interpretation of the text behind the thunderous laughter and applause. Vasya was a genius of resonant verse.

They tried to exclude him from the list of participants in the next Olympiad. But at a meeting of directors of participating schools, head. rono Kryuchkov invariably asked the director of our school: "And this slave poet, will he recite something?" And Gagin was urgently written back.

Starting from the fourth grade, he sat in each class - all because of the same Russian language - for three years. The uncle, after receiving yet another news about repeating, puffed Vaska with a crutch, after which he considered the educational issue settled.

In the sixth grade, they left for their village. The last masterpiece that came down to me in someone else's transmission was the word ararch- so, Vasya believed, the phenomenon referred to in the textbook as "feudal hierarchy" was called.

Vaska's nickname was Eighty-five. Why, no one knew. But Vaska was very suitable for something.

The village supported the Bolsheviks. Disabled propagandists came there.

Why disabled people? - the teacher was indignant.

Anthony did not know this. But grandfather always said only this: everything was quiet in Muravank, but a disabled propagandist arrived. Or: the estate of the Zhulkevskys stood untouched, but then two disabled agitators appeared and the estate was first plundered, and then completely burned.

And for a long time Anton will say “Alexander the Second, Tsar Liberator”, and in geography lessons - “North American United States”, “Arctic and South Arctic”, and in physics lessons - that Marconi invented radio, call transfer a single feature and sometimes write absent-mindedly at the end of the words of the era, which will especially irritate the teacher of literature, who believed that Anton was doing this out of hooliganism.

8. Spelling Genius Vaska Eighty

Five Whenever Anton saw a brick or the word "brick", he remembered Vaska Gagin, who wrote this word like this: kerdpich. The word was scribbled in red ink, displayed on the blackboard. Vaska peered, craned his neck, moved his lips.

And then he wrote: "Kerpich." When the teacher corrected: the cases are not “bone”, but indirect, Vaska frowned suspiciously, for he was firmly convinced that this name comes from the word “bone”; Klavdia Petrovna finally waved her hand. It was impossible to force him to write "garlic" correctly by any human effort - other, more powerful forces guided him with a pen and forced him to guess again and again to insert an extra letter and warningly sound the ending: "honest".

From his spelling experience, he made an unshakable conclusion: in Russian, all words are written differently than they are pronounced, and as far as possible from the real sound. All exceptions, unpronounceable consonants, voiced in place of spoken

deaf, unstressed vowels - all this flopped around in his head, like water in an incomplete barrel that is being carried over potholes, and splashed out with unexpected force.

The exhausted Claudia Petrovna transferred Vaska to the fourth grade with a re-examination in the Russian language. Vaska's uncle (he had no parents) brushed him off with a crutch. And he promised to repeat his upbringing in the fall if Vaska did not move to the next class.

Vaska had to be rescued. We began to write dictations with him. The result of the first was stunning. In a text of one hundred words, my student made one hundred and thirty mistakes. Grandfather advised, after working through them with Vaska, to repeat the same dictation. Vaska made one hundred and forty. Grandfather said that in thirty-five years of teaching he had never seen such a thing - even at the party school and at the workers' faculty. I, too, since then had to read different texts - by correspondence students, students of veterinary courses, Chinese, Vietnamese, students from the Ivory Coast, Koreans. Nothing like it was even close. I think it won't. Vaska was a genius, and like any genius he was unique. Where, whose sophisticated imagination would come up with such masterpieces as "pestmo", "pe-jag", "zoz-tezhka"? When and who else could turn “apricot” into “aprekoz”?..

It was mine best friend. When in the fourth grade (Vasya would have written: "in class") the teacher gave the topic of the homework "My friend", I did not think for a second.

The beginning went easily: “I have a friend Vasya. We help each other in everything. In the summer, when it was very hot, we wrote dictations with Vasya. However, further, when it was necessary to highlight Vaska's help to a friend, that is, to me, the writing stalled. Something different popped up in my memory: how Vasya dragged cucumbers from my aunt's garden for me or gave back some of the feathers won from me so that we could continue to play this forbidden game of chance. Or I remembered the story with the pants. It was such a fun game: while you are swimming in the river, your trouser leg is tied in a knot. The knot is tightened by two - like a tug of war. After that, the pants are still soaked.

But the work could not remain without end. It was inevitable to turn to the grandfather. True, he could say: "Unintelligible, very long in writing"; however, he only noticed that he would have limited himself to one phrase of a general nature, and immediately offered such a phrase: “A friend also took a lively part in my affairs, providing me with all kinds of help, and in all the vicissitudes of fate one could completely rely on him.” At the same time, grandfather especially frowned his eyebrows - as always, when he tried not to laugh. But I was in a hurry, and I was not up to my grandfather's eyebrows.

Two days later, Klavdia Petrovna, handing out essays, asked:

Anton, what vicissitudes of fate did you mean?

My mother came to me with this book. Read it, read it, you just open it, no, you read it now, I'm re-reading it for the second time, you'll like it - and stuff like that. And the work is really impressive. This is a real saga: powerful, deep, huge in its power. I remember only Kuznetsov of similar people, but everything is much more intelligent with him. Alexander Chudakov literally put his whole soul into the novel: as far as I know, this is his only work of art, the rest of the books are literary studies, according to Chekhov.

In fact, the novel is an autobiography, but not in the first person, but in the third: at first I got confused why the main character's name is Anton, when it is clear that this is a memoir genre, and the narrative sometimes still gets lost in “I”. Then it became clear that this was the author's technique: to move away from one's life a little and survey it from the outside, at the same time smoothing out possible roughness. The book itself is about the life of Soviet exiles living in northern Kazakhstan, although what kind of life is there, survival is natural there. In the center of the work is Anton's grandfather, a man of great strength, intelligence and courage. You can immediately see how attached the boy was to him - Alexander Chudakov writes in detail about his father and mother only in the very last chapters, and they seem to be like that, but they seem to be in the background.

What fascinated me the most were the descriptions of their Everyday life. Imagine an independent subsistence economy: home-made production of soap, candles, starch, dressing of boots - I don’t even talk about agriculture, it was by itself, especially since one of the formations of grandfather Anton was agronomic. And the author writes in detail how they prepared this or that product: “ Making soap was considered a simple matter: alkali - NaOH and waste animal fat. The soap, it is true, turned out like household soap, dirty pale brown, smelly, but it served its function, although it was caustic, and it was not recommended to lather heavily - red spots went over the body; when a sister was born, to wash her, they boiled a piece of another, toilet soap from a glass of butter”.

Against the background of hard physical work, the boy's obsession with language is manifested: he literally collects sayings, proverbs, songs, and just individual words, for example, hrompik, in his memory. There is one episode connected with this, which greatly amused me. Alexander Chudakov wrote this book before Albansky appeared, and even then, most likely, he was not aware of its existence. Too bad, he would have appreciated all the humor of this language:

Whenever Anton saw a brick or the word "brick", he remembered Vaska Gagin, who wrote this word like this: kerdpich. The word was scribbled in red ink, displayed on the blackboard. Vaska peered, craned his neck, moved his lips. And then he wrote: "Kerpich." When the teacher corrected: the cases are not “bone”, but indirect, Vaska frowned suspiciously, for he was firmly convinced that this name comes from the word “bone”; Klavdia Petrovna finally waved her hand. It was impossible to force him to write "garlic" correctly by any human effort - other, more powerful forces guided him with a pen and forced him to guess again and again to insert an extra letter and warningly sound the ending: "honest".

From his spelling experience, he made an unshakable conclusion: in Russian, all words are written differently than they are pronounced, and as far as possible from the real sound. All exceptions, unpronounceable consonants, voiced in place of pronounced deaf, unstressed vowels - all this flopped around in his head, like water in an incomplete barrel that is being driven over potholes, and splashed out with unexpected force.

[...] Vaska was a genius, and like any genius he was unique. Where, whose sophisticated imagination would come up with such masterpieces as "pestmo", "pe-jag", "zoz-tezhka"? When and who else could turn “apricot” into “apprekoz”?..

But this is not the most important thing that hooked me. Already in the last chapters, I read the cry of the soul of extraordinary strength and despair: the author compares the attitude to objects in the middle of the twentieth century, when he was a child, and at the end of the twentieth century. He did not know the now fashionable word "consumerism", and if he did, he would probably marvel at its accuracy. Chudakov writes about the attachment to things that I am very familiar with: during all the moves, I did not forget to take with me a ruler drawn by classmates, or a mug donated by classmates - and I have quite a few of these, precious for memory. He does not call for saving in the name of maintaining ecological balance, but speaks of the frugality that people of the past era were distinguished for (which, of course, was a forced measure) and which is so lacking now:

... The main trouble is different. A person takes a thing into his soul. Even an old man who has gone to the desert loves his style, the leather binding of his only book.

Previously, the transsubjective world was stable. The shape of the clay pot has not changed for thousands of years; the bureau from the Lomonosov time did not differ much from a similar subject in 1913. But more and more often, our contemporary cannot understand the purpose of not only an antique, but also an object even in a meager domestic hardware store.

The change in property in the Western countries is fantastically fast, and the diversity is assuming extraordinary proportions. Things that are familiar and beloved are being taken away from a person more and more boldly. [...]

A person can bear everything. Twenty years of loneliness and even a northern pit-prison without a roof, like Archpriest Avvakum. But wouldn’t it be better to spend these huge God-given psychic resources not on non-stop choosing, buying, wearing out, throwing away, choosing again, but in our country still getting, getting used to it again, throwing it away again, on solving more spiritual problems? We need to protect the psyche of modern man from the rapidly growing aggression of things, colors, from the too rapidly changing world.

A powerful book, very powerful and written in incredibly rich language - a pure pleasure to read. No wonder the novel received the Russian Booker of the decade - it's worth it. I recommend it to everyone who reads this blog: it will be interesting for older people to look at that time through the eyes of the author, and for young people to find out how their peers lived then. The work is read in one breath, it is impossible to tear yourself away from it. And then, perhaps, you will pester someone: read it and read it, just open it, you will like it ...

Vaska was a genius and, like any genius, he was unique.

Indeed, it is not easy. And the debate about the principles of writing has been going on for a long time.

In the 18th century, V.K. Trediakovsky called for writing “by ringing”, in other words, by pronunciation. At the beginning of the 20th century, Academician A.V. Shcherba considered the ideal of orthography to be the maximum coincidence between the written language and the spoken language.

Is such a letter possible? It turns out that the same word can be spelled differently. So, "on the bells" the preposition "without" with different words can be written in different ways: biz house, bish rustle, bizh fat, bis fkusu. The Russian alphabet does not reflect all the features of the pronunciation of both individual people and individual regions (akanye, okanye, clatter). According to M.V. Panov, with the introduction of phonetic spelling, “each village will have to create its own textbook.” A very small part of Russian spellings is based on the phonetic principle (“I write as I hear and pronounce”): it sounds under the stress [o] - we write o (search); pronounce without stress [a] - write a (search).

The traditional principle (“I write as they wrote before”) of Russian spelling involves memorizing the spelling of the roots of words, according to tradition, the endings of the -th / its adjectives, pronouns, participles, ordinal numbers are written in the form of the genitive singular.

Modern ideas about the leading principle of Russian spelling boil down to the fact that Russian writing is writing in a strong position, when the sound is most audible. For a vowel, a strong position is a position under stress: home, because home. For consonants - before a vowel or before sonorant consonants m, n, l, r: garlic, because garlic, water supply, because water supply. Such a principle - the principle of a weak and strong position of spelling - is called phonemic (from the word phoneme - sound - semantic difference).

The task of making Russian spelling more consistent and therefore easier to learn, to revise the rules of Russian spelling and punctuation was set in the 1960s by the Spelling Commission. The project prepared by the commission was discussed on the pages of newspapers and methodical magazines. Many copies were broken, in particular on the issue of cancellation soft sign in feminine nouns of the third declension and adverbs. The project was not accepted.

Dina Rubina in one of her essays noted that there is a certain mystical connection between what has already been written and what has not yet happened. Maybe there is nothing terrible that errors slip in the press, in books, on Internet pages, but suddenly an “author” written by someone materializes somewhere and writes his own “raskas”? But we have to live with it somehow ...

Irina DOBROTINA, laureate of the competition "Teacher of the Year of Russia-2002", teacher of Russian language and literature at Lyceum No. 1310, Moscow

Blok's line in the title should, in my opinion, emphasize the imperious necessity of memories and their healing power. The author is an excellent literary scholar, doctor of sciences, author of several books about Chekhov's life and work. Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov (1938-2005) worked on this work for many years, the book went through six editions.

"Roman-idyll" - such a genre definition was given by the author. The feelings and thoughts of the protagonist Anton are interesting, reliable and very recognizable for many representatives of the older generation. In the words of one reviewer (with whom I fully agree), "the book is homerically funny and incredibly sad, creepy and life-affirming, epic and lyrical, it is a novel of education and a human document."

In the provincial Chebachinsk, the city of Schuchinsk is guessed in the north of Kazakhstan. Many outstanding representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were exiled there “in memorable years” (A. Tvardovsky).

The novel Darkness Falls on the Old Steps was awarded the Russian Booker of the Decade award. By the way, it mentions our city and Lake Turgoyak.

I quote fragments from the book, from the chapter "Genius of Spelling". Laugh.

“Whenever Anton saw a brick or the word “brick”, he remembered Vaska Gagin, who wrote this word like this: “kerdpich”. The word was scribbled in red ink, displayed on the blackboard. Vaska peered, stuck out his neck, moved his lips. And then he wrote: "Kerpich." When the teacher corrected: the cases are not “bone”, but indirect, Vaska frowned suspiciously, for he was firmly convinced that this name comes from the word “bone”; Klavdia Petrovna finally waved her hand. It was impossible to force him to write “garlic” correctly by any human effort - other, more powerful forces led him with a pen and forced him to insert an extra letter again and again and prudently sound the ending: “honest”.

“Vaska had to be rescued. We began to write dictations with him. The result of the first was stunning. In a text of one hundred words, my student made one hundred and thirty mistakes. Grandfather advised, after working through them with Vaska, to repeat the same dictation. Vaska made one hundred and forty. Grandfather said that in thirty-five years of teaching he had never seen such a thing - even at the party school and at the workers' faculty. Since then, I also had to read different texts - by correspondence students, students of veterinary courses, Chinese, Vietnamese, students from the Ivory Coast ... Nothing similar was even close. I think it won't. Vaska was a genius, and like any genius he was unique.