Virginia Woolf: The Wave Runner. Waves

Virginia Woolf
Waves
Novel
Translation from English by E. Surits
Editorial
"Waves" (1931) is the most unusual novel in artistic construction by the English writer Virginia Woolf, whose name is well known to the readers of "IL". Throughout her creative life, Woolf strove for a radical renewal of traditional narrative models, believing that the time had passed for a "novel of environment and characters" with its typical socio-psychological conflicts, carefully written out background of action and unhurried deployment of intrigue. A new "point of view" in literature - Wolfe's most important essays were written in its justification - meant the desire and ability to convey the life of the soul in its spontaneity and confusion, at the same time achieving the internal integrity of both the characters and the whole picture of the world, which is captured "without retouching ", but as it is seen and understood by the heroes.
In the novel "The Waves" there are six of them, their life is traced from childhood, when they were all neighbors in the house that stood on the seashore, and to old age. However, this reconstruction is made exclusively through the internal monologues of each of the characters, and the monologues are brought together by associative links, repetitive metaphors, echoes of often the same, but each time perceived in their own way, events. A through internal action arises, and six human destinies pass before the reader, and it arises not due to external authenticity, but through polyphonic construction, when the most important goal is not so much the image of reality as the recreation of heterogeneous, whimsical, often unpredictable reactions to what is happening of each of the acting persons. Like waves, these reactions collide, flow - most often barely noticeable - one into another, and the movement of time is indicated by pages or paragraphs in italics: they also outline the atmosphere in which the dramatic plot unfolds.
Long considered one of the canonical texts of European modernism, Woolf's novel still provokes debate about whether the artistic solution proposed by the writer is creatively promising. However, the significance of the experiment carried out in this book, which served as a school of excellence for several generations of writers, is unconditionally recognized by the history of literature.
Below we publish excerpts from the diaries of V. Wulf during the creation of the novel "Waves".
The first mention of "Waves" - 03/14/1927.
VV has finished "To the Lighthouse" and writes that she feels "the need for an escapade" (which she soon satisfied with the help of "Orlando") before embarking on "a very serious, mystical, poetic work."
On May 18 of the same year, she already writes about "Butterflies" - this is how she first intended to name her novel:
"... a poetic idea; the idea of ​​a certain constant stream; not only human thought flows, but everything flows - the night, the ship, and everything flows together, and the stream grows when bright butterflies fly in. A man and a woman are talking at the table. Or they are silent "It will be a love story."
Thoughts about "Waves" ("Butterflies") do not let her go, no matter what she writes. Every now and then, individual references flash in the diary.
11/28/1928 recorded:
"... I want to saturate, saturate every atom. That is, to expel all vanity, deadness, everything superfluous. To show the moment in its entirety, no matter what it is filled with. Vanity and deadness come from this terrible realistic narrative: a consistent presentation of events from dinner until supper. This is a falsehood, a convention. Why allow everything into literature that is not poetry? Do I annoy the novelists because they do not make it difficult to select? Poets - they usually select so that they leave almost nothing. I want to contain everything, but to saturate, to saturate.That's what I want to do in Butterflies.
Record 04/09/1930:
“I want to convey the essence of each character with a few lines ... The freedom with which “To the Lighthouse” or “Orlando” was written is impossible here because of the inconceivable complexity of the form. It seems that this will be a new stage, a new step. In my opinion, I hold fast to the original idea."
Record 04/23/1930:
"This is a very important day in the history of the Waves. I seem to have led Bernard to the corner where the last leg of the journey will begin. He will now go straight, straight and stop at the door: and for the last time there will be a picture of the waves."
But how many more times did she rewrite, rewrite, correct!
Entry 02/04/1931:
"A few more minutes and I, thank Heavens, will be able to write - I finished "Waves"! Fifteen minutes ago I wrote - oh, Death! .."
Of course, the work didn't end there...
There were many more rewrites, corrections...
Entry 07/19/1931:
"This is a masterpiece," said L. (Leonard), coming in to me. "And the best of your books." But he also said that the first hundred pages are very difficult and it is not known whether they will be tough for the average reader.
WAVES
The sun hasn't risen yet. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, only the sea lay all in light folds, like a crumpled canvas. But now the sky turned pale, the horizon cut through with a dark line, cut off the sky from the sea, the gray canvas was covered with thick strokes, strokes, and they ran, galloping, running, overlapping, excitedly.
At the very shore, the strokes stood up, swelled, broke and covered the sand with white lace. The wave will wait, wait, and again it will recoil, sighing like a sleeper, not noticing either his inhalations or exhalations. The dark streak on the horizon gradually cleared up, as if sediment had fallen in an old bottle of wine, leaving the glass green. Then the whole sky cleared up, as if that white sediment had finally sunk to the bottom, or perhaps it was someone who had lifted the lamp from behind the horizon and fanned flat stripes of white and yellow and green over it. Then the lamp was raised higher, and the air became friable, red, yellow feathers protruded from the green, and flickered, flashing like clouds of smoke over a fire. But then the fiery feathers merged into one continuous haze, one white heat, boiling, and he shifted, lifted the heavy, woolly-gray sky and turned it into millions of atoms of the lightest blue. Little by little the sea also became transparent; And the hand holding the lamp rose higher and higher, and now a wide flame became visible; a fiery arc burst over the horizon, and the whole sea around it flared up with gold.
The light engulfed the trees in the garden, now one leaf became transparent, another, a third. Somewhere above, a bird chirped; and everything was quiet; then, lower, another squeaked. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, fell like a fan on the white curtain, and under the leaf by the bedroom window it cast a blue shadow - like the imprint of an ink finger. The curtain swayed slightly, but inside, behind it, everything was still indefinite and vague. Outside, the birds sang without rest.
“I see a ring,” Bernard said. - It hangs over me. Trembling and hanging like a loop of light.
“I see,” Susan said, “the yellow liquid smear spreads, spreads, and he runs off into the distance until he hits a red streak.
- I hear, - Rhoda said, - the sound: chirp-chirp; chirp-chirp; up down.
- I see a ball, - Nevil said, - he hung like a drop on the huge side of the mountain.
- I see a red brush, - Ginny said, - and it is all intertwined with golden threads like that.
“I hear,” Louis said, “someone stomping. A huge beast is chained by the leg with a chain. And stomp, stomp, stomp.
- Look - there, on the balcony, in the corner of the cobweb - Bernard said. - And on it are water beads, drops of white light.
“The sheets have gathered under the window and pricked up their ears,” Susan said.
The shadow leaned on the grass, Louis said, with a bent elbow.
“Islands of light float on the grass,” Rhoda said. - They fell from the trees.
“The eyes of the birds burn in the darkness between the leaves,” Nevil said.
"The stalks are overgrown with tough, short hairs," Ginny said, and dewdrops got stuck in them.
- The caterpillar curled up in a green ring, - Susan said, - all with blunt legs.
- The snail drags its gray heavy shell across the road and crushes the blades of grass, - Rhoda said.
“And the windows will light up, then go out in the grass,” Louis said.
“The stones are chilling my legs,” Nevil said. - I feel each one: round, sharp, - separately.
"My hands are on fire," Ginny said, "only my palms are sticky and wet with dew."
- Here is a cock crowing, as if a red, tight stream flared up in a white splash, - Bernard said.
- The birds are singing - up and down, back and forth, everywhere, everywhere the hubbub sways, Susan said.
- The beast stomps; the elephant is chained by the leg; a terrible beast stomps on the shore, - Louis said.
“Look at our house,” Ginny said, “what white-white curtains it has all the windows.
- Already dripped cold water from the kitchen faucet, - Rhoda said, - into the basin, on the mackerel.
“The walls went golden cracks,” Bernard said, “and the shadows of the leaves lay like blue fingers on the window.
"Mrs. Constable is now putting on her thick black stockings," Susan was saying.
“When the smoke rises, it means: the dream curls in mist over the roof,” Louis said.
“Birds used to sing in chorus,” Rhoda said. “Now the kitchen door is open. And they immediately jumped away. As if someone threw a handful of grains. Only one sings and sings under the bedroom window.
"Bubbles start at the bottom of a pot," Ginny said. - And then they rise, faster, faster, such a silver chain under the very cover.
“And Biddy scrapes fish scales on a wooden board with a chipped knife,” Nevil said.
“The dining-room window is dark blue now,” Bernard said. - And the air is shaking over the pipes.
“A swallow perched on a lightning rod,” Susan said. And Biddy slammed a bucket on the stoves.
“Here is the strike of the first bell,” Louis said. - And others followed him; bim-bom; bim-bom.
“Look how the tablecloth runs across the table,” Rhoda said. “It’s white itself, and it has white china in circles, and silver dashes next to each plate.
- What is this? A bee is buzzing in my ear,” Nevil said. - Here she is, here; here she is gone.
"I'm on fire, I'm shaking from the cold," Ginny said. This is the sun, this is the shadow.
"So they're all gone," Louis said. - I am alone. Everyone went to the house for breakfast, and I was alone, by the fence, among these flowers. It's still early, before school. Flower after flower flashes in the green darkness. The leaves dance like a harlequin and the petals jump. The stems stretch out from the black abysses. Flowers float on dark, green waves like fish woven from light. I am holding a stalk in my hand. I am this stem. I take root in the very depths of the world, through the brick-dry, through the wet earth, along the veins of silver and lead. I'm all fibrous. The slightest ripple shakes me, the earth presses heavily on my ribs. Up here, my eyes are green leaves and they can't see anything. I'm a boy in a gray flannel suit with a copper zipper on the trouser belt. There, in the depths, my eyes are the eyes of a stone statue in the Nile desert, devoid of eyelids. I see how women are wandering with red jugs to the Nile; I see the buildup of camels, men in turbans. I hear the clatter, the rustle, the rustle around.
Here Bernard, Nevil, Ginny and Susan (but not Rhoda) launch rampettes into the flower beds. Butterflies are shaved with rampets from still sleepy flowers. Combing the surface of the world. The flutter of the wings tears the nets. They yell "Louis! Louis!" but they don't see me. I am hidden behind a fence. There are only tiny gaps in the foliage. Oh Lord, let them pass by. Oh God, let them dump their butterflies on a handkerchief on the road. Let them count their admirals, cabbage girls and swallowtails. If only they didn't see me. I am green as a yew in the shade of this hedge. Hair - from foliage. Roots are in the center of the earth. The body is a stem. I'm squeezing the stem. The drop is squeezed out of the mouth, slowly pours, swells, grows. Here's something pink flickering past. A quick glance slips between the leaves. It burns me with a beam. I am a boy in a gray flannel suit. She found me. Something hit me in the back of the head. She kissed me. And everything overturned.
“After breakfast,” Ginny said, “I started running. Suddenly I see: the leaves on the hedge are moving. I thought the bird was sitting on a nest. I straightened the branches and looked; I see there are no birds. And the leaves are moving. I got scared. Running past Susan, past Rhoda and Nevil with Bernard, they were talking in the barn. I cry myself, but I run and run, faster and faster. Why are the leaves jumping like that? Why is my heart jumping so fast and my legs won't let go? And I rushed here and I see - you are standing, green as a bush, standing quietly, Louis, and your eyes are frozen. I thought: "Suddenly he died?" - and I kissed you, and my heart was pounding under the pink dress, and trembling, like the leaves were trembling, although they now don’t understand why. And here I am smelling geraniums; I smell the earth in the garden. I am dancing. I'm streaming. I was thrown over you like a net, like a net of light. I flow, and the net thrown over you trembles.
“Through a crack in the leaves,” Susan said, “I saw that she was kissing him. I lifted my head from my geranium and peered through a crack in the foliage. She kissed him. They kissed - Ginny and Louis. I suppress my sadness. I'll hold it in a handkerchief. I'll roll it into a ball. I'll go to the lessons in the beech grove, alone. I don't want to sit at the table, add up the numbers. I don't want to sit next to Ginny, next to Louis. I will lay my longing at the roots of the beech tree. I will sort it out, pull it. Nobody will find me. I will eat nuts, look for eggs in the brambles, my hair will become dirty, I will sleep under a bush, I will drink water from a ditch, and I will die.
"Susan walked past us," Bernard was saying. - Walked past the barn door and squeezed a handkerchief. She did not cry, but her eyes, because they are so beautiful, narrowed like a cat's when she is about to jump. I'll follow her, Neville. I will quietly follow her, so that I can be at hand and console her when she comes in, bursts into tears and thinks: "I am alone."
Here she is walking through the meadow, seemingly as if nothing had happened, she wants to deceive us. Reaches the slope; thinks no one will see her now. And he runs, clutching his chest with his fists. Squeezes this handkerchief-knot. I took it in the direction of the beech grove, away from the morning shine. Here she is, spreading her arms - now she will swim in the shadow. But he sees nothing from the light, stumbles over the roots, falls under the trees, where the light seems to be exhausted and suffocated. Branches go - up and down. The forest is worried, waiting. Darkness. The world is trembling. Scary. Creepy. The roots lie on the ground like a skeleton, and rotten leaves are heaped over the joints. It was here that Susan spread her anguish. The handkerchief lies on the roots of the beech, and she huddled where she fell and weeps.
“I saw her kiss him,” Susan said. I looked through the leaves and saw. She danced and shimmered with diamonds, light as dust. And I'm fat, Bernard, I'm short. My eyes are close to the ground, I distinguish every bug, every blade of grass. The golden warmth in my side turned to stone as I saw Ginny kissing Louis. Here I will eat grass and die in a dirty ditch where last year's leaves rot.
“I saw you,” Bernard said, “you walked past the barn door, I heard you cry: “I am unhappy.” And I put down my knife. Neville and I carved boats out of wood. And my hair is shaggy because Mrs. Constable told me to comb it, and I saw a fly in the web and thought: "Should I free the fly? Or leave it to be eaten by a spider?" That's why I'm always late. My hair is shaggy, and in addition there are chips in them. I hear you cry, and I followed you, and saw how you put a handkerchief, and all your hatred, all resentment is squeezed in it. Never mind, it'll all be over soon. Now we are very close, we are close. You hear me breathe. You see a beetle dragging a leaf on its back. Tossing about, unable to choose the road; and while you're watching the beetle, your desire for the one thing in the world (now it's Louis) will waver like light swaying between beech leaves; and the words will roll darkly in the depths of your soul and break through the tight knot with which you squeezed your handkerchief.
“I love,” Susan said, “and I hate. I only want one. I have such a hard look. Ginny's eyes glow like a thousand lights. Rhoda's eyes are like those pale flowers on which butterflies descend in the evening. Your eyes are full to the brim and they never spill. But I already know what I want. I see insects in the grass. Mom still knits white socks for me and hem aprons - I'm small - but I love; and I hate.
“But when we sit side by side, so close,” Bernard said, “my phrases flow through you, and I melt in yours. We are hidden in the fog. On the shifting ground.
"Here's a beetle," Susan said. - He's black, I see; I see it is green. I am bound by simple words. And you go somewhere; you slip away. You climb higher, higher on words and phrases from words.
- And now, - Bernard said, - let's scout the area. Here is a white house, it is spread among the trees. He is deep below us. We will dive, swim, slightly checking the bottom with our feet. We dive through the green light of the leaves, Susan. Let's dive on the run. Waves close over us, beech leaves clash over our heads. The clock in the stable is blazing with gold hands. And here is the roof of the master's house: slopes, eaves, tongs. The stableman paddles around the yard in rubber boots. This is Elvedon.
We fell between the branches to the ground. The air no longer rolls its long, poor, purple waves over us. We are walking on the ground. Here is the nearly bare hedge of the master's garden. The mistresses are behind her, lady. They walk around at noon, with scissors, cut roses. We entered the forest, enclosed by a high fence. Elvedon. There are signs at the intersections, and the arrow points to "To Elvedon", I saw it. Nobody has set foot here yet. What a bright smell these ferns have, and red mushrooms are hidden under them. We scared the sleeping jackdaws, they never saw people in their lives; we walk on ink nuts, red from old age, slippery. The forest is surrounded by a high fence; no one comes here. You listen! It is a giant toad flopping in the undergrowth; these primitive cones rustle and fall to rot under the ferns.
Put your foot on that brick. Look over the fence. This is Elvedon. The lady sits between two high windows and writes. Gardeners sweep the lawn with huge brooms. We got here first. We are discoverers of new lands. Freeze; If the gardeners see it, they will immediately shoot it. Crucified with nails, like ermines, on the stable door. Carefully! Do not move. Get a firmer grip on the fern on the hedge.
- I see: there is a lady writing. I see gardeners sweeping the lawn, Susan said. - If we die here, no one will bury us.
- Let's run! Bernard spoke. - Let's run! The gardener with the black beard has noticed us! Now we're going to be shot! They'll shoot you like jays and nail them to the fence! We are in the camp of enemies. We must hide in the forest. Hide behind beeches. I broke a branch when we were walking here. There is a secret path here. Bend down low. Follow me and don't look back. They will think we are foxes. Let's run!
Well, we are saved. You can straighten up. You can stretch out your hands, touch the high canopy in the vast forest. I hear nothing. Only the voice of distant waves. And a wood dove breaks through the crown of a beech. The dove beats the air with its wings; the dove beats the air with forest wings.
“You are going somewhere,” Susan said, “composing your own phrases. You rise like the lines of a balloon, higher, higher, through the layers of leaves, you do not give me. Here it is delayed. You pull my dress, you look around, you compose phrases. You are not with me. Here is the garden. Fence. Roda on the path shakes flower petals in a dark basin.
- White-white - all my ships - Rhoda said. - I do not need red petals stockrose and geraniums. Let the whites float when I rock the pelvis My armada swims from coast to coast. I'll throw a chip - a raft for a drowning sailor. I will throw a pebble - and bubbles will rise from the bottom of the sea. Nevil had gone somewhere, and Susan had gone; Ginny is in the garden picking currants, probably with Louis. You can be alone for a while while Miss Hudson arranges textbooks on the school table. Be free for a while. I collected all the fallen petals and floated. Some will be raindrops. Here I will put a lighthouse - a sprig of euonymus. And I will rock the dark basin back and forth so that my ships overcome the waves. Some drown. Others will break on the rocks. Only one will remain. My ship. He swims to icy caves, where a polar bear barks and stalactites hang in a green chain. The waves are rising; breakers foam; where are the lights on the top masts? Everyone crumbled, everyone drowned, everyone except my ship, and it cuts through the waves, it leaves the storm and rushes to a distant land, where parrots chatter, where lianas curl ...
- Where is this Bernard? Neville spoke. He left and took my knife. We were in the barn carving boats and Susan walked past the door. And Bernard left his boat, went after her, and grabbed my knife, and it is so sharp, they cut the keel with it. Bernard - like a wire dangling, like a broken doorbell - ringing and ringing. Like an algae hung out of a window, sometimes it is wet, sometimes it is dry. Brings me down; runs after Susan; Susan will cry, and he will pull out my knife and tell her stories. This big blade is the emperor; Breeded blade - Negro. I can't stand all the dangling; I hate everything wet. I hate confusion and confusion. Well, call, we'll be late now. You have to leave the toys. And everyone enter the class together. Textbooks are laid out side by side on a green cloth.
“I won't conjugate that verb,” Louis said, “until Bernard conjugates it. My father is a Brisbane banker, I speak with an Australian accent. I better wait, listen to Bernard first. He is an Englishman. They are all English. Susan's father is a priest. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Nevil are both from good families. Ginny lives with her grandmother in London. Here - everyone gnaws pencils. They fiddle with notebooks, look askance at Miss Hudson, count the buttons on her blouse. Bernard has a chip in his hair. Susan looks tearful. Both are red. And I'm pale; I am neat, my breeches are tied with a belt with a copper serpentine clasp. I know the lesson by heart. All of them in life do not know as much as I know. I know all cases and types; I would know everything in the world, if only I wanted to. But I don't want to answer the lesson in front of everyone. My roots branch out like fibers in a flower pot, branch out and entangle the whole world. I don't want to be in front of everyone, in the rays of this huge clock, it's so yellow and ticking, ticking. Ginny and Susan, Bernard and Nevil are lashing out to whip me. They laugh at my neatness, at my Australian accent. Let me try, like Bernard, softly cooing in Latin.
“Those are white words,” Susan said, “like the pebbles you pick up on the beach.”
“They twirl their tails, hit right and left,” Bernard said. They twist their tails; beat with tails; flocks soar into the air, turn, flock, fly apart, unite again.
"Oh, what yellow words, words like fire," Ginny said. - I would like a dress, yellow, fiery, to wear in the evening.
“Each tense of the verb,” Neville said, “has its own special meaning. There is order in the world; there are differences, there are divisions in the world on the verge of which I stand. And everything is ahead of me.
- Well, - Rhoda said - Miss Hudson slammed the book. Now the horror begins. Here - she took the chalk, draws her numbers, six, seven, eight, and then a cross, then two dashes on the board. What answer? They are all watching; watch and understand. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Ginny writes; even Bernard - and he began to write. And I have nothing to write. I just see numbers. Everyone turns in the answers, one by one. Now it's my turn. But I don't have any answer. They were all released. They slam the door. Miss Hudson is gone. I was left alone looking for an answer. The numbers mean nothing now. The meaning is gone. The clock is ticking. Arrows caravan stretch across the desert. The black dashes on the dial are oases. A long arrow stepped forward to explore the water. Short stumbles, poor thing, on the hot stones of the desert. She's in the desert to die. The kitchen door slams. Stray dogs bark in the distance. This is how the loop of this figure swells, swells with time, turns into a circle; and holds the whole world. While I write out the figure, the world falls into this circle, and I remain aloof; so I bring, close the ends, tighten, fasten. The world is rounded, finished, and I stand aside and shout: "Oh! Help, save me, I was thrown out of the circle of time!"
“Rhoda sits there, staring at the blackboard in the classroom,” Louis said, “while we wander off, picking a thyme leaf here, a bunch of wormwood somewhere, and Bernard telling stories. Her shoulder blades converge on her back like the wings of such a small butterfly. She looks at the numbers and her mind gets stuck in those white circles; slips through the white loops, alone, into the void. The numbers don't tell her anything. She doesn't have an answer for them. She doesn't have a body like others do. And I, the son of a banker in Brisbane, I, with my Australian accent, do not fear her as I fear others.
- And now we will crawl under the canopy of the currant, - Bernard said, - and we will tell stories. Let's populate the underworld. Let's enter as masters into our secret territory, lit up like candelabra, hanging berries, shimmering scarlet on one side, black on the other. You see, Ginny, if we crouch down well, we can sit side by side under the canopy of currant leaves and watch the censer rock. This is our world. The others all follow the road. The skirts of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry float past like candle-extinguishers. Here are Susan's white socks. Luis' polished canvas shoes print hard marks in the gravel. The smell of rotten leaves, rotten vegetables, sends out in gusts. We stepped into the swamp; into the malaria jungle. Here is an elephant, white from the larvae, struck by an arrow that hit the eye. Glow eyes of birds - eagles, hawks - jumping in the foliage. They take us for fallen trees. A worm is pecked - this is a spectacled snake - and left with a purulent scar to be torn to pieces by lions. This is our world, illuminated by sparkling stars, moons; and large, cloudy-transparent leaves close the spans with purple doors. Everything is unprecedented. Everything is so big, everything is so tiny. Blades of grass are mighty, like the trunks of centuries-old oaks. The leaves are high, high, like the spacious dome of a cathedral. You and I are giants, if we want, we will make the whole forest tremble.

The novel "The Waves" and the story "The Flush" by the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf are combined under one cover. The book was read by me at the age of 15 and immediately took the place of apotheously brilliant.
The novel and the story converged on the basis of originality. "Waves" is quite complex, built on endless chains of images and paintings, and even almost musical epithets; very experimental novel. "Flush" - "a kind of literary joke": a biography of a real-life 19th-century English poetess, presented to the reader through the perception of her pet, a purebred cocker spaniel, Flush.
The Flush was created by Virginia as a kind of respite in between writing complex, deep novels. "Waves" was edited several times by the author, and when they saw the light of day, they caused a very mixed reaction from critics and readers. Subsequently, after the death of Woolf, "The Waves" were recognized as perhaps the most brilliant novel of the writer.

Waves is by no means easy reading. The novel requires complete immersion and dedication from the reader. I must say that the composition of this work is very, very unusual. "Waves" is divided into nine chapters by insanely picturesque and beautiful landscape sketches, always displaying the sea, the coast. The chapters themselves are continuous alternating monologues of the main characters.
In unthinkably beautiful verbal "combs" the unusual author's signature of Virginia Woolf seems to be guessed, as an emotion expressed in the images of waves or sunbeams.
The novel tells about six people, six friends. In principle, like The Flash, it is a kind of biopic, but that's where the similarities end.
Three men and three women throughout their lives are looking for themselves, diverging and reuniting as parts of one whole, at the same time being very different. In the novel, I was struck by Wolfe's art, the ability to create completely different characters, with radically different characters and worldviews - and yet leave a kind of connecting thread that is almost imperceptible to the reader's gaze.

Bernard. For some reason, it seemed to me that Virginia loved this hero in particular. I can’t say that it is shown deeper than the others, and the manifestations of the author’s love in the text as such cannot be noticed. But still, his monologues are more extensive, sometimes there are very, very many interesting thoughts in them. It is with Bernard's spatial monologue that the novel ends.
Actor. He is all, entirely composed of invented phrases, without the birth of which he does not pass a day, from the images of the heroes of the books that he once read, and he himself, in the largest period of his life, is Lord Byron.

Kind. An incomprehensible woman. Lonely, shy, very changeable and a little infantile. I was always afraid of this life and eventually left it voluntarily. She really wasn't like that.
Rhoda is very sweet and touching, as the fragile pattern of a snowflake can be touching. There is no confusion or lack of meaning in her confusion, there is no place for total reclusion in her aloofness, and her fears are not paranoia.

Louis. This guy is accompanied throughout the novel by a complex due to his Australian accent and the phrase (and in the speech of others - the memory of the phrase) "My father is a Brisbane banker." He connected his life with business, everything he had was collected and neat. However, the fact that Rhoda was his mistress for some time speaks volumes. He, like her, is lost and alone.

Ginny. An ordinary narcissist, for whom practically nothing but his own appearance matters. She loves to be admired. She just can't be ignored. After reading the novel, I feel antipathy towards it, because it is empty. It doesn't have the depth that Bernard, Rod or Neuville has...

Susan. In appearance - hardness. In green eyes - the same thing. it seems that she was supposed to become a lawyer or a business woman. But she chose a calm and measured life in the village, with children and a husband. No confusion. No fuss. She is sympathetic to me precisely by the firmness of her character, the immutability of her convictions, the constancy of feelings and a certain pragmatism.

Neville. Let his words speak for me.
"- People go, go. But you will not break my heart. After all, only for this moment, one and only moment - we are together. I press you to my chest. Eat me, pain, torment me with your claws. Tear me apart. I cry , I'm crying".

The reader, fascinated, hand in hand with each of the six goes through their path from childhood to old age. He experiences every event of the "outside world": a new meeting, the marriage of Bernard, the death of Percival (a mutual friend), the death of Rod - as if it were happening to people close to him. The text of the "waves" is addictive, bewitching. And some phrases involuntarily forever cut into memory.
I recommend this particular novel to all people in whose souls the percentage of romance exceeds 40%.

The story "Flush" is radically different from "Waves" both in compositional structure and in emotional coloring. The life of the English poetess Elizabeth Barret-Browning is shown not from her face, but through the perception of her dog Flush. Therefore, this story can in no way be ranked among Beethoven, Garfield and other similar creations. It is written in a refined and refined language, very easy, almost flying in, read and perceived with a bang.
In addition to biographical details from the life of Elizabeth, the reader will also learn about the fate of Flush, about his experiences, relationships with the mistress and other people (and a little - dogs), about the sorrows and joys of a purebred Cocker Spaniel.
At times funny, at times touching to tears, the story will be of interest to anyone.

Pleasantly surprised by the article by N. Morzhenkova, given as an afterword. Morzhenkova also talks about Wolfe herself, and analyzes in detail each of her works. This article will help you better understand the novel "The Waves" and its intention, clarify some details for yourself, and also look at the story "Flush" through the eyes of an experienced literary critic.
A great book to get started with Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf is an iconic figure in world literature of the 20th century. And, like many outstanding people, the writer's fate - both personal and creative - was very complex, full of contradictions, joys and tragedies, achievements and bitter disappointments.

Childhood and youth spent in a respectable house in the center of London, in an atmosphere of worship of art (the guests of the father, historian and philosopher Sir Leslie Stephen, - the first values ​​in British culture of that time); amazing home education - and constant sexual harassment from half-brothers, the unexpected death of mom, difficult things with dad and the strongest nervous breakdowns, which were often accompanied by suicide attempts. Close affairs with ladies - and a long, according to Virginia Woolf herself, happy marriage with the writer Leonard Wolfe. Productive creative activity, lifetime recognition - and constant doubts about their own writing abilities. A disease that exhausted her and took away precious strength and time in her work, and a catastrophic end - suicide. And the immortality of written works. Year by year, the number of research papers devoted to various aspects of Virginia Woolf's work is growing exponentially, as is the ranks of her researchers. But it is unlikely that anyone will dare to talk about the exhaustion of the topic under the title “Virginia Woolf phenomenon”.

Virginia Woolf was an innovator, a bold experimenter in the field of verbal art, but in all this she was distant from the general rejection of tradition, like many of her modernist contemporaries. Janet Interson notes: “Virginia Woolf deeply respected the cultural traditions of the past, but she understood that these traditions needed to be reworked. Each new generation needs its own living art, which is connected with the art of the past, but not copying it.” Wolfe's creative discoveries are still vital, and the works themselves continue to tangibly influence contemporary creators. The South American writer Michael Cunningham has repeatedly admitted in an interview that it was the reading of W. Wolfe's novels that encouraged him to write, and his most recognizable novel, The Hours, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the heroine of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Delaway, where she herself the writer turns out to be one of the heroines of the work.

Virginia Woolf is first known to readers all over the world thanks to the novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, but, according to the fair assertion of many researchers, both Russian and foreign, it is the most complex, most experimental, the most “tense” both in terms of poetics and problem-thematic filling, there is a novel "The Waves" (The Waves, 1931).

It is clear that not a single work was given to Virginia Woolf simply: her diary entries are a chronicle of painful hesitation, sharp changes in creative activity and creative impotence, endless rewriting and editing. But the novel The Waves was especially difficult to write. This was due to the fact that work on the text, which began in 1929, was always interrupted by an exacerbation of the disease, and the fact that the undertaking required indescribable mental stress from the writer. Diary entries for the period from 1928 (the time when plans for the upcoming novel were still being formed) to 1931 fully allow you to feel how hard the work was.

Initially, Virginia Woolf intended to call her novel Butterflies. And in his notes dated November 7, 1928, V. Wolfe writes that the future novel should become a “drama-poem”, in which one could “allow oneself to be affected”, “allow oneself to be very magical, very abstract.” But how to accomplish such an undertaking? Doubts about the form of the work, about the correctness of the choice of artistic method, accompanied the writer from the first to the last page of the new novel. On May 28, 1929, she writes: “About my Butterflies. How do I get started? What should this book be? I do not feel a huge lift, in a rush, one unbearable burden of difficulties. But here is another entry, dated June 23 of the same year: “As soon as I think about“ Butterflies ”, and everything inside me turns green and comes to life.” Tides of creative energy alternate with periods of complete impotence. The uncertainty about the title of the novel interferes with starting full-fledged work on the text - here is the entry dated September 25, 1929: “Yesterday morning I tried to start “Butterflies” again, but the title needs to be changed.” In the October entries of the same year, the novel already exists under the title “Waves”. The entries for 1930 and 1931 are full of conflicting emotions caused by the work on "The Waves" - from interest to complete despair. And finally, on February 7, 1931: “I have only a couple of minutes to mark, thank God, the end of The Waves. The physical feeling of victory and freedom! Excellent or bad - the case is done; and, as I felt in the first minute, not just made, but complete, finished, formulated. But this was far from the end - the manuscript was corrected for a long time, pieces were rewritten again and again (only the beginning of the novel was rewritten 18 times!), And after, as in the case of every previous work by V. Wolf, a period of agonizing waiting for the reaction of the public began and criticism of the new creation.

In a certain sense, The Waves was an attempt to reach a new level, to generalize everything that had been created before, and to make a high-quality leap. And the writer succeeded. In artistic terms, this is the most fascinating, most unusual novel by W. Wolfe, in which the text itself breaks out of its specific framework. With regard to the problem-thematic field, we can say that the sound of such cross-cutting for creativity themes as loneliness, reaches its climax here.

The novel is not easy to read, and because it is not an ordinary story, equipped with a complex plot and system of morals, but a typical synthesis of actually words, music and painting. The fact that the novel appeals to sight and hearing is already evidenced by the first pages. The work opens with an impressionistic description of the sea coast before sunrise, full of colors and sounds.

And the first words of the heroes of the novel are “I see” and “I hear”. And this is not accidental - the novel, with every line, every word, encourages the reader to create and hear, to catch every image, every sound of the world around us, because, according to W. Wolfe, this is exactly how we comprehend the world through sounds and colors.

There are six heroes in the novel, and the entire text, which describes one day by the sea, from dawn to dusk (transparent symbolism: one day by the sea is human life, and the waves are the same people: they live for a moment, but belong to an endless element called sea, under the title of life), represents the expressions of the heroes. In other words, we can say that W. Wolfe here again recreates the polyphonic structure already familiar from previous works. But in “Waves” this structure becomes more complicated. Firstly, despite the frequent introduction of the introduced verb “to speak”, which precedes the word of heroes (“Bernard spoke”, “Roda spoke”, etc.), the reader quickly realizes that the expressions of heroes are not expressions in ordinary awareness, in other words, not expressions aloud addressed to the interlocutor. These are typical internal monologues that absorb what was once said in reality, thought out, also seen and heard, but not said either aloud or to oneself (after all, in reality, from afar, not everything that we see and hear is “pronounced” , in other words, is realized in words), cherished and obvious - in other words, here we have a complex textual substance, a typical “inner speaking”, which is neither an internal monologue in classical awareness, nor a stream of consciousness (after all, the accuracy of phrases, their saturation with poetic metaphors, rhythm, uncharacteristic sparse informative and formally non-ideal flow of consciousness). Francesco Mulla calls The Waves a “novel of silence” (a novel of silence), and this definition seems reasonable. The heroes in the work speak in turn, which purely from the outside makes the illusion of dialogue, but there is no real dialogue - the heroes practically talk to themselves, which is the discovery of a failure of communication and complete loneliness among people similar to themselves.

Formally, the characters in the novel go from youth to maturity, but if in a classic realistic novel such a plot is accompanied by the development of morals, then this does not happen here. And the indicator of this is the language of the characters. It is believed that at first the novel is spoken by children, but this language is very far from ordinary children's.

Of course, there are still characters in the novel - if only because they have names, gender, albeit a sketch, but still a personal history is indicated. But, like sea waves, they are separated from each other only for a short time, so that later they will again unite into a single stream. And connects together the feeling of loneliness and the tormenting search for oneself.

The novel "Waves" is a poetic expression that a person's life is the life of a wave, an instant, but it is also a particle of eternity, and the essence of life is in life itself; living, each person defies death.

«...»
“Before, everything was different,” Bernard said, “before, when you want, you gasp and enter the river. And now - how many postcards, how many phone calls to gouge this well, this tunnel that we converged on, all together, in Hampton Court! How quickly life flies from January to December! We have all been picked up and carried by a stream of utter nonsense, so familiar that it no longer casts a shadow; not up to comparisons; about me and you, God forbid, remember in a hurry; and in such a half-asleep we are carried along with the current, and we rake the reeds that have surrounded the backwater with our hands. We fight, we gallop like a fish flying over the water to catch the Waterloo to the train. But no matter how you take off, you still fall into the water again. I'll never sail to the South Seas, never, never. A trip to Rome is the limit of my pilgrimages. I have sons and daughters. I hit a predetermined gap in the folding picture like a wedge.

But this is only my body, the appearance - the elderly gentleman, whom you call Bernard, is fixed once and for all - so I would like to think. I now reason more abstractly, more freely than in my youth, when, with the Christmas anticipation of a child rummaging in a stocking, I was looking for myself: “Oh, what is there? And here? And it's all? Is there another surprise? - and further in the same spirit. Now I know what's in bundles; and I don't really care about it. I scatter right and left, wide, like a sower scatters seeds, and they fall through the purple sunset, fall into the glossy, bare, plowed land.

Phrase. Unbaked phrase. And what are phrases? They left me so little and nothing to put on the table next to Susan's hand; along with Nevil's safe-conduct to pull out of his pocket. I'm not an authority on jurisprudence, or medicine, or finance. I am covered with phrases like damp straw; I glow with phosphorescent light. And each of you feels when I say: “I am glowing. I am illumined." The boys, I remember, felt: “Not badly started up! I turned it down!” when the phrases boiled on my lips under those elms by the cricket field. And they themselves boiled up; they ran away after my phrases. But I'm withering alone. Loneliness is my death.

I go from door to door, like those monks in the Middle Ages who fooled gullible virgins and wives with tirades and ballads. I am a wanderer, paying for the night with a ballad; I am undemanding, I am an indulgent guest; sometimes I lie in the best chambers under a canopy; and then I wallow on the bare straw in the barn. I have nothing against fleas, but I don't mind silk either. I am exceptionally tolerant. I am not a moralist. I understand too well how fleeting life is and how many temptations it holds to put everything on the shelves. Although - I'm not such a mug, as you conclude - do you conclude? - according to my chatter. Just in case of a fire, I have in store a downright smashing blade of mockery. But I'm easily distracted. That's the thing. I write stories. I can make toys out of nothing. The girl is sitting at the door of a village house; waiting; but whom? Seduced her, poor thing, or not seduced? The director sees a hole in the carpet. Sighs. His wife, passing her still magnificent hair through her fingers, ponders ... et cetera. A wave of the hand, a hitch at the crossroads, someone throws a cigarette into the gutter - all stories. But which one is worth it? I don't know. And so I keep my phrases like rags in a closet, and wait: maybe someone will fit. So I wait, I think, then I will make one note, then another, and I do not really cling to life. Shake me off like a bee off a sunflower. My philosophy, always absorbing, boiling up every second, like mercury spreads in different directions, immediately in different directions. But Louis, hard, stern for all his wild look, in his attic, in his office, drew unshakable verdicts about everything that was supposed to be known.

It breaks, - Louis said, - the thread that I spin; your laughter tears her, your indifference, and also your beauty. Ginny broke that thread a long time ago when she kissed me in the garden. Those braggarts at school made fun of my Aussie accent and she got ripped off. "The point is," I say; but immediately I stumble painfully: from vanity. “Listen,” I say, “the nightingale that sings in the midst of the clatter of the crowds; conquest and travel. Believe me ... ”- and immediately it tears me in two. I make my way over broken tiles, over broken glass. In the light of strange lights, everyday life becomes spotted, like a leopard, and alien. Here, let's say, the moment of reconciliation, the moment of our meeting, the sunset moment, and the wine, and the leaves sway, and the boy in white flannel trousers comes from the river, carrying a pillow for the boat - but for me everything turns black from the shadows of the dungeons, from torment and outrage that one person repairs to another. I am so unfortunate that I cannot hide behind the sunset purple from the most serious accusations that my mind fusses and fusses against us - even now, even as we sit like this together. Where is the exit, I ask myself, where is that bridge ...? How can I bring these blinding, dancing visions into one line that would absorb and connect everything? So I think hard; and in the meantime you are looking badly at my clenched mouth, my sunken cheeks, my eternally cloudy forehead.

But, I beg you, pay attention at last to my cane, to my waistcoat. I inherited a solid mahogany desk in a study hung with maps. Our ships are enviably famous for the luxury of their cabins. There are swimming pools and gyms. I wear a white vest now and check my notebook before making an appointment.

In such an ironic, cunning manner, I distract you from my trembling, tender, infinitely young and defenseless soul. After all, I am always the youngest, naive; I am the easiest to be taken aback; I run ahead, ready with sympathy for everything awkward and funny: like soot on the nose, like an unbuttoned fly. I feel in myself all the humiliations of the world. But I'm tough, I'm stone. I don't understand how you can talk about life itself being lucky. Your childishness, your delights: ah! like a kettle boils, ah! how gently the wind picked up Ginny's spotted scarf, it floats like cobwebs, which, to me, is like throwing silk ribbons into the eyes of an angry bull. I condemn you. And yet, my heart yearns for you. I would go with you to the end of the world. And yet, I'm better off alone. I luxuriate in gold and purple. And yet most of all I love the view of the chimneys; cats scratching their skinny backs on porous tiles; broken windows; the hoarse rattle of bells falling from some imperceptible belfry.

I see what's in front of me, - Ginny said. - This scarf, these wine-red stains. This glass. Mustard. Flower. I love things that you can touch and taste. I love it when rain turns to snow and you can touch it. But, you know, I am dashing, and I am much braver than all of you, and therefore I do not dilute my beauty with tediousness for fear of getting burned. I swallow it undiluted; it is made of flesh; that's from what. The body rules my fantasies. They are not as intricate and snow-clear as Luis's. I don't like your skinny cats and mangy pipes. The pitiful beauties of these roofs of yours make me sad. Men and women, in uniforms, wigs and gowns, bowler hats, tennis shirts with a beautifully open collar, endlessly varied women's rags (I won't miss a single one) - that's what I adore. Together with them, I pour into the halls, halls, hither and thither, wherever they go. He shows a horseshoe. This one locks and unlocks the drawers of his collection. I am never alone. I follow the regiment of my brethren. My mother, not otherwise, went to the call of the drum, my father - to the call of the sea. I am like a dog that marches along the street to the beat of regimental music, but either stops to study the smell of a tree, or sniffs at an interesting spot, or suddenly blows across the street after a vulgar mongrel, and then, raising its paw, catches a bewitching breath from the meat door. Wherever it took me! Men - and how many there were! - broke away from the walls and hurried to me. You just have to raise your hand. They fly like pretty little ones to the place of the appointed meeting - to the chair on the balcony, to the shop window on the corner. Your torments, your doubts are resolved with me from night to night, sometimes with a single touch of a finger under the tablecloth when we are sitting at dinner - my body has become so fluid that from a simple touch of a finger it is poured into a drop, and it sparkles, trembles and falls into oblivion.

I was sitting in front of a mirror, the way you sit and write or add figures at the desk. And so, in front of the mirror, in my temple, in the bedroom, I critically examined my nose and my chin; and lips - they open so that the gums are visible. I peered. I noticed. Picked up: to yellow, white, shiny or matte, straight or lush - whichever is more suitable. With one I am windy, with the other I am taut, I am cold, like an icicle of silver, I burn like a golden candle flame. As I ran, I flew like an arrow, I rushed with all my strength, until I dropped. His shirt, over there in the corner, was white; then it was red; flame and smoke enveloped us; after a violent fire - we did not raise our voices, we sat on the rug by the fireplace and whispered the secrets of the soul quietly, quietly, as into a shell, so that no one in the sleepy house would hear us, only once I heard the cook tossing and turning, but once we accepted the ticking hours for steps - we burned to the ground, and there was no trace left, not a bone, not a curl, to keep in a locket, as is customary with you. And now I'm graying; foolish; but in the bright sun I look at my face in the mirror, I perfectly see my nose, chin, lips, which open so that the gums are visible. But I'm not afraid of anything.

There were lanterns, - Rhoda said, - and the trees had not yet shed their leaves, there, on the road from the station. It was still possible to hide behind these leaves. But I didn't. I went straight to you, I did not dodge, as always, to delay the horror of the first minute. But I only drilled my body. My insides are not trained in anything; I am afraid, I hate, I love, I despise you - and I envy you, and I will never, never be easy with you. Approaching from the station, abandoning the protective shade of foliage and mailboxes, I saw from a distance, by your raincoats and umbrellas, that you were standing, leaning on something long-standing, common; that you stand firmly on your feet; you have your own attitude to children, to power, to fame, love and society; and I have nothing. I don't have a face.

Here, in the hall, you see antlers, goblets; salt shakers; yellow spots on the tablecloth. "Waiter!" Bernard says. "Bread!" Susan says. And the waiter comes. He brings bread. And I see the edge of the cup, like a mountain, and only part of the horns, and the glare on this vase, like a cleft of darkness, with bewilderment and horror. Your voices are like the crackling of trees in a forest. The same with your faces, their bulges and hollows. How beautiful they were, distant, motionless, at midnight, by the fence of the square! Behind you, white, foamy, the newborn moon glides, fishermen at the end of the world choose nets, cast them. The wind ruffles the top leaves of primeval trees. (We are sitting in Hampton Court.) The parrots cry out in the dead silence of the jungle. (A tram squealed at the turn.) The swallow dips its wings into the midnight ponds. (We're talking.) These are the limits I'm trying to grasp while we're sitting together. We must endure this penance - Hampton Court - at seven-thirty sharp.

But since these cute bagels and bottles of wine, and your faces, beautiful with all the bulges and hollows, and a pleasant tablecloth, cozy yellow spots - the attempts of the mind break into a gloss in the end (as I dream when the bed soars under me in space) to hug the whole world, you will have to delve into the leaps of individuals. I will shudder when you climb up to me with your children, your poems, chills - well, what else amuses and torments you. But you can't fool me. No matter how you climb, or call to me, I will still fall through a thin sheet into the fiery depths - alone. And don't rush to help. More heartless than medieval executioners, you will let me fall, and when I fall, you will tear me to shreds. And yet - there are such moments when the walls of the soul become thinner; and it is not separated from anything, it absorbs everything into itself; and it seems then that together we could blow out such an incredible soap bubble that the sun would rise in it and set in it, and we would take the blue of noon and the shadow of midnight with us and run away from here and now.

Drop by drop, - Bernard said, - minutes of silence fall. Souls flow under the slope and plop down into puddles. Forever alone, alone, alone - I listen to how the pauses fall and diverge in circles, circles. Full and drunk, at ease and the solidity of age. Loneliness is my death, but here I drop pauses, drop by drop.

But these pauses, falling, make me pockmarked, spoil my nose, like a snowman left in the yard in the rain. I spread, I lose features, I can no longer be distinguished from others. Eka importance. Well, what's important? We had an excellent dinner. Fish, veal cutlets, wine dulled the sharp tooth of selfishness. Anxiety subsided. Louis, the most vain of us, is no longer exhausted: what will they think of him. Neville's anguish calmed down. Let others prosper - that's what he thinks. Susan hears the sweet sniffing of all her sleepy children at once. Sleep, sleep, she whispers. Rhoda drove her ships to the shore. They drowned, anchored - it doesn't matter to her anymore. We are ready, without any whims, to accept what the world will offer us. And it even seems to me that our earth is simply a pebble that accidentally fell off a sunny face, and in all the abysses of space, there is no life anywhere, nowhere.

In such silence, it seems, Susan said, that not a leaf will ever fall, and a bird will never fly.

It was as if some kind of miracle happened, - Ginny said, - and life took its course and stopped in place.

And, - Rhoda said, - we no longer need to live.

But just listen, - Louis said, - how the world passes through the abysses of space. It thunders; the illuminated streaks of the past flash by, our kings, queens; we are gone; our civilization; Nile; and all life. We dissolved - separate drops; we died out, lost in the abyss of time, in the dark.

Pauses fall; pauses fall, - Bernard said. - But listen; tick-tock, tick-tock; tu-u, tu-u; The world is calling us to itself, back. I heard for a moment the thundering wind of darkness as we passed out of life; and then - tick-tock, tick-tock (clock), too-too, too-too (cars). We landed; went ashore; we, all six, are sitting at a table. The thought of my own nose brings me to my senses. I get up; “We have to fight,” I yell, remembering the shape of my nose. - We must fight! - and belligerently beat the spoon on the table.

To oppose this immeasurable chaos, Neville said, this formless stupidity. That soldier, making out with a nanny under a tree, is more charming than all the stars of heaven. But sometimes a trembling star will rise in the sky, and suddenly you will think how wonderfully beautiful the world is, and we ourselves are larvae, distorting even the trees with their lust.

(- Still, Louis, - Rhoda said, - it wasn't quiet for long. Here they are smoothing napkins near their appliances. "Who will come?" - Ginny says; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival will never come. Ginny mirror looked at herself like an artist, slid the powder puff over her nose, and, after a moment's hesitation, gave her lips just the right amount of ruddy, just the right amount—exactly. She'll button it up again. What is she getting ready for?

They tell themselves, Louis said, “It's time. I'm still nothing," they say. “My face will look nice on the blackness of endless spaces ...” They do not finish their sentences. “It's time, it's time,” they say. “Then the park will be closed.” And we'll go with them, Rhoda, caught up in the current, but we'll be a little behind, right?

Like conspirators with something to whisper about, Rhoda said.)

Yes, indeed, - Bernard said, - here we are walking along this alley, and I definitely remember that some king fell off his horse into a molehill here. But isn't it strange to imagine a tiny figure with a golden teapot on its head against the backdrop of swirling abysses of endless time? Figurines, let's say, are gradually regaining their importance in my eyes, but here's what they wear on their heads! Our English past is a momentary glow. And people put teapots on their heads and say: “I am the king!” No, as we walk along the alley, I honestly try to restore my understanding of time, but because of this fluttering darkness in my eyes, it eludes me. This palace for a moment becomes weightless, like a cloud that has risen into the sky. Such a mind game - to put kings on thrones, one after another, with crowns on their heads. Well, and we ourselves, when we walk side by side, what are we opposing? With a homeless, fleeting fire in ourselves, which we call the mind and soul, how can we cope with such an avalanche? And what is forever? Our lives, too, are flowing away along the unlit alleys, beyond this strip of time, unidentified. Once Nevil launched poems into my head. Suddenly, immutably believing in immortality, I shouted: "And I know the same thing that Shakespeare knew." But when it was...

It is incomprehensible, funny, - Nevil said, - we are wandering, and time is stepping back. Runs, long dog gallop. The machine is running. The gates turn gray from antiquity. Three centuries are melting like a moment. King Wilhelm climbs a horse in a wig, the ladies of the court sweep the ants with embroidered crinolines. I am ready to believe that the fate of Europe is a thing of tremendous importance, and although it is still terribly funny, the basis of the foundations is the Battle of Blenheim. Yes, I declare as we pass through this gate, this is the real thing; I am a subject of King George.

As we walk down the alley," Louis said, "I lean slightly towards Ginny, Bernard arm in hand with Neville, and Susan squeezes my hand, it's so hard to keep from crying, calling ourselves little kids, praying that the Lord will keep us until we are sleeping. How sweet it is to sing along, holding hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the harmonium.

The cast iron gates opened, Ginny said. - The terrible jaws of time no longer clang. So we conquered the abyss of spaces with lipstick, powder, gas handkerchiefs.

I've got a hold, I'm holding on, Susan said. - I firmly hold on to this hand, to someone's hand, with hatred, with love; doesn't it matter?

The spirit of silence, the spirit of incorporeality has found on us, - Rhoda said, - and we enjoy a moment of relief (it is not so often that you get rid of anxiety), and the walls of the soul become transparent. Wren's Palace - like the quartet that played for the unfortunate and callous people in that hall - forms a rectangle. The square is placed on the rectangle, and we say: “Here is our housing. The design is already visible. Almost everyone fit in."

That flower, - Bernard said, - that carnation that was in a vase then, on the table, in the restaurant, when we dined with Percival, became a six-sided flower; out of six lives.

And a mysterious illumination, - Louis said, - shines through these yews.

And how difficult it is, with what labors it was built, - Ginny said.

Marriage, death, travel, friendship, Bernard said, city, nature; children and all that; multifaceted substance carved out of darkness; terry flower. Let's stand a minute; Let's see what we have built. Let it sparkle against the background of yews. Life. Here! And passed. And it went out.

They're disappearing, Louis said. - Susan and Bernard. Neville and Ginny. Well, you and I, Rhoda, let's stand near this stone urn. I wonder what song we'll hear - now that the two have disappeared under the canopy of the groves and Ginny, pretending to distinguish water lilies, points to them with a gloved hand, and Susan says to Bernard, whom she has loved all her life: “My ruined life, my lost life?" And Neville, holding Ginny's raspberry-nailed pen, over the pond, over the moonlit water, calls out: "Love, love," and she, impersonating a famous bird, echoes: "Love, love?" What song are we listening to?

They disappear, go to the pond, - Rhoda said. - They glide over the grass furtively and yet confidently, as if our pity had been shown their ancient right: not to be disturbed. It rushed to the soul; got them; they left us, they could not help it. Darkness closed in behind them. Whose song do we hear - owls, nightingale, kinglet? The ship is buzzing; sparks glide along the wires; the trees sway heavily, bend. A glow hung over London. The old woman peacefully wanders home, and a belated fisherman descends along the terrace with a fishing rod. No movement, no sound - nothing will hide from us.

The bird is flying home, Louis said. - The evening opens its eyes and looks around the bushes with a hazy look before falling asleep. How to understand how to fit that indistinct, that collective message that they send us, and not only them, but how many more dead girls, boys, adult men and women wandered around here under that king, under another?

In the night, a load fell out, - Rhoda said, - and pulled it all down. Every tree grows heavy from the shadow, and not the one that it itself casts. We hear the drumming on the rooftops of the hungry city, and the Turks are treacherous and greedy. We hear them barking like dogs barking, “Open up! Open!" Do you hear how the tram squealed, how sparks rustled along the rails? We hear the birches and beeches uplifting branches, as if the bride has thrown off her silk nightgown, comes to the door and says: "Open, open."

Everything is alive, - Louis said, - there is no death tonight - nowhere. Stupidity on this male face, old age on this female one, it seems, could already resist the spell and reintroduce death into circulation. But where is she, death, tonight? All rudeness, all nonsense and turbidity, this and that, like glass shards, is picked up by this blue, red-finned surf, and it rolls towards the shore, carrying countless fish, and breaks at our feet.

If it were possible like this, together, to rise high, high, look down, - Rhoda said, - and so that no one would support, just not touch, stand and stand; but you have a rustle of praise and ridicule in your ears, and I hate concessions and deals, the good and evil of human lips, I believe in loneliness alone and also in the power of death, and therefore we are separated.

Forever, Louis said, forever separated. Hugs among the ferns, and love, love, love over the pond - we have sacrificed everything and stand, like conspirators who have something to whisper about, near this stone urn. But you look - while we are standing, the swell passes along the horizon. Higher, higher pull the network. Here she is on the surface of the water. Silver, small fish flicker across the surface. They jump, fight, they are thrown ashore. Life overturns its catch on the grass. But someone is coming towards us. Men or women? They still have the indistinct shrouds of the surf into which they plunged.

Well, - Rhoda said, - they passed by this tree and acquired an ordinary human appearance. Just men, just women. They lift the covers of the surf, and the amazement leaves, the horror leaves. Pity returns when they, like the remnants of a defeated army, step under the moonbeam - our representatives, who every night (here or in Greece) go out to battle and return wounded, with dead faces. Here the light shines on them again. They have faces. It's Bernard, Susan, Ginny and Nevil again, the ones we know. But where does this fear come from? This tremor? Why such humiliation? I tremble again, as I always did, from hatred and horror, when I feel how they hook me with a hook, drag me; recognize, call out, grab by the hand, stick their eyes. But as soon as they speak, and from the very first words, an unforgettable, unsteady, forever deceiving tone, and hands, raking in thousands of sunken days with every movement, disarm me.

Something is shining and dancing, Louis said. - The illusion returns as they walk towards us along this alley. Again excitement, questions. What do I think of you? What do you think about me? Who am i? And you? - and the pulse quickens, and the eyes shine, and again it's off and on, and the madness of an inherently personal existence, without which life would collapse and perish, begins anew. Here they are nearby. The southern sun shines on this urn; we dive into the tide of the evil, pitiless sea. God help us play our parts as we greet them after we get back - Bernard and Susan, Ginny and Neville.

We have disturbed something with our presence, - Bernard said. - The whole world, maybe.

But we can hardly breathe, - Neville said, - we are so tired. Such dullness, such torment, that it only draws us to unite with the mother's body, from which we have been torn away. Everything else is disgusting, strained and boring. Ginny's yellow scarf turned moth-gray in the light; Susan's eyes went blank. We are almost indistinguishable from the river. Only the light of a cigarette for some reason marks us with a cheerful accent. And sadness is mixed with pleasure: why was it necessary to leave you, to tear the pattern; succumbing to the temptation to squeeze out, in private, such a blacker, more bitter juice, but there is also sweetness in it. And here we are dead tired.

After our fire,” Ginny said, “there is nothing left that is kept in medallions.

I stand, dissatisfied, with my mouth open, I catch everything, - Susan said, - what escaped me, I didn’t get it: like a chick opens its beak.

Let's stay here a little longer," Bernard said, "before we leave. Wander over the river - almost alone. After all, it's almost nighttime. The people returned home. How comforting it is to watch when the lights go out in the windows of the shopkeepers on the other side. Here - one fire went out, here is another. What do you think their earnings are today? Only just right to pay rent, food, light and clothes for the kids. But just right. What a sense of the portability of life these lights give us in the windows of the shopkeepers on the other side! Saturday will come, and maybe even cinema can be afforded. Probably, before turning off the light, they go out into the courtyard to admire the gigantic rabbit, comfortably curled up in its wooden cage. This is the same rabbit that will be eaten at Sunday dinner. And then they turn off the light. And they fall asleep. And for thousands, sleep is only warmth, and silence, and momentary fun with some outlandish dream. “I sent a letter,” thinks the greengrocer, “to the Sunday paper. What if he gets lucky with this football tote and earns five hundred pounds? And we'll kill the rabbit. Life is a pleasant thing. The good thing is life. I sent the letter. We'll kill the rabbit." And he falls asleep.

And so on. But just listen. Some kind of sound, like clutch plates clinking. This is a happy chain of events, one after another following on our way. Knock-knock-knock-knock. Need-need-need. We must go, we must sleep, we must wake up, get up - a sober, merciful word that we pretend to scold, which we press to our chest, without which we are subhuman. How we idolize this sound - tinkle-knock-knock-knock of clutch plates.

But now - far away on the river I hear the chorus; the song of those same boasters, they return in buses after a day's trip on the steamer. But they sing resolutely in the same way as they used to sing to the whole winter, night yard, or to the open summer windows, when they got drunk, they smashed the furniture - all in striped hats, and their heads turned in one direction, as if on command, when they turned around angle and ruler; and how I wanted them.

Because of this chorus, and the swirling water, and the wind grumbles more and more noticeably - we are leaving. Somehow we crumble. Here! Something important has fallen off. I want to sleep. But we must go; you have to catch the train; to go back to the station - it is necessary, it is necessary, it is necessary. We hobble side by side, completely empty. I'm not there - only my heels are burning and my overworked thighs are aching. We seem to have been wandering for an eternity. But where? I can't remember. I'm like a log sliding silently into a waterfall. I am not a judge. Nobody needs my judgment. Houses and trees twilightly blended into one. What is a pole? Or is someone coming? Here it is, the station, and if the train cuts me in two, I will grow together on the other side, one, indivisible. But strangely, I still clutch the return half of my Waterloo ticket in the fingers of my right hand, even now, even as I sleep.

Sunset. Sky and sea became indistinguishable. The waves, having broken, covered the shore with large white fans, sent white shadows into the depths of the sonorous grottoes and, sighing, ran back along the pebbles.

The tree swayed its branches, the downpour brushed off the leaves. The leaves were stacked quietly, doomed, stacked to die. Grey, black showered into the garden from the vessel that previously held the red light. Black shadows lay between the stems. The thrush fell silent, and the worm sucked back into its narrow hole. Every now and then gray, empty straw shone from the old nest, and it lay down on dark grasses, between rotten apples. The light had gone from the barn wall, and the viper skin hung empty from the nail. Everything in the room has shifted, changed beyond recognition. The clear line of the brush swelled and became crooked; cupboards and chairs merged into one solid, heavy blackness. Everything from floor to ceiling hung like a wide, quivering curtain of darkness. The mirror became dark, like a cave entrance shaded by overhanging ivy.

The mountains melted, became incorporeal. Will-o'-the-wisps cut like fluffy wedges into the invisible, sunken roads, but there was no light in the folded wings of the mountains, and no sound but the cry of a bird calling to the loneliest tree. At the edge of the rocks, combing through the forest, the air rumbled evenly, and, cooled in the countless icy depressions of the sea, the water rumbled.

Darkness rolled through the air in waves, it covered houses, mountains, trees, like waves washing the sides of a sunken ship. Darkness was washing the streets, swirling around late-night singles, swallowing them up; washed couples hugging under the rainy darkness of the elm tree in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its waves along the overgrown alleys, along the wrinkled ant, flooded the lonely thorn bush and the empty snail houses at its roots. Climbing higher and higher, the darkness flooded the bare slopes of the highlands and stumbled upon jagged peaks, where snow always lies on the cliffs, even when streams boil in the valley, and yellow vine leaves, and girls look at this snow from verandas, covering their faces with fans. Darkness covered them too.

Well, - Bernard said, - let's draw a line. I will explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (although I once met you, it seems to me, on board a steamer going to Africa), we can talk without hiding. I was seized by the illusion that something is fixed for a moment, has weight, depth, something is complete. And it seems like this is my life. If only it were possible, I would hand it over to you in its entirety. I would break it off like a bunch of grapes break off. I would say: “Excuse me. Here's my life."

But, unfortunately, what I see (this ball full of images), you cannot see. You see the one who is sitting opposite you at the table, an elderly gentleman, in a body, with gray temples. See how I take a napkin, straighten it. I pour myself a glass of wine. See how the door opens behind me, someone enters, leaves. And in order for you to understand me, in order to give you an idea about my life, I have to tell you a story - and there are so many of them, so many of them - about childhood, about school, about love, marriage, about death, and so on; and it's all a lie. But no, we, like children, tell each other stories and, in order to decorate them, compose funny, colorful, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of these stories, these phrases, charmingly, with all their paws flopping to the ground! Yes, but there is little joy from clear sketches of life on a piece of stationery paper. Involuntarily, you begin to dream of the conventional babbling that lovers use, of abrupt, unintelligible speech, like shuffling on a panel. You begin to look for a plan that is more in line with those moments of victories and failures that irrefutably run into each other. When, let's say, I'm lying in a ditch, it's a windy day, and it's raining, and clouds are floating across the sky, huge clouds, ragged clouds, shreds. It is this confusion, this height, this detachment and rage that fascinates me. Large clouds change endlessly, float away; something ominous, eerie swirls, breaks off, rears up, somersaults and crawls away, and I, forgotten, tiny, I lie in the ditch. And I don’t see any history, no plan then.

And yet, while we are having dinner, let's look through these scenes, how children turn the pages of a picture book, and the nanny points her finger and says: “Here is a dog. Here is the boat." Let's turn these pages, and I'll amuse you with explanations in the margins.

At first there was a nursery, and the windows looked into the garden, and then, beyond it, there was the sea. I saw something shining - not otherwise the chest of drawers. And then Mrs. Constable lifts a sponge over her head, she squeezes it out, and sharp arrows prick me, left, right, all over the spine. And from the time we breathe, until the end of days, when we stumble upon a chair, a table, a woman, these arrows pierce us through - when we wander through the garden, we drink this wine. Sometimes I pass by the illuminated window in the house where the child was born, and I’m ready to pray that they just don’t squeeze the sponge over this brand new little body. Yes, and then there was that garden, and a canopy of currant leaves seemed to cover everything; flowers like sparks burned in the green depths; and a rat covered in worms under a rhubarb leaf; and a fly buzzed, buzzed in the nursery under the ceiling, and plates stood in a row, plates with innocent sandwiches. All these things happen in a moment and last forever. Faces pop up. Dashing around the corner, "Hi," you say, "here's Ginny. Here is Neville. Here is Louis in gray flannel pants with a zipper at the waistband. Here is Rhoda. She had such a bowl, she floated white petals on it. It was Susan who cried the day I was in the shed with Neville; and melted away my indifference. Nevil didn't melt. “Therefore,” I said, “I am not Neville, I am on my own,” an amazing discovery. Susan was crying and I followed her. Her handkerchief was all wet, her narrow back was shaking like a pump handle, she was crying because she couldn't get it - and my nerves couldn't take it. “This is unbearable,” I said, sitting next to her on those beech roots, and they were hard as a skeleton. Then for the first time I felt the presence of those enemies who change, but they are always there; forces against which we fight. Resignedly surrender - and there can be no question. “For you, this road, world,” you say, “and for me, over there.” And - "Let's scout the area!" I yelled and I jumped up and ran downhill, Susan behind me, and we saw the stable boy paddling around the yard in rubber boots. Far, far below, behind a thick layer of foliage, gardeners were sweeping the lawn with huge brooms. Lady sat writing. Shocked, dumbfounded, I thought: “I can’t stop a single sweep of the broom. They sweep and sweep. And the lady writes and writes.” How strange - you can't stop those brooms, nor drive this lady away. So they stuck with me for the rest of my life. It's like suddenly waking up in Stonehenge, in a circle of giant stones, in a circle of spirits, enemies. And then that wood dove fluttered out of the foliage. And - falling in love for the first time in my life - I composed a phrase - poems about a forest dove from a single phrase, because something suddenly popped in my mind, a window, transparency through which everything is visible. And then - again bread and butter, and again the buzzing of flies in the nursery under the ceiling, and islands of light tremble on it, unsteady, iridescent, and blue puddles flow from sharp fingers of chandeliers in the corners, near the fireplace. Day after day, sitting at tea, we watched this picture.

But we were all different. That wax, that virgin wax that covers the spine, melted on each in its own way. The rumbling of the stable boy, who has flunked the girl in the gooseberry bushes; linen torn from a rope; dead man in a ditch; an apple tree frozen under the moon; rat in worms; a chandelier pouring blue - different things were imprinted on wax in different ways for everyone. Louis was horrified by the properties of human flesh; The kind of our cruelty; Susan couldn't share; Neville wanted order; Ginny - love; and so on. We suffered terribly, becoming separate beings.

However, I saved myself from such extremes, outlived many of my friends, blurred, turned gray, a shot sparrow, as they say, for the panorama of life, no, not from the roof, but from the fourth floor - that's what delights me, and not that a woman told the man, even if that man is myself. And therefore - how could I be harassed at school? How could they poison me? Let's say our director entered the chapel, all leaning forward as if in a gale he went out on the deck of a warship and gave commands through the mouthpiece, because people in power are always theatrical - did I hate him like Neville, did I hate him read like Louis? I took notes as we sat together in the chapel. There were columns, and shadows, and copper tombstones, and the boys hit each other and exchanged stamps under the cover of prayer books; hissed pump; the headmaster talked about immortality and that we should behave like men; Percival scratched his thigh. I took notes for my stories; drew portraits on the margins of a notebook and thus became even more independent. Here is one or the other image that saved the memory.

Percival sat looking straight ahead, this day in the chapel. He had such a manner - to raise his hand and smear himself on the back of the head. Every movement was an unthinkable miracle. We all tried to slap ourselves on the back of the head in the same way - where there! He possessed that special beauty that shuns caresses. Without thinking about the future, he swallowed everything that was written for our edification, without any comment (Latin just begs to be spoken), and with a majestic inviolability, which later protected him from so many baseness and humiliation, he believed that linen braids and rosy cheeks Lucy is the pinnacle of beauty and femininity. So guarded, its taste then became remarkably subtle. But here we would need music, some kind of wild choir. So that the hunting song flew through the window, the distant echo of a fast, unexpected life, like a scream in the mountains, swept, and it is gone. What stuns, hurts, what we are unable to understand, what turns symmetry into absurdity - everything suddenly falls on my soul when I think about it. That surveillance device is broken. The columns collapsed; the director floats away; I suddenly find an incomprehensible delight. He was thrown from his horse at full gallop, and as I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue today, those dim, indistinct faces that emerge from the subway door, and many indistinguishable Indians, and people dying of hunger and disease, and abandoned women, and beaten dogs and weeping children all seemed to mourn him. He would have established justice. I would be their protector. By the age of forty, I would have shaken the powers that be. It never occurred to me what kind of lullaby could calm him down.

But let me dive in again and scoop up with a spoon another of those little things we presumptuously refer to as "the characters of our friends," that's Louis. He sat without taking his eyes off the preacher. He seemed to be all one intense thought; lips compressed; eyes are motionless, but how they suddenly light up with laughter. And he also had swollen joints, the trouble of poor circulation. Without happiness, without friends, in exile, in moments of frankness, sometimes, he talked about how the surf rolls on the distant native shore. And the pitiless gaze of youth drilled into his swollen joints. Yes, but very soon we realized how capable, sharp, how scrupulous and strict he was, and how naturally, lying under the elms and supposedly watching cricket, we waited for his approval and rarely waited. His dominance was as infuriating as Percival's power fascinated. Prudish, wary, pacing with a cock's gait... But there was a legend that he broke some door with his bare fist. But this peak was too stony and bare for such a fog to cling to it. He was deprived of those simple devices that bind one person to another. He remained aloof; mysterious; a scientist capable of inspired, even some frightening scrupulousness. My phrases (how to describe the moon?) met with no favorable response from him. On the other hand, he envied me to the point of melancholy how easy I was with the servants. Of course, he knew the price of his achievements. It was commensurate with his respect for discipline. Hence his success - in the end. Although his life was not happy. But look, his eyes went white as he lay in my palm. But here I am confused, my head is spinning. I return it to that element where it will shine again.

Next is Nevil - lying on his back, looking at that summer sky. He hovered between us like sow thistle fluff, settled languidly in the corner of the playing field, did not listen, but did not withdraw into himself. It was from him that I picked up concepts about Latin poets, without giving myself the trouble to verify them on my own, and adopted that sweeping train of thought, which leads God knows where: that crucifixes, say, are the devil’s tool. Our sour love, cool hatred and uncertainty in this matter were an inexorable betrayal for him. The heavy, resonant headmaster, whom I seated by the fireplace with dangling suspenders, was for him nothing more nor less than an instrument of the Inquisition.

With a passion that completely atoned for laziness, he pounced on Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, lay half asleep, yes, but carefully, enthusiastically watched the cricket players, and his mind, like the tongue of an anteater - sharp, fast, sticky, explored every turn , every twist of the Latin phrase, and he was looking for one person, always one person, to sit next to.

And the long skirts of the teachers' wives whistled past, menacing like mountains; and our hands flew up to the caps. And a huge, gray, unshakable skinny thing hung. And nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, not a single fin flashed on the lead desert waves. Nothing has happened to relieve us of this burden of unbearable boredom. The trimesters went by. We grew; we changed; We are animals, after all. We are not eternally conscious of ourselves; we breathe, eat and sleep completely automatically. And we exist not only separately, but also as indistinguishable lumps of matter. A line of boys is immediately scooped up with one ladle, and - off we go, they play cricket and football. The army is marching in Europe. We gather in the parks and halls and diligently denounce the apostates (Nevil, Louis, Rod) who prefer a separate existence. I'm so made that though I can make out a couple of distinct tunes that Louis or Nevil sings, I'm irresistibly drawn to the sound of the choir wailing their old, wailing their almost wordless, almost meaningless song that flies through the yard at night; which is still buzzing around you and me, while buses and cars take people to theaters. (Listen; cars are rushing past the restaurant; suddenly a siren hoots on the river: the steamer goes out to the open sea.) If a traveling salesman treats me to tobacco on the train, well, I'm happy; I love everything that is not too subtle, beaten almost to the point of flatness, almost to the point of vulgarity; conversations of men in clubs and pubs; or miners, half-naked, in underpants - straight, unpretentious, who have everything and worries about dinner, a woman, earnings, and if only it doesn't get worse; and no great hopes, ideals, things like that for you; and no pretensions, and most importantly, just do not hang your nose. I love all that. So he hobnobbed with them, and Nevil sulked, and Louis, great, who argues, turned his back on them.

So, not exactly evenly, in some order, but my wax cover melted off me in large stripes, there a drop would fall, there another. And in this transparency, blissful pastures began to shine through, at first moon-white, shining, where not a single foot had set foot; meadows full of roses and crocuses, but also stones and snakes; and something spotted there came across, and dark; discouraged, baffled, knocked down the pantalyk. Jump out of bed, jerk open the window; with what a whistle the birds take off! You know yourself, this rustle of wings, this cry, delight, confusion; soaring and boiling of voices; and each drop shines, trembles, as if the garden is a broken mosaic, and it disappears, flickers; not yet collected; and one bird sings just under the window. I have heard these songs. Run after these phantoms. I saw Annas, Dorothies and Pamelas, I forgot the names, wandering along the alleys, stopping on arched bridges and looking at the water. And among them stands out several individual figures, birds, which, in the rapture of youthful selfishness, sang under the very window; snail cocalys on stones; launched their beaks into sticky, viscous; greedily, harshly, cruelly; Ginny, Susan, Rhoda. Did they go to boarding school on the East Bank, or is it on the South? They grew long braids and acquired this look of a frightened foal - the mark of adolescence.

Ginny was the first to sneak up to the gate to nibble some sugar. She took it very deftly from the palm of her hand, but her ears were pressed - she was about to bite. Rod - she was wild, Rod could not be caught. Scary and awkward. Susan - that's who first became a woman, femininity itself. It was she who first shed those tears on my face, which are terrible, beautiful; all at once; what nonsense. She was born to be adored by poets, after all, give poets reliability; those who sit and sew, who say: “I love, I hate”, not satisfied, not prosperous, but endowed with something that is akin to the high, discreet beauty of impeccable style, to which poets are so greedy. Her father shuffled from room to room, down the tiled corridors, in a flapping dressing gown and worn slippers. On quiet nights, a wall of water crashed down a mile from the house. The ancient dog crawled with difficulty into his chair. From above suddenly came the laughter of a foolish maid, while the sewing wheel was spinning and spinning.

I noticed all this even in my confusion, when, tearing at her handkerchief, Susan sobbed: “I love; I hate". “The useless maid,” I noticed, noticed, “is laughing in the attic,” and this little dramatization shows how incompletely we are immersed in our own experiences. On the outskirts of the most acute pain, the observer sits and pokes; and whispers, as he whispered to me on that summer morning, in that house where bread is sighed under the very windows: “That willow grows by the river. The gardeners sweep the meadow with huge brooms, and the lady sits and writes. So he sent me to that which lies beyond our own tossings and torments; what is symbolic and, perhaps, unchangeable, if there is anything unchanging in our food, breath and sleep, which consists of such an animal, such a spiritual and impossible life.

That willow grew by the river. I sat on that soft turf with Nevil, Baker, Larpent, Hughes, Percival and Ginny. Through thin feathers, all with pointed ears, green in spring and bright orange in autumn, I saw boats; buildings; I saw old women hurrying around somewhere. I buried matches in the turf, one after another, marking one or another step in the comprehension of the subject (let it be philosophy; science; or myself), until the loose edge of my thought, floating freely, absorbed those distant sensations that the mind would then extract in order to make out ; ringing of bells; rustle, rustle; melting images; here is that girl on a bicycle, who suddenly pulled back the edge of the curtain in mid-air, hiding the indistinguishable, teeming chaos of life that rushed to the silhouettes of my friends, to our willow.

That willow alone held back our continuous fluidity. Because I kept changing, changing; was Hamlet, Shelley, was that hero, oh, I forgot the name, from Dostoevsky's novel; he spent a whole trimester, you will forgive me, Napoleon; but mostly I was Byron. For weeks on end I played my part, striding into living rooms with diffuse acidity and tossing my gloves and cloak on a chair. Every now and then I jumped to the bookshelf to refresh myself with the divine elixir. And then he fired with wild shot of his phrases for a completely unsuitable goal - now she is married; well, the Lord is with her; all the windowsills were littered with sheets of unfinished letters to the woman who made me Byron. Well, how do you finish a letter in the style of another someone? I rushed to her, lathered; everything was decided; but I never married her: I had not matured, of course, to such a depth.

But here I would like music again. Not that wild hunting song, the music of Percival; but sad, throaty, uterine, and yet soaring like a lark, and chiming, it would have been here instead of these stupid, boring attempts - what strained ones! and how inexpensive they are! - to keep with words the flying moment of the first love. A purple mesh glides over the surface of the day. Look at the room before she entered, look after. Look at the simpletons outside the window, going their own way. They see nothing, they hear nothing; go to yourself. When you yourself walk in this radiant but sticky air, how aware of your every movement! Something sticks, something firmly sticks to your hands, even when you just grab a newspaper. And this emptiness - you are pulled, spun with cobwebs and wound painfully on a thorn. Then, like a thunderclap - complete indifference; the light is off; then an impossible, absurd happiness returns; other fields seem to glow green forever, and innocent views rise as in the light of the first morning - for example, that emerald seam on Hempstead; and all faces shine; all conspired to hide their tender joy; and then this mystical feeling of fullness, and then this whipping, tearing, rough - black arrows of chilling fear: she didn’t answer the letter, she didn’t come. Suspiciousness, horror, horror, horror grows like sharp stubble - but what's the point of diligently deducing these logical phrases when no logic will help, only barking, only groaning? And years later, watching an elderly woman take off her coat in a restaurant.

Yes, so what am I talking about? Let's pretend again that life is such a hard thing, like a globe that we turn in our fingers. Let's pretend that a simple, logical story is available to us, and when one topic is finished - let's say, with love - we dignifiedly and nobly move on to another. Was, then, I said, the same willow. Falling strands in a downpour, a knotty, folded bark - the willow embodied what remains on the other side of our illusions, cannot hold them, and, changing for a moment by their mercy, quietly, unshakably sees through them - with inexorability, what kind of our life is not so enough. That's where her dumb comment comes from; the scale it proposes; that is why, while we are changing and flowing, it seems to measure us. Nevil, let's say, was sitting on that turf then, and - what can be more understandable? - I said to myself, following his gaze through these branches to the skiff gliding along the river, and to the young man who was taking out bananas from a bag. The scene was so clearly cut out and so saturated with the features of his gaze that for a minute I saw it all; skiff, bananas, well done - through willow branches. Then everything went off.<...>

Translation from English by E. Surits

Woolf Virginia

Virginia Woolf

Translation from English by E. Surits

Editorial

"Waves" (1931) is the most unusual novel in artistic construction by the English writer Virginia Woolf, whose name is well known to the readers of "IL". Throughout her creative life, Woolf strove for a radical renewal of traditional narrative models, believing that the time had passed for a "novel of environment and characters" with its typical socio-psychological conflicts, carefully written out background of action and unhurried deployment of intrigue. A new "point of view" in literature - Wolfe's most important essays were written in its justification - meant the desire and ability to convey the life of the soul in its spontaneity and confusion, at the same time achieving the internal integrity of both the characters and the whole picture of the world, which is captured "without retouching ", but as it is seen and understood by the heroes.

In the novel "The Waves" there are six of them, their life is traced from childhood, when they were all neighbors in the house that stood on the seashore, and to old age. However, this reconstruction is made exclusively through the internal monologues of each of the characters, and the monologues are brought together by associative links, repetitive metaphors, echoes of often the same, but each time perceived in their own way, events. A through internal action arises, and six human destinies pass before the reader, and it arises not due to external authenticity, but through polyphonic construction, when the most important goal is not so much the image of reality as the recreation of heterogeneous, whimsical, often unpredictable reactions to what is happening of each of the acting persons. Like waves, these reactions collide, flow - most often barely noticeable - one into another, and the movement of time is indicated by pages or paragraphs in italics: they also outline the atmosphere in which the dramatic plot unfolds.

Long considered one of the canonical texts of European modernism, Woolf's novel still provokes debate about whether the artistic solution proposed by the writer is creatively promising. However, the significance of the experiment carried out in this book, which served as a school of excellence for several generations of writers, is unconditionally recognized by the history of literature.

Below we publish excerpts from the diaries of V. Wulf during the creation of the novel "Waves".

The first mention of "Waves" - 03/14/1927.

VV has finished "To the Lighthouse" and writes that she feels "the need for an escapade" (which she soon satisfied with the help of "Orlando") before embarking on "a very serious, mystical, poetic work."

On May 18 of the same year, she already writes about "Butterflies" - this is how she first intended to name her novel:

"... a poetic idea; the idea of ​​a certain constant stream; not only human thought flows, but everything flows - the night, the ship, and everything flows together, and the stream grows when bright butterflies fly in. A man and a woman are talking at the table. Or they are silent "It will be a love story."

Thoughts about "Waves" ("Butterflies") do not let her go, no matter what she writes. Every now and then, individual references flash in the diary.

11/28/1928 recorded:

"... I want to saturate, saturate every atom. That is, to expel all vanity, deadness, everything superfluous. To show the moment in its entirety, no matter what it is filled with. Vanity and deadness come from this terrible realistic narrative: a consistent presentation of events from dinner until supper. This is a falsehood, a convention. Why allow everything into literature that is not poetry? Do I annoy the novelists because they do not make it difficult to select? Poets - they usually select so that they leave almost nothing. I want to contain everything, but to saturate, to saturate.That's what I want to do in Butterflies.

Record 04/09/1930:

“I want to convey the essence of each character with a few lines ... The freedom with which “To the Lighthouse” or “Orlando” was written is impossible here because of the inconceivable complexity of the form. It seems that this will be a new stage, a new step. In my opinion, I hold fast to the original idea."

Record 04/23/1930:

"This is a very important day in the history of the Waves. I seem to have led Bernard to the corner where the last leg of the journey will begin. He will now go straight, straight and stop at the door: and for the last time there will be a picture of the waves."

But how many more times did she rewrite, rewrite, correct!

Entry 02/04/1931:

"A few more minutes and I, thank Heavens, will be able to write - I finished "Waves"! Fifteen minutes ago I wrote - oh, Death! .."

Of course, the work didn't end there...

There were many more rewrites, corrections...

Entry 07/19/1931:

"This is a masterpiece," said L. (Leonard), coming in to me. "And the best of your books." But he also said that the first hundred pages are very difficult and it is not known whether they will be tough for the average reader.

The sun hasn't risen yet. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, only the sea lay all in light folds, like a crumpled canvas. But now the sky turned pale, the horizon cut through with a dark line, cut off the sky from the sea, the gray canvas was covered with thick strokes, strokes, and they ran, galloping, running, overlapping, excitedly.

At the very shore, the strokes stood up, swelled, broke and covered the sand with white lace. The wave will wait, wait, and again it will recoil, sighing like a sleeper, not noticing either his inhalations or exhalations. The dark streak on the horizon gradually cleared up, as if sediment had fallen in an old bottle of wine, leaving the glass green. Then the whole sky cleared up, as if that white sediment had finally sunk to the bottom, or perhaps it was someone who had lifted the lamp from behind the horizon and fanned flat stripes of white and yellow and green over it. Then the lamp was raised higher, and the air became friable, red, yellow feathers protruded from the green, and flickered, flashing like clouds of smoke over a fire. But then the fiery feathers merged into one continuous haze, one white heat, boiling, and he shifted, lifted the heavy, woolly-gray sky and turned it into millions of atoms of the lightest blue. Little by little the sea also became transparent; And the hand holding the lamp rose higher and higher, and now a wide flame became visible; a fiery arc burst over the horizon, and the whole sea around it flared up with gold.

The light engulfed the trees in the garden, now one leaf became transparent, another, a third. Somewhere above, a bird chirped; and everything was quiet; then, lower, another squeaked. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, fell like a fan on the white curtain, and under the leaf by the bedroom window it cast a blue shadow - like the imprint of an ink finger. The curtain swayed slightly, but inside, behind it, everything was still indefinite and vague. Outside, the birds sang without rest.