It’s strange: August is the most blessed month in Russia in terms of weather and abundance, but Russian poets did not like it, as if anticipating the catastrophes that would plague post-Soviet Russia in this month. “Oh, if only it weren’t August, it wasn’t this damn time!” - wrote Alexander Galich. Pasternak, in his poem “August,” scheduled his funeral for this month, which lyrical hero sees poems in dreams. And I guessed something again: for this August, Evgeniy Pasternak.
Immediately after the funeral, I did not dare to write about it: it seemed that there were many more worthy authors. But most of the obituaries were routine replies: born, served, dismissed for seeing off the Solzhenitsyn family... And this is about a man about whom, at apartment readings of his novel Doctor Zhivago, he said: “I could say that I am writing this novel about my eldest son ".
Evgeny Pasternak lived a long and, without exaggeration, great life - 88 years, from 1923 to 2012. Of these eighty-eight years, the father was alive for 37 - for Evgeniy Borisovich he was not only great poet, but also “the kindest and most understanding person on earth.”
There were so many troubles and hardships during these years - the end of the NEP and the fight against the “former”, repressions, war and the post-war timelessness. None of these marks of the century escaped Evgeniy Pasternak.
The blast wave during the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior broke the glass in his children's room on Volkhonka. The former maid of honor Elizaveta Stetsenko, who raised him, did not greet people from pre-revolutionary life who recognized her for fear of reprisals. Evgeny Borisovich participated in the Great Patriotic War, awarded with medals"For victory over Germany" and "For military merits".
Seeing off Solzhenitsyn's family at Sheremetyevo, who were leaving the USSR to reunite with him, turned out to be his dismissal from MPEI. Support for the Solzhenitsyn family is all the more valuable because there was no corporate solidarity - Pasternak the son did not belong to the writing workshop: after the war, Evgeniy Borisovich graduated from the Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces with a degree in mechanical engineer for electrical equipment and automatic control systems, and then for a long time connected his life with the Moscow Energy Institute.
And against the backdrop of all these tragedies, Evgeny Pasternak called the divorce of his father and mother, which he experienced very hard at the age of eight, “the greatest misfortune of his life.”
We live in dry times, after all: it would be good if Evgeniy Borisovich were silent or barren in literary and biographical terms. Then the “undetectedness” of his death could be understood.
But everything was just the opposite: just as Vera Nabokova, according to experts, could have emerged victorious at some international championship of writers’ wives, so Evgeny Pasternak would probably have taken first place at world competition writers' sons.
And the point here is not only in the household help that Evgeniy provided to his father from a young age (it all started in infancy with a somewhat controversial main postulate educational system Pasternak Sr.: “I’m teaching my son not to interfere with adults”).
He is also the author of the first in Russia full biography father (named modestly: “Boris Pasternak. Biography”). God alone knows what this seven-hundred-page biography cost seventy-year-old Evgeniy Borisovich: after all, he also had to write about the details of his father’s divorce - that is, about the main misfortune of his own life.
And also - memories, in the center of which the father is always. And also - articles about his mother, artist Evgenia Lurie, whose fate was broken by her proximity to a genius; about “ideal socialism” in my father’s work, about the Nobel Prize matter.
In general, about everything that was paid for not with money or archival dust, but with blood and nerves. And all this - in the nineties and zero years, when the author, born in 1923, crossed the seventy and eighty-year mark.
Labor and patience... The son learned from his father, and Pasternak the father had a lot of patience. This is how Evgeniy Borisovich writes in his memoirs about the work of his “daddy” in the fifties (he also calls him Borey and Borechka only in his memoirs; scientific politeness is observed in articles and biography): “If earlier the translation of one Shakespeare tragedy paid for whole year, then now it was only enough for six months. The fact is that rates for translation work have been reduced by law."
Can you imagine what it’s like to not only translate - to read and correctly understand Shakespeare’s tragedy, taking into account the archaic language and the meanings embedded in it? And what does it mean to translate it into verse - and at the Pasternak level at that - and all this in six months? Father could.
And after that he received “gratitude” from the first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, who spoke at the Komsomol plenum in the presence of Khrushchev: “He shit where he ate.” All this at sixty-eight years old.
The son, who took on the main work of his life at the age of seventy, probably followed his father’s example.
If you come across Evgeniy Pasternak’s book “Understood and Found,” don’t be lazy, read the chapter “From Family Memories.” A completely different Boris Pasternak will appear before you - somewhat similar to Hamlet in his own, Pasternak’s interpretation. An undoubting young man, an unconfused man in love, crying from the inability to preserve the love of his first wife along with family happiness with his second.
By the fifties, this is all in the past. Before us - strong man, demanding that his son provide him with weapons to protect him from bandits in Peredelkino, angrily throwing at “Vasily Terkin” who laughed at his praise: “I didn’t come to you to joke!”
Yevgeny Pasternak left - and everything around became even more empty. It is not without reason that in his autobiography he writes what a shock it was for him, a child, to discover a pile of broken bricks on the site of the golden-domed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, previously visible when the train approached Moscow. “And who are we and where are we from - when from all those years // There are gossip left, but we are not in the world?” This is what his father wrote...
I heard it from a friend on the Odnoklassniki network from America. In Russia, this sad event was virtually ignored. Not a media person. Only “Echo of Moscow” and a few printed publications They gave scant information.
...I was afraid of his death 11 years ago. We then lived in the same house for several months. Ours and his windows faced the courtyard - on both sides, and we could see each other. And I shuddered when, on an ordinary day, while washing my face or talking on the phone, I suddenly saw Parsnip’s unique profile in the window.
At night, I sometimes woke up and saw that the lights were on at the Pasternaks’ house. Evgeny Borisovich stood by the window in blue pajamas. I was worried - it seemed that he was looking for a cure, he felt bad. We were separated by a courtyard, it often rained, it was autumn. An old lantern swayed in the yard. And I remembered the famous “I silently recognized Russia’s unique features...”
For some reason, exactly these lines.
We communicated with Evgeny Borisovich only once, but I saw him several times a year at evenings at the Tsvetaevsky Museum. He hosted all Pasternak evenings for many years on February 11th. Here, at the Tsvetaevsky Museum, they take place on the 11th, because the 10th is always evening in the Peredelkino house.
The first time, I think, I went to such an evening was in February 1996. I’m writing from memory now, then I’ll check it in my diaries. It was bitterly cold, but at the appointed time the hall of the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum was full, even overcrowded. Nadezhda Ivanovna Kataeva-Lytkina, the head of the museum, beamed and thanked everyone who came... And suddenly everyone froze. Pasternak appeared at the door. Breathless. They were remarkably similar.
Pasternaks also attended our other evenings - in memory of Boris Zaitsev, the name day of Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva... Yesterday I suddenly acutely realized that I had found that GENUINE intelligentsia, old Moscow, "the generation with lilacs and Easter in the Kremlin..." Back then Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev, Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, Sergei Averintsev, Svyatoslav Richter, Olga Vedernikova, the widow of the legendary pianist, were alive...
And I saw them and many others, and it seemed that they would always be there. And now, when there was almost no one left, I looked around and froze. "Generation, I am yours! Continuation of mirrors!" Is this why many of us have no understanding with the current generation (of different ages)?
Evgeny Borisovich and Elena Vladimirovna. They perform or sit next to us in the hall. Their granddaughter Asya is almost always with them, beautiful girl, sophisticated and timeless. I saw their son Boris, their second son, Peter, but I didn’t have a chance to see their daughter Lisa. Knew about the grandchildren. There are a lot of them, it seems there are nine now. We were all close then. And Natalya Anisimovna Pasternak, widow of Leonid, youngest son Boris Leonidovich, and her family.
And those that left. Boris Leonidovich. His first wife, Evgenia Vladimirovna, mother of Evgeny Borisovich, and Zinaida Nikolaevna Pasternak, and her children - Leonid and Adik. At the Peredelkino cemetery. We go there often.
Evgeny Borisovich left at the end of July, almost on the days written about in the legendary poem “August”. “You walked in a crowd, separately and in pairs, Suddenly someone remembered that today is the sixth of August in the old way, the Transfiguration of the Lord...” And further: “Usually light without flame Comes on this day from Tabor...”
And they buried him in August. In the cemetery forest in Peredelkino.
He was at war. By education he is very far from literature, an engineer. But it was he who wrote best biography father. Made a lot of comments. Published letters. Science articles, lectures, performances at evenings, compiling Pasternak’s books... - he did all this for many years. Together with his wife Elena Vladimirovna, his modest companion.
“That’s all, the eyes of geniuses have closed their eyes...” - let’s remember David Samoilov. The earth became orphaned and was populated by other people. And ours will no longer be there.
From the biography of Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak
Born on September 23, 1923 in Moscow. Died on July 31, 2012 in Moscow. The eldest son of Boris Pasternak from his first marriage to artist Evgenia Vladimirovna Lurie (1898-1965).
“When my parents separated in 1931, for me it was the most great grief in life,” wrote Evgeniy Borisovich.
After graduating from school in 1941 in Tashkent, where he was evacuated with his mother, he entered the Central Asian State University to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. I took one course. From 1942 to 1954 he served in the Armed Forces, was a participant in the Great Patriotic War. In 1946 he graduated from the Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces with a degree in mechanical engineer for electrical equipment and automatic control systems. In 1969 he defended his dissertation and became a candidate technical sciences. In 1954-1975 he taught at the Faculty of Automation and Telemechanics at the Moscow Energy Institute. Yevgeny Pasternak was actually expelled from MPEI because he saw off the family of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, with whom he was friends, at Sheremetyevo airport.
Since 1960, after the death of his father, he has been a literary historian, text critic, and specialist in the works of Boris Pasternak. Since 1976 - Researcher Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAN). The author of the first Russian biography of Boris Pasternak, created on the basis of the richest and exclusive archival material, first of all - from family archive. Compiler and commentator of the first complete 11-volume collected works of Pasternak, published in 5,000 copies by the Slovo publishing house (October 2005). Regular participant and speaker scientific conferences dedicated to creative heritage Pasternak. Gave lectures in a number of European universities and leading US universities. Has about 200 printed works, dedicated to the life and work of Pasternak, his relationships with famous contemporaries. Under his editorship, several more editions of the poet’s collected works were published, as well as correspondence, collections, memoirs and materials for the biography of B. L. Pasternak.
On December 9, 1989, in Stockholm, Evgeny Pasternak was awarded a diploma and medal Nobel laureate- his father.
He was awarded the medals “For Victory over Germany”, “For Military Merit” and other state awards.
The most famous books of Evgeny Pasternak
Boris Pasternak. Materials for biography. M., “Soviet Writer”, 1989;
Boris Pasternak. Biography. M., "Citadel", 1997;
“The fabric of existence is through and through...” Book of Memories;
In 2009, the couple released memoirs of Boris Pasternak's sister Josephine, which were published for the first time in Russian.
Wife - Elena Vladimirovna Walter (b. 1936) - granddaughter of the philosopher G. G. Shpet, philologist, co-author and collaborator of E. B. Pasternak in his scientific and publishing activities.
Children - Peter (b. 1957), theater artist, designer; Boris (b. 1961), architect; Elizaveta (b. 1967), philologist.
Don't be afraid of words, don't suffer, quit.
I love and think and know.
Look: even the rivers cannot think apart
Elena V. Pasternak
Preface to the second edition
The compiler of this book, Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak, the eldest son of Boris Leonidovich, son from his first marriage, by the will of fate, became his first biographer. He collected a large number of documents and letters that gave him the opportunity to write a detailed biography of Boris Pasternak under the modest title “Materials for a Biography.” The book was written over ten years at a time when his father’s name was banned and accusations of anti-Sovietism, as was customary to characterize the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” and of treason after its publication abroad and award Nobel Prize were alive in memory. With the support of Academician D. S. Likhachev, who wrote the preface to the novel published in 1988 in Novy Mir, E. Pasternak’s book about his father was published in 1989 and became the main material on which future biographers of Boris Pasternak could build their research .
But Evgeniy Pasternak considered his main achievement to be the genre that he found for publications of his father’s correspondence with by different persons. Not being a philologist or literary historian by training, he did not like scientific publications epistolary heritage, equipped with an inventory of links typed in petit at the bottom of the page. Compiling the first of a series of books of Boris Pasternak's correspondence, letters to his cousin, professor classical literature To Olga Freidenberg, a correspondent equal in strength to him, we considered that it was possible to fill out the unsurvived letters of O. Freidenberg with extracts from her diaries, recreating the circumstances of her life and the events of that time. The correspondence covered the period from 1910 to 1955. This translated scientific publication letters in the category of literature based on original documents terrible era, in which its heroes lived, and became a fascinating read. Such a story made it possible to clearly see not only the characters characters in the dialogue they had, but also those life conditions problems they had to deal with and how they overcame them.
When compiling the second book in a series of epistolary publications, we ourselves had to build on the same principle the correspondence of three great lyricists of the 20th century: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva with Rainer Maria Rilke. We managed to convince the serious academic scientist Konstantin Markovich Azadovsky of the superiority of such a composition, who took upon himself the translation German letters Tsvetaeva and Rilke and part of the comments placed between them as text necessary for understanding.
The same principle was applied when publishing Pasternak’s correspondence with his French translators Jacqueline de Prouillard and Hélène Pelletier-Zamoyska, and later with his parents and sisters.
After the publication of O. V. Ivinskaya’s book and the publication of Z. N. Pasternak’s memoirs and letters to her, the task “the closest and therefore the most difficult,” as Evgeniy Borisovich wrote, “was to publish the correspondence of my parents, Boris Pasternak and Evgenia Vladimirovna.” Pasternak, supplemented by letters from my father to me. I am already older than my father was when he passed away, and this task can no longer be postponed.”
It was impossible to leave this until future times and future researchers. And who, other than a living participant in the events, could cope with this task, no matter how difficult it may be for him.
Due to the mental difficulty of conveying the tragedy of the family, their separation, the severity of which the son carried throughout his life, the work proceeded very slowly. Letters were gradually sorted out and composed; In addition, it was necessary to reconstruct from documents events that the son could not remember. In the following chapters it became possible to supplement the letters with Evgeniy Borisovich’s own memories. He writes that much has been erased from his memory, even what he seemed to remember and know well. Individual scenes and episodes arose before my eyes that could be translated into text, but it was not possible to restore a complete picture of life and relationships with my parents. This was confusing and interfered with my work.
Compiling the texts of letters, Evgeniy Borisovich recalled something, wrote it down, sometimes dictated it, and then redrew the notes and supplemented them with thoughts that arose along the way. To make the task of memory easier, I asked myself certain topics: write about the apartment on Volkhonka, about the neighbors, remember the pictures of the city at that time. Sometimes, in order to imagine something, he specially came to the place where it happened, but what he saw there often could not help and only got in the way, and it took time to see this place again through the eyes of the past and write about it.
The book came together slowly and difficultly, with long pauses to take a break from difficult memories, sometimes I wanted to give up everything and not come back, but after a while I had to set myself tasks again: to remember how this or that happened.
The first attempt to publish this book ended in failure; the publishing house fell apart and was unable to print an edition, especially since it was necessary to introduce readers to the works of Evgenia Vladimirovna Pasternak, an undeservedly forgotten artist. It was a happy accident that Irina Dmitrievna Prokhorova became acquainted with the text of the book; she appreciated its significance and decided to publish it in 1998, at the beginning of her publishing career. The book was beautifully published, the artist E. Polikashin supplied it with many photographs and beautiful reproductions of paintings and portraits of the heroine. The circulation sold out very quickly. The book was immediately published in French by Gallimard in a brilliant translation by Sophie Benes.
Many years have passed since then, and in order to repeat the publication, we had to add something from what E. B. Pasternak wrote during this time, correct and clarify something.
We give the floor to the compiler.
Evgeniy Pasternak
Introduction
The bulk of my parents' letters date back to the time when we lived together as a family. They were written during periods of separation, that is, in the most emotionally intense and painful moments, illuminated by the strong and contrasting light of the difficult way of life of the 1920s.
In this case, a clear pattern in the change in tone of letters is easily revealed. At first, after my mother’s departures, the letters sent after her were full of concern about her trip, about what greeted her in the new place. In response - by inertia set by fatigue and mutual grievances last months, - there are reproaches that cause long analytical showdowns.
However, soon the painful tone gives way to the melancholy of separation, turning into a lyrical dialogue in the impatient anticipation of a delayed date.
After my parents’ divorce, we all continued to live in Moscow, and writing letters gave way to live communication - my father visited us almost weekly. The story about this time seems to be a natural continuation of their correspondence.
I put off writing this difficult book for an unduly long time. With the death of my father in 1960, the most significant content of our lives disappeared from our lives. It became difficult for my mother to live and work; she began to grow gloomy before our eyes. A severe depression began, which soon brought her to the grave. My memories of her are painfully obscured and distorted by impressions recent years, when a decisive, strong-willed and cheerful artist, devoted to his art, gradually gave way to helpless person, oppressed by painful experiences and fruitless thoughts. But she was only 60 years old then. As can be seen from the letters, emotionally deep moments had previously had a depressing effect on her, but then there was enough external light and own strength. I don’t want to burden the already difficult text of the correspondence with psychological reasoning, although I deeply remember much of what my parents experienced. Therefore, after a short introduction, we give letters to their chronological sequence, interspersed with descriptions of specific biographical circumstances mentioned in the text or accompanying events.
The eldest son of the writer Boris Pasternak, literary critic Yevgeny Pasternak, died on Tuesday in Moscow at the age of 89, RIA Novosti reports with reference to his niece Elena Pasternak.
“He died today at seven in the morning in his Moscow apartment,” Pasternak said.
According to her, it was "very an old man, who had great life and a dignified death."
“I can’t say that he had some kind of routine diagnosis that killed him - just due to the combination of various age-related diseases, his heart stopped; nothing unexpected happened, unfortunately,” said the literary critic’s niece.
Relatives of Evgeny Pasternak want to bury him next to his father in a cemetery in the village of Peredelkino. “I’m now working to ensure that we bury him in Peredelkino on our plot next to his father. It was his will, and we are not considering any other options,” said Elena Pasternak.
Boris Pasternak lived in the village of Peredelkino from 1936 until the end of his life. On June 2, 1960, the poet was buried at the Peredelkinskoye cemetery. Since 1990, the House-Museum named after Pasternak has been opened in Pasternak’s two-story house.
The agency's interlocutor suggested that the funeral will take place on Thursday or Friday.
“Of course, there will be a farewell and a funeral service - it’s just that now his children, my brothers, and I need certain time, to settle all issues with papers,” she concluded.
Evgeny Pasternak is the eldest son of Boris Pasternak from his first marriage to artist Evgenia Lurie. Literary historian and text critic Evgeny Pasternak was an outstanding specialist in the work of his father. He wrote the first domestic biography Boris Pasternak and acted as the compiler and author of commentaries on the complete 11-volume collected works of the poet. He was awarded the medals “For Victory over Germany” and “For Military Merit.” In 1989, in Stockholm, he received a diploma and a Nobel laureate medal for his father.
Evgeny Pasternak, biography:
Literary critic, military engineer Evgeny Borisovich Pasternak was born on September 23, 1923 in Moscow. He was the eldest son of the writer Boris Pasternak from his first marriage to the artist Evgenia Lurie.
After graduating from school in 1941, he entered the Central Asian State University in Tashkent at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where he studied one course.
From 1942 to 1954 he served in the Armed Forces, a participant in the Great Patriotic War.
In 1946, Evgeny Pasternak graduated Military Academy armored and mechanized troops named after I.V. Stalin (now the Combined Arms Academy of the RF Armed Forces) with a degree in mechanical engineer for electrical equipment and automatic control systems. In 1969 he defended his dissertation, candidate of technical sciences.
From 1954 to 1974 he was a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Automation and Telemechanics of Moscow Energy Institute(MPEI).
After Evgeny Pasternak saw off the relatives of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, with whom they were family friends, at Sheremetyevo Airport, the institute suggested that he not apply for the next competition for re-election to associate professor. After this, he was forced to leave MPEI.
After his father’s death in 1960, Evgeny Pasternak devoted himself entirely to his father’s creative legacy and, together with his wife, philologist Elena Pasternak, began collecting materials for his biography.
Since 1976 - research fellow at the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAN).
Evgeniy and Elena Pasternak prepared for publication several publications about the life and work of Boris Pasternak, his correspondence, and memoirs about his father. They were the creators of the first Full meeting works of Boris Pasternak, prepared by the Slovo publishing house. It consists of 11 volumes and a multimedia application on CD. Multimedia disc includes biographical information, a photo album, translations of dramatic works not included in the main collection, as well as phonograms (poems performed by the author and music that Pasternak wrote in his early youth).
In total, the Yevgeny Pasternak archive contains about 200 printed works dedicated to the life and work of Boris Pasternak, his relationships with famous contemporaries.
He was a regular participant and speaker at scientific conferences dedicated to the creative heritage of Pasternak, and gave lectures at a number of leading universities in the world.
On December 9, 1989, in Stockholm, Evgeniy Pasternak was awarded a diploma and medal as a Nobel laureate by his father, which he was unable to receive.
He was awarded the medals "For Victory over Germany" and "For Military Merit."
On July 31, 2012, Evgeny Pasternak died in his Moscow apartment from cardiac arrest.
Evgeny Pasternak was married to Elena Walter (later Pasternak), the granddaughter of the philosopher Gustav Shpet. Elena Pasternak was her husband's co-author and editor. Evgeny and Elena Pasternak have three children.
USSR USSR→Russia, Russia
Peter, Boris, Elizaveta
Evgeniy Borisovich Pasternak(September 23, Moscow - July 31, Moscow) - Russian literary critic, literary historian, military engineer, biographer, eldest son of writer Boris Pasternak from his first marriage to artist Evgenia Vladimirovna Lurie (-).
Biography
“When my parents separated in 1931, it was the greatest grief in my life.”
After graduating from school in 1941, together with his mother in evacuation in Tashkent, he entered the Central Asian State University at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where he studied one course. S served in the Armed Forces, a participant in the Great Patriotic War. He graduated from the Academy of Armored and Mechanized Forces with a degree in mechanical engineering for electrical equipment and automatic control systems. He defended his dissertation, candidate of technical sciences. From to senior lecturer at the Faculty of Automation and Telemechanics. E. B. Pasternak, as he himself recalled, was actually expelled from MPEI because he saw off the family of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who were leaving to reunite with him, at Sheremetyevo airport.
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An excerpt characterizing Pasternak, Evgeniy Borisovich
- Do you know why? - Petya asked Natasha (Natasha understood that Petya understood why his father and mother quarreled). She didn't answer.“Because daddy wanted to give all the carts to the wounded,” said Petya. - Vasilich told me. In my opinion…
“In my opinion,” Natasha suddenly almost screamed, turning her embittered face to Petya, “in my opinion, this is such disgusting, such an abomination, such... I don’t know!” Are we some kind of Germans?.. - Her throat trembled with convulsive sobs, and she, afraid to weaken and release the charge of her anger in vain, turned and quickly rushed up the stairs. Berg sat next to the Countess and comforted her with kindred respect. The Count, pipe in hand, was walking around the room when Natasha, with a face disfigured by anger, burst into the room like a storm and quickly walked up to her mother.
- This is disgusting! This is an abomination! - she screamed. - It can’t be that you ordered.
Berg and the Countess looked at her in bewilderment and fear. The Count stopped at the window, listening.
- Mama, this is impossible; look what's in the yard! - she screamed. - They remain!..
- What happened to you? Who are they? What do you want?
- The wounded, that's who! This is impossible, mamma; this doesn’t look like anything... No, Mama, darling, this is not it, please forgive me, darling... Mama, what do we care about what we’re taking away, just look at what’s in the yard... Mama!.. This can’t be !..
The Count stood at the window and, without turning his face, listened to Natasha’s words. Suddenly he sniffed and brought his face closer to the window.
The Countess looked at her daughter, saw her face ashamed of her mother, saw her excitement, understood why her husband was now not looking back at her, and looked around her with a confused look.
- Oh, do as you want! Am I disturbing anyone? – she said, not yet suddenly giving up.
- Mama, my dear, forgive me!
But the countess pushed her daughter away and approached the count.
“Mon cher, you do the right thing... I don’t know that,” she said, lowering her eyes guiltily.
“Eggs... eggs teach a hen...” the count said through happy tears and hugged his wife, who was glad to hide her ashamed face on his chest.
- Daddy, mummy! Can I make arrangements? Is it possible?.. – Natasha asked. “We’ll still take everything we need…” Natasha said.
The Count nodded his head affirmatively at her, and Natasha, with the same quick run as she used to run into the burners, ran across the hall to the hallway and up the stairs to the courtyard.
People gathered around Natasha and until then could not believe the strange order that she conveyed, until the count himself, in the name of his wife, confirmed the order that all carts should be given to the wounded, and chests should be taken to storerooms. Having understood the order, people happily and busily set about the new task. Now not only did it not seem strange to the servants, but, on the contrary, it seemed that it could not be otherwise, just as a quarter of an hour before it not only did not seem strange to anyone that they were leaving the wounded and taking things, but it seemed that it couldn't be otherwise.
All the household, as if paying for the fact that they had not taken up this task earlier, busily began the new task of housing the wounded. The wounded crawled out of their rooms and surrounded the carts with joyful, pale faces. Rumors also spread in the neighboring houses that there were carts, and the wounded from other houses began to come to the Rostovs’ yard. Many of the wounded asked not to take off their things and only put them on top. But once the business of dumping things had begun, it could not stop. It didn't matter whether to leave everything or half. In the courtyard lay untidy chests with dishes, bronze, paintings, mirrors, which had been so carefully placed in last night, and they kept looking and finding an opportunity to put this and that and give away more and more carts.
“You can still take four,” said the manager, “I’m giving away my cart, otherwise where will they go?”
“Give me my dressing room,” said the countess. - Dunyasha will get into the carriage with me.
They also gave away a dressing cart and sent it to pick up the wounded two houses away. All the household and servants were cheerfully animated. Natasha was in an enthusiastically happy revival, which she had not experienced for a long time.
-Where should I tie him? - people said, adjusting the chest to the narrow back of the carriage, - we must leave at least one cart.
- What is he with? – Natasha asked.
- With the count's books.
- Leave it. Vasilich will clean it up. It is not necessary.
The chaise was full of people; doubted about where Pyotr Ilyich would sit.
- He's on the goat. Are you a jerk, Petya? – Natasha shouted.
Sonya kept busy too; but the goal of her efforts was the opposite of Natasha’s goal. She put away those things that were supposed to remain; I wrote them down, at the countess’s request, and tried to take with me as many as possible.
In the second hour, the four Rostov carriages, loaded and stowed, stood at the entrance. The carts with the wounded rolled out of the yard one after another.
The carriage in which Prince Andrei was carried, passing by the porch, attracted the attention of Sonya, who, together with the girl, was arranging seats for the countess in her huge tall carriage, which stood at the entrance.