Lisa
She travelled to Kazan for three days in Moscow, and all these days, which merged into one, were a sharp, unceasing revelation to her. She had met Ivan Ivanovich Reutov, a teacher at Stroganov's College, a long bald man who loved to say that painting and everything around painting in Moscow was quite different from in St. Petersburg. She found him at his aunt's first day of arrival - and the conversation was pulling the soul, rubber, monotonous: in St. Petersburg, such a modest man as Anna Vasilievna (Lizina aunt), will not by painting, and from her - do not hesitate to see - on the walls of the sketch, which fit to see in the museum. (The aunt had only one good sketch, the Levitan, which she bought at the posthumous exhibition.) In St. Petersburg, paintings are bought as an object of furnishings, and if a real statue hangs Bogdanov-Belsky, the other real statue of the skin climbing out, and his living room was decorated with Bogdanov-Belsky. In short, in St. Petersburg: "I have - like this one. And in Moscow: "Even though I am not that kind of person, but I am not that kind of person in my own way.
But it was agreed that we crawled back to French painting, and it turned out that this boring Ivan Ivanovich not only knows Adian Ivanovich Shchukin, but can arrange a visit to his gallery.
We went the next day, having listened to a long discussion from Ivan Ivanovich about the fact that the audience in Moscow was quite different from in St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, she was brought up in well-known traditions and as if she did not forget that the Hermitage belongs to the Ministry of the Court. And in Moscow they look at the picture as a work of art, and the public does not care who it belongs to.
He hoped that Adian would show them his own collection. Fortunately, this did not happen - he was away - fortunately because his aunt was talking nonsense, from which even the polite Ivan Ivanovich was helplessly clapping his eyes, and Lisa... What she saw reminded her, strange as it may seem, of the summer day of last year, when she went to Simbirsk to visit her family. Together with her 15-year-old cousin she went in a big boat to the other side of the Volga River. They immediately took a lot up, but a strong wind along the stream began to tear them down. Suddenly, everything was overshadowed around, the Volga was covered with squirrels, hitting the thunder, the rain poured buckets, and the girl, who was afraid of thunderstorms, rushed to her with tears. Here it was necessary to do everything at once - and to calm her down, and to row that was strong, and to rule the oars anyway where, only against the current! Wet to the thread, exhausted, trembling, they finally got to the shore, where he lived, about twenty kilometers from Simbirsk, a familiar buoyant.
With this feeling of helplessness, confusion, amazement, she dragged from one room to another. Ivan Ivanovich cleverly told about the dark palette of Kurbe (French painter) and silver - Koro (French painter), joked that between Monet and Manet - the difference is not the only letter, explained for a long time, where Renoir's "porcelain light strokes" - she listened and did not understand anything. She needed only one thing - to get to the shore under a thunderstorm, and the thunder stunned her in every room - Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh. Then came Matisse, as the silence or night comes, just as someone's mighty hand took her by the spine, like a puppy and threw her into this dancing to music, transparent magic world.
Ivan Ivanovich said something about the musical chord, which consisted of a green and blue background, complemented by the body color of the figures, that Matisse used the whiteness of the canvas, "to give the shades of a kind of silky" - she did not listen and did not hear. She only took apart that Matisse, it turns out, five years ago was in Moscow and helped Shchukin hang his paintings.
She left with such a feeling, as if in her life there was an event, the whole meaning of which she could not yet understand. As in her childhood, when she was betting, without blinking at the sun, violet, red, green, golden spots were floating in front of her eyes.
With this feeling, she listened to her aunt, who told a lot of interesting stories about the war, about the air fight she saw with her own eyes, about the epidemic of typhus, about the gas attacks, against which we can hardly resist. With this feeling, which never left her for a moment, she spent the rest of her days in Moscow.
The city was a winter city, sparkling in the sun, covered with snow, which nobody seemed to clean. Lisa was in Kazan for the first time in winter. But it seems that only the season of the year has changed: she unintentionally laughed when, having met her at the station and spent time in the Shekinsky rooms, Kostya apologized and said that he was expected at the women's gymnasium. He laughed too and left, saying: "Always the same"
To be continued...