Life in writing

Konstantin Pavlovich no longer hoped that he would be able to save mankind from the power of blindness with the help of mathematics. He began to study this blind power. He was convinced that in the twentieth century probability theory could change the whole picture of the world in science. But the passion with which he was engaged in this theory, strangely mixed feeling of longing. Self-defense, neutral zone, saving distance allowed him to quietly meet the blows, which, since childhood, consisted of life...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. So, in order I will tell you about it and about our acquaintance. It began, we can say, by chance, although Elizaveta Nikolaevna not only knew for a long time about my works, but even copied some of them. One day, on her way home late at night, she hurt her leg, kicked her leg open, and, as it turned out the next day, torn her ligaments in her ankle. Helpless, barely got to the bench in Alexander Square, and then I literally stumbled upon it in the dark. I ran to the cabbage market, and two cab men carried it to my apartment...

There are days when I ask myself if I had a dream about all this - Petrograd, Isaac, white nights, a dress not from someone else's shoulder (I was robbed and I walk here God knows what), the opportunity not to think about tomorrow's lunch? You - I have no doubt about it - have been, are and will be. But was I on my trip to Kazan and how could it happen that I left without saying goodbye to you? Oh, how much I demanded from life then, how pampered, capricious, proud I was! Or was I then - me, and...

He received several letters from Lisa immediately after her departure from Kazan and returned them without printing them out. He didn't want to know more about her - now it was his turn to return her unopened letters. She dumped him, and she was fine! True, it happened to him for the first time in his life, "but maybe - he thought with coldness, which was (he knew it) comforting, pretend - will happen again and again. But not with coldness, but with rage he asked himself: what made him rush to Petrograd in the midst of urgent matters? Insulted self-love? Yes, maybe...

The past flew away swiftly, irrevocably. Life, cut off from everyday life, broke into a small apartment in the Hospital, all in its own way, forcing Karnovsky to quit for a while the master's exams, because there were fights with "hustlers", who announced that the capital of the "Ural-Volga states" is located in one of the city districts, behind the dirty little channel Bulak. In June 1918, he left for Moscow with his mother and girls: the Czechoslovak Corps went up the Volga River and was not far from Kazan...

On a narrow street, winding along the snowdrifts, she went to some square. The women were rattling buckets at the water booth. At a distance, there were horses that had become indelible and were pulled into low, roofless sleds. It was a parking lot for barabuses - Tatar cab men. Kostya said something to her about them. She came up - they rushed to her. She sat down in a sled, the coachman covered her legs with a thick nightmare. - Where do you want it, young lady? - To Szczecinka's rooms. And the stale horse touched quickly...

She got up, washed, dressed, moved the curtain apart, and everything in the room was fine - the furniture, roughly painted nuts, burned blue trellises. The morning was pink, fresh, with a playing light. Lisa put on a coat, stood in front of the mirror: the coat was old, not fashionable - now worn in the waist, with patch pockets, with wide fur-treated sleeves. She thought about it with annoyance. At Big Breakthrough, she had breakfast in a cafe and went where she looked - Kostya had to come by at twelve, after a lesson with some rich Muraleevs...

She gave Morozov's book: "And there will be no sounds of a harp playing, no singing voice, no trumpet voice, no music of those who play the pipe and other instruments in you," she read. - And there will be no artist or art in you, and the noise of the millstones will no longer be heard in you. What a prediction! "So it will be," she thought stubbornly. The author interpreted the Apocalypse, the last book of the New Testament. She opened the book somewhere else, not on herself, but on the Bone. "And...

A girl of fifteen years old, wearing a diocesan uniform, opened the door, made a klixen (like a curtsy) and said in a slightly audible voice: - Hello. - Sister Katya," said Karnovsky. They undressed in the hallway. Another older woman showed up at the door and made a bookie too: - Hello. - Sister Nina," said Karnowski. The girls stood up. It was obvious that they were breathless. Then, when Lisa and Karnovsky sat in the room, which was obviously a dining room and bedroom - there was an iron bed by...

But it wasn't "always the same" at all, though it hasn't even been two weeks since they broke up in St. Petersburg. He lost weight, his cheeks fell into thin air, and his nose was showing a hump that she hadn't noticed before. His eyelids were swollen, maybe tired. He was pale in spite of the frost. He was... Cleaning herself up after the train, Lisa looked for and couldn't find a word. He was a bit overwhelmed - and she felt it ten minutes after he rushed to the train and picked her up from the last step of the car with her suitcase...

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...

27.01.1917. Petrograd. Dear Friend! My first duty is to send you my blessing. Be diligent, honor the parents and mentors who lead us to the knowledge of the good, and work diligently on your "aesthetic topology", in which you, I hope, after my sudden disappearance, made great progress. I can't hide what I miss most about Peter is you. Of course, you would have been under the wheels of my "wooden bicycle", on which I am flying with unheard-of speed in an unknown direction. My cute stool, the story isn't so hard to tell on paper...