Summer pandemic reading : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Summer pandemic reading / solarisgirl
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | Was going through my friend's bookshelf while staying over at his place during the pandemic(I suppose it was during the first wave in 2020). This book looked interesting so I read this all in one go - on a nice mat in the warm sun, on the terrace. A really nice collection of stories, and I'm surprised to see the mature topics in these stories. Were all children's books always like this ? Did I read such stories of war and morals when I read the so-called children's books ? Even reading it as a adult, I loved this book and found the ideas and stories in it beautiful - some funny, some silly, some sad, some thought-provoking, some made me cry outright at the unfairness of life, of how people simply suffer, and the people who fight for some imagined hopeful "better future". Some parts I liked from the book:-[A funny story. Mitka, the local drunk of the town, has decided to mend his ways and become a devout follower and take the monastic vows. Everyone hears this and ...]Crowds flocked to the monastery. And sure enough, there was Mitka next to the choir, bowing away and publicly repenting his sins, even confessing to having stolen a nanny-goat from the merchant Bebeshin the year before and spent the money on drink. The merchant Bebeshin was moved almost to tears and gave Mitka a ruble to buy and light a candie for his soul’s salvation. Many people had shed a tear at the spectacle of that sinful man mending his ways and returning to the fold.This went on for a whole week, and just when Mitka was due to take his monastic vow, he failed to turn up at the church - whether because he had had another vision of an opposite nature or for some other reason, no one could tell. A rumour spread among the parishioners that Mitka was lying in a ditch in Novoplotinnaya Street with an empty vodka bottle lying next to him. -[This is my favourite story. Most hilarious. So, it's sometime during WW1 timeframe...Tupikov, a young boy and the author's classmate, goes missing. He had decided he wanted to join the war against the enemy and so had run away, worrying his parents and everyone in town.He is found on the third day within sixty kilometres of Arzamas on the road to Nizhni Novgorod and returned to his parents.]At home, people said, they made a terrible fuss of him, bought him all kinds of presents. He gave his mother his solemn word of honour never to run away again, and for this he was promised an air rifle in the summer. At school however, Tupikov became an an object of ridicule. “Who wouldn’t agree to run around the town for three days and get a real rifle for it,” the boys sneered.Most unexpectedly, Tupikov got a wigging from our geography master Malinovsky, whom we called, behind his back, “the hell-roarer”.Malinovsky called Tupikov out to the blackboard.“Well, well. Now tell me, young man, what front were you trying to run away to? The Japanese front, maybe?”“No, sir,” Tupikov answered, reddening. “The German front.”"I see," Malinovsky went on maliciously. “And what devil, may I ask you, made you steer for Nizhni Novgorod? Where is your head and in what place do you store the geography lessons that I give you? Isn’t it as clear as a pikestaff that you had to go via Moscow?" - he jabbed at the map with his pointer - “via Smolensk and Brest, if you intended making for the German front? But you went toddling East, in the opposite direction. What made you go the other way? You are studying with me in order to be able to make practical use of the knowledge you gain, and not keep it in your head as if it were a dustbin. Sit down. I’m giving you bad marks. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, young man!”-[Boys discussing their knowledge of the world]"I don't know, really. You know, I read a book by Dumas. Interesting book, chock-full of adventures. According to that book the French killed their tsar, and they've had a president instead of a tsar ever since.""How can you kill a tsar?" I said, indignant. "You're a liar, Fedka, or else you've got it all mixed up.""They killed him, it's a fact, killed him and killed his wife too. They put them all on trial and sentenced 'em to death.""Oh, tell me another one! How can a tsar be tried? Take our judge, Ivan Fyodorovich - he tries thieves. The chap who broke Plushchikha's fence - he tried him. He tried Mitka the Gypsy for pinching a box of wafers from the monks. But he daren't try the tsar, because the tsar is chief over everybody.""You can believe me or not!" Fedka said, turning sniffy. "When Sasha Goloveshkin is through with the book, I'll let you have it. The trial there, was nothing like those of Ivan Fyodorovich's. There all the people gathered, and they passed judgement and carried out the execution. I even remember the way they executed them. They don't hang people there, they've got a machine - a guillotine. They wind it up, and before you can count two it chops your head off.""And they chopped the tsar's head off too?""The tsar's and the tsarina's and other heads too. I'll let you have that book if you like. Very interesting. It tells about a monk too. A cunning fellow he was, fat, supposed to be holy, but in fact he was nothing of the sort. When I read about him I laughed till I cried. Mother was so angry, she got out of bed and blew out the lamp. But I waited till she had fallen asleep again and took the little icon lamp to read by." -[The author trying to read his fathers old books from the trunk]I spent several days in succession reading. I remember, in the first of the two books I had selected I read only three pages. This book, chosen at random, was entitled The Philosophy of Poverty. I could make nothing of this headachy stuff at the time. But the other book - stories by Stepnyak-Kravchinsky - was something I could understand, and I read it right through and reread it a second time. Everything in these stories was the other way round. The heroes there were people the police were after, and the police sleuths, instead of arousing sympathy, provoked only contempt and indignation. These stories were about revolutionaries. -[An old soldier and the authors family friend, stops by their home with his war stories]"Life's gone all awry," he said, pushing the glass away. "They wrote me from home that the farm's gone to the dogs. But what could I do to help 'em? We went hungry ourselves for months at a stretch. You felt as miserable as sin, wished it was all over, one way or another. People have had all they can stand. Sometimes you feel everything boiling inside o' you like rusty water in a billy-can. You think - ugh, if I only had the guts to chuck it all up and walk out. Let 'em fight if they want, but I don't owe Jerry anything and he doesn't owe me anything. Alexei and I talked about this a lot. The nights are long, you know. The fleas don't let you get any sleep. Your only comfort is singing or talking. Sometimes you feel like crying or strangling somebody, but you sit down and start singing. The tears have dried up. You feel like taking it out on somebody, but you just try! So you say, ah well, mates, buddies, dear comrades, let's have a song!"The soldier's face reddened and became covered with moisture, and the smell of iodoform spread more and more thickly through the room. I opened the window. The air flooded in, bringing the smells of evening freshness, stacked hay in the yards and overripe cherries.I sat on the window-sill, tracing patterns on the glass with a finger and listening to what the soldier was saying. His words left a sediment of dry bitter dust on my heart, and that dust gradually formed a thick coating over all my notions about the war, its sacred meaning and its heroes, all of which had been so clear-cut and intelligible to me until then. I looked at the soldier almost with hatred. He took off his belt and unbuttoned the wet collar of his shirt. He continued, evidently a bit tipsy:"Death's bad, of course. But it's not death that makes war bad, it's the sense o' wrong. You don't feel that with death. Every man has to die, sooner or later - you can't help that, it's a law. But who thought up a law that you've got to fight? I didn't, you didn't, He didn't, but somebody did. Now if God were all-powerful, all-merciful and all-wise, the way they write about Him in books, He'd call that man up on the carpet and say: 'Now answer me this - what made you plunge these millions of peoples into war for? What do they stand to gain by it and what do you? Now then, come clean, so that everyone should know what it's all about.' ""Only" - here the soldier swayed and all but dropped the glass - "only God doesn't like to interfere in earthly matters. Ah, well, we can wait. We're a patient people. But when our patience wears thin, we'll go out ourselves and find the judges as well as the guilty parties." -[At a crowd in the public square, some speeches by one the leaders, though the author who is still a young boy realizes "it's not even a speech he is making, he is simply talking to them"]"Peace after victory?" Baskakov was saying, "Not a bad idea. We'll conquer Constantinople. We're desperately in need of Constantinople, we are! We'll conquer Berlin, too, while we're at it. I ask you," - Baskakov jabbed a finger at the peasant with the bridle, who had pushed his way forward - "I ask you: Has the German or the Turk borrowed money from you which he doesn't want to give back? Come on, my dear man, tell me what business you've got in Constantinople. Are you going to cart potatoes to the market there? Why don't you speak?”The peasant reddened and blinked, then spread his hands and answered in an irate tone:"I don't need it at all... What do I want it for?”“You don't want it, nor do I, nor does anyone else here. The merchants want it so's to carry on a profitable trade. If they want it let 'em fight! for it. What's the peasant got to do with it? Why have they driven half your village off to the front? To help the merchants rake in the profits! What boobs you are! Big fellows with beards, yet anyone can twist you round his little finger." -[Our young author is proud of himself that he CHOSE to join the RIGHT side in the revolution. Chubuk, a wise experienced fighter, quickly brings him down back to earth]“Silly ass! Now nothing! I'm telling you - it's just circumstances,Now say, for instance, that you'd been sent to military school - they'd have made a cadet out of you and you'd now be serving with General Kaledin.""What about yourself?”"Me?" Chubuk smiled. “I've got twenty years of mine work behind me, my lad. And no cadet school of yours could knock that out of me!"I felt terribly hurt. Chubuk's words had offended me deeply and I fall silent. But I couldn't keep silent.“In that case, Chubuk, I've got no business in the detachment, once I could have turned out a cadet, a Kaledinite...”“Silly ass!" Chubuk answered coolly, seeming not to notice how sore I was. “Who cares what you could have been. It's what you are that counts. I'm just telling you this so's you shouldn't give yourself airs." -[Our young author admits to his commander he lied to him]“Look here, Boris," Shebalov said, "you've lied to me once already, and if I take your word for it this time and don't have you court-martialled together with Fedya,it's only because you're so young. But don't make any more of these mistakes, my boy. It was through your mistake that Chubuk lost his life, and it was through you fellows that the signalmen ran into the Whites. You've made enough mistakes! I say nothing about that devil Fedya – he's been a thorn in my side, more of a nuisance than a help. Now go back to Sukharev in Company One and take up your old place. Frankly, I made a blunder that time in letting you go to join Fedya. Chubuk ... he was different, you had something to learn from him. But Fedya? He's unreliable. And generally speaking, what's the idea taking up now with one fellow, now with another? You've got to make friends with everybody. When a man's on his own its easier for him to go wrong and make mistakes."-[The author is with the revolutionary army as a young recruit, and he is asking a fellow recruit who is injured in a battle, a Gypsy boy, about a song he is softly singing.]His answer was delayed."I am singing an old song which speaks about the gypsies having no homeland of their own, home to them being the land where they were received. Then it goes on to say: 'Tell me, Gypsy, where are you well received?' And he answers: 'I have walked the length and breadth many lands, I have been with the Hungarians, and with the Bulgarians and in the country of the Turks, but never yet have I found a country where my people were well received.'""Gypsy Kid," I said to him, "what made you come to us? Your men are not being called up."The whites of his eyes gleamed as he raised himself on his elbow and answered:"I came myself, I don't need to be called up. I am fed up with gypsy camp life. My father knows how to steal horses and my mother tells people's fortunes. My grandfather stole horses and my grandmother told fortunes. And none of them ever stole happiness for themselves, or told their own good fortunes. It did not work."Gypsy Kid sat up in his excitement, but winced from the pain of his wound and fell back on the heap of leaves with a faint groan.The milk boiled over and instantly put out the fire before I could snatch the mess-tin off the coals. Gypsy Kid suddenly laughed."What are you laughing at?"He tossed his head with a gay gesture. "I was thinking, all the people were like that. The Russians, the Jews, the Georgians and the Tatars, they all put up with the old life until their patience boiled over and they threw themselves into the fire, like water from a mess-tin. The same with me... stood it for as long as I could, then I snatched a rifle and went in search of the good life." "You think you'll find it?""Not by myself. I wouldn't ... but all together we ought to, being so keen on it. " - |
| 撮影日 | 2020-09-09 16:18:38 |
| 撮影者 | solarisgirl |
| タグ | |
| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | Nokia 8.1 , HMD Global |
| 露出 | 0.05 sec (1/20) |
| 開放F値 | f/1.8 |