Prayer before the dam

"A poet in Russia is more than a poet." The author sums up everything that happened before, humbly kneeling, asking for help from the great Russian poets ...

Give, Pushkin, your melodiousness and your ability, as if to be naughty, to burn with a verb. Give, Lermontov, your gallstone look. Give, Nekrasov, the pain of your dissected muse, give the strength of your inexhaustibility. Give, Block, your material nebula. Give, Parsnip, so that your candle burns in me forever. Yesenin, give me tenderness for happiness. Mayakovsky give me terrible intransigence, so that I, cutting through time, could tell my fellow descendants about it.

Prologue

I'm over thirty. At night I cry about wasting my life on trifles. We all have one soul disease - superficiality. We give half answers to everything, but our forces are dying away ...

Together with Galya, we traveled across Russia to the sea in the fall and turned to Yasnaya Polyana beyond Tula. There we realized that genius is the relationship of height to depth. Three ingenious people gave birth to Russia again and more than once will give birth to it: Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin.

We drove again, slept in the car, and I thought that in the chain of great insights, perhaps, only the link is missing. Well, that’s our turn.

Monologue of the Egyptian Pyramid

I beg: people, steal my memory! I see that everything in the world is not new; everything exactly repeats Ancient Egypt. The same meanness, the same prisons, the same oppression, the same thieves, gossips, traders ...

And what is the face of the new sphinx called Russia? I see peasants, workers, there are scribes - there are a lot of them. Is this a pyramid?

I, the pyramid, will tell you something. I saw slaves: they worked, then they rebelled, then they humbled them ... What is the use of this? Slavery is not destroyed: there is still slavery of prejudice, money, things. There is no progress. Man is a slave by nature and will never change.

Monologue of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station

The patience of Russia is the courage of the prophet. She endured - and then exploded. So I’m lifting Moscow to you with an excavator bucket. Look, something happened there.

Execution of Stenka Razin

All the inhabitants of the city — a thief, and a king, and a noblewoman with a boyar, and a merchant, and buffoons — rush to execute Stenka Razin. Stenka rides on a cart and thinks about what he wanted for the people of good, but something failed him, maybe illiteracy?

The executioner raises an ax, blue as the Volga, and Stenka sees in his blade how FACES sprout in the faceless crowd. His head rolls, wheezing "No wonder ...", and laughs at the king.

Bratsk hydroelectric power station continues

And now, pyramid, I will show you something else.

Decembrists

They were still boys, but the ringing of spurs did not drown out the moans of someone for them. And the boys angrily swarmed swords. The essence of the patriot is to rebel in the name of liberty.

Petrashevtsy

On the Semenovsky parade ground, it smells of Senate Square: Petrashevists are executed. Hoods are pulled over the eyes. But one of those executed through the hood sees the whole of Russia: as Rogozhin rampage along it, Myshkin rushes about, Alyosha Karamazov wanders. But the executioners do not see anything like it.

Chernyshevsky

When Chernyshevsky stood at the pillory, he could see the whole of Russia from the scaffold, as a huge "What to do?" A fragile hand threw a flower from the crowd. And he thought: the time will come, and this same hand will drop a bomb.

Fair in Simbirsk

Goods are flashed in the hands of the clerks, the bailiff is observing order. Hiccups, the caviar god rolls. And the woman sold her potatoes, grabbed the pervacha and fell, drunk, into the mud. Everyone laughs, poke fingers at her, but some clear-faced schoolboy picked it up and led her.

Russia is not a drunken woman, she was not born for slavery, and she will not be trampled into the mud.

Bratsk hydroelectric power station turns to the pyramid

The fundamental principle of revolutions is kindness. In the Winter feast, the Provisional Government. But now the Aurora is unfolding, the palace has been taken. Look at the history - there is Lenin!

The pyramid answers that Lenin is an idealist. Only cynicism does not deceive. People are slaves. This is elementary.

But the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station responds that it will show another alphabet - the alphabet of the revolution. Here teacher Elkina at the front in the nineteenth teaches the Red Army literacy. Here is an orphan Sonya, having escaped from Zybkov’s fist, comes to Magnitogorsk and becomes a red digger. She has a padded jacket, tattered skirts, but together with their beloved Petka they put

Concrete concrete

The fraternal hydroelectric power plant roars over eternity: “Communists will never be slaves!” And, thinking, the Egyptian pyramid disappears.

First tier

Ah, the Trans-Siberian Railway! Remember how cars with grills flew over you? There was a lot of scary, but do not worry about it. Now here is the inscription on the cars: “The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station is coming!” A girl from Sretenka is riding: in the first year, her pigtails will freeze to a cot, but she will stand, like everyone else.

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station will rise, and Alyosha Marchuk will answer questions about it in New York.

Frying

There is a grandmother in the taiga, and in her hands are flowers. Previously, prisoners lived in this camp, and now - the builders of the dam. Nearby residents bring to them some sheets, some shanezhki. But the grandmother carries a bouquet, cries, baptizes excavators and builders ...

Nyushka

I am a concrete worker, Nyushka Burtova. I was brought up and brought up by the village of Velikaya Gryaz, because I remained an orphan, then I was a housekeeper, worked as a dishwasher. Others lied, stole, but, working in a restaurant car, I recognized real Russia ... Finally, I got to the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station. She became a concrete worker, received public weight. Fell in love with one proud Muscovite. When a new life awoke in me, that Muscovite did not recognize paternity. The unfinished dam didn’t let me commit suicide. My son Trofim was born and became a construction son, as I was a village daughter. The two of us were at the opening of the dam. So let the grandchildren remember that they got the light from Ilyich and a little from me.

Bolshevik

I am a hydraulic engineer Kartsev. When I was young, I raved about the world fire and slashed the enemies of the commune. Then he went to the rabfak. He built a dam in Uzbekistan. And I could not understand what was happening. The country seemed to have two lives. In one - Magnitogorsk, Chkalov, in the other - arrests. I was arrested in Tashkent, and when I was tortured, I wheezed: “I am a Bolshevik!” Remaining an “enemy of the people”, I built a hydroelectric power station in the Caucasus and the Volga, and finally the XX Congress returned my membership card. Then I, the Bolshevik, went to build a hydroelectric station in Bratsk. I will say to our young shift: there is no place for scoundrels in the commune.

Shadows of our beloved

In Hellas, there was a custom: starting to build a house, the first stone was put in the shadow of a beloved woman. I don’t know in whose shadow the first stone was laid in Bratsk, but when I peer at the dam, I see in it your shadows, builders, your beloved. And I put the first line of this poem in the shadow of my beloved, as if in the shadow of conscience.

Mayakovsky

Standing at the foot of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, I immediately thought of Mayakovsky: he seemed to have risen in her guise. He, like a dam, stands across from untruth and teaches us to stand for the cause of the revolution.

Poetry night

On the Bratsk Sea, we read poetry, sang a song about the commissars. And the commissioners stood before me. And I heard how in the meaningful grandeur of the hydroelectric power station thunders over the false grandeur of the pyramids. In the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, the maternal image of Russia was revealed to me. There are still many slaves on earth, but if love fights, and does not contemplate, then hatred is powerless. There is no purer and higher fate - to give our whole lives so that all people on earth can say: "We are not slaves."