A golden cloud flew by. Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin the golden cloud spent the night

Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin is a representative of the generation of “children of war.” And not just those living in their families amid the devastation of war, but children from an orphanage, where everyone is for themselves from an early age. The writer grew up in conditions in which it was easier to die than to survive.

This bitter childhood memory gave rise to a number of painfully truthful works describing poverty, vagrancy, hunger and the early adulthood of children and adolescents of that cruel time. One of them was the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis of which will be discussed below.

Prose of A. I. Pristavkin in world literature

Over the years, Pristavkin’s works were published in Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, France, the Czech Republic, and Finland. In December 2001, he became an adviser to the President of the Russian Federation. The writer is the USSR, as well as a number of literary Russian and foreign awards. Pristavkin was awarded the national German prize for youth literature.

His autobiographical prose is close and understandable to young readers. In modern schools, children are taught not only the analysis of the work “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.” Other stories are included in the range of youth reading: “Portrait of a Father”, “Between the Lines”, “Stars”, “Shard”, “Baby Relatives”, “Doctor”, “Steps Behind You”, “Shurka”, etc. All of them poignant, lyrical, revealing a person from the deepest, sometimes most unexpected side.

Subject of the work

In 1981, A. Pristavkin created his most famous work, which reached the mass reader only in 1987. Analysis of the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” is carried out in the classroom; its study is included in many author’s literature programs for high school. Along with the general theme of war, the writer talks about the harsh and difficult childhood of the war generation, reflects on friendship and camaraderie, and love for his native land.

The most vivid feeling of the tragedy of life and the constant will to overcome it are visible precisely in the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin). The analysis of the work is carried out in the context of the drama of the difficult orphanage years, wartime, where, in spite of everything, lies a huge charge of optimism, faith in man, his strength, resilience, intelligence, faith in goodness. The story included the development of the theme of homeless orphanage childhood, which subsequently brought Pristavkin wide fame.

The main characters of the story

The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmin, are pupils of an orphanage. They go to the North Caucasus, where they subsequently find themselves drawn into the terrible, even tragic realities of the mass resettlement of North Caucasian peoples. It was undertaken in our country in 1943 - 1944. This is how the description of the boys begins in the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of which follows below: “... The brothers’ names were Kuzmenyshi, they were eleven years old, and they lived in an orphanage near Moscow. There, the children’s lives revolved around the frozen potatoes they found, rotten potato peelings and, as the pinnacle of desire and dream, a crust of bread, just to survive, to snatch an extra war day from fate.”

Theme of moving and roads

At the beginning of the story, the director of the orphanage invites the brothers to go to the Caucasus, which has just been liberated from the Germans. Naturally, the guys were attracted by adventure, and they did not miss this opportunity. And so the brothers travel through the war, completely destroyed and the land that has not yet had time to rise after the fascist raids on an amazing, insanely fun train.

It is not by chance that A. Pristavkin touches on the theme of the road in his work. “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis of which includes the problems of the road and the life path of the characters, is a story-memory. The author complains: “There were half a thousand of us in that composition! Hundreds then, right before my eyes, began to disappear, simply die on that distant new land where we were brought at that time.”

Even on the road of the twin brothers to the Caucasus, a strange, ominous meeting took place - on the neighboring tracks at one of the stations Kolka Kuzmenysh discovered carriages. Black-eyed children's faces looked out from the barred windows, hands were stretched out, and incomprehensible screams were heard. Kolka, not really understanding that they are asking for something to drink, hands someone some blackthorn berries. Only a homeless boy abandoned by everyone is capable of such a touching, sincere impulse. The description of a child's soul tearing itself apart runs through the entire story, complementing its literary analysis. “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin) is a story of contradiction, where parallels are drawn between essentially opposite phenomena.

The Science of Survival: The Realities of War Through the Eyes of Children

During the war years, hunger overtook both children and adults, but for people like Kuzmenyshi, orphans from the orphanage, food was the main dominant feature of life. Hunger drives the brothers’ actions, pushes them to steal, to desperate and cunning acts, and sharpens their senses and imagination.

Kuzmenysh comprehend the science of survival, so they have a special value system - it is counted “from food.” And contact with adults begins with this: he didn’t take away, but fed, which means he’s good, you can trust him. In the story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis is based on seeing military reality and the people in it through children’s eyes.

A dramatic turn in the fate of the heroes

It was difficult for the Kuzmenis to understand what was happening around them, to which they were eyewitnesses. When the worst thing happened to Kolka (he saw the brother of the murdered man hanged by the armpits on the edge of a fence, and fell ill from the shock), Sashka’s place was taken by the same eleven-year-old orphan Alkhuzor - a Chechen.

Kolka calls him his brother, first to save him from Russian soldiers, and then out of deeper feeling, when Alkhuzor saved Kolka from a Chechen gun aimed at him. This brotherhood of children is what A. Pristavkin exalts.

“The golden cloud spent the night”: analysis

The main leitmotif of the work is the friendship of lonely children who are in danger from everywhere, but who with all the strength of their souls defend their right to love and affection. Kolka and Alkhuzor were not the only ones in the orphanage, where they were taken, having been picked up half-dead in the mountains. The Crimean Tatar Musa, the German Lida Gross “from the big river,” and the Nogai Balbek already lived there. They all had a common bitter and terrible fate.

Children from orphanages, abandoned by the war to Caucasian regions far from their native places, are tragically faced with something that they are not yet able to understand or comprehend - an attempt by a totalitarian system to exterminate the lives of entire peoples. This is what runs like a “red thread” through the story, complementing its analysis.

“The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin) is a story in which constantly hungry, ragged boys who do not know the warmth and comfort of home learn from their own bitter experience the price of severe social injustice. They learn the lessons of spiritual warmth, black human hatred and unexpected mercy, cruelty and great spiritual brotherhood. The history of the Tomilino orphanage is only a small part of this tragic and inhumane process. But even in such cruel conditions, the colonists received lessons in eternal values: morality, goodness, justice, compassion.

Connection of times

The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmina, go through many adventures and difficulties. They - street children - display the features of early maturation, so characteristic of the entire generation of children of the 1940s, who were faced with problems that were not at all childish. The story leaves a feeling of the indissoluble unity of the child with the adult world.

If we touch more deeply on the work “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of the story should be completed by indicating the main idea. In his story, Anatoly Pristavkin tries to show that the war and everything connected with it have not become reality. “I won’t hide,” writes the author, “more than once the thought came to me that they were alive, that somewhere there existed all these people who, without thought or fear, did His will in His (Stalin’s) name.”

Conclusion

By expressing the truth, exposing it in all its terrible guise, the writer may have removed some of the burden from his own soul, but he certainly did not lighten the reader’s soul. Although this is the whole of A. Pristavkin (“The Golden Cloud Spent the Night”) - everyone has their own analysis of his works, this is what the author sought. According to the writer, the meaning of real literature is not to delight the ear, not to “inspire a golden dream,” but to in every possible way encourage the reader to think, feel, sympathize and draw conclusions. The book encourages spiritual work, the birth of doubts within oneself, and a re-evaluation of the familiar world. It serves not just as a description of “that present,” but also as a warning to the future.

Anatoly Pristavkin

The golden cloud spent the night

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair.

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field. It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!" What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.

And what a strange fantasy in the dirty Moscow region to talk about some kind of Caucasus, about which only from reading aloud at school (there were no textbooks!) The orphanage shantrap knew that it exists, or rather, existed in some distant, incomprehensible time, when the black-bearded, eccentric highlander Hadji Murat fired at the enemies, when the leader of the Murids, Imam Shamil, defended himself in a besieged fortress, and the Russian soldiers Zhilin and Kostylin languished in a deep hole.

There was also Pechorin, one of the extra people, who also traveled around the Caucasus.

Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.

Against the backdrop of broken snow-white mountains, a rider in a black cloak gallops and gallops on a wild horse. No, it doesn’t jump, it flies through the air. And under it, in an uneven, angular font, the name: “KAZBEK”.

A mustachioed lieutenant colonel with a bandaged head, a handsome young man, glanced at the pretty nurse who had jumped out to look at the station, and tapped his fingernail meaningfully on the cardboard lid of the cigarettes, not noticing that nearby, with his mouth open in amazement and holding his breath, the little ragged little Kolka was looking at the precious box.

I was looking for a crust of bread from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!

Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?

Nothing to do with it at all.

And it is not clear how this pointed word, sparkling with a shiny icy edge, was born where it is impossible for it to be born: among the everyday life of an orphanage, cold, without firewood, always hungry. The whole tense life of the boys revolved around frozen potatoes, potato peelings and, as the height of desire and dream, a crust of bread in order to subsist, to survive just one extra day of war.

The most cherished, and even impossible, dream of any of them was to at least once penetrate into the holy of holies of the orphanage: into the BREAD SLICER - so we highlight it in font, because it stood before the eyes of the children higher and more inaccessible than some KAZBEK!

And they were appointed there, just as God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!

Kuzmenyshi was not among them.

And I had no idea that I would be able to enter. This was the lot of the thieves, those of them who, having escaped from the police, reigned during this period in the orphanage, and even in the entire village.

To penetrate the bread slicer, but not like those chosen ones - the owners, but with a mouse, for a second, for an instant, that's what I dreamed about! With an eye, to look in reality at all the great wealth of the world, in the form of clumsy loaves piled up on the table.

And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...

That's all. All!

I didn’t dream about any tiny little things that could not help but remain after the dumplings were dumped and brittlely rubbed against their rough sides. Let them be gathered, let the chosen ones enjoy! It rightfully belongs to them!

But no matter how you rubbed against the iron-lined doors of the bread slicer, it could not replace the phantasmagoric picture that arose in the heads of the Kuzmin brothers - the smell did not penetrate through the iron.

It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.

And this is what this dream brought Kolka and Sashka to in the winter of forty-four: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.

In these especially dreary months, when it was impossible to get frozen potatoes, let alone crumbs of bread, there was no strength to walk past the house, past the iron doors. To walk and know, almost to imagine, how there, behind the gray walls, behind the dirty, but also barred window, the chosen ones, with a knife and scales, cast their spells. And they shred, and cut, and knead the droopy, damp bread, pouring the warm, salty crumbs into the mouth by the handful, and saving the fatty fragments for the tiller.

Saliva boiled in my mouth. It hurt my stomach. My head was getting fuzzy. I wanted to howl, scream and beat, beat on that iron door so that they would unlock it, open it, so that they would finally understand: we want it too! Let him then go to a punishment cell, anywhere... They will punish, beat, kill... But first let them show, even from the door, how he is, bread, in a pile, a mountain, Kazbek towering on a table mangled with knives... How he smells!

Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.

A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.

The guys thought this scene was very fantastic! They come up with it too! The wing didn't work! Yes, they would immediately run anywhere by the bone gnawed from that wing! After such a loud reading aloud, their stomachs turned even more, and they forever lost faith in writers; If they don’t eat chicken, it means the writers themselves are greedy!

Since they drove away the main orphanage boy Sych, many different big and small thieves have passed through Tomilino, through the orphanage, twisting their half-raspberries here for the winter far from their native police.

One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.

For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.

The front crust, the one that is crispier, blacker, thicker, sweeter, cost two months, on a loaf it would be the top one, but we are talking about soldering, a tiny piece that looks flat as a transparent leaf on the table; the back one is paler, poorer, thinner - months of slavery.

And who didn’t remember that Vaska Smorchok, the same age as the Kuzmenyshes, also about eleven years old, before the arrival of a relative-soldier, he once served for the back crust for six months. He gave away everything he could eat, and ate buds from trees so as not to die completely.

Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.

If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.

But the Kuzmenyshi already knew their advantage.

It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something is lying badly!

While two eyes are busy, the other two watch over both. Yes, they still have time to make sure that they don’t snatch anything from themselves, clothes, the mattress from underneath when you sleep and see your pictures from the life of a bread slicer!

Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin

The golden cloud spent the night

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field.

It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!" What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.

There was also Pechorin, one of the extra people, who also traveled around the Caucasus.

Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.

I was looking for a crust of bread left over from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!

Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?

Nothing to do with it at all.

And it is not clear how this pointed word, sparkling with a shiny icy edge, was born where it was impossible for it to be born: among the everyday life of an orphanage, cold, without firewood, always hungry. The whole tense life of the boys revolved around frozen potatoes, potato peelings and, as the height of desire and dream, a crust of bread in order to survive, to survive just one extra day of war.

The most cherished, and even impossible, dream of any of them was to at least once penetrate into the holy of holies of the orphanage: into the BREAD SLICER - so we’ll highlight it in font, because it stood before the eyes of the children higher and more inaccessible than some KAZBEK!

And they were appointed there, just as the Lord God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!

Kuzmenyshi was not among them.

To penetrate the bread slicer, but not like those chosen ones - the owners, but with a mouse, for a second, for an instant - that’s what I dreamed about! With an eye to look in reality at all the great wealth of the world in the form of clumsy loaves piled on the table.

And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...

That's all. All!

It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.

And this is what this dream brought Kolka and Sashka to in the winter of forty-four: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.

Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.

A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.

The guys thought this scene was very fantastic! They come up with it too! The wing didn't work! Yes, they would immediately run anywhere by the bone gnawed from that wing! After such a loud reading aloud, their stomachs twisted even more, and they forever lost faith in writers: if they don’t eat their chicken, it means the writers themselves are greedy!

One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.

For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.

Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.

If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.

But the Kuzmenyshis already knew their advantage.

It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something bad is lying!

And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers whines, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they turned to the second one, the first one sniffed, and he was gone. And the second one follows! Both brothers are like vines, nimble, slippery, once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.

Eyes will see, hands will grab, legs will carry away...

But somewhere, in some pot, all this must be cooked in advance... It’s difficult to survive without a reliable plan: how, where and what to steal!

The two heads of Kuzmenysh were cooked differently.

Sashka, as a world-contemplative, calm, quiet person, extracted ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know.

A story by A. Pristavkin about twin orphans Kuzmenysh, sent during the Great Patriotic War from the Moscow region to the Caucasus. It was written back in 1981, but was only released in the late 80s. A book about the war, about children's destinies broken by the war, is unlikely to leave anyone indifferent.

Anatoly Pristavkin
The golden cloud spent the night

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair.

1

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field. It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!” What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.

There was also Pechorin, one of the extra people, who also traveled around the Caucasus.

Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.

I was looking for a crust of bread from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!

Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?

Nothing to do with it at all.

And they were appointed there, just as God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!

Kuzmenyshi was not among them.

And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...

That's all. All!

It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.

And this is what this dream brought Kolka and Sashka to in the winter of forty-four: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.

Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.

A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.

One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.

For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.

Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.

If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.

But the Kuzmenyshi already knew their advantage.

It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something is lying badly!

And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers whines, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they turned to the second one, the first one sniffed, and he was gone. And the second one follows! Both brothers are like nimble, slippery vines; once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.

Eyes will see, hands will grab, legs will carry away...

But somewhere, in some pot, all this must be cooked in advance... It’s difficult to survive without a reliable plan: how, where and what to steal!

The two heads of Kuzmenysh were cooked differently.

Sashka, as a world-contemplative, calm, quiet person, extracted ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know.

Kolka, resourceful, tenacious, practical, figured out with lightning speed how to bring these ideas to life. To extract, that is, income. And what’s even more precise: take some food.

If Sashka, for example, had said, scratching the top of his blond head, “shouldn’t they fly to, say, the Moon, there’s a lot of oilcake there,” Kolka would not have said right away: “No.” He would first think about this business with the Moon, which airship to fly there on, and then ask: “Why? We can steal it closer...” But it happened that Sashka would look dreamily at Kolka, and he, like a radio, would catch Sashkina on the air thought. And then he wonders how to implement it.

Sashka has a golden head, not a head, but the Palace of Soviets! The brothers saw this in the picture. All sorts of American skyscrapers a hundred floors below are at hand. We are the very first, the highest!

And the Kuzmenyshis are the first in something else. They were the first to understand how to get through the winter of 1944 without dying.

When they made a revolution in St. Petersburg, I suppose, in addition to the post office and telegraph, and the station, they didn’t forget to take the bread slicer by storm!

The brothers walked past the bread slicer, not for the first time, by the way. But it was painfully unbearable that day! Although such walks added their torment.

When you think about how children survived during wartime, it becomes very difficult. And if you also know that these children were orphans and lived in an orphanage, then your heart aches with pain and pity. The story “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” which is the most famous work of Anatoly Pristavkin, tells about such children.

The events of the novel take place in 1944, just after the Chechens and Ingush were deported. Twin boys Kolya and Sasha live in an orphanage and know firsthand what it’s like when you have nothing to eat for a long time. They understand that, by and large, no one in this world needs them and are left to their own devices. But they still believe that it is possible to live, and not just survive, that there is friendship, kindness and devotion. However, all their thoughts are occupied by the idea of how to get food for themselves.

In their pair, Sashka is more proactive, and Kolka always supports his plans. After one unsuccessful operation to obtain food, the guys decide to go to the Caucasus along with other orphans. Maybe it will be easier to get food and make friends there. And indeed, there the guys meet people who treat them well. True, not everything goes well. After all, they initially did not know why they were being taken to the Caucasus, and why these lands were empty...

The book can evoke a variety of emotions: pity, anger, indignation, a feeling of injustice and hopelessness. But still, orphans show that there is good in the world, despite all the cruelty. And a person of a different nationality can become a friend. After all, it doesn’t matter at all: you are Russian or a Chechen boy. It's just a pity that adults don't understand this.

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