What a sad detective story. Roman in

V.P. Astafiev is a writer whose works reflect the life of people of the 20th century. Astafiev is a person who knows and is close to all the problems of our sometimes difficult life. Viktor Petrovich went through the war as a private and knows all the hardships of post-war life. I think that with his wisdom and experience he is one of those people whose advice and orders you should not only listen to, but try to follow. But Astafiev does not act as a prophet, he simply writes about what is close to him and what worries him.
Although the works of Viktor Petrovich belong to modern Russian literature, the problems that are often raised in them are more than one thousand years old. Eternal questions of good and evil, punishment and justice have long forced people to look for answers to them. But this turned out to be a very difficult matter, because the answers lie in the person himself, and good and evil, honesty and dishonor are intertwined in us. Having a soul, we are often indifferent. We all have a heart, but we are often called heartless.
Astafiev’s novel “The Sad Detective” raises the problems of crime, punishment and the triumph of justice. The theme of the novel is the current intelligentsia and the current people. The work tells about the life of two small towns: Veisk and Khailovsk, about the people living in them, about modern morals. When people talk about small towns, the image of a quiet, peaceful place appears in the mind, where life, filled with joys, flows slowly, without any special incidents. A feeling of peace appears in the soul. But those who think so are mistaken. In fact, life in Veisk and Khailovsk flows in a stormy stream. Young people who get drunk to the point where a person turns
They transform into an animal, rape a woman old enough to be their mother, and the parents leave the child locked in the apartment for a week. All these pictures described by Astafiev terrify the reader. It becomes scary and creepy at the thought that the concepts of honesty, decency and love are disappearing. The description of these cases in the form of summaries is, in my opinion, an important artistic feature. Hearing every day about various incidents, we sometimes don’t pay attention, but collected in the novel, they force us to take off our rose-colored glasses and understand: if it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t concern you. The novel makes you think about your actions, look back and see what you have done over the years. After reading, you ask yourself the question: “What good and good have I done? Did I notice when the person next to me felt bad? You begin to think that indifference is as evil as cruelty. I think that finding answers to these questions is the purpose of the work. In the novel “The Sad Detective” Astafiev created a whole system of images. The author introduces the reader to each hero of the work, talking about his life. The main character is police operative Leonid Soshnin. He is a forty-year-old man who was injured several times in the line of duty and should retire. Having retired, he begins to write, trying to figure out where there is so much anger and cruelty in a person. Where does he keep it? Why, along with this cruelty, does the Russian people have pity for the prisoners and indifference to themselves, to their neighbor - a disabled person of war and labor? Astafiev contrasts the main character, an honest and brave operative worker, with policeman Fyodor Lebed, who quietly serves, moving from one position to another. On especially dangerous trips, he tries not to risk his life and gives the right to neutralize armed criminals to his partners, and it is not very important that his partner does not have a service weapon, because he is a recent graduate of a police school, and Fedor has a service weapon. A striking image in the novel is Aunt Granya - a woman who, without children of her own, gave all her love to the children who played near her house at the railway station, and then to the children in the Children's Home.
Often the heroes of a work, who should cause disgust, cause pity. Urna, who has transformed from a self-employed woman into a drunkard without a home or family, evokes sympathy. She screams songs and pesters passers-by, but she becomes ashamed not for her, but for the society that has turned its back on the Urn. Soshnin says that they tried to help her, but nothing worked, and now they simply don’t pay attention to her.
The city of Veisk has its own Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky. Astafiev does not even change the names of these people and characterizes them with a quote from Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” thereby refuting the well-known saying that nothing lasts forever under the sun. Everything flows, everything changes, but such people remain, exchanging clothes of the 19th century for a fashionable suit and shirt with gold cufflinks of the 20th century. The city of Veisk also has its own literary luminary, who, sitting in his office, “enveloped in cigarette smoke, twitched, squirmed in his chair and littered with ashes.”
This is Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova. It is this man, whose description brings a smile, that moves local literature forward and further. This woman decides what works to print. But not everything is so bad, because if there is evil, then there is also good.
Leonid Soshnin makes peace with his wife, and she returns to him again along with her daughter. It’s a little sad that the death of Soshnin’s neighbor, Tutyshikha’s grandmother, forces them to make peace. It is grief that brings Leonid and Lera closer together. The blank sheet of paper in front of Soshnin, who usually writes at night, is a symbol of the beginning of a new stage in the life of the protagonist’s family. And I want to believe that their future life will be happy and joyful, and they will cope with grief, because they will be together.
The novel "The Sad Detective" is an exciting work. Although it is difficult to read, because Astafiev describes too terrible pictures. But such works need to be read, because they make you think about the meaning of life, so that it does not pass colorlessly and empty.
I liked the piece. I learned a lot of important things and understood a lot. I met a new writer and I know for sure that this is not the last work by Astafiev that I will read.

Chapter first

Leonid Soshnin returned home in the worst mood. AND
although it was a long walk, almost to the outskirts of the city, to the railway village,
he didn’t get on the bus - his wounded leg may ache, but walking will calm him down and
he will think over everything that was told to him at the publishing house, think it over and judge how
what should he do next?
Actually, there was no publishing house as such in the city of Veisk, from
a department remained there, but the publishing house itself was transferred to the city more
large, and, as the liquidators probably thought, more cultured,
possessing a powerful printing base. But the "base" was exactly the same as
in Veisk - a decrepit legacy of old Russian cities. Printing house
was located in a pre-revolutionary building made of strong brown brick, stitched
gratings of narrow windows at the bottom and shaped curved windows at the top, also narrow,
but already raised upward like an exclamation mark. Half a building
Wei printing house, where there were typesetting shops and printing machines, has long been
fell into the bowels of the earth, and although there were lamps in continuous rows along the ceiling
daylight, it was still uncomfortable, chilly and
something was always ticking, as if in the ears that were blocked, or was working, buried
in the dungeon, a delayed-action explosive mechanism.
The publishing department huddled in two and a half rooms, creaking
highlighted by the regional newspaper. In one of them, shrouded in cigarette smoke,
twitched, squirmed in the chair, grabbed the phone, littered the local
cultural luminary - Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrokvasova, moving forward and
then local literature. Syrovasova considered herself the most knowledgeable
person: if not in the whole country, then in Veisk she has no equal in intelligence
was. She made presentations and reports on current literature, shared plans
publishers through the newspaper, sometimes in newspapers, and reviewed books
local authors, inappropriately and inappropriately inserting quotes from Virgil and Dante,
from Savonarola, Spinoza, Rabelais, Hegel and Exupery, Kant and Ehrenburg, Yuri
Olesha, Tregub and Ermilov, however, and the ashes of Einstein and Lunacharsky sometimes
worried, and did not ignore the leaders of the world proletariat.
Everything has long been decided with Soshnin’s book. Let the stories from it be published
and in thin but metropolitan magazines, three times they were condescendingly mentioned in
review critical articles, he stood in the back of his head for five years, ended up in
The plan was established, all that remained was to edit and design the book.
Having set the time for a business meeting at exactly ten, Syrovasova appeared at
publishing department by twelve. Smelling Soshnin with tobacco,
out of breath, she rushed past him along the dark corridor - light bulbs
someone “stole”, hoarsely said “Sorry!” and crunched the key for a long time
faulty lock, cursing in a low voice.

A retired operative due to disability, Leonid Soshnin, comes to the editorial office, where his manuscript was practically approved for publication. But the editor-in-chief Oktyabrina (a beacon of the local literary elite, sprinkling quotes from famous writers) in a conversation with him expresses her contempt for the unprofessionalism of the retired writer. Insulted, Leonid returns home with heavy thoughts; he recalls his career, wondering why Russian people are ready to condone bandits out of imaginary mercy.

For example, his aunt, who, unfortunately, was raped, suffers from remorse, because she “sued” those scum, although young. Or he remembers how he had to shoot a drunk and aggressive truck driver, who had already hit many innocent people, did not obey the orders of the police, and Leonid himself almost lost his leg because of him, so after all this nightmare Soshin had to go through an official investigation due to... for the use of service weapons. So he remembers, reflects, and after difficult communication with his family, in the morning he sits down with a white sheet of paper, he is ready to create.

The story of the “sad detective” consists of the memories of a former operative, a current pensioner and a future writer - Leonid, which boil down to the question of resisting evil, globally. In particular, these are issues of crime and punishment in his county town. Astafiev’s work begins with a scene in the editorial office, where the hero was invited after several years of reviewing his manuscript. The editor-in-chief (an angry, lonely woman) takes advantage of her position to speak disparagingly to a grown man. Leonid feels insulted, but even Oktyabrina herself feels that she has crossed boundaries. It seems that she is trying to smooth out the unpleasant situation, but Soshnin’s mood is ruined.

In a bad mood, he returns to his home. He looks at his uncomfortable neighborhood, which would not give anyone optimism. Sad thoughts flooded the hero; memories, also mostly sad, bother him. The operative had to retire early. I went to the village, and they turned to him (as a doctor) for help. A drunk man has locked two old women in a neighbor's barn and promises to set them on fire if they don't give him ten rubles to soothe his hangover. This is how Soshnin often had to deal with drunks and fools... and this time the drunkard, getting scared, foolishly stuck a pitchfork into the fallen operative.

Leonid was barely saved! But with a disability I had to retire. When Lenya was still at police school, his aunt Lina was almost arrested. She raised him from childhood, denying herself everything. I was lucky here - I got a job in the budget department, money, expensive things, and scarce products immediately appeared. Yes, she began to steal - for the sake of her pupil. He was initially sent to police school, because she felt that she herself could not expect anything good. When they came to “take her away,” she was on her knees and sobbing. This whole story became stressful for young Leonid. Then, although he was almost expelled from school, he vowed to fight crime, because bandits, in addition to ordinary crimes, also lead good people, like his aunt, astray.

Picture or drawing Sad detective

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Forty-two-year-old Leonid Soshnin, a former criminal investigation operative, returns home from a local publishing house to an empty apartment, in the worst mood. The manuscript of his first book, “Life is More Precious than Everything,” after five years of waiting, has finally been accepted for production, but this news does not make Soshnin happy. A conversation with the editor, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrovasova, who tried to humiliate the author-policeman who dared to call himself a writer with arrogant remarks, stirred up Soshnin’s already gloomy thoughts and experiences. “How to live in the world? Lonely? - he thinks on the way home, and his thoughts are heavy.

He served his time in the police: after two wounds, Soshnin was sent to a disability pension. After another quarrel, Lerka’s wife leaves him, taking with her his little daughter Svetka.

Soshnin remembers his whole life. He cannot answer his own question: why is there so much room in life for grief and suffering, but always close to love and happiness? Soshnin understands that, among other incomprehensible things and phenomena, he has to comprehend the so-called Russian soul, and he needs to start with the people closest to him, with the episodes he witnessed, with the destinies of the people with whom his life encountered... Why Russian people Are you ready to feel sorry for the bone crusher and bloodletter and not notice how a helpless war invalid is dying nearby, in the next apartment?.. Why does a criminal live so freely and cheerfully among such kind-hearted people?..

In order to escape from his gloomy thoughts at least for a minute, Leonid imagines how he will come home, cook himself a bachelor’s dinner, read, sleep a little so that he has enough strength for the whole night - sitting at the table, over a blank sheet of paper. Soshnin especially loves this night time, when he lives in some isolated world created by his imagination.

Leonid Soshnin's apartment is located on the outskirts of Veysk, in an old two-story house where he grew up. From this house my father went to war, from which he did not return, and here, towards the end of the war, my mother also died from a severe cold. Leonid stayed with his mother’s sister, Aunt Lipa, whom he used to call Lina since childhood. Aunt Lina, after the death of her sister, went to work in the commercial department of the Wei Railway. This department was “judged and replanted at once.” The aunt tried to poison herself, but she was saved and after the trial she was sent to a colony. By this time, Lenya was already studying at the regional special school of the Internal Affairs Directorate, from where he was almost kicked out because of his convicted aunt. But the neighbors, and mainly Lavrya’s father’s fellow Cossack soldier, interceded for Leonid with the regional police authorities, and everything turned out okay.

Aunt Lina was released under an amnesty. Soshnin had already worked as a district police officer in the remote Khailovsky district, from where he brought his wife. Before her death, Aunt Lina managed to nurse Leonid’s daughter, Sveta, whom she considered her granddaughter. After Lina’s death, Soshniny passed under the protection of another, no less reliable aunt named Granya, a switchwoman on the shunting hill. Aunt Granya spent her whole life taking care of other people’s children, and even little Lenya Soshnin learned the first skills of brotherhood and hard work in a kind of kindergarten.

Once, after returning from Khailovsk, Soshnin was on duty with a police squad at a mass celebration on the occasion of Railway Worker's Day. Four guys who were drunk to the point of losing their memory raped Aunt Granya, and if not for his patrol partner, Soshnin would have shot these drunken fellows sleeping on the lawn. They were convicted, and after this incident, Aunt Granya began to avoid people. One day she expressed to Soshnin the terrible thought that by convicting the criminals, they had thereby ruined young lives. Soshnin shouted at the old woman for feeling sorry for non-humans, and they began to avoid each other...

In the dirty and spit-stained entrance of the house, three drunks accost Soshnin, demanding to say hello and then to apologize for their disrespectful behavior. He agrees, trying to cool their ardor with peaceful remarks, but the main one, a young bully, does not calm down. Fueled by alcohol, the guys attack Soshnin. He, having gathered his strength - his wounds and hospital “rest” took their toll - defeats the hooligans. One of them hits his head on the heating radiator when he falls. Soshnin picks up a knife on the floor, staggers into the apartment. And he immediately calls the police and reports the fight: “One hero’s head was split on a radiator. If so, don’t look for it. The villain is me."

Coming to his senses after what happened, Soshnin again remembers his life.

He and his partner were chasing a drunk on a motorcycle who had stolen a truck. The truck rushed like a deadly ram through the streets of the town, having already ended more than one life. Soshnin, the senior patrol officer, decided to shoot the criminal. His partner fired, but before he died, the truck driver managed to hit the motorcycle of the pursuing policemen. On the operating table, Soshnina’s leg was miraculously saved from amputation. But he remained lame; it took him a long time to learn to walk. During his recovery, the investigator tormented him for a long time and persistently with an investigation: was the use of weapons legal?

Leonid also remembers how he met his future wife, saving her from hooligans who were trying to take off the girl’s jeans right behind the Soyuzpechat kiosk. At first, life between him and Lerka went in peace and harmony, but gradually mutual reproaches began. His wife especially did not like his literary studies. “Such Leo Tolstoy with a seven-shooter pistol, with rusty handcuffs in his belt...” she said.

Soshnin recalls how one “took” a stray guest performer, a repeat offender, Demon, in a hotel in the town.

And finally, he remembers how Venka Fomin, who was drunk and returned from prison, put a final end to his career as an operative... Soshnin brought his daughter to his wife’s parents in a distant village and was about to return to the city when his father-in-law told him that there was a drunk in the neighboring village A man has locked old women in a barn and is threatening to set them on fire if they do not give him ten rubles to cover their hangover. During the detention, when Soshnin slipped on manure and fell, the frightened Venka Fomin stabbed him with a pitchfork... Soshnin was barely taken to the hospital - and he barely escaped certain death. But the second group of disability and retirement could not be avoided.

At night, Leonid is awakened from sleep by the terrible scream of the neighbor girl Yulka. He hurries to the apartment on the first floor, where Yulka lives with her grandmother Tutyshikha. Having drunk a bottle of Riga balsam from the gifts brought by Yulka’s father and stepmother from the Baltic sanatorium, Grandma Tutyshikha is already fast asleep.

At the funeral of grandmother Tutyshikha, Soshnin meets his wife and daughter. At the wake they sit next to each other.

Lerka and Sveta stay with Soshnin, at night he hears his daughter sniffling behind the partition, and feels his wife sleeping next to him, timidly clinging to him. He gets up, approaches his daughter, adjusts her pillow, presses his cheek to her head and loses himself in some kind of sweet grief, in a resurrecting, life-giving sadness. Leonid goes to the kitchen, reads “Proverbs of the Russian People” collected by Dahl - the section “Husband and Wife” - and is surprised at the wisdom contained in simple words.

“Dawn was already rolling in like a damp snowball through the kitchen window, when, having enjoyed the peace among the quietly sleeping family, with a feeling of long-unknown confidence in his capabilities and strength, without irritation or melancholy in his heart, Soshnin stuck to the table and placed a blank sheet of paper in the spot of light and froze over him for a long time.”

Retold

The journalistic beginning is palpable in V. Astafiev’s story “The Sad Detective,” but the main thing that defines this work is “cruel” realism. The prose of “cruel” realism is merciless in depicting the horrors of everyday life. The story concentrates criminal episodes from the life of the provincial town of Veysk, and in such quantity that it seems implausible that so much negativity, so much dirt, and blood could be concentrated in such a small geographical space. Here are collected monstrous manifestations of the collapse and degradation of society. But there is both an artistic and real justification for this.

V. Astafiev makes us horrified by reality, he awakens ears accustomed to information not only with the meaning of crimes, but also with their number. The pumped-up facts, destinies, and faces mercilessly plunge one into a reality that is terrible in its bitterness and lack of motive for crimes. This brutal realism combines fictional and real episodes into a single canvas, imbued with angry pathos.

This saturation with criminal events is also explained by the profession of the main character Leonid Soshnin. Soshnin is an investigator, a policeman, who daily deals with the fall of a person. He is also an aspiring writer. Everything that Soshnin sees around becomes material for his notes; with all facets of his soul he is turned towards people. But “work in the police eradicated from him pity for criminals, this universal, not fully understood by anyone and inexplicable Russian pity, which forever preserves in the living flesh of the Russian person an unquenchable thirst for compassion and the desire for good.”

V. Astafiev sharply raises the question of the people. That idealized image of a single people - a lover of truth, a passion-bearer, which was created in previous decades (1960-80s) in “village prose”, does not suit the writer. He shows in the Russian character not only what makes one touch. Where then does the dump truck hijacker, who killed several people in a drunken stupor, come from, or Venka Fomin, who threatens to burn the village women in the calf barn if they don’t give him a hangover? Or that pet guy who was humiliated in front of women by more arrogant suitors, and in revenge he decided to kill the first person he met. And for a long time, he brutally killed a beautiful student with a stone in the sixth month of pregnancy, and then at the trial he shouted: “Is it my fault that such a good woman was caught?..”

The writer discovers in man a “terrible, self-devouring beast.” He speaks the merciless truth about his contemporaries, adding new features to their portrait.

The children buried their father. “At home, as usual, the children and relatives cried for the deceased, drank heavily - out of pity, at the cemetery they added - damp, cold, bitter. Five empty bottles were later found in the grave. And two complete ones, with a muttering voice, are now a new, cheerful fashion among highly paid hard workers: with force, richly not only spend your free time, but also bury it - burn money over the grave, preferably a pack, throw after the departing bottle of wine - maybe the poor thing will want a hangover in the next world. The grieving children threw bottles into the hole, but they forgot to lower their parents into the land.”

Children forget their parents, parents leave their tiny child in an automatic storage room. Others lock the baby at home for a week, leading him to catch and eat cockroaches. The episodes are interconnected by a logical connection. Although V. As-tafiev does not make any direct comparisons, it seems that he simply strings one after another onto the core of the hero’s memory, but in the context of the story, between different episodes there is a force field of a certain idea: parents - children - parents; criminal - the reaction of others; people - “intelligentsia”. And all together adds new touches to the image of the Russian people.

V. Astafiev does not spare black tones in national self-criticism. He turns inside out those qualities that were elevated to the rank of virtues of the Russian character. He is not admired by patience and humility - in them the writer sees the causes of many troubles and crimes, the sources of philistine indifference and indifference. V. Astafiev does not admire the eternal compassion for the criminal, noticed in the Russian people by F. Dostoevsky. Material from the site

V. Astafiev, in his desire to understand the Russian character, is very close to Gorky’s “Untimely Thoughts,” who wrote: “We, Rus', are anarchists by nature, we are a cruel beast, dark and evil slave blood still flows in our veins... There are no words, which it would be impossible to scold a Russian person - you cry with blood, but you scold..." V. Astafiev also speaks with pain and suffering about the beast in man. He brings terrible episodes into the story not in order to humiliate the Russian people, to intimidate, but to make everyone think about the reasons for the brutality of people.

“The Sad Detective” is an artistic and journalistic story, marked by sharp analysis and merciless assessments. “Detective” by V. Astafiev is devoid of the happy ending element inherent in this genre, when a lone hero can tame the evil that has broken through and return the world to the norm of its existence. In the story, it is evil and crime that become almost the norm in everyday life, and Soshnin’s efforts cannot shake it. Therefore, the story is far from an ordinary detective story, although it includes crime stories. The title can be interpreted both as a sad crime story and as a sad hero whose profession is a detective.

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