In 2001, E. I. Nosov, a veteran novelist, was awarded the Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize.

In E. I. Nosov's prose, vocabulary, rhythm, and sound recording are all directed to the main image, which is the innermost core of the work, "the image of images," as A. Potebni put it.

Let's try to use lexical and stylistic analysis to get into the deep author's idea of the story "Red Wine of Victory".

Researchers have already written about the semantics of color in this amazing work ("Russian Speech". 1985. N 3). Indeed, it is impossible not to notice that the war in the story is given dark and gray roles.-

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tenki: "gray dugouts", "earthy-gray linen" (here and further italics are ours. - SM ). "We were picked up in the Masurian swamps... This was already the enemy's land. We walked along it only a short distance, through this strange, dreary area, with thickets of stunted heather on sandy hills "(Here and further cit. by: Nosov E. I. And steamboats float away, Moscow, 1975). Although the color is not always specified directly, the overall color is maintained: "It was rumored that in our direction, among these gloomy swamps, Hitler had set up his main headquarters - an underground concrete lair."

In the memoirs of the wounded narrator, the harsh colors of war are preserved, but the reducing comparison makes the enemy disgustingly undaunted: "In their short black jackets, like cockroaches, the Germans, quickly moving their hands and feet, climbed on all fours along the steep slope of the lake dune." And as they scrambled "in their insect frenzy", "we hit them with dumps from three hundred meters away, and the shells disappeared without a trace in the thickness of the sand."

Let's pay special attention to the fact that at first the narrator does not call anyone around him by name, without singling out himself from among the fighters: everywhere the cathedral we are triumphant. The army has not yet broken up into units, and the popular definition of "gray cattle" involuntarily subconsciously pops up, but with an intonation that is not humiliating, but compassionate.

And in February of the forty-fifth year, " our echelon... after wandering for about a week through the snow-covered spaces of Russia, " it turns out to be somewhere in the Serpukhov cul-de-sac. Whiteness begins to displace gray-black-brown.

The wounded "marveled at the forgotten taste of white bread", white bunks and white nightstands surrounded them, white dressing gowns and bandages flashed around them, and "a white ceiling that constantly hung over their heads" crowned this tent world. You can feel the constant whiteness of the hospital beginning to depress you.

"Now it was spring, and we were deep in the rear, far from the heat of war." It was in her inferno that the nameless we, which only in the white hospital walls began to break up into names, merged, fused together: "I wonder where our people are now ?" - reflects Sasha Selivanov, "the swarthy Volgar with the Tatar raskosina"; " Neshto not navoevalsya?" - Borodukhov bassed back to him; " He was one of the Mezen peasants-foresters..."

Contrary to the narrator's ideas, the Moldovan Mihai "was golden-red, as if doused with honey ", and in the evenings "his fiery head blazed from the setting sun". Two walking patients - Siberians Saenko and Bugaev-one a steppe Altai crest, the other a native Yenisei chaldon - "unlike us, the belokalsonniks ... sported striped hospital gowns that allowed them to walk around the yard." "Both of them have already managed to get a tan, banish the yellowness of the tent from their faces ."

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The most seriously wounded person in the ward is Kopeshkin, a Penza peasant from the village of Sukhoi Zhiten, Lomovsky district, who was immured "in a solid chest cast". Although he did "his simple peasant work in the war" - in the wagon train, but even there an enemy shell found him and turned his overworked peasant body. The generalized image of Russia is gradually being translated into specific places, and "it turned out that every inch of the earth had its own defender."

Outside the window of the white hospital, the fields were green. Spring of forty-five. Berlin collapsed. The newspaper photos that the ward's occupants were eagerly eyeing were of "grim ruins", "dirty, terrified Nazis with their hands in the air, white flags and sheets on the balconies and in the windows of houses..." All the colors of life had to return a single word-victory.

"So passed the eighth day of May, and a languid and silent evening." The main thing is learned at three o'clock in the morning not by radio messages, but by the orders of the head of the hospital: "... give out everything clean-bed, linen"; " Kill the boar. Make something more interesting for dinner"; "It would be nice to have wine for dinner"; " No, alcohol is not that. (...) Day! What a day it is, my dear fellow!" And even before the day came, "in the bright moonlit night, a crimson rocket bloomed mellowly, overripe and scattered in clusters. A green"; "crossed with it...Outside the window, colorful, exultant rockets flew up into the sky more and more often, denser and denser, and from them colored flashes and bizarre shadows of trees walked on the walls and faces." A successful and precise detail-flashes and shadows-is actually much deeper than its simple external depiction. The shadows of the trees are like the silent presence of those (the great we) who have not returned from the gray, pitch-black, and bloody world of war.

The closer you get to the climax of the story, the more colorful and diverse the world becomes. An old photographer appears in the ward to capture all comers on Victory Day. Of course, the photos will be black and white, but the old man's props are excellent: "a black kubanka with a gilded crosshair on the red top", a new woolen tunic, a banner with a burning tank painted on it.

The photographer was replaced by "amber-yellow boar soup" and "a tray with several dark red glasses". "These ruby-red glasses filled to the brim were perceived in our colorless-white ward as something unprecedented-solemn, as an exciting sacrament." From now on, all the shades of the most mysterious color will flood the pages of the story: "everything... they turned pink ", a red trickle "slid down the chin of the armless Mihai, but "the sunset reflection of the sun" painted everything in a single color.

It was in the evening after drinking wine that everyone remembered his "span of land", for which blood was shed. The hero-narrator mentally tries to imagine a modest Kopeshkin land:

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"The whitish broomsticks must be splashing in front of the huts, the May freshness of bread can be seen on the undulating hills outside the village, the herd will wander from the meadows in the evening, it will smell of dry dust and cattle, the early nightingale will click softly by the stream, the new moon will break through, it will sway in the dark water..." Automatically, he scribbles a pencil on a piece of paper: "I drew a log cabin with three windows on the facade, a shaggy tree at the gate, like an overturned broom." And then, at the request of Kopeshkin, he added a birdhouse. "I reached out and put this unsightly painting in Kopeshkin's hands."

Before the tragic denouement of the story, Evgeny Nosov strengthens the personal principle: personal and possessive pronouns push aside the diversity of names: "I tried to imagine Kopeshkin's homeland..."; "I only knew that this Penza was somewhere near Mordovia, or in the neighborhood of the Chuvash people"; "I was already training my left hand for the second week"; " My picture was leaning against Kopeshkin's hands until dusk, and I was secretly glad that I had pleased him... It seemed to me that Kopeshkin was quietly looking at the drawing..."

Here the writer breaks off the narrator's "yak", separates the departed Kopeshkin from the tent-war we, and the narrative is interrupted by a paragraph that can be called a prose poem without stretching it: "In fact, a person always dies alone, even if his headboard is sympathetically surrounded by friends: he turns off his hearing so as not to listen to unnecessary regrets, turns off his vision, as the lights go out when leaving the apartment, and, for a while, left alone, in mute silence and darkness, with the last effort pushes the boat away from these objects. beregov..."

The young narrator, who has seen thousands of deaths, is for the first time so struck by her appearance, for the first time has the opportunity to look into this "incomprehensible nothingness called dust", to reflect on the majestic mystery of "leaving", "presenting" (before Whom?), to ask himself the last questions: "Is that all?.. There won't be anything else for him? Then why was he...?"

And the writer uses the cherished word "sacrament": "some codes of the sacrament coincided, and he was finally born..."

However, the consciousness, the soul of the Russian Orthodox person pushed aside the godless man in the final story and placed its own signs. So the picture leaning against Kopeshkin's hands stands out in front of the deceased's face like an icon. The nurse will sigh about "our grave sins". The release of Kopeshkin's body from the heavy "plaster shell"," shell " - like a hint of the release of the soul, leaving a weak, ill body.

The imagination of the narrator is transferred from the drawing drawn with a simple pencil to the unknown Penza land and, without naming the name of the author of the story.

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directly, he connects the real world of the Russian hut and family with the Orthodox church and the sacrament of communion: "In the windows of his hut, the liquid flame of a kerosene lamp must have already lit up", reminding us of the flame of a candle and a lamp, "we saw the brands of children surrounding the table with evening soup." I do not think that it would be blasphemous to see in the word chowder traces of the sacred bread that is fulfilled by the prayer of the priest on the throne. And the wine-here, in the ward, " thickly colored the white one... a pillowcase " of "idle whiteness".

These last phrases speak almost directly of transubstantiation and communion: "The remaining wine in the glass, he (Sayenko. - S. M.) he smashed us to our bunks, and we each had a drink. Now it seemed mysteriously dark, like blood ." Let us recall the words from the prayer of St. John the Baptist. St. John Chrysostom: "I still believe that this is Your Most Pure Body, and this is Your Most Precious Blood." And it is not by chance that the writer returns in this act to the conciliar we, uniting everyone at the Chalice of Redemption.

The" image of images " of this magnificent story, which gathers content around itself, is the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Red Wine of Victory is dedicated to the great redemptive sacrifice of our people made during the war.

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