Paustovsky I was only seven years old. (1) I was only seven years old when I met the writer Christian Andersen

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Paustovsky I was only seven years old. (1) I was only seven years old when I met the writer Christian Andersen

Read the text carefully and complete tasks A1 - A9, B1 - B14.

(1) I was only seven years old when I met the writer Christian Andersen. (2) Then, of course, I did not yet know the double meaning of Andersen’s fairy tales. (3) I didn’t know that every children’s fairy tale contains a second one, which only adults can fully understand. (4) I realized this much later. (5) I realized that I was just lucky when, on the eve of the difficult and great twentieth century, I met the sweet eccentric and poet Andersen and taught me faith in the victory of the sun over darkness and the good human heart over evil. (6) He taught me to enjoy everything interesting and good that comes across on every path and at every step. (7) to notice what eludes lazy human eyes.
(8) We walk on the earth, but how often does it occur to us to want to bend down and carefully examine this earth, to examine everything that is under our feet? (9) And if we bent down or, even more, lay down on the ground and began to examine it, then on every inch we would find many curious things.
(10) Isn’t it interesting to see dry moss scattering emerald pollen from its little jars, or a plantain flower that looks like a lilac soldier’s plume? (11) Or a fragment of a mother-of-pearl shell - so tiny that even a pocket mirror for a doll cannot be made from it, but large enough to endlessly shimmer and sparkle with the same variety of dim colors that the sky over the Baltic glows at dawn.
(12) Isn’t every blade of grass, filled with fragrant juice, and every flying linden seed beautiful? (13) A mighty tree will definitely grow from it. (14) You never know what you’ll see under your feet! (15) Because all this can be used to write stories and fairy tales - such fairy tales that people will only shake their heads in surprise and say to each other:
- Where did this lanky son of a shoemaker from Odense get such a blessed gift?
(16) He must be a sorcerer after all.

(K. Paustovsky)

For each task A1 - A9 there are 4 possible answers, of which only one is correct. Circle the answers to tasks A1-A9.

A1. Choose a title that contains the main idea of the text.
1) Writer Andersen.
2) A priceless gift.
3) Good and evil.
4) Fairy tales that teach you to rejoice.

A2. Which of the statements below contains the answer to the question: What do Andersen's fairy tales teach?
1. He must be a sorcerer after all.
2. Enjoy everything interesting and good.
3. You never know what you’ll see under your feet.
4. Notice what eludes lazy human eyes.

A3. Find “given” in 8-9 sentences.
1) we walk on earth
2) we
3) a lot of things
4) desire

A5. Which sentences of the text contain an argument that confirms the narrator’s thesis that Andersen’s fairy tales are interesting not only for children, but also for adults?
1) 2, 13
2) 5,6
3) 1, 2
4) 8, 9

A6. What side of the writer’s nature does the information contained in sentence 5 indicate?
1) Andersen was a strange person.
2) Andersen was an observant person.
3) Andersen was a great optimist.
4) Andersen was a cheerful person.

A7. Find a sentence that is related to the previous one using a demonstrative pronoun and repetition.
1) 3rd
2) 4th
3) 7th
4) 15th

A8. Which answer option indicates the means of verbal expression used by the author in sentences 3-16?
1) exclamatory sentences, rhetorical questions, rhetorical appeal
2) epithets, comparisons, metaphors
3) antithesis, hyperbole
4) comparative speech, professional vocabulary

A9. Which answer option correctly defines the type(s) of speech of this text?
1) narration
2) description
3) reasoning
4) reasoning with descriptive elements

Write down answers to tasks B1 - B14 in words or numbers, separating them, if necessary, with commas.

IN 1. From sentences 1 - 5, write down words with an unpronounceable consonant at the root.

AT 2. From sentences 11 - 13, write down a word whose spelling of the prefix is determined by the rule: “At the end of the prefix, -C is written if it is followed by a letter denoting a voiceless consonant.”

AT 3. From sentences 12 - 14, write down a word in which the spelling of НН is determined by the rule: “In a participle formed from a verb ending in -IT, the suffix -ENN- is written”

AT 4. From sentence 10 below, write down all the numbers used to number the commas that highlight the participial phrase.

Isn’t it interesting to see dry moss, (1) scattering emerald pollen from its little jars, (2) or a plantain flower, (3) looking like a lilac soldier’s plume?

AT 5. Among sentences 6 - 9, find a complex sentence that contains a complex sentence. Write the number of this offer.

AT 6. From sentence 12 below, write down the number(s) used to indicate the comma(s) separating the main and subordinate parts of the complex sentence.

And if we bent down or, (1) even more, (2) lay down on the ground and began to examine it, (3) then on every inch we would find many curious things.

AT 7. Replace the phrase from sentence 11, built on the basis of the subordinating connection management, with a synonymous phrase with the connection agreement. Write the resulting phrase.
the sky over the Baltic - ...

AT 8. Write down the grammatical basis from the subordinate part of the 7th sentence.

AT 9. Indicate the number of grammatical bases in sentence 9.

AT 10. Among sentences 6 - 10, find a sentence with separate definitions. Write the number of this offer.

AT 11. Among sentences 1 - 5, find a sentence with an introductory word. Write the number of this offer.

AT 12. Among sentences 8 - 10, find a complex sentence with coordinating and subordinating connections. Write the number of this offer.

B13. Among sentences 1 - 5, find complex sentences with sequential subordination. Write the numbers of these sentences.

B14. In sentence 15, replace direct speech with indirect speech. Write the resulting sentence.

Answers

A1-4;
A2-4;
A3-2;
A4-1;
A5-2;
A6-3
A7-2;
A8-2;
A9-4;

B1- sun, heart;
B2-infinite;
B3 - filled;
B4-1,2;
B5-8;
B6-3;
B7 - Baltic sky;
Q8-what escapes;
B9-2;
B10-10;
B11-2;
B12-8;
B13-3.5;
Q14- You can write stories and fairy tales about all this - such tales that people will only shake their heads in surprise and tell each other where such a blessed gift came from this lanky son of a shoemaker from Odense.

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Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky
Great storyteller

I was only seven years old when I met the writer Christian Andersen.

It happened on the winter evening of December 31, 1899 - just a few hours before the onset of the twentieth century. A cheerful Danish storyteller met me on the threshold of a new century.

He looked at me for a long time, squinting one eye and chuckling, then he took out a snow-white fragrant handkerchief from his pocket, shook it, and suddenly a large white rose fell out of the handkerchief. Immediately the whole room was filled with its silver light and an incomprehensible slow ringing. It turned out that it was rose petals ringing as they hit the brick floor of the basement where our family lived at that time.

The Andersen incident was what old-fashioned writers called a “waking dream.” I must have just imagined it.

On that winter evening that I am talking about, our family was decorating a Christmas tree. On this occasion, the adults sent me outside so that I would not rejoice at the Christmas tree ahead of time.

I just couldn’t understand why you couldn’t rejoice before some fixed date. In my opinion, joy was not such a frequent guest in our family as to make us children languish, waiting for its arrival.

But be that as it may, I was sent out onto the street. It was that time of twilight when the lanterns were not yet on, but could be about to light up. And from this “just about”, from the anticipation of the suddenly flashing lanterns, my heart sank. I knew well that in the greenish gas light various magical things would immediately appear in the depths of the mirrored store windows: snow maiden skates, twisted candles of all the colors of the rainbow, clown masks in small white top hats, tin cavalrymen on hot bay horses, firecrackers and golden paper chains . It is not clear why, but these things smelled strongly of paste and turpentine.

I knew from the words of adults that the evening of December 31, 1899 was very special. To wait for the same evening, you had to live another hundred years. And, of course, almost no one will succeed.

I asked my father what “special evening” meant. My father explained to me that this evening is called that because it is not like all the others.

Indeed, that winter evening on the last day of 1899 was not like all the others. The snow fell slowly and importantly, and its flakes were so large that it seemed as if light white roses were flying from the sky onto the city. And along all the streets the dull ringing of cab bells could be heard.

When I returned home, the tree was immediately lit, and the cheerful crackling of candles began in the room, as if dry acacia pods were constantly bursting around.

Near the tree lay a thick book - a gift from my mother. These were Christian Andersen's fairy tales.

I sat down under the tree and opened the book. It contained many colored pictures covered with tissue paper. I had to carefully blow this paper away to see these pictures, still sticky with paint.

There the walls of snow palaces sparkled with sparklers, wild swans flew over the sea, in which pink clouds were reflected like flower petals, and tin soldiers stood sentry on one leg, clutching long guns.

First of all, I read the fairy tale about the steadfast tin soldier and the charming little dancer, then the fairy tale about the snow queen. Amazing and, as it seemed to me, fragrant, like the breath of flowers, human kindness emanated from the pages of this book with a golden edge.

Then I dozed off under the tree from fatigue and the heat of the candles, and through this doze I saw Andersen when he dropped the white rose. Since then, my idea of him has always been associated with this pleasant dream.

At that time, of course, I did not yet know the double meaning of Andersen’s fairy tales. I didn’t know that every children’s fairy tale contains a second one, which only adults can fully understand.

I realized this much later. I realized that I was just lucky when, on the eve of the working and great twentieth century, I met the sweet eccentric and poet Andersen and taught me the bright faith in the victory of the sun over darkness and the good human heart over evil. Then I already knew Pushkin’s words “Long live the sun, let the darkness disappear!” and for some reason I was sure that Pushkin and Andersen were bosom friends and, when they met, they patted each other on the shoulder for a long time and laughed.

I learned Andersen’s biography much later. Since then, it has always appeared to me in the form of interesting paintings, similar to the drawings for his stories.

Andersen knew how to rejoice all his life, although his childhood did not give him any reason for this. He was born in 1805, during the Napoleonic wars, in the old Danish city of Odense in the family of a shoemaker.

Odense lies in one of the basins among the low hills on the island of Funen. In the hollows on this island the fog almost always stagnated, and on the tops of the hills the heather bloomed and the pines rustled sadly.

If you think carefully about what Odense was like, then perhaps you can say that it most closely resembled a toy city carved out of blackened oak.

No wonder Odense was famous for its woodcarvers. One of them, the medieval master Klaus Berg, carved a huge altar from ebony for the cathedral in Odense. This altar - majestic and formidable - terrified not only children, but even adults.

But Danish carvers made not only altars and statues of saints. They preferred to carve from large pieces of wood those figures that, according to maritime custom, decorated the stems of sailing ships. They were crude but expressive statues of Madonnas, the sea god Neptune, Nereids, dolphins and twisting seahorses. These statues were painted with gold, ocher and cobalt, and the paint was applied so thickly that a sea wave could not wash it off or damage it for many years.

Essentially, these carvers of ship statues were poets of the sea and their craft. It is not for nothing that one of the greatest sculptors of the 19th century, Andersen’s friend, the Dane Albert Thorvaldsen, came from the family of such a carver.

Little Andersen saw the intricate work of carvers not only on ships, but also on the houses of Odense. He must have known that old, old house in Odenza, where the year of construction was carved on a thick wooden board in a frame of tulips and roses. A whole poem was cut out there, and the children learned it by heart. (He even described this house in one of his fairy tales.)

And Andersen’s father, like all shoemakers, had a wooden sign hanging above his door with the image of an eagle with a pair of heads as a sign that shoemakers always sew only pairs of shoes.

Andersen's grandfather was also a woodcarver. In his old age, he carved all sorts of fancy toys - people with bird heads or cows with wings - and gave these figures to the neighborhood boys. The children rejoiced, and the parents, as usual, considered the old carver weak-minded and unanimously mocked him.

Andersen grew up in poverty. The only pride of the Andersen family was the extraordinary cleanliness of their house, a box of soil where onions grew thickly, and several flowerpots on the windows.

Tulips were blooming in them. Their smell merged with the rattling ringing of bells, the knock of his father's shoe hammer, the dashing beat of drummers near the barracks, the whistle of a wandering musician's flute and the hoarse songs of sailors taking clumsy barges along the canal into the neighboring fiord.

On holidays, sailors fought on a narrow board thrown from the side of one ship to another. The defeated man fell into the water to the laughter of the spectators.

In all this variety of people, small events, colors and sounds that surrounded the quiet boy, he found a reason to rejoice and invent all sorts of incredible stories.

While he was still too young to dare to tell these stories to adults. The decision came later. Then it turned out that these stories are called fairy tales and bring people thought and joy.

In the Andersen house, the boy had only one grateful listener - an old cat named Karl. But Karl had a major drawback - the cat often fell asleep without listening to the end of some interesting fairy tale. The cat years, as they say, have taken their toll.

But the boy was not angry with the old cat. He forgave him everything because Karl never allowed himself to doubt the existence of witches, the cunning Klumpe-Dumpe, quick-witted chimney sweeps, talking flowers and frogs with diamond crowns on their heads.

The boy heard his first fairy tales from his father and old women from a neighboring almshouse. All day long these old women hunched over and spun gray wool and muttered their simple stories. The boy remade these stories in his own way, decorated them, as if he painted them with fresh colors, and in an unrecognizable form again told them, but from himself, to the almshouses. And they only gasped and whispered among themselves that little Christian was too smart and therefore would not make it in the world.

It is perhaps incorrect to call this property a skill. It is much more accurate to call it talent, a rare ability to notice what eludes lazy human eyes.

We walk on the earth, but how often does the desire come to us to bend down and carefully examine this earth, to examine everything that is under our feet? And if we bent down or, even more, lay down on the ground and began to examine it, then on every inch we would find many curious and beautiful things.

Isn’t the dry moss beautiful, scattering emerald pollen from its little jars, or the plantain flower, looking like a lush lilac plume? Or a fragment of a mother-of-pearl shell - so tiny that even a pocket mirror for a doll cannot be made from it, but large enough to endlessly shimmer and sparkle with the same variety of opal colors as the sky above the Baltic glows at dawn.

Isn’t every blade of grass, filled with fragrant juice, and every flying linden seed beautiful? A mighty tree will definitely grow from it. One day, the shadow of its foliage will quickly rush away from a gusty wind and wake up a girl who had fallen asleep in the garden. And she will slowly open her eyes, full of fresh blue and admiration for the spectacle of late spring.

You never know what you’ll see under your feet! You can write poems, stories and fairy tales about all this - such tales that people will only shake their heads in surprise and say to each other:

“Where did this lanky son of a shoemaker from Odense get such a blessed gift?” He must be a sorcerer after all.

But children are introduced into the magical world of fairy tales not only by folk poetry, but also by theater. Children almost always accept the performance as a fairy tale.

Bright scenery, the light of oil lamps, the clanking of knightly armor, the thunder of music, similar to the thunder of battle, the tears of princesses with blue eyelashes, red-bearded villains clutching the handles of jagged swords, the dancing of girls in aerial outfits - all this does not in any way resemble reality and, of course, it can happens only in a fairy tale.

Odense had its own theater. There, little Christian first saw a play with the romantic title “Maiden of the Danube.” He was stunned by this performance and from then on became an ardent theatergoer for the rest of his life, until his death.

But there was no money for the theater. Then the boy replaced the real performances with imaginary ones. He became friends with the city poster putter Peter, began to help him, and for this Peter gave Christian one poster for each new performance.

Christian brought the poster home, hid in a corner and, having read the title of the play and the names of the characters, immediately invented his own, breathtaking play under the same name that was on the poster.

This invention lasted for several days. This is how a secret repertoire of children's imaginary theater was created, where the boy was everything: author and actor, musician and artist, lighting designer and singer.

Andersen was the only child in the family and, despite the poverty of his parents, he lived freely and carefree. He was never punished. He only did what he dreamed of. This circumstance even prevented him from learning to read and write in time. He mastered it later than all the boys of his age, and until his old age he wrote not quite confidently and made spelling mistakes.

Christian spent most of his time at the old mill on the Odense River. This mill was shaking with age, surrounded by abundant splashes and streams of water. Green beards of heavy mud hung from her holey trays. Along the banks of the dam, lazy fish swam in duckweed.

Someone told the boy that right under the mill on the other side of the globe was China and that the Chinese could quite easily dig an underground passage in Odensee and suddenly appear on the streets of a musty Danish town in red satin robes embroidered with golden dragons and carrying elegant fans. .

The boy waited for this miracle for a long time, but for some reason it did not happen.

Besides the mill, another place in Odense attracted little Christian. On the bank of the canal there was an estate of an old retired sailor. In his garden, the sailor installed several small wooden cannons and next to them - a tall, also wooden soldier.

When a ship passed through the canal, the cannons fired blanks and the soldier fired into the sky with a wooden gun. This is how the old sailor saluted his happy comrades - the captains who had not yet retired.

A few years later, Andersen came to this estate as a student. The sailor was not alive, but the young poet was met among the flower beds by a swarm of beautiful and perky girls - the granddaughters of the old captain.

For the first time then, Andersen felt love for one of these girls - love, unfortunately, unrequited and vague. The same were all the hobbies with women that happened in his hectic life.

Christian dreamed of everything that could come into his head. The parents dreamed of making the boy a good tailor. His mother taught him to cut and sew. But if the boy sewed anything, it was only colorful dresses from silk scraps for his theater dolls. He already had his own home theater. And instead of cutting, he learned to masterfully cut out intricate patterns and little dancers doing pirouettes from paper. With this art of his he amazed everyone even in his old age.

The ability to sew later came in handy for Andersen as a writer. He scribbled the manuscripts so much that there was no room for corrections. Then Andersen wrote out these amendments on separate sheets of paper and carefully sewed them into the manuscript with threads - he put patches on it.

When Andersen was fourteen years old, his father died. Remembering this, Andersen said that a cricket sang over the deceased all night, while the boy cried all night.

So, to the song of a baked cricket, a shy shoemaker passed away, not remarkable for anything except that he gave the world his son - a storyteller and poet.

Soon after the death of his father, Christian asked his mother for leave and, using the pitiful pennies he had saved, left Odense for the capital Copenhagen - to win happiness, although he himself did not yet really know what it was.

In Andersen's complex biography, it is not easy to establish the time when he began to tell his first charming fairy tales.

From early childhood, his memory was full of various magical stories. But they were kept under wraps. The young man Andersen for a long time considered himself anything - a singer, dancer, reciter, poet, satirist and playwright, but not a storyteller. Despite this, the distant voice of a fairy tale has long been heard in one or another of his works, like the sound of a slightly touched but immediately released string.

I don’t remember which writer said that fairy tales are made of the same substance that dreams are made of.

In a dream, the particulars of our real life are freely and whimsically combined into many combinations, like multi-colored pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope.

The work that the twilight consciousness carries out in a dream is carried out by our boundless imagination during wakefulness. This, obviously, is where the idea of the similarity between dreams and fairy tales arose.

Free imagination catches hundreds of details in the life around us and connects them into a coherent and wise story. There is nothing that a storyteller would neglect, be it the neck of a beer bottle, a drop of dew on a feather lost by an oriole, or a rusty street lamp. Any thought - the most powerful and magnificent - can be expressed with the friendly assistance of these inconspicuous and modest things.

What pushed Andersen into the realm of fairy tales?

He himself said that he wrote fairy tales most easily when he was alone with nature, “listening to her voice,” especially when he was resting in the forests of Zealand, almost always shrouded in thin fog, dormant under the faint twinkling of stars. The distant murmur of the sea, reaching into the thicket of these forests, gave them mystery.

But we also know that Andersen wrote many of his fairy tales in the middle of winter, at the height of children's Christmas holidays, and gave them an elegant and simple form, characteristic of Christmas tree decorations.

What should I say! Seaside winter, carpets of snow, crackling fires in stoves and the glow of a winter night - all this is conducive to a fairy tale.

Or perhaps the impetus for Andersen to become a storyteller was one incident on the street in Copenhagen.

A little boy was playing on the windowsill of an old Copenhagen house. There weren't that many toys - a few blocks, an old tailless horse made of papier-mâché, which had already been bought many times and therefore lost its color, and a broken tin soldier.

The boy's mother, a young woman, sat by the window and embroidered.

At this time, in the depths of the deserted street from the Old Port, where the ships' beams swayed soporificly and monotonously in the sky, a tall and very thin man in black appeared. He walked quickly with a somewhat galloping, uncertain gait, waving his long arms, and talked to himself.

He carried his hat in his hand, and therefore his large sloping forehead, aquiline thin nose and gray narrowed eyes were clearly visible.

He was ugly, but elegant and gave the impression of a foreigner. A fragrant sprig of mint was stuck into the buttonhole of his coat.

If we could listen to the muttering of this stranger, we would hear him reciting poetry in a slightly singsong voice:

I kept you in my chest
Oh tender rose of my memories...

The woman behind the hoop raised her head and said to the boy:

- Here comes our poet, Mr. Andersen. His lullaby makes you fall asleep so well.

The boy looked from under his brows at the stranger in black, grabbed his only lame soldier, ran out into the street, put the soldier in Andersen’s hand and immediately ran away.

It was an incredibly generous gift. Andersen understood this. He stuck the soldier into the buttonhole of his coat next to a sprig of mint, like a precious medal, then took out a handkerchief and pressed it lightly to his eyes - apparently, it was not without reason that his friends accused him of being overly sensitive.

And the woman, raising her head from her embroidery, thought how good and at the same time difficult it would be for her to live with this poet if she could fall in love with him. Now, they say that even for the sake of the young singer Jenny Lund, with whom he was in love - everyone called her “dazzling Jenny” - Andersen did not want to give up any of his poetic habits and inventions.

And there were many of these inventions. Once he even came up with the idea of attaching an Aeolian harp to the mast of a fishing schooner in order to listen to its plaintive singing during the gloomy northwest winds that constantly blow in Denmark.

Andersen considered his life wonderful and almost cloudless, but, of course, only because of his childish cheerfulness. This gentleness towards life is usually a sure sign of inner wealth. People like Andersen have no desire to waste time and energy struggling with everyday failures, when poetry sparkles so clearly around them and they need to live only in it, live only in it and not miss the moment when spring touches its lips to the trees. How nice it would be to never think about the troubles of life! What are they worth compared to this fertile, fragrant, blinding spring!

Andersen wanted to think like this and live like this, but reality was not at all merciful to him, as he deserved.

There were many, too many upsets and resentments, especially in the early years in Copenhagen, during the years of poverty and neglectful patronage from established poets, writers and musicians.

Too often, even in old age, Andersen was made to understand that he was a “poor relative” in Danish literature and that he, the son of a shoemaker and a poor peasant, should know his place among gentlemen advisers and professors.

Andersen said about himself that throughout his life he drank more than one cup of bitterness. He was silenced, slandered, and ridiculed. For what?

Because “peasant blood” flowed in him, that he was not like the arrogant and prosperous inhabitants, because he was a true poet, a poet “by God’s grace,” was poor, and, finally, because he didn't know how to live.

The inability to live was considered the most serious vice in the philistine society of Denmark. Andersen was simply uncomfortable in this society - this eccentric, this, in the words of the philosopher Kierkegaard, a funny poetic character come to life, suddenly appearing from a book of poems and having forgotten the secret of how to return back to the dusty shelf of the library.

“Everything good in me was trampled into the dirt,” Andersen said about himself. He also said more bitter things, comparing himself to a drowning dog at which boys throw stones, not out of anger, but for the sake of empty fun.

Yes, the life path of this man, who knew how to see the glow of rose hips at night, similar to the flickering of a white night, and who knew how to hear the grumbling of an old stump in the forest, was not strewn with wreaths.

Andersen suffered, suffered cruelly, and one can only bow to the courage of this man, who in his life’s path did not lose either his goodwill towards people, or his thirst for justice, or his ability to see poetry wherever it is.

He suffered, but he did not submit. He was indignant. He was proud of his blood closeness to the poor - peasants and workers. He joined the “Workers' Union” and was the first of the Danish writers to begin reading his amazing fairy tales to the workers.

He became ironic and merciless when it came to disdain for the common man, injustice and lies. Along with childish warmth, there lived in him a caustic sarcasm. He expressed it with full force in his great tale of the naked king.

When the sculptor Thorvaldsen, the son of a poor man and Andersen’s friend, died, Andersen could not bear the thought that the Danish nobility would pompously march ahead of everyone behind the coffin of the great master.

Andersen wrote a cantata on Thorvaldsen's death. He gathered poor children from all over Amsterdam for the funeral. These children walked in a chain along the sides of the funeral procession and sang Andersen’s cantata, which began with the words:

Give the way to the grave of the poor, -
The deceased emerged from their midst on his own...

Andersen wrote about his friend the poet Ingeman that he was looking for the seeds of poetry on peasant land. With much greater right, these words apply to Andersen himself. He collected seeds of poetry from peasant fields, warmed them near his heart, sowed them in low huts, and from these seeds unprecedented and magnificent flowers of poetry grew and blossomed, delighting the hearts of the poor.

There were years of difficult and humiliating studies, when Andersen had to sit at school at the same desk with boys who were many years younger than him.

There were years of mental confusion and painful searches for my true path. For a long time Andersen himself did not know which areas of art were akin to his talent.

“Like a highlander carving steps in a granite rock,” Andersen says about himself in his old age, “so I slowly and hard won my place in literature.”

He didn’t really know his strength until the poet Ingeman told him jokingly:

"You have the precious ability to find pearls in any gutter."

These words revealed himself to Andersen.

And so, in the twenty-third year of his life, the first truly Andersen book, “A Walk to the Island of Amager,” was published. In this book, Andersen finally decided to release “a motley swarm of his fantasies” into the world.

The first slight thrill of admiration for the hitherto unknown poet passed through Denmark. The future was becoming clear.

With the first meager fee from his books, Andersen set off on a trip to Europe.

Andersen's continuous trips can rightfully be called travels not only around the world, but also through his great contemporaries. Because, wherever Andersen was, he always met his favorite writers, poets, musicians and artists.

Andersen considered such acquaintances not only natural, but simply necessary. The brilliance of mind and talent of Andersen's great contemporaries filled him with a sense of freshness and personal strength.

Andersen’s whole life passed in a long, bright excitement, in a constant change of countries, cities, peoples and fellow travelers, in waves of “road poetry”, in amazing meetings and no less amazing reflections.

He wrote wherever the thirst to write found him. Who can count how many scratches his sharp, hasty pen left on the tin inkwells in the hotels of Rome and Paris, Athens and Constantinople, London and Amsterdam!

I deliberately mentioned Andersen's hasty rewrite. We will have to put aside the story of his travels for a moment to explain this expression.

Andersen wrote very quickly, although he later corrected his manuscripts for a long time and meticulously.

He wrote quickly because he had the gift of improvisation. Andersen was a pure example of a poet and improvisational writer. Countless thoughts and images swarmed through him as he worked. It was necessary to hurry to write them down before they slipped out of memory, faded and disappeared from view. It was necessary to have extraordinary vigilance in order to catch on the fly and fix those pictures that flashed and instantly went out, like a branched pattern of lightning in a stormy sky.

Improvisation is the poet’s rapid responsiveness to any alien thought, to any push from the outside, the immediate transformation of this thought into streams of images and harmonious pictures. It is possible only with a huge supply of observations and excellent memory.

Andersen wrote his story about Italy as an improviser. That’s why he called her this word – “Improviser”. And perhaps Andersen’s deep and respectful love for Heine was partly explained by the fact that in the German poet Andersen saw his fellow improviser.

But let's return to the travels of Christian Andersen.

He made his first journey through Kattegat, filled with hundreds of sailing ships. It was a very fun trip. At that time, the first steamships Denmark and Caledonia appeared in Kattegat. They caused a whole hurricane of indignation among the skippers of sailing ships.

When the steamships, having filled the entire strait with smoke, embarrassedly passed through the formation of sailing ships, they were subjected to unheard-of ridicule and insults. The skippers sent the most selective curses into their mouthpieces. They were called “chimney sweeps”, “smoke carriers”, “smoked tails” and “smelly tubs”. This cruel naval feud amused Andersen very much.

But sailing the Kattegat didn't count. After him, Andersen’s “real travels” began. He traveled all over Europe many times, was in Asia Minor and even in Africa.

He met Victor Hugo and the great artist Rachel in Paris, talked with Balzac, and visited Heine. He found the German poet in the company of his young, charming Parisian wife, surrounded by a bunch of noisy children. Noticing Andersen’s confusion (the storyteller was secretly afraid of children), Heine said:

- Don't be scared. These are not our children. We borrow them from our neighbors.

Dumas took Andersen to cheap Parisian theaters, and one day Andersen saw Dumas writing his next novel, either loudly quarreling with his characters, or rolling with laughter.

Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Liszt played their own works for Andersen. Andersen called Liszt “the spirit of the storm over the strings.”

In London, Andersen met Dickens. They looked intently into each other's eyes. Andersen could not stand it, turned away and cried. These were tears of admiration for Dickens's great heart.

Then Andersen visited Dickens in his small house on the seaside. An Italian organ grinder played mournfully in the courtyard, outside the window the lighthouse light glittered in the twilight, clumsy steamers sailed past the house, leaving the Thames into the sea, and the distant bank of the river seemed to be burning like peat - then London's factories and docks were smoking.

“We have a house full of children,” Dickens said to Andersen, clapped his hands, and immediately several boys and girls—Dickens’s sons and daughters—ran into the room, surrounded Andersen and kissed him in gratitude for the fairy tales.

But most often and for the longest time, Andersen visited Italy.

Rome became for him, as for many foreign writers and artists, a second home.

Once, on his way to Italy, Andersen traveled in a stagecoach through Switzerland.

It was a spring night full of large stars. Several village girls boarded the stagecoach. It was so dark that the passengers could not see each other. But despite this, a humorous conversation began between them. Yes, it was so dark that Andersen only noticed how the girls’ wet teeth glistened.

He began to tell the girls about themselves. He spoke of them as if they were beautiful fairy-tale princesses. He got carried away. He praised their green mysterious eyes, fragrant braids, blushing lips and heavy eyelashes.

Each girl was charming in her own way in Andersen’s description. And happy in her own way.

The girls laughed embarrassedly, but despite the darkness, Andersen noticed how some of them had tears shining in their eyes. Those were tears of gratitude to a kind and strange fellow traveler.

One of the girls asked Andersen to describe himself to them.

Andersen was ugly. He knew it. But now he portrayed himself as a slender, pale and charming young man with a soul trembling with the anticipation of love.

Finally, the stagecoach stopped in a remote town where the girls were going. The night became even darker. The girls parted with Andersen, and each warmly and tenderly kissed the amazing stranger goodbye.

The stagecoach started moving. The forest rustled outside his windows. Horses snorted, and low, already Italian, constellations blazed overhead. And Andersen was happy as perhaps he had never been happy in his life. He blessed road surprises, fleeting and sweet meetings.

Italy conquered Andersen. He loved everything about it: stone bridges overgrown with ivy, dilapidated marble facades of buildings, ragged dark children, orange groves, the “fading lotus” - Venice, statues of Lateran, autumn air, cold and intoxicating, the flickering of the domes over Rome, ancient canvases, caressing the sun and the many fruitful thoughts that Italy gave birth to in his heart.

Andersen died in 1875.

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Paustovsky Konstantin

Paustovsky Konstantin

Storyteller (Christian Andersen)

Konstantin Paustovsky

Storyteller

(Christian Andersen)

I was only seven years old when I met the writer Christian Andersen.

It happened on a winter evening, just a few hours before the onset of the twentieth century. A cheerful Danish storyteller met me on the threshold of a new century.

The Andersen incident was what old-fashioned writers called a “waking dream.” I must have just imagined it.

But be that as it may, I was sent out onto the street. It was that time of twilight when the lanterns were not yet on, but could be about to light up. And from this “vogue”, from the anticipation of suddenly flashing lanterns, my heart sank. I knew well that in the greenish gas light various magical things would immediately appear in the depths of the mirrored store windows:

Snow Maiden skates, twisted candles in all the colors of the rainbow, clown masks in small white top hats, tin cavalrymen on hot bay horses, firecrackers and gold paper chains. It’s not clear why, but these things smelled strongly of paste and turpentine.

I knew from the words of the adults that this evening was very special. To wait for the same evening, you had to live another hundred years. And, of course, almost no one will succeed.

I asked my father what "special evening" meant. My father explained to me that this evening is called that because it is not like all the others.

Indeed, that winter evening on the last day of the nineteenth century was not like all the others. The snow fell slowly and very importantly, and its flakes were so large that it seemed that light white flowers were flying from the sky onto the city. And along all the streets the dull ringing of cab bells could be heard.

When I returned home, the tree was immediately lit and the cheerful crackling of candles began in the room, as if dry acacia pods were constantly bursting around.

Near the Christmas tree lay a thick book - a gift from my mother. These were Christian Andersen's fairy tales.

I sat down under the tree and opened the book. It contained many colored pictures covered with tissue paper. I had to carefully blow away the paper to see these pictures, sticky with paint.

There the walls of snowy palaces sparkled with sparklers, wild swans flew over the sea, in which pink clouds were reflected, and tin soldiers stood sentry on one leg, clutching long guns.

I realized this much later. I realized that I was just lucky when, on the eve of the difficult and great twentieth century, I met the sweet eccentric and poet Andersen and taught me faith in the victory of the sun over darkness and the good human heart over evil. Then I already knew Pushkin’s words “Long live the sun, let the darkness disappear!” and for some reason I was sure that Pushkin and Andersen were bosom friends and, when they met, they patted each other on the shoulder for a long time and laughed.

I learned Andersen’s biography much later. Since then, it has always appeared to me in the form of interesting paintings, similar to the drawings for his stories.

Andersen “all his life knew how to rejoice, although his childhood did not give him any grounds for this. He was born in 1805, during the Napoleonic wars, in the old Danish city of Odense in the family of a shoemaker.

Odense lies in one of the basins among the low hills on the island of Funen. Fog almost always stagnated in the hollows on this island, and heather bloomed on the tops of the hills.

If you think carefully about what Odense was like, then perhaps you can say that it most closely resembled a toy city carved out of blackened oak.

No wonder Odense was famous for its woodcarvers. One of them, the medieval master Klaus Berg, carved a huge altar from ebony for the Cathedral in Odensee. This altar - majestic and formidable - terrified not only children, but even adults.

Essentially, these carvers of ship statues were poets of the sea and their craft. It is not for nothing that one of the greatest sculptors of the nineteenth century, Andersen’s friend, the Dane Albert Thorvaldsen, came from the family of such a carver.

Little Andersen saw the intricate work of carvers not only on ships, but also on the houses of Odense. He must have known that old, old house in Odenza, where the year of construction was carved on a thick wooden board in a frame of tulips and roses. A whole poem was cut out there, and the children learned it by heart. And the shoemakers had wooden signs with an image of an eagle with two heads hanging above the door as a sign that shoemakers always sew only pairs of shoes.

Andersen's father was a shoemaker, but there was no image of a double-headed eagle hanging above his door. Such

Only members of the shoemaker's workshop had the right to keep signs, and Andersen's father was too poor to pay dues to the workshop.

Andersen grew up in poverty. The only pride of the Andersen family was the extraordinary cleanliness of their house, a box of soil where onions grew thickly, and several flowerpots on the windows.

Tulips were blooming in them. Their smell merged with the ringing of bells, the knock of his father's shoe hammer, the dashing beat of drummers near the barracks, the whistle of a wandering musician's flute and the hoarse songs of sailors leading clumsy barges along the canal into the neighboring bay.

In all this variety of people, small events, colors and sounds that surrounded the quiet boy, he found a reason to rejoice and invent all sorts of stories.

In the Andersen house, the boy had only one grateful listener, an old cat named Karl. But Karl suffered from a major drawback - he often fell asleep without listening to the end of some interesting fairy tale. The cat years, as they say, have taken their toll

But the boy was not angry with the old cat. He forgave him everything because Karl never allowed himself to doubt the existence of witches, the cunning Klum-pe-Dumpe, quick-witted chimney sweeps, talking flowers and frogs with diamond crowns on their heads.

The boy will hear his first fairy tales from his father and old women from the neighboring almshouse. All day these old women hunched over and spun gray wool and muttered their simple stories. The boy reworked these stories in his own way, decorated them, as if he painted them with fresh colors, and in an unrecognizable form told them again, but from himself to the almshouses. And they only gasped and whispered among themselves that little Christian was too smart and therefore would not make it in the world.

It is perhaps incorrect to call this property a skill. It is much more accurate to call it talent, a rare ability to notice what eludes lazy human eyes.

We walk on the earth, but how often does it occur to us to want to bend down and carefully examine this earth, to examine everything that is under our feet? And if we bent down, or even more, lay down on the ground and began to examine it, then on every inch we would find many curious things.

Isn’t it interesting to see dry moss scattering emerald pollen from its little jars, or a plantain flower that looks like a lilac soldier’s plume? Or a piece of mother-of-pearl shell, so tiny that you can’t even make a pocket mirror for a doll out of it, but large enough to endlessly shimmer and sparkle with the same variety of dim colors that the sky over the Baltic glows at dawn.

Isn’t every blade of grass, filled with fragrant juice, and every flying linden seed beautiful? A mighty tree will definitely grow from it.

You never know what you’ll see under your feet! You can write stories and fairy tales about all this - such tales that people will only shake their heads in surprise and say to each other:

Where did this lanky son of a shoemaker from Odense get such a blessed gift? He must be a sorcerer after all.

Children are introduced to the world of fairy tales not only by folk poetry, but also by theater. Children almost always accept the performance as a fairy tale.

Bright scenery, the light of oil lamps, the clanking of knightly armor, the thunder of music, similar to the thunder of battle, the tears of princesses with blue eyelashes, red-bearded villains clutching the handles of jagged swords, the dancing of girls in aerial outfits - all this in no way resembles reality and, of course, it can happens only in a fairy tale.

Odense had its own theater. There, little Christian first saw a play with the romantic title "Maiden of the Danube." He was stunned by this performance and has since become an ardent...