“Sooner or later, in old age or in the prime of life, the Unfulfilled calls us, and we look around, trying to understand where the call came from. Then, waking up in the midst of our world, painfully realizing and cherishing every day, we peer into life with our whole being, trying to see if the Unfulfilled will begin to come true? Isn’t its image clear now? Isn’t it now only necessary to reach out to grab and hold its faintly flickering features? Meanwhile, time passes, and we sail past the high, foggy shores of the Unfulfilled, talking about the affairs of the day? "

A. Green, "Running on the Waves"

Green arrived in Feodosia in May 1924 and began to live by the sea. The six Feodosian years turned out to be unusually fruitful in his creative biography. His most significant works were born there: the stories “The Shining World” in 1924, “The Golden Chain” in 1925, “Running on the Waves” in 1928, “Jessie and Morgiana” in 1929, as well as a series of short stories. He lived in a rented apartment with an ascetic environment, and in the clearing of the street he could see the sea. The whistles of ships could be heard from there, and the blue of the evening could be seen through the closed shutters. In the story “Running on the Waves,” Alexander Green wrote: “I settled in an apartment on the right corner of the building on Amilego Street, one of the most beautiful streets of Lissa. The house stood at the lower end of the street... behind the dock, a place of ship debris and silence, broken, not too intrusively, by the language of the port day, softened by distance.” It seems that Alexander Green was talking about himself, about the apartment where he settled in September 1924 and lived for several years, where his best books were written. Here he invented an entire country called Greenland, and populated it with characters who bore strange names and lived in cities with the same exotic names. “He remained distrustful of reality throughout his life,” Konstantin Paustovsky later wrote. “He always tried to get away from her, believing that it was better to live with elusive dreams than with the “trash and rubbish” of every day.”

Running on the waves

The sea knows many legends. Green added one more to them: about a girl gliding through the waves as if through a ballroom, and about a ship named after her. A special fate awaited anyone who stepped onto the deck of this ship...

"Frezi stood there, biting her lip. At that time, as luck would have it, the young lieutenant took it into his headgive her a compliment. “You are so light,” he said, “that if you wanted, you could run across the water to the island without getting your feet wet.” What do you think? “Have it your way, sir,” she said. “I have already promised myself to be there, I will keep it or die.” And so, before they had time to stretch out their hand, she jumped up on the railing, became thoughtful, turned pale and waved her hand to everyone. “Farewell!” said Frezi. “I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I can’t retreat.” With these words she jumped off and, screaming, stood on the wave like a flower.
No one, not even her father, could say a word, everyone was so amazed. She turned around and smiled and said, “It’s not as hard as I thought.
- Tell my fiancé that he won’t see me again. Farewell to you too, dear father! Farewell, my homeland!"
While this was happening, everyone stood as if tied up. And so, from wave to wave, jumping and skipping, Frezi Grant ran to that island. Then the fog fell, the water trembled, and when the fog cleared, neither the girl nor that island was visible, as it rose from the sea and sank back to the bottom."

(Alexander Green)

"Novel-dream. Novel-flight. Novel-mirage.

Green carefully released him into life with this special feeling,
settled in your heart, - with a feeling of Touching the Miracle.
"Sooner or later, in old age or in the prime of life,
The unfulfilled is calling us, and we look around, trying to understand
where did the call come from? Then, waking up in the midst of his world,
painfully realizing and cherishing every day,
we peer into life, trying with all our being
to see if the Unfulfilled is beginning to come true?”
Each of us knows what it is like, his Unfulfilled,
each of us is waiting for him. But will that desired hour come?
It might be worth following Green's other advice:
"I understood one simple truth. It is to do this
so-called do-it-yourself miracles. When the main thing for a person is to receive the dearest nickel, it is easy to give this nickel, but,
when the soul conceals the grain of a fiery plant - a miracle,
give him this miracle if you are able.
He will have a new soul and you will have a new one.
When the warden himself releases the prisoner,
when the billionaire gives the scribe a villa,
an operetta singer and a safe, and the jockey will hold the horse at least once
for the sake of another horse who is unlucky -
then everyone will understand how pleasant it is, how inexpressibly wonderful.
But there are no less miracles: a smile, fun, forgiveness, and the right word spoken at the right time.
To own this is to own everything."

Artist Arthur Braginsky

Everything will now go differently than before...

(what is the poem about, what is the author trying to convey to the reader, is there a plot, what images does the author create). 4. Composition of a lyrical work. - determine the leading experience, feeling, mood reflected in the poetic work; - how the author expresses these feelings, using the means of composition - what images he creates, which image follows which and what it gives; - is the poem permeated with one feeling or can we talk about the emotional picture of the poem (how one feeling flows into another) - does each stanza represent a complete thought or does the stanza reveal part of the main thought? The meaning of the stanzas is compared or contrasted. Is the last stanza significant for revealing the idea of ​​the poem, does it contain a conclusion? 5. Poetic vocabulary, what means of artistic expression does the author use? (examples) Why does the author use this or that technique? 6. The image of the lyrical hero: who is he? (the author himself, the character), Don’t frighten me with a thunderstorm: The roar of spring storms is cheerful! After the storm, the azure shines more joyfully over the earth, After the storm, looking younger, In the brilliance of new beauty, The flowers bloom more fragrant and more magnificent! But bad weather frightens me: It’s bitter to think that Life will pass without grief and without happiness, In the bustle of daytime worries, That life’s strength will fade Without struggle and without labor, That the damp, dull fog will hide the Sun forever!

The article is devoted to the consideration of the specifics of the world model in Alexander Green’s novel “Running on the Waves”. Analysis of the symbolic structures of the novel, its spatio-temporal features, plot level and key images shows that the model of the world in the novel is created in accordance with the lyrical dominant and symbolically embodies the spiritual ideal of the writer, where the main emphasis is on the inner world of man. This type of novel (lyrical-symbolic) is A. Green’s genre discovery.

Key words: Running on the waves, Eternal Femininity, Green, novel, symbolism, chronotope.

Alexander Green is one of the most original and original writers of the early twentieth century. The depth of his creativity has not yet been fully realized. The ideological cliches of Soviet literary criticism prevented a comprehensive study of his work, and the view of the writer as a master of adventurous, romantic, fascinating plots, partly still in existence today, must be recognized as more than superficial.
There are a variety of points of view regarding the features of Greene's novels.
C. Volpe in his book “The Art of Otherness” speaks of Green only as the author of adventurous stories. Researchers V. Kovsky and V. Baal consider the dominant element of Green's novel to be philosophical and call Green's novels philosophical. N. Kobzev gives several definitions to A. Green’s novels: taking into account the role of the fantastic principle in them, he calls his novels fantastic; due to their philosophical nature, these novels, according to him, acquire the special features of a philosophical novel; in addition, according to the researcher, all Greene’s novels can be called symbolic. The author’s reflections conclude with the conclusion that Green’s novel forms a special type of genre that has no analogues in Russian literature. This genre syncretism is based on Greene's psychologism. Psychologism, according to Kyubzev, is the dominant feature of Green’s novels. And this gives the right to define them as psychological.
But in all cases, most researchers consider A. Green to be a writer striving to reflect objective reality and try to draw an analogy between the fantastic events described in his novels and modernity.
True, there is the opinion of A. Tsoneva, who believes that in Green’s works there is the dominance of one subject of consciousness, due to the transformation of the real world by the author. This transformation is carried out in order to realize their ethical and aesthetic views.
The researcher draws attention to the following circumstance: even in those works by Green where the narration is told in the third person, the narrator becomes the main character of the work, the basis of its compositional and plot structure. He subordinates the idea and style, as well as the rest of the images of the novel. And in all his work, according to Tsoneva, Green strives for an extremely open identification of the author’s “I”.
From all that has been said, we can conclude that A. Green created his own original type of novel, and more broadly, his own model of the world, built according to his own laws, consonant with the author’s inner world.
After all, Green as a creative personality developed at the intersection of two eras - the late 19th - early 20th centuries (the “Silver Age” of Russian literature) and Soviet literature of the 20s. At the same time, such bright (and at the same time completely different) word artists as A. Blok and V. Veresaev, V. Bryusov and I. Bunin, A. Bely and L. Andreev, N. Gumilyov and Vl. Mayakovsky. Green's work was influenced by symbolism and was formed in the same crucible with Russian (Soviet) prose of the 1920s. (A. Bely, I. Ehrenburg, “Serapion’s Brothers”). But the view of Greene as a writer close to symbolism was completely alien to literary criticism of the last century. And only in recent years has interest in the Green symbol begun to appear.
In 1999, a work appeared devoted to the study of symbols in Greene’s prose; this is the dissertation of V. Romanenko. True, the researcher mainly focuses on the linguistic analysis of symbolic images, without paying close attention to their associative and semantic context. In 2002, A. Mazin’s dissertation “The Poetics of the Romantic Prose of Oleksandr Grin” was defended, where one of the objectives is the study of the nature of the symbol and the features of symbolism in Green’s prose. And finally, in 2003, E. Kozlova’s fundamental dissertation research “Principles of artistic generalization in A. Green’s prose: the development of symbolic imagery” appeared. In it, the author puts the symbol in A. Green’s prose at the center of his research, and “the main problem is to consider the dynamics of the development of forms of generalization to the extent that they contribute to the construction of symbolic images” in A. Green’s prose.
Thus, only in our days has literary criticism come close to considering A. Green’s novel as close to a symbolist novel. Although, it must be noted that Green created his own new original model of the symbolist novel, which in many ways has no analogues in previous literature.
The model of the world in his novels is very unique and original.
In literary criticism, there is a broad understanding of the model of the world, implemented in the text: from mythological models of archaic cultures to individual author’s models of modern art, expressed in a separate work of art, where reality is not only reflected, but also transformed in accordance with the characteristics of the author’s personality. These problems are discussed in detail
D. Likhachev in the article “The Inner World of a Work of Art” and M. Bakhtin in his work “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”.
The model of the world in a work of art can be built in accordance with the epic dominant if the “author’s self” fades into the background in it, giving way to an objective depiction of reality. And it can also be built in accordance with the lyrical dominant, if the main emphasis is on the author’s attitude to the world. In this case, the subject of the image becomes the inner world of the writer himself.
The lyrical principle is not only expressed by Green in direct monologues “in the first person”, like the romantics of the 19th century, but is encoded in symbolic structures, the analysis of which is the subject of this work. Its goal is to identify the specifics of the world model in Green’s novel “Running on the Waves,” created in accordance with the lyrical dominant.
This approach is justified by the fact that:
1. This novel has a special autobiographical quality: the world of the lyrical hero is built in identity with the ethical and aesthetic attitudes of the author.
2. The author’s attention is focused on the inner world of the lyrical hero, and not on his objective environment, which is presented through the prism of the subjective vision of the protagonist.
3. The model of the world created in the novel is a symbolic reflection of the author’s spiritual world. This is manifested both in its spatio-temporal and plot structure.
All this makes A. Green’s novel close to a modernist novel, where the creative process is considered as a process of creating one’s own image of the world.
By lyrical dominant we mean:
1) the dominance of the lyrical pathos of the statement;
2) subordination of the novel’s stylistics to this pathos;
3) the dominant “point of view” on the events of the novel, which for A. Green is always psychological, and always subjective and lyrical.
To achieve this goal, the following tasks are solved:
1) analysis of the spatial-temporal structure of the novel;
2) analysis of the plot level of the novel;
3) analysis of key images of the novel.
The center that organizes the artistic world of the novel is the most important image of the Eternal Femininity for symbolist aesthetics, embodied in the legend of Frezi Grant. The mythological image of Frezi Grant, in which the author, following the symbolists, tries to express the mystery hidden behind external things, to touch the innermost essence of being, subjugates all the coordinates of the inner world of the work: time, space, event series. Heroes are evaluated in relation to this image.
This mystical female image, according to Greene, is both the “soul” of the external world and a reflection of the inner world of the protagonist. The legend of Frezi Grant symbolically reflects Harvey's spiritual path.
The spatial structure of the novel is divided into the closed space of people (city, room, ship) and the boundless space of the sea, which can be considered in the following plans, including symbolic ones:
1) profane plane - real sea space;
2) the sea as a reflection of the vast Universe in its material manifestation;
3) the sacred plane – the higher, spiritual world in which Frezi Grant exists;
4) the sea as a symbol of the inner world of man:
Traveling by sea - one of the leading plot motifs of the novel - reflects the path of the hero’s soul; The stormy life of the sea, full of either excitement or calm, is associated with the seething inner life of a person. The image of the sea, combining the external and internal, symbolically expresses the idea of ​​the unity of the macrocosm and microcosm, the human soul and the Universe.
The spaces of people and the sea do not exist limited from each other. They constantly touch and intersect. The sea, symbolizing eternity, the unreal world, constantly enters the world of people. Moreover, the author is interested in the space of people insofar as it “meets” the sea space. Therefore, Liss and Gel-Gyu are port cities, and the author chooses the harbor as the place where the events that changed the fate of Harvey take place. The room that Filatr rents for Harvey - with a window to the sea - and the sea invades Harvey's inner world, making him think about “The Unfulfilled”. In addition, the main events of the novel take place on the ship, and the ship is an integral element of the sea space.
But all this is an intersection only at the material level. At the spiritual level, the world of people is connected with the world of the sea through the image of Frezi Grant, who left the world of people for the sea. Having left people, she is constantly present among them - in the name of the ship, in the statue that is the central point of Gel-Gyu, in the carnival organized in her honor, in the legend of the “Runner” that sailors tell each other.
Such an intersection of spaces, in our opinion, is a symbolic reflection of the interaction between the human world, the real world and the unreal world. Thus, Green seeks to show that the ordinary life of people does not exist in isolation from the Mysteries of the vast Universe, from the spiritual world. And if people do not notice this, art (the statue of Frezi Grant), the word (the legend of “Running on the Waves”), the greatness of nature (the beauty of the sea) remind them of this world.
In addition, through the interaction of spaces: closed human and sea, the state of mind, the internal search of the protagonist is expressed. After all, he himself lives among people, his world is limited to the space of a room, a city, a ship. But the constant desire to go beyond this isolation, to find his “Unfulfilled” makes the hero strive for the secrets of the boundless sea.
It is interesting that such a connection between the sea and the human soul, the understanding of the ship as a wanderer in the world of spirit can be traced in the marine motifs of A. Blok’s lyrics - in his poems such as “The Girl Sang in the Church Choir”, “By the Sea”, “The Ships Came”, “In the hour of desolate separation from the sea”, “Voice in the clouds”, and especially in the poem “Leave me in my distance”:
Leave me in my distance
I am unchanged. I'm innocent.
But the dark shore is so deserted
And ships go to sea.
Sometimes an oncoming sail is close,
And a dream is ignited;
And here - over the endless expanse
The soul is occupied with miracles.
But the distance is deserted and calm -
And I’m still the same - at the helm,
And I sing, still harmonious,
The dream of a native ship.
Leave the sail of will to the stormy
Someone else's, not your destiny:
More than once in the azure silence
I will cry for you.
An important element of the spatial structure of the novel is the space of the masquerade city, in the center of which is the statue of Frezi Grant. This reflects Green’s idea of ​​the world as a masquerade, correlated with modernist aesthetics, in which masks are torn off from the profane world of everyday life, and the true, sacred plane of existence is revealed, expressed in the symbol of the Eternal Feminine (in this case, in the image of Frezi Grant).
In the epilogue of the novel, the author models the ideal space of a house built by the hero according to his own design - in accordance with the inner world of his beloved, identical to his own.
This space is the final point of the hero’s spiritual path, since here the contradiction between the external and the internal is removed. Man creates the outer world from his inner world, organizing it according to the laws of his own spiritual aspirations.
When analyzing the structure of time in the novel, it is noticeable that although it is clearly divided into hours and days, not even approximately the year or month of the events taking place is indicated. Therefore, they take on a timeless connotation.
Like space, time in the novel has three symbolic planes:
1) profane time clearly divided into hours of the day,
2) the sacred time of eternity, the unreal world, where Frezi Grant exists,
3) the time of a person’s inner life, reflecting the rhythm of internal changes occurring in the hero’s soul, and the immortality of the spiritual world of a person, identical to the eternal image of Frezi Grant.
The plot structure of the novel, just like the spatio-temporal one, is subordinated to the reflection of the author’s inner world. This is manifested in the fact that the impetus that gives development to the action is not any events or conflicts in the surrounding world, but only the internal spiritual search of the hero.
The main character is placed in the chronotope of the road, symbolizing his spiritual path. It is not external events that make Harvey travel. This is not a craving for adventure, as in an adventure novel, and not a desire to gain wealth or fame, not any social contradictions, not boredom (like the “superfluous people” of the 19th century novels - Onegin, Pechorin). Even the intention to find a beloved is only an indirect impulse to travel. The author does not give a clear definition of the feeling that motivates the hero. This subtlest aspect of the inner world, perhaps, cannot be strictly defined. Green calls it “the call of the Unfulfilled” or “the power of the Unfulfilled.”
The peculiarities of the plot structure of the novel lie in the fact that each subsequent event brings the hero closer to the spiritual ideal that he is looking for and symbolically reflects a certain stage on his inner path.
Of these stages, three main stages can be distinguished:
1) Meeting in the sea, symbolizing the spiritual world, with the ideal of Eternal Femininity, expressed in the novel through the image of Frezi Grant, finding this unreal image in one’s soul.
2) Awareness (during the masquerade) that Frezi Grant is the beginning located at the center of both the spiritual and material world, as well as the awareness of his loneliness among people from whom this is hidden.
3) Finding, through the image of Frezi Grant, one’s “Unfulfilled” in an earthly woman, for whom, as for the hero, Frezi Grant is a reality that unites them both.
Among the key images of the novel, we highlight two main female images: the image of Bice Seniel and Daisy (the future wife of Gavray), who, being for the hero a personified reflection of the ideal image of Frezi Grant, represent two opposites.
Biche Seniel personifies the rational, logical beginning of the world. Daisy is its creative, romantic basis.
Beach is unable to see “beyond the visible”; she is unable to believe in the existence of Frezi Grant. Daisy is not only able to believe - she independently guesses about Harvey’s meeting with Frezi.
Biche does not understand the hero, and therefore cannot love him. Daisy understands him, and mutual spiritual intimacy unites them in love.
It may seem strange that the hero finds his “Unfulfilled” in a real earthly woman, in a quiet, comfortable life next to her. The fact is that at the end of the journey, Gavray not only finds a wife, he is not just satisfied with his passion for her - in Daisy he finds the other half of his soul. They are united by spiritual kinship. After all, for both, Frezi Grant is the reality that united them both.
This motif of the spiritual closeness of a man and a woman, the commonality of their inner world, runs through many of A. Green’s works (“Scarlet Sails”, “The Shining World”, “The Loquacious Brownie”, “The Pillory”, “Jesse and Morgiana”). In the novel “Running on the Waves” it is expressed especially clearly.
It is characteristic that, striving to follow the symbolists into the world hidden behind real things, Green’s hero finds his ideal not in the world of abstract spiritual ideas, but in the inner world of a loved one. Thus, the world of an individual soul becomes the whole universe for the hero - and thus its highest value is affirmed.
Such a spiritual ideal is in consonance with the thoughts of the modern Christian author A. Sicari. Considering the love between a man and a woman as a reflection on earth of the Divine principle, the Lord's love, he writes that, by loving another, “a person reveals himself..., in the sense that the unity, which for the first time you feel as a possibility, turns almost into the original vocation and destiny." And “marital love makes sense only if one helps the other to be born internally, if one carries the other within himself, just as one carries a child.”
All of the above shows that the model of the world in A. Green’s novel “Running on the Waves” reflects the author’s subjective idea of ​​reality and expresses the spiritual ideal of the writer, where the main emphasis is on the inner world of man, on his spiritual search. From which it follows that this novel can be classified as a lyrical-symbolic novel.
This type of novel is Greene’s genre discovery; All his novels can be attributed to this type in one way or another. I would like to hope that a detailed study of Greene’s innovation as a novelist is a matter of the near future.

LITERATURE

1. Volpe Ts.S. The art of otherness: B. Livshits, A. Green, A. Bely. – M., 1991.
2. Kovsky V. E. The romantic world of Alexander Green. – M., 1965.
3. Baal V. I. Creativity of A. S. Green. – M., 1978.
4. Kobzev N. A. Novel by Alexander Green (Problems, hero, style). - Chisinau, 1983.
5. Tsoneva A. Subjective structure of A. Green’s stories // Problems of the author in Russian literature. - Izhevsk, 1978.
6. Romanenko V. A. Linguistic and poetic system of cross-cutting symbols in the works of A. S. Green. dis. for the job application step. Ph.D. Philol. Sci. -Tiraspol, 1999.
7. Mazin A.M. Poetics of romantic prose by Oleksandr Grin. dis. for free Sci. stup. Ph.D. Philol. Sci. - Dnipropetrovsk, 2002.
8. Kozlova E.A. Principles of artistic generalization in A. Green’s prose: development of symbolic imagery. dis. for the job application step. Ph.D. Philol. Sci. - Pskov, 2004.
9. Likhachev D.S. The inner world of a work of art // Questions of literature. – 1968. No. 8. - With. 74 – 87.
10. Bakhtin M. M. Forms of time and chronotope in the novel // Questions of literature and aesthetics. - M.: Artist. lit., 1975. - P.234-407.
11. Sicari A. About marriage. – Milan – Moscow, 1993.

Left a reply Guest

The romance of the sea, the mysterious stories of ships, and mysterious sailor legends lie at the heart of “Running on the Waves,” a novel that constitutes the apotheosis of Green’s romanticism. Here it permeates everything - the characters of the positive heroes, their worldview, their attitude towards each other, and pictures of nature, the carnival, and the description of the sculpture “Running”. The main characters of the work are sharply divided into two camps. Some - and all the author’s sympathies are on their side - are romantics in their soul, in their perception of life: Thomas Harvey, Dzzy, Frezi Grant, the townspeople guarding the sculpture of the “Running Woman”; others are prosaic, thoughtful natures: Bice Seniel, Tobbogan, the city's rich, seeking to destroy the monument. These sober-minded people, devoid of imagination and a poetic attitude to life, are one-sided and callous. They live in the real world, everything for them has its own specific, direct or indirect, value, everything must be logical and clear. The smart, but too rational girl Beach cannot believe in the existence of Frezi Grant, the girl from the legend, the patroness of sailors. How many times does she repeat: “It didn’t happen, Harvey.” “It was,” he replies, “and this is the reason for their divergence.” Tobbogan, looking at the cheerful, riotous carnival in honor of the city’s centenary, thoughtfully says: “Just think what kind of money wasted on trifles... if you gave me one thousandth of this ruined money, I would build a house and start a good farm” - and The enthusiastic, romantic Daisy leaves him. Romantics live completely differently in this world. They are inspired by a power “more commanding than passion or mania” - the power of a dream, a romantic expectation of happiness, “the power of the Unfulfilled,” as Harvey calls this feeling. It guides a person, and, obeying it, he commits actions that would seem meaningless from the point of view of a “realist,” but only complete surrender of oneself into the hands of this force brings happiness to a person. And at the same time, this novel is surprisingly full of realistic details. They are in descriptions of ships, and in scenes of street carnival processions, and in sketches of nature. This combination of the romantic spirituality of the events described with the realistic details surrounding them creates a completely unique poetic style of the novel and makes it one of Greene’s most popular works. One very interesting idea appears in “Running on the Waves,” which would seem completely uncharacteristic of Greene. Usually his romantic hero is a proud loner. He alone confronts the prose of life and, with beautiful courage, alone withstands the blows of reality. Here the romantic heroes are not loners. They are united not only by personal connections and sympathies, but also by a common cause - the protection of the Running Woman statue. The townspeople have rallied into a team protecting the sculpture, and even Harvey, a stranger in this city, quickly becomes an insider in it, not only because of his common views with the townspeople, but also because he feels in their collective the only force that can save the “Running” .The spirit of collectivism, which binds the positive heroes and gives them strength in the struggle, is a feature of the romance of this work

Agashina Diana

The review of A.S. Green’s novel “Running on the Waves” corresponds to the structure of the genre, is not a simple retelling of the text, there are elements of analysis of the work.

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III city literary readings

"Russia is like destiny..."

Section “In the world of children's literature. “When we open a book, we open the world.” Anniversary books in 2016.

REVIEW

based on the book by A.S. Green “Running on the Waves”

completed : student of grade 6 “B”

MBOU "School No. 178" Samara

Agashina Diana

supervisor : Russian teacher

Language and literature Gagarina O.V.

Samara, 2016

I think many people associate the name of Alexander Stepanovich Green with the story “Scarlet Sails”. I really liked this book too. Such a gentle and “light” Assol, completely different from all the people who surrounded her. And handsome Gray, I think, is the dream of many girls. He is so brave, responsible, courageous and capable of actions that are incomprehensible to ordinary people, but from which you immediately come to delight.

Having learned that there was another book by this author in my library, I became interested in it. This is the novel "Wave Runner". The name itself already speaks of some kind of magic. Besides, I once heard such an expression in a song. In general, I decided to read this novel.

I will not hide that at first I found the book a little boring. But the more I read, the more interesting I was about what would happen next. And when the novel came to an end, I was a little upset that I would no longer be able to be in such a wonderful atmosphere.

This work raises such important and always relevant issues as love and self-denial, truth and lies, fear and overcoming it, fortitude and the inability to rise above the vanity of life.

The events in the novel take place either in Lissa, or at sea on the ship “Running on the Waves,” or on the ship “Nyrok,” or in the city of Gel-Gyu, or in Leg. But in any case, all actions take place in deep connection with the sea.

The main character of the work is Thomas Harvey, who is looking for his Unfulfilled. He accidentally sees a beautiful girl in the seaport. He later learns that her name is Biche Seniel. Harvey wants to find her at all costs, and goes on a journey across the sea with the not very friendly captain of a ship with the telling name “Wave Runner”.

This phrase is the center of the story. Every time we hear or see it in a new and new guise. This is either a ship, or a certain girl from a legend, or a statue in a port city.

Another feature of the novel is that the reader, together with the hero of the work, involuntarily returns to something that, it would seem, will no longer be possible to find out. In real life, we rarely find out what happened to a person who was once close to us. But in the book, Harvey learns about the death of the ship “Running on the Waves”, about the further fate of Beach Seniel, about Desi, with whom he parted in a different way than he would have liked.

If we talk about the plot, it revolves around the journey by sea of ​​Thomas Harvey, to whom Dr. Filatr prescribed a change of scenery after an illness.

Harvey, as in any adventure novel, goes through many trials before meeting his future wife. And only from the last chapters of the novel do we learn that Harvey realized that he had always been looking for Desi. It was the memory of her that always warmed his soul. I'm very glad that everything ended so well. Desi and Harvey are married, live in the house of their dreams, can host friends and openly say what they think without hiding the truth.

Another feature of the work is that we almost all the time hear what the main character thinks, what feelings he experiences. This moment, I think, greatly distinguishes the book from any movie. Where it is not always clear how the hero really feels.

“I shuddered - the blood rushed into my temples. More than one sigh of amazement—a greater, more complex feeling—held in me the beating of my loudly then speaking heart. I took a breath twice before I could once again read and understand these amazing words that rushed into my brain like a volley of arrows.” This describes the moment when Harvey accidentally saw the name of the ship, which just recently suddenly very clearly popped up in his brain.

“While these explanations were taking place, I was so stunned, confused and conflicted in my thoughts that, although I avoided looking at Biche for a long time, I still asked her with my eyes. Unnoticed by others, and immediately her look told me exactly: “No.” It talks about the feelings that Harvey experienced when he was in the hotel room where he discovered Geza's corpse.

Some duality can also be seen in the fact that Biche and Desi are wearing the same dresses at the carnival. Harvey confuses them.

This duality is not just symbolic, it resembles the complexity of the character of almost any real person. After all, sometimes we are in such a hurry to believe in something magical, and sometimes we do not notice the beauty of the things around us, looking at the world indifferently. So Beach cannot believe in the existence of Frezi Grant, and Harvey does not want to give up his principles, distort the truth to please even the woman he loves.

It is also interesting that Frezi Grant is the most unreal woman, but she speaks like ordinary people. But Harvey sees Beach as something unreal, she seems to be floating above this dirty environment in which she found herself by accident. And when speaking or thinking about Desi, Harvey always remembers the feeling that remains from contact with something unusual.

Almost all the characters in the book are ambivalent. Even Captain Gez showed himself to be a very contradictory person. He either plays cards, having gotten pretty drunk, or plays the violin quite decently, or practically throws Harvey into the open sea, or tells Beach about his love for her.

But still, the passion for profit, for easy and dishonest money destroys Gez and his assistant Butler, who kills his captain.

The language of the novel is also worthy of praise. Greene resorts to comparisons very often. For example: “Among the men there were two old men. The first, resembling an overweight, grinning bulldog, with his elbows wide apart, was smoking, rolling a huge cigar in his mouth; the other laughed..."; “He rushed after me like a dog”; “I liked her like a warm wind in my face; “I was lost, like a stone falling into water.”; “Like marble in the beam, her hand sparkled.”

There are also metaphors in the novel. For example: “I stunned myself with such a portion of whiskey that I myself would have considered monstrous at another time, and buried myself in bed...”; “the chorus of thoughts flew by and died down”; “in the distance above us a light avalanche of the east began to move, sending bright spears of advancing fire hidden by the clouds.”

There are also epithets: “wild night”, “sudden beauty”, “in its greedy hope”, “an elegant black car among that colorful and deafening traffic”.

The details of the characters’ portraits play a special role. They give a very accurate description of their owner.

“I stopped the woman. A fat, loud woman of about forty with a scarf tied around her head and a brush in her hands, having learned that we were inquiring whether Gez was at home, frantically pointed to the opposite door at the far end. “Is he at home? I don’t and don’t want to know!” she announced, quickly pushing stray dirty hair onto the floor of her handkerchief with her fingers and becoming excited.” The portrait of Ghez also evokes some disgust: “his profile went from the roots of his hair with a thrown back, nervous forehead - an almost vertical line of a long nose, a dreary upper lip and a stubbornly protruding lower lip - to a heavy, steeply turned chin. The line of a flabby cheek, propping up an eye, was connected below with a gloomy mustache.”

There is a lot of dialogue in the novel, which gives the story a certain realism, even when Harvey talks to Frezi Grant.

Another feature of the novel is that even seemingly insignificant people are capable of great deeds. Like, for example, Cook, who at first seemed to me a gossip and a bore. But later we learn that he died (“he was shot during an attack on the Graca Parana house”). Death for a statue... Not every person is capable of this.

After reading the book, I wanted to know what the critic thought about this novel, how he understood the essence of the work.

“During his life, Greene saw a lot of grief and people crushed by life. He saw even more disfigured souls, a general disease of lack of spirituality, the consequence of which was various vices and flaws: individualism, insensitivity to beauty, selfishness, mutual understanding. Green wanted to see people differently, better; he envisioned the ideal of a harmonious person, a free personality with a rich spiritual life, with a developed sense of beauty, with respect for the inner world of others.”

Critic V. Kharchev calls this novel “the most bizarre and mysterious, enigmatic and magical.”

I would advise all girls to read “Running on the Waves” by A.S. Green. Boys will also find many interesting moments in it, but I think they are far from understanding the book, because it teaches not only courage, but also the ability and desire to see beauty where others do not notice it. And for modern boys, sacrificing something for girls is difficult. Therefore, it is difficult to feel the inner beauty of a person, a girl. But Harvey didn’t even regret at all that he gave so much money to Gez so that he would take him on his ship. And Gavrey did not feel sorry for the money, with which he bought and built (with the help of Toval) a dream house for Desi.

This book made me think about very complex, adult questions. Why is it so difficult to stay the course and not obey the opinion of the majority? How to make your life more interesting and notice the beauty and miracles around you? How to learn to trust again the people who betrayed you once? Why is real life sometimes like a carnival of bustle, and why can a person’s rich inner life go unnoticed?

Read the novel “The Wave Runner” and you will find something of your own in it that you have not yet understood or that you have not yet had time to think about. Enjoy your reading, dear people!