About the product
Astafiev created the story “Lyudochka” in 1987. Depicting the general mismanagement of times of stagnation, the decline of morality, rampant crime, the author showed how all this affects the lonely “little man”.
The main theme is the squalor and selfishness of city life, the corrupting influence of the city on people who become cruel, cynical and unable to sympathize with the grief of another person.
On our website you can read a summary of “Lyudochka” online, as well as take a test on your knowledge of the work.
The material was prepared jointly with the highest category teacher Lyubov Alexandrovna Koroshchup.
Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 30 years.
Summary
The narrator heard this story “about fifteen years ago.” Lyudochka was born in the village of Vychugan and “grew like withered roadside grass.” The girl's father disappeared long ago. Mother soon began to live with the tractor driver.
After finishing ten classes, Lyudochka left for the city. After spending the night at the station, the girl went to the hairdresser. There she met the old hairdresser Gavrilovna and asked to become her student. Gavrilovna allowed Lyudochka to stay with her, transferring housework to the girl. Lyudochka never learned to become a hairdresser, so she worked part-time as a cleaner in a hairdressing salon.
The girl got from work through the semi-abandoned park of the carriage and locomotive depot - "Vepeverze". In the center of the park there was a ditch filled with sewage overgrown with dense thickets, in which garbage was floating. The park was the favorite place of the “punks”, among whom the main one was Artemka-soap. Once, when a guy pestered Lyudochka during a haircut, she hit him hard. After that, Artemka forbade everyone from pestering the girl. One day Artemka took Lyudochka to a disco. “In the menagerie pen, people behaved like animals.” Frightened by the noise and “bodily shame,” Lyudochka ran home.
Strekach soon returned to the village from prison. Now he has become the leader of the local punks. One day, when Lyudochka was returning home through the park, Strekach attacked and raped her, and forced the others to rape the girl. Without remembering herself, Lyudochka barely made it home. Gavrilovna assured that nothing bad had happened.
Lyudochka went home. There are two houses left in her native village - one of her mother, and the second of the old woman Vychuganikha, who died in the spring. Lyudochka was met by her pregnant mother. She immediately realized “what trouble had happened to her.” “But all women have to go through that misfortune <...> sooner or later.” While walking by the river, Lyudochka saw her stepfather splashing around like a child. The girl guessed that he had no childhood. She wanted to cry to him, maybe he would take pity on her. In the morning Lyudochka returned to the village.
The girl remembered how long she had been in the hospital. A lonely guy was dying next to her. All night she tried to distract him with conversations, but then she realized that the guy expected from her not consolation, but sacrifice. The girl thought about her stepfather: he was probably one of the “strong people” with a “mighty spirit.”
When Lyudochka was returning from work through the park, the guys again began to crowd her. The girl promised to return, changing into second-hand clothes. At home, Lyudochka put on an old dress, untied the rope from the village bag (this rope had previously been on her cradle) and went to the park. Throwing a rope onto a poplar with a crooked branch with the thought: “no one cares about me,” she hanged herself.
Lyudochka was buried in the city cemetery. The funeral was held at Gavrilovna's. After drinking vodka, Lyudochka’s stepfather went to the park, where Strekach’s company was located at that time. The man tore off the criminal’s cross and, dragging him into the “impassable weeds,” threw him into the gutter. “The guys felt a real, unimaginative godfather.”
Artemka-soap soon went to school and got married. The death of Lyudochka and Strekach was not even written about in the local newspaper, so as “not to spoil the positive percentage with dubious data.”
Viktor Astafiev - Lyudochka
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Victor Astafiev
Lyudochka
You fell like a stone.
I died under it.
Vl. Sokolov
A story told in passing, heard in passing, fifteen years ago.
I've never seen her, that girl. And I won't see it again. I don’t even know her name, but for some reason it popped into my head - her name was Lyudochka. "What's in a name? It will die like a sad noise...” And why do I remember this? In fifteen years, so many events have happened, so many people were born and died of natural causes, so many died at the hands of villains, got drunk, got poisoned, burned, got lost, drowned...
Why does this story, quietly and separately from everything, live in me and burn my heart? Maybe it's all about its depressing ordinariness, its disarming simplicity?
Lyudochka was born in a small dying village called Vychugan. Her mother was a collective farmer, her father a collective farmer. Due to his early oppressive work and long-standing, inveterate drunkenness, my father was frail, frail, fussy and dull. The mother was afraid that her child would not be born a fool, she tried to conceive him during a rare break from her husband’s drinking, but still the girl was bruised by her father’s unhealthy flesh and was born weak, sick and tearful.
She grew up like wilted roadside grass, played little, rarely sang or smiled, at school she did not get C grades, but she was silently diligent and did not stoop to straight Ds.
Lyudochka's father disappeared from life long ago and unnoticed. Mother and daughter lived freer, better and more cheerful without him. Men would visit my mother, sometimes they drank, sang at the table, stayed overnight, and one tractor driver from a neighboring timber industry enterprise, having plowed the garden, had a hearty dinner, stayed for the whole spring, grew into the farm, began to debug it, strengthen it and multiply it. He traveled seven miles to work on a motorcycle, at first he carried a gun with him and often threw crumpled, feather-dropping birds out of his backpack onto the floor, sometimes he took out a hare by its yellow paws and, hanging it on nails, deftly skinned it. For a long time afterwards, the skin hung over the stove, turned outward, with a white trim and red spots scattered with stars on it, so long that it began to break, and then the wool was cut from the skins, spun together with linen thread, and shaggy shawls were knitted.
The guest did not treat Lyudochka in any way, neither good nor bad, did not scold her, did not offend her, did not reproach her, but she was still afraid of him. He lived, she lived in the same house - and that’s all. When Lyudochka completed ten grades at school and became a girl, her mother told her to go to the city to get settled, since she had nothing to do in the village, she and herself - her mother stubbornly did not call the guest master and father - were planning to move to the timber industry enterprise. At first, the mother promised to help Lyudochka with money, potatoes and whatever God would send - in her old age, you see, she will help them too.
Lyudochka arrived in the city by train and spent the first night at the station. In the morning, she went to the station hairdresser and, after sitting in line for a long time, she spent even longer getting herself into a city look: she got a perm and a manicure. She also wanted to dye her hair, but the old hairdresser, who herself dyed it like a copper samovar, advised against it: they say, your hair is “me-a-ah-kanky, fluffy, little head, like a dandelion, but the chemicals will cause your hair to break and fall off.” . Lyudochka agreed with relief - she didn’t so much want to put on makeup as she wanted to be in the hairdresser’s, in this warm room emanating cologne aromas.
Quiet, seemingly constrained in a village way, but dexterous in a peasant way, she offered to sweep up the hair on the floor, dispensed soap for someone, handed someone a napkin, and by the evening she had learned all the local customs, waylaid an auntie named Gavrilovna at the exit to the hairdresser’s , who advised her not to wear makeup, and asked her to be her student.
The old woman looked carefully at Lyudochka, then studied her unburdensome documents, asked a little, then went with her to the city municipal administration, where she registered Lyudochka to work as a hairdresser's apprentice.
Gavrilovna took the student to live with her, setting simple conditions: to help around the house, not to go out longer than eleven, not to bring guys into the house, not to drink wine, not to smoke tobacco, obey the mistress in everything and honor her as your own mother. Instead of paying for the apartment, let them bring a carload of firewood from the timber industry enterprise.
- As long as you are a student, you will live, but as soon as you become a master, go to the hostel. God willing, you will arrange your life. “And after a heavy pause, Gavrilovna added: “If you get pregnant, I’ll drive you away.” I didn’t have children, I don’t like squeaks, and besides, like all the old masters, I struggle with my feet. When the weather is good, I howl at night.
It should be noted that Gavrilovna made an exception to the rule. For some time now she had been reluctant to let boarders in at all, and even refused to let girls in at all.
Long ago, during the Khrushchev era, two students from a financial college lived with her. Wearing trousers, dyed, smoking. Regarding smoking and everything else, Gavrilovna gave strict instructions straight out and without beating around the bush. The girls curled their lips, but resigned themselves to the demands of everyday life: they smoked on the street, came home on time, did not play their music loudly, but did not sweep or wash the floor, did not put away the dishes after themselves, and did not clean the restroom. That would be okay. But they constantly raised Gavrilovna, referred to examples of outstanding people, and said that she was living wrong.
And that would be all right. But the girls didn’t really distinguish between their own and someone else’s, they would eat the pies off the plate, they would scoop the sugar out of the sugar bowl, they would wash out the soap, they were in no hurry to pay the rent until you reminded it ten times. And this could be tolerated. But they began to manage the garden, not in the sense of weeding and watering, but they began to pick what was ripe, using the gifts of nature without asking. One day we ate the first three cucumbers from a steep manure ridge with salt. Those cucumbers, the first, Gavrilovna, as always, grazed and groomed, knelt down in front of the ridge, onto which in winter she dragged manure in a backpack from the horse yard, putting a coin for it to the old robber, the lame Slyusarenko, talking to them, to the cucumbers: “Well, grow up, grow up, take heart, kids! Then we’ll take you to okro-o-oshechka-oo, to okro-o-oshechka-oo-oo” - and we’ll give them some warm water, under the sun in a heated barrel.
- Why did you eat the cucumbers? - Gavrilovna approached the girls.
- What's wrong with that? They ate and ate. It's a pity, isn't it? We'll buy you something at the market!
- I don’t need to know what! You really need this!.. For pleasure. And I was saving the cucumbers...
- For myself? You are selfish!
- Who?
- Selfish!
- Well, what about you...! - Offended by the unfamiliar word, Gavrilovna made the final conclusion and swept the girls out of the apartment.
From then on, she allowed only guys, most often students, into the house to live, and quickly brought them into God's form, taught them how to do housework, wash floors, cook, and do laundry. She even taught two of the smartest guys from the Polytechnic Institute how to cook and how to operate a Russian stove. Gavrilovna allowed Lyudochka to come to her because she recognized in her a village relative who had not yet been spoiled by the city, and she began to feel burdened by loneliness, she would collapse - there was no one to give water, and that she gave a strict warning without leaving the cash register, so how could it be otherwise? Just disband them, the young people of today, give them some slack, they will immediately go crazy and ride you wherever they want.
Lyudochka was an obedient girl, but her studies were a little difficult, the barbering trade, which seemed so simple, was difficult for her, and when the appointed period of study had passed, she was unable to pass the master's degree. She worked as a cleaner at a hair salon and remained on staff, continuing her practice - cutting the heads of pre-conscripts with a clipper, cutting schoolchildren with electric scissors, leaving a ponytail on the bare head above the forehead. She learned to do shaped haircuts “at home”, cutting the hair of the terrible fashionistas from the village of Vepeverze, where Gavrilovna’s house was located, to look like schismatics. She created hairstyles on the heads of fidgety disco girls, like those of foreign hit stars, without charging anything for it.
Gavrilovna, sensing a weakness in the guest’s character, sold all the household chores and all the household chores to the girl. The old woman’s legs were hurting more and more, the veins on her calves stood out, lumpy, black. Lyudochka’s eyes stung as she rubbed the ointment into the mangled legs of the housewife, who was working her last year before retirement. Gavrilovna called Mazi te “bonbeng”, also “mamzin”. The smell from them was so fierce, Gavrilovna’s screams were so heartbreaking that the cockroaches scattered among the neighbors, every single flie died.
- Wow, she’s our work, wow, she’s such a beauty of a human being, she’s such a bother! - Having calmed down, Gavrilovna spoke out in the darkness. - Look, rejoice, even though you are stupid, you will still become some kind of master... What drove you out of the village?
Lyudochka endured everything: the ridicule of her girlfriends, who had already become masters, and the city’s homelessness, and her loneliness, and the morality of Gavrilovna, who, however, did not hold a grudge, did not drive her away from the apartment, although her stepfather did not bring the promised car of firewood. Moreover, for patience, diligence, for help around the house, for use in illness, Gavrilovna promised to give Lyudochka a permanent residence permit, register the house in her name, if she continued to behave just as modestly, take care of the hut, the yard, bend her back in the garden and he will look after her, the old woman, when she is completely deprived of legs.
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