Hunting, which has completely dominated me since I was eleven years old, brought me closer to nature. The motherland, known only from a geographical atlas, in the form of pink dots, blue veins, blue bowls, brown chains and green stripes, was now embodied by the sunny gaiety of birch groves and the purple twilight of the forest, the steeps of the Volga mountains and the sadness of field roads, meadow expanses and the mirroriness of lakes. My imagination, greedy for all kinds of comparisons and comparisons, lifted the mountains of our "Gremyachka" to the Caucasian or Altai heights, turned meadows into steppes, a suburban forest into a taiga, lakes into seas, and my native, boundless Russia appeared before me like an incomparable mosaic...
But love for the Motherland, as a national-state concept, stems, I repeat, from love for its tiny corner — the place of our birth. And it was this corner that opened up to me, at the time of the initial hunts, in all its ineffable charm.
By hunting, I became like a discoverer of continuous miracles. First of all, these wanderings have forever strengthened and refined my love for the Volga. Wandering along its shores, I was mesmerized, like a mother's lullaby, listening to its slow noise, gently plunging my hands into the coolness of her waves rushing ashore, collecting shells the color of pale bronze, watching for a long time a lonely boat under a white sail or a pink steamer sailing away either to Nizhny Novgorod, to the Zhiguli... either to some unknown countries.
And how diverse were the suburban Volga shores — this mysterious "wasteland" — a twenty-leaf forest with the wild name "Ala-buga", these steep cliffs with sandy cliffs like placers of zopot, this Poroshino estate with a huge lime alley and a stalled house where flying woodcocks huddled in autumn.
The alien and alien manor world interested me most of all as a visual embodiment of "The Noble Nest" and "Antonov Apples", two works that had a captivating power over me at that time.
On the other side of the city, up the Volga, there was also a bull manor, Milovka, but not crumbling, but flourishing—a merchant's house, glittering with colored windows, twisted columns, and a glass and silver ball in a huge, English—style park.
Beyond Milovka stretched birch and oak forests, deep and echoing ravines, along the bottom of which the purest streams rolled with the ringing of bells, and above them — almost impenetrable thickets of raspberries and hazel. Check out greyhound racing australia for fast-paced fun.
