It’s bitter, scary, and many of us, God knows, are ashamed to return in memory to the monstrous Russian tragedy, but what can you do - it hurts, the memory, even though it’s already ten years old...February 1920, the cries of seagulls, heartbreaking beeps over the emptying Novorossiysk port, dying before our eyes, a steamer heading for Constantinople. When, and whether the Lord would bring him back, none of his passengers could know. Nor did fourteen-year-old Zinaida Shakhovskaya, with her mother and sisters, climb aboard the slippery ladder, heavy with thousands of refugees. From the last edge of the Russian land she was taking away something that the robbers who had taken away her homeland, even if they had broken their teeth, could not pull out. , - she took the Russian language with her. He had strength. The future turned out to be in it. Constantinople, Brussels, Paris - cities and years of study. But the European languages, revealed to her to the last blood, the world culture, under the sky of which she entered as a legitimate heiress, with all their fabulous greatness, did not displace and could not suppress what was bestowed by Russia with her ancient family. Later, Zinaida Shakhovskaya will write: “The task that confronted me was this: how to live in a three-dimensional world, remember the past that feeds the present, and discern the grain of the future in them. I was part of foreign Russia, the same one that prayed, worked, quarreled, sang, danced and... wrote." Let the fire burn above us, O Rus', I am connected with you by thousand-year snows Above the black Russian land... . . . . . . . . . . .Chained by dreams with you, Sharing your anger and your pain, I remember - breathing under the snow, Still the same black earth.Are these lines born from one lyrical gift? They are hard-earned. Three collections of Russian poems in multi-book Europe have not been lost, nor have they been erased from memory - a truly Russian muse lives in them. There is no reason to be surprised that the pages of the best Russian foreign publications became for Zinaida Shakhovskaya the space of her life - and her prosaic talent is undeniable. There is, of course, no reason to be surprised that the war that split the world led her to the French Resistance - how can a Russian heart not feel on whose side the truth is. If you think about it, there will be no reason to be surprised that for almost twenty years - from 49 to 68 - she wrote exclusively in French - her second homeland may not be her mother, but not her stepmother either; Is it any wonder that over the years sixteen were published in Paris and scattered around the world in different languages? her books; among them are novels, historical works and four volumes of memoirs (1910 - 1950), priceless for the Russian reader, but not translated in Russia. All this does not exclude, but even gives us the right to include Zinaida Shakhovskaya in the category of Russian literature. And the new throw - from 1968 to today - into her native element, which we owe to her Russian stories, essays, memoirs and the brilliant essay “In Search of Nabokov”, only confirms the truth that for the Russian writer, despite the sharpest turns of his fate, the dear - this is inescapable. What we really can and should be amazed at is the fact that Zinaida Shakhovskaya’s books have not yet been put on the Russian shelf! This annoying and, of course, offensive lacuna will perhaps be partially filled by the published story, for the first acquaintance from rich creativity of the Russian writer, it was not chosen by chance. The fact that Zinaida Shakhovskaya begins one of her works with the words: “Pushkin is our everything - this is indisputable, although before Pushkin there was Russia...” is, of course, a weighty argument for this. But let’s not discount the other one either - how many generations have already been asking themselves the fatal and sacramental question: “If Dantes’s bullet...” And here is the answer before us. What is this - a fantasy story, an imagination story? Maybe. But one way or another, this is still the second coming of Pushkin, albeit born of imagination and fantasy.