Graduation

The winter of 1942-1943 was not easy. The building of the external school was not heated, we sat in lessons in wadded coats, hats, felt boots. In frozen buildings, there is no water or toilet. It is impossible to write in mittens, and the paper is ice-cold. My brother Seryozha and I had frostbitten skin on my little finger and other fingers. They swelled and cracked to the point of blood. And yet we wrote. Seryozha graduated from the 7th and 8th grades in two years, and I graduated from the 9th and 10th grades. In the summer, he entered the Power Engineering Institute, which gave students reservations, that is, they were not drafted into the army. So my younger brother escaped the front and survived, and my older brother Nikolai was killed in the very first battle, on August 30, 1943.

Kolya was my friend, adviser, I never quarreled with him. I remember how I persuaded him to go to church with me on Saturdays instead of defending my father's all-night prayers in his office. The service in the Elokhovsky Cathedral, which was a ten-minute walk from us, Kolya liked very much. Father Nikolai Kolchitsky, who was known as an agent of the NKVD, very clearly and with feeling pronounced all the priestly exclamations. And his pleasant voice carried every word to our hearts. In seventy years of my life, I have heard a lot of wonderful priests, but Father Nicholas is unique! "Christ, the true Light, enlighten and sanctify every man who comes into the world," still rings in my heart. Then I understood that it was Kolya and me, entering the world. "Let the light of Thy countenance shine upon us..." And we waited for this last prayer of the All-Night Vigil and did not leave without reaching the end. May the Lord forgive His servant Priest Nicholas for his sins, may He rest his soul for his diligent service in the church. After all, it touched our hearts, and this is what the Lord needs, Who said: "Son, give Me your heart."

I also called Seryozha to church, but he replied dryly: "Here (at dad's house) I lose one hour, and there (in church) three hours." "I'm losing..." How painful it was that he didn't realize how many hours we really lost every day studying things that we didn't need in life at all. If Sergei needed the sciences for the formation of this temporal life, then our life here will soon end, and the time dedicated to the Lord opened the doors to eternal life for us.

A great sorrow befell us, which united us with the sufferings of the entire Russian people, when we lost our Kolenka!

In the autumn of 1942, Kolya was drafted into the army. Seeing him off, his mother cried, and he sang a merry song. He was eighteen years old, but he had not yet experienced a single separation from his family. But in a year he went through a lot, grew spiritually, as evidenced by his letters from military school.

In the autumn of 1943, dad, entering the room, saw a postcard on the table, which reported that his son had been killed in battle. For two or three hours, my father was alone, I was late from the institute, I went to lectures at the Tretyakov Gallery. Dad opened the door for me and ran away without looking at me. I rushed after him, realizing that something was happening to him. He stood facing the icons, held on to the wardrobe, and turned away from me and shuddered all over, without saying a word.

"Daddy!" What's wrong with you? What happened?

He silently pointed to the table where the card lay, and he sobbed loudly, sobbing. We sat for a long time, hugging, on my mother's bed, I also shed tears, but I kept trying to calm my dad. And for a long time he could not say anything because of his sobs. The first thing he said was: "How difficult it was for me to say: thank God for everything!"

He poured out his grief by writing a book about Kolyusha in blessed memory, or Monument over the grave of his son. Then he renamed his work, calling it "Life for Eternity". For about fifty years, this book was circulated as samizdat literature [3].

By the end of the war years, my father stopped hiding his beliefs. He covered all the walls of his office with icons and religious paintings (reproductions) by Vasnetsov and Nesterov. Nikolai Evgrafovich went to church and was not afraid to meet his colleagues or students there. One day he saw a girl, his student, taking communion. As she stepped down from the ambo, she met Nikolai Yevgrafovich's eyes and was embarrassed. But the professor warmly handed her a prosphora and congratulated her on receiving the Holy Mysteries.

Students loved their father. He did not force them to memorize formulas, did not fight with cribs, so no one used them in his classes. For exams and tests, he allowed students to bring with them and have any textbooks, notebooks and notes on the table. "If only they could cope with the tasks assigned to them," my father said. "And they will always be able to have these textbooks and notebooks with them in life, so why remember something by heart?" "I don't want to deprive anyone of a scholarship," he said.

In the first years after the war, when I was also a student, I became very close to my father. He guided my life, gave me books. I also read his works, made comments that my father always appreciated very much. We often discussed with him some topics of the Christian worldview. My father often said to me: "After all, you are the dearest thing I have in this world."