“Snake’s Snake” by Moriak in brief
In the rich estate of Kalez, his sixty-eight-year-old master, a successful lawyer in the recent past, is slowly dying from a chest frog. His family is looking forward to its end. He himself writes about this in a letter-diary, which he addresses to his wife and in which he sums up his life.
As a child, he imagines himself a “sullen little”, in which there was not what is called “the freshness of youth.” However, he was proud and proud. And because, not possessing charm, he persisted in working hard to get the title of the first disciple wherever he had to study. The mother who raised him alone did not like the soul in her Louis. With the rest of humanity, relations with him were more difficult. Proud and at the same time vulnerable, he acted like this: “I deliberately hastened not to like it, being afraid that it will come out by itself.”
And now, when he was twenty-three, he was fond of a young girl from a well-to-do bourgeois family.
The hero tries to understand how, from the happiest lover, he turned into an angry old man with a snake ball in his heart. To himself, he is also ruthless in his diary.
The newlyweds were loved in the evening, lying in bed, “whisper” about how the day passed, or indulge in memories… And then one of such moments of special spiritual intimacy the wife, his sweet Izya, confessed that she already had a fiance, Rudolph. But, having learned that her two brothers had died from consumption, under the pressure of the family, he refused the wedding. And her parents were terribly afraid that there would be rumors of a disease in the family and Izi would not marry at all. Not noticing the state of Louis, she continues to make her completely innocent confessions. It turns out that Rudolph was “handsome, charming,
It means that everything was a lie and a deceit, that means he was not loved, as he imagined, and he just turned on his arm at the right time.
The wife, without knowing it herself, threw him “into hell.”
However, alienation did not immediately turn into hatred. One case confirmed the complete indifference of his wife. Louis was a wonderful lawyer. And once in court, he acted as an advocate in the case of the Vilnav family. The wife took the blame for the attempt on the life of the horror, which the son actually did. She did this not only for her son, but also because it was the child of her beloved husband, and he asked her to take the blame on herself. Such love and such self-sacrifice could not help shaking the hero. He had a great defense. In connection with this case all newspapers wrote about him, his portraits were placed on the front pages – and no one congratulated him at home, no one asked anything…
So gradually more alienation arises in the family. In the diary, he calls himself a sibling-lover, believing that this trait was inherited from the mother peasant woman. It seemed to him that only with the help of a purse he could manage a family. “Gold attracts you, but defends me,” he writes in his diary, mentally sorting out the options for sharing the inheritance and reveling in the imaginary reaction of children and his wife. His wife is afraid, children are afraid and hate.
The hero reproaches his wife for having completely gone into caring for children, then about grandchildren, having excluded him from life, without trying to understand him. For her and the children, he is only a source of well-being. The wife considers herself to be a believer – they with children strictly observe all religious holidays, go to church. But when her husband deliberately provokes religious disputes, it is revealed how superficial this belief is, how little it corresponds to the real life of the wife and children. Neither herself, nor her children have true Christian love and humility, it all comes down to caring for money.
The hero tries to find contact with the children, but only one – the youngest daughter of Marie “with her childlike affection” touches his heart. But she is dying because of the doctor’s ignorance. The hero is seriously experiencing this loss. He always remembers her warmth, and it helps him survive among the wolf pack, what his family imagines. And the hero recalls one more affection – to Luke, the nephew, whom he adopted, because his mother, the sister of his wife, died. He fell in love with the boy because he was “so unlike” him. Sincere, open, cheerful and spontaneous, he was completely devoid of money-love, which oppresses the hero in himself and his children, he alone did not look at him, “like a scarecrow.” But Luke dies in the war.
In the family of Louis, the abbe Arduin lives – he understands the hero’s soul, speaks simple words that shock him, accustomed to the callousness of his family. These words: “You are good.” And they turn him away from an unjust act and make him see in himself another person.
The hero, in order to somehow drown out the pain, take revenge on his wife, embarked on “all the hard”, not seeking love, and revenge her for deception. He also had a long romance from which his son was born, but that woman went to Paris, not bearing the despotism of the hero.
All this worries children who do not know how he will dispose of the inheritance. And one evening they gather in the garden and discuss how to do so to declare the father crazy. The hero is furious. Here is a real snake ball. His own children are capable of such perfidy! And he decides to go to Paris in the morning to hand over his immense wealth to his illegitimate son. Before leaving, he had a conversation with his wife, who was destined to be the last. From it, the hero with surprise understands that his wife suffered because of him and, maybe, even loved. “I did not dare to put any child with me into bed for the night – I waited for you to come…” A glimmer of hope. But he still leaves for Paris. There, he accidentally sees his son Gyuber and Alfred’s son-in-law, who tracked him down and came to prevent him from realizing what he had planned. He is late in learning about the death of his wife and only has time for her funeral. She never had time to explain, she would never read his diary. “Now nothing has to rebuild anew, she died, not knowing that I was not only a monster and executioner, but that another person lived in me.”
There is a difficult explanation with the children – the son of Hubert and the daughter of Genevieve. The hero explains that he feels all the time, “like a seriously sick old man against a whole pack of young wolves…”. They are justified by the fact that their behavior was “legitimate self-defense.”
And all that was saved in him good, suddenly forced him to make a decision – give the children all the multimillion-dollar inheritance, stipulating the rent for the illegitimate son.
“I tore from my soul what I thought was deeply attached to… But I experienced only relief, a purely physical sense of relief: it was easier for me to breathe.”
Reflecting on this, the hero exclaims: “All my life I was a prisoner of passions, which really did not own me! Think, wake up at sixty-eight years! Rekindle before death!”
And yet he learns joy and comfort with his granddaughter Yanina, from which escaped the unlearned, empty but beloved husband of Fili and who, along with his daughter, finds refuge with his grandfather, and when the great-granddaughter climbed on his lap and pressed himself to her soft, like fluff, hair, to her cheeks, pacification visited him. Remembering Marie, Luke, Abbot Ardouin, he took faith in his heart, realized that his family was only “a cartoon on the Christian life.” He defeated his snake ball.
The novel ends with two letters: Gyuber to Genevieve, in which he reports about the death of his father and about strange records left by the father, whose inner meaning he did not understand, and Janina to Hubert, in which she asks permission to read the journal of the grandfather, who actually returned it to life.
It seems that she was the only one in the family who understood the proud, restless soul of her grandfather: “I consider him right in front of us, because where our treasures were, our heart was there – we thought only of an inheritance that we were afraid to lose. All the soul forces we had aspiring to possess material possessions, while grandfather Will you understand me if I say that his heart was not where his treasures were He was the most faithful of us… “
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