Summary “Native birches”


The narrator becomes ill. He is given a ticket to the southern sanatorium. For some time he wanders along the embankment “with the joy of the discoverer,” and neither mass idleness nor the monotonous sound of the sea irritates him. But after a week the narrator begins to miss something. The sea, in the noise of which “old sorrow” is audible, makes you yearn for it.

For hours the narrator wanders through the park, examining the lush, bright vegetation collected from all sides of the world. All these palm trees, ficuses and cypresses surprise him, but they do not please him. And suddenly, in the depths of the park, on the green meadow, he sees three thin birches, on white trunks and dim green leaves, which so rests the eye.

These birches were brought along with the grassy glade on the steamer, they repaired and left them, and they took root. But the leaves were turned to the north face, and the tops too…

Looking at the birches, the narrator remembers his native village, where birch branches break down to the Trinity, and in summer they harvested birch brooms for a bath. Brooms are dried in the attic, and the whole winter there is a “windy, spicy summer”, and the brooms treat people, “sweat out of the skin, bumps and sickness from the bones worn out.”

“Ah, how nice the birch smells,” the narrator thinks.


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Summary “Native birches”