K. G. Paustovsky's Story "The Rook in the trolleybus" as an early Text of the Thaw

Elizarova Nataliya Mikhailovna Russian Literature Department, Institute of Humanities, Moscow City University 129226, Russia, Moscow, ul. 2nd Selskohozyaistvennyi proyezd, 4, building 1, office - zablik31@yandex.ru

Nikolskaya Tatiana ORCID: 0000-0002-9571-5417 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing, Russian Language and Stylistics Department 117036, Russia, Moscow, blvd. Tverskoi, 25, kab. 16 t.e.nikolskaya@gmail.com

In 2022, the 130th anniversary of K. G. is celebrated in Russia. Paustovsky, a writer who received worldwide recognition during his lifetime as the finest stylist, humanist and thinker. Paradoxically, his unconditional gift as a writer and, in particular, his masterly command of the word led to the fact that today, as the founder of the bookstore "Lives and Works" Denis Kryukov writes in the article "Paustovsky is not a school reading about nature", for many Russians "Paustovsky... to the great achievements of world culture XX the century has nothing to do with it. Most of them, of course, do not see the difference between him and Prishvin" ("Bookmate journal" of June 3, 2020, https://journal.bookmate.com ). The inclusion of Paustovsky's stories and fairy tales as a kind of reference texts in Russian in the primary school curriculum led, on the one hand, to the choice of works that readers first get acquainted with – kind, with smoothed conflict, dedicated to nature, animals, man–made miracles, and on the other - a schematic and obviously simplified interpretation of their content. Most readers remain of the opinion that Paustovsky wrote only about nature for children, and, as adults, do not return to him, so that the other side of his work remains forever closed to many. In this regard, the scientific study of Paustovsky's works, which makes it possible to deeply penetrate into the artistic content of the text and understand the creative method of the writer, seems relevant. 

The material of the research presented in this article was the story "The Rook in the trolleybus", unjustifiably, in our opinion, considered "childish". It was first published in the festive May Day issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1953 under the title "A Simple Case" together with the story "Supply Grass" ^{[1, p. 2]}. The original title did not reflect the content of the story, but set its evaluation mode, forcing the reader to consider a really rare event (not every day in a trolleybus you can see a rook!) as ordinary, and, coupled with the title "Pages from a diary", combining the stories, emphasized the uncomplicated literary form of the work. 

"The Rook in the Trolleybus" was not highly appreciated by critics. In particular, L. M. Polyak, qualifying it as a "story-scene", does not see in it either the progressive development of the action, which, according to the researcher, is replaced by a polyphonic "kind" dialogue (quotes L. M. Polyak), nor the realization of aesthetic principles inherent in Paustovsky, and in general characterizes the story as excessively idyllic and sentimental and even as a creative "miscalculation" of the writer ^[2]. Indirect criticism not only of the artistic characteristics of the story, but also of the creative method and literary concept implemented in it and in other works by K. G. Paustovsky is found in the article by the famous and influential writer in Soviet times V. A. Kochetova. Frida Vigdorova refers to this article in an essay published in the almanac "Tarus Pages", whose soul, according to M. O. Chudakova, "... was Paustovsky, and in the prose of the collection there are undoubtedly traces of his school" ^{[3, 93]}. F. Vigdorova writes (the punctuation of the original is preserved): "An article by V. Kochetov entitled "The Face of the Writer" was published in the newspaper "Literature and Life" not so long ago. It says: “There's a bunch of dudes in literature right now. They write about... what they saw from the window of the trolleybus on the Moscow sidewalks, about how fluffy the snow is on Nikitsky Boulevard – they tweet, go out with their chirping on the stage of “creative evenings”, accept the applause of girls with secondary education as signs of national recognition, and, intoxicated with cheap success, deviate further from great people's life". When you don't know who you're talking about," F. continues. Vigdorova, – you can neither argue nor agree with whether the writers referred to in the article are rightly called dudes. One thing cannot be understood: if a writer does not see how fluffy the snow is on Nikitsky Boulevard, then what kind of a writer is he? If he does not know how to see anything interesting from the window of a trolleybus, he is also not a writer" ^{[4, pp. 157-158]}.  

And yet the "Rook in the trolleybus" was not forgotten. Perhaps, thanks to, on the one hand, artistic simplicity, and on the other – ideological and thematic clarity, this story is still often included in the extracurricular reading program or used as material for dictation: it seems that it will not be difficult to understand it even for a junior school student. Usually the theme and content of the story are interpreted in the key of the love of a kind by nature Russian person for his native land, which, for example, is reflected in the following entry on the website "Big вопрос.ги "in the reader's online diary: "The whole story is about human warmth, about the solidarity of ordinary people thinking about the revival of their Homeland."

Without elevating the "Rook in the Trolleybus" to the rank of unconditional artistic achievements of Konstantin Paustovsky, we still note that, in our opinion, this work deserves closer attention, since it is one of the first creative responses to changes in public sentiment that followed the death of I. V. Stalin, and therefore has at least socially-cultural significance and can serve as a kind of symbol of the period in the history of the USSR, which was called the thaw. Consideration of the story "The Rook in the trolleybus" in this way determines the novelty of the research presented in the article.

However, in order to understand the significance of K. G. Paustovsky's story, it is necessary to use a more subtle reader's toolkit than the one that is usually used in school literature lessons, namely, an integral philological analysis, at the center of which is "... a simple and immutable truth: language does not exist outside of its incarnations, in particular incarnations in literature (literature), and literature does not exist outside of incarnations in language" ^{[5, p. 10]}. Philological analysis involves "the study of a work of art at the level of the text, which allows us to speak not about a separate linguistic fact present in the text, but about the peculiarities of the organization of the text as a whole" ^{[6, p. 239]}. At the same time, the text is considered as an inseparable systemic two-sided unity. One side, the content side, is an ideal entity that can be perceived by the reader only through its manifestation in the form of another, material, namely– the linguistic side of the text. "The reality revealed in a work of art is embodied in its speech shell; objects, persons, actions called and reproduced here are internally united and connected, put into various functional relationships. All this affects and is reflected in the ways of communication, use and dynamic interaction of words, expressions and constructions in the internal compositional and semantic unity of a verbal and artistic work. The composition of speech means in the structure of a literary work is organically related to its "content" and depends on the nature of the author's attitude to it" ^{[7, p. 104]}.

In other words, reality is embodied in the linguistic composition of the work. The language composition is "a single complex system consisting of components (units) connected by meaning and grammatical intonation, outlined by the image framework, which dynamically develop in the text ..." ^{[8, p. 67]}. The components from which the language composition is built are word series, the most complete and structured definition of which was given by A. I. Gorshkov: "A word series is a sequence presented in the text (not necessarily continuous) linguistic units of different tiers, united by: a) compositional role and b) correlation with a certain sphere of linguistic use or with a certain method of constructing a text" ^{[9, p. 158]}. It follows from this definition that word series, firstly, do not necessarily consist of words themselves; secondly, that they consist of fragments of text varying in volume, from a combination of sounds to several sentences; thirdly, that they perform various functions in the text. As M. M. Shitkova notes, the analysis of word series allows "... to penetrate into the text, to understand the author's intention" ^{[10, p. 165]}, therefore, the composition, dynamic deployment of word series "in the complex unity of the whole" ^{[11, p. 49]} and their interaction serve as the starting point of cognition of the true meaning of the text. Due to the fact that the purpose of the analysis presented in this article is to reveal the author's intention and the meaning of the story, which is not obvious to the superficial reader's view, the subject of this study will be language composition (word series and their interaction) Paustovsky's story "The Rook in the trolleybus".

The analysis of language composition as a way of studying the content, figurative system and meaning of a literary text has long been successfully used in the framework of stylistic research by the student and follower of V. V. Vinogradov A. I. Gorshkov and, in turn, his scientific pupils: N. M. Godenko, Y. M. Papyan, M. M. Shitkova ^[12-17]. Representatives of the Chita school of interpretation of a living literary text, founded by another student of A. I. Gorshkov – G. D. Akhmetova, are very productive in scientific terms. A detailed and informative review of their work is presented in the article by A. B. Bushev ^[18]. These works are one of the components of the theoretical basis of the research presented in the article.

However, despite all the elaboration and effectiveness of the methods and techniques of stylistic analysis of a literary text used in these works, the conscious desire inherent in the scientists of the Vinogradov-Gorshkov school to consider the work as a hermetic and self-sufficient phenomenon of language use, in our opinion, can become an obstacle to an adequate understanding of the author's intention. The involvement of discursive analysis allows you to expand the horizons of interpretation. If the purpose of discursive analysis is to understand "... the identification of the social context behind oral or written speech, the study of the relationship between language and social processes" ^{[19, p. 452]}, then it becomes obvious the need to analyze the subtext created "... as a result of the connection of the text with the so-called background knowledge that exists outside of this text, they are part of the culture and, as a rule, are known to most native speakers" ^{[20, p. 212]}. Background knowledge is actualized in a literary text through details and thus enters the artistic space of the work. So, an additional subject of our analysis is the non-textual spatio–temporal circumstances reflected in the story in the form of significant details for understanding its content, and the second component of the theoretical basis of the study is the concept of discourse, considered as "... a specific communicative event recorded in written texts and in oral speech, carried out in a certain, cognitively and typologically conditioned the communicative space. In other words, it is a text plus its round-text background" ^{[21, p. 143]}.

Integral analysis of a work of fiction is a combination of proper philological and interdisciplinary discursive approaches to the text. Within the framework of the philological approach proper, the text is analyzed as a formal and meaningful unity and conclusions regarding the topic, idea, author's intentions, content, etc. are made, first of all, based on the analysis of language composition. In discursive analysis, a literary work is considered as part of a communicative event that includes the text itself and "extralinguistic factors (knowledge about the world, opinions, attitudes, goals of the addressee) necessary for understanding the text" ^{[22, p. 8]}. The use of these approaches in the analysis of K. G. Paustovsky's story "The Rook in the trolleybus", as it seems to us, makes it possible to read it in a new way and bring it out of the niche of literature exclusively for elementary school.

The story was written in late March – April 1953 . It was a landmark time in the history of the USSR: on March 5, 1953, Stalin died, which entailed drastic changes in almost all spheres of life of Soviet people. Of course, it is impossible to talk about the general joyful expectation of changes for the better: the mass media and party leaders by inertia, and perhaps sincerely continue to praise the leader (see, for example, the newspaper Pravda of March 12, 1953, where A. Fadeev's article "Stalin's Humanism" was published, in which he painted the hero his article as the main inspirer and teacher of Soviet writers and the largest literary theorist, or the editorial "The Sacred Duty of Writers" published a week later in the Literary Gazette, in which Stalin is called "the greatest genius of all times and peoples", as well as A. N. Shelepin's proposal to rename the Komsomol into the Komsomol (All-Union Leninist-Stalinist Communist Youth Union), and the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in the "Stalin Shift" ^{[23, pp. 19-24]}. However, literally on the same days, such promising events occur as the restructuring of the GULAG, the complete rehabilitation and release of 37 people brought to justice in the case of pest doctors, the arrest of the head of the investigation in this case, Colonel M. D. Ryumin, the official prohibition of the use of torture to those arrested, the most massive amnesty in the previous 35 years. Censorship has been weakened, and some freedom of speech and creative activity has appeared. The diary entries of that time are indicative: "Wonderful April events! The decree on amnesty, the revision of the case of poison doctors colored all my days with joy" (Korney Chukovsky, entry of April 13, 1953 [cit. according to: 23, p. 32]); "In the mass," Lyubov Shaporina writes in her diary, "spring moods are waiting for the regime to soften, life to improve, they stopped feeling this heavy oppression hanging over the country. It's a strange thing, but it's true! Nothing seems to have changed, but it became easier to breathe. In Moscow, the USSR is deciphered: Stalin's death will save Russia" (entry from May 7, 1953, [cit. on 23, p. 34]). The word-emblem of this time – "thaw" has not yet been put into the people by Ilya Ehrenburg: his novel of the same name will be published only in a year, but the "warming" of the domestic political atmosphere in the country has already begun. In his story, Paustovsky reflected the changing state of society: against the background of the still too fresh memory of the Stalinist past, a premonition of freedom and happiness already arises.

Let's consider how, describing a "simple case" in a trolleybus, Paustovsky was able to convey the mood of the thaw.

Returning to the remark made by L. M. Polyak about the absence of action in the story and about replacing it with a "polyphonic dialogue" (see above), we agree with her, but only that there is really no complex plot in the story and there are no such elements as a collision or intrigue. At the same time, the story is not plotless, it reveals internal dynamics: during a short trip, as if by magic, the mood of passengers changes, and the cramped space of the trolleybus seems to expand. This artistic effect is achieved due to a special, rather complex for a small text volume, architectonics. The story begins with an exposition presented in the form of an objectified description of nature in the city: "There was still that early spring when you can guess about the approach of heat only by barely noticeable signs – by the fog on the Moscow streets, by the drops of this fog flowing from the black branches of recently planted lime trees, and by the loose wind. From it the snow settles and becomes nozdryovat. But this last sign, perhaps, does not apply to Moscow. Snow in Moscow by the end of March remains only in some yards, and on warm asphalt it has long been gone. Winter in Moscow is collected by conveyor machines on dump trucks and taken out of the city without a trace." The image of winter, which is forcibly expelled from the city thanks to the efforts of people, attracts attention. An unexpected parallel of it, by the way, is found in the article "The Prose of the thaw" by M. O. Chudakova: "They did a thaw, i.e. they melted snow with the warmth of their hands and their breath, people, personalities" ^{[3, p. 70]}. Chudakova uses the extended metaphor "they melted the snow with the warmth of their hands and their breath" as an explanation of the expression "people, personalities did the thaw", that is, explicitly connects the metaphorical image of the man-made cessation of winter with the historical period known today as the thaw. The images created by Paustovsky and Chudakova suggest that, perhaps, the events that took place in March – April 1953 caused the same reaction among people with similar views, which was reflected in the way of artistic representation of the sense of time.

In the exposition of the story, time and spatial coordinates are set: the action takes place in early spring in Moscow. Further, using a montage technique (change of plans and introduction of the narrator-observer), Paustovsky narrows the space, extremely concretizing it: "The case I want to tell you about occurred in trolleybus number five", "which departed from the stop on Theater Passage" (here and further, unless otherwise indicated, everything quotes from K. G. Paustovsky's short story "The Rook in the trolleybus" are given according to the publication ^[24]). The "case" is that a girl about eight years old was carrying a rook in a trolley bus to release it into the wild at the zoo. The conductor and the passengers were glad to see the rook, a conversation ensued between them, as a result of which everyone's mood improved. However, such a retelling, devoid of artistry and details, does not convey the essence of the work: Paustovsky does not resort to a simple narrative, but gives the right to vote to ten characters – passengers of the trolleybus, building a polylogue of 28 replicas, which makes the text of the story dense and compositionally complex. In addition, one of the characters, the general, tells his story, so that the text is even more structurally complicated due to the story within the story. In the finale, the narrator returns to the reader and promises "sometime later" to share "another story" heard in the same trolleybus from one of the passengers. The question arises: is such an abundance of characters, polyphony, compositional complexity, change of perspective really justified when the volume of the text barely exceeds a thousand words? It seems to us that all of the above is not only justified, but is a technique deliberately used by Paustovsky to create a visible image of a trip in a cramped trolleybus, in the hustle and bustle. The linguistic composition of the story confirms our assumption. As K. A. Kalinin notes, "the choice of the use of specific linguistic means in the text is undoubtedly determined by the author's task" ^{[25, p.117]}. The verbal series describing the movement of passengers caused by the presence of a rook is adequate to the composition of the story and also creates an image of a cramped space.  It consists exclusively of components with the meaning of the difficulty of performing an action due to the tightness in the trolleybus: "the conductor ... squeezed through to the girl"; "Passengers began to get up, crowding around the girl"; "A dense, stern general was struggling through the crowd from the exit door back"; "Where are you going, comrade general, - noticed a thin young man without a cap, – against the current?"; "The General squeezed through to the girl."

It is important for the writer to emphasize the tightness in the trolleybus in order to show the significance of the presence of the rook there: people are ready to make efforts, overcome obstacles just to touch the rook or stand next to it. Moreover, they break the rules and change their plans, as does the general, who with difficulty makes his way to the girl "against the current" from the "exit door" and consciously passes his stop just to be near the rook, hold it in his hands and talk about spring birds with fellow travelers.  The conductor also violates the rules because of the rook: firstly, she, contrary to the regulations, allows the girl to ride in a trolleybus with a bird, secondly, she does not fulfill her duties - does not sell tickets, as she stands near the girl and strokes the rook on the head, and when one of the passengers demands that the conductor When she returned to work, she accuses him of heartlessness: "People don't have any hearts!", and the passenger calls for order: "And you be quiet, citizen," the old woman said to the disgruntled passenger." The presence of a rook in a trolleybus not only provokes people to break the rules, but also makes following the rules reprehensible, since it is seen as heartless in these circumstances. The rook changes people's guidelines: the rules turn out to be "wrong", and going "against the current", breaking it is right, because it is human, sincere, and heartfelt.

A comparison of the composition of the verbal rows of the description of passengers and the rook demonstrates that initially the rook is opposed to the trolleybus passengers along the "appearance – character" axis.  The verbal series of the representation of the passenger characters mainly consists of external characteristics that are the result of a superficial observation of the narrator: "a girl of about eight years old", "an old man with a cardboard folder", "an elderly man in the form of a railway worker", "an old woman in a headscarf", "a dense stern general", "a young lieutenant", "a young woman with laughing eyes", "a thin young man without a cap". By the way, we note that this last detail fits into the overall picture of spring warming and disregard for written and unwritten rules: in the middle of the twentieth century, it was mandatory for a man to wear a headdress in a public place, "decent", not to mention that in early spring it was simply cold to go without a hat or cap.

Only in two cases does the representation of the character speak about the character ("harsh") and about the emotional state ("with laughing eyes"), in the rest it is an external identifier, similar to those used in real life when people need to designate strangers, for whom they, for example, are standing in line. Throughout the story, these characteristics, except for one (see below about the change in the general's state), remain static.

It could be reasoned that the presentation of the characters, as well as the immutability of their characteristics, realistically reflect the narrator's perception of random fellow travelers, if not for the verbal series describing the rook. According to the observation of O. Yu . Tkachenko and M. M. Shitkova, "the first textual appearance and introductory characterization of the character is given a special place in the construction of his image. Presenting a new character to the reader, the author makes the image "visible" (as a rule, by means of detailed or fragmentary portrait characteristics), and also explicitly or covertly gives a primary assessment of the character ..." ^{[26, p.180]}. In this regard, attention is drawn to the anthropomorphic use of the word "nose" instead of the expected, when it comes to a bird, "beak" in the first description of the rook: "The rook ... stuck his nose out from under his coat." Further on, only one characteristic of the rook appears in the text, which cannot be unambiguously called anthropomorphic – the rook has a "chiseled head", but all the others indicate its humanization, indicate that, unlike people in a trolleybus, it has an inner life and emotions: "The Rook is emboldened"; "He is very serious, but kind", "The Rook gave himself to be stroked, but looked at everyone contemptuously and arrogantly." When the conversation in the trolleybus turns to birds in general, the "young lieutenant", speaking of rooks, also characterizes them as people: "the bird is smart and independent." This, perhaps, according to Paustovsky, is the secret of the attraction of the rook: he is endowed with human qualities, and next to him people become more human. This is manifested in the fact that a conversation is started between them, during which they not only exchange information, but pick up each other's emotional and sensual state. Along the way, going back a few years, we note that even this conversation between passengers is a kind of violation of the usual, if not rules, then standards of behavior in public transport. At the beginning of the story, Paustovsky calls the taciturnity and unsociability of Muscovites on buses and trolleybuses "the usual mood", and at the end he gives another picture representing people leading a polylogue in unison: "And the passengers talked for a long time about the rook - the harbinger of spring, about Savrasov's painting "The Rooks have Arrived", that Moscow is gradually turning to the garden." In this description of the conversation, the expectation of renewal sounds (cf. the interpretation of the verb "to transform": "to become something different, new, take a different look, form, turn into something else, new" ^[27]), part of which will be the free life of "every bird". The use of this phrase is hardly accidental: the word "bird", in addition to its direct meaning ("An animal covered with down and feathers from the vertebrate class with wings, two legs and a beak"), also has a figurative one: "about a person, from the point of view of his social significance, position", and also denotes a person in phraseological units "free bird", "fired bird", "high-flying bird" ^{[28, pp. 554-555]}. It follows from what has been said that not only birds: nightingales, larks and rooks, but also people "will be free."     The metaphor of the coming life is spring in its entirety: with flowering trees and singing birds. While such a spring has not yet come, while there is only a March thaw in Moscow, however, an unusual rook riding in a trolleybus is a sure sign that spring, which means a new life, is already on the way. 

The expectation of changes in nature and the conversation about them correlate with a change in the emotional state of passengers. Touching the rook, people begin to behave differently: they are overcome with joy. Upon seeing the rook, the "vigilant conductor", who was keeping order in the trolleybus, "stopped giving tickets" and "laughed" after "gently stroking his chiseled head with her finger." The general, after holding the rook, stopped being "harsh", started talking and got out of the trolleybus "smiling at something". The girl, who was initially afraid that she and the rook would have to "get off" from the trolleybus (in the final version of the story, Paustovsky used only the verb "blushed" to describe her emotional reaction, and in the first (newspaper) added an intensifier: "blushed to tears" ^[1], which emphasized the amplitude of the girl's emotional state), realizing that nothing threatens them with the rook, "the whole shone." Passengers, having learned that a rook was riding in the trolleybus, "began to get up." All these verbs mark a change in the nature of the subject's action: "to laugh" and "to shine" are united by the initial mode of action and have the general meaning of "an attack to action, the initial phase of action" ^{[29, p. 596]}, the phasic verb "to begin" adjoins them, and the other phasic verb – "to stop" has the meaning termination. The verb series, whose members are united on the basis of the initial mode of action, continues in the direct speech of one of the passengers (our italics – N. E., T. N.): "Spring, then, soon," the railway worker sighed. – The bird cherry will bloom. And the birds will fly over Russia, they will carry their songs. Thus, the verbal series of verbs of the perfect type of the initial mode of action and semantically similar phasic verbs convey the atmosphere of changes for the better – which have already happened to trolleybus passengers and are coming in nature and in the country.

It is no coincidence that the presence of a rook leads to a conversation among passengers about imminent changes and a positive transformation of their mood: rook in Russian culture is associated with spring, and spring is associated with the awakening of nature, with joy, love, changes for the better: "...rooks bring the first breath of spring on their wings. This is the very first spring bird. People say: "A rook on the mountain – spring is in the yard", "I saw a rook – meet the spring"" ^{[30, pp. 314-315]}. Thus, the story connects the joyful mood of passengers and the expectation of spring changes, the renewal of nature, the city and the country as a whole. 

So, in early spring, when the real heat is still far away, passengers travel in a cramped trolleybus, but, thanks to the presence of a rook, they start talking about birds and their free flight, and then the space of the trolleybus seems to expand: a young lieutenant tells about nightingales singing on his native river Seima, and the general – about starlings, which he saw and heard near Leningrad during the war. At the end of the story, passengers are already talking about Russia as a whole, and then about a cloudless future. Thus, already at the level of composition, one can note a kind of expansion of the original local and temporal boundaries: firstly, staying in a close enclosed space, passengers in their conversations emotionally and mentally free themselves, go beyond it and mentally fly with the birds over their country and admire it; secondly, at the very beginning spring, when the snow has not melted yet, people dream of the time when the trees will bloom and spring will come into its own. Passengers crammed into a trolleybus traveling through the cold pre-spring Moscow have confidence that "... soon the whole city will be ringing with birdsong from morning to night." In line with this consideration, the whole story acquires a metaphorical sound and can serve as a kind of literary illustration of the diary entries given above.

This compositional dynamics corresponds to the internal dynamics of the word series: the key words in the text set the centrifugal movement of the word series, thanks to which the supposedly plotless "story-scene" receives an internal development hidden from the surface view. The title of the story – "The Rook in the trolleybus" – sets the vector of the dominant verbal series, which, as the story unfolds, generates new rows, resulting in a complex network of linguistic composition. The deployment of verbal series occurs along the path of amplification: the "starting" element of the verbal series is any unit with a weakened, neutral or generally negative manifestation of the attribute, then elements accumulate in the verbal series, thanks to which the members of the verbal series grow in meanings and acquire significance in the fabric of the work. The key word of the text – "rook" for the first time appears only in the beginning, except for the name. However, the intra-textual system connections allow us to speak about its significant absence in the exposition: both the narrator and the trolleybus passengers seemed to have forgotten about rooks as an obligatory sign of spring, but the verbal series of "barely noticeable signs of early spring" presented in the exposition could be used in describing A. K. Savrasov's painting "Rooks have Arrived", which is by no means accidentally mentioned at the end of the story as one of the topics of conversation of passengers. The context indicates a strong implicational sign of the word "rook": "The arrival of rooks is a sign of the onset of spring" ^{[31, stb. 618]}. The rook is not where it should be – in the early spring landscape, but it is found in an unexpected place – in a trolleybus. As "winter in Moscow is collected by conveyor machines", so the main sign of spring – the rook is brought by a trolleybus, that is, both are the work of a man – the creator of change. Further in the story, the presence of the rook is only outlined at first: the "vigilant conductor" asks the question: "Wait! What is it?", after which the girl's answer sounds: "It's a rook." The conductor's response uses a hyperonym with an adjective expressing a positive assessment: "Oh, what a good bird!". However, passengers do not immediately identify the bird and, on the half-question–half-statement of the conductor: "Is it really a rook?", they suggest that it is a starling, but in the end they agree that there is a rook in front of them (it is indicative that none other than a general, a man unconditionally respected and authoritative in post-war Moscow, with confidence calls the bird a rook). In the course of identification, words denoting generic concepts are heard: "bird" and "bird", which again, but no longer to denote a specific rook, but as symbols of renewal and free life will appear at the end of the story. In addition, the word "starling" is repeated twice, and this is important, since the general's story about these birds will follow, and this name, too, like the words "bird" and "bird", will contextually outgrow its specific meaning ("After all, the starling has accompanied the Russian person since ancient times," he says general). Finally, in the remark of the old woman, it would seem, there is doubt about the possibility of determining what kind of bird the girl is carrying: "We don't care if it's a rook, a starling, a sparrow or a swift," but by its role in the language composition, this statement turns out to be more significant than it seems at first glance, so how it serves as a key to the subtext, which can be revealed through discursive analysis, as will be discussed below. In the meantime, we note that both the hyperonyms "bird" and "bird", and the pseudonyms of the word "rook": "starling", "sparrow", "swift" – serve as starting points from which other word series originate. Thus, the words "bird" and "bird", being the designations of a generic concept, determine the appearance of other names of birds in the text. The ability of a bird to sing as a highly probable implicational sign is realized in the verbal series "voice / singing of birds". The word "rook" in a specific meaning opens the verbal series "character of the rook", and in its generic use – the verbal series "voice / singing of birds". 

Let's look at how the iconic word series associated with bird voices is structured for the story. At first, while no one else notices the rook, except for the "vigilant conductor", the bird's voice, namely the rook's, seems to be hiding in the text and is heard only in alliteration: "Gr ach was sitting, having eaten, under the coat on gr udi at the girl" (highlighted by us. – N. E., T. N.), then the "young lieutenant" characterizes the rooks as having no voice and opposes them with nightingales ("In spring our land sings all night"). The general picks up this theme, and in his statement the generalizing "sings" is concretized in a verbose hyponymic series, and in the story, as if different bird voices really begin to sound: knees, whistles, chimes, trills, chokes and "all other bird music". The verbal range is expanding, and a qualitative leap is taking place within its framework: bird singing also receives a value dimension. A conversation with a lieutenant about bird singing makes the general recall "an amazing story", and the verbal series "bird's voice" is supplemented with the verb "shout" with dependent words and the noun "cry" derived from it: "Starlings have arrived and are curling, screaming over their birdhouses", "Their (fascists. – N. E., T. N.), you see, the cry of the starlings bothered." The bird's voice becomes a kind of test of humanity: the Germans shot the starlings because they irritated them by shouting, but the Soviet soldiers "could not stand... the heart", they took revenge for the birds: "And our fighters opened such fire on the Fritz that they instantly quieted down." In this story of the general, the verbal series "bird's voice" contrasts with the verbal series describing military operations, which includes a verb denoting the absence of sound, the cessation of sound – "hushed": Soviet soldiers silenced German guns to make bird voices sound. Russian Russian is a symbol of the "bird's voice", which originates from the "voiceless" rook, is growing not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively: in the general's story, it acquires special significance and reaches the level of a symbol ("the starling has accompanied the Russian man since ancient times", therefore his singing ("cry") for the Russian man sacred). Then the verbal series, formed on the basis of the designation of sounds made by birds, is supplemented with the word "songs", which has a generalizing and symbolic meaning here: "And the birds will fly over Russia, they will carry their songs." The song of a bird (and not a cry!) is no longer just a voice, but a consequence of changes and their symbol. Thus, the verbal series, which began with a sound recording, only a subtle hint transmitting a rook's cry, grows to the level of a symbol. Note that the "silent" rook, according to the girl carrying him, will be released, that is, soon he will "be free", although he does not sing songs.

The discursive approach involves addressing the details. In the story of K. G. On the one hand, they play a traditional role for fiction, that is, they mark the chronotope. On the other hand, in the context of the work, they acquire a special cultural load, and therefore they can be considered as a tool for decoding the deep meaning. So, at the beginning of the story, the trolleybus number is called twice and the stop is exactly called – Theater passage, from which he moved away: "The incident I want to tell you about happened in trolleybus number five"; "And in that trolleybus number five, which departed from the stop on Theater Passage, there was also a normal mood." If in a work of fiction, especially in the strong position of the beginning of the text, any detail is mentioned twice, then this is hardly an accident. According to the information we found on the website http://trolley.ruz.net dedicated to the Moscow trolleybus, in 1949-1951 trolleybus No. 5 ran along the route "Dzerzhinsky Square – Zoo", in 1952 the route was extended to Bauman Square, but in any case, before the stop "Theater Passage" the trolleybus stopped at Dzerzhinsky Square. Dzerzhinsky Square (now Lubyanka Square) was strongly associated and continues to be associated among Russians with the state security agencies located in the buildings located there. In the year of writing the story, the infamous inner prison was located on Dzerzhinsky Square. The reader cannot know exactly where the girl got on the trolleybus, but if the conductor has already noticed her at the stop "Theater Passage", then probably the girl got on the trolleybus earlier, at least at "Dzerzhinsky Square". She takes the rook from the square, whose name motivated the unofficial name of the prison, to the zoo to "release", as she says. The meaning of this verb is defined as "to release, to set free" ^{[32, pp. 273-274]}. Thus, both the route of the trolleybus and the verb used by the girl can be considered as a means of expressing the idea of liberation, which will lead to the emerging changes for the better, warming. Consequently, the route number turns out to be one of the elements of the language composition, allowing the attentive reader to understand that the joyful mood of passengers (let's remember the woman with laughing eyes) and the expectation of happy changes spilled in the text are connected not only with the approaching spring, but also with the "warming" of domestic politics in the country that has already begun.

The exact name of the stop is "Theater Passage" – unexpectedly for today's reader, unfamiliar with the post–war history of Moscow, it echoes with another seemingly insignificant detail - the mention of the story "recently planted lime trees" in the exposition. Meanwhile, for Paustovsky's contemporaries, the lime trees recently planted in the Theater Passage were a clearly readable sign of the time. In Moscow, after the war, a landscaping plan was implemented, numerous parks and squares were laid out. Lime trees were planted in the center of the city, one of the first places is just the Theater Passage, from which the trolleybus departs. These newly planted lime trees are a sign of peaceful life, they promise the transformation of Moscow.

The lime trees recently planted in the Theater Passage, in turn, are coordinated with another detail, namely with the age of the girl – the only child among the passengers. The narrator reports that she is about eight years old. Simple arithmetic says that if a girl is eight years old in 1953, it means that she was born in 1945. The girl is the child of Victory, she is the only one in the trolleybus who does not remember the war.  She, unburdened by terrible memories, will release the rook, and then spring will begin, changes will come. An eight-year-old girl and lime trees are associated with transformations in post-war Moscow.

Finally, another detail that may be the key to uncovering the subtext is fixing attention on the time when the action of the story takes place: the end of March. The description of the picture outside the window of the trolleybus (see the first paragraph of the story) leaves no doubt that we are talking about the off-season, when winter is not quite gone yet, and spring, on the contrary, has not quite come. It was at this time, at the end of March according to the old style (March 25) or at the beginning of April (April 7) – according to the new, the Orthodox Church celebrates the twelve–day feast - the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos, with which the custom of releasing birds is associated (cf. Pushkin's poem "I release a bird at the bright spring festival" and the proverb "Annunciation – the bird is released to freedom"). Of course, other birds were usually released not rooks, but other birds: "Historically, they were different birds — pigeons, tits, larks,– writes E. Kiktenko, author of the Orthodox magazine "Thomas" (https://foma.ru/traditsii-blago.html ). – People caught them in the forest, carefully put them in cages, and then, gathering all together, released them into the sky.  Ordinary people believed in the purity of the people's faith that forest birds released into the wild would intercede with the Lord for their liberators." However, in the context of the story, the rook serves as a more capacious (and at the same time, in a sense, a disguise, allowing to avoid direct and not the most desirable allusions in an atheistic state) symbol compared to other birds, because, on the one hand, it is a bird, like those that are usually released on the Annunciation, with the other is the brightest symbol of the very threshold of spring, on which the "last winter-spring holiday" falls, as Apollo of Corinth writes about it ^{[33, p. 191]}. The apologist of Paustovsky, who replaced the traditional Blagoveshchensk pigeons or larks with a rook, in the story is an old woman in a headscarf, saying that a city dweller does not distinguish one bird from another. The main thing is that the spring bird will be released into the wild by a pure child – a girl who was not a witness to those terrible events that they themselves had to go through. The feast of the Annunciation in the minds of Russian people is firmly connected with inspired joy, the expectation of a warm spring, a fertile summer, with the idea of liberation: the earth – from winter shackles and birds – from cages: "Since time immemorial, a good custom has been conducted in Russia – to release birds from cages on the Annunciation at will. It is observed everywhere: both in villages and in cities. This celebrates the arrival of spring warmth, which overcame the freezing winter cold, and at the same time a bloodless sacrifice is made to mother nature. <...> Until the evening dawn, small guys are enjoying themselves on the street – old old people for consolation. And everything around is breathing the welcome proximity of spring; the blurry warm air is spreading with the good news about it, as if it too has escaped from the chilling shackles of winter cold [Ibid., p. 196].  Therefore, we can say that a fairly accurate binding of the story to time is an artistically significant detail of the language composition, implicitly, together with other structural elements, expressing a mood – a joyful premonition of good changes associated, first of all, with liberation: nature – from the winter cold, birds – from cages, people – from prisons, etc. camps. The latter is not mentioned directly in "The Rook in the Trolleybus", but given its content, linguistic composition and subtext, it can be said with a high degree of confidence that the March events of 1953 and the reaction of society in general and, in particular, the writer himself were reflected in the story.  

So, an integral analysis of K. G. Paustovsky's story "The Rook in the trolleybus" allowed us to see that it not only expresses the idea of unity of the Russian people and their love for the Motherland and native nature, but also, above all, shows the special state of people freed from fear and waiting for changes for the better. The story establishes a figurative connection between early spring – the time of the thaw and a joyful premonition of a wonderful "free" life. This allows us to consider K. G. Paustovsky's story "The Rook in the trolleybus" as an early text of the not yet Khrushchev, but already post-Stalin thaw.