The thirteenth labor of Hercules. Fazil Iskander

The mathematician Kharlampy Diogenovich was noticeably different from his slovenly colleagues. With his appearance in the class, strict discipline was established. The lessons were so quiet that the headmaster could not believe that the students were in their places and not in the stadium. Silence reigned as soon as the teacher entered the classroom, and lasted until the end of the lesson. Sometimes there was laughter. Kharlampy Diogenovich allowed himself to joke, and the guys laughed merrily. For example, he could show the greatest respect to a late student by giving him the way to class and calling him after him the Prince of Wales. The teacher never cursed, never called parents to school. The guys didn’t cheat on the control ones, because they knew that Kharlampy Diogenovich would immediately recognize such a work and ridicule a negligent student. The narrator did not escape the fate of being funny in front of the whole class.

One day he could not solve the problem. Without doing his homework, he came to school. After making sure that the other guys did not agree with the answer either, the boy ran to play football. Just before the start of the lesson, he learned that the excellent student Sakharov had coped with the task. And at the desk neighbor Adolf Komarov, the problem was also solved. The narrator froze in anticipation of what would be asked of him. A doctor and a nurse entered the classroom. They were looking for a fifth "A" class to vaccinate. Out of fear, the boy volunteered to show where the class was and the teacher gave him permission. On the way, he learns that their class is scheduled to be vaccinated in the next lesson and informs the medics that the class will go to the museum. Running into the classroom in front of the doctor, the narrator saw that Shurik Avdeenko was solving the problem at the blackboard, but he could not explain the solution. The teacher sent him to his place, and praised Adolf for the solved problem.

When the doctors returned, they said that the children needed to be vaccinated and the teacher allowed them to take a lesson. Avdeenko was the first to be vaccinated. He did it without fear, because the vaccine saved him from a possible deuce. Adolf Komarov was pale. The neighbor on the desk consoled him, but it did not work. The injection made Alik even paler, and the doctor had to give him ammonia. The narrator was proud of Alik that he did not feel the prick, although this was not true. The doctors are gone.

There was little time left before the end of the lesson. Kharlampy Diogenovich thoughtfully began a story about the twelve labors of Hercules and about a certain young man who decided to correct Greek mythology with his thirteenth labor. The teacher said that this feat was accomplished out of cowardice, and for the sake of what it was done, he asked the narrator to explain, calling him to the blackboard. Kharlampy Diogenovich asked the boy to tell how he solved his homework. The student tried to play for time, but he looked more and more ridiculous and ridiculous. Since then, the boy has become more serious about doing homework. Reasoning, he came to the conclusion that the worst thing is that a person ceases to be afraid of being funny. This may bring misfortune upon him. The arrogant Roman emperors did not see in time how ridiculous they really were, and that is why the great empire perished.

“All the mathematicians that I had to meet in school and after school were sloppy people, weak-willed and quite brilliant.”

But one mathematician in our school was different from all the others. He was neither weak-willed nor slovenly.

“His name was Kharlampy Diogenovich. Like Pythagoras, he was of Greek origin. He appeared in our class since the new school year ...

He immediately established exemplary silence in our class. The silence was so terrible that sometimes the director frightenedly opened the door, because he could not understand whether we were there or had fled to the stadium.

The stadium was next to the school yard ... "

Children often ran to the stadium, which irritated the headmaster very much. But not from math lessons!

The teacher knows how to subtly ridicule a delinquent student. No one wants to be the object of his wit.

He “imperiously and calmly held the class in his hands ... It was almost useless to copy from him, because he immediately recognized the copied work and began to ridicule it ...

A student who deviates from school rules is not a lazy person, not a lazybones, not a hooligan, but just a funny person. Or rather, not just funny, perhaps many would agree to this, but some kind of offensively funny. Funny, not realizing that he is funny, or the last to know about it ...

The whole class is laughing at you. Everyone laughs against one."

Once the object of ridicule is the hero-narrator. He failed to solve his homework. And he waved it off: probably the answer in the textbook is wrong!

“Next to me sat a quiet and modest student. His name was Adolf Komarov. Now he called himself Alik and even wrote Alik on his notebook, because the war had begun and he did not want to be teased by Hitler. All the same, everyone remembered his name before, and on occasion reminded him of this.

I liked to talk, and he liked to sit quietly. We were put together to influence each other, but, in my opinion, nothing came of it. Everyone stayed the way they were."

Adolf solved the problem. The hero becomes more and more uncomfortable. But suddenly a nurse comes into the classroom. The school is vaccinated against typhoid. It's better to be vaccinated than to be ridiculed with your unsolved problem!

“I was not afraid of injections, because they gave me a lot of injections for malaria, and these are the most disgusting of all injections in existence.”

But the white coats are looking for the fifth "A". The boy is studying in the fifth "B".

- Can I show them where the fifth "A" is? I said, emboldened with fear.

This class was in one of the outbuildings at the school yard, and the doctor's wife could really get confused ... "

The doctor says that class "B" will be given injections in the next lesson. The boy, hoping to avoid embarrassment in the math class, invents that class "B" in the next lesson is going to the museum in an organized manner.

The doctor and nurse decide to go to the fifth B. Many children are afraid of injections, especially Alik Komarov.

“With every minute he became stricter and paler. He kept looking at the doctor's needle...

His back was as hard as a board from the tension...”

Alik almost fainted during the injection. The narrator, nicknamed the "painter" by the doctors, behaves heroically.

But here is the procedure.

“Open the window,” said Kharlampy Diogenovich, taking his seat. He wanted the spirit of hospital freedom to leave the classroom with the smell of medicine.

- As you know, Hercules performed twelve labors ... - he said. — One young man wanted to correct Greek mythology.

And accomplished the thirteenth feat...

We immediately understood from his voice what a false and useless feat it was, because if Hercules had needed to perform thirteen labors, he would have performed them himself, and since he stopped at twelve, it means that it was necessary and there was nothing to climb with your amendments.

— Hercules performed his exploits like a brave man. And this young man did his feat out of cowardice ... "

The trickster is still called to the board. In the home task, we are talking about an artillery shell.

“An artillery shell…” the schoolboy mutters.

Kharlampy Diogenovich makes fun of him:

- Did you swallow the projectile? Then ask the military instructor to clear mines for you ...

The whole class laughed.

“Sakharov laughed, trying not to stop being an excellent student during laughter. Even Shurik Avdeenko, the gloomiest person in our class, whom I saved from the inevitable deuce, laughed.

Komarov laughed, who, although he is now called Alik, but as he was, he remained Adolf.

“Since then, I have become more serious about homework ... Later, I noticed that almost all people are afraid of seeming ridiculous. Women and poets are especially afraid of seeming ridiculous...

Of course, being too afraid of looking funny isn't very smart, but it's far worse not to be afraid of it at all."

“All the mathematicians that I had to meet in school and after school were sloppy people, weak-willed and quite brilliant.”

But one mathematician in our school was different from all the others. He was neither weak-willed nor slovenly.

“His name was Kharlampy Diogenovich. Like Pythagoras, he was of Greek origin. He appeared in our class since the new school year.

He immediately established exemplary silence in our class. The silence was so terrible that sometimes the director opened the door in fright, because

That I could not understand whether we were in place or. fled to the stadium.

The stadium was next to the school yard. "

Children often ran to the stadium, which irritated the headmaster very much. But not from math lessons!

The teacher knows how to subtly ridicule a delinquent student. No one wants to be the object of his wit.

He “imperiously and calmly held the class in his hands. It was almost useless to copy from him, because he immediately recognized the copied work and began to ridicule it.

A student who deviates from school rules is not a lazy person, not a lazybones, not a hooligan, but just a funny person. Or rather, not just funny, on this,

Perhaps many would agree, but some insultingly funny. Funny, not realizing that he is funny, or the last to know about it.

The whole class is laughing at you. Everyone laughs against one."

Once the object of ridicule is the hero-narrator. He failed to solve his homework. And he waved it off: probably the answer in the textbook is wrong!

I liked to talk, and he liked to sit quietly. We were put together to influence each other, but, in my opinion, nothing came of it. Everyone stayed the way they were."

“I was not afraid of injections, because they gave me a lot of injections for malaria, and these are the most disgusting of all injections in existence.”

But the white coats are looking for the fifth "A". The boy is studying in the fifth "B".

- Can I show them where the fifth "A" is? I said, emboldened with fear.

This class was in one of the wings at the school yard, and the doctor's wife could really get confused. "

The doctor and nurse decide to go to the fifth B. Many children are afraid of injections, especially Alik Komarov.

“With every minute he became stricter and paler. He kept looking at the doctor's needle.

His back was as hard as a board from the strain. "

Alik almost fainted during the injection. The narrator, nicknamed the "painter" by the doctors, behaves heroically.

But here is the procedure.

“Open the window,” said Kharlampy Diogenovich, taking his seat. He wanted the spirit of hospital freedom to leave the classroom with the smell of medicine.

- As you know, Hercules performed twelve labors. - he said. — One young man wanted to correct Greek mythology.

And he accomplished the thirteenth feat.

— Hercules performed his exploits like a brave man. And this young man did his feat out of cowardice. "

The trickster is still called to the board. In the home task, we are talking about an artillery shell.

- Artillery projectile. the student mutters.

Kharlampy Diogenovich makes fun of him:

- Did you swallow the projectile? Then ask the military instructor to clear mines for you.

The whole class laughed.

“Sakharov laughed, trying not to stop being an excellent student during laughter. Even Shurik Avdeenko, the gloomiest person in our class, whom I saved from the inevitable deuce, laughed.

Komarov laughed, who, although he is now called Alik, but as he was, he remained Adolf.

“Since then, I have become more serious about homework. Later I noticed that almost all people are afraid of seeming ridiculous. Women and poets are especially afraid to seem ridiculous.

Of course, being too afraid of looking funny isn't very smart, but it's far worse not to be afraid of it at all."

Comment. You have read an honest story about lies.

The hero of the story is a smart and observant boy. And the story is told by an adult who laughs at himself, a little one. We see history as if with a “double vision”: through the eyes of a schoolboy and through the eyes of a person wise by experience.

The schoolboy is afraid of the teacher of mathematics and at the same time tries to outwit him. The writer who tells us this story admires the teacher, while analyzing the mechanisms by which he influences the minds and souls of his students.

The simplest conclusion from this story: "take your homework more seriously."

The second conclusion: sooner or later lies are exposed, "everything secret becomes clear." Therefore, a liar becomes a laughing stock in the eyes of his comrades. If you don't want to blush, don't lie!

The third conclusion: know how to laugh at yourself. Look at the situation from the outside - and much will become much clearer.

In Iskander's stories, warm soft humor and a little more harsh irony permeate the entire fabric of the narrative. And this gives the reader the confidence that even in not very pleasant situations one can feel the joy and beauty of life.

Essays on topics:

The mathematician Kharlampy Diogenovich was noticeably different from his slovenly colleagues. With his appearance in the class, strict discipline was established. The lessons were...

Option 1

A new mathematics teacher Kharlampy Diogenovich appears at the school. From the first minutes of his appearance at school, he manages to establish "exemplary silence" in the lessons. Kharlampy Diogenovich immediately intrigued his pupils by the fact that he never raised his voice, did not force him to study, did not threaten to call his parents to school. Humor was his main weapon. If the student was somehow guilty, Kharlampy Diogenovich joked with him, and the whole class could not help laughing.

Once a student of the 5th "B" class (from whom the narration is being conducted), having not learned his homework, came to a lesson with Kharlampy Diogenovich. The boy was very afraid that after going to the blackboard with his homework, he would become a target for his teacher's sparkling humor. Some time after the start of the lesson, a doctor entered the classroom along with a nurse who were vaccinating against typhus among the students of the school. They were looking for 5 "A", but mistakenly entered a parallel class. To protect himself from going to the blackboard, the student-narrator volunteered to take the doctors to the lesson by 5 "A". Moreover, while they were walking through the corridors of the school, the "valiant" fifth-grader managed to convince the doctors to start vaccination in 5 "B". Thus, he managed to save himself and his classmates from the inevitable deuce and humor of the teacher.

After the doctoral "executions" that disrupted the lesson, there was very little time left before the bell bell, and during this period Kharlampy Diogenovich decided to listen to the solution of the homework from our fifth grader. The hero, who had just saved the class, could not escape either the sarcasm of his teacher or the laughter of his classmates. Since then, he has become much more responsible in approaching homework. This feat was not due to courage, but due to cowardice, due to the fact that he did not do his homework in mathematics.

Option 2

In Fazil Iskander's story "The Thirteenth Feat of Hercules", the story is told on behalf of a boy who studies in the fifth grade of a men's school in Georgia.

The story takes place during the war. We learn about this from the narrator himself, who teases his desk mate named Adolf.

The protagonist of the story is a smart, mischievous and crafty boy. He, like many boys, loves to play football, sometimes he cannot cope with the task, laughs with everyone at his classmates, whom Kharlampy Diogenovich, the teacher, puts in a ridiculous position.

The hero treats his classmates in a friendly manner, with irony. The narrator is observant and accurately describes the main features of his friends. He notices the constant well-being of Sakharov, who, even laughing, tries to remain an excellent student, notices the modesty and invisibility of Alik Komarov and the gloom of Shurik Avdeenko. But Kharlampy Diogenovich has no favorites in the class. Anyone can be funny. And then the moment comes when the class laughs at the main character.

The main character did not cope with the task in mathematics. Instead of asking for help from his comrades, he played football before the lessons, convincing himself that the answer in the textbook was wrong. Then he tried to evade responsibility for his actions by tricking and deceiving doctors into giving injections during a math lesson. When he finds himself at the blackboard and does not find the strength to honestly admit that he did not solve the problem, Kharlampy Diogenovich understands why the doctors came specifically to the mathematics lesson.

The teacher does not punish the student with laughter, but his cowardice. He says that the narrator performed "the thirteenth feat of Hercules", that is, a feat that actually did not exist, which is not a feat at all. Yes, he changed the situation, but he changed it not out of noble motives, but out of cowardice.

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander

13 feat of Hercules

All the mathematicians that I had to meet in school and after school were slovenly people, weak-willed and quite brilliant. So the statement that Pythagorean pants are supposedly equal in all directions is hardly absolutely accurate.

Perhaps this was the case with Pythagoras himself, but his followers probably forgot about this and paid little attention to their appearance.

And yet there was one mathematician in our school who was different from all the others. He could not be called weak-willed, much less slovenly. I do not know if he was a genius - now it is difficult to establish. I think it most likely was.

His name was Kharlampy Diogenovich. Like Pythagoras, he was of Greek origin. He appeared in our class since the new school year. Before that, we had not heard of him and did not even know that such mathematicians could exist.

The stadium was located next to the school yard and constantly, especially during big competitions, interfered with the pedagogical process. The director even wrote somewhere to be moved to another place. He said that the stadium made schoolchildren nervous. In fact, it was not the stadium that made us nervous, but the stadium commandant, Uncle Vasya, who unmistakably recognized us, even if we were without books, and drove us out of there with anger that did not fade over the years.

Fortunately, our director was not obeyed and the stadium was left in place, only the wooden fence was replaced with a stone one. So now those who used to look at the stadium through the cracks in the wooden fence had to climb over.

Nevertheless, our director was in vain afraid that we might run away from the mathematics lesson. It was unthinkable. It was like going up to the director at recess and silently throwing off his hat, although everyone was pretty tired of it. He always, both in winter and summer, wore the same hat, evergreen, like a magnolia. And I was always afraid of something.

From the outside, it might seem that he was most afraid of the commission from the city department, in fact, he was most afraid of our head teacher. It was a demonic woman. Someday I will write a Byronian poem about her, but now I am talking about something else.

Of course, there was no way we could escape from the math lesson. If we ever skipped class at all, it was usually singing class.

It used to happen that as soon as our Kharlampy Diogenovich entered the class, everyone immediately calmed down, and so on until the very end of the lesson. True, sometimes he made us laugh, but it was not spontaneous laughter, but fun organized from above by the teacher himself. It did not violate discipline, but served it, as in geometry proof of the contrary.

It happened like this. Say, another student is a little late for the lesson, well, about half a second after the bell, and Kharlampy Diogenovich is already entering the door. The poor student is ready to fall through the floor. Maybe it would have failed if there hadn't been a teacher's room right under our classroom.

Some teacher will not pay attention to such a trifle, another will scold him in the heat of the moment, but not Kharlampy Diogenovich. On such occasions he would stop at the door, shift the magazine from hand to hand, and, with a gesture of respect for the student's personality, point to the passage.

The student hesitates, his bewildered physiognomy expresses a desire to slip through the door somehow more discreetly after the teacher. But the face of Kharlampy Diogenovich expresses joyful hospitality, restrained by decency and understanding of the unusualness of this moment. He makes it clear that the very appearance of such a student is the rarest holiday for our class and personally for him, Kharlampy Diogenovich, that no one expected him, and since he has already arrived, no one will dare to reproach him for this little delay, especially since he, modest a teacher who, of course, will enter the classroom after such a wonderful student and will close the door behind him as a sign that the dear guest will not be released soon.

All this lasts a few seconds, and finally the student, awkwardly squeezing through the door, stumbles to his place.

Kharlampy Diogenovich looks after him and says something magnificent. For example:

Prince of Wales.

The class is laughing. And although we do not know who the Prince of Wales is, we understand that he cannot appear in our class. He simply has nothing to do here, because the princes are mainly engaged in deer hunting. And if he gets tired of hunting for his deer and wants to visit some school, then he will definitely be taken to the first school, which is near the power plant. Because she is exemplary. As a last resort, if he had taken it into his head to come to us, we would have been warned long ago and prepared the class for his arrival.

That's why we laughed, realizing that our student could not possibly be a prince, let alone some kind of Wales.

But here Kharlampy Diogenovich sits down. The class is instantly silent. The lesson starts.

Large-headed, short, neatly dressed, carefully shaven, he imperiously and calmly held the class in his hands. In addition to the journal, he had a notebook where he entered something after the survey. I don't remember him yelling at anyone, or persuading anyone to study, or threatening to call his parents to school. All these things were of no use to him.

During the tests, he did not even think of running between the rows, looking into the desks, or vigilantly tossing his head there at every rustle, as others did. No, he calmly read something to himself, or fingered a rosary with beads as yellow as cat's eyes.

It was almost useless to copy from him, because he immediately recognized the copied work and began to ridicule it. So we wrote off only as a last resort, if there was no way out.

It happened that during the test work he would tear himself away from his rosary or book and say:

Sakharov, please move to Avdeenko's.

Sakharov gets up and looks at Kharlampy Diogenovich questioningly. He does not understand why he, an excellent student, should change to Avdeenko, who is a poor student.

Have pity on Avdeenko, he might break his neck.

Avdeenko looks blankly at Kharlampy Diogenovich, as if not understanding, or perhaps not really understanding, why he can break his neck.

Avdeenko thinks he is a swan, Kharlampy Diogenovich explains. “The black swan,” he adds after a moment, hinting at Avdeenko's tanned, sullen face. - Sakharov, you can continue, - says Kharlampy Diogenovich.

Sakharov sits down.

And you, too, - he turns to Avdeenko, but something in his voice has barely perceptibly shifted. A well-measured dose of mockery poured into him. - ... Unless, of course, you break your neck ... a black swan! - he firmly concludes, as if expressing a courageous hope that Alexander Avdeenko will find the strength to work independently.