White goose

The action takes place on the Essex coast, where an abandoned lighthouse was located in a swampy area near the mouth of the Elder River. In 1930, 27-year-old Philip Reyder settled on the lighthouse, a hunchback with a dried hand - an artist painting landscapes and observing the habits of wild geese. Near the lighthouse, he builds a pen for migratory birds, where they stop and live in winter, before flying back to the north again in spring.

Three years later, Reider meets Frita, a girl of about twelve from a nearby fishing village - she brings a wounded white goose to him with a request to save her. With surprise, Reider discovers that this species of white geese is found in Canada, and so far from its homeland, the bird most likely fell due to a strong storm that carried it across the Atlantic. He takes care of a bird, which then, for many years, flying north in the spring along with other geese, returns to the lighthouse again in autumn. At this time, Fritha also comes to the Reyader to be with him and the “Lost Princess”, as the Reyader calls the goose. When the goose flies away, Reyader and Fritha are not seen for months, and the artist suffers from loneliness.

Several years pass, Fritha becomes an adult girl and it is becoming increasingly difficult for Reyader to restrain his feelings for her. In the spring of 1940, the white goose did not fly north for the first time, and Reyder tells Frith that now the Princess of her own free will remained at the lighthouse forever. Frith leaves in confusion, and when he returns to the lighthouse at the end of May, Reyader catches up on the eve of departure: he leaves via the English Channel to take part in the evacuation of the British , who were surrounded on the French coast in the Dunkirk area. The goose follows him. As it later becomes known from military stories, a strange man in a boat over which a white goose was constantly circling saved hundreds of soldiers, but he himself was killed by a machine gun burst.

The goose last flies to the lighthouse, where Frith sees it in the sky and takes Reyader for the soul, and then the bird flies away forever. Frita sometimes returns to the lighthouse to feed the birds, but soon the German pilot mistakenly drops a bomb on the lighthouse, and only ruins flooded by the sea after the destruction of the dam remain in its place. Frita manages to save one of the paintings by Reyader, in which he depicted from memory the first meeting with her when she came to him with a wounded goose in her hands.

There are several Russian translations of the work.

In 1983, the newspaper Literary Russia appeared a translation of Alexander Pakhotin (subsequently, Gallico’s novel Poseidon was also published in his translation). The name of the work is transferred from him as “The White Goose”, and the bird itself is spoken of as a male (“Lost Prince”, etc.) ^[2] .

Translated by N. Koscheeva under the title "Snow Goose", the story was published in the Kiev magazine " Rainbow " in 1985 ^[3] .

Then the story was published in the journal “ Youth ”, No. 10 for 1994 , translated by Tatyana Stamova (also called “Snow Goose”).

The new White Goose translation by director Oleg Dorman was published by Clover Publishing House in 2015 ^[4] and became the 300th separate edition of the story (and the first separate edition in Russian) ^[5] .

The television movie of the same name was shot by Patrick Garland and shown on the BBC channel in 1971 as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame program. The script was written by Gallico himself, however, it has a number of differences from the story (for example, Frita is immediately shown as an adult, and the action takes place for only three years, and the goose flies away only once and returns for good after three years). Reyader in the film adaptation was played by Richard Harris , Fritu - Jenny Egatter . The film received a number of awards, including the Golden Globe of 1972 for the best television movie , and Egatter won the Emmy for an outstanding supporting role ^[6] .

In 1975, British progressive rock band Camel recorded the instrumental album The Snow Goose , inspired by Gallico’s tale. The writer, however, did not like the use of the title of his work, and after the lawsuit he won, the group changed the name of the album to Music Inspired by The Snow Goose (music inspired by The Snow Goose ). The album gained great popularity, the music from it was performed by a group, including together with the London Symphony Orchestra in Albert Hall .

• Information about the story on Paul Gallico's website
• First publication in The Saturday Evening Post
• The White Goose, translation by Oleg Dorman (fragment)
• Maria Shaskolskaya. The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
• Sergey Kumysh. Re-education of matured children: Paul Gallico's White Goose
• Reader's Diary: Paul Gallico's White Goose