On the day of the thirtieth anniversary personal life Voshchev was given payment from a small mechanical plant, where he obtained funds for his existence. In the dismissal document they wrote to him that he was being removed from production due to the growth of weakness and thoughtfulness in him amid the general pace of work. Voshchev took his things in a bag at the apartment and went outside to better understand his future in the air. But the air was empty, the motionless trees carefully kept the heat in their leaves, and the dust lay boringly on the deserted road - this was the situation in nature. Voshchev did not know where he was being drawn, and at the end of the city he leaned his elbows on the low fence of an estate where homeless children were taught to work and be useful. Then the city stopped - there was only a pub for otkhodniks and low-paid categories, which stood like an institution, without any yard, and behind the pub there was a clay mound, and an old tree grew on it alone in bright weather. Voshchev made his way to the pub and entered there to hear sincere human voices. There were uncontrollable people here, abandoning themselves to the oblivion of their misfortune, and Voshchev felt quieter and lighter among them. He was present in the pub until the evening, when the wind of changing weather began to rustle; then Voshchev went to the open window to notice the beginning of the night, and saw a tree on a clay mound - it was swaying from the weather, and its leaves were curled up with secret shame. Somewhere, probably in the garden of the Soviet trade employees, a brass band was languishing: monotonous, unfulfilling music was carried by the wind into nature through the ravine wasteland, because it was rarely given joy, but could not accomplish anything equivalent to music and spent its evening time motionless. After the wind, silence came again, and an even quieter darkness covered it. Voshchev sat down by the window to observe the gentle darkness of the night, listen to various sad sounds and suffer from his heart, surrounded by hard, stony bones. “Hey, food!” was heard in the already silent establishment. “Give us a couple of mugs - pour them into the cavity!” Voshchev discovered long ago that people always came to the pub in pairs, like brides and grooms, and sometimes in whole friendly weddings. The food server did not serve beer this time, and two roofers who arrived wiped their thirsty mouths with their aprons. - You, bureaucrat, a working man should order with one finger, and you are proud! But the food industry saved its strength from official wear and tear for its personal life and did not enter into disagreements. - The establishment, citizens, is closed. Do something in your apartment. The roofers took a salty dry thing from the platter into their mouths and walked away. Voshchev was left alone in the pub. - Citizen! You only demanded one mug, but you are sitting here indefinitely! You paid for the drink, not the room! Voshchev grabbed his bag and went into the night. The questioning sky shone over Voshchev with the tormenting power of the stars, but in the city the lights had already been extinguished, and whoever had the opportunity slept, having eaten his fill of dinner. Voshchev went down the crumbs of earth into the ravine and lay down there with his stomach down to fall asleep and part with himself. But sleep required peace of mind, trust in life, forgiveness of past grief, and Voshchev lay in the dry tension of consciousness and did not know whether he was useful in the world or whether everything would work out well without him? A wind blew from an unknown place so that people would not suffocate, and with a weak voice of doubt a suburban dog made his service known. - The dog is bored, he lives thanks to one birth, like me. Voshchev's body turned pale from fatigue, he felt the cold on his eyelids and closed his warm eyes with them. The pub was already refreshing its establishment, the winds and grass were already agitated by the sun all around, when Voshchev regretfully opened his eyes, filled with moist strength. He had to live and eat again, so he went to the factory to defend his unnecessary work. “The administration says that you stood and thought in the middle of production,” they said in the factory committee. “What were you thinking about, Comrade Voshchev?” - About the plan of life. -- The plant operates according to ready plan trust, And you could work out your personal life plan in a club or in a red corner. - I was thinking about a plan common life. I am not afraid of my life, it is not a mystery to me. - Well, what could you do? - I could invent something like happiness, and the spiritual meaning would improve productivity. - Happiness will come from materialism, Comrade Voshchev, and not from meaning. We cannot defend you, you are an irresponsible person, and we do not want to find ourselves in the tail of the masses. Voshchev wanted to ask for some very weak work so that he would have enough for food: he would think outside of school hours; but to make a request you need to have respect for people, and Voshchev did not see feelings for himself from them. - You are afraid to be in the tail: it is a limb, and they sat on the neck! - You, Voshchev, the state gave you an extra hour for your thoughtfulness - you worked for eight, now it’s seven, you would have lived in silence! If we all think at once, then who will act? “People act senselessly without thought!” Voshchev said thoughtfully. He left the factory committee without help. His path on foot lay in the middle of summer, houses and technical improvements were being built on the sides - in those houses the homeless masses would silently exist until now. Voshchev's body was indifferent to comfort; he could live without exhaustion in open place and languished with his misfortune during the time of satiety, during the days of rest in his previous apartment. Once again he had to pass a suburban pub, once again he looked at his place of lodging for the night; there remained something in common with his life, and Voshchev found himself in a space where in front of him was only the horizon and the feeling of the wind in his bowed face. A mile away stood the house of the highway supervisor. Having become accustomed to emptiness, the warden loudly quarreled with his wife, and the woman sat open window with a child on her lap and answered her husband with exclamations of abuse; the child himself silently plucked the frill of his shirt, understanding, but saying nothing. This patience of the child encouraged Voshchev, he saw that the mother and father did not feel the meaning of life and were irritated, and the child lived without reproach, growing up to suffer. Here Voshchev decided to strain his soul, not to spare his body for the work of his mind, in order to soon return to the house of the road guard and tell the intelligent child the secret of life, all the time forgotten by his parents. “Their body now wanders automatically,” Voshchev observed his parents, “they don’t feel the essence.” “Why don’t you feel the essence?” asked Voshchev, turning to the window. “Your child lives with you, and you swear—he was born to end the whole world.” The husband and wife looked at the witness with fear of conscience hidden behind the malice of their faces. - If you have nothing to exist in peace with, you would honor your child - it will be better for you. “What do you want here?” the road supervisor asked with malicious subtlety in his voice. “You go and go, the road was paved for such people...” Voshchev stood in the middle of the path, hesitating. The family waited for him to leave and kept their evil in reserve. - I would leave, but I have nowhere to go. How far is it from some other city? “It’s close,” answered the warden, “if you don’t stand, the road will lead you to it.” “And you honor your child,” said Voshchev, “when you die, he will be.” Having said these words, Voshchev walked away from the overseer's house a mile away and sat down on the edge of a ditch, but soon he felt doubt in his life and weakness of his body without the truth, he could not continue to work and walk along the road, not knowing the exact structure of the whole world and that where to strive. Voshchev, tired of thinking, lay down in the dusty, roady grass; it was hot, the daytime wind was blowing, and somewhere the roosters were crowing in the village - everything was abandoned to an unrequited existence, only Voshchev stood apart and was silent. The dead, fallen leaf lay next to Voshchev’s head, it was brought by the wind from a distant tree, and now this leaf was faced with humility in the ground. Voshchev picked up the withered leaf and hid it in a secret compartment of the bag, where he saved all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity. “You had no meaning in life,” Voshchev believed with stinginess of sympathy, “lie here, I will find out why you lived and died. Since no one needs you and you are lying around among the whole world, then I will protect and remember you.” “Everything lives and suffers in the world, not realizing anything,” said Voshchev near the road and stood up to walk, surrounded by everyone’s patient existence. “It’s as if someone, one or a few few, extracted a convinced feeling from us and took it for themselves.” He walked along the road until he was exhausted; Voshchev quickly became exhausted, as soon as his soul remembered that it had ceased to know the truth. But the city in the distance was already visible; its cooperative bakeries were smoking, and the evening sun illuminated the dust over the houses from the movement of the population. That city began with a forge, and in it, during Voshchev’s passage, a car was repaired for off-road driving. The fat cripple stood near the hitching post and turned to the blacksmith: “Mich, pour some tobacco: I’ll tear the lock off again at night!” The blacksmith did not answer from under the car. Then the crippled man pushed him in the butt with a crutch. - Mish, you better stop working - the embankment: I’ll cause losses! Voshchev paused near the cripple, because a line of pioneer children with tired music was moving down the street from the depths of the city. “I gave you a whole ruble yesterday,” said the blacksmith. “Give me peace for at least a week!” Otherwise I’ll endure and endure and I’ll burn your crutches! “Burn!” agreed the invalid. “The guys will deliver me on a cart - I’ll rip the roof off the forge!” The blacksmith was distracted by the sight of the children and, becoming kinder, poured tobacco into the crippled pouch: - Rob, locust! Voshchev noticed that the cripple had no legs - one at all, and instead of the other there was a wooden attachment; he was holding on, crippled, with the support of crutches and the auxiliary tension of the wooden appendage of his right amputated leg. The disabled man had no teeth, he used them all up for food, but he ate his huge face and the fat rest of his body; his brown, sparingly open eyes observed a world foreign to them with the greed of deprivation, with the melancholy of accumulated passion, and his gums rubbed in his mouth, uttering the inaudible thoughts of a legless man. The orchestra of pioneers, moving away, began to play the music of the young campaign. Barefoot girls walked past the forge, conscious of the importance of their future; their weak, mature bodies were dressed in sailor suits, red berets rested freely on their thoughtful, attentive heads, and their legs were covered with the down of youth. Each girl, moving in moderation general system, smiled from the feeling of her importance, from the awareness of the seriousness of life necessary for the continuity of the formation and the strength of the campaign. Any one of these pioneers was born at a time when the horses of the social warrior lay dead in the fields, and not all pioneers had skin at the hour of their birth, because their mothers fed only on the stores of their own bodies; therefore, the difficulty of weakness remained on the face of each pioneer early life, poverty of body and beauty of expression. But the happiness of children's friendship, the realization of the future world in the play of youth and the dignity of their strict freedom indicated on the children's faces an important joy that replaced beauty and homely plumpness for them. Voshchev stood with timidity before the eyes of the procession of these excited children, unknown to him; he was ashamed that the pioneers probably knew and felt more than him, because children are time ripening in a fresh body, and he, Voshchev, is eliminated by his hasty, active youth into the silence of obscurity, like a vain attempt of life to achieve its goal. And Voshchev felt shame and energy - he wanted to immediately discover the universal, long-term meaning of life, in order to live ahead of the children, faster than their dark legs, filled with firm tenderness. One pioneer woman ran out of the ranks into a rye field adjacent to the forge and picked a plant there. During her action, the little woman bent down, exposing the spring on her swollen body, and with the ease of an imperceptible force she disappeared past, leaving regret in the two spectators - Voshchev and the cripple. Voshchev looked at the disabled man; his face puffed up with hopeless blood, he groaned a sound and moved his hand in the depths of his pocket. Voshchev observed the mood of the mighty cripple, but was glad that the monster of imperialism would never get socialist children. However, the cripple watched the pioneer procession to the end, and Voshchev feared for the integrity and integrity of the little people. “You should look somewhere away with your eyes,” he said to the disabled man. “You’d better light a cigarette!” “March to the side, pointer!” said the legless man. Voshchev did not move. “Who am I talking to?” the cripple reminded. “Do you want to get it from me?!” “No,” answered Voshchev. “I was afraid that you would say your word to that girl or act in some way.” The disabled man, in his usual torment, tilted his big head to the ground. - What am I going to tell the child, you bastard. I look at children for memory, because I will die soon. “You were probably injured in a capitalist battle,” Voshchev said quietly. “Although cripples can be old people too, I’ve seen them.” The crippled man turned his eyes to Voshchev, in which there was now the brutality of a superior mind; The crippled man at first even paused out of anger at the passer-by, and then said with the slowness of bitterness: “There are old people like that, but there are no crippled people like you.” “I wasn’t in a real war,” said Voshchev. “Then I wouldn’t have returned from there completely.” - I see that you weren’t: why are you such a fool! When a man has not seen war, he is like a nulliparous woman - he lives like an idiot. You can be seen through the shell of everything! “Eh!..” the blacksmith said plaintively. “I look at the children, but I myself just want to shout: “Long live the First of May!” The music of the pioneers rested and began to play the march of the movement in the distance. Voshchev continued to languish and went to this city to live. Until the evening Voshchev walked silently around the city, as if waiting for the world to become publicly known. However, it was still unclear to him about the world, and he felt in the darkness of his body a quiet place where there was nothing, but nothing prevented anything from starting. Like someone living in absentia, Voshchev walked past people, feeling the growing strength of his grieving mind and increasingly secluded in the closeness of his sadness. Only now did he see the middle of the city and its structures being built. The evening electricity had already been lit on the scaffolding, but the field light of silence and the fading smell of sleep approached here from the common space and stood untouched in the air. Separate from nature, in a bright place of electricity, people worked with desire, erecting brick fences, walking with a burden of loads in the cumbersome delirium of forests. Voshchev watched for a long time the construction of a tower unknown to him; he saw that the workers were moving evenly, without sudden force, but something had already arrived in the construction to complete it. “Don’t people’s sense of life decrease when buildings arrive?” Voshchev did not dare to believe. “A man will build a house.” and he himself will be upset. Who will live then? - Voshchev doubted as he walked. He moved from the middle of the city to the end of it. While he was moving there, a deserted night fell; Only water and wind inhabited this darkness and nature in the distance, and only birds were able to sing the sadness of this great substance, because they flew from above and it was easier for them. Voshchev wandered into a wasteland and discovered a warm pit for the night; Having descended into this earthly depression, he put a bag under his head, where he collected all kinds of obscurity for memory and revenge, became sad and fell asleep. But some man entered the vacant lot with a scythe in his hands and began to cut the grass groves that had grown here from time immemorial. By midnight the mower reached Voshchev and ordered him to get up and leave the square. “What do you want!” Voshchev said reluctantly. “What a square there is, this is an extra place...” “And now there will be a square.” Now there is a place for stone work here. Come and look at this place in the morning, otherwise it will soon disappear forever under the device. -Where should I be? - You can safely sleep in the barracks. Go there and sleep until the morning, and in the morning you will find out. Voshchev followed the mower’s story and soon noticed a plank shed in a former vegetable garden. Inside the barn, seventeen or twenty people were sleeping on their backs, and a dimmed lamp illuminated the unconscious human faces. All the sleepers were as thin as the dead, the tight space between the skin and bones of each was occupied by veins, and the thickness of the veins showed how much blood they must let through during the strain of labor. The chintz of the shirt accurately conveyed the slow, refreshing work of the heart - it beat close, in the darkness of the devastated body of each person who fell asleep. Voshchev peered into the face of the sleeping neighbor to see if it expressed the unrequited happiness of a satisfied person. But the sleeping man lay dead, his eyes were deeply and sadly hidden, and his cold legs stretched out helplessly in his old work pants. Apart from breathing, there was no sound in the barracks, no one saw dreams or talked to memories - everyone existed without any excess of life, and during sleep only the heart remained alive, protecting the person. Voshchev felt the cold of fatigue and lay down for warmth among the two bodies of sleeping artisans. He fell asleep, a stranger to these people who had closed their eyes, and happy that he was spending the night near them, and so he slept, not feeling the truth, until the bright morning.

Voshchev worked at a mechanical plant and was in good standing with his superiors until he began to “solve” philosophical questions directly at the workplace. This activity greatly reduced the quality of his work and led to a sad result: Voshchev was fired from the plant on his thirtieth birthday.

Having drunk out of grief in a pub, Voshchev makes his way to the neighboring town. On the way, he meets a legless disabled man, Zhachev, who makes his living by begging, and enters into an argument with him. After a tiring day, Voshchev is going to spend the night in a vacant lot, but the mower drives him away, since a grandiose construction project is planned for that place. Kosar advises the unemployed man to rest in the barracks where workers live who have come to dig a foundation pit - the most important construction project in the city. It is planned to build a “common proletarian house” there. All representatives of the working class will live in a huge building, and they will simply abandon their previous homes.

In the morning, the artisans wake up and offer Voshchev to have breakfast together. Then everyone goes to the site. The vacant lot has already been marked according to the parameters of the pit. Voshchev is given a shovel, and he, along with other builders, gets to work.

Among his new acquaintances, the main ideological inspirer turns out to be trade union activist Safronov - a sincere and kind man, but narrow-minded. The strong and hardworking Chiklin also stands out in the brigade, but the artisans do not like the sick and weak Kozlov.

The chief engineer and developer of the project, Prushevsky, dreams that in a few decades a tower will be built in the very middle of the world, in which workers from all over the globe will live happily. But, like all intellectuals, Prushevsky is overcome by doubts. If the growth of production increases, will the growth of the soul also increase with it? Due to daily torment, the engineer stops sleeping at night, and thoughts of suicide begin to occur to him.

The next morning, the craftsmen continued digging the pit. To strengthen the working spirit, the chairman of the regional trade union council, Pashkin, arrives. He tells the diggers that the pace of their work is still low, not socialist. Kozlov turns out to be the first informer and runs after the chairman with slander.

Chiklin conducts a survey of the area and makes sure that they started digging the pit in the wrong place. It would have been better to use a natural ravine for it, rather than start all the work from scratch. Prushevsky takes soil samples and is convinced that Chiklin is right: it is better to expand the neighboring ravine and make a pit out of it.

Disabled Zhachev arrives on his cart to the house of Chairman Pashkin. He is greatly indignant at the chairman's abundance of money and his meager pension. Pashkin does not want to spoil relations with the working class, so he asks his fat wife to give the disabled person food. Zhachev takes food, which he shares in the barracks with Chiklin and Safronov.

Voshchev still hopes to find the meaning of life, but his attempts remain fruitless. Even such hard work as digging a pit did not advance him in this philosophical quest. Voshchev spends the entire evening in sadness.

At the same time, Prushevsky and Chilkin indulge in the sweet memories of their youth. Chiklin loves to remember the pre-revolutionary time, when he was unexpectedly given a kiss by the daughter of the owner of the factory where he worked. Prushevsky remembers the beautiful unknown girl, which once passed near his house. The engineer had already forgotten the features of her face, but the girl captured his heart so much that from then on he peered into every stranger, trying to find the one...

Kozlov was tired of the hard work of digging a pit. He wants to do “social work.” The remaining artisans continue to work at the main construction site. However, engineer Pashkin is still not satisfied with the pace of work.

Chiklin, in sweet memories of the beauty’s kiss, comes to that very plant, which is now in a destroyed state. He wanders through abandoned buildings and accidentally stumbles upon a hidden room. There's a woman lying there dying. Next to her is a little girl who is smearing dying lemon peel on her lips. Chiklin recognizes the unfortunate woman as the daughter of the owner of the plant, who gave him a kiss. The woman dies before his eyes, and Chiklin takes her daughter with him.

A radio is broadcast for the workers in the barracks, through which they call on all artisans to fully mobilize internal resources for the construction of the main facility. Voshchev and Zhachev are opponents of the radio, but Safronov does not allow it to be turned off. He believes that every conscious citizen should listen to socialist slogans and be imbued with the right ideas. And capitalist slogans must be thrown out of our heads forever.

The girl Nastya, whom Chiklin took with him, is settling into the work barracks. All the artisans loved her very much. Nastya was given two coffins from the reserve. She was now sleeping in one, and in the other she kept her toys. Safronov is trying to raise the girl in the spirit of communist ideology.

Chairman Pashkin, on his own initiative, gives the order to increase the pit six times. Kozlov made his way into trade union activists. He travels with the chairman in a car and shouts at the workers. After some time, Kozlov and Safronov set off to collectivize a neighboring village, but never returned from there. In the village they are killed by “kulaks”. Having learned about the tragedy, Voshchev and Chiklin go to the village. The rural activist leading the creation of the collective farm enrolls the arriving workers in the “mobilized cadres.”

The corpses of Kozlov and Safronov lie in the village council, covered with a red banner. Chiklin remains with the deceased until the morning. In the middle of the night, a village man wandered into the village council. Chiklin decides that this is the killer of his friends and takes the peasant’s life himself.

There are many arrested people in the village. The activist is looking for “advanced peasants”, whom he gives the order to campaign under the banners for the unification and collectivization of the village. The peasants no longer want any collective farm. Some of the bravest ones lie down in coffins and try to die. The rural priest is very frightened by the coming repressions. In order to somehow appease the supporters of the new life, he submits an application to the circle of non-believers and donates all church income to the purchase of tractors. And yesterday’s priest writes a denunciation to the activist, in which he indicates the names of everyone who was baptized in his church.

The activist orders Voshchev, Chiklin and three other villagers to build a raft. On it the “kulaks” will be sent into the river. Activist collects local residents and demands that they stop interfering with the building of communism. Everyone must join the collective farm. The peasants ask for one more night of delay to think carefully. The activist does not want to wait that long and gives time to think only until the raft is built. He promises everyone who goes against the collective farm a “journey” on a raft to the open sea.

The village is in chaos. The villagers have not fed their horses for a long time and are slaughtering cows, gorging themselves on their meat to death. They do this so as not to give their livestock to common use. At the Organizational Court, the villagers say goodbye to each other, as if before death.

Zhachev and Prushevsky arrive at the new collective farm. They bring Nastya with them. The girl is already going to kindergarten, she is convinced that all the “kulaks” must be exterminated.

Chiklin goes to the local blacksmith, who works in tandem with the bear. The beast knows how to hit an anvil with a hammer. Chiklin and the bear look into the houses where the kulaks live. The bear growls, and at this time Chiklin is “dispossessing” everyone. Rebellious villagers, herded onto a raft, are lowered into the river.

The peasants remaining on the shore happily trample around the yard to the march of the great march. This fun continues until Zhachev puts them to bed.

Voshchev collects ownerless rubbish scattered around the village. He puts all the items on the list and then gives them to little Nastya instead of toys. The bear is so inspired by the prospect of a new life that he begins to work with triple strength.

In the morning, all the villagers gather near the forge. There the bear and Chiklin worked all night and continue to diligently forge iron. However, the men notice that they are doing forging incorrectly. But only the threat of expulsion from the collective farm forced Chiklin and the bear to stop work.

Prushevsky, together with local youth, goes to the hut-reading room to make a cultural revolution.

Nastya became seriously ill. The activist is declared an enemy of the proletariat and killed. Voshchev is elected instead. The activist’s body is thrown into the river after the raft with “fists”.

Prushevsky, Zhachev, Chiklin and Nastya return to the city. There, the pit there is covered with snow, and the workers' barracks stand empty and abandoned. Despite all the efforts of the men, the girl cannot be saved. Chiklin himself buries Nastya. Trying to drown out his mental suffering, he digs a pit all night.

Andrey Platonovich Platonov

"Pit"

“On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his personal life, Voshchev was given a settlement from a small mechanical plant, where he obtained funds for his existence. In the dismissal document they wrote to him that he was being removed from production due to an increase in weakness and thoughtfulness in him amid the general pace of work.” Voshchev goes to another city. In a vacant lot in a warm pit, he settles down for the night. At midnight he is awakened by a man mowing grass in a vacant lot. Kosar says that construction will soon begin here, and sends Voshchev to the barracks: “Go there and sleep until the morning, and in the morning you will find out.”

Voshchev wakes up with an artel of artisans, who feed him and explain that today the construction of a single building begins, where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle. Voshchev is given a shovel, he squeezes it with his hands, as if wanting to extract the truth from the dust of the earth. The engineer has already marked out the pit and tells the workers that the exchange should send fifty more people, but for now the work must begin with the leading team. Voshchev digs along with everyone else, he “looked at people and decided to live somehow, since they endure and live: he came into being with them and will die in due time inseparably from people.”

The diggers are gradually settling in and getting used to working. Comrade Pashkin, the chairman of the regional trade union council, often comes to the pit and monitors the pace of work. “The pace is quiet,” he tells the workers. — Why do you regret increasing productivity? Socialism will manage without you, and without it you will live in vain and die.”

In the evenings, Voshchev lies with his eyes open and yearns for the future, when everything will become generally known and placed in a stingy feeling of happiness. The most conscientious worker, Safronov, suggests installing a radio in the barracks to listen to achievements and directives; the disabled, legless Zhachev objects: “It’s better to bring an orphan girl by the hand than your radio.”

The excavator Chiklin finds in an abandoned building of a tile factory, where he was once kissed by the owner's daughter, a dying woman with a little daughter. Chiklin kisses a woman and recognizes from the trace of tenderness on her lips that this is the same girl who kissed him in his youth. Before her death, the mother tells the girl not to tell anyone whose daughter she is. The girl asks why her mother is dying: from a potbelly stove, or from death? Chiklin takes her with him.

Comrade Pashkin installs a radio speaker in the barracks, from which every minute demands are heard in the form of slogans - about the need to collect nettles, trim the tails and manes of horses. Safronov listens and regrets that he cannot speak back into the pipe so that they know about his sense of activity. Voshchev and Zhachev become unreasonably ashamed of the long speeches on the radio, and Zhachev shouts: “Stop this sound! Let me answer it!” Having listened to the radio enough, Safronov sleeplessly looks at the sleeping people and expresses with grief: “Oh, you mass, mass. It's hard to organize a skeleton of communism out of you! And what do you want? Such a bitch? You tortured the entire avant-garde, you bastard!”

The girl who came with Chiklin asks him about the features of the meridians on the map, and Chiklin replies that these are fences from the bourgeoisie. In the evening, the diggers do not turn on the radio, but, having eaten, sit down to look at the girl and ask her who she is. The girl remembers what her mother told her and talks about how she doesn’t remember her parents and that she didn’t want to be born under the bourgeoisie, but how Lenin became - and she became. Safronov concludes: “And deep is our Soviet authority, since even children, not remembering their mother, can already smell Comrade Lenin!”

At the meeting, the workers decide to send Safronov and Kozlov to the village in order to organize collective farm life. They are killed in the village - and other diggers, led by Voshchev and Chiklin, come to the aid of the village activists. While a meeting of organized members and unorganized individual workers is taking place at the Organizational Yard, Chiklin and Voshchev are putting together a raft nearby. Activists designate people according to a list: the poor for the collective farm, the kulaks for dispossession. To more accurately identify all the kulaks, Chiklin takes to help a bear who works in the forge as a hammerman. The bear remembers well the houses where he used to work - these houses are used to identify the kulaks, who are driven onto a raft and sent along the river current to the sea. The poor people remaining in the Orgyard march in place to the sounds of the radio, then dance, welcoming the arrival of collective farm life. In the morning, people go to the forge, where they can hear the hammer bear working. The members of the collective farm burn all the coal, repair all the dead equipment and, sad that the work is over, sit by the fence and look at the village in bewilderment about their future lives. Workers lead villagers in town. In the evening, travelers come to the pit and see that it is covered with snow, and the barracks are empty and dark. Chiklin lights a fire to warm the sick girl Nastya. People pass by the barracks, but no one comes to visit Nastya, because everyone, with their heads bowed, is constantly thinking about complete collectivization. By morning Nastya dies. Voshchev, standing over the calmed child, thinks about why he now needs the meaning of life if there is no this small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement.

Zhachev asks Voshchev: “Why did you bring the collective farm?” “The men want to join the proletariat,” Voshchev answers. Chiklin takes a crowbar and a shovel and goes to dig at the far end of the pit. Looking around, he sees that the entire collective farm is constantly digging the ground. All the poor and average men work with such zeal as if they want to escape forever in the abyss of the pit. The horses don’t stand either: the collective farmers use them to carry stone. Only Zhachev does not work, mourning the death of Nastya. “I’m a freak of imperialism, and communism is a child’s business, that’s why I loved Nastya... I’ll go and kill Comrade Pashkin now as a farewell,” says Zhachev and crawls away on his cart to the city, never to return to the foundation pit.

Chiklin digs a deep grave for Nastya so that the child will never be disturbed by the noise of life from the surface of the earth.

The main character, Voshchev, works at a mechanical plant, from where he was fired, citing the fact that he was not strong enough to continue growing and working. Having left for another city, he got a job as a navvy to build a single building where the entire proletariat was supposed to move. Comrade Pashkin often comes there to check how fast work in progress. He is the chairman of the regional trade union council, advocating socialism in all its forms. Sometimes he tells the workers that socialism will do without them, but people will live their lives in vain. Coming after working day Voshchev, lying down, dreams of the quick happiness that was to come into his life.

One of the workers named Safronov suggests installing a radio in order to learn about new directives earlier than others. The legless disabled person Zhachev is against this. At an abandoned factory, Chiklin found a woman near death with her daughter. Having kissed her, he remembered her lips, they had once met. He took the girl with him. Pashkin installed a radio speaker in the barracks, and now everyone listens to continuous tirades of slogans. Safronov wants to say something in response to the voice from the megaphone. In the evening, after dinner, the workers ask the girl Chiklin brought about her family. But she, remembering her mother’s instructions not to say who her father is, says that she did not want to be born under the bourgeoisie, but was born under Lenin.

Soon Safronov and Kozlov are killed. Voshchev and Chiklin are assembling a raft in order to put the dispossessed people on it and send them to the sea. To help, they take a bear who works in a forge; he remembers well all the houses in which he used to work. Having thrown their fists into the sea and restored order in the village, the workers are sad that the work is over. Returning to the city, it turns out that everything is covered with snow, and little Nastya is sick. By morning the girl died. Voshchev, standing over the girl, does not see any further meaning of existence. Chiklin, taking a shovel, begins to dig diligently.

Zhachev is sad about the girl and, reflecting on life and communism, decides that he has no reason to live and finally needs to kill Pashkin. He leaves on his cart for the city. Chiklin digs a deep hole for the girl so that the sounds of life will never reach her.

Essays

Sad existing people (based on A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”) A.P. Platonov. "Pit". Biblical motifs in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”. The drama of initiation into a new life (Based on the story “The Pit” by A.P. Platonov) People in A. Platonov’s work “The Pit”. What I thought about while reading “The Pit” The main images of A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” Features of the style of A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” Predictions in the works "Pit" by Platonov and "We" by Zamyatin Predictions and warnings from the works of Zamyatin and Platonov (“We” and “The Pit”). The problem of collectivization and the image of an activist in Platonov’s story “The Pit” Problems and idea of ​​A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” Problematics of A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” Platonov's prophecy in the story "The Pit" Review of A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” The meaning of the title of A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” The meaning of the title of A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” Construction of the “new world” in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”. The theme of the meaning of life in A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” The philosophical meaning of A. P. Platonov’s work “The Pit” The artistic originality of A. Platonov’s work “The Pit”. Man and the totalitarian state in A. P. Platonov’s story “The Pit” "Pit" by A. Platonov as an artistic document of the era Truth as the meaning of life (based on Platonov’s story “The Pit”) Heroes of the story "Pit" Character system of the story "The Pit" Platonov A.P. Dystopian novel in Russian literature “New” reality in the story “The Pit” Problems and heroes of the works of A.P. Platonov (using the example of one story). Based on the story "The pit" The image of a simple Russian man in A. Platonov’s work “The Pit” Essay by A.P. Platonov. "Pit" Features of the story style The central problem in the story "The Pit" In “The Pit” the author breaks the myth of a bright future Characteristics of the image of Pashkin Lev Ilyich

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND PLOT-COMPOSITIONAL FEATURES OF THE STORY. Time spent working on the story, indicated by the author on last page text (December 1929 - April 1930), indicates that “The Pit” was written by Platonov practically from life - in the very “Year of the Great Turning Point”, the onset of which was proclaimed by I. Stalin’s article on November 7, 1929. Exact time frame the events described in the “Pit” are also given specific historical facts: On December 27, 1929, Stalin announced the transition to the policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and on March 2, 1930, in the article “Dizziness from Success,” he briefly put the brakes on forced collectivization.

The plot of the story is very simple. Main character In the story, Voshchev is fired from a mechanical plant during the hot season of the beginning of leaf fall (late summer - early autumn), and the dismissal occurs on the day of his thirtieth birthday. It is interesting that in the year of the events described, the author of the story, Platonov, also turned 30 years old, and his birthday, like Voshchev’s birthday, falls at the end of summer (August 28). This suggests that the hero’s worldview is close to the author’s.

The documented reason for Voshchev’s dismissal was “an increase in his weakness and thoughtfulness amid the general pace of work.” In the factory committee, where the hero turns every other day with a request for a new job, Voshchev explains the reason for his thoughtfulness: he is thinking about a “plan for a common life” that could bring “something like happiness.” Having been refused a job, the hero sets off on the road and after another day reaches the neighboring city. In search of accommodation for the night, he ends up in a barracks crowded with sleeping workers, and in the morning, in a conversation, he finds out that he ended up in a brigade of diggers who “know everything” because they “give all organizations their existence.” In other words, before Voshchev are bearers of “unrequited happiness”, “able to keep the truth within themselves without triumph.” Hoping that living and working next to these people will provide answers to the questions tormenting Voshchev, he decides to join their team.

It soon becomes clear that the diggers are preparing a pit for the foundation of a large building intended for life together all the ordinary working people still huddled in barracks. However, the scale of the pit is constantly increasing during the work process, because the project is becoming more and more grandiose.” common house" The digger foreman Chiklin brings to the barracks where the workers live an orphan girl, Nastya, who now becomes their common pupil.

Until late autumn, Voshchev works together with the diggers, and then finds himself witnessing dramatic events in the village adjacent to the city. At the direction of the management, two workers from the brigade are sent to this village: they must help the local activists in carrying out collectivization. After they die at the hands of unknown kulaks, Chiklin and members of his brigade arrive in the village and complete the work of collectivization. They exterminate or float down the river (into “distant space”) all the wealthy peasants of the village. After this, the workers return to the city, to the pit. The ending of the story is the funeral of Nastya, who died from a fleeting illness, who by this time had become the common daughter of the navvies. One of the walls of the pit becomes her grave.

As you can see, a few paragraphs were enough to list the main events of the story. However, the plot itself is far from main level expression of its deepest meanings. For Platonov, the plot is just an event framework in which it is necessary to tell about the essence of his contemporary era, about the position of man in the post-revolutionary world.

The main events of the plot are the endless digging of a pit and the rapid “special operation” to “liquidate the kulaks” - two parts of a single grandiose plan for the construction of socialism. In the city, this construction consists of the erection of a single building, “where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle”; in the village - in the creation of a collective farm and the destruction of the “kulaks”. Let us note that the concrete historical aspects of the picture created in the story are significantly retouched: the mythopoetic, generalized symbolic facets of the events described come to the fore.

This tendency towards symbolic generalization of the image is fully consistent with the title of the story and the features of its spatio-temporal organization. The image-symbol of the pit is echoed in the text with many semantic associations: in it - the “shovelling” of life, the “virgin soil” of the earth being turned up, the construction of a temple - only going not up, but down; “bottom” of life (plunging into the depths of the pit, diggers sink lower and lower from the edge of the earth); “a cauldron of collectivism” that gathers workers; finally, a mass grave - both in the literal and figurative sense of the word (here the dying can be buried, and here the collective hope for a bright future perishes).

The time frame of the narrative is indicated in the text of “The Pit” not by specific historical dates, but by the most general indications of the change of seasons: from early autumn to winter. At the same time, the internal “chronometry” of the story is far from clear and any kind of rhythmic order. Time seems to move in jerks, sometimes almost stopping, sometimes quickly accelerating. The first three days of Voshchev’s life (from the moment of his dismissal until he ended up in the navvy barracks) can still be judged thanks to indications of where and how he spends the night, but later the alternations of day and night are no longer accurately recorded, and the plot events seem to be “torn off” from the calendar .

The exhausting monotony of the work of the diggers is set off by the repetition of monotonous words and phrases: “until the evening”, “until the morning”, “next time”, “at dawn”, “in the evenings”. Thus, six months of plot action turns into an endless repetition of the same “daily video”. The organization of the collective farm, on the contrary, proceeds rapidly: the scenes of dispossession, the expulsion of kulaks and the holiday of rural activists fit into one day. The ending of the story again returns the reader to the feeling of an endlessly dragging day turning into eternal night: starting at noon, Chiklin digs a grave for Nastya for fifteen hours in a row. The last “chronometric” detail of the story records the moment of Nastya’s burial in the “eternal stone”: “The time was night...” Thus, before the reader’s eyes, the “current time” of fateful socio-historical transformations melts into the motionless eternity of loss. The last word of the story is the word “farewell”.

In the quote above, the clock “walks patiently,” as if traversing physically felt space. This example illustrates the special nature of the relationship between time and space in Platonov’s prose: figuratively speaking, the main organ of “experience” of time in the writer’s world becomes the soles of the feet of a wandering truth-seeker, the hours and days of his movement are visible through kilometers of travel. The hero’s internal efforts, the tension of his consciousness, are connected with a real feat of expectation. “His walking route lay in the middle of summer,” the author informs the reader at the very beginning of the story about Voshchev’s route. To judge time, Platonov’s character does not need wrist watch, it is enough for him to turn to space: “...Voshchev went to the window to notice the beginning of the night.” Space and time meet metonymically, and sometimes become mutually reversible, so that the name of “place” becomes a kind of pseudonym for “time.” Platonov’s style encourages us to read the title of the story not only as a “spatial” metaphor, but also as an allegory about the era. The “pit” is not only an abyss or an abyss, but also an empty “funnel” of time that has stopped and has exhausted its movement.

If time in Platonov’s story can be “seen,” then its artistic space loses its perhaps the most important attribute - the quality of visual clarity, optical sharpness. This quality of Plato's vision of the world becomes especially noticeable if you observe the movements of the characters. While the routes of Raskolnikov’s movements around St. Petersburg in “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky or Bulgakov’s heroes around Moscow in “The Master and Margarita” are so specific that each of them can be marked on a map of a real city; the movements of Plato’s heroes almost do not correlate with clear spatial landmarks, they are practically devoid of topographical “references”. It is impossible for the reader to imagine where the city, factory, barracks, roads, etc. mentioned in the story are located.

Pay attention to how the hero’s path is depicted: “Voshchev, who arrived on a cart from unknown places, touched his horse to ride back to the space where he was.” “Unknown” places of unknown “space” give the characters’ wanderings a dreamlike, “somnambulistic” character: the hero’s route constantly gets lost, he returns to the foundation pit again and again. The characters in the story are constantly moving, but this movement is often conveyed by Platonov outside the real “circumstances of the place” - through the vague coordinates of abstract concepts. Most often, this is the language of underformed ideological slogans: “to the proletarian masses”, “under a common banner”, “following the gone barefoot collectivization”, “to the distance of history, to the summit of invisible times”, “back to the old days”, “forward to your hope ”, “to some undesirable distance in life.” People's wanderings along the surface of linguistic abstractions, devoid of material density, turn into a feverish search for vital support, movements in the space of meanings. “Circumstances of consciousness” mean more to Platonov’s characters than everyday circumstances.

The “Brownian” chaotic “walking” of the characters embodies the author’s pity about their homelessness, orphanhood and loss in the world of ongoing grandiose projects. By building a “common proletarian house,” people find themselves homeless wanderers. At the same time, the author is close to his heroes in their unwillingness to stop, to be content with materially specific goals, no matter how outwardly attractive they may be. Platonov couples their search with “lunar purity of a distant scale,” “questioning sky,” and “the selfless but painful power of the stars.”

It is not surprising that in a world deprived of the usual space-time supports, the events described are also deprived of traditional cause-and-effect relationships. In a story, completely dissimilar episodes can coexist with each other, and their artistic meaning is revealed only when the reader captures in his mind’s eye the entire picture presented by the writer, when through the kaleidoscopic flashing of scenes he was able to discern a clear connection of motives. Let us trace, for example, how the “village theme”, associated with the motive of collectivization, arises and develops in the story. It originates in a seemingly random mention of a man “with yellow eyes” who ran to the team of diggers and settled in a barracks to do chores.

Soon it is he who turns out to be the “guilty bourgeois” for the inhabitants of the barracks, and therefore the disabled Zhachev deals him “two blows in the side.” Following this, another resident of a nearby village comes to the diggers with a request. In the ravine, which becomes part of the pit, the men hid coffins that they had prepared for future use “according to self-taxation.” “Everyone lives with us because he has his own coffin: it is now a complete household for us!” - the alien tells the diggers. His request is perceived completely calmly, as a matter of course; True, a small dispute arises between the workers and the peasant. Two coffins have already been used by Chiklin (one as a bed for Nastya, the other as a “red corner” for her toys), but the man insists on the return of two “small phobes” prepared according to their height for the village children.

This conversation is conveyed in the story in a neutral emotional tone, which gives the episode an absurd tone: it creates the impression of a bad dream, an obsession. The absurdity of what is happening is emphasized in the conversation between Nastya and Chiklin that follows the episode. Having learned from the foreman that the men who came for the coffins were not bourgeois at all, she, with the inexorable logic of a child, asks him: “Why do they need coffins then? Only the bourgeoisie should die, but the poor should not!” The author reports about the end of the conversation: “The diggers remained silent, not yet aware of the data to speak.”

In the actual rural scenes of the story there are even more semantic shifts: heterogeneous episodes adjacent to each other create the impression of logical incoherence, a kaleidoscopic flickering of fragments of a vague dream: an activist teaches peasant women political literacy, a bear recognizes village kulaks by smell and leads Chiklin and Voshchev to their huts, horses on their own they prepare straw for themselves, the dispossessed peasants say goodbye to each other before they all go together on a raft to the sea.

By weakening or completely destroying the cause-and-effect relationships between the events depicted, Platonov thereby reveals the monstrous illogicality of contemporary history, the absurd thoughtlessness of its creators. The grandiose project of a “common proletarian house” remains a mirage, and the only reality of the “new world” turns out to be the “abyss of the pit.”

SYSTEM OF CHARACTERS OF THE STORY. The central character of the story, Voshchev, represents the type of hero-observer characteristic of Plato's prose. He continues in his work a string of “thoughtful”, “doubted” and searching for the meaning of life heroes. “My body weakens without the truth...” he answers the diggers’ questions. All of Voshchev’s property fits into a bag, which he constantly carries with him: there he puts “all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity” - fallen leaves, grass roots, twigs, various rags. Behind the external eccentricity of his “gathering” there is an important worldview: the hero strives to prolong the existence of every thing in the world. His surname is an echo of this love for the substance of the world, for things different weights and caliber. At the same time, it reveals the phonetically close words “in general” and “in vain,” signaling the direction of the hero’s search (he strives to discover the meaning common existence) and about the sad futility of his comprehensive care (the search will be in vain).

Voshchev's closest circle in the story is represented by images of diggers. Many of them are nameless; their collective portrait comes to the fore, composed not from descriptions of faces, but from the most general biological characteristics: “Inside the barn, seventeen or twenty people were sleeping on their backs... All the sleepers were thin, like the dead, the tight space between the skin and bones of each was occupied by veins, and the thickness of the veins showed how much blood they must let through during stress labor." Against the background of this impersonal sketch, not so much individualized images appear, but rather generalized roles: foreman Chiklin, enthusiast Safronov, disabled Zhachev, “snitch” Kozlov. Trying to “forget” in the furious work, workers stop thinking, leaving this concern to managers like Pashkin. The truth for them is an intellectual mental game that does not change anything in reality, and they can only rely on their own super-efforts, on the enthusiasm of work.

Standing apart in the character system are the nameless “activist” and the engineer Prushevsky. The image of the first of them is a satirical embodiment of the “dead soul” of a bureaucratic leader, rushing to respond to the next directive of the authorities and bringing the “party line” to the point of absurdity. He draws up an “acceptance invoice” for coffins, arranges the peasants in the form of a five-pointed star, teaches young peasant women to read and write, forcing them to memorize words they do not understand: “Bolshevik, bourgeois, bourgeois, permanent chairman, the collective farm is the benefit of the poor, bravo-bravo-Leninists!” Place solid signs on the hillock and the Bolshevik...” The image of Prushevsky is another variant of the traditional type of scientist in Platonov’s prose, a lonely thinker who claims to conquer the natural elements. It is he who owns the project of the “eternal house” - a kind of modern Tower of Babel. Prushevsky’s moods are unstable: he either elegiacally recalls youthful love, or experiences bouts of hopelessness and decides to commit suicide, but in the end he leaves after the girl “in a poor scarf,” whose eyes attract him with “surprised love.”

However, Platonov makes hard-working and sincere workers the main characters of his story. They crave happiness not so much for themselves as for their descendants. Their very ideas about happiness are not revealed in any way, but they clearly do not resemble the “paradise” of their leader Pashkin, who lives as if already in the future, in satiety and contentment. Singles who believe that “happiness comes from materialism” easily get their share and are well settled. Such, for example, is the weak Kozlov, who goes to the city to “keep an eye on everything” and “strongly love the proletarian masses.” But for most workers, happiness is, first of all, the best life for children. Even though the diggers’ own life is difficult, it is sanctified by the meaning of existence of the girl Nastya, an orphan adopted by the workers.

Voshchev regards the girl as an angel on a church wall in childhood; he hopes that “this weak body, abandoned without kinship among people, will someday feel the warming flow of the meaning of life and its mind will see a time similar to the first primordial day.” Nastya becomes for the diggers a living symbol of the future, a material confirmation of the reality of their faith. The name Anastasia (“resurrected”), of Greek origin, carries in the context of the story the idea of ​​​​the resurrection of happiness. The more tragic and gloomy is the ending of the story, leading to the death of the girl who had already been “resurrected” once (Chiklin found her next to her dying mother). The semantic outcome of the event is summed up by the reflections of Voshchev, standing over the body of the just deceased Nastya: “He no longer knew where communism would be in the world now, if it was not first in a child’s feeling and convinced impression? Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement?

The portrait characteristics of the characters in “The Pit” are extremely scarce, so that the faces of most of the characters are visually unrepresentable. Practically ignoring physiognomic signs, Platonov “reads” faces as “existential” signs general condition peace. Thus, on the faces of the pioneer girls “the difficulty of the weakness of early life, the poverty of the body and the beauty of expression remained”; Kozlov had a “cloudy, monotonous face” and “damp eyes,” and Chiklin had a “small, rocky head.” Particularly interesting is the description of the appearance of a man who came running from the village: “He closed one eye and looked at everyone with the other, expecting the worst, but not intending to complain; his eye was that of a farmer, yellow color, appreciating all appearances with the sorrow of economy.”

The characters seem to be disembodied, their images are “reduced” to the idea or emotion they express. It is significant that the inhabitants of the village are absolutely devoid of proper names; people appear under crude sociological “nicknames”: “bourgeois”, “semi-bourgeois”, “kulak”, “sub-kulak”, “saboteur”, “mobilized cadre”, “helper of the avant-garde”, “ middle peasant”, “leading poor”, etc. In the “side column” of the list of destroyed kulaks, the activist writes down “signs of existence” and “property mood”: in the world of the realized utopia there is no place for living people.

But in full accordance with the logic of the absurd, it contains a place for animals, acting in the rural scenes of the story along with people and obeying the same norms of behavior. The horses, like the pioneer women, walk in formation, as if they were “certainly convinced of the collective farm system of life”; the hammer-bear works as selflessly at the forge as the diggers do in the pit, as if he realized himself as a “rural proletarian” and was imbued with a “class instinct”; but a lonely dog ​​wanders through a strange village “in the old fashioned way.” This artistic solution enhances the semantic ambiguity of the story. On the one hand, the idea of ​​the blood connection of man with nature, the unity of all life on earth, the reciprocity of human and natural principles is revealed. “His soul is a horse. Let him now live empty, and let the wind blow through him,” says Chiklin about the man left without a horse and feeling “empty inside.”

On the other hand, the use of zoomorphic (“animal-like”) imagery unexpectedly “grounds”, materializes, makes sensually perceptible and visual the abstract concepts of “class struggle”, “class instinct”, “socialization”. Thus, for example, the erased metaphor “class instinct” is realized when the blacksmith bear “suddenly growled near a solid, clean hut and did not want to go further”; “after three yards the bear growled again, indicating the presence of his class enemy here.” The implementation of the metaphor becomes even more obvious in Chiklin’s praise of the activist: “You are a conscious fellow, you smell classes like an animal.” People act like animals: Chiklin mechanically kills a man who happens to be at hand; Voshchev “makes a blow to the face” of the “under-kulak”, after which he does not respond; men do not distinguish between killing activists, livestock, cutting down trees and destroying their own flesh. Collectivization appears in the story as collective murder and suicide.

In the final scenes of the story, the men who joined the workers (survivors after collectivization) find themselves in the depths of the pit: “All the poor and middle-aged men worked with such diligence in life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit.” In this thirst for “salvation forever,” people and animals unite again in the finale: horses carry a rubble stone, a bear carries this stone in its front paws. “Save forever” in the context of “The Pit” means only one thing - to die. FEATURES OF LITERARY SPEECH. At the first acquaintance, Platonov’s language confuses the reader: against the background of normative literary language, it seems outlandish, pretentious, and incorrect. The main temptation in explaining such language is to recognize Plato’s use of words as ironic, to assume that Platonov deliberately, consciously twists the phrase in order to expose the absurdity, to emphasize the absurdity of what is depicted. “Even now you can be an assistant to the avant-garde and immediately have all the benefits of the future,” an activist of the collective farm named after the General Line decides for himself. The formulation of the activist’s thoughts, taken in itself, can be interpreted as a sign of the author’s irony towards the new “masters of life.” The problem, however, is that almost all of Platonov’s phrases are like this: with “displaced” word usage, with the replacement of a word with a synonym that is unsuitable at first glance, with persistently used pleonasms, with inversions that are not entirely explainable.

In Platonov’s prose there is no noticeable boundary between the words of the author and the words of the characters: without separating himself from the heroes, the author, as it were, learns to speak together with them, painfully searching for words. Platonov's language was shaped by the elements of the post-revolutionary years. In the 1920s the linguistic norm was rapidly changing: the lexical composition of the language expanded, words of different stylistic layers fell into the common cauldron of new speech; Everyday vocabulary coexisted with ponderous archaics, jargon coexisted with abstract concepts that were not yet “digested” by the consciousness of a person from the people. In this linguistic chaos, the established literary language hierarchy of meanings, the opposition of high and low styles disappeared. Words were read and used as if anew, outside the tradition of word usage, combined indiscriminately, regardless of belonging to one or another semantic field. In this verbal orgy, the main contradiction was formed between the globality of new meanings that required new words, and the lack of stable, established word usage, building material speech.

This is the linguistic ferment of the Platonic style. It must be said that there is no generally accepted, established opinion about the reasons for Platonov’s “strange speech”. One version is that the writer’s speaking style is deeply analytical. It is important for a writer not to depict the world, not to reproduce it in visual images, but to express a thought about the world, and “a thought tormented by feeling.” Platonov's word, no matter what abstract concept it expresses, strives not to lose the fullness of emotional feeling. Because of this emotional load, it is difficult for words to “grind” to each other; like unstripped wires, the connections of the words “spark.” Nevertheless, the connection of words turns out to be possible due to the fact that abstract words become materially denser and lose their familiar abstract meaning, and specific, “everyday” words receive symbolic illumination and are illuminated with additional figurative meaning. An allegory can be read literally, as a statement of fact, but an ordinary phrase, a specific designation is fraught with a clot of allegory.

An original verbal centaur emerges - a symbiosis of the abstract and the concrete. Here is a typical example: “The current time passed quietly in the midnight darkness of the collective farm; nothing disturbed the socialized property and the silence of the collective consciousness.” In this sentence, the abstract and unrepresentable “current time” is endowed with the signs of a material object moving in space: it moves “quietly” (how?) and in the “darkness of the collective farm” (where?). At the same time, the very specific designation of darkness (“midnight darkness”) acquires an additional semantic connotation - the phrase not so much denotes the time of day as it conveys an attitude towards the “gloom of the collective farm,” the obsession of collectivization.

According to another version, Platonov consciously subordinated himself to the “language of utopia,” the language of the era. He adopted the meaningless and designed for simple memorization (and not understanding) language of ideological cliches, dogmas and clichés in order to explode it from the inside, bringing it to the point of absurdity. Thus, Platonov deliberately violated the norms of the Russian language in order to prevent it from turning into the dumbing language of utopia. “Platonov himself subjugated himself to the language of the era, seeing in it such abysses, having looked into which once, he could no longer glide across the literary surface, occupied with the intricacies of the plot, typographical delights and stylistic laces,” Joseph Brodsky believed, calling at the end of his article Platonov’s language is “a language that compromises time, space, life and death itself.”

Platonov's leading stylistic device is an artistically justified violation of lexical compatibility and syntactic word order. Such a violation enlivens and enriches the phrase, giving it depth and ambiguity. Let’s do a small stylistic experiment: let’s put in brackets “extra”, optional from the point of view of common sense, words and phrases in the first sentence of the story: “On the day of his thirtieth birthday (personal life) Voshchev was given a settlement from a small mechanical plant (where he obtained funds for his existence )". A deliberately excessive clarification, marked here in brackets, disrupts the usual semantic balance of the phrase and complicates perception. But for Platonov, the main thing is not to report Voshchev’s dismissal, but to draw the reader’s attention to those “seeds of meaning” that will later sprout in the story: Voshchev will painfully search for the meaning of his personal life and general existence; The means of acquiring such meaning will be for the diggers to work hard in the pit. Thus, already in the first phrase there is a semantic “matrix” of the story, which determines the movement of its speech flow.

In Platonov's language, the word is not so much the unit of a sentence as the unit of the entire work. Therefore, within the framework of a specific sentence, it can be placed outwardly “incorrectly” - “at random.” The word is saturated with many contextual meanings and becomes a unit higher levels text, such as plot and artistic space. Violations of syntactic connections in individual sentences are necessary to create a unified semantic perspective of the entire story. That is why not all words turn out to be “superfluous”, formally “inappropriate” in the statements of Platonov’s characters. As a rule, these are words that convey a stable semantic and emotional complex: life, death, existence, languor, boredom, uncertainty, direction of movement, purpose, meaning, etc.

The signs of objects, actions, states seem to be torn away from the specific words with which they are usually combined, and begin to wander freely in the story, attached to “unusual” objects. There are many examples of such word usage in Platonov’s story: “mercilessly born,” “convex vigilance of an asset,” “unpleasant water flowed,” “dreary clay,” “difficult space.” It is obvious that the signs of objects or actions extend beyond the framework established by the linguistic norm; adjectives or adverbs take “out of place.” One of the frequently encountered features in Platonov’s language is the replacement of circumstances with definitions: “knock with a quiet hand” (instead of “knock softly”), “give an immediate whistle” (“immediately blow a whistle”), “hit with a silent head” (“silently hit with your head” ). In the world of the writer, the properties and qualities of the “stuff of existence” are more important and significant than the nature of the action. Hence the preference given by Platonov to the adjective (attribute of an object or phenomenon) over the adverb (attribute of action).

A coordinative connection in the language of a story can arise between qualitatively heterogeneous members: “the lamp and the spoken words made it stuffy and boring”; “The winds and grass were agitated all around by the sun.” Collective designations can replace a specific noun: “The kulak sector rode along the river to the sea and beyond.” Ordinary verbs begin to function as verbs of movement, receiving direction: “There’s nowhere to live, so you’re thinking in your head.” Adjectives usually attached to living people are used to describe inanimate objects: “patient, bent fences, puny machines.” Auditory, visual and taste sensations mix and interact: “hot woolen voice.”

Platonov regularly uses the method of implementing metaphor, when words that have lost their direct, objective meaning in speech are returned to their “natural” meaning. Often this transformation of a figurative meaning into a direct one is carried out in accordance with naive childish logic. So, sick Nastya asks Chiklin: “Try what a terrible heat I have under my skin. Take off my shirt, otherwise I’ll burn, I’ll get well - I won’t have anything to walk in!”

So, all elements of Platonov’s artistic world are subordinated to the main thing - an endless search, clarification of the meaning of what is happening. The scale of vision of the world - spatial, temporal, conceptual - is the scale of the universal whole, not the parts. The local disorder of actions, events, combinations of words is overcome by the highest orderliness of the author's view of the world. Semantic shifts within a sentence, episode, plot in Platonov’s prose most adequately reflect the real shift, the shift in the world order of the era of global transformations. Words, phrases, episodes in a writer’s prose cannot and should not be more understandable, more logical than the reality of life that they convey. In other words, it is Platonov’s “holy fool” prose that is the most accurate mirror of the fantastic reality of Soviet life in the 1920s-1930s.

“On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his personal life, Voshchev was given a settlement from a small mechanical plant, where he obtained funds for his existence. In the dismissal document they wrote to him that he was being removed from production due to an increase in weakness and thoughtfulness in him amid the general pace of work.” Voshchev goes to another city. In a vacant lot in a warm pit, he settles down for the night. At midnight he is awakened by a man mowing grass in a vacant lot. Kosar says that construction will soon begin here, and sends Voshchev to the barracks: “Go there and sleep until the morning, and in the morning you will find out.”

Voshchev wakes up with an artel of artisans, who feed him and explain that today the construction of a single building begins, where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle. Voshchev is given a shovel, he squeezes it with his hands, as if wanting to extract the truth from the dust of the earth. The engineer has already marked out the pit and tells the workers that the exchange should send fifty more people, but for now the work must begin with the leading team. Voshchev digs along with everyone else, he “looked at people and decided to live somehow, since they endure and live: he came into existence with them and will die in due time inseparably from people.”

The diggers are gradually settling in and getting used to working. Comrade Pashkin, the chairman of the regional trade union council, often comes to the pit and monitors the pace of work. “The pace is quiet,” he tells the workers. - Why do you regret increasing productivity? Socialism will manage without you, and without it you will live in vain and die.”

In the evenings, Voshchev lies with his eyes open and yearns for the future, when everything will become generally known and placed in a stingy feeling of happiness. The most conscientious worker, Safronov, suggests installing a radio in the barracks to listen to achievements and directives; the disabled, legless Zhachev objects: “It’s better to bring an orphan girl by the hand than your radio.”

The excavator Chiklin finds in an abandoned building of a tile factory, where he was once kissed by the owner's daughter, a dying woman with a little daughter. Chiklin kisses a woman and recognizes from the trace of tenderness on her lips that this is the same girl who kissed him in his youth. Before her death, the mother tells the girl not to tell anyone whose daughter she is. The girl asks why her mother is dying: from a potbelly stove, or from death? Chiklin takes her with him.

Comrade Pashkin installs a radio speaker in the barracks, from which every minute demands are heard in the form of slogans - about the need to collect nettles, trim the tails and manes of horses. Safronov listens and regrets that he cannot speak back into the pipe so that they know about his sense of activity. Voshchev and Zhachev become unreasonably ashamed of the long speeches on the radio, and Zhachev shouts: “Stop this sound! Let me answer it!” Having listened to the radio enough, Safronov sleeplessly looks at the sleeping people and expresses with grief: “Oh, you mass, mass. It's hard to organize a skeleton of communism out of you! And what do you want? Such a bitch? You tortured the entire avant-garde, you bastard!”

The girl who came with Chiklin asks him about the features of the meridians on the map, and Chiklin replies that these are fences from the bourgeoisie. In the evening, the diggers do not turn on the radio, but, having eaten, sit down to look at the girl and ask her who she is. The girl remembers what her mother told her and talks about how she doesn’t remember her parents and that she didn’t want to be born under the bourgeoisie, but how Lenin became - and she became. Safronov concludes: “And our Soviet power is deep, since even children, not remembering their mother, can already sense Comrade Lenin!”

At the meeting, the workers decide to send Safronov and Kozlov to the village in order to organize collective farm life. They are killed in the village - and other diggers, led by Voshchev and Chiklin, come to the aid of the village activists. While a meeting of organized members and unorganized individual workers is taking place at the Organizational Yard, Chiklin and Voshchev are putting together a raft nearby. Activists designate people according to a list: the poor for the collective farm, the kulaks for dispossession. To more accurately identify all the kulaks, Chiklin takes to help a bear who works in the forge as a hammerman. The bear remembers well the houses where he used to work - these houses are used to identify the kulaks, who are driven onto a raft and sent along the river current to the sea. The poor people remaining in the Orgyard march in place to the sounds of the radio, then dance, welcoming the arrival of collective farm life. In the morning, people go to the forge, where they can hear the hammer bear working. The members of the collective farm burn all the coal, repair all the dead equipment and, sad that the work is over, sit down by the fence and look at the village in bewilderment about their future lives. Workers lead villagers to the city. In the evening, travelers come to the pit and see that it is covered with snow, and the barracks are empty and dark. Chiklin lights a fire to warm the sick girl Nastya. People pass by the barracks, but no one comes to visit Nastya, because everyone, with their heads bowed, is constantly thinking about complete collectivization. By morning Nastya dies. Voshchev, standing over the quiet child, thinks about why he now needs the meaning of life if there is no this small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement.

Zhachev asks Voshchev: “Why did you bring the collective farm?” “The men want to join the proletariat,” Voshchev answers. Chiklin takes a crowbar and a shovel and goes to dig at the far end of the pit. Looking around, he sees that the entire collective farm is constantly digging the ground. All the poor and average men work with such zeal as if they want to escape forever in the abyss of the pit. The horses don’t stand either: the collective farmers use them to carry stone. Only Zhachev does not work, mourning the death of Nastya. “I’m a freak of imperialism, and communism is a child’s business, that’s why I loved Nastya... I’ll go and kill Comrade Pashkin now as a farewell,” says Zhachev and crawls away on his cart to the city, never to return to the foundation pit.

Chiklin digs a deep grave for Nastya so that the child will never be disturbed by the noise of life from the surface of the earth.

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