Platonov's aphrodite summary. Literary direction and genre

Platonov's story "Fro" is a small sketch from the life of a simple family. There are almost no events in this work. Not the plot, but the images are important in the story "Fro". Brief summary and can be read in this article.

The main character is a girl named Efrosinya. Her father, a retired railway worker, affectionately calls her Frosya. Husband gave a strange name - Fro. Actions in the story begin from the moment when the husband of the main character is leaving in an unknown direction for an indefinite period.

Yearning

What is the story "Fro" about? The summary can be summarized as follows: the husband left for a long time, and the wife is extremely sad. But the idea of the work is deeper.

Life for Frosya really lost its meaning. She dropped out of the railroad communications course, inspired by her husband's extraordinary intellect. But he left, and everything around lost its color. Life has become colorless and dull, and there is only room for sadness. But not only Frosya was seized by this painful feeling. Her father is also in anguish.

Nefed Stepanovich retired. He has worked so long that he cannot live otherwise. Having become a pensioner, he comes every day to his former workplace, wanders there for a long time, gives out useful advice to his former colleagues, and then returns home tired, under the illusion that his fatigue is the result of a useful pastime. This is the plot of the work "Fro". A brief summary of other, less significant events, however, should be stated.

Return

The old man is so punctual in his visits to the depot that they eventually take him back. It is returned to its original place, but now it works in a different mode. Nefed Stepanovich is called only in an emergency, when, for example, one of the mechanics falls ill. But he is happy. And now the reserve mechanic is in full readiness day and night. He does not take off his work clothes even during sleep. Every evening he has a hearty supper and tries not to waste his energy. After all, he can be called, and at work nothing should interfere with the normal labor process.

Frosya fraudulently summons her husband. She sends him a telegram on behalf of her father, in which he allegedly speaks of the imminent death of her daughter. The husband arrives and does not hold a grudge against the liar. They are happy and remain in this state for several days. But one day he disappears again. The girl is left alone, and already somewhere far away, perhaps in the Far East, the man who called her by the strange name Fro ...

Work

Ordinary people, who are characterized by both sadness and joy, were portrayed by Andrei Platonov. Fro one day, walking along the platform, sees workers carrying construction tools. The girl expresses a desire to join the work and, when she gets to work, forgets for a while her longing for her husband.

There is no need to talk about the role of labor in the life of Father Frosya. Inaction is killing him. The absence of work duties both confuses and frightens him, and makes him sad. The image of this hero deserves special attention.

Brief analysis of the story

"Fro" is a work that can be called a sad story about a little man. The image of the main character - Father Frosya - is sad and touching. Moreover, the reader's sympathy can be caused not so much by his longing for work as by his relationship with his daughter.

Nefed Stepanovich appears in the work as a gentle, active, talkative person. With the help of small details, he depicted his image of Platonov. “Fro” is a story in which the main background at first glance is created by the experiences of the heroine. However, on closer examination, it turns out that the image of the father plays almost the main role. After all, it is no coincidence that the story “Fro” is filled with subtle hints and details that the author seems to accidentally add to the story. The image of Father Frosya is characterized by the following fragments:

The father happily awaits the return of his daughter, because he loves to talk to her. But he, the author mentions, is happy to have conversations with anyone. And therein lies his loneliness.
The backup mechanic annoys his daughter, and she throws hurtful words in his face. He is not sad. After all, Frosya's father knows that children are enemies, and you should not be angry with enemies. But then Platonov depicts him crying alone.
He is crying over a pot of yesterday's pasta, and suddenly a notice arrives: he is called to work. The mechanic immediately transforms and becomes energetic and outwardly cheerful. Perhaps work for him is not only a habitual way of life, but also a way to get rid of loneliness?
At the end of the story, before the second departure of Frosya's husband, the father spends several days at the station. And my daughter doesn't notice. And this is, perhaps, the main idea in Platonov's story: the closest people are sometimes incredibly far away.

"Fro" is a semi-fantastic, partly even surreal story by Andrei Platonov, written in the genre of "socialist romance". It differs from the works of official Soviet literature in its light, humane spirit.

The twenty-year-old woman Frosya Evstafieva was called "Fro" by her relatives and friends. Fro's husband, Fyodor, was a technician who dreamed of transforming the world with the help of machines for the benefit and enjoyment of mankind. Once he went away from his wife - to the Far East, to set up mysterious electrical appliances there.

Seeing him off at the railway station, Fro felt that life had lost its meaning for her. At home, only her widowed father was now waiting for her - an elderly locomotive driver, who now, due to his old age, worked as a reserve mechanic. Fro looked at her husband's childhood photo for a long time, which stood on her desk.

When it got dark, she walked along the railway, looking at the passing trains and wondering if they had met Fyodor's train along the way. To drown out the anguish, Fro joined a group of women walking past with shovels. She, too, was given a shovel and set to clean the slag pit where the locomotives cleaned their fireboxes. The work was hard, in the midst of burning and gas, but Fro's soul felt better: in labor she lived with people and saw a big, free night.

Fro met one of the women who just today got out of prison, where she spent four days at the slander of an evil man, her own former lover. After work, the two of them went to the club.

Fro was invited to the dance by a dispatcher. To the music, she again became so homesick that she laid her head on the dispatcher's chest. He recoiled slightly: his fiancee was in the audience, who "could have maimed him for being close to Fro." Fro's eyes were full of tears.

The next morning, Frosya received a telegram from her husband from the Urals. There were words of love. Her sad romantic mood was amplified by the sound of a harmonica. A little boy was playing on it one floor upstairs. Fro went to classes on railway communication, but instead of giving a lecture she wrote in her notebook: "Fedya, come soon."

She returned home again in tears and, lying on the bed, eagerly waited for the little musician upstairs to play.

"Fro". Film based on the story by Andrey Platonov, 1964

There was no more news from Fedor. Fearing that letters from him would not be lost in the mail, she went to work as a letter carrier and carefully examined all the incoming envelopes. Fro waited for two weeks in vain, once she even ran away out of boredom into the field with a mail bag. But on the same day in the evening she received a telegram from Fyodor with his new address and a kiss.

That same night, Fro asked her father to take a reply telegram to the post office. Father read it to her before sending it. It was written there: “Leave by the first train, your wife, daughter Frosya, is dying at death, a complication of the respiratory tract, father Nefed Evstafiev.” The father, after hesitating, sent a telegram.

Fedor arrived from the Far East seven days later. Seeing a healthy Fro on the platform, he rushed to hug her. At home, they immediately went to bed and spent several days in it. Fyodor was explaining in detail to Fro his projects on the transmission of power energy without wires, using ionized air, and she listened as if spellbound. Conversations were replaced by loving embraces.

A week later, Fedor said that it was time to "work and live as you need." But Fro insisted on being alone for another day. The next day she said the same thing.

On the 10th or 12th day of the inseparable date, Fro woke up late and saw that her husband was not around. She thought that Fedor had gone away for a short time, but the old father said: her husband again got on the train and left for the Far East, and from there he dreams of penetrating into Southern, Soviet China and fighting for socialism there.

Fro did not know whether to say goodbye to Fyodor forever or to wait for him. There was a knock on the door. It was the little boy upstairs who was playing the harmonica. Fro took the boy by the arms and admired him. He, probably, was the humanity that Fedor was going to make happy.

Was his Aphrodite still alive? - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin now turned not to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars, and the horizon, and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or a vague signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or whether her chest had already cooled. He left the dugout in the field, stopped in front of a blue naive flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? You know better there, you are connected with the whole earth, and I go separately - is Aphrodite alive or not? The flower did not change from his anguish and question, he was silent and lived in his own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as he had passed before, perhaps over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from a height, one could perhaps see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and one can notice the sadness of loss or contentment from the safety of one's property, and wanted to see through the general connection of all the living and the dead in the world a barely distinguishable, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.

Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved creature in any way to save him. Aphrodite was a young, intelligent, accommodating woman and should not be lost without a trace or die of starvation among her own people. Admissible, of course, misfortune on long roads or accidental death. However, neither in nature nor in people could one notice any voice and shudder, answering the sad news to the open, expectant heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.

Fomin indulged in recollection, repeating in himself what he once experienced with the immobility of eternal stopped happiness ... He saw with his memory a small city lit by the sun, dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under a blue sky. At noon, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the office of fire-resistant construction, in which he served as a foreman. A gramophone was playing in the café. Fomin went to the sideboard, asked for sausages with cabbage, the so-called "letuchka", that is, salted peas that are thrown into the mouth in free flight, and in addition took a mug of beer. A woman who specially works on beer poured the drink into a mug, and Fomin followed the beer stream, demanding in principle that they pour it to hell and not fill the containers with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never looked carefully into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But once that woman took a deep, inadvertent sigh at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter for a long time. She, too, looked at him: the foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, forgetting herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" Fomin said to her then, and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear in face, with dark shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair growing with wild strength on her head. Fomin averted his gaze from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and then that feeling did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the person to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent to the fact that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble plane of the bar. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him over the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived as a husband and wife for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate among plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question at the celestial manifestations of clouds and stars. The Information Bureau for the evacuees has been looking for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina intensively and for a long time, but has not yet found her. Closer to Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich did not have a person; he had been accustomed all his life to conversing with her, because it helped his thinking and inspired him with confidence in the work he was doing. And now, in the war, being separated from Aphrodite for the fourth year, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin writes long letters to her in every free time and sends them to the information desk of the evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters would be handed to the addressee upon finding him. During the war, many such letters, probably, have accumulated in the information bureau - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will fade away without being read. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and in detail, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he has never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army men and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander would not be lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters from either his wife or relatives.

Those happy peaceful years are long gone now. And they could not last forever, because happiness must change in order to be preserved. In the war, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin found his other happiness, different than the former peaceful labor, but also akin to it; after the war, he hoped to know a higher life than that which he had already experienced as a worker and a warrior.

* * *

Our avant-garde units occupied the southern city in which Fomin lived and worked before the war. Fomin's regiment was in reserve and was not put into action due to lack of need.

Fomin's regiment settled down in the city area in the second echelon, in order to then move on a distant march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on the very first day and went on a visit to the dearest city for him in all of Russian land. The city was crushed by artillery fire, burned by the flames of fires, and its solid buildings were blown up by the enemy to dust. Fomin was already accustomed to seeing the grain fields trampled down by machines, the earth wounded by trenches and the settlements of people torn down by the blows of fire; it was the plowing of war, where something was sown in the ground that should never grow on it again - the corpses of villains, and that which was born for a good active life, but doomed only to eternal memory - the flesh of our soldiers posthumously guarding in the earth fallen enemy.

Fomin walked through the orchard to the place where the cafe of Aphrodite had once been. It was December. The bare fruit trees had cooled down for the winter and were numb in a sad sleep, and their outstretched branches, which had held fruits in autumn, were now cut through by bursts of bullets and hung helplessly down on the residual fibers of the wood, and only rare branches were preserved in a healthy integrity. Many trees were completely cut down by the Germans as material for building defenses.

The house, where more than twenty years ago there was a cafe, and then there was a dwelling, now lay crumbled into rubble and garbage, killed and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin still remembered the appearance of this house, but soon, after time, it fades into him, and he will forget it. Is it not so somewhere in the distant, decayed field now lies the cold large beloved body of Aphrodite, and cadaverous creatures devour it, it melts in water and air, and it dries and is carried away by the wind, so that all the substance of Aphrodite's life is squandered in the world evenly and without a trace for the person to be forgotten.

He went further to the outskirts of the city, where he lived as a child. Desolateness chilled his soul, the late posthumous wind blew in the ruins of silent dwellings. He saw the place where he lived and played in his infancy. The old wooden house burned to the very foundations, the tiles crumbling from the intense heat lay on top of his children's monastery on the scorched earth. The poplar in the yard, under which little Nazar slept in the summer, was cut down and lay near its stump, dead, with decayed bark.

Fomin stood by this tree of his childhood for a long time. His numb heart suddenly became as if insensible, so as not to receive any more sadness. Then Fomin collected a few surviving tiles and stacked them in a small regular pile, as if he were preparing material for future construction or collecting seeds to sow Russia again. This tile and all the others that are in the area were made in the workshops that Fomin established here in the old peacetime and which he was in charge of for whole years.

Fomin went to the steppe; there, two versts from the city, he once laid and built his first pond dam. He was then a happy builder, but now the field of his youth was sad and empty, dug up by war and barren; unfamiliar blades of grass were occasionally seen on the melted fine snow and, indifferent to man, dutifully swayed in the wind ... An earthen dam was blown up in the middle of its body, and the reservoir dried up, and the fish in it died.

Fomin returned to the city. He found Shevchenko Street and the house in which he lived after returning from Rostov, when he graduated from the Polytechnic School there. There was no house, but a bench remained; she used to stand under the windows of his apartment; he sat in the evenings on this bench, at first alone, and later with Aphrodite, and in this now-decayed house they then lived together in one room, with windows overlooking the street. His father, a foundry foreman, died suddenly when Fomin was still studying in Rostov, and his mother remarried and left for permanent residence in Kazan. Young Nazar Fomin was then left to live alone, but the whole world, illuminated by the sun, full of attractive people, attracting the world of youth and unresolved eternal secrets, a world not yet settled and meager, but animated by the hope and will of the Bolshevik workers - this world was expecting a young man, and the familiar native land, starved, bare by the calamities of the First World War, lay before him.

Fomin sat down on a bench where he spent many quiet summer evenings in conversation and in love with Aphrodite. Now before him was an empty, ruined world, and his best friend, perhaps, was no longer in the world. Everything must now be done anew in order to continue what was planned a quarter of a century ago.

Probably, Nazar Fomin's life would have taken a completely different course if, in the past days of his youth, he had not been inspired by faith in the meaning of the life of the working class. He might have gone on with his life more calmly, but despondently and fruitlessly; he would have had his separate fate, but he would not have known that fate when, having entrusted to the people only one of his heart, he felt and learned more than it is necessary for one, and he began to live with the whole breath of mankind. One person cannot understand the meaning and purpose of his existence. When he clings to the people who gave birth to him, and through him to nature and the world, to the past time and future hope, then that secret source opens for his soul, from which a person must feed in order to have inexhaustible strength for his deed and strength. faith in the necessity of his life.

The peers of Nazar Fomin, Komsomols and Bolsheviks, were animated by the same idea of creating a new world, they, like Nazar, were convinced that they were called by Lenin to participate in the global feat of mankind - in order to finally begin on earth the time of true life, so that all the hopes of people may be fulfilled, which they have earned through centuries of labor and mortal sacrifices, which they have saved in long experience and in patient reflection ...

After graduating from a special school in Rostov-on-Don, Nazar Fomin returned to his homeland, to the same city, where he was now sitting alone. Nazar then became a construction technician, and the work of his life began. He took everything material, gray and ordinary so close to his heart that it became spiritual for him and fed his passion for work. Now he no longer remembered whether he was aware at that time that everything truly sublime is born only from worldly need; but he then did this transformation of the material into the spiritual with his own hands, and he believed in the truth of the revolution, because he himself made it and saw its effect on the fate of the people.

Nazar Fomin was initially in charge of rural fire-resistant construction in the region; it was considered a small position. But he was inspired by this work, he accepted it into his heart - not as a service, but as the meaning of his existence - and looked with passionate eyes at the tile product first made in a handicraft workshop; he then stroked the first tiled tile, sniffed it and took it to his room where he lived in order to examine it again in the evening and in the morning - is it really quite good and durable so that for many years to lie instead of straw in the roof of rural huts and thereby save peasant dwellings from fires. At the same time, he studied the statistics of fires in his area according to Zemstvo information and calculated that if tiles replaced a thatched roof, then the peasantry, from the sheer savings on fire losses, could, for example, in three years build in each village an artesian well with abundant healthy water or anything else, and in the next three or four years it is possible to build a local electric station with a mill and a grain grinder with the same funds saved by tiles from fire. From these considerations, Nazar Fomin could, without getting bored, look at the tile for a long time and think about how to make it even stronger and cheaper - the tile was then his feeling and experience, it replaced his book and friend - a person; later he realized that no object could replace a person for him, but in his youth, only the imagination of a person was enough for him.

There are times when people live only in hopes and expectation of a change in their fate; there is a time when only the memory of the past consoles the living generation, and there is a happy time when the historical development of the world coincides in people with the movement of their hearts. Nazar Fomin was a man of a happy time for his people, and at first, like many of his peers and like-minded people, he thought that an era of meek joy, peace, brotherhood and bliss had come, which would gradually spread throughout the earth. In order for this to happen in reality, it is enough just to build and work: this is how the young man Fomin believed at that time.

And Nazar Fomin created peace of mind for himself with love for his wife Aphrodite and his fidelity to her; he humbled in himself all the vague passions that carried him into the dark sides of the sensual world, where one can only uselessly, although perhaps sweetly, waste his life, and he devoted his strength to work and service to the idea that became the attraction of his heart - to that that did not squander man, but regenerated him again and again, in which his pleasure began to consist, not furious and exhausting, but meek, like quiet goodness.

Nazar Fomin in those days was busy, like his generation of people, with the spiritualization of the world, which had hitherto existed in a wretched form, in fragmentation and without a common clear meaning.

At the beginning of his work, Fomin made tiles for fire-resistant coatings; then his duties increased, and soon he was elected deputy chairman of the village council, and in the real significance of his activity, he became the chief engineer of all work in the village and in the surrounding area. Then even this city was considered a settlement, which was a district or volost center.

Fomin built dams in the dry steppe for watering livestock, he dug wells in the villages with concrete rings for fastening and paved roads throughout the district from local rock in order to overcome the poverty of the economy by all means and introduce the lonely peasant soul to all the people.

But even then he was thinking of more essential things, and even in his dreams the same thought continued in him, encouraging him with happiness. For two years, Fomin prepared his business, until the district executive committee entrusted him with starting it. This business consisted in building an electric station in the settlement, with the gradual expansion of the electrical network from it to the entire volost - the district, in order to give the people light for reading books, machine power to facilitate their work and warmth in winter for heating dwellings and livestock buildings. From the fulfillment of this simple dream, the entire way of life of the population must change, and then a person will feel liberation from poverty and grief, from the burden of labor, exhausting him to the bone and yet unreliable, not giving him well-being in life ...

Shadows of memory now passed over the face of Colonel Fomin, who sat in the midst of the ruins of the damaged city that he had once created with his comrades. Memories imprinted on his face either a smile, or sadness, or a calm imagination of a long time ago.

He then built an electric station. There was a ball in the volpolitprosvet club in honor of the opening to action of a powerful electrical power plant for that time, and Aphrodite then danced at that ball, illuminated by the radiance of electricity, to an orchestra of three button accordions, and she was happier than Nazar himself, because her husband’s business was successful.

But it was difficult then for Fomin to build. Volost funds were released from the budget a little; Therefore, it was necessary to explain to the entire population of the volost the benefits of electricity, so that the people would invest their labor and their accumulated funds in the construction of the station and the electrical network. For the sake of this, Fomin then organized thirty-four peasant associations for electrification and united them into a volost union. It cost him a lot of heart, anxiety and restless work. He remembered one peasant orphan girl, Evdokia Remeiko; her parents left her a small girlish dowry, she contributed it without a trace to her share, and then, more diligently and more willingly than many, she worked as a second-hand carpenter on the construction of the station building. Now Evdokia Remeiko, if she is still alive in the world, then she is already an elderly woman, but if she were young, she would probably serve in the Red Army or fight in a partisan detachment. Fomin remembered many more people who worked with him then - peasants and peasant women, suburban residents, old men and young men. With all sincerity and sincerity, with all their skill, they built a new world on earth: their hidden, suppressed abilities then appeared outward and began to develop in meaningful, gracious work; their soul, their understanding of life brightened and grew when plants grow from the ground from which stone slabs have been removed. The station was not yet fully completed and equipped, and Fomin already saw with satisfaction that its builders - peasants who voluntarily worked in addition to their grain labor in the fields - went so deep into the matter and felt through it an interest in each other and their connection with the working class who made machines for the production of electricity, that the wretched loneliness of their hearts departed from them and the indifference to the entire unfamiliar world and fear of it also began to leave them. True, in the secret plan of each person there is a desire to leave his yard, from his loneliness, in order to see and experience the whole universe, but it is necessary to find ways that are feasible and accessible to all for this. The old peasant Eremeev then expressed to Fomin his vague thought about the same: “Or do we not feel, Nazar Ivanovich, that the Soviet government gives us a rush of life: act, they say, rejoice and answer for good and for famously, you, they say, are now on earth is not a stranger passerby. And before that, what kind of life was: you lie in your mother’s womb - you don’t remember yourself, you went outside - grief and misfortune oppresses you, you live in a hut, like in a casemate, and you can’t see the light, but you died - lie quietly in a coffin and forget, what you were. Everywhere we had a cramped place, Nazar Ivanovich - a womb, a casemate and a grave - and one unconsciousness. And after all, everyone interfered with everything! And now everyone is helping everyone - that's where it is, Soviet power and cooperation!

Where is that old man Eremeev now? Maybe it still exists, although hardly, much time has passed ...

The power plant did not operate for long; seven days after it was put into operation, it burned down. Nazar Fomin was at that hour forty miles from the settlement; he left to inspect the dam near the Dubrovka farm, washed out by the autumn flood, and establish the amount of work to restore it. He was informed about the fire with a messenger on horseback, and Fomin immediately went back.

On the outskirts of the settlement, where only yesterday there was a new adobe building of the power plant, now it has become empty. Everything crumbled to dust. Only the dead metal bodies of the machines remained - the vertical engine and generator. But from the heat, all its copper parts flowed out of the body of the engine; came down and stiffened on the foundation, streams of tears, bearings and fittings; the contact rings at the generator melted and swelled, the winding went into smoke and all the copper boiled away into nothing.

Nazar Fomin stood near his dead cars, looking at him with blind holes of burnt tender parts, and wept. The stormy wind rattled dejectedly the iron sheets on the floor, curled up from the heat they had endured. Fomin looked at the sky in that sad hour of his life; dark clouds of autumn were moving overhead, driven by gloomy bad weather; it was boring there and there was no sympathy for man, because all nature, even though it is big, is all alone, knowing nothing but itself. Only here, what was burned in the fire, was it different; here was a world created by people in sympathy with each other, here in a small form the hope for a higher life was fulfilled, for the change and revival in the future of all painful, oppressive nature, a hope that exists, perhaps, in the whole universe only in the heart and consciousness man, and not just any man, but only that one who first through sacrifice, work and revolution made his way to such an understanding of his destiny. How small, then, is this beneficent force in the dimensions of the vast world, and how it must be protected.

A sad time has come for Nazar Fomin; the investigating authorities informed him that the station had burned down not by accident or negligence, but had been burned by a villainous hand. Fomin could not immediately understand this - how what is good for everyone can cause hatred and become a cause of villainy. He went to see the man who burned down the station. The criminal seemed to him an ordinary person, and he did not regret his action. In his words, Fomin felt unsatisfied hatred, with which the criminal fed his spirit even under arrest. Now Fomin no longer remembered exactly his face and words, but he remembered his undisguised anger in front of him, the main builder of the destroyed people's creation, and his explanation of his act as an action necessary to satisfy his mind and conscience. Fomin then silently listened to the criminal and realized that it was impossible to convince him with a word, but it was possible to convince him with deeds, but only he would never give the opportunity to complete the work to the end, he would constantly destroy and destroy what had not been built by him at the beginning.

Fomin saw a creature about which he assumed that he either did not exist at all, or that after the revolution he already lives in a weak and harmless state. In fact, this creature lived a violent life and even had its own mind, in the truth of which it believed. And then Fomin's faith in near bliss on the whole earth was broken by doubt; the whole picture of the bright future in front of his mental gaze seemed to recede into a foggy horizon, and under his feet again lay gray, hard, impassable land, along which it was necessary to go for a long time to that radiant world that seemed so close and achievable.

Peasants, builders and shareholders of the power plant made a meeting. At the meeting, they listened to Fomin's words and thought in silence, not concealing their common grief. Then Evdokia Remeiko came out and timidly said that it was necessary to raise funds again and rebuild the burnt station; in a year or a year and a half, you can do it all over again with your own hands, said Remeiko, and maybe much sooner. “What are you, a girl,” a cheered peasant answered her from a place, no one knows who, “you lived one dowry in the fire, you put the other in the same place: so you won’t get married to the grave, you’ll wither in overstark!”

Having discussed the matter of how much state insurance will be issued in case of a fire, how much the state will help with a loan, how much will be left to add from the acquired labor, the shareholders made it their common concern to build the station for the second time. “The electricity has gone out,” said Yevtukhov, a craftsman in the cooper business, “and we will continue to live inextinguishably! And for you, Nazar Ivanovich, we all mericand in a caricatic sense to build according to the plan and scale, as it was! Evtukhov loved to recommend both great and small deeds for execution in a categorical sense; he lived categorically and revolutionary and invented a round ball barrel. As if a warm light touched the then darkened soul of Nazar Fomin. Not knowing what to do or say, he touched Evdokia Remeiko and, ashamed of people, wanted to kiss her on the cheek, but dared to kiss only the dark hair above her ear. So it was then, and a living feeling of happiness, the smell of the Remeiko girl's hair, her meek image are still preserved in Fomin's memories.

And again, Nazar Fomin built an electric station in the same place, twice as powerful as the one that died in the fire. This work took almost two years. During this time, Aphrodite left Nazar Fomin; she fell in love with another man, one engineer who came from Moscow to install a radio center, and married him with a second marriage. Fomin had many friends among the peasants and the working people, but without his beloved Aphrodite, he felt like an orphan, and his heart trembled in loneliness. He used to constantly think that his faithful Aphrodite was a goddess, but now she was pathetic in her need, in her need for the pleasure of a new love, in her attachment to joy and pleasure, which were stronger than her will, stronger than her loyalty and proud steadfastness. in relation to the one who loved her constantly and uniquely. However, even after separation from Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin could not wean from her and loved her as before; he didn’t want to fight his feeling, which had now turned into suffering: even if circumstances took his wife away from him and she physically moved away from him, but it’s not necessary to have close possession of a person and rejoice only near him - it is enough to feel a loved one as a permanent resident of your heart; this, however, is more difficult and painful than close, satisfied possession, because love for the indifferent lives only at the expense of its true strength, not feeding on anything in return. But do Fomin and other people of his country change the world for a better fate in order to dominate it or then use it as property? .. Fomin also remembered that he then had a strange thought that remained inexplicable. He felt, in separation from Aphrodite, that the villainous force again entered across his life path; in its original cause it was, perhaps, the same force that burned the power plant. He understood the difference of events, he saw them inconsistently, but they equally severely destroyed his life, and the same person opposed them. It is possible that he himself was guilty before Aphrodite - after all, it happens that evil is done without desire, involuntarily and imperceptibly, and even when a person strains to do good to another person. This must be because each heart is different from the other: one, receiving the good, turns it entirely to its own need, and nothing of the good remains for the other; another heart is capable of reworking evil, turning it into good and strength - for itself and for others.

After the loss of Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin realized that universal bliss and enjoyment of life, as he imagined them until then, is a false dream and that is not the truth of man and his real bliss. Overcoming his suffering, enduring what could destroy him, rebuilding what was destroyed, Fomin suddenly felt a free joy, independent of either the villain or chance. He understood his former naivete, his whole nature began to harden, ripening in disasters, and to learn the ability to overcome, to work the stone grief that gets in the way of life; and then the world before him, hitherto, as it seemed to him, clear and accessible, now spread into a distant mysterious darkness - not because it was really dark, sad or scary, but because it really was greater in all directions and at once it cannot be surveyed - neither in the human soul, nor in simple space. And this new idea was more satisfying to Fomin, for the sake of which, as he used to think, only people lived for some kind of wretched bliss.

But then, together with his generation, he was only at the beginning of a new life path for the entire Russian Soviet people; and everything that Nazar Fomin experienced at that time was only an introduction to his difficult fate, the initial test of a young man and his preparation for the necessary historical work, which his people undertook to accomplish. In essence, there is something base and fragile in the striving for happiness for oneself alone; only with a feat and the fulfillment of his duty to the people who conceived him into the world does a person begin, and this is his highest satisfaction or true eternal happiness, which no calamity, no sorrow, no despair can destroy. But then he could not hide his sadness from his misfortunes, and if there had not been people around him who loved him as a like-minded person, perhaps he would have completely lost heart and not recovered. “Calm down,” one close comrade told him with sadness of understanding, “you calm down! What else did you expect - who prepared joy and truth for us here? We ourselves must make them, because our party makes the meaning of life in the world ... Our party is the guard of humanity, and you are the guard! The Party does not educate blessed calves, but heroes for the great epoch of wars and revolutions... We will face more and more tasks, we will climb such mountains, from where all horizons will be visible to the very end of the world! What are you whining and bored! Live with us - what do you want, everything is warm from one home stove and from your wife, or what! You yourself are smart - you know, we do not need a weak, self-protective creature! Another time has now come!”

Fomin heard the word “guard” for the first time… His life went on. Aphrodite, the wife of Nazar Fomin, offended by the infidelity of her second husband, once met Nazar and told him that she was sad and yearning for him, that she misunderstood life, wanting only to enjoy it and not know any duty or duties. Nazar Fomin silently listened to Aphrodite; jealousy and wounded pride still existed in him, suppressed, almost silent, but still alive, like immortal creatures. But his joy in the face of Aphrodite, the closeness of her heart beating towards him, killed his miserable sadness, and after more than two years of separation, he kissed Aphrodite's hand, which was outstretched to him.

New years of life have come. Many times circumstances turned Fomin into a victim, brought him to the brink of death, but his spirit could no longer be exhausted in hopelessness or despondency. He lived, thought and worked, as if constantly feeling a big hand leading him gently and firmly forward - into the fate of the heroes. And the same hand that led him rigidly forward, the same big hand warmed him, and its warmth penetrated to his heart.

Goodbye, Aphrodite! Nazar Fomin said aloud.

Wherever she is now, dead or alive, it’s all the same here, in this depopulated city, there are still traces of her feet on the ground and things that she once held in her hands were kept in the form of ash, imprinting warmth in them. her fingers, - there were imperceptible signs of her life everywhere, which are never completely destroyed, no matter how deeply the world may change. Fomin's feeling for Aphrodite was satisfied in its modesty even by the fact that she once breathed here and the air of her homeland still contains the scattered warmth of her lips and the faint smell of her disappeared body - after all, there is no traceless destruction in the world.

Goodbye, Aphrodite! I can only feel you now in my memory, but I want to see you all, alive and whole! ..

Fomin got up from the bench, looked at the city, which had sunk low into its ruins, now freely visible from end to end, bowed to him and went back to the regiment. His heart, taught to be patient, was able to endure, perhaps even eternal separation, and it was able to maintain fidelity and a sense of affection until the end of its existence. Secretly, he had in himself the pride of a soldier who can perform any work and feat of a person; and Fomin was happy when he knocked down an enemy who had grown into concrete and into the ground, or when he turned the despair of his soul into hope, and hope into success and victory.

The orderly turned on a light in a small stearin bowl on the wooden kitchen table. Fomin took off his overcoat and sat down to write a letter to Aphrodite: “Dear Natasha, you believe me and do not forget me, as I remember you. You believe me that everything will come true, as it should, and we will again live inseparably. We will still have beautiful children with you, whom we are obliged to give birth to. They torment my heart with longing for you ... "

Platonov Andrey

Aphrodite

Andrey Platonov

APHRODITE

"Was his Aphrodite alive?" - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin now turned not to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars and the horizon and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or a vague signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or whether her chest had already cooled. He left the dugout in the field, stopped in front of a blue naive flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? The flower did not change from his anguish and question, he was silent and lived in his own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as he had passed before, perhaps over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from a height, one could perhaps see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and one can notice the sadness of loss or contentment from the safety of one's goods, and wanted to see through the common connection of all the living and the dead in the world a barely distinguishable, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.

Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved creature in any way to save him. Aphrodite was a young, intelligent, accommodating woman and should not be lost without a trace or die of starvation among her people. Admissible, of course, misfortune on long roads or accidental death. However, neither in nature nor in people could one notice any voice and shudder, answering the sad news to the open, expectant heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.

Fomin indulged in recollection, repeating in himself what he once experienced with the immobility of eternal stopped happiness. He saw in memory a small city lit by the sun, the dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under a blue sky. At noon, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the office of fire-resistant construction, in which he served as a foreman. A gramophone was playing in the café. Fomin went to the sideboard, asked for sausages with cabbage, the so-called "letuchka", that is, salted peas that are thrown into the mouth in free flight, and in addition took a mug of beer. A woman who specially works on beer poured a drink into a mug, and Fomin followed the beer stream, demanding in principle that they pour it to hell and not fill the containers with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never looked carefully into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But once that woman took a deep, inadvertent sigh at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter for a long time. She looked at him too; foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, forgetting herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" Fomin said to her then, and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear in face, with dark, shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair growing with wild strength on her head. Fomin averted his gaze from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and then that feeling did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the person to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent to the fact that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble plane of the bar. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him over the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived, as a husband and wife, for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate among plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question at the celestial manifestations of clouds and stars. The Information Bureau for the evacuees has been looking for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina intensively and for a long time, but has not yet found her. Closer to Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich did not have a person; he had been accustomed all his life to conversing with her, because it helped his thinking and inspired him with confidence in the work he was doing. And now, in the war, being separated from Aphrodite for the fourth year, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin writes long letters to her in every free time and sends them to the information bureau of the evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters are handed to the addressee upon finding him. During the war, many such letters have probably accumulated in the information bureau - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will fade away without being read. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and in detail, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he has never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army men and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander would not be lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters from either his wife or relatives ...

Our avant-garde units occupied the southern city in which Fomin lived and worked before the war. Fomin's regiment was in reserve and was not put into action due to lack of need.

Fomin's regiment settled down in the city area in the second echelon, in order to then move on a distant march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on the very first day and went on a visit to the dearest city for him in all of Russian land. The city was crushed by artillery fire, burned by the flames of fires, and its solid buildings were blown up by the enemy to dust. Fomin was already accustomed to seeing the grain fields trampled down by machines, the earth wounded by trenches and the settlements of people torn down by the blows of fire; it was the plowing of war, where something was sown in the ground that should never grow on it again - the corpses of villains, and what was born for a good active life, but doomed only to eternal memory - the flesh of our soldiers posthumously guarding in the land of a fallen enemy.

The house, where more than twenty years ago there was a cafe, and then there was a dwelling, now lay crumbled into rubble and garbage, killed and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin still remembered the appearance of this house, but soon, after time, it fades into him, and he will forget it. Isn’t it so somewhere in the distant, decayed field now lies the cold, large, beloved body of Aphrodite, and cadaverous creatures devour it, it melts in water and air, and it dries and is carried away by the wind, so that all the substance of Aphrodite’s life is squandered in the world evenly and without a trace, so that the person was forgotten.

Current page: 1 (total book has 2 pages) [available reading excerpt: 1 pages]

Andrey Platonov
Aphrodite

Was his Aphrodite still alive? - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin no longer turned to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars, and the horizon, and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or a vague signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or whether her chest had already cooled. He left the dugout in the field, stopped in front of a blue naive flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? You know better there, you are connected with the whole earth, and I go separately - is Aphrodite alive or not? The flower did not change from his anguish and question, he was silent and lived in his own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as he had passed before, perhaps over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from a height, one could perhaps see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and one can notice the sadness of loss or contentment from the safety of one's goods, and wanted to see through the common connection of all the living and the dead in the world a barely distinguishable, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.

Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved creature in any way to save him. Aphrodite was a young, intelligent, accommodating woman and should not be lost without a trace or die of starvation among her own people. Admissible, of course, misfortune on long roads or accidental death. However, neither in nature nor in people could one notice any voice and shudder, answering the sad news to the open, expectant heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.

Fomin indulged in recollection, repeating in himself what he once experienced with the immobility of eternal stopped happiness ... He saw with his memory a small city lit by the sun, dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under a blue sky. At noon, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the office of fire-resistant construction, in which he served as a foreman. A gramophone was playing in the café. Fomin went to the sideboard, asked for sausages with cabbage, the so-called "letuchka", that is, salted peas that are thrown into the mouth in free flight, and in addition took a mug of beer. A woman who specially works on beer poured the drink into a mug, and Fomin followed the beer stream, demanding in principle that they pour it to hell and not fill the containers with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never looked carefully into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But once that woman took a deep, inadvertent sigh at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter for a long time. She, too, looked at him: the foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, forgetting herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" Fomin said to her then, and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear in face, with dark, shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair growing with wild strength on her head. Fomin averted his gaze from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and then that feeling did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the person to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent to the fact that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble plane of the bar. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him over the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived as a husband and wife for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate among plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question at the celestial manifestations of clouds and stars. The Information Bureau for the evacuees has been looking for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina intensively and for a long time, but has not yet found her. Closer to Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich did not have a person; he had been accustomed all his life to conversing with her, because it helped his thinking and inspired him with confidence in the work he was doing. And now, in the war, being separated from Aphrodite for the fourth year, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin writes long letters to her in every free time and sends them to the information desk of the evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters would be handed to the addressee upon finding him. During the war, many such letters, probably, have accumulated in the information bureau - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will fade away without reading. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and in detail, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he has never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army men and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander would not be lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters from either his wife or relatives.

Our avant-garde units occupied the southern city in which Fomin lived and worked before the war. Fomin's regiment was in reserve and was not put into action due to lack of need.

Fomin's regiment settled down in the city area in the second echelon, in order to then move on a distant march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on the very first day and went on a visit to the dearest city for him in all of Russian land. The city was crushed by artillery fire, burned by the flames of fires, and its solid buildings were blown up by the enemy to dust. Fomin was already accustomed to seeing the grain fields trampled down by machines, the earth wounded by trenches and the settlements of people torn down by the blows of fire; it was the plowing of war, where something was sown in the ground that should never grow on it again - the corpses of villains, and what was born for a good active life, but doomed only to eternal memory - the flesh of our soldiers posthumously guarding in the earth fallen enemy.

Fomin returned to the city. He found Shevchenko Street and the house in which he lived after returning from Rostov, when he graduated from the Polytechnic School there. There was no house, but a bench remained; she used to stand under the windows of his apartment; he sat in the evenings on this bench, at first alone, and later with Aphrodite, and in this now-decayed house they then lived together in one room, with windows overlooking the street. His father, a foundry foreman, died suddenly when Fomin was still studying in Rostov, and his mother remarried and left for permanent residence in Kazan. Young Nazar Fomin was then left to live alone, but the whole world, illuminated by the sun, full of attractive people, attracting the world of youth and unresolved eternal secrets, a world not yet arranged and meager, but animated by the hope and will of the Bolshevik workers - this world was expecting a young man, and the familiar native land, starved, bare by the calamities of the First World War, lay before him.

Probably, Nazar Fomin's life would have taken a completely different course if, in the past days of his youth, he had not been inspired by faith in the meaning of the life of the working class. He might have gone on with his life more calmly, but despondently and fruitlessly; he would have had his separate fate, but he would not have known that fate when, having entrusted to the people only one of his heart, he felt and learned more than it is necessary for one, and he began to live with the whole breath of mankind. One person cannot understand the meaning and purpose of his existence. When he clings to the people that gave birth to him, and through him to nature and the world, to the past time and future hope, then that secret source opens for his soul, from which a person must feed in order to have inexhaustible strength for his deed and strength. faith in the necessity of his life.

The peers of Nazar Fomin, Komsomols and Bolsheviks, were animated by the same idea of creating a new world, they, like Nazar, were convinced that they were called by Lenin to participate in the worldwide feat of mankind - in order to finally begin on earth the time of true life, so that all the hopes of people may be fulfilled, which they have earned through centuries of labor and mortal sacrifices, which they have saved in long experience and in patient reflection ...

After graduating from a special school in Rostov-on-Don, Nazar Fomin returned to his homeland, to the same city, where he was now sitting alone. Nazar then became a construction technician, and the work of his life began. He took everything material, gray and ordinary so close to his heart that it became spiritual for him and fed his passion for work. Now he no longer remembered whether he realized at that time that everything really sublime is born only from worldly need; but he then did this transformation of the material into the spiritual with his own hands, and he believed in the truth of the revolution, because he himself made it and saw its effect on the fate of the people.

Nazar Fomin was initially in charge of rural fire-resistant construction in the region; it was considered a small position. But he was inspired by this work, he accepted it into his heart - not as a service, but as the meaning of his existence - and looked with passionate eyes at the tile product first made in a handicraft workshop; he then stroked the first tiled tile, sniffed it and took it to his room where he lived in order to examine it again in the evening and in the morning - is it really quite good and durable, so that for many years to lie instead of straw in the roof of rural huts and thereby save peasant dwellings from fires. At the same time, he studied the statistics of fires in his area according to Zemstvo information and calculated that if tiles replaced a thatched roof, then the peasantry, from the sheer savings on fire losses, could, for example, in three years build in each village an artesian well with abundant healthy water or anything else, and in the next three or four years it is possible to build a local electric station with a mill and a grain grinder with the same funds saved by tiles from fire. From these considerations, Nazar Fomin could, without getting bored, look at the tile for a long time and think about how to make it even stronger and cheaper - the tile was then his feeling and experience, it replaced his book and friend - a person; later he realized that no object could replace a person for him, but in his youth, only the imagination of a person was enough for him.

But even then he was thinking of more essential things, and even in his dreams the same thought continued in him, encouraging him with happiness. For two years, Fomin prepared his business, until the district executive committee entrusted him with starting it. This matter consisted in the construction of an electric station in the settlement, with the gradual expansion of the electrical network from it to the entire volost - the district, in order to give the people light for reading books, machine power to facilitate their work and warmth in winter for heating dwellings and livestock buildings. From the fulfillment of this simple dream, the entire way of life of the population must change, and then a person will feel liberation from poverty and grief, from the burden of labor, exhausting him to the bone and yet unreliable, not giving him well-being in life ...

But it was difficult then for Fomin to build. Volost funds were released from the budget a little; Therefore, it was necessary to explain to the entire population of the volost the benefits of electricity, so that the people would invest their labor and their accumulated funds in the construction of the station and the electrical network. For the sake of this, Fomin then organized thirty-four peasant associations for electrification and united them into a volost union. It cost him a lot of heart, anxiety and restless work. He remembered one peasant orphan girl, Evdokia Remeiko; her parents left her a small girlish dowry, she contributed it without a trace to her share, and then, more diligently and more willingly than many, she worked as a second-hand carpenter on the construction of the station building. Now Evdokia Remeiko, if she is still alive in the world, then she is already an elderly woman, but if she were young, she would probably serve in the Red Army or fight in a partisan detachment. Fomin remembered many more people who worked with him then - peasants and peasant women, suburban residents, old men and young men. With all sincerity and sincerity, with all their skill, they built a new world on earth: their hidden, suppressed abilities then appeared outward and began to develop in meaningful, gracious work; their soul, their understanding of life brightened and grew when plants grow from the ground from which stone slabs have been removed. The station was not yet fully completed and equipped, and Fomin already saw with satisfaction that its builders - peasants who voluntarily worked in excess of their grain labor in the fields - went so deep into the matter and felt through it an interest in each other and their connection with the working class who made machines for the production of electricity, that the wretched loneliness of their hearts departed from them and the indifference to the entire unfamiliar world and fear of it also began to leave them. True, in the secret plan of each person there is a desire to leave his yard, from his loneliness, in order to see and experience the whole universe, but it is necessary to find ways that are feasible and accessible to all for this. The old peasant Eremeev then expressed to Fomin his vague thought about the same: “Or do we not feel, Nazar Ivanovich, that the Soviet government gives us a rush of life: act, they say, rejoice and answer for good and for famously, you, they say, are now on earth is not a stranger passerby. And before that, what kind of life was: you lie in your mother’s womb - you don’t remember yourself, you went outside - grief and misfortune oppresses you, you live in a hut, like in a casemate, and you can’t see the light, but you died - lie quietly in a coffin and forget, what you were. Everywhere we had a cramped place, Nazar Ivanovich - a womb, a casemate and a grave - and one unconsciousness. And after all, everyone interfered with everything! And now everyone is helping everyone - that's where it is, Soviet power and cooperation!

Where is that old man Eremeev now? Maybe it still exists, although hardly, much time has passed ...

Nazar Fomin stood near his dead cars, looking at him with blind holes of burnt tender parts, and wept. The stormy wind rattled dejectedly the iron sheets on the floor, curled up from the heat they had endured. Fomin looked at the sky in that sad hour of his life; dark clouds of autumn were moving overhead, driven by gloomy bad weather; it was boring there and there was no sympathy for man, because all nature, even though it is big, is all alone, knowing nothing but itself. Only here, what was burned in the fire, was it different; here was a world created by people in sympathy with each other; here, in a small form, the hope for a higher life was fulfilled, for the change and revival in the future of all burdensome, self-depressing nature - a hope that exists, perhaps, in the whole universe only in the heart and consciousness man, and not just any man, but only that one who first through sacrifice, work and revolution made his way to such an understanding of his destiny. How small, then, is this beneficent force in the dimensions of the vast world, and how it must be protected.

Peasants, builders and shareholders of the power plant made a meeting. At the meeting, they listened to Fomin's words and thought in silence, not concealing their common grief. Then Evdokia Remeiko came out and timidly said that it was necessary to raise funds again and rebuild the burnt station; in a year or a year and a half, you can do it all over again with your own hands, said Remeiko, and maybe much sooner. “What are you, a girl,” a cheered up peasant answered her from the spot, no one knows who, “you lived one dowry in the fire, you put the other in the same place: so you won’t get married to the grave, you’ll wither in overstark!”

Having discussed the matter of how much state insurance will be issued in case of a fire, how much the state will help with a loan, how much will be left to add from the acquired labor, the shareholders made it their common concern to build the station for the second time. “Electricity has gone out,” said Yevtukhov, a handicraft cooper, “and we will continue to live inextinguishably! And for you, Nazar Ivanovich, we all mericand in a caricatic sense to build according to the plan and scale, as it was! Evtukhov loved to recommend both great and small deeds for execution in a categorical sense; he lived categorically and revolutionary and invented a round ball barrel. As if a warm light touched the then darkened soul of Nazar Fomin. Not knowing what to do or say, he touched Evdokia Remeiko and, ashamed of people, wanted to kiss her on the cheek, but dared to kiss only the dark hair above her ear. So it was then, and a living feeling of happiness, the smell of the Remeiko girl's hair, her meek image are still preserved in Fomin's memories.

And again, Nazar Fomin built an electric station in the same place, twice as powerful as the one that died in the fire. This work took almost two years. During this time, Aphrodite left Nazar Fomin; she fell in love with another man, one engineer who came from Moscow to install a radio center, and married him with a second marriage. Fomin had many friends among the peasants and the working people, but without his beloved Aphrodite, he felt like an orphan, and his heart trembled in loneliness. He used to constantly think that his faithful Aphrodite was a goddess, but now she was pathetic in her need, in her need for the pleasure of a new love, in her attachment to joy and pleasure, which were stronger than her will, stronger than her loyalty and proud steadfastness. in relation to the one who loved her constantly and uniquely. However, even after separation from Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin could not wean from her and loved her as before; he didn’t want to fight his feeling, which had now turned into suffering: even if circumstances took his wife away from him and she physically moved away from him, it’s not necessary to have close possession of a person and rejoice only near him - it is enough to feel a loved one as a permanent resident of your heart; this, however, is more difficult and painful than close, satisfied possession, because love for the indifferent lives only at the expense of its true strength, not feeding on anything in return. But do Fomin and other people of his country change the world for a better fate in order to dominate it or then use it as property? .. Fomin also remembered that he then had a strange thought that remained inexplicable. He felt, in separation from Aphrodite, that the villainous force again entered across his life path; in its original cause it was, perhaps, the same force that burned the power plant. He understood the difference of events, he saw them inconsistently, but they equally severely destroyed his life, and the same person opposed them. It is possible that he himself was guilty before Aphrodite - after all, it happens that evil is done without desire, involuntarily and imperceptibly, and even when a person strains to do good to another person. This must be because each heart is different from the other: one, receiving the good, turns it entirely to its own need, and nothing of the good remains for the other; another heart is capable of reworking the evil, turning it into goodness and strength - for itself and for others.

After the loss of Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin realized that universal bliss and enjoyment of life, as he imagined them until then, is a false dream and that is not the truth of man and his real bliss. Overcoming his suffering, enduring what could destroy him, rebuilding what was destroyed, Fomin suddenly felt a free joy, independent of either the villain or chance. He understood his former naivete, his whole nature began to harden, ripening in disasters, and to learn the ability to overcome, to work the stone grief that gets in the way of life; and then the world before him, hitherto, as it seemed to him, clear and accessible, now spread into a distant mysterious darkness - not because it was really dark, sad or scary, but because it really was greater in all directions and at once it cannot be surveyed - neither in the human soul, nor in simple space. And this new idea satisfied Fomin more than that miserable bliss for the sake of which, as he had previously thought, only people lived.

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Platonov's aphrodite summary. Literary direction and genre

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Andrey Platonov Aphrodite

Andrey Platonov
Aphrodite