There are dilapidated edges of old provincial towns. Alexander's return home, illness and meeting with Sonya. Heroes and images

Four years later, during the fifth famine, people were driven into cities or forests - there was a crop failure. Zakhar Pavlovich remained alone in the village. Behind long life Not a single product passed his hands, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, but Zakhar Pavlovich himself had nothing: no family, no home. One night, when Zakhar Pavlovich was listening to the sound of the long-awaited rain, he heard the distant whistle of a steam locomotive. In the morning he got ready and went to the city. Working in a locomotive depot opened up a new skillful world for him - so beloved for a long time, as if always familiar, and he decided to stay in it forever.

The Dvanovs had sixteen children, seven survived. The eighth was Sasha, the son of a fisherman. His father drowned out of curiosity: he wanted to know what happens after death. Sasha is the same age as one of the Dvanov children, Proshka. When more twins were born in the hungry year, Prokhor Abramovich Dvanov sewed a begging bag for Sasha and took him out of the outskirts. “We are all boors and scoundrels!” - Prokhor Abramovich correctly defined himself, returning to his wife and his own children. Sasha went to the cemetery to say goodbye to his father. He decided, as soon as he had collected a bag full of bread, to dig himself a dugout next to his father’s grave and live there, since he had no home.

Zakhar Pavlovich asks Proshka Dvanov to find Sasha for a ruble and takes him as his son. Zakhar Pavlovich loves Sasha with all the devotion of old age, with all the feeling of unaccountable, unclear hopes. Sasha works as an apprentice at a depot to learn to become a mechanic. In the evenings he reads a lot, and after reading, he writes, because at seventeen he does not want to leave the world unnamed. However, he feels an emptiness inside his body, where, without stopping, life enters and exits, like a distant hum, in which it is impossible to make out the words of a song. Zakhar Pavlovich, watching his son, advises: “Don’t suffer, Sash, you’re already weak...”

War begins, then revolution. One October night, having heard shooting in the city, Zakhar Pavlovich says to Sasha: “There fools take power, maybe at least life will become wiser.” In the morning they go to the city and look for the most serious party so that they can immediately enroll in it. All parties are located in one state-owned house, and Zakhar Pavlovich walks around the offices, choosing a party according to his own mind. At the end of the corridor, behind the outer door, only one person sits - the rest are away to rule. “Is everything going to end soon?” - Zakhar Pavlovich asks the man. “Socialism, or what? In a year. Today we only occupy institutions.” “Then write to us,” agrees the delighted Zakhar Pavlovich. At home, the father explains to his son his understanding of Bolshevism: “A Bolshevik must have empty heart so that everything can fit there..."

Six months later, Alexander enters the newly opened railway courses, and then transfers to the polytechnic school. But soon the teaching of Alexander Dvanov ceases, and for a long time. The party sends him to the front civil war- to the steppe city of Novokhopersk. Zakhar Pavlovich sits with his son at the station all day, waiting for a passing train. They have already talked about everything except love. When Sasha leaves, Zakhar Pavlovich returns home and reads algebra piece by piece, not understanding anything, but gradually finding consolation for himself.

In Novokhopersk, Dvanov gets used to the warring revolution of the steppes. Soon a letter arrives from the province ordering his return. On the way, instead of the runaway driver, he drives a steam locomotive - and on a single-track road the train collides with an oncoming one. Sasha miraculously remains alive.

Having done a lot and hard way, Dvanov returns home. He immediately falls ill with typhus, shutting down life for eight months. Zakhar Pavlovich, in despair, makes a coffin for his son. But in the summer Sasha recovers. Their neighbor, the orphan Sonya, comes to them in the evenings. Zakhar Pavlovich splits the coffin into a firebox, happily thinking that now it’s time to make not a coffin, but a crib, because Sonya will soon grow up and he and Sasha can have children.

The sponge committee sends Sasha around the province - “to look for communism among the amateurs of the population.” Dvanov walks from one village to another. He falls into the hands of the anarchists, from whom he is recaptured by a small detachment under the command of Stepan Kopenkin. Kopenkin participates in the revolution for the sake of his love for Rosa Luxemburg. In one village, where Kopenkin and Dvanov visit, they meet Sonya, who teaches children at school here.

Dvanov and Kopenkin, wandering around the province, meet many people, each of whom in his own way imagines the construction of a new, even unknown life. Dvanov meets Chepurny, chairman of the Revolutionary Committee county town Chevengur. Dvanov likes the word Chevengur, which reminds him of the enticing roar of an unknown country. Chepurny talks about his city as a place in which the good of life, the accuracy of truth, and the sorrow of existence occur by themselves as needed. Although Dvanov dreams of returning home and continuing his studies at the polytechnic, he is carried away by Chepurny’s stories about the socialism of Chevengur and decides to go to this city. “We’re going to your land! - says Chepurny and Kopenkin. “Let’s look at the facts!”

Chevengur wakes up late; its inhabitants were resting from centuries of oppression and could not rest. The revolution won dreams for the Chevengur district and made the soul its main profession. Having locked his horse Proletarian Strength in a barn, Kopenkin walks along Chevengur, meeting people who are pale in appearance and alien in appearance. He asks Chepurny what these people do during the day. Chepurny replies that the human soul is the main profession, and its product is friendship and camaraderie. Kopenkin suggests that, in order not to be very good in Chevengur, organize a little grief, because communism must be caustic - for good taste. They appoint emergency commission, which compiles lists of bourgeois survivors of the revolution. The security officers shoot them. “Now our business is dead!” - Chepurny rejoices after the execution. "Cry!" - the security officers say to the wives of the murdered bourgeoisie and go to bed from fatigue.

After the reprisal against the bourgeoisie, Kopenkin still does not feel communism in Chevengur, and the security officers begin to identify the semi-bourgeoisie in order to free life from them. The semi-bourgeois are gathered into a large crowd and driven out of the city to the steppe. The proletarians who remained in Chevengur and arrived in the city at the call of the communists quickly eat up the food leftovers of the bourgeoisie, destroy all the chickens and eat only plant food in the steppe. Chepurny expects that the final happiness of life will develop by itself in the undisturbed proletariat, because the happiness of life is a fact and a necessity. Only Kopenkin walks around Chevengur without happiness, waiting for Dvanov’s arrival and his assessment of his new life.

Dvanov comes to Chevengur, but does not see communism from the outside: it probably hid in people. And Dvanov guesses why the Chevengurian Bolsheviks so desire communism: it is the end of history, the end of time, but time passes only in nature, and there is melancholy in man. Dvanov invents a device that should sunlight convert into electricity, for which they took out mirrors from all the frames in Chevengur and collected all the glass. But the device doesn't work. A tower was also built on which a fire was lit so that those wandering in the steppe could come to it. But no one comes to the light of the beacon. Comrade Serbinov comes from Moscow to check the works of the Chevengurians and notes their uselessness. Chepurny explains this: “So we work not for benefit, but for each other.” In his report, Serbinov writes that there are many happy, but useless things in Chevengur.

Women are brought to Chevengur to continue their lives. Young Chevengurs only warm themselves with them, as with their mothers, because the air is already completely cold from the onset of autumn.

Serbinov tells Dvanov about his meeting in Moscow with Sofia Alexandrovna - the same Sonya whom Sasha remembered before Chevengur. Now Sofya Alexandrovna lives in Moscow and works at a factory. Serbinov says that she remembers Sasha as an idea. Serbinov is silent about his love for Sofya Alexandrovna.

A man comes running to Chevengur and reports that Cossacks on horseback are moving towards the city. A fight ensues. Serbinov dies with thoughts of distant Sofya Alexandrovna, who kept within herself a trace of his body, Chepurny and the rest of the Bolsheviks die. The city is occupied by the Cossacks. Dvanov remains in the steppe above the mortally wounded Kopenkin. When Kopenkin dies, Dvanov mounts his horse Proletarian Strength and gallops away from the city, into the open steppe. He drives for a long time and passes the village in which he was born. The road leads Dvanov to the lake, in the depths of which his father once rested. Dvanov sees a fishing rod that he forgot on the shore as a child. He forces the Proletarian Power to go into the water up to his chest and, saying goodbye to it, gets off the saddle into the water - in search of the road along which his father once walked in curiosity about death...

Zakhar Pavlovich comes to Chevengur in search of Sasha. There are no people in the city - only Proshka sits near the brick house and cries. “If you want, I’ll give you another ruble, bring me Sasha,” asks Zakhar Pavlovich. “I’ll bring you for free,” Prokofy promises and goes to look for Dvanov.

There are dilapidated edges of the old ones provincial cities. People come to live there directly from nature. A man appears - with that vigilant and sadly emaciated face who can fix and equip everything, but he himself lived his life unequipped. Any product, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, has not escaped the hands of this man. He also did not refuse to throw out soles, pour wolf shot and stamp fake medals for sale at rural antique fairs. He never made anything for himself - neither a family, nor a home. In the summer he lived simply in nature, placing the instrument in a bag, and using the bag as a pillow - more for the safety of the instrument than for its softness. He saved himself from the early sun by putting burdock on his eyes in the evening. In winter, he lived on the remnants of his summer earnings, paying the church watchman for his apartment by ringing the clock at night. He was not particularly interested in anything - neither people, nor nature - except for all kinds of products. Therefore, he treated people and fields with indifferent tenderness, without encroaching on their interests. IN winter evenings he sometimes made unnecessary things: towers from wires, ships from pieces of roofing iron, glued paper airships and so on - solely for his own pleasure. Often he even delayed someone's random order - for example, they gave him new hoops to fit on a tub, and he worked on constructing a wooden clock, thinking that it should run without winding - from the rotation of the earth.

The church watchman didn't like those free classes.

- In your old age you will beg, Zakhar Palych! The tub has been standing there for days, and you’re touching the ground with a piece of wood—you don’t know why.

Zakhar Pavlovich was silent: a human word for him is like forest noise for a forest dweller - you can’t hear it. The watchman smoked and calmly looked on - he didn’t believe in God due to frequent services, but he knew for sure that nothing would work out for Zakhar Pavlovich: people have lived in the world for a long time and have already invented everything. But Zakhar Pavlovich thought the opposite: people have not invented everything, since natural matter lives untouched by hands.

Four years later, in the fifth year, half of the village went to the mines and cities, and half to the forests - there was a crop failure. It has long been known that forest glades Even in dry years, herbs, vegetables and bread ripen well. The remaining half of the village rushed to these clearings to protect their greenery from instant plunder by streams of greedy wanderers. But this time the drought repeated in next year. The village locked its huts and went out in two detachments onto the highway - one detachment went to beg in Kyiv, the other went to Lugansk to earn money; some turned into the forest and into overgrown ravines, began to eat raw grass, clay and bark and went wild. Almost only the adults left - the children themselves died beforehand or fled to beg. The nursing mothers themselves gradually exhausted the infants, not allowing them to suckle until they were full.

There was one old woman, Ignatievna, who treated children from hunger: she gave them mushroom tincture half and half with sweet grass, and the children calmed down peacefully with dry foam on their lips. The mother kissed the child’s aged, wrinkled forehead and whispered:

- I'm tired, darling. Glory to you, Lord!

Ignatievna stood right there:

- He passed away, quiet: he lies better than alive, now in paradise he listens to the silver winds...

The mother admired her child, believing in relief from his sad fate.

“Take my old skirt, Ignatievna, there’s nothing more to give.” Thank you.

Ignatievna held out her skirt to the light and said:

“Cry a little, Mitrevna: that’s what you’re supposed to do.” And your skirt is worn and worn, at least add a handkerchief or an iron...

Zakhar Pavlovich was left alone in the village - he liked the solitude. But he lived more in the forest, in a dugout with one bob, eating a brew of herbs, the benefits of which the bob had learned in advance.

All the time Zakhar Pavlovich worked to forget hunger, and learned to do everything from wood that he had previously done from metal. Bobyl has done nothing all his life - even more so now; Until the age of fifty, he only looked around - how and what - and expected that he would eventually emerge from the general anxiety, so that he could immediately begin to act after calming down and clarifying the world; he was not at all obsessed with life - and his hand never raised a single female marriage and not for any generally useful act. When he was born, he was surprised and lived like that until old age. blue eyes on a youthful face. When Zakhar Pavlovich was making an oak frying pan, the boby was amazed that nothing could be fried in it anyway. But Zakhar Pavlovich poured water into a wooden frying pan and, over low heat, achieved that the water was boiling, but the frying pan did not burn. Bobyl froze in surprise:

- A powerful thing. Where is it, brothers, to find out everything...

And the little guy gave up on the crushing universal secrets. No one ever explained to the bogeyman the simplicity of events - or he himself was completely stupid. Indeed, when Zakhar Pavlovich tried to tell him why the wind blows and does not stand still, the bob was even more surprised and did not understand anything, although he felt exactly the origin of the wind.

- Really? Say please! So, from the sun's heat? Nice thing!..

Zakhar Pavlovich explained that the heat was not a nice thing, but just the heat.

– It’s hot?! – the little guy was surprised. - Look, what a witch!

The boy's surprise only moved from one thing to another, but nothing turned into consciousness. Instead of intelligence, he lived with a feeling of trusting respect.

Over the summer, Zakhar Pavlovich made all the wood products he knew. The dugout and its adjoining estate were furnished with objects of Zakhar Pavlovich’s technical art - a complete set of agricultural implements, machines, tools, enterprises and everyday devices - all made entirely of wood. It’s strange that there wasn’t a single thing that replicated nature, like a horse, a pumpkin, or anything else.

In August, the little guy went into the shade, lay down with his stomach down and said:

- Zakhar Pavlovich, I’m dying, I ate a lizard yesterday... I brought you two mushrooms, and fried the lizard for myself. Wave a burdock at me - I love the wind.

Zakhar Pavlovich waved a burdock, brought water and gave the dying man something to drink.

- You won’t die. It only seems to you.

“I’ll die, by God, I’ll die, Zakhar Palych,” the little guy was afraid to lie. “My gut doesn’t hold anything, a huge worm lives inside me, it drank all my blood...

Bobyl turned on his back:

– What do you think, should I be afraid or not?

“Don’t be afraid,” Zakhar Pavlovich answered positively. “I wish I could die right now, but, you know, you’re working on different products...

Bobyl was delighted by the sympathy and by the evening he died without fear. At the time of his death, Zakhar Pavlovich went to bathe in the stream and found the boby already dead, suffocated by his own green vomit. The vomit was thick and dry, it settled like dough around the bob’s mouth, and small-sized white worms were active in it.

At night, Zakhar Pavlovich woke up and listened to the rain: the second rain since April. “If only the little guy would be surprised,” thought Zakhar Pavlovich. But the little guy got wet alone in the darkness of the steady streams pouring from the sky and quietly swelled.

Through the sleepy, windless rain, something sang dully and sadly - so far away that where it sang, it was probably not raining and it was day. Zakhar Pavlovich immediately forgot the boy, the rain, and the hunger and got up. It was the hum of a distant machine, a living, working locomotive. Zakhar Pavlovich went outside and stood in the moisture of the warm rain, humming about peaceful life, about the vastness of the long land. The dark trees were dozing, stretched out, embraced by the caress of the calm rain; they felt so good that they were exhausted and moved the branches without any wind.

Zakhar Pavlovich did not pay attention to the joy of nature; he was agitated by the unknown, silent steam locomotive. When he went back to bed, he thought that the rain was also working, but I was sleeping and hiding in the forest in vain: the bob died, so will you; he had not made a single product in his entire life - he scrutinized everything and adjusted it, was amazed at everything, saw a wondrous thing in every simplicity and could not raise his hands to anything, so as not to spoil something; I only picked mushrooms, and even then I didn’t know how to find them; And so he died without harming nature in any way.

In the morning there was a big sun, and the forest sang with all the depth of its voice, letting the morning wind pass under the leaves. Zakhar Pavlovich noticed not so much the morning as the shift of workers - the rain fell asleep in the soil, it was replaced by the sun; a bustle of wind rose from the sun, the trees ruffled, the grass and bushes began to mutter, and even the rain itself, without resting, rose to its feet again, awakened by the tickling warmth, and gathered its body into the clouds.

Zakhar Pavlovich put his wooden products in a bag - how many of them fit in it - and walked into the distance, along the woman’s mushroom path. He didn’t look at the little guy: the dead are inconspicuous; although Zakhar Pavlovich knew one person, a fisherman from Lake Mutevo, who asked many about death and was saddened by his curiosity; This fisherman loved fish most of all, not as food, but as a special creature that probably knew the secret of death. He showed the eyes of dead fish to Zakhar Pavlovich and said: “Look - wisdom! The fish stands between life and death, which is why it is mute and looks without expression; Even the heifer thinks, but the fish doesn’t—she already knows everything.” Contemplating the lake for years, the fisherman kept thinking about the same thing - about the interest of death. Zakhar Pavlovich dissuaded him: “There’s nothing special there: just something cramped.” A year later, the fisherman could not stand it and threw himself from the boat into the lake, tying his legs with a rope so as not to accidentally swim. Secretly, he did not believe in death at all, the main thing was that he wanted to see what was there: perhaps much more interesting than living in a village or on the shore of a lake; he saw death as another province, which is located under the sky, as if at the bottom of cool water, and it attracted him. Some men, to whom the fisherman spoke about his intention to live in death and return, dissuaded him, while others agreed with him: “Well, the test is not a loss, Mitriy Ivanovich. Try it, then you’ll tell us.” Dmitry Ivanovich tried: he was pulled out of the lake three days later and buried near the fence in the village churchyard.

Now Zakhar Pavlovich was passing by the churchyard and looking for the fisherman’s grave in the palisade of crosses. There was no cross over the fisherman’s grave: he did not grieve a single heart with his death, not a single mouth remembered him, because he died not because of weakness, but because of his curious mind. The fisherman had no wife left - he was a widow, his son was young and lived with strangers. Zakhar Pavlovich came to the funeral and led the boy by the hand - such an affectionate and intelligent boy, either like his mother or his father; where is this boy now? - probably died first in these hungry years as an orphan. The boy walked behind his father’s coffin without grief and with decorum.

- Uncle Zakhar, did father lie down like that on purpose?

- Not on purpose, Sasha, but foolishly - now I’ve put you at a loss. It won't be long before he has to catch fish.

- Why are the aunts crying?

- Because they are honzhi!

When the coffin was placed at the grave pit, no one wanted to say goodbye to the deceased. Zakhar Pavlovich knelt down and touched the fisherman’s stubbly fresh cheek, washed on the lake bottom. Then Zakhar Pavlovich said to the boy:

- Say goodbye to your father - he is dead forever. Look at him and you will remember.

The boy lay down next to his father’s body, next to his old shirt, which smelled of his family’s living sweat, because the shirt was put on for the coffin - his father drowned in another one. The boy felt his hands; they smelled of fishy dampness; one finger was wearing a tin wedding ring in honor of a forgotten mother. The child turned his head to the people, was afraid of strangers and cried pitifully, grabbing his father’s shirt in the folds as his protection; his grief was silent, devoid of consciousness of the rest of his life, and therefore inconsolable; he was so sad for his dead father that a dead man could have been happy. And all the people at the coffin also began to cry out of pity for the boy and from that premature sympathy for themselves that everyone would have to die and be mourned in the same way.

Zakhar Pavlovich, despite all his grief, remembered what happened next.

- You will howl, Nikiforovna! - he said to one grandmother, who was crying bitterly and hurriedly lamenting. “You’re not howling out of grief, but so that they’ll cry for you when you die.” Take the boy with you - you still have six of them, one of them will become saturated with some kind of falsehood among all of them.

Nikiforovna immediately regained her womanly mind and lost her fierce face; she cried without tears, only with wrinkles:

- And so it seems! He also said that he would be saturated with some kind of falsehood! This is how he is now, but let him mature - when he starts eating and ruffling his pants - you won’t be prepared!

Another woman, Mavra Fetisovna Dvanova, who had seven children, took the boy. The child gave her his hand, the woman wiped his face with her skirt, blew his nose and led the orphan to her hut.

The boy remembered the fishing rod his father made for him, but he threw it into the lake and forgot it there. Now the fish must have already been caught and can be eaten, so that strangers do not scold them for their food.

“Auntie, I caught a fish in the water,” said Sasha. “Let me go get it and eat it so you don’t have to feed me.”

Mavra Fetisovna accidentally wrinkled her face, blew her nose into the tip of her head scarf and did not let go of the boy’s hand.

Zakhar Pavlovich thought and wanted to go tramp, but remained where he was. He was greatly touched by grief and orphanhood - from some unknown conscience that opened in his chest; he would like to walk the earth without rest, meet grief in all the villages and cry over other people's coffins. But he was stopped by the next items: the headman gave him a wall clock to repair, and the priest gave him a piano to tune. Zakhar Pavlovich had never heard any music; he once saw a gramophone in the district, but the men tortured him, and he did not play; The gramophone stood in the tavern, the sides of the box were broken so that one could see the deception and who was singing there, and a darning needle was threaded into the membrane. He spent a month tuning the piano, trying out the mournful sounds and examining the mechanism that produces such tenderness. Zakhar Pavlovich struck the key - sad singing rose and flew away; Zakhar Pavlovich looked up and waited for the sound to return - it was too good to be wasted without a trace. The priest got tired of waiting for the setting, and he said: “You, uncle, don’t announce the tone in vain, you try to time the matter to the end and don’t delve into the meaning of what is inappropriate for you.” Zakhar Pavlovich was offended to the roots of his skill and made a secret in the mechanism that can be eliminated in one second, but cannot be discovered without special knowledge. Afterwards, the priest called Zakhar Pavlovich weekly: “Go, friend, go - again the secret-forming power of music has disappeared.” Zakhar Pavlovich did not make a secret for the priest and not in order to go often to enjoy music himself: he was touched by the opposite - how the product is constructed, which worries any heart, which makes a person kind; For this purpose, he developed his secret, capable of interfering with euphony and covering it with howling. When, after ten repairs, Zakhar Pavlovich understood the secret of mixing sounds and the structure of the trembling main board, he took the secret out of the piano and forever ceased to be interested in sounds.

Now Zakhar Pavlovich recalled his past life as he walked and did not regret it. He personally comprehended many devices and objects in the past years and could repeat them in his products if he had the right material and tools. He walked through the village in order to meet unknown cars and objects, beyond the line where the mighty sky meets the village's motionless lands. He went there with the same heart with which peasants go to Kyiv when their faith dries up and life turns into survival.

There was a smell of burning on the rural streets - this was ash lying on the road, which the chickens had not raked up because they had eaten them. The huts stood full of childless silence; wild burdocks, having outgrown their norm, were waiting for their owners at the gate, on the paths and in all the inhabited, well-trodden places where no grass had previously held, and they swayed like future trees. The fences also blossomed from desolation: they were entwined with hops and grass, and some stakes and twigs began to grow and promised to become a grove if people did not return. The yard wells had dried up, and lizards ran there freely, crawling over the frame, to rest from the heat and breed. Zakhar Pavlovich was still quite surprised by such a senseless incident that in the fields the grain had long since died, and on the thatched roofs of the huts there was green rye, oats, millet and the sound of quinoa: they began to grow from the grains in the thatched coverings. Yellow-green field birds also moved to the village, living right in the upper rooms of the huts; the sparrows rose from the foot of the clouds and uttered their master's business songs through the wind of their wings.

Passing the village, Zakhar Pavlovich saw a bast shoe; Lapot also came to life without people and found his fate - he gave himself a shoot of a shell, and the rest of his body rotted into dust and kept the shadow under the root of a future bush. Under the bast shoe the soil was probably damper, because many pale blades of grass were trying to crawl through it. Of all the village things, Zakhar Pavlovich especially loved bast shoes and horseshoes, and of the devices - wells. On the chimney of the last hut sat a swallow, which, at the sight of Zakhar Pavlovich, climbed inside the chimney and there, in the darkness of the chimney, hugged its descendants with its wings.

To the right is the church, and behind it is a clean famous field, smooth, like a calming wind. The small bell - the echo - began to ring and struck noon: twelve times. The ruler entangled the temple and tried to get to the cross. The graves of the priests near the walls of the church were covered with weeds, and low crosses perished in its thickets. The watchman, having gotten off, still stood at the porch, watching the progress of the summer; his alarm clock became confused in the many years of counting time, but the watchman, in his old age, began to sense time as keenly and accurately as grief and happiness; no matter what he does, even when he sleeps (although in old age life stronger than sleep- she is vigilant and every minute), but the hour passed, and the watchman felt some kind of anxiety or lust, then he struck the clock and fell silent again.

- Still alive, grandfather? – Zakhar Pavlovich said to the watchman. – For whom are you counting the day?

The watchman wanted not to answer: over the seventy years of his life, he was convinced that he had done half the work in vain, and three-quarters of all the words he had said in vain: neither his children nor his wife survived from his worries, and the words were forgotten like extraneous noise. “I’ll say a word to this man,” the watchman judged himself, “ the person will pass mile and will not leave me in eternal memory his: who am I to him - neither a parent nor a helper!

- You're working in vain! – Zakhar Pavlovich reproached.

The watchman responded to this stupidity:

- How so - in vain! In my memory, our village left ten times, and then settled back. And now he will return: it is impossible to live without a person for long.

- What is your ringing for?

The watchman knew Zakhar Pavlovich as a man who gave free rein to his hands for any work, but who did not know the value of time.

- Here's what the ringing is for! I shorten the time with a bell and sing songs...

“Well, sing,” said Zakhar Pavlovich and left the village. On the outskirts there is a hut with no yard, apparently someone hastily got married, had a fight with their father and moved out. The hut also stood empty, and it was creepy inside. Only one thing about parting made Zakhar Pavlovich happy - a sunflower grew out of the chimney of this hut - he had already matured and bowed his ripening head towards the sunrise.

The road was overgrown with dry, dusty grasses. When Zakhar Pavlovich sat down to smoke, he saw cozy forests on the ground, where the grass was trees: a whole small residential world with its own roads, its own warmth and complete equipment for the daily needs of small, anxious creatures. Looking at the ants, Zakhar Pavlovich kept them in his head for another four miles of his journey and finally thought: “If only we could be given the intelligence of an ant or a mosquito, we could immediately improve our lives comfortably: these little things are great masters.” friendly life; Man is far from being a skilled ant.”

Zakhar Pavlovich appeared on the edge of the city, rented a closet for himself from a widower-carpenter with many children, went outside and thought: what should he do?

The carpenter-owner came home from work and sat down next to Zakhar Pavlovich.

– How much should I pay you for the premises? – asked Zakhar Pavlovich.

The carpenter did not laugh, but wanted to do it - he somehow grunted in his throat: in his voice one could hear hopelessness and that special, well-worn despair that happens to a person who is constantly and forever upset.

- And you what do you do? Nothing? Well, live like this before my guys rip your head off...

He said this correctly: on the very first night, the carpenter’s sons - guys from ten to twenty years old - doused the sleeping Zakhar Pavlovich with their urine, and locked the door of the closet with a stag. But it was difficult to anger Zakhar Pavlovich, who was never interested in people. He knew that there were machines and complex, powerful products, and he appreciated the nobility of a person by them, and not by random rudeness. And in fact, in the morning Zakhar Pavlovich saw how the eldest son of the carpenter deftly and seriously made an ax handle, which means that the main thing in him is not urine, but manual skill.

A week later, Zakhar Pavlovich became so sad from idleness that he began to repair the carpenter’s house without asking. He repaired the thin seams on the roof, rebuilt the porch in the entryway, and cleaned out the soot from the chimneys. IN evening time Zakhar Pavlovich was cutting pegs.

- What are you doing? - the carpenter asked him, dabbing his mustache with a crust of bread - he had just had lunch: he ate potatoes and cucumbers.

“Maybe they’re good for something,” answered Zakhar Pavlovich.

The carpenter chewed the crust and thought.

– It’s good to fence graves! My guys were fasting - all the graves in the cemetery were deliberately crap.

Zakhar Pavlovich's melancholy was stronger than the consciousness of the futility of work, and he continued to cut stakes until he was completely tired at night. Without a craft, Zakhar Pavlovich's blood rushed to his head from his hands, and he began to think so deeply about everything at once that he became delusional, and a melancholy fear rose in his heart. Wandering around the sunny courtyard during the day, he could not overcome his thought that man came from a worm, and a worm is a simple terrible tube that has nothing inside - just empty, stinking darkness. Observing city houses, Zakhar Pavlovich discovered that they were exactly like closed coffins, and was afraid to spend the night in the carpenter’s house. The brutal working force, finding no place, ate the soul of Zakhar Pavlovich, he could not control himself and was tormented by various feelings that he had never experienced during work. He began to see dreams: as if his father, a miner, was dying, and his mother was pouring milk from her breast on him so that he could come to life; but her father angrily says to her: “At least let her suffer freely, bitch,” then she lies there for a long time and delays death; his mother stands over him and asks: “Are you coming soon?”; the father spits with the ferocity of a martyr, lies down face down and reminds: “Bury me in my old pants, you’ll give these to Zakharka!”

The only thing that made Zakhar Pavlovich happy was sitting on the roof and looking into the distance, where crazy railway trains sometimes passed two miles from the city. From the rotation of the locomotive's wheels and its rapid breathing, Zakhar Pavlovich's body itched joyfully, and his eyes wet with light tears from sympathy for the locomotive.

The carpenter looked and looked at his tenant and began to feed him for free from his table. The carpenter's sons threw snot into Zakhar Pavlovich's separate cup for the first time, but the father stood up and with a flourish, without a word, knocked out a bump on the eldest son's cheekbone.

“I’m a human being myself,” the carpenter said calmly, sitting down in his place, “but, you understand, I gave birth to such a bastard that, before anyone knows, they’ll end me.” Look at Fedka! The strength is devilish: and I don’t understand where he got himself a bunch of duckweed - from an early age they have been sitting on cheap grub...

The first rains of autumn began - without time, without benefit: the peasants had long since disappeared in foreign lands, and many died on the roads, before reaching the mines and southern grain. Zakhar Pavlovich went with a carpenter to the station to hire a job: the carpenter knew a driver there.

They found the driver in the duty room where the locomotive crews slept. The driver said that there were a lot of people, but there was no work; the remnants of nearby villages live entirely at the station and do whatever they can for low prices. The carpenter came out and brought a bottle of vodka and a circle of sausage. After drinking vodka, the driver told Zakhar Pavlovich and the carpenter about the locomotive engine and the Westinghouse brake.

– Do you know what kind of inertia there is on slopes with sixty axles in the train? - Indignant at the ignorance of the listeners, the driver said and elastically showed the power of inertia with his hands. - Wow! You open the brake valve - a blue flame shoots out from under the blocks under the tender, a rod hits the back of the cars, the locomotive blows with closed steam - it bubbles into the chimney with one run! Wow, your mother is annoying!.. Pour it up! It was a shame I didn’t buy the cucumber: the sausage packs your stomach...

Zakhar Pavlovich sat and was silent: he did not believe in advance that he would go to work on a locomotive - where could he cope after wooden frying pans!

From the driver’s stories, his interest in mechanical products became more secretive and sadder, like rejected love.

- What are you, zakvok? – the driver noticed Zakhar Pavlovich’s grief. - Come to the depot tomorrow, I’ll talk to the mentor, maybe they’ll hire you as a wiper! Don’t be timid, son of a bitch, if you want to eat...

The driver stopped without finishing a word: he started burping.

- But, devil: your sausage is rushing in reverse! For a ten-kopeck piece, the beggar bought it, it would be better if I could eat the wiping ends... But,” the driver turned to Zakhar Pavlovich again, “but make me a locomotive under the mirror, so that I can touch any part in May gloves!” The locomotive doesn’t like any speck of dust: the car, brother, this is a young lady... A woman is no good - the car won’t work with an extra hole...

The driver carried off into the distance abstract words about some women. Zakhar Pavlovich listened and listened and did not understand anything: he did not know that women could be loved especially and from afar; he knew that such a person should marry. You can talk with interest about the creation of the world and about unfamiliar products, but talking about women, just like talking about men, is incomprehensible and boring. Zakhar Pavlovich once had a wife, she loved him - and he did not offend her - but he did not see too much joy from her. A person is endowed with many properties, if you passionately think about them, you can laugh with delight even at your own breathing every second. But what will happen then? It’s an idea and game to play with your body, and not a serious external existence. Zakhar Pavlovich never respected such conversations.

An hour later the driver remembered his duty. Zakhar Pavlovich and the carpenter accompanied him to the locomotive, which came out from under the gas station. The driver shouted to his assistant from afar in an official bass voice:

- How's the steam?

“Seven atmospheres,” the assistant answered without a smile, leaning out of the window.

– Normal level.

- Siphon.

- Great.

The next day Zakhar Pavlovich came to the depot. The machinist-mentor, an old man who doubts living people, peered at him for a long time. He loved steam locomotives so painfully and jealously that he watched with horror when they drove. If it were his will, he would put all the locomotives into eternal rest, so that they would not be mutilated by the rough hands of the ignorant. He believed that there were many people, few cars; people are alive and can stand up for themselves, but a car is a gentle, defenseless, fragile creature: in order to drive it properly, you must first leave your wife, throw all worries out of your head, dip your bread in oleonaft - then you can let a person near the car, and then after ten years of patience!

The mentor studied Zakhar Pavlovich and was tormented: a lackey, probably - where you need to press with your finger, he, the brute, will hit with a sledgehammer, where you can barely wipe the glass on the pressure gauge, he will press so hard that the entire device with the tube will be torn off - is it really permissible to allow the plowman's mechanism?! My God, my God, the mentor was silently but heartily angry, where are you, old mechanics, assistants, stokers, wipers? It used to be that people would tremble near the locomotive, but now everyone thinks that he is smarter than the machine! Bastards, sacrileges, scoundrels, damn lackeys! According to the rule, traffic should be stopped now! What kind of mechanics are these days? It's the wreck, not the people! These are tramps, riders, reckless drivers - you can’t give them a bolt in their hands, but they are already operating the regulator! It happened to me, when something slightly knocks too much in a steam locomotive while moving, something just sings in the driving mechanism - so I feel it with the end of my fingernail, without leaving the spot, I’m trembling all over from suffering, at the very first stop I’ll find the defect with my lips, lick it, suck it out, I’ll smear it with blood, but I won’t go in the dark... But this one made of rye wants to go straight into the locomotive!

“Go home, wash my face first, then go to the locomotive,” the mentor said to Zakhar Pavlovich.

Having washed himself, Zakhar Pavlovich appeared again on the second day. The mentor lay under the locomotive and carefully touched the springs, lightly tapping them with a hammer and putting his ear to the tinkling iron.

- Motya! – the mechanic’s mentor called. – Tighten the nut here by half a thread!

Motya touched the nut with an adjustable wrench half a turn. The mentor suddenly became so offended that Zakhar Pavlovich felt sorry for him.

- Motyushka! – the mentor said with quiet, depressed sadness, but gritting his teeth. -What have you done, you damned bastard? After all, that’s what I told you: screw it!! What nut? The main one! And you turned the locknut for me and confused me! And you're loosening the locknut on me! And again you’re touching the locknut for me! Well, what should I do with you, you damned animals? Go away, you bastard!

- Let me, Mr. Mechanic, give the lock nut back half a turn, and press the main one half a thread! – Zakhar Pavlovich asked.

- A? You noticed, right? He is, he is... a lumberjack, not a mechanic! He doesn’t even know the nut by name! A? So what are you going to do? Here he treats the locomotive like a woman, like some kind of whore! Lord my God!.. Well, come, come here - put a wrench in my opinion...

Zakhar Pavlovich crawled under the locomotive and did everything exactly and as it should. Then the mentor worked on locomotives and quarrels with drivers until the evening. When the lights were turned on, Zakhar Pavlovich reminded his mentor about himself. He stopped in front of him again and thought his thoughts.

“The father of the machine is the lever, and the mother is the inclined plane,” the mentor said affectionately, remembering something sincere that gave him peace at night. - Try to clean the fireboxes tomorrow - come on time. But I don’t know, I can’t promise – we’ll try and see... This is too serious a matter! You understand: firebox! Not just anything, but a firebox!.. Well, go, go away!

Zakhar Pavlovich slept one more night in the carpenter's closet, and at dawn, three hours before the start of work, he came to the depot. There were run-in rails, there were freight cars with inscriptions from distant countries: Transcaspian, Transcaucasian, Ussuri railways. Special, strange people walked along the tracks: smart and focused - switchmen, machinists, inspectors and others. There were buildings, machines, products and devices all around.

Zakhar Pavlovich was presented with a new artful world - so beloved for a long time, as if always familiar - and he decided to stay in it forever.

Andrey Platonov

Chevengur

(travel with an open heart)

“The Idea of Life” by Andrei Platonov

Nowadays, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) is experiencing a special situation that does not often happen to a writer, even posthumously, when a new image of him crystallizes (for us, for art, for history and the future): from the strange, the marginal, even the “holy fool” - harmful literary phenomenon - as criticism defined him during his lifetime, from a remarkable, original master - in the opinion of the literature of the last thirty years - he rises to the most select and responsible circle of classics. Climbing? Yes! But how difficult and long it is and what a colossal difference in grades!

The posthumous Platonov came to us with a burst of the late 50s and early 60s, which stabilized the volume of texts allowed for publication for two decades. Almost half of them then left the handwritten form of existence for the first time. Many things saw the light of day in full form. And yet, until recently, several of the writer’s central works remained unpublished in his homeland. However, without “Chevengur,” the writer’s only novel, without the stories “The Pit” and “The Juvenile Sea,” Plato’s work seems woefully incomplete (for the sake of analogy, imagine Dostoevsky without “Demons” or Sholokhov without “ Quiet Don"). Created by writer art world- and especially the world of these works - amazes, makes you suffer with thoughts and feelings - and some are fascinated, and some are stunned, perplexed, and pose riddles...

Anyone who has delved into Platonov’s works feels that they are always talking about the same thing. Entering for the first time the amazing Platonic the universe, in any of its segments, is immediately penetrated by an intense field of persistent, almost obsessive images, motives, moods - as if it encounters the same sufferer with his persistent pain.

“My ideals are monotonous and constant,” the writer admitted in a letter to his wife and closest friend Maria Alexandrovna. Everyone who knew Andrei Platonovich well speaks of his obsession with a single idea - the “idea of life,” as he himself defined it. The strength of the attraction of readers and researchers to Platonov's prose is largely explained by the mysterious depth of meaning that flickers behind the astonishing ligature of his thought-words. We will be doomed to remain in the superficial layer of his text, content with an indistinct flicker of depth, if we do not recognize the “monotonous and constant ideals” of the artist, his “idea of life.”

It is worth opening any story or story by this writer - and you will soon be pierced by a sad sound languishing over earth Platonov. Everything dies on this earth: people, animals, plants, houses, cars, colors, sounds. Everything deteriorates, grows old, smolders, “burns out” - all living and inanimate nature. Everything in his world bears the stamp of “tormented by death.” In the story “The Origin of the Master” (1927), which is the first part of the novel “Chevengur” (1928-1929), the father of the main character Sasha Dvanov, a fisherman, “contemplating the lake for years... kept thinking about the same thing - about the interest of death” . The concentration of his “curious mind” on this mystery leads to the fact that he throws himself into the lake: “Secretly, he did not believe in death at all, but most importantly, he wanted to see what was there.”

In the history of Russian philosophy there was a thinker who focused his entire teaching on humanity overcoming its “last enemy” - death. It's about about N. F. Fedorov (1829-1903), the author of the two-volume “Philosophy of the Common Cause,” which influenced the formation of the worldview of the still very young Platonov. Recognizing, following a number of natural scientists and philosophers, the internal direction of natural evolution towards the generation of reason, Fedorov made a radical new output about the need for conscious management of evolution: united, fraternal humanity is called upon, in his opinion, to master the elemental destructive forces outside and inside oneself, to go out into space and become its active transformer (the “regulation of nature” project). But the main task will be the final victory over death - the acquisition of immortal status by humanity, and in in full force previously living generations (“scientific resurrection”).

According to the writer’s wife, “Philosophy of a Common Cause” with numerous notes by the author of “Chevengur” was kept in the home library for a long time. The “idea of life” with which Platonov was so imbued has its roots in a deep and complex rethinking of Fedorov’s doctrine of the “common cause”. Its hidden facets are the infinite value of every, even the most modest life; a sharp rejection of death, which gives rise to the situation of “orphanhood”, which requires its overcoming through work and creativity; the inextricable connection of generations, living and dead, “in a common fatherhood.”

Fedorov in many ways anticipated the cosmic, active-evolutionary direction in scientific- philosophical thought The 20th century, marked by the names of K. E. Tsiolkovsky, V. I. Vernadsky, A. V. Chizhevsky, whose ideas influenced the broadest movement of feelings and minds of the 20s and were picked up by poetry and journalism of that time. Here, previously unheard of themes of universal labor, radical transformation of the world, and mastery of space began to sound persistently. The revolutionary era is perceived not only as social revolution, but - as a universal cataclysm, an “ontological” revolution aimed at the re-creation of not only society, but also the earth, and man himself in his natural basis. Thus, for Platonov, the ongoing revolution foreshadows another, “cosmic intellectual revolution,” when “thought will easily and quickly destroy death with its systematic work - science.” The hearts of the heroes of Plato’s prose, which tells about the very first years of the revolution, were illuminated with such hope. And if in the stories about the pre-revolutionary time the melancholy, the “heartfelt need” of its “spiritual poor” comes from the meaninglessness of an existence doomed to death, then here it is not for nothing that they believed in the revolution as the beginning of the “future century”. In Platonov, the eschatological aspirations of the people seem to come to life, but with the significant amendment that the “future century” is supposed to be built by oneself, and not obtained in a supernatural way: “Alexander... believed that the revolution is the end of the world. In the future world, Zakhar Pavlovich’s anxiety will instantly be destroyed, and the fisherman father will find what he willfully drowned for (that is, the solution to death. - S.S.). In his clear feeling, Alexander already had that New World, but it can only be done, not told.” And indeed, Alexander Dvanov and his comrades are participating in the immediate implementation of this “future world.”

Teacher Nekhvoraiko shod the horses of his Red Army detachment in bast shoes so as not to drown in the swamp, and at night he drove the Cossacks out of the city of Urochev. And after a few paragraphs we hear sad music: they are carrying “the cooled body of the deceased Nekhvoraiko.” People in the novel begin to die with him: they are killed, or their eyes get sick and die, or they give up their lives, like Sasha Dvanov in last pages novel.

In the meantime, Sasha is leaving Urochev. He is summoned to the province. But instead of a business trip, the hero’s strange wandering begins. Very quickly a feeling of some kind of vague, delirious feverish dream arises. The main thing that is seen in it is the road; the heroes move along it, stop, suddenly rush forward, return and set off again. Who dreams of this? Obviously, not only Sasha, since he, too, is one of the faces in this dream.

But at first, it’s as if it’s his dream. Everything that happens around is imbued with an infinitely sad feeling. For a moment, nameless villages, roads, and railway stations rush in and disappear forever. “Strangers, unknown people” flash from corners forgotten by life - and then disappear. And this human disunity in the world gives rise to such piercing pain that the soul is ready to share the fate of each of the disappearing forgotten specks of dust: “to stick to them and together disappear from the order of life.”

“The gray sadness of a cloudy day”, an even, sunless light floods special place, that strange landscape that the author dreamed of in “Chevengur”. Just as in the sleep of an individual his soul may act, here - in the larger space of universal sleep - the Russian soul lives in some kind of languid oblivion. Its depth and bottom are rising. And gradually it begins to seem more and more that Sasha Dvanov and the other main and barely glimpsed heroes are not just literary characters, but as if different incarnations people's soul, and Platonov himself, as the Russian Plato, is a contemplator and exponent of its main “ideas”.

In extreme poverty, hunger, illness, physical poverty, mental exhaustion, death of Platonov and his “ hidden heroes"always saw the naked face human destiny, the fundamental fragility of existence. “The commander was lying opposite the commissar... his book was open on the description of Raphael; Dvanov looked at the page - there Raphael was called the living god of early happy humanity, born on the warm shores of the Mediterranean Sea. But Dvanov could not imagine that time: the wind blew there, and the men plowed the land at dawn, and mothers died of little children.” This is how Sasha reasoned when he woke up at dawn in a stopped carriage. And then, forced to drive the train himself, due to his inexperience, he collides with someone coming towards him. Death, many deaths: the spirit leaves the body, the eyes fade, “turning into a round mineral” reflecting the sky - either man returns to nature, or nature returns to man. The incomprehensibility of the transition from the miracle of living life to a lifeless body attracts, almost fascinates the author. Where does all the working factory of the body, the sophistication of instinct, the calculation of the mind, the trembling of the soul, the teeming memory that contains the whole world disappear? This riddle forces Platonov to endlessly imagine in his works the moment of transition from life to death. It is, of course, not resolved by this, but it is persistently placed before the reader’s feelings and reflections.

Andrey Platonov

Chevengur

(travel with an open heart)

“The Idea of Life” by Andrei Platonov

The posthumous Platonov came to us with a burst of the late 50s and early 60s, which stabilized the volume of texts allowed for publication for two decades. Almost half of them then left the handwritten form of existence for the first time. Many things saw the light of day in full form. And yet, until recently, several of the writer’s central works remained unpublished in his homeland. However, without “Chevengur,” the writer’s only novel, without the stories “The Pit” and “The Juvenile Sea,” Plato’s work seems woefully incomplete (for the sake of analogy, imagine Dostoevsky without “Demons” or Sholokhov without “Quiet Don”). The artistic world created by the writer - and especially the world of these works - amazes, makes you suffer with thoughts and feelings - and some are fascinated, and some are stunned, bewildered, pose riddles...

Anyone who has delved into Platonov’s works feels that they are always talking about the same thing. Anyone who first enters Plato’s amazing universe, any segment of it, is immediately penetrated by an intense field of persistent, almost obsessive images, motives, moods - as if he encounters the same sufferer with his unrelenting pain.

It is worth opening any story or story by this writer - and you will soon be pierced by the sad sound languishing over the land of Platonov. Everything dies on this earth: people, animals, plants, houses, cars, colors, sounds. Everything deteriorates, grows old, smolders, “burns out” - all living and inanimate nature. Everything in his world bears the stamp of “tormented by death.” In the story “The Origin of the Master” (1927), which is the first part of the novel “Chevengur” (1928-1929), the father of the main character Sasha Dvanov, a fisherman, “contemplating the lake for years... kept thinking about the same thing - about the interest of death” . The concentration of his “curious mind” on this mystery leads to the fact that he throws himself into the lake: “Secretly, he did not believe in death at all, but most importantly, he wanted to see what was there.”

In the history of Russian philosophy there was a thinker who focused his entire teaching on humanity overcoming its “last enemy” - death. We are talking about N. F. Fedorov (1829-1903), the author of the two-volume “Philosophy of the Common Cause,” which influenced the formation of the worldview of the still very young Platonov. Recognizing, following a number of natural scientists and philosophers, the internal direction of natural evolution towards the generation of reason, Fedorov made a radically new conclusion about the need for conscious management of evolution: united, fraternal humanity is called upon, in his opinion, to master the spontaneous destructive forces outside and within itself, to go into space and become its active transformer (project of “regulation of nature”). But the main task will be the final victory over death - the acquisition of immortal status by humanity, and in the full complement of previously living generations (“scientific resurrection”).

Fedorov in many ways anticipated the cosmic, active-evolutionary direction in scientific and philosophical thought of the 20th century, marked by the names of K. E. Tsiolkovsky, V. I. Vernadsky, A. V. Chizhevsky, whose ideas influenced the broadest movement of feelings and minds of the 20s years and were picked up by poetry and journalism of that time. Here, previously unheard of themes of universal labor, radical transformation of the world, and mastery of space began to sound persistently. The revolutionary era is perceived not only as a social revolution, but as a universal cataclysm, an “ontological” revolution aimed at the re-creation of not only society, but also the earth, and man himself in his natural basis. Thus, for Platonov, the ongoing revolution foreshadows another, “cosmic intellectual revolution,” when “thought will easily and quickly destroy death with its systematic work - science.” The hearts of the heroes of Plato’s prose, which tells about the very first years of the revolution, were illuminated with such hope. And if in the stories about the pre-revolutionary time the melancholy, the “heartfelt need” of its “spiritual poor” comes from the meaninglessness of an existence doomed to death, then here it is not for nothing that they believed in the revolution as the beginning of the “future century”. In Platonov, the eschatological aspirations of the people seem to come to life, but with the significant amendment that the “future century” is supposed to be built by oneself, and not obtained in a supernatural way: “Alexander... believed that the revolution is the end of the world. In the future world, Zakhar Pavlovich’s anxiety will instantly be destroyed, and the fisherman father will find what he willfully drowned for (that is, the solution to death. - S.S.). In his clear feeling, Alexander already had that new light, but it can only be done, not told.” And indeed, Alexander Dvanov and his comrades are participating in the immediate implementation of this “future world.”

“The gray sadness of a cloudy day,” an even, sunless light floods that special place, that strange landscape that the author dreamed of in “Chevengur.” Just as in the sleep of an individual his soul may act, here - in the larger space of universal sleep - the Russian soul lives in some kind of languid oblivion. Its depth and bottom are rising. And gradually it begins to seem more and more that Sasha Dvanov and the other main and barely glimpsed characters are not just literary characters, but as if different

Andrey Platonov

Chevengur

There are dilapidated edges of old provincial towns. People come to live there directly from nature. A man appears - with that vigilant and sadly emaciated face who can fix and equip everything, but he himself lived his life unequipped. Any product, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, has not escaped the hands of this man. He also did not refuse to throw out soles, pour wolf shot and stamp fake medals for sale at rural antique fairs. He never made anything for himself - neither a family, nor a home. In the summer he lived simply in nature, placing the instrument in a bag, and using the bag as a pillow - more for the safety of the instrument than for its softness. He saved himself from the early sun by putting burdock on his eyes in the evening. In winter, he lived on the remnants of his summer earnings, paying the church watchman for his apartment by ringing the clock at night. He was not particularly interested in anything - neither people, nor nature - except for all kinds of products. Therefore, he treated people and fields with indifferent tenderness, without encroaching on their interests. On winter evenings, he sometimes made unnecessary things: towers from wires, ships from pieces of roofing iron, glued paper airships and so on - solely for his own pleasure. Often he even delayed someone's random order - for example, they gave him new hoops to fit on a tub, and he worked on constructing a wooden clock, thinking that it should run without winding - from the rotation of the Earth.

The church watchman did not like such free activities.

In your old age you will beg, Zakhar Palych! The tub has been standing there for days, and you touch the ground with a piece of wood for some unknown reason.

Zakhar Pavlovich was silent: a human word for him is like a forest noise for a forest dweller - you can’t hear it. The watchman smoked and calmly looked on - he didn’t believe in God due to frequent services, but he knew for sure that nothing would work out for Zakhar Pavlovich: people have lived in the world for a long time and have already invented everything. But Zakhar Pavlovich thought the opposite: people have not invented everything, since natural matter lives untouched by hands.

Four years later, in the fifth year, half of the village went to the mines and cities, and half to the forests - there was a crop failure. It has long been known that in forest clearings, even in dry years, herbs, vegetables and bread ripen well. The remaining half of the village rushed to these clearings to protect their greenery from instant plunder by streams of greedy wanderers. But this time the drought repeated the following year. The village locked its huts and went out in two detachments onto the highway - one detachment went to beg in Kyiv, the other went to Lugansk to earn money; some turned into the forest and into overgrown ravines, began to eat raw grass, clay and bark and went wild. Almost only the adults left

The children themselves died beforehand or fled to beg. The nursing mothers themselves gradually exhausted the infants, not allowing them to suckle until they were full.

I'm tired, my dear. Glory to you, Lord!

Ignatievna stood right there:

He reposed, quiet: he lies better than alive, now in paradise he listens to the silver winds...

The mother admired her child, believing in relief from his sad fate.

Take my old skirt, Ignatievna, there is nothing more to give. Thank you.

Ignatievna held out her skirt to the light and said:

Yes, cry a little, Mitrevna: that’s what you’re supposed to do. And your skirt is worn and worn, at least add a handkerchief or an iron...

And he expected that he would eventually emerge from the general anxiety, so that he could immediately begin to act after calming down and clarifying the world; he was not at all obsessed with life, and his hand never rose to a woman’s marriage or to any generally useful act. When he was born, he was surprised and lived like that until old age with blue eyes on a youthful face. When Zakhar Pavlovich was making an oak frying pan, the boby was amazed that nothing could be fried in it anyway. But Zakhar Pavlovich poured water into a wooden frying pan and, over low heat, achieved that the water was boiling, but the frying pan did not burn. Bobyl froze in surprise:

A mighty thing. Where is there, brothers, to find out everything!

Really? Say please! So, from the sun's heat? Nice thing!..

Zakhar Pavlovich explained that he did not do something cute, but simply

Heat?! - the little guy was surprised. - Look, what a witch!

The boy's surprise only moved from one thing to another, but nothing turned into consciousness. Instead of intelligence, he lived with a feeling of trusting respect.

Over the summer, Zakhar Pavlovich made all the wood products he knew. The dugout and its adjoining estate were furnished with objects of Zakhar Pavlovich's technical art - a complete set of agricultural implements, machines, tools, enterprises and everyday devices - all entirely made of wood. It’s strange that there wasn’t a single thing that replicated nature: for example, a horse, a pumpkin, or anything else.

In August, the little guy went into the shade, lay down with his stomach down and said:

Zakhar Pavlovich, I’m dying, I ate a lizard yesterday... I brought you two mushrooms, and fried the lizard for myself. Wave the burdock over the tops of me - I love the wind.

Zakhar Pavlovich waved a burdock, brought water and gave the dying man something to drink.

You won't die. It only seems to you.

“I’ll die, by God, I’ll die, Zakhar Palych,” the little guy was afraid to lie. - My gut doesn’t hold anything, a huge worm lives inside me, it drank all my blood...

Bobyl turned on his back:

What do you think, should I be afraid or not?

“Don’t be afraid,” Zakhar Pavlovich answered positively. “I wish I could die right now, but, you know, you’re working on different products...