Secret man analysis of the main character. “The Hidden Man”, analysis of Platonov’s story

Main character Foma Pukhov's works look very strange against the backdrop of traditional Soviet art characters of proletarian origin. Unlike the doubtless heroes A.A. Fadeev and N.A. Ostrovsky, Pukhov does not believe in the revolution, he doubts it. He worries about “where and to what end of the world all the revolutions and all human anxiety are going.” Rooted in his soul is a deep passion for true knowledge of the world, the desire to check everything and see for himself. A parallel arises with the Evangelical Apostle Thomas the Unbeliever. He was not with the other apostles when the resurrected Jesus Christ came to them, and Thomas refuses to believe in the resurrection of the Teacher until he himself touches his wounds. There is an interpretation according to which Thomas was the only apostle who was able to comprehend the secret, hidden meaning of the teachings of Christ.

Platonov’s hero, like Nekrasov’s men in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” is attracted by the eternal mystery of happiness. He is interested not so much in everyday life as in being. The story opens with a very strange scene: a hungry Thomas cuts sausage on his wife’s coffin. In this episode, the eternal and the momentary are expressively correlated with each other, the full extent of Thomas’s dissimilarity from an ordinary person. Thomas is orphaned, but he has to continue living.

Thus, from the first episode, the story intertwines the everyday and philosophical dimensions of life. All the questions that concern Thomas will be of both an abstract spiritual and practical, everyday nature. Why, after all, a revolution, thinks Thomas, if it does not bring the highest justice and does not solve the problem of death? For Foma’s acquaintances, the goal of the revolution is quite specific - material equality, practical improvement in the lives of workers. Pukhov is concerned that, apart from this material goal, there is nothing in the revolution.

Foma Pukhov is an eternal wanderer. At first glance, he travels aimlessly, while everyone around him is busy with very specific things. He does not find a permanent refuge for himself, because there is no place for his soul in the revolution. Others find their place: Zvorychny, becoming the secretary of the party cell; sailor Sharikov, getting a job as a hiring commissioner work force in Baku, foreman of the assembly shop Perevoshchikov. From their point of view, the revolution is fulfilling its promise to bring happiness to everyone. Thomas is looking - alas, to no avail - for confirmation of the revolutionary faith. Only the reality of the revolutionary storm is revealed to him - the reality of dying. Having left the house after the death of his wife, he works on a railway snowplow. Before his eyes, an assistant driver dies in a locomotive accident, a white officer kills an engineer, a red armored train is shot “outright” by a Cossack detachment. And there is no end to this feast of death.

Three deaths are depicted especially vividly in the story. Death of the worker Afonin, who fought on the side of the Reds. The death of the white officer Mayevsky, who shot himself: “and his despair was so great that he died before his shot.” The death of an engineer, the head of the distance, who is “saved” by a Cossack officer’s bullet from execution by decision of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The reality of the revolution that Thomas sees only strengthens his doubts about its holiness.

Does this mean that Pukhov does not find happiness in the world? Not at all. Joy and spiritual peace give him a feeling of communication with the whole world (and not with part of it). Platonov carefully describes Pukhov’s feeling of the fullness of life: “The wind stirred Pukhov, like the living hands of a large unknown body, revealing its virginity to the wanderer and not giving it, and Pukhov made noise with his blood from such happiness. This conjugal love of a whole, immaculate land aroused master's feelings in Pukhov. With homely tenderness he looked at all the accessories of nature and found everything appropriate and living in its essence.” This is Thomas’s happiness - the feeling of the need and relevance of everything in life, the organic connection and cooperation of all beings. It is interconnection and cooperation, not struggle and destruction. Thomas is a man who equally all the hardships of life in the country in the conditions of civil war, and the "luxury" of "desperate nature", "Good morning!" - Pukhov says to the driver he replaces at the end of the story. And he answers: “Completely revolutionary.”

Another work in which the holiness of the revolutionary cause is “tested” is the novel “Chevengur” (1929). Chevengur is the name of a small town in which a group of Bolsheviks tried to build communism. In the first part of the novel, its heroes wander in search of happiness in Russia, engulfed in civil war. In the second part, they come to the peculiar city of the Sun - Chevengur, where communism has already come true. In revolutionary fervor, the Chevengurs exterminated most population “unworthy” to live under communism. Now they have to confront a regular army sent to pacify the evader from under state power city. The ending of the novel is tragic: the road to communism ends in death. For the heroes, this death has the character of a collective suicide. The Cheven-Gurs die in battle with a feeling of joyful liberation from the futility of the earthly “paradise” they built. "Chevengur" - awareness of the falsity of the goals proclaimed by the Bolshevik revolution. True, there is no unequivocal condemnation of Platonov’s attitude towards his heroes. The author is on their side in a passionate desire to “make the fairy tale come true”, to bring the age-old dream to life. But he leaves them when they begin to divide people into “clean” and “impure”. Chevengur's heroes appear as victims of an incorrectly set goal, a misunderstood idea. This is their fault and misfortune.

The writer will return to the problems posed in the novel until the end of his life. creative path. Gradually the range of these problems will narrow, because in the 1930s. It will become more and more difficult to discuss them in print. However, the main result of the time travel undertaken by Platonov in the 20s, the result of the test of the past and the future, is the recognition of the “falseness of the project,” the falsity of the plan for a revolutionary remake of life. In the writer's work of the late 1920s - 1930s. the place of the alluring mirages of utopia will be taken by a formidable reality.

Such works of Platonov as the irony-filled story “City of Gradov” (1927), the “organizational-philosophical” essay “Che-Che-O” (1929), and the story “Doubting Makar” (1929) are devoted to the “test of the present.” Literary scholars sometimes call these works a “philosophical-satirical trilogy.” Platonov’s plays “Fourteen Red Huts” (1937-1938, published in 1987) and “Hurdy Organ” (1933, published in 1988) were created using modern material. The most significant works of this period are the stories “The Pit” (1930, published in 1986), “The Juvenile Sea” (1934, published in 1987) and “Jan” (1934).

What is the meaning of the title of the story?

It is known that the word “intimate” traditionally, following the definition in V. I. Dahl’s dictionary, “hidden, concealed, concealed, secret, hidden or hidden from someone” - means something opposite to the concepts of “frank”, “external” , "visual". In modern Russian, the definition of “secret” - “undetectable, sacredly kept” - is often added with “sincere”, “intimate”, “cordial”. However, in connection with Platonov’s Foma Pukhov, an outspoken mockingbird, subjecting a harsh analysis to the holiness and sinlessness of the revolution itself, looking for this revolution not in posters and slogans, but in something else - in characters, in structures new government, the concept of “hidden”, as always, is sharply modified and enriched. How secretive, “buried”, “closed” this Pukhov is, if at every step Pukhov reveals himself, opens up, literally provokes dangerous suspicions about himself. He doesn’t want to enroll in the primitive political literacy circle: “Learning dirty my brains, but I want to live fresh.” " To the proposal of some workers - “You would become a leader now, why are you working?” - he mockingly replies: “There are already so many leaders. But there are no locomotives! I won’t be one of the parasites!” And to the offer to become a hero, to be in the vanguard, he answers even more frankly: “I am a natural fool!”

In addition to the concept of “intimate”, Andrei Platonov was very fond of the word “accidental”.

"I Accidentally I stood up, walked alone and thought,” says, for example, the boy in the story “Clay House in the District Garden.” And in “The Hidden Man” there is an identification of the concepts “accidental” and “hidden”: “ Unintentional Sympathy for people manifested itself in Pukhov’s soul, overgrown with life.” We would hardly be mistaken if, based on many of Platonov’s stories for children, his fairy tales, and in general “signs of abandoned childhood,” we say that children or people with an open, childishly spontaneous soul are the most “innermost”, behaving extremely naturally, without pretense, hiding, especially hypocrisy. Children are the most open, artless, and they are also the most “intimate.” All their actions are “accidental,” that is, not prescribed by anyone, sincere, “careless.” Foma Pukhov is constantly told: “You will achieve your goal, Pukhov! You’ll get spanked somewhere!”; “Why are you a grumbler and a non-party member, and not a hero of the era?” etc. And he continues his path as a free contemplator, an ironic spy, who does not fit into any bureaucratic system, hierarchy of positions and slogans. Pukhov’s “intimacy” lies in this Freedom Self-development, freedom of judgment and assessment of the revolution itself, its saints and angels in the conditions of the revolution stopped in a bureaucratic stupor.

“What are the features of the plot development of Pukhov’s character and what determines them?” - the teacher will ask the class.

Andrei Platonov does not explain the reasons for Pukhov’s continuous, endless wanderings through the revolution (this is 1919-1920), his desire to look for good thoughts (i.e., confidence in the truth of the revolution) “not in comfort, but from crossing with people and events.” He also did not explain the deep autobiographical nature of the entire story (it was created in 1928 and

It is preceded by his story “The Doubting Makar”, which caused sharp rejection by the officialdom of Platonov’s entire position).

The story begins with a defiantly stated, visual theme of movement, a break with peace, with home comfort, with the theme of the onslaught of oncoming life on his soul; from the blows of the wind, storm. He enters a world where “there is wind, wind in the whole wide world” and “man cannot stand on his feet” (A. Blok). Foma Pukhov, still unknown to the reader, does not just go to the depot, to the locomotive, to clear the snow from the tracks for the red trains, - he enters space, into the universe, where “a blizzard unfolded terribly over Pukhov’s very head,” where “he was met by a blow snow in the face and the noise of the storm.” And this makes him happy: the revolution has entered nature, lives in it. Later in the story, the incredibly mobile world of nature and rapidly moving human masses appears more than once - and not at all as a passive background of events, a picturesque landscape.

“The blizzard howled evenly and persistently, Armed with enormous tension Somewhere in the steppes of the southeast."

"Cold Night It was pouring There was a storm, and lonely people felt sadness and bitterness.”

"At night, Against the stronger wind, the detachment was heading to the port to land.”

« The wind grew hard And it destroyed a huge space, going out somewhere hundreds of miles away. Water drops, Plucked from the sea, rushed through the shaking air and hit my face like pebbles.”

“Sometimes past the Shani (a ship with a Red amphibious landing force. - V.Ch.) rushed by

Entire columns of water, engulfed in the whirlwind of the nor’easter.

Following them they exposed Deep abysses, Almost showing the bottom of the sea».

“The train went on all night, rattling, suffering and Faking a nightmare The wind stirred the iron on the roof of the carriage into the bony heads of forgotten people, and Pukhov thought about the dreary life of this wind and felt sorry for it.”

Please note that among all the feelings of Foma Pukhov, one thing prevails: if only the storm does not stop, the majesty of contact with people heart to heart does not disappear, stagnation does not set in, “parade and order,” the kingdom of those who have been sitting! And if only he himself, Pukhov, was not placed, like the civil war hero Maxim Pashintsev in “Chevengur”, in a kind of aquarium, a “reserve reserve”!

By 1927-1928, Platonov himself, a former romantic of the revolution (see his 1922 collection of poems, “Blue Depth”), felt terribly offended, offended by the era of bureaucratization, the era of “ink darkness,” the kingdom of desks and meetings. He, like Foma Pukhov, asked himself: are those bureaucrats from his satirical story “City of Grads” (1926) right, who “philosophically” deny the very idea of movement, renewal, the idea of a path, saying: “what flows will flow and flow?” and - will stop”? In “The Hidden Man”, many of Pukhov’s contemporaries - both Sharikov and Zvorychny - had already “stopped”, sat down in bureaucratic chairs, and believed, to their advantage, in the “Cathedral of the Revolution”, that is, in the dogmas of the new Bible.

The character of Pukhov, a wanderer, a righteous man, a bearer of the idea of freedom, “accidentality” (i.e., naturalness, non-prescription of thoughts and actions, the naturalness of a person), is complexly unfolded precisely in his movements and meetings with people. He's not afraid

Dangers, inconveniences, he is always prickly, unyielding, mocking, careless. As soon as the dangerous trip with the snowplow ended, Pukhov immediately suggested to his new friend Pyotr Zvorychny: “Let’s get going, Pyotr!.. Let’s go, Petrush!.. The revolution will pass, but there will be nothing left for us!” He needs hot spots of the revolution, without the tutelage of bureaucrats. Subsequently, restless Pukhov, non-believer Foma, a mischievous man, a man of playful behavior, ends up in Novorossiysk, participates (as a mechanic on the landing ship "Shanya") in the liberation of Crimea from Wrangel, moves to Baku (on an empty oil tank), where he meets a curious character - sailor Sharikov.

This hero no longer wants to return to his pre-revolutionary working profession. And to Pukhov’s proposal to “take a hammer and patch up the ships personally,” he, who “became a scribe,” being virtually illiterate, proudly declares: “You’re an eccentric, I’m the general leader of the Caspian Sea!”

The meeting with Sharikov did not stop Pukhov in his tracks, did not “get him to work,” although Sharikov offered him a command: “to become the commander of an oil flotilla.” “As if through, Pukhov made his way in the stream of unhappy people to Tsaritsyn. This always happened to him - almost unconsciously he chased life through all the gorges of the earth, sometimes into oblivion of himself,” writes Platonov, reproducing the confusion of road meetings, Pukhov’s conversations, and finally his arrival in his native Pokharinsk (certainly Platonov’s native Voronezh) . And finally, his participation in the battle with a certain white general Lyuboslavsky (“his cavalry is darkness”).

Of course, one should not look for any correspondence with specific historical situations in the routes of Pukhov’s wanderings and wanderings (albeit extremely active, active, full of dangers), or to look for the sequence of events of the Civil War. The entire space in which Pukhov moves is largely conditional, just like the time of 1919-1920. Other contemporaries and eyewitnesses real events of those years, like Platonov’s friend and patron, editor of the “Voronezh Commune” G.Z. Litvin-Molotov, even reproached the writer for “deviating from the truth of history”: Wrangel was expelled in 1920, then what white general could Pokharinsk (Voronezh) besieged after this? After all, the raid of the corps of the white Denikin generals Shkuro and Mamontov (they really had a lot of cavalry), which took Voronezh, happened in 1919!

“What made Pukhov happy about the revolution and what saddened him immensely and increased the flow of ironic judgments?” - the teacher will ask a question to the class.

What is the meaning of the title of the story?

"visual". In modern Russian language, the definition of “secret” is

“undetectable, sacredly preserved” - often added “sincere”, “intimate”,

"cordial". However, in connection with Platonov’s Foma Pukhov, an outspoken mockingbird, subjecting a harsh analysis to the holiness and sinlessness of the revolution itself, looking for this revolution not in posters and slogans, but in something else - in characters, in the structures of the new government, the concept of “hidden”, as always, is sharp modified, enriched. How secretive, “buried”, “closed” this Pukhov is, if... Pukhov reveals himself, opens up at every step, literally provokes dangerous suspicions about himself... He doesn’t want to enroll in the primitive political literacy circle: “Learning dirty my brains, but I want to live fresh." To the proposal of some workers - “You would become a leader now, why are you working?” - he mockingly replies: “There are already so many leaders. But there are no locomotives! I won’t be one of the parasites!” And to the proposal to become a hero, to be in the vanguard, he answers even more frankly:

“I am a natural fool!”

In addition to the concept of “intimate”, Andrei Platonov was very fond of the word “accidental”.

“I accidentally became, I walk alone and think,” says, for example, the boy in the story

"Clay house in the district garden." And in “The Hidden Man” there is an identification of the concepts “unintentional” and “innermost”: “Unintentional sympathy for people┘ manifested itself in Pukhov’s soul, overgrown with life.” We would hardly be mistaken if, based on many of Platonov’s stories for children, his fairy tales, and in general “signs of abandoned childhood,” we say that children or people with an open, child-like elemental soul are the most “innermost”, behaving extremely naturally, without pretense, hiding, especially hypocrisy. Children are the most open, artless, and they are also the most “intimate.” All their actions are “accidental,” that is, not prescribed by anyone, sincere, “careless.” Foma Pukhov is constantly told: “You will achieve your goal, Pukhov! You’ll get spanked somewhere!”;

“Why are you a grumbler and a non-party member, and not a hero of the era?” etc. And he continues his path as a free contemplator, an ironic spy, who does not fit into any bureaucratic system, hierarchy of positions and slogans. Pukhov’s “intimacy” lies in this freedom of self-development, freedom of judgment and assessment of the revolution itself, its saints and angels in the conditions of the revolution stopped in a bureaucratic stupor.

“What are the features of the plot development of Pukhov’s character and what determines them?” - the teacher will ask the class.

precedes his story “The Doubting Makar”, which caused sharp rejection by the officialdom of Platonov’s entire position).

The story begins with a defiantly stated, visual theme of movement, the hero’s break with peace, with home comfort, with the theme of the onslaught of oncoming life on his soul; from the blows of the wind, storm. He enters a world where “there is wind, wind in the whole wide world” and “man cannot stand on his feet” (A. Blok). Foma Pukhov, still unknown to the reader, does not just go to the depot, to the locomotive, to clear the snow from the tracks for the red trains, - he enters space, into the universe, where “a blizzard unfolded terribly over Pukhov’s very head,” where “he was met by a blow snow in the face and the noise of the storm.” And this makes him happy: the revolution has entered nature, lives in it. Later in the story, the incredibly mobile world of nature and rapidly moving human masses appears more than once - and not at all as a passive background of events, a picturesque landscape.

“The blizzard howled evenly and persistently, stocked with enormous tension somewhere in the steppes of the southeast.”

“The cold night became stormy, and lonely people felt sad and bitter.”

“At night, against the strengthening wind, the detachment went to the port to land.”

“The wind hardened and thundered across a huge space, extinguishing somewhere hundreds of miles away. Drops of water, pulled out of the sea, rushed through the shaking air and hit the face like pebbles.”

“Sometimes whole columns of water rushed past the Shani (a ship with a Red amphibious assault - V.Ch.), enveloped in a whirlwind of a nor'easter. Behind them they exposed deep abysses, almost showing the bottom of the sea.”

“The train went on all night, rattling, suffering and sending a nightmare into the bony heads of forgotten people... The wind stirred the iron on the roof of the carriage, and Pukhov thought about the dreary life of this wind and felt sorry for it.”

By 1927-1928, Platonov himself, a former romantic of the revolution (see his 1922 collection of poems, “Blue Depth”), felt terribly offended, offended by the era of bureaucratization, the era of “ink darkness,” the kingdom of desks and meetings. He, like Foma Pukhov, asked himself: were those bureaucrats from his satirical story “City of Grads” (1926) right, who “philosophically” denied the very idea of movement, renewal, the idea of a path, saying: “what flows will flow and - will stop"? In “The Hidden Man”, many of Pukhov’s contemporaries - both Sharikov and Zvorychny - had already “stopped”, sat down in bureaucratic chairs, and believed, to their advantage, in the “Cathedral of the Revolution”, that is, in the dogmas of the new Bible.

dangers, inconveniences, he is always prickly, unyielding, mocking, careless. As soon as the dangerous trip with the snowplow ended, Pukhov immediately suggested to his new friend Pyotr Zvorychny: “Let’s get going, Pyotr!.. Let’s go, Petrush!.. The revolution will pass, and there will be nothing left for us!” He needs hot spots of the revolution, without the tutelage of bureaucrats. Subsequently, restless Pukhov, non-believer Foma, a mischievous man, a man of playful behavior, ends up in Novorossiysk, participates (as a mechanic on the landing ship "Shanya") in the liberation of Crimea from Wrangel, moves to Baku (on an empty oil tank), where he meets a curious character - sailor Sharikov.

This hero no longer wants to return to his pre-revolutionary working profession. And to Pukhov’s proposal “take a hammer and patch the ships personally,” he,

“who became a scribe┘,” being virtually illiterate, proudly declares: “You’re an eccentric, I’m the general leader of the Caspian Sea!”

The meeting with Sharikov did not stop Pukhov in his tracks, did not “get him to work,” although Sharikov offered him a position of command: “to become the commander of an oil flotilla.” “Like through smoke, Pukhov made his way in the stream of unhappy people towards Tsaritsyn. This always happened to him - almost unconsciously he chased life through all the gorges of the earth, sometimes into oblivion of himself,” writes Platonov, reproducing the confusion of road meetings, Pukhov’s conversations, and finally his arrival in his native Pokharinsk (certainly Platonov’s native Voronezh) . And finally, his participation in the battle with a certain white general Lyuboslavsky (“his cavalry is darkness”).

Of course, one should not look for the sequence of events of the Civil War in the routes of Pukhov’s wanderings (albeit extremely active, active, full of dangers) for some kind of correspondence with specific historical situations. The entire space in which Pukhov moves is largely conditional, just like the time of 1919-

1920s Some of the contemporaries and eyewitnesses of the real events of those years, such as Platonov’s friend and patron, editor of the “Voronezh Commune” G. Z. Litvin Molotov, even reproached the writer for “deviations from the truth of history”: Wrangel was expelled in 1920, then what a white general could Pokharinsk (Voronezh) besieged after this? After all, the raid of the corps of the white Denikin generals Shkuro and Mamontov (they really had a lot of cavalry), which took Voronezh, happened in 1919!

“What made Pukhov happy about the revolution and what saddened him immensely and increased the flow of ironic judgments?” - the teacher will ask a question to the class.

Once in his youth, Andrei Platonov, who came from a large family of a railway foreman in Yamskaya Sloboda, admitted: “The words about the steam locomotive revolution turned a steam locomotive into a feeling of revolution for me.” For all his doubts, Foma Pukhov, although he is by no means a heroic character and not a cold sage, not a conventional mockingbird, still retained the same youthful trait, the romanticism of the author’s own feelings about life. Platonov put into Pukhov’s life perceptions much of his perception of the revolution as the most grandiose event of the 20th century, which changed all history, ending the old, “spoiled” history (or rather, prehistory) that was offensive to people. “Time stood all around like the end of the world,” “deep times breathed over these mountains” - there are a lot of similar assessments of time, of all the events that changed history, the fate of the former little man. From early lyrics Platonov, from the book “Blue Depth”, transferred into the story the most important motif about the eternal mystery, the intimacy (freedom) of the human soul:

I am still unknown to myself,

No one has yet illuminated the path for me.

In the story, such “unilluminated”, i.e., those who do not need the granted, prescribed, given from outside “light” (directives, orders, propaganda), are the young Red Army soldiers on the ship “Shanya”:

“They did not yet know the value of life, and therefore cowardice was unknown to them - the pity of losing their body... They were unknown to themselves. Therefore, the Red Army soldiers did not have chains in their souls that chained them to their own personality. That's why they lived life to the fullest with nature and with history - and history ran in those years like a locomotive, dragging behind it the worldwide burden of poverty, despair and humble inertia.”

“What upsets Pukhov in the events, in the very atmosphere of time?” - the teacher will ask the children.

corps of all-powerful officials, signs of obvious inhibition, cooling, even

“petrification”, petrification of everything - souls, deeds, general inspiration, destruction or vulgarization of a great dream. The engineer sending Pukhov on his flight is a complete fright: “they put him up against the wall twice, he quickly turned gray and obeyed everything - without complaint and without reproach. But then he fell silent forever and spoke only orders.”

In Novorossiysk, as Pukhov noted, arrests and destruction of “prosperous people” were already underway, and his new friend the sailor Sharikov, already known to himself, realizing his right to proletarian benefits, the benefits of the “rising class,” is trying to turn Pukhov onto the path of careerism. If you are a worker, then... “- then why are you not at the forefront of the revolution?”

“Two Sharikovs: what do you think are their similarities and differences?” - the teacher will ask a question to the class.

Fortunately for Platonov, it was not noticed that in “The Hidden Man” Plato’s own Sharikov had already appeared (after, but independently of Bulgakov’s grotesque story “ dog's heart", 1925). This yesterday’s sailor, also Platonov’s second “I,” does not yet give rise to the so-called “fearful laughter” (laughter after a forbidden joke, a scary allegory, ridicule of an official text, etc.). Sharikov is no longer averse to increasing his revival history, he does not want to remain among those snotty ones, without whom they will do without Wrangel, he does not enter, but intrudes... into power!

As a result, he - and there is no need for any fantastic surgery with the cute dog Sharik! - already with visible pleasure he writes his name on papers, orders for a bag of flour, a piece of textiles, a pile of firewood, and even, like a puppet, he goes to great lengths: “to sign so famously and figuratively, so that later the reader of his name will say: Comrade Sharikov is intelligent person!».

A not idle question arises: what is the difference between Platonov’s Sharikov and his

“Sharikovism” from the corresponding hero in M. Bulgakov’s story “The Heart of a Dog” (1925)? Essentially, two Sharikovs appeared in the literature of the 20s. Platonov did not have to seek the services of Professor Preobrazhensky and his assistant Bormental (heroes

"Heart of a Dog") to create the phenomenon of Sharikov - smug, yet

a simple-minded demagogue, a bearer of primitive proletarian swagger. Wasn't needed

“material” in the form of a good-natured stray dog Sharik. Platonov’s Sharikov is not an extraordinary, not speculative and exceptional (like Bulgakov’s) phenomenon: he is simpler, more familiar, more everyday, autobiographical, and therefore probably more terrible. And it’s more painful for Platonov: he grows up in “Chevengur” into Kopenkina, and in “Kotlovan” into Zhachev. It is not the laboratory that grows it, but time. He is preparing a landing party in Crimea and is trying to somehow teach the soldiers. At first, he simply “happily rushed around the ship and said something to everyone.” It is curious that he no longer spoke, but constantly agitated, not noticing the poverty of his lectures.

Platonovsky Sharikov, having learned to move " large papers on an expensive table”, having become “the general leader of the Caspian Sea”, he will very soon learn to “be bully” and fool around in any area.

The ending of “The Hidden Man” as a whole is still optimistic: behind for Pukhov are the episodes of dying - the driver’s assistant, the worker Afonin, and ghosts

“Sharikovism,” and threats addressed to him... He “again saw the luxury of life and the fury of bold nature,” “the unexpected in his soul returned to him.” However, these episodes of reconciliation, a kind of harmony between the hero-seeker and the hero-philosopher (the first titles of the story “The Land of Philosophers”), are very fragile and short-lived. A year later, another mockingbird, only more desperate, “doubting Makar”, having come to Moscow, the supreme, governing city, will cry out: “Strength is not dear to us - we will put even the little things at home - the soul is dear to us... Give your soul, since you are an inventor " This is perhaps the main, dominant note in Platonov’s entire orchestra: “Everything is possible - and everything succeeds, but the main thing is to sow the soul in people.” Foma Pukhov is the first of the messengers of this Platonic dream of pain.

Questions and topics for review

1. How did Platonov understand the meaning of the word “hidden”?

2. Why did Platonov choose the plot of wandering, pilgrimage to reveal character?

3. What was the autobiographical nature of Pukhov’s image? Wasn’t Platonov himself the same wanderer, full of nostalgia for the revolution?

4. What is the difference between Sharikov and the character of the same name from “Heart of a Dog”

M.A. Bulgakova? Which writer stood closer to his hero?

5. Is it possible to say that Pukhov is partly of a specifically historical character, and partly

“floating point of view” (E. TolstayaSegal) of Platonov himself on the revolution, its ups and downs?

Andrey Platonov: Memoirs of contemporaries. Biography materials / Comp. N. Kornienko,

E. Shubina. - M., 1994.

Vasily in V.V. Andrei Platonov: Essay on life and creativity. - M., 1990.

K Ornienko N.V. History of the text and biography of A.P. Platonov (1926-1946). - M., 1993.

The main character of the work, Foma Pukhov, looks very strange against the background of characters of proletarian origin traditional in Soviet art. Unlike the doubtless heroes A.A. Fadeev and N.A. Ostrovsky, Pukhov does not believe in the revolution, he doubts it. He worries about “where and to what end of the world all the revolutions and all human anxiety are going.” Rooted in his soul is a deep passion for true knowledge of the world, the desire to check everything and see for himself. A parallel arises with the Evangelical Apostle Thomas the Unbeliever. He was not with the other apostles when the resurrected Jesus Christ came to them, and Thomas refuses to believe in the resurrection of the Teacher until he himself touches his wounds. There is an interpretation according to which Thomas was the only apostle who was able to comprehend the secret, hidden meaning of the teachings of Christ.

Platonov’s hero, like Nekrasov’s men in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” is attracted by the eternal mystery of happiness. He is interested not so much in everyday life as in being. The story opens with a very strange scene: a hungry Thomas cuts sausage on his wife’s coffin. In this episode, the eternal and the momentary are expressively correlated with each other, and the full extent of Thomas’s difference from an ordinary person is shown. Thomas is orphaned, but he has to continue living.

Foma Pukhov is an eternal wanderer. At first glance, he travels aimlessly, while everyone around him is busy with very specific things. He does not find a permanent refuge for himself, because there is no place for his soul in the revolution. Others find their place: Zvorychny, becoming the secretary of the party cell; sailor Sharikov, who became a labor recruitment commissioner in Baku, became the foreman of the Perevoshchikov assembly shop. From their point of view, the revolution is fulfilling its promise to bring happiness to everyone. Thomas is looking - alas, to no avail - for confirmation of the revolutionary faith. Only the reality of the revolutionary storm is revealed to him - the reality of dying. Having left the house after the death of his wife, he works on a railway snowplow. Before his eyes, an assistant driver dies in a locomotive accident, a white officer kills an engineer, a red armored train is shot “outright” by a Cossack detachment. And there is no end to this feast of death.

Does this mean that Pukhov does not find happiness in the world? Not at all. Joy and spiritual peace give him a feeling of communication with the whole world (and not with part of it). Platonov carefully describes Pukhov’s feeling of the fullness of life: “The wind stirred Pukhov, like the living hands of a large unknown body, revealing its virginity to the wanderer and not giving it, and Pukhov made noise with his blood from such happiness. This conjugal love of a whole, immaculate land aroused master's feelings in Pukhov. With homely tenderness he looked at all the accessories of nature and found everything appropriate and living in its essence.” This is Thomas’s happiness - the feeling of the need and relevance of everything in life, the organic connection and cooperation of all beings. It is interconnection and cooperation, not struggle and destruction. Foma is a person to whom all the hardships of the country’s life in conditions of civil war and the “luxury” of “desperate nature” are equally open to him, “Good morning!” - Pukhov says to the driver he replaces at the end of the story. And he answers: “Completely revolutionary.”

Another work in which the holiness of the revolutionary cause is “tested” is the novel “Chevengur” (1929). Chevengur is the name of a small town in which a group of Bolsheviks tried to build communism. In the first part of the novel, its heroes wander in search of happiness in Russia, engulfed in civil war. In the second part, they come to the peculiar city of the Sun - Chevengur, where communism has already come true. In revolutionary fervor, the Chevengurs exterminated most of the population “unworthy” to live under communism. Now they have to confront a regular army sent to pacify the city, which is evading state power. The ending of the novel is tragic: the road to communism ends in death. For the heroes, this death has the character of a collective suicide. The Cheven-Gurs die in battle with a feeling of joyful liberation from the futility of the earthly “paradise” they built. "Chevengur" - awareness of the falsity of the goals proclaimed by the Bolshevik revolution. True, there is no unequivocal condemnation of Platonov’s attitude towards his heroes. The author is on their side in a passionate desire to “make the fairy tale come true”, to bring the age-old dream to life. But he leaves them when they begin to divide people into “clean” and “impure”. Chevengur's heroes appear as victims of an incorrectly set goal, a misunderstood idea. This is their fault and misfortune.

The writer will return to the problems posed in the novel until the end of his creative career. Gradually the range of these problems will narrow, because in the 1930s. It will become more and more difficult to discuss them in print. However, the main result of the time travel undertaken by Platonov in the 20s, the result of the test of the past and the future, is the recognition of the “falseness of the project,” the falsity of the plan for a revolutionary remake of life. In the writer's work of the late 1920s - 1930s. the place of the alluring mirages of utopia will be taken by a formidable reality.

Composition

Andrei Platonovich Platonov began publishing in 1921. He made his debut with poetry and journalism, published a collection of short stories in 1927, and became famous. The story " Hidden Man"Published in 1928. Art world Platonov is contradictory and tragic. He addresses the theme of the “little man” with his innermost soul, continuing the traditions of N. M. Karamzin, A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov. In Platonov's small man"is called "secret" because it is special, unusual, even eccentric.

For example, the machinist Foma Pukhov, the hero of the story “The Hidden Man,” is distinguished by his spontaneity, childish, naive perception of the world. Pukhov has a keen sense of people and nature, he meets different people and tries to understand something important about himself. Those around him cannot understand Thomas. He seems to them either a “stupid man”, or “a wind blowing past the sails of the revolution”, a “gnarly man” who cuts sausage on his wife’s coffin. But no one understands that he does this out of hunger, and not out of a desire to be violated. The word “hidden” in the context of the story is understood as natural, with an open soul, having that treasure that cannot be lost.

Such heroes are fused with nature and have preserved the ideal human life and a feeling of kinship with all people. Platonov's heroes are not typical, they are endowed with the same features, they are all " hidden people».

Pukhov searches for the meaning of the revolution, setting out on the road. He breaks with his settled way of life and home comfort and enthusiastically begins to move. The most important thing for a hero is comfort in his soul. Pukhov thinks about his place in life, his connection with nature. To reveal the character of his hero, Platonov chooses the motif of wandering. And the image of a righteous man in search of truth is closely connected with this motif in Russian literature. In the story, the plot of the journey has a secondary plan: it symbolizes the new birth of a person. This theme runs through Platonov’s works related to the revolution. From it the author moves on to the theme of the awakening of the entire people. The leitmotif of the road, the journey of Pukhov traveling to Baku, Novorossiysk, and Tsaritsyn forms the plot of the story, it is a symbol of the hero’s spiritual search. He walks without a goal and without looking for it.

Pukhov cannot bear loneliness and, imbued with feelings for the world, seeks eternal truths that could fill the emptiness in his soul. It is not by chance that he is called Thomas: like Thomas, an unbeliever, he wants to see everything for himself, and he is not afraid of dangers. And the Apostle Thomas is also the only one who understood the hidden, secret meaning teachings of Christ. Pukhov wants to comprehend the meaning and results of the revolution, looking at it from the inside of people's life. Not everything he sees pleases him. “Why revolution if it does not bring the highest justice? Only a feast of death, more and more victims,” thinks Thomas, not finding a place for it in his soul. As an observer, Thomas sees that the revolution has no moral future. This disappointment gives rise to irony. The ironic author shows us a portrait of Trotsky painted over St. George the Victorious with “bad paint.” The era of bureaucracy and nomenklatura vulgarized the revolution. “History ran in those years like a locomotive, dragging behind it the worldwide burden of poverty, despair and humble inertia,” the writer testifies.

We can say that Platonov's hero is autobiographical and expresses the feelings and thoughts of the author. For Platonov, the main thing in creativity was not skill, but sincerity. In his works about war and revolution, the writer reflects on how people exist during a period of revolutionary catastrophe. In particular, the fate of a man from the people in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era is examined. The author did not believe in revolution. Platonov’s journalism of these years expresses a utopian view of what is happening, a sense of history as an apocalypse.

Platonov has satirical beginning in works that are not such in pathos. Unusual language in the style of slogans and cliches, the author’s hidden irony, grotesque and hyperbole reveal to the reader the meaning of the work. Platonov quickly felt what bureaucracy was and showed the reader how the “innermost man” changes and degenerates, turning into an official, like the former “simple” sailor Sharikov, who now considers himself the “universal leader of the Caspian Sea” and drives around in a car. He trains himself in the ability to “sign his name so famously and figuratively that later the reader of his name will say: Comrade Sharikov is an intelligent person,” he moves “large papers on an expensive table.” Sharikov does not speak, but agitates. He also offers Pukhov “to become the commander of an oil flotilla,” but the hero does not want to be in charge. Sarcastic satire and skepticism regarding the revolutionary process, “depicting the terrible features of my people,” as Platonov wrote, caused constant rejection of criticism. The author does not support the poeticization of the civil war in literature. “Platonov’s irony was an expression of the pain of a writer who believed in both utopia and its language... Platonov alone shows that collectivization was, from a psychological point of view, the infantilization of the peasantry... Platonov can be called a religious writer, despite the fact that his heroes the writer is aware of this, they are looking for an “imaginary faith”, they are the apostles of pseudo-religion,” concludes M. Geller in his book “Andrei Platonov in Search of Happiness.” He believes that Platonov's heroes accept communism as a new religion, but one that distorts Christianity.

The hero goes through enough difficult path from the “external” in oneself to the “innermost”. In the finale, Pukhov sees “the luxury of life and the fury of bold nature” and is reconciled in his moral and philosophical quests. He sees his uniqueness and sows the soul in people, which is the main thing, according to Platonov. The writer expresses a thesis about the unique value of each person, his warmth and compassion, saying that everyone should find their “I”, like Pukhov. This is his faith in man. In the finale, Pukhov feels “his life in all its depth to the innermost pulse” and comes to the conclusion that universal brotherhood is necessary for the integrity of the world.