Read "Fro" in summary
The main character of the work is a twenty-year-old girl Frosya
, the daughter of a railway worker. Her husband left far and wide. Frosya is very sad for him, life loses all meaning for her, she even gives up courses in railway communications and signaling. Frosya's father, Nefed Stepanovich, retired due to age, but continues to miss work. Every day he goes to the hillock in the right-of-way, watching with tearful eyes the steam locomotives running heavily at the head of the trains. Sometimes Nefed Stepanovich shouts to the drivers from his high place, pointing out their mistakes in driving trains. In the evenings, the old man returns tired and asks his daughter for Vaseline to rub on his sore hands. The old man's daily trips to the hill end with him being hired back to work at the depot. Only now he goes to work less often than before retirement, only when he needs to replace someone who is sick. Frosya, as a rule, is angry with his father and his constant readiness to work. Very often she goes out onto the platform, thinking about the train that took her husband to the Far East.
One boring and gray evening, walking along the platform, Frosya sees railway workers, four women and a man, carrying shovels. Frosya volunteers to help them in order to forget her longing for her husband for a while. While working in a slag pit, she meets Natalya Bukova. Together with her, she receives the money she earns and goes dancing at a club. There, Frosya is often invited to dance, because she is one of the few who is not shy and knows how to do it. When dancing with the dispatcher, Frosya often puts her head on his chest, which causes him bewilderment. When the dispatcher asks her name, Frosya states that she is a foreigner named Fro
, and then starts crying and runs away. At home, Frosya again begins to remember her husband Fyodor and cannot find a place for herself out of longing for him. An attempt to return to railway communication courses is unsuccessful: microfarads, iron cores and current harmonics are meaningless without Fedor. Frosya is always waiting for a letter from him, but he does not write to her. She gets a job as a letter carrier, wanting to be the first to receive all the letters, but again there is not a single line from Fyodor.
One day, the day she has long dreamed of comes: a telegram arrives from Fedya with the address of his residence. That night Frosya does not sleep, but composes a reply telegram for him. In the morning she asks her father to take the telegram to the post office without reading it. The old man, without listening to his daughter, reads the telegram. It talks about unexpectedly developing pneumonia and the possible imminent death of Frosya. A week later Fyodor arrives. He tells Frosa that while on the train he realized that the telegram was false, but out of longing and love for Frosa he still came. Frosya is very happy, she cleans the apartment, and asks her father to go to the depot and find out if they are going to send him on a flight. Nefed Stepanovich leaves. Frosya does not part with Fedor for twelve days. On the twelfth day she wakes up and sees that Fyodor and his things are gone.
On the twelfth day she wakes up and sees that Fyodor and his things are gone. The father comes and says that he was not called on the flight, all these days he lived at the station, afraid to disturb them. The father also adds that he saw Fyodor at the station, he left for the Far East and promised, having done all his work, to return or take Frosya to him.
Source
A very short summary for a reader's diary (20 sentences)
The husband of twenty-year-old Frosya, Fyodor, went to the Far East to put electrical mechanisms into operation. That same evening she went to the station to find out if anything had been reported to the station about the courier train that had left here, but she did not find out any information about it. The girl really missed her husband and didn’t know where to escape from her melancholy. For a while, she was distracted from her melancholy by working that same evening: together with other women, throwing out the slag dumped by the locomotives from the pit.
At this random job, she became friends with Natasha Bukova and went with her to the club after work. At the dance, Frosya became so sad again that she began to cry.
In the morning, the girl went to courses in railway communications and signaling, but she lost the desire to study, since now she did not understand anything. Previously, her husband explained to her what was incomprehensible, and she studied well.
Frosya was waiting for a letter or telegram from Fyodor, but there was nothing from him, except for the telegram that he sent the next morning after leaving. Fearing that letters were going missing at the post office, the girl got a job as a postman.
When the telegram finally arrived, in which Fyodor reported his current address, Frosya asked her father to take the telegram to the post office, but not to read what was written in it. The father nevertheless decided to see what his daughter wrote to her husband. It turned out that she, on his behalf, informed Fyodor that Frosya was dying. Two days later, my husband announced in a telegram that he was leaving.
The girl calculated exactly when Fyodor would arrive and met him at the station. The husband who arrived told her that he did not believe about her death for long, but came because he loved her.
Frosya's father, like her husband, loved his job very much; he was a locomotive driver. Having told his daughter and son-in-law that he had been called on a flight, he left them alone in the apartment for several days. The young people were happy and shared their dreams of always working for people. Then Fyodor still had to leave, and Frosya was sure that he would return to her.
Summary of Platonov Fro
The young girl Frosya spends dreary everyday life after her husband went to the Far East. She even quits her railway course. The girl's father, railway worker Nefed Stepanovich, is retiring, but does not stop coming to his place of work. In despair, the old man follows the locomotives with his eyes and gives advice to the drivers. Soon he is given a job again at the depot - sometimes replacing sick workers. Frosya is angry with Nefed Stepanovich for his zeal, and often comes to the platform to be sad.
One evening, Frosya volunteers to help the railway workers with their work in order to get a little distraction. Frosya meets Natalya Bukova, with whom they go to a dance after work. Frosya dances well, so she is often invited. While dancing with the dispatcher, Frosya often lowers her head on his chest, and he is perplexed. She introduces herself to him as the foreigner Fro and, bursting into tears, runs away.
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Platonov's story fro summary
The main character of the work is a twenty-year-old girl Frosya, the daughter of a railway worker. Her husband left far and wide. Frosya is very sad for him, life loses all meaning for her, she even gives up courses in railway communications and signaling. Frosya's father, Nefed Stepanovich, retired due to age, but continues to miss work. Every day he goes to the hillock in the right-of-way, watching with tearful eyes the steam locomotives running heavily at the head of the trains. Sometimes Nefed Stepanovich shouts to the drivers from his high place, pointing out their mistakes in driving trains. In the evenings, the old man returns tired and asks his daughter for Vaseline to rub on his sore hands. The old man's daily trips to the hill end with him being hired back to work at the depot. Only now he goes to work less often than before retirement, only when he needs to replace someone who is sick. Frosya, as a rule, is angry with his father and his constant readiness to work. Very often she goes out onto the platform, thinking about the train that took her husband to the Far East.
One boring and gray evening, walking along the platform, Frosya sees railway workers, four women and a man, carrying shovels. Frosya volunteers to help them in order to forget her longing for her husband for a while. While working in a slag pit, she meets Natalya Bukova. Together with her, she receives the money she earns and goes dancing at the club. There, Frosya is often invited to dance, because she is one of the few who is not shy and knows how to do it. When dancing with the dispatcher, Frosya often puts her head on his chest, which causes him bewilderment. When the dispatcher asks her name, Frosya states that she is a foreigner named Fro, and then starts crying and runs away. At home, Frosya again begins to remember her husband Fyodor and cannot find a place for herself out of longing for him. An attempt to return to railway communication courses is unsuccessful: microfarads, iron cores and current harmonics are meaningless without Fedor. Frosya is always waiting for a letter from him, but he does not write to her. She gets a job as a letter carrier, wanting to be the first to receive all the letters, but again there is not a single line from Fyodor.
Andrey Platonov - Aphrodite
Introductory fragment Andrey Platonov
Aphrodite
Andrey Platonov
APHRODITE
“Was his Aphrodite alive?” - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin now turned not to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars and the horizon and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or an unclear signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or her chest had already grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a naive blue flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? You know better there, you are connected to the whole earth, and I walk separately - is Aphrodite alive or not? The flower did not change from his melancholy and question, it was silent and lived in its own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as it had passed before, perhaps, over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living, laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from above, perhaps one could see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and from it one can notice the sadness of loss or satisfaction from the safety of one’s goods, and he wanted to discern through the common connection of all the living and dead in the world the barely discernible, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.
Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not do anything to help his beloved creature to save him. Aphrodite was a young, smart, accommodating woman and should not get lost without a trace or die of hunger among her people. Of course, accidents on long roads or accidental death are acceptable. However, neither in nature nor in people could any voice or trembling be noticed, responding with sad news to the open, waiting heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.
Fomin indulged in memory, repeating within himself what he had once experienced with the immobility of eternal stopped happiness. He saw in memory a small town illuminated by the sun, the dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under a blue sky. At midday, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the fireproof construction office, in which he served as a work supervisor. A gramophone was playing in the cafe. Fomin went to the buffet, asked for sausages and cabbage, the so-called “letuchka”, that is, salted peas that fly freely into the mouth, and in addition took a glass of beer. A woman who specially worked on beer poured the drink into a mug, and Fomin watched the beer stream, fundamentally demanding that he be poured according to the devil and not fill the container with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never once carefully looked into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But one day that woman accidentally took a deep breath at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter with a long gaze. She also looked at him; the foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, having forgotten herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" - Fomin told her then and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear-faced, with dark shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair on her head growing with wild force. Fomin took his gaze away from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and that feeling then did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the man to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble surface of the counter. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him on top of the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived as husband and wife for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate from plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question into the celestial phenomena of clouds and stars. The information bureau about evacuees has been searching intensively and for a long time for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina, but has not yet found her. Nazar Ivanovich had no person closer to Aphrodite; All his life he had been accustomed to talking with her, because it helped his thinking and instilled in him confidence in the work he was performing. And now, during the war, being separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin, in every free time, writes long letters to her and sends them to the information office of evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters are delivered to the addressee when he is found. During the war, many such letters have probably accumulated in the information desk - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will disappear without being read. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and thoroughly, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander was not lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters either from his wife or from relatives...
Now those happy, peaceful years are long gone. And they could not last forever, because happiness must change in order to be preserved. In the war, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin found his other happiness, different from his previous peaceful labor, but also related to it; after the war, he hoped to know a higher life than the one he had already experienced as a worker and warrior.
* * *
Our vanguard units occupied the southern city in which Fomin lived and worked before the war. Fomin's regiment was in reserve and was not put into action due to lack of need.
Fomin's regiment settled down in the city area in the second echelon, in order to then move on a long march to the west. On his first day, Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite and went on leave to the sweetest city for him in all of Russian land. The city was fragmented by artillery fire, burned by the flames of fires, and its strong buildings were blown to dust by the enemy. Fomin was already accustomed to seeing grain fields trampled by machines, earth scarred by trenches and human settlements razed by fire; it was the plowing of war, where something was sown in the ground that should never grow on it again - the corpses of villains, and that which was born for a good active life, but doomed only to eternal memory - the flesh of our soldiers, posthumously guarding in the ground fallen enemy.
Fomin walked through the orchard to the place where Aphrodite's cafe was once located. It was December. The bare fruit trees had cooled down for the winter and became numb in a sad sleep, and their outstretched branches, which held fruits in the fall, were now cut by bursts of bullets and hung helplessly downward on the residual fibers of the wood, and only rare branches were preserved in healthy integrity. Many trees were completely cut down by the Germans as material for building defenses.
The house where twenty-odd years ago had been a cafe, and then a home, now lay crumbled into rubble and debris, killed and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin still remembered the appearance of this house, but soon, with time, it would fade from him, and he would forget it. Isn’t it so that somewhere in a distant, dead field now lies the cold, large, beloved body of Aphrodite, and it is devoured by corpse creatures, it melts in water and air, and it is dried and carried away by the wind, so that all the substance of Aphrodite’s life is squandered evenly in the world and without a trace, so that the person is forgotten.
He went further to the outskirts of the city, where he lived as a child. The desolation chilled his soul, the late posthumous wind blew through the ruins of silent dwellings. He saw the place where he lived and played as a baby. The old wooden house burned down to the very foundation, the tiles, crumbled from the intense heat, lay on top of his children's abode on the scorched ground. The poplar in the yard, under which little Nazar slept in the summer, was cut down and lay near its stump, dead, with decayed bark.
Fomin stood for a long time near this tree of his childhood. His numb heart suddenly became as if insensitive, so as not to accept any more sadness. Then Fomin collected several surviving tiles and placed them in a small regular pile, as if preparing material for future construction or collecting seeds to sow Russia again. These tiles and all the others that are in the area were made in the workshops that Fomin established here in the old times of peace and which he was in charge of for whole years.
Fomin went to the steppe; there, two miles from the city, he once laid out and built his first pond dam. He was then a happy builder, but now the field of his youth was sad and empty, dug up by war and barren; unfamiliar blades of grass were occasionally visible on the melted fine snow and, indifferent to man, obediently swayed in the wind... The earthen dam was blown up in the middle of its body, and the reservoir dried up, and the fish in it died.
“Fro”, a summary of Platonov’s story
The main character of the story is a twenty-year-old woman, Frosya Evstafieva. Her husband Fyodor went to the Far East for a year to “set up and put into operation mysterious electrical devices.” With their help, he hoped to transform the world. Fro lived in a new three-room apartment. True, she didn’t occupy all of it. She and her husband were allocated only two rooms. In the third lived Fro’s widowed father, a locomotive driver. Due to his advanced age, he did not travel very often and was listed as a reserve mechanic.
When Frosya returned from the station, having seen her husband off, her father asked for food. He wanted to be prepared in case he was called into work unexpectedly. This happened rarely - once every three or four days. Having fed her father, Frosya went to her room and sat there, being “in the bliss of love and memory for the person who had left.” Her father suggested she go to the club. She refused, saying that she would miss her husband at home. Nevertheless, after feeding her father dinner, Frosya left the apartment. Only instead of the club the woman went to the station. There, Fro asked the man who was sweeping the platform whether courier train number two was traveling safely (it was the one her husband boarded that day), but instead of an answer she encountered rudeness.
After work, Fro invited Natalya to her home. There the friends cleaned themselves up, then went to the club to dance. The next morning, Frosa received a telegram from her husband, where he said that he loved her and saw her in a dream. Father was not at home. Upstairs, a little boy was playing the harmonica - his dad had gone to work, his mother was doing laundry, and the child was bored. Fro slept and then went to a course in railway communications and signaling. She did not show up for classes for four days, but she was forgiven a lot there for her “ability to learn.” When Frosya first started attending courses, she studied poorly. As a result, only her husband could instill interest in the subject in a woman, “who felt machine mechanisms with the precision of his own flesh.”
During classes, Frosya could not concentrate on her studies - when her husband left, she again became completely uninterested. The song of the neighbor boy with the harmonica was playing in her head. When Fro returned home, the father tried to feed his daughter and talk to her, but she refused to eat and went to her room. Soon he was called to work. Quickly getting ready, my father set off on a flight for several days. Frosya did not come out to say goodbye to him. Left alone, she dozed off a little. Then I heard the boy playing the harmonica again. All evening Frosya wandered through the fields, groves, and station tracks. She didn’t want to go to her friends and acquaintances.
Other characters
- Nefyod Stepanovich Evstafiev is Frosya's father. He is delicate and sensitive to his daughter and son-in-law. The old locomotive driver cannot imagine life without his job. He could not live peacefully in retirement, so he began going to the railroad and looking at steam locomotives all day. When Evstafiev saw that there was a problem with the moving locomotive, he shouted to the driver about it. The party organizer of the depot got the restless, active pensioner back to work, and Nefyod Stepanovich became a reserve mechanic.
- Fyodor is Frosya's husband. He is 28 years old, he graduated from two technical institutes and “felt machine mechanisms with the precision of his own flesh.” He went to the Far East to set up and put into operation electrical mechanisms and devices. Fedor loves his wife, he helped her study and understand physics when she was taking courses.
- Natasha Bukova is a woman in her thirties who became friends with Frosya at work cleaning slag pits. She spent four days under arrest at the behest of her lover. When he himself was arrested for fraud, Natasha was released from arrest, and now she is going to live honestly with her husband.
The story “Fro” by Platonov: summary
In 1937, three works by Andrei Platonov were published. One of them is “Fro”. A summary of the story is presented in this article.
In the center of the story is a middle-aged employee of the railway station and his daughter, a strange girl, unlike others, for whom nothing exists in this world except love. There is an active struggle against the imperialists abroad. All conscious Soviet citizens take part in it. But Frosya doesn’t care about this fight at all. She is in a dream. The summary of “Fro” by Platonov is presented below according to the following plan:
Aphrodite
Was his Aphrodite alive? - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin now turned not to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars, and the horizon, and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or an unclear signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or her chest had already grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a naive blue flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? You know better there, you are connected to the whole earth, and I walk separately - is Aphrodite alive or not? The flower did not change from his melancholy and question, it was silent and lived in its own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as it had passed before, perhaps, over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living, laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from above, perhaps one could see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and from it one can notice the sadness of loss or satisfaction from the safety of one’s goods, and he wanted to discern through the common connection of all the living and dead in the world the barely discernible, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.
Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not do anything to help his beloved creature to save him. Aphrodite was a young, smart, easy-going woman and should not get lost without a trace or die of hunger among her own people. Of course, accidents on long roads or accidental death are acceptable. However, neither in nature nor in people could any voice or trembling be noticed, responding with sad news to the open, waiting heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.
Fomin indulged in memory, repeating in himself what he had once experienced with the stillness of eternal stopped happiness... He saw in his memory a small city illuminated by the sun, dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under the blue sky. At midday, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the fireproof construction office, in which he served as a work supervisor. A gramophone was playing in the cafe. Fomin went to the buffet, asked for sausages and cabbage, the so-called “letuchka”, that is, salted peas that fly freely into the mouth, and in addition took a glass of beer. A woman specially working on beer poured the drink into a mug, and Fomin watched the beer stream, fundamentally demanding that he be poured according to the devil and not fill the container with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never once carefully looked into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But one day that woman accidentally took a deep breath at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter with a long gaze. She also looked at him: the foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, having forgotten herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" - Fomin told her then and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear-faced, with dark shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair on her head growing with wild force. Fomin took his gaze away from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and that feeling then did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the man to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble surface of the counter. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him on top of the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived as husband and wife for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate from plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question into the celestial phenomena of clouds and stars. The information bureau about evacuees has been searching intensively and for a long time for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina, but has not yet found her. Nazar Ivanovich had no person closer to Aphrodite; All his life he had been accustomed to talking with her, because it helped his thinking and instilled in him confidence in the work he was performing. And now, during the war, being separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin, in every free time, writes long letters to her and sends them to the information office of evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters can be delivered to the addressee when he is found. During the war, many such letters have probably accumulated in the information desk - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will disappear without being read. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and thoroughly, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander was not lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters from either his wife or relatives.
End of introductory fragment.
Nefed Stepanovich
My father worked as a locomotive driver for many years. In recent years, he was listed as a reserve mechanic. He replaced sick people, checked steam locomotives after repairs, and drove lightweight trains. They tried to send him into retirement, but it turned out that this was not so easy. At first the old man agreed: he didn’t know what a pension was. But on the third day of idleness he felt sad, and then went to the station, where he spent the whole day.
The next morning I went back to my previous place of work. He returned in the evening, tired, as if after a long day of work. It got to the point that the daughter started bringing lunch to her father at work. She felt sorry for the old man. He did not walk idly around the station. The former driver told employees how to work and scolded careless mechanics. In the end, the old man was returned to work. The clerk signed him up for the locomotive service. From now on, he was again on the staff, although he was called to work quite rarely.
He left far and for a long time, almost irrevocably. The locomotive of the courier train, having retired, sang in the open space to say goodbye: the mourners left the passenger platform back to settled life, a porter appeared with a mop and began to clean the platform, like the deck of a ship left aground.
- Move aside, citizen! - said the porter to the two lonely plump legs.
The woman went to the wall, to the mailbox and read on it the deadlines for removing correspondence: they took it out often, you can write letters every day. She touched the iron of the box with her finger - it was strong, no one’s soul in a letter would be lost from here.
Behind the station was the new railway town; the shadows of tree leaves moved along the white walls of the houses, the evening summer sun illuminated nature and homes clearly and sadly, as if through a transparent emptiness where there was no air to breathe.
On the eve of the night, everything in the world was too clearly visible, dazzling and ghostly - it therefore seemed non-existent.
The young woman stopped in surprise in the midst of such a strange light: in the twenty years of her life, she did not remember such an empty, shining, silent space, she felt that her heart was weakening from the lightness of the air, from the hope that her loved one would come back. She saw her reflection in the window of the hairdresser: her appearance was vulgar, her hair was fluffed and flounced (this hairstyle was once worn in the nineteenth century), her deep gray eyes looked with intense, as if artificial tenderness - she was used to loving the one who had left, she wanted to be loved by him constantly, continuously, so that inside her body, among an ordinary, boring soul, a second sweet life would languish and grow. But she herself could not love as she wanted - strongly and constantly; She sometimes got tired and then cried out of grief that her heart could not be tireless.
She lived in a new three-room apartment; Her widowed father, a locomotive engineer, lived in one room, and in the other two she lived with her husband, who had now gone to the Far East to set up and put into operation mysterious electrical devices. He always occupied himself with the secrets of machines, hoping through mechanisms to transform the whole world for the benefit and pleasure of mankind or for something else: his wife did not know exactly.
Due to his old age, my father rarely traveled. He was listed as a reserve mechanic, replacing sick people, working on running-in steam locomotives that were out of repair, or driving light short-haul trains. A year ago they tried to transfer him to retirement. The old man, not knowing what it was, agreed, but, having lived four days in freedom, on the fifth day he went outside the signal, sat down on a hillock in the right-of-way and sat there until the dark night, watching with tearful eyes the steam locomotives running heavily at the head of the trains. . From then on, he began to go to that hill every day to look at the cars, live with sympathy and imagination, and in the evening come home tired, as if returning from a haul flight. At the apartment, he washed his hands, sighed, said that on a nine-thousand-meter incline the brake pad of one car had fallen off or something else had happened, then he timidly asked his daughter for Vaseline to lubricate his left palm, supposedly strained by a tight regulator, ate dinner, muttered and soon slept in bliss. The next morning, the retired mechanic again walked into the right-of-way and spent another day in observation, in tears, in fantasy, in sympathy, in the frenzy of lonely enthusiasm. If, from his point of view, there was a malfunction on the moving locomotive or the driver was driving the car out of shape, he shouted condemnation and instructions to him from his high point: “You pumped the water! Open the tap, you bastard! Blow!”, “Take care of the sand: you’ll be on the rise! Why are you pouring it out foolishly?”, “Tighten the flanges, don’t lose steam: what do you have – a car or a bathhouse?” If the train composition was incorrect, when light empty platforms were at the head and in the middle of the train and could be squeezed out during emergency braking, the free mechanic shook his fist from the hump at the tail conductor. And when the car of the retired driver himself was running and it was driven by his former assistant Veniamin, the old man always found a clear malfunction in the locomotive - this was not the case with him - and advised the driver to take action against his careless assistant. “Venyaminchik, Venyaminchik, spray him in the face!” - shouted the old mechanic from the hill of his alienation.
In cloudy weather, he took an umbrella with him, and his only daughter brought him lunch on the hill, because she felt sorry for her father when he returned in the evening, thin, hungry and mad with unsatisfied work lust. But recently, when an outdated mechanic, as usual, was yelling and swearing from his elevated position, the party organizer of the depot, Comrade Piskunov, approached him; The party organizer took the old man by the hand and led him to the depot. The depot clerk signed the old man up for locomotive service again. The mechanic climbed into the booth of one cold engine, sat down by the boiler and dozed off, exhausted by his own happiness, hugging the locomotive boiler with one hand, like the belly of all working humanity, to which he had again joined.
- Frosya! - the father said to his daughter when she returned from the station, having seen her husband off on the long journey. - Frosya, give me something to chew from the stove, otherwise they might call me to go at night...
Every minute he expected to be called on a trip, but he was called rarely - once every three or four days, when a prefabricated, lightweight route was selected or another simple need arose. Still, my father was afraid to go to work hungry, unprepared, and gloomy, so he constantly took care of his health, vigor and proper digestion, regarding himself as a leading iron man.
- Citizen mechanic! - the old man sometimes spoke with dignity and articulately, addressing himself personally, and was meaningfully silent in response, as if listening to a distant ovation.
Frosya took the pot out of the oven and gave it to her father to eat. The evening sun shone through the apartment, the light penetrated all the way to Frosya’s body, in which her heart warmed and the flowing blood and vital feeling were continuously activated. She went to her room. On her desk she had a childhood photograph of her husband; After childhood, he never acted in films because he was not interested in himself and did not believe in the meaning of his face. On the yellowed card stood a boy with a large, baby-like head, in a poor shirt, cheap pants and barefoot; behind it grew magical trees, and in the distance there was a fountain and a palace. The boy looked carefully into the still unfamiliar world, not noticing the wonderful life behind him on the photographer’s canvas. A wonderful life was in this boy himself with a wide, inspired and timid face, who held a branch of grass in his hands instead of a toy and touched the ground with his trusting bare feet.
Night has already come. The village shepherd brought dairy cows from the steppe to spend the night. The cows mooed, asking to rest with their owners, women, housewives, took them to the yard; the long day cooled into night; Frosya sat in the darkness in the bliss of love and memory for the person who had left. Outside the window, having begun a direct path into the heavenly happy space, pine trees grew, the weak voices of some insignificant birds sang their last, dormant songs, the guards of darkness, grasshoppers, made their meek peaceful sounds - that everything is fine and they are not sleeping and seeing .
Father asked Frosya if she would go to the club: there was a new production today, a flower fight and a performance by entertainers from the conductor reserve.
“No,” said Frosya, “I won’t go.” I'll miss my husband.
- According to Fedka? - said the mechanic. - He will appear: one year will pass, and he will be here... Bored yourself, otherwise what! I used to go away for a day or two, your late mother was even bored: she was a bourgeois!
- But I’m not a bourgeois, but I still miss you! – Frosya said in surprise. - No, I’m probably a bourgeois too...
Her father reassured her:
- Well, what a bourgeois you are!.. Now they are gone, they died a long time ago. Before you become a bourgeois you still have a long time to live and study: those good women were...
“Dad, go to your room,” Frosya said. - I’ll give you dinner soon, I want to be alone now...
The main character of the work is a twenty-year-old girl Frosya, the daughter of a railway worker. Her husband left far and wide. Frosya is very sad for him, life loses all meaning for her, she even gives up courses in railway communications and signaling. Frosya's father, Nefed Stepanovich, retired due to age, but continues to miss work. Every day he goes to the hillock in the right-of-way, watching with tearful eyes the steam locomotives running heavily at the head of the trains. Sometimes Nefed Stepanovich shouts to the drivers from his high place, pointing out their mistakes in driving trains. In the evenings, the old man returns tired and asks his daughter for Vaseline to rub on his sore hands. The old man's daily trips to the hill end with him being hired back to work at the depot. Only now he goes to work less often than before retirement, only when he needs to replace someone who is sick. Frosya, as a rule, is angry with his father and his constant readiness to work. Very often she goes out onto the platform, thinking about the train that took her husband to the Far East.
One boring and gray evening, walking along the platform, Frosya sees railway workers, four women and a man, carrying shovels. Frosya volunteers to help them in order to forget her longing for her husband for a while. While working in a slag pit, she meets Natalya Bukova. Together with her, she receives the money she earns and goes dancing at the club. There, Frosya is often invited to dance, because she is one of the few who is not shy and knows how to do it. When dancing with the dispatcher, Frosya often puts her head on his chest, which causes him bewilderment. When the dispatcher asks her name, Frosya states that she is a foreigner named Fro, and then starts crying and runs away. At home, Frosya again begins to remember her husband Fyodor and cannot find a place for herself out of longing for him. An attempt to return to railway communication courses is unsuccessful: microfarads, iron cores and current harmonics are meaningless without Fedor. Frosya is always waiting for a letter from him, but he does not write to her. She gets a job as a letter carrier, wanting to be the first to receive all the letters, but again there is not a single line from Fyodor.
One day, the day she has long dreamed of comes: a telegram arrives from Fedya with the address of his residence. That night Frosya does not sleep, but composes a reply telegram for him. In the morning she asks her father to take the telegram to the post office without reading it. The old man, without listening to his daughter, reads the telegram. It talks about unexpectedly developing pneumonia and the possible imminent death of Frosya. A week later Fyodor arrives. He tells Frosa that while on the train he realized that the telegram was false, but because of longing and love for Frosa he still came. Frosya is very happy, she cleans the apartment, and asks her father to go to the depot and find out if they are going to send him on a flight. Nefed Stepanovich leaves. Frosya does not part with Fedor for twelve days. On the twelfth day she wakes up and sees that Fyodor and his things are gone.
On the twelfth day she wakes up and sees that Fyodor and his things are gone. The father comes and says that he was not called on the flight, all these days he lived at the station, afraid to disturb them. The father also adds that he saw Fyodor at the station, he left for the Far East and promised, having done all his work, to return or take Frosya to him.
A twenty-year-old girl, Frosya, is waiting for her husband, who has left for the Far East. Longing for her husband forces Frosya to quit the railway courses in which she studied. Her father is a retired railroad worker who passionately misses his job. Nefed Stepanovich often went out onto the hill and watched the locomotives passing by. Sometimes, he waved and shouted to the drivers, pointing out their mistakes in driving. Tired, in the evenings he asks Frosya to give him Vaseline to soften his rough hands.
Over time, they agree to take him back to the depot, but only to replace sick employees. Frosa doesn't like her father's working spirit. She herself often walks along the platform, remembering the departed Fedor. One day, while walking, the girl saw workers carrying shovels and volunteered to help them. While working, she met Natalya Bukova. In the evening, with the money they earned, the girls went dancing at a club. Frosya always enjoyed the attention of the guys because she was one of the few who knew how to dance. Having met the dispatcher who invited her to dance, she introduced herself to him as the foreigner Fro. But then, bursting into tears, the girl runs home. Longing for her beloved, Frosya gets a job as a letter carrier so that she can be the first to receive letters. But the letters don't arrive. After some time, a telegram arrives with a return address from Fedor. All night long, Frosya composes a reply telegram for her husband. In the morning she asks her father to send a message without looking at it.
Without listening to his daughter, the father reads the telegram. In it, Frosya writes that she is terminally ill and may be dying. A week later my husband arrived. He realized that the message was false, but still visited his wife. Frosya cleans the house and asks his father to go to the depot and find out if there is a job for him. Frosya spends twelve whole days with her husband. On the twelfth day, Frosya found neither her husband nor his things. The returning father said that all these days he lived at the station, and Fyodor went on a business trip, but promised to return soon or call Frosya to his place.
“Fro”
analysis of the work - theme, idea, genre, plot, composition, characters, issues and other issues are discussed in this article.
Story by A.P. Platonov's "Fro" is a sketch from the life of one ordinary family. The father of the young woman Frosya works as a reserve mechanic. Using this image as an example, Platonov shows the tragedy of a person who is haunted by an unfulfilled thirst for activity. When the old man was sent into retirement, he sat for days on a hillock near the railway, trying to help the drivers with valuable advice, and he was eventually taken back. Since then, he even slept in his clothes (in a thick winter jacket and a hat with a locomotive badge), waiting for the night call.
His daughter Frosya also cannot sit idly by. After seeing off her husband on a business trip, she goes to a club, but feels that she doesn’t want to have fun alone. Then Frosya comes to the station to find out how the courier train on which her husband set off arrived. Without really learning anything, Frosya undertakes to help a team of workers shovel out a slag pit. After work, she and her new friend go to a club, but dancing does not bring joy, since her husband is far away, and random gentlemen cannot replace him. A woman quits her studies in railway communications courses, which she perceived through the prism of her husband’s thoughts. She literally disappears into thoughts
About love for your husband. When no letters arrive from Fyodor, Frosya gets a job at the post office as a letter carrier. Meeting many people on duty, she soon understands a simple truth: “Life has never had emptiness and peace anywhere.”
Against the background of discussions about the attitude of the heroes of the story to the work of A.P. Platonov shows their humble life. Frosya's husband does not value or save money. The family eats very modestly (tea with dried fruit, yesterday’s pasta). From the narrative it is clear that other families live this way: Natasha Bukova dreams of drinking fruit water with her husband, and Frosya’s neighbors are once again putting off replacing their worn-out linen. It becomes obvious that the heroes of the story do not work for money, but simply because of the need to do their job in life.
Frosya, bored without her husband, decides to call him with a false telegram that she is dying. He arrives immediately. Happy time begins. Day after day, the heroes enjoy their love, each time postponing things (work, study). On the tenth day, Fyodor, Frosya’s husband, nevertheless leaves again for the Far East. The hero prefers the business that inspires him to bourgeois family happiness.
There is another image in the story that is important for understanding the work - a neighbor's boy playing the harmonica. The heroine invites him to visit and understands that “this man was probably the humanity about which Fyodor spoke sweet words to her.”
Frosya's husband sincerely loves her, but he cannot afford to spend his whole life on his own pleasures. Global dreams of the happiness of all people, of all humanity, force him to be involved in the most daring projects.
In this story A.P. Platonov emphasizes one of his favorite ideas that a person should live for the sake of business, and not for worldly pleasures. This is how our ancestors lived from generation to generation. This is how we are destined to live. It is no coincidence that in a conversation with his daughter, Frosya’s father talks about how his wife was waiting for him from work, and says that Frosya should wait for her husband so faithfully. At the end of the story, Frosya resigns himself to his fate. Her attention to the neighbor's boy makes the reader believe that her dream will come true and she will soon also have a child similar to Fyodor. This event would fill her life with meaning and true happiness.
Platonov Andrey
Andrey Planonov
He left far and for a long time, almost irrevocably. The locomotive of the courier train, having retired, sang in the open space to say goodbye; the mourners left the passenger platform back to settled life, a porter appeared with a mop and began to clean the platform, like the deck of a ship left aground.
Step aside, citizen! - said the porter to the two lonely plump legs.
The woman went to the wall, to the mailbox and read on it the deadlines for removing correspondence: they took it out often, you can write letters every day. She touched the iron of the box with her finger - it was strong, no soul in a letter would be lost from here.
Behind the station was the new railway town; the shadows of tree leaves moved along the white walls of the houses, the evening summer sun illuminated nature and homes clearly and sadly, as if through a transparent emptiness where there was no air to breathe. On the eve of the night, everything in the world was too clearly visible, dazzling and ghostly - it therefore seemed non-existent.
The young woman stopped in surprise in the midst of such a strange light: in the twenty years of her life, she did not remember such an empty, shining, silent space, she felt that her heart was weakening from the lightness of the air, from the hope that her loved one would come back. She saw her reflection in the window of the hairdressing salon: her appearance was vulgar, her hair was fluffed and flounced (this hairstyle was once worn in the nineteenth century), her deep gray eyes looked with intense, as if artificial tenderness - she was used to loving the one who had left, she wanted to be loved by him constantly , continuously, so that inside her body, among an ordinary, boring soul, a second sweet life would languish and grow. But she herself could not love as she wanted - strongly and constantly; She sometimes got tired and then cried out of grief that her heart could not be tireless.
She lived in a new three-room apartment; Her widowed father, a locomotive engineer, lived in one room; in the other two she lived with her husband, who had now gone to the Far East to set up and put into operation mysterious electrical devices. He always occupied himself with the secrets of machines, hoping through mechanisms to transform the whole world for the benefit and pleasure of mankind or for something else: his wife did not know exactly.
Due to his old age, my father rarely traveled. He was listed as a reserve mechanic, replacing sick people, working on running-in steam locomotives that were out of repair, or driving light short-haul trains. A year ago they tried to transfer him to retirement. The old man, not knowing what it was, agreed, but, having lived four days in freedom, on the fifth day he went outside the signal, sat down on a hillock in the right-of-way and sat there until the dark night, watching with tearful eyes the steam locomotives running heavily at the head of the trains. . From then on, he began to go to that hill every day to look at the cars, live with sympathy and imagination, and in the evening come home tired, as if returning from a haul flight. At the apartment, he washed his hands, sighed, said that on a nine-thousand-meter incline the brake pad of one car had fallen off or something else had happened, then he timidly asked his daughter for Vaseline to lubricate his left palm, supposedly strained by a tight regulator, ate dinner, muttered and soon slept in bliss. The next morning, the retired mechanic again walked into the right-of-way and spent another day in observation, in tears, in fantasy, in sympathy, in the frenzy of lonely enthusiasm. If, from his point of view, there was a malfunction on the moving locomotive or the driver was driving the car out of shape, he shouted condemnation and instructions to him from his high point: “You pumped the water! Open the tap, you bastard! Blow it!” - “Take care of the sand: you will rise on the rise! Why are you foolishly pouring it out?” - “Tighten the flanges, don’t lose steam: what do you have, a machine or a sauna?” If the train composition was incorrect, when light empty platforms were at the head and in the middle of the train and could be squeezed out during emergency braking, the free mechanic shook his fist from the hump at the tail conductor. And when the car of the retired driver himself was running and it was driven by his former assistant Veniamin, the old man always found a clear malfunction in the locomotive - this was not the case with him - and advised the driver to take action against his careless assistant. “Venyaminchik, Venyaminchik, spray him in the face!” - shouted the old mechanic from the hill of his alienation. In cloudy weather, he took an umbrella with him, and his only daughter brought him lunch on the hill, because she felt sorry for her father when he returned in the evening, thin, hungry and mad with unsatisfied work lust. But recently, when an outdated mechanic, as usual, was yelling and swearing from his elevated position, the party organizer of the depot, Comrade Piskunov, approached him; The party organizer took the old man by the hand and led him to the depot. The depot clerk signed the old man up for locomotive service again. The mechanic climbed into the booth of one cold engine, sat down by the boiler and dozed off, exhausted by his own happiness, hugging the locomotive boiler with one hand, like the belly of all working humanity, to which he had again joined.
Frosya! - the father said to his daughter when she returned from the station, having seen her husband off on the long journey. - Frosya, give me something to chew from the stove, otherwise they might call me to go at night...
Every minute he expected to be called on the trip, but he was called rarely - once every three or four days, when a prefabricated, easy route was selected or another simple need arose. Still, my father was afraid to go to work hungry, unprepared, and gloomy, so he constantly took care of his health, vigor and proper digestion, regarding himself as a leading iron man.
Citizen mechanic! - the old man sometimes spoke with dignity and articulately, addressing himself personally, and was meaningfully silent in response, as if listening to a distant ovation.
Frosya took the pot out of the oven and gave it to her father to eat. The evening sun shone through the apartment, the light penetrated all the way to Frosya’s body, in which her heart warmed and the flowing blood and vital feeling were continuously activated. She went to her room. On her desk she had a childhood photograph of her husband; After childhood, he never acted in films because he was not interested in himself and did not believe in the meaning of his face. On the yellowed card stood a boy with a large, baby-like head, in a poor shirt, cheap pants and barefoot; behind it grew magical trees, and in the distance there was a fountain and a palace. The boy looked carefully into the still unfamiliar world, not noticing the wonderful life behind him on the photographer’s canvas. A wonderful life was in this boy himself with a wide, inspired and timid face, who held a branch of grass in his hands instead of a toy and touched the ground with his trusting bare feet.
Platonov Andrey
Aphrodite
Andrey Platonov
APHRODITE
“Was his Aphrodite alive?” - with this doubt and this hope, Nazar Fomin now turned not to people and institutions - they answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere - but to nature, to the sky, to the stars and the horizon and to dead objects. He believed that there was some indirect sign in the world or an unclear signal indicating to him whether his Aphrodite was still breathing or her chest had already grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a naive blue flower, looked at it for a long time and finally asked: “Well? You know better there, you are connected to the whole earth, and I walk separately - is Aphrodite alive or not? The flower did not change from his melancholy and question, it was silent and lived in its own way, the wind walked indifferently over the grass, as it had passed before, perhaps, over the grave of Aphrodite or over her living, laughing face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clouds floating above the horizon, shining with pure light, and thought that from there, from above, perhaps one could see where Aphrodite was now. He believed that in nature there is a common economy and from it one can notice the sadness of loss or satisfaction from the safety of one’s goods, and he wanted to discern through the common connection of all the living and dead in the world the barely discernible, secret message about the fate of his wife Aphrodite - about her life or of death.
Aphrodite disappeared at the beginning of the war among the people moving away from the Germans to the east. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not do anything to help his beloved creature to save him. Aphrodite was a young, smart, accommodating woman and should not get lost without a trace or die of hunger among her people. Of course, accidents on long roads or accidental death are acceptable. However, neither in nature nor in people could any voice or trembling be noticed, responding with sad news to the open, waiting heart of man, and Aphrodite must be alive in the world.
Fomin indulged in memory, repeating within himself what he had once experienced with the immobility of eternal stopped happiness. He saw in memory a small town illuminated by the sun, the dazzling limestone walls and tiled roofs of its houses, orchards growing in warm bliss under a blue sky. At midday, Fomin usually went to have breakfast in a cafe, which was not far from the fireproof construction office, in which he served as a work supervisor. A gramophone was playing in the cafe. Fomin went to the buffet, asked for sausages and cabbage, the so-called “letuchka”, that is, salted peas that fly freely into the mouth, and in addition took a glass of beer. A woman who specially worked on beer poured the drink into a mug, and Fomin watched the beer stream, fundamentally demanding that he be poured according to the devil and not fill the container with empty foam; in this daily struggle with beer foam, he never once carefully looked into the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he left the cafe. But one day that woman accidentally took a deep breath at an inopportune time, and Fomin looked at the woman behind the counter with a long gaze. She also looked at him; the foam overflowed the mug, and the employee, having forgotten herself, did not pay attention to it. "Stop!" - Fomin told her then and for the first time he discovered that the woman was young, clear-faced, with dark shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness and mockery in their expression, with dense black hair on her head growing with wild force. Fomin took his gaze away from her, but his feeling was already seduced by the image of this woman, and that feeling then did not take into account either his mind or the calmness of his spirit, but went against them, leading the man to his happiness. He then looked at the beer foam on the table and was already indifferent that the foam was filling up in vain on the marble surface of the counter. Later, with a smile, he called Natalya Vladimirovna Aphrodite, whose image also appeared to him on top of the foam, although not sea water, but another liquid. And together with his Aphrodite, Nazar Ivanovich lived as husband and wife for twenty years, except for one break of two and a half years, and only the war separated them; and now he asks in vain about her fate from plants and all the good creatures of the earth, and even peers with the same question into the celestial phenomena of clouds and stars. The information bureau about evacuees has been searching intensively and for a long time for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomina, but has not yet found her. Nazar Ivanovich had no person closer to Aphrodite; All his life he had been accustomed to talking with her, because it helped his thinking and instilled in him confidence in the work he was performing. And now, during the war, being separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin, in every free time, writes long letters to her and sends them to the information office of evacuees in Buguruslan, so that these letters are delivered to the addressee when he is found. During the war, many such letters have probably accumulated in the information desk - some of them will be handed over, others never, and will disappear without being read. Nazar Ivanovich wrote to his wife calmly and thoroughly, believing in her existence and in a future meeting with her, but he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers commanded by Fomin carefully monitored the mail so that the letter addressed to the commander was not lost, because he was almost the only person in the regiment who did not receive letters either from his wife or from relatives...
Now those happy, peaceful years are long gone. And they could not last forever, because happiness must change in order to be preserved. In the war, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin found his other happiness, different from his previous peaceful labor, but also related to it; after the war, he hoped to know a higher life than the one he had already experienced as a worker and warrior.
Our vanguard units occupied the southern city in which Fomin lived and worked before the war. Fomin's regiment was in reserve and was not put into action due to lack of need.
Fomin's regiment settled down in the city area in the second echelon, in order to then move on a long march to the west. On his first day, Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite and went on leave to the sweetest city for him in all of Russian land. The city was fragmented by artillery fire, burned by the flames of fires, and its strong buildings were blown to dust by the enemy. Fomin was already accustomed to seeing grain fields trampled by machines, earth scarred by trenches and human settlements razed by fire; it was the plowing of war, where something was sown in the ground that should never grow on it again - the corpses of villains, and that which was born for a good active life, but doomed only to eternal memory - the flesh of our soldiers, posthumously guarding in the ground fallen enemy.
Fomin walked through the orchard to the place where Aphrodite's cafe was once located. It was December. The bare fruit trees had cooled down for the winter and became numb in a sad sleep, and their outstretched branches, which held fruits in the fall, were now cut by bursts of bullets and hung helplessly downward on the residual fibers of the wood, and only rare branches were preserved in healthy integrity. Many trees were completely cut down by the Germans as material for building defenses.
The house where twenty-odd years ago had been a cafe, and then a home, now lay crumbled into rubble and debris, killed and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin still remembered the appearance of this house, but soon, with time, it would fade from him, and he would forget it. Isn’t it so that somewhere in a distant, dead field now lies the cold, large, beloved body of Aphrodite, and it is devoured by corpse creatures, it melts in water and air, and it is dried and carried away by the wind, so that all the substance of Aphrodite’s life is squandered evenly in the world and without a trace, so that the person is forgotten.
He went further to the outskirts of the city, where he lived as a child. The desolation chilled his soul, the late posthumous wind blew through the ruins of silent dwellings. He saw the place where he lived and played as a baby. The old wooden house burned down to the very foundation, the tiles, crumbled from the intense heat, lay on top of his children's abode on the scorched ground. The poplar in the yard, under which little Nazar slept in the summer, was cut down and lay near its stump, dead, with decayed bark.
Fomin stood for a long time near this tree of his childhood. His numb heart suddenly became as if insensitive, so as not to accept any more sadness. Then Fomin collected several surviving tiles and placed them in a small regular pile, as if preparing material for future construction or collecting seeds to sow Russia again. These tiles and all the others that are in the area were made in the workshops that Fomin established here in the old times of peace and which he was in charge of for whole years.
Fomin went to the steppe; there, two miles from the city, he once laid out and built his first pond dam. He was then a happy builder, but now the field of his youth was sad and empty, dug up by war and barren; unfamiliar blades of grass were occasionally visible on the melted fine snow and, indifferent to man, obediently swayed in the wind... The earthen dam was blown up in the middle of its body, and the reservoir dried up, and the fish in it died.
Loneliness
The summary of Platonov’s “Fro” can be stated extremely succinctly. Platonov's story about two yearning people. Frosya lives with her father in the same apartment, but they are both lonely and far from each other.
Frosya also sometimes visits the station. She knows that her husband will not arrive soon, but she is in constant anticipation. One day, on a boring evening, a girl sees workers unloading an embankment. She volunteers to help these people. Not because he needs money so badly, but in order to forget himself, at least for a while to disconnect from fruitless expectations.
Return
He returns and spends twelve days with Frosya. Nefed Stepanovich is called on a trip. He returns only after his son-in-law leaves. Later it turns out that he was not working all this time. The old man lived at the station and was afraid to disturb his daughter. This is the summary of the story “Fro” by Platonov.
Why did my husband leave Frosya again? He sincerely loves her, but strives for high goals. This man dreams of universal happiness. The main character is able to think only about her own, personal things. The main idea of Platonov’s work is this: a person is obliged to live for the sake of business. This is the only way, according to the author, to find happiness.
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