Text of the book "Pit"
Andrey Platonov Kotlovan
On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his personal life, Voshchev was given a settlement from a small mechanical plant, where he obtained funds for his existence.
In the dismissal document they wrote to him that he was being removed from production due to the growth of weakness and thoughtfulness in him amid the general pace of work. Voshchev took his things in a bag at the apartment and went outside to better understand his future in the air. But the air was empty, motionless trees carefully kept the heat in their leaves, and dust lay boringly on the deserted road - this was the situation in nature. Voshchev did not know where he was being drawn, and at the end of the city he leaned his elbows on the low fence of an estate where homeless children were taught to work and be useful. Then the city stopped - there was only a pub for otkhodniks and low-paid categories, which stood like an institution, without any yard, and behind the pub there was a clay mound, and an old tree grew on it alone in bright weather. Voshchev made his way to the pub and entered there to hear sincere human voices. There were uncontrollable people here, abandoning themselves to the oblivion of their misfortune, and Voshchev felt quieter and lighter among them. He was present in the pub until the evening, when the wind of changing weather began to rustle; then Voshchev went to the open window to notice the beginning of the night, and saw a tree on a clay mound - it was swaying from the weather, and its leaves were curled up with secret shame. Somewhere, probably in the garden of the Soviet trade employees, a brass band was languishing: monotonous, unfulfilling music was carried by the wind into nature through the ravine wasteland, because it was rarely given joy, but could not accomplish anything equivalent to music and spent its evening time motionless. After the wind, silence came again, and an even quieter darkness covered it. Voshchev sat down by the window to observe the gentle darkness of the night, listen to various sad sounds and suffer from his heart, surrounded by hard, stony bones.
- Hey, food! – was heard in the already silent establishment. - Give us a couple of mugs to pour into the cavity!
Voshchev discovered long ago that people always came to the pub in pairs, like brides and grooms, and sometimes in whole friendly weddings.
The food server did not serve beer this time, and two roofers who arrived wiped their thirsty mouths with their aprons.
- You, bureaucrat, a working man should order with one finger, and you are proud!
But the food industry saved its strength from official wear and tear for its personal life and did not enter into disagreements.
– The establishment, citizens, is closed. Do something in your apartment.
The roofers took a salty dry thing from the platter into their mouths and walked away. Voshchev was left alone in the pub.
- Citizen! You only demanded one mug, but you are sitting here indefinitely! You paid for the drink, not the room!
Voshchev grabbed his bag and went into the night. The questioning sky shone over Voshchev with the tormenting power of the stars, but in the city the lights had already been extinguished, and whoever had the opportunity slept, having eaten his fill of dinner. Voshchev went down the crumbs of earth into the ravine and lay down there with his stomach down to fall asleep and part with himself. But sleep required peace of mind, trust in life, forgiveness of past grief, and Voshchev lay in the dry tension of consciousness and did not know whether he was useful in the world or whether everything would work out well without him? A wind blew from an unknown place so that people would not suffocate, and with a weak voice of doubt a suburban dog made his service known.
- The dog is bored, he lives thanks to one birth, just like me.
Voshchev's body turned pale from fatigue, he felt the cold on his eyelids and closed his warm eyes with them.
The pub was already refreshing its establishment, the winds and grass were already agitated by the sun all around, when Voshchev regretfully opened his eyes, filled with moist strength. He again had to live and eat, so he went to the factory to defend his unnecessary work.
“The administration says that you stood and thought in the middle of production,” they said at the factory committee. – What were you thinking, Comrade Voshchev?
- About the plan of life.
– The plant operates according to the trust’s ready-made plan. And you could work out your personal life plan in a club or in a red corner.
“I was thinking about a plan for a common life.” I am not afraid of my life, it is not a mystery to me.
- Well, what could you do?
“I could invent something like happiness, and the spiritual meaning would improve productivity.”
– Happiness will come from materialism, Comrade Voshchev, and not from meaning. We cannot defend you, you are an irresponsible person, and we do not want to find ourselves in the tail of the masses.
Voshchev wanted to ask for some very weak work so that he would have enough for food: he would think outside of school hours; but to make a request you need to have respect for people, and Voshchev did not see feelings for himself from them.
– You are afraid to be in the tail: it is a limb, and you sat on the neck!
- Voshchev, the state gave you an extra hour for your thoughtfulness - you worked for eight, now it’s seven, you would have lived - you were silent! If we all think at once, then who will act?
– Without thought, people act meaninglessly! - Voshchev said in thought.
He left the factory committee without help. His path on foot lay in the middle of summer, on the sides they were building houses and technical improvements - in those houses the homeless masses would silently exist until now. Voshchev’s body was indifferent to comfort; he could live without exhaustion in an open place and languished in his misfortune during the times of satiety, during the days of rest in his previous apartment. Once again he had to pass the suburban pub, once again he looked at the place of his overnight stay - there was something left in common with his life, and Voshchev found himself in a space where there was only the horizon in front of him and the feeling of the wind in his bowed face.
A mile away stood the house of the highway supervisor. Having become accustomed to emptiness, the warden loudly quarreled with his wife, and the woman sat at the open window with a child on her lap and answered her husband with exclamations of abuse; the child himself silently plucked the frill of his shirt, understanding, but saying nothing.
This patience of the child encouraged Voshchev, he saw that the mother and father did not feel the meaning of life and were irritated, and the child lived without reproach, growing up to suffer. Here Voshchev decided to strain his soul, not to spare his body for the work of his mind, in order to soon return to the house of the road guard and tell the intelligent child the secret of life, all the time forgotten by his parents. “Their body now wanders automatically,” Voshchev observed his parents, “they don’t feel the essence.”
– Why don’t you feel the essence? – Voshchev asked, turning to the window. “Your child lives with you, and you swear—he was born to end the whole world.”
The husband and wife looked at the witness with fear of conscience hidden behind the malice of their faces.
- If you have nothing to exist in peace, you would honor your child - it will be better for you.
- What do you want here? – the road supervisor asked with malicious subtlety in his voice. - You go and go, the road is paved for such people...
Voshchev stood in the middle of the path, hesitating. The family waited for him to leave and kept their evil in reserve.
“I would leave, but I have nowhere to go.” How far is it from some other city?
“It’s close,” the warden answered, “if you don’t stand, the road will lead you to it.”
“And you honor your child,” said Voshchev, “when you die, he will be there.”
Having said these words, Voshchev walked away from the overseer's house a mile away and sat down on the edge of a ditch, but soon he felt doubt in his life and weakness of his body without the truth, he could not continue to work and walk along the road, not knowing the exact structure of the whole world and that where to strive. Voshchev, tired of thinking, lay down in the dusty, roady grass; it was hot, the daytime wind was blowing, and somewhere roosters were crowing in the village - everything was abandoned to an unrequited existence, only Voshchev stood apart and was silent. The dead, fallen leaf lay next to Voshchev’s head, it was brought by the wind from a distant tree, and now this leaf was faced with humility in the ground. Voshchev picked up the withered leaf and hid it in a secret compartment of the bag, where he saved all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity. “You had no meaning in life,” Voshchev believed with avarice of sympathy, “lie here, I will find out why you lived and died. Since no one needs you and you’re lying around among the whole world, then I will protect and remember you.”
“Everything lives and suffers in the world, not realizing anything,” Voshchev said near the road and stood up to walk, surrounded by everyone’s patient existence. “It’s as if someone, one or a few few, extracted a convinced feeling from us and took it for themselves.”
He walked along the road until he was exhausted; Voshchev quickly became exhausted, as soon as his soul remembered that it had ceased to know the truth.
But the city in the distance was already visible; its cooperative bakeries were smoking, and the evening sun illuminated the dust over the houses from the movement of the population. That city began with a forge, and in it, during Voshchev’s passage, a car was repaired for off-road driving. The fat cripple stood near the hitching post and addressed the blacksmith:
- Misha, pour some tobacco: I’ll tear the lock down again at night!
The blacksmith did not answer from under the car. Then the crippled man pushed him in the butt with a crutch.
- Mish, you better stop working - the embankment: I’ll cause losses!
Voshchev paused near the cripple, because a line of pioneer children with tired music was moving down the street from the depths of the city.
“I gave you a whole ruble yesterday,” said the blacksmith. - Give me peace for at least a week! Otherwise I’ll endure and endure and I’ll burn your crutches!
- Burn! - the disabled person agreed. - The guys will deliver me on a cart - I’ll rip the roof off the forge!
The blacksmith was distracted by the sight of the children and, becoming kinder, poured tobacco into the crippled pouch:
- Rob, locust!
Voshchev noticed that the cripple had no legs - one at all, and instead of the other there was a wooden attachment; he was holding on, crippled, with the support of crutches and the auxiliary tension of the wooden appendage of his right amputated leg. The disabled man had no teeth, he used them all up for food, but he ate his huge face and the fat rest of his body; his brown, sparingly open eyes observed a world foreign to them with the greed of deprivation, with the melancholy of accumulated passion, and his gums rubbed in his mouth, uttering the inaudible thoughts of a legless man.
The orchestra of pioneers, moving away, began to play the music of the young campaign. Barefoot girls walked past the forge, conscious of the importance of their future; their weak, mature bodies were dressed in sailor suits, red berets rested freely on their thoughtful, attentive heads, and their legs were covered with the down of youth. Each girl, moving in accordance with the general order, smiled from a sense of her importance, from the awareness of the seriousness of life necessary for the continuity of the order and the strength of the campaign. Any one of these pioneers was born at a time when the dead horses of the social war lay in the fields, and not all pioneers had skin at the hour of their birth, because their mothers lived only on the stores of their own bodies; Therefore, the difficulty of the weakness of early life, the poverty of the body and the beauty of expression remained on the face of each pioneer. But the happiness of children's friendship, the realization of the future world in the play of youth and the dignity of their strict freedom indicated on the children's faces an important joy that replaced beauty and homely plumpness for them.
Voshchev stood with timidity before the eyes of the procession of these excited children, unknown to him; he was ashamed that the pioneers probably knew and felt more than him, because children are time ripening in a fresh body, and he, Voshchev, is eliminated by his hasty, active youth into the silence of obscurity, like a vain attempt of life to achieve its goal. And Voshchev felt shame and energy - he wanted to immediately discover the universal, long-term meaning of life, in order to live ahead of the children, faster than their dark legs, filled with firm tenderness.
One pioneer woman ran out of the ranks into a rye field adjacent to the forge and picked a plant there. During her action, the little woman bent down, exposing a mole on her swollen body, and with the ease of an imperceptible force she disappeared past, leaving regret in the two spectators - Voshchev and the cripple. Voshchev looked at the disabled man; his face puffed up with hopeless blood, he groaned a sound and moved his hand in the depths of his pocket. Voshchev observed the mood of the mighty cripple, but was glad that the monster of imperialism would never get socialist children. However, the cripple watched the pioneer procession to the end, and Voshchev feared for the integrity and integrity of the little people.
“You should look somewhere away with your eyes,” he said to the disabled man. - You better smoke!
- Move to the side, pointer! - said the legless man.
Voshchev did not move.
- Who am I telling? – reminded the cripple. – Did you want to get it from me?!
“No,” Voshchev answered. “I was afraid that you would say your word to that girl or act in some way.”
The invalid bowed his large head to the ground in his usual torment.
- What am I going to tell the child, you bastard. I look at children for memory, because I will die soon.
“You were probably injured in a capitalist battle,” Voshchev said quietly. “Although cripples are also old, I have seen them.”
The crippled man turned his eyes to Voshchev, in which there was now the brutality of a superior mind; The crippled man at first even paused out of anger at the passer-by, and then said with the slowness of bitterness:
“There are such old people, but there are no crippled people like you.”
“I wasn’t in a real war,” said Voshchev. “Then I wouldn’t have returned from there completely.
- I see that you weren’t: why are you such a fool! When a man has not seen war, he is like a nulliparous woman—he lives like an idiot. You can be seen through the shell of everything!
“Eh!..” the blacksmith said plaintively. “I look at the children, but I just want to shout: “Long live the First of May!”
The music of the pioneers rested and began to play the march of the movement in the distance. Voshchev continued to languish and went to this city to live.
Until the evening Voshchev walked silently around the city, as if waiting for the world to become publicly known. However, it was still unclear to him about the world, and he felt in the darkness of his body a quiet place where there was nothing, but nothing prevented anything from starting. Like someone living in absentia, Voshchev walked past people, feeling the growing strength of his grieving mind and increasingly secluded in the closeness of his sadness.
Only now did he see the middle of the city and its structures being built. Evening electricity had already been lit on the scaffolding, but the field light of silence and the withering smell of hay approached here from the common space and stood untouched in the air. Separate from nature, in a bright place of electricity, people worked with desire, erecting brick fences, walking with a burden of loads in the cumbersome delirium of forests. Voshchev watched for a long time the construction of a tower unknown to him; he saw that the workers were moving evenly, without sudden force, but something had already arrived in the construction to complete it.
– Don’t people’s sense of life diminish when buildings arrive? - Voshchev did not dare to believe. “A man will build a house, but he himself will be upset.” Who will live then? - Voshchev doubted as he walked.
He moved from the middle of the city to the end of it. While he was moving there, a deserted night fell; Only water and wind inhabited this darkness and nature in the distance, and only birds were able to sing the sadness of this great substance, because they flew from above and it was easier for them.
Voshchev wandered into a wasteland and discovered a warm pit for the night; Having descended into this earthly depression, he put a bag under his head, where he collected all kinds of obscurity for memory and revenge, became sad and fell asleep. But some man entered the vacant lot with a scythe in his hands and began to cut the grass groves that had grown here from time immemorial.
By midnight the mower reached Voshchev and ordered him to get up and leave the square.
- What do you want! - Voshchev said reluctantly. - What is the area here, this is extra space.
- And now there will be a square, now there is supposed to be stone work here. Come and look at this place in the morning, otherwise it will soon disappear forever under the device.
-Where should I be?
“You can safely sleep in the barracks.” Go there and sleep until the morning, and in the morning you will find out.
Voshchev followed the mower’s story and soon noticed a plank shed in a former vegetable garden. Inside the barn, seventeen or twenty people were sleeping on their backs, and the dimmed lamp illuminated unconscious human faces. All the sleepers were as thin as the dead, the tight space between the skin and bones of each was occupied by veins, and the thickness of the veins showed how much blood they must let through during the strain of labor. The chintz of the shirt accurately conveyed the slow, refreshing work of the heart - it beat close, in the darkness of the devastated body of each person who fell asleep. Voshchev peered into the face of the sleeping neighbor to see if it expressed the unrequited happiness of a satisfied person. But the sleeping man lay dead, his eyes were deeply and sadly hidden, and his cold legs stretched out helplessly in his old work pants. Apart from breathing, there was no sound in the barracks, no one saw dreams or talked to memories - everyone existed without any excess of life, and during sleep only the heart remained alive, protecting the person. Voshchev felt the cold of fatigue and lay down for warmth among the two bodies of sleeping artisans. He fell asleep, a stranger to these people who had closed their eyes, and happy that he was spending the night near them, and so he slept, not feeling the truth, until the bright morning.
In the morning, Voshchev was struck by some instinct in his head, he woke up and listened to other people’s words without opening his eyes.
- He's weak!
- He is irresponsible.
- Nothing: capitalism made fools out of our breed, and this one is also a remnant of darkness.
“As long as he fits his class: then he’ll do.”
– Judging by his body, his class is poor.
Voshchev opened his eyes in doubt to the light of the coming day. Those who slept alive yesterday stood over him and observed his weak position.
– Why do you walk and exist here? - asked one, whose beard was growing weakly from exhaustion.
“I don’t exist here,” Voshchev said, ashamed that many people now feel him alone. - I'm just thinking here.
– Why do you think you’re torturing yourself?
– Without the truth, my body weakens, I can’t feed myself by work, I thought about it at work, and I was laid off...
All the artisans were silent against Voshchev: their faces were indifferent and boring, a rare, pre-tired thought illuminated their patient eyes.
- What is your truth! - said the one who spoke before. – You don’t work, you don’t experience the substance of existence, how can you remember a thought!
– Why do you need the truth? - asked another man, opening his lips, which were caked from silence. - Only in your mind it will be good, but outside it will be disgusting.
– You probably know everything? - Voshchev asked them with timidity and faint hope.
- How else? We give existence to all organizations! - the short man answered from his dry mouth, around which a beard was growing weakly from exhaustion.
At this time, the door opened, and Voshchev saw a night mower with an artel kettle: the boiling water was already ripe on the stove, which was heated in the courtyard of the barracks; the time of awakening has passed, the time has come to eat for the day's work...
The village clock hung on the wooden wall and moved patiently by the gravity of the dead weight; a pink flower was depicted on the face of the mechanism to comfort anyone who sees time. The artisans sat down in a row along the length of the table, the mower, who was in charge of the women's work in the barracks, cut the bread and gave each person a slice, and in addition a piece of yesterday's cold beef. The artisans began to eat seriously, taking food for granted without enjoying it. Although they possessed the meaning of life, which is tantamount to eternal happiness, their faces were gloomy and thin, and instead of the peace of life they had exhaustion. Voshchev, with the stinginess of hope, with the fear of loss, observed these sadly existing people, capable of keeping the truth within themselves without triumph; He was already pleased with the fact that the truth was in the world in the body of the person closest to him, who was just talking to him, which means that it is enough just to be near that person to become patient with life and able to work.
- Come eat with us! - the people who were eating called Voshchev.
Voshchev stood up and, not yet having complete faith in the general necessity of the world, went to eat, embarrassed and sad.
- Why are you so meager? - they asked him.
“Yes,” answered Voshchev. – Now I also want to work on the substance of existence.
During his time of doubt about the correctness of his life, he rarely ate calmly, always feeling his tormenting soul.
But now he ate in cold blood, and the most active among the artisans, Comrade Safronov, informed him after eating that, perhaps, Voshchev was now fit for work, because people had now become dear, along with the material; For many days now, the trade union representative has been walking around the outskirts of the city and empty places to meet the economically poor people and form them into permanent workers, but he rarely brings anyone - all the people are busy with life and work.
Voshchev had already eaten his fill and stood among those sitting.
- Why are you up? – Safronov asked him.
– While sitting, my thoughts develop even worse. I'd rather stand.
- Well, stop. You are probably an intelligentsia - you just want to sit and think.
– While I was unconscious, I lived by manual labor, and only then I did not see the meaning of life and weakened.
Music approached the barracks and began to play special life sounds, in which there was no thought, but there was a jubilant presentiment that brought Voshchev’s body into a rattling state of joy. The alarming sounds of sudden music gave a feeling of conscience, they suggested saving the time of life, going through the distance of hope to the end and reaching it, in order to find there the source of this exciting singing and not cry before dying from the anguish of futility.
The music stopped, and life settled in everyone with the same heaviness.
The trade union representative, already familiar to Voshchev, entered the workroom and asked the entire team to walk once across the old city in order to see the significance of the work that would begin on the mowed wasteland after the procession.
The artel of artisans came out and stood in front of the musicians with embarrassment. Safronov coughed falsely, ashamed of the public honor addressed to him in the form of music. The excavator Chiklin looked with surprise and expectation - he did not feel his merits, but wanted to listen to the solemn march again and silently rejoice. Others timidly lowered their patient hands.
The trade union representative, from his worries and activities, forgot to feel himself, and this made it easier for him; in the bustle of rallying the masses and organizing auxiliary joys for the workers, he did not remember about satisfaction with the pleasures of his personal life, lost weight and slept deeply at night. If the trade union representative were to reduce the excitement of his work, remember the lack of household goods in his family, or stroke his diminished, aged body at night, he would feel the shame of living at the expense of two percent of yearning labor. But he could not stop and have a contemplative consciousness.
With the speed that comes from restless devotion to the working people, the trade union representative stepped forward to show the city, populated by estates, to qualified craftsmen, because today they must begin the construction of that single building, where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle - and that common house will rise above the entire estate , a courtyard city, and small individual houses will be empty, they will be impenetrably covered by the plant world, and there the wasted people of a forgotten time will gradually stop breathing.
Several stone masons from two newly built factories approached the barracks, the trade union representative tensed with the delight of the last minute before the march of builders through the city; The musicians put their wind instruments to their lips, but the artel of artisans stood apart, not ready to go. Safronov noticed the false zeal on the faces of the musicians and was offended by the humiliated music.
- What kind of toy did they come up with? Where are we going – what we haven’t seen!
The trade union representative lost his face and felt his soul - he always felt it when he was offended.
- Comrade Safronov! This regional trade union bureau wanted to show your first exemplary artel the pity of the old life, the various poor dwellings and boring conditions, as well as the cemetery where the proletarians who died before the revolution without happiness were buried - then you would see what a lost city stands in the middle of the plain of our country, Then you would immediately know why we need a common house for the proletariat, which you will begin to build after that...
– Don’t please us too much! – Safronov said objectingly. - What, or have we not seen the small houses where various authorities live? Take the music to the children's organization, and we will cope with the house using our consciousness alone.
– So I’m an over-pleaser? – the trade union representative became more and more frightened, guessing more and more. “We have some kind of halleluer in the trade union bureau, and that means I’m an over-indulgencer?”
And, having fallen ill with his heart, the trade union representative silently went to the union office, and the orchestra followed him.
The mown wasteland smelled of dead grass and the dampness of naked places, which made the general sadness of life and the melancholy of futility more clearly felt. Voshchev was given a shovel, he squeezed it with his hands, as if he wanted to extract the truth from the dust of the earth; Dispossessed, Voshchev agreed not to have a meaning of existence, but he wanted to at least observe it in the substance of the body of another, neighbor, - and in order to be close to that person, he could sacrifice his entire weak body, exhausted by thought and meaninglessness, to work.
In the middle of the wasteland stood an engineer - not an old man, but a gray-haired man from the account of nature. He imagined the whole world as a dead body - he judged it by those parts that he had already turned into structures: the world everywhere succumbed to his attentive and imaginative mind, limited only by the consciousness of the inertia of nature; the material always yielded to precision and patience, which means it was dead and deserted. But the man was alive and worthy among all the dull matter, so the engineer now smiled politely at the workmen. Voshchev saw that the engineer’s cheeks were pink, but not from fatness, but from excessive heartbeat, and Voshchev liked that this man’s heart was worried and beating. The engineer told Chiklin that he had already laid out the excavation work and marked out the foundation pit, and pointed to the driven pegs: now we can begin. Chiklin listened to the engineer and additionally checked his breakdown with his intelligence and experience - during the excavation work he was a senior member of the artel, excavation work was his best profession; when the time comes for rubble laying, Chiklin will obey Safronov.
“You don’t have enough hands,” Chiklin said to the engineer, “this is exhaustion, not work—time will eat up all the benefits.”
“The exchange promised to send fifty people, but I asked for a hundred,” answered the engineer. – But only you and I will be responsible for all work on the mainland: you are the leading team.
- We won’t lead. And we will make everyone equal to ourselves. If only people would show up.
And, having said this, Chiklin plunged the shovel into the upper pulp of the earth, focusing his indifferent, thoughtful face down. Voshchev also began to dig deep into the soil, putting all his strength into the shovel; he now accepted the possibility that childhood would grow up, joy would become a thought, and the future man would find peace in this strong house to look out of the high windows into the outstretched world waiting for him. He had already destroyed thousands of blades of grass, roots and small soil shelters of the zealous creature forever and worked in the gorges of dreary clay. But Chiklin was ahead of him; he left the shovel long ago and took a crowbar to crumble the lower compressed rocks. Abolishing the ancient natural structure, Chiklin could not understand it.
From the consciousness of the small number of his artel, Chiklin hastily broke the age-old soil, turning the entire life of his body into blows on dead places. His heart beat as usual, his patient back was exhausted with sweat, Chiklin had no protective fat under his skin - his old veins and insides came close to the outside, he felt his surroundings without calculation or consciousness, but with precision. Once he was younger and girls loved him - out of greed for his powerful body, wandering anywhere, which did not protect itself and was devoted to everyone. In Chiklin, many then needed shelter and peace among his faithful warmth, but he wanted to shelter too many so that he himself had something to feel, then women and comrades left him out of jealousy, and Chiklin, yearning at night, went out to the market square and he knocked over trade booths or took them away altogether, for which he then languished in prison and sang songs from there on cherry-cherry summer evenings.
By noon, Voshchev’s diligence yielded less and less land; he began to get irritated from digging and fell behind the artel; only one thin worker worked more quietly than him. This back one was gloomy, insignificant all over, the sweat of weakness dripped into the clay from his dull, monotonous face, overgrown with sparse hair around the circumference; when the earth rose to the edge of the pit, he coughed and forced phlegm out of himself, and then, having calmed down, closed his eyes, as if wishing to sleep.
- Kozlov! – Safronov shouted to him. -Are you feeling unwell again?
“Again,” Kozlov answered in his pale child’s voice.
“You enjoy it a lot,” said Safronov. “We will now put you to sleep on the table under the lamp, so that you lie there and feel ashamed.”
Kozlov looked at Safronov with red, raw eyes and remained silent from indifferent fatigue.
- Why did he bother you? - asked Voshchev.
Kozlov took a speck out of his bone nose and looked to the side, as if yearning for freedom, but in fact he was not yearning for anything.
“They say,” he answered, “that I don’t have a woman,” Kozlov said with difficulty of resentment, “that I love myself under the covers at night, but during the day I’m not fit to live from the emptiness of my body.” They, as they say, know everything!
Voshchev again began to dig through the same clay and saw that there was still a lot of clay and common soil left - we still had to live for a long time in order to overcome through oblivion and labor this buried world, which hid in its darkness the truth of all existence. It may be easier to invent the meaning of life in your head - after all, you can accidentally guess about it or touch it with a sad current feeling.
“Safronov,” said Voshchev, losing patience, “I’d rather think without work, you still can’t dig the whole world to the bottom.”
“You won’t make it up,” Safronov said without being distracted, “you won’t have a memory of the substance, and you will, like Kozlov, begin to think about yourself, like an animal.”
- Why are you moaning, orphan! - Chiklin responded from the front. – Look at people and live until you were born.
Voshchev looked at the people and decided to live somehow, since they endure and live: he came into existence with them and will die in due time inseparably from the people.
- Kozlov, lie down face down and catch your breath! - said Chiklin. - Coughs, sighs, is silent, grieves! - that’s how they dig graves, not houses.
But Kozlov did not respect other people’s pity for himself - he himself quietly stroked his dull, decrepit chest in his bosom and continued to dig the cohesive soil. He still believed in the onset of life after the construction of large houses and was afraid that he would not be accepted into that life if he presented himself there as a complaining, unearned element. Only one feeling touched Kozlov in the morning - his heart found it difficult to beat, but still he hoped to live in the future with at least a small remnant of his heart; however, due to the weakness of his chest, he had to stroke himself occasionally over the bones while working and persuade him to endure it in a whisper.
It was already midday and the exchange had not sent any diggers. The night mower of the grass got some sleep, boiled the potatoes, poured eggs over them, moistened them with oil, added yesterday's porridge, sprinkled dill on top for luxury, and brought this prefabricated food in a cauldron for the development of the fallen forces of the artel.
Pit
Unsurpassed anti-Soviet
When folding the printed signs with which the author depicted the vital existence and meaning of all who were born into the world, you begin to feel the increase in the mind….
This is how I planned to write my review in a la Platonic style. But I changed my mind, because I want to say a lot and be correctly understood, and Plato’s language is only for allegories and all sorts of meetings of activists and members of various kinds of “communities” (desks, profs, places).
Platonov's story is brilliant anti-Soviet! Further, no one in Soviet and Russian literature will be able to write such a powerful anti-Soviet text. Solzhenitsyn, with his thousand-page attempts, looks like a dwarf compared to Platonov, and all these Rybakovs, Aksyonovs, Voinovichs and others are just pygmies.
I’ll warn you right away - I’m not a fan of anti-Soviet literature, in the sense that if it’s anti-Soviet, then I’ll love it. In no case! Any work oversaturated with ideology, be it both “for” and “against”, arouses my interest only as a historical monument of its era and a specific ideological direction.
Platonov's story is a unique monument. It is not often that an author manages to unite form and content so much that they begin to mutually determine each other; Platonov coped with the task. We are talking about the language in which “The Pit” was written. To many he seems abstruse, to some funny, however, there is both. Doesn't this language seem familiar to you? After all, this is exactly how, for example, almost all the heroes of Zoshchenko’s stories speak, and Bulgakov’s Sharikov and Shvonder speak the same way, and examples of such speech can be found in Ilf and Petrov. This is not an invention of the authors - this is a global phenomenon in Russian culture of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century.
As Comrade Stalin said: “The cadres decide everything!” By the end of the thirties, they would recruit new personnel and give them a good education. In the meantime, “take what you have.” The revolution did its job - carriers of high-level culture were exterminated, expelled, isolated.
The one about whom Merezhkovsky warned - “the coming boor” - came to the forefront! It was they – the bourgeoisie – who became the main driving force behind the renewal of society. The proletariat had no time - it “worked”, the peasantry was also busy, but the bourgeoisie went into power and into the intelligentsia. It is known that an uneducated person is better than a half-educated one. So the philistines, some having a couple of classes at a gymnasium or a real school, some from the Central School of Education, and some, having simply read “mental books,” were in a hurry to express their thoughts not in the old regime, but in a new way! But the main source of new vocabulary was newspapers and rallies, and there were also carriers of “newspeak.” Often, not knowing or even guessing about the real meaning of the “smart” words used, giving rise to pretentious and equally meaningless turns of phrase, these people represented a powerful cultural stratum.
This is what Platonov recorded in his story. Zoshchenko and others forced their heroes to speak these languages, Platonov uses a bold technique and makes rally newspeak the author's language, thereby achieving a stunning effect. It is the language that is the main advantage of “The Pit”, a reliable historical document.
A lot has been said about the ideological component of the story. But even here I want to draw attention to the historicity and documentary nature of the book. See the dates: late 1929 – early 1930. Look for all the answers there. Yes, the foundation pit is socialism, which Platonov does not believe in, which is why it is depicted as a foundation pit, and not as a tower, for example. I remember, I remember, they are digging a foundation pit just so they can build a tower later. But when will this happen and will it happen at all? In the meantime, they are digging a pit - building a new world means digging deeper and deeper into the ground, the image is not the most optimistic.
The author does not believe in either collectivization or industrialization. The peasantry is depicted as weak-willed, and a bear in the role of the rural proletarian. On the one hand, there is a stupid animal, what can you take from it, on the other, there is a “Russian bear”, which, if you get angry, will not show itself to anyone.
Personal lack of will, predestination, subordination to a certain center - even a collective farm named after the General Line - is the main quality of the heroes of the story. And there are no heroes as such in it. The author never gives the reader a main character, jumping from one to another, without particularly lingering on anyone. By the end of the story they all merge into a single impersonal mass.
The author convincingly shows that this country has no future with these people. That is why Nastya dies, cut off from her environment, yearning in the last minutes of her life for “mother’s bones.”
He honestly described everything he saw and knew. That's how he saw and felt that way. But in many ways he was wrong - the country rose, the children of the Chiklins and Voshchevs received a good education, became real specialists, built power plants and spaceships, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren went even further - today they write reviews of books about their great-grandfathers on online resources 
The pit was dug anyway, a different tower was built, not the one planned, but the foundation rests in the pit dug then.
So Platonov was convincing, but wrong; his pessimism did not allow him to see the human potential that would pull the country out of the pit of timelessness. But he created the best anti-Soviet thing in our literature, because it is honest and sincere. And this is the main advantage of a true artist, even if he is mistaken.
