The characterization of the literary hero Zhachev is an invalid of the First World War, a legless cripple, moving on a cart. “The invalid did not have any teeth, he worked them clean for food, but he ate a huge face and a fat rest of the body; his ... sparingly open eyes watched ... the world with the greed of deprivation, with the anguish of accumulated passion. Zh. hates all intellectuals and bourgeois. Every week he goes to the official Pashkin for the next portion of food (“for his share of life”). But the hero does not eat these products, but simply
He translates so that the "bourgeois body" does not get them. Zh. also visits Chiklin. The hero tells him that he would like to burn the city, as “finding the bastard torments” him. Zh. is sure that a new society should be built only for the sake of children. Seeing Nastya, the hero decides that “as soon as this girl and others like her ... mature, he will finish all the big inhabitants of his area ...” Together with Prushevsky and Nastya Zh., he goes to the collective farm. Chiklin entrusts him with an important task - "eliminate the kulaks in the distance." The hero gladly sends the dispossessed along the river on a raft towards their fate. Soon Nastya catches a cold and starts to get sick. Zh. and Chiklin bring her back to the foundation pit. But the girl cannot be saved. After the death of Nastya, Zh. tells Chiklin that he no longer believes in communism: “... I am a freak of imperialism, and communism is a childish affair, for which I loved Nastya ... I’ll go and kill Comrade Pashkin now. And Zhachev crawls away to the city, never again returning to the foundation pit.
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Essay on literature on the topic: Zhachev (Platonov's Pit)
Other writings:
- Nastya Description of the literary hero Nastya is a little girl, an orphan. Her mother, the daughter of the owner of the plant, dies in this plant, which has long been abandoned. Chiklin takes N. with you and brings her to the workers' barracks. N. becomes everyone's favorite. Everyone cares Read More ......
- Pit “On the day of the thirtieth anniversary personal life Voshchev was given a paycheck from a small mechanical plant, where he got the means for his existence. In the dismissal document, they wrote to him that he was removed from production due to the growth of weakness in him and thoughtfulness amid the general pace Read More ......
- Prushevsky Characteristics of the literary hero Prushevsky is “not an old, but gray-haired man from the account of nature”. The engineer who designed the “general proletarian house” and supervised its construction. P. decided to move the entire proletariat of the city to his "monumental new house." But the hero does not understand inner peace workers. Read More ......
- Voshchev Description of the literary hero Voshchev is the main character of the story. On the day of the hero's 30th birthday, he is fired from the factory for "thoughtfulness amid the general pace of work." V. wanted to "invent something like happiness." Having gone to wander, V. comes to some city. He goes to spend the night, according to Read More ......
- Zhachev is a legless cripple, an invalid from the First World War, moving on a cart. “The invalid did not have any teeth, he worked them clean for food, but he ate a huge face and a fat remnant4 of the body; his brown, stingily open eyes observed a stranger to them Read More ......
- “Virtuoso masters, ingenious inventors and selfless fighters for universal happiness, in the image of which Platonov knew neither tired nor repetitions, having passed through the fiery pipes of their inspiration and its implementation, they discover the futility of their initiatives” (I. Borisova). As a rule, they are victims of their own Read More ......
- Researchers are “amazed by the closeness” of Platonov to the Chinese utopian Li Shipei, who designed a society of “equal expenditure of physical strength”, in which the inequality of people is overcome through “age regulation of work and professions (at 21, everyone builds roads; at 23-26 - houses; at 46 -50 – all Read More ......
A. Platonov's story "The Pit" tells about the construction of a symbolic structure - a "general proletarian house" for the workers of the whole city to move there. A lot of people are going to build the pit, led by Chiklin's brigade.
The story opens in the image of Voshchev. This hero is only 30 years old, but he, according to life experience and pessimistic outlook, seems much older than his years. "On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his personal life," Voshchev received a payment due to "weakness in him and thoughtfulness amid the general pace of work."
Platonov immediately shows one of Voshchev's main qualities - love for children. This hero advises spouses who constantly swear: “If you have nothing to exist in peace, you would honor your child - you will be better off”; “And you honor your child,” said Voshchev, “when you die, he will be.” Voshchev admires the children - pioneers, marching to the cheerful music. He is afraid that the cripple may envy the children, their freshness, their health and, as it were, jinx them with his envy. And what an active part the hero takes in the fate of the orphan girl Nastya!
Why did Voshchev suddenly begin to think during the labor process? After all, he is not a lazy person, not a parasite shirking from work! It's just that for some time now Voshchev began to guess that the meaning of life cannot be limited only to the mechanical performance of physical work. It seems to him that he has forgotten about the biggest and most important thing - about the soul.
All the characters in the story are very lonely people. Lone engineer Prushevsky. The project of creating a common proletarian home is his idea. But Prushevsky instinctively realizes that in the process of actively building a socialist society one should not forget about souls, turn into robots programmed only for work: “He was afraid to erect empty buildings - those in which people live only because of bad weather.” Prushevsky acutely feels his loneliness, "he was afraid of empty home time, he did not know how to live alone": "I'd rather die," thought Prushevsky. “I am being used, but no one is happy with me…”
Lonely and unhappy is Chiklin, the foreman of the diggers. Once, when he was younger, he enjoyed the attention of women and lived full life: loved, friends, made mistakes. But for the sake of a great goal - digging a ditch - this hero hides his personal feelings, "repels" from himself a young girl who once kissed him, "as if she was a shameful creature."
Prushevsky also obeyed the same ban on love in his time. As it turned out, Chiklin and Prushevsky in their youth experienced love for the same girl, whom they now met again, under very tragic circumstances. This is Yulia, Nastya's mother. The ban on love, which played a sad role in the fate of Chiklin and Prushevsky, was dictated by the harsh requirements of that time. Any deviation from the main common cause distracts people, spoils them, above all state, and not personal.
Chiklin's cruelty towards the dispossessed peasants is not a consequence of his supposedly cruel nature. This is explained not by his personal qualities, but, first of all, by the fact that the Idea prescribed him to be cruel. Chiklin's callousness is justified by class interests. The ideas of universal equality, the need to exterminate wealthy people as a harmful element are too firmly entrenched in the mind of this hero.
But the Bear's cruelty has no justification. The bear is a fanatic of labor, working not for the sake of the result, but for the sake of the process itself. However, Bear's cruelty has some motivation. This hero recalls how once the kulak, for whom he worked, underfed him, and sometimes did not feed him at all. Hammer fighter is the executor of the will of those who are in power.
Lev Ilyich Pashkin is a typical image of a bureaucrat, a leader who has always been, is and will be, under any state system. This is a man who knows how to speak, to call the masses to labor exploits: “The pace is quiet,” he said to the artisans. - Why do you regret raising productivity? Socialism will do without you, and you will live without it and die in vain.”
Pashkin lives in a good house, enjoys great privileges, unlike those who are engaged in physical labor. Pashkin is a trade unionist who has set personal enrichment as the goal of life. You can call him the master of life. But despite his material well-being, this hero regrets good food for the cripple Zhachev.
Nastya, a little girl who lost her mother, is a symbol of the future of socialism. She dies from a lack of spiritual kindness towards her: “Instead of toys, she has an iron crowbar, the girl sleeps in one coffin, and uses the second as a red corner.” Nastya is the daughter of the owner of a tile factory, a “bourgeois woman”. Dying, her mother instructs her: not to tell anyone about her origin, because she, as the offspring of the bourgeoisie, will be “frozen”.
It is strange, funny and very sad to hear arguments about the class struggle from the lips of a little girl. So, Nastya thinks that the features of the meridians on the map of the USSR are "fences from the bourgeois." She firmly knows that “the main one is Lenin, and the second is Budyonny”, that she “wasn’t born” before because she “didn’t want to”, but “how Lenin became”, then she “became”! And it’s completely sad to hear the phrase uttered by Safronov: “And our deep Soviet authority, since even children, not remembering their mother, already smell Comrade Lenin! Nastya died, and with her, according to the author's intention, faith in a brighter future also disappeared.
Main character Voshchev's story embodies the image of a seeker of happiness, traditional for Russian literature. At the beginning of the story, he leaves to roam the world in search of the meaning of life. He wants to know whether he, the only one, and not a faceless mass is needed for the construction of universal happiness. But at the same time, he does not protest against the inhumanity of the idea, he participates in collectivization. His desire to be a person is an involuntary challenge to the communist state, and his cruelty is a reflection of the inhuman atmosphere of the era.
Researchers drew attention to the peculiarities of Voshchev's surname. In this surname of the hero, many different meanings flicker: “wax”, “waxed”, that is, a person sensitive to the influences of life, absorbing everything, obeying the currents. But “Voshchev” is also “in vain”, that is, in vain, in vain (a hint of his longing, the will to search for complex truth). His surname determines his spiritual path - from the hope of finding universal truth to the realization of the insignificance of common efforts in achieving the ideal and personal existence.
Of all the characters, doubts overcome only Voshchev and the engineer Prushevsky. The engineer feels anguish because his existence seems meaningless to him; he lives in memories of his beloved woman and does not find a place for himself in the present. Prushevsky sees the only way to overcome longing in joining the team, in engaging in useful work. So he hopes to get rid of his own problems.
The image of Nastya symbolizes the society of the future in the story. She herself connects her life with communism: “The main one is Lenin, and the second is Budyonny. When they were gone, and only bourgeois lived, I was not born, because I did not want to. And as Lenin became, so I became!
Nastya became the favorite of the builders of the pit. Chiklin and Zhachev reached out to her, she replaced the meaning of life for them, they had a purpose of existence. And when the emptiness in the souls of people is filled with love for the child, the denouement of the story comes. Nastya is dying of a cold. With her death, Platonov emphasizes the meaninglessness of everything that happens, along with the death of the girl, the future of the builders dies.
In the story, some images of workers are outlined with separate strokes. One of them, Zhachev, is a legless cripple, an invalid from the First World War, moving on a cart. He is angry and aggressive. On behalf of Chiklin, Zhachev "liquidates the kulaks into the distance" - he sends them along the river on a raft. Zhachev is absolutely sure that a new society must be built for children. When Nastya dies, Zhachev tells Chiklin that he no longer believes in communism: “... I am a freak of imperialism, and communism is a childish affair, that's why I loved Nastya .... I’m going to say goodbye to Comrade Pashkin and kill him.” Zhachev crawls into the city. He was never seen again in the pit.
An elderly worker, Nikita Chiklin, lives on with memories of failed love. Once he loved the daughter of the owner of the tile factory, where he worked in his youth. Nastya, being the daughter of Chiklin's former lover, causes particular pain in his heart. It is Chiklin who gets the heavy burden of chiselling a grave for the girl in the "eternal stone". There was only one job left in the life of a digger. material from the site
The figures of the official-bureaucrat, the chairman of the regional trade union council Pashkin are barely indicated by Platonov; artisans Safonov and Kozlov, who turned into a trade union activist.
The collective image of the peasants is opposed to the workers in the story. They differ from earthworkers in that they are concerned not with the future welfare of the world, but with their own welfare. Peasants are depicted as unhappy people. The most they can count on is their own coffin, made exactly to size.
In the part that is devoted to the organization of the collective farm, the key is the image of the hammer-bear. The bear is a fanatic, he works not for the result, but for the very process of labor. Everything that he made in the village forge is not suitable for the collective farm. The bear is a symbol of fruitless, meaningless labor.
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On this page, material on the topics:
- the image of a bear in the story of Plato's pit
- image of a bear in pdatonov's "pit"
- the image of nastya as the future of the pit
- images of nature in the story of Platonic pit
- andrey platonov pit analysis
The surname of the protagonist of "The Pit" Voshchev immediately attracts the reader's attention. Grammatically, this is a typical Russian surname ending in -ev. Lexically - a conglomerate of heterogeneous meanings, guessed by ear. Perhaps the phonetically surname Voshchev is associated with the words "in general" (in the colloquial version - "finally") or "in vain". It is interesting that both "meanings" of the hero's surname are realized in the story. Voshchev is looking for the meaning of common existence (“I am not afraid of my life, it is not a mystery to me”), however, his own search for truth and the desire to get closer to some ideal remain in vain. The name of the protagonist seems to guide the reader and, at the same time, "absorbs" the meanings of the context, being filled with new shades of meaning.
In Platonov's prose, there are almost no portrait characteristics, his characters live in a world without interiors and material ("real") details. The place of the portrait is occupied by approximately the following descriptions: Kozlov had a "muddy, monotonous face" and "damp eyes", Chiklin had a "little stony head", the pioneer girls had "difficulty of infirmity" on their faces. early life, paucity of body and beauty of expression, "the peasant, who came running from the village, had eyes of a" farm, yellow color. "An unrealistic moment in the story - Chiklin and Prushevsky, who once knew Nastya's mother, remember her not by facial features, but by the feeling of a kiss, carefully stored in their memory.
Platonov builds a portrait of the hero not from specific facial features, but from his barely perceptible expressions. For the writer, it is not a separate external detail that is important, but the inner meaning of the whole. Occasionally, substantive details appear that are perceived as an unexpected dissonance, since they are too material in the "transparent" space of the Platonic text.
Just like the surname Voshchev, the name Nastya in the context of the story is filled with deep meaning. From the Greek name Anastasia is translated as "resurrected". In the story, all the actions of the characters are permeated with a sense of the future resurrection of the dead. The protagonist of "The Foundation Pit" Voshchev collects "all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity" in his bag in order to return to them in the future the meaning of universal existence, which they never recognized. Collecting "scrap materials", he has in mind the coming spiritualization of dilapidated, obsolete matter: "I am dust and save that, but here is a poor creature!"
However, it is with the death of Nastya - "resurrected" - that the story ends. The dramatic dissonance of the child's name and fate is the logical result of the "common cause" of the builders of the Pit - a mirage. Just as unnecessary after the death of Nastya - "the future happy person" - the House became, life in which lost all meaning. "Voshchev stood in perplexity over this calmed child, he no longer knew where communism would be in the world now, if it was not there at first in a childish feeling and a convinced impression?" All hopes for the resurrection of truth and life were in vain.
The heroes of the story "The Foundation Pit" believe that by building a "single common proletarian house", they will live a wonderful life. Exhausting, exhausting work is the digging of a foundation pit, a foundation pit for “the only common proletarian house instead of the old city, where people still live in a courtyard fenced way.” This house is a dream, a house-symbol. Collapsed to the floor after labor day, people sleep side by side, “like the dead”. Voshchev (one of the main characters of the story) “peered into the face of his neighbor sleeping - does it express unrequited happiness
Satisfied person.
But the sleeper lay dead, his eyes were deeply and sadly hidden, and his cold legs stretched out helplessly in worn work trousers. In addition to breathing, there was not a sound in the barracks, no one saw dreams and did not talk with memories - everyone existed without any excess of life, and during sleep only the heart that protected a person remained alive.
The workers believe in "the coming of life after the construction of big houses." Therefore, they give themselves without a trace to work that sucks the juices out of the body. For the sake of the future life, one can endure and suffer. Each previous generation endured in the hope that the next one would live with dignity.
Therefore, people refuse to finish work on Saturday: they want to bring new life. “It’s a long time until the evening ... why waste life in vain, it’s better to do a thing. We are not animals, we can live for the sake of enthusiasm.” With the advent of the girl Nastya, digging a ditch seems to acquire some certainty, meaningfulness.
Nastya is the first inhabitant of a dream house, a symbol house that has not yet been built. But Nastya is dying from loneliness, restlessness, from lack of warmth. Adult people who saw in her the source of their life did not feel “how the world must be gentle ... so that she is alive. The construction of a dream house turned out not to be correlated with the life of a particular person, for whose sake, for whom everything seemed to be done. Nastya died, and the light that shone in the distance dimmed.
“Voshchev stood in perplexity over this calmed child, and he no longer knew where communism would now be in the world, if it was not at first in a childish feeling and in a convinced impression. Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement? Platonov believed that someone else's misfortune should be experienced in the same way as one's own, remembering one thing: “Humanity is one breath, one living warm being. It hurts one, it hurts everyone. One dies, all die. Down with humanity - dust, long live humanity - the organism ... Let's be humanity, and not a person of reality.
Many years later, E. Hemingway, who admired Platonov’s story “The Third Son”, would find an epigraph to the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in the verses of the 17th century English poet John Donne, speaking about the unity of mankind in the face of grief and death: “There is no person who was would be like an island, by itself; each person is part of the mainland, part of the land; and if a coastal cliff is blown into the sea by a wave, Europe will become smaller ... The death of each person detracts from me, for I am one with all mankind; therefore, never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you.”
One can only be surprised at the deep consonance of humanistic motives, and the almost direct coincidence of the lines: “the death of each person diminishes me too” and “one dies - everyone dies ...” Truly, the words about a true artist can rightfully be attributed to Andrei Platonov:
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Essay on literature on the topic: Heroes of the story “Pit”
Other writings:
- An incorrigible idealist and romantic, A.P. Platonov believed in “ life creativity good”, into the “peace and light” stored in the human soul, into the “dawn of the progress of mankind” occupying on the horizon of history. A realist writer, Platonov saw the reasons forcing people to “save their truth”, “turn off their consciousness”, “transition Read More ......
- “Then he stopped and looked around. The collective farm followed him and did not stop digging the ground, all the poor and average peasants worked with such zeal of life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit” A.P. Platonov. In the story "Pit" A. Read More ......
- From the pages of the works of A. Platonov, a strange, anomalous, unnatural world rises before us. This is a world of power directed against a thinking person, who “doubts”, who wants to independently decide his own destiny. The forced unification of people with the elimination of those who disagree turns society into a huge barracks. One family, one Read More ......
- "The Pit" (1930) is the title of Platonov's story, dedicated to the construction of a new, unprecedented House of light and high human relations. Platonov stops at the very beginning of construction - at earthworks that ensure the success of construction, so that the house is strong, the foundation pit must be reliable. With Read More ......
- main theme A. Platonov's story "Pit" is the construction of socialism in the city and countryside. In the city, as the author shows, it is carried out through the erection of a new building, “where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter the settlement.” In the countryside, the construction of socialism lies in the creation of Read More ......
- A. Platonov did not accept the social system of his time, expressed his views on the development Soviet Russia through the artistic word. The story "The Pit", completed by A. Platonov in 1930, became known to the general reader only in 1987. Here in allegorical form, with the help of Read More ......
- The life of A. Platonov fell on the first half of our century - the most difficult time in the history of the country. Recognizing life as the highest value, Platonov, however, did not consider any life worthy of a person. The writer sought to comprehend the meaning of life, the purpose of man. In labor - endless, exhausting Read More ......
- Voshchev was the first to appear on the pages of The Pit. The hero's surname immediately attracts the reader's attention: grammatically, this is a typical Russian surname ending in -ev, lexically - a conglomerate of different, “flickering” meanings, guessed by ear. The phonetic connection of the surname Voshchev with the words “in general” is most obvious Read More ......
