The main characters of the story in n Plato. The strange heroes of Plato and the meaning of their existence

In one of his early articles - “The Flame of Knowledge”, A. Platonov wrote: “It was necessary to understand what the existence of people is, is this serious or on purpose?” All themes, plots, motives of his work are an attempt to answer this question.

In the artistic world of the writer, a special type of hero was formed - the "inmost person": a dreamer, an eccentric, a seeker of truth, with open heart knowing the world.

In Platonov's world, people live "like grass at the bottom of a hollow." They do not know their interests, they are heroes who have "forgotten themselves." But it is precisely such eccentrics that support life, preserve it. They are the "stuff of life". Platonov's "intimate people" cannot be called strong. A “thoughtful person” can hardly be strong. Most often they are fragile, physically weak. But their “futility of existence” lasts despite any pressure and, as a result, overcomes the strength of the hard world that surrounds them. There is no logic in this, but Platonov does not strive for it. Weakness suddenly turns into strength. "Non-heroic" characters at some moments of their lives show seemingly unusual qualities: willpower, self-sacrifice, spiritual strength. So, the heroine of the story "At the dawn foggy youth”, a weak girl, substitutes her engine under the wagons unhooked from another train, in which soldiers ride, realizing that she herself could die.

About his heroes - and about his people - Platonov said: “They lived full and common life with nature and history - and history ran in those years like a locomotive, dragging the world's load of poverty, despair and humble inertia behind it. In his world, the "living socialist substance" consists of " secret people". Often it is not known where these people come from, what are the details of their biography. They, as a rule, have simple, not very harmonious, or the most common surnames: Pukhov, Ganushkin, Voshchev, Dvanov, Kopyonkin, Ivanov, etc. By this, the author emphasizes the commonness of his characters. But all of them are passionately searching for truth, “the meaning of separate and common existence”, they think in terms of universal human categories.

Favorite Platonic heroes are people of labor. Many of them are connected with the railway, with steam locomotives. They are delighted with the machines, their perfection and power. " Why man- so-so: neither bad nor good, but the cars are evenly famous? - asks one of the heroes of "Chevengur", Zakhar Pavlovich, who has become a repair worker in the depot. And his mentor, a machinist, loves cars even more than people: “He loved locomotives so painfully and jealously that he looked with horror when they were going. If it were his will, he would put all the locomotives to eternal rest, so that they would not be maimed by the rough hands of the ignorant. He believed that there were many people, few cars; people are alive and will stand up for themselves, and the machine is a tender, defenseless, brittle creature ... "

Something very important is happening to Zakhar Pavlovich artistic world Platonic transformation: being in love with machines, mechanisms, he suddenly realizes that mechanical "products and devices" do not change the life of the people, they exist, as it were, in parallel with it. He is led to this conclusion by childhood suffering, which cannot be changed with the help of a machine: “The warm fog of love for cars ... was blown away by a clean wind, and Zakhar Pavlovich opened up the defenseless, lonely life of people who lived naked, without any deception of themselves by faith in help cars". Alexander Dvanov, one of the main characters of Chevengur, also discovers the value of each human life: “... people live here, you can’t fix them until they get settled themselves. I used to think that the revolution was a locomotive, but now I see it is not.”

As a rule, Platonov's heroes are not involved in politics. For them, the revolution is an accomplished historical fact, a resolved political issue, it brings with it beneficial changes. In the story "The Foundation Pit" and the novel "Chevengur" the characters are arguing about how exactly the revolution should put an end to the injustice of life.

The heroes of Platonov are the transformers of the world. The revolution requires a truly universal transformation. And the forces of nature, in their opinion, must also be subordinated to man. The heroes of the "Juvenile Sea" plan to drill the earth with a "voltage arc" and get to the ancient - juvenile - waters in order to bring the moisture it needs to the arid steppe. It is this scale of the planned changes that is characteristic of Platonov's artistic world.

Life, in which everything began to move after the revolution, is the main subject of the image in most of the writer's works. The worker Zakhar Pavlovich remarks about the revolutionary people in Chevengur: “They are wandering! They'll get to something." Hence the permanent motif of wandering for Platonov. Platonic truth-seekers strive to do as much as possible for everyone's happiness, to find out the answer to the most main question, and this requires them to move, to strive for something.

But life, in which everything is in motion, determines not only the motive of wandering. This largely explains the “shift-ness” of the entire artistic world of Platonov. Fantasy, often very bizarre, and reality coexist in his works. The heroines of the "Juvenile Sea" - milkmaids who do not have housing - spend the night in huge pumpkins. Phantasmagoric is the transformation of Makar and Peter, the heroes of the story “Doubting Makar”, from truth-seekers who went through the hell of the “institute of the mentally ill” into officials. One of the heroes of the novel "Chevengur" travels on a horse Proletarian Power to find, dig out of the grave and revive the German revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg.

"The composition of an unknown route and destination", into which the hero of the "Secret Man" Foma Pukhov climbs during his journey around the country, in a certain sense can be considered a symbol of the revolution. The revolution in Platonov appears not only as a creative, but also as a randomly acting force. Chepurny, the leader of the Chepurny people, says: "You always live forward and in the dark." Life "in the dark", "in the void" leads to the fact that the revolution often becomes a force and a destructive one. People are “taught by the political instructor” about happiness, but the model he proposes turns out to be too simplified. Foma Pukhov (" Intimate Man”) states: “The revolution is simplicity ...” This simplicity leads to bloody sacrifices. Reality resists people's hopes. Their activity in building a new society turns out to be destructive, and as a result of sincere efforts, a monstrous thing happens - for example, in Chevengur, the builders of a new life die from a sudden raid by "regular troops".

Andrey Platonov is one of the brightest phenomena of Russian literature of the 20th century. Platonov was born in 1899 and died in 1951. Thus, Platonov's life became a kind of frame for the first half of the 20th century. And the first half of the 20th century is a very interesting time.

Literature and painting are making a powerful breakthrough, and cinema is rising to its feet. At the same time, one after another, two world wars happen at once. There is a total recoding of human life. In Russian prose, these changes were introduced and approved by Andrey Platonov.

Platonic hero

Plato's hero is redundant, redundant. It should not be on Earth, but it is. You can often hear that reading Platonov is very difficult, almost impossible. Here's the thing, I think. All of us, being victims of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, carry some idea of ​​man. This is a man imbued with ideas, a thinking man, a man whose inner world full of emotions and feelings. We were taught that way, We used to think that way. It flatters us, after all. Platonov's man is completely different.

As Makar said about himself from the story "Doubting Makar": "I am empty." Emptiness - main characteristic Platonic world. Accordingly, steppes and fields are the main landscape. Also, the heroes of Platonov's stories are always thoughtless. Knowledge suddenly comes to them out of nowhere. Thought gives way to feeling. And when the reader is introduced to a Platonic character who is his complete opposite, the reader becomes frightened. The reader is not accustomed to living in a void. It's scary to say the least.

The psychoanalytic meaning of the existence of Platonov's heroes

Platonov at one time was extremely passionate about psychoanalysis, so the interpretation of his characters from this side will be highly justified. So, for example, almost all heroes have psychopathological disorders. The main one is schizophrenia. Sasha Dvanov, main character novel "Chevengur", a schizophrenic even at the level of a surname. Dvanov, two, duality. Platonov's man is already immediately split into several personalities. Whereas in culture it is customary to consider a person as a single person.

Also, the problem of birth in Platonov has a psychoanalytic meaning. This refers to Otto Rank's theory that the main experience in a person's life is the pain experienced at birth. Platonov's people are autochthonous, they are born from the earth. This is exactly what was believed in ancient mythological cultures. The theme of death is directly related to the theme of birth. So, for example, Sasha Dvanov's father drowned himself in the lake to find out what was happening there after death. Finding out what will happen after - that's what Plato's heroes want. However, the price to be paid for this knowledge is very high.

The work of Andrei Platonov, a writer, on long years deleted from the history of Russian literature, and to this day is very difficult to perceive. His concept of the world is unusual, his language is complicated. Everyone who opens his books for the first time is immediately forced to abandon the usual fluency of reading: the eye is ready to glide over the familiar outlines of words, but at the same time the mind refuses to keep up with the thought expressed. Some force delays the perception of the reader on every word, every combination of words. And here is not the secret of mastery, but the secret of a person, the solution of which, according to F. M. Dostoevsky, is the only thing worthy of devoting one's life to it. The works of A. Platonov are based on the same humanistic ideals that Russian literature has always preached. An incorrigible idealist and romantic, Platonov believed in “ life creativity good”, into “peace and light”, stored in human soul, into the “dawn of human progress” on the horizon of history. A realist writer, Platonov, saw the reasons forcing people to “save their nature”, “turn off their consciousness”, move “from inside to outside”, without leaving a single “personal feeling” in their souls, “lose the feeling of oneself”. He understood why “life temporarily leaves” this or that person, subordinating him without a trace to a fierce struggle, why “inextinguishable life” goes out in people every now and then, giving rise to darkness and war around. “You must write not with talent, but with humanity - with a direct sense of life” - this is the writer's credo.

In A. Platonov, the idea and the person expressing it do not merge, but the idea does not close the person tightly from us. In Plato's works, we see precisely the "socialist substance", which strives to build an absolute ideal out of itself.

Of what does the living “socialist substance” according to A. Platonov consist? Of the romantics of life at the very literally words. They think in large-scale, universal categories and are free from any manifestations of egoism. At first glance, it may seem that these are people with asocial thinking, since their mind does not know any social and administrative restrictions. They are unpretentious, they endure the inconveniences of everyday life easily, as if not noticing them at all. All of them are the changers of the world. The humanism of these people and the quite definite social orientation of their aspirations lies in the set goal of subordinating the forces of nature to man. It is from them that we must expect the achievement of a dream. It is they who will someday be able to turn fantasy into reality and will not notice it themselves. This type of people is represented by engineers, mechanics, inventors, philosophers, dreamers - people of liberated thought.

The heroes of the first stories of A. Platonov are inventors who dream of rebuilding the world and know how to do it (“Markun”). In more later work a missionary hero appears who believes that he knows the truth and is ready to bring the light of his consciousness to people. “I thought strongly, for everyone,” say the Platonic preachers. However, the most interesting hero Platonov, undoubtedly, is a doubting person, a “natural”, “organic” person. Foma Pukhov (the story "The Secret Man") resists external circumstances. His pilgrimage is undertaken for the sake of gaining inner truth.

The fate of builders-philosophers in the works of A. Platonov, as a rule, is tragic. And this is quite consistent with the logic of the era. A. Platonov belongs to those few authors who heard in the revolution not only “music”, but also a desperate cry. He saw that good desires sometimes correspond to evil deeds, and in the plans of good, someone provided for the strengthening of his power to destroy many innocent people, allegedly interfering with the common good. Romantic heroes of Platonov are not involved in politics, as such. Because they view the completed revolution as a settled political issue. All who did not want it were defeated and swept away.

The second group of characters are the romantics of the battle, people who formed on the fronts civil war. Fighters. Extremely limited natures, such as the era of battles usually produces in droves. Fearless, disinterested, honest, extremely frank. Everything in them is programmed for action. For obvious reasons, it was they who, having returned from the front, enjoyed unconditional trust in the victorious republic and the moral right to leadership positions. They set to work with the best of intentions and with their characteristic energy, but it soon becomes clear that most of them, under the new conditions, lead in a purely automatic way, as they commanded regiments and squadrons in the war. Having received posts in management, they did not know how to dispose of them. Lack of understanding of what was happening gave rise to heightened suspicion in them. They are entangled in deviations, excesses, distortions, slopes. Illiteracy was the soil in which violence flourished. In the novel "Chevengur" Andrey Platonov portrayed just such people. Having received unlimited power over the county, they decided by order to abolish labor. They reasoned something like this: labor is the cause of people's suffering, since labor creates material values ​​that lead to property inequality. Therefore, it is necessary to eliminate the root cause of inequality - labor. You should feed on what nature gives birth to. Thus, due to their illiteracy, they come to substantiate the theory of primitive communism. The heroes of Platonov had no knowledge and no past, so they were replaced by faith. The confrontation between the “external” and “internal” person for the hero of “Chevengur” Sasha Dvanov ends tragically. He lives for a long time only by an idea, by faith, and therefore he goes into the lake from a life that has lost its value.

The hero of the novel The Pit, Voshchev, wants to “invent something like happiness,” but concrete, material happiness. He wants to materialize the idea and fill the matter with meaning. That is why he rejoices when he learns about the “substance of existence”, and remains to work on the foundation pit. The test of this idea is the fate of the child, the little girl Nastya, who is perceived by the workers as “ small man destined to be a universal element.”

Nastya dies, and the surviving heroes of the story lose vitality. “Why... is the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin needed, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement?” Voshchev reflects. And the writer exposes the created “world happiness”. The enthusiasm of the first years of the revolution turns out to be nothing more than digging one's own grave. The peasants appearing at the construction of the pit work "with such zeal of life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit." But what can be saved from the abyss? So gradually A. Platonov comes to the idea of ​​people moving away from the truth to which they were ready to devote themselves without a trace. That is why, in my opinion, the tragedy of a generation is fully embodied in his works.

The writer does not give any hope that in the distant future a garden city will grow on the site of the foundation pit, that at least something will rise from this hole, which the heroes are constantly digging. expands and, according to the Directive, spreads on the ground, first four times, and then, thanks to administrative decision Pashkin, six times.

The builders of the proletarian house are literally building their future on children's bones. The writer created a merciless grotesque, testifying to the mass psychosis of universal obedience, insane sacrifice and blindness that have taken possession of the country.

The main character is the speaker author's position. Among the fantastic communist leaders and the dead mass, he thought and bitterly doubted the human correctness of what was happening around him. Lost in thought in the midst of the general pace of work, Voshchev does not move in accordance with the general line, but seeks his own path to the truth. Voshchev never found the truth. Looking at the dying Nastya, Voshchev thinks: 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 be joy and a movement wants to find out what exactly could move people who continued to dig a hole with such zeal. This new slavery is based on the rituals of a new faith: the religion of the foundation pit as expounded by Stalin.

The foundation pit is a dramatic picture of the breaking of time. Already on the first pages of the story, two words are heard that determined the pathos of time: pace and plan. But next to them, others appear in the story. keywords, entering into a very difficult relationship with the former: the meaning of what is happening and reflection on universal happiness.

Happiness comes from materialism, Comrade Voshchev, and not from meaning, Voshchev is told in the factory committee

This was already reflected in the short story "Tayr" about a captive who managed to take all the blows of fate and how to "work" them ( favorite word Platonov), wear away, master and defeat the "stone mountain". The short story "Fro" is a poem about the unconscious beauty of the feeling of love, the expectation of motherhood. It is no coincidence that in the center of the entire group of heroes (the husband is an engineer, fascinated by some mysterious machines; Fro's father, an old machinist; the heroine Frosya Fro herself) is a woman, wise by the naturalness of feelings, loyalty to the instincts of love, the obligation to continue the human race. It is important to glorify humanity, to amaze it with a sensation of discovery, but who will think about how to prolong it, this victorious humanity!

The true masterpiece of world prose is the story "Jan". Such faith in man, such a force of historical optimism in the artist of the 20th century is difficult to compare with anything.

A man among the sands... Among a special space where he costs exactly as much as his courage, his soul "costs"... Where one cannot be a dependent, shifting all difficulties onto others. In the desert, one must see the world very vigilantly, not with physical vision, but with the help of memory, imagination. The desert is silent, not "talkative", but how many unspeakable words a sensitive heart will hear here, what deep "sighs" will reach it from here! The East only dozed for millennia, sighing amidst the abundance of the sun, but how many great ideas were born among these sighs, in its seeming laziness... symbolic image of all the lonely, abandoned, destitute from the captivity of a barren depression in the desert, was a victory over these "brakes" of humility, disunity, which weakened people.

Platonov wrote: “You need to write not with talent, but with “humanity” with a direct sense of life,” and he himself wrote with his whole life, involving in any picture the most distant spiritual and physical impressions, reflections of many years. An example of this is the wonderful story "The July Thunderstorm".

At first, it is so easy to walk along the field path, among the bread, together with two peasant children Antoshka and Natasha to their grandmother. But wait! Who is this Where is it from? What kind of an old man, a field boy, suddenly appeared in front of the children? Is it a person or a kind spirit, a kind of kind brownie? From the depths of the loaves a thin old man, with a naked, unfamiliar face, came out to the children; He was no taller than Natasha, shod in bast shoes, and dressed in old linen trousers, patched with military cloth patches, and he carried a wicker purse behind his back. The old man also stopped against the children. He looked at Natasha with pale, kind eyes, which had long looked at everything in the world, took off his hat, knitted from home wool, bowed and walked past. A doubt arises: was Platonov drawing a real path among the loaves, not. Are both the village and the storm conditionalThe outside world creates, weaving the bonds of strange events, a force field, leaving some objects in the shadow, highlighting others.

The old man bowed to the children. “Bowed” did not just say hello, but, as it were, bowed before the flowering of youth, before the future, realizing Popushkin wisely and sublimely:

I give you a place

It's time for me to smolder, for you to bloom.

The old man seems to be shy in front of the higher meaning of life, which children carry without realizing it. And when they left their grandmother under a thunderstorm, having experienced fear of the radiance of lightning that illuminated “mounds of mighty darkness in the sky,” this old man reappears, appears with a very characteristic question:

“Who are you, a close alien voice asked them hoarsely. Natasha raised her head from Antoshka. Kneeling down, near them stood a thin old man with an unfamiliar face, whom they met today when they went to visit their grandmother ... We were afraid, Natasha said.

It would seem that at the first meeting the old man with the guys should have asked: “Who are you?” But then nothing threatened the children, the world was kind and complacent, and for a conversation about a thunderstorm, about fear, a dangerous situation is needed, a beautiful and furious world is needed. Then the reader is more attentive to the meaning of the old man's words: "Be afraid, you need it." Only obsolete, dead or insensible idols are not afraid of anything! The writer peculiarly “scares” (if he scares at all) his heroes, admiring the fury of nature: “Antoshka saw lightning that came out of the darkness of the clouds and stung the earth. First, lightning rushed down far beyond the village, crept back into the height of the sky and from there immediately killed a lone tree ... "

L. N. Tolstoy once said about the possibilities of man: “I am convinced that an infinite not only moral, but also infinite physical strength, but at the same time, a terrible brake is placed on this force - love for oneself, or, most likely, memory of oneself, which produces impotence. But as soon as a person breaks out of this brake, he receives omnipotence.

The heroes of Platonov live according to this principle, it is ordinary people with their advantages and disadvantages, but all of them are united by the greatness of simple hearts.

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The work of Andrey Platonov, a writer who was erased from the history of Russian literature for many years, is still very difficult to perceive to this day. His concept of the world is unusual, his language is complicated. Everyone who opens his books for the first time is immediately forced to abandon the usual fluency of reading: the eye is ready to glide over the familiar outlines of words, but at the same time the mind refuses to keep up with the thought expressed. Some force delays the perception of the reader on every word, every combination of words. And here is not the secret of mastery, but the secret of a person, the solution of which, according to F. M. Dostoevsky, is the only thing worthy of devoting one's life to it. The works of A. Platonov are based on the same humanistic ideals that Russian literature has always preached.

An incorrigible idealist and romantic, Platonov believed in "the vital creativity of the good", in "peace and light" stored in the human soul, in the "dawn of the progress of mankind" on the horizon of history. A realist writer, Platonov saw the reasons forcing people to “save their nature”, “turn off their consciousness”, move “from inside to outside”, leaving not a single “personal feeling” in their souls, “lose the feeling of oneself”. He understood why “life leaves this or that person for a while, subordinating him without a trace to a fierce struggle, why “the inextinguishable life goes out in people every now and then, giving rise to darkness and war around. “You need to write not with talent, but with humanity - a direct sense of life - this is the writer’s credo. In A. Platonov, the idea and the person expressing it do not merge, but the idea does not close the person from us tightly.

In Plato's works we see precisely the "socialist substance" which strives to build an absolute ideal out of itself. Of whom does the living "socialist substance of A. Platonov" consist? From the romantics of life in the most direct sense of the word.

They think in large-scale, universal categories and are free from any manifestations of egoism. At first glance, it may seem that these are people with asocial thinking, since their mind does not know any social and administrative restrictions. They are unpretentious, they endure the inconveniences of everyday life easily, as if not noticing them at all.

All of them are world changers. The humanism of these people and the quite definite social orientation of their aspirations lies in the set goal of subordinating the forces of nature to man. It is from them that we must expect the achievement of a dream. It is they who will someday be able to turn fantasy into reality and will not notice it themselves. This type of people is represented by engineers, mechanics, inventors, philosophers, dreamers - people of liberated thought.

The heroes of the first stories of A. Platonov are inventors who dream of rebuilding the world and know how to do it ("Markun"). In later works, a missionary hero appears who believes that he knows the truth and is ready to bring the light of his consciousness to people. "I thought strongly, for everyone," say the Platonic preachers.

However, Platonov's most interesting hero is undoubtedly a doubting person, a "natural", "organic" person. Foma Pukhov (the story "The Secret Man") resists external circumstances. His pilgrimage is undertaken for the sake of gaining inner truth.

The fate of builders-philosophers in the works of A. Platonov, as a rule, is tragic. And this is quite consistent with the logic of the era. A. Platonov belongs to those few authors who heard in the revolution not only "music", but also a desperate cry.

He saw that good desires sometimes correspond to evil deeds, and in the plans of good, someone provided for the strengthening of his power to destroy many innocent people, allegedly interfering with the common good. Romantic heroes of Platonov are not involved in politics, as such. Because they view the completed revolution as a settled political issue. All who did not want it were defeated and swept away. The second group of characters are the romantics of the battle, people who formed on the fronts of the civil war.

Fighters. Extremely limited natures, such as the era of battles usually produces in droves. Fearless, disinterested, honest, extremely frank.

Everything in them is programmed for action. For obvious reasons, it was they who, having returned from the front, enjoyed unconditional trust in the victorious republic and the moral right to leadership positions. They set to work with the best of intentions and with their characteristic energy, but it soon becomes clear that most of them, under the new conditions, lead in a purely automatic way, as they commanded regiments and squadrons in the war. Having received posts in management, they did not know how to dispose of them.

Lack of understanding of what was happening gave rise to heightened suspicion in them. They are entangled in deviations, excesses, distortions, slopes. Illiteracy was the soil in which violence flourished. In the novel "Chevengur" Andrey Platonov portrayed just such people.

Having received unlimited power over the county, they decided by order to abolish labor. They reasoned something like this: labor is the cause of people's suffering, since labor creates material values ​​that lead to property inequality. Therefore, it is necessary to eliminate the root cause of inequality - work.

You should feed on what nature gives birth to. Thus, due to their illiteracy, they come to substantiate the theory of primitive communism. The heroes of Platonov had no knowledge and no past, so they were replaced by faith.

The confrontation between the "external and" internal man ends tragically for the hero of "Chevengur" Sasha Dvanov. He lives for a long time only with an idea, faith, and therefore goes into the lake from a life that has lost its value. . He wants to materialize the idea and fill the matter with meaning.

That is why he rejoices, having learned about the "substance of existence", and remains to work on the foundation pit. The test of this idea is the fate of the child, the little girl Nastya, who is perceived by the workers as "a little person destined to be a universal element."

Nastya dies, and the surviving heroes of the story lose their vitality. "For what...

Do you 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? - reflects Voshchev. And the writer exposes the created "universal happiness". The enthusiasm of the first years of the revolution turns out to be nothing more than digging one's own grave. The peasants appearing at the construction of the pit work "with such zeal of life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit."

But what can be saved from the abyss? So gradually A. Platonov comes to the idea of ​​people moving away from the truth to which they were ready to devote themselves without a trace. That is why, in my opinion, the tragedy of a generation is fully embodied in his works.