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Platonov recovery of the dead summary. Andrey Platonov: Recovery of the dead

After the war, when a temple of eternal glory to the soldiers is built on our land, then against it ... a temple of eternal memory should be built for the martyrs of our people. On the walls of this temple of the dead will be inscribed the names of decrepit old men, women, infants.
They equally accepted death at the hands of the executioners of mankind...

A.P. PLATONOV

The 20th century became for the Russian Orthodox Church a time of confessional and martyrdom, unusual in its scale. During the years of temptations that befell our Motherland, Russia revealed to the world a host of clergy and laity who preserved and multiplied by their feat of faith love and fidelity to Christ even to death. In 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized many new saints who suffered during the years of persecution for the faith of Christ.

Andrei Platonovich Platonov cannot be called a confessor and martyr in the exact canonical sense. But he is the one about whom it is said in the Gospel - salt of the earth, which will not lose its salinity either in trials or in torment. The life and work of the writer is the unfolding-growth of that evangelical buckwheat grain into a wondrous tree, in the shade of which we find the breath of grace, the sources of spiritual light.
How is it possible to talk about a person whose memories do not give us visible traces of confession, who has never been seen in overt or covert dissidence, open opposition to the godless authorities, who can be "reproached" with an ardent desire to serve with his work, even with his life, which built the communist the future of the Motherland? We dare, because Platonov's fate and his writings, which contain the genetic code of Christianity, the humble Russian Orthodox consciousness, speak for Platonov.
It can be said about Platonov's life that it was a life in Christ even when, in his youthful delusion, he accepted the workers' and peasants' revolution as the fulfillment of God's will and justice. And then, when, realizing that "it is impossible to create anything without God," he denied the revolutionary builders the right to be "co-workers with God in the universe" (father Sergei Bulgakov), and then, when with his writings he testified that the soul of the people, God-given will not exchange a spiritual gift for material goods that do not come from God, and when in his own destiny, in his free human choice, he realizes the formula of a conciliar consciousness based on faith in the unity of the earthly and heavenly Church, of the living and heavenly Christian people.
Is it possible to consider Platonov a confessor ... Probably, it is possible, because contemporary critics of Platonov with a trained eye recognized the hostile spirit of the times, the structure of thought and style of the writer: "as according to the Gospel"! Platonov was reproached for the "religious Christian idea of Bolshevism", persecuted for "Christian foolish sorrow and great martyrdom", "religious Christian humanism". Unacceptable for the era of spiritual "Westernism", the brainchild of which was the idea and embodiment of the socialist revolution, was Plato's "gathering of the people", a gathering based on a reminder of those spiritual foundations that once made up Holy Rus', helped it survive and maintain spiritual and material self-identification in conditions foreign oppression, destructive wars, fiery temptations.

Icon of the Mother of God "Search for the Lost"

Can Platonov be considered a martyr?
On January 5, 2002, a memorial service was served at the grave of the Armenian cemetery for the servant of God Andrei, who died 51 years ago. In the memorial prayers, then the names of the people most beloved by Andrei Platonovich sounded - "eternal Mary", the wife of the writer, and the son of Platon. It pleased God to take them almost on the same day: Maria Alexandrovna on January 9, 1983, Platon on January 4, 1943, perhaps so that from now on they would be commemorated inseparably, with one breath of love, as they once lived and would like to live forever.
“You see how difficult it is for me. But how about you – I don’t see and I don’t hear,” Platonov writes in 1926 in the seeming grief of separation from unattainable distant Moscow from Tambov. “I think about what you are doing there with Totka. How is he? Everything has somehow become alien to me, distant and unnecessary... Only you live in me - as the cause of my anguish, as a living torment and unattainable consolation ...
Totka is also so expensive that you suffer from the mere suspicion of losing it. Too beloved and precious I am afraid - I am afraid of losing it ... "
Platonov will lose his son and take this loss as a retribution for his beliefs. He will lose his son twice. The first time on May 4, 1938, Plato will be arrested. In September, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR will sentence him to 10 years in prison under the articles: treason and complicity in a terrorist act. The arrest was authorized by Yezhov's deputy Mikhail Frinovsky. A fifteen-year-old boy was forced to confess that he discussed the issues of committing terrorist acts against Stalin, Molotov and Yezhov. Later, Plato will say: "I gave false, fantastic testimony with the help of an investigator<…>which actually didn’t happen, and I signed this testimony under the investigator’s threat that if I didn’t sign the testimony, my parents would be arrested.”
The second time was after the son's miraculous return home in 1940. Then this return was immensely helped by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was connected with Platonov by the feeling of unity of the small homeland, the homeland of the ancestors, the homeland of childhood - love for the Don expanses. Plato returned from the camps terminally ill with tuberculosis.

At the beginning of the war, Platonov is preparing for publication a book with the symbolic title "The Passage of Time". The war will stop her coming out. The evacuation to Ufa for Platonov will not be long, he will be sent to the front. In the fall of 1942, Platonov was approved as a war correspondent in the army. From April 1943, he was a special correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, captain of the administrative service, such was his military rank.
“Behind the theater of the Red Army there was a hospital where Tosha was lying, in the winter of 1943 the doctors called me:“ Maria Alexandrovna, take him away, he is dying. ”There was no car. Sobolev gave me gasoline, I brought Toshenka home and called Platonov with a telegram front ... "- recalled the widow of A.P. Platonov. Called to see the dying son of Platonov, the next day after the funeral, he leaves for the front, not yet knowing that he is taking with him a material sign of memory of his departed son - his fatal illness.
“I feel like a completely empty person, physically empty - there are such summer bugs. They fly and don’t even buzz. Because they are empty through and through. The death of my son opened my eyes to my life. What is it now, my life? For what and for whom should I live? The Soviet government took my son away from me - the Soviet government stubbornly wanted for many years to take away the title of writer from me. But no one will take away my work from me. Even now they print me, gritting their teeth. But I am a stubborn person. Suffering me only harden. I will not go anywhere from my positions and never. Everyone thinks that I am against the communists. No, I am against those who are destroying our country. Who wants to trample on our Russian, dear to my heart. And my heart hurts. Oh, how hurts!<…>Right now I see a lot at the front and observe a lot (Bryansk Front. - D.M.). My heart is bursting with grief, blood and human suffering. I will write a lot. The war taught me a lot "(from the report of the senior operational commissioner to the secret political department of the NKVD of the USSR dated February 15, 1943 to A.P. Platonov).
"What is it now, my life? For what and whom should I live ..." With the loss of the dearest earthly affection, Platonov finally loses his adoption to the temporary. The loss strengthens in him that special feeling of kinship always inherent in him to his people, now dying on the fronts of the war, and holy hatred for those who want to trample on our Russian, dear to the heart - the immortal soul of the people. The departure of a beloved being fills with new strength of life - not for himself: his "I" died in order to give space to an impersonal existence: "And my heart hurts. Oh, how it hurts!<…>My heart is bursting with grief, blood and human suffering. I will write a lot. The war taught me a lot." Letters came from the front: "Maria, go to church and serve a memorial service for our son."

Suffering not only hardens, it can enlighten, sharpen eyesight - spiritually circumcise. So it was with Platonov. The military prose of the writer is permeated with extraordinary light, although all of it is a truthful and unvarnished document of human suffering and death. Its pinnacle was the story "Recovery of the Lost", written in October 1943, nine months after the death of his son.
In the first edition of the story, as N.V. Kornienko, a description of Kyiv has been preserved (the story is dedicated to the heroic crossing of the Dnieper); it was excluded later, perhaps for censorship reasons: “But strong young eyes, even on moonlit nights, could see in the daytime in the distance the ancient towers of the holy city of Kiev, the mother of all Russian cities. It stood on the high bank of the ever striving, singing Dnieper, petrified with blinded eyes, exhausted in a grave German crypt, but looking forward, like the whole earth drooping around him, resurrection and life in victory ... "
For Platonov, Kiev was the ancestor of Russian holiness, in which he felt himself involved: after all, the writer’s childhood homeland, Yamskaya Sloboda, was located on the famous Voronezh-Zadonsk pilgrimage route, along which pilgrims, wanderers, old women of God went to worship from the Voronezh shrines to the Zadonsk monastery. The Kiev pilgrimage tract ran along the Zadonskoye highway, and the images of wanderers going to worship at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra through Voronezh did not leave Platonov's prose of the 1920s.
The beginning of the story tightly linked the theme of resurrection and life in victory, which is so understandable in its literal sense to the soldiers fighting for the Motherland, with the theme of holiness - a concept that is alien only to material meaning. The image of the city - the mother of Russian cities, exhausted, blinded, but not losing its holiness and faith in the triumph of true resurrection and the final victory over death and destruction, like an overture, sets the theme of the story - the theme of the holiness of the mother, seeking all her dead children in repentance and resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
It is amazing how Platonov manages to tangibly convey the presence of holiness, its immaterial, but formidable force even for a material enemy.

M.A. Vrubel. Funeral cry. Mural sketch for the Vladimir Cathedral in Kyiv. 1887

“Mother returned to her home. She was a refugee from the Germans, but she could not live anywhere except her native place, and returned home.<…>On her way she met the Germans, but they did not touch this old woman; it was strange for them to see such a sorrowful old woman, they were horrified by the look of humanity on her face, and they left her unattended so that she died of herself. It happens in life this dim aloof light on the faces of people, frightening the beast and the hostile person, and such people cannot be destroyed by anyone, and it is impossible to approach them. Beast and man are more willing to fight with their kind, but unsimilar he leaves aside afraid to be afraid of them and be defeated unknown force"(Italics in quotations are ours everywhere. - D.M.).
What does the writer say to those who have ears to hear? About the holiness born of suffering, the holiness of a mother going to the grave of her children. The image of holiness in Platonov's description has a canonical character: " dim aloof light" reminds us that the radiance of holiness is indeed alien to the beast and the hostile man - it is the radiance of divine love. His "mystery" cannot be unraveled and defeated by the forces of the prince of this world, who really "are more willing to fight with their kind": "Enemies of the soul give no rest to anyone and nowhere, especially if they find a weak side in us," said St. Ambrose of Optina. Holiness really defeats the beast and tames the ferocity of the enemy, as evidenced by the lives of St. Mary of Egypt, St. Sergius of Radonezh, Seraphim of Sarov ...
Surprising in its simplicity, Christian humility, in its conciliar spirit, her conversation with her neighbor, Evdokia Petrovna, a young woman, once stout, but now weakened, quiet and indifferent: her two young children were killed by a bomb when she left the city, and her husband disappeared unaccounted for in earthworks," and she came back to bury the children and live out her time in a dead place.
“Hello, Maria Vasilievna,” Evdokia Petrovna said.
"It's you, Dunya," Maria Vasilievna told her. - Sit down with me, let's talk to you.<…>
Dunya humbly sat down beside<…>. Both were easier now<…>.
Are all of yours dead? asked Maria Vasilievna.
- Everything, but how! Dunya replied. - And all of yours?
“That’s it, there’s no one,” said Maria Vasilievna.
“You and I have no one equally,” Dunya said, satisfied that her grief was not the greatest in the world: other people have the same.
The sick soul of Maria Vasilyevna agrees with Dunya's advice to "live like the dead," but the yearning, loving heart does not reconcile herself to the fact that her loved ones "are lying there, now they are getting cold." The image of a mass grave, thrown "a little bit of earth", with a cross of two branches, put by the hand of Evdokia Petrovna, recalls an old Cossack song about a "merciful man" who buried 240 people in the grave and put an oak cross with the inscription: "Here lie with the Don heroes. Glory to the Don Cossacks! ", with the only difference being that Dunya does not believe that eternal glory-memory will be protected by this cross:" I tied a cross of two branches for them and put it, but it's useless: the cross will fall, even though you make it iron, and people will forget the dead ... "
Apparently, the matter is not in the material from which the cross is made: the glory of the Don Cossacks was strong in the memory of the living people, forever liturgically commemorating them, and worldly - in songs. Dunya does not believe in the memory of his people. Maria Vasilievna does not believe in her either. This is the main reason for her grief. "Then, when it was already light, Maria Vasilievna got up<…>and went into the twilight where her children lay, two sons in the near land and a daughter far off.<…>Mother sat down at the cross; under him lay her naked children, slaughtered, abused and thrown into the dust by the hands of others<…>
"...Let them sleep, I'll wait - I can't live without children, I don't want to live without the dead..."
And as if in answer to a prayer, she heard how out of "the silence of the world, the calling voice of her daughter sounded to her<…>, speaking of hope and joy, that everything that did not come true will come true, and the dead will return to live on earth, and the separated will embrace each other and will never part again.

The mother heard that her daughter's voice was cheerful, and understood that this meant the daughter's hope and trust in returning to life, that the deceased expects the help of the living and does not want to be dead.
This sounding “silence of the world” and the materially heard joy in the daughter’s voice are amazing - so tangibly material are the visits of the inhabitants of the Heavenly Kingdom for the inhabitants of the underworld. The message heard changes the direction of the mother’s thoughts: “How, daughter, can I help you? I myself am barely alive<…>I alone will not lift you, daughter; if only all the people loved you and corrected all the untruth on earth, then both you and He raised all the righteous dead to life: after all death is the first untruth!"
Platonov again directly and unambiguously addresses these words of a simple Orthodox woman to those who have ears to hear with a reminder that only the liturgical conciliar love of the whole people ("if all the people loved you") and nationwide repentance ("corrected all the untruth on earth"), can " raise all the righteous dead" to life, that is, to seek those who died from sin, because death is the result of sin, "and there is the first untruth! .."
Reading these words filled with canonical faith, it is difficult to imagine with what eyes one must read Platonov in order to attribute occultism and sectarian views to him, and yet such ideas are sometimes imposed on the writer even on the pages of church periodicals.
"By noon, Russian tanks reached the Mitrofanevskaya road and stopped near the settlement for inspection and refueling<…>. Near the cross, connected from two branches, the Red Army soldier saw an old woman, her face bowed to the ground.<…>
“Sleep for now,” the Red Army soldier said aloud at parting. - Whose mother you are, and without you I was also left an orphan.
He stood a little longer, in the languor of his separation from a strange mother.
- It's dark for you now, and you've gone far from us ... What can we do! Now we have no time to grieve for you, we must first put down the enemy. And then the whole world must enter into understanding, otherwise it will not be possible, otherwise everything is useless!..
The Red Army soldier went back, and it became boring for him to live without the dead. However, he felt that now it became all the more necessary for him to live. It is necessary not only to destroy the enemy of human life, but also to be able to live after the victory of that higher life, which the dead silently bequeathed to us<…>. The dead have no one to trust except the living - and we need to live now so that the death of our people is justified by the happy and free fate of our people, and thus their death is exacted.

So Platonov clearly links the theme of death with "unrighteousness on earth," that is, sin as a consequence of the unwillingness to live a "higher life." He unequivocally testifies that the duty to the “righteous dead” (recall that righteousness is a church concept, meaning life in truth, that is, in accordance with the divine commandments) requires the conciliar memory of the living about the dead, which is possible only in church liturgical prayer, which Russia almost lost, because her sons ceased to live the "higher life" and lost that radiance of holiness, which could prevent the approach of the "beast".
The title of the story does not allow misunderstanding of the meaning of Plato's testament to us, now living, enclosed in the artistic flesh of the text. "Recovery of the Lost" is the name of one of the most revered icons of the Most Holy Theotokos in Rus', an icon that has the grace of consoling parental grief, an icon of fathers and mothers praying for their children. For non-Orthodox extra-church consciousness, this name is associated with the idea of searching for missing people, while the Church prays before her for those who are perishing and lost, primarily spiritually, and not physically. Prayer in front of this icon is an expression of the last hope for the help of the Most Pure Virgin in liberation from the eternal death of a person over whom goodness has finally lost its power.
The story does not give us reason to believe that it refers to the "righteously dead" children of Maria Vasilyevna, that it is to them that the prayer for the recovery of the dead applies: together with the mother, we hear the cheerful voice of her daughter, testifying that the Private Court elevated her to the monastery, where there is no sighing and crying: “But my daughter took me from here wherever my eyes look, she loved me, she was my daughter, then she moved away from me, she loved others, she loved everyone, she regretted one thing - she was a kind girl, she my daughter, - she leaned towards him, he was sick, he was wounded, he became as if lifeless, and she was also killed then, they were killed from above from the airplane ... "- says Maria Vasilyevna. And the epigraph of the story "From the abyss I call. The words of the dead", which, as you know, is a paraphrase of the words of the living, the words of the psalm of David, which are so often heard in worship: From the depths I called to Thee, O Lord, and hear me , indicates to us that the story is a warning of the Church of Heaven, the Church of the righteous, confessors, martyrs of the Russian land to the living, that the whole story is an artistic projection of the prayer of the Holy Motherland for her unjustly living children, who with their sins opened the gates of physical death - war – and spiritual – oblivion of the “higher life”.
The warning of the Red Army soldier sounds menacing, in which Platonov himself is guessed, because his main character bears the name his mother, that "the whole world must enter into understanding, otherwise it will not be possible, otherwise everything is useless!"
We have spoken of the immaterial light with which this sad story is filled, in which death and destruction so visibly triumph. This immaterial light is made up of the radiance of love, which makes the mother "go through the war", because "it was necessary for her to see her home, where she lived her life, and the place where her children died in battle and execution." Love that protects her from accidental death; love that seeks eternal life for the departed; love that helps Duna endure her own inconsolable pain; love even to the death of the daughter of Maria Vasilievna for a wounded soldier she did not know; love that allows the Red Army soldier to recognize in the deceased old woman and his mother and to languish in grief in separation from her; love that clearly gives rise to the image of conciliar love, the love of the dead for the living and the living for the dead, a love that promises that "everything that did not come true will come true, and the dead will return to live on earth, and the separated will embrace each other and will never part again."

© Daria MOSKOVSKAYA,
Candidate of Philology,
senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature
them. A.M. Gorky RAS

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Maria Vasilievna returns home. She walks across the front, past the positions of the Germans, who look at her lazily, not wanting to waste bullets on the life of a worthless old woman. Maria Vasilyevna lost three children. They were rolled on the ground by the caterpillar of a German tank. And now the mother goes home to visit the grave of her children. Mother's grief is immeasurable, it made her fearless. Not only Germans, but also animals, and dashing people do not touch a woman distraught with grief. She calmly continues her way home.

Maria Vasilievna comes to her native village. Her home was razed to the ground by German tanks. On the ruins of her house, she meets a neighbor - Evdokia Petrovna. Evdokia has grown old and haggard during the war years, she lost her little children during the bombing, and her husband disappeared during earthworks. Evdokia lives in an empty ruined village. The two women begin a dialogue about life and death.

Evdokia tells how the Germans came to the village, how they killed almost all the inhabitants. How the dead were buried. Lazy German soldiers threw the corpses into a shell crater, sprinkled them with earth, rolled the earth with a tank, and put the dead bodies on top again. Evdokia placed a wooden cross on the site of the mass grave. A young and beautiful woman, Evdokia, in a couple of years, turned into an old woman. She lives not for something, but in spite of. Together with Mary, they do not live, but exist, because, unlike the body, their souls are already dead.

Maria Vasilyeva goes to a mass grave, she sees a cross over the ground smoothly packed by tank tracks. The mother falls to the ground and tries to hear the whispers of the dead. But they are silent. Maria Vasilievna presents a conversation with her dead daughter. She understands that her duty to the dead is to prevent this bloody, senseless and merciless massacre called the Great Patriotic War from happening again.

Maria falls into eternal sleep, hugging that piece of land under which her children are buried. An old soldier passes by a mass grave. He sees a woman lying at the cross, time and grief did not spare her. The soldier realizes that the woman is dead and covers her face with a handkerchief, which he previously used as a footcloth. He leaves, he must save the others from such a terrible fate.

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Summary Recovery of the dead Platos

After the war, when a temple of eternal glory to the soldiers is built on our land, then against it ... a temple of eternal memory should be built for the martyrs of our people. On the walls of this temple of the dead will be inscribed the names of decrepit old men, women, infants.
They equally accepted death at the hands of the executioners of mankind...

A.P. PLATONOV

Icon of the Mother of God "Search for the Lost"

M.A. Vrubel. Funeral cry. Mural sketch for the Vladimir Cathedral in Kyiv. 1887

© Daria MOSKOVSKAYA,
Candidate of Philology,
senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature
them. A.M. Gorky RAS

"Recovery of the Lost"

The mother returned to her home. She was a refugee from the Germans, but she could not live anywhere except her native place, and returned home.

She twice passed through the intermediate fields past the German fortifications, because the front here was uneven, and she walked on a straight short road. She had no fear and was not afraid of anyone, and her enemies did not hurt her. She walked through the fields, melancholy, bare-haired, with a vague, as if blind, face. And she didn’t care what is now in the world and what is happening in it, and nothing in the world could either disturb or please her, because her grief was eternal and her sadness was inexhaustible - the mother had lost all her children dead. She was now so weak and indifferent to the whole world that she walked along the road like a withered blade of grass carried by the wind, and everything that she met also remained indifferent to her. And it became even more difficult for her, because she felt that she did not need anyone, and for that no one needed her anyway.

It's enough for a man to die, but she didn't die; she needed to see her home, where she lived her life, and the place where her children died in battle and execution.

On her way she met the Germans, but they did not touch this old woman; it was strange for them to see such a sorrowful old woman, they were horrified by the look of humanity on her face, and they left her unattended so that she died of herself. In life there is this vague alienated light on the faces of people, frightening the beast and the hostile person, and it is beyond the power of anyone to destroy such people, and it is impossible to approach them. Beast and man are more willing to fight with those like themselves, but he leaves the unlike ones aside, fearing to be frightened of them and be defeated by an unknown force.

After going through the war, the old mother returned home. But her native place was now empty. A small poor house for one family, smeared with clay, painted with yellow paint, with a brick chimney resembling a man's thoughtful head, burned down long ago from German fire and left behind coals that are already overgrown with the grass of the grave burial. And all the neighboring residential places, this whole old city, also died, and everything around it became light and sad, and you can see far away across the silent earth. A little time will pass, and the place of life of people will be overgrown with free grass, it will be blown out by winds, rain streams will level it, and then there will be no trace of a person, and there will be no one to understand and inherit all the torment of his existence on earth for good and teaching for the future, because no one will be alive. And the mother sighed from this last thought of hers and from the pain in her heart for the forgetful perishing life. But her heart was kind, and out of love for the dead, she wanted to live for all the dead, in order to fulfill their will, which they took with them to the grave.

She sat down in the middle of the cooled conflagration and began to touch the ashes of her dwelling with her hands. She knew her fate, that it was time for her to die, but her soul did not reconcile herself to this fate, because if she died, then where would the memory of her children be preserved and who would save them in her love when her heart also stopped breathing?

The mother did not know that, and she thought alone. A neighbor, Evdokia Petrovna, a young woman, formerly pretty and stout, but now weakened, quiet and indifferent, came up to her; her two young children were killed by a bomb when she left the city with them, and her husband went missing in earthworks, and she returned back to bury her children and live out her time in a dead place.

Hello, Maria Vasilievna, - said Evdokia Petrovna.

It's you, Dunya, - Maria Vasilievna told her. - Pdis with me, let's talk to you. Look in my head, I haven't washed in a long time.

Dunya meekly sat down beside her: Maria Vasilievna laid her head on her knees, and the neighbor began to search in her head. It was easier for both of them to do this now; one diligently worked, and the other clung to her and dozed off in peace from the proximity of a familiar person.

Have you all died? asked Maria Vasilievna.

Everything, but how! Dunya answered. - And all yours?

Everything, there is no one. - said Maria Vasilievna.

You and I have no one equally, ”Dunya said, satisfied that her grief was not the greatest in the world: other people have the same.

I will have more grief than yours: I used to live as a widow, -

Maria Vasilievna spoke. - And two of my sons lay down here at the settlement.

They entered the working battalion when the Germans from Petropavlovka came out to the Mitrofanevsky tract And my daughter took me from here wherever they look, she loved me, she was my daughter, then she left me, she fell in love with others, she fell in love with everyone, she took pity on one - she was a kind girl, she is my daughter, - she leaned towards him, he was sick, he was wounded, he became as if lifeless, and then they killed her too, they killed her from above from the airplane And I came back, what is it to me! What do I need now! I don't care!

I myself am dead now

And what are you supposed to do: live like a dead woman, I live like that too, said Dunya. - Mine lie, and yours lay down. I know where yours lie - they are there, where they dragged and buried everyone, I was here, I saw it with my own eyes. They counted all the dead dead on the ditch, compiled a paper, put their own separately, and dragged ours away further away. Then we were all stripped naked and all the income from things was written down on paper. They took such care for a long time, and then they began to carry the burial.

And who dug the grave? Maria Vasilievna was worried. Did you dug deep? After all, naked, chilly people were buried, a deep grave would be warmer!

No, how deep it is! Dunya said. - A pit from a shell, here's your grave. They piled on there in addition, but there was not enough space for others. Then they drove through the grave over the dead in a tank, the dead sank, the place became, and they also put those who remained there. They have no desire to dig, they save their strength. And from above they threw a little bit of earth, the dead lie there, they are getting cold now;

only the dead can endure such torment - to lie naked in the cold for a century

And mine, too, were mutilated by a tank, or were they put whole on top? -

asked Maria Vasilievna.

Yours? Dunya replied. - Yes, I didn’t see it. There, behind the settlement, by the very road, everyone lies, if you go, you will see. I tied a cross for them out of two branches and put it, but it’s useless: the cross will fall, even if you make it iron, and people will forget the dead Maria Vasilievna got up from Dunya’s knees, put her head to her and herself began to search in her head hair . And the work made her feel better;

manual work heals a sick yearning soul.

Then, when it was already light, Maria Vasilievna got up; she was an old woman, she is tired now; she said goodbye to Dunya and went into the dusk, where her children lay - two sons in the near land and a daughter in the distance.

Maria Vasilievna went out to the suburb, which was adjacent to the city. Gardeners and gardeners used to live in the suburb in wooden houses; they fed from the land adjacent to their dwellings, and thus existed here from time immemorial. Today there is nothing left here, and the earth above was baked from the fire, and the inhabitants either died, or went into wandering, or they were taken prisoner and taken to work and death.

The Mitrofanevsky tract went out of the settlement into the plain. Willows used to grow along the side of the highway, now their war had gnawed them to the very stumps, and now the deserted road was boring, as if the end of the world was already close and rarely anyone came here.

Maria Vasilievna came to the place of the grave, where stood a cross made of two mournful, trembling branches tied across. Mother sat down at this cross;

beneath him lay her naked children, slaughtered, abused and thrown into the dust by the hands of others.

Evening came and turned into night. The autumn stars lit up in the sky, as if, after weeping, surprised and kind eyes opened there, peering motionlessly at the dark earth, so sad and alluring that out of pity and painful affection no one can take their eyes off it.

If you were alive, - the mother whispered to the ground to her dead sons, -

if you were alive, how much work you have done, how much fate you have experienced! And now, well, now you are dead - where is your life, what you have not lived, who will live it for you? .. How old was Matvey? The twenty-third was on, and Vasily was the twenty-eighth. And my daughter was eighteen, now she would have gone nineteenth, yesterday she was a birthday girl. Only I spent my heart on you, how much of my blood was gone, but that means that it was not enough, my heart and my blood alone were not enough, since you died, since I She didn’t keep her children alive and didn’t save them from death. Well, they are my children, they didn’t ask to live in the world.

And I gave birth to them - I did not think; I gave birth to them, let them live. But it’s obviously impossible to live on earth yet, nothing is ready for the children here: they only cooked, but they didn’t manage it! .. They can’t live here, and they had nowhere else to do, - what should we, mothers, do something, and we gave birth to children. How else? To live alone, I suppose, and to nothing She touched the grave earth and lay down to her face. The ground was quiet, nothing could be heard.

Yat, - whispered the mother, - no one will move, - it was difficult to die, and they were exhausted. Let them sleep, I'll wait - I can't live without children, I don't want to live without the dead Maria Vasilievna took her face off the ground; she heard that her daughter Natasha had called her; she called to her without saying a word, as if she had uttered something with one of her weak breaths. The mother looked around, wanting to see from where her daughter was calling to her, from where her meek voice sounded - from a quiet field, from the depths of the earth or from the height of the sky, from that clear star. Where is she now, her dead daughter? Or is she nowhere else, and only Natasha's voice seems to her mother, which sounds like a memory in her own heart?

Maria Vasilievna listened again, and again from the silence of the world she heard her daughter’s calling voice, so distant that it was like silence, but, however, pure and intelligible in meaning, speaking of hope and joy, that everything that did not come true would come true. and the dead will return to live on the earth, and those separated will embrace each other and never part again.

“How can I help you, daughter? I’m barely alive myself,” said Maria Vasilievna; she spoke calmly and intelligibly, as if she were in her house, at rest, and was talking with the children, as happened in her recent happy life. - I alone will not raise you, daughter; if all the people loved you, but corrected all the untruth on earth, then he would raise you and all the righteous dead to life: after all, death is the first untruth! .. And I How can I help you alone? I’ll just die of grief and then I’ll be with you!

The mother spoke words of reasonable consolation to her daughter for a long time, as if Natasha and her two sons in the earth were attentively listening to her. Then she dozed off and fell asleep on the grave.

The midnight dawn of war rose in the distance, and the rumble of cannons came from there; there the battle began. Maria Vasilievna woke up, and looked towards the fire in the sky, and listened to the rapid breathing of the cannons. "These are ours coming, -

she believed. - Let them come soon, let there be Soviet power again, she loves the people, she loves work, she teaches people everything, she is restless;

maybe a century will pass, and the people will learn how the dead become alive, and then they will sigh, then the orphaned heart of the mother will rejoice.

Maria Vasilievna believed and understood that everything would come true, as she wished and as she needed to console her soul. She saw flying airplanes, but they were also difficult to invent and make, and all the dead can be returned from the earth to life in sunlight, if the mind of people turned to the need of a mother who gives birth and bury her children and dies from separation from them.

She crouched again on the soft earth of the grave, in order to be closer to her silent sons. And their silence was a condemnation of the whole villainous world that killed them, and grief for the mother, who remembers the smell of their childish body and the color of their living eyes. now they did not shoot ahead of themselves, because the German garrison of the lost town saved itself from the battle and retreated ahead of time to their troops.

One Red Army soldier from the tank moved away from the car and went to walk on the ground, over which the peaceful sun was now shining. The Red Army soldier was no longer so young, he was in years, and he liked to see how the grass lives, and check -

whether there are still butterflies and insects to which he is accustomed.

Near the cross, connected from two branches, the Red Army soldier saw an old woman, her face bowed to the ground. He leaned towards her and listened to her breathing, and then turned the woman's body on her back and, for the sake of correctness, put his ear to her chest. “Her heart is gone,” the Red Army soldier realized, and covered his calm face with the deceased clean linen, which he had with him as a spare footcloth.

She had nothing to live with: look how hunger and grief ate her body - the bone glows out through the skin.

And yet, - the Red Army soldier said aloud at parting. - Whose mother you are, I am also an orphan without you.

He stood a little longer, in the languor of his separation from a strange mother.

It's dark for you now, and you've gone far from us. What can we do! Now we have no time to grieve for you, we must first put down the enemy. And then the whole world must enter into understanding, otherwise it will not be possible, otherwise - everything is useless! ..

The Red Army man went back. And it became boring for him to live without the dead. However, he felt that now it became all the more necessary for him to live. It is necessary not only to exterminate the enemy of human life, but also to be able to live after the victory with that higher life that the dead have silently bequeathed to us; and then, for the sake of their eternal memory, it is necessary to fulfill all their hopes on earth, so that their will would be realized and their heart, having stopped breathing, would not be deceived. There is no one to trust the dead, except the living, and we must live in such a way now that the death of our people would be justified by the happy and free fate of our people, and thus their death would be exacted.

Platonov Andrey - Recovery of the dead, read text

Andrey Platonov
Recovery of the dead

I call from the abyss.

words of the dead

The mother returned to her home. She was a refugee from the Germans, but she could not live anywhere except her native place, and returned home. She twice passed through the intermediate fields past the German fortifications, because the front here was uneven, and she walked on a straight short road. She had no fear and was not afraid of anyone, and her enemies did not hurt her. She walked through the fields, melancholy, bare-haired, with a vague, as if blind, face. And she didn’t care what is now in the world and what is happening in it, and nothing in the world could either disturb her or make her happy, because her grief was eternal and her sadness was inexhaustible - the mother had lost all her children dead. She was now so weak and indifferent to the whole world that she walked along the road like a withered blade of grass carried by the wind, and everything that she met also remained indifferent to her. And it became even more difficult for her, because she felt that she did not need anyone, and for that no one needed her anyway. It's enough for a man to die, but she didn't die; she needed to see her home, where she lived her life, and the place where her children died in battle and execution.

“Hello, Maria Vasilievna,” Evdokia Petrovna said.

"It's you, Dunya," Maria Vasilievna told her. - Sit down with me, let's talk to you. Look in my head, I haven't washed in a long time.

Dunya meekly sat down beside him; Maria Vasilievna laid her head on her knees, and the neighbor began to search in her head. It was easier for both of them to do this now; one diligently worked, and the other clung to her and dozed off in peace from the proximity of a familiar person.

Are all of yours dead? asked Maria Vasilievna.

- Everything, but how! Dunya replied. - And all of yours?

“That’s it, there’s no one,” said Maria Vasilievna.

“You and I have no one equally,” Dunya said, satisfied that her grief was not the greatest in the world: other people have the same.

“I’ll have more grief than you: I used to live as a widow,” said Maria Vasilievna. - And two of my sons lay down here at the settlement. They entered the working battalion when the Germans from Petropavlovka came out to the Mitrofanevsky tract ... And my daughter took me from here wherever they look, she loved me, she was my daughter, then she moved away from me, she fell in love with others, she fell in love with everyone, she regretted one thing - she was a kind girl, she is my daughter - she leaned towards him, he was sick, he was wounded, he became as if lifeless, and then they also killed her, they killed her from above from the airplane ... But I returned, what is it to me! What do I need now! I don't care! I am dead now...

“But what should you do: live like a dead woman, I live like that too,” said Dunya. - Mine lie, and yours lay down ... I know where yours lie - they are there, where they dragged everyone and buried them, I was here, I saw it with my own eyes. First, they counted all the dead dead, compiled a paper, put their own separately, and dragged ours away further away. Then we were all stripped naked and all the income from things was written down on paper. They took such care for a long time, and then they began to carry the burial ...

Who dug the grave? Maria Vasilievna was worried. Did you dug deep? After all, naked, chilly people were buried, a deep grave would be warmer!

- No, what is it like there

end of introduction

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