The story “An Incident at Kochetovka Station” was written in 1962 and published in the magazine “New World” in 1963. This is the time of Khrushchev’s “thaw”: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a former prisoner who served eight years, the author of the sensational “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published thanks to Khrushchev’s personal permission. In 1964, the “thaw” ended and the era of Brezhnev stagnation began. And Solzhenitsyn became one of the two main Soviet dissidents, along with academician Andrei Sakharov.
The text of the story is structured like a classic short story; it describes one significant incident. Autumn 1941, front-line station, main character- assistant to the station commandant, Lieutenant Zotov. Typical goodie Soviet literature. A selfless, kind, honest, sincere person, always ready to help. The culmination of the story is Zotov’s meeting with Tveritinov, a soldier who was behind the train and has no documents except a home photo. Tveritinov is a non-combatant soldier, a typical civilian, an artist, an intellectual. Friendly feelings arise between them, but notes of condemnation appear in the conversation: for example, the actor Tveritinov for some reason is not delighted with Gorky’s plays. Mutual misunderstanding grows, but human sympathy between the characters does not disappear. Zotov is a little suspicious of his new acquaintance, but wants to help him. After Tveritinov’s question about the former name of Stalingrad, Zotov becomes convinced that he is a spy. He hands it over to the NKVD. "What are you doing? - Tveritinov shouted in a voice booming like a bell. “You can’t fix this!”
In a sense, this is another “station guard” "The Station Agent"- a story by A. S. Pushkin from the cycle “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin.” who looks, but sees poorly, being confused by false literary and ideological cliches. But if Pushkin’s caretaker is hypnotized by Karamzin’s sentimentalism and gospel stories, then Zotov is confused by Soviet, Stalinist ideology. In the future, he tries to find out from the authorities who Tveritinov turned out to be. They tell him that they will sort it out: “Why are you asking?<…>We don’t have marriage.” The story ends with the words: “But never in his entire life could Zotov forget this man...”
The essence of the story is that a kind, positive hero surrenders a person close to him to death. Why? Because of a verbal trifle - the name of the city, but also because of the name of Stalin - and this is no longer a trifle, but a sacred moment. Zotov seems to kill his brother, but not out of malice, but solely for the sake of ideological good, as he understands it. The system makes him a killer. Simple soviet man kills another as if in continuation Civil War. Not a sadist, not a professional torturer in uniform and boots, but a positive hero of Soviet literature.
Let us allow ourselves a not entirely correct question: where is the author himself in the story? He, as often happens, is in both antagonists: in the excellent officer Zotov, who suddenly begins to doubt the official truths, and in Tveritinov, an artist who becomes a victim of the system, moreover, tripping over the name of Stalin, like the author himself, who served time for a letter to a friend with unflattering comments about the leader. In general, Solzhenitsyn is especially strong when he brings something of his own, personal into problematic characters. Literarily, we have before us a classic case of the conversion of ready-made forms of Soviet positive hero and the genre of detective story about the exposure of a suspicious foreigner in contrast to them. The story, roughly speaking, is intended to re-educate the hero, to plow him up, to put it in Leninist terms, and with him - all of Soviet literature and its readers.
Hello, is this the dispatcher?
Who is this? Dyachikhin?
Well, no, but I ask - Dyachikhin?
Drive the tanks from the seventh to the third, drive them. Dyachikhin, yes.
This is the duty assistant to the military commandant, Lieutenant Zotov, speaking! Listen, what are you doing? Why don’t you still send a train of six hundred and seventy to Lipetsk... which one, Valya?
Eighth.
Six hundred and seventy-eighth!
There is nothing to pull.
How to understand this - there is nothing?
There is no steam locomotive, how. Varnakov? Varnakov, there, on the sixth, do you see four platforms with coal? Pull them there too.
Listen to how the locomotive is gone, when I see six in a row out the window.
This is a raft.
What - a raft?
Locomotive. From the cemetery. They are evacuating.
Okay, then you have two shunters!
Comrade Lieutenant! Yes, I saw three shunters!
The chief of the convoy from this echelon is standing nearby, he corrects me - three shunters. Give me one!
I can't do them.
What do you mean you can't? Are you aware of the importance of this cargo? You can’t keep him for a minute, and you...
Bring it up the hill.
- ... and you’ll soon be holding him for half a day!
Not half a day.
What do you have there - a nursery or a control room? Why do babies cry?
Yes, we're crowded here. - Comrades, how much should I say? Clear the room. I can't send anyone. Military cargo is still there.
There is canned blood in this echelon! For the hospital! Understand!
I understand everything. Varnakov? Now unhook, go to the water pump, take those ten.
Listen! If you do not send this train within half an hour, I will report higher! This is not a joke! You will be responsible for this!
Vasil Vasilich! Give me the phone, I'll do it myself...
I pass it on to the military dispatcher.
Nikolai Petrovich? This is Podshebyakina. Listen, what's in the depot? After all, one Sushka was already filled.
So, Comrade Sergeant, go to the escort car, and if in forty minutes... Well, if they don’t send you before half past seven, come and report.
Come and report! May I go?
The head of the convoy turned sharply, clearly, and, with the first step, letting go of his hand from his hat, he left.
Lieutenant Zotov straightened his glasses, which gave a stern expression to his not at all stern face, looked at the military dispatcher Podshebyakina, a girl in a railway uniform, as she, with abundant white curls scattered, was talking into an old-fashioned receiver of an old-fashioned telephone - and from her small room he went into his own a small one, from where there was no further door.
The line commandant's office was a corner room on the ground floor, and upstairs, just above this corner, the drainpipe was damaged. A thick stream of water, audibly lashing behind the wall, was diverted by wind shocks and scattered first in front of the left window, onto the platform, then in front of the right, into a blind passage. After clear October frosts, when the morning found the entire station covered in frost, last days It was damp, and since yesterday it had been raining this cold rain incessantly, so much so that you had to wonder where there was so much water in the sky.
But the rain brought order: there was no senseless jostling of people, no constant swarming of civilians on the platforms and along the tracks, disrupting the decent appearance and operation of the station. Everyone hid, no one crawled on all fours under the carriages, climbed the carriage ladders, the locals did not fight with buckets boiled potatoes, and passengers of freight trains did not wander between trains, as if in a flea market, hanging underwear, dresses, and knitted items on their shoulders and arms. (This trade was very embarrassing for Lieutenant Zotov: it was as if it could not be allowed and could not be prohibited - because no food was supplied to the evacuees.) Only the service people were not driven away by the rain. Through the window one could see a sentry on a platform with covered loads - all drenched in flowing rain, he stood and did not even try to shake it off. Yes, along the third track, a shunting locomotive was pulling tanks, and a switchman in a canvas raincoat with a hood was waving a flag at him. The still dark, undersized figure of the carriage foreman walked along the train of the second track, diving under each carriage.
And then everything was - rain and lashings. In the cold, persistent wind, it hit the roofs and walls of freight cars, and the chests of steam locomotives; he cut the red-burnt curved iron ribs of two dozen carriage frames (the boxes were burned somewhere in the bombing, but the chassis survived, and they were pulled to the rear); doused four divisional cannons standing openly on platforms; merging with the falling twilight, the first green circle of the semaphore and here and there flashes of crimson sparks flying out of the heating pipes were drawn in gray. The entire asphalt of the first platform was filled with glassy bubbling water that did not have time to drain, and the rails glistened with water even in the twilight, and even the dark brown filling of the canvas shuddered with puddles that did not drain.
And all this made no sounds, except for the dull shaking of the earth and the weak horn of the switchman - the whistles of locomotives were canceled from the first day of the war.
And only the rain blew through the ruined pipe.
Behind another window, in a passage near the fence of the warehouse, an oak tree grew. He was torn, wet, he held on to the dark leaves, but today the last ones flew off.
There was no time to stand and stare. It was necessary to roll out the camouflage paper curtains on the windows, turn on the lights and sit down to work. There was still a lot to do before the shift at nine o'clock in the evening.
But Zotov did not lower the curtains, but took off his commander’s cap with a green band, which always sat on his head while on duty even in his room, took off his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyes with his fingers, tired of copying out encrypted transport numbers from one pencil sheet to another. No, not fatigue, but melancholy came up to him in the prematurely darkening day - and scratched him.
The melancholy was not even about his wife, who was left with an unborn child far away in Belarus, under the Germans. Not about a lost past, because Zotov did not yet have a past. Not about lost property, because he did not have it and would never want to have it.
Zotov felt oppressed and needed to howl out loud because of the course of the war, which was wildly incomprehensible. It was impossible to draw a front line based on the Information Bureau reports; one could argue who had Kharkov and who had Kaluga. But among the railway workers it was well known that trains no longer sent beyond Uzlovaya to Tula and only reached the Upper Reaches through Yelets. Here and there bombers broke through to the Ryazan-Voronezh line, dropped several bombs, and Kochetovka also suffered. And about ten days ago, two crazy German motorcyclists fell out of somewhere, flew into Kochetovka and fired machine guns as they went. One of them was put down, the other ran away, but at the station everyone was alarmed by the shooting, and the head of the special forces detachment, in charge of explosions in the event of an evacuation, left to tear up the water pump with the previously laid tar. Now a recovery train was called, and for the third day it worked here.
Written in November 1962. Published in Novy Mir, 1963, No. 1; even before that, in December 1962, an excerpt was published in Pravda. (Because of this circumstance, he was never criticized in the Soviet press, since Pravda could not be mistaken.) “Kochetovka” is the real name of the station, where the described authentic incident occurred in 1941. Upon publication, the name was changed to “Krechetovka” due to the severity of the confrontation between the “New World” and “October” ( editor-in-chief- Kochetov), although all other geographical points remained precisely named.
INCIDENT AT THE STATION
KOCHETOVKA
Hello, is this the dispatcher?
Who is this? Dyachikhin?
Well, no, but I ask - Dyachikhin?
Drive the tanks from the seventh to the third, drive them. Dyachikhin, yes.
This is the duty assistant to the military commandant, Lieutenant Zotov, speaking! Listen, what are you doing? Why don’t you still send a train of six hundred and seventy to Lipetsk... which one, Valya?
Eighth.
Six hundred and seventy-eighth!
There is nothing to pull.
How to understand this - there is nothing?
There is no steam locomotive, how. Varnakov? Varnakov, there, on the sixth, do you see four platforms with coal? Pull them there too.
Listen to how the locomotive is gone, when I see six in a row out the window.
This is a raft.
What - a raft?
Locomotive. From the cemetery. They are evacuating.
Okay, then you have two shunters!
Comrade Lieutenant! Yes, I saw three shunters!
The chief of the convoy from this echelon is standing nearby, he corrects me - three shunters. Give me one!
I can't do them.
What do you mean you can't? Are you aware of the importance of this cargo? You can’t keep him for a minute, and you...
Bring it up the hill.
- ... and you’ll soon be holding him for half a day!
Not half a day.
What do you have there - a nursery or a control room? Why do babies cry?
Yes, we're crowded here. - Comrades, how much should I say? Clear the room. I can't send anyone. Military cargo is still there.
There is canned blood in this echelon! For the hospital! Understand!
I understand everything. Varnakov? Now unhook, go to the water pump, take those ten.
Listen! If you do not send this train within half an hour, I will report higher! This is not a joke! You will be responsible for this!
Vasil Vasilich! Give me the phone, I'll do it myself...
I pass it on to the military dispatcher.
Nikolai Petrovich? This is Podshebyakina. Listen, what's in the depot? After all, one Sushka was already filled.
So, Comrade Sergeant, go to the escort car, and if in forty minutes... Well, if they don’t send you before half past seven, come and report.
Come and report! May I go?
The head of the convoy turned sharply, clearly, and, with the first step, letting go of his hand from his hat, he left.
Lieutenant Zotov straightened his glasses, which gave a stern expression to his not at all stern face, looked at the military dispatcher Podshebyakina, a girl in a railway uniform, as she, with abundant white curls scattered, was talking into an old-fashioned receiver of an old-fashioned telephone - and from her small room he went into his own a small one, from where there was no further door.
The line commandant's office was a corner room on the ground floor, and upstairs, just above this corner, the drainpipe was damaged. A thick stream of water, audibly lashing behind the wall, was diverted by wind shocks and scattered first in front of the left window, onto the platform, then in front of the right, into a blind passage. After the clear October frosts, when the morning found the entire station covered in frost, the last few days had become damp, and since yesterday this cold rain had been pouring incessantly, so much so that one had to wonder where there was so much water in the sky.
But the rain brought order: there was no senseless jostling of people, no constant swarming of civilians on the platforms and along the tracks, disrupting the decent appearance and operation of the station. Everyone hid, no one crawled on all fours under the carriages, climbed the carriage ladders, the locals did not shove with buckets of boiled potatoes, and the passengers of the freight trains did not wander between the trains, as if in a flea market, hanging underwear, dresses, and knitted items on their shoulders and arms. (This trade was very embarrassing for Lieutenant Zotov: it was as if it could not be allowed and could not be prohibited - because no food was supplied to the evacuees.) Only the service people were not driven away by the rain. Through the window one could see a sentry on a platform with covered loads - all drenched in flowing rain, he stood and did not even try to shake it off. Yes, along the third track, a shunting locomotive was pulling tanks, and a switchman in a canvas raincoat with a hood was waving a flag at him. The still dark, undersized figure of the carriage foreman walked along the train of the second track, diving under each carriage.
And then everything was - rain and lashings. In the cold, persistent wind, it hit the roofs and walls of freight cars, and the chests of steam locomotives; he cut the red-burnt curved iron ribs of two dozen carriage frames (the boxes were burned somewhere in the bombing, but the chassis survived, and they were pulled to the rear); doused four divisional cannons standing openly on platforms; merging with the falling twilight, the first green circle of the semaphore and here and there flashes of crimson sparks flying out of the heating pipes were drawn in gray. The entire asphalt of the first platform was filled with glassy bubbling water that did not have time to drain, and the rails glistened with water even in the twilight, and even the dark brown filling of the canvas shuddered with puddles that did not drain.
And all this made no sounds, except for the dull shaking of the earth and the weak horn of the switchman - the whistles of locomotives were canceled from the first day of the war.
And only the rain blew through the ruined pipe.
Behind another window, in a passage near the fence of the warehouse, an oak tree grew. He was torn, wet, he held on to the dark leaves, but today the last ones flew off.
There was no time to stand and stare. It was necessary to roll out the camouflage paper curtains on the windows, turn on the lights and sit down to work. There was still a lot to do before the shift at nine o'clock in the evening.
But Zotov did not lower the curtains, but took off his commander’s cap with a green band, which always sat on his head while on duty even in his room, took off his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyes with his fingers, tired of copying out encrypted transport numbers from one pencil sheet to another. No, not fatigue, but melancholy came up to him in the prematurely darkening day - and scratched him.
The melancholy was not even about his wife, who was left with an unborn child far away in Belarus, under the Germans. Not about a lost past, because Zotov did not yet have a past. Not about lost property, because he did not have it and would never want to have it.
Zotov felt oppressed and needed to howl out loud because of the course of the war, which was wildly incomprehensible. It was impossible to draw a front line based on the Information Bureau reports; one could argue who had Kharkov and who had Kaluga. But among the railway workers it was well known that trains no longer sent beyond Uzlovaya to Tula and only reached the Upper Reaches through Yelets. Here and there bombers broke through to the Ryazan-Voronezh line, dropped several bombs, and Kochetovka also suffered. And about ten days ago, two crazy German motorcyclists fell out of somewhere, flew into Kochetovka and fired machine guns as they went. One of them was put down, the other ran away, but at the station everyone was alarmed by the shooting, and the head of the special forces detachment, in charge of explosions in the event of an evacuation, left to tear up the water pump with the previously laid tar. Now a recovery train was called, and for the third day it worked here.
But it wasn’t about Kochetovka, it was about why the war is going on like this? Not only was there no revolution throughout Europe, not only did we not invade there with little bloodshed and against any combination of aggressors, but it has now come together - until when? No matter what he did during the day and when he went to bed in the evening, Zotov could only think: until when? And when he was not on duty, but sleeping in the apartment, he still woke up to a radio call at six in the morning, languishing in the hope that today the victory report would ring out. But the Vyazemsk and Volokolamsk directions hopelessly crawled out of the black bell and clawed at the heart: wouldn’t they also surrender Moscow? Not only out loud (it was dangerous to ask out loud), but Zotov was afraid to ask himself like that - he thought about it all the time and tried not to think.
However, this dark question was not the last. Surrendering Moscow was not the whole problem. Moscow was also surrendered to Napoleon. Something else burned: and then what? And if - to the Urals?...
Vasya Zotov considered it a crime to even entertain these trembling thoughts. It was blasphemy, it was an insult to the almighty, all-knowing Father and Teacher, who is always on the spot, foresees everything, will take all measures and will not allow it.
But railway workers came from Moscow, who had been there in mid-October, and told some monstrously unthinkable things about the escape of factory directors, about the destruction of some cash registers or stores somewhere - and silent torment again squeezed Lieutenant Zotov’s heart.
I want to start with an apology: this may be the first time I've had to talk seriously about prose. As familiar as it is for me to think and talk about poetry, prose is so unusual. This is not the place to talk about the general differences between these two types of literature, but it is worth recalling at least the remark of Roman Jakobson, who compared the prose of poets with the gait of a highlander walking across the plain. The poet’s prose is like this - he is accustomed to fulfilling different conditions than the prose writer, taking into account other limitations and other possibilities - and what in his natural environment, on a narrow and dangerous path, represents dexterity and grace, on the plain looks ridiculous or mannered. So, the only type of prose that I had to talk about was the prose of poets.
I’ll start the conversation about “real prose” with the words of Academician Alexei Fedorovich Losev (as far as I know, not yet published anywhere and unknown words; they were recorded by Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin, Losev’s secretary at that time). Losev shared his thoughts with Bibikhin after he listened to “August the 14th” on the radio (and did not sleep all night after that): “Wait, I’ll tell you something else - Merezhkovsky writes in the book “Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”, that Tolstoy is a genius in depicting the passions of the body, and Dostoevsky in depicting the passions of the soul and mind. But this is what I, Losev, say: Solzhenitsyn brilliantly portrays social passions. And in this, of course, his time, which is so terrible, helps him.”
As everyone remembers, Merezhkovsky expresses this somewhat differently, he says: “The seer of the flesh is Tolstoy. The Seer of the Spirit – Dostoevsky.” And continuing Merezhkovsky, we can say that Solzhenitsyn is a seer of the social and historical. Historical because it is social. To me, Losev’s words seem much deeper than it might seem from their deliberate simplicity - Losev’s characteristic defiant simplicity. It seems to me that here there is a very important key to understanding Solzhenitsyn the writer - and even Solzhenitsyn the critic (literary critic). After all, the dissatisfaction with predecessors that we often hear in literary criticism Solzhenitsyn, can be associated precisely with this: with the fact that the element of the social and historical, for the first time so completely expressed in his “ artistic research“, never before appeared in such obviousness, never was realized in this way, never was the subject of an artist.
Criticism of a certain type taught us to read the classics this way - in social generalizations: type extra person, type little man etc. But, in fact, of course, the writers themselves did not think so. The measure and method of this generalization, historical and sociological, do not at all correspond to immediate reality classical literature. Well, did Pushkin, for example, imagine that he was depicting a “noble type of the 30s of the 19th century” in Onegin? Or that he portrays “serf Russia”? I think not. Pushkin portrayed simply a “good friend,” because he could not have any friends other than “nobles,” and simply Russia, because he did not know any other Russia.
But if a Russian artist of the 20th century does not know what he is depicting Soviet Russia, if an artist in Germany of the 30s does not recognize that he is a participant in a special history, a special – Hitler’s – Germany, then he is hardly a worthy witness of the time, and he is unlikely to be a full-fledged artist and a good thinker. Social history has become an element that has captured the private life of a person: no, not only private, but also public life, mental, professional life. To be more precise, history has come between a person and his life, between him and his own thought, both private and public. Each topic - at least, say, the study of Plutarch (as you understand, I remember the first work of Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev) - could only be approached through this environment, otherwise even a simple historical and philological study of the most remote subjects would become false and meaningless. This revolution was carried out by the time that Losev calls “so terrible” - the time of Solzhenitsyn.
It should be noted that at the same time, in the 20th century, the theme of this prevailing omnipresent social appeared in European thought. The existentialist theme of a dehumanized person, an anonymous person who is in the grip of some superhuman social force, in Freudian language - an impersonal “super-ego” in the psyche of everyone. But here we don’t even have to compare Solzhenitsyn with his European contemporaries: this is a completely different and differently understood sociality, and, accordingly, completely different conclusions are drawn from its “secret vision.” Naturally, the very reality of the social with which Camus and Solzhenitsyn deal is somewhat different. Solzhenitsyn’s sociality is an ideologically, quasi-religiously based sociality, it has some positivity: in any case, it pretends to be some positivity. She puts forward values for which a person must sacrifice himself and his own. Whereas the hero of existentialism, an “outsider” both to himself and to everything outside of him, social person Europe - he does not have any “positive” program, it is as if he does not serve anything, and should not serve anything. It is quite difficult to determine what actually constitutes this element that devours the personality, which is called der Mensch, l’on, etc. The Russian equivalent here would be the word “people” in a certain usage: “like people,” “what people will say.” In any case, these “people” do not have a positive, ideological program.
So, I would like to use the example of my favorite work by Solzhenitsyn (maybe because, as it seems to me, among all his works it is closer to poetry) and discover this very new vision, “secret vision of the social.” Here, in the closest thing to classical writing, it seems most difficult - and most interesting. “An Incident at Kochetovka Station” is a superbly executed canon of a short story (generally speaking, a whole bunch of short stories, but most of the plot branches are incidental, in between). This narrative—I remember my first reading, back in school—has a whiff of Lermontov’s “Tamanya.” We are told about a certain incident that happened in a random place, equally alien to characters. They are all cut off from their families, they are all wanderers. The scene of action - a junction railway station - is not a place of residence, it is a point of travel that everyone passes, safely or not. But more than that, the land itself at this time - passing from hand to hand, and in whose hands it is unknown at the time of the story - is also not a habitat. This is the place of advance or retreat. The theme of homelessness, general displacement, the “carousel,” as the hero of the story says, is brought to fantastic tension, while being completely realistically motivated. It can be noted that such a place and time is classic for the short story, this is its birthplace. Let's remember that the classic short story appears in the plague city of Boccaccio, when somewhere between life and death, characters who are out of their ordinary meet and begin to tell entertaining stories.
Such time-space, we note, is not only a field of action for diverse discontinuities that are obvious, but also a field of incredible encounters. Such meetings, which they talk about, were brought together by fate. In a non-catastrophic time, how could the two protagonists of “The Case” come together, the young lieutenant Vasya Zotov, from somewhere in the northern wilderness (as his name says), and the capital’s actor Igor Dementievich Tveritinov, who met the revolution as a 25-year-old man? And to meet in such a way that the fate of one depends entirely on the other?
So, before us is a novelistic exposition - a stage in which chance is omnipotent. Chance crosses the barriers of all ordinary boundaries: social, geographical, etc. It is a story about the unforeseen eventfulness of life, about unpredictable fatality: something happens by chance, but forever. As Tveritinov says his last words, “You can’t fix this.” And behind all this detailed, very detailed, naturalistic scene we feel a mythical background. This mythical background is primarily expressed by the weather: slanting rain, heavy wind, which always speaks of the approach of some extraordinary, significant event.
And it is here, in this closeness to the classical canon, that Solzhenitsyn’s originality, which I think Losev had in mind, is especially clearly visible. The world that we see here, the world that has gone off the rails, metaphorically speaking, but speaking directly, continues to roll its trains along the rails to the East, couple and uncouple cars, reorganize trains, is a social world.
What is the social we are talking about? This is a foregone conclusion that everything is possible. This given to a person the opportunity to avoid a direct meeting with life and with oneself. A social person is instructed ideally for any situation. He knows, he, in principle, must know everything necessary about every thing - both what it is and how to deal with it. A completely social person should not be perplexed at anything. He must recognize: oh, this is this; I was taught this way; here I have to behave like this. A social person cannot look for a way out of an unforeseen situation, out of bewilderment - in himself or somewhere else, in the unknown. He cannot, because nothing other than firmly internalized instructions represents an authoritative authority for him. To put it quite simply, a social person lives in a complete world, in a world where nothing should happen. Translating all this into the language of psychology, we can say that a ultimately social person is neurotic. His relationship with the world and with himself is a well-protected neurosis. This is what society recommends as the norm.
And the main character himself, Lieutenant Zotov, and all his relationships with the other characters in “The Case” have this social dimension. Among everyone, he was the only one who fully understood the instructions given to him. Everyone else around them did not assimilate them (like old Kordybaylo) or did not assimilate them well. They should have been like Zotov, but they weren’t. He really new person- not out of duty, not out of self-interest, but from the bottom of my heart. His words are remarkable: “It made no sense to survive for yourself.” Zotov is written carefully and without biased judgment. In his relationships with other characters, the reader's sympathy will most often be on his side, because these unfinished, unprocessed people are clearly self-interested, petty, etc., and only he entirely belongs to some higher sphere. This is especially evident in his history of relations with the refugee Polina (“He loved Polina, her child and mother in a way that people do not know how to love outside of trouble”).
And, like any social person, he is programmed for catastrophe, for collapse, for innocent crime, for “not knowing what you are doing.” The catastrophe is prepared by the fact that Zotov is instructed, but not informed. He is just beginning to guess about this terrible and helpless state of his. He was indeed instructed, but was not informed of anything; all the necessary information was hidden from him, starting with where and why the trains were going, which he was supposed to send, where the enemy was located, in whose hands the land was, etc. Beginning with the immediate conditions of the work he must perform, all this reality is hidden from him.
The narration reveals the scale of his ignorance: he doesn’t know what 1937 means for people like his interlocutor (“What happened in 1937? The Spanish War?”). He does not know that there is such an area of life in his country as camps. He cannot imagine - where the whole tragedy begins - how his contemporary and compatriot could not know the new name of the city of Stalingrad. We simply do not and cannot have such people. The instructions answer: this is the enemy. Zotov is doomed to his fatal mistake. That is, in fact, this ideology or sociality lays down the possibility of such a collapse in every person who surrenders to it. Because someday, in some “case”, and this is inevitable, the conventional environment, the scenery about which he is instructed, will collapse, and because of them something will appear: the real reality will appear, about which he knows nothing - and What’s worse, he doesn’t know how to know. Even the image of the carousel, which he thinks about when looking at Tveritinov’s pre-war family photographs (“and millions of people spun in some damned carousel - some on foot from Lithuania, some by train from Irkutsk”) is not full image, due to his ignorance. He doesn't know (and fatally cannot find out) where these photographs of children and wife were with Tveritinov (he himself is not in them). Zotov sees the terrible mixing of people and places that war brings with it. He does not know that at this time another impregnable peacetime border: people emerge from prison and such strange encounters become possible. From survivors of that time, I think we all heard stories about such incredible meetings at the beginning of the war. So, it happens - and it ends badly for both (there is no need to guess what will happen to Tveritinov - “They will deal with your Tverikin too. We don’t have marriage,” but the serene era of Zotov’s life ends). Therefore, this is a case with a bad - and fatally predetermined end: thus, it is not a case at all: an anti-case.
I have always wanted to understand what is strange, and, dare I say, the unearthly greatness of this small essay. The collision of this meeting can very easily be interpreted realistically: this is a meeting of two worlds that cannot enter into communication, “ new world" cannot recognize the "old" one, because he simply knows nothing about him. He doesn't know what happens. Zotov tries to remember, looking at Tveritinov’s photographs, what they remind him of. But he has almost nothing to remember, in any case, he has nothing to remember from his life (“Zotov himself never had to be in such families”), he finds “small notches of memory” - theatrical performances, paintings, books. It is characteristic that this “new” hero is a man without a past. Among all his thoughts, there is no memory of his native place, of his parents, only of his abandoned wife. It's like he came from nowhere. Only his appearance allows us to conclude from which geographical places in Russia he comes. It’s as if he grew up in a completely new place - and meets a person from his old life with all its unknown values and unfamiliar habits, “smart comfort.” Zotov is one of the best “new people”: this unknown comfort evokes in him affection, and not envy - a “class feeling”, which, according to the instructions, he should have experienced in this case.
Undoubtedly, such a realistic plan is present in “The Incident at Kochetovka Station,” but it does not seem to me the most significant, it is not what conveys the strange excitement with which we are left after reading it. The most significant thing seems to me to be different - and here, in an attempt to understand this other meaning, I owe a lot to the thoughts of Anna Ilyinichna Shmaina-Velikanova, with whom we discussed all this more than once. The arch-plot of this work can be called this: Visit. This is the story of the Visitation. And if we grasp this dotted plot, we read what happened differently. The first poetic memory of “Tamani” when reading “The Case,” which I spoke about at the beginning, is quite superficial. In fact, what comes to mind here quite seriously are stories such as Tolstoy’s “How do people live?” . We are talking about a visit to the human world by some other, higher principle; the hero of the story was not informed and aware of the very existence.
The archetypal plot of the visit includes some enduring moments. First of all, the messenger visiting the world comes incognito. He is difficult to recognize. Only some people who meet him along the way are told by something about his extraordinary significance, something unconsciously attracts them to him. Already recognition, attraction is a sign of some chosenness, purity of heart.
The fact that Zotov can be said to be a righteous man of sociality, a righteous man of ideology (the course of the narrative shows that he is in his own way an irreproachable hero, a martyr of his convictions) probably justifies the fact that this hero appears to him. It is he who sees the visit (this vision is expressed in an inexplicable affection for the new acquaintance, in an attempt to remember and learn something): everyone else does not see anything special in this strange character. How can we conclude that Tveritinov is a messenger, some kind of angel or something like that? We learn the characteristic features of the Visitation. Whenever we talk about the appearance of some messenger from another - God's - world, he is distinguished primarily by simplicity. It is simple among an extremely complex, complicated life, among the ingenious plexuses of the accepted, practical, useful, political. Where everyone knows perfectly well the conventions and conditions of existence, it is somehow too simple. So, Tveritinov casually says: “otherwise they’ll take him for a spy!” - something that people who know the situation well would never say. Its simplicity is revealed by many other features. He is trusting: “those trusting eyes”; he does not expect a dirty trick from Zotov until the last moment.
Zotov has no words to name what attracts him and disposes him to this wonderful man. He chooses a completely inappropriate word - “balanced”: “Zotov could no longer restrain his sympathy for this balanced man.” And one more word – “attentive”. He clearly has no words, no memories for what is contained in his strange interlocutor. An understanding person would probably call this otherworldliness; for Zotov this is balance.
Tveritinov is absolutely helpless, and this too characteristic feature visits of the 20th century. If, for example, in the Old Testament story we see an omnipotent, formidable messenger, one who will destroy a person who received him poorly, here he himself is in an extremely threatened position, and this corresponds to the unprecedented reality of the twentieth century. There are many stories of people who experienced something like such a visit from the divine during these years: and they always saw these messengers in the form of a completely defenseless person surrendering to their power, such as this Tveritinov, who is completely in the power of Lieutenant Zotov.
Further we see that what usually happens in cases of Visitation happens. The first moment is the hero’s unexpected disposition, inexplicable to himself: he instantly trusts his guest. He is captivated by his smile - remember “How do people live?” What effect does everyone who meets an angel have? his look and smile, a trusting look and a liberating smile. Tveritinov’s effect on the hero is a liberating effect: Zotov suddenly becomes frank, he begins to tell him about the most different things, including about the situation at the fronts (a military secret!), himself being surprised by this: “but it was very rare that there was an opportunity to unwind with an attentive, intelligent person.” We can say that the beginning of the visit took place - the man responded to the messenger, and none of the other heroes of this story clearly could respond.
But then the second part of the visit begins: the test. And, as we see, our hero cannot stand this test. He betrays his guest. This is where his ignorance, his ignorance, reveals its tragic potential. He is not able to understand how this person can not know things that are known to everyone, and according to the simplest orientation in which he is instructed, he classifies him as an enemy - and stops believing his own feelings (“Tyuha-matyuha! Wasted. Spread out before the enemy, not knew how to please." Then we see how Zotov, who aroused our undoubted sympathy with his purity and childishness, - this same Zotov behaves meanly, and he himself feels his own meanness (“He himself was cut by the disgusting falseness of his own voice”). This is an amazing transformation. With a person like Zotov, something, but meanness is somehow not associated. (“But Zotov didn’t know how to lie”). “An opportunity to take your soul away” turns out to be “an opportunity to destroy your soul.”
And here I want to note, looking ahead a little: “The Incident at the Station” is one of the most devastating blows to sociality and ideology that Solzhenitsyn dealt. Instead of the usual image of an idealistic fanatic, a limited but pure person (as a person of ideology is still portrayed - and “purity” is contrasted with a “dirty” but good-natured man in the street), we saw an unexpected and inevitable scoundrel. Solzhenitsyn tells us that in this place, in a social person, a person-ideologist, meanness is inevitable, that without meanness here, things cannot be done with the most lofty intentions.
And then the nobly justified meanness is committed, and then the curtain rises: finally, turning around, Zotov sees his guest, a man devoted to him in stature - and this growth turns out to be inhuman. The growth of King Lear - and more. “He threw out his hands coming out of his sleeves, one with a duffel bag, swollen to the size of his winged dark shadow, and the ceiling was already pressing on his head” - and his real voice sounds, uttering the immortal words: “You can’t fix this!”, the words of the latter the court sounds “loud like a bell.” Zotov sees the true appearance of the guest: this is how they usually see an angel who flies away.
It would seem that this story is a story about a failed visit, about an irreparable catastrophe. The hero could not stand the test, he surrendered the man to death and betrayed himself. However, in fact, the last phrase of the story, its open end: “But never in his entire life could Zotov forget this man...” says the opposite. The visit was a success. Surely his life has already been decided. In the end, the hero of this story turns out to be the suffering person. And this is not a disaster, but the beginning of a different path.
And finally, the last thing I wanted to say from the very beginning: about Solzhenitsyn’s secret vision of the social. Yes, this very covertly presented plot of the visit could be placed in a number of other works of all times: angels (gods, messengers: cf. Goethe’s ballad “God and the Lord”) visit a person - and test how he will answer them: that is what he really is in his depth. Here, in “The Case,” you can even find a wonderful scene of a treat: Zotov suddenly gives his guest the tobacco he had stored up, i.e. he behaves like a true hospitable person, like Abraham in his way receiving an angel. And suddenly all this turns into such base meanness...
But this is what sets “The Case” apart. Usually a visit is a test of a person as a person, as a name. So it is with Tolstoy, in his “How People Live.” Each individual person, each “soul” is tested: what will happen when he, exactly he, the shoemaker N. or the master T., meets an angel? Here, in Solzhenitsyn’s “Case,” what is tested is not man in himself, not Zotov as such, but this very sociality. This is her, in her best incarnation, experienced a strange meeting, an “incident”, and she guessed it - again, not Zotov - she guessed in this messenger her most dangerous enemy: not at all the kind of enemy as poor Zotov thought, not a spy, not an officer, but in the most radical sense the enemy of all this sociality, all this quasi-religion, an enemy who can be called this - living human life.
Postscript
The modern reader can close “The Incident at Kochetovka Station” with relief: thank God, these days it’s historical narrative, we are not in danger of poor Zotov’s mistake simply because this entire ideology, this form of sociality no longer exists. It seems that no one is now obliged to maintain class vigilance and look for an enemy in everything unfamiliar. Alas, sociality has many forms, and any of them, strongly or weakly ideological, left or right, progressive or conservative, nationalist or cosmopolitan, does to a person the same as to the hero of a story. For her adept she prepares her own, not so easily guessed “Stalingrad”, which turns the opportunity to free the soul into an opportunity to destroy the soul.
Plot
The events of the story mostly take place on one evening, November 1, 1941. railway station Kochetovka in the Tambov region, near the front line. The main character of the story is the duty assistant to the military commandant, Lieutenant Vasily Zotov, an honest and respectable young man, a true patriot of his country, who volunteered for service immediately after graduating from college. Bye local residents go about their daily activities, he is very worried about the untied Patriotic War, wants to join his comrades on the front line, but despite his valiant impulses he is forced to deal with the rear routine. It is necessary to carry out a complete census of the surviving and damaged cargo of the train that was bombed, and the lieutenant strives to do even this paper work as efficiently as possible in order to somehow help the fighting homeland.
During the day Zotov is visited different people, through communication with them, the features of his worldview are more fully revealed, and the facts of his biography emerge. Being a noble idealist, he is ready to do anything for good man, up to altruistic self-sacrifice, while he treats scoundrels with extreme hatred and dreams of their eradication. For example, he refused to live in a large, spacious house because of the depraved behavior of the hostess, the immoral manager of the dining room, and preferred to her the cold, cramped hut of a decrepit old woman. The hero always acts according to his conscience, in accordance with his firm moral principles, however, life presents him with situations where the choice is not always obvious. So, just yesterday an unpleasant incident occurred at the station: a young Red Army soldier guarding the carriages with flour shot one of the encirclement traveling on the next train, who were so hungry that they ate this flour raw, mixing it with water. On the one hand, the guard did the right thing, he defended the people's property, but on the other hand, he killed a man who fought in fierce battles a compatriot, a fellow Soviet person.
The culmination of the story is Zotov’s meeting with the mobilized theater actor Tveritinov, who has fallen behind his train and gets to his destination on passing trains. The intelligence of this man is very close to the hero, he starts a conversation with him and, without noticing it, opens his soul, pours out all his experiences. However, during a casual conversation, the lieutenant suddenly realizes that the visitor may be sent by a spy, since he does not have any documents with him. Listening to explanations about his future path, Tveritinov is interested in what the city of Stalingrad used to be called, and after this question it seems to Zotov that his worst fears have been confirmed, because only a foreign agent could not know this. Guided by indirect assumptions and conjectures, the assistant commandant ultimately decides to send the actor to be checked by the NKVD.
Zotov is confident in the correctness of his action, but even after a few days, the fate of Tveritinov continues to worry him. Wanting to know about the results of the check, he calls the operational point, but does not receive a direct answer. The lieutenant wants to call again, but, fearing to incur suspicion, he does not dare. A few months later, the opportunity arises to ask about the alleged spy from an investigator who came on other matters, and he assures that their employees will “deal with” anyone. The last sentence of the story says that until the very end of his life Zotov could not forget this interlocutor.
Creation and publication
The story is completely based on real events, the plot is based on a real incident at the Kochetovka station, and the prototype of the main character is the real commandant Leonid Vlasov, a friend of Solzhenitsyn. Even when the writer lived in Ryazan, this man came to visit him, in July - August 1962 they traveled together on bicycles in Latvia and Lithuania, rode through many railways that time, and it was then that the material for “The Case” was obtained. What attracted Solzhenitsyn to the story he heard was, first of all, the moral side of what happened, the conscience, which for many people is in a state of sleep and needs to be awakened. The writer drew certain episodes from his early unfinished novel “Love the Revolution!” Lieutenant Zotov in many ways resembles Gleb Nerzhin, the main character of this largely autobiographical work of art. For example, a fragment of the poem “If Lenin’s cause falls in these days, what will I have left to live for?” is borrowed from there unchanged, the scene of a visit to the library is borrowed, Zotov’s and Nerzhin’s thoughts on the retreat and rallying of the broken Soviet resistance are similar.
The manuscript was created in November 1962, according to the author, “directly for the magazine, for the first time in my life.” On November 26, at a discussion in the editorial office of “New World”, it was decided to rename the story, since Kochetovka was associated with Vsevolod Kochetov, editor-in-chief of the competitive magazine “October”. As Vladimir Lakshin noted in his diary, the options “Green Cap” and “On Duty” were proposed, but in the end the name of the station was simply changed to Krechetovka. At the same meeting, some members of the editorial board, including Alexander Tvardovsky, expressed doubt that a person could forget about renaming Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad, but Solzhenitsyn insisted that in reality everything was exactly like that.
Despite the fact that the writer prepared the text specifically for Novy Mir, the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Pavel Satyukov, first asked for a small piece from the story for his newspaper. Solzhenitsyn chose a passage where the characters discuss the murder of their encirclement, from: “There were two telephones on Zotov’s desk...” to “My favorite holiday of the year, joyful in defiance of nature, and this time tearing at the soul.” On December 23, the excerpt was published, and this publication forever protected the story from harsh censorship and criticism, since it was believed that Pravda, the main ideological newspaper of the country, could not make mistakes. A month later, the story was published in full in the first January issue of Novy Mir, together with “Matryonin’s Dvor” under the general heading “Two Stories”, the circulation of the issue was 102.7 thousand copies.
Reviews
The story did not have any negative reviews due to the publication of the excerpt in the untouchable Pravda, but positive ones came regularly. Varlam Shalamov called “The Case” an indictment of great force, noting that in his artistic power he is not inferior to “Ivan Denisovich”, and in some ways even superior. Korney Chukovsky, after reading the story, spoke of Solzhenitsyn as a worthy successor to Tolstoy and Chekhov. The prototype of the main character also spoke positively about the work; in personal correspondence with the author, he wrote the following: “Of course, I have absolutely no objections to you using everything that you know about me and from me. I can only rejoice that my more than ordinary person is to some extent contributing to the flourishing of Soviet literature.”
Soon after the publication of “The Incident at Kochetovka Station,” representatives of the Lenfilm film studio offered the author a contract to film the story, but Solzhenitsyn immediately refused: “give them the rights, and they will spoil it, show something artificial, false? - but I can’t fix it...”
Notes
Links
- Sedakova O. A small masterpiece: “The Incident at Kochetovka Station”. Orthodoxy and the world (December 12, 2012). Archived from the original on December 17, 2012. Retrieved December 15, 2012.
| Alexander Solzhenitsyn | ||
|---|---|---|
| Stories and novellas |
One day of Ivan Denisovich (1959) · Matryonin yard (1959) · Right hand (1960) · The incident at Kochetovka station (1963) · For the good of the cause (1963) · Zakhar-Kalita (1965) · What a pity (1965) · Easter procession (1966) · Tiny (1958-1963, 1996-1999) |
 |
| Novels | In the first circle (1955-1958) · Cancer building (1963-1966) | |
| Memories | A calf butted heads with an oak tree (1967-1974) · A grain landed between two millstones | |
| Poems, poems | Dorozhenka (1947–1952) · Prussian nights (1947–1952) | |
| Dramaturgy | Feast of the Winners (1951-1953) · Prisoners (1952-1953) · Deer and bowerbird (1954) | |
| Essays and journalism |
It’s not the custom to whiten cabbage soup with tar, that’s why sour cream (1965) · Peace and violence (1973) · On the return of breathing and consciousness (1974) · Repentance and self-restraint as categories of national life (1974) · Education (1974) · Don't live by lies (1974) · Shredding Freedom (1976) · Our pluralists (1982) · ...Your tripod is shaking (1984) · How can we arrange Russia? (1990) · Russia in collapse (1998) · Reflections on the February Revolution (2007) |
|
| Other |
Gulag Archipelago (1973) · Red wheel · The Russian question towards the end of the 20th century (1994) · Russian language extension dictionary (1990-2000) · Two hundred years together (2001-2002) |
|
| Film adaptations | One day of Ivan Denisovich (1970) · In the first circle (2006) | |
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See what “The Incident at Kochetovka Station” is in other dictionaries:
This term has other meanings, see Kochetovka. Coordinates: 52°57′38.8″ N. w. 40°28′52.9″ E. d. / 52.960778° n. w. 40.481361° E. d... Wikipedia
Wikipedia has articles about other people with this last name, see Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn ... Wikipedia
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich Alexander Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn in 1994 after returning to Russia Birth name: Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn Date of birth ... Wikipedia