Analysis of the dispossession scene (Based on Platonov’s story “The Pit”). Essay on the topic: Tragic and comic in Platonov’s story “The pit Test for the work

29.06.2020

They died anyway, why do they need coffins!

A. Platonov. Pit

A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” was written in difficult years for the Soviet country (1929-1930), which remain in the memory of many as the time of the final ruin of the peasantry and the formation of collective farms, which changed not only life, but also the consciousness of people. These and many other accompanying processes (the eternal search for truth, an attempt to build a happy future, etc.) are reflected in the story using a monolithic alloy of comic form and essentially tragic content.

Platonov's humor for me

It seems something akin to Bulgakov’s humor: it’s not just “laughter through tears,” but laughter from the understanding that it shouldn’t be the way it is—a kind of “black humor.”

The reality of the collectivization period was so absurd that it seemed that the sad and the funny had swapped places. And that’s why we feel uneasy when we laugh at the village peasant who gave his horse to the collective farm and then lies there with a samovar tied to his stomach: “I’m afraid to fly away, put... some kind of weight on his shirt.” Not only a smile, but also a painful melancholy is caused by the indignant exclamation of the little girl Nastya before the funeral of Kozlov and Safronov: “They died anyway, why do they need coffins!” Indeed, why do the dead need coffins if now living builders of a “bright future” sleep so well in them and if children’s toys feel so comfortable there?!

The grotesque situations created by the author (or time itself?) amazingly combine the real and the fantastic, lively humor and bitter sarcasm. People build things that are incomprehensible to no one really the right house happiness, but the matter progresses no further than the digging of a universal mass grave - a pit for the foundation, because in the poverty, hunger and cold that surround people in the present, few survive. The episode with the man who “just in case” prepared to die was funny and scary at the same time: he had been lying in a coffin for several weeks and periodically added oil to the burning lamp on his own. It seems that the dead and the living, the inanimate and the conscious have switched places.

What can we say if the main and respected enemy of the kulaks and friend of the proletarians is the bear Medvedev, a hammerman from the forge. Intuition never fails the beast, which works for a “happy future” along with people, and it always correctly finds the “kulak element”.

Another inexhaustible source of Platonov’s humor and sarcasm is the speech of the characters in the story, which fully reflects another area of excesses and nonsense of this awkward time. The parodic reinterpretation and ironic play on political language saturates the characters’ speech with clichéd phrases, categorical labels, and makes it look like a bizarre combination of slogans. Such a language is also inanimate, artificial, but it also evokes a smile: “milk was promoted from the carts,” “the question arose fundamentally, and it is necessary to put it back in the entire theory of feelings and mass psychosis...” The scary thing is that even the language of little Nastya is already turns out to be a monstrous fusion of speeches and slogans that she hears from the ubiquitous activists and propagandists: “The main one is Lenin, and the second is Budyonny.

When they weren’t there, and only the bourgeoisie lived, I wasn’t born because I didn’t want to. And as Lenin became, so did I!”

Thus, the interweaving of the comic and tragic in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” allowed the writer to expose many imbalances in the social and economic life of the young Soviet country, which had a painful impact on life common people. But it has long been known: when people no longer have the strength to cry, they laugh...

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A. Platonov’s life occurred in the first half of our century - the most difficult time in the history of the country. Recognizing life as the highest value, Platonov did not consider all life worthy of a person. The writer sought to understand the meaning of life, the purpose of man. The life of the heroes of his works passes through labor - endless, exhausting. But is all work for good? Are those proclaimed [...] humane?

Tragic and comic in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”

Tragic and comic in A. Platonov's story A. Platonov's story “The Pit” was written in difficult years for the Soviet country (1929-1930), which remained in the memory of many as the time of the final ruin of the peasantry and the formation of collective farms, which changed not only life, but also the consciousness of people. These and many other accompanying processes (the eternal search for truth, an attempt to build a happy future, etc.) are reflected in the story using a monolithic fusion of comic form and essentially tragic content. Platonov’s humor seems to me something akin to Bulgakov’s humor: it’s not just “laughter through tears,” and laughter from the understanding that it shouldn’t be the way it is is a kind of “black humor.” The reality of the collectivization period was so absurd that it seemed that the sad and the funny had swapped places. And that’s why we feel uneasy when we laugh at the village peasant who gave his horse to the collective farm and then lies there with a samovar tied to his stomach: “I’m afraid to fly away, put... some kind of weight on his shirt.” Not only a smile, but also a painful melancholy is caused by the indignant exclamation of the little girl Nastya before the funeral of Kozlov and Safronov: “They died anyway, why do they need coffins!” Indeed, why do the dead need coffins, if now living builders of a “bright future” sleep so well in them and if children’s toys feel so comfortable there?! The grotesque situations created by the author (or time itself?) amazingly combine the real and the fantastic, lively humor and bitter sarcasm. People are building an incomprehensible house of happiness that no one really needs, and the work progresses no further than digging a universal mass grave - a pit for the foundation, because in the poverty, hunger and cold that surround people in the present, few survive. The episode with the man who “just in case” prepared to die was funny and scary at the same time: he had been lying in a coffin for several weeks and periodically added oil to the burning lamp on his own. It seems that the dead and the living, the inanimate and the conscious have switched places. What can we say if the main and respected enemy of the kulaks and friend of the proletarians is the bear Medvedev, a hammerman from the forge. Intuition never fails the beast, which works for a “happy future” along with people, and it always correctly finds the “kulak element.” Another inexhaustible source of Platonov’s humor and sarcasm is the speech of the characters in the story, which fully reflects the next area of excesses and nonsense of this absurd time. The parodic reinterpretation and ironic play on political language saturates the characters’ speech with clichéd phrases, categorical labels, and makes it look like a bizarre combination of slogans. Such a language is also inanimate, artificial, but it also evokes a smile: “milk was promoted from the carts,” “the question arose fundamentally, and it is necessary to put it back in the entire theory of feelings and mass psychosis...” The scary thing is that even the language of little Nastya is already turns out to be a monstrous fusion of speeches and slogans that she hears from the ubiquitous activists and propagandists: “The main one is Lenin, and the second is Budyonny. When they weren’t there, and only the bourgeoisie lived, I wasn’t born because I didn’t want to. And as Lenin became, so did I!” Thus, the interweaving of the comic and tragic in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” allowed the writer to expose many distortions in the social and economic life of the young Soviet country, which had a painful impact on the lives of the common people. But it has long been known: when people no longer have the strength to cry, they laugh...

“The pit” - a story by A.P. Platonov. The story is a rare exception in Platonov’s work: the author indicated the exact date its creation: “December 1929 - April 1930.” But in in this case This refers not so much to the period of the author’s work on the work, but to the time of the events depicted in it. The story was written in the early 30s, as evidenced, for example, by the mention of the need to sow soybeans, indicating the campaign of mass introduction of this agricultural crop that was then underway.

“The Pit” was first published in 1969 in the magazines “Grani” (Germany) and “Student” (England). In 1973 the story was published a separate book in the Ardis publishing house (USA) with a foreword by I.A. Brodsky. In the USSR in the 60-80s. “The pit” was distributed in “samizdat”. In 1987, the story was first published in the author’s homeland in the magazine “ New world" This version of the text of the story was republished in the book “A. Platonov. The Juvenile Sea” (1988). More full text The story, restored from the author's manuscript, was republished in the book “D. Platonov. Recovery of the Dead” (1995).

Platonov’s story “The Pit” reflected the main events of the first five-year plan carried out in the USSR (1929-1932): industrialization and collectivization. The content of “The Pit” externally fits into Soviet industrial and village prose of the late 20-30s. (“Cement” by F. Gladkov. “Hot” by L. Leonov, “The Second Day” by I. Ehrenburg, “Hydrocentral” by M. Shaginyan, “Bars” by F. Panferov, “Virgin Soil Upturned” by M.A. Sholokhov). But this similarity only more clearly reveals the originality of Plato’s story. It consists in the author’s understanding of the doom of the reconstruction of nature and society, based on exhausting physical labor and violence.

The first part of the work depicts the construction of a “common proletarian house,” which is a symbol of a socialist society. The “building of socialism” was intended to house the working people of an entire city, but construction stalled at the stage of digging a pit for its foundation. In the second part, the action is transferred to a village subjected to “complete collectivization.” Here, the analogue of the “common proletarian home” becomes the “organizational yard”, where collective farmers gather into a “submissive herd” (F.M. Dostoevsky), escorting dispossessed peasants to the cold sea.

The image of the “common proletarian house” in the story is multi-layered: it is based on the mythological image of a tree, which can also act as a model of the entire universe. The symbolism of the “tree” shines through in the image of the “eternal home”; it must take root in the earth, like the world tree of ancient myths. The foundation of the “house” is laid with the hope that the “eternal root of indestructible architecture” is planted in the ground. “The construction of socialism” is depicted in the context of the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel, as a new attempt by mankind to build “a city and a tower, as high as the heavens...”. The plans to turn the earth into a “comfortable home” and to correct the imperfections of the world created by God symbolized the hope of achieving “universal harmony” and pointed to the genetic connection of the project of a “common proletarian home” with the images of the “crystal palace” and the “building of universal harmony” repeated in the “Winter Notes” about summer impressions”, “Notes from the Underground”, “Crime and Punishment”, “The Brothers Karamazov” by F.M. Dostoevsky. “Crystal Palace” in “Winter Notes...” was a description of a real palace built in London in 1851 to host world exhibitions. In Notes from Underground, the “crystal palace” resembled the “cast-iron-crystal” building from the novel by N.G. Chernyshevsky “What to do?” and brought to mind the project of a palace for people in a society of universal equality, invented by Charles Fourier.

The image-symbol of the “tower house” in “The Pit” is enriched with meanings acquired by the art of the avant-garde, which sought to model technical structures that protect man from nature. The pinnacle of avant-garde art was the “Monument to the Third International” (1920), created by the architect V.E. Tatlin in the form of a Babylonian ziggurat. The image of the Tatlin “tower” inspired the proletarian poet A. Gastev. In the interpretation of the latter, the construction of a “giant made of iron” served as a justification for violence against nature and human sacrifice: “On terrible cliffs of the earth, over the abyss of terrible seas, a tower grew, iron tower working effort. ...People fell into pits, the earth mercilessly devoured them.” The “towers” of Tatlin and Gastev were transformed in “The Pit” into the images of the “unknown tower” that Voshchev sees as he enters the city where construction is going on, and the “tower in the middle of the universal earth”, in the construction of which the engineer Prushevsky believes. The purpose of the construction of the “general proletarian house” and “towers” in Platonov’s “Pit” coincides with the purpose of Tatlin’s design: “to rise above the ground, to overcome matter...”.

One of the sources of projects for “overcoming matter” was the work “General Organizational Science” by A.A. Bogdanov—theorist and organizer of Proletkult. Bogdanov saw highest goal proletarian labor collectives, dissolving within themselves a separate personality capable of sacrificing themselves in order to “begin their work on the surrounding, non-human world.” Plato’s definition of harmony as “the perfect organization of matter in relation to man” (“Proletarian Poetry”) reveals a connection with the philosophy of God-building by Bogdanov, A.V. Lunacharsky, M. Gorky, the essence of which was the deification of the collective “mass” and the religious experience of the sacrificial fusion of man with humanity and the universe.

The dreams of the “organization” (Bogdanov’s term) of nature by a collective of proletarians who had mastered the latest achievements of science and technology were close to Platonov (in October 1920 in Moscow, at the First All-Russian Congress of Proletarian Writers, he listened to a report by the Proletkult theorist).

Platonov’s heroes believe in technology, with the help of which they want to protect people “from the wild elements of the disordered world” (“Ethereal Tract”). One of them - engineer Prushevsky in "The Pit" - dreams of a global transformation of the appearance of the earth through the collective efforts of united humanity. In “Pit”, the project of a “common proletarian house” is proposed as a means of saving people from hostile nature.

Platonov inherited from Dostoevsky the technique of creating “double” images. In the novel “Demons” there were doubles of Kirillov, Stavrogin, Pyotr Verkhovensky, Shigalev, whose images embodied different variants philosophical ideas of the author. In “The Pit” one of such figurative pairs is represented by the lines “Prushevsky - Voshchev”, “Prushevsky - Chiklin”. The hope of Voshchev, who is wandering for the truth, is that the construction of a “common proletarian house” will change people’s lives at least in the future, and a passionate desire to find the answer to the question: “Why did the whole world work?” - they make Prushevsky suspect his double in Voshchev. Indeed, Voshcheva has many similarities with the author of the project for a building of a bright future: both suffer from the “untruth” of life, realizing that people live meaninglessly, both strive to save and preserve the fragile human life. Voshchev collected and “saved all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity,” Prushevsky built a house intended to “protect people.” The project of the “eternal house” of engineer Prushevsky is tested by the degree of its compliance with Voshchev’s spiritual needs. The excavator Chiklin, like Prushevsky and Voshchev, is tormented by the awareness of people's insecurity. Chiklin is endowed with a special attitude towards the dead, which distinguished Platonov himself. From his lips sounds the Christian truth: “The dead are people too.” Chiklin and Prushevsky discover that in their youth they experienced love for a girl, whom they met again at tragic circumstances. This is Yulia, Nastya’s dying mother, accidentally found by Chiklin. The desire to save the lives of the pit workers, exhausted by back-breaking labor, gives birth in the excavator’s head to a project of using a ravine to expand the pit (“the ravine” has always remained in Plato’s world a symbol of the “bottom of hell”). Chiklin’s dream of turning the ravine into the foundation of an “eternal home” was dictated by the desire to achieve immortality.

At the same time, the images of Voshchev and Prushevsky have parallels in the works of Dostoevsky. “I’m a bug and I admit with all humiliation that I can’t understand anything, why everything is arranged this way,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother. His words contain the same question about the structure of the world that haunts Plato’s seekers of truth.

In “The Pit” the motif of life reconstruction is intertwined with the writer’s traditional motif of wandering in search of truth. Platonov believed that by wandering, a person can understand the truth, passing space through himself. Unemployed Voshchev becomes a wanderer against his will; he spends the night in a “warm pit” (which in Plato’s world means a state close to death). Once at a construction site, Platonov’s hero discovers the builders of socialism in a barracks, where they are sleeping side by side on the floor, exhausted half to death by backbreaking labor. The existence of diggers is compared to being at the “bottom” of hell. The description of the construction of the “common proletarian house” is reminiscent of “The Story... about Kuznetskstroy...” by V.V. Mayakovsky (1929), where workers are building a “garden city” in dirt, hunger and cold, and paintings by artists of that time P.I. Sholokhov “Construction” (1929) and P.I. Kotov "Kuznetskstroy. Blast furnace No. 1" (1930).

The excavators, enlarging and deepening the pit, are trying to repeat what the heroes of Plato’s early stories “Markun” (1921) and “Satan of Thought” (1921) managed to do, who managed to create an engine that re-created the world: to unite humanity and rebuild the planet. Their efforts are aimed at mastering the secret of transforming dead matter into living matter.

The religious attitude towards communism is determined by the belief of Platonov’s heroes that the new social order will provide people with immortality. Relocation to the “eternal” “common proletarian home” means the realization of heaven on earth.

But the pit becomes larger and larger, a hole is formed, which turns into the grave of the orphan Nastya, adopted by the diggers. The girl, a symbol of the Russia of the future, dies after her mother, the daughter of the owner of a tile factory, a “potbelly stove” whose fate is the story of savagery and the death of a person in a cruel world. The motive of turning a person into a creature “overgrown with skin” is strengthened by the appearance of an unusual character in the story - a hammer bear (the motive of turning a person into a bear was previously heard in Mayakovsky’s poem “About This”).

The ending of Platonov’s “The Pit” shows what the heroes come to when they strive for “elevation” above the world, for power over matter, which opens up the possibility of immortality. They do not go to heavenly paradise and cannot create earthly paradise. In the story, the future itself, embodied in the image of the orphan Nastya, is sacrificed to “future harmony.” The death of the child leads Voshchev to despair.

Despite the variety of themes in the works of A.P. Platonov, who was concerned with the problems of electrification and collectivization, civil war and the construction of communism, all of them are united by the writer’s desire to find the path to happiness, to determine what the joy of the “human heart” is. Platonov resolved these issues by turning to the realities of life around him. The story “The Pit” is dedicated to the time of industrialization and the beginning of collectivization in the young Soviet country, in whose bright communist future the author really believed. True, Platonova

It began to worry more and more that in the “plan of general life” there was practically no room left for a specific person, with his thoughts, experiences, and feelings. And with his works, the writer wanted to warn overzealous “activists” against mistakes that were fatal for the Russian people.

The scene of dispossession in the story “The Pit” very clearly and accurately reveals the essence of the collectivization carried out in the Soviet village. The perception of the collective farm is shown through the eyes of a child – Nastya. She asks Chiklin: “Have you created a collective farm here? Show me the collective farm! This innovation is understood as completely new life, heaven on earth. Even adult “non-local people” expect “joy” from the collective farm: “Where is the collective farm benefit - or did we go for nothing?” These questions are caused by disappointment from the true picture that opened before the gaze of the wanderers: “The strangers, the newcomers, settled down in heaps and small masses around the Orgyard, while the collective farm was still sleeping in a general cluster near the night, faded fire.” The “nightly, faded fire” and the “general gathering” of collective farmers look symbolic. Behind the simple disorder of these people (compared to the “strong, clean huts” of the “kulak class”), their facelessness is also hidden. Therefore, their main representative is the hammer bear, half-man, half-animal. He has the ability to do productive work, but is deprived of the most important thing - the ability to think and, accordingly, speak. Thinking has been replaced in the bear by a “class sense.” However, this is precisely what was required in the new Soviet society; “one person could think for everyone... main man" It is no coincidence that Chiklin takes his breath away and opens the door “so that freedom can be seen” when the “reasonable man” calls on him to consider the advisability of dispossession. The easiest thing is to simply turn away from the truth and let others decide for themselves, shifting responsibility to the faceless “we”. “None of your business, bastard! - Chiklin answers his fist. “We can appoint a king when it is useful for us, and we can knock him down with one breath... And you – disappear!” But for some reason Chiklin screams “from the grinding strength of his heart,” probably inside himself protesting against the right to think and make decisions independently that had been taken away from him.

Both Nastya (“He’s also suffering, he’s ours, isn’t it?”) and the bureaucrat Pashkin (“Pashkin was completely sad about the unknown proletarian of the region and wanted to quickly deliver him from oppression"). But if the girl sees in the bear, first of all, a suffering creature and therefore feels a kinship with him, then the representative of the authorities, instead of a good desire “to find a residual farm laborer here and, having provided him with a better share of life, then dissolve the district committee of the union for negligence in serving the membership,” hastily and in bewilderment “went back by car,” formally not seeing the possibility of classifying the bear as an oppressed class. The author objectively portrays the situation of the poor in the village, who are forced to work for wealthy fellow villagers for almost nothing. Through the image of a bear, it is shown how people like him were treated: “The hammerman remembered how in vintage years he uprooted stumps on this man’s land and ate grass out of silent hunger, because the man gave him food only in the evening - what was left of the pigs, and the pigs lay down in a trough and ate the bear’s portion in their sleep.” However, nothing can justify the cruelty with which dispossession took place: “... the bear rose from the dishes, hugged the man’s body comfortably and, squeezing him with such force that the accumulated fat and sweat came out of the man, shouted at his head at different voices“Out of anger and rumors, the hammer hammer could almost not speak.”

It’s scary that children were brought up on such hatred, who were then supposed to live in a country free from hostility. However, the ideas about friends and others that have been ingrained since childhood are unlikely to disappear in adulthood. Nastya is initially opposed to those whom the bear “guts” to be kulaks: “Nastya strangled a fat kulak fly on her hand... and also said:

“And you beat them like a class!”

She says about a boy from a kulak family: “He is very cunning,” seeing in him a reluctance to part with something of his own, his own. As a result of such upbringing, all those sailing on a raft for a child merge into one person - “bastards”: “Let him travel the seas: today here, and tomorrow there, right? – said Nastya. “We’ll be bored with the bastard!” Chiklin’s words about the party, which should, in theory, guard the interests of the working people, seem ironic to us: “You don’t recognize it by sight, I barely feel it myself.”

When analyzing Platonov's works close attention captivates their tongue. This is the style of a poet, satirist, and mainly, a philosopher. The narrator most often comes from a people who have not yet learned to use scientific terms and tries to answer important, pressing questions of existence in their own language, as if “experiencing” thoughts. That’s why such expressions as “I couldn’t say a single word due to the lack of my mind”, “organized people should not live without a mind” arise, “I lived with people - so I turned gray from grief”, etc. Platonov's heroes think with the linguistic means they speak. The special atmosphere of the 20s of the twentieth century is emphasized by the abundance of bureaucratic language in the speech of Plato’s heroes (“Chiklin and the hammerman first inspected the economic secluded places”), the vocabulary of slogans and posters (“... Pashkin decided to throw Prushevsky at full speed on the collective farm as a frame cultural revolution..."), ideologisms ("... point out to him the most oppressed farm laborer who, almost from time immemorial, worked for nothing in the households of the property..."). Moreover, the words various styles are randomly mixed up in the speech of Plato’s wanderers, often they poorly understand the meaning of the words used (“Empty the farm laborers’ property!” Chiklin said to the bedridden man. “Get off the collective farm and don’t dare live in the world anymore!”). One gets the impression that thoughts and ideas seem to collide with each other, attracting and repelling. Thus, following the traditions of Russian literature, Platonov uses landscapes to convey the general mood of the depicted. But even here we feel roughness, clumsiness and a combination of different styles of words in the descriptions: “The snow, which had hitherto occasionally fallen from the upper places, now began to fall more often and harder - some kind of wind that came across began to produce a blizzard, which happens when winter sets in. But Chiklin and the bear walked through the snowy secant frequency in straight street order, because Chiklin could not take into account the moods of nature...”

The ending of the scene of the sending of fists on the raft is ambiguous. On the one hand, we are imbued with sympathy for Prushevsky, who looks with sympathy at the “kulak class”, “as if out of touch.” But there is some truth in the words of Zhachev, who remarks about those sailing: “Do you think these people exist? Wow! This is just outer skin, we have a long way to go to reach people, that’s what I feel sorry for!” Let's pay attention to the pronoun “us”. Zhachev also considers himself one of the “tired prejudices.” He pins all his hopes on future generations: “Zhachev crawled after the kulaks in order to ensure that they could safely sail into the sea with the current and to be more reassured that socialism would happen, that Nastya would receive it in her maiden dowry, and he, Zhachev, would rather will perish like a tired prejudice.” However, as we are convinced, the author’s view of Nastya’s future is quite pessimistic. Even a child's happiness cannot be built on someone else's suffering.

Completed in the early 1930s, it chronicles the peak of collectivization. The work was not published during the writer's lifetime. It was first published in the Soviet Union only in 1987.

Brief history of creation

Often the period from December 1929 to April 1930 is indicated as the time of writing “The Pit”. The dates were put down by Platonov himself on the title page of the second typewritten edition of the work in place of the cut out original version. Modern researchers of the writer’s work do not believe that the story was created exactly during the indicated period. However, Platonov chose the above-mentioned time period not by chance. This period is the peak of collectivization, which is discussed in “The Pit.”

Name

Platonov’s story received its name by analogy with popular industrial novels of the 1920s and 30s - “Whetstones” by Panferov, “Cement” by Gladkov, “Sawmill” by Karavaeva, and so on. Most of these names had a metaphorical meaning. In particular, Gladkov’s cement is not only construction material, produced at the factory, but also the working class, which is destined to hold together the “working masses” and act as the foundation of a new life. Platonov follows the literary template of the time. The pit is where much of the action takes place, as well as the pit and the grave. As a result, in Plato’s story, an ordinary construction project, of which there were many during the first Soviet five-year plan, turns into a symbol of a historical dead end. Digging a foundation pit in a work is the first stage in the construction of a common house for the proletarians. In the end, the pit was never completely dug.

Subjects

The most important theme of the work is the theme of the search for truth, the meaning of life. Voshchev is mainly occupied with this. Life without meaning and without truth is not sweet to him. Trying to find answers to eternal questions, he loses himself in his work so that it would not be so painful to exist. Not only Voshchev, but also other characters in the story are looking for the meaning of life. For example, a bear working at a forge. Voshchev takes him as a witness that there is no truth, and then notes: “He can only work, but when he rests and thinks, he will begin to get bored.” At the end of the work, it is not possible to discover either the truth or the meaning of life. Nastya is dying, the foundation pit has not been dug.

Another important theme of the story is the theme of death. She is constantly mentioned in the work, directly or indirectly. The pit looks like a grave. Nastya is given two coffins - it is assumed that the girl will sleep in one and store toys in the other. The author calls Voshchev “living in absentia.” It is said about the workers sleeping in the barracks that they “were as thin as the dead.” For the engineer Prushevsky, the whole world is a “dead body.” There are many more examples that can be given. By the way, the theme of death and overcoming it is perhaps the most important in all of Platonov’s works. As Anatoly Ryasov notes, in Plato’s works the terrible experience of death is at the same time the experience of immortality.

"Pit" is considered one of the the most complex works not only in Russian, but also in world literature. Everyone who carefully reads the story will understand it in their own way, and with repeated readings they will constantly discover new facets.

Characters

In “The Pit,” Platonov presents the reader with a model of Soviet society against the backdrop of the events of 1929 and 1930. For example, Safronov acts as a spokesperson official ideology. People like him were considered the ideological support of power. Kozlov is a typical opportunist who decided to leave the pit for social work. The chairman of the district bureau of trade unions, Pashkin, is a bureaucrat functionary who receives a handsome salary.

As for the girl Nastya, she symbolizes the new Soviet Russia. Her mother is the deceased potbelly stove Yulia - Historical Russia. According to Platonov, the new Russia, which is trying to abandon its own past, is unable to exist without the old Russia. That is why Nastya dies in the finale, yearning for her mother.

The main character of the story is Voshchev, a man trying to find the truth and find the meaning of life. Without this, nothing in this world pleases him. Voshchev has it strange hobby- collect all kinds of rags “for socialist revenge.” In the finale, he will also gather the villagers and lead them to build a foundation pit. Voshchev’s activities are closely connected with the real attitude of the Soviet government towards the delivery of scrap, which was supposed to help raise money for industrialization and create a raw material base for industry. In “The Pit”, the village people whom Voshchev brought to the construction site are, in fact, the same scrap, consumable material. Nothing good awaits him.

Composition

The story consists of two parts. The first is urban. The story centers on digging a pit. The second is rural. Here the main attention is paid to the creation of a collective farm and dispossession. This composition does not arise by chance. It correlates with Stalin’s speech “On questions agricultural policy in the USSR,” delivered at the end of December 1929 at a conference of Marxist agrarians. It paid special attention to the issue of “eliminating the opposition between city and countryside.” In the finale, the action returns to the pit - the composition loops.

Language features

“The Pit,” like other Platonic works, is distinguished by a special language. One of its key features is individual author’s combinations. They serve as means of artistic representation, and also help to reflect the author’s philosophy and draw the attention of readers to the problems that concern the author.

Literary direction and genre

In 1920, while still a novice author, Platonov filled out a questionnaire for the First All-Russian Congress of Proletarian Writers. Among others, there was the following question: “What literary trends do you belong or sympathize?” Platonov replied: “None, I have my own.” He maintained this position throughout his entire career.

According to Platonov’s own definition, the genre of “The Pit” is a story. In addition, various researchers have found elements of other genres in the work. Among them is dystopia, industrial novel and even mystery.