Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

At first Nazar Fomin had been in charge of rural production of fireproof materials throughout the district; this was not considered a big responsibility. But he was excited by this work and he cherished it, not just as a public service but as the very meaning of his existence, and he looked with passionate eyes at the first baked tiles prepared in his village kiln. He stroked the first tile, sniffed it, and carried it back to the room where he was living so that he could look at it again in the evening and in the morning, to make sure it really was completely good and solid, fit to last for long years in place of the straw on the roofs of village houses and thus to save the peasants’ homes from fire. Then he studied the fire statistics of his district in the rural reports and figured out that if straw thatch could be replaced by tiles, this economy alone would save the peasants enough from fire damage to build, for example, an artesian well with abundant clean water in every village in three years’ time, or even more; and then in the next three or four years, out of the same funds saved from fire by the tiled roofs, enough to construct a local electric power station with a mill for hulling grain and another for grinding it. With these ideas Nazar Fomin could stare at a tile for a long time without growing bored, thinking about how it could be made stronger and cheaper. Tiles had become both feeling and experience for him, they had replaced books and friends; later on he understood that no object could really replace human beings, but when he was young just thinking about man was enough for him.

There are times when people live on hopes and expectations of a change in their destiny; there are other times when only the memory of the past can comfort the living generation; and there are lucky times when the historical development of the world coincides in people with the beating of their own hearts. Nazar Fomin was a man of his people’s lucky times, and at the beginning, like many of his contemporaries and those who thought as he did, he believed it was the beginning of an epoch of quiet happiness, of peace, of brotherhood, and of blessedness, all of which would gradually spread across the entire world. For all of this to happen it would be enough just to work hard and to build: this was how the young man Fomin thought at that time.

And Nazar Fomin found spiritual peace for himself in his love for his wife Aphrodite and his faithfulness to her; with these he conquered all the troubled passions inside himself which pulled him toward the dark sides of the world of sensations where a man could only squander his life to no purpose, even if with some delight, and he devoted all his energy to his work and to the service of the idea which had become his heart’s desire—not what wasted a man but what regenerated him again and again, in which his real delight was found, not furious and incapacitating but gentle, like quiet goodness.

Nazar Fomin was preoccupied then, like his whole generation, with the spirituality of a world which had existed until that time only in misery, in disconnection, and without any general, clear meaning.

At the beginning of his work, Fomin made tiles for fire-resistant roofing; then his responsibilities were increased, and he soon was elected vice president of the village Soviet, but the real significance of his job was to be the chief engineer of all construction in the settlement and the district around it. At that time this town was only a settlement, the center of a small rural district.

Fomin built dams in the dry steppe for watering the cattle, he dug wells in the villages and reinforced them with concrete tiles, and he paved roads all through the district with a kind of local stone, in order to use all the means available to overcome the poverty of the economy and to bring a unified peasant spirit to the whole people.

But even then he was already thinking about something more important and one idea dominated his dreams, giving hopes to his happiness. For two years Fomin worked on his plan before the district executive committee trusted him to start it. This plan was for the construction of an electric power station in the district with the gradual extension of a power network over the entire region, so as to give the people light with which to read books, machine power for lightening their labor, and warmth in wintertime for heating their houses and their stables. With the realization of this simple dream, the whole tenor of life of the population would be transformed, and man would then feel true freedom from poverty and grief, from the burden of heavy work which exhausts him to his very bones, and from all the hopelessness which leaves him no satisfaction in his life…

Reflections of these memories were moving now across the face of Colonel Fomin as he sat there among the ruins of his town that had been destroyed, the town he had built once upon a time together with his comrades. The memories showed on his face first in a smile, then in grief, in the quiet recollection of what had happened a long time ago.

He had built the power station. A dance had been organized in the hall of the district political education club to celebrate the completion of what was for that time a powerful generator, and Aphrodite had danced at that ball under the radiance of the new electric lights, with an orchestra of three accordians, and she had been even happier than Nazar himself, because her husband’s project had succeeded.

But it had been hard for Fomin to complete the construction. Too little money was available from the district budget, so it was necessary to explain the usefulness of electricity to the whole population of the district so the people themselves would invest in the station and in the power network their own labor and their wealth beyond what had already been accumulated for the purpose. Because of this Fomin organized thirty-four peasant associations for electricity and he joined them all up in a district union. This cost him a lot of courage, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of unquiet work. He remembered one peasant orphan girl, Yevdokia Remeiko; her parents had left her a small dowry, and she invested it all in her association and then went to work harder and more eagerly than most, as an assistant carpenter on the construction of the station. By now Yevdokia Remeiko would be a grown woman, if she was still alive, but if she had been still young, she would probably be serving in the Red Army, or fighting in a partisan detachment.

Fomin could remember a lot of the other people who had worked with him then—peasant men and women, people who lived in the settlement, old people and young ones. In all sincerity and candor they were building a new world on this earth with all the skills they had: their hidden, inhibited abilities burst forth then and started to develop in beneficial, intelligent labor; their spirits and their understanding of life blossomed and grew as plants grow out of the ground when stones are lifted from on top of them. The station had not yet been completely built and equipped when Fomin could already see with satisfaction that its builders—peasants working as volunteers over and above their work in the fields—had become so much more profound in doing this and had developed such interest in each other and in their relations to the working class, making turbines for generating the electricity, that the wretched loneliness of their hearts had disappeared, and their individual peasant-farmer indifference to the whole strange world around them and their terror in front of it also began to leave them. It is true that in the secret thinking of every man there is a desire to go out of his own courtyard, out of his own loneliness, to see and to live through all that is worldwide, but it is necessary to find a path which is not beyond a man’s powers and which is open to everyone. An old peasant named Yeremeyev expressed his tangled ideas about this at that time to Fomin: