The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  Nazar Fomin’s contemporaries, Young Communists and Bolsheviks, were inspired by the same idea of creating a new world; just like Nazar, they were convinced that they had been challenged by Lenin to take part in a worldwide triumph of humanity. It was in order that a time of true living should begin at last on this earth, in order to fulfill all the hopes which people had earned by their centuries of hard work and of sacrifice, the hopes they had saved up through long trials and much patient thinking…

  When he had finished the special institute in Rostov, Nazar Fomin returned to his birthplace, to this same town where he was now sitting all alone. Nazar had become a technical builder, and started his lifework. He took everything that was material, rough, and ordinary so close to his heart that it became something spiritual for him, and sustained his passion for his work. Now he no longer remembered: had he realized then or not that everything that is truly spiritual comes only from the living needs of human beings? But with his own hands he accomplished this transformation of the material into the spiritual, and he believed in the truth of the revolution because he had accomplished this and seen its effect on the destiny of his people.

  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:

  “You see, Nazar Ivanovich, we don’t feel that Soviet power is giving us any easy life: go on, it tells us, be glad, and be responsible yourself for good and evil, it says, you’re not any longer just a bystander on this earth. And what kind of life did we have before! When you’re in your mother’s womb you don’t remember who you are, then you come outside and grief and hardship drive you, you live in a hut like in some dungeon where you can’t even see the light, and then you die and lie there quiet in your grave and forget that you even existed. We’ve been in tight places everywhere, Nazar Ivanovich—a womb, a prison cell, a coffin, with nothing but blankness all around us. And everybody hindering everybody else! While now everybody comes to help—that’s where Soviet power and cooperation have brought us!”

  Where was that old man Yeremeyev now? Maybe he was still alive somewhere, although it wasn’t likely, a lot of time had gone by…

  The power station did not work long; seven days after it began to operate it burned to the ground. Nazar Fomin was miles away when this happened; he had gone out to look at the dam near Dybrovka’s farmstead, which had been washed away by the autumn floods, and to estimate the work needed to rebuild it. They had sent him an urgent message about the fire, and Fomin had gone back immediately.

  Just outside the settlement, where the new adobe building of the power station had been yesterday, there was nothing now. Everything had been reduced to ashes. Nothing was left but the dead frames of the machinery—the motor and the generator. But the heat had made all the copper parts run out of the body of the motor; the ball bearings and the fittings had melted like streams of tears and then hardened and grown cold on the building’s foundations; the coils had gone up in smoke and all the copper had boiled down to nothing.

  Nazar Fomin stood next to his dead machinery staring up at him out of the blind holes of its burned-out vital parts, and he wept. A rainy wind was dolefully ruffling the sheets of metal on the floor which had been curled up by the heat of the fire. Fomin looked into the sky at this melancholy moment of his life; dark autumn clouds were scudding across it, driven by heavy bad weather; there was no interest to be seen there, no sympathy for man, because nature, despite its bigness, is all the same, knowing nothing except itself. Only what had been consumed in the fire had been different; here had been a world created by people in sympathy with each other, here in a small way a hope for a higher life was being realized, for a future end to all the pain with which nature oppresses even itself. This was a hope, perhaps, which existed in all creation only in the consciousness of men, and not of all men but only those who first in sacrifice, in work, and in revolution have struggled through to an understanding of their destiny. How small this blessed force still is, inside the enormous world, and how urgent it is to preserve it!

  A sad time started for Nazar Fomin. Investigatory authorities informed him that the fire had started not by accident or because of carelessness, but had been set by a criminal. Fomin could not understand this at first—how was it possible that something good for everybody could provoke hatred, and become the reason for a crime? He went to see the man who had set fire to the station. The criminal looked to him like any ordinary man, but he did not regret his act. In what he said Fomin could feel an unslaked hatred; before his arrest the criminal had fed his spirit with it. Now Fomin could no longer remember clearly his face or his words, but he still remembered the man’s unhidden malice toward him, the chief engineer of this people’s building which had been destroyed, and his explanation of what he had done as an act absolutely essential to satisfy his own mind and his own conscience. Fomin had listened quietly to the criminal then, and realized that it would be impossible with words to make him change his mind and that this could be done only with deeds, except that he would never allow the deeds to be accomplished, he would constantly sabotage and destroy what he had not helped to build.

  Fomin was seeing a creature whom he had thought not to exist on this earth, or at best to be living in a helpless, harmless condition since the revolution. In actual fact this creature was living a real life and even had its own intelligence, in the truth of which it believed. And then Fomin’s belief in an imminent heaven on earth was shattered by doubt; the whole picture in his mind’s eye of a shining future seemed to fade back toward the misty horizon, and under his feet was only that drab, hard, impassable earth along which there was still a long way to go before reaching the radiant world which had seemed so close and so attainable.

  The peasants, the builders, and the investors in the power station held a meeting. They listened to Fomin, and they were quietly thoughtful, not hiding their general grief. Then Yevdokia Remeiko stood up and said shyly that they must collect the funds again and rebuild the burned-down station; in a year, or a year and a half, Remeiko said, they could do it with their own hands, and maybe a good deal faster. “What’s the matter with you, girl?” some cheerful peasant, nobody knew who, answered her from his seat, “you’ve burned up one dowry in the fire, and now you’re throwing in another, so you’ll never get married before you’re in your coffin, and you’ll just wither away with the old folks.”

  When they had considered the problem, how much they could get from state insurance funds for the fire, how much the government would lend them, how much was left to be covered by voluntary labor, the investors took on the task of building the station from the beginning for a second time. “The electricity’s gone off,” a craftsman at making barrels named Yevtukhov said, “but we want to live without being turned off! So we empower you, Nazar Ivanovich, in a categorical sense to build it to the same plan and scale as it was before!” With both big things and little things, Yevtukhov loved to recommend that they be done in a categorical sense; he himself lived in a categorical and revolutionary style, and he had invented a completely spherical box. And now it was as if a warm light had shone on Nazar Fomin’s darkened spirit. Not knowing what to do or to say, he went up to Yevdokia Remeiko and, shy in front of all the people, wanted to kiss her cheek, but he managed to kiss only the dark hair above her ear. This is how it had been then, and the living feeling of happiness, the smell of the Remeiko girl’s hair, and her shy look had all stayed intact in Fomin’s memory.

  Once more Nazar Fomin built an electric power station on the same site, and it was twice as powerful as the one which had been burned. Two years went into this work. During this time Aphrodite left Nazar Fomin; she fell in love with another man, an engineer who had come from Moscow to install a radio transmitter, and she married him. Fomin had a great many friends among the peasants and the working people, but without his beloved Aphrodite he felt himself an orphan, and his heart trembled with loneliness. He had always thought before this that his faithful Aphrodite was a goddess, but now she was pitiable in her wanting, in her need to satisfy her new love, in her pull toward happiness and enjoyment, which were stronger than her will, stronger than her faithfulness and her pride in relation to someone who had always loved her and no one else but her. But even after his divorce from Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin could not lose the habit of loving her just as before; he did not want to struggle against the feeling which was now turning into suffering—life had taken his wife from him, and she had gone away, but it isn’t essential to possess a person closely and to be happy only next to her—it is sometimes enough to feel a beloved person as a permanent dweller in one’s heart; it’s true that this is harder and more demanding than close, satisfying possession, because unrequited love lives only on
its own true strength, feeding on nothing in return. But were Fomin and the other people of his country making the world over for a better fate simply in order to hold power over people, or to use them later like their property? Fomin still remembered that a strange idea had come to him then, which he could not explain. He felt that in his divorce from Aphrodite an evil power had again blocked his road to life; in its original cause this was perhaps the same force which had caused the fire in the power station. He realized the difference between the two events, he saw their incongruity, but they had destroyed his life with equal brutality, and it was one and the same man who had withstood them. It was possible that he had been to blame with Aphrodite, for sometimes it happens that evil is done without being intended, unwillingly and unnoticed, and even when a man is straining every nerve to do good to someone else. This must be because every heart is different from every other: one heart, recipient of what is good, applies it entirely to its own needs, with none of the goodness left over for another; a different kind of heart is capable of working over even what is evil, and of turning it into what is good and strong, for itself and for others, too.