"Inhabitant of the State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Platonov Andrei)

dwellings and places of farming necessity. All manure and the dead remnants
of human life were washed down to the hollow of the pond and were settled
into a yellowish-brown viscous soup that could not serve as a quenching
liquid. During the common epidemics among citizens, namely cholera, typhus
or a poor wheat harvest due to the local soil containing few of the
bountiful good, the people of Koz'ma would lie down on warm stoves and came
to their end, gazing at flies and cockroaches with their eyes. In the old
times, they say, Koz'ma had almost a hundred homesteads, but now there are
no traces of the past thickness of population. Vegetative shrubbery covered
the spots previously populated by the now desolate villas, and there were
neither ashes nor brick or limestone spots under that shrubbery. Pyotr
Yevseyevich had already dug through that place, for he did not believe that
the State could shrink; he felt the multiplying strength of order and
sociality, everywhere he observed the automatic growth of the State-born
happiness.
The peasants who lived in Koz'ma respected Pyotr Yevseyevich for
giving them hope and correctly deemed that the whole Republic should know
their need of drinking water, while Pyotr Yevseyevich would support them in
that opinion:
"You will be provided with drinking," he would promise. "It's the
State after all. The justice occurs automatically, not to mention drinking
water! It is not any kind of dermal disease, is it? No, it is an internal
affair: each citizen needs water as much as the mind!"
"Of course!" the people of Koz'ma would confirm. "The Soviet authority
has us in the watering aspect as first thing. Our turn will come, and we
shall drink our fill! Or did we not drink since old times? We just go
downtown and drink."
"Absolutely right," Pyotr Yevseyevich would determine. "And one also
has to appreciate in addition that life goes drier and stingier with
thirst, and one feels it more from the languish."
"One cannot escape it without water," the peasants would agree. "One
lives as if just swallowed a burning log from a fire."
"This is merely an imaginary impression," explained Pyotr Yevseyevich.
"One would imagine many things when one has a desire to drink. The sun also
seems to you and to us a heat and a force, but one can hide and quench it
with some steam from a kettle -- at once there will be chill on the
table-cloth. It only seems that way to you and to us in the middle of the
mind..."
Pyotr Yevseyevich always regarded himself and the State with more
respect than the population, unaware of the sense of it, since the
population constantly exists alongside with and is provided by the State
with the necessary life.
Usually Pyotr Yevseyevich was offered food in Koz'ma -- not because of
kindness and plenty, but out of a feeling of security. However, Pyotr
Yevseyevich would never eat others' food: bread grows on a peasant's lot
only for one, not for two -- and so Pyotr Yevseyevich had nothing to eat
out of. The sun, it also burns sparingly and socially: it does not warm up
more bread than for one labouring eater, therefore, there should be no
feeding of guests in the State.
Amidst the summer the village of Koz'ma, as well as all rural places,