«Cow»
“Child’s story. The story about love. About first love. Recollections of the first love. And of the first death. And of the fault that hasn’t been leaving us in peace for many years.
There is something of Ivan Bunin in this story. The boy and sadness, and dreams, and the first conflict with the reality. But instead of “antonovskiye apples” we see some other landscape of the childhood — the part of railway; and instead of cozy manor — a little poor house of the railway inspector and a barn where the cow (and that was the very cow whom the boy loved) spent long days and nights of her life.
Instead of buzzing insects of Bunin’s gardens in Platonov’s landscapes there are steam locomotives which pass by this little railway crossing without a stop wrapping up the boy standing by the road with their smoke and also the boy’s mother and farther and that’s why seeming so mysterious and people inside them — so charmingly wonderful.
World is unperceivable, it’s big and mysterious, dark and disturbed. There is anxious readiness in a man (or a boy) to get to know it, to take part in it, but the world doesn’t wait for anybody and for the boy either, it’s scary and fearful, and unexplainable. You have to name it somehow for to live in it but once you pronounce the name for it you realize all the naivety and incorrectness of the word said. As you can’t realize and explain with your mind the universe, or night, or God, or fate, or fortune so you can’t understand the sense of human (or cow’s) life. Cow here — is the guide to the mysterious, adult and big world. Confusion against the secret of life — this is the “child’s” story“.
“… We had a COW. While it was alive MOTHER, FATHER and I ate milk from her. Then it gave birth to the son — calf, and it also ate milk from her, we were the three and the calf was the forth and that was enough for all us. Besides that the COW plowed and carried load. Then its son was sold for meat, it was killed and eaten. The COW suffered much but soon died from the train. And it was also eaten because it’s beef. There is nothing now. Where are the COW and its son calf? Nobody knows but everybody had good from them. The COW gave everything to us: milk, son, meat, skin, internal organs and bones, it was kind. I also want to be useful for all people of my motherland and let me have less, because I remember our COW and shall never forget…”
April, 3 (Tue), 29 (Thu), 30 (Wed) Manege Hall, Sretenka str., 19/27, begins at 20:00.
