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Once upon a time there lived Ignatius who was a minion of fortune and a privileged boy.
he was a son of a responsible party worker from a big city of the Urals; his father had a personal chauffeur and went to regular missions and challenges to Moscow. He enjoyed closed retail establishments and other nomenclature benefits.
By the way, his father was a staunch ascetic, a fan of 'the locomotive flying ahead'.
Though engine drivers can be changed and be wrong; they can go to red light, crushing individual citizens and even entire nations - do not stand on rails!
The rails are laid correctly; the stop will be only in the commune and we have no other way.
And in case of some attacks we have rifles in our hands.
His father prayed to this locomotive flying to the bright future.
This was the meaning of his life, for which his grandfather fought in the Civil War, and then he worked hard, starved, shed blood in the Second World War
And again he built, managed, did not sleep at night, sometimes at work, sometimes at home, waiting for an arrest.
His father probably would have preferred to be crushed by this locomotive than to lose faith in it. If he would have deprived of this belief, he probably would have shot himself.
Then the end of the eighties came, the time of exposure.
When former co-religionists began to worship not the goal, not the bright future, not even the locomotive but rails.
Which allegedly were once laid properly, but loony villains and morons-engineers managed to somehow steal their locomotive, driving around surrounding fields and villages, crushing mass of people and doing the lot of troubles.
And now the whole point is to get it back on rails.
Although the goal was not visible now, but the rails were right!
It would be sad to see those remaining in the late eighties and later would stand helplessly on the rails, along which their lives raced, and painfully thinking, where have they come?
Or by inertia alone wandering forward along the rails, without their derailed locomotive.
They would drag themselves as long as they would be able to.
But then, in the late fifties, Ignatius' father was in the saddle, and Ignatius who always doubted everything tried to argue with him.
But he answered,
'I will call the police and you will be delivered to the proper place'.
Of course, he joked, bu his mother frightened.
'Shut up, Ganya. Think what you want, just keep silence.'
His father also believed that everyone had a right to think. But in silence.
You can believe even in Martians, but come down the rails and do not disturb the right move.
"Why do you think it is correct?"
"Because I believe so. And what do you believe in?' the father talked back. 'In the trough of caviar? In the bag of gold? In capitalism?
What's good in their capitalism? Abundance!
Just imagine: everything is yours. Come in to any store, buy what you want and how much you want.
You will be full of caviar, and then what?"
"Is it not so in the bright your future? To each according to his needs. You never know what needs one has!
What if I'm a glutton?"
"Son, my future is bright but not well-fed,' the father prayerfully lifted his finger, 'it is bright!"
"Do you even know what it is? This is an abstraction and a beautiful mirage."
"It's better to believe in a beautiful mirage than in a trough."
- You, father is as Pushkin. 'Our uplifting deception is dearer to me than a lot of low truths'."
From this, perhaps, it all started. With the need to adequately respond to his father and himself.
Where to go? What is the goal instead of 'a beautiful dream, which is not clear yet', which abundantly watered with sweat and blood of several generations?
Thus, 'may our locomotive fly ahead'.
If not to a commune, then where?
Ignatius was surprised to find that modern humanity does not thinks very much about it.
Of course, nobody wants global catastrophes, nuclear or environmental ones...
Some still believe in progress, although with the development of civilization a chance to go to the nuclear, environmental or other ruin rather increases.
Others would be happy to turn the engine back and make plans about it.
But the majority just goes to an unknown destination, knowing only one thing - sooner or later you will be thrown out of the train forever.
And this train with condemned people will rush away.
Everyone is sentenced to death. Hundreds of generations have replaced each other, but one escape from it.
The sentence is final and not appealable.
Passengers are trying to behave as if they go on forever.
They settle in compartments more conveniently, changing mats, curtains, make acquaintances, have children, so that the offspring can take their compartments when they will be thrown away.
It is a kind of illusion of immortality!
Children, in turn, will be replaced with grandchildren, grandchildren will replaced with great-grandchildren�
Poor humanity!
The train of life, becoming a train of death.
Dead people are a hundred times more than living ones. And the living are sentenced too.
Steps of a conductor are heard. He came to take somebody. Maybe, it is you.
Feast during Plague. Eating, drinking, having fun, playing cards, chess...
They collect matchbox labels, stuff their suitcases, while they are required to go out, 'without personal luggage'.
But others have touching plans to reconstruct their compartments, carriages or even the whole train.
Or a carriage makes war against a carriage, a compartment against compartment, a berth against a berth for happiness of future passengers.
Ahead of time, millions of lives are lost, and the train rushes ahead.
And those crazy passengers merrily play dominoes on suitcases of sincere dreamers.
This cheerless picture opened before young Ignatius after his many reflections on the meaning of life.
It turned out that every particular life goal turns into a great injustice and absurdity.
Assert yourself and disappear.
To spend a life so as to benefit future passengers and release a for place. It is beautiful!
But these future passengers mortal too.
All mankind is mortal, then your life is devoted to death.
And if someone of people achieve immortality, is it fair to be immortal of bones of millions?
OK, let's take consumer society for example.
The most ideal way is to give according to abilities and receive according to needs.
Of course, the most terrible needs can appear, and abilities too...
Live in order to live.
Eat, drink, be merry, give birth, go to theater or to races...
Left behind a pile of empty bottles, worn shoes, dirty glasses and sheets burnt by cigarettes...
What if we reject extremities...
Get on a train, sit on your place, behave decently, do whatever you like, just do not disturb other passengers. Give lower berths to ladies and the elderly, do not smoke in the carriage.
Before you go away forever, hand furnishing to a conductor and turn off the light.
Everything ended in zero in all cases. There was no meaning in life.
Yes, the father believed in bright future in his heart.
Not in the economic wealth and not in political rights, but in some beautiful fairy tale, coming paradise on earth.
In which a place will be found for him, Peter Darenov.
Because it was an abstraction. Because the father and thousands of others of his co-religionists could not explain what exactly was meant by \bright future.
But this the age-old Russian, and not only the Russian dream of light and immortality got together.
The big word 'Light', combining in itself concepts of truth, righteousness, goodness and beauty, and the word 'future', promising all the light to the living and the dead.
No specific earthly goal promise it.
It was a naive child's belief. A new religion, replacing the prohibited God.
Not stuffed belly, not permissiveness and all-accessibility, because his father was an ascetic, a supporter of hard training and hard power.
He longed for an iron hand, which substitute God, in which one could trust in a child's blind way and only throw coal into a furnace of a locomotive driven by it.
Ordinary earthly man was not fit for this purpose. A superman was needed, and they believed him.
After the death of the superman, his role was partly replaced by the idea of an infallible and all-merciful state.
All this indeed was opium for wayward and suffering souls of people.
It was opium for people who managed not to sleep and not to be drowned in the morass of narrow-minded.
For those who felt anguish because the words of Lermontov 'boring songs of the earth'.
Which reduce the role of humans to the role of grass grown on manure of previous harvest and designed only to fertilize following ones.
Ignatius truly understood it later, but then he didn't found what to reply to his father.
An opportunity to enjoy life even in the most comfortable train of condemned people, where there were empty compartments, and in any weather they could arrest you, it seemed very doubtful.
'Life is a joke; it is not only 'stupid and empty, but tragic' - to the conclusion young Ignatius came.
"But there are elects of fate," Ignatius thought. "Who do not have to sink in vanity, chimeras or drinking to get rid of horrible life.
They are ndowed with the gift of creativity.
Only in creative inspiration people can escape from the everyday pressing impasse and fly to the stars.
And he, Ignatius, is this chosen one.
He could not remember when he began to paint... It seemed he always painted: on doors, windows, wallpapers. By fingers, pencils, charcoal, chalk, stolen mother's lipstick, or a piece of beet from a salad.
Something struck him; he grabbed that fell under his hand and drew.
He managed grasp the most important thing by two or three lines or by a color smear.
Ignatius went to kindergarten, when he was sent to Moscow for the competition of children's art and watercolor 'The Furnace' received the award.
It was a brown rectangle in the orange-red border, which meant flames buzzing behind the door.
At first Ignatius brushes just sang like birds in trees.
They sang about beauty of the world, nature, human body, face and information contained in this beauty secret.
His early portraits and landscapes resembled slightly opened caskets of jewels, where under a painted cover mysterious and inaccessible beauty was hidden.
He then took a great interest in sports (in summer it was kayak-paddling; in the winter it was skiing) and smartly danced rock 'n' roll. In streets he followed for beautiful girls and older ladies, often was beaten and bit by himself.
And he painted and painted.
Everything seems to be going good. his son's talents of an unknown origin both frightened and pleased his father who was afraid of bohemia.
However, when Ignatius' works were exhibited in the museum, among other gifts to Stalin, published in the newspaper 'Pioneers] Truth' and even sent somewhere abroad, his father became gradually inclined to mother's persuasions to let Ignatius go and study in Leningrad.
Where lived his father's sister who was an unmarried woman and would have been happy to settle his gifted nephew.
After the death of the leader's father finally gave; he had no time for his son. The physical death of his god shook him much more than debunks the Twentieth Congress. The father grew thin and retired to himself.
It's interesting that Stalin, but not Lenin, was a man-god for Peter Darenov.
Thus, in the mid-fifties Ignatius found himself in Leningrad.