Andrei Platonov - "Markun" (1921)

Introduction

Andrei Platonovich Klimentov, better known as Andrei Platonov, was born on August 28th, 1899 and is primarily known, both inside and outside of Russia, as a non-science fiction author of social and philosophical novels. His most well known works in the English speaking world are the novels "Chevengur" (1928), "The Foundation Pit" (1930), and the novella "Soul/Dzhan" (1935). The excellent Russian science fiction bibliography site, fantlab.ru, which can be seen as a ISFDB type site for the Russophone world, identifies several science fiction adjacent stories Platonov wrote, some of which have been translated into English, including "The Ether Channel", "Descendants of the Sun", and "The Lunar Bomb". "Markun", as far as we know is previously untranslated, and was originally written in August of 1920, and was first published in the magazine "The Forge", in early 1921 (vol. 7). The editor of "The Forge" particularly liked the story for its potential use as propaganda. It later appeared in the 1978 anthology "Selected Works", and was included in several anthologies afterwards. 

This translation is based off of the Russian text which is found here: https://traumlibrary.ru/book/platonov-ss08-01/platonov-ss08-01.html#s004002

Markun

Every evening after dinner, when his little brothers went to bed, he would light an iron lamp and sit down to think.

Nobody bothered him. Cockroaches scurried across the floor, the children muttered in their sleep and cried. Their rags slipped off from them, and their plump bellies were breathing strained and heavily, like those of their snoring father.

Markun found the page in his book and read what was written down, already long forgotten: "do you really know anything in the world better than you know yourself?" And additionally: "but you are not only what is breathing and beating in this body. You can be Fedor and Kondrat both, if you want, if you're able know them until the end, that is, to fall in love. After all, you only love yourself because you most confidently know yourself. Have confidence in others and you'll see a great deal, you'll see everything, for the world has never yet been contained in one person."

Further down on the page was written: "The night of February 3rd. I'm cold and sick. And yesterday I saw my bride in a dream. But no such girl have I ever known so closely. Who was it? Maybe, I'll see today. Why do I never want to sleep?"

Markun read, and remembered that he never again saw her in a dream. From a recent illness, his legs trembled and his whole body hung like a rag on his bones. But his head was clear and demanded work. He was always full of energy. Even when he was writhing in nightmares, he thought of his machines, of the anticipated designs, where to him, the soul of the future's productive forces was born. He was in torment if he discovered an error, any inaccuracy, and couldn't remedy it at that exact instant.

Markun took the paper bearing his designs off the stove, pulled a bug off the boy's cheek and sat down again.

In the yard, the whistle of a locomotive squealed through the frost. Sharp spirals were drawn on a large sheet. A thick pipe bent six times on its spine stored the power of range and rotation. The gear trains were ready to meet the impact of the teeth and cogs, and to shift any heavy stress.

In a corner of the paper, Markun wrote: 

"Nature is a force, nature is infinite, and force, therefore, is also infinite. Then let there be a machine that can turn an infinite force into an infinite number of pulley rotations per any given unit of time. Let power shed its limitations, and man be freed from his struggle of material labor.

"To raise the earth up to any of the stars, humanity only needs one of my motorized machines". 

Markun stood up, leaned against the stove, and sleep came over him like a calm breeze.

At that time, a blizzard broke out in the field and the locomotives were barely breaking through the snowdrifts, and with tender hooks and chains, pulled the wagons that were stuck in the snow.

A bright, cheerful steamship was moving through the distant warm sea, filled with gorgeous laughing women. With meek eyes, they were looking into the vast night sky, waiting for the morning, when they would come ashore to the white cities, to their own forgotten mothers.

Markun woke up.

"Archimedes, why did you forget the earth, when you were looking for the fulcrum that would make the universe tremble under your hands?

"This fulcrum was under your feet - the center of the earth. There's no weight, no gravity - the same with mass, no resistance. Disturb it - and you can break the entire universe, everything would fly out from its nest. The earth, after all, is strongly connected with everything. To do this, you need not be at the center of the earth: stemming from it are handles - levers, which extend across its entire surface.

"You couldn't do it, but I will do it, Archimedes, I will grasp them.

"The most forceful force, the best lever, the most precise point is in me, a man. If you were to turn the earth, Archimedes, it wouldn't be the lever that does it, but you.

"I will lean on myself, by myself, for myself, and overpower, override everything, not just this one universe.

"Lamp, I find no light brighter than yours."

Markun liked the designs more than the books. The machines' animating force shook in this mesh of thin curved lines, exact dimensions, planes and circles.

He once wrote, in lines, a song about water pressure. He drew this tempest of lines with a ruler and compass and hung it on the wall. When he asked one of his friends if he could interpret the drawing, the friend didn't understand and averted his eyes. And from this drawing, the music in Markun's blood rose like the tide.

"If you run an engine," thought Markun, "a certain amount of energy per second is produced; if with one shaft, you directly connect it with another engine, in that same second, twice as much energy as the first engine is generated, and if you gave them an unlimited amount of natural force (water, wind), then the total work of this pair of motors will be as follows: the rotation would initially correspond with the work of the natural energy in the initial small motor, then would double, as the second motor simultaneously consumes the natural driving forces twofold. But the first motor will then also begin to consume twice as much force as the first moment of its operation, in other words, it will start working with the power of the second motor. And the second motor, twice as strong, will again work twice as energetically as the first one (that means four times relative to the initial moment) and will pull the shaft behind it with the speed's acceleration quadrupled from that from the first starting moment. Then the acceleration would be equal to 8, 16, 32... Thus, power would increase indefinitely; its limit is the strength of the metal from which the motors are built."

Markun stooped over the design. His turbine had six systems of spirals, successively linked and successively increasing in power. Therefore, the acceleration would be sixfold. The water would be so consumed, such that if the last in the sixth spiral is running; it's due to the other five coils running with the same water.

"Any theory is false if cannot be proven by trial", thought Markun - "The world is infinite and therefore its energy is also infinite. My turbine has vindicated this law."

And like a flame, a sudden thought came, "What if one were to find a metal with an infinite capacity for stress, an infinite strength? But there is such a metal: it's simply one kind of universal energy, discharged into the form of destruction. This follows from the general law of infinite possibilities of forces and their forms. But then my, machine would be a maw in which the whole universe would disappear in an instant, receive a new image inside it, in which over and over again I will pass through the motor's spirals."

"I will build a turbine with a quadratic, cubic increase in power, I'll pull the warm southern oceans into the mouth of my machine and pump it to the poles. Let everything bloom, the joy of infinity tremble in everything, the ecstasy of its omnipotence." 

The clock chimed. Markun didn't count how many.

On the bedding, his little brother was shaking in a frightening dream. Markun bent over him...

He again sat by the lamp and listened to the blizzard behind the shutters.

Why do we love and pity the distant, the dead, the sleeping? Why are the living, and those that are close to us, strangers? Everything that's unknown and irretrievable evoke love and pity in us.

Conscience squeezed his heart and suffering disfigured his face. Markun saw his life, powerless and insignificant, entangled in trifles, mistakes and imperceptible crimes.

He remembered how he recently pushed his little brother off the table, who is now thrashing with fear in his sleep, and since then has remained silent, cowering and covering himself from an unexpected quick wave of the hand, which he thought would again strike.

The lamp went out. The blizzard lasted for a day.

Markun went out into the courtyard. The wind was whistling through a cloud of snow, and sometimes when the blizzard broke through above, one or two frightened stars were visible in the gray sky, as if they were closely near.

Markun called out. A cold clump hit him in the face and dripped down his shirt. For a moment everything was suddenly quiet and a nearby star was smiling at him.

"How many stars are we able to see, and how many are we unable to see?", thought Markun. - "They glow with a reflected light from alien suns. And if strong, intelligent beings live on other stars: they'll surely convert this light into labor, absorb it with their machines, making their worlds unseen to us, they'd be dark, and maybe, close to the earth there's a large dark planet, closer than the moon, that we know nothing about. It could absorb all the energy from the light and the heat, not produce any reflection, and would be invisible, dead to us."

Markun returned home. The lamp went out and the wick burned with a distant red spark. He lay down on the floor and froze until morning.

Months passed. Markun procured, from somewhere, two gas pipes of a specific size, bent them into spirals and made an approximate model of his turbine. But he didn't experiment with it right away, rather he stashed it in a barn and forgot about it for a while. Now, days of anxious happiness of anticipation were stretched out for him.

Markun believed in himself. He knew that no, there could be no mistake in the concealed machine. It will work. Its power is limitless. He, Markun, conquered numerous forces. Still, nobody knows anything yet. They don't know that it was he, who from his weak hands, would give mankind a new hammer of insane power.

It was spring. Markun walked through the fields in the evenings and watched how the sunset burned in the sky, in the swamps and in the puddles. Everywhere there was water, water and silence. And last year, as well as now, he loved someone in the spring. He was invisible and lived alone.

But in childhood, when he lost faith in God, he began to pray and serve all mankind, he put himself in slavery to everyone, and he remembered now, how good he had it then. His heart burned with love, he grew thinner and withered with the delight of being worse off and lower than everyone else. He then feared man, as a mystery, as a God, and filled his life with shameful self-sacrifice and labor for man.

Once he spent half a day unloading firewood from a train car at the railway station, and with the money he earned he bought a red rattle for a blind child who lived with his neighbors in a barn, where he was locked in by his mother, so that he wouldn't run out and get himself killed when she left for work. He was so accustomed to the barn that he didn't cry there, nor did he know how to play nor laugh.

The cool spring sky was growing darker, as if it was rising. And from the edge of the field, fog was creeping upwards.

Markun stood under the tree branches in silence as the damp slime crept its way across the fields. And he could not understand his hidden love for everything.

The forester's hut was barely visible. A girl approached it, and loomed in the blue dusk with a reddish skirt. She waved her hand. She must have been calling someone from the forest, shouting from her soft bosom, affectionately, prolonged, and smiling.

Markun didn't hear anything, and laid down on the ground from unexpected anguish and pain.

A traveller passed silently, and immediately disappeared on the road.

Markun didn't sleep that night. He lay at the window and looked up into the sky at the smiling stars, at the lurking, waiting night.

Tomorrow he will start the machine. Everything in him immediately calmed down, subsided, and he forgot himself, as if he fell into a bottomless well.

The last morning star was still burning and the east was heating up from the nearby sun, when Markun awoke and immediately jumped up. He remembered something, some kind of fire, hot and instantaneous, that passed through him and left. And Markun forgot everything. He stood, moved his cheekbones, as he tried to reach out in thought for these fleeting cockroaches, but could not remember anything. Something great and unknown struck him in his sleep. He up stood and grasped what was gone and would not return. But the mark, direct and sharp, remained in his soul and altered it.

"Everything was given to man, yet he took only so little," - remembered Markun in his old thoughts. And he wasn't remorseful that this great delight broke off from him, and no longer familiar.

Markun went out into the courtyard. It was quiet, cold and bright. If you now look in the spacious field down the road in the distance, you can see someone approaching you quietly and directly from afar.

Markun constructed the turbine in a corner of the shed, screwed a funnel and a basin onto it, against which the foot of the machine rested, and brought in five buckets of water from the street's tap. He poured the water into a barrel, then lubricated the machine, and with his hands, turned two revolutions on it, laughing at his lonely joy.

Would he like to call, tell someone? No, not then, after. He's already considered a fool, and not the kind of fool that is loved and pitied, but the kind that is hated.

And he remembered the girl who waved her hand near the forest and cried out. If only she'd come to the barn now. If he told her everything, she would have understood him and he would have taken her by the very same hand. And Markun smiled with happiness and anguish.

The whistle sounded. Markun remembered the labor, the bloody work, the struggle and indefatigability, the proud human life which fills the jubilant earth, the thunder of machines and electrical currents.

He scooped up a bucketful of water and poured it into the funnel above the turbine. He was calm and confident. He released the tap - and the machine rushed and thundered. Around it hung a motionless ring of ejected wastewater.

Markun poured all the water in. The turbine roared and from its rapid rotation, appeared like it was standing still. In the funnel, the water was swirling like a whirlwind from the suction of the machine. And the water inside the spirals was audible, howling and groaning. The machine was accumulating force. The machine broke off and whistled in movement, cutting the air with a whirlwind of water.

Markun stood. Anxiety and anticipation filled him. Everything inside him froze, as if he was just born and unable to understand anything. For the first time, he couldn't think, no ideas could lead him.

From the machine's impact into the walls, the whole shed shook and rocked. Below, a bearing was smoking, and a second later flames were erupting from it.

The machine was accelerating. Its power increased and encountering no resistance, took off with great speed.

The lower spiral burst, a piece of pipe broke off with a screech and, spinning, struck the wooden wall of the barn, pierced through it, and flew out into the yard.

The turbine leapt out of the bearing and dug into the ground.

Markun went out the door and stopped. The bare twigs on the lower branches were blown down and shaking in the wind.

The third whistle sounded. Markun didn't hear the second.

"That's why I couldn't do anything earlier," thought Markun, "because I concealed myself from the world, by loving myself. Now that I've learned that I'm nothing, everything has opened itself up to me, and I can see the entire world, without anyone concealing it from me, because I've been consumed by it, I'm dissolved in it, and thus have won. Only now have I begun to live. Only now have I become the world."

"I'm the first who's dared."

Markun looked up at the pale, wakening sky.

"That's why I feel so awful, I understand all this."