Summary of the story by AP Platonov “Unknown Flower”


This is a story about a small flower, which no one knew on earth, because he grew up alone in a vacant lot. Cows and goats did not go there, and children from the pioneer camp there never played. The grass did not grow on the vacant lot, but dead stones lay alone. The wind walked through the wasteland and everywhere sowed the seeds – and into the black wet earth, and to the bare stone wasteland.

Once one seed fell and sheltered in a hole between the stone and clay. For a long time it languished, then it was saturated with dew, straightened, let out of itself thin roots, it stuck into stone and clay and began to grow.

So this little flower began to live in the world. He had nothing to eat in stone and clay, and raindrops did not penetrate to his root. The flower all lived and gradually grew higher. He lifted his leaves to meet the wind, and dust from the wind fell to the ground, brought from the fat fat land. These specks of dust served as a food for the flower, but

they could not be soaked. Then the flower began to guard the dew at night. When the leaves grew heavy with dew, he lowered them, and the dew fell down. It moistened the black specks that brought the wind, and corroded the dead clay. The flower worked day and night.

It was very difficult for him, but he needed a life and patiently endured his pain from hunger and fatigue. He rejoiced only once a day: when the first ray of sun touched his weary leaves.

If the wind did not come to the wasteland for a long time, then the flower became very bad. At this time he was dozing. And all the time I tried to grow up, even when there was absolutely nothing to eat and I had to swallow dead clay. His leaves could not turn green, one vein was blue, another was red, the third was blue or gold. Hunger and agony were indicated by a different color within his leaves. But the flower did not know this: he was blind.

Similar before that to the grass, in mid-summer he dissolved the corolla and with it became a real flower. The corolla was a simple, strong and clear color, like a star. And, like a star, it shone with a living

flickering fire, which was visible even on a dark night. And the wind, when he came to the wasteland, always took with him the fragrance of a flower.

One morning a girl Dasha was walking past the wasteland, having a rest near the pioneer camp. She missed her mother, wrote her a letter and went with him to the station to get it. On the way, Dasha kissed the envelope and envied that he would see his mother before her.

At the edge of the wasteland, Dasha felt a fragrance. Dasha remembered one story that her mother told her about a flower that was sad for her mother-rose, but she could not cry, and only his sorrow passed in the fragrance. Dasha compared his sadness with her and went to the wasteland. There she actually saw a flower growing near the stone.

Dasha had never seen such a flower in life or in a picture, so she began to ask him where he came from, what his name was and why he had not died here, among the stones and clay. The flower answered most of the questions that it does not know, because for the first time the voice of a man was so close and did not want to offend Dasha by silence.

At the end of the conversation Dasha bent over the flower and kissed him in the small head.

The next day all the pioneers came to visit the little flower. According to Dasha’s request, they inhaled his fragrance, and then they admired him for a long time as a hero. They calculated how much it was necessary to bring ashes and manure to the wasteland so that the earth would become good, so that the courageous flower would rest and his children would not die.

For four days the pioneers worked, and then they left for their homes and did not come to the wasteland. Only Dasha ran one day to say goodbye to the flower before leaving. Summer was ending.

For another summer Dasha again went to the same pioneer camp. All winter she remembered the unusual flower and immediately ran to the wasteland to visit him.

Dasha saw that the wasteland was now not the same. He was overgrown with herbs and flowers, over which butterflies and birds flew. From the flowers there was the same fragrance as from the first flower.

However, he himself was no more. He must have died last fall. The new flowers were good, only slightly worse, and Dasha again sad about him. She already went back, but suddenly stopped. Between the two narrow stones grew a new flower, even better and more beautiful than the old one. He was alive and patient, like his father, only stronger than him, because he lived in a stone.

It seemed to Dasha that the flower was reaching out to her and calling to herself with the voice of her fragrance.


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Summary of the story by AP Platonov “Unknown Flower”