“Get up and go” Nagibin in summary


The story “Get up and go” – the story of the relationship between father and son, on whose behalf the narrator-author acts. Divided into relatively short twenty-two chapters, she honestly talks about filial feelings, sincere and spontaneous, passing from adoration to pity, from deep devotion to duty, from sincere love for condescension and even anger. The well-established fate of the writer’s son comes into constant contradiction with the fate of the imprisoned father, the exiled father, who does not have a decent and permanent residence.

His son’s first impressions of his father are beautiful, well-worn banknotes associated with the word “exchange”, where his father works, they are allowed to play children. Then the boy gets the impression that his father is the strongest, fastest and most resourceful. This opinion is supported by a home legend. In the first world father deserved two St. George’s cross, went to bayonet attack, replaced

in battle the killed commander. He was cocky, his mother’s fans were afraid of him. He was the winner. Famous in Moscow, a beautiful woman writer wrote a whole book about how she loved her father and how jealous of him to her sister, an even more famous and beautiful woman. But one day my father is arrested, condemned for three years “free” settlement in Siberia. The son with his mother, left with almost no money and no support,

The next place of exile of his father is Saratov, where the son feels happy, he begins to study here collecting butterflies and receives the first lesson from the exile biologist who extinguished his frenzy of gathering, which became the destructive beginning of his character. A little older, he begins to collect maps and atlases. All the walls of his room are hung with maps of the globe and five continents, terrestrial flora and fauna. Returned at last from exile, the father is glad to meet with the changed house and family, but he is forced to leave for settlement in Baksheevo settlement, the center that serves Shaturskaya power station. However, even here during

the May pre-holiday cleansing in 1937, his father was arrested, accusing him of setting fire to peat works. It does not help the fact that he was in Moscow during the fire.

In the 40th, a new meeting of the son with his father took place in the forced labor camp. This is one of the happiest days they have lived together. During a feast in a cold barrack, the son feels kind and heroic, bosses and prisoners, nice people and scoundrels bow out with him. Everyone looks at him with delight and hope, as if he is endowed with some kind of power, and “this power is undoubtedly from literature”, from a printed printed word. “And you look like a real man,” says the father, “it’s the most beautiful time, youth is much better than adolescence and adolescence.” After the war, my father lives in Rokhma, in a wilderness, forgotten by God. It is thin, skinny and bony, covered with yellowish skin, forehead, cheekbones, jaws, nose and some bone knobs near the ears, which are only among the deceased from hunger. On it the boots, cut from automobile tires, Baggy trousers with two blue patches on his knees and a washed shirt. The child, who was a wealthy writer, married to the daughter of a Soviet nobleman, feels a deep pity to his father, mixed with disgust. “I felt a touch, or rather, a shadow of a touch on my knee, I dropped my eyes and saw something yellow, patchy, slowly, with timid caressing crawling along my leg. Some bones, tied with a dark, black-and-yellow membrane, frog’s foot, and this frog’s foot was the hand of his father! ” It’s sad and hard to see my father’s son at the extreme stage of physiological humiliation. But with all this, the father, like a man of pride, tells his son about the past years of grief and humiliation very sparingly, without complaining, not indignant, perhaps because he wanted to spare the son who is young and who still has to live and live.

In Rokhma, the father again works in the planning department with an arithmometer in his hands, but without the same shine, often wrinkling his forehead, apparently forgetting some figure. He is still conscientious, but his employees do not understand him and often humiliate him. The son oppresses the futility of his father’s fate. But finally my father gets the opportunity to come to Moscow, enter the old familiar apartment, take a bath, sit with his family at the table. Close people hide their father from friends and acquaintances, for which they often ask him to go out into the corridor, stay in a dark room or in the restroom.

The return to Moscow was not the same as it was seen by the father. His generation is very thin, who disappeared in exile, who died in the war. Surviving Mohicans – people are old-fashioned, decent, the father meets with them, but from the first attempts refuses renewal of former communications. Hopelessly aged, not succeeded in anything, people crushed by fear are uninteresting to him.

Shortly before his death, his father, who had regained his former confidence, came to Moscow and, as it were, met with her again: so much has changed around. But, having left for Rokhmu, he falls ill and no longer rises. His son never managed to return him to the bosom of the family.


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“Get up and go” Nagibin in summary