«How could you do all this without proper arrangement?» Pyotr Yevseyevich would upset himself and rebuke the young communists. «This is the soil of the State, the State will also give you a drinking well — wait automatically, and for now drink the rains! Your work is to plough the soil within the bounds of your lots of land.»
Pyotr Yevseyevich would leave Koz'ma with a certain grief that citizens lack water, but also with a happiness of expectation that, therefore, the forces of the State must be coming there and he shall see them on the way. Moreover, Pyotr Yevseyevich liked to weaken his peace of mind, as a test, also by devising a small doubt. This small doubt in the State was on Pyotr Yevseyevich's mind after Koz'ma because of lack of water in the village. At home Pyotr Yevseyevich would take out an old map of Austro-Hungary and spend a long time examining it in quiet meditation; he cared not for Austro-Hungary but rather for a live State outlined by its borders, a hedged and protected meaning of civil life.
Under a painting of the Battle of Sevastopol, which adorned the warm, stable dwelling of Pyotr Yevseyevich, there hung a popular map of the united Soviet Union. Here Pyotr Yevseyevich would observe with more concern: he troubled himself about the unshakeability of the border line. But what is a border line? It is a still frontier of a live and faithful army behind whose backs the bent-down labour peacefully sighs.
In labour there is a meekness of squandered life, but this spent life is accumulated in the form of the State, and one must love it with an undivided love, because it is in the State that the life of the living and of the dead is untouchably preserved. Buildings, gardens and railways — what are they but a short life of labour captured for ages? Because of this, Pyotr Yevseyevich was right in feeling compassion not for the transitory citizens but for their work, petrified in the image of the State. All the more necessary was it to conserve all labour that was to become the common body of the State.