Be So Kind!

Cheerful about sad, sad about cheerful.
Vasily Kilyakov’s story “Be so kind!” is very unusual. And for good reason!
At first, it might even seem a little humorous to someone, with its external cheerfulness. But that’s far from the case. You understand it later. At the end of the story, not a trace remains of that cheerfulness—because it can’t be otherwise: Vasily Kilyakov raises deeply tragic themes of human relationships. The theme of being unsettled in this life, the theme of the “little man” in society has been brought up many times. And now, in relative modern times, many people live a dull, uninteresting life; they get used to it and don’t even think that something can be changed. But then chance intervenes—and the “little man” suddenly sees that life can be completely different. With joy, he rushes into this new direction for him; he is happy to the extent he can be happy… And tragedy, if the same chance—showing such a vivid, such gentle light—suddenly just takes it and extinguishes it, stealing from the hero his last hope of what he had so naively reached for.