In "The Potudan River," Platonov tells the story of Nikita Firsov, a young, recently demobilized soldier returning home after the Civil War ? and details the difficulties he experiences intrinsically as he searches for both normalcy and significance in the post-war period. The story is heartbreaking. It seems as though Nikita is struggling from something akin to PTSD. He suffers from nightmares and suicidal inclinations throughout the story. There is even some indication that he has difficulty bedding his wife. He has been stripped of his identity; he does not know himself as anything but a byproduct of the war and he has trouble adjusting, either psychologically, or emotionally, or both, to day-to-day life upon returning home. One might wonder if Nikita even planned on making it home alive since, after all, his two older brothers both had fought and perished in war before him. Now that he has returned, he will need to decide how he will live from here on out, and where he will go to work. “Nikita had never lost his habits of work. For the war would be over and life would go on, and it was necessary to think about this in advance” (loc 2157). Life outside of a career, though, he had yet to considered. So without plan or purpose, he sets about living a life he believes he ought to be living, working the same trade as that of his father, and marrying a girl he had known in his childhood. He does not know how to live that kind of life, though, and consequently he falls victim to his own fears of inadequacy, consumed by his own self-hatred and doubt. “He decided somehow to live out the rest of his life, until he wasted away from shame and grief” (loc 2378). Nikita cannot cope and so he splits town, leaving his wife and his father behind to get on without him, presumably without a thought for their care or well-being. “The sadness of one’s own grief makes people indifferent to all other suffering” (loc 2214). He follows a b