>Compositions based on the work Quiet Flows the Don
Civil war as a tragedy of the people
Any war brings destruction and suffering. A civil war is especially cruel, when people who only yesterday were relatives to each other are at enmity. In his epic novel The Quiet Don, M. A. Sholokhov described the suffering of the Don Cossacks during civil war the first half of the XX century. He skillfully showed the negative consequences and the senselessness of this war, which did not spare a single family, did not pass by. If before the military and revolutionary events the Cossacks lived freely in prosperity and respect, then with their beginning they were drawn into a global conflict. People faced an unfamiliar and previously unseen problem, which side to take. They were not ready for this.
Knowing how many victims the war would bring, the people were against it, but they were purposefully drawn into the conflict that had already erupted, in which "brother goes against brother, and son against father." Even Grigory Melekhov, who was not cruel by nature, had to be killed more than once. Of course, this was a great test for him. After his first murder, when he hacked an Austrian in battle, Gregory could not recover for a long time. He was tormented by sleepless nights and conscience. But the war hardened everyone. Even women participated in it in their own way. Daria, the wife of Pyotr Melekhov, killed Kotlyarov without hesitation in revenge for her husband. She also supplied the soldiers with ammunition. Dunyasha, knowing that her lover was a brutal killer, married him anyway.
In this cruel bloody war, few people thought about its true causes and meaning. Not disdaining anything, many began to engage in looting, drunkenness and violence. In contrast to them, Grigory Melekhov from the beginning to the end of the novel seeks the truth, thinks about the meaning of everything that happens. His mother, Ilyinichna, being a wise woman, immediately understands the futility of this war. There are no "reds" or "whites" for her. They are all her children. The author himself main reason sees tragedy in the painful transition from the old way of life, formed over the centuries, to a new way of life. In the civil war there was a clash of two worlds. Everything that had become an integral part of existence collapsed and a new one was built - something that had to be used to.
Eternal in its value, the work “Quiet Flows the Don” by Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov, as a boundless panorama, presents us with the tragic events of the first quarter of the 20th century. Russian history. The minds of readers are struck by the terrible picture of the wars that have befallen the country, its people and every single person.
Touching upon the motive of the First World War, the author nevertheless places the strongest emphasis not on such a seemingly more comprehensive military arena, but on the Civil War of 1917-1922 localized in one country. For the writer, it was a life's work to portray, to reflect the spirit of his native people, his native land in the most difficult periods of the life of the state, at its turning points. And the Civil War, sadly, is the most telling example. Such a war is unusually terrible: it is not just a thirst for victory over a third-party enemy, a desire to acquire new lands and trophies, it is the murder of people close to you, your own people, enemies within your family, neighbors, farms, etc. This is some kind of warped caricature, breaking, breaking souls, hearts, houses, bonds of people. Mikhail Sholokhov portrayed all this drama realistically and without “censorship” using the example of the Melekhov family, their initially strong and, as they would now say, successful court.
A friendly family lives peacefully and harmoniously, works, cultivates the land, keeps the hearth and moral foundations of the “Orthodox Quiet Don”. Of course, some troubles happen in it, but this fundamentally changes nothing. And then comes and hits, as if with a butt on the head, war, fratricidal war, immoral and merciless. With her clawed paws, she takes, distorts the lives of people in turn, delaying her own pleasure, the head of the family - Pantelei Prokofievich, his son Peter Melekhov, matchmaker Miron Korshunov; Aksinya Astakhova, Daria Melekhova, old people and kids indiscriminately - the war takes everyone. The strong Melekhov family, friendship with neighbors, the entire social structure of the farm, village, region and, in the end, the whole state is collapsing. As in a kaleidoscope, friends and enemies, relatives and strangers change, and a spiritual break occurs inside the person himself. So, Grigory Melekhov, weighed down by his love throwing from his legal wife to another desired woman, is faced with a choice between the Red Army and the White Guards, he is desperately looking for the truth in their ranks. Gregory is a fighter for justice, he does not crave blood like a wild beast, he does not crave superiority, power. He wants the return of peace and tranquility to his native land and wants to contribute to this, but he does not know how exactly - the war has confused all the cards.
Despite all the complexity and tragedy of the terrible events, the formula for achieving peace and happiness becomes obvious to the reader at the end of the novel: the preservation of morality and the family, caring for the neighbors and flowers of this life - children.
Sholokhov was born on May 14, 1905 in the village of Kruzhilinsky in the village of Veshenskaya, Don District. Childhood years were spent in the farm Kruzhilinsky. He studied in Kargin, Moscow, Boguchar and Veshenskaya. He graduated from four classes of the gymnasium. At the time of the Great October Socialist Revolution, he studied at the men's gymnasium in one of the county towns of the Voronezh province. In 1918, when the occupying troops approached this city, he interrupted his studies and went home. From 1918 to the beginning of 1920, the Sholokhov family was alternately in the villages of Yelanskaya and Karginskaya in the Verkhnedonsky district. It was a difficult time: white and red waves swept the Don region - a civil war was raging. Teenager Misha "absorbed" the events taking place: battles, executions, poverty. Whites against reds, reds against whites, Cossacks against Cossacks. The stories are one scarier than the other.
The future writer not only eagerly listened to the stories of experienced Cossacks; he went to watch those returning from the front, saw the emaciated, bloodless faces of wounded soldiers, read newspapers and leaflets. Memory recorded faces, names, facts, the expression of human eyes, the reflection on the faces of joy, grief, fear, hope, mortal agony. An unprecedented trace was left by the terrible incident of those years in the soul of an impressionable young man, incredible pictures were painted by his mighty imagination. In the events of the civil war, in the acute class conflicts, in the stanitsa and peasant farmers who separated themselves, in the exploits that the Bolsheviks performed, in the cruel habits of the defenders of the old world, life opened up before the keen eye and inquisitive thought of an early ripe young man. The desire to tell about what he saw and experienced was forced to take up the pen. Although the little stories that he sent to the Komsomol newspapers and Ogonyok back in 1922 were not published, Sholokhov firmly decided to devote himself to literature. In the winter of 1924, in Moscow, he was interrupted by odd jobs in newspapers. Life was difficult: during the day - wandering around the editorial offices, at night - working on the manuscript.
Sholokhov's first story appeared on December 14, 1924 in the newspaper Molodoy Leninets. It was "Motherland". They discover a large cycle of Don stories, which was created by the writer in a year. The civil war for Sholokhov is a catastrophe in which human ties are destroyed. There are no right and wrong here, which means there can be no winners. The author’s position turns out to be wider than any socio-political concepts, as evidenced by the landscape that crowns the story: “And in the evening, when horsemen loomed behind the copse, the wind brought voices, horse snorting and the ringing of stirrups, a vulture kite reluctantly fell off the ataman’s shaggy head .
At first glance, it may seem that the story "Rodinka" is based on a social class conflict between the Red Army men, who establish Soviet power on the Don, and a gang that takes bread from peaceful Cossacks. Moreover, the drama of the depicted situation is aggravated by the fact that the class struggle demarcated not only the Don, but also the Cossack families: father and son find themselves on opposite sides of the barricade. However, in the state of mind of implacable enemies there is much in common. The life of the squadron commander Nikolka Koshevoy, like the life of the chieftain of the gang, got out of the usual norm. This is evidenced by the portraits and author's characteristics of the characters. In the portrait of Nikolka, Sholokhov emphasizes the contradiction between his young age and the harsh life experience that the civil war gave him: “Nikolka is broad-shouldered, looks beyond his years. His eyes are aging in radiant wrinkles and his back, stooped like an old man ”(the hero is 18 years old).
The main theme of the "Don Tales" can be defined as follows: the dehumanization of both the Reds and the Whites during the civil war and rare moments of the triumph of a very difficult reverse process - incarnation. At the same time, traditional Christian values, at first glance, are not taken into account by the author, but, nevertheless, the content of the inner spiritual life of the characters is built in accordance with the gospel commandments. It must be admitted that the best stories from the Don cycle, such as "The Foal" and "Strange Blood", are variations on biblical themes.
The conflict between the Reds and the bandits, in the work of Sholokhov, is increasingly giving way to a more important conflict - between the centuries-old norms of human life and the inhumanity of fratricidal war. Starting the conversation with an analysis of the senselessness and suicidality of the confrontation of the parties in the civil war ("Mole"), M. Sholokhov comes to the idea of the need to remove this mutual support by the New Testament morality: love your enemies. And this idea reaches its artistic peak in the story “Alien Blood”.
Approximately the same concept Sholokhov adheres to in the epic The Quiet Flows the Don. Working on it, Sholokhov proceeded from the fact that the people are the main driving force of history. This concept received a deep artistic embodiment in the novel: in the image folk life, life and work of the Cossacks, in the image of the participation of the people in historical events. Sholokhov showed that the path of the people in the revolution and civil war was difficult, tense, tragic. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the novel Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov spoke about the greatness of the historical path of the Russian people.
First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster, and the old soldier, confessing Christian wisdom, advises young Cossacks: “Remember one thing: if you want to be alive, get out of a mortal battle, you must observe human truth ...” Sholokhov describes with great skill the horrors of war, crippling people physically, and morally. Death, suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in the second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke joyful feelings among the Cossacks, they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of finishing it. How many of them have already died: not one Cossack widow grieved for the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand the historical events. Having returned from the fronts of the world war, the Cossacks did not yet know what tragedy of the fratricidal war they would have to endure in the near future. The Upper Don uprising appears in the image of Sholokhov as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don. There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of the representatives of the Soviet authorities on the Don in the novel are shown with great artistic power. Numerous executions of Cossacks carried out in the villages - the murder of Miron Korshunov and grandfather Trishka, who personified the Christian principle, preaching that all power is given by God, the actions of Commissar Malkin, who gave orders to shoot bearded Cossacks. Sholokhov showed in the novel that the Upper Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations peasant life and the age-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that became the basis of peasant morality and morality, which evolved over the centuries, and are inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already in the course of events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal character. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.” The life of the Cossacks is determined by two concepts - they are warriors and grain growers at the same time. It must be said that historically the Cossacks developed on the borders of Russia, where enemy raids were frequent, so the Cossacks were forced to defend their land with weapons in their hands, which was distinguished by its special fertility and rewarded a hundredfold for the work invested in it. Later, already under the rule of the Russian Tsar, the Cossacks existed as a privileged military class, which largely determined the preservation of ancient customs and traditions among the Cossacks. Sholokhov shows the Cossacks as very traditional. For example, from an early age they get used to the horse, which serves them not just as an instrument of production, but as a true friend in battle and a comrade in labor (the description of the crying hero Christoni takes the description of the funnel taken away by the Reds by the heart). All Cossacks are brought up in respect for their elders and unquestioning obedience to them (Pantelei Prokofievich could punish Grigory even when hundreds and thousands of people were under the latter's command). The Cossacks are controlled by the ataman, elected by the military Cossack Circle, where Pantelei Prokofievich is sent to Sholokhov.
War and peace - these two states of life of the human community, erected by Leo Tolstoy into the title formula of his great novel, to which the author of The Quiet Flows the Don oriented himself (he constantly read War and Peace at the time of thinking and working on the epic, he took with him and to the front of the Great Patriotic War), in fact, for Sholokhov, they are the two main layers of national life, the two points of human reference. Tolstoy's influence on Sholokhov, especially in his view of the war, has been noted more than once, but still the author of The Quiet Flows the Don has his own in-depth understanding of the peaceful and military status of life, coming from greater proximity to the natural type of existence, the root feeling of being in general .
Sholokhov’s world war, revolution, civil war in many ways only condenses to a terrible, repulsive concentrate what exists in a peaceful state, in the very nature of man and things in this world: impulses of separation, displacement, passionate selfhood, mockery of a person, malice and murder . The world is twisted by its bundle of contradictions and struggle - having heated up, they will come out in a civil confrontation, they will reach the Homeric “bloodshed”, violent mutual extermination, the complete destruction of the former way of life. Peace and war are states of relative, visible health (with a chronicity driven inside) and acute illness of one organism. The diagnosis of both phases of the disease, by and large, is the same: it is determined by that central ideological opposition of the Quiet Don, which Fedorov defined as relatedness, unrelatedness despite the fact that kinship is both the most naturally deep and irrevocable relationship between people, children of one father, heavenly and earthly, and at the same time the most distorted, up to its opposite, even in its warm and secret core - the family and the community. It is in the fratricidal civil confrontation, ironically and mercilessly backed by ideology, on the one hand, and on the other, by the instinct of physical survival and protection of one’s home and well-being, that all the suicidality and mutual extermination of the “tit for tat” principle is untiringly fed by poisoned revengeful passion - to the last enemy and offender! Sholokhov does not get tired of clearly demonstrating how, inflaming more and more, the passionate indulgence in hatred, evil, murder is aggravated, how it hits its bearers with a boomerang. Here, in the soul of Petro Melekhov, who was forced to dance to the common tune, currying favor with Fomin, “hatred pounded fitfully and his hands convulsed with a cramp from an itchy desire to hit, kill.” When the opportunity arises, no one is holding back either hatred or this desire. Bitterness, frenzy - mutually and it is growing in degrees. The installation is for the complete physical destruction of the enemy, there is no question of some kind of disassembly-sorting of people, their disposal, transformation: “Shovel this evil spirits from the ground” and that’s it! An officer of the Don Army harshly, coldly, like a breeder, signs the final verdict to the captured Red Army soldiers: “This bastard, which is a breeding ground for all sorts of diseases, both physical and social, must be exterminated. There is nothing to babysit them!” The same thing is mirrored in the thoughts and speeches of Mishka Koshevoy: camaraderie and unanimity by cutting down the rebellious, vacillating human material!
The discovery of the Don cycle by M. Sholokhov consisted in the fact that he showed the criminality of the civil war, its disastrous destructive consequences both for the fate of the Quiet Don and for Russia as a whole. Don writers before Sholokhov do not have this soul-shattering senselessness and sinfulness of fratricide. R. Kumov, S. Arefin, P. Krasnov only approached this topic, and M. Sholokhov developed it and deepened it. Very early in his life, the idea matures that both sides are wrong in this war, for which he sometimes received the label of a dubious fellow traveler.
And there, and here between the rows
The same voice sounds:
“Whoever is not for us is against us.
No one is indifferent: the truth is with us.”
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And time with your own strength
I pray for both.
M.A. Voloshin
A civil war is a tragic page in the history of any nation, because if in a liberation (patriotic) war a nation defends its territory and independence from a foreign aggressor, then in a civil war people of one nation destroy each other in order to change the social system - in order to overthrow the old one and establish a new one. state political system.
In Soviet literature of the 20s of the XX century, the topic of the civil war was very popular, since the young Soviet Republic had just won this war, the Red troops defeated the White Guards and interventionists on all fronts. In works about the civil war, Soviet writers had something to sing about and something to be proud of. The first stories of Sholokhov (later they compiled the collection Don Stories) are devoted to depicting the civil war on the Don, but the young writer perceived and showed the civil war as a national tragedy. Because, firstly, any war brings death, terrible torment to people and destruction of the country; and secondly, in a fratricidal war, one part of the nation destroys the other, as a result, the nation destroys itself. Because of this, Sholokhov did not see either romance or sublime heroism in the civil war, in contrast, for example, to A.A. Fadeev, the author of the novel Defeat. Sholokhov directly stated in the introduction to the story “Azure Steppe”: “Some writer who has not smelled gunpowder very touchingly talks about the civil war, the Red Army men - certainly “brothers”, about the smelly gray feather grass. (...) In addition, you can hear about how in the steppes of the Don and Kuban, red soldiers died, choking on pompous words. (...) In fact, feather grass is a blond grass. Harmful herb, odorless. (...) The trenches overgrown with plantain and swan, silent witnesses of recent battles, could tell about how ugly and simply people died in them. In other words, Sholokhov believes that it is necessary to write the truth about the civil war, without embellishing the details and without ennobling the meaning of this war. Probably in order to emphasize the disgusting essence of real war, the young writer places frankly naturalistic, repulsive fragments in some stories: detailed description the chopped body of Foma Korshunov from the story "Nakhalyonok", the details of the murder of the chairman of the farm council Efim Ozerov from the story "The Mortal Enemy", the details of the execution of the grandchildren of grandfather Zakhar from the story "Azure Steppe", etc. Soviet critics unanimously noted these naturalistically reduced descriptions and considered them to be a shortcoming of Sholokhov's early stories, but the writer never corrected these “shortcomings”.
If Soviet writers (A. Serafimovich "Iron Stream", D.A. Furmanov "Chapaev", A.G. Malyshkin "The Fall of Daire" and others) inspiredly depicted how the units of the Red Army heroically fight with the whites, then Sholokhov showed the essence of the civil wars, when members of the same family, neighbors or fellow villagers, living side by side for decades, kill each other, as they turned out to be defenders or enemies of the ideas of the revolution. Koshevoy's father, a white ataman, kills his son, a red commander (the story "Birthmark"); the kulaks kill a Komsomol member, almost a boy, Grigory Frolov, because he sent a letter to the newspaper about their machinations with the land (the story "The Shepherd"); food commissar Ignat Bodyagin sentences his own father, the first fist in the village, to be shot (the story "Food commissar"); the red machine gunner Yakov Shibalok kills the woman he loves because she turned out to be a spy for ataman Ignatiev (the story "Shibalkov's seed"); fourteen-year-old Mitka kills his father in order to save his older brother, a Red Army soldier (the story "Bakhchevnik"), etc.
The split in families, as Sholokhov shows, does not occur because of the eternal conflict of generations (the conflict of "fathers" and "children"), but because of the different socio-political views of members of the same family. “Children” usually sympathize with the Reds, since the slogans of Soviet power seem to them “extremely fair” (the story “Family Man”): the land - to the peasants who cultivate it; power in the country - to deputies elected by the people, power in the localities - to the elected committees of the poor. And the "fathers" want to preserve the old order, familiar to the older generation and objectively beneficial to the kulaks: Cossack traditions, egalitarian land use, the Cossack circle on the farm. Although, it must be admitted, this is not always the case both in life and in Sholokhov's stories. After all, a civil war affects the entire nation, so the motivation for choosing (whose side to fight on) can be very different. In the story “Kolovert”, the middle brother Mikhail Kramskov is a White Cossack, because he rose to the rank of officer in the tsarist army, and his father Pyotr Pakhomych and brothers Ignat and Grigory, middle peasants, join the Red Army detachment; in the story “Alien Blood”, son Peter died in the white army, defending Cossack privileges, and his father, grandfather Gavrila, reconciled with the Reds, as he fell in love with the young food commissar Nikolai Kosykh with all his heart.
The civil war not only makes enemies of adult family members, but does not spare even young children. Seven-year-old Mishka Korshunov from the story "Nakhalyonok" is shot when he rushes to the village at night for "help". The newborn son Shibalk from the story "Shibalkovo Seed" wants to kill hundreds of special purpose soldiers, since his mother is a gangster spy, half a hundred died because of her betrayal. Only the tearful prayer of Shibalka saves the child from terrible punishment. In the story "Alyoshkino's Heart", the bandit, surrendering, hides behind a four-year-old girl, whom he holds in his arms so that the Red Army soldiers do not shoot him in the heat of the moment.
The civil war does not allow anyone to stay away from the general slaughter. The validity of this thought is confirmed by the fate of the ferryman Mikishara, the hero of the story "Family Man". Miki-shara is a widower and father of a large family, he is completely indifferent to politics, his children are important to him, whom he wants to put on their feet. The White Cossacks, testing the hero, order him to kill the two eldest sons of the Red Army, and Mikishara kills them in order to stay alive himself and take care of the seven younger children.
Sholokhov depicts the extreme bitterness of both warring sides - the Reds and the Whites. The heroes of the "Don stories" are sharply and definitely opposed to each other, which leads to the schematism of images. The writer shows the atrocities of the whites and kulaks, who ruthlessly kill the poor, the Red Army and rural activists. At the same time, Sholokhov draws the enemies of the Soviet regime, usually without delving into their characters, into the motives of behavior, in the history of life, that is, one-sidedly and simplified. The fists and the White Guards in the Don Stories are cruel, treacherous, and greedy. Suffice it to recall Makarchykha from the story "Alyoshkino's Heart", who smashed the head of a girl dying of hunger with an iron - Alyoshka's sister, or the rich farmer Ivan Alekseev: he hired fourteen-year-old Alyoshka as a worker "for grub", forced the boy to work like an adult peasant and mercilessly beat "for every trifle." The unnamed White Guard officer from the story "The Foal" kills in the back the Red Army soldier Trofim, who had just saved the foal from the whirlpool.
Sholokhov does not hide the fact that his political and human sympathies are on the side of the Soviet authorities, therefore, the village poor become positive characters for the young writer (Alyoshka Popov from the story "Alyoshkino Heart", Efim Ozerov from the story "Mortal Enemy"), Red Army soldiers (Yakov Shibalok from the story "Shibalkovo seed", Trofim from the story "The Foal"), communists (Ignat Bodyagin from the story "Food Commissar", Foma Korshunov from the story "Nakhalyonok"), Komsomol members (Grigory Frolov from the story "Shepherd", Nikolai Koshevoy from the story "Mole") . In these heroes, the author emphasizes a sense of justice, generosity, sincere faith in a happy future for themselves and their children, which they associate with the new government.
However, already in the early Don Stories, statements of heroes appear, indicating that not only the White Guards, but also the Bolsheviks are pursuing a policy of brute force on the Don, and this inevitably gives rise to the resistance of the Cossacks and, therefore, further inflates the civil war. In the story “Food Commissar,” Father Bodyagin expresses his resentment to his son, the food commissar: “I need to be shot for my kindness, for not letting me into my barn, I am a contra, and who fumbles through other people's bins, this one under the law? Rob, your strength." Grandfather Gavrila from the story "Alien Blood" thinks about the Bolsheviks: "They invaded the Cossack primordial life as enemies, their grandfather's life, ordinary, was turned inside out, like an empty pocket." In the story “On the Donprodkom and the misadventures of Comrade Ptitsyn, who replaces the gel Don,” which is considered weak and usually not analyzed by critics, the methods of requisitioning during the civil war are shown quite frankly. Comrade Ptitsyn reports how famously he fulfills the order of his boss, food commissar Goldin: “I go back and pump bread. And he got so far that there was only wool left on the peasant. And I would have lost that good, I would have taken it for felt boots, but then Goldin was transferred to Saratov. In Don Stories, Sholokhov does not yet focus on the fact that the political extremism of whites and reds equally repels ordinary people, but later, in the novel Quiet Don, Grigory Melekhov will clearly speak out on this subject: “To me, if I tell the truth, neither the one nor the other is conscientious.” His life will become an example of the tragic fate of an ordinary person who finds himself between two irreconcilably hostile political camps.
Summing up, it should be said that Sholokhov in his early stories portrays the civil war as a time of great national grief. The mutual cruelty and hatred of the Reds and Whites lead to a national tragedy: neither one nor the other understands the absolute value of human life, and the blood of Russian people flows like a river.
Almost all the stories of the Don cycle have a tragic ending; positive characters, drawn by the author with great sympathy, perish at the hands of the White Guards and kulaks. But after Sholokhov's stories, there is no feeling of hopeless pessimism. In the story "Nakhalyonok", the White Cossacks kill Foma Korshunov, but his son Mishka is alive; in the story “A Mortal Enemy”, fists lie in wait for Yefim Ozerov when he returns to the farm alone, but before his death, Yefim recalls the words of his friend: “Remember, Yefim, they will kill you - there will be twenty new Yefims! .. As in a fairy tale about heroes ... »; in the story "The Shepherd" after the death of the nineteen-year-old shepherd Grigory, his sister, seventeen-year-old Dunyatka, goes to the city to fulfill her and Grigory's dream - to study. This is how the writer expresses historical optimism in his stories: the common people, even in the context of a civil war, retain in their souls the best human qualities: noble dreams of justice, a high desire for knowledge and creative work, sympathy for the weak and small, conscientiousness, etc.
It can be seen that already in his first works Sholokhov raises global universal problems: man and revolution, man and people, the fate of man in an era of world and national upheavals. True, the young writer did not give a convincing disclosure of these problems in short stories, and could not give. What was needed here was an epic with a long duration of action, with numerous heroes and events. This is probably why Sholokhov's next work after Don Stories was the epic novel about the civil war Quiet Don.
Civil war in the image of M. A. Sholokhov
In 1917, the war turned into a bloody turmoil. This is no longer a national war requiring sacrificial duties from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the onset of the revolutionary era, relations between classes and estates change dramatically, moral foundations and traditional culture are rapidly destroyed, and with them the state. The disintegration that was generated by the morality of war embraces all social and spiritual ties, brings society into a state of struggle of all against all, to the loss of the Fatherland and faith by people.
If we compare the face of the war depicted by the writer before this milestone and after it, then an increase in tragedy becomes noticeable, starting from the moment the world war turned into a civil one. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for its quick end, because the authorities "must end the war, because the people, and we do not want war."
The First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster,
Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war, crippling people both physically and morally. Death, suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in the second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke joyful feelings among the Cossacks, they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of finishing it. How many of them have already died: not one Cossack widow voted for the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand the historical events. Having returned from the fronts of the world war, the Cossacks did not yet know what tragedy of the fratricidal war they would have to endure in the near future. The Upper Don uprising appears in the image of Sholokhov as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.
There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of the representatives of the Soviet authorities on the Don in the novel are shown with great artistic power. Sholokhov showed in the novel that the Upper Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations of peasant life and the centuries-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that became the basis of peasant morality and morality, which developed over the centuries, and passed down from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already in the course of events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal character. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.”
The epic covers a period of great upheavals in Russia. These upheavals had a strong impact on the fate of the Don Cossacks described in the novel. Eternal values determine the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period that Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love for the native land, respect for the older generation, love for a woman, the need for freedom - these are the basic values without which a free Cossack cannot imagine himself.
Depiction of the civil war as a tragedy of the people
Not only civil, any war for Sholokhov is a disaster. The writer convincingly shows that the cruelties of the civil war were prepared by the four years of the First World War.
Dark symbolism contributes to the perception of the war as a nationwide tragedy. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarsky, “at night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible cries hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, soiled by calves, groaned over the brown, haunted graves.
“To be thin,” the old people prophesied, hearing owl voices from the cemetery.
“The war will come.”
The war broke into the Cossack kurens like a fiery tornado just at the time of harvesting, when the people cherished every minute. The orderly rushed in, raising a cloud of dust behind him. The fateful...
Sholokhov demonstrates how just one month of war changes people beyond recognition, cripples their souls, devastates them to the very bottom, makes them look at the world around them in a new way.
Here the writer describes the situation after one of the battles. In the middle of the forest, corpses are completely scattered. “They lay flat. Shoulder to shoulder, in various poses, often obscene and scary.
A plane flies by, drops a bomb. Next, Yegorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: “The released intestines smoked, shimmering with pale pink and blue.”
This is the merciless truth of war. And what blasphemy over morality, reason, betrayal of humanism became under these conditions the glorification of the feat. The generals needed a "hero". And he was quickly “invented”: Kuzma Kryuchkov, who allegedly killed more than a dozen Germans. They even began to produce cigarettes with a portrait of the "hero". The press wrote about him excitedly.
Sholokhov tells about the feat in a different way: “But it was like this: people who collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind, stumbled, knocked down in animal horror that declared them, delivered blind blows, mutilated themselves and horses and fled, frightened by a shot, killed a man, departed morally crippled.
They called it a feat."
People at the front are cutting each other in a primitive way. Russian soldiers hang like corpses on wire fences. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The ground is thickly stained with human blood. Everywhere settled hills of graves. Sholokhov created a mournful cry for the dead, cursed the war with irresistible words.
But even more terrible in the image of Sholokhov is the civil war. Because she is fratricidal. People of the same culture, one faith, one blood engaged in an unheard-of extermination of each other. This "conveyor belt" of senseless, terrible in terms of cruelty, murders, shown by Sholokhov, shocks to the core.
... Punisher Mitka Korshunov spares neither the old nor the young. Mikhail Koshevoy, satisfying his need for class hatred, kills his centenary grandfather Grishaka. Daria shoots the prisoner. Even Gregory, succumbing to the psychosis of the senseless destruction of people in the war, becomes a murderer and a monster.
There are many amazing scenes in the novel. One of them is the massacre of the podtelkovites over forty captured officers. “The shots were fired feverishly. The officers, colliding, rushed in all directions. A lieutenant with beautiful female eyes, in a red officer's hood, ran, clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if through a barrier. He fell and didn't get up. The tall, brave Yesaul was cut down by two. He clutched at the blades of the checkers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child, fell on his knees, on his back, rolled his head in the snow; his face showed only bloodshot eyes and a black mouth drilled with a continuous scream. His flying checkers slashed across his face, along his black mouth, and he was still screaming in a voice thin with horror and pain. Having squatted over him, the Cossack, in an overcoat with a torn off strap, finished him off with a shot. The curly-haired cadet almost broke through the chain - he was overtaken and killed by some ataman with a blow to the back of the head. The same chieftain drove a bullet between the shoulder blades of the centurion, who was running in his overcoat, which had opened from the wind. The centurion sat down and scratched his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired podsaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he kicked a deep hole in the snow and would have beaten like a good horse on a leash, if the pitying Cossacks had not finished it. These mournful lines are extremely expressive, filled with horror before what is being done. They are read with unbearable pain, with spiritual trepidation and carry the most desperate curse of a fratricidal war.
No less scary are the pages devoted to the execution of the "podtelkovtsy". People who at first “willingly” went to the execution “as if to a rare merry spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of a cruel and inhuman execution, are in a hurry to disperse, so that by the time the massacre of the leaders - Podtelkov and Krivoshlykov - there were completely few people.
However, Podtelkov is mistaken, presumptuously believing that people dispersed because of the recognition of his innocence. They could not endure the inhuman, unnatural spectacle of their violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life.
Two “truths” collide on the pages of the novel: the “truth” of the Whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtelkov: “Traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the “truth” opposing it, Podtelkov, who thinks that he is defending the interests of the “working people.”
Blinded by their "truths", both sides mercilessly and senselessly, in some kind of demonic frenzy, exterminate each other, not noticing that there are fewer and fewer of those for whom they are trying to approve their ideas. Talking about the war, about the military life of the most combative tribe among the entire Russian people, Sholokhov, however, nowhere, not in a single line, praised the war. No wonder his book, as noted by the well-known Sholokhov expert V. Litvinov, was banned by the Maoists, who considered the war the best way social improvement of life on Earth. Quiet Don is a passionate denial of any such cannibalism. Love for people is incompatible with love for war. War is always a people's misfortune.
Death in the perception of Sholokhov is what opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially violent death. In this sense, the creator of The Quiet Flows the Don is a faithful successor to the best humanistic traditions of both Russian and world literature.
Despising the extermination of man by man in war, knowing what tests the moral sense is subjected to in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, on the pages of his novel, painted the classic pictures of mental stamina, endurance and humanism that took place in the war. A humane attitude towards one's neighbor, humanity cannot be completely destroyed. This is evidenced, in particular, by many of the actions of Grigory Melekhov: his contempt for looting, the protection of the Pole Frani, the salvation of Stepan Astakhov.
The concepts of “war” and “humanity” are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and at the same time, against the backdrop of bloody civil strife, the moral possibilities of a person, how beautiful he can be, are especially clearly drawn. War severely examines the moral fortress, unknown to peaceful days.
