Female infidelity is a rather complex phenomenon. First, with the social ...
Serafimovich, Mayakovsky, Furmanov, and after them the young writers opposed the depiction of the revolution, the civil war as a natural element, emphasized the organizing role of the party in the popular movement. Sholokhov turned to the topic of the civil war following Furmanov and Serafimovich. It was these writers that he received high praise and recognition. It can be assumed that Sholokhov's works on the civil war met with Furmanov's approval primarily because they were close to his ideological positions, because idealization of the spontaneous principle in the revolutionary movement was alien to them. A. Serafimovich also appreciated the "Don Stories" for its vital truthfulness. He was the first to note the peculiarities of Sholokhov's creative manner; vital simplicity, dynamism, imagery of the language of stories, a sense of proportion in "acute moments", "a delicate grasping eye", "the ability to snatch the most characteristic from many signs",
In his early stories, Sholokhov realistically visually, from the ideological standpoint of the writer of the new world, explains the social meaning of the events that took place on the Don in the first years of the formation of Russian power. The first collection of Sholokhov's "Don Stories" (1926) opened with the story "Birthmark". The commander of the red squadron, Nikolai Koshevoy, is fighting an irreconcilable struggle with the white gangs. One day, his squadron collides with one of the gangs, headed by the father of Nikolai Koshevoy. In battle, the father kills his son and accidentally recognizes him by his birthmark. Opening the collection with this story, Sholokhov thereby drew attention to one of the central thoughts of the entire collection - an acute class struggle delimited not only the Don, the village, the farm, but also the Cossack families. One side defends property, class interests, the other defends the gains of the revolution. Communists, Komsomol members, the youth of the village boldly break with the old world, heroically defend the interests and rights of the people in severe battles with it.
The second collection "Azure Steppe" (1926) begins with a story of the same name, the introduction to which, written in 1927, is openly polemical. The author sneers at the writers who are very touchingly lisp about "the odorous gray feather grass", about the Red Army men, "brothers" who allegedly died, "choking on pompous words." Sholokhov asserts that the Red fighters died for the revolution in the Don and Kuban steppes "it is ugly simple." Resolutely opposing idealization, false romanticization of reality, he portrays the struggle of the people for Soviet power as a complex social process, traces the growth of revolutionary sentiments in the Cossack environment, overcoming difficulties and contradictions on the path to a new life.
Almost simultaneously with Sholokhov, writers such as S. Podyachev, A. Neverov, L. Seifullina and others revealed the acuteness of the brutal class struggle in the countryside during the Civil War, showing the new that the revolution brought to the countryside. However, a number of writers continued to focus on the “idiocy” of the village, on the supposedly eternal inertia of the “muzhik”, not noticing the revolutionary renewal of the village and its people. Sun. Ivanov in the collection "Secret Secret" artificially isolated the peasants from the social struggle, carried away by the depiction of their biological instincts. K. Fedin in the story "Transvaal" and the stories of the collection of the same name did not notice the triumph of new, social relations in the Russian countryside. By exaggerating the role of the kulak, he thereby violated the real balance of forces, paying primary attention to the inertia and stagnation of village life.
In 1925, L. Leonov's novel "Badgers" was published, in which the writer, in contrast to the early stories, claimed the victory of the organizing principle in the revolution over the elements of the old world. However, the author has not yet succeeded in clearly showing the stratification of the village. The class struggle was replaced by the occasional litigation of two villages over the ownership of the mows. This litigation determined the attitude of the peasants to the Russian government. Drawing two brothers, Semyon and Pavel Rakhleev, participating in the struggle on the side of two hostile camps, L. Leonov is guided not so much by the need to show the class struggle, which delimited even families, as by the desire to base the work on a psychologically tense conflict.
Sholokhov was interested in the class, social struggle, which led to the ideological delimitation of members of the same family. In the story "The Wormhole" the writer depicts the "rift" of a wealthy kulak family. The younger son, the Komsomol member Stepan, opposes the father and brother, who are hostile to the Russian government. He cannot be silent knowing
that they are deceiving the Soviet government, concealing their surplus grain. The enmity in the family reaches the point that Yakov Alekseevich and his eldest son Maxim kill the hated Stepan.
Eternal in its value, the work "Quiet Don" by Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov presents before us as an endless panorama tragic events the first quarter of the XX century of Russian history. The minds of readers are struck by the terrible picture of the wars that have befallen the country, its people and each individual person.
Touching upon the motive of the First World War, the author makes a strong 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 lifelong task to portray, 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 an outside enemy, a desire to acquire new lands and trophies, it is the murder of loved ones, people dear to you by yourself, enemies within your family, neighbors, farms, etc. This is some kind of warped caricature, breaking, breaking souls, hearts, houses, bonds of people. All this drama Mikhail Sholokhov realistically and without "censorship" portrayed the example of the Melekhov family, their at first strong and, as they would say now, successful court.
A friendly family lives peacefully and smoothly, 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 does not change anything. And then comes and strikes, as if with a butt on the head, a war, a fratricidal, immoral and merciless war. With her clawed paws, she takes, distorts the lives of people in turn, delaying her own pleasure, the head of the family - Panteley Prokofievich, his son Peter Melekhov, matchmaker Miron Korshunov; Aksinya Astakhova, Daria Melekhova, old people and children indiscriminately - all are taken by the war. A strong family Melekhovs, friendship with neighbors, the entire social structure of the farm, village, region and, in the end, the whole state collapses. As in a kaleidoscope, friends and enemies, relatives and strangers change, and a spiritual break occurs within the person himself. So, Grigory Melekhov, weighed down by his love throwing from his legal wife to another desired woman, faces 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 thirst for blood like a wild beast, does not thirst for 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 exactly how - the war has confused all the cards.
Despite all the complexity and tragedy of terrible events, the formula for achieving peace and happiness becomes obvious to the reader at the end of the novel: preserving morality and family, caring for neighbors and the flowers of this life - children.
Civil war as depicted by M. A. Sholokhov
In 1917, the war turned into a bloody turmoil. This is no longer a patriotic war requiring sacrificial duty from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the onset of the revolutionary period, relations between classes and estates changed dramatically, moral foundations and traditional culture, and with them the state, were rapidly destroyed. The disintegration that was engendered by the morality of war covers all social and spiritual ties, leads society to 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 and after this milestone, then the intensification of tragedy becomes noticeable, starting from the moment of the transition of the world war into a civil war. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for its early end, because the authorities "must finish the war, then, both the people and we do not want war."
The first World War depicted by Sholokhov as a national disaster,
Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war, crippling people both physically and mentally. 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 a joyful feeling among the Cossacks; they treated it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of ending it. How many of them have already died: not one Cossack widow has voiced over 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 Verkhne-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 regime on the Don, is shown in the novel with great artistic force. Sholokhov also showed in the novel that the Verkhne-Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations of peasant life and the age-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that have become the basis of peasant morality and morality that have developed over the centuries and are inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already in the course of the 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 strongly affected the fate of the Don Cossacks, described in the novel. Eternal values define the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period, which Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love to 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.
The depiction of the civil war as a tragedy of the people
Not only civil war, any war for Sholokhov is a disaster. The writer convincingly shows that the atrocities of the civil war were prepared by the four years of the First World War.
Gloomy symbolism contributes to the perception of war as a national tragedy. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarskoye, “an owl roared in the bell tower at night. Shaky and terrible screams hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, fossilized by calves, moaning over the brown, poisoned graves.
- To be thin, - the old men prophesied, having heard from the cemetery owl voices.
"The war will bring on."
The war burst into the Cossack kurens like a fiery tornado just during the harvest, when the people treasured every minute. The messenger rushed in, raising a cloud of dust behind him. Fatal has come ...
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 is a writer describing the situation after one of the battles. In the middle of the forest, corpses are scattered everywhere. “We lay down for a while. Shoulder to shoulder, in various positions, often obscene and scary. "
A plane flies by, drops a bomb. Then Yegorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: "The released intestines were smoking, casting pale pink and blue."
This is the merciless truth of the war. And what a blasphemy against morality, reason, a betrayal of humanism became in these conditions the glorification of heroism. 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 had collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands on the destruction of their own kind, in their declared animal horror, stumbled, knocked over, inflicted blind blows, disfigured themselves and horses and fled, frightened by a shot, who killed a person, the morally crippled departed.
They called it a feat. "
In a primitive way, people at the front cut each other down. Russian soldiers are hanging corpses on the barbed wire. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The earth is thickly stained with human blood. Hills of graves settled everywhere. Sholokhov created a mournful lament for the dead, cursed the war with irresistible words.
But the civil war is even more terrible in Sholokhov's portrayal. Because she is fratricidal. People of one culture, one faith, one blood engaged in extermination of each other on an unheard-of scale. This "conveyor belt" of senseless, terrible in cruelty murders, shown by Sholokhov, is shaking to the depths of the soul.
... Punisher Mitka Korshunov spares neither old nor small. Mikhail Koshevoy, satisfying his need for class hatred, kills his hundred-year-old 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.
The novel has many stunning scenes. One of them is the massacre of the Podtelkovites over forty captured officers. “Shots were feverishly caught. The officers, colliding, rushed scatteringly. The lieutenant with beautiful female eyes, in a red officer's hat, ran, clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if over a barrier. He fell - and never got up. The tall, brave esaul was cut by two. He grabbed the blades of the checkers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child - he fell to his knees, on his back, rolled his head over the snow; his face showed only blood-stained eyes and a black mouth drilled with a continuous cry. His flying checkers slashed across his face, over his black mouth, and he still screamed in a voice thin with horror and pain. Having raced over him, the Cossack, in an overcoat with a torn 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 greatcoat opened from the wind. The centurion sat down and scraped his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired poysaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he knocked out a deep hole in the snow with his feet and would still beat like a good horse on a leash, if the pitying Cossacks had not finished him off ”. Extremely expressive are these sorrowful lines, filled with horror before what is being done. They are read with unbearable pain, with spiritual trepidation and carry within themselves the most desperate curse of fratricidal war.
No less terrible are the pages dedicated to the execution of the "Podtelkovites". People, who at first “willingly” went to execution “as for a rare cheerful spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of a cruel and inhuman execution, rush to disperse, so that by the time of the massacre of the leaders - Podtyolkov and Krivoshlykov - there was absolutely few people.
However, Podtyolkov is mistaken, presumptuously believing that people dispersed because of the recognition that he was right. They could not bear the inhuman, unnatural spectacle of violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life from him.
On the pages of the novel, two "truths" collide: the "truth" of whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtyolkov: "Traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the opposing "truth" of 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 fewer and fewer are left for whom they are trying to approve their ideas. Talking about the war, about the military life of the most militant tribe among the entire Russian people, Sholokhov, however, nowhere, not a single line, did not praise the war. No wonder his book, as noted by the well-known scholokhoj expert V. Litvinov, was banned by the Maoists, who considered 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 something that opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially a violent death. In this sense, the creator of The Quiet Don is a faithful successor of 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 undergoes in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, on the pages of his novel painted the classic pictures of mental fortitude, 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 Grigory Melekhov's actions: his contempt for looting, protection of Frani's polka, the salvation of Stepan Astakhov.
The concepts of "war" and "humanity" are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and at the same time, against the background of bloody civil strife, the moral capabilities of a person, how wonderful he can be, are especially clearly drawn. War severely examines a moral fortress, unknown in days of peace.
And there, and here between the rows
The same voice sounds:
“He who is not for us is against us.
There are no indifferent: the truth is with us. "
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And time with your strength
I pray for both.
M.A. Voloshin
Civil War - 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 for the sake of changing the social system - for the sake of overthrowing the old one and establishing a new state political system.
V Soviet literature 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 praise and something to be proud of. The first stories of Sholokhov (later they compiled the collection "Don Stories") were devoted to the depiction of 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 suffering to people and destruction to the country; and secondly, in a fratricidal war, one part of the nation destroys another, as a result the nation destroys itself. Because of this, Sholokhov did not see any romance or sublime heroism in the civil war, unlike, for example, A.A. Fadeev, the author of the novel "The Defeat". Sholokhov bluntly stated in the introduction to the story “Azure Steppe”: “Some writer who hasn’t sniffed gunpowder speaks very touchingly about the civil war, the Red Army men - certainly“ little brothers ”, about the odorous gray feather grass. (...) In addition, you can hear how in the steppes of the Don and Kuban Red soldiers died, choking with pompous words. (...) In fact - feather grass is a blond grass. Harmful herb, odorless. (...) The trenches overgrown with plantain and swan, silent witnesses of the recent battles, could tell about how ugly people simply died in them. " In other words, Sholokhov believes that the truth should be written about the civil war, without embellishing the details or ennobling the meaning of this war. Probably to emphasize the hideous nature of real war, the young writer places in some stories frankly naturalistic, repulsive passages: detailed description the hacked body of Foma Korshunov from the story "Nakhalenok", details of the murder of the chairman of the farm council Yefim Ozerov from the story "The Mortal Enemy", details of the execution of grandchildren Zakhar from the story "Azure Steppe", etc. Soviet critics unanimously noted these naturalistically reduced descriptions and considered them a flaw in Sholokhov's early stories, but the writer never corrected these “flaws”.
If Soviet writers (A. Serafimovich "Iron Stream", D.A. Furmanov "Chapaev", A.G. Malyshkin "The Fall of Dair" and others) inspiredly depicted how units of the Red Army were fighting heroically with the Whites, then Sholokhov showed the essence of 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. Kosheva's father, a white ataman, kills his son, a red commander (story "Birthmark"); kulaks kill a member of the Komsomol, almost a boy, Grigory Frolov because he sent a letter to the newspaper about their machinations with the land (story "Shepherd"); the food commissar Ignat Bodyagin sentenced to death his own father - the first kulak in the village (the story “The food commissar”); the red machine gunner Yakov Shibalok kills his beloved woman because she turned out to be the spy of the chieftain Ignatiev (the story "Shibalkovo Seed"); fourteen-year-old Mitka kills his father in order to save his elder brother, a Red Army soldier (story "Melon"), and so on.
The split in families, as Sholokhov shows, is not due to 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 the Soviet regime seem to them to be “extremely fair” (the story “The Family Man”): the land - to the peasants who cultivate it; power in the country - to the deputies elected from the people, local power - to the elected committees of the poor. And the "fathers" want to preserve the old order, familiar to the older generation and objectively beneficial for the kulaks: Cossack traditions, equal land use, the Cossack circle on the farm. Although, it must be admitted, this is not always the case in life and in Sholokhov's stories. After all, a civil war affects the entire nation, so the motivation for choosing (on which side to fight) can be very different. In the story "Kolovert", the middle brother Mikhail Kramskov is a White Cossack, because in the tsarist army he rose to the rank of officer, and his father Pyotr Pakhomych and brothers Ignat and Grigory, middle Cossacks, join the Red Army detachment; In the story “Alien Blood,” the son Peter died in the White Army, defending Cossack privileges, and his father, Gavril's grandfather, reconciled with the Reds, since he fell in love with the young food commissar Nikolai Kosykh with all his heart.
The civil war not only makes adult family members enemies, but does not spare even young children. Seven-year-old Mishka Korshunov from the story "Nakhalenok" is shot when he hurries to the village at night for "help". Hundreds of special forces want to kill the newborn son Shibalka from the story "Shibalkovo Seed", since his mother is a bandit spy, half a hundred died because of her betrayal. Only Shibalka's tearful supplication saves the child from a terrible reprisal. In the story "Alyoshkino's Heart" the bandit, surrendering to captivity, hides behind a four-year-old girl, whom he holds in his arms, so that the Red Army men in a rage would not shoot him.
Civil war does not allow anyone to stay away from the general massacre. The truth of this thought is confirmed by the fate of the ferryman Mikishara, the hero of the story "A Family Man". Miki-shara is a widower and the father of a large family, he is completely indifferent to politics, his children are important to him, whom he dreams of putting 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 and take care of the seven youngest children himself.
Sholokhov depicts the extreme bitterness of both warring parties - red and white. The heroes of the Don Stories are sharply and definitely opposed to each other, which leads to schematic images. The writer shows the atrocities of whites and kulaks who ruthlessly kill the poor, the Red Army and rural activists. At the same time, Sholokhov draws the enemies of Soviet power, usually without delving into their characters, motives of behavior, in the history of life, that is, one-sided and simplified. The fists and White Guards in "Don Stories" are cruel, insidious, greedy. Suffice it to recall Makarchikha from the story "Alyoshka's heart", who broke the head of a girl dying of hunger, Alyoshka's sister, or the rich farmer Ivan Alekseev with an iron: he hired fourteen-year-old Alyoshka as a worker for grub, forced the boy to work like an adult man for every trifle. " The unnamed White Guard officer from the story "The Foal" kills in the back the Red Army soldier Trofim, who has just rescued a foal from the whirlpool.
Sholokhov does not hide the fact that his political and human sympathies are on the side of the Soviet regime, therefore, the village poor (Alyoshka Popov from the story "Alyoshka's Heart", Efim Ozerov from the story "Mortal Enemy"), the Red Army soldiers (Yakov Shibalok from the story "Shibalkovo seed", Trofim from the story "Foal"), communists (Ignat Bodyagin from the story "Prodcomissar", Foma Korshunov from the story "Nakhalenok"), Komsomol members (Grigory Frolov from the story "Shepherd", Nikolai Koshevoy from the story "Birthmark") ... In these characters, 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, even in the early Don Stories, statements of the heroes appear, testifying that not only the White Guards, but also the Bolsheviks are pursuing a policy of brute force on the Don, and this inevitably generates 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-food commissioner: “I must be shot for my good, for not letting me into my barn, I am a contradiction, and who fumbles through other people's bins, this is under the law? Rob, your strength. " Gavril's grandfather from the story "Another's Blood" thinks about the Bolsheviks: "They invaded the primordial Cossack life as enemies, grandfather's life, ordinary, turned inside out like an empty pocket." In the story "About the Donprodkom and the misadventures of replacing the Don food commissar comrade Ptitsyn's gel", which is considered weak and usually not analyzed by critics, the methods of surplus appropriation during the civil war are shown very frankly. Comrade Ptitsyn reports how famously he fulfills the order of his boss, food commissar Gol-din: “I go back and download the bread. And I got to the point that there was only one 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 alike repels common people, but later, in the novel The Quiet Don, Grigory Melekhov will clearly express himself in this regard: neither these nor these are conscientious. " His life will be an example tragic fate an ordinary person caught between two irreconcilably hostile political camps.
Summing up, it should be said that Sholokhov in his early stories depicts the civil war as a time of great national grief. Mutual cruelty and hatred of red and white lead to a national tragedy: neither one nor the other understands the absolute value of human life, and the blood of the 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 "Nakhalenok" White Cossacks kill Foma Korshunov, but his son Mishka is alive; in the story "The Mortal Enemy", fists lie in wait for Efim Ozerov when he returns to the farm alone, but before his death, Efim recalls the words of his comrade: “Remember, Efim, they will kill you - there will be twenty new Efimov! .. As in a fairy tale about heroes ... "; in the story "The Shepherd" after the death of the nineteen-year-old shepherd Gregory, his sister, seventeen-year-old Dunyatka, goes to the city to fulfill his and Gregory's dream - to study. This is how the writer expresses historical optimism in his stories: the common people, even in the midst of a civil war, retain the best human qualities in their souls: noble dreams of justice, a high desire for knowledge and creative work, sympathy for the weak and small, conscientiousness, etc.
It can be noted that already in his first works, Sholokhov raises global universal human problems: man and revolution, man and people, man's destiny in an era of world and national upheavals. True, the young writer did not, and could not, give a convincing disclosure of these problems in short stories. An epic with a long duration of action, with numerous heroes and events was needed here. This is probably why Sholokhov's next novel after the "Don Stories" was an epic novel about the civil war "Quiet Don".
To rise above the everyday and to see the historical distance means to become the ruler of the thoughts of your time, to embody the main conflicts and images of a vast historical period, touching the so-called "eternal themes". MA Sholokhov made a name for himself not only in Russian, but also in world literature, reflecting in his work the era more strongly and more dramatically than many other writers were able to do.
In 1928, Mikhail Sholokhov published the first book of The Quiet Don, the second in 1929, the third in 1933, and the fourth in early 1940. Sholokhov's epic novel is dominated by the Tolstoyan epic principle: "to capture everything." On the pages of Sholokhov's narrative, a wide variety of strata of Russian society are presented: poor Cossacks and rich, merchants and intelligentsia, nobility and professional military. Sholokhov wrote: "I would be happy if, behind the description ... of the life of the Don Cossacks, the reader ... considered something else: colossal changes in everyday life, life and human psychology that occurred as a result of war and revolution." The Sholokhov epic reflects a decade of Russian history (1912-1922) at one of its steepest breaks. Soviet power brought with it a terrible, incomparable tragedy - the civil war. A war that leaves no one aside, cripples human destinies and souls. A war that forces a father to kill a son, a husband - to raise his hand against his wife, against his mother. The blood of the guilty and the innocent flows like a river.
In the epic novel by M. Sholokhov "And Quiet Don" is shown one of the episodes of this war - the war on the Don land. It was on this land that the history of the civil war reached that drama and clarity that make it possible to judge the history of the entire war.
According to M. Sholokhov, the natural world, the world of people living freely, loving and working on earth, is beautiful, and everything that this world destroys is terrible, ugly. No violence, the author believes, can be justified by anything, not even the most seemingly just idea in the name of which it is committed. Anything related to violence, death, blood and pain cannot be beautiful. He has no future. Only life, love, mercy have a future. They are eternal and significant at all times. That is why the scenes depicting the horrors of the civil war, scenes of violence and murder are so tragic in the novel. The struggle between the Whites and the Reds on the Don, captured by Sholokhov in the epic novel, is filled with even greater tragedy and meaninglessness than the events of the First World War. Yes, it could not be otherwise, because now each other was killed by those who grew up together, were friends, whose families had lived nearby for centuries, whose roots had long been intertwined.
Civil war, like any other war, tests the essence of man. A decrepit grandfather, a participant in the Turkish war, instructing the young, advised: "Remember one thing: if you want to be alive, get out of mortal combat whole - you have to observe the human truth." "Human Truth" is an order that has been verified for centuries by the Cossacks: "Don't take someone else in a war. God forbid you touch women, and you need to know such a prayer." But in the civil war, all these commandments are violated, once again emphasizing its antihuman nature. What were these terrible murders for? Why did the brother go against the brother, and the son against the father? Some killed in order to live on their land as they were accustomed to, others - to establish a new system, which seemed to them more correct and just, others - fulfilled their military duty, forgetting about the main human duty to life itself - just to live; there were those who killed for the sake of military glory and career. Was the truth on anyone's side? Sholokhov in his work shows that both red and white are equally cruel and inhuman. The scenes depicting the atrocities of both, as it were, mirror and balance each other.
And this applies not only to the description of the hostilities themselves, but also to the pictures of the destruction of prisoners, looting and violence against the civilian population. The truth is not on anyone's side - Sholokhov emphasizes again and again. That is why the fate of young people involved in bloody events is so tragic. That is why the fate of Grigory Melekhov - a typical representative of the young generation of the Don Cossacks - is so tragic, painfully deciding "with whom to be" ...
The family of Grigory Melekhov appeared in the novel as that microcosm, in which both the tragedy of the entire Cossacks and the tragedy of the entire country were reflected in a mirror. The Melekhovs were a typical Cossack family, possessed all the typical qualities inherent in the Cossacks, unless these qualities manifested themselves more clearly in them. In the Melekhov family, everyone is wayward, stubborn, independent and courageous. They all love work, their land and their quiet Don. Civil war bursts into this family when both sons, Peter and Gregory, are taken to the front. Both of them are real Cossacks, in which hard work, military courage and valor are harmoniously combined. Peter has a simpler view of the world. He wants to become an officer, does not hesitate to take away from the defeated something that can be useful in the economy. Gregory, on the other hand, is endowed with a heightened sense of justice, he will never allow abuse of the weak and defenseless, appropriate "trophies" for himself, senseless murder is disgusting to his being. Gregory is undoubtedly the central figure in the Melekhov family, and the tragedy of his personal fate is intertwined with the tragedy of his family and friends.
During the civil war, the Melekhov brothers tried to step aside, but were forced into this bloody action. The whole horror lies in the fact that there was no force in time that could explain the current situation to the Cossacks: divided into two warring camps, the Cossacks, in essence, fought for the same thing - for the right to work on their land in order to feed their children, and not to shed blood on the holy Don land. The tragedy of the situation also lies in the fact that the civil war and general devastation destroyed the Cossack world not only from the outside, but also from within, introducing disagreements into family relationships... These disagreements also affected the Melekhov family. The Melekhovs, like many others, do not see a way out of this war, because no power - neither white nor red, can give them the land and freedom that they need like air.
The tragedy of the Melekhov family is not limited to the tragedy of Peter and Gregory. The fate of the mother, Ilyinichna, is also sad, having lost her son, husband, and both daughters-in-law. Her only hope is her son Grigory, but deep down she feels that he has no future either. The moment when Ilyinichna sits at the same table with the murderer of her son is filled with tragedy, and how unexpectedly she forgives and accepts Koshevoy, whom she hates so much!
But the most tragic fate in the Melekhov family is, of course, the fate of Grigory. He, who has a heightened sense of justice, who is stronger than others experiencing the contradictions of the world, had a chance to experience all the hesitations of the average Cossacks in the civil war. Fighting on the side of the whites, he feels his inner alienation from those who lead them, the reds are also alien to him by nature. The only thing he strives for with all his soul is peaceful labor, peaceful happiness on his land. But military honor and duty oblige him to take part in the war. Gregory's life is a continuous chain of bitter losses and disappointments. At the end of the novel, we see him devastated, worn out by the pain of loss, with no hope for the future.
For many years, criticism convinced readers that in portraying the events of those years, Sholokhov was on the side of the revolution, and the writer himself fought, as you know, on the side of the Reds. But the laws of artistic creation forced him to be objective and say in the work what he denied in his public speeches: the civil war unleashed by the Bolsheviks, which broke strong and hardworking families, broke the Cossacks, was only a prologue to that great tragedy into which the country would plunge into many years.
K. Fedin highly appreciated the work of M. Sholokhov in general and the novel "Quiet Don" in particular. “Mikhail Sholokhov’s merit is enormous,” he wrote, “in the courage inherent in his works. He never avoided the contradictions inherent in life ... to himself in his youth, the covenant is not only not to lie directly, but not to lie and negatively - by being silent. Sholokhov is not silent, he writes the whole truth. "
