As depicts the civil war of the Sholokhs. The depiction of the civil war in the novel Quiet Don

Speaking about the work of M. Sholokhov, first of all, it should be said about the era in which the writer lived and worked, since social, social upheavals are almost the main factor influencing creativity. Without a doubt, the revolution, civil and even the Great Patriotic War had a huge impact on Sholokhov. So, for example, the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" is one of the best works who recreated pictures of historical reality. It should be noted that in depicting the war, Sholokhov continues the traditions of Russian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although, of course, the writer brought a lot of new things to the reproduction of such social cataclysms.

"Quiet Flows the Don" tells about the two most significant wars of the early twentieth century, which shook the whole country, and indeed the whole world. No sooner had the First World War ended than another, more cruel and bloody, began. It is important to note that Sholokhov is characterized by truthfulness, objectivity in the depiction of those events.

The First World War is shown in the darkest colors. Thus the author conveys the attitude ordinary people to her: “At night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible cries hung over the farm, and the owl flew over to the cemetery, groaning over the brown, haunted graves.

- To be thin, - the old people prophesied. “The war will come.”

In my opinion, the scale of the pictures of the war drawn by Sholokhov is comparable only with the battles created by L.N. Tolstoy in the novel "War and Peace".

What strikes the reader in "Quiet Don", first of all, is accuracy and objectivity. One gets the feeling that the author is in the very center of the events he describes: “A dandy was stretched from the Baltic with a deadly cord. The headquarters developed plans for a broad offensive, generals pored over maps, orderlies rushed, delivering ammunition, hundreds of thousands of soldiers went to their deaths.

It is worth mentioning that in order to cover the whole picture of hostilities, Sholokhov resorts to a very justified method. He "distributes" his characters to various sections of the fronts. It is the war, shown through the eyes of heroes, that allows the reader to better understand those terrible years and the suffering of people. Reading through the episodes, we begin to experience anxiety and a terrible expectation of death: “The relatives lay down with their heads on all four sides, poured Cossack blood and, dead-eyed, unrestrained, decayed under an artillery memorial service in Austria, Poland, Prussia ... The Cossack flower left the kurens and died there in death, in lice, in horror.

Sholokhov cannot ignore what people call a feat: “But it happened like this: people collided on the death field ..., stumbled, knocked together, inflicted blind blows, mutilated themselves and horses and scattered, frightened by a shot that killed a man, departed morally crippled . They called it a feat."

The civil war turned out to be a little different, more tragic, senseless. Her horrors rendered strong influence on heroes, changing them internally. The most unacceptable and monstrous thing was that brother went against brother, son against father, father against son. Many people found it difficult to decide which side they would best take. Suffice it to recall the throwing of Grigory Melekhov, who was alternately in the Red Army, then in the White Guard.
In 1951, Sholokhov wrote: “People like Grigory Melekhov went to Soviet power very winding way. Some of them came to a final break with Soviet power. The majority, however, became close to the Soviet government and took part in the construction and strengthening of our state.

Although during civil war both white and red are equally alien to the Cossacks. Whichever side they fight on, they want only one thing: to return to their native lands, to their relatives and friends. Painfully wavering between the two camps, Grigory Melekhov is trying to find a third, non-existent path in the revolution. I think this is the tragedy not only of the hero Sholokhov, but also of most of those people who fought for the sake of some illusory ideal.

Thus, the writer creates pictures of two wars that are very different from each other. But at the same time, there is one thing in common that unites them and makes them similar - senselessness and cruelty.

War is a national disaster.

Not with plows - our glorious little land is plowed up ...

Our land is plowed with horse hooves.

And the glorious land was sown with Cossack heads,

Our quiet Don is decorated with young widows,

Our father, the quiet Don, is blooming with orphans,

The wave in the quiet Don is filled with paternal, maternal tears.

Depiction of war in literature.

Wars were different, the history of peoples from antiquity is full of them. They are reflected in different ways in literature and painting. Pictures of the war and the military environment - we name only some writers - are in " Captain's daughter» A. Pushkin, in “Taras Bulba” by N. Gogol, in the works of M. Lermontov, L. Tolstoy, in the stories of V. Garshin and K. Stanyukovich, “Duel” by A. Kuprin, “Red Laughter” by L. Andreev, in “Stories about the war” and notes “At war” by V. Veresaev, etc.

After 1914, the topic of war became one of the main ones in our country and in other countries.

Wars, as you know, are divided into just, defensive, raising the whole people to defend their homeland, giving rise to mass heroism, and unjust, predatory. As humanistic ideas developed, aggressive wars were recognized as an anti-human phenomenon, incompatible with moral norms, as a relic of barbarism. They cripple and destroy people, bring innumerable misfortunes and suffering, coarsen morals. The truth of such wars, their “apotheosis” was not parades, marches, generals prancing on beautiful impatient horses, trumpet sounds, but the blood and torment of tormented people. For example, L. Tolstoy, V. Vereshchagin, about the patriotism and valor of the Russian soldier, at the same time debunked the policy of forcible invasion of foreign countries, the desire to subjugate the will of peoples by force of arms, exposed the cult of greatness erected on corpses, the romance of extermination of people.

Since it was precisely this that was increasingly coming to the fore, works about the war became sharply revealing and led to social problems. They truthfully showed not only what was happening on the battlefields, in hospitals, on operating tables and in families who have lost loved ones - but also what happened in the life of society, what powerful cataclysms were ripening in its depths.

Tolstoy's method - the reproduction of war and peace in organic unity and mutual conditionality, exact reality, historicism, battle painting, and in the center of everything - the fate of man - is perceived as a new progressive step in the development of realism. Sholokhov, having inherited this tradition, developed it and enriched it with new achievements.

The First World War in the "Quiet Don" by M. A. Sholokhov.

Sholokhov's concept of war is precise and definite. The causes of war are social. War is criminal from beginning to end, it tramples on the principles of humanism. He looks at military events through the eyes of the working people, to hard fate which added new suffering.

If the hero of a military novel was most often an intellectual - honest, suffering, who lost everything in battles, then Sholokhov has a million-strong population of the country, which has the power to decide its fate, these are the sons of the "all-enduring Russian tribe" from the villages and farms. Sholokhov's war is a nationwide disaster, so her paintings correspond to gloomy symbolism: “At night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible screams hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, soiled by calves, moaning over the brown, baited graves.

To be thin, - the old people prophesied, having heard owl voices from the cemetery ...

The war will come."

"War caught" just at the time when the people were busy harvesting bread and cherished every hour. But the orderly rushed in, and I had to unharness the horses from the mowers and rush to the farm. Fatal was coming.

“The farm chieftain poured oil of joyful words to the Cossacks crowding around him:

War? No, it will not. Their nobility, the military bailiff said that this was for clarity. You can be calm.

Dobrisha! As soon as I return home, immediately to the fields.

Yes, it's worth it!

Please tell me what the authorities think? .. "

Newspapers are choking. Speakers solemnly speak, and the mobilized Cossacks at the rally have "rounded eyes and square blackness of open mouths." Words do not reach them. Their thoughts are about something else:

“The colonel spoke more, arranging the words in the necessary order, trying to set fire to a sense of national pride, but before the eyes of thousands of Cossacks - not the chic of other people's banners, rustling, bowed to their feet, but their everyday life, blood, scattered, called, wailed: wives, children, lovers, unharvested grain, orphaned farms, villages ... "

“In two hours, loading into trains. The only thing that broke into the memory of everyone.

Sholokhov's pages are sharply denounced, their tone is disturbing and does not portend anything but a terrible expectation of death: “Echelons ... Echelons ... Uncountable echelons! Through the arteries of the country, along the railways to the western border, agitated Russia is driving gray overcoat blood.

The front line is pure hell. And everywhere in Sholokhov’s work, pain for the earth emerges: “the ripened bread was trampled by the cavalry”, “Where there were battles, shells blew up the gloomy face of the earth with smallpox: rusted in it, longing for human blood, fragments of iron and steel.” And even more painful was the pain for the people. Russian waves hang like corpses on wire fences. German artillery mows down entire regiments to the root. The wounded crawl through the stubble. The earth groans deafly, “crucified by many hooves,” when the distraught people rush into cavalry attacks and fall flat with their horses. Neither a prayer from a gun, nor a prayer during a raid helps the Cossack. “They fastened them to gaitans, to maternal blessings, to bundles with a pinch of native land, but death stained those who carried prayers with them.”

The first blows of the checker, the first shots - all this remains in the memory of those who committed the murders.

Only a month of war, but how people have changed: Yegorka Zharkov swore dirty, obscene, cursed everything, Grigory Melekhov "all somehow charred, turned black." War cripples souls, devastates to the very bottom. The front-line soldiers grow coarse, fall. “In the head column they played an obscene song; a fat-assed, woman-like soldier walked backwards along the side of the column, snapping his palms on his short tops. The officers laughed.

Residents of front-line areas rush about, run with home belongings. "Refugees, refugees, refugees..."

The Cossacks recognize that very line of uncertainty between the two enemy troops, which Tolstoy spoke about and recalls in Sholokhov's novel - the line that separated the living from the dead. One of the Cossacks writes in his diary how at that moment he “heard a distinct hoarse slap of German machine guns, processing these living people into corpses. Two regiments were swept away and fled, throwing down their weapons. On their shoulders was a regiment of German hussars.

The field of the recent sich. On a clearing in the forest - a long stitch of corpses. “They lay in a roll, shoulder to shoulder, in various poses, often obscene.”

A plane flew over and dropped a bomb. Yegorka Zharkov crawls out from under the torn porch - "smoke, casting gently pink and blue, released intestines."

On the Vladimir-Volynsk and Kovelsk directions in September 1916, they applied french way advances in waves. “Sixteen waves splashed Russian trenches. Swaying, thinning, boiling at the ugly clods of crumpled barbed wire, gray waves of human surf rolled in ... Out of sixteen waves, three rolled ... ”.

Takova terrible truth about war. And what blasphemy over morality, reason, the essence of humanity seemed to be the glorification of a feat. It took a hero - and he appeared. Kuzma Kryuchkov allegedly alone killed eleven Germans.

The hero is needed by the headquarters of the division, by influential ladies and gentlemen, officers, and the emperor. Newspapers and magazines wrote about Kryuchkov. His portrait was on a pack of cigarettes.

Sholokhov writes:

“But it happened like this: people collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind, in the animal horror that declared them, they stumbled, knocked together, inflicted blind blows, mutilated themselves and horses and fled, frightened by a shot that killed a person, morally crippled dispersed .

They called it a feat."

Critics said that here is an imitation of Tolstoy in thought (antithesis) and syntax (a "revealing" phrase, framed as a periodical speech). Yes, the similarity, no doubt, but it did not come from external imitation, but from the coincidence in views on horrors, lies, disguise, ceremonial ideas about war. But at the same time, one cannot imagine the matter as if, according to the writer, there were no feats at all in that war. They were. It seemed to a significant part of the people that it was really about saving the Motherland, the Slavs, that Russia's goal was to help Serbia, to tame the claims of the German militarists. This inspired the front-line soldiers and put them in a very controversial position.

Sholokhov's main attention is focused on depicting the troubles that the war brought to Russia. The semi-feudal regime that existed in the country strengthened even more during the war, especially in the army. Wild treatment of a soldier, bullying, surveillance... Front-line soldiers are fed whatever they have to. Dirt, lice... The impotence of the generals to improve things. The mediocrity and irresponsibility of many of the command. The desire of the allies to win the campaign at the expense of the human reserves of Russia, which the tsarist government willingly went for.

The rear collapsed. “Together with the second stage, the third one also left. The villages and farms were depopulated, as if the whole Donshchina had come to rest, to suffer.

Not laziness, supposedly characteristic of Russians, not anarchism, not indifference to the fate of the Motherland, but a more sensitive perception of internationalist slogans, distrust of the government, protest against internal anarchy generated by the ruling classes, that was what led the Russians when they went to fraternization, refused to fight.

“The front was close. The army breathed deathly fever, there was not enough ammunition, food; the armies reached out with many hands to the ghostly word "peace"; the armies greeted the provisional ruler of the republic, Kerensky, in different ways and, urged on by his hysterical cries, stumbled in the June offensive; in the armies, ripened anger melted and boiled like water in a spring, swept out by deep springs ... "

With exceptional expressiveness, pictures of the national disaster in the Quiet Don are drawn. In the autumn of 1917, the Cossacks began to return from the fronts imperialist war. They were gladly welcomed by their families. But it even more ruthlessly emphasized the grief of those who lost loved ones.

It was necessary to take the pain, the martyrdom of the whole Russian land very close to the heart, so that so solemnly and mournfully about this:

“Many Cossacks were missing, they were lost on the fields of Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, Carpathians, Romania, they lay down as corpses and decayed under a gun memorial service, and now high hills are overgrown with weeds mass graves, crushed them with rain, covered with loose snow. And no matter how many simple-haired Cossack women run out into the alleys and look from under their palms, they won’t wait for those dear to their hearts! No matter how many tears flow from swollen and discolored eyes - do not wash away the longing! No matter how many times you cry on the days of anniversaries and commemorations, the east wind of their cries will not carry them to Galicia and East Prussia, to the settled mounds of mass graves! ..

The graves are overgrown with grass - pain is overgrown with prescription. The wind licked the traces of the departed - time will lick both the blood pain and the memory of those who did not wait for their loved ones and will not wait, because human life and not many of us are destined to trample the grass ...

The wife of Prokhor Shamil beat her head against the hard ground, gnawed the dirt floor with her teeth, having seen enough how the returned brother of her late husband, Martin Shamil, caresses his pregnant wife, nurses the children and distributes gifts to them. The woman struggled and crawled in writhing motions on the ground, and children crowded around in a pile of sheep, howling, looking at their mother with eyes choked with fear.

Tear, darling, on yourself the collar of the last shirt! Tear thin hair from a bleak, hard life, bite your blood-bitten lips, break your hands mutilated by work and fight on the ground at the threshold of an empty hut! Your chicken has no owner, you have no husband, your children have no father, remember that no one will caress you or your orphans, no one will save you from overwork and poverty, no one will press your head to your chest at night, when you fall, crushed by fatigue, and no one will tell you, as he once said: “Do not grieve, Aniska! We'll live!"

Strict parallelisms with single-mindedness (“And no matter how much ...”), with the injection of denials (“do not wait”, “do not wash away the longing”) and the poetic comparisons that follow (“Grass overgrow graves - pain overgrows with time”) give the narrative mournful grandeur. This is a requiem.

Verbs are accentuated intonation (“beat her head”, “a woman beat”, “crawled in writhing”, “kids huddled”, “howled”), which are then replaced by a series of expressive appeals (“Tear the collar ... Tear your hair ... bite your own in blood bitten lips...”) and again repetitions with these merciless “no” and “no one” - all this raises the tone of the narration to tragic pathos. In every word there is a cruel nakedness of the truth: “the bare-haired Cossacks”, “the collar of the last shirt”, “hair liquid from a joyless, hard life ...”, “crushed by the mouth ...”. Only a writer who had been ill with pain for the working people could say so simply and expressively about the terrible.

Wars are usually associated in the memory of the people with the names of cities, villages, fields, rivers. In ancient times there were Don, Kulikovo field. Then Borodino, Shipka, Tsushima. The world war is the fields of Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Carpathians, Romania, stained with the blood of the working people. All these geographical designations have acquired a new terrible meaning.

Galicia is a symbol of innumerable people's misfortunes, senselessly shed blood, these are settled hills of graves, bare-haired Cossack women running out into the alleys, tearing apart the cry of mothers and children.

"Corpses lay down." From what distant times did these words come! "Let's go to the Russian land." But then they laid their heads for their land, and the loss was easier to bear. And here for what? ..

Sholokhov created a majestic mournful cry for those who died under the rumble of guns, cursed criminal wars. Everyone remembers the epic image: “The high hills of mass graves were overgrown with weeds, they were given by rains, covered with loose snow ...”

Exposing careerists, and adventurers who are accustomed to managing other people's destinies, all those who, in the name of robbery, drive their people against other peoples - directly into minefields and barbed obstacles, into damp trenches, under machine-gun fire, and terrible cavalry and bayonet attacks, resolutely protesting against any encroachment on the right of a person to live freely and joyfully, Sholokhov opposed the beauty of human feelings, the happiness of earthly existence, humanism, the victorious march of emerging life to crimes against the people. The pages of the novel, dedicated to friendship, kindred feelings, love, compassion for everything truly human, are amazing.

... The Melekhovs received news from the front that Grigory "fell the death of the brave." This news shocked the whole family. But on the twelfth day after that, we received two letters from Peter. Dunya read them at the post office and rushed to the house, like a blade of grass caught in a whirlwind, then, swaying, leaned against the wattle fence. She caused quite a stir around the farm, and brought indescribable excitement to the house.

Alive Grisha! .. Alive, our dear one! .. - she screamed in a sobbing voice from afar. - Peter writes! .. Wounded Grisha, not killed! .. Alive, alive! .. "

And it is difficult to say where Sholokhov achieves greater artistic power: in the descriptions of front-line spectacles or of these emotions, exciting with their sincerity and humanity.

People at the front are killing each other. And no one knows what happened to Gregory. And in the house of the Melekhovs, ineradicable life takes its rights. “Pantelei Prokofievich, having heard at the base that the daughter-in-law had given birth to twins, at first threw up his hands, then delightedly, shaking his beard, wept and for no reason shouted at the midwife who arrived in time:

Crap, eve! he shook his clawed finger in front of the old woman's nose. II the Melekhov breed will not be transferred at once! The daughter-in-law presented the Cossack with the girl. Here is the daughter-in-law - so the daughter-in-law! Lord, my God! For such and such a favor, how can I repay her, my dear?

Irresistibly matured among the people internal forces protests, which multiplied from day to day and hung over the royal system like a thundercloud. The people did not want war.

Garanzha explains: “You need to turn the rifles without fussing. It is necessary for him to drive a bullet who sends people "into hell."

Front-line soldiers began to talk more boldly with officers. Anger flared up. By the end of 1916, “the Cossacks had changed radically compared to previous years,” writes Sholokhov.

When Yesaul Listnitsky forbade the soldiers to make fires, “fiery fireflies trembled in the wet gaze of the bearded man.

Offended, bitch!

E-eh-eh!..-- one sighed with a long sigh, throwing the rifle belt over his shoulder.

Knave releases the prisoner: "Run, German, I have no malice towards you." Patrolmen on the roads, instead of detaining the fugitives, let them go.

The war exposed class contradictions, further separated the soldiers from the reactionary officers, and in the countryside - working people from the top.

The "Quiet Don" shows the process of gradual awakening and growth of people's consciousness, the movement of the masses, which determined the entire course of history. Tsarism is overthrown. Events develop further. The class struggle flares up. The idea of peace, freedom, equality takes possession of all the working people, they cannot be turned back. “Once the revolution has surpassed, freedom has been given to the whole people,” says the Cossack Manzhulov, “it means that we must end the war, because the people and we do not want war!” And the villagers unanimously support him.

The idea of the revolution was borne and suffered by the “lower classes”. Lagutin tells Listnitsky that his father has four thousand acres of land, while others have nothing. Esaul got angry:

“- This is what the Bolsheviks from the Soviet of Deputies are filling you with ... It turns out that you are not in vain hanging around with them.

Eh, Mr. Yesaul, pass, patient, life itself started, and the Bolsheviks will only set fire to the fuse ... "

Thus, the people sought and found a way out of the tragic impasse of history, rising under the Bolshevik banner. The Quiet Flows the Don differs sharply from those books about the world war, whose heroes, cursing reality, are unable to find a way out and fall into despair or reconcile. The novel to this day remains an unsurpassed book about that terrible world catastrophe.

Sholokhov imperiously entered the 20th century with his ideas, images and populated literature with life. human characters. They came as if from life itself, still smoking with the conflagrations of wars, torn apart by the turbulent changes of the revolution. The origins, the vital basis of creativity, the time torn apart by the revolution determined the aesthetic principles of the artist, who managed to express the very spirit of the revolution with such powerful artistic power. Taking the very first steps in literature, Sholokhov stepped on the hot traces of events, scorched by the breath of time. His "Don Stories" are thematically connected with the years of the Civil War, but most of them are about the outcome of this war, about the difficult formation of a new life on the Don. In terms of the time depicted, these stories are close to the epic novel Quiet Flows the Don, a broad epic story about the fate of the Cossacks in the era of the greatest revolutionary upheavals.

In "Quiet Don" revolutionary struggle for socialism is presented on an epic scale, the epoch itself is expressed in the psychological and dramatic depth of complex human relationships and contradictions. Beginning with the collapse of the imperialist war, with the violent reversal revolutionary events in Russia there is not a single noticeable event of those years that would not find some kind of response in the novel. The collapse of the front and the July events in the capital, the Moscow State Conference and the counter-revolution, the Kornilov rebellion and the rebellion of the Cossack regiments, the revolution in Petrograd and the flight of the Kornilovites to the Don, the entry of "Russia, which was boiling over in battles" into the Civil War and the course of the battles on the Don, a sharp clash of the world revolution and counter-revolutions - the display of these and other events in the novel determined the originality of The Quiet Flows the Don as a historical narrative. The writer abruptly transfers the description of events from one sector of the front to another, from headquarters to the capital, from the Don farms and villages to Rostov and Novocherkassk ... Dozens of episodic heroes, primarily revolutionaries, are involved in the narrative. The world of counter-revolution also appears in concrete faces, and not only in its generals, but also in ordinary living characters.

Two worlds, two forces, stubborn in achieving their goals - to win at all costs - operate in the epic, colliding face to face. Each of these forces carries its own truth, and the opposition of these forces reaches supreme power in scenes of massacre of enemies. The scene of the murder of the White Guard officer Chernetsov by Podtelkov makes a terrible impression. By pushing the opponents enraged by the battle face to face, Sholokhov shows to what extent the hatred of class enemies reaches. Lost self-control from the words thrown to him by Chernetsov: “A traitor to the Cossacks! Scoundrel! Traitor!" - Podtelkov arranges lynching of Chernetsov and his punitive detachment. Having hacked Chernetsov, he shouts in an exhausted barking voice: “- Chop-and-and-and them ... such a mother! Everyone! .. There are no prisoners ... in the blood, in the heart!!” Everything he sees will stick in Grigory’s memory for a long time, causing him to reject what is happening around him: “... Grigory could neither forgive nor forget the death of Chernetsov and the extrajudicial execution of captured officers.” Gregory really does not forget what he saw. “In the midst of the struggle for power on the Don,” he leaves Podtelkov and meets with him already at the gallows, furiously reminiscent of the battle near Glubokaya and the execution of officers: “Did they shoot at your order? BUT? Now you're burping! Well, don't worry!.. You, grebe, sold the Cossacks to the Jews! Clear? Is it to say?" The massacre of the counter-revolution against the Podtelkovites appears in the novel in an open author's description as "the most disgusting picture of destruction", as "an immensely terrible, amazing spectacle." In the image with screams in the voice of people running away from such a spectacle, and Cossack women closing their eyes to children, an expression of the people's assessment of the ongoing cruel reprisal.

The violent clash of the polar worlds - Kaledin's suicide, the tragic death of Podtelkov and the fate of Grigory "lost" in the struggle - is full of deep historicism and embodies all the sharpness and intransigence, the historical concreteness and scope of the Civil War. The tragedy of the Civil War on the Don is also shown by Sholokhov among the Cossacks, where the attitude to power determined the choice life position. Sholokhov begins the third book of the novel with the message that in April 1918 "the great partition ended on the Don." A significant part of the “Verkhovsky” Cossacks, especially the front-line soldiers, left with the retreating Red Guard detachments, while the “Nizovsky” Cossacks pursued them, finding themselves this time, as many times in the past, on the side of the old world. The civil war, entering into Cossack kurens and deploying already on Cossack lands, further strengthens this "great division", delimits the Cossacks along different camps, brings changes to their consciousness. A terrible impression is made by the scene of the massacre of captured Red Army soldiers on the Tatar farm. Finding himself in a crowd of native farmers, Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov does not see sympathy and pity in any person. Feeling the unspoken support of her fellow villagers, Daria takes a gun and shoots Ivan Alekseevich. His own fellow villagers finish him off.

The drama of the Civil War is also revealed by everyday paintings, mass scenes associated with the Tatarsky farm and the fate of Grigory Melekhov. Striking changes are taking place in everyday life, the nature of everyday scenes in the novel is changing. These are mainly funeral scenes, depicting the death of those who defend the old world, the desolation of Cossack huts. When Koshevoy arrives in Tatarsky, he is struck by “the great silence that is not characteristic of the farm”: “The shutters were tightly closed at the kurens, there were locks on the doors in some places, but most of the doors were wide open. It was as if the pestilence passed with black feet through the farm, depopulating the bases, filling the residential buildings with emptiness and uninhabited.”

During the Civil War, family ties collapsed. Mishka Koshevoy, having married Dunyashka, the sister of Grigory Melekhov, sees in him, first of all, his class enemy. He cannot and does not want to believe Grigory, who returned home, yearning so much for home and land, for children, that he forever broke with his past. Not experiencing the slightest feeling of compassion, he tells Dunyashka that a tribunal is waiting for Grigory and is ready to arrest him himself. In complete desperation, surrounded by distrust, Grigory takes another wrong step in his life and, at the time of new deaf fermentation on the Upper Don, finds himself in Fomin's gang.

The fate of the protagonist Grigory Melekhov is also tragic. Controversial and tangled road Gregory's life is a path of ups and downs, hopes and disappointments, ending tragic ending. The author compares the life of Gregory at the end of his journey with the black steppe scorched by fires. All people close and dear to his heart perish, and the last force holding him in this world is the growing son of Mishatka.

In his novel The Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov depicts life in the struggle of different principles, in the boiling of feelings, in joy and suffering, in hope and sorrow. Life is unstoppable, and everything that happens in it is just a link in the chain of the eternal movement of being. Beauty is stable, and the greatness of the natural world is unshakable. But for a humanist artist, the values that people have suffered in cruel trials have the highest beauty: human dignity and generosity, freedom and patriotism, kindness and tenderness, love and trusting affection of a child. Whatever happens in the world, these values must be preserved, they must be fought for. Otherwise, life will lose its meaning, and a person will become spiritually impoverished. And this is the great humanism of Sholokhov.

Civil war in the image of M. A. Sholokhov

In 1917, the war turned into a bloody turmoil. This is no longer domestic, requiring from everyone a sacrificial duty, but 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.

First World War 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 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. Red terror, unjustified cruelty of representatives Soviet power 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 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 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 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.

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. Lieutenant with beautiful woman's 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 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 trials moral sense 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.

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PLAN

Introduction…………………………………………………………………….3

1. Realism of the “Quiet Flows the Don”……………...……………………………………4

2. Reflection of the civil war in the novel……………..................................8

Conclusion………………………………………………………………..15

Literature………………………………………………………………...16

INTRODUCTION

Epic novel by M.A. Sholokhov "Quiet Don" is an epic work about the fate of the Russian Cossacks during the First World War and the Civil War, recognized as one of the pinnacles of Russian and world literature of the 20th century. The novel tells about the most difficult time in the life of Russia, which brought huge social and moral upheavals. The unity - as it was in reality - of the tragic and heroic principles, expressed through the dramatic fate of the Cossacks, is the main historical originality and strength of the novel.

showing tragic events of the civil war on the Don, the writer created vivid, truthful, lively images of people who clashed in a fiercely irreconcilable struggle. People of relatives, relatives, fathers and sons who raised their hands against each other. He showed their cruelty and mercy, spiritual suffering and hopes, their souls, their characters, joys and misfortunes, defeats and victories. The tragic grandeur of their lives. And could the life of the Russian people be different in a critical, revolutionary era?

The purpose of this work is to study the theme of the civil war in the novel by M.A. Sholokhov "Quiet Don". In accordance with the goal, the research tasks are defined:

- to show the realism of "The Quiet Flows the Don";

- to show the reflection of the civil war in the novel.

The totality of the goal and the tasks set led to following structure research, which consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a list of references.

1. Realism of the "Quiet Flows the Don"

M.A. Sholokhov began writing The Quiet Flows the Don at the age of twenty in 1925 and completed in 1940. The book was conceived as quite traditional for Soviet literature a story about the fierce struggle for the victory of Soviet power on the Don in the autumn of 1917 - in the spring of 1918. Something similar was already in the "Don stories", which made up the first book of the writer. However, soon Sholokhov abandoned the original plan. And the whole first volume of his novel is about something else: about the life and way of life of the Don Cossacks.

A brief but energetic plot tells about the history of the Melekhov family with mid-nineteenth century, when Russian-Turkish war Prokofy Melekhov brought a Turkish wife to the farm; he loved her, carried her in his arms to the top of the mound, where they both "looked at the steppe for a long time"; and when a threat loomed over her, he defended with a saber in his hands. So, from the first pages, proud, capable of great feelings, freedom-loving people, workers and warriors appear in the novel.

In the terrible scene of the murder of the offender of his wife by Prokofy, another important idea for the writer is revealed: the protection of the clan, family, and offspring. Contrary to the tradition of Soviet writers of the 1920s to depict pre-revolutionary reality as a chain of horrors, Sholokhov frankly admires the life of the Cossacks. Living reality, truthfulness of the depicted events of a large epic plan are given by very specific, juicy, full-blooded sketches of the life and life of the Cossacks of various historical periods. Sholokhov recreates the indestructible, inert way of life, the closed life of the “important kurens” of the pre-revolutionary years. “In every yard, surrounded by wattle fences, under every roof of every kuren, its own, isolated from the rest, full-blooded, bittersweet life was spinning like a bell.”

With all the smallest everyday details, the writer tells about this life of the inhabitants of kurens with its sorrows and joys, anxieties and worries. With colorful strokes, he paints pictures of mowing, folk festivals, youth games, their free Cossack songs about the glorious blue Don.

But Sholokhov the realist also shows the other side of pre-revolutionary Cossack life. And then the savagery, inertness, bestial cruelty of this possessive, closed little world is exposed. For a heap of hay, trampled by bulls, a Cossack, the sovereign master of the kuren, “ruined his wife” almost half to death. For treason, Stepan Astakhov “deliberately and terribly” beats his young beautiful wife Aksinya in front of indifferent neighbors watching this “spectacle”: “it’s very clear why Stepan favors his lawful one.”

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2. Reflection of the civil war in the novel

One of the favorite tricks of M.A. Sholokhov - a story-preliminary. So, at the end of the first chapter of the fifth part of the novel, we read: “Until January, they lived quietly on the Tatar farm. The Cossacks who returned from the front rested near their wives, ate, did not feel that at the thresholds of the kurens they were guarded by bitter misfortunes and hardships than those that they had to endure in the war they had gone through.

“The worst troubles” are a revolution and a civil war that broke the usual way of life. In a letter to Gorky, Sholokhov noted: "Without exaggerating my colors, I painted the harsh reality that preceded the uprising." The essence of the events depicted in the novel is truly tragic, they affect the fate of vast sections of the population. More than seven hundred characters, main and episodic, named by name and nameless, act in The Quiet Don; and the writer is concerned about their fate.

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." But there is still a long search for an answer to the question posed by Grigory Garanzhe: “How can you shorten the war? How to destroy it, since they have been fighting forever?

CONCLUSION

The novel by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov "Quiet Flows the Don" is a masterpiece of world literature. In "Quiet Don"

LITERATURE

1. Vasilenko E.V. Towards death // Literature at school, 2004. - No. 5.

2. Ermolaev G.S. Mikhail Sholokhov and his work. - St. Petersburg: 2000.

3. Kiseleva L.F. On the importance of key and dominant foundations artistic world Sholokhov for the past and present // Philological Bulletin of Rostov state university, 2005. – № 2.

4. Kovalev V.A. etc. Essay on the history of Russian Soviet literature. Part two. – M.: 1955.

5. Ognev A. Don sun // Soviet Russia, 2005. – № 70-71.

6. Semenova S. Philosophical and metaphysical facets of the "Quiet Don" // "Questions of Literature", 2002. - No. 1.

7. Tolstoy A.N. A quarter of a century of Soviet literature. – M.: 1943.

8. Sholokhov M.A. Sobr. cit.: In 8 vols. - M.: 1985-1986.

9. Yakimenko L.G. Creativity M.A. Sholokhov. – M.: 1977.