Serafimovich, Mayakovsky, Furmanov, and after them young writers spoke out against the depiction of the revolution, civil war like elements, they emphasized the organizing role of the party in the popular movement. Sholokhov turned to the topic of the civil war following Furmanov and Serafimovich. From these writers he received high praise and recognition. It can be assumed that Sholokhov’s works about the civil war met with Furmanov’s approval primarily because they were close to his ideological positions, because the idealization of the spontaneous principle in the revolutionary movement was alien to them. A. Serafimovich also valued “Don Stories” for its truthfulness. He was the first to note the features creative manner Sholokhov; simplicity of life, dynamism, figurative language of stories, a sense of proportion in “acute moments”, “a subtle grasping eye”, “the ability to snatch out the most characteristic from many signs”,
In Sholokhov's early stories, it is realistically visible, with ideological positions 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. Sholokhov's first collection, “Don Stories” (1926), opened with the story “The Birthmark.” The commander of the red squadron, Nikolai Koshevoy, is waging an irreconcilable fight against white gangs. One day his squadron encounters one of the gangs, headed by Nikolai Koshevoy’s father. In a battle, a 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 demarcated not only the Don, the village, the farm, but also Cossack families. One side defends proprietary, class interests, the other – the gains of the revolution. Communists, Komsomol members, and the youth of the village boldly break with the old world, heroically defending the interests and rights of the people in harsh battles with it.
The second collection “Azure Steppe” (1926) begins story of the same name, the introduction to which, written in 1927, is openly polemical in nature. The author is ironic about writers who very touchingly lisp “about the odorous gray feather grass,” about the Red Army “brothers” who allegedly died, “choking on pompous words.” Sholokhov claims that the red fighters died for the revolution in the Don and Kuban steppes “disgustingly simply.” Strongly speaking out against idealization and false romanticization of reality, he portrays the people's struggle for Soviet power as a complex social process, traces the growth of revolutionary sentiments among the Cossacks, overcoming difficulties and contradictions on the path to a new life.
Almost simultaneously with Sholokhov, such writers as S. Podyachev, A. Neverov, L. Seifullina and others revealed the severity of the brutal class struggle in the countryside during the Civil War, showing the new things 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 “peasant,” without noticing the revolutionary renewal of the village and its people. Sun. Ivanov, in the collection “The Secret of the Secret,” artificially isolated the peasants from the social struggle and became carried away by the depiction of their biological instincts. K. Fedin, in the story “Transvaal” and the stories in the collection of the same name, did not notice the triumph of new, social relations in the Russian village. By exaggerating the role of the kulak, he thereby violated the real balance of forces and paid primary attention to the inertia and stagnation of village life.
In 1925, L. Leonov’s novel “Badgers” was published, in which the writer, unlike earlier stories, asserted the victory of the organizing principle in the revolution over the elements of the old world. However, the author has not yet achieved a clear demonstration of the stratification of the village. Class struggle was replaced by random litigation between two villages for ownership of hayfields. This litigation determined the attitude of the peasants towards the Russian authorities. 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 that even divided families, but by the desire to base the work on a psychologically intense conflict.
Sholokhov was interested in the class and social struggle, which determined the ideological demarcation of members of the same family. In the story “Wormhole,” the writer depicts a “rift” in a wealthy kulak family. He opposes his father and brother, who are hostile to Russian power. younger son, Komsomol member Stepan. He cannot remain silent, knowing
that they are deceiving the Soviet government, hiding surplus grain. The feud in the family reaches the point that Yakov Alekseevich and his eldest son Maxim kill Stepan, whom they hate.
Both here 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 with our own time
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 the same nation destroy each other for the sake of change social order- for the sake of overthrowing the previous and establishing a new state political system.
In Soviet literature of the 20s of the 20th century, the theme 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 glorify and be proud of. Sholokhov’s first stories (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 people’s 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 either romance or sublime heroism in the civil war, unlike, for example, A.A. Fadeev, the author of the novel “Destruction.” Sholokhov directly stated in the introduction to the story “Azure Steppe”: “Some writer who has not smelled gunpowder talks very touchingly about the civil war, the Red Army soldiers - certainly “brothers”, about the fragrant gray feather grass. (...) In addition, you can hear about how Red fighters died in the Don and Kuban steppes, choking on pompous words. (...) In fact, it is feather grass. Harmful herb, odorless. (...) The trenches overgrown with plantain and quinoa, silent witnesses to recent battles, could tell a story about how ugly, how people simply died in them.” In other words, Sholokhov believes that the truth must be written 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 a real war, the young writer places openly naturalistic, repulsive fragments in some stories: a detailed description of the hacked body of Foma Korshunov from the story “Nakhalyonok”, details of the murder of the chairman of the farm council Efim Ozerov from the story “Mortal Enemy”, details of the execution of his grandchildren grandfather Zakhar from the story “Azure Steppe”, etc. Soviet critics unanimously noted these naturalistically reduced descriptions and considered them 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 Dayra” and others) inspiredly depicted how units of the Red Army heroically fought 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, because 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 "Mole"); kulaks kill a Komsomol member, almost a boy, Grigory Frolov because he sent a letter to the newspaper about their fraud with the land (the story “Shepherd”); food commissar Ignat Bodyagin sentences his own father, the first kulak in the village, to execution (story “Food Commissar”); red machine gunner Yakov Shibalok kills the woman he loves because she turned out to be a spy of Ataman Ignatiev (story “Shibalkov’s Seed”); Fourteen-year-old Mitka kills his father to save his older brother, a Red Army soldier (the story “The Bakhchevnik”), etc.
A split in families, as Sholokhov shows, occurs not because of the eternal conflict of generations (the conflict between “fathers” and “children”), but because of 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 “extremely fair” (story “The Family Man”): the land goes to the peasants who cultivate it; power in the country - to deputies elected by the people, local power - to 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, Cossack circle on the farm. Although, it must be admitted, both in life and in Sholokhov’s stories this is not always the case. After all, a civil war affects the entire nation, so the motivation for choosing (which side to fight on) can be very different. In the story "Kolovert" the middle brother Mikhail Kramskov is a White Cossack, because in tsarist army rose to the rank of officer, and his father Pyotr Pakhomych and brothers Ignat and Grigory, middle peasant Cossacks, joined the Red Army detachment; in the story “Alien Blood,” son Peter died in the white army, defending Cossack privileges, and his father, grandfather Gavril, reconciled with the Reds, because he fell in love with the young food commissar Nikolai Kosykh with all his heart.
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 hurries to the village at night for “help.” Hundreds of special-purpose soldiers want to kill the newborn son of Shibalko from the story “Shibalkovo’s Seed”, since his mother is a bandit spy, and because of her betrayal, half a hundred died. Only Shibalka's tearful plea saves the child from terrible reprisals. In the story “Alyoshka’s Heart,” a bandit, surrendering, hides behind a four-year-old girl, whom he holds in his arms, so that the Red Army soldiers do not rashly shoot him.
The civil war does not allow anyone to stay away from the general carnage. The validity of this idea is confirmed by the fate of the ferryman Mikishara, the hero of the story “The 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 younger children.
Sholokhov depicts the extreme bitterness of both warring sides - Red and White. Heroes " Don stories” are sharply and definitely opposed to each other, which leads to schematism of images. The writer shows the atrocities of the whites and kulaks, who mercilessly kill the poor, Red Army soldiers and rural activists. At the same time, Sholokhov depicts the enemies of the Soviet regime, usually without delving into their characters, motives of behavior, or life history, that is, in a one-sided and simplified manner. The kulaks and White Guards in “Don Stories” are cruel, treacherous, and greedy. Suffice it to recall Makarchikha from the story “Alyoshka’s Heart,” who smashed the head of a starving girl—Alyoshka’s sister—with an iron, or the rich farmstead Ivan Alekseev: he hired fourteen-year-old Alyoshka as a worker “for grub,” forced the boy to work like an adult man, and beat him mercilessly “for grub.” every little thing." The nameless White Guard officer from the story “The Foal” kills in the back the Red Army soldier Trofim, who had just saved a foal from a whirlpool.
Sholokhov does not hide the fact that his political and human sympathies are on the side of the Soviet regime, so the young writer’s positive heroes are the village poor (Alyoshka Popov from the story “Alyoshka’s 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 “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, already in the early “Don Stories” statements of the 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 resistance from the Cossacks and, therefore, inflates the civil war even more. In the story “Food Commissar,” Father Bodyagin expresses his grievance to his son, the food commissar: “I should be shot for my goods, because I don’t let anyone into my barn, I am the counter, and who is rummaging through other people’s bins, this one is under the law? Rob, your strength." Grandfather Gavrila from the story “Alien Blood” thinks about the Bolsheviks: “They invaded the Cossacks’ ancestral life by enemies, they turned my grandfather’s ordinary life inside out, like an empty pocket.” In the story “About the Don Food Committee and the Misadventures of the Don Food Commissar Comrade Ptitsyn,” which is considered weak and is usually not analyzed by critics, the methods of surplus appropriation during the Civil War are shown very frankly. Comrade Ptitsyn reports how dashingly he carries out the order of his boss, Food Commissar Goldin: “I go back and download bread. And he got so worked up that the man was left with only fur. And he would have lost that good, he would have robbed him of his 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 the common people, but later, in the novel “ Quiet Don“, Grigory Melekhov will clearly speak out on this matter: “To me, if I’m telling the truth, neither one nor the other is in good conscience.” His life will become an example of the tragic fate of an ordinary person who finds himself between two irreconcilably hostile political camps.
To summarize, it should be said that Sholokhov in his early stories depicts the civil war as a time of great national grief. The mutual cruelty and hatred of the Reds and the Whites leads to a national tragedy: neither one nor the other understands the absolute value human life, and the blood of the Russian people flows like a river.
Almost all the stories in the Don cycle have a tragic ending; goodies, drawn by the author with great sympathy, die 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 lives; in the story “Mortal Enemy,” fists lie in wait for Efim Ozerov when he returns to the farm alone, but before his death, Efim remembers the words of his comrade: “Remember, Efim, they will kill you - there will be twenty new Efims!.. Like 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 her and Gregory’s dream - to study. This is how the writer expresses historical optimism in his stories: ordinary people, even in a situation of 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 problems: man and revolution, man and the people, the fate of man in an era of global and national upheaval. True, a convincing disclosure of these problems in short stories the young writer did not give, and could not give. What was needed here was an epic with a long running time, with numerous characters and events. This is probably why Sholokhov’s next work after “Don Stories” was the epic novel about the civil war “Quiet Don”.
The second volume of Mikhail Sholokhov's epic novel tells about the civil war. It included chapters about the Kornilov rebellion from the book “Donshchina”, which the writer began to create a year before “Quiet Don”. This part of the work is precisely dated: late 1916 - April 1918.
The slogans of the Bolsheviks attracted the poor who wanted to be free masters of their land. But the civil war raises new questions for the main character Grigory Melekhov. Each side, white and red, seeks its truth by killing each other. Once among the Reds, Gregory sees the cruelty, intransigence, and thirst for blood of his enemies. War destroys everything: the smooth life of families, peaceful work, takes away the last things, kills love. Sholokhov's heroes Grigory and Pyotr Melekhov, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy, almost the entire male population are drawn into battles, the meaning of which is unclear to them. For whose sake and what should they die in the prime of life? Life on the farm gives them a lot of joy, beauty, hope, and opportunity. War is only deprivation and death.
The Bolsheviks Shtokman and Bunchuk see the country exclusively as an arena of class battles, where people are tin soldiers in someone else's game, where pity for a person is a crime. The burdens of war fall primarily on the shoulders of the civilian population, ordinary people; it is up to them to starve and die, not to the commissars. Bunchuk arranges lynching of Kalmykov, and in his defense he says: “They are us or we are them!.. There is no middle ground.” Hatred blinds, no one wants to stop and think, impunity gives a free hand. Grigory witnesses how Commissioner Malkin sadistically mocks the population in the captured village. Sees scary pictures robbery by fighters of the Tiraspol detachment of the 2nd Socialist Army, who rob farmsteads and rape women. As the old song says, you have become cloudy, Father Quiet Don. Grigory understands that in fact it is not the truth that people mad with blood are looking for, but real turmoil is happening on the Don.
It is no coincidence that Melekhov rushes between the two warring sides. Everywhere he encounters violence and cruelty that he cannot accept. Podtelkov orders the execution of prisoners, and the Cossacks, forgetting about military honor, chop down unarmed people. They carried out the order, but when Gregory realized that he was chopping up prisoners, he fell into a frenzy: “Who did he chop down!.. Brothers, I have no forgiveness! Hack to death, for God’s sake... for God’s sake... To death... deliver!” Christonya, dragging the “enraged” Melekhov away from Podtelkov, says bitterly: “Lord God, what is happening to people?” And the captain, Shein, who had already understood the essence of what was happening, prophetically promises Podtelkov that “the Cossacks will wake up and they will hang you.” The mother reproaches Gregory for participating in the execution of captured sailors, but he himself admits how cruel he became in the war: “I don’t feel sorry for the children either.” Having left the Reds, Grigory joins the Whites, where he sees Podtelkov’s execution. Melekhov tells him: “Do you remember the battle near Glubokaya? Do you remember how the officers were shot?.. They shot on your orders! A? Now you're burping! Well, don't worry! You're not the only one to tan other people's skins! You have left, Chairman of the Don Council of People’s Commissars!”
War embitters and divides people. Grigory notices that the concepts of “brother,” “honor,” and “fatherland” disappear from consciousness. The strong community of Cossacks has been disintegrating for centuries. Now everyone is for himself and for his family. Koshevoy, using his power, decided to execute the local rich man Miron Korshunov. Miron's son, Mitka, avenges his father and kills Koshevoy's mother. Koshevoy kills Pyotr Melekhov, his wife Daria shot Ivan Alekseevich. Koshevoy now takes revenge on the entire Tatarsky farm for the death of his mother: when leaving, he sets fire to “seven houses in a row.” Blood seeks blood.
Peering into the past, he recreates the events of the Upper Don Uprising. When the uprising began, Melekhov perked up and decided that now everything would change for the better: “We must fight those who want to take away life, the right to it...” Having almost driven his horse, he rushes off to fight the Reds. The Cossacks protested against the destruction of their way of life, but, striving for justice, they tried to solve the problem with aggression and conflict, which led to the opposite result. And here Gregory was disappointed. Having been assigned to Budyonny's cavalry, Grigory does not find an answer to bitter questions. He says: “I’m tired of everything: both the revolution and the counter-revolution... I want to live near my children.”
The writer shows that there can be no truth where there is death. There is only one truth, it is not “red” or “white”. War kills the best. Realizing this, Grigory throws down his weapon and returns to his native farm to work for native land, raise children. The hero is not yet 30 years old, but the war turned him into an old man, took him away, burned him out the best part souls. Sholokhov in his immortal work raises the question of the responsibility of history to the individual. The writer sympathizes with his hero, whose life is broken: “Like a steppe scorched by fires, Gregory’s life became black...”
In the epic novel, Sholokhov created a grandiose historical canvas, describing in detail the events of the civil war on the Don. The writer became a national hero for the Cossacks, creating an artistic epic about the life of the Cossacks in a tragic time of historical change.
M. A. Sholokhov’s epic novel “Quiet Don” is undoubtedly his most significant and serious work. Here the author surprisingly well managed to show the life of the Don Cossacks, convey their very spirit and connect all this with specific historical events.
The birth of the famous epic novel by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov “Quiet Don” is associated with events in Russian history that have global significance: the first Russian revolution of 1905, World War 1914-1918, October Revolution, the civil war, and the period of peaceful construction caused the desire of word artists to create works of wide epic scope.
It is characteristic that in the twenties, almost simultaneously, M. Gorky began to work on the epic “The Life of Klim Samgin”, A.N. Tolstoy began to work on the epic “Walking Through Torment”, M. Sholokhov turned to creating the epic “Quiet Don”. The creators of epic paintings relied on the traditions of Russian classics, on such works about the destinies of people as “The Captain's Daughter”, “Taras Bulba”, “War and Peace”. At the same time, the authors were not only continuers of traditions classical literature, but also innovators, because they reproduced such transformations in the life of the people and the Motherland that the great artists of the past could not see. 1
The epic novel “Quiet Don” occupies a special place in the history of Russian literature. Sholokhov devoted fifteen years of his life and hard work to its creation. M. Gorky saw in the novel the embodiment of the enormous talent of the Russian people. The events in "Quiet Don" begin in 1912 and end in 1922, when the civil war died down on the Don. Knowing very well the life and way of life of the Cossacks of the Don region, being himself a participant in the harsh struggle on the Don in the early twenties, Sholokhov focused on depicting the Cossacks. The work closely combines document and fiction. In "Quiet Don" there are many authentic names of farms and villages of the Don region. The center of events with which the main action of the novel is connected is the village of Veshenskaya.
The First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster, and the old soldier, professing Christian wisdom, advises the young Cossacks: “Remember one thing: if you want to be alive, to emerge from mortal combat, you must preserve human truth...” Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war that cripples people both physically and mentally. Death and suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in his second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke a joyful feeling among the Cossacks; they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of its end. How many of them have already died: more than one Cossack widow echoed the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand
1 Gordovich K. D. History Russian literature XX century. 2nd ed., rev. and additional: A manual for humanitarian universities. – St. Petersburg: SpetsLit, 2000.–p.216
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
in the near future. The Upper Don Uprising appears in Sholokhov's depiction as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.
There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of representatives of the Soviet government on the Don are shown in the novel with great artistic force. 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 also 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 had developed over centuries, and were inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already during the events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal nature. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.”
A. Serafimovich wrote about the heroes of “Quiet Don”: “...his people are not drawn, not written out - this is not on paper.” 1 The type images created by Sholokhov summarize the deep and expressive features of the Russian people. Depicting the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the characters, the writer did not cut off, but exposed the threads leading to the past.
Working on the epic "Quiet Don", Sholokhov proceeded from philosophical concept that the people are the main driving force of history. This concept received deep artistic embodiment in the epic: in the image folk life, life and labor of the Cossacks, in depicting 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, and tragic. The destruction of the “old world” was associated with the collapse of centuries-old folk traditions, Orthodoxy, the destruction of churches, the rejection of moral commandments that were instilled in people from childhood.
The epic covers a period of great upheaval in Russia. These upheavals greatly affected the fate of the Don Cossacks described in the novel. Eternal values define the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible during 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.
1 Lukin Yu. B. Mikhail Sholokhov. M.: " Soviet writer", 1962. – p. 22
The life of the Cossacks is defined 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 take up arms in defense of their land, which was particularly fertile and rewarded the labor invested in it a hundredfold. 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 a horse, which for them is not just a tool of production, but a faithful friend in battle and a comrade in work (the description of the crying hero Christoni after Voronok, taken away by the Reds, touches the heart). All Cossacks are brought up with respect for their elders and unquestioning submission to them (Panteley Prokofievich could punish Grigory even when the latter had hundreds and thousands of people under his command). The Cossacks are governed by an ataman, elected by the military Cossack Circle, where Sholokhov’s Panteley Prokofievich is heading.
But it should be noted that among the Cossacks traditions of a different kind are strong. Historically, the bulk of the Cossacks were peasants who fled from the landowners in Russia in search of free land. Therefore, the Cossacks are primarily farmers. The vast expanses of the steppes on the Don made it possible, with a certain amount of hard work, to obtain good harvests. Sholokhov shows them as good and strong owners. Cossacks treat land not just as a means of production. She is something more to them. Being in a foreign land, the Cossack’s heart reaches out to his native kuren, to the land, to work on the farm. Grigory, already a commander, more than once leaves home from the front to see loved ones and walk along the furrow, holding the plow. It is the love of the land and the craving for home that forces the Cossacks to abandon the front and not conduct an offensive beyond the borders of the district.
Sholokhov's Cossacks are very freedom-loving. It was the love of freedom, of the opportunity to dispose of the products of their labor themselves that pushed the Cossacks to revolt, in addition to hostility towards the peasants (in their understanding, lazy people and klutzes) and love for their own land, which the Reds had to hand over in an arbitrary way. The love of freedom of the Cossacks is to some extent explained by their traditional autonomy within Russia. Historically, people flocked to the Don in search of freedom. And they found it here and became Cossacks.
In general, freedom for the Cossacks is not an empty phrase. Brought up in complete freedom, the Cossacks negatively perceived attempts to encroach on their freedom by the Bolsheviks. While fighting against the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks do not seek to completely destroy their power. The Cossacks only want to liberate their land. If we talk about the innate sense of freedom among the Cossacks, then we should remember Gregory’s experiences due to responsibility before the Soviet authorities for his participation in the uprising. How worried Gregory is about thoughts of prison! Why? After all, Gregory is not a coward. The fact is that Gregory is afraid of the very thought of limiting his freedom. He failed to experience any coercion. Gregory can be compared to wild goose, who was knocked out of his family by a bullet and thrown to the ground at the feet of the shooter.
War and peace are two states of life of the human community, elevated by Leo Tolstoy to the title formula of his great novel, towards which the author of “The Quiet Don” oriented himself (he constantly read “War and Peace” at the time of thinking and working on the epic, took with him and to the front of the Great Patriotic War), in essence, are Sholokhov’s two main layers of national life, two points of human reference. Tolstoy’s influence on Sholokhov, especially in his view of war, was noted more than once, but still the author of “Quiet Flows the Don” has his own in-depth understanding of the peaceful and military status of life, coming from a greater proximity to the natural type of existence, the root feeling of existence in general . 1
World war, revolution, civil war in Sholokhov in many ways only condenses to an eerie, repulsive concentrate what exists in a peaceful state, in the very nature of man and the things of this world: impulses of separation, repression, passionate selfishness, mockery of man, anger and murder . The world is twisted by its own bundle of contradictions and struggles - when they are heated, they will emerge in civil confrontation, reaching the Homeric “bloodshed”, frantic mutual destruction, complete destruction of the previous way of life. Peace and war are states of relative, visible health (with a chronicle 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 “Quiet Flows the Don,” which Fedorov defined as kinship - non-kinship, despite the fact that kinship is also the most naturally deep and irrevocable relationship between people, children of the same father, heavenly and earthly, and together the most distorted, right up to its opposite, even in its warm and intimate core - family and community.
Of course, such distortion reaches an egregious degree precisely in a state of war, especially civil war. But the seeds of unrelatedness, which, as Fedorov pointed out, go to the very root of fallen, mortal existence, sprout with ominous fruits even before the war and revolution. Let us remember how, in the heat of prejudices and dark passions, Gregory’s grandmother was killed, and his grandfather “ruined to the waist” the one who came to his yard at the head of the farm, communal massacre. Or how Aksinya’s father, who encroached on her, was brutally beaten by his son and wife, how the Cossacks and Taurideans maimed and killed each other in a fight at the mill, how he “deliberately and terribly” tortured
1 Yakimenko L. “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov. About the skill of a writer. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1954. – p. 34
Stepan, how Mitka Korshunov “forced” Liza Mokhova, and later shamelessly pestered his sister... And Natalya, a quiet, selfless, pure woman, turns out to be capable of a grave sin (according to Christian concepts) - to lay hands on herself, and even on Easter night, and later - albeit in a burning resentment against her husband for his infidelity - to kill their own fetus, their possible future child: some kind of subtle fanaticism of the clean and quiet! “He emasculated my life like a boletus,” Stepan squeezes out of himself to Grigory: willingly or unwillingly, in his passions, one stands across the path of the other, destroying him. The burden of such guilt of the central beloved heroes of the novel - and in purely peaceful, love conflicts and struggles - the same Gregory and Aksinya is enormous.
In the most peaceful times, as we see, the natural underside of life and human relationships is thick: family crimes, secret nightly abuses, hatred of strangers, anger and murder... Moreover, the people's hero, the grassroots hero, is much closer to this underside than, say, nobles characters of the same Tolstoy: the very way of life and way of existence is much tougher, more natural, more open: they live among and next to animals, with nature, do not know urban hygiene, slaughter cattle themselves, fight famously, habitually beat their wives, are cocky and merciless to each other in word... Their hardening, physical and mental, is incomparable with the sensitivity of a civilized, polished, urban, wealthy person pampered by the everyday comforts: and this ranges from dirt, fleas, lice to the excesses of human passions. By the threshold of endurance, mental resistance to injury, by inapplicability to many of folk characters Sholokhov’s moral normative line, they are as flexible and plastic, saving and killing, faithful and “treacherous” as life itself. Is nature moral, giving birth and destroying, caring and indifferent, sometimes welcoming, sometimes turning away from its recent favorite?
So young Aksinya does not break down from being raped by her father and - let’s not forget - being murdered by her loved ones (which is perhaps even worse), and does not even remember this at all - a trait noted by P. V. Palievsky 5 . And what mental devastation Gregory went through! Leonov painfully, hopelessly, for the whole novel, jammed Mitka Vekshin from “The Thief” on his murder of an officer, and the hero of “Quiet Don”, having gone through a close internal breakdown (after the murder of an unarmed Austrian, overwhelmed by the horror of the inevitable end), and then through a cascade even more terrible things, through a stultifying and brutal addiction to them, through the loss of those closest and dear people, each time it becomes obsolete, finds the strength to still live and feel, forget and be reborn. On Sholokhov's heroes - until the last fatal capture - it heals and grows, almost like in nature itself, of course not without ugly scars, rough bark, heavy growths... 1
So is there a fundamental difference between a peaceful and a war state of life? On the one hand, it seems there is no - only a sharp increase in the degree and degree of struggle and atrocity, on the other - it is still there: quantity turns into quality. One thing is a spontaneous clash of eternal instincts, interests, passions, one thing is interhuman, individual or collective, dramatic, tragic conflicts: they are part of some general economy of natural-mortal existence, with its light and dark sides. It’s one thing for Grigory to brutally beat his offender, Listnitsky’s rival, ready in a fit of furious anger to kill Chubaty or the general humiliating him (even if he killed him, it would be in a state of passion, like Natalya, who attempted to kill herself and the child in her womb), or even Mitka, raping a bored young lady, greedy for spicy, dangerous entertainment...
It’s a completely different matter when hatred, anger, and behind them murder is massified, mechanized, extremely simplified, becomes habitual and cold. Another is the extrajudicial executions and chopping down of prisoners, the sadistic exploits of the same Mitka, who kills old women and children, the transformation of extreme passionate excess (which most often is murder in peaceful life) into a calm, satanized craft, the object of which is worthless, cheaper than boots and jackets, - and the well-known terrible synonymy, which flourished so much in these years and is presented in full form in the novel, began: to waste, to spray, to make heads, to take off the account, to slap, to knock, to press to the nail, to crumble into smoke... As the wise people spoke an old man in the novel, Aksinya’s accidental travel companion: “It’s easier to kill someone who has broken their hand in this matter than to crush a louse. The man has fallen in price for the revolution.”
The mutual killing of people in battle appears as an unnecessary, insane action already in the initial scenes on the front of the First World War. “Being enraged with fear, the Cossacks and Germans stabbed and hacked at anything: on the backs, on the arms, on horses and weapons...” - the terrible stupidity of the battles is then retrospectively formalized into folding military reports and reports. This is the ironically presented story of the Cossack Kozma Kryuchkov, the first to receive George, nymphomaniacally inflated for the needs of the gasping capital ladies and rear gentlemen (so that, hanging around until the end of the war at the division headquarters, he was awarded three more crosses). “And it was like this,” Sholokhov summarizes in Tolstoy’s spirit and tone, “people who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind collided on the field of death, in the animal horror that overwhelmed them they stumbled, knocked down, dealt blind blows, mutilated themselves and their horses and fled , frightened by the shot that killed the man, they dispersed, morally crippled. They called it a feat." 1
1 Ibid., p. 340
The first shock from the first battle (“baring his teeth, his face changed, like a dead man” - this is how a normal, healthy Cossack suddenly appears), looking at the first corpses, mental illness, “boring internal pain” of Gregory, experiencing his murder of an Austrian, and then it went... here we go: corpses are piled up in piles, a person enters into a dark, devastating habit of killing, becomes mentally charred, becomes angry and isolated, or even experiences a perverted passion for chopping and crumbling “hostile” human flesh - in the heat of the moment, in the paroxysm of a demon’s obsession with murder. Sholokhov constantly emphasizes how physically people change at the same time, what a disfiguring imprint the war leaves on their faces, body and soul. So Grigory “became flabby, stooped”, in his gaze “the light of senseless cruelty began to shine through more and more often” - (and what can we say about others, about some Mitka Korshunov). He explains to Natalya in response to her reproaches for her debauchery at the front: yes, they “went crazy,” but after all, “on the verge of death,” “I have become terrible to myself... Look into my soul, and there is blackness, like in an empty well.” Let us remember how Aksinya’s loving eyes reveal his new, war-hardened appearance when she peers for the last time into the face of Gregory sleeping in a forest clearing: “There was something stern, almost cruel, in the deep transverse wrinkles between the eyebrows of her lover, in the folds of his mouth, in sharply defined cheekbones... And for the first time she thought how terrible he must be in battle, on a horse, with a drawn saber.” Aksinya only assumes and guesses, and we, the readers, have seen this with our own eyes more than once in those terrifyingly piercing pictures of the battle that the writer unfolded before us (especially in the episodes when Gregory resorted to masterly techniques of unexpectedly cutting down the enemy with his left hand). One of the historical characters in “Quiet Flows the Don,” Kharlampy Ermakov, who, as is known, served as the main prototype of Grigory Melekhov (he acts independently in the novel) “...embarrassedly looked away his bloodshot, rabid eyes that had not yet gone out after the battle” - these are the fighting eyes , I’m ashamed of them myself, I know what I was like just now!
It is in the fratricidal civil confrontation, ironclad and mercilessly supported 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, tirelessly fueled by poisoned vengeful passion - to the last enemy and offender! Sholokhov never tires of clearly demonstrating how, as it flares up more and more, the passionate commitment to hatred, evil, and murder intensifies, how it boomerangs its bearers. In the soul of Petro Melekhov, forced to dance to the common tune, ingratiating himself with Fomin, “hatred was pounding in fits and his hands were twisted by a spasm from an itching desire to hit, to kill.” When the opportunity arises, no one can restrain either hatred or this desire. The bitterness and frenzy are mutual and it is growing in degrees. The goal is for the complete physical destruction of the enemy, there is no talk of any kind of dismantling and sorting of people, their disposal, transformation: “Rake this evil spirits from the earth” and that’s it! An officer of the Don Army, harshly, coldly, like a breeder, signs the final verdict on 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’s no point in coddling them!” The same is mirrored in the thoughts and speeches of Mishka Koshevoy: camaraderie and unanimity through the cutting down of disobedient, wavering human material!
The chain of mutual mortal grievances, bullying, cruel retribution and new never-ending accounts tightens the fabric of the military layer of the novel, digging in especially piercingly in such places as the shooting and chopping down of prisoners Chernetsov and forty of his officers by Podtelkov and his men, and then the execution of Podtelkov himself and his squad , the murder of Pyotr Melekhov by Mishka Koshev with the participation of Ivan Alekseevich, and then the lynching of those driven through Cossack villages communists of the Serdobsky regiment - to a bloody mess and “visceral animal roar”, finally, beating them all in Tatarskoe, where Peter’s wife Daria especially distinguished herself by shooting Ivan Alekseevich... But Mishka Koshevoy, inflamed by the news of the murder of Shtokman, Ivan Alekseevich, with the words of Trotsky’s order about the merciless devastation of the rebel villages, the extermination of the participants in the uprising, he organizes a man-made apocalypse, the act of burning the old world - merchants' and priests' houses with all their household goods, he shoots grandfather Grishak on the porch of the Korshunovs' house (at one time both Mishka himself and his father worked for them as laborers) , and a few months later Mitka Korshunov brutally massacres the remaining family of the revolutionary avenger: his mother and young brother and sister.
A terrible series of actions and reactions opens up, leading to an ever-increasing voltage of mutual hatred and murderous fury. This bad, mutually destructive infinity is interrupted only by the child’s reaction (“Mommy! Don’t hit him! Oh, don’t hit him!.. I’m sorry! I’m afraid! There’s blood on him!” - in the scene of the torture of the prisoners, forcing the mother and some women to come to their senses. Yes, Grigory Melekhov, despite his involuntary participation in this series, with a direct inner instinct tries every time (but, alas, most often unsuccessfully) in moments of paroxysms of mutual bitterness to prevent the unleashing of an ominous gallop of tearing out each other’s eyes, according to the Old Testament law. an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, and even in abundance, with overlap. Moreover, it is through his main character that the writer leads the reader to the feeling and thought (in fact, deeply Christian) about the need to interrupt the evil infinity of retribution and struggle that is going on. crescendo, get off the “tit for tat” principle, stop, forgive, forget to start from the beginning. And although people and life do not allow Gregory to jump off the spinning fiery wheel of hatred and murder, he still comes to this in the finale of the epic: he returns. home, throwing away the weapon, at the so problematic mercy of the winner...
And Grigory’s mother, Ilyinichna, having resigned herself to the will of her daughter, to the force of circumstances, steps over the natural repulsion from the murderer of her eldest son, accepting into the house a person so hated by her, charged with an alien “truth.” But gradually, having peered into him, she highlights some of his unexpected reactions (say, attention and affection for Grigory’s son Mishatka) and suddenly begins to feel “uninvited pity” for him when he is exhausted, oppressed and tormented by malaria. Here it is, the great, redemptive pity of a mother’s heart for the lost children of this cruel world! And before her death, she gives Dunyasha the most precious thing for Mishka - Grigory’s shirt, let him wear it, otherwise he’s already sweating! This is the highest gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation on her part! And Natalya, mortally resentful of her husband - to the point of being unable to carry and bear his child - taking revenge on him and herself by cutting out a living fetus, forgives Gregory before her death, dying reconciled. And the frantic warrior for Grigory, Aksinya, takes Natalya’s children to her, warming them with love. And maybe this is where some kind of supreme test of a person’s quality lies: in any case, it radically fails chief representative The new government in the novel is Mishka Kosheva, irreconcilable, unstoppable in his class suspicion and revenge.
1 Gura V.V. How “Quiet Don” was created. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1989. – p. 279
The situation of war, the test of complete uncertainty in the future, devastation, infection, impending death in an aggravated, acute form reveals the face of human destiny. They removed the covers from the man - he was left naked: the wife of a major general, “a noble woman with glasses sits, looking through her glasses for lice on herself. And they walk along it<…>Lice are like fleas on a mangy cat!” Everyone was plunged into the dirty, smelly, dangerous irrational underbelly of life, the one that urban civilization is trying so hard to camouflage! 1
Emphasizing the internal contradiction, the conflict in the Cossack between a peaceful tiller and a warrior (and the combination of these two occupations, two human types constitutive in him, reveals his reason to be), Sholokhov brings to the fore the farmer, endowing his heroes with an uncontrollable attraction to this so natural and beloved occupation and corresponding way of life. It is during war that they turn especially nostalgically to peaceful work on the land, imagining in memory and anticipation what is most dear to them: plowing in the steppe, mowing, harvesting, caring for horses, household utensils and tools... For Sholokhov himself, the time of creation “ "Quiet Don" war, as already noted, quite in Tolstoy's style - madness, nonsense, evil, with the exception, perhaps, of protecting the country from the Turks, the mountaineers, which from the very beginning was the meaning of the formation and existence of the Cossacks as such and what found itself reflected in the ancient songs that sound so often and soulfully in the novel. 2
In order to write a truly great epic novel, Sholokhov not only took part in hostilities, but also lived the Cossack life that he describes in “Quiet Don.” In the novel, he does not just show events civil revolution and the World War, but also speaks of their influence on the peaceful way of life of the Cossacks, their families, their fate. Sholokhov loved the Cossacks and therefore, when presenting the Nobel Prize for the novel “Quiet Flows the Don,” Sholokhov spoke about the greatness of the historical path of the Russian people and that “to all that I have written and will write, to pay tribute to this working people, the builder people, the hero people "
1 Ibid., p. 284
2 Ibid., p. 298
List of used literature:
1. Gordovich K. D. History of Russian literature of the 20th century. 2nd ed., rev. and additional: A manual for humanitarian universities. – St. Petersburg: SpetsLit, 2000. – 320 p.
2. Gura V.V. How “Quiet Don” was created. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1989. – 464 p.
For obvious reasons, the author is not named in the novel - he is indignant: “They scribbled with a pen and completely paired him with Denikin, they enlisted him as an assistant”). Truly historical, not distorted to please official versions the basis of the novel testifies to the honest position of the author, which caused active opposition from pro-Bolshevik criticism. Sholokhov's reputation as an apologist for the kulaks and whites was firmly established...
And makes it an epic novel. Less than a hundred years have passed, and Russian literature has given the world a book, the author of which creatively interpreted the traditions of L. Tolstoy in a new way. historical stage. The epic novel “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov continued and developed Tolstoy’s traditions of depicting major historical events as they were refracted in the destinies of a number of heroes. Gorky's statement that communism will give rise to...
The Civil War as depicted by M. A. Sholokhov
In 1917, the war turned into bloody turmoil. This is no longer a domestic war, requiring sacrificial duties from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the onset of revolutionary times, relations between classes and estates change dramatically, moral foundations are rapidly destroyed and traditional culture, and with them the state. The disintegration that was generated by the morality of war covers all social and spiritual ties, leads society into a state of struggle of all against all, to the loss of people of the Fatherland and faith.
If we compare the face of 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 war. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for a quick end, because the authorities “must end the war, because both 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, which cripples people both physically and morally. Death and suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in his second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke a joyful feeling among the Cossacks; they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of its end. How many of them have already died: more than one Cossack widow echoed 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 Sholokhov's depiction as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.
There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of representatives of the Soviet government on the Don are shown in the novel with great artistic force. Sholokhov also 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 had developed over centuries, and were inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already during the events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal nature. 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 upheaval in Russia. These upheavals greatly affected 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.
Portraying the Civil War as a People's Tragedy
Not only civil war, any war is a disaster for Sholokhov. The writer convincingly shows that the atrocities of the civil war were prepared by four years of the First World War.
The perception of the war as a national tragedy is facilitated by gloomy symbolism. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarskoye, “at night an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible cries hung over the farmstead, and an owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, fossilized by calves, moaning over the brown, grassy graves.
“It will be bad,” the old men prophesied, hearing owl calls from the cemetery.
“The war will come.”
The war burst into the Cossack kurens like a fiery tornado just during the harvest, when the people valued every minute. The messenger rushed up, raising a cloud of dust behind him. The fateful thing has come...
Sholokhov demonstrates how just one month of war changes people beyond recognition, cripples their souls, devastates them to the very bottom, and makes them look at the world around them in a new way.
Here the writer describes the situation after one of the battles. There are corpses scattered all over the middle of the forest. “We were lying down. Shoulder to shoulder, in various poses, often obscene and scary.”
A plane flies by and drops a bomb. Next, Egorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: “The released intestines were smoking, casting soft pink and blue.”
This is the merciless truth of war. And what a blasphemy against morality, reason, and a betrayal of humanism, the glorification of heroism became under these conditions. 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 talks about the feat differently: “And it was like this: the 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, in the animal horror that overwhelmed them, stumbled, knocked down, delivered blind blows, mutilated themselves and their horses and fled, frightened by the shot, who killed a man, the morally crippled ones dispersed.
They called it a feat."
People at the front are cutting each other down in a primitive way. Russian soldiers hang corpses on wire fences. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The earth is thickly stained with human blood. There are settled hills of graves everywhere. Sholokhov created a mournful lament for the dead, and cursed the war with irresistible words.
But even more terrible in Sholokhov’s depiction is the civil war. Because she is fratricidal. People of the same culture, the same faith, the same blood began to exterminate each other on an unprecedented scale. This “conveyor belt” of senseless, horribly cruel murders, shown by Sholokhov, shakes to the core.
... Punisher Mitka Korshunov does not spare either the old or the young. 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 war, becomes a murderer and a monster.
There are many stunning scenes in the novel. One of them is the reprisal of forty captured officers by the Podtelkovites. “Shots were fired frantically. The officers, colliding, rushed in all directions. The lieutenant with the most beautiful feminine eyes, wearing a red officer’s cap, ran, clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if over a barrier. He fell and never got up. Two men chopped down the tall, brave captain. He grabbed the blades of the sabers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child, fell to his knees, on his back, rolling his head in the snow; on the face one could see only blood-stained eyes and a black mouth, drilled with a continuous scream. His face was slashed by flying bombs, across his black mouth, and he was still screaming in a thin voice of horror and pain. Stretching over him, the Cossack, wearing an overcoat with a torn strap, finished him off with a shot. The curly-haired cadet almost broke through the chain - some ataman overtook him and killed him with a blow to the back of the head. The same ataman drove a bullet between the shoulder blades of the centurion, who was running in an overcoat that had opened in the wind. The centurion sat down and scratched his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired podesaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he kicked a deep hole in the snow and would have beaten him like a good horse on a leash if the Cossacks, who took pity on him, had not finished him off.” These mournful lines are extremely expressive, filled with horror at what is being done. They are read with unbearable pain, with spiritual trepidation and carry within themselves the most desperate curse of the fratricidal war.
No less terrible are the pages dedicated to the execution of the Podtelkovites. People, who at first “willingly” went to the execution “as if for a rare cheerful spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of a cruel and inhumane execution, are in a hurry to disperse, so that by the time of the reprisal against the leaders - Podtelkov and Krivoshlykov - there was nothing left few people.
However, Podtelkov is mistaken, arrogantly believing that people dispersed out of recognition that he was right. They could not bear the inhuman, unnatural spectacle violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life.
On the pages of the novel, two “truths” collide: the “truth” of the Whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtelkov: “Traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the opposing “truth” of Podtelkov, who thinks that he is protecting the interests of the “working people.”
Blinded by their “truths,” both sides mercilessly and senselessly, in some kind of demonic frenzy, destroy each other, not noticing that there are fewer and fewer of those left for whose sake they are trying to establish 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, praised the war. It is not for nothing that his book, as noted by the famous Sholokhov scholar 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 disaster.
Death in Sholokhov’s perception is that which opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially violent death. In this sense, the creator of “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 is subjected to in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, depicted on the pages of his novel the classic paintings mental fortitude, endurance and humanism that took place during the war. A humane attitude towards one's neighbor and humanity cannot be completely destroyed. This is evidenced, in particular, by many of the actions of Grigory Melekhov: his contempt for looting, the defense of the Polish woman Franya, the rescue 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 beautiful he can be, are especially clearly outlined. War severely tests moral strength, unknown in days of peace.
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