How Sholokhov portrays the events of the First World War. The depiction of the civil war as a tragedy of the people

The second volume of the epic novel by Mikhail Sholokhov tells about the civil war. It includes chapters about the Kornilov rebellion from the book "Don region", which the writer began to create a year before " Quiet Don". This part of the work is accurately dated: late 1916 - April 1918.
The slogans of the Bolsheviks attracted the poor, who wanted to be free masters in their land. But the civil war poses new questions for the protagonist Grigory Melekhov. Each side, white and red, seeks its own truth by killing each other. Once with the Reds, Gregory sees the cruelty, intransigence, bloodlust of enemies. War destroys everything: the orderly life of families, peaceful labor, takes away the last, kills love. Sholokhov's heroes Grigory and Pyotr Melekhovs, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy, practically the entire male population are drawn into battles, the meaning of which is incomprehensible to them. For whom and why should they die in their prime? Life on the farm gives them a lot of joy, beauty, hope and opportunity. War is only hardship and death.
The Bolsheviks Shtokman and Bunchuk see the country exclusively as an arena of class battles, where people are like 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; to starve and die — to them, not to the commissars. Bunchuk arranges lynching against Kalmykov, and in his defense says: "They are us or we are them! .. There is no middle ground." Hatred blinds, no one wants to stop and think, impunity unties their hands. Grigory witnesses how Commissioner Malkin sadistically mocks the population in the captured village. He sees terrible pictures of the robbery of the soldiers of the Tiraspol detachment of the 2nd Socialist Army, who rob the farm and rape the women. As it is sung in the old song, you have become muddy, father quiet Don. Gregory understands that in fact people mad with blood are not looking for the truth, but real turmoil is going on in the Don.
It is no coincidence that Melekhov is rushing between the two warring parties. Everywhere he encounters violence and cruelty that he cannot accept. Podtyolkov orders the execution of the prisoners, and the Cossacks, forgetting about military honor, cut down unarmed people. They obeyed the order, but when Grigory realized that he was chopping off prisoners, he fell into a frenzy: “Whom did he chop! .. Brothers, I have no forgiveness! Hack it, for God's sake ... mother of God ... Death ... betray! " Christonya, pulling the "enraged" Melekhov away from Podtelkov, says bitterly: "Lord God, what is happening to people?" And podgesaul Shein, who has already understood the essence of what is happening, prophetically promises Podtyolkov that "the Cossacks will wake up - and you will be hanged." His mother reproaches Gregory for taking part in the execution of the captive sailors, but he himself admits how cruel he became in the war: “I don’t regret that children either.” Leaving the red, Grigory nailed to the white, where he sees the execution of Podtelkov. Melekhov says to him: “Do you remember the Battle of Glubokaya? Do you remember how the officers were shot? .. They shot at your order! A? Tepericha burps you! Well, do not grieve! You are not the only one to tan someone else's skins! You retired, chairman of the Don Council of People's Commissars! "
War embitters and divides people. Gregory notes that the concepts of "brother", "honor", "fatherland" disappear from consciousness. The strong community of Cossacks has been disintegrating for centuries. Now - every man for himself and for his family. Koshevoy, using his power, decided to execute the local wealthy Miron Korshunov. Miron's son, Mitka, avenges his father and kills Koshevoy's mother. Koshevoy kills Peter Melekhov, his wife Daria shot Ivan Alekseevich. Koshevoy is already taking revenge on the entire Tatarsky farm for the death of his mother: when he leaves, he sets fire to "seven houses in a row." Blood seeks blood.
Looking into the past, he recreates the events of the Upper Don Uprising. When the uprising began, Melekhov perked up, decided that now everything would change for the better: “We must fight those who want to take away life, the right to it ...” Almost having driven the horse, he rushes 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. Bailing Budyonny's cavalry, Grigory does not find an answer to his bitter questions. He says: "I'm tired of everything: both the revolution and the counter-revolution ... I want to live near my kids."
The writer shows that there can be no truth where death is. Truth is one, it cannot be “red” or “white”. War is killing the best. Realizing this, Gregory drops his weapon and returns to his native farm to work on native land raising children. The hero is not yet 30 years old, but the war turned him into an old man, took away, burned out from him 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 the steppe burnt out by the fires, the life of Gregory became black ..."
In the epic novel, Sholokhov created a grandiose historical canvas, describing in detail the events civil war on the Don. The writer became for the Cossacks national hero, creating an artistic epic about the life of the Cossacks in the tragic time of historical changes.

Wars were different, the history of peoples from antiquity is full of them. They are reflected in different ways in the literature. After 1914, the theme of war becomes one of the main ones in our country and in other countries. Memories of that time, terrible in the degree of savagery and inhumanity, are full of scorching anger, especially those who have been in the trenches, barely escaped alive from the flames and black ash. This is how A. Serafimovich, D. Furmanov, K. Fedin, A. Tolstoy and others wrote about the war. The field of death ... dressing points ... Half-dead in hospitals ... Buried alive ... Crazy ... Writers as if summed up the terrible results of the war: destroyed cities, burned villages, trampled fields ... Legless, blind, orphaned ...

Reproduction of war and peace in organic unity and mutual conditioning, exact reality, historicism, battle painting and, in the center of everything, the fate of man - these are the traditions that were inherited by Russian writers in depicting war. Sholokhov, adopted this tradition, enriched with new achievements. "Quiet Don" was created by two wars, the largest in the history of nations. No sooner had the fires of the First World War been covered in ashes than the imperialists began preparations for the second. The first World War depicted as a national disaster, therefore her paintings correspond to the gloomy symbolism: “At night an owl roared in the bell tower. Shaky and terrible screams hung over the farm, and the owl flew over to the cemetery, groaning over the brown, hunted graves.

To be thin, - the old men prophesied. "The war will bring on."

With sharp, expressive strokes, the writer draws the onset of war - a national disaster. In crowd scenes, he allows many people to speak out - and the war appears in the people's perception, in the element of feelings, emotions, and people's assessment. The story breaks into the narrative broadly and freely, in all its realities. The epically dynamically developed pictures of Russia's entry into the world war end with an emotional assessment, in which the voice of the writer himself sounds alarming.

The war demanded more and more new victims “From the Baltic, the front was stretched like a deadly rope. The headquarters developed plans for a broad offensive, generals pored over the maps, orderlies rushed, delivering battle orders, hundreds of thousands of soldiers went to their deaths. "

Sholokhov's heroes find themselves in various regiments scattered across different sectors of the fronts, which allows the writer to broadly cover the beginning of hostilities, focus on depicting the first battles of the Southwestern and Northwestern Fronts, on the events of the invasion of the Russian armies in East Prussia, at the famous Battle of Galicia ... Sholokhov's pages are sharply denunciatory, their tone is alarming and does not portend anything but a terrible expectation of death: “Echelons ... Echelons ... Echelons are innumerable! Along the arteries of the country, along the railways to the western border, agitated Russia is driving grayish blood. " The front line is portrayed as a continuous hell. And everywhere in the works of Sholokhov, pain appears for the land: "The ripe bread was trampled by the cavalry", "The din, where the battles were going, the gloomy face of the earth exploded shells with smallpox: rusted in it, yearning for human blood, fragments of iron and steel." But the pain for the people was even more excruciating. The war was gathering its terrible harvest: “The dear ones lay down with their heads on four sides, poured ore Cossack blood and, dead-eyed, unrestrained, decayed under an artillery memorial service in Austria, Poland, in Prussia ... lice, terrified. "

Only a month of war, but how people have changed: Yegorka Zharkov swore dirty, cursed everything, Grigory Melekhov "somehow got charred and blackened." War cripples souls, devastates to the very bottom: "Changes were made on every face, each in his own way nurtured and grew the seeds sown by the war."

On the Vladimirov-Volynsk and Kovel areas in September 1916, the French method of attack was used - in waves. “Sixteen waves splashed out Russian trenches. Swaying, thinning, boiling at the ugly lumps of crumpled barbed wire, the gray waves of the surf of the people rolled over ... Of the sixteen waves, three came ... "

That was terrible truth war. And what a blasphemy against morality, reason, the essence of humanity, the glorification of heroism seemed. Sholokhov debunks this notion of heroism: “And it was like this: people collided on the field of death ... stumbled, knocked over, inflicted blind blows, disfigured themselves and the horses and fled, frightened by a shot that killed a person, and parted morally crippled. They called it a feat. "

The popular perception of the imperialist war as a bloody massacre imposed on the people determined the realism of Sholokhov, the open truth her images. The semi-feudal regime that existed in the country intensified even more during the war, especially in the army. The savage treatment of the soldiers, the jabbing, the surveillance ... The front-line soldiers are fed whatever they have to. Dirt, lice ... The powerlessness of the generals to make things right. The desire of the allies to win the campaign at the expense of the manpower reserves of Russia, to which the tsarist government willingly went. And behind all this - countless human sacrifices.

Pictures of the national disaster in the "Quiet Don" are painted with exceptional expressiveness. In the fall of 1917, the Cossacks began to return from the fronts of the imperialist war. We greeted them with joy in their families. But this even more mercilessly emphasized the grief of those who had lost their loved ones. It was necessary to take the pain, the torment of the entire Russian land very close to heart, in order to say so solemnly about it, as Sholokhov said: “Many were missing the Cossacks - they lost them in the fields of Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Carpathian region, Romania, they lay down with corpses and decayed under the gun panikhida, and now the high hills of mass graves are overgrown with weeds, crushed by rains, covered with quicksand ... Grass overgrows the graves - the pain is overgrown long ago. The wind licked the traces of the departed, - time will lick both the blood pain and the memory of those who did not wait, because it is short human life and not many of us are destined to trample the herbs ... "

Sholokhov's humanism resounds with particular force on those pages where beauty is opposed to war human feelings, the happiness of earthly existence, the victorious march of the nascent life. When the Melekhovs received news of the death of Gregory in the war, they were overwhelmed with grief. But on the twelfth day Dunyashka learns from Peter's letter that Gregory is alive. She runs home with joyful news: “Live Grishka! .. Our live dear! she screamed in a sobbing voice from afar. - Peter writes! .. The wounded Grisha, not the killed! .. Alive, alive! .. "And how happy Panteley Prokofievich is at the birth of two grandchildren:" Isho the Melekhov breed will not be transferred at once! The Cossack with the girl was presented by her daughter-in-law. Here is a daughter-in-law, so a daughter-in-law! .. ”So pictures of simple human happiness set off the entire horror of a bloody massacre - a war that brings horror, death, ruin. This vision of war brings Sholokhov closer to the Tolstoyan tradition of depicting war. The mighty breath of Tolstoy's tradition in The Quiet Don is reflected in the depiction of the madness of war, its hostility to human nature, in tearing off its heroic masks.

The First World War, which was followed by violent revolutionary events, became, as you know, the subject of close attention of world literature. But for the first time Sholokhov succeeded in portraying this war with genuine epic power and deep historicism and from a truly popular standpoint in The Quiet Don.

Literature lesson. Grade 11. "In a world split in two"

"Civil war in the image of M. Sholokhov". Teacher T.E. Maltseva

The purpose of the lesson: to show the civil courage of M. Sholokhov, one of the first to tell the truth about the civil war as a tragedy of the people.

Methodological techniques: teacher's story, episode analysis, repetition of what has been learned, intersubject connections with history.

During the classes.

I. The teacher's word.

For a long time, the civil war was shrouded in an aura of heroism and romance. Let us recall Svetlov's "Grenada", "Far Beyond the River", films about "elusive avengers", etc.

Boris Vasiliev wrote about it this way: “In the civil war there are no right and wrong, no angels and no demons, just like there are no victors. There are only the vanquished in it - all of us, all the people, all of Russia. "

Sholokhov is one of those who spoke of the civil war as the greatest tragedy that had grave consequences. High level the truth about the civil war is supported by the author's work with the archive, memoirs, personal impressions and facts.

The essence of the events of the novel is tragic, it captures the fate of huge sections of the population.

II. Analysis of episodes of the II book.

Finding and analyzing episodes.

The scene of the massacre of the Chernetsovites (part 5, chapter 2).

a) How are Podtyolkov and Chernetsov depicted in this scene?

b) What details most clearly express their inner state?

c) What motivates the behavior of these heroes?

d) Why are the details of the portraits of the executed officers included in the episode?

e) How is the depiction of "enemies" related to Melekhov's act?

f) What is the meaning of Minaev in his phrase that ends the episode? "... And you thought - how? ..."

g) What is Gregory going through after these tragic events(part 5, chapter 13)

g) How does Gregory perceive the execution of Podtelkov? Why does he leave the square during his execution?

III.Analysis of the last episode of the 2nd book

What is the symbolic image of this picture (episode)?

V last episode Sholokhov draws symbolic images: an old man who built a chapel over the grave; the female bustard, symbolizing life and love. Sholokhov contrasts fratricidal war, mutual cruelty of people with the life-giving force of nature.

The ending of what piece can you compare with this episode? (finale of the novel by I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons")

IV. Teacher's words. (Criticism about "Quiet Don")

Boris Vasiliev saw in the novel the reflection of the main thing in the civil war: “Monstrous fluctuations, throwing of a normal, calm family man. One fate shows the entire break in society. Let him be a Cossack, all the same he is, first of all, a peasant, a farmer. He is the breadwinner. And the breaking of this breadwinner is the whole civil war. "

Sholokhov was accused of White Guards. Yagoda signed a decree on the execution of the Cossack Kharlampy Ermakov - the main real prototype G. Melekhova. They tried to recommend Sholokhov to "re-educate", "reforge" Melekhov into a Bolshevik, to bring him together with the proletariat (as A. Tolstoy re-educated his hero in "Walking through the agony".

V. Conversation on the content of the novel.

2. What images-symbols do you remember? (birch tree with brown buds; eagle floating over the steppe; quiet Don, separating the warring ones).

Vi. Homework.

Tell about the connection between the state of nature and the heroes of The Quiet Don. Confirm with examples from the text of the novel. (The element of Aksin's love is as strong and unstoppable as a snow avalanche, etc.)

IMAGE OF THE CIVIL WAR. To rise above everyday life and to see the historical distance means to become the ruler of the thoughts of your time, to embody the main conflicts and images of a vast historical period, touching the so-called “ eternal themes". MA Sholokhov declared himself not only in Russian, but also in world literature, reflecting in his work the era more strongly and more dramatically than many other writers were able to do.

In 1928, Mikhail Sholokhov published the first book of The Quiet Don, the second in 1929, the third in 1933, and the fourth in early 1940. Sholokhov's epic novel is dominated by the Tolstoyan epic principle: "to capture everything." On the pages of Sholokhov's narrative, a wide variety of strata of Russian society are presented: poor Cossacks and rich, merchants and intelligentsia, nobility and professional military. Sholokhov wrote: “I would be happy if, behind the description of ... life Don Cossacks the reader ... considered something else: colossal shifts in everyday life, life and human psychology that occurred as a result of war and revolution. " The Sholokhov epic reflects a decade of Russian history (1912-1922) at one of its steepest breaks. The Soviet regime brought with it a terrible, incomparable tragedy - the civil war. A war that leaves no one aside, cripples human destinies and souls. A war that forces a father to kill a son, a husband - to raise his hand against his wife, against his mother. The blood of the guilty and the innocent flows like a river.

In the epic novel by M. Sholokhov "And Quiet Don" is shown one of the episodes of this war - the war on the Don land. It was on this land that the history of the civil war reached that drama and clarity that make it possible to judge the history of the entire war.

According to M. Sholokhov, the natural world, the world of people living freely, loving and working on earth, is beautiful, and everything that this world destroys is terrible, ugly. No violence, the author believes, can be justified by anything, not even the most seemingly just idea in the name of which it is committed. Anything related to violence, death, blood and pain cannot be beautiful. He has no future. Only life, love, mercy have a future. They are eternal and significant at all times. That is why the scenes depicting the horrors of the civil war, scenes of violence and murder are so tragic in the novel. The struggle between the Whites and the Reds on the Don, captured by Sholokhov in the epic novel, is filled with even greater tragedy and meaninglessness than the events of the First World War. Yes, it could not be otherwise, because now each other was killed by those who grew up together, were friends, whose families had lived nearby for centuries, whose roots had long been intertwined.

Civil war, like any other, tests the essence of man. A decrepit grandfather, a participant in the Turkish war, teaching the young, advised: "Remember one thing: if you want to be alive, to get out of mortal combat whole - you have to observe the human truth." “Human Truth” is an order that has been calibrated for centuries by the Cossacks: “Don't take someone else's in the war - just once. God forbid touching women, and one must know such a prayer *. But in the civil war, all these commandments are violated, once again emphasizing its anti-human nature. What were these terrible murders for? For the sake of what a brother went against a brother, and a son against a father? Some killed in order to live on their land as they used to, others - to establish new system, which seemed to them more correct and just, the third - fulfilled their military duty, forgetting about the main human duty to life itself - just to live; there were also those who killed for the sake of military glory and career. Was the truth on anyone's side? Sholokhov in his work shows that both red and white are equally cruel and inhuman. The scenes depicting the atrocities of both, as it were, mirror and balance each other.

And this applies not only to the description of the hostilities themselves, but also to the pictures of the destruction of prisoners, looting and violence against the civilian population. The truth is not on anyone's side - Sholokhov emphasizes again and again. That is why the fate of young people involved in bloody events is so tragic. That is why the fate of Grigory Melekhov - a typical representative of the young generation of the Don Cossacks - is so tragic, who is painfully deciding "with whom to be" ...

The family of Grigory Melekhov appeared in the novel as that microcosm, in which both the tragedy of the entire Cossacks and the tragedy of the whole country were reflected in a mirror. The Melekhovs were a typical Cossack family, possessed all the typical qualities inherent in the Cossacks, unless these qualities manifested themselves more clearly in them. In the Melekhov family, everyone is wayward, stubborn, independent and courageous. They all love work, their land and their quiet Don. Civil war bursts into this family when both sons, Peter and Gregory, are taken to the front. Both of them are real Cossacks, in which hard work, military courage and valor are harmoniously combined. Peter has a simpler view of the world. He wants to become an officer, does not hesitate to take away from the defeated something that can be useful in the economy. Gregory, on the other hand, is endowed with a heightened sense of justice, he will never allow outrage at the weak and defenseless, to appropriate "trophies" for himself, senseless murder is disgusting to his being. Gregory is undoubtedly the central figure in the Melekhov family, and the tragedy of his personal fate is intertwined with the tragedy of his family and friends.

During the civil war, the Melekhov brothers tried to step aside, but were forced into this bloody action. The whole horror lies in the fact that there was no force in time that could explain the current situation to the Cossacks: having divided into two warring camps, the Cossacks, in essence, fought for the same thing - for the right to work on their land in order to feed their children, and not to shed blood on the holy Don land. The tragedy of the situation also lies in the fact that the civil war and general devastation destroyed the Cossack world not only from the outside, but also from within, introducing disagreements into family relationships... These disagreements also affected the Melekhov family. The Melekhovs, like many others, do not see a way out of this war, because no power - neither white nor red, can give them the land and freedom that they need like air.

The tragedy of the Melekhov family is not limited to the tragedy of Peter and Gregory. The fate of the mother, Ilyinichna, is also sad, having lost her son, husband, and both daughters-in-law. Her only hope is her son Grigory, but deep down she feels that he has no future either. The moment is filled with tragedy when Ilyinichna sits at the same table with the murderer of her son, and how unexpectedly she forgives and accepts Koshevoy, whom she hates so much!

But the most tragic fate in the Melekhov family is undoubtedly the fate of Grigory. He, who has a heightened sense of justice, who is stronger than others experiencing the contradictions of the world, had a chance to experience all the hesitations of the average Cossacks in the civil war. Fighting on the side of the whites, he feels his inner alienation from those who lead them, the reds are also alien to him by nature. The only thing he strives for with all his soul is peaceful labor, peaceful happiness on his land. But military honor and duty oblige him to take part in the war. Gregory's life is a continuous chain of bitter losses and disappointments. At the end of the novel, we see him devastated, worn out by the pain of loss, with no hope for the future.

For many years, criticism convinced readers that in portraying the events of those years, Sholokhov was on the side of the revolution, and the writer himself fought, as you know, on the side of the Reds. But the laws artistic creation forced him to be objective and say in the work what he denied in his public speeches: the civil war unleashed by the Bolsheviks, which broke strong and hardworking families, broke the Cossacks, was only a prologue to that great tragedy, into which the country will plunge for many years.

K. Fedin highly appreciated the work of M. Sholokhov in general and the novel "Quiet Don" in particular. “Mikhail Sholokhov’s merit is enormous,” he wrote, “in the courage that is inherent in his works. He never avoided the inherent contradictions of life ... His books show the struggle in the fullness of the past and the present. And I involuntarily recall the behest of Leo Tolstoy, given to himself in his youth, the behest not only not to lie directly, but not to lie, and negatively - silently. Sholokhov is not silent, he writes the whole truth. "

Civil war as depicted by M. A. Sholokhov

In 1917, the war turned into a bloody turmoil. This is no longer a patriotic war requiring sacrificial duty from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the onset of the revolutionary period, relations between classes and estates are changing sharply, moral foundations and traditional culture, and with them the state. The disintegration that was engendered by the morality of war covers all social and spiritual ties, leads society to a state of struggle of all against all, to the loss of the Fatherland and faith by people.

If we compare the face of war depicted by the writer before and after this milestone, then an increase in tragedy becomes noticeable, starting from the moment of the transition of world war to civil war. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for its early end, because the authorities "must finish the war, then, both the people and we do not want war."

The First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster,

Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war, crippling people both physically and mentally. Death and suffering awaken sympathy and unite the soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in the second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not arouse joyful feelings among the Cossacks, they treated it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of ending it. How many of them have already died: not one Cossack widow has voiced over the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand the historical events... Returning from the fronts of the World War, the Cossacks did not yet know what a tragedy fratricidal war they will have to go through in the near future. The Verkhne-Don uprising appears in the image of Sholokhov as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.

There were many reasons. Red terror, unjustified brutality of representatives Soviet power on the Don in the novel are shown with a large artistic force... Sholokhov also 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 have become the basis of peasant morality and morality, formed over the centuries, and passed down from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already in the course of the events the people understood and felt their fratricidal character. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: "But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising."

The epic covers a period of great upheavals in Russia. These upheavals strongly affected the fate of the Don Cossacks, described in the novel. Eternal values define the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period, which Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love 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.

The depiction of the civil war as a tragedy of the people

Not only civil war, any war for Sholokhov is a disaster. The writer convincingly shows that the atrocities of the civil war were prepared by the four years of the First World War.

Gloomy symbolism contributes to the perception of war as a national tragedy. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarskoye, “an owl roared in the bell tower at night. Shaky and terrible screams hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, fossilized by calves, moaning over the brown, poisoned graves.

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

"The war will bring on."

The war burst into the Cossack kurens like a fiery tornado just during the harvest, when the people treasured every minute. The messenger rushed in, raising a cloud of dust behind him. Fatal has come ...

Sholokhov demonstrates how just one month of war changes people beyond recognition, cripples their souls, devastates them to the very bottom, makes them look at the world around them in a new way.

Here is a writer describing the situation after one of the battles. In the middle of the forest, corpses are scattered all over. “We lay down for a while. Shoulder to shoulder, in various positions, often obscene and scary. "

A plane flies by, drops a bomb. Then Yegorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: "The released guts were smoking, casting pale pink and blue."

This is the merciless truth of war. And what a blasphemy against morality, reason, 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 tells about the feat in a different way: “But it was like this: people who had collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands in destroying their own kind, in their declared animal horror, stumbled, knocked over, inflicted blind blows, disfigured themselves and the horses and fled, frightened by a shot, who killed a person, the morally crippled departed.

They called it a feat. "

In a primitive way, people at the front cut each other down. Russian soldiers are hanging corpses on the barbed wire. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The earth is thickly stained with human blood. Buried mounds of graves are everywhere. Sholokhov created a mournful lament for the dead, cursed the war with irresistible words.

But the civil war is even more terrible in Sholokhov's portrayal. Because she is fratricidal. People of one culture, one faith, one blood engaged in extermination of each other on an unheard-of scale. This "conveyor belt" of senseless, terrible in cruelty murders, shown by Sholokhov, is shaking to the depths of the soul.

... Punisher Mitka Korshunov spares neither old nor small. Mikhail Koshevoy, satisfying his need for class hatred, kills his hundred-year-old grandfather Grishaka. Daria shoots the prisoner. Even Gregory, succumbing to the psychosis of the senseless destruction of people in the war, becomes a murderer and a monster.

The novel has many stunning scenes. One of them is the massacre of the Podtelkovites over forty captured officers. “Shots were feverishly caught. The officers, colliding, rushed in all directions. Lieutenant with the most beautiful female eyes, in a red officer's hat, ran clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if over a barrier. He fell - and never got up. The tall, gallant esaul was cut by two. He grabbed the blades of the checkers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child - he fell to his knees, on his back, rolled his head over the snow; his face showed only blood-stained eyes and a black mouth drilled with a continuous cry. His flying checkers slashed across his face, over his black mouth, and he still screamed in a voice thin with horror and pain. Having raced over him, the Cossack, in an overcoat with a torn strap, finished him off with a shot. The curly-haired cadet almost broke through the chain - he was overtaken and killed by some ataman with a blow to the back of the head. The same chieftain drove a bullet between the shoulder blades of the centurion, who was running in his greatcoat opened from the wind. The centurion sat down and scraped his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired podlesaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he kicked a deep hole in the snow with his feet and would still beat like a good horse on a leash, if the pitying Cossacks had not finished it off. " The most expressive are these sorrowful lines, 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 fratricidal war.

No less terrible are the pages dedicated to the execution of the "Podtelkovites". People, who at first “willingly” went to execution “as for a rare cheerful spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of a cruel and inhuman execution, rush to disperse, so that by the time of the massacre of the leaders - Podtyolkov and Krivoshlykov - there was absolutely few people.

However, Podtyolkov is mistaken, presumptuously believing that people dispersed because they admitted that he was right. They could not endure the inhuman, unnatural spectacle of violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life from him.

On the pages of the novel, two "truths" collide: the "truth" of whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtyolkov: "Traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the opposing "truth" of Podtelkov, who thinks that he is defending the interests of the "working people."

Blinded by their "truths", both sides mercilessly and senselessly, in some kind of demonic frenzy, exterminate each other, not noticing that fewer and fewer are left for whom they are trying to approve their ideas. Talking about the war, oh military life the most militant tribe among the entire Russian people, Sholokhov, however, nowhere, not a single line, did not praise the war. No wonder his book, as noted by the well-known scholokhoj expert V. Litvinov, was banned by the Maoists, who considered war the best way social improvement of life on Earth. Quiet Don is a passionate denial of any such cannibalism. Love for people is incompatible with love for war. War is always a people's misfortune.

Death in the perception of Sholokhov is that which opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially a violent death. In this sense, the creator of "Quiet Don" is a faithful successor of the best humanistic traditions both Russian and world literature.

Despising the extermination of man by man in war, knowing what tests the moral feeling undergoes in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, on the pages of his novel painted the classic pictures of mental fortitude, endurance and humanism that took place in the war. A humane attitude towards one's neighbor, humanity cannot be completely destroyed. This is evidenced, in particular, by many of Grigory Melekhov's actions: his contempt for looting, protection of Frani's polka, the salvation of Stepan Astakhov.

The concepts of "war" and "humanity" are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and at the same time, against the background of bloody civil strife, the moral capabilities of a person, how wonderful he can be, are especially clearly drawn. War severely examines a moral fortress, unknown in days of peace.

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