The old communist Mikhail Mostovskaya, taken prisoner on the outskirts of Stalingrad, is brought to a concentration camp in West Germany. He falls asleep under the prayer of the Italian priest Gardi, argues with the Tolstoyan Ikonnikov, sees the Menshevik Chernetsov's hatred of himself and the strong will of the "ruler of thoughts" Major Ershov.

Political worker Krymov was sent to Stalingrad, to Chuikov's army. He must sort out a controversial matter between the commander and commissar of a rifle regiment. Arriving at the regiment, Krymov learns that both the commander and the commissar died under the bombing. Soon Krymov himself takes part in the night battle.

Moscow scientist-physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum with his family is in evacuation in Kazan. Mother-in-law Shtruma Alexandra Vladimirovna, even in the grief of war, retained her spiritual youth: she is interested in the history of Kazan, streets and museums, the everyday life of people. Shtrum's wife Lyudmila considers this interest of her mother to be senile selfishness. Lyudmila has no news from the front from Tolya, a son from her first marriage. She is saddened by the categorical, lonely and difficult character of her daughter, a high school student, Nadia. Lyudmila's sister Zhenya Shaposhnikova ended up in Kuibyshev. Nephew Seryozha Shaposhnikov is at the front. Shtrum's mother Anna Semyonovna remained in the German-occupied Ukrainian town, and Shtrum realizes that she, a Jewess, has little chance of surviving. His mood is heavy, he accuses his wife of the fact that, due to her harsh nature, Anna Semyonovna could not live with them in Moscow. The only person who softens the difficult atmosphere in the family is Lyudmila's friend, shy, kind and sensitive Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, the wife of Shtrum's colleague and friend.

Strum receives a farewell letter from his mother. Anna Semyonovna tells what humiliations she had to endure in the city where she lived for twenty years, working as an ophthalmologist. The people she had known for a long time amazed her. The neighbor calmly demanded to vacate the room and threw out her things. The old teacher stopped greeting her. But on the other hand, a former patient, whom she considered a sullen and gloomy person, helps her by bringing food to the fence of the ghetto. Through him, she handed a farewell letter to her son on the eve of the destruction action.

Lyudmila receives a letter from the Saratov hospital, where her seriously wounded son lies. She urgently leaves there, but when she arrives, she learns about Tolya's death. "All people are guilty before the mother, who lost her son in the war, and have tried in vain to justify themselves to her throughout the history of mankind."

The secretary of the regional committee of one of the regions of Ukraine occupied by the Germans, Getmanov, was appointed commissar of the tank corps. Getmanov worked all his life in an atmosphere of denunciations, flattery and falsehood, and now he is transferring these principles of life to the frontline situation. The corps commander, General Novikov, is a straightforward and honest man, trying to prevent senseless human casualties. Getmanov expresses his admiration to Novikov and at the same time writes a denunciation that the corps commander delayed the attack for eight minutes in order to save people.

Novikov loves Zhenya Shaposhnikova, comes to her in Kuibyshev. Before the war, Zhenya left her husband, political worker Krymov. She is alien to the views of Krymov, who approved of dispossession, knowing about the terrible famine in the villages, justified the arrests of 1937. She reciprocates Novikov, but warns him that if Krymov is arrested, he will return to her ex-husband.

Military surgeon Sophia Osipovna Levinton, arrested on the outskirts of Stalingrad, ends up in a German concentration camp. Jews are being taken somewhere in freight cars, and Sofya Osipovna is surprised to see how, in just a few days, many people go from a man to a "dirty and unhappy cattle devoid of name and freedom." Rebekah Buchman, trying to hide from the raid, strangled her crying daughter.

On the way, Sofya Osipovna meets six-year-old David, who just before the war came from Moscow on vacation to his grandmother. Sofya Osipovna becomes the only support for a vulnerable, impressionable child. She has a motherly feeling for him. Until the last minute, Sofya Osipovna calms the boy, reassures him. They die together in the gas chamber.

Krymov receives an order to go to Stalingrad, to the surrounded house "six fractions one", where the people of Grekov's "house manager" are holding the defense. Reports reached the front political administration that Grekov refuses to write reports, is conducting anti-Stalinist conversations with the soldiers and, under German bullets, is showing independence from his superiors. Krymov must establish Bolshevik order in the surrounded house and, if necessary, remove Grekov from command.

Shortly before the appearance of Krymov, the "house manager" Grekov sent from the surrounded house a soldier Serezha Shaposhnikov and a young radio operator Katya Vengrova, knowing about their love and wanting to save them from death. Saying goodbye to Grekov, Seryozha "saw that beautiful, human, intelligent and sad eyes, which he had never seen in his life, were looking at him."

But the Bolshevik Commissar Krymov is only interested in collecting dirt on the "uncontrollable" Grekov. Krymov revels in the consciousness of his significance, tries to catch Grekov in anti-Soviet sentiments. Even the mortal danger to which the defenders of the house are exposed every minute does not cool his ardor. Krymov decides to remove Grekov and take command himself. But at night a stray bullet wounds him. Krymov guesses that Grekov was shooting. Returning to the political department, he writes a denunciation of Grekov, but soon learns that he was late: all the defenders of the house "six fractions one" were killed. Due to the Crimean denunciation, Grekov is not awarded the posthumous title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

In the German concentration camp where Mostovskaya is sitting, an underground organization is being created. But there is no unity among the prisoners: the brigade commissar Osipov does not trust the non-partisan Major Ershov, who comes from a dispossessed family. He is afraid that the brave, direct and decent Ershov will gain too much influence. Comrade Kotikov, abandoned from Moscow to the camp, gives instructions - to act by Stalinist methods. The communists decide to get rid of Ershov and put his card in the group selected for Buchenwald. Despite the emotional closeness with Ershov, the old communist Mostovskoy submits to this decision. An unknown provocateur betrays the underground organization, and the Gestapo destroys its members.

The institute where Strum works is returning from evacuation to Moscow. Strum is writing a paper on nuclear physics that is of general interest. The famous academician says at the Academic Council that a work of such importance has not yet been born within the walls of the Physics Institute. The work was nominated for the Stalin Prize, Strum is on the wave of success, it pleases and worries him. But at the same time, Strum notices that Jews are gradually surviving from his laboratory. When he tries to stand up for his employees, he is given to understand that his own position is not too secure in connection with the "fifth point" and numerous relatives abroad.

Sometimes Shtrum meets with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova and soon realizes that he loves her and is loved by her. But Marya Ivanovna cannot hide her love from her husband, and he takes her word not to see Shtrum. It was at this time that the persecution of Strum began.

A few days before the Stalingrad offensive, Krymov was arrested and sent to Moscow. Once in a prison cell on the Lubyanka, he cannot recover from surprise: interrogations and torture are intended to prove his treason to the Motherland during the Battle of Stalingrad.

In the Battle of Stalingrad, the tank corps of General Novikov is distinguished.

During the days of the Stalingrad offensive, the persecution of Strum intensifies. A devastating article appeared in the institute newspaper, he was persuaded to write a letter of repentance, to come out with a confession of his mistakes at the academic council. Shtrum collects all his will and refuses to repent, does not even come to the meeting of the Academic Council. The family supports him and, while awaiting arrest, is ready to share his fate. On this day, as always in the difficult moments of his life, Marya Ivanovna calls Shtrum and says that she is proud of him and longs for him. Shtrum is not arrested, but only fired from his job. He finds himself isolated, friends stop seeing him.

But in an instant, the situation changes. Theoretical work in nuclear physics attracts Stalin's attention. He calls Strum and asks if the outstanding scientist is lacking in anything. Shtrum is immediately restored at the institute, all conditions for work are created for him. Now he himself determines the composition of his laboratory, without regard to the nationality of the employees. But when Shtrumu begins to think that he has left the black strip of his life, he again faces a choice. He is required to sign an appeal to British scientists who spoke out in defense of the repressed Soviet colleagues. Leading Soviet scientists, to whom Shtrum is now ranked, must, by the strength of their scientific authority, confirm that there is no repression in the USSR. Shtrum does not find the strength to refuse and signs the appeal. The most terrible punishment for him is a call from Marya Ivanovna: she is sure that Shtrum did not sign the letter, and admires his courage ...

Zhenya Shaposhnikova arrives in Moscow after learning about Krymov's arrest. She stands in all the lines in which the wives of the repressed are standing, and a sense of duty towards her ex-husband fights in her soul with love for Novikov. Novikov learns of her decision to return to Krymov during the Battle of Stalingrad. It seems to him that he will fall dead. But we must live and continue the offensive.

After the torture, Krymov lies on the floor in the Lubyanka office and hears the conversation of his executioners about the victory at Stalingrad. It seems to him that he sees Grekov walking towards him over the broken Stalingrad brick. The interrogation continues, Krymov refuses to sign the accusation. Returning to the cell, he finds a transmission from Zhenya and cries.

The Stalingrad winter is coming to an end. In the spring silence of the forest, you can hear the cry for the dead and the fierce joy of life.

Retold

Vasily Grossman

"Life and Fate"

The old communist Mikhail Mostovskaya, taken prisoner on the outskirts of Stalingrad, is brought to a concentration camp in West Germany. He falls asleep under the prayer of the Italian priest Gardi, argues with the Tolstoyan Ikonnikov, sees the Menshevik Chernetsov's hatred of himself and the strong will of the "ruler of thoughts" Major Ershov.

Political worker Krymov was sent to Stalingrad, to Chuikov's army. He must sort out a controversial matter between the commander and commissar of a rifle regiment. Arriving at the regiment, Krymov learns that both the commander and the commissar died under the bombing. Soon Krymov himself takes part in the night battle.

Moscow scientist-physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum with his family is in evacuation in Kazan. Mother-in-law Shtruma Alexandra Vladimirovna, even in the grief of war, retained her spiritual youth: she is interested in the history of Kazan, streets and museums, the everyday life of people. Shtrum's wife Lyudmila considers this interest of her mother to be senile selfishness. Lyudmila has no news from the front from Tolya, a son from her first marriage. She is saddened by the categorical, lonely and difficult character of her high school daughter Nadia. Lyudmila's sister Zhenya Shaposhnikova ended up in Kuibyshev. Nephew Seryozha Shaposhnikov is at the front. Shtrum's mother Anna Semyonovna remained in the German-occupied Ukrainian town, and Shtrum realizes that she, a Jewess, has little chance of surviving. His mood is heavy, he accuses his wife of the fact that, due to her harsh character, Anna Semyonovna could not live with them in Moscow. The only person who softens the difficult atmosphere in the family is Lyudmila's friend, shy, kind and sensitive Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, the wife of Shtrum's colleague and friend.

Strum receives a farewell letter from his mother. Anna Semyonovna tells what humiliations she had to endure in the city where she lived for twenty years, working as an ophthalmologist. The people she had known for a long time amazed her. The neighbor calmly demanded to vacate the room and threw out her things. The old teacher stopped greeting her. But on the other hand, a former patient, whom she considered a sullen and gloomy person, helps her by bringing food to the fence of the ghetto. Through him, she handed a farewell letter to her son on the eve of the destruction action.

Lyudmila receives a letter from the Saratov hospital, where her seriously wounded son lies. She urgently leaves there, but when she arrives, she learns about Tolya's death. "All people are guilty before the mother, who lost her son in the war, and have tried in vain to justify themselves to her throughout the history of mankind."

The secretary of the regional committee of one of the regions of Ukraine occupied by the Germans, Getmanov, was appointed commissar of the tank corps. Getmanov worked all his life in an atmosphere of denunciations, flattery and falsehood, and now he is transferring these principles of life to the frontline situation. The corps commander, General Novikov, is a straightforward and honest man, trying to prevent senseless human casualties. Getmanov expresses his admiration to Novikov and at the same time writes a denunciation that the corps commander delayed the attack for eight minutes in order to save people.

Novikov loves Zhenya Shaposhnikova, comes to her in Kuibyshev. Before the war, Zhenya left her husband, political worker Krymov. She is alien to the views of Krymov, who approved of dispossession, knowing about the terrible famine in the villages, justified the arrests of 1937. She reciprocates Novikov, but warns him that if Krymov is arrested, he will return to her ex-husband.

Military surgeon Sophia Osipovna Levinton, arrested on the outskirts of Stalingrad, ends up in a German concentration camp. Jews are being taken somewhere in freight cars, and Sofya Osipovna is surprised to see how, in just a few days, many people go from a man to a "dirty and unhappy cattle devoid of name and freedom." Rebekah Buchman, trying to hide from the raid, strangled her crying daughter.

On the way, Sofya Osipovna meets six-year-old David, who just before the war came from Moscow on vacation to his grandmother. Sofya Osipovna becomes the only support for a vulnerable, impressionable child. She has a motherly feeling for him. Until the last minute, Sofya Osipovna calms the boy, reassures him. They die together in the gas chamber.

Krymov receives an order to go to Stalingrad, to the surrounded house "six fractions one", where the people of Grekov's "house manager" are holding the defense. Reports reached the front political administration that Grekov refuses to write reports, is conducting anti-Stalinist conversations with the soldiers and, under German bullets, is showing independence from his superiors. Krymov must establish Bolshevik order in the surrounded house and, if necessary, remove Grekov from command.

Shortly before the appearance of Krymov, the "house manager" Grekov sent from the surrounded house a soldier Serezha Shaposhnikov and a young radio operator Katya Vengrova, knowing about their love and wanting to save them from death. Saying goodbye to Grekov, Seryozha "saw that beautiful, human, intelligent and sad eyes, which he had never seen in his life, were looking at him."

But the Bolshevik Commissar Krymov is only interested in collecting dirt on the "uncontrollable" Grekov. Krymov revels in the consciousness of his significance, tries to catch Grekov in anti-Soviet sentiments. Even the mortal danger to which the defenders of the house are exposed every minute does not cool his ardor. Krymov decides to remove Grekov and take command himself. But at night a stray bullet wounds him. Krymov guesses that Grekov was shooting. Returning to the political department, he writes a denunciation of Grekov, but soon learns that he was late: all the defenders of the house "six fractions one" were killed. Due to the Crimean denunciation, Grekov is not awarded the posthumous title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

In the German concentration camp where Mostovskaya is sitting, an underground organization is being created. But there is no unity among the prisoners: the brigade commissar Osipov does not trust the non-partisan Major Ershov, who comes from a dispossessed family. He is afraid that the brave, direct and decent Ershov will gain too much influence. Comrade Kotikov, abandoned from Moscow to the camp, gives instructions - to act by Stalinist methods. The communists decide to get rid of Ershov and put his card in the group selected for Buchenwald. Despite the emotional closeness with Ershov, the old communist Mostovskoy submits to this decision. An unknown provocateur betrays the underground organization, and the Gestapo destroys its members.

The institute where Strum works is returning from evacuation to Moscow. Strum is writing a paper on nuclear physics that is of general interest. The famous academician says at the Academic Council that a work of such importance has not yet been born within the walls of the Physics Institute. The work was nominated for the Stalin Prize, Strum is on the wave of success, it pleases and worries him. But at the same time, Strum notices that Jews are gradually surviving from his laboratory. When he tries to stand up for his employees, he is given to understand that his own position is not too secure in connection with the "fifth point" and numerous relatives abroad.

Sometimes Shtrum meets with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova and soon realizes that he loves her and is loved by her. But Marya Ivanovna cannot hide her love from her husband, and he takes her word not to see Shtrum. It was at this time that the persecution of Strum began.

A few days before the Stalingrad offensive, Krymov was arrested and sent to Moscow. Once in a prison cell on the Lubyanka, he cannot recover from surprise: interrogations and torture are intended to prove his treason to the Motherland during the Battle of Stalingrad.

In the Battle of Stalingrad, the tank corps of General Novikov is distinguished.

During the days of the Stalingrad offensive, the persecution of Strum intensifies. A devastating article appeared in the institute newspaper, he was persuaded to write a letter of repentance, to come out with a confession of his mistakes at the academic council. Shtrum collects all his will and refuses to repent, does not even come to the meeting of the Academic Council. The family supports him and, while awaiting arrest, is ready to share his fate. On this day, as always in the difficult moments of his life, Marya Ivanovna calls Shtrum and says that she is proud of him and longs for him. Shtrum is not arrested, but only fired from his job. He finds himself isolated, friends stop seeing him.

But in an instant, the situation changes. Theoretical work in nuclear physics attracts Stalin's attention. He calls Strum and asks if the outstanding scientist is lacking in anything. Shtrum is immediately restored at the institute, all conditions for work are created for him. Now he himself determines the composition of his laboratory, without regard to the nationality of the employees. But when Shtrumu begins to think that he has left the black strip of his life, he again faces a choice. He is required to sign an appeal to British scientists who spoke out in defense of the repressed Soviet colleagues. Leading Soviet scientists, to whom Shtrum is now ranked, must, by the strength of their scientific authority, confirm that there is no repression in the USSR. Shtrum does not find the strength to refuse and signs the appeal. The most terrible punishment for him is a call from Marya Ivanovna: she is sure that Shtrum did not sign the letter, and admires his courage ...

Zhenya Shaposhnikova arrives in Moscow after learning about Krymov's arrest. She stands in all the lines in which the wives of the repressed are standing, and a sense of duty towards her ex-husband fights in her soul with love for Novikov. Novikov learns of her decision to return to Krymov during the Battle of Stalingrad. It seems to him that he will fall dead. But we must live and continue the offensive.

After the torture, Krymov lies on the floor in the Lubyanka office and hears the conversation of his executioners about the victory at Stalingrad. It seems to him that he sees Grekov walking towards him over the broken Stalingrad brick. The interrogation continues, Krymov refuses to sign the accusation. Returning to the cell, he finds a transmission from Zhenya and cries.

The Stalingrad winter is coming to an end. In the spring silence of the forest, you can hear the cry for the dead and the fierce joy of life.

The novel describes the fate of the heroes, connected only by the time of concentration camps, bloody battles at Stalingrad and repressions.

Mostovskaya - an ardent communist, was captured at Stalingrad and taken to a concentration camp. An underground organization is being created there and the communists, wishing the death of the non-party Ershov, throw his card for those selected for Buchenwald. Soon the organization is exposed and everyone is destroyed.

The family of Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, a talented physicist, is being evacuated to Kazan. His wife is constantly worried about her son Anatolia, who is now at the front. She grieves about her daughter, who, having a difficult character, prefers loneliness and is far from her mother. And Shtrum himself blames his wife for the fact that she could not make friends with his mother, and she had to stay in Ukraine, instead of living next to her son in Moscow. And now his Jewish mother has practically no chance of surviving in the German-occupied country. Soon Viktor Pavlovich received a letter from his mother, who is now in the ghetto. In it, she says goodbye and talks about all the humiliations she went through. As a respected eye doctor, she was thrown out into the street by her neighbor only because a Jew and now only one of her former patients brings her food to the ghetto fence. Strum's wife, Lyudmila, received a letter from the hospital where her son is, but did not have time to see him - he died.

Soon Strum returns to Moscow to evacuate them. His work on nuclear physics has been spotted and is a candidate for the Stalinist Prize, but he is a Jew and risks being arrested. He was expelled from the institute. But Stalin personally calls him, interested in his work. Shtrum is being restored at the institute. Strum, having signed a letter to his British colleagues, confirms that there is no, and never has been, repression in the union.

The secretary of the regional committee Getmanov was transferred to the tank corps by the commissar. He is used to living his whole life in an atmosphere of lies and denunciations. This he transferred to the war. In the eyes he praises and admires his corps commander Novikov, who prevented the death of people and immediately wrote a denunciation against him that he delayed the attack for 8 hours in order to save people.

Levinton Sophia Osipovna was taken from Stalingrad, and is now being transported in freight trains to a concentration camp. She watches the other arrested, and is amazed at the human baseness. Her neighbor, Reveka Bukhman, strangled her crying daughter in an attempt to be unnoticed by the raid. And all the way he takes care of 6-year-old David, who ended up in Stalingrad, because he came to his grandmother from Moscow on vacation. All the way to the concentration camp, she took care of him, surrounded him with warmth and care, like her own mother. They died together in the gas chamber.

Writing

For many generations of Soviet people, the Great Patriotic War was an "unknown war" for a long time. And not only because decades have passed since its end. In a totalitarian communist state, the true truth about the war was carefully hushed up, hidden, distorted. V. Grossman's novel "Life and Fate" shared the fate of other honest works of art about the events of 1941-1945. And the fate was a common ban. And how could it be otherwise with a book that tells the truth about the reasons for our failures in the initial period of the war, about the true role of the party in the rear and on the front lines, about the complete mediocrity of many Soviet military leaders?

The former secretary of the regional committee, Dementiy Getmanov, is actively pursuing the "party line" on the front line. He is a convinced Stalinist who was promoted to leadership positions thanks to close cooperation with the state security authorities. Commissioner Getmanov is an immoral and shameless person, which, however, does not prevent him from lecturing other people. In military affairs, Dementy Trifonovich does not understand at all, but he is ready with surprising ease to sacrifice the lives of ordinary soldiers for his own quick promotion in the service. Getmanov is in a hurry to fulfill Stalin's order to attack. The military page of the biography of Dementy Trifonovich ends in the most natural way for a former state security officer - a denunciation of the commander of a tank corps Novikov.

Dementiy Getmanov is matched by the chief of staff, General Neudobnov. Behind the shoulders of the "gallant commander" is the regular service in the OGPU, during which Neudobnov personally interrogated and tortured people (recall the story of Lieutenant Colonel Darensky). On the front line, Illarion Innokentievich feels uncomfortable, lost in the simplest situation. No amount of ostentatious courage can replace organizational skills and leadership talent. The heavy burden of practical leadership of the tank corps rests entirely with Novikov. General Eremenko also understands this. Remembering Getmanov and Neudobnov, he bluntly says to Novikov: "That's what. He worked with Khrushchev, he worked with Titian Petrovich, and you, son of a bitch, soldier's bone, remember - you will lead the corps into a breakthrough."

The commander of a tank corps, Colonel Novikov, is a true hero of the Great Patriotic War. At first glance, there is nothing particularly heroic or military about this man. And he dreams not of military exploits, but of a peaceful and happy life. Scenes depicting the relationship between Novikov and Evgenia Nikolaevna play an important role in the novel. The corps commander has endless pity for the boy recruits. Novikov is really close to soldiers and officers. Grossman writes about his hero and ordinary soldiers: "And he looks at them, the same as they, and what is in them, so in him ..." It is this feeling of closeness that makes Novikov do everything to reduce human losses during the offensive. At his own peril and risk, the corps commander postpones the introduction of tanks into the breakthrough for 8 minutes. And by this, he actually violates Stalin's order. Such an act required real civic courage. However, Novikov's bold decision was dictated not only by compassion for the soldiers, but also by the sober calculation of the commander from God - it was imperative to suppress the enemy's artillery, and only then to advance. It can be said that it was largely thanks to officers such as Novikov that it was finally possible to turn the tide of the Battle of Stalingrad and win a decisive victory, while the fate of Novikov himself is uncertain. After Getmanov's denunciation, he was recalled to Moscow. ".. And it was not entirely clear whether he would return to the corps."

The commander of the regiment, Major Berezkin, can also be called a true hero of the war. Like Novikov, he takes care of the soldiers, delves into all the little things in frontline life. He is characterized by "judicious human strength." “His strength usually subordinated both commanders and Red Army men in battle, but its essence was not military and combat, it was simple, reasonable human strength. domestic and judicious human strength, and were the true masters of the war. " Therefore, the appointment of Berezkin as the division commander is not so accidental.

Among the "true masters of the war" is Captain Grekov, who commanded the defense of the house "six fractions one" in Stalingrad. On the front line, his remarkable human and combat qualities are fully affected. V. Grossman writes that in Grekov, strength, courage, imperiousness are combined with everyday routine. But there is another very important feature in the captain - a passion for freedom, rejection of totalitarianism, Stalinist collectivization. Perhaps it is in the name of liberating his native country from the iron grip of the communist regime that Captain Grekov sacrifices his life. But he does not die alone, but together with his entire small detachment.

The writer again and again draws our attention to the fact that people went to death not in the name of Stalin, the party or the communist utopia, but for the sake of freedom. Freedom of the native country from the enslavers and their personal freedom from the rule of a totalitarian state.

"The Stalingrad triumph determined the outcome of the war, but the tacit dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continued. The fate of man, his freedom, depended on this dispute."

The reason for the Russian victory at Stalingrad in 1942 lies, in Grossman's opinion, not in some special military leader's prowess. Following the traditions of Leo Tolstoy, the writer is not inclined to overestimate the role of commanders and generals (although, of course, he does not deny it). The true master of the war is its ordinary worker, an ordinary person who has retained in himself the "seeds of humanity" and a passion for freedom.

And there are many such "invisible" heroes: the pilot Viktorov, the commander of the flight regiment Zakabluka, and the Krymov rushing in search of justice, and the radio operator Katya Vengrova, and the young Serezha Shaposhnikov, and the director of the Stalingrad State District Power Plant Spiridonov, and Lieutenant Colonel Darensky. It was they, and not the hetmans and non-renewals, who bore on their shoulders all the hardships of the war. It was they who defended not only the freedom and independence of the Motherland, but also the very best in themselves: decency, kindness, humanity. That very humanity that sometimes makes the enemy feel sorry for him. The very humanity in the name of which it is worth living ...

Other compositions on this work

"Life and Fate" Found a bug? Highlight and press CTRL + ENTER

Litvinova V.I. Furious joy of life (methodological material for conducting lessons based on the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate")

Ministry of Public Education of the RSFSR
Abakan State Pedagogical Institute
Research Sector
Abakan, 1991

Published by the decision of the Scientific and Technical Council of the Abakan NIS of the State Pedagogical Institute from a year. Furious joy of life (methodological material for conducting lessons based on the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate"). Abakan, AGPI, 1991, 54 p.

This issue includes materials for studying at school V. Grossman's novel "Life and Fate". The theoretical part of the work contains literary sections, the practical part helps to comprehend the text, offers the most productive forms of analysis of individual problems, material on the biography of the writer, sets out the history of the creation of the novel, reveals issues that are particularly difficult for students to perceive, indicates literature to help the teacher.

The issue is intended for secondary school teachers, teachers and students of the philological faculties of higher educational institutions.

Reviewers:

A. N. Kasivanova - teacher of literature at the Abakan State Pedagogical School.

T. A. Nikiforova - teacher of literature at school N 1 in the city of Abakan.

(c) Abakan State Pedagogical Institute, 1991

"... We live in one present in its closest limits, without the past and the future, in the midst of dead stagnation.

The whole world was rebuilt anew, but we did not create anything. We were still vegetating, huddled in shacks ... In a word, new destinies of the human race were accomplished apart from us. "So Pyotr Chaadaev wrote at the beginning of the last century, expressing an unbearable view for anyone in Russia. A.S. Pushkin answered him. that he is proud of Russian history and, whatever it may be, he would not want any other history for his people.

The national self-consciousness will probably affirm even today Pushkin's answer to the accursed question: " WHO ARE WE IN HUMANITY?"But the question itself does not disappear even after Pushkin's answer, it remains painfully open. The answer to the question" who are we? " , from exploitation and inequality, from fascist enslavement).

“We live hard and meagerly, but we do not suffer in vain: we pave the way to a brighter future, go ahead, cover others with ourselves, this is our morality and our pride,” - this is the content of our attitude. This performance was a fact of public consciousness, it worked.

And then by the 90s it suddenly became clear that it was possible to study strikes and labor movements not only in Italy and England, but intercommunal conflicts in Punjab and Ulster. That the foreign word inflation is understandable to us and quite even Russian. That the mafia, racketeering, business - have become as common words as the district committee, party bureau, vegetable warehouse. It was also discovered that "global processes" can explode not somewhere in Sao Paulo, but in Chernobyl, Sverdlovsk or Baku.

And in this panorama it suddenly became clear that we are not the center of the world system, but a country that is unable to feed or clothe itself. The cold, cruel everyday life of history began.

Why so many things all at once and suddenly? The point is that not all at once and not all of a sudden, starting from P. Ya. Chaadaev to A. D. Sakharov, there was an intense struggle for the fate of Russia. And since a writer in Russia became not only an artist, but also a philosopher, historian, sociologist, sometimes works of art told more about history than professional historians.

But literary texts also have destinies. One of America's Sovietologists once remarked that "Russians are famous for their ability to rewrite their history." This claim is worth pondering. At the beginning of our seventy-three-year existence, individual critics and literary historians called for "throwing off the ship of history" all the classics, starting with A.S. Pushkin and L.N. Tolstoy, then deleting F.M.Dostoevsky, I. Bunin and A. Akhmatov, then hide the books of M. Bulgakov, M. Zoshchenko, E. Zamyatin and others like them. them. Years passed, but disgraced writers continued to appear among the writers. Since the war, schoolchildren have read books by B. Polevoy, V. Kozhevnikov, A. Perventsev, and somewhere near the reader they were waiting for the works of V. Bykov, Y. Bondarev, G. Baklanov. The books of the new-opted poets, as if on command, disappeared and just as suddenly appeared now. Only yesterday we knew little about the literary names of V. Nekrasov, V. Aksenov, B. Pasternak, A. Solzhenitsyn.

After the novel "Life and Destiny" was published in the October magazine in 1988 (N 1-4), the literary star of the Soviet writer Vasily Semenovich Grossman flashed again.

The gaps that the writer undertook to resolve almost thirty years ago are being comprehended only now. It is no coincidence that the critic A. Anninsky noted that Grossman "has gone ahead. We are only now ripe to publish, understand and accept the truth of this book. Therefore, the novel does not seem outdated. It still comes out on time today." 1) This is why the 11th grade literature program released in Moscow recommends this work on the teacher and student reading list.

Some teachers suggest studying the novel in grade 10, after studying "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy. 2) It seems that it is more expedient to get acquainted with the multi-problem and "difficult" for comprehension work of V. Grossman, nevertheless, in the 11th grade, when the idea of ​​the difficult fate of Soviet literature is already formed, when graduates learn the works of V.V. Mayakovsky and E. Zamyatin , N. Ostrovsky and M. Bulgakov, A. Fadeev. Everything is learned in comparison, in such a combination the authors will widely present a picture of the Soviet way of life of our people. After examining The Young Guard, you can try exploring Grossman's view of the war. At the same time, one more task of the teacher is carried out: the repetition of "War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy, since the parallels here are obvious.

The volume of the work is impressive, the number of texts for work in the classroom is probably not enough even now. This, of course, will complicate the teacher's work. However, it should be borne in mind that after a scrupulous review by the teacher of the entire work, one can stop at the analysis of individual problems solved by the writer: the fate of the people in the works of V. Grossman and L. Tolstoy; problems of relations between the state, society and the individual; "Life is freedom ..." and so on. In less prepared classes, the questions studied may be simpler: how does the writer represent collectivization and what questions do the reader have in this connection? What is common in the depiction of collectivization in M. Sholokhov's novel "Virgin Land Upturned" and Grossman's "Life and Fate". What do we learn about collectivization from Grossman's work? How is the Stalinist genocide presented by the author? How is the theme of violence conveyed in the letter to Strum's mother?

For discussion of the novel, it is more convenient to use COLLECTIVE ANALYSIS METHOD.

TEACHER'S CHALLENGE- to help students in mastering the author's thoughts about the greatness and tradition of the people who conquer fascism, about the tragedy of time and lawlessness.

THE PURPOSE OF THE LESSON will depend on the teacher's choice of individual fragments for analysis or the novel as a whole. This work presents possible options for the analysis of individual problems, which together will approximately complete the coverage of the novel as a whole.

MATERIAL FOR THE LESSON... (Questions for analysis are highlighted in petite).

BIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

V. Grossman was born in the city of Berdichev in 1905 in the family of a chemical engineer. Mother taught French. After graduating from the Kiev real school in 1924, young Grossman studied at the chemistry department of the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. With a diploma of a chemical engineer in 1929, he left for Donbass, where he worked at the Makeyevka scientific research institute for the safety of black work and was in charge of a dust and gas laboratory at the deepest mine "Smolyanskaya - II".

In Donbass V. Grossman began writing fiction. But he was in no hurry to publish his works, he was very demanding of himself, did not think that what he had written was worthy of being published.

In 1932, Grossman fell ill with tuberculosis, and on the advice of doctors returned to Moscow, where two years later his first story, "In the City of Berdichev," appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. M. Gorky immediately noticed him, summoned him and after a long conversation advised him to seriously study literature.

The plot of the story boils down to the relationship of two destinies. At the height of the fighting, the female commissar Vavilova is forced to give birth in Berdichev, which was part of the Russian Pale of Settlement. She leaves the baby in the family of a local Jewish craftsman with many children, who is very far from political passions, but who knows very well what pogroms are and what the commissioner's stay under his roof can mean. Grossman's story about how such socially different people understood and accepted each other.

In 1962, based on this story, director A. Askoldov shot a film in which N. Mordyukova and R. Bykov appeared in all the splendor of their talent. Only in 1989, a miraculously preserved copy of the film was finally allowed to appear before the viewer. The film is called "Commissar" and next to the title of the story, the author's thought is revealed: the strength of the impulse of the revolutionaries and the wisdom of the people, "brought out by the revolution from political, social and national settled life" 2) constitute a single whole.

Gorky's almanac "The Sixteenth Year" soon published a story about miners with a German sound "Gluckauf" written by Grossman in the Donbass. This is how the German miners go down to the mine, wishing a happy return to the top.

Then came the novel "Stepan Kolchugin", which made Grossman's writer's name known throughout the country.

In the first days of the war, the writer went to the front, becoming one of the most widely read correspondents of "Krasnaya Zvezda". At the first military certification, he was awarded the rank of quartermaster II rank, and in 1943 he already wears the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel.

Military fate threw V. Grossman across different sectors of the front. But the main thing for him was and remained for the rest of his life - Stalingrad. There he survived everything, from the bitterness of defeat, tragedy and despair of a handful of people, pressed against the Volga by steel and the fire of the military machine of fascism, to the greatest Victory.

In terms of his human character and especially his literary talent, Grossman was not a quick, lively reporter, one of those who "with a" watering can "and a notebook were the first to burst into cities." He was a leisurely essayist, deep, thoughtful, who saw and knew how to show the reader in each separate episode of the war the fate of a person, his role and place and the high significance of the specific actions of each in the multi-million pandemonium of war. In order to understand all this himself, to feel the war with a soldier's instinct, the writer considered himself obliged to be together with the soldiers in the trench, the quarter of the dilapidated city defended from the Nazis, on the raft of the bombarded ferry. Therefore, he was always honest.

The writer's daughter, E. V. Korotkova-Grossman says: “D. Ortenberg, editor of Krasnaya Zvezda, summoned three correspondents - A. Tolstoy, V. Grossman, P. Pavlenko. write an essay or a story. Father immediately said: “I will not write such an essay.” Pavlenko suddenly became indignant, jumped up to him: “Proud, Vasily Semyonovich.” But military commander Grossman knew what he was saying. “deserters.” Almost always these people, who were frightened on the first day, fight the next, like everyone else. took prisoner and brought him to the tribunal. "Who are you - they ask him, -" I came to sue. " 3)

And not only was the author of "Life and Fate" honest, but also brave. “We are brave now - we are talking openly about Stalin's crimes, about years of unprecedented terror,” notes A. Ananiev. And then, in the days of V. Grossman’s work on the novel, who would dare to compare the two regimes - Hitler’s and Stalin’s - according to those parameters, why are their similarities so obvious to all of us now? Stalinism destroyed the main thing in a person - his dignity. The novel "fighting Stalinism, protects, defends the dignity of the individual, puts it at the center of all burning questions" 4)

E. V. Korotkova-Grossman added that the hero of the novel Grekov "is a very close person in spirit to the author, is not afraid of either the Germans, or the authorities, or the commissar Krymov, who sews work for him. A brave, internally free person who does not want to live like this after the war. how they lived in the 30s. "

The famous German writer Heinrich Böll, evaluating the work of W. Grossmann, wrote that he was always exactly where the writer ought to be. And this, both in peaceful and in frontline life, is far from safe places.

Relatives of the writer recall the great warmth of Grossman. His memos testify to this. Here is an excerpt from one of them: "If my trip is associated with any sad surprises, I ask you to help my family ...".

Grossman loved his mother very much. She died at the hands of fascist executioners. In 1961, nineteen years after the death of his mother, his son wrote her a letter, which was preserved in the archives of the writer's widow: “When I die, you will live in a book that I have dedicated to you, and whose fate is similar to yours” 5).

V. Grossman was the author of one of the first fiction books about the war - "The people are immortal", the story was published in 1942. Along with numerous enthusiastic responses to the story of Soviet readers, it is interesting to recall the speech of the famous English translator Harry Stephen, who wrote in August 1943 in the newspaper "British Ally" about Grossman as a writer of "mighty strength and humanity." It is the humanity that permeates the book, its charm values ​​... "6).

Vasily Grossman's nuts, although they were written on the fresh trail of events for the newspaper, which, as you know, lives for one day, were so deep and significant that from the pages of Krasnaya Zvezda they passed into books - "The War Years", "Stalingrad", " The Battle of Stalingrad "," Life "," Treblinsky Hell ".

The main business of his life was the book "Life and Fate"; “My main work,” he wrote after the war in his autobiography, “is a book about the war, which I decided to write in the spring of 1943. At the same time I wrote the first chapters. Almost all of them approached this work in the postwar years after demobilization from the army. I devoted my time in the post-war years to this work. Sleep turned out to be very difficult. "

HISTORY OF CREATION

In 1952, the magazine "Novy Mir" published V. Grossman's novel "For the Right Cause", where the main idea was arguing with the song, from which, as we know, words cannot be thrown out: "When the country orders to be a hero, everyone becomes a hero in our country." ... The hero of Grossman does not consider this to be true: "Is love for freedom, joy of work, loyalty to the Motherland, maternal feeling given only to one hero? Truly great things are done by ordinary people."

Grossman's war is not a game of heroism, not a field for heroic deeds, but an environment in which a person with convictions and hopes is revealed.

"Deal" in the old Russian sense is a battle, the essence, the work of life. The writer knew the war firsthand: through the eyes of a military commander he saw Treblinka, with the knowledge of an engineer, he appreciated the mechanics of a sinking floor in a gas chamber, the chemist's experience determined the choice of a kind of deadly gas. The novel contained the truth about the war.

The reader's success was enormous. Grossman received thousands of letters. Among them are many congratulations from writers. I am looking forward to the next issue of Novy Mir, ”Mikola Bazhan wrote to him. - I grab each new issue and read your novel - a large, humane, clever work. I don’t want to write much, but let me sincerely thank you and firmly shake the hand that wrote such a book ... ".

A. Tvardovsky wrote to Grossman in June 1944: “I am very glad for you that you are writing, and with great interest I look forward to what else you write. Just to say, I don’t expect from anyone as much as I expect from you. .. ".

The success of the novel "For a Just Cause" evoked a powerful opposition, unexpected for the author, by a number of literary men who were officially considered recognized masters of military prose. One of them - the author of the then, but now firmly forgotten book "White Birch" Mikhail Bubennov with a devastating article in "Pravda" gave a signal to obedient literary criticism to smash Grossman's novel as "an idealess, anti-popular work that does not correspond to the principles of socialist realism," where images of Soviet people "are impoverished, belittled, discolored", "where the author seeks to prove that ordinary people perform immortal feats ... Grossman does not show the party at all as the organizer of victory - neither in the rear, nor in the army ...". There were also accusations that the author described Hitler, but missed the image of Stalin. They remembered Grossman's play "According to the Pythagoreans", which was criticized in 1945. A. Perventsev, who in his now also forgotten novel "Honor from Young", branded all Crimean Tatars as a "nation of traitors", defined Grossman's book as "ideological sabotage." M. Shahinyan criticized the novel for its unusual portrayal of party workers: Commissar Krymov does little to act, "is depicted in isolation from his direct work as a leader and educator of soldiers and commanders."

As a result, the book and the author were "closed". But the life of the novel continued, and letters of approval and support continued to arrive. The letters from the front-line soldiers were especially valuable to Grossman. "From all the literature on the war, I must single out two works: V. Nekrasov" In the trenches of Stalingrad "and your" For a just cause "- wrote A. A. Kedrov-Polyansky from Rostov-on-Don. realism, - wrote B. K. Gubarev from the Kharkov region - This is how you need to write about Stalingrad or not write at all. It is disgusting to read a light book about Stalingrad, but writing is probably criminal. "

"Fearing that the annihilating criticism of Bubennov will affect the writer and he will start" combing his characters, "wrote the reader. Grossman that his "gray" heroes are in the eyes of the reader real, living people with all the weaknesses and shortcomings inherent in living people, even if they are three times Heroes of the Soviet Union ... The critic Bubennov does not see in the novel the organizing and guiding role of the party in the defense of Stalingrad ... True, I also did not find generally accepted meetings of the party committee in the novel. But isn't our party made up of the Novikovs, Krymovs, battalion commissar Filyashkin, Rodimtsev's division, StalGRES director Spiridonov and other heroes? "And finally a letter from Viktor Nekrasov:" Dear Vasily Semenovich! I don't think I need to explain to you how I feel about all this. The soul is disgusting to nausea. And why duels are not allowed now ... But the book is still there! And keep it going for heaven's sake! I believe in the victory of a just cause! "

Then Grossman showed loyalty: he admitted the shortcomings, took into account the criticism and, with the help of A. Fadeev, brought the book to a separate publication. Is the magazine or book version now the expression of the "last author's will"? 7)

"For a just cause" is a prelude to the big, this is the first part of the dilogy about the Great Patriotic War.

The dispute about who will create War and Peace about 1941-1945 has been going on for a long time: at first they argued who would be the author - a soldier who marched "from and to" or a general appointed "just now." Then they complained that the years went by, but the book was still missing. At one of the writers' congresses G. Baklanov asked: "Will it be easy for the author of the new War and Peace, if even someone suddenly writes?" The subtext then was clear to many front-line soldiers: yes, there was a truthful book about the war, but it was not recognized, it was torn away from the people.

In the meantime, Stalin had died, the charges of ideological harm were removed from the novel For a Just Cause, but the author's label of “unreliability” remained. When, in 1960, Grossman submitted the completed manuscript of the new novel to the editorial board of the Znamya magazine, it was read with passion. And those who wanted to read everything there that they needed to start a new persecution. Grossman made no secret of his intentions to tell the country and the world the cruel truth that had been hidden for many years about our life, about the tragic fate of the people and about the real cost of Victory. The honored colleagues in the editorial office of the Znamya magazine sent the manuscript of the Life and Fate novel "upward" with the corresponding characteristics.

And then, on a frosty February day, there was a knock on the door of Grossman's apartment and to the question: "Who is there?" - They answered sharply: "Open it! From the house management!" The very words with which trouble entered thousands of houses with "people in civilian clothes", tragedy burst in, and the owner himself was waiting for death, even if it was the 30s, the beginning of the 50s.

In the Stalinist-Beria times, "in civilian clothes" usually came late at night, often before dawn, to stun people with a search and arrest warrant and take away the next victim in a "black raven" without witnesses.

They came to Grossman in the afternoon. The year was 1961, and the "people in civilian clothes" worked in a new way. Grossman was not taken away in the "funnel", now his novel was arrested. Here are some extracts from the "detention" protocol: "We, employees of the State Security Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers, Lieutenant Colonel Prokopenko, Majors Nefedov and Baranov, on the basis of the order of the State Security Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers No. В-36 dated 4 / II-1961 . in the presence of attesting witnesses, search the house of Joseph Solomonovich Grossman at the address: Moscow, Lomonosovsky prospect, 15, building 10 b, apt. 9. During the search, the following was seized:

1. The text of the novel "Life and Fate", typed on a typewriter, 3 parts, 2 copies each ... The specified copies of the novel are in 6 brown bags.
2. Draft materials of the typewritten text in a salad-colored folder ... The search was carried out from 11:40 minutes 14/2 1961. This report on the arrest of an unprinted book actually became a certificate of the death of the writer V. Grossman, for he could not imagine his life without this novel. The writer was then 56 years old and he devoted all the days remaining to him until 1964 to the unsuccessful struggle for the release of his work, in which he rightly saw the crown of creativity.

In response to indignation, complaints, protests, many well-wishers said to Grossman: "Do not anger God. It is your happiness that the times are different. Say thank you for arresting the novel and leaving you free." The writer did not consider it normal to be able to do to the author what they did to him with impunity.

He no longer wrote novels. He wrote letters, statements, protests, demanding freedom for his brainchild. Here are some excerpts from a large letter to NS Khrushchev after the XXII Party Congress: “I started writing the book even before the XX Party Congress, during Stalin’s lifetime. At that time, there seemed to be not a shadow of hope for the publication of the book. I wrote it.

Your report at the XX Congress gave me confidence. After all, the writer's thoughts, his feelings, his pain are a particle of common thoughts, common pain, common truth.

It has been a year since the book was confiscated from me. For a year now, I have been persistently thinking about her tragic fate, looking for an explanation of what happened. I know my book is imperfect, that it cannot be compared with the works of the great writers of the past: But the point is not in the weakness of my talent. The point is the right to write the truth, suffered and matured over the long years of life.

Why is my book, which, perhaps, to some extent responds to the internal needs of Soviet people, a book in which there is no lies and slander, but there is truth, pain, love for people, is a ban imposed ...

If my book is a lie, let the people who want to read it be told about it. If my book is slander, let it be said about it.

When my manuscript was confiscated, I was offered to give a signature that I would be responsible for disclosing the fact of the seizure of the manuscript in a criminal proceeding.

I was recommended to answer the reader's questions that I had not finished the work on the manuscript yet, that this work would drag on for a long time. In other words, I was asked to tell a lie. The methods by which they want to keep everything that happened to my book a secret are not methods of fighting untruth and slander. This is not how one fights against a lie. This is how they fight against the truth.

I ask for the freedom of my book, so that editors, and not employees of the State Security Committee, speak and argue with me about my manuscript.

There is no sense, there is no truth in the current situation - in my actual freedom, when the book to which I gave my life is in prison - after all, I wrote it, because I do not renounce it. I still believe that I wrote the truth, that I wrote it, loving and pitying people, believing in people. I ask freedom for my book ... ".

Nikita Sergeevich said nothing in response. Only a few months after the letter was sent, Grossman invited M. A. Suslov for a conversation, on whose conscience the fractured fates of E. Pasternak, A. Tvardovsky, I. Brodsky. Judging by the note that Grossman made upon returning home, Suslov told him: “I have not read your book, but I have carefully read numerous reviews, reviews, in which there are many quotes from your novel. Everyone who read your book considers it to be politically hostile to us.

It is impossible to print your book ... Your book contains direct comparisons between us and Hitler's fascism. Your book speaks positively about religion, about God, about Catholicism. In your book, Trotsky is taken under protection. "

The verdict for the novel "Life and Fate" was final: indefinite confinement. The author's name was mercilessly deleted from all printed publications of the Soviet Union. The name of Grossman was destroyed both after Khrushchev, and under Brezhnev, and after the death of the main ideologue, who survived all the "leaders", and in the first years of glasnost. The device continued to work clearly.

Only in 1988, 24 years after the death of the author, his novel "Life and Fate" was released.

THE MEANING OF THE NAME OF THE NOVEL

The title of the book is deeply symbolic. Our life determines our destiny: "a person is free to go through life, because he wants, but he is free and not wanting."

"Life and destiny" ... The first word in the author's view is a chaotic list of actions, thoughts, feelings, what gives rise to the "mess of life": childhood memories, tears of happiness, bitterness of separation, pity for a bug in a box, suspiciousness, motherly tenderness , sadness, sudden hope, happy guess. And at the center of all these events, incalculable like life, is a man. He is the symbol of life, the main event of the novel, life, state. A person is drawn into the maelstrom of events, and, consequently, a person's catastrophes are not only his own. In the movement of life, a person, like a small speck of dust, may coincide with the phase of the flow or not. Those who are lucky to be in the main stream are lucky ones, "sons of time", but unfortunate "stepchildren of time" (A. Annensky), who did not fall into the saving stream, are doomed. So the word "fate" becomes next to it, meaning at once both the structural orderliness and the doom of any structure. Life and destiny are in a peculiar dependence. Nations converge, armies are fighting, classes collide, the movement of the "stream" becomes unusual. And the elements of the structure that were strong yesterday, making revolutions, governing industry, moving science, today turn out to be knocked out of the usual course. Fate cuts right into life.

THEORETICAL MATERIAL

TOPIC- a re-read history of the country during the Great Patriotic War. The theme is based on the author's understanding of the crucial battle in the war - the Battle of Stalingrad. But it is also a novel about Peace (about the peaceful life of people in the rear and about Peace in the philosophical meaning of its concept).

PROBLEM- man and society. It includes a lot of questions that the author is trying to answer. Chief among them: how can an individual remain himself in a crushing reality with its totalitarian regime? And what does it mean to be yourself when there is nothing that would not be dictated to you by time, law, or power? In what way is the principle of "good" and "freedom" realized in the conditions of the existing system? The author's task is to reveal the relationship between politics and morality as the main conflict of the time.

IDEA- to lead through the test of war, as through a moral X-ray, all the heroes of the novel, in order to find out their true human essence in an extreme situation.

PLOT- Unaccustomed: at first glance, random facts, observations are collected. But there is no kaleidoscopicity, “everything is tightly pressed to each other: events, biographies, collisions, connections between people, their hopes, love, hate, life and death. Everything is explained by a single philosophical meaning. differently: dough, dough, mass, chaos, hot peat. The mass is organized according to laws that kill the individual - state. Lived Grossman to the present day, he might have adopted the term Administrative System from G. Kh. Popov.

The plot bears a general conclusion: the villains overpowered honest people: "Hitler did not change the ratio, but only the state of affairs in the German dough of life." And the age of Einstein and Planck turned out to be the age of Hitler. Grossman sees and understands the era through the actions and thoughts of the heroes. Their fates are incomplete. Life goes on. "8)

COMPOSITION- the short chapters of Grossman's narration are mosaic in appearance, details, author's judgments flow in a stream. Taken together, this ensures the movement of the plot. But one can also feel in the narration a sharply cocked spring of contradictory force: the executioner cries over his victim; the criminal knows that he has not committed a crime, but will be punished; the National Socialist enters the life of people with jokes, with plebeian manners; the camp is built for good; "anti-tank mines are stacked in a cream-colored baby carriage", hell is inhabited; fighters repair walkers between attacks; the mother continues to talk to her deceased son. Madness is no different from the norm.

Grossman's leitmotif is also peculiar: silence on the main thing. It defies words. "Gaping in place of the target is the leitmotif" (L. Annensky, p. 260).

GROUPING OF IMAGES- Grossman writes his heroes into the era. They represent different peoples, generations, professions, classes and sectors of society. They have different attitudes towards life. They have different fates, but almost all of them are united by fear of destruction, doubts about the correctness of the chosen path, anxiety for relatives and friends, faith in the future.

The writer pays more attention to some characters, less to others, but the usual division into main and secondary characters is inapplicable to the characters of the novel: "each carries a particle of a general ideological and artistic concept and each is associated with its philosophical concept" (A. Elyashevich).

The heroes help the author to reveal problematic layers. For example, battle scenes are drawn by the Novikovskaya line. There are also discussions about the strategy and tactics of battle, about the role of soldiers, about the types of military leaders. There is a clear overlap with the traditions of the best military prose (K. Simonov, "Soldiers are not born").

THE DRAMA OF THE SCIENTIST- this layer is revealed by the Strum line. It is based on the torment of reason, powerless before demagoguery. Later D. Granin, F. Amlinsky will reveal this topic in their works.

Arrests, as a manifestation of the action of a totalitarian system, are shown by Krymov's line.

Grossman's heroes in many ways anticipate the appearance of famous characters from the best works of Soviet prose. The fate of Zhenya Shaposhnikova echoes "Sophia Petrovna" by L. Chukovskaya; Grossman gave a description of the torment of people in a German concentration camp earlier than A. Solzhenitsyn in "One Day in Ivan Denisovich". And if we further consider literary parallels in this regard, then we can indicate the themes raised by Grossman, which found their further development in other works of famous authors: the famine of 1932 - "The Brawlers" (M. Alekseev), the tragedy of Jewry - "Heavy Sand" , the nature of Stalin's policy is "Children of the Arbat". All this Grossman said in 1961, before A. Rybakov, M. Dudintsev, A. Solzhenitsyn, L. Chukovskaya, K. Simonov, D. Granin began work on their novels. Grossman in his heroes revealed what they are all about and each separately.

Grossman's man is a secret of himself: Zhenya Shaposhnikova, having fallen in love with Novikov, left Krymov, but having learned about the fate of her first husband, refuses love and becomes in a long line of lines to the window, sung by poets, from Nekrasov to Anna Akhmatova.

Abarchuk, Mostovsky, Krymov are paying for the zealous fulfillment of their own illusions.

A Russian woman, predatory choosing a prisoner to strike, unexpectedly for everyone and for herself in the first place, gives him a piece of bread: "Here, eat!"

A brilliant scientist, sheltered from the front by the state, who in the hungry days received meat, butter, buckwheat on coupons, he draws strength in a letter to his mother, who came from the world of the dead: "Where can I get strength, son? Live, live, live. Mom."

In the most difficult times, the heroes do not forget their responsibility not only for another person, but also for everything around them, for society, for the people. That is why Novikov delays the offensive by 8 minutes, therefore he does not give up his house 6 / I "house manager" of the Greeks, therefore Ikonnikov preaches the Gospel to the dispossessed.

“But there are characters in his book who“ forgot ”great truths. For them, they were blinded by their power, impunity allowed them to use any means to achieve“ revolutionary ”goals. Grossman shows the moral decline of such people and indicates the source of the tragedy - the administrative system and its the chief is the father of all nations.

GENRE it is impossible to define unambiguously. There is no doubt that Life and Fate is an epic. But this is both a psychological and lyrical-publicistic intellectual, and political, and socio-philosophical novel.

The fate of the heroes is directly linked to the political situation in the country. None of them wants to evade her assessment and choice of their attitude towards her.

Grossman analyzes the structure of the socialist state distorted by Stalin. It is difficult for a person who lives under the iron hand of an omniscient power to remain himself. And here comes the psychological analysis of the soul of a person who has betrayed his principles. Shtrum was bullied at work. Suddenly Stalin's call changed everything for the better. And something happens to Strum himself: implacable to the truth, he signs a collective letter accusing honest people. And a grave sin gnaws at his soul. And Krymov will not sign false testimony and will remain a man fooled by his belief in the state. Only a free person can be truly strong.

THE EPIC TRADITIONS OF LEO TOLSTOY IN THE ROMAN OF V. GROSSMAN

The writer consciously, consistently and purposefully used the lessons and experience of the great novelist.

In a philosophical sense, both novels are focused on the fate of the people. All the events referred to in the works of L.N. Tolstoy and the writer of the sixties are assessed from the standpoint of national morality. In both cases, we are talking about a liberation struggle, which means that it is just from the people's point of view.

Grossman, in Tolstoy's style, sharpens the idea of ​​the priority of popular power, which a commander must understand if he wants to win a battle. The soul of a soldier is the main thing for a commander. The components of success for both writers were the wisdom of the leadership of the troops and the moral strength of the soldiers performing their duty. We read from Grossman: "The secret of secret wars, its tragic spirit were in the right of one person to send another to death ... This right rested on the fact that people went into the fire for the sake of a common cause." Let us recall that Kutuzov was guided by the same principles in the epic of L. N. Tolstoy.

The two writers have in common their close attention to everything Russian: nature, song, talents. This can be explained by the philosophical position of the authors, which emphasizes that the war awakened people's self-awareness: the history of Russia began to be perceived as the history of Russian glory. The national became the basis of the world outlook. In the days of national disasters, human dignity, faith in goodness, fidelity to freedom flare up. The people who rose up to defend their land (be it 1812 or 1941) are invincible: "Just as life itself is indestructible, in spite of everything reviving in people and reviving people incinerated by suffering" 9).

The continuation of the epic tradition was expressed in the novel "Life and Fate" and in the fact that Grossman portrayed the whole reality of war and peace through the prism of the era, preserving the individuality of social characters, leaving them typologically significant.

Due to the depth and intensity of thought, Grossman's dilogy does not look like a panorama: it is not illustrative. The movement of life in the work of Grossman is presented in a multifaceted and variegated manner, as in L.N. Tolstoy, subordinated to the sovereign trend, focused on the fate of the people. It is no coincidence that the spirit of the army is named the main force in both works.

Both the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace and the Battle of Stalingrad at Grossman concentrated all the fundamental problems of the confrontation between the two camps, absorbed the events preceding the war and predetermined the future. That is, the center of both works is the culmination of the war.

Like the great teacher, Grossman tries to explain the historical patterns that predetermined the final victory over the enemy. Working (on a huge amount of material, L.N. Tolstoy selected vital events for the epic that helped in many respects to the victory over Napoleon: 1805-1807, 1812, 1825, 1856. For this purpose, Grossman chooses such moments in the life of the country that influenced on the course of military events: violent collectivization, thoughtless industrialization, repression in 1937 1 ode, the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy (the case of doctors, anti-Semitism, the state of the army and the state as a whole).

The entire chain of events of the era of L. N. Tolstoy embraces the Bolkonsky and Rostov families. In Grossman's novel - the Shaposhnikov and Shtrum families. The novel's epic canvas is wide enough: from Hitler's headquarters to the Kolyma camp, from the Jewish ghetto to the Ural tank forge.

In the first part of the dilogy, all episodes were concentrated around several epic centers: the Red Army soldier Vavilov, stern and implacable; Filyashkin's battalion, which has fulfilled its military duty; the August bombing of the city.

In Life and Fate, along with the battle of two irreconcilable camps, the power of the personality cult arose, which fell upon the fate of all heroes. The vitality of Grossman's characters stubbornly resists violence.

Finally, L.N. Tolstoy skillfully knew how to alternate scenes of everyday life and battles, and Grossman develops this tradition in his work. All manifestations of war and peace in the lives and destinies of people are investigated by the authors of the works.

But V. Grossman's dilogy is not an imitation of the great Russian writer. What makes Life and Fate different from Leo Tolstoy's epic?

First of all - the original genre: Grossman's novel is lyrical and publicistic, intellectual, political, socio-philosophical. These are new facets in the epic genre. Tolstoy's key move: "at a time when" is absent from Grossman. Tolstoy weaves events and facts, Grossman confronts: Stalin - Hitler, fascist torture chambers - a camp for political prisoners at home, and even Strum is a scientist, Strum is a Jew.

Once General Dragomirov thrashed War and Peace because Tolstoy distorted the deployment of the regiments. In Life and Fate, even from the point of view of a meticulous historian, almost everything is verified. Almost because there are some inaccuracies - for example, Lake Tsatsa was named by him as Dacey, the newspaper "Edzola" is written with the letter p, the camp ranger Kashketin appears as Kashkotin, Natalya Borisovna was not alone, by the time of Peter II's wheeling she already had children.

But the main thing in the novel is not the events, but the reflections of the heroes over their lives and destinies.

LN Tolstoy argued that the horror of life can be endured if the internal order of life is not violated.

V. Grossman's life order of heroes is unstable, and in a time of trials not every person can remain himself. The fate of a person in a totalitarian state is always tragic, because he cannot fulfill his life purpose without first becoming a "cog" of the state machine. If, in a particular human age, a machine commits a crime, the person becomes an accomplice or victim. In house 6 / I, Grekov makes a choice, and Krymov, writing a denunciation, another. (Let's remember why A. Balkonsky and young Kuragin ended up in the army). If the choice is wrong, then, as Magar says before his death, it can no longer be redeemed.

In addition to being tested by war, as was the case with Tolstoy, all the main characters of Grossman are tested by loneliness, by the oppression of a total machine. Shtrum, Krymov, Zhenya Shaposhnikova, Anna Semyonovna pass through this.

So, we followed the artistic depiction of the two Patriotic Wars. Leo Tolstoy is in great trouble. V. Grossman also has trouble, but also a huge cleansing.

The essence of the society built by 1941 is analyzed through the prism of war.

At will, the teacher can trace the continuation of the traditions of A. P. Chekhov (about dramatic things quietly, without pathos) and F. M. Dostoevsky (who fought over the "damned" questions of life) in the novel by V. Grossman.

PRACTICAL PART

GROSSMAN'S NEW READING OF THE PAGES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

The Soviet people, according to the writer, perceived the war as an obstacle that must be overcome on the way to achieving freedom and peaceful labor, the main components of life. Therefore, the people entered the war with dignity and simplicity.

Grossman was shocked by the miraculous resilience of the Soviet man, his calm, firm performance of his duty. Starting to portray the truth about the war, Grossman set himself clear tasks: to carry out a critical analysis of the history of the Great Patriotic War; to show the conscious interconnection of two national tragedies: the repressions of 1937 and the retreat to Moscow in 1941-1942; introduce "true enemies of the people"; direct executors of Stalin's will and the bureaucracy.

In this regard, the narrative expands the usual framework of the canvas of war: the Jewish ghetto in Ukraine and the extermination of Jews to the music of the orchestra in the crematoria of Germany; a fascist camp for Soviet prisoners of war and Dal-Stroy; the year of the great turning point and the famine caused by it; Lenin, who until his last days did not understand that "his business would become Stalin's business," and Stalin was the only one who would become Lenin's heir; the nightmares of 1937 and the hope that the war will end the repression. Ilya Ehrenburg in the book "People, Years, Life" recalled that Olga Bergolts told him about this.

DO YOU NEED TO SEARCH THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR IN THE ROMANCE NOW WHEN A LOT OF FACTS AND DOCUMENTS ARE PUBLISHED?

Historians are reluctant to give up their distorted positions. Only under the pressure of artistic truth and with the help of readers do they provide explanations. I will cite a quote from Voenno-Istorichesky Zhurnal, where quite recently in an editorial one could read: “Recently, through the efforts of a number of writers, journalists, historians, the initial period of the war, despite the historical” reliability and archival documents, is turning from “difficult” into “tragic” and is mainly associated with the words "failure", "confusion", "confusion". All this will create in millions of people, especially among young people, a wrong idea of ​​what really happened in the first months of the war. "12) Probably the editorial staff of the magazine would live more calmly if the schoolchildren had nothing but Molodaya Gvardiya and Shield and Sword But young people are already informed that Minsk was surrendered on the fifth day of the war, the tanks approached Khimki, a few meters remained to the Volga. Does this inconsistency of the magazine with the correct idea of ​​the war contribute? ! ".

Those who were the first to try to convey the truth were beaten. They continue to beat those who allow themselves too actively to demonstrate their right to have their own individual judgment on fundamental issues of political and public life, which differs from the opinion of the organized majority, which is still trying to "keep their head down". Even at the Congress of People's Deputies, Academician Sakharov was branded as a renegade, a slanderer, almost an enemy of the people. The instinct for self-preservation of the system, which it, in disguise, calls class instinct, works flawlessly.

A new reading of the history of the war reveals such biographical pages from the activities of some generals, which are like death to the reader's eyes. General A. A. Epishev's statement is significant: "There, in Novy Mir, they say, give them the black bread of truth, but why the hell is it needed if it is not profitable." Historians continue to debate whether we know everything about the Great

Patriotic? (see "Political Education", 1988, N 17, pp. 37-43; N 3, 1989, pp. 30-35), refer to the authority of G.K. Zhukov, but everyone snatches out the quotes necessary for him and there is still no clear picture. For example, N. Kirsanov in polemics proves Stalin's "purely amateurish" military knowledge and quotes from "Memoirs and Reflections of Zhukov:" he set completely unrealistic dates for the start of the operation, as a result of which many operations began poorly prepared, the troops suffered unjustified losses. "

Arguing with N. Kirsanov, R. Kalish cites another quote from these memoirs: "JV Stalin possessed the basic principles of organizing front-line operations ..., led them with knowledge of the matter. Undoubtedly, he was a worthy Supreme Commander-in-Chief." Historians throw quotations like peaks, and science does not tolerate playing with facts, sleep requires deep understanding.

Many "white spots" of the Great Patriotic War have yet to be revealed: the activities of law enforcement agencies - the NKVD, the Court, the Prosecutor's Office, the State Arbitration; the protection of the rear of the country and the protection of the rear of the active Red Army; the problem of war and children (at the beginning of the war 976 orphanages with 167,223 children were evacuated).

In the history of the Great Patriotic War, "black spots" have not been revealed either: a reassessment of the heroism of the past, the position of General Vlasov towards the country's leadership, and so on. Fiction helps to learn balance and objectivity in assessing history.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE REASONS OF THE RED ARMY RETREATING?(meaning textbooks published before 1990).

• surprise attack by the enemy,
• inexperience of the army and navy (the Germans have fought for 2 years),
• lack of a second front,
• superiority of the enemy in technology.

From works of fiction, we knew that the failures of the army and navy were also associated with the activities of stupid generals who did not know how to carry out the orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief (Korneichuk, "Front"). To the credit of literature, not all writers took this version on faith. Serpilin from K. Simonov's novel "Soldiers are not born" asked the question where illiterate generals come from: "Was it at the general meeting that they were chosen?"

Many authors, in explaining the reasons for the failures of the Red Army, were guided by data from Stalin's report of November 6, 1942, where he, in particular, pointed out that more German and their allied divisions fought against the Soviet Union than on the Russian front in the First World War, that so many of them had gathered because there is no second front, because of the absence of a second front, and there is a series of failures on all fronts.

WHAT IS NOW KNOWN ABOUT THE FIRST DAYS OF THE WAR?

The reasons for our defeats in the initial period of the war are complex and ambiguous. They are rooted in a number of political, economic and military factors. Political include Stalin's criminal stubbornness in disbelief of the obvious facts about the impending attack coming from various sources, his unjustified hope for a treaty of 23 / VIII-1939. In its desire to gain time to prepare for war, the Soviet government even broke off diplomatic relations with the government countries occupied by Germany.

One of the reasons for the defeat of the Red Army in the first period of the war was the destruction by Stalin of the experienced command and political staff of the army, who had gone through the experience of the civil war. Almost the entire Supreme Military Council was destroyed, three out of five marshals. In his memoirs "The Deed of Life" Marshal Vasilevsky pointed out that if the command and political personnel of our army had not been destroyed, then perhaps there would have been no war.

Stalin concentrated in his hands the leadership of the country and the Armed Forces. In the USSR, there were several supreme governing bodies, as if they should act collegially, in fact, there was a brutal centralization, which was closed on Stalin.

During the war there was not a single congress of the CPSU (b), not a single congress of the union republic. (Let us recall how many congresses and party conferences were under Lenin during the years of the civil war). The Plenum of the Central Committee, scheduled for October 1941, was canceled by Stalin's sole decision, despite the fact that members of the Central Committee had already arrived in Moscow. All wartime questions were decided by the staff of the respective Soviets.

With their direct participation in prisons and camps there were hundreds of thousands of Soviet people, the overwhelming majority of them remained true patriots there too, they wanted to defend their Motherland or work for victory without the stigma of an "enemy of the people". But they were deprived of this right. As a result, the front received fewer armies, and people died in the camps.

To the above-mentioned military factors, one can add: yes, the Red Army had less experience in modern warfare than the Wehrmacht. But even the experience of the Soviet-Finnish war could not be studied and implemented during the time of Stalin's personality cult. A participant in those events P.G. Gilev recalled that two weeks before the Nazi attack, the head of the NKVD of the Baranovichi region reported that in recent weeks there had been massive cases of crossing our borders, the murder of Soviet citizens. In conclusion, he said that we are actually in a state of war with Germany. To the question: "Why are we not on the defensive lines?" was the answer: "No order!" - "So give it back!" - "Forbidden!" ... As a result of Stalin's criminal stubbornness, the separate 155th rifle division that participated in the war with Finland was doomed in advance to death. The way to the East was practically open.

In economic terms, we did not fully manage to use at the beginning of the war the industrial potential that, at the cost of incredible efforts, was created by the people in 20 years. The command-administrative methods used by Stalin during the period of industrialization and collectivization caused enormous damage to the economy and the course of its preparation for war.

As for the superiority in the number of equipment, then there are the following facts:

From British secret intelligence documents recently it became known that "between July and December 1941, more than 200 British aircraft took part in the defense of Moscow. Later, another 400 Hurricanes took part in the defense of the city. In total, the Allies supplied about 20,000 fighters. This is not to mention 3,000 air defense guns, 1,500 naval guns and 3,000,000 pairs of British shoes that warmed up Soviet soldiers "... 13) The help that Stalin received from England was substantial, it was provided to the detriment and risk of England itself. It was beneficial for Stalin to hide these facts in order to hide the main reason for the retreat. This is how today's scientists - historians interpret the reasons for the retreat.

In the 60s V. Grossman revealed almost all of the listed reasons for the retreat of the Red Army at the beginning of the war. In the novel "Life and Fate" the writer identified the main points in the course of the initial military events and their consequences. We find a roll call of the truthful description of the Battle of Stalingrad in the stories of G. Baklanov, Yu. Bondarev, V. Bykov, V. Nekrasov, K. Simonov.

WHAT CAUSES OF THE RED ARMY'S FAILURE DETERMINED BY V. GROSSMAN?

1. Repression.

In the repressions of 1937, "Madyarov did not justify those commanders and commissars, who were then shot as enemies of the people, he did not justify Trotsky, but also in admiration for Krivoruchenko, Dubov, in how respectfully and simply he called the names of commanders and army commissars who were exterminated in In 1937, it was felt that he did not believe that Marshals Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Yegorov, commander of the Moscow military district Muralov, commander of the second rank Lewandovsky, Gamarnik, Dybenko, Bubnov, that Trotsky's first deputy Sklyansky and Unshlikht were enemies of the people and traitors to the motherland. "

The repressions of 1937 decapitated the army, starting with the regiments, and at the same time disintegrated discipline by these events, giving rise to desertion. Captain Grekov, exposing the true state of affairs in the army, spoke "about the pre-war army affairs with purges, certification, with pull when receiving apartments, spoke about some people who reached the generals in 1937, wrote dozens of denunciations that exposed the imaginary enemies of the people."

Thus, the repressions destroyed the main achievement of socialism - comradeship, loyalty to a friend, which led to the appearance of an army of informers.

Grossman notes that the repression increased the flow of new personnel to the national economy, the system of political administration, and the army.

By the beginning of the war, only 7 percent. commanders remained with higher education, 37 percent. did not complete a full course of study even in secondary military educational institutions. The repressed commanders knew a lot and were able to, they were excellently versed in the German military organization, but ... The command staff before the war itself was thrown back to the level of civil war. In 1937, in 1937, those who had gained the favor began to lead the clever and talented specialists. The author says about Novikov: “On this happy day, evil rose heavily in him for many years of his past life, to the position that had become legal for him, when the military-illiterate guys, accustomed to power, food, orders, listened to his reports, mercifully tried to provide people who did not know the caliber of artillery, who did not know how to correctly read out loud a speech written to them by someone else's hand, who were confused in a map, who said instead of "percentage" "percentage", "outstanding commander", "Berlin ", they always guided him. He reported to them. Illiteracy, sometimes, it seemed to him, was the strength of these people, it replaced them with education, his knowledge, correct speech, interest in books were his weakness." The war also revealed that such people have little will and faith.

The wave of repressions of the 30s touched a huge mass of people, and almost all the heroes of the novel were touched by it in one way or another: the father was arrested at the radio operator Katya, the parents and two sisters of Ershov were killed in a special settlement, several people from the Shaposhnikov family were repressed. And Neudobov, who carried out this action, became a general, although he was now "due to lack of military experience" subordinate to the colonel.

Repression is described in the novel as crimes motivated by the abuse of power. At that time, Madyarov's reasoning that he did not believe in the guilt of the convicted military leaders looked like "sedition." Today we heard the president's words: "We must not forgive or justify what happened in 1937-1938." This is the essence of Grossman's reflections on repression: we must see, but not justify or forgive.

2. Forced collectivization.

The literature of recent years quite often turned to the problems of collectivization: "On the Irtysh" by S. Zalygin, "Men and Women" by B. Mozhaev, "Kasian Ostudny" by I. Akulov, "Eves" by V. Belov. There will be lines in the novel "Children of the Arbat" by A. Rybakov, "Greetings to you from Baba Lera" by B. Vasiliev and the story "Vaska" by S. Antonov about the ordeal of the immigrants. Let us evaluate what Grossman said about this earlier than others, already at the turn of the sixties the writer was able to understand and show the cruel truth: "... the Germans are killing Jewish old people and children, and we were in the thirty-seventh year and complete collectivization with the expulsion of millions of unfortunate peasants with hunger, with cannibalism ... ".

Collectivization was carried out against the will of the people. People left without land were dying of hunger. Once again, Grossman draws a terrible parallel: "The state is able to build a dam separating wheat, rye from those who sowed it and thereby cause a terrible pestilence, like the pestilence that killed hundreds of thousands of Leningraders during the Nazi blockade, which killed millions of prisoners of war in Hitler's camps."

The peasants were so tortured by serf labor that they were waiting for liberation from the Germans, "but it turned out that the Germans guessed - collective farms are a good thing for them. They brought five-khat, ten-khatki, the same units and brigades."

Some writers-"villagers", conveying the excesses of collectivization, emphasize that the expulsion of the owners undermined the sense of the proprietor in the entire peasantry and aggravated the state of affairs in agriculture. In Grossman's novel, there are no familiar fists. Through the memories of a peasant woman, he reproduces a true picture of "dispossession": "There was a rich harvest that year. The wheat stood as a dense wall, high, on the shoulder of Vasily, and Christ was covered with his head."

A quiet, drawn-out moan stood over the village, living skeletons, children, crawling on the floor, whimpering barely audible; peasants with their feet filled with water wandered through the yards, exhausted, hungry shortness of breath. The women were looking for a brew for food, everything was eaten, boiled - nettles, acorns, a linden leaf, hooves, bones, horns lying behind the huts, unmade sheep skins ... And the guys who came from the city walked around the yards, past the dead and half-dead, they opened basements, dug holes in sheds, poked them into the ground with iron sticks, and knocked out kulak grain.

On a sultry summer day, Vasily Chunyak calmed down, stopped breathing. At this hour, the lads who had come from the city again came into the hut and the blue-eyed man said, going up to the deceased: "The fist has rested, he does not regret his life."

Grossman shows the tragedy of people dying of hunger next to wheat. Honest people cannot take someone else's. The bread grown by these people is a stranger here. This is how the idea is carried out that the state is alien to the peasants.

Nearby is the tragedy of people who sacredly believe in the myth with the fist-the world-eater and therefore destroy it as a class.

Let's pay attention to the phrase used by Grossman - "complete collectivization". The writer is not against the very idea of ​​Lenin. He worried about how the good goal was perverted by bad means and extraordinary cruelty, having carried out collectivization thoughtlessly, hastily, forcibly, more "for show", and not for a person.

The decision to "destroy as a class" a million peasants with wives and children unwittingly evokes in Grossman an association with Hitler's decision to destroy the Jews as a nation together with children.

3. Persecution based on ethnicity.

Along the way, we are clarifying the question, did not V. Grossman distort history in solving this problem? Therefore, to begin with, let us recall the origins of the Leninist nationalities policy. It is known that in V. I. Lenin dreamed of a voluntary alliance of nations based on complete trust, on the realization of fraternal unity. Such an alliance, according to him, cannot be created immediately; it must be achieved with the greatest caution and patience in order to prevent the revival of national friction.

Lenin's precepts were grossly violated during the years of Stalinism and stagnation. In the pre-revolutionary period, Stalin established himself as one of the theoreticians of the national question, and Lenin positively assessed his work "Marxism and the National Question". But later Stalin departed from Lenin's teaching.

Lenin was categorically against the idea of ​​"autonomization" during the formation of the USSR, which was expressed by Stalin. Forced to accept the Leninist plan, supported by the party, Stalin in his current policy gradually began to pursue a course of "autonomization". Instead of a voluntary union of sovereign peoples based on respect, independence and trust, he led a policy of centralizing and depriving peoples of their national rights. Not only social strata of society, but entire nations were subjected to unjustified repressions. In the 1920s, Stalin demarcated Transcaucasia, in the 30s he liquidated national village councils and districts (Red Kurdistan disappeared from the map of the Azerbaijan SSR).

The Constitution of the USSR, adopted in 1936, did not contain the criteria for a state governed by the rule of law. Repressions rained down, they engulfed and destroyed the creative intelligentsia of the peoples of the Volga region, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus.

Collectivization, accompanied by dispossession and exile of millions of peasants, had catastrophic consequences for the Russian and Ukrainian nation.

In 1937-1938. followed by the punishment of the Korean population of the Soviet Far East, he was resettled to Central Asia and Kazakhstan.

The gross violation of the basic principles of Lenin's policy were the deportations of the early 1940s from the Soviet Baltic republics and the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine.

The Stalinist "concept" of the responsibility of peoples for the acts of individual nationalist groups led to the accusation of a whole group of peoples of treason during the Great Patriotic War. By the will of Stalin, the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachais, Tuvinians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Meskhetian Turks, Hemshids, Kurds, Armenians from the Akhaltsikhe-laki and Akhaltsikhe Laki regions were deprived of their national statehood and were expelled without exception.

In the same period, an absurd propaganda of the absolute superiority of Russian science and culture over Western models was carried out; the "doctors' case" was fabricated, which had an anti-Semitic orientation.

Let us trace the presentation of the national problem by V. Grossman through the prism of the listed scientific concepts in order to make sure once again how honest and truthful the writer was in the 60s.

Grossman was keenly aware of the national sentiment that had grown during the war. "Stalingrad, the Stalingrad offensive contributed to a new self-consciousness of the army and the population. The national became the basis of the world outlook."

The war forced people of different nationalities to be treated in a new way. Taking advantage of the national upsurge, Stalin began to implement the "ideology of state nationalism." Speaking at the Red Army parade 7. XI. 1941, he drew the attention of the protesters to the "spirit of the great Lenin", which inspired the people to the war in 1918 and inspires the Patriotic War: "May the image of our great ancestors - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, inspire you in this courageous war, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov ". It is not difficult to notice that Stalin refers not so much to the traditions themselves as to the great names of Russia, among which he put the spirit of Lenin. ”The outstanding commanders of the Civil War Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Blucher, Kovtyuk, Fedko did not inspire, they were declared enemies of the people Outstanding military leaders Frunze and Kamenev did not live to see the period of repression.

At a reception in the Kremlin on 24 May 1945, Stalin again announced that the Russian people were "leading", they had "a clear mind, steadfast character and patience." This "theoretical" thesis was used to kill some peoples. It is no coincidence that the episode of Strum's filling out of the "royal questionnaire" is described in such detail: "Filling out the fifth point of it," pressing the pen, wrote in decisive letters "ev. rey. ”He did not know what it would soon mean for hundreds of thousands of people to answer the fifth question of the questionnaire: a Kalmyk, a Balkarian, a Chechen, a Crimean Tatar ... fear, anger, despair, hopelessness, blood will migrate into him from the next sixth item "social origin", which in a few years many people will fill out the fifth item of the questionnaire with a sense of fate, with which in the past decades the children of Cossack officers answered the next sixth question , nobles and manufacturers, sons of priests. "

Grossman points out how the singling out of the chosen people in the community of equals, opposes it to other peoples, interferes with their international cooperation, and more often the cause they serve. Getmanov puts Sazonov as commander, and not Basangov, who knows the business well, and is guided by the following reasoning: "Deputy commander of the second brigade, an Armenian colonel, his chief of staff will be a Kalmyk, add - in the third brigade, the chief of staff is Lieutenant Colonel Lifshits. Maybe we are without a Kalmyk. will we manage? "

Grossman gives in the novel an episode in which representatives of different nationalities talk about their culture. "Let me love Tolstoy not only because he wrote well about the Tatars," Sokolov says. Karimov got up, his face was covered with pearly sweat, and he said: "I will tell you the truth ... If you remember how in the 1920s they burned out those who are proud of the Tatar people, all our big cultured people ... only people, national culture were destroyed. The present Tatar intelligentsia are savages in comparison with those people ... ".

Getmanov talks about his trip to the liberated territory: "Many Kalmyks sang a German tune. But what did the Soviet power not give them! After all, there was a country of ragged nomads, a country of everyday syphilis, sheer illiteracy. looks into the steppe ".

The former and future secretary of the regional committee in Ukraine, speaking about nations, emphasizes: "We always sacrifice Russian people ... Enough!" He is supported by Neudobnov: "Friendship of peoples ... is a sacred cause, but, you see, a large percentage of nationals are hostile, shaky, obscure people. In our time, a Bolshevik is primarily a Russian patriot." Let's add to the above: General Gudzia identified Soviet patriotism with the "Russian spirit."

Most of the heroes of Grossman's novel "are indifferent - a Russian, a Jew, a Ukrainian, an Armenian - a person with whom he has to work, a worker, a manufacturer, whether his grandfather is a fist; their attitude towards a work comrade does not depend on whether his brother is arrested by the NKVD They don't care whether the sisters of their workmate live in Kostroma or Geneva. The main thing is talent, fire, the spark of God. "

Grossman was convinced that national consciousness manifests itself as a mighty wonderful force in the days of national disasters because it is human: it awakens human dignity, human loyalty to freedom, human faith in goodness. "The history of man is a battle of great evil, striving to grind the seeds of humanity. Kindness ... is invincible. Evil is powerless in front of it."

The "Jewish question" also appears complex and ambiguous in the novel. Sometimes this is expressed in everyday sketches such as: "Abrash is in a hurry to receive a medal for the defense of Moscow," sometimes through official, service relations: "Our mother Russia is the head of the whole world", but to a greater extent the "problem of Jewishness" is revealed through the life of the family of the scientist Strum The image of Strum is to some extent autobiographical: Grossman understood what it means to separate a person from his favorite work, Strum's pain is close to him after signing a false letter (he himself wrote an explanatory letter to the Writers' Union), the writer, according to the recollections of friends, experienced a similar "forbidden" love for the wife of his comrade, the mother of the author of the novel died at the hands of the Nazis.

The tragedy of the people is revealed in the letter of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum.

Before her death, Anna Semyonovna gazes more intently at the faces of people and cannot "really understand them," many of them amaze her with their difference in characters: "This morning, I was reminded of what I had forgotten over the years of Soviet power, that I am Jewish. The Germans were traveling in a truck and shouted: “Juden kaput!” And then some of my neighbors reminded me of this. The janitor’s wife stood under my window and said to the neighbor: “Thank God, the Jews are finished.”

Grossman shows how defenseless the Jews were in the very first days of the war. They were moved to the Old Town, allowing them to take 15 kg of things with them. The list of those things that made up the allowed kilograms of Anna Semyonovna is very eloquent. She took the essentials: a spoon, a knife, 2 plates, photographs of her husband and son, volumes of Pushkin, Maupassant, Chekhov, several medical instruments. It was time to say goodbye to the neighbors: "Two neighbors in my presence began to argue about who would take chairs for themselves, who would take a writing table, and began to say goodbye to them, both burst into tears ...".

Hundreds of Jews flocked to the damned ghetto, there were many people with crazy, horrified eyes. And on the sidewalk there were people and looked ...

Anna Semyonovna draws a border between these people: "... two crowds, Jews in coats and hats, women in warm headscarves, and the second crowd on the sidewalk is dressed in summer clothes. It seemed to me that for the Jews walking down the street, already the sun refused to shine ... ". The Nazis forbade Jews to walk on sidewalks, use transport, baths, visit dispensaries, go to the cinema, buy butter, eggs, milk, berries, white bread, meat, all vegetables, excluding potatoes. If a Jew is found in a Russian house, the owner is shot. But Anna Semyonovna's old patient, despite the ban, brought her things and promised that he would bring food to the fence once a week. And before, Anna Semyonovna thought that he was a gloomy and callous person.

The ghetto united people of the same destiny, but she never ceased to be amazed at the different characters of people: Sperling, at the age of 58, got hold of mattresses, kerosene, firewood, and rejoices at all his success. Epstein goes to searches with the Germans, participates in interrogations. Engineer Raivich, "who is more helpless than a child," dreams of equipping the ghetto with homemade grenades. In the ghetto they know that death awaits all of them, but life takes its toll: they play a wedding, transmit a rumor about the advance of Soviet troops, about Hitler's order not to kill Jews "The world is full and all events, their meaning, reason, are always the same - the salvation of the Jews. wealth of hope! " - exclaims Anna Semyonovna.

The instinct for life makes people hope and believe in a happy tomorrow. “Once you used to come running to me as a child, looking for protection. And now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head in your lap, so that you, smart, strong, cover me, protect me,” the mother confesses to her son. I am not only strong in spirit, Vitya, I am also weak. I often think about suicide, but weakness, or strength, or senseless hope holds me back. "

Like many heroes of the novel, Anna Semyonovna goes through the tests of loneliness: "Vitya, I have always been alone." In the ghetto, being next to people of the same fate, Anna Semyonovna “did not feel lonely. This is because before the war she was an invisible grain of sand in a dusty stream, and behind the barbed wire she felt like a significant part of her people.

Having carefully looked at people, Anna Semyonovna stood next to those who retained the best human qualities. This is a student of a pedagogical school who hid a sweet, exhausted lieutenant with a Volga-like speech, these are Jewish youths planning to go behind the front line, the "fiend" Alka, who, according to the passport of a dead Russian, was going to flee the ghetto. Next to them, Anna Semyonovna feels needed, useful to people: "I was so happy, helping this guy, it seemed to me that I was also participating in the war against fascism." Anna Semyonovna understands that the hours of her people's life are numbered, but she goes to the sick at home, gives Yura French lessons, sees in the eyes of the patients the reflection of "a sad and kind, grinning and doomed, defeated by violence and at the same time triumphant over violence of a strong soul ! ". She draws strength from her people: "Sometimes it seems to me that I do not go to the sick, but on the contrary, the people's kind doctor heals my soul." She instinctively resists death.

The tragedy of the Jews is, in the author's opinion, that they have ceased to feel like a separate people. She is conveyed by the writer in a letter to Anna Semyonovna: "I never felt like a Jew, from childhood I grew up among Russian friends, I loved more than anyone the poet Pushkin, Nekrasov, and the play over which I cried with the whole audience, the Congress of Russians zemstvo doctors, there was "Uncle Vanya" with Stanislavsky. And once, Vitenka, when I was a fourteen-year-old girl, our family was going to emigrate to South America. And I told my dad: "I won't go anywhere from Russia, I'd rather drown." left.

But in these terrible days my heart was filled with maternal tenderness for the Jewish people. I didn't know about this love before. "

Strum himself experiences similar feelings: “Before the war, Strum never thought that he was a Jew, that his mother was Jewish. one student, professor, workshop leader did not speak to him about this.

I never, never had a desire to talk about this with Nadya - to explain to her that her mother was Russian and her father was Jewish. "

These thoughts came to Strum's mind from the fact that he realized: he acts like a scientist, but answers like a Jew. "Is there really no one in Russia to replace you if you cannot do science without Landesman and Vaspapir," his fellow scientists declare to him and find that Strum's discovery contradicts "Lenin's views on the nature of matter," they capture the "spirit of Judaism" in him.

Grossman does not idealize Jews. He tells about Rebekah, who strangled the baby so that he would not find a place of hiding by crying, about greed and slovenliness. All this is on the pages of his novel. But there is also Sofya Osipovna, who gave the last seconds of her life to alleviate the fate of little Davyd, there are dying children who “cannot become musicians, shoemakers, cutters. What will it be when everyone is killed? the noisy world of wedding customs, sayings, Saturday holidays will go to earth forever ... we will disappear ... ".

The writer appeals to the obligatory humanistic principle: all peoples must be respected, not a single nation must be belittled. Grossman defended the vital right of every people to live freely and with dignity in the community of all nations.

The writer was looking for an explanation for the fact that tens of millions of people were passive witnesses of the persecution of Jews and explained this by fear: "... this fear is special, heavy, insurmountable for millions of people, this is the one written in ominous, iridescent red letters in the winter leaden sky of Moscow - Gosstrakh ! ".

Fear breeds obedience. Beginning with a description of the obedience of the Jews, going to the ditches of mass executions from the ghettos, traveling in an echelon to the extermination camp, Grossman rises to general conclusions about mass obedience, which makes them uncomplainingly wait for arrest, to watch the extermination of prisoners. Obedience disfigures people, let us remember the quiet and sweet old executioner, who, during the executions, asked permission to transfer the clothes of the executed to an orphanage. Let us recall another executor of sentences who drank, yearning (idle, and when he was expelled from work, began to go to collective farms to prick pigs, brought pig blood with him in bottles, - he said that the doctor prescribed him to drink blood for anemia.

For the author, obedience and compliance are synonymous with denunciations and cruelty. There are people and non-people in Grossman's novel. He shows how Zhuchenko and Khmelkov act near the crematorium furnaces in the extermination camp for Soviet prisoners of war. Zhuchenko was one of people with a shifted psyche, he was outwardly unpleasant, his hands with long and thick fingers always seemed unwashed. The former hairdresser went through in captivity all the torment of beatings, hunger, bloody diarrhea, bullying, subconsciously choosing one thing all the time - life, "he didn't want more." And one day he realized that he and Zhuchenko are the same, because people are indifferent to the state of mind in which the extermination deed is being carried out. Khmelkov "vaguely knew that at the time of fascism, a person who wants to remain human has an easier choice than a saved life - death." This is another of the main ideas of the book: the correctness of the choice of fate is determined not by heaven, not by the state court, and not even by the judgment of society, but "the highest judgment is the judgment of the sinner over the sinner." "... a dirty and sinful person crushed by fascism, who himself experienced the terrible power of a totalitarian state, who himself fell, bowed, timid, obeyed, will pronounce the verdict. Guilty!" This is where the writer's answer to questions about fate, fate, will and lack of will of a person is concentrated. The judge is the one who withstood the mortal battle. V. Grossman did not want a person to get used to betrayal, lies, violence, humiliation, arbitrariness. It bothered him that people didn't really want to remember what they went through. We are talking about events large and small: about the mass extermination of Jews in fascist death camps, about the everyday heroism of the defenders of Stalingrad, about the fight against "cosmopolitans" at the physics institute, about the ordeals of the innocent.

That is why Grossman argues that the cruel incommensurability of History and Life is overcome by every life lived with dignity. That is why he leads his protagonists through the three most important events for the country: collectivization, repression, ethnic persecution. But, in addition to those listed in the novel "Life and Fate", no less important in importance, although less noticeable outwardly, problems are raised. The volume of this work, of course, does not allow us to cover all of them; let us dwell on some, perhaps more interesting for high school students.

There is a key scene in the text that reveals the author's position in the representation of the war: after a powerful explosion, under the incessant bombardment, a Soviet spy and a German appeared in one crater: “They looked at each other. Both were crushed by the same force, both of them were helpless to fight with this strength, and it seemed, she did not protect one of them, but equally threatened one and the other.

They were silent, two military residents. The perfect and unmistakable kill mechanism they both possessed did not work.

Life was terrible, and in the depths of their eyes a dull epiphany flashed that even after the war, the force that drove them into this hole, pressed their muzzles into the ground, would press not only the conquered.

They, as if by agreement, climbed out of the pit, exposing their backs and skulls for a light shot, unshakably confident in their safety.

Klimov and the German climbed to the surface, and both looked: one to the east, the second to the west, - did not the authorities see that they were climbing out of the same hole, not killing each other. Without looking back, without "adyu" each went to their trenches ... ".

And in that and in the other army, people kill people for some kind of duty not invented by them, and, by all means, there is someone looking after the murder. Grossman has no traditional description of an outraged enemy. The writer is more concerned with the psychology of a German soldier who, against his will, found himself in a foreign land: "They walk in a special gait that people and animals who have lost their freedom walk ... It seems that one bluish-gray face for all, one eyes for all, one for all an expression of suffering and longing. It's amazing how many of them were small, nosy, low-browed, with funny hare mouths, with sparrow heads. There is no desire of the writer to humiliate enemy soldiers in these words, there is pain for them; "These were ugly, weak people, people born by mothers and loved by them. And it was as if those non-people, the nation, who walked with heavy chins, with haughty mouths, white-headed and fair-faced, with granite breasts, had disappeared."

Grossman compares the soldiers of the warring armies and finds that they are somewhat similar "to those sad and woeful crowds of unfortunates born to Russian mothers, whom the Germans drove with twigs and sticks to the camps, to the west, in the fall of 1941".

The writer understands that not everyone shares his feelings for the Germans, so he does not hide how the exhausted civilians perceived their persecutors: with relief we went to the dark basement and did not rush to leave it, preferring the darkness and stench to the outside air and daylight. "

However, Grossman's sympathies are still on the side of those who have not lost their human dignity, officer honor in a brutal war. Let us recall a captured German who crossed the road on all fours: "A piece of blanket, with scraps of cotton wool that had come out, dragged behind him. The soldier crawled hastily, fingering his arms and legs like a dog, without raising his head ... The Colonel waited until the prisoner was level with him. and kicked him. "And a weak jolt was enough to beat the sparrow's strength ... His arms and legs spread apart. He looked from below at the one who struck him: in the eyes of the German, like in the eyes of a dying sheep, there was no reproach, not even suffering, only humility. "

He who has a soul, may not be able to endure this picture. Among the many Soviet soldiers, there was also one who said to the senior in rank: "The Russian people do not beat lying people. You are a scoundrel." And when the driver, with disdain for the "trick" of his boss, showing off, said: “I have no pity for them. carelessly".

The traditional attitude of Russians towards prisoners, familiar to us since 1812, and conveyed in the Tolstoyan aspect.

And there are other examples that Leo Tolstoy did not see in the Russian army during the Patriotic War. The soldier Bulatov told how he saw a German in an embrace with a woman walking along the road, made them fall to the ground and, "before killing, he gave them to rise three times ... And I killed him when he was standing over her, so cross and lay down on the road. "

For a long time it was considered a great valor to kill more enemies. War veterans unveiled their trophies at meetings with young people. But here is an episode from Grossman's book that made us think deeply about the “victory” of Bulatov, who “today” has 78 Fritz. Someone's children, someone's fathers ...

Stalingrad transformed the conquerors, they grew thin from hunger and numb from the cold. They left the Stalingraders without a roof, without bread. The war equalized the human needs of invaders and conquerors, "... the prisoner tore off cabbage leaves from the ground, looked for tiny, acorn-sized frozen potatoes, which at one time, due to their scanty size, did not enter the cauldron. From behind the stone wall, a tall old woman in a torn a man's coat, belted with a rope, wearing worn-out men's boots, she walked towards the soldier, gazing intently at the ground, stirring up the snow with a hook made of thick wire.

They saw each other, without raising their heads, through the shadows that collided in the snow.

The gigantic German raised his eyes to the tall old woman and, trustingly holding the leaky, mica cabbage leaf in front of her, said slowly and then solemnly: "Hello, madam."

The old woman, unhurriedly brushing away the clothes that had slipped onto her forehead, looked with dark eyes, full of kindness and intelligence, majestically, replied slowly: "Hello, sir."

Me without bitterness and irony ends this episode of Grossman: "It was a meeting at the highest level of representatives of the two peoples."

WHY IS V. GROSSMAN PAYING CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE DEFENSE OF THE HOUSE SIX FRACTIONAL ONE?

Stalingrad in the historical and artistic concept of Grossman was of the greatest importance not only for the war, but also for the whole life of the Soviet and German peoples, the socialist and fascist states. “The tragic glow of Stalingrad illuminated all life, to the lowest points. At these points, the humiliated and insulted according to the old Russian novel tradition more clearly manifest the social“ moral essence of the events of social life, ”noted A. Bocharov. 14 ).

Analyzing the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman finds out why the Soviet soldiers retreated to Stalingrad, but remained unbroken. Where did they get the strength to repulse the enemy?

The biographies of the defenders of the house 6/1 add up to one common fate, according to which one can discern the fate of Stalingrad. The defenders of the house, being in the balance from death, pacified the fascist pressure. These were people of different ages and professions, but they were convinced that everything in the collapsed house was fragile, brittle, both iron and stone, "but not them." At home 6/1 there was life, here they loved swearing, fought, dreamed, kept a kitten and he "did not complain", believed that this roar, hunger, fire is life on earth. "

WHAT IS THE STRATEGIC PURPOSE OF HOUSE 6/1?

There was a sapper unit in the house, transmitting important information about the enemy. The Germans could start a general offensive only by eliminating this center of resistance. If the house "six fractions one" holds out for a long time, then the German offensive program will be upset, and the Soviet headquarters in the gained time will be able to strengthen the army.

WHAT ARE THE HOUSEHOLDERS REPRESENTED?

The defenders of the 6/1 house represent a social cut of any military unit that participated in the Stalingrad battle, but there is one detail, there were "special people, or ordinary people, having got into this house, became special." Everything that the Germans did aroused in the "tenants" of the house not a feeling of horror, but a condescending, mocking attitude. "Oh, and Fritz is trying," "Look, look, what these hooligans have thought up ...", "Well, a fool, where does he put bombs?"

The defenders of the house were strong, desperate people, although in general they were the most ordinary: Kolomeytsev, who respected scientists and writers more than all the bosses, "in his opinion, those with any position and title did not mean anything before some bald Lobachevsky or withered Romain Rolland "; "sloppy lieutenant Batrakov, a former teacher, spoke of ignorant schoolchildren in an arrogant voice"; the commander of a sapper platoon Antsiferov, who liked to remember his pre-war chronic diseases, a former opera singer, a cheeky lieutenant Zubarev, an innocent Bunchuk. What was their strength? They were united by a sense of inner freedom. None of them had to be forced, held by force, each knew his place, his duty, each understood that the hour of the decisive German assault was near, and prepared for it with military dignity.

The organizing link and the soul of the defenders of the house was Grekov: "Some amazing combination of strength, courage, authority with everyday life. He remembers how much children's boots cost before the war, and what salary a cleaner or a locksmith received, and how much grain and money were given for a workday. on the farm ".

His biography is usual: he worked as a foreman at a mine, then as a construction technician, became an infantry captain, went to retraining, read books in the evening, drank vodka, played cards, quarreled with his wife. Now he is half-jokingly half-seriously called the house manager. From him, the soldiers adopt calmness and are free in speech and action. The conversations were not simple: “You cannot lead a person like a sheep, for which Lenin was smart and he didn’t understand. The revolution is done so that no one can lead a person. I will be smart. ”People calmly condemned those who killed tens of thousands of innocent people, spoke with pain about the torture of collectivization.

Calmness and self-confidence of the tenants of the house (5/1 eliminated the fear of the concept of "environment." loves: a grenade, a knife, a shovel. To teach you - to spoil. Just ask - beat, whoever loves what. "Most likely in these words, the house manager takes care of" their boys ", personal protection depends on many individuals, they must be used as much as possible. outwardly inexplicable maternal instinct. After all, Grekov knew that "the house in which he settled with his people would be on the axis of the German strike," but did not report this in the report. Did not count on help? Did not want to evoke sympathy? Everything that happened outside his house, he lived according to other laws alien to him. The political instructor reported to the commander that Grekov refused to write a report ("we report only to the Fritzes"): "In general, they have there" you will not understand anything, all this Grekov would They lie, and he is with them, like an equal, they lie side by side, “you” they say to him and call him “Vanya” ... not a military unit, but some kind of Parisian commune ”(note, not in praise, but in condemnation).

Secret "informants" have been installed behind Grekov's fighters, who pay more attention to how "the house manager has completely dissolved", and not how he is dashingly fighting. Constant mistrust on the part of the bosses, suspicion, orders "to report in detail at nineteen zero-zero every day," under the incessant enemy fire, force Grekov to take urgent defensive measures: with a blow of his hand he knocked the radio operator's palm off the key, grinned and said: "A mine fragment hit the radio transmitter , the connection will improve when Grekov needs it. " House 6/1 was subject not to formal subordination, but to the law of "natural equality, which was so strong in Stalingrad."

The garrison died, having fulfilled its sacred duty - to hold out to the last, and fearful reports - denunciations, only reached their addressees. The regimental commissar, comforting Krymov, adds about Grekov, "lowering his voice," that according to the information of the head of the Special Department, he "may have been alive. He could have gone over to the enemy's side."

WHAT IS THIS FORCES ABLE TO OVERLINE THE COURAGE AND HEROISM OF FIGHTERS?

They can be called with one succinct word - bureaucracy. It can manifest itself in a peaceful life, but in war it has extremely ugly forms: the pilot shot down a Messer, jumped out of a burning car, he was safe, and his pants were burned. "And so, they do not give him pants, the wear period has not expired and that's it!"

"The German thrashes hundreds of people, but as soon as they are taken away for the reverse slope of the height, the people will be safe, and there is no tactical loss, and the equipment will remain. But there is an order:" Not a step back "and they keep them under fire and destroy equipment, they destroy people." ...

Bureaucracy is terrible when the consumptive widow of the hero is thrown out of the apartment, when a person is allowed to fill out 24 questionnaires and he eventually confesses at the meeting: "Comrades, I am not your man" grandfathers were fists: "Our bureaucracy is terrible when you think: this is not a growth on the body of the state - the growth can be cut off. It is terrible when you think: bureaucracy is the state."

WHAT WAS THE SOVIET STATE DEVELOPED IN THE SAME WAYS IF ITS MOST EFFECTIVE INTERNAL FORCE BUROKRATISM PROVE?

Investigating this question, Grossman turned to the tasks of the revolution, the names of the leaders.

Through the memories of one of the main characters of the novel, the author reminds the reader who Lenin was for people: the peasants from Gorki saw off the good, intelligent worker on his last journey; relatives and friends buried a white-headed boy with a difficult character, demanding to the point of cruelty, but loving his mother, sisters, brothers; the wife thought that they never had children; workers from “Dynamo” remembered him frightened and mournful in the last days of his life.

The political friends of the great Lenin - Rykov, Kamenev, Bukharin - were still looking absentmindedly at the pockmarked dark-complexioned man in a long greatcoat. Revealing the tragedy of power, Grossman already here makes a significant remark: "If Stalin were tactful, he should not have come to Gorki, where the relatives and closest friends of the great Lenin gathered. They did not understand that he, the only one, would become Lenin's heir, would push all of them, even the closest ones, will even drive their wife away from Lenin's inheritance. "

Grossman emphasized that the very death of Lenin made Stalin the master of the country: “It was not they - Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev - who had Lenin's truth. Until his last days Lenin did not know and did not understand that Lenin's cause would become Stalin's. "

People knew that at his word alone huge construction projects arose, hundreds of thousands of people dug canals, erected cities, laid roads in the edge of permafrost. He expressed a great state in himself. The great state expressed itself in it, in its character, in its habits. The newspapers wrote: "Stalin is Lenin today", "Stalin is the heir of Razin, Dobrolyubov, Herzen." And only the most notorious skeptics knew that Stalin was building iron terror, arranging medieval witch trials for the speedy construction of socialism in one single country. "They saw how" dozens of people who created the Bolshevik Party together with Lenin turned out to be provocateurs, paid agents of foreign intelligence services. "and were destroyed.

Today, these thoughts of the author are confirmed by the published figures: an almost complete change of leading cadres took place between the 17th and 18th Party Congresses. At the 17th Congress of the Old Bolsheviks there were 80 percent, who joined after 1929 - 2.6 percent. At the XVIII Congress of the Party with the right to vote of the old Bolsheviks there were 24 percent, who joined after 1929 - 80.6 percent. Of the party leaders, Stalin remained. One.

In the battle of Stalingrad, the fate of the state founded by Lenin was decided, the centralized rational force of the party was able to exercise for itself in the construction of huge factories, in the creation of nuclear power plants and thermonuclear installations, jet and turboprop aircraft, space and transcontinental missiles, high-rise buildings, palaces of science, new channels , seas, in the creation of polar highways and cities.

The fate of France and Belgium, Italy, the Scandinavian and Balkan states occupied by Hitler was decided, the death sentence was pronounced against Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Moabite dungeon, the gates of 900 concentration and labor camps were being prepared to open. "The fate of German prisoners of war, Soviet prisoners of war in the Nazi camps was decided. , the actor Zuskin, the writers Bergelson, Markin, Ferrer The fate of Wormwood, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania was decided.The fate of the Russian peasants and workers, the freedom of Russian thought, Russian literature and science.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT STALIN MADE A DEFENSE PLAN FOR STALINGRAD?

Grossman debunks the ingenious idea of ​​encircling Stalingrad. He appreciates the merit of the organizers of the Stalingrad offensive, who correctly chose the area, the time of the offensive, skillfully arranged the interaction of the three fronts, and worked out the details of the operation.

But he proves that the basis of this work, in which Stalin also took part, "was the principle of the enemy's flank encirclement, introduced into military practice by a primitive hairy man."

The human consciousness, shocked by the grandeur of the military events, identified it with the grandeur of the commanders' thoughts: "The history of battles shows that the generals do not introduce new principles into operations to break through defenses, persecute, encircle, and exhaust them; they apply and use principles that are still known to people of the Neanderthal era. ... Of great importance for the life of airplanes, turbines, jet engines, rockets, and, however, humanity owes its creation to its talent, but not to its genius. "

V. Grossman is against attributing the victory to a genius. Of course, the activity of a talented military leader for the cause of war cannot be belittled, but it is not only stupid and dangerous to count victory to one person. And because the well-worn conclusion sounds like the phrase of the writer: the spirit of the army must be called the genius of success, "this is how the people's victory expressed itself."

According to Grossman, Hitler's character "deeply and fully expressed the character of the fascist state" - this is how the character of Stalin expressed the features of the Soviet state, therefore the author compares fascism and the cult of personality, the essence of the fascist order, with elements of the socialist system. Grossman showed the clash of two states, totalitarian in nature. The struggle for the homeland, freedom, the just revolutionary cause was just and the Soviet people won.

WHY DID THE PARTY ALLOW THE DISTORTION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS?

Honest communists did not agree with Stalin's autocracy in the party, lamented about the bloody trials and disrespectful attitude towards the old party members, but they knew that by opposing the party on any of these issues, they, against their will, would be opposed to Lenin's cause. The appointment of the Stalinist party to mobilize the anger of the masses, rage, aim to beat the enemy. It is no accident that Krymov says: "Christian humanism is not suitable in our business. Our Soviet humanism is harsh. We do not know the ceremonies ...". The faithful Leninist Krymov admires the infallibility of the General Secretary of the Marxist-Leninist Party, violating the Leninist spirit, combining party democracy with iron discipline: “Krymov never doubted the right of the party to act with the sword of dictatorship, the holy right of the revolution to destroy its enemies. He never sympathized with the opposition! did not think that Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev followed the Leninist path. Trotsky, with all the brilliance of his mind and revolutionary temperament, did not outlive his Menshevik past, did not rise to Leninist heights. That is the strength - Stalin! That is why they call him the master. His hand is not. never wavered, there was no Bukharin's intellectual flabbiness in him. The party created by Lenin, smashing enemies, followed Stalin. They do not argue with enemies, they do not listen to their arguments. "

Even realizing that he had essentially written a denunciation against Grekov, Krymov reassures himself: "Nothing can be done, dear comrade, you are a party member, do your party duty."

For a thousand years Russia has been a country of autocracy and autocracy, and during this time respect for a strong hand has been cultivated in it. Former Menshevik Chernetsov instills in Mostovsky that cruelty is an inevitable consequence of the revolution.

WHAT DOES V. GROSSMAN SEE THE TRAGEDY OF THE REVOLUTION?

Grossman believed in the need for revolutionary transformations, so the war against fascism for him is a war for a just cause: "Yes, yes. The war that raised the bulk of the national forces was a war for revolution." In the author's opinion, the cleansing war will bring new, free breath to the Soviet people.

Other writers also dreamed of this: the Graninskiy "Zubr" did not return to Russia in 1937, when he was invited, knowing that he would be repressed, but after 1945 he came, believing in a just post-war life.

V. Kondratyev, donating his "Red Gate" to readers, recalled: "After the war, everyone was expecting some kind of change. They hoped that Stalin, convinced of the loyalty and loyalty of the victorious people, would stop repression, but this did not happen." Pasternak continued to work on Doctor Zhivago, making sure that "the expectations of the changes that the war would bring to Russia" did not come true.

Grossman is inclined to believe that collectivization, industrialization and 1937 "were the logical result of the October Revolution." But the new way of life used old ideas, phraseology. The basis of the new order was its state-national character: “The revolutionary goal liberated in the name of morality from morality, it justified the name of the future of today's Pharisees, informers, hypocrites, it explained why a person, in the name of the happiness of the people, should push the innocent into the pit. the revolution allowed to turn away from children whose parents were in camps, explaining why the revolution wanted a wife who did not denounce her innocent husband to be torn away from her children and sent to a concentration camp for 10 years.

The power of the revolution entered into an alliance with the fear of death, with the horror of torture, with a longing that gripped those who felt the breath of distant camps. "

For a long time, going into the revolution, people knew that "consumption and Siberia" awaited them. It is alarming for Grossman to realize that "now the revolution has paid for its loyalty to itself, for its loyalty to a great goal with well-fed rations, Kremlin dinner, People's Commissars' packages, personal cars, vouchers ..., international carriages."

The Stalingrad battle, according to the author, should revive the Leninist ideals of the revolution: "the Stalingrad feat is akin to the revolutionary struggle of the Russian workers." Together with howl-howl, they want to bury everything that interferes with the development of the conquests of the revolution: “The neighbors in Kazan need products, and I am taking them to Chita, then they will be delivered from Chita back to Kazan.

Centralization has strangled. ”(And how many angry speeches have been made at congresses and sessions on this matter!).

"The wages of the workers are small, and the management knows one thing - come on a plan! Walk swollen, hungry, but come on with a plan. The trade union is silent. Instead of protecting the interests of workers, it calls for victims: before the war, there is preparation for war, during the war - everything for the front, and after the war calls for the elimination of the consequences of the war. "

Grossman brings the reader to the conclusion that "over 1000 years the Russian man has seen enough of both greatness and super-greatness, but he has not seen one thing - democracy."

WHAT ARE THE COMMUNISTS REPRESENTED IN ROMAN?

In this regard, Grossman relies on our healthy perceptions, because the characters are presented contrary to the stereotypes for which "allowed" fiction has prepared us. The destinies of almost all heroes are cut short, for it is important for the author not so much to trace specific "life stories" as to highlight their social character.

COMMISSIONER HETMANOV

His biography is poor in interesting events, mainly with a negative particle, he did NOT participate in the civil war. In the ill-fated 1937, he became the "master of the region" with so much power that the secretary of the regional party organization could not even dream of. As you can see, the biography is typical for the nominees of the late 30s.

Getmanov himself lets go of frontier jokes that dangerously provoke the interlocutor: "It is our happiness that the Germans are more disgusted with the peasants in a year than the communists in 25 years."

He had a disgusting manner of always feeling like a master, “convinced of his right to speak out verbosely at meetings on technical issues in which he knew nothing. someone else's bed, read other people's papers on the table. "

He has never been to the front, in the brigades they said about him: "Oh, we have a combat commissar!" Getmanov loved to speak at rallies, bowed low like a village grandfather in front of a gaping tanker who did not have time to greet his superiors, did not tolerate objections.

Before the war, he led the region, spoke on the problems of building renovation, brick production, chicken plague epidemics. Now Getmanov spoke just as confidently about the quality of weapons, battle tactics, medical care, and the evacuation of damaged vehicles from the battlefield.

The power of the party leader Getmanov did not require either talent or talent, "it turned out to be above talent, above talent. Hundreds of people with the gift of research, singing, writing books eagerly listened to the leading, decisive word of Getmanov, although he not only did not know how to sing and play piano, create theatrical performances, but did not know how with taste and depth to understand the works of science, poetry, music ... ". Getmanov twists fate, because "the need to sacrifice people for the sake of the cause always seemed to him natural, undeniable, not only during the war."

How did he understand the interests of the party? "The spirit of partisanship, the interests of the party should permeate his decisions in any circumstances ... The spirit of partisanship should permeate the leader's attitude to business, to a book, to a picture, and therefore, no matter how difficult it is, he should not hesitate to abandon his usual business, favorite book, if the interests of the party conflict with his personal sympathies. everything that is close and dear to a party leader is therefore close to him, because only and dear to him, because it expresses the spirit of the party spirit. Sometimes the sacrifices that Getmanov made in the name of the spirit of party spirit were cruel, harsh. owes much, here it should not be considered either with love or with pity. Here such words as "turned away", "did not support", "ruined", "betrayed ..." should not disturb. But the spirit of partisanship is manifested in the fact that the sacrifice is just not needed - not needed because personal feelings - love, friendship, fellowship - naturally cannot persist if they contradict the spirit of partisanship. "

Getmanov does not doubt anything, does not worry, does not repent. He does meanness easily and deliberately. Congratulates, kisses the corps commander for an important victory and immediately writes a denunciation on him.

At every feast Getmanov manages to be the first to raise a toast: "To our father." Know that Getmanov survived, we would probably find out that after the death of the leader, he raised a glass with the same haste to all subsequent secretaries general. Now he would have marched in the forefront of perestroika. The current hetmans, who once glorified Brezhnev, Chernenko, and other "great leaders of the international communist and workers' movement," do not hesitate to explain the past by the mistakes of their youth or fanatical belief in the party. They deliberately did not take the honest path, fearing to lose their privileges.

GENERAL UNCONVENIENT

Novikov still wanted to understand, for what qualities did Neudobnov become a general?

His biography is better than that of the Hetman: for his participation in the Bolshevik circle in 1916 he ended up in the tsarist prison, after the civil war he worked in the OGPU, served in the border troops, studied at the academy, worked in the military department of the Central Committee, and traveled abroad.

As a nomenclature worker, he very quickly went a long way to a high rank. He is a little embarrassed that the war affected his career and he is now subordinate to Novikov, but it was clear to him that with the end of the war this abnormal situation would also end.

For some warrant in 1938, he received a hunting rifle, furniture, carpets, china and a dacha. He had an excellent memory, apparently read a lot, studying the works of Lenin and Stalin. During disputes, he usually said: "Comrade Stalin said at the 17th Congress" and quoted a quote. He talked with pleasure about the exposed pests (doctors, shoemakers, employees of the Tretyakov Gallery and hippodromes).

Neudobnov went through Beria's school and at the end of the war achieved his goal: Novikov was removed and he began to command a tank corps.

LEGAL COMMUNISTS. (MOSTOVSKY, KRYMOV, ABARCHUK)

For them, the indisputable truths were the phrases that revolution is the violence of the majority against the minority, that as socialism is being built, the bitterness of the class struggle increases, that the country is in a capitalist encirclement, trying by any means to blow up the Soviet system from within. In the eyes of the communists, these postulates justified cruelty, terror, the destruction of "potentially" alien estates and groups: first the monarchists, then (white officers, then Mensheviks, kulaks, Trotskyists, Zinovievites - and where is the line where the line of repression could stop?

MOSTOVSKY I started with small deals with my conscience and gradually came to a double truth. In the name of "higher interests" he has to admit that there is one truth - for the people, another - for a narrow circle of leaders.

The most terrible torture for the conscience of the old party member was a conversation imposed on him in a fascist concentration camp with Obersturmbannführer Liss. Drawing his interlocutor into discussions about fascism and Stalinism, about the suppression of freedoms, about concentration camps in Germany and the USSR, about the need for violence, the Gestapo man brings Mostovsky to the need to recognize these analogies: , we look in the mirror. This is the tragedy of the era. Don't you recognize yourself, your will in us? " The old party member drives away these thoughts, fearing to cross the line of impermissibility in the subconscious, and subconsciously overcomes this line: “We must renounce what we have lived all our life, condemn what we have defended and justified. their hatred of the camp, Lubyanka, bloody Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! But not enough - Stalin, his dictatorship! No, no, no, even more! We must condemn Lenin! Edge of the abyss! "

Mostovsky, of course, feels a common responsibility with the party for the events of 1937 and his specific guilt for not standing up for his repressed comrades. He suffers, suffers, but only continues to do what he did all the previous years - "he steadfastly followed the party's cause": he refuses trust, condemning the most honest man to death, only because he comes from a kulak family.

Unfortunately, such as Mostovsky are not being rebuilt.

ABARCHUK.

All his life he was irreconcilable with opportunists and hated double-dealing. His mental strength, his faith were in the right of the court. He doubted his wife and left her, did not believe that his son was growing up as an unshakable fighter and denied his son his name. Abarchuk despised whiners, those who hesitated. He disowned his philistine father and sued 40 dishonest workers who fled from the construction site to their homes in the village.

Judging others is sweet. In making judgment, he asserted his strength, his ideal. He wanted to be like Stalin: he wore a tunic, boots.

In the camp, he lost the right to judge, he felt that he himself was judged. Abarchuk managed to defeat himself, suppressing animal fear, told the operative who killed Ugarov. And again he acquired the right to court.

But this was not yet the main test of his fate, he had to listen to the testament of the teacher Magar, who pointed out, dying, three mistakes committed by the communists: they built a nightmare and called it socialism, they did not understand freedom and crushed it: "Without freedom there is no proletarian revolution," "The communists created an idol, put on shoulder straps, profess nationalism, they raised their hand against the working class, it will be necessary, they will reach the Black Hundreds."

How did Abarchuk take this will? Frightened: "Stop it! They broke you!" I didn’t hear the most important thing from Magar: "If we cannot live like revolutionaries, we will die, it is worse to live like this." Abarchuk had the courage to end his deceived life. In the last minutes of his life, he turned to his son, whom he did not give his last name: "You are my hope, will you ever know that your father did not bend that night?" He mentally forged the broken ties with his son, until the ancestral shadow of a criminal flashed nearby.

COMMISSIONER OF KRYMOV.

In Krymov, the movement of all Grossman's prose was refracted from pure admiration for the dedication of commissar Vavilova ("In the city of Berdichev"), party organizer of the mine Lunin ("Gluckauf"), battalion commissar Bocharov ("The people are immortal"), he comes to understand how different the Getmans turned out to be. and Krymov, Mostovsky and Osipov. For Grossman, commissars are still the conscience of the people.

Krymov is disinterested and honest, he believes the party so fanatically that he does not notice how he vacillates "along with the party's line." Let's remember the episode in the house 6/1. “I was sent to you by a party,” said Krymov to the manager of the Grekov’s house, bursting with angry paint, “Why did I, say, come to you?”. "For the soup, for the sake of the soup," someone suggested in a low, friendly tone. Krymov came to "break" the heroes, but they were not afraid of him, they were not afraid to learn that he was sent by the party. Such an attitude towards him, the commissioner, "aroused in him a feeling of anger, a desire to suppress, twist."

Why was there no connection between the commissar and the soldiers?

Because in house 6/1 people felt strong and confident. It was a collective, united by will, they openly expressed their thoughts, there were no "informers" among them, before they died they could afford to be human. The fighters really did not like the offensive and useless "propaganda" of Krymov, and the defenders turned to the commissar with "his" questions: "What if under communism everyone starts to receive as needed - everyone gets drunk?" "And what about the collective farms, Comrade Commissar? How can they be liquidated after the war." The enraged commissar once again recalled that he had come here to overcome partisanism. To this Grekov remarked: "Overcome. Who will overcome the Germans?" Krymov's power was to remove Grekov from his post, this gave him confidence and strength, "he knew that he could handle Grekov." But he wanted the building manager to "bend over", to recognize his right to execute and have mercy, so he tries to challenge the recalcitrant commander to a frank conversation: "What do you want?" Grekov looked at him and said cheerfully: "I want freedom, and I am fighting for it."

A small detachment of Red Army men has been holding back the attacks of the powerful colossus of the Nazis for many days, they are all worthy of the highest awards, but Krymov suspects that Grekov shot at him. Grekov's philosophy about the need for freedom of man from the state seems to the commissioner to be wrecking. In the house manager, Krymov feels not only a personal enemy, but an enemy of society, which he creates as a commissar. Krymov writes a denunciation of the hero.

Why does the reader have no antipathy for Krymov?

The commissioner does not feel satisfied with his work, he constantly ponders why this is happening? He put so much effort into building a state, which for some reason honest people are dissatisfied with. Krymov understands that he is doing something wrong in his life.

When did Krymov realize his mistakes - the commissar?

All his doubts are resolved after his arrest. Krymov begins to judge himself, remembering those who were sent to be shot and sent to penal battalions only for some phrases. Krymov was rapidly reborn: “The skin of the living body of the revolution was ripped off, the new time wanted to dress in it, and the bloody living meat, the insides of the proletarian revolution went to the dump, the new time did not need them. The skin of the revolution was needed ... But there was a different brain, other lungs, liver, eyes ...

Great Stalin! A slave of time and circumstances ... And those who did not bow before the new time went to the dump ... Now he knows, they split the man. " , beaten up during interrogation by a communist, "doom" to lose oneself ", as if it was not he who" met his friend Georgy Dimitrov ..., carried the coffin of Clara Zetkin, " a stranger, but himself ... This feeling of closeness was truly awful. "He prepared something like this for Grekov, if necessary, he would not hesitate to shoot with his own hand.

Reflecting on his life and the path traveled by the country, he returns to house 6/1 and does not see Grekov as an enemy - he is tormented by remorse for that denunciation.

His own misfortune helps him understand the national drama: "Yes, in general, all this does not look very much like socialism. Why does my party need to destroy me? After all, we made the revolution — not Malenkov, not Zhdanov. We were all merciless towards the enemies of the revolution. Why is the revolution merciless towards us? Or maybe that is why it is merciless ... ".

Why is Krymov dear to Grossman?

Having weighed his path, realizing the mistakes in it, Krymov, in conditions of lack of freedom and violence, did not give his soul to desecration, he managed to preserve his human dignity. "The most difficult thing is to be a stepson of time. There is no harder fate than a stepson who lives at the wrong time. Time loves only those whom it has given birth to - its children, its heroes, its workers."

Krymov made his choice, chose to remain the stepson of the times.

But at the same time, Grossman also cherishes the inexpressible sense of loyalty to his word, his duty, his faith, which distinguish the "unyielding" communists. Each of them will face trials similar to those that befell the revolutionaries before October: torture chambers, hard labor, a concentration camp. Hard labor united people who were devoted to the idea that in their youth it had called them so ardently.

Rigidly outlined in the novel is the detachment of communists who entered her career for the sake of, in the name of life's blessings. Grossman, carried away by the revolutionary heroism of his former commissars, was painful to see people capable of meanness. The writer did not forgive them for deviations from the norms of revolutionary morality, he judged them especially harshly (A. Bocharov).

So, having followed the fate of the three heroes, interconnected not only by events and ties of kinship, we share V. Grossman's anxiety and hope: it is very difficult to live in a country where the relationship between a person and a state is determined by the ideology of a "totalized empire". It seems that there can be no freedom of speech. Then why should we live? The author claims: a person must get freedom (I. Rudakova).

I would like to draw your attention to one more feature of V. Grossman's intellectual novel.

THE ROLE OF ART IN DISCLOSING THE MAIN PROBLEMS

Grossman's heroes talk about great artists, composers, classics and the theme of art helps the author to deeper reveal the characters of the characters, better understand their philosophy and understand the chain of events taking place in the country.

There is now a lot of discussion about the method of socialist realism. Already in the sixties, Grossman formulated and in an original artistic form was able to convey the essence of today's disputes: "The essence is the same - delight before one's own exclusivity. Socialist realism ... is a mirror, which to the question of the party and government" Who in the world is loveliest, most beautiful and whiter ? "answers:" You, you, the party, the government, the state, are the most beautiful and nicer of all! "

The state corrodes all those writers in whose work it does not see its glorification, let us recall E. Zamyatin, M. Zoshchenko, M. Bulgakov, A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Nekrasov and many others. But it shamefully omits those writers' names, in whose books it does not see the obvious: "Chekhov lifted the failed Russian democracy on his shoulders. The path of Chekhov is the path of Russian freedom. her classes, estates, ages ... He introduced these millions as a democrat. He said: we are all people first of all, and then the arch-heresy, Russians, shopkeepers, Tatars, workers. People are equal, because they are people. Half a century ago, Blinded by the narrowness of the party, people believed that Chekhov was the spokesman for timelessness, while Chekhov was the standard-bearer of the greatest banner that was raised in Russia in 1000 years of its history - true, Russian, good democracy, Russian human dignity, Russian freedom.

Chekhov said: let's start with a man, let us be kind, attentive to a man, whoever he may be - the arch-righteous, the peasant, the millionaire manufacturer, the Sakhalin convict, the lackey from the restaurant; Let's start with the fact that we will respect, regret, love a person, without this nothing will work for us ... the state does not understand the essence of Chekhov, therefore it tolerates him. "

Today, when the question of the development of democracy has arisen so acutely, Grossman's lines sound especially modern.

Mentioning in the context of the names of famous writers and poets reveals the intellect of the characters, characterizes their worldview. For example, Zhenya Shaposhnikova, listening to an old admirer of Fet and Vladimir Solovyov, compared him to Krymov: “She was amazed that he, indifferent to the charm of a Russian fairy tale, Fet's and Tyutchev's verse, was the same Russian person as the old man Shargo-rodsky. Fet was above all a Russian god. And just as divine were the tales about Finist Yasny Sokol, Glinka's "Doubt." for him Beethoven's "Heroic" symphony triumphed over Russian music. Perhaps Nekrasov was an exception for him. "

Soviet writers with their works provoke discussions on political topics among the characters of the novel. Krymov listens to how academics speak of Gorky's novel Mother: “And I'm not a fan of this work. Georgy Valentinovich said:“ The image of a mother created by Gorky is an icon, and the working class does not need icons. ”Generations read Mother. "said Krymov," what does the icon have to do with it? Dre-ling, in the voice of a kindergarten teacher, said: "Icons are needed by all those who want to enslave the working class. Here in your communist icon case there is an icon of Lenin, there is an icon of the Monk Stalin. Nekrasov didn't need icons. "

Bogoleev, angry, said: "In your ideas about poetry, you did not go further than Nekrasov. Since then, Blok, and Mandelstam, and Khlebnikov arose. You are here in our cell, Marxists of different persuasions, but similar in that you are blind to poetry .. . ".

During the years of Stalin's personality cult, art set itself the deification of the "father of all peoples" as its main task. One of Grossman's favorite characters expresses his attitude to this fact in his own way: “Shtrum was outraged that Stalin's name eclipsed Lenin, his military genius was opposed to the civilian mentality of Lenin's mind. One artist painted how Stalin walked the steps of Smolny, and Lenin hurriedly, like a cock, keeping up with him.If the picture depicted Lenin and Stalin among the people, then only old men, grandmothers and children looked at Lenin affectionately, and armed giants were reaching out to Stalin - workers, sailors, entangled in machine-gun belts ... ".

Art did not serve the people, but the state. The intelligentsia noticed all this, but was overwhelmingly silent. It is no coincidence that Strum ironically defines the role of the intelligentsia: "So I read Hemingway, his intellectuals drink continuously during conversations. Cocktails, whiskey, rum, cognac, again cocktails, again cognac, again whiskey of all systems. And the Russian intelligentsia conducted its main conversation. with a glass of tea ... ".

One of the problems of the novel "The Role of Poetry in Revealing the Ideological Content of Life and Fate" deserves a separate discussion.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

"Life and Fate" is a book about the greatness and tragedy of the people. About the greatness of people who defeated any enemy. About the tragedy they are experiencing in the era of brutal arbitrariness.

The main advantage of Grossman's novel is the merciless truth not only about the heroic defenders of Stalingrad, but also about the wide world of people in whose lives the battle on the Volga banks played a decisive role.

In the trenches of Stalingrad, people continued to live and therefore there is a feeling of strength that lives in a person who did not break under a flurry of fire. The people V. Grossman talks about do not obey fate; life wins in the fight with it.

LITERATURE

1. Anninsky L. The Universe of V. Grossman. // Friendship of Peoples. - 1988. - N 10, p. 253.
2. Malchina O. I. Life and Fate. To the study of the novel by V. Grossman. // Russian language and literature in secondary educational institutions of the Ukrainian SSR. - 1990. - N 4, p. 37.
3. Rishina I., Egorov A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom ... // Literary newspaper. - 1988 - 24. VIII, p. 5.
4. Ananiev A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988. - 24. VIII, p. 5.
5. Grossman V. Life and destiny. M., 1988.
6. Gurnov B. Just cause of V. Grossman. Feat. - 1990. - N 1, p. 357.
7. Anninsky L. The universe of Grossman // Friendship of peoples. - 1988. - N 10, p. 255.
8. Elyashevich A. Invitation to conversation. // Star. - 1989. N 1, p. 169.
9. Rudakova I. A. Sons and stepchildren of time. // Russian language and literature in secondary educational institutions of the Ukrainian SSR. - 1990. - N 4, p. 37.
10. Bocharov A. Pain zones. // October. - 1988, N 3, p. 156.
11. Bocharov A. The fate of the people. // October. - 1988, N 3, s 156.
12. Editorial. // Military History Journal, - 1988, VI.
13. Korchagan M. "Spitaifer" - take off! // Ogonek, 1990, N 46, p. 25.
14. Bocharov. Freedom against the press. // October. - 1988, N 1, p. 131.

LITERATURE TO HELP THE TEACHER

1. Kulish A., Oskotsky V. Epos of the People's War. // Questions of literature. 1988, No. 10, p. 27-87.
2. Kuzicheva A. Evening light of "Life and Fate". // Book review. - 1989. - 13/1, N 2, p. 5.
3. Zolotussky I. War and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988 - b / VI, N 23, p. 4.
4. Karpov A. The present day and the past day, // Political education. - 1989. - N 1, p. 96-102.
5. Cardin V. Life is freedom. // Ogonek - 1988, N 23, p. 21-24.
6. Kazintsev A. History - uniting or separating. // Our contemporary, 1988, N 11, - p. 163-184.
7. Rishina I., Egorov A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988 - 24 / VIII, N 34, p. 5.
8. Shklovsky E.V. Into the depth of the core. // Lit. review. - 1989 - N 2, p. 20-37.

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(Option II)
The natural human desire for freedom is ineradicable, it can be suppressed, but it cannot be destroyed. A person will not voluntarily give up freedom. V. Grossman
"Manuscripts do not burn ..." How many times have already quoted this phrase of Woland, but I want to repeat it again. Our time is the time of discoveries, returned masters, waiting in the wings, finally seeing the light of day. V. Grossman's novel Life and Fate, written thirty-five years ago, came to the reader only in 1988 and shook the literary world with its modernity, with the great power of its truthful word about war, about life, about fate. He reflected his time. Only now, in the nineties, it was possible to speak and write about what the author of the novel is thinking about. And therefore this work belongs to the present day, it is topical even now.
Reading Life and Fate, one cannot help but be amazed at the scale of the novel, the depth of the conclusions drawn by the author. It seems that philosophical ideas are intertwined, forming a bizarre but harmonious fabric. Sometimes it is difficult to see and understand these ideas. Where is the main thing, what is the main idea that pervades the story? What is life, what is destiny? “Life is so confusing ... paths, ravines, swamps, streams ... And destiny is straight, straight, you go by a string ... Life is freedom,” the author reflects. Fate, however, is lack of freedom, slavery, it is not for nothing that people doomed to death in gas chambers feel how “the sense of fate is being forced into them”. Fate does not obey the will of man.
The main theme of Grossman's work is freedom. The concept of "freedom", "will" is familiar to the wild beast. But that freedom or lack of freedom is physical. With the advent of the human mind, the meaning of these concepts has changed, became deeper. There is moral freedom, moral freedom, freedom of thought, non-enslavement of the soul. So which is more important - to keep the freedom of the body or mind? Why was the author concerned about this particular philosophical problem? Obviously, this was predetermined by the era in which he lived. Two states rose above the world at that time, came together in a struggle, and the fate of mankind depended on the outcome of this battle. Both powers, according to one of the characters in the novel, are party states. “The strength of a party leader did not require the talent of a scientist, the talent of a writer. She turned out to be above talent, above talent ”. The term "will of the party" meant the will of one person, whom we now call a dictator. Both states were similar in that their citizens, deprived of the official right to think, feel, behave in accordance with their individuality, constantly felt the power of fear prevailing over them. One way or another, government buildings, more like prisons, were erected and seemed indestructible. In them, man was assigned an insignificant role; much higher than he was the state and the spokesman of its will, infallible and mighty. “Fascism and man cannot coexist. At one pole - the state, at the other - the need of a person. " It is no coincidence that Grossman, comparing the two camps, compares the totalitarian states - Germany and the Soviet Union of the thirties and forties. People are sitting there for the same “crimes”: a careless word, bad work. These are "criminals who have not committed crimes." The only difference is that the German camp is given through the eyes of Russian prisoners of war, who know what they are serving for and are ready to fight. People in Siberian camps consider their fate to be a mistake and write letters to Moscow. The tenth-grader Nadya Shtrum will understand that the one to whom her letters are addressed, in fact, is the culprit of what is happening. But letters continue to go ... The Siberian camp is, perhaps, more terrible than the German one. “Get to your own camp, your own to yours. That's where the trouble is! " - says Ershov, one of the heroes of the novel. Grossman leads us to a terrible conclusion: a totalitarian state resembles a huge camp, where prisoners are both victims and executioners. It is not without reason that the “philosopher” Kazenelenbogen, a former security officer who has now ended up in a cell on the Lubyanka, but continues to declare that “there is a merger, the destruction of the opposition between camps and life beyond the wire, would like to turn the whole country into a camp. .. the triumph of great principles ”. And now two such states enter into a war against each other, the outcome of which was decided in the city on the Volga in 1942. One people, intoxicated by the speeches of their leader, advanced, dreaming of world domination; the other, retreating, did not need calls - he was accumulating strength, preparing to give millions of lives, but to defeat the invader, to defend the Motherland. What happens to the souls of those who oppress the enemy's army, and what happens in the hearts of those who are oppressed? In order to turn the enemy back, the power that has little power over the people, freedom is necessary, and in this difficult time it has come. Never before have people conducted such bold, truthful, free conversations as in the days of the battles at Stalingrad. The breath of freedom is felt by people in Kazan, in Moscow, but it is strongest in the “world city”, the symbol of which will be the house “six fraction one”, where they talk about the thirty-seventh year and collectivization. Fighting for the independence of the Motherland, people like Ershov and Grekov are also fighting for the freedom of the individual in their country. Grekov will tell Commissioner Krymov: "I want freedom, and I am fighting for it." In the days of defeats, when free power rose from the very bottom of human souls, Stalin feels that ... not only his today's enemies won on the battlefields. Following Hitler's tanks in the dust and smoke were those whom he seemed to have pacified and calmed down forever. "History is not the only judge of the vanquished." Stalin himself understands that if he is defeated, he will not be forgiven for what he did to his people. A sense of Russian national pride is gradually rising in the souls of people. At the same time, an epiphany comes to the surrounded German soldiers, to those who a few months ago crushed the remnants of doubts in themselves, convinced themselves of the correctness of the Fuhrer and the party like Ober-Lieutenant Bach. The Stalingrad operation determined the outcome of the war, but the tacit dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continues. So who will win - the state or the individual? After all, freedom begins with a person. The totalitarian power suppresses, the feeling of fear for life fetters, gives rise to obedience to this power. However, many people sincerely believe that their strength lies in admiration for the state, the party, in the perception of the leader's statements as holy truths. Such people may not bend over the fear of death, but with a shudder they reject doubts about what they believed in throughout life. Such is the old Bolshevik, Leninist Mostovskaya, hearing from the lips of the Gestapo Liss what tormented him, which he even in his heart was afraid to admit to himself, only for a moment loses confidence: what he defended and justified ”. This strong, unyielding man himself seeks lack of freedom, feels relief, once again submitting to the will of the party, approving the dispatch of Ershov, who despises violence, to the death camp. Others, like Magar, Krymov, Shtrum, needed defeat in order to become human, to see the truth, to return freedom to their souls. Krymov regains his sight, once in the camera. Magar, deprived of his freedom, is trying to convey his conclusions to his student Abarchuk: “We do not understand freedom, we handed it out ... It is the basis, the meaning, the basis over the basis”. But, faced with mistrust, fanatical blindness, Magar commits suicide. He paid a dear price for spiritual emancipation. Losing illusions, Magar also loses the meaning of existence. The influence of freedom on thoughts and human behavior is especially convincingly shown on the example of Strum. It was at that moment when the “mighty power of the free speech” completely absorbed thoughts that his scientific victory, his discovery, came to Strum. It was when his friends turned their backs on him and the power of the totalitarian state pressed and oppressed, Shtrum will find the strength not to sin against his own conscience, to feel free. But Stalin's call blows out these seeds of freedom, and only by signing a vile, false letter, he will be horrified at what he has done, and this defeat will again open his heart and mind to freedom. The most powerful, unbroken, undelivered human personality in the novel will turn out to be the miserable prisoner of the German camp of Ikonnikov, who proclaimed the ridiculous and ridiculous categories of supra-class morality.

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