How Sholokhov portrays the senselessness of war. Sholokhov "Quiet Don"

Epic novel by M. A. Sholokhov “ Quiet Don“, undoubtedly, is his most significant and serious work. Here the author surprisingly well managed to show the life of the Don Cossacks, convey their very spirit and connect all this with specific historical events.

The birth of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov’s famous epic novel “Quiet Don” is associated with events in Russian history that have global significance: the first Russian revolution of 1905, World War 1914-1918, October Revolution, the civil war, and the period of peaceful construction caused the desire of word artists to create works of wide epic scope.

It is characteristic that in the twenties, almost simultaneously, M. Gorky began to work on the epic “The Life of Klim Samgin”, A.N. Tolstoy began to work on the epic “Walking Through Torment”, M. Sholokhov turned to creating the epic “Quiet Don”. The creators of epic paintings relied on the traditions of Russian classics, on such works about the destinies of people as “ Captain's daughter", "Taras Bulba", "War and Peace". At the same time, the authors were not only continuers of traditions classical literature, but also innovators, because they reproduced such transformations in the life of the people and the Motherland that the great artists of the past could not see. 1

The epic novel “Quiet Don” occupies a special place in the history of Russian literature. Sholokhov devoted fifteen years of his life and hard work to its creation. M. Gorky saw in the novel the embodiment of the enormous talent of the Russian people. The events in "Quiet Don" begin in 1912 and end in 1922, when the civil war died down on the Don. Knowing very well the life and way of life of the Cossacks of the Don region, being himself a participant in the harsh struggle on the Don in the early twenties, Sholokhov focused on depicting the Cossacks. The work closely combines document and fiction. In "Quiet Don" there are many authentic names of farms and villages of the Don region. The center of events with which the main action of the novel is connected is the village of Veshenskaya.

The First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster, and the old soldier, professing Christian wisdom, advises the young Cossacks: “Remember one thing: if you want to be alive, to emerge from mortal combat, you must preserve human truth...” Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war that cripples people both physically and mentally. Death and suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in his second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke a joyful feeling among the Cossacks; they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of its end. How many of them have already died: more than one Cossack widow echoed the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand

1 Gordovich K. D. History Russian literature XX century. 2nd ed., rev. and additional: A manual for humanitarian universities. – St. Petersburg: SpetsLit, 2000.–p.216

historical events. Having returned from the fronts of the World War, the Cossacks did not yet know what tragedy of the fratricidal war they would have to endure in

in the near future. The Upper Don Uprising appears in Sholokhov's depiction as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.

There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of representatives of the Soviet government on the Don are shown in the novel with great artistic force. Numerous executions of Cossacks carried out in the villages - the murder of Miron Korshunov and grandfather Trishka, who personified the Christian principle, preaching that all power is given by God, the actions of Commissar Malkin, who gave orders to shoot bearded Cossacks. Sholokhov also showed in the novel that the Upper Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations of peasant life and the centuries-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that became the basis of peasant morality and morality, which had developed over centuries, and were inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already during the events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal nature. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.”

A. Serafimovich wrote about the heroes of “Quiet Don”: “...his people are not drawn, not written out - this is not on paper.” 1 The type images created by Sholokhov summarize the deep and expressive features of the Russian people. Depicting the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the characters, the writer did not cut off, but exposed the threads leading to the past.

Working on the epic "Quiet Don", Sholokhov proceeded from the philosophical concept that the people are the main driving force stories. This concept received deep meaning in the epic. artistic embodiment: in the depiction of folk life, life and work of the Cossacks, in the depiction of the participation of the people in historical events. Sholokhov showed that the path of the people in the revolution and civil war was difficult, tense, and tragic. The destruction of the “old world” was associated with the collapse of centuries-old folk traditions, Orthodoxy, the destruction of churches, and the rejection of moral commandments that were instilled in people from childhood.

The epic covers a period of great upheaval in Russia. These upheavals greatly affected the fate of the Don Cossacks described in the novel. Eternal values determine the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period that Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love for the native land, respect for the older generation, love for a woman, the need for freedom - these are the basic values without which a free Cossack cannot imagine himself.

1 Lukin Yu. B. Mikhail Sholokhov. M.: " Soviet writer", 1962. – p. 22

The life of the Cossacks is defined by two concepts - they are warriors and grain growers at the same time. It must be said that historically the Cossacks developed on the borders of Russia, where enemy raids were frequent, so the Cossacks were forced to take up arms in defense of their land, which was particularly fertile and rewarded the labor invested in it a hundredfold. Later, already under the rule of the Russian Tsar, the Cossacks existed as a privileged military class, which largely determined the preservation of ancient customs and traditions among the Cossacks. Sholokhov shows the Cossacks as very traditional. For example, from an early age they get used to a horse, which for them is not just a tool of production, but a faithful friend in battle and a comrade in work (the description of the crying hero Christoni after Voronok, taken away by the Reds, touches the heart). All Cossacks are brought up with respect for their elders and unquestioning submission to them (Panteley Prokofievich could punish Grigory even when the latter had hundreds and thousands of people under his command). The Cossacks are governed by an ataman, elected by the military Cossack Circle, where Sholokhov’s Panteley Prokofievich is heading.

But it should be noted that among the Cossacks traditions of a different kind are strong. Historically, the bulk of the Cossacks were peasants who fled from the landowners in Russia in search of free land. Therefore, the Cossacks are primarily farmers. The vast expanses of the steppes on the Don made it possible, with a certain amount of hard work, to obtain good harvests. Sholokhov shows them as good and strong owners. Cossacks treat land not just as a means of production. She is something more to them. Being in a foreign land, the Cossack’s heart reaches out to his native kuren, to the land, to work on the farm. Grigory, already a commander, more than once leaves home from the front to see loved ones and walk along the furrow, holding the plow. It is the love of the land and the craving for home that forces the Cossacks to abandon the front and not conduct an offensive beyond the borders of the district.

Sholokhov's Cossacks are very freedom-loving. It was the love of freedom, of the opportunity to dispose of the products of their labor themselves that pushed the Cossacks to revolt, in addition to hostility towards the peasants (in their understanding, lazy people and klutzes) and love for their own land, which the Reds had to hand over in an arbitrary way. The love of freedom of the Cossacks is to some extent explained by their traditional autonomy within Russia. Historically, people flocked to the Don in search of freedom. And they found it here and became Cossacks.

In general, freedom for the Cossacks is not an empty phrase. Brought up in complete freedom, the Cossacks negatively perceived attempts to encroach on their freedom by the Bolsheviks. While fighting against the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks do not seek to completely destroy their power. The Cossacks only want to liberate their land. If we talk about the innate sense of freedom among the Cossacks, then we should remember Gregory’s experiences due to responsibility before the Soviet authorities for his participation in the uprising. How worried Gregory is about thoughts of prison! Why? After all, Gregory is not a coward. The fact is that Gregory is afraid of the very thought of limiting his freedom. He failed to experience any coercion. Gregory can be compared to a wild goose, which was knocked out of its native flock by a bullet and thrown to the ground at the feet of the shooter.

War and peace are two states of life of the human community, elevated by Leo Tolstoy to the title formula of his great novel, towards which the author of “The Quiet Don” oriented himself (he constantly read “War and Peace” at the time of thinking and working on the epic, took with him and to the front of the Great Patriotic War), in essence, are Sholokhov’s two main layers of national life, two points of human reference. Tolstoy’s influence on Sholokhov, especially in his view of war, was noted more than once, but still the author of “Quiet Flows the Don” has his own in-depth understanding of the peaceful and military status of life, coming from a greater proximity to the natural type of existence, the root feeling of existence in general . 1

World war, revolution, civil war in Sholokhov in many ways only condenses to an eerie, repulsive concentrate what exists in a peaceful state, in the very nature of man and the things of this world: impulses of separation, repression, passionate selfishness, mockery of man, anger and murder . The world is twisted by its own bundle of contradictions and struggles - when they are heated, they will emerge in civil confrontation, reaching the Homeric “bloodshed”, frantic mutual destruction, complete destruction of the previous way of life. Peace and war are states of relative, visible health (with a chronicle driven inside) and acute illness of one organism. The diagnosis of both phases of the disease, by and large, is the same: it is determined by that central ideological opposition of “Quiet Flows the Don,” which Fedorov defined as kinship - non-kinship, despite the fact that kinship is also the most naturally deep and irrevocable relationship between people, children of the same father, heavenly and earthly, and together the most distorted, right up to its opposite, even in its warm and intimate core - family and community.

Of course, such distortion reaches an egregious degree precisely in a state of war, especially civil war. But the seeds of unrelatedness, which, as Fedorov pointed out, go to the very root of fallen, mortal existence, sprout with ominous fruits even before the war and revolution. Let us remember how, in the heat of prejudices and dark passions, Gregory’s grandmother was killed, and his grandfather “ruined to the waist” the one who came to his yard at the head of the farm, communal massacre. Or how Aksinya’s father, who encroached on her, was brutally beaten by his son and wife, how the Cossacks and Taurideans maimed and killed each other in a fight at the mill, how he “deliberately and terribly” tortured

1 Yakimenko L. “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov. About the skill of a writer. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1954. – p. 34

Stepan, how Mitka Korshunov “forced” Liza Mokhova, and later shamelessly pestered his sister... And Natalya, a quiet, selfless, pure woman, turns out to be capable of a grave sin (according to Christian concepts) - to lay hands on herself, and even on Easter night, and later - albeit in a burning resentment against her husband for his infidelity - to kill their own fetus, their possible future child: some kind of subtle fanaticism of the clean and quiet! “He emasculated my life like a boletus,” Stepan squeezes out of himself to Grigory: willingly or unwillingly, in his passions, one stands across the path of the other, destroying him. The burden of such guilt of the central beloved heroes of the novel - and in purely peaceful, love conflicts and struggles - the same Gregory and Aksinya is enormous.

In the most peaceful times, as we see, the natural underside of life and human relationships is thick: family crimes, secret nightly abuses, hatred of strangers, anger and murder... Moreover, the people's hero, the grassroots hero, is much closer to this underside than, say, nobles characters of the same Tolstoy: the very way of life and way of existence is much tougher, more natural, more open: they live among and next to animals, with nature, do not know urban hygiene, slaughter cattle themselves, fight famously, habitually beat their wives, are cocky and merciless to each other in word... Their hardening, physical and mental, is incomparable with the sensitivity of a civilized, polished, urban, wealthy person pampered by the everyday comforts: and this ranges from dirt, fleas, lice to the excesses of human passions. By the threshold of endurance, mental resistance to injury, by inapplicability to many of folk characters Sholokhov’s moral normative line, they are as flexible and plastic, saving and killing, faithful and “treacherous” as life itself. Is nature moral, giving birth and destroying, caring and indifferent, sometimes welcoming, sometimes turning away from its recent favorite?

So young Aksinya does not break down from being raped by her father and - let’s not forget - being murdered by her loved ones (which is perhaps even worse), and does not even remember this at all - a trait noted by P. V. Palievsky 5 . And what mental devastation Gregory went through! Leonov painfully, hopelessly, for the whole novel, jammed Mitka Vekshin from “The Thief” on his murder of an officer, and the hero of “Quiet Don”, having gone through a close internal breakdown (after the murder of an unarmed Austrian, overwhelmed by the horror of the inevitable end), and then through a cascade even more terrible things, through a stultifying and brutal addiction to them, through the loss of the closest and dearest people, each time it becomes obsolete, finds the strength to still live and feel, forget and be reborn. On Sholokhov's heroes - until the last fatal capture - it heals and grows, almost like in nature itself, of course not without ugly scars, rough bark, heavy growths... 1

So is there a fundamental difference between a peaceful and a war state of life? On the one hand, it seems there is no - only a sharp increase in the degree and degree of struggle and atrocity, on the other - it is still there: quantity turns into quality. One thing is a spontaneous clash of eternal instincts, interests, passions, one thing is interhuman, individual or collective, dramatic, tragic conflicts: they are part of some general economy of natural-mortal existence, with its light and dark sides. It’s one thing for Grigory to brutally beat his offender, Listnitsky’s rival, ready in a fit of furious anger to kill Chubaty or the general humiliating him (even if he killed him, it would be in a state of passion, like Natalya, who attempted to kill herself and the child in her womb), or even Mitka, raping a bored young lady, greedy for spicy, dangerous entertainment...

It’s a completely different matter when hatred, anger, and behind them murder is massified, mechanized, extremely simplified, becomes habitual and cold. Another is the extrajudicial executions and chopping down of prisoners, the sadistic exploits of the same Mitka, who kills old women and children, the transformation of extreme passionate excess (which most often is murder in peaceful life) into a calm, satanized craft, the object of which is worthless, cheaper than boots and jackets, - and the well-known terrible synonymy, which flourished so much in these years and is presented in full form in the novel, began: to waste, to spray, to make heads, to take off the account, to slap, to knock, to press to the nail, to crumble into smoke... As the wise people spoke an old man in the novel, Aksinya’s accidental travel companion: “It’s easier to kill someone who has broken their hand in this matter than to crush a louse. The man has fallen in price for the revolution.”

The mutual killing of people in battle appears as an unnecessary, insane action already in the initial scenes on the front of the First World War. “Being enraged with fear, the Cossacks and Germans stabbed and hacked at anything: on the backs, on the arms, on horses and weapons...” - the terrible stupidity of the battles is then retrospectively formalized into folding military reports and reports. This is the ironically presented story of the Cossack Kozma Kryuchkov, the first to receive George, nymphomaniacally inflated for the needs of the gasping capital ladies and rear gentlemen (so that, hanging around until the end of the war at the division headquarters, he was awarded three more crosses). “And it was like this,” Sholokhov summarizes in Tolstoy’s spirit and tone, “people who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind collided on the field of death, in the animal horror that overwhelmed them they stumbled, knocked down, dealt blind blows, mutilated themselves and their horses and fled , frightened by the shot that killed the man, they dispersed, morally crippled. They called it a feat." 1

1 Ibid., p. 340

The first shock from the first battle (“baring his teeth, his face changed, like a dead man” - this is how a normal, healthy Cossack suddenly appears), looking at the first corpses, mental illness, “boring internal pain” of Gregory, experiencing his murder of an Austrian, and then it went... here we go: corpses are piled up in piles, a person enters into a dark, devastating habit of killing, becomes mentally charred, becomes angry and isolated, or even experiences a perverted passion for chopping and crumbling “hostile” human flesh - in the heat of the moment, in the paroxysm of a demon’s obsession with murder. Sholokhov constantly emphasizes how physically people change at the same time, what a disfiguring imprint the war leaves on their faces, body and soul. So Grigory “became flabby, stooped”, in his gaze “the light of senseless cruelty began to shine through more and more often” - (and what can we say about others, about some Mitka Korshunov). He explains to Natalya in response to her reproaches for her debauchery at the front: yes, they “went crazy,” but after all, “on the verge of death,” “I have become terrible to myself... Look into my soul, and there is blackness, like in an empty well.” Let us remember how Aksinya’s loving eyes reveal his new, war-hardened appearance when she is in last time peers into the face of Gregory sleeping in a forest clearing: “There was something stern, almost cruel, in the deep transverse wrinkles between her lover’s eyebrows, in the folds of his mouth, in sharply defined cheekbones... And for the first time she thought how terrible he must be in battle, on horseback, with a drawn saber.” Aksinya only assumes and guesses, and we, the readers, have seen this with our own eyes more than once in those terrifyingly piercing pictures of the battle that the writer unfolded before us (especially in the episodes when Gregory resorted to masterly techniques of unexpectedly cutting down the enemy with his left hand). One of the historical characters in “Quiet Flows the Don,” Kharlampy Ermakov, who, as is known, served as the main prototype of Grigory Melekhov (he acts independently in the novel) “...embarrassedly looked away his bloodshot, rabid eyes that had not yet gone out after the battle” - these are the fighting eyes , I’m ashamed of them myself, I know what I was like just now!

It is in the fratricidal civil confrontation, ironclad and mercilessly supported by ideology, on the one hand, and on the other, by the instinct of physical survival and protection of one’s home and well-being, that all the suicidality and mutual extermination of the “tit for tat” principle, tirelessly fueled by poisoned vengeful passion - to the last enemy and offender! Sholokhov never tires of clearly demonstrating how, as it flares up more and more, the passionate commitment to hatred, evil, and murder intensifies, how it boomerangs its bearers. In the soul of Petro Melekhov, forced to dance to the common tune, ingratiating himself with Fomin, “hatred was pounding in fits and his hands were twisted by a spasm from an itching desire to hit, to kill.” When the opportunity arises, no one can restrain either hatred or this desire. The bitterness and frenzy are mutual and it is growing in degrees. The goal is for the complete physical destruction of the enemy, there is no talk of any kind of dismantling and sorting of people, their disposal, transformation: “Rake this evil spirits from the earth” and that’s it! An officer of the Don Army, harshly, coldly, like a breeder, signs the final verdict on the captured Red Army soldiers: “This bastard, which is a breeding ground for all sorts of diseases, both physical and social, must be exterminated. There’s no point in coddling them!” The same is mirrored in the thoughts and speeches of Mishka Koshevoy: camaraderie and unanimity through the cutting down of disobedient, wavering human material!

The chain of mutual mortal grievances, bullying, cruel retribution and new never-ending accounts tightens the fabric of the military layer of the novel, digging in especially piercingly in such places as the shooting and chopping down of prisoners Chernetsov and forty of his officers by Podtelkov and his men, and then the execution of Podtelkov himself and his squad , the murder of Pyotr Melekhov by Mishka Koshev with the participation of Ivan Alekseevich, and then the lynching of the communists of the Serdobsky regiment driven through the Cossack villages - to a bloody mess and “visceral animal roar”, finally, the beating of them all in Tatarskoye, where Pyotr’s wife Daria especially distinguished herself by shooting Ivan Alekseevich... But Mishka Koshevoy, inflamed by the news of the murder of Shtokman, Ivan Alekseevich, by the words of Trotsky’s order about the merciless destruction of the rebel villages, the extermination of the participants in the uprising, arranges a man-made apocalypse, the act of burning the old world - merchants’ and priests’ houses with all their household goods, shoots grandfather Grishak on the porch of the Korshunovs’ house (at one time both Mishka himself and his father worked for them as laborers), and a few months later Mitka Korshunov brutally massacres the remaining family of the revolutionary avenger: his mother and young brother and sister.

A terrible series of actions and reactions opens up, leading to an ever-increasing voltage of mutual hatred and murderous fury. This bad, mutually destructive infinity is interrupted only by the child’s reaction (“Mommy! Don’t hit him! Oh, don’t hit him!.. I’m sorry! I’m afraid! There’s blood on him!” - in the scene of the torture of the prisoners, forcing the mother and some women to come to their senses. Yes, Grigory Melekhov, despite his involuntary participation in this series, with a direct inner instinct tries every time (but, alas, most often unsuccessfully) in moments of paroxysms of mutual bitterness to prevent the unleashing of an ominous gallop of tearing out each other’s eyes, according to the Old Testament law. an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, and even in abundance, with overlap. Moreover, it is through his main character that the writer leads the reader to the feeling and thought (in fact, deeply Christian) about the need to interrupt the evil infinity of retribution and struggle that is going on. crescendo, get off the “tit for tat” principle, stop, forgive, forget to start from the beginning. And although people and life do not allow Gregory to jump off the spinning fiery wheel of hatred and murder, he still comes to this in the finale of the epic: he returns. home, throwing away the weapon, at the so problematic mercy of the winner...

And Grigory’s mother, Ilyinichna, having resigned herself to the will of her daughter, to the force of circumstances, steps over the natural repulsion from the murderer of her eldest son, accepting into the house a person so hated by her, charged with an alien “truth.” But gradually, having peered into him, she highlights some of his unexpected reactions (say, attention and affection for Grigory’s son Mishatka) and suddenly begins to feel “uninvited pity” for him when he is exhausted, oppressed and tormented by malaria. Here it is, the great, redemptive pity of a mother’s heart for the lost children of this cruel world! And before her death, she gives Dunyasha the most precious thing for Mishka - Grigory’s shirt, let him wear it, otherwise he’s already sweating! This is the highest gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation on her part! And Natalya, mortally resentful of her husband - to the point of being unable to carry and bear his child - taking revenge on him and herself by cutting out a living fetus, forgives Gregory before her death, dying reconciled. And the frantic warrior for Grigory, Aksinya, takes Natalya’s children to her, warming them with love. And maybe this is where some kind of supreme test of a person’s quality lies: in any case, it radically fails chief representative The new government in the novel is Mishka Kosheva, irreconcilable, unstoppable in his class suspicion and revenge.

1 Gura V.V. How “Quiet Don” was created. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1989. – p. 279

The situation of war, the test of complete uncertainty in the future, devastation, infection, impending death in an aggravated, acute form reveals the face of human destiny. They took off the covers of a man - he was left naked: the wife of a major general, “a noble woman with glasses sits, looking out for lice on herself through her glasses. And they walk along it<…>Lice are like fleas on a mangy cat!” Everyone was plunged into the dirty, smelly, dangerous irrational underbelly of life, the one that urban civilization is trying so hard to camouflage! 1

Emphasizing the internal contradiction, the conflict in the Cossack between the peaceful tiller and the warrior (and the combination of these two occupations, two human types is constitutive in him, reveals his reason for being), Sholokhov brings to the fore the farmer, endowing his heroes with an uncontrollable attraction to this so natural and their favorite activity and corresponding lifestyle. It is during war that they turn especially nostalgically to peaceful work on the land, imagining in memory and anticipation what is most dear to them: plowing in the steppe, mowing, harvesting, caring for horses, household utensils and tools... For Sholokhov himself, the time of creation “ "Quiet Don" war, as already noted, quite in Tolstoy's style - madness, nonsense, evil, with the exception, perhaps, of protecting the country from the Turks, the mountaineers, which from the very beginning was the meaning of the formation and existence of the Cossacks as such and what found itself reflected in the ancient songs that sound so often and soulfully in the novel. 2

In order to write a truly great epic novel, Sholokhov not only took part in hostilities, but also lived the Cossack life that he describes in “Quiet Don.” In the novel, he not only shows the events of the civil revolution and the world war, but also talks about their influence on the peaceful way of life of the Cossacks, their families, their fate. Sholokhov loved the Cossacks and therefore, when presenting the Nobel Prize for the novel “Quiet Flows the Don,” Sholokhov spoke about the greatness of the historical path of the Russian people and that “to all that I have written and will write, to pay tribute to this working people, the builder people, the hero people "

1 Ibid., p. 284

2 Ibid., p. 298

List of used literature:

1. Gordovich K. D. History of Russian literature of the 20th century. 2nd ed., rev. and additional: A manual for humanitarian universities. – St. Petersburg: SpetsLit, 2000. – 320 p.

2. Gura V.V. How “Quiet Don” was created. M.: “Soviet Writer”, 1989. – 464 p.

For obvious reasons, the author is not named in the novel - he is indignant: “They scribbled with a pen and completely paired him with Denikin, they enlisted him as an assistant”). The truly historical basis of the novel, not distorted to suit official versions, testifies to the honest position of the author, which caused active opposition from pro-Bolshevik criticism. Sholokhov's reputation as an apologist for the kulaks and whites was firmly established...

And makes it an epic novel. Less than a hundred years have passed, and Russian literature has given the world a book, the author of which creatively comprehended the traditions of L. Tolstoy at a new historical stage. The epic novel “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov continued and developed Tolstoy’s traditions of depicting major historical events as they were refracted in the destinies of a number of heroes. Gorky's statement that communism will give rise to...

Mikhail SOLOMINTSEV

Mikhail Mikhailovich SOLOMINTSEV (1967) - teacher of literature and Russian language at Novokhopyorsk secondary school No. 2, Voronezh region.

The monstrous absurdity of war as depicted by M.A. Sholokhov

Based on the novel "Quiet Don"

The purpose of the lesson. Show the development of the humanistic traditions of Russian literature in depicting the war and the significance of “Quiet Don” as a novel that conveyed the truth about the Civil War, about the tragedy of the people.

Roman M.A. Sholokhov's "Quiet Don" among books about pre-revolutionary events and the Civil War stands out for its originality. Why did this book captivate contemporaries? It seems that, first of all, the significance and scale of the events described in it, the depth and truth of the characters. The first book of the novel is dedicated to the life and everyday life of the Don Cossacks before and at the very beginning of the imperialist war.

(A recording of a Cossack song is played, which is taken as an epigraph to the novel.)

Tell me, what is the role of the epigraph in this work?

In the ancient Cossack songs, taken by the author as an epigraph to the novel, a story is introduced about an unnatural, fratricidal war, about the death of Cossack clans, about the tragedy of the people, when the steppe is plowed with the wrong things (“horse hooves”), and sowed with the wrong things (“Cossack heads”), It is watered the wrong way and the wrong harvest will be harvested. The songs composed by the Cossacks indicate the inconsistency of their entire unfortunate tribe - a tribe of warriors and farmers at the same time, truthfully explaining and revealing the essence of the tragedy that happened to the descendants of unknown authors already in the 20th century. In addition, the elegiac structure of the Cossack song itself is composed according to the formula of negative parallelism at the beginning (“Our glorious land was not plowed with plows... our land was plowed with horse hooves...”) and continued with a one-term parallel, the silent part of which is too scary (“And the glorious land was sown with Cossacks heads"). This is not ordinary peasant everyday life, not sowing, but something terrible, disgusting that explodes the peaceful way of life and fills the waves “in the quiet Don with fatherly and motherly tears.” The atmosphere of the Cossack way of life is not simply depicted here, it is anticipated main idea the entire work.

How are epigraphs related to the title of the novel?

(In this case, the quiet Don is not a majestically calm river, but the land of the Donshchina, long since sown by the Cossacks, knowing no rest. And then “quiet Don” is an oxymoron, a mutually contradictory combination of words: this is exactly what the ancient Cossack songs, taken as the epigraph to the novel by Sholokhov, are composed about .)

Let's look at how the First World War is depicted in the novel Quiet Don.

Let's listen to the student-historian's message “From the history of the Don Cossacks.”

With great national grief, the war with Germany invaded the life of the Cossacks of the Tatar farm. (Message from a history teacher about the First World War.)

In the spirit of old beliefs, the writer paints a gloomy landscape that foretells trouble: “At night, the clouds thickened beyond the Don, thunderclaps burst dryly and loudly, but the rain did not fall to the ground, burning with feverish heat, the lightning burned in vain... At night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible screams hung over the farmstead, and an owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery...

“The worst will happen,” the old men prophesied... “War will come.”

And now the established peaceful way of life is sharply disrupted, events are developing more and more alarmingly and rapidly. In their menacing whirlpool, people swirl like chips in a flood, and the peaceful, quiet Don is enveloped in gunpowder smoke and the fumes of fires (we can see this in the mobilization scene - part 3, chapter IV).

Gregory experienced the first human blood shed as a tragedy. Let's watch a fragment of the movie "Quiet Don". Now let’s read an episode of the novel - the hero’s emotional experiences (Part 3, Chapter X).

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is deeply contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. This torments him, does not allow him to live in peace, breaks him, cripples his soul.

The scene of the clash between the Cossacks and the Germans is reminiscent of the pages of the works of L.N. Tolstoy.

- Give examples of a truthful depiction of war in the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace".

The war in Sholokhov’s depiction is completely devoid of any touch of romance or heroic aura. People did not accomplish the feat. This clash of people distraught with fear was called a feat. (Retelling of Chapter IX, Part 3.)

Sholokhov in his novel depicts not only the Cossacks, but also their officers. Many of them are honest and brave, but some are cruel.

Which officer can be classified as cruel? (Chubatogo.) Describe him.

(Such an inhumane position by Chubaty, even in conditions of war, turns out to be unacceptable for Gregory. That’s why he shoots Chubaty when he cut down a captive Magyar for no reason.)

War in the novel is presented in blood and suffering.

Give examples of the suffering of the novel's heroes during the war.

How did the war affect Grigory Melekhov?

(“...Grigory firmly guarded the Cossack honor, seized the opportunity to show selfless courage, took risks, acted extravagantly, went to the rear of the Austrians in disguise, took down outposts without bloodshed<...>The Cossack horse-rided and felt that the pain for the person that oppressed him in the first days of the war had gone away irrevocably. The heart became coarsened, hardened, and just as a salt marsh does not absorb water, so Gregory’s heart did not absorb pity...” - part 4, ch. IV.)

Sholokhov portrays Grigory Melekhov as a courageous warrior who deservedly received a high award - the St. George Cross. (Retelling of the episode - part 3, chapter XX.)

But the war confronts Gregory with different people, communication with whom makes him think about both the war and the world in which he lives.

Fate brings him together with Garanzha, who turned Gregory’s life upside down.

Why did Garanzhi’s instructions sink into Gregory’s soul?

The war brought complete disappointment, I wanted to return to peaceful life. It was on this fertile soil that the seeds of “Bolshevik truth” and the promise of peace fell.

Here Gregory's attempts to understand the complex structure of life begin. Here begins his tragic path to the truth, to the people's truth.

How is the change in the mood of the fighting Cossacks between the two revolutions shown?

(The student makes a general report on the topic: “Sholokhov’s depiction of the events of the First World War in the novel “Quiet Don”.”)

Let's look at how the Civil War is depicted in the novel.

A history teacher talks about the events on the Don after the October Revolution.

The October Revolution, which split the whole world, and the Cossacks in particular, into friends and foes, poses painful questions to Gregory. Sholokhov again puts his hero before a choice, and again different people instill in him different truths.

How does communication with Izvarin and Podtyolkov affect Gregory?

(Sotnik Efim Izvarin, a well-educated man, was an “avid Cossack-autonomist.” Not believing in universal equality, Izvarin is convinced of the special fate of the Cossacks and advocates the independence of the Don region. Melekhov tries to argue with him, but the semi-literate Grigory was unarmed compared to his opponent, and Izvarin easily defeated him in verbal battles (Part 5, Chapter II). It is no coincidence that the hero falls under the influence of separatist ideas.

Fyodor Podtyolkov inspires Grigory with a completely different idea, believing that the Cossacks have common interests with all Russian peasants and workers, and defending the idea of elective people's power. And it is not so much education and logic, as in the case of Izvarin, but the power of inner conviction that makes Grigory believe Podtyolkov. This power is clearly expressed in the portrait details: Grigory felt the “leaden heaviness” of Podtelkov’s eyes when he “stared his sad gaze at his interlocutor” (Part 5, Chapter II). After the conversation with Podtyolkov, Grigory painfully tried to sort out the confusion of thoughts, think through something, decide.)

The search for truth for Gregory is not an abstract task, but a problem of life choice, for it occurs at a time of acute confrontation between various political forces that decide the fate of the Cossacks and the entire country. The intensity of this confrontation is evidenced by the scene of the arrival of the delegation of the Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by the same Podtyolkov, in Novocherkassk for negotiations with the Kaledin government (Part 5, Chapter X).

After the revolution, Gregory fights on the side of the Reds, but this choice is far from final, and Gregory will abandon it more than once on his painful path of life.

What will influence the fate of the main character of the novel?

(Let's watch a fragment of the film "Execution of Officers".)

What does Gregory experience after these tragic events?

(“The weariness acquired during the war also broke him. He wanted to turn away from the whole seething with hatred, hostile and incomprehensible world. There, behind, everything was confused, contradictory. It was difficult to find the right path; as if in a marshy road, the soil rippled under your feet, the path was fragmented , and there was no confidence whether he was following the right path. He was drawn to the Bolsheviks - he walked, led others along with him, and then he began to think, his heart grew cold: “Is Izvarin really right to lean on this?” Grigory, leaning against the back of the shed, but when he imagined how he would prepare harrows and carts for spring, weave a manger out of redwood, and when... the earth dried out, he would go out into the steppe, holding the chapigi with his hands, bored with work, and go behind the plow, feeling it; its living beating and tremors; imagining how it would be to inhale the sweet spirit of young grass and black soil raised by plowshares, which had not yet lost the fresh aroma of snow dampness - it warmed my soul to clean up the cattle, throw hay, breathe in the withered smell of sweet clover, wheatgrass, and a spicy aroma. manure I wanted peace and silence”- Part 5, Ch. XIII.)

Unjustified inhumanity pushed Melekhov away from the Bolsheviks, since it contradicted his ideas about conscience and honor. Grigory Melekhov had to observe the cruelty of both whites and reds many times, so the slogans of class hatred began to seem fruitless to him: “I wanted to turn away from the entire hostile and incomprehensible world seething with hatred. I was drawn to the Bolsheviks - I walked, led others along with me, and then I began to think, my heart grew cold.” To Kotlyarov, who is enthusiastically proving that the new government has given the poor Cossacks rights and equality, Grigory objects: “This government, apart from ruin, gives nothing to the Cossacks!”

After some time, Gregory begins service in the White Cossack units.

Watching a fragment of the film “The Execution of Podtyolkovites” or reading a fragment from the novel (Part 5, Chapter XXX), from the biography of the writer himself.

Before watching, let's ask a question:

How does Gregory perceive the execution?

(He perceives it as retribution, as evidenced by his passionate monologue addressed to Podtyolkov.)

From 1918 to the beginning of 1920, the Sholokhov family was alternately in the villages of Elanskaya and Karginskaya, Verkhnedonsky district. It was a difficult time: white and red waves swept over the Don region - the Civil War raged. Teenager Misha “absorbed” the events taking place (and he has a good head - a bold and daring mind, an excellent memory): battles, executions, poverty. Whites against reds, reds against whites, Cossacks against Cossacks. The stories are each more terrible than the other... One, a handsome, light-blond guy from Migulin, did not want to face a bullet, he begged: “Don’t kill! Have pity!.. Three kids... a girl...” What a pity! With a shod heel in the ear, blood shot out from the other shank. They lifted him up and put him in the pit... And this guy, they say, earned four crosses in the German, a full Knight of St. George... So Kharlampy Ermakov entered the hut. Usually cheerful, today he was gloomy and angry. He began to talk about the execution of Podtyolkovites in the Ponomarev farmstead. And Podtyolkov was also good, he says. Near Glubokaya, on his orders, officers were also shot without any pity... He is not the only one to tan other people's skins. Burped.

Read an excerpt from Andrei Vorontsov’s novel “Sholokhov” and answer the question: who is to blame for the outbreak of the war on the Don?

“The February days of 1919 on the Upper Don were languid, cold, gray. Residents of quiet villages and villages, with some kind of nasty, sucking feeling in the pit of their stomachs, waited for the onset of dusk, listened to the steps, the squealing of sledge runners behind the wall. The hour of arrests was approaching, when Red Army teams cordoned off the streets, broke into the smoking areas and took the Cossacks into jail. No one ever returned from prison alive. At the same time, when a new batch of prisoners was brought into the cold room, the old ones were taken out and space was cleared. There were no spacious prison houses on the Don; there was no need for them in the past. Those sentenced to execution were taken out of the basement with their hands tied behind their backs, beaten in the back with rifle butts, causing them to fall onto sleds like sacks of flour, stacked up alive in piles and taken to the outskirts.

After midnight, terrible torture began for the inhabitants of the kurens, which had already been visited by security officers. Outside the outskirts, a machine gun started firing - sometimes in short but frequent bursts, sometimes in long, choking, hysterical bursts. Then there was silence, but not for long; it was interrupted by rifle and revolver shots dryly clicking, like firewood in a stove, as they finished off the wounded. Often after this, a dog began to howl at someone’s base - apparently sensing the death of its owner-breadwinner. And in the huts the women, whose son or husband could have suffered a cruel death that night, howled at him, holding their heads. Until his death, Mikhail remembered this howl, which made his blood run cold.

Most of the Cossacks who rebelled against Soviet power in April and did not go with the Don Army to the lower reaches of the Don fled from the kurens at the first news of the arrests, hid in distant farmsteads and winter huts; those who were mobilized by Krasnov against their will remained. They voluntarily withdrew from the front in January, allowed the Reds into the Upper Don, believing the promises of the Soviet government and its new proteges Mironov and Fomin that they would all be given an amnesty for this. These people had already fought ad nauseam - both for the German war and for 1818, and now only wanted a peaceful life in their kurens. They had already forgotten to think about defending their rights before nonresidents, as in December 17th, when they supported the Kamensky Revolutionary Committee with this condition. It became clear to everyone that we would have to share; you couldn’t fight against red peasant Russia, which was pouring in with all its might from the north. The agreement with the Red Army was simple - you don’t touch us, we don’t touch you, and whoever remembers the old things is out of the question. The neutrality of the Don was beneficial to Moscow: if successful, the war-weary Kuban people could follow the example of the Don people, and this promised an early victory for the Red Army in the south, since Denikin’s army consisted mainly of Kuban and Don people. But people called “commissars of arrests and searches” arrived in the villages, and punitive teams went to the kurens... They took away not only the front-line soldiers who had laid down their arms, but also the “grandfathers” - the St. George Knights, the living glory of the Don, who refused to take off their crosses, Cossack caps, tear off stripes from pants. Machine guns clattered outside the outskirts of the villages, where just recently, during the Christmas holidays, lively dark-haired young men in excellent fur coats and diamond rings on short thick fingers came from Trotsky’s headquarters, congratulated them on the bright holiday, generously treated them to wine brought in the troika, and gave them packs of tsar’s money, they convinced: “You live peacefully in your villages, and we will live peacefully. We fought, and that’s enough.” In the village of Migulinskaya, 62 Cossacks were shot without any trial, and in the villages of Kazanskaya and Shumilinskaya, 400 were shot in just one week. superfluous person, and in total about eight thousand people died on the Upper Don at that time. But the executions of Sverdlov’s envoys Syrtsov and Beloborodov-Weisbart, the regicide, were not enough... In Veshenskaya, dark-haired young people ordered the bells to be rung, drunken Red Army soldiers herded Cossacks, women and children into the cathedral. Here a blasphemous action awaited them: an 80-year-old priest, who served in Vyoshenskaya during the abolition of serfdom, was married to a mare...

The secret directive on “decossackization”, signed on January 24, 1919 by Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, was carried out. A cadaverous smell wafted across the Quiet Don, which in its entire history has never known either enemy occupation or mass executions...

The next morning, mournful caravans were getting ready for the outskirts. The relatives of the executed people dug them out, somehow covered with earth, convulsively, with difficulty overcoming faintness and holding back sobs, turned over the bodies, pulled the dead by the arms and legs, looking for their own, peering into the white faces with hair caught in frost. If they found it, they dragged the dead man to the sleigh under the mikit, and his head, with his pupils stopped forever, shook like a drunken man. The horses neighed restlessly and glanced sideways at the terrible load. But in those days of utter sorrow, it was considered a blessing for the relatives to get the deceased - Bukanovsky commissar Malkin, for example, left the executed to lie naked in the ditch, and forbade burying...

The Chekists at that time sang a ditty:

Here's your honor in the dead of midnight -
Quick march to rest!
Let the bastard rot under the snow,
With us is a hammer-sickle with a star.

The Sholokhovs, like everyone else, awaited the onset of twilight with chilling fear, burned a lamp under the icons, and prayed that Alexander Mikhailovich would not be taken away. At that time they lived on the Pleshakovo farm, renting half of the kuren from the Drozdov brothers, Alexei and Pavel. Pavel came with a German officer. The brothers, as soon as the arrests began, disappeared to God knows where. The security officers had already come for them from the Yelanskaya village, questioned Alexander Mikhailovich for a long time, with suspicion, who he was, then they left, before leaving, saying: “Maybe we’ll meet again...” And my father now had reason to be afraid of such meetings, even though he didn’t Cossack. At the very beginning of 17, he received an inheritance from his mother, merchant Maria Vasilyevna, née Mokhova, and not a small one - 70 thousand rubles. At that time, Alexander Mikhailovich served as the manager of the steam mill in Pleshakovo, and he decided to buy it, along with the waste and the forge, from the owner, the Elan merchant Ivan Simonov. Meanwhile, the February Revolution broke out.”

Let's read and analyze the last episode of the second book.

(“...And a little later, right there near the chapel, under a hummock, under the shaggy cover of old wormwood, the female little bustard laid nine smoky blue spotted eggs and sat on them, warming them with the warmth of her body, protecting them with a glossy feathered wing.”)

The ending of the second book of the novel has a symbolic meaning. Which one do you think? Sholokhov contrasts the fratricidal war and mutual cruelty of people with the life-giving power of nature. Reading these lines, we involuntarily recall the ending of the novel by I.S. Turgenev “Fathers and Sons”: “No matter what passionate, sinful, rebellious heart hides in the grave, the flowers growing on it serenely look at us with their innocent eyes; They tell us not only about eternal peace, about that great peace of “indifferent nature”; they talk about eternal reconciliation and endless life...”

I would like to end today’s lesson with Maximilian Voloshin’s poem “Civil War”. Although the political views and aesthetic attitudes of Voloshin and the author of “Quiet Don” are very far from each other, the great humanistic idea of Russian literature connects these artists.

Some have risen from the underground,
From links, factories, mines,
Poisoned by the dark will
And the bitter smoke of cities.
Others from the ranks of the military,
Nobles' ruined nests,
Where they took us to the churchyard
Fathers and brothers of the murdered.
Some have not yet gone out
The hops of immemorial fires
And the steppe, riotous spirit is alive
And the Razins and Kudeyarovs.
In others - devoid of all roots -
The pernicious spirit of the capital Nevskaya:
Tolstoy and Chekhov, Dostoevsky -
The anguish and turmoil of our days.
Some exalt on posters
Your nonsense about bourgeois evil,
About the bright proletariats,
A bourgeois paradise on earth...
In others, all the color, all the rot of empires,
All gold, all the decay of ideas,
The shine of all the great fetishes
And all scientific superstitions.
Some are going to liberate
Moscow and again shackle Russia,
Others, having unbridled the elements,
They want to recreate the whole world.
In both of them the war breathed
Anger, greed, the dark drunkenness of revelry.
And after the heroes and leaders
A predator sneaks in a greedy flock,
So that the power of Russia is boundless
Unlock and give to enemies;
Rot her wheat piles,
She will dishonor the heavens,
Devour wealth, burn forests
And suck up the seas and ores.
And the roar of battles does not cease
Across all the expanses of the southern steppe
Among the golden splendors
Horses trampled crops.
Both here and here between the rows
The same voice sounds:
“Whoever is not for us is against us.
There are no indifferent people: the truth is with us.”
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And with all our might
I pray for both.
(1919)

“The monstrous absurdity of war” in the novel “Quiet Don”

September

Let us recall the scene of Napoleon rewarding a randomly selected Russian soldier (“War and Peace”). “It was an explosion of bestial enthusiasm,” as it was written in the diary of the murdered Cossack (entry dated September 2, part 3, chapter 11), at whose life the staff clerks laughed. In this diary, “War and Peace” is mentioned, where Tolstoy talks about the line between two enemy troops - the line of uncertainty, as if separating the living from the dead.

, the inhumanity of war.

Battle scenes in themselves are not interesting to Sholokhov. He is concerned about something else - what war does to a person. The moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute feeling of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy, in battle is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, an acute sense of someone else's pain, the ability to compassion - this is the essence of the character of Sholokhov's hero.
The madness of a war in which innocent people die (senseless victims placed on the altar of someone’s ambition) is what the hero thinks about.

What visual means does the author use?

it shows how the Cossacks write off the pages diary one of the Cossacks, letters from the front; lyrically colored campfire scenes the voice of the author of a hard life breaks in, hair

Sholokhov’s visual means are varied: he shows how the Cossacks write off “Prayer from a gun”, “Prayer from a battle”, “Prayer from a raid”; leads pages diary one of the Cossacks, letters from the front; lyrically colored campfire scenes– the Cossacks sing “The Cossack went to a distant foreign land...”; The voice of the author bursts into the epic narrative, addressing the widows: “Tear off the collar of your last shirt, my dear! Tear your hair, limp from a joyless, hard life, bite your bitten lips until they bleed, break your hands mutilated by work, and fight on the ground at the threshold of an empty smoking room!”

Gregory's qualities

Gregory's qualities
Pride, independence, anger for everything the war did

Following the traditions of Russian literature, through battle scenes, through the acute experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions (the scene around the fire - a soldier's song), Sholokhov leads to an understanding of the alienness, unnaturalness, and inhumanity of war.

At home

At home: (based on book 2) 1) How did the events of the World War affect the peaceful life of the Cossacks?
2) The new government and the attitude of the Cossacks towards it.
3) The Civil War as a tragedy of the people (select episodes).
4) Re-read volume 2, part 5, chapter. 1, 12, 13,24,30
5) Make a plan “The Fate of Grigory Melekhov.”

I'm going to class

Mikhail SOLOMINTSEV

Mikhail Mikhailovich SOLOMINTSEV (1967) - teacher of literature and Russian language at Novokhopyorsk secondary school No. 2, Voronezh region.

The monstrous absurdity of war as depicted by M.A. Sholokhov

Based on the novel "Quiet Don"

(A recording of a Cossack song is played, which is taken as an epigraph to the novel.)

- Tell me, what is the role of the epigraph in this work?

- How are epigraphs related to the title of the novel?

Let's look at how the First World War is depicted in the novel Quiet Don.

Let's listen to the student-historian's message “From the history of the Don Cossacks.”

With great national grief, the war with Germany invaded the life of the Cossacks of the Tatar farm.(Message from a history teacher about the First World War.)

- “The worst will happen,” the old men prophesied... “War will come.”

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is deeply contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. This torments him, does not allow him to live in peace, breaks him, cripples his soul.

The scene of the clash between the Cossacks and the Germans is reminiscent of the pages of the works of L.N. Tolstoy.

- Give examples of a truthful depiction of war in the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace".

Sholokhov in his novel depicts not only the Cossacks, but also their officers. Many of them are honest and brave, but some are cruel.

- Which officer can be classified as cruel?(Chubatogo.) Describe him.

(Such an inhumane position by Chubaty, even in conditions of war, turns out to be unacceptable for Gregory. That’s why he shoots Chubaty when he cut down a captive Magyar for no reason.)

War in the novel is presented in blood and suffering.

- Give examples of the suffering of the novel's heroes during the war.

- How did the war affect Grigory Melekhov?

Sholokhov portrays Grigory Melekhov as a courageous warrior who deservedly received a high award - the St. George Cross.(Retelling of the episode - part 3, chapter XX.)

But the war confronts Gregory with different people, communication with whom makes him think about both the war and the world in which he lives.

Fate brings him together with Garanzha, who turned Gregory’s life upside down.

- What can you say about Garange?(Read his monologue from part 3, chapter XXIX.)

- Why did Garanzhi’s instructions sink into Gregory’s soul?

The war brought complete disappointment, I wanted to return to peaceful life. It was on this fertile soil that the seeds of “Bolshevik truth” and the promise of peace fell.

Here Gregory's attempts to understand the complex structure of life begin. Here begins his tragic path to the truth, to the people's truth.

- How is the change in the mood of the fighting Cossacks between the two revolutions shown?

(The student makes a general report on the topic: “Sholokhov’s depiction of the events of the First World War in the novel “Quiet Don”.”)

Let's look at how the Civil War is depicted in the novel.

A history teacher talks about the events on the Don after the October Revolution.

- How does communication with Izvarin and Podtyolkov affect Gregory?

After the revolution, Gregory fights on the side of the Reds, but this choice is far from final, and Gregory will abandon it more than once on his painful path of life.

- What will influence the fate of the main character of the novel?

(Let's watch a fragment of the film "Execution of Officers".)

- What does Gregory experience after these tragic events?

After some time, Gregory begins service in the White Cossack units.

Watching a fragment of the film “The Execution of Podtyolkovites” or reading a fragment from the novel (Part 5, Chapter XXX), from the biography of the writer himself.

Before watching, let's ask a question:

- How does Gregory perceive the execution?

(He perceives it as retribution, as evidenced by his passionate monologue addressed to Podtyolkov.)

Read an excerpt from Andrei Vorontsov’s novel “Sholokhov” and answer the question: who is to blame for the outbreak of the war on the Don?

“The February days of 1919 on the Upper Don were languid, cold, and gray. Residents of quiet villages and villages, with some kind of nasty, sucking feeling in the pit of their stomachs, waited for the onset of dusk, listened to the steps, the squealing of sledge runners behind the wall. The hour of arrests was approaching, when Red Army teams cordoned off the streets, broke into the smoking areas and took the Cossacks into jail. No one ever returned from prison alive. At the same time, when a new batch of prisoners was brought into the cold room, the old ones were taken out and space was cleared. There were no spacious prison houses on the Don; there was no need for them in the past. Those sentenced to execution were taken out of the basement with their hands tied behind their backs, beaten in the back with rifle butts, causing them to fall onto sleds like sacks of flour, stacked up alive in piles and taken to the outskirts.

Most of the Cossacks who rebelled against Soviet power in April and did not go with the Don Army to the lower reaches of the Don fled from the kurens at the first news of the arrests, hid in distant farmsteads and winter huts; those who were mobilized by Krasnov against their will remained. They voluntarily withdrew from the front in January, allowed the Reds into the Upper Don, believing the promises of the Soviet government and its new proteges Mironov and Fomin that they would all be given an amnesty for this. These people had already fought ad nauseam - both for the German war and for 1818, and now only wanted a peaceful life in their kurens. They had already forgotten to think about defending their rights before nonresidents, as in December 17th, when they supported the Kamensky Revolutionary Committee with this condition. It became clear to everyone that we would have to share; you couldn’t fight against red peasant Russia, which was pouring in with all its might from the north. The agreement with the Red Army was simple - you don’t touch us, we don’t touch you, and whoever remembers the old things is out of the question. The neutrality of the Don was beneficial to Moscow: if successful, the war-weary Kuban people could follow the example of the Don people, and this promised an early victory for the Red Army in the south, since Denikin’s army consisted mainly of Kuban and Don people. But people called “commissars of arrests and searches” arrived in the villages, and punitive teams went to the kurens... They took away not only the front-line soldiers who had laid down their arms, but also the “grandfathers” - the St. George Knights, the living glory of the Don, who refused to take off their crosses, Cossack caps, tear off stripes from pants. Machine guns clattered outside the outskirts of the villages, where just recently, during the Christmas holidays, lively dark-haired young men in excellent fur coats and diamond rings on short thick fingers came from Trotsky’s headquarters, congratulated them on the bright holiday, generously treated them to wine brought in the troika, and gave them packs of tsar’s money, they convinced: “You live peacefully in your villages, and we will live peacefully. We fought, and that’s enough.” In the village of Migulinskaya, 62 Cossacks were shot without any trial, and in the villages of Kazanskaya and Shumilinskaya, more than 400 people were shot in just one week, and in total about eight thousand people died on the Upper Don at that time. But the executions of Sverdlov’s envoys Syrtsov and Beloborodov-Weisbart, the regicide, were not enough... In Veshenskaya, dark-haired young people ordered the bells to be rung, drunken Red Army soldiers herded Cossacks, women and children into the cathedral. Here a blasphemous action awaited them: an 80-year-old priest, who served in Vyoshenskaya during the abolition of serfdom, was married to a mare...

The Chekists at that time sang a ditty:

Here's your honor in the dead of midnight -
Quick march to rest!
Let the bastard rot under the snow,
With us is a hammer-sickle with a star.

- Let's read and analyze last episode second book.

The ending of the second book of the novel has symbolic meaning. Which one do you think? Sholokhov contrasts the fratricidal war and mutual cruelty of people with the life-giving power of nature. Reading these lines, we involuntarily recall the ending of the novel by I.S. Turgenev “Fathers and Sons”: “No matter what passionate, sinful, rebellious heart hides in the grave, the flowers growing on it serenely look at us with their innocent eyes; They tell us not only about eternal peace, about that great peace of “indifferent nature”; they talk about eternal reconciliation and endless life...”

Some have risen from the underground,
From links, factories, mines,
Poisoned by the dark will
And the bitter smoke of cities.
Others from the ranks of the military,
Nobles' ruined nests,
Where they took us to the churchyard
Fathers and brothers of the murdered.
Some have not yet gone out
The hops of immemorial fires
And the steppe, riotous spirit is alive
And the Razins and Kudeyarovs.
In others - devoid of all roots -
The pernicious spirit of the capital Nevskaya:
Tolstoy and Chekhov, Dostoevsky -
The anguish and turmoil of our days.
Some exalt on posters
Your nonsense about bourgeois evil,
About the bright proletariats,
A bourgeois paradise on earth...
In others, all the color, all the rot of empires,
All gold, all the decay of ideas,
The shine of all the great fetishes
And all scientific superstitions.
Some are going to liberate
Moscow and again shackle Russia,
Others, having unbridled the elements,
They want to recreate the whole world.
In both of them the war breathed
Anger, greed, the dark drunkenness of revelry.
And after the heroes and leaders
A predator sneaks in a greedy flock,
So that the power of Russia is boundless
Unlock and give to enemies;
Rot her wheat piles,
She will dishonor the heavens,
Devour wealth, burn forests
And suck up the seas and ores.
And the roar of battles does not cease
Across all the expanses of the southern steppe
Among the golden splendors
Horses trampled crops.
Both here and here between the rows
The same voice sounds:
“Whoever is not for us is against us.
There are no indifferent people: the truth is with us.”
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And with all our might
I pray for both.
(1919)

Sholokhov "Quiet Don"

written by the greatest writer of the 20th century, who gained worldwide fame. It was for this novel that Sholokhov was awarded Nobel Prize. "Quiet Don"

The epic novel “Quiet Don,” on which the writer worked from 1925 to 1940, reflects the fate of a man who went through the First World War and the Civil War.

At the center of Sholokhov’s narrative are several families: the Melekhovs, the Korshunovs, the Mokhovs, the Koshevs, the Listnitskys. This is not accidental: the patterns of the era are revealed not only in historical events, but also in family relationships, where the power of traditions is especially strong and any break in them gives rise to acute, dramatic conflicts.

The story about the fate of the Melekhov family begins with the story of Prokofy Melekhov, who amazed the farmers with his “outlandish act.” He brought his Turkish wife back from the Turkish war. He loved her in the evenings, when “the dawns were fading,” he carried her in his arms to the top of the mound, “he sat down next to her, and they looked at the steppe for a long time.” And when an angry crowd approached their house, Prokofy with a saber stood up to defend his beloved wife.

From the first pages, proud people with an independent character and capable of great feelings appear. Thus, from the story of Grandfather Gregory, the novel “Quiet Don” enters into something beautiful and at the same time tragic. And for Gregory, love for Aksinya will become a serious test of life. “I wanted to talk about the charm of a person in Grigory Melekhov,” admitted Sholokhov. The writer was also influenced by the charm of Natalya, Ilyinichna, Aksinya, Dunyashka. The main values of the Melekhovs are moral, human: goodwill, responsiveness, generosity and, most importantly, hard work.

In the Cossack environment, a person was valued in relation to work. “He’s a great groom,” Natalya’s mother says about Gregory, “and their family is very hard-working... A hard-working family with plenty.” “The Melekhovs are glorious Cossacks,” Grishak’s grandfather echoes her. “In his heart, Miron Grigorievich liked Grishka for his Cossack prowess, for his love of farming and work. The old man singled him out from the crowd of guys from the village back when Grishka took away the first prize for horse riding at the races.”

The chronological framework of the novel is clearly indicated: May 1912 - March 1922. The writer captured “the people's life of Russia at a historical turning point.”

“The monstrous absurdity of war” as depicted by Sholokhov. The antithesis of peaceful life in “Quiet Don” will be war, first the First World War, then civil war. These wars will take place in villages and villages, each family will have casualties. Sholokhov’s family will become a mirror, uniquely reflecting the events of world history.

In the third part of the novel, the date appears for the first time: “In March 1914...” This is a significant detail in the work: a historical date will separate the world from the war. Rumors about her spread through the villages: “War will come…”, “There won’t be a war, you can tell by the harvest”, “How’s the war?”, “War, uncle!” The news about her found the Cossacks at their usual work - mowing wheat (part three, chapter 3). The Melekhovs saw: a horse was walking with a “catchy advance”; the horseman jumped up and shouted: “Flash!” The alarming news gathered a crowd in the square (chapter 4). “One word in a diverse crowd: mobilization.”

Sholokhov solves the “man at war” conflict in his own way. In “Quiet Don” we will not find descriptions of exploits, admiration of heroism, military courage, or delight in battle, which would be natural in a story about the Cossacks. Sholokhov is interested in something else - what war does to a person.

Getting to know the heroes of the novel, we will notice each of them has their own ability to experience and comprehend the war, but everyone will feel the “monstrous absurdity of war”. Through the eyes of the Cossacks we will see how “the ripened grain was trampled by the cavalry,” how a hundred “crushed the bread with iron horseshoes,” how “between the brown, unharvested rolls of mown grain, a black marching column unfolded into a chain,” how “the first shrapnel covered the rows of unharvested wheat.” And everyone, looking at the “unharvested shafts of wheat, at the bread lying under the hooves,” remembered his tithes and “hardened his heart.”

The novel strongly expresses a moral protest against the meaninglessness of war, its inhumanity. Drawing episodes of a baptism of fire, Sholokhov reveals state of mind a person who shed someone else's blood. In a chain of similar episodes, the scene “Gregory kills an Austrian” stands out for its psychological expressiveness. An Austrian was running along the garden railing. Melekhov caught up with him. “Inflamed by the madness that was happening all around, he raised his saber,” and lowered it onto the temple of an unarmed soldier. “Lengthened by fear” his face “turned cast iron black”, “the skin hung like a red flap”, “blood fell in a crooked stream” - it’s as if this “frame” was shot in slow motion. Gregory met the Austrian's gaze. “Eyes filled with mortal horror looked at him deadly... Squinting his eyes, Grigory waved his saber. The blow with a long pull split the skull in two. The Austrian fell, thrusting his arms, as if slipping; half of the skull thumped dully on the stone of the pavement.”

The details of this scene are scary! They don't let Gregory go. He, “Without knowing why,” he approached the Austrian soldier he had hacked to death. “He was lying there, near the playful braid of the lattice fence, stretching out his dirty brown palm, as if asking for alms. Grigory looked into his face. It seemed small to him, almost childish, despite the drooping mustache and the twisted, stern mouth, exhausted - either by suffering or by the previous joyless life...

Grigory... stumbled and went to the horse. His step was confused and heavy, as if he was carrying an unbearable baggage on his shoulders; disgust and bewilderment crumpled the soul.”

A terrible picture in all its details will remain before Gregory’s eyes for a long time, painful memories will bother him for a long time. When meeting his brother, he admits: “I, Petro, have lost my soul. I’m so unfinished... It’s as if I’ve been under a millstone, they crushed it and spat it out... My conscience is killing me. I stabbed one with a pike near Leszniow. In the heat of the moment. It was impossible otherwise... Why did I cut this guy down?.. I cut down a man in vain and because of him, the bastard, my soul is sick. At night I dream...".

Gregory watched with interest the changes taking place among his comrades in the hundred... Changes took place on every face, each in his own way nurtured and nurtured the seeds sown by the war.”

The changes in Gregory himself were striking: he was “bent ... by the war, sucked the color from his face, painted him with bile.” And internally he became completely different : “Grigory firmly guarded the Cossack honor, seized the opportunity to show selfless courage, took risks, acted extravagantly, went disguised to the rear of the Austrians, removed outposts without bloodshed, performed horseback riding as a Cossack and felt that the pain for a person that oppressed him in the first days of the war was gone forever . The heart became coarse, hardened, like a salt marsh in a drought, and just as a salt marsh does not absorb water, so Gregory’s heart did not absorb pity. With cold contempt he played with other people's and his own life; That’s why he was known as brave - he won four St. George’s crosses and four medals. At rare parades he stood at the regimental banner, covered in the gunpowder smoke of many wars; but he knew that he would no longer laugh as before, he knew that his eyes were sunken and his cheekbones were sticking out sharply; he knew that it was difficult for him, when kissing a child, to look openly into clear eyes; Gregory knew the price he paid for a full bow of crosses and production.”(Part Four, Chapter 4).

Sholokhov diversifies visual arts, showing Cossacks at war. So they write off “Prayer from a gun”, “Prayer from battle”, “Prayer from a raid”. The Cossacks kept them under their shirts and attached them to bundles with a pinch of their native land. “But death also stained those who carried prayers with them.”

The author's voice bursts into the epic narrative: “The native kurens were imperiously drawn to themselves, and there was no such force that could restrain the Cossacks from the spontaneous desire to go home.” Everyone wanted to visit home, “just have a look.” And, as if fulfilling this desire, Sholokhov draws a farmstead, “bloodless like a widow,” where “life was being sold - like hollow water in the Don.”

So through battle scenes, through the acute experiences of the heroes, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions Sholokhov leads us to comprehend the “monstrous absurdity of war.”

How does Sholokhov paint a world torn apart by revolution? One of the author's favorite techniques is a foreshadowing story. So, at the end of the first chapter of the fifth part of the novel we read: “Until January, even on the Tatarsky farm they lived quietly. The Cossacks who returned from the front rested near their wives, ate their food, did not sense that at the thresholds of the kurens they were watching for greater troubles and hardships than those they had to endure in the war they had experienced.”

“Big troubles” are revolution and civil war, which disrupted the usual way of life. The essence of the events depicted in the novel is truly tragic; they affect the fate of huge sections of the population. In "Quiet Don" there are more than seven hundred characters, main and episodic, named and unnamed; and the writer is concerned about their fates.

There is a name for what happened on the Don during the civil war - “the decossackization of the Cossacks,” accompanied by mass terror, which provoked retaliatory cruelty. “Dark rumors” spread through the villages about emergency commissions and revolutionary tribunals, the trial of which was “simple: accusation, a couple of questions, a verdict - and then a machine-gun fire.” The author writes about the atrocities of the Red Army in the farmsteads (part six, chapter 16). The military courts of the Don Army were just as tough. We see the Reds chopped down with particular cruelty. Making the facts more convincing, Sholokhov cites documents: a list of those executed from Podtelkov’s detachment (part five, chapter 11) and a list of executed hostages of the Tatarsky farm (part six, chapter 24).

How do the Cossacks themselves perceive this time?

Petro Melekhov: “Look how the people were divided, you bastards! It was as if we were driving with a plow: one - in one direction, the other - in the other, as if under a ploughshare. Damn life, and terrible times! One can no longer guess the other...
“Here you are,” he abruptly turned the conversation, “you’re my dear brother, but I don’t understand you, by God!” I feel that you are somehow leaving me... am I telling the truth? - and answered himself: - The truth. You’re confused... I’m afraid you’ll go over to the Reds... You, Grishatka, haven’t found yourself yet.
- Did you find it? - asked Grigory.
- Found. I fell into my furrow... You can’t pull me to the red lasso. The Cossacks are against them, and I am against them."
“Miron Grigorievich spoke in a new way, with matured anger:
- Why did life collapse? Who's the reason? This damn power!.. I worked all my life, I wheezed, then I washed myself, and in order for me to live equally with this, what finger did I not raise to get out of poverty? No, we’ll just wait a little!..”

“The people were played off”, - Gregory will think about what is happening. “The people got excited and went crazy,” the author will add. He does not forgive anyone for cruelty: neither Polovtsev, who hacked to death Chernetsov and ordered the death of forty more captured officers, nor Grigory Melekhov, who hacked to death the captured sailors. He does not forgive Mikhail Koshevoy, who killed Pyotr Melekhov, shot Grandfather Grishaka in Tatarskoye, burned down Korshunov’s kuren, and then set fire to seven more houses; does not forgive Mitka Korshunov, who “cut out Koshevoy’s entire family.”

“The people were played off”, - we remember when we read about the execution of the detachment commander Likhachev, captured by the rebels: “He was not shot... Seven miles from Veshenskaya, in the sandy, stern breakers, he was brutally hacked to death by the guards. They gouged out his eyes while he was alive, cut off his hands, ears, nose, and mangled his face with sabers. They unbuttoned their pants and violated and desecrated a large, courageous, beautiful body. They violated the bleeding stump, and then one of the guards stepped on the flimsily trembling chest, on the prone body, and with one blow cut off the head obliquely” (part six, chapter 31).

“The people were played off”-Are these words about how twenty-five communists led by Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov were killed? “The guards beat them, herding them into a heap like sheep, they beat them for a long time and cruelly... Then everything was like in a heavy fog. We walked for thirty miles through continuous farmsteads, met at each farmstead by crowds of torturers. Old men, women, teenagers beat and spat on the swollen, blood-stained faces of the captured communists.”

And one more execution - of Podtelkov and his squad.

Harsh times forced them all to make a choice.
-Which side are you on?
- You seem to have accepted the red faith?
- Were you wearing white? Little white! Officer, huh?

These questions were asked to the same person - Grigory Melekhov, but he himself could not answer them. “Who should I lean against?” - a question that excites the consciousness of the hero Sholokhov, this is his anxiety and thought, conveyed through an internal monologue:

“The fatigue acquired during the war also broke him. I wanted to turn away from everything seething with hatred, hostile and incomprehensible world. There, behind, everything was confused and contradictory. It was difficult to find the right path, and there was no certainty whether he was following the right path. He was drawn to the Bolsheviks - he walked, led others behind him, and then he began to think, his heart grew cold. “Is Izvarin right? Who should I lean against?” Grigory thought about this indistinctly, leaning against the back of his wallet. But, when he imagined how he would prepare the harrows for spring, weave a manger out of redwood, and when the earth stripped and dried out, he would go out into the steppe; holding onto the chipigs with his hands that are bored with work, he will follow the plow, feeling its lively movement and jolts; imagining how it would be to inhale the sweet spirit of young grass and black soil raised by ploughshares - it warmed my soul. I wanted to clean up the cattle, throw the hay, breathe in the withered smell of sweet clover, wheatgrass, and the spicy aroma of manure. I wanted peace and silence - that’s why there was shy joy and shore in Grigory’s stern eyes, looking around... Sweet and thick, like hops, life seemed at that time here, in the wilderness.”(part five, chapter 13).

One fate shows the entire breakdown of society. Even if he is a Cossack, he is still first and foremost a peasant, a farmer. He is the breadwinner. And the breakdown of this breadwinner is the whole civil war.

Gregory's dream of living as a peaceful worker and family man was constantly destroyed by the cruelty of the civil war. Emotional contrast is used by Sholokhov as a means of expressing the hero’s moods: “Grigory should rest, get some sleep! And then walk along the soft arable furrow with a plow, whistle at the bulls, listen to the crane’s blue trumpet call, tenderly remove the alluvial silver of cobwebs from your cheeks and continuously drink the wine smell of the earth raised by the plow.

And in return - bread cut by the blades of the roads. Along the roads there are crowds of undressed prisoners, corpse-black with dust... In the farmsteads, amateurs search the families of the Cossacks who left with the Reds, flogging the wives and mothers of the apostates... Discontent, fatigue, and embitterment have accumulated.”(part six, chapter 10).

“The Fate of Grigory Melekhov”, “The Tragedy of Grigory Melekhov. Why was Grigory Melekhov chosen for the role of the central character? In fact, why did the author's choice not fall on Mikhail Koshevoy, Pyotr Melekhov or Evgeny Listnitsky, Podtelkov or Bunchuk? There are explanations for this: they are in the moral values that the heroes profess, in the peculiarities of their emotional and psychological make-up.

Grigory Melekhov, unlike other heroes of "Quiet Don" - bright personality, unique individuality, whole, extraordinary nature. He is sincere and honest in his thoughts and actions (this is especially evident in his relationships with Natalya and Aksinya: Gregory’s last meeting with Natalya (part seven, chapter 7), Natalya’s death and related experiences (part seven, chapter 16 -18), Aksinya’s death (part eight, chapter 17). Gregory is distinguished by an acute emotional reaction to everything that happens, he has a heart that is responsive to the impressions of life. He has a developed feeling of pity and compassion, this can be judged by such scenes, for example. , like “In the haymaking”, when Grigory accidentally trimmed a wild duckling (part one, chapter 9), the scene with the murdered Austrian (part three, chapter 10), the reaction to the news of the execution of Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov (part six).

Always remaining honest, morally independent and straightforward in character, Gregory showed himself to be a person capable of action. An example is the following episodes: a fight with Stepan Astakhov over Aksinya (part one, chapter 12), leaving with Aksinya for Yagodnoye (part two, chapters 11-12), a clash with the sergeant (part three, chapter 11) , break with Podtelkov (part three, chapter 12), clash with General Fitzkhalaurov (part seven, chapter 10), decision, without waiting for an amnesty, to return to the farm (part eight, chapter 18). The sincerity of his motives is captivating - he never lied to himself, in his doubts and tossing. His internal monologues convince us of this (part six, chapters 21, 28). Note that he is the only character who is given the right to monologues—“thoughts”—that reveal his spiritual nature.

Gregory's deep attachment to home, to the land remains his strongest spiritual movement throughout the novel. “I won’t move anywhere from the ground. Here is the steppe, there is something to breathe...” This confession of Aksinye echoes another: “My hands need to work, not fight. My whole soul has been sick over these months.”

“Hero and time”, “hero and circumstances”, the search for oneself as an individual - eternal theme art became the main one in “Quiet Don”. This search is the meaning of the existence of Grigory Melekhov in the novel. “I’m looking for a way out myself,” he says about himself. At the same time, he constantly faces the need to make a choice, which was not easy and simple. The very situations in which the hero found himself prompted him to action. So, Gregory’s entry into the rebel detachment is to some extent a forced step. It was preceded by the atrocities of the Red Army soldiers who came to the farm and their intention to kill Melekhov.

His relations with his friends sharply worsened: Koshev, Kotlyarov. The scene of the night dispute in the executive committee is indicative, where Grigory “out of old friendship came to chat, to say that there was a boil in his chest.” The dispute turned out to be sharp, the positions were irreconcilable. Kotlyarov threw it in Grigory’s face: “...you have become a stranger. You are an enemy of the Soviet regime!.. There is no need to shake the Cossacks, they are already wavering. And don’t get in our way. Stop!.. Goodbye!” Shtokman, who became aware of this collision, said: “Melekhov, although temporarily, escaped. It is he who should be taken into account!.. The conversation that he had with you in the executive committee is the conversation of tomorrow's enemy... Either they are us, or we are them! There is no third". This is how those who asserted Soviet power on the Don defined their line.

This meeting essentially marked a turning point in the fate of Grigory Melekhov. Sholokhov defines its significance as follows: “Gregory walked, experiencing a feeling as if he had crossed a threshold, and what seemed unclear suddenly arose with utmost brightness... And because he stood on the brink in the struggle of two principles, denying both of them, a dull, incessant irritation was born.”

He “tried painfully to sort out the confusion of thoughts.” His “soul was rushing about” like “a wolf caught in a raid, looking for a way out, in resolving contradictions.” Behind him were days of doubt, “difficult internal struggle", "search for truth." In him, “his own, Cossack, absorbed with mother’s milk throughout his life, took precedence over the great human truth.” He knew the “truth of Garanzhi” and anxiously asked himself: “Is Izvarin really right?” He himself says about himself: “I wander, like in a blizzard in the steppe...” But Grigory Melekhov “strays”, “looking for the truth,” not from emptiness and thoughtlessness. He yearns for such truth, “under the wing of which everyone could warm themselves.” And from his point of view, neither the whites nor the reds have such truth: “There is no truth in life. It can be seen whoever defeats whom will devour him... But I was looking for the bad truth. He was sick at heart, he was swinging back and forth...” These searches, according to his admission, turned out to be “in vain and empty.” And this also determined the tragedy of his fate.

Let us highlight the episodes that became catharsis for the hero: “Gregory chopped up the sailors,” “ Last meeting with Natalya”, “The Death of Natalya”, “The Death of Aksinya”. Any episode of “Quiet Don” reveals the multidimensionality and high humanity inherent in Sholokhov’s text. Grigory Melekhov evokes deep sympathy and compassion as a hero of tragic fate.

Makeup. Skin and hair care. Manicure

How Sholokhov portrays the senselessness of war. Sholokhov "Quiet Don"

Mikhail SOLOMINTSEV

The monstrous absurdity of war as depicted by M.A. Sholokhov

Based on the novel "Quiet Don"

“The monstrous absurdity of war” in the novel “Quiet Don”

, the inhumanity of war.

Battle scenes in themselves are not interesting to Sholokhov. He is concerned about something else - what war does to a person. The moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute feeling of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy, in battle is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, an acute sense of someone else's pain, the ability to compassion - this is the essence of the character of Sholokhov's hero.

The madness of a war in which innocent people die (senseless victims placed on the altar of someone’s ambition) is what the hero thinks about.

What visual means does the author use?

Gregory's qualities

Gregory's qualities

Pride, independence, anger for everything the war did

At home

At home: (based on book 2) 1) How did the events of the World War affect the peaceful life of the Cossacks?

2) The new government and the attitude of the Cossacks towards it.

3) The Civil War as a tragedy of the people (select episodes).

4) Re-read volume 2, part 5, chapter. 1, 12, 13,24,30

5) Make a plan “The Fate of Grigory Melekhov.”

Makeup. Skin and hair care. Manicure

Mikhail SOLOMINTSEV

The monstrous absurdity of war as depicted by M.A. Sholokhov

Based on the novel "Quiet Don"

“The monstrous absurdity of war” in the novel “Quiet Don”

, the inhumanity of war.

Battle scenes in themselves are not interesting to Sholokhov. He is concerned about something else - what war does to a person. The moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute feeling of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy, in battle is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, an acute sense of someone else's pain, the ability to compassion - this is the essence of the character of Sholokhov's hero.

The madness of a war in which innocent people die (senseless victims placed on the altar of someone’s ambition) is what the hero thinks about.

What visual means does the author use?

Gregory's qualities

Gregory's qualities

Pride, independence, anger for everything the war did

At home

At home: (based on book 2) 1) How did the events of the World War affect the peaceful life of the Cossacks?

2) The new government and the attitude of the Cossacks towards it.

3) The Civil War as a tragedy of the people (select episodes).

4) Re-read volume 2, part 5, chapter. 1, 12, 13,24,30

5) Make a plan “The Fate of Grigory Melekhov.”

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