Grigory Melekhov in the novel "Quiet Don": characteristics. The tragic fate and spiritual quest of Grigory Melekhov

Essay on the topic “The Image of Grigory Melekhov” briefly: characteristics, life story and description of the hero in search of the truth

In Sholokhov's epic novel "Quiet Don" Grigory Melekhov occupies a central place. He is the most complex Sholokhov hero. This is a truth seeker. He suffered such cruel trials that a person, it would seem, is not able to endure. The life path of Grigory Melekhov is difficult and tortuous: first there was the First World War, then the civil war, and, finally, an attempt to destroy the Cossacks, an uprising and its suppression.

The tragedy of Grigory Melekhov is the tragedy of a man who broke away from the people and became a renegade. His detachment becomes tragic, because he is a confused person. He went against himself, against millions of workers just like himself.

From his grandfather Prokofy Gregory, he inherited a hot-tempered and independent character, as well as the ability for tender love. The blood of the “Turkish” grandmother manifested itself in his appearance, in love, on the battlefield and in the ranks. And from his father he inherited a tough disposition, and it was because of this that integrity and rebellion haunted Gregory from his youth. He fell in love with a married woman Aksinya (this is a turning point in his life) and soon decides to leave with her, despite all the prohibitions of his father and the condemnation of society. The origins of Melekhov's tragedy lie in his rebellious character. This is the predetermination of a tragic fate.

Gregory is a kind, brave and courageous hero who always tries to fight for truth and justice. But war comes, and it destroys all his ideas about the truth and justice of life. The war appears to the writer and his characters as a series of losses and terrible deaths: it cripples people from the inside and destroys everything dear and dear to them. It forces all the heroes to take a fresh look at the problems of duty and justice, to look for the truth and not find it in any of their warring camps. Once among the Reds, Gregory sees the same cruelty and thirst for blood as the Whites. He can't understand why all this? After all, war destroys the smooth life of families, peaceful work, it takes away the last things from people and kills love. Grigory and Pyotr Melekhov, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy and other heroes of Sholokhov are unable to understand why this fratricidal massacre is happening? For whose sake and what should people die when they still have a long life ahead of them?

The fate of Grigory Melekhov is a life incinerated by war. The characters' personal relationships unfold against the backdrop of the country's tragic history. Gregory will never again be able to forget how he killed his first enemy, an Austrian soldier. He cut him down with a saber, it was terrible for him. The moment of murder changed him beyond recognition. The hero has lost his point of support, his kind and fair soul protests, cannot survive such violence against common sense. But the war is on, Melekhov understands that he needs to continue killing. Soon his decision changes: he realizes that the war is killing the best people of his time, that among thousands of deaths the truth cannot be found, Grigory throws down his weapon and returns to his native farm to work on his native land and raise his children. At almost 30 years old, the hero is almost an old man. The path of Melekhov’s search turned out to be an impassable thicket. Sholokhov in his work raises the question of the responsibility of history to the individual. The author sympathizes with his hero Grigory Melekhov, whose life is already broken in such young years.

As a result of his search, Melekhov is left alone: ​​Aksinya is killed by his recklessness, he is hopelessly distant from his children, if only because he will bring disaster on them with his closeness. Trying to remain true to himself, he betrays everyone: the warring parties, women, and ideas. This means that he was initially looking in the wrong place. Thinking only about himself, about his “truth,” he did not love and did not serve. At the hour when a strong man’s word was required from him, Gregory could only provide doubts and soul-searching. But the war did not need philosophers, and women did not need a love of wisdom. Thus, Melekhov is the result of the transformation of the “superfluous man” type in the conditions of a severe historical conflict.

THE FATE OF GRIGORY MELEKHOV

In "Quiet Don", as already noted, there are many characters. But among them there is one whose controversial life and tragic fate attracts the most attention. This is Grigory Melekhov, whose image, without a doubt, is the main one in the epic. One can argue about who is the central character of “Eugene Onegin” - Onegin or Tatiana, “War and Peace” - Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov or the people, but when we talk about “Quiet Don”, the answer is clear: the main character of the work is Grigory Melekhov.

Grigory Melekhov is the most complex Sholokhov character. This is a truth seeker. Melekhov's life path is difficult and tortuous. In search of truth, the hero rushes between two warring camps: he is now in the camp of the Reds, now in the camp of the Whites. However, he never finds what he is looking for - truth - it constantly eludes him. And this complexity of Grigory Melekhov’s character and the tortuousness of his life’s path gave rise to various interpretations of this image in criticism.

In the discussion about Grigory Melekhov, two wings of critics can be distinguished. The first wing consists of those who adhere to the so-called concept of “renegadeism.” These are researchers such as Lezhnev, Gura, Yakimenko. The work of these Sholokhov scholars is permeated by the idea that Grigory Melekhov, being in a camp hostile to Soviet power, loses his positive qualities, gradually turns into a pitiful and terrible semblance of a person, into a renegade.

A striking example of a critical statement by representatives of this camp is I. Lezhnev’s commentary on one of the episodes of the novel.

Almost the very end of the work. After a long separation, Grigory and Aksinya are together again. Aksinya looks at the sleeping Grigory: “He was sleeping, his lips slightly parted, breathing regularly. His black eyelashes, with tips burnt by the sun, trembled slightly, his upper lip moved, revealing his tightly closed white teeth. Aksinya looked at him carefully and only now noticed how he had changed during these few months of separation. There was something stern, almost cruel, in the deep transverse wrinkles between her lover’s eyebrows, in the folds of his mouth, in his sharply defined cheekbones... And for the first time she thought how terrible he must be in battle, on a horse, with a drawn sword. Lowering her eyes, she glanced briefly at his large, gnarled hands and for some reason sighed.”

Here is how I. Lezhnev comments on this episode: “The eyes of a beloved are the mirror of the soul. Sholokhov’s description of Grigory’s cruel face and terrible gnarled hands, as Aksinya saw them, says with restrained strength and captivating persuasiveness: this is the appearance of a murderer.”
The second wing of the discussion about the image of Grigory Melekhov is represented by those researchers who tend to see the hero’s story in an unconditionally rosy light. These are V. Petelin, F. Biryukov, Yu. Lukin, V. Grishaev and others. Their point of view boils down to approximately the following: a great artist could write his book only about a crystal-clear hero, only about a noble soul, and Grigory Melekhov is exactly like that. And if there were some hiccups on his way, then it was not he himself who was to blame, but various kinds of “tragic circumstances” and accidents - Mikhail Koshevoy was to blame, Commissioner Malkin was to blame, Poddelkov was to blame, Fomin was to blame...

It seems to critics belonging to this wing of the discussion that only by defending Grigory Melekhov can they express their admiration and love for the novel. However, with their naive defense they only compromised him and are compromising him.

Sholokhov himself was not satisfied with any of the above-mentioned interpretations of the image of the main character. In an interview with the newspaper “Soviet Russia”, given in August 1957, he said that he wanted to tell the world about the “charm of a person” in Grigory Melekhov,” therefore, the writer did not agree with those who considered the main character of the novel a “renegade.” But, on the other hand, Sholokhov also criticized those who tried to see in Grigory Melekhov the future builder of socialism. He, in particular, criticized the film based on “Quiet Don,” to which the director and screenwriter attached an optimistic ending. In an interview with the Izvestia newspaper (published on July 1, 1956), Sholokhov said: “From the tragic end of Grigory Melekhov, this rushing seeker of truth, who became entangled in events... the screenwriter makes a happy ending... In the script, Grigory Melekhov puts Mishatka on his shoulder and goes with him somewhere up the mountain, so to speak, a symbolic end, Grishka Melekhov rises to the shining heights of communism. Instead of a picture of a person’s tragedy, you can end up with a kind of frivolous poster.”

Both interpretations of the image of the main character of “Quiet Don” suffer from the same drawback: they extremely schematize the image, reducing it only to social aspects. As G. Nefagina correctly noted, “Gregory’s character is much richer. It includes the typical features of the Cossack mentality that developed over two centuries and the new things that the 20th century brought with its wars and revolutions. The image of Gregory is a reflection of not only the typical socio-psychological, but also the sharply individual. Hence the tragedy of a hero is a tragedy not so much of a type as of a personality.”

On the one hand, in Grigory Melekhov, Sholokhov strives to show the best features of the Cossacks: hard work, humanity, daring, dexterity, military valor, self-esteem, nobility, on the other hand, we cannot help but notice that the main character of the novel from the very beginning of the work something sharply different from the rest of the inhabitants of the farm. He is seriously upset about a duckling that was cut off with a scythe. And in another episode, the enraged father, who raised his hand against him, declares: “I won’t let him fight!” Seeing through the fence how Stepan beats Aksinya, Grigory immediately rushes to defend her, although in his youth he is much weaker than Stepan Astakhov. The fact that he is an extraordinary character, that he is not like everyone else, becomes extremely clear after his escape with Aksinya to Yagodnoye. For the sake of love for a woman, Gregory sacrifices everything - family, wealth, reputation - an act unheard of at that time.

It is Grigory, with his brutal, hate-filled gaze, that frightens the officer at the inspection (“How are you looking! How are you looking, Cossack?”). It is Grigory who at first finds it more difficult than others to adapt to army service: for the freedom-loving Grigory, the army with its suffocating lack of freedom is the most difficult test.

In the army, the hero meets Chubaty, who teaches Melekhov the first lessons of cruelty: “Cut a man boldly. Don't think about how or what. You are a Cossack, your job is to chop without asking... You cannot destroy an animal without need - a heifer, say, or whatever - but destroy a person. He’s a rotten man...” However, Grigory is extremely reluctant to learn these lessons. Philanthropy, even in war, remains one of the defining traits of his personality. This is evidenced by the episode with the Polish woman Franya, when Melekhov, alone against an entire platoon, rushes to protect her. Being seriously wounded, Grigory carries the officer out of the battle. In battle, he finally saves his mortal enemy, Aksinya’s husband Stepan Astakhov, from death. Sholokhov emphasizes: “I saved by obeying my heart.”

Gregory is sensitive to changes happening around him. Personal qualities do not allow him to remain outside the struggle that has gripped the entire country since the beginning of 1917. He pesters either the reds or the whites. But, seeing that the words of both of them are at odds with the deeds, he quickly loses faith in the justice of the actions of both warring camps. He is alien to both, and both whites and reds treat the hero with distrust. And all because Melekhov, despite his inherent straightforwardness and gullibility, does not take anything for granted. Whatever colors fanaticism is painted in, it remains absolutely unacceptable for Gregory. In a decaying, chaotic world, which has consigned elementary human values ​​and freedoms to oblivion, the hero is looking for integrity and harmony, looking for truth, for the sake of whose triumph it would not be necessary to suppress entire groups of people. But the events, each of which is more catastrophic and bloodier than anything that human history has known so far, which Melekhov witnesses, lead the hero to disappointment in life, the loss of its meaning. We begin to notice strange changes in Gregory's behavior.

As if he had forgotten with what disgust he had recently treated the robberies, like the last marauder, Grigory undresses the red commander: “Take off your sheepskin coat, commissar!.. You are smooth. You ate your fill of Cossack bread, I bet you won’t freeze!”

Having so painfully experienced Podtelkov’s bloody reprisal of the captured officers, Grigory, having become the head of the rebel division, became so carried away by executions and shootings that the rebel leadership was forced to turn to Melekhov with a special message: “Dear Grigory Panteleevich! Insidious rumors have reached our attention, allegedly you are committing cruel reprisals against captured Red Army soldiers... You go with your hundreds, like Taras Bulba from the historical novel by the writer Pushkin, and you put everything to fire and sword and worry the Cossacks. Please settle down, don’t put the prisoners to death...”

Having cut down a sailor machine-gun crew, Grigory, in an epileptic fit, struggles in the arms of the Cossacks, covered in white foam, wheezing: “Let me go, you bastards!.. Sailors!.. Everyone!.. Rrrub-lu!..”
The moral and physical decline of the hero is also expressed in endless drinking and partying. The novel says that “even the sweatshirt on the saddle” of Melekhov was saturated with the smell of moonshine. “Women and girls who had lost their maiden color walked through the hands of Gregory, sharing a short love with him.”

Gregory’s very appearance changes: “he is noticeably flabby, stooped; the baggy folds began to turn blue under the eyes, and the light of senseless cruelty began to appear more and more often in his gaze.” Grigory lives now, “with his head down, without a smile, without joy.” The bestial, wolfish quality emerges more and more clearly in him.

Realizing the extent of his fall, Grigory explains it with the following reasons (in a conversation with Natalya): “Ha! Conscience!.. I forgot to think about it. What kind of conscience is there when your whole life has been stolen... You kill people... I smeared myself so much on other people’s blood that I didn’t even have any regrets left for anyone. I almost don’t regret my childhood, but I don’t even think about myself. The war took everything out of me. I’ve become scary to myself... Look into my soul, and there’s blackness there, like in an empty well...”

Gregory's state of mind will change little in the future. He will end his difficult life in Fomin’s gang and among deserters hiding in the forest. After the death of Aksinya, with whom the hero pinned his last hopes, life will lose all interest for him, and he will wait for the outcome. It is this desire to end his life, to bring the ending closer, that explains the hero’s return to the farm at the end of the novel. Gregory returns before the amnesty. Inevitable death awaits him. The correctness of this assumption is confirmed by the fate of Melekhov’s prototypes: Philip Mironov and Kharlampy Ermakov. Both were shot without trial, one in 1921, the second in 1927. In the novel, it was impossible to show the execution of a hero beloved by readers, given the situation in the country in the thirties.
What did Sholokhov want to convey to the reader by depicting the complex, contradictory path of Grigory Melekhov? This question is answered in different ways. Some researchers believe that, using the example of the image of the main character, Sholokhov defends the concept of a historically responsible person, others talk about the responsibility of the era to the individual. Both of these points of view are legitimate, but, I think, they greatly detract from the importance of Sholokhov’s character.

Grigory Melekhov stands on a par with numerous heroes of Russian literature, whom we call truth-seekers, and rightfully occupies one of the first places among them. No wonder he is called the “Russian Hamlet.” Hamlet is a tragic hero. Melekhov too. He is looking for the highest meaning of life, but these searches lead the hero to disappointment and moral devastation. Sholokhov shows the inevitable tragedy of idealistic people in a world that has entered a protracted period of social experiments and historical cataclysms, testing the strength of the humanistic traditions of human culture.

The TV series “Quiet Don” has ended on the Rossiya channel. It became the fourth version of the film adaptation of the great novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, who managed to use the example of his hero to show the catastrophe of human fate during the Civil War era. Did Grigory Melekhov really exist? After the publication of the work, Sholokhov was asked this question thousands of times.

For half a century, the writer stated unequivocally: his hero is a completely fictitious character. And only in his later years did the writer Sholokhov admit: Melekhov actually had a real prototype. But it was impossible to talk about this, because by the time the first volume of “Quiet Don” was published, Gregory’s prototype was lying in a mass grave, shot as an “enemy of the people.”

It is worth noting that Sholokhov still made attempts to reveal the secret. So, back in 1951, at a meeting with Bulgarian writers, he said that Gregory had a prototype. However, he responded with silence to further attempts to extort details from him. Only in 1972, the Nobel laureate told the literary critic Konstantin Priyma the name of the one from whose biography he almost completely copied the image of his hero: a full Knight of St. George, the Upper Don Cossack Kharlampiy Vasilyevich Ermakov.

From red to white and back

“Almost completely” is not a figure of speech in this case. Now that researchers have studied “Quiet Don” from the first to the last line, having compared the plot with the life of Ermakov, we can admit: Sholokhov’s novel was almost biographical, down to the smallest detail. Do you remember where “Quiet Don” begins? “Melekhovsky yard is on the very edge of the farm…”. So the house in which Kharlampy grew up also stood on the very outskirts. And even Grigory’s appearance is based on him - Ermakov’s grandfather actually brought his Turkish wife back from the war, which is why the dark-haired children came from him. Except that Kharlampy went to war not as an ordinary Cossack, but as a platoon sergeant, having managed to graduate from the training team. And, apparently, he fought desperately - in two and a half years he earned four soldiers' St. George Crosses and four St. George medals, becoming one of the few full holders. However, at the end of 1917 he caught a bullet and returned to his native farm.

On the Don, as well as throughout the country, confusion and vacillation reigned at that time. The Whites and Ataman Kaledin called to continue fighting for “one indivisible”, the Reds promised peace, land and justice. Coming out of the Cossack poverty, Ermakov, naturally, joined the Reds. Soon, the Cossack commander Podtyolkov appoints an experienced warrior as his deputy. It is Ermakov who destroys the detachment of Colonel Chernetsov - the last counter-revolutionary force on the Don. However, immediately after the fight, a fatal twist occurs. Podtyolkov ordered the execution of all prisoners, for example, personally hacking to death a dozen of them.

“It’s not a matter of killing without a trial,” Ermakov objected. – Many were taken because of mobilization, and many were drugged due to their darkness. The revolution was not made to disperse dozens of people.” After this, Ermakov, citing injury, left the detachment and returned home. Apparently, that bloody execution was firmly ingrained in his memory, since with the beginning of the Cossack uprising on the Upper Don, he immediately sided with the whites. And again fate threw a surprise: now the former commander and comrade Podtyolkov with his staff was himself captured. The “traitors to the Cossacks” were sentenced to hanging. Ermakov was assigned to carry out the sentence.

And again he refused. The military court sentenced the apostate to death, but hundreds of Cossacks threatened to start a riot and the case was put on hold.

Ermakov fought in the Volunteer Army for another year, rising to the rank of colonel.

shoulder straps However, by that time victory had gone to the Reds. Having retreated with his detachment to Novorossiysk, where the defeated units of the White movement boarded ships, Ermakov decided that Turkish emigration was not for him. After which he went to meet the advancing squadron of the First Cavalry. As it turned out, yesterday’s opponents had heard a lot about his glory as a soldier, not an executioner. Ermakov was received personally by Budyonny, giving him command of a separate cavalry regiment. For two years, the former White Captain, who replaced his cockade with a star, alternately fights on the Polish front, crushes Wrangel’s cavalry in the Crimea, and chases Makhno’s troops, for which Trotsky himself gives him a personalized watch. In 1923, Ermakov was appointed head of the Maikop cavalry school. He retires from this position, settling in his native farm. Why did they decide to forget the owner of such a glorious biography?

Sentence without trial

The archives of the FSB directorate for the Rostov region still contain volumes of investigative case No. 45529. Their contents answer the question posed above. Apparently, the new government simply could not leave Ermakov alive.

From his military biography it is not difficult to understand: the brave Cossack ran from one side to the other not at all because he was looking for a warmer place for himself. “He always stood for justice,” Ermakov’s daughter said years later. So, having returned to peaceful life, the retired Red commander soon began to notice that he actually fought for something else. “Everyone thinks that the war is over, but now it’s going against its own people, it’s worse than the German war...” he once remarked.

In the Bazki farm Ermakov was met by young Sholokhov. The story of Kharlampy, who rushed in search of the truth from the Reds to the Whites, greatly interested the writer. In conversations with the writer, he openly talked about his service, without hiding what both the whites and the reds did during the Civil War. In Kharlampy’s file there is a letter sent to him by Sholokhov in the spring of 1926, when he was just planning “Quiet Don”: “Dear comrade Ermakov! I need to get some information from you regarding the 1919 era. This information concerns the details of the Upper Don Uprising. Tell me what time would be most convenient for me to come to you?”

Naturally, such conversations could not go unnoticed - a GPU detective came to Bazki.

It is unlikely that the security officers were pointed at Ermakov himself - as follows from the investigative file, the former white officer was already under surveillance.

At the beginning of 1927, Ermakov was arrested. Based on the testimony of eight witnesses, he was found guilty of counter-revolutionary agitation and participation in a counter-revolutionary uprising. Fellow villagers tried to intercede for their fellow countryman. “Very, very many can testify that they remained alive only thanks to Ermakov. Always and everywhere, when catching spies and taking prisoners, dozens of hands reached out to tear those captured to pieces, but Ermakov said that if you allow the prisoners to be shot, then I will shoot you too, like dogs,” they wrote in their appeal. However, it remained unnoticed. On June 6, 1927, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, chaired by Kalinin, allowed Kharlampy Ermakov to be given an “extrajudicial verdict.” After 11 days it was carried out. By that time, Grigory Melekhov’s prototype was 33 years old.

On August 18, 1989, by a decision of the Presidium of the Rostov Regional Court H.V. Ermakov was rehabilitated “for lack of corpus delicti.” For obvious reasons, Ermakov’s burial place remains unknown. According to some reports, his body was thrown into a mass grave in the vicinity of Rostov.

In the epic novel “Quiet Don”, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov develops the traditions of L.N. Tolstoy. He shows the basics of life, subjecting them to cruel testing and breaking. The ideal of life according to Sholokhov is peaceful work, regularity, where the main value is family. The war broke this life, which affected everyone, including Grigory Melekhov, who is the focus of the author’s attention.

Grigory is a Cossack, a representative of a family that was somewhat different from the other families of the Tatarsky farm.

Grigory is capable of action, of strong feeling. He is distinguished by a great love for all living things, determination, courage, and a high concept of honor. At the beginning of the novel, he is young, proud, with an independent character, “a restive and simple guy.” Everything in Gregory rebels against violence against the individual, and he decides his own fate. Only once did he give in to his father, agreeing to marry Natalya, going against his heart. But realizing that he feels nothing for his wife, he decisively leaves the family with his beloved Aksinya.

The outbreak of war turned Gregory's whole life upside down. And, like Tolstoy’s heroes, he takes the path of searching for the truth. At the beginning of the war, he has no doubt that he must defend his homeland, but his whole nature is opposed to murder, and he deeply worries about the death of an Austrian, whom he hacked to death with a saber. He sees violence, senseless death, is tired of war, so the truth of the Reds becomes obvious to him. However, he realizes that this truth does not spare everyone. He witnesses the massacre of Chernetsovites, the execution of hostages, and numerous atrocities.

Then Gregory goes over to the side of the whites, trying to find the truth there. But even here, cruelty is before his eyes: the execution of the Podtelkovites, the events near Karginskaya, the murder of prisoners. The back and forth between the Reds and the Whites leads Gregory to internal contradictions, embitters him, and now he himself commits a terrible act: he furiously chops down the sailors. Realizing what had been done, Gregory “fluttered in a severe fit,” everything in him protested against senseless cruelty.

Grigory rushes between the Reds and the Whites, ends up in Fomin’s gang, then among the deserters. The search for the truth exhausted him, “something harsh” appeared in the features of his face. The world around the hero was split in two, and in it Gregory was looking for the truth, “under the wing of which everyone could warm up.” But there was no such truth. And the only consolation in Gregory’s life was love. He loved his family, children, and in his own way he loved Natalia. The love of his life was the beautiful Aksinya, who was ready to go with him “even to death.” But the war deprived him of this too: his mother, father, brother, Natalya and Aksinya, and little daughter died... An enemy settled in his home. The sister turned away from the foundations of the family. Gregory's whole world collapsed.

The tragedy of the hero is that he was born for a different, peaceful life, for work, family, love. And he was forced to fight and kill in the terrible meat grinder of the civil war. His further fate will be difficult. He was left with his son in his arms on the threshold of his home, in which there was no longer a place for him.

The main impression of Soviet people about the First World War is, of course, “Quiet Don” by Mikhail Sholokhov

For several decades, the events of the First World War seemed to remain in the shadows, away from public attention. But the memories of that war echoed and were echoed in many books, poems, and songs. Here are the satirical revelations of Hasek, and the novels of Alexei Tolstoy, Sergei Sergeev-Tsensky - very thorough, by the way, with many quotes from the press of 1914 - 17...

Let's remember the textbook - “At the position, the girl saw off the fighter...”. Mikhail Isakovsky wrote these poems at the beginning of the war, and the young composer Igor Lavrentyev gave them a melody that became popular. We are accustomed to this wonderful song and, of course, we associate it with the image of the Great Patriotic War. But in 1941 they almost didn’t say “in position”; then another expression was in use - “seeing off to the front.” And the positions are precisely 1914 or 15, as they used to say during the “Great War” - and the poet remembered this saying.

But the main impression of Soviet people about that war is, of course, Sholokhov. Several generations of Soviet people learned about the First World War from Sholokhov, from the novel “Quiet Don”. Already in the early thirties, the book (or rather, the parts published by that time) received wide recognition. The source, of course, is subjective: fiction. But it is useful not to forget about it today, when leafy, smooth, ceremonial assessments of that war are in use.

And some celebrate the centenary of the beginning of this tragic historical milestone as a kind of patriotic holiday, forgetting to comprehend the often not at all fanfare course of battles, not to mention the catastrophe in the rear, in the capitals...

And it is impossible to forget (and surpass!) the poetic images of Sholokhov... His prose is remembered in chunks, powerful fragments - like poetry. The Cossack Iliad begins on the eve of the war, in the penultimate year of peace. The next decade after the peaceful year of 1912 would become catastrophic for the Don Cossacks (and, accordingly, for the heroes of the novel). Yes, Sholokhov’s novel is the Cossack-style death of the Nibelungs of the 20th century. That is why it is difficult for the reader of “Quiet Don” to doubt that this is an epic.

War is approaching as in a fairy tale or epic - with alarming signs. “At night, an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible screams hung over the farmstead, and the owl flew to the cemetery, moaning over the brown, grassy graves. “It will be bad,” the old men prophesied. “The war will come.” How many arguments and gossip did Don hear: to be or not to be a war? But even experienced Cossacks, veterans of many campaigns, could not imagine the scale of the disaster. They knew nothing about the war of the twentieth century. No one knew!

Sholokhov draws attention to the drama of the first days of the war: the breakdown of peaceful life, the tears of mothers and future widows. He is interested in precisely this perspective, precisely this layer of truth. Aleksey Tolstoy, who became a war correspondent, interpreted the beginning of the war completely differently. “And the whole people, the one who was just dark, and sleepy, and drunk, for whom we always feared, who were taught wisdom with such difficulties, rose up to this unprecedented war, decisively, courageously and seriously.” Different mood, different intonation. True, Tolstoy wrote these lines during the war, and Sholokhov comprehended the events of 1914 even after the next war - the Civil War. And yet, the ever-present features of two writers, contemporaries, but not like-minded people, appear here. Alexey Tolstoy was in no way a Tolstoyan... The sovereignist invariably appeared in him - even when it seemed irreparably old-fashioned.

The Great War is at the center of the Don epic, it unites and separates heroes, plays with destinies. Sholokhov began working on the novel as a very young man (and L.N. Tolstoy wrote the first volume of the novel “War and Peace” at the age of 36 - today it’s hard to believe). It seems that he did not visit the headquarters, did not fight in Galicia, did not communicate with the generals, could not participate in that war, but in the novel the author’s voice sounds impressive. It was as if he had seen a chronicle of battles both in reality and in documentaries - although when Russia emerged from the First World War, Mikhail Sholokhov was twelve years old.

This happens with great writers - and therefore conversations about Sholokhov’s “plagiarism” are unconvincing, involving, among other things, the following argument: “it’s hard to believe that a young man penetrated so deeply into the logic of history.” An artist can control a lot.

Revealing the fates of fictional heroes, he knows how to look at events strategically: “From the Baltic, the front stretched like a deadly rope. Plans for a wide offensive were being developed at headquarters, generals were poring over maps, orderlies were rushing to deliver ammunition, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were going to their deaths.” And again - a feeling of the meaninglessness of war, the futility of efforts. Sholokhov has no doubt: the war could have been avoided, the enemy would not have invaded Russian territory if...

It is difficult for a novelist - especially a Russian one and especially one who writes about war and peace - not to fall under the influence of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Not only artistic, but also ideological. Leo Tolstoy was perhaps the first to try to look at battles through the eyes of a peasant, a forced soldier, for whom war was, first of all, backbreaking work and separation from his native peasant home. Sholokhov was also no stranger to Tolstoy’s pacifism—with a folk, peasant slant. Sholokhov was also a communist, and the “First Imperialist” should have been treated accordingly. “The monstrous absurdity of war” - how Tolstoy-like it is. Several times Sholokhov compares the war to a meat grinder - even on the train, the old railway worker will say about the Cossacks heading “to position”: “You are my dear beef.” Sholokhov shows the Cossacks heading to war as doomed.

In the mouth of a Cossack, such thoughts would seem strange. Although... No one knows how to hate war as much as experienced warriors. After all, even in 1914, it was not commanders or officers who were the initiators and culprits of the pan-European tragedy. If you need to fight, orders are not discussed and you should serve, as it was formulated back in the years of Peter the Great, without sparing your belly. “War is like a war,” this is how a popular French proverb is translated into Russian.

But the main culprits of bloodshed, by and large, are always diplomats, politicians and, most importantly, big business sharks - no matter what they are called in different eras.

Only they, as a rule, remain on the sidelines, remain behind the scenes, their names are not known to the general public, and, if known, they are not directly associated with the outbreak of wars.

The patriotic canon of Tsarist Russia is alien to the writer. For example, it is impossible to imagine Sholokhov writing the following words: “In the face of the terrible judgment of history that is taking place, the Russian state must become worthy of the name of Holy Rus' and Great Russia. And then in the victory, which, we believe, will crown our national efforts, we will see not a mercy granted to us, but a right deserved by us.” This is an excerpt from an article by Nikolai Ustryalov, written when the war had been going on for more than a year, and revolutions were just a stone's throw away.

And Sholokhov even talks about the most heroic episodes of the war with sadness, with a degree of skepticism: “And it was like this: people collided on the killing field..., they bumped into each other, knocked them down, delivered blind blows, mutilated themselves and their horses and scattered, frightened by the shot that killed a man, they parted morally crippled. They called it a feat."

Here we are not talking about an abstract feat, but about the famous battle of the Cossack Kozma Kryuchkov. In childhood - and it happened during the First World War - Sholokhov, along with other boys, played “Kozma Kryuchkov,” but the childish delight was not preserved. “Kryuchkov, the favorite of the commander of the hundred, according to his report, received George. His comrades remained in the shadows. The hero was sent to division headquarters, where he hung around until the end of the war, receiving the other three crosses because influential ladies and gentlemen officers came from Petrograd and Moscow to see him. The ladies gasped, the ladies treated the Don Cossack to expensive cigarettes and sweets, and he first flogged them with thousands of obscenities, and then, under the beneficial influence of staff sycophants in officer uniform, he made a profitable profession out of it: he talked about the “feat”, thickening the colors to blackness, lying without a twinge of conscience, and the ladies were delighted, looking with admiration at the pockmarked robber face of the Cossack hero” - this is how Sholokhov saw Kryuchkov.

During the Great War, it was customary to talk about this very dashing Cossack in folklore (opponents will say: pseudo-folklore) spirit. Young Sholokhov did not like the cheerful style. But by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, either maximalism would weaken, or Sholokhov would become more sensitive to the topic of defending the Motherland. His front-line journalism is full of admiration for the heroes, and “The Fate of a Man” will be on the same shelf as “The Stories of Ivan Sudarev” by Alexei Tolstoy... Sholokhov will understand: the fighting people need an epic story about exploits, about heroism, about skilled and indomitable warriors - such as Kozma Kryuchkov.

During the Civil War, Kryuchkov found himself in the White camp and fought against the First Cavalry with the rank of cornet. He died in 1919, on his native soil, perhaps from a Cossack bullet. And his comrade-in-arms Mikhail Ivankov (participant in the legendary battle) entered the Red Army. It was he who told Sholokhov about the feat and about Kryuchkov in detail. It seems that the writer was prejudiced towards the hero: a white hare, and besides, a symbol of tsarist propaganda during the war. Propaganda is necessary at all times - especially during war years.

But Kryuchkov’s feat was not a falsification! At the very beginning of the war, four Cossacks on patrol took on 27 German lancers. As a result, only three Germans escaped. The Cossacks captured two, and the rest were accepted by the land.

Kozma Firsovich Kryuchkov earned his Georgy with courage and combat skill. Yes, they trumpeted the feat - and rightly so. At the beginning of the war, it was precisely such news that inspired recruits - those who had to pull the military burden. During the Great Patriotic War, Sholokhov would learn to appreciate such feats and the propaganda charge that was associated with them.

The fate of Kozma Kryuchkov’s comrades is like a plot from “Don Stories” or “Quiet Don”. Brothers in arms found themselves on opposite sides of the front line. Could the fratricidal split have been avoided? "Quiet Flows the Flow" shows contradictions from which it is incredibly difficult to get out. There are no coincidences in history.

Grigory Melekhov knew how to fight, was a savvy leader and a patient fighter, Sholokhov does not underestimate his valor. But the writer’s favorite hero is dissatisfied with himself: “the Cossack was riding horseback 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.” Very soon he begins to reject the war - for him, like for Hamlet, the world has split apart. Perhaps this happened when he met the gaze of the Austrians, whom he cut down.

Why was World War I considered an unjust war? In Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, “industrialists and bankers” were rushing to power. The traditional foundations of the merchant class were revised. In previous centuries, merchants could not even imagine political influence on the scale of the empire: they could cope with the mayors... But here - as a result of the “development of capitalism in Russia” - they got the opportunity to openly profit from the war, and even influence the government. The semi-oligarchic system did not last long in Russia - and during the war it showed instability. Merchant arrogance cost Russia dearly: the best turned out to be victims, including among the Cossacks.

For them, “Quiet Don” sounds like a requiem: “Many Cossacks were missing, they were lost in the fields of Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Carpathian region, Romania, they lay down as corpses and decayed under the gun memorial service, and now the high hills of mass graves are overgrown with weeds, crushed their rains, and then the shifting snow... The graves are overgrown with grass - the pain is overgrown with long ago. The wind licked the footprints of the departed, - time will lick the blood pain and memory of those who did not wait, because human life is short and it is not long before all of us are destined to trample the grass...”

It was. The dead cannot be returned.

But memory still does not die, this is proven by the current attention to the fate of the heroes and victims of the First World War.

G.R. Derzhavin, a guard lieutenant, dedicated the following lines to the Izmail heroes:

But their glory never dies,

Who will die for the fatherland;

She shines so forever

Like moonlight on the sea at night.

This is also true in relation to those who fell in the First World War, to the dead and mutilated Sholokhov Cossacks.

Special for the Centenary