What did not give Grigory Melekhov peace of mind inside. Grigory Melekhov in the novel "Quiet Don": characteristics. The tragic fate and spiritual quest of Grigory Melekhov. Critics' opinions on the ending

Sections: Literature

Lesson plan.

History of the Melekhov family. Already in the history of the family, the character of Gregory is laid down.
Portrait description of Gregory in comparison with his brother Peter (it was Gregory, and not Peter, who was the successor of the “Turk” family - the Melekhovs.)
Attitude to work (house, Listnitsky estate Yagodnoye, longing for the land, eight returns home: an ever-increasing craving for home, thriftiness.
The image of Gregory at war as the embodiment of the author's concept of war (debt, coercion, senseless cruelty, destruction). Gregory never fought with his Cossacks, and Melekhov’s participation in the internecine fratricidal war is never described.
Typical and individual in the image of Gregory. (why does Melekhov return home without waiting for the amnesty?)
Points of view of writers and critics on the image of Grigory Melekhov

In criticism, debates about the essence of the tragedy of Grigory Melekhov still continue.

At first there was an opinion that this is the tragedy of the renegade.

He, they say, went against the people and therefore lost all human traits, became a lone wolf, a beast.

Refutation: the renegade does not evoke sympathy, but they cried over the fate of Melekhov. And Melekhov did not become a beast, did not lose the ability to feel, suffer, and did not lose the desire to live.

Others explained Melekhov's tragedy as a delusion.

Here it was true that Gregory, according to this theory, carried within himself the traits of the Russian national character, the Russian peasantry. They further said that he was half owner, half hard worker. /quote Lenin about the peasant (article about L. Tolstoy))

So Gregory hesitates, but in the end he gets lost. Therefore, he must be condemned and pitied.

But! Gregory is confused not because he is the owner, but because in each of the warring parties does not find absolute moral truth, which he strives for with the maximalism inherent in Russian people.

1) From the first pages Gregory is depicted in everyday creative peasant life:

Fishing
With a horse at a watering hole
In love,
Scenes of peasant labor

C: “His feet confidently trampled the ground”

Melekhov is merged with the world, is part of it.

But in Gregory, the personal principle, Russian moral maximalism with its desire to get to the essence, without stopping halfway, and not to put up with any violations of the natural course of life, is unusually clearly manifested.

2) He is sincere and honest in his thoughts and actions.(this is especially evident in relations with Natasha and Aksinya:

The last meeting of Gregory with Natalya (Part VII Chapter 7)
The death of Natalya and related experiences (Part VII Ch. 16-18)
Death of Aksinya (Part VIII Chapter 17)

3) Gregory characterized by an acute emotional reaction to everything that happens, him responsive on the impressions of life heart. It has developed feeling of pity, compassion, This can be judged by the following lines:

While making hay, Grigory accidentally cut off ********* (Part I Chapter 9)
Episode with Franya part 2 chapter 11
Vanity with the murdered Austrian (Part 3, Chapter 10)
Reaction to the news of Kotlyarov’s execution (Part VI)

4) Staying always honest, morally independent and upright in character, Gregory showed himself to be a person capable of action.

Fight with Stepan Astakhov over Aksinya (Part I Ch. 12)
Leaving Aksinya for Yagodnoye (Part 2 Ch. 11-12)
Collision with the sergeant (Part 3, Chapter 11)
Breakup with Podtelkov (Part 3, Chapter 12)
Collision with General Fitzhalaurav (Part VII Chapter 10)
The decision, without waiting for an amnesty, to return to the farm (Part VIII, Chapter 18).

5) Captivates the sincerity of his motives– he did not lie to himself anywhere, in his doubts and tossing. His internal monologues convince us of this (Part VI Ch. 21,28)

Gregory is the only character who given the right to monologues- “thoughts” that reveal his spiritual origin.

6) It is impossible to “obey dogmatic rules” They forced Grigory to abandon the farm, the land, and go with Aksinya to the Listnitsky estate with a koshokh.

There, Sholokhov shows , social life disrupted the course of natural life. There, for the first time, the hero broke away from the earth, from his origins.

“An easy, well-fed life,” spoiled him. He became lazy, put on weight, and looked older than his years.”

7) But too much the people's beginning is strong in Gregory so as not to be preserved in his soul. As soon as Melekhov found himself on his own land during the hunt, all the excitement disappeared, and an eternal, main feeling trembled in his soul.

8) This abyss, fueled by man’s desire for regret and the destructive tendencies of the era, widened and deepened during the First World War. (true to duty - active in battles - rewards)

But! The more he delves into military action, the more he is drawn to the ground, to work. He dreams of the steppe. His heart is with his beloved and distant woman. And his soul is gnawing at his conscience: “... it’s difficult to kiss a child, to open and look into his eyes.”

9) The revolution returned Melekhov to the land, with his beloved, to his family, and children. And he wholeheartedly sided with the new system . But the same revolution his cruelty towards the Cossacks, his injustice towards prisoners, and even towards Gregory himself pushed again him on the warpath.

Fatigue and embitterment lead the hero to cruelty - Melekhov’s murder of sailors (it was after this that Grigory will wander around the earth in “monstrous enlightenment,” realizing that he has gone far from what he was born for and what he fought for.

“Life is going wrong, and maybe I’m to blame for this,” he admitted.

10) Having stood up with all his inherent energy for the interests of the workers and therefore became one of the leaders of the Veshensky uprising, Gregory is convinced that it did not bring the expected results: the Cossacks suffer from the white movement just as they suffered from the red ones before. (peace did not come to the Don, but the same nobles who despised the ordinary Cossack, the Cossack peasant, returned.

11) But Gregory the feeling of national exclusivity is alien: Grigory has deep respect for the Englishman, a mechanic with work problems.

Melekhov prefaces his refusal to evacuate overseas with a statement about Russia: “No matter what the mother is, she is dearer than a stranger!”

12) And salvation for Melekhov again - a return to the land, to Aksinya, and children . Violence disgusts him. (he releases relatives of the Red Cossacks from prison) drives a horse to save Ivan Alekseevich and Mishka Koshevoy.)

13) Moving on to the reds in the last years of the civil war, Gregory became , according to Prokhor Zykov, “fun and smooth " But it is also important that the roles Melekhova did not fight with his own , but was on the Polish front.

In Part VIII, Gregory’s ideal is outlined: “ He was going home to eventually get to work, live with the children, with Aksinya...”

But his dream was not destined to come true. Mikhail Koshevoy ( representative revolutionary violence) provoked Gregory to run away from home, from children, Aksinya .

15) He is forced to hide in the villages, join Fomin's gang.

The lack of a way out (and his thirst for life did not allow him to go to execution) pushes him to an obvious wrong.

16) All that Grigory has left by the end of the novel are children, mother earth (Sholokhov emphasizes three times that Grigory’s chest pain is cured by lying on the “damp earth”) and love for Aksinya. But even this little remains with the death of the beloved woman.

“Black sky and a dazzlingly shining black disk of the sun” (this characterizes the strength of Gregory’s feelings and the degree of sensation or loss).

“Everything was taken from him, everything was destroyed by merciless death. Only the children remained, but he himself still frantically clung to the ground, as if, in fact, his broken life was of some value to him and to others.”

In this craving for life there is no personal salvation for Grigory Melekhov, but there is an affirmation of the ideal of life.

At the end of the novel, when life is reborn, Grigory threw his rifle, revolver, cartridges into the water, and wiped his hands “ He crossed the Don across the blue March ice and walked briskly towards the house. He stood at the gates of his home, holding his son in his arms...”

Critics' opinions on the ending.

Critics argued for a long time about the future fate of Melekhov. Soviet literary scholars argued that Melekhov would join socialist life. Western critics say the venerable Cossack will be arrested the next day and then executed.

Sholokhov left the possibility of both paths open with an open ending. This is not of fundamental importance, because at the end of the novel, what constitutes essence humanistic philosophy of the main character of the novel, humanity inXX century: ““under the cold sun” the vast world shines, life continues, embodied in the symbolic picture of a child in the arms of his father.(the image of a child as a symbol of eternal life was already present in many of Sholokhov’s “Don Stories”; “The Fate of a Man” also ends with it.

Conclusion

The path of Grigory Melekhov to the ideal of true life - this is a tragic path gains, mistakes and losses that the entire Russian people went through in the 20th century.

“Grigory Melekhov is an integral person in a tragically torn time.” (E. Tamarchenko)

Portrait, character of Aksinya. (Part 1 Ch. 3,4,12)
The origin and development of love between Aksinya and Gregory. (Part 1, Chapter 3, Part 2, Chapter 10)
Dunyasha Melekhova (part 1 chapter 3,4,9)
Daria Melekhova. The drama of fate.
Ilyinichna's maternal love.
Natalia's tragedy.

“Quiet Don” is one of the most famous “Nobel” novels of the 20th century, which caused controversy, gave rise to rumors, and survived immoderate praise and unbridled abuse. The dispute over the authorship of “Quiet Don” was resolved in favor of Mikhail Sholokhov - such a conclusion was given by an authoritative foreign commission back in the nineties of the last century. Today, the novel, cleared of the husks of rumors, is left alone with a thoughtful reader.

“Quiet Don” was created in a terrible time, when Russia was torn apart by an internecine war, senseless and merciless. Divided into whites and reds, society lost not only its integrity, but also God, beauty, and the meaning of life. The country's tragedy was made up of millions of human tragedies.

The exposition of “The Quiet Don” captivates the reader. Sholokhov introduces us to the world of the Russian borderland, the Cossacks. The life of these warrior-settlers, which developed centuries ago, is colorful and original. The description of Melekhov's ancestors is reminiscent of an old tale - leisurely, full of interesting details. The language of "Quiet Don" is amazing - rich, full of dialect words and expressions, organically woven into the fabric of the novel.

Peace and contentment are destroyed by the First World War. Mobilization for a Don Cossack is not at all the same as, say, for a Ryazan peasant. It is hard to part with home and relatives, but a Cossack always remembers his great destiny - the defense of Russia. The time is coming to show your combat skills, to serve God, your homeland and your father-tsar. But the times of “noble” wars have passed: heavy artillery, tanks, gases, machine-gun fire - all this is directed against the armed horsemen, the fellows of the Don. The main character of "Quiet Don" Grigory Melekhov and his comrades experience the murderous power of industrial war, which not only destroys the body, but also corrupts the spirit.

From the imperialist war grew a civil war. And now brother went against brother, father fought with son. The Don Cossacks perceived the ideas of the revolution generally negatively: traditions were too strong among the Cossacks, and their well-being was much higher than the Russian average. However, the Cossacks did not stand aside from the dramatic events of those years. According to historical sources, the majority supported the whites, the minority followed the reds. Using the example of Grigory Melekhov, Sholokhov showed the mental tossing of a person who doubts the correctness of his choice. Who should I follow? Who to fight against? Such questions really torment the main character. Melekhov had to play the role of white, red and even green. And everywhere Gregory witnessed human tragedy. The war passed through the bodies and souls of fellow countrymen like an iron roller.

The civil war once again proved that there are no just wars. Executions, betrayals, and torture became commonplace for both warring sides. Sholokhov was under ideological pressure, but still he managed to convey to the reader the inhuman spirit of the era, where the reckless daring of victory and the fresh wind of change coexisted with medieval cruelty, indifference to an individual person, and a thirst for murder.

“Quiet Don”... Amazing name. By putting the ancient name of the Cossack river in the title of the novel, Sholokhov once again emphasizes the connection between eras, and also points out the tragic contradictions of the revolutionary time: I would like to call the Don “bloody”, “rebellious”, but not “quiet”. The Don waters cannot wash away all the blood spilled on its banks, cannot wash away the tears of wives and mothers, and cannot return the dead Cossacks.

The ending of the epic novel is high and majestic: Grigory Melekhov returns to the earth, his son, and peace. But for the main character, the tragic events are not over yet: the tragedy of his situation is that the Reds will not forget Melekhov’s exploits. Gregory awaits execution without trial or painful death in Yezhov’s dungeons. And Melekhov’s fate is typical. Only a few years will pass, and the people will fully feel what “revolutionary transformations in a single country” really means. The suffering people, the victim people became the material for a historical experiment that lasted more than seventy years...

History does not stand still. Some events are constantly happening that radically affect the life of the country. Changes are taking place in social life itself. And these changes most directly affect the destinies of people. In society, there are usually two camps that are in opposition to each other. Some people support one side in their views, others the other. But not all. Still, there are people who, due to their convictions, cannot choose either side. Their fates are sad, even tragic, since they cannot choose what they like best, according to their hearts.

It is the fate of such a person that is depicted in the epic novel “Quiet Don” by Mikhail Alekseevich Sholokhov. This is how we see the main character, Grigory Melekhov, on the pages of his book. With each chapter read, a clear picture of the tragedy of this strong personality opens before the reader. He rushes about, searches, makes mistakes and tries with all his might to find the truth, which he never finds. Transitions from one camp to another, painful doubts about the correctness of the chosen path reflect the dramatic contradictions of the time, revealing the struggle of different feelings in the hero’s soul. Revolutionary events pose the most complex questions of existence to Melekhov. Gregory strives to comprehend the meaning of life, the historical truth of time.

The formation of Gregory's views begins with the days of the First World War. He serves in the army, more or less supporting the views of his colleagues regarding the order in the country, regarding the state structure. He holds the following opinion: “We need our own, and first of all, the deliverance of the Cossacks from all guardians, be it Kornilov, or Kerensky, or Lenin. We’ll manage on our own field without these figures.”

But, having been wounded, he ends up in a hospital, where he meets the machine gunner Garanzha. This meeting made a profound revolution in the soul of the protagonist. Garangi’s words ingrained deep into Gregory’s soul, forcing him to radically reconsider all his views. “Day after day, he introduced hitherto unknown truths into Gregory’s mind, exposed the real reasons for the outbreak of the war, and caustically ridiculed the autocratic government. Grigory tried to object, but Garanzha baffled him with simple questions, and Grigory was forced to agree.” Melekhov was forced to admit that Garanzha’s words contained a bitter truth that shattered his existing relationship to the events that were taking place.

Civil war... Grigory was mobilized into the ranks of the White Army. He served there for quite a long time, receiving a high rank. But thoughts related to the structure of life do not leave his consciousness. Gradually he moves away from the whites.

After meeting with Podtelkov, Grigory leans towards the Reds, fights on their side, although his soul has not yet landed on any shore. Having gone over to the side of the Reds, he not only goes to another camp, he also moves away from his family and friends. After all, now he and his father and brother are, as it were, enemies. After being wounded near the village of Glubokaya, he goes to his home village. And it’s heavy in his chest. “Back there, everything was confused and contradictory. It was difficult to find the right path; as if in a thin path, the soil swayed under your feet, the path became fragmented, and there was no certainty as to whether it was the right one to follow.” Being among the Reds, Gregory learned the basics of the Bolshevik structure of society. But many provisions are contradictory to his views; he did not see his truth in them. And gradually he began to realize that there was no place for him there either, since he saw what disasters they brought to them, that is, to the Cossacks.

“...And little by little Gregory began to become imbued with anger towards the Bolsheviks. They invaded his life as enemies, took him away from the earth! Sometimes in battle it seemed to Grigory that his enemies from Tambov, Ryazan, Saratov were moving, driven by the same jealous feeling for the land.”, “We are fighting for it as if for a lover.”

Melekhov rejected the old world, but he did not understand the truth of the new reality, which was being established in struggle, blood, and suffering, did not believe it, and in the end he found himself at a historical crossroads. In a tense situation, saving his life, he ends up in Fomin’s gang. But there is no truth for him either.

But the most tragic thing is that, rushing from one side to the other, Gregory saw that there was no place for him either here or here. He understood that neither the whites nor the reds had the truth. “They fight so that they can live better, but we fought for our good life. There is no one truth in life. It can be seen whoever defeats whom will devour him... But I was looking for the bad truth. I was sick at heart, I was swinging back and forth. In the old days, it is heard, the Tatars offended the Don, they went to take away the land, to force it. Now - Rus'. No! I won't make peace! They are strangers to me and to all Cossacks. The Cossacks will now become wiser. The fronts asked, and now everyone, like me: ah! - it’s too late.”

The author constantly reminds us that wherever the hero went, wherever he rushed, he always reached out to those who fought for a happy life. After all, it is in his throwing that Gregory acquires his best qualities, gains his strength and power.

The tragedy of the fate of Grigory Melekhov is enhanced by another line of the novel, namely the personal life of the Cossack. He not only cannot deal with political issues, but he also cannot handle his own heart. From the days of his youth, he loves Aksinya Astakova, his neighbor’s wife, with all his heart. But he is married to someone else, Natalya. Although after many events peace reigned in the family, children appeared, but he remains cold towards her. Grigory says to her: “You’re cold, Natalya.” Aksinya is always in the hearts of the Cossack. “A feeling blossomed and fermented in him, he loved Aksinya with the same exhausting love, he felt it with his whole body, with every beat of his heart, and at the same time he realized before his eyes that this was a dream. And he rejoiced at the dream and accepted it as life.” The love story permeates the entire novel. Wherever Gregory runs, no matter how hard he tries to break up with this woman, their paths always converge again. And before marriage, despite all the threats of the father, and during hostilities, when the life of Gregory and Natalya had already improved, and after the death of his wife, they reunite again.

But here too the main character is torn between two fires. On the one hand, home, family, children, on the other hand, the beloved woman.

The tragedy of Gregory’s life reaches its highest level not when he tries to choose a side to join, but against a personal background, during the death of Aksinya. He remains alone. Completely alone, quietly swaying, Gregory is kneeling near Aksinya’s grave. The silence is not broken by the noise of battles or the sounds of an ancient Cossack song. Only the “black sun” shines here for Gregory alone.

Everything disappeared in the bloody whirlpool: parents, wife, daughter, brother, beloved woman. At the very end of the novel, when Aksinya is tired of explaining to Mishatka who his father is, the writer says: “He’s not a bandit, your father. He’s such a…unhappy person.” How much sympathy there is in these words!

In “Quiet Flows the Flow” the writer raised to a universal height the suffering of a strong personality, enslaved in his development, in the movement towards the most humane philosophy of life, by the burden of both the old moral order and the inhumane norms of the new system. He finds neither work nor goal for himself in terms of the scale and depth of his “conscience,” soul, talent; he is in the “minority” within all situations of his time. But who was not, following Gregory, in the minority, in the zone of death and extermination in the 30s and 40s among a firmly established command-administrative system? The “minority” often contained everything universally human.

For the first time in literature, Mikhail Sholokhov showed the life of the Don Cossacks and the revolution with such breadth and scope. The best features of the Don Cossack are expressed in the image of Grigory Melekhov. “Grigory took firm care of the Cossack honor.” He is a patriot of his land, a man completely devoid of the desire to acquire or rule, who has never stooped to robbery. The prototype of Gregory is a Cossack from the village of Bazki, village of Veshenskaya, Kharlampiy Vasilyevich Ermakov.

For the first time in literature, Mikhail Sholokhov showed the life of the Don Cossacks and the revolution with such breadth and scope.

The best features of the Don Cossack are expressed in the image of Grigory Melekhov. “Grigory took firm care of the Cossack honor.” He is a patriot of his land, a man completely devoid of the desire to acquire or rule, who has never stooped to robbery. The prototype of Gregory is a Cossack from the village of Bazki, village of Veshenskaya, Kharlampiy Vasilyevich Ermakov.

Gregory comes from a middle-class family that is accustomed to working on its own land. Before the war, we see Gregory thinking little about social issues. The Melekhov family lives in abundance. Grigory loves his farm, his farm, his work. Work was his need. More than once during the war, Gregory recalled with deep melancholy his close people, his native farm, and work in the fields: “It would be nice to take the chapigi with your hands and follow the plow along the wet furrow, greedily taking in with your nostrils the damp and insipid smell of loosened earth, the bitter aroma of grass cut by a ploughshare. "

In a difficult family drama, in the trials of war, the deep humanity of Grigory Melekhov is revealed. His character is characterized by a heightened sense of justice. During haymaking, Grigory hit a nest with a scythe and cut a wild duckling. With a feeling of acute pity, Gregory looks at the dead lump lying in his palm. This feeling of pain revealed that love for all living things, for people, for nature, which distinguished Gregory.

Therefore, it is natural that Gregory, thrown into the heat of war, experiences his first battle hard and painfully, and cannot forget the Austrian he killed. “I cut down a man in vain and because of him, the bastard, my soul is sick,” he complains to his brother Peter.

During World War I, Grigory fought bravely, was the first from the farm to receive the St. George Cross, without thinking about why he shed blood.

In the hospital, Gregory met an intelligent and sarcastic Bolshevik soldier, Garanzha. Under the fiery power of his words, the foundations on which Gregory’s consciousness rested began to smoke.

His search for the truth begins, which from the very beginning takes on a clear socio-political overtones, he has to choose between two different forms of government. Grigory was tired of the war, of this hostile world, he was overcome by the desire to return to peaceful farm life, plow the land and care for the livestock. The obvious senselessness of the war awakens in him restless thoughts, melancholy, and acute discontent.

The war did not bring anything good to Gregory. Sholokhov, focusing on the internal transformations of the hero, writes the following: “With cold contempt he played with someone else’s life and his own... 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 what price he paid for a full bow of crosses and production.”

During the revolution, Gregory's search for the truth continues. After an argument with Kotlyarov and Koshev, where the hero declares that the propaganda of equality is just bait to catch ignorant people, Grigory comes to the conclusion that it is stupid to look for a single universal truth. Different people have their own different truths depending on their aspirations. The war appears to him as a conflict between the truth of the Russian peasants and the truth of the Cossacks. The peasants need Cossack land, the Cossacks protect it.

Mishka Koshevoy, now his son-in-law (since Dunyashka’s husband) and chairman of the revolutionary committee, receives Grigory with blind distrust and says that he should be punished without leniency for fighting against the Reds.

The prospect of being shot seems to Grigory an unfair punishment due to his service in Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army (he fought on the side of the Cossacks during the Veshensky uprising of 1919, then the Cossacks united with the whites, and after the surrender in Novorossiysk Grigory was no longer needed), and he decides to evade arrest . This flight means Gregory's final break with the Bolshevik regime. The Bolsheviks did not justify his trust by not taking into account his service in the 1st Cavalry, and they made an enemy out of him with their intention to take his life. The Bolsheviks failed him in a more reprehensible way than the Whites, who did not have enough steamships to evacuate all the troops from Novorossiysk. These two betrayals are the climaxes of Gregory's political odyssey in Book 4. They justify his moral rejection of each of the warring parties and highlight his tragic situation.

The treacherous attitude towards Gregory on the part of the whites and reds is in sharp contradiction with the constant loyalty of the people close to him. This personal loyalty is not dictated by any political considerations. The epithet “faithful” is often used (Aksinya’s love is “faithful”, Prokhor is a “faithful orderly”, Gregory’s sword served him “faithfully”).

The last months of Gregory's life in the novel are distinguished by a complete disconnection of consciousness from everything earthly. The worst thing in life - the death of his beloved - has already happened. All he wants in life is to see his native farm and his children again. “Then I might as well die,” he thinks (at the age of 30), that he has no illusions about what awaits him in Tatarskoye. When the desire to see the children becomes irresistible, he goes to his native farm. The last sentence of the novel says that his son and his home are “all that is left in his life, what still connects him with his family and with the whole ... world.”

Gregory's love for Aksinya illustrates the author's view of the predominance of natural impulses in man. Sholokhov's attitude towards nature clearly indicates that he, like Grigory, does not consider war the most reasonable way to solve socio-political problems.

Sholokhov's judgments about Gregory, known from the press, vary greatly from each other, since their content depends on the political climate of the time. In 1929, before workers from Moscow factories: “Gregory, in my opinion, is a kind of symbol of the middle Don Cossacks.”

And in 1935: “Melekhov has a very individual fate, and in him I am in no way trying to personify the middle peasant Cossacks.”

And in 1947 he argued that Grigory personifies the typical features of not only “a well-known layer of Don, Kuban and all other Cossacks, but also the Russian peasantry as a whole.” At the same time, he emphasized the uniqueness of Gregory’s fate, calling it “largely individual.” Sholokhov, thus, killed two birds with one stone. He could not be reproached for hinting that most Cossacks had the same anti-Soviet views as Grigory, and he showed that, first of all, Grigory is a fictitious person, and not an exact copy of a certain socio-political type.

In the post-Stalin period, Sholokhov was as stingy in his comments about Gregory as before, but he expressed his understanding of Gregory’s tragedy. For him, this is the tragedy of a truth-seeker who is misled by the events of his time and allows the truth to elude him. The truth, naturally, is on the side of the Bolsheviks. At the same time, Sholokhov clearly expressed an opinion about the purely personal aspects of Gregory’s tragedy and spoke out against the gross politicization of the scene from the film by S. Gerasimov (he rides up the mountain - his son on his shoulder - to the heights of communism). Instead of a picture of a tragedy, you can get a kind of light-hearted poster.

Sholokhov's statement about Grigory's tragedy shows that, at least in print, he speaks about it in the language of politics. The tragic situation of the hero is the result of Gregory’s failure to get closer to the Bolsheviks, the bearers of the true truth. In Soviet sources this is the only interpretation of the truth. Some place all the blame on Gregory, others emphasize the role of the mistakes of the local Bolsheviks. The central government, of course, cannot be blamed.

Soviet critic L. Yakimenko notes that “Gregory’s struggle against the people, against the great truth of life, will lead to devastation and an inglorious end. On the ruins of the old world, a tragically broken man will stand before us - he will have no place in the new life that is beginning.”

Gregory's tragic fault was not his political orientation, but his true love for Aksinya. This is exactly how the tragedy is presented in “Quiet Don” according to the later researcher Ermolaev.

Gregory managed to maintain his humane qualities. The impact of historical forces on it is frighteningly enormous. They destroy his hopes for a peaceful life, drag him into wars that he considers senseless, make him lose both his faith in God and his feeling of pity for man, but they are still powerless to destroy the main thing in his soul - his innate decency, his ability to true love.

Grigory remained Grigory Melekhov, a confused man whose life was burned to the ground by the civil war.

Image system

There are a large number of characters in the novel, many of whom do not even have their own names, but they act and influence the development of the plot and the relationships of the characters.

The action is centered around Grigory and his immediate circle: Aksinya, Pantelei Prokofievich and the rest of his family. A number of genuine historical characters also appear in the novel: Cossack revolutionaries F. Podtelkov, White Guard generals Kaledin, Kornilov.

The critic L. Yakimenko, expressing the Soviet view of the novel, identified 3 main themes in the novel and, accordingly, 3 large groups of characters: the fate of Grigory Melekhov and the Melekhov family; Don Cossacks and revolution; party and revolutionary people.

Images of Cossack women

Women, wives and mothers, sisters and loved ones of the Cossacks steadfastly bore their share of the hardships of the civil war. The difficult, turning point in the life of the Don Cossacks is shown by the author through the prism of the lives of family members, residents of the Tatarsky farm.

The stronghold of this family is the mother of Grigory, Peter and Dunyashka Melekhov - Ilyinichna. Before us is an elderly Cossack woman, whose sons are grown up, and her youngest daughter, Dunyashka, is already a teenager. One of the main character traits of this woman can be called calm wisdom. Otherwise, she simply would not have been able to get along with her emotional and hot-tempered husband. Without any fuss, she runs the household, takes care of her children and grandchildren, not forgetting about their emotional experiences. Ilyinichna is an economical and prudent housewife. She maintains not only external order in the house, but also monitors the moral atmosphere in the family. She condemns Grigory’s relationship with Aksinya, and, realizing how difficult it is for Grigory’s legal wife Natalya to live with her husband, treats her like her own daughter, trying in every possible way to make her work easier, takes pity on her, sometimes even gives her an extra hour of sleep. The fact that Natalya lives in the Melekhovs’ house after a suicide attempt says a lot about Ilyinichna’s character. This means that in this house there was the warmth that the young woman so needed.

In any life situation, Ilyinichna is deeply decent and sincere. She understands Natalya, who is tormented by her husband’s infidelities, lets her cry, and then tries to dissuade her from rash actions. Tenderly cares for the sick Natalya and her grandchildren. Condemning Daria for being too free, she nevertheless hides her illness from her husband so that he does not kick her out of the house. There is some kind of greatness in her, the ability not to pay attention to the little things, but to see the main thing in the life of the family. She is characterized by wisdom and calmness.

Natalya: Her suicide attempt speaks volumes about the strength of her love for Gregory. She has experienced too much, her heart is worn out by constant struggle. Only after the death of his wife does Gregory realize how much she meant to him, what a strong and beautiful person she was. He fell in love with his wife through his children.

In the novel, Natalya is opposed by Aksinya, also a deeply unhappy heroine. Her husband often beat her. With all the ardor of her unspent heart, she loves Gregory, she is ready to selflessly go with him wherever he calls her. Aksinya dies in the arms of her beloved, which becomes another terrible blow for Gregory, now the “black sun” is shining for Gregory, he is left without warm, gentle, sunshine - Aksinya’s love.

Among books about revolutionary events and the civil war, “Quiet Don” stands out for its original uniqueness. What captivates readers with this book? I think, first of all, the significance and scale of the events described in it, the depth and realism of the characters’ characters, which allows us to think about the moral and philosophical issues raised in the novel. The writer unfolded before us, the readers, a picture of the life of the Cossack Don, with its characteristics, traditions, and its own imaginative way of life, which unfolds against the backdrop of historical life. In the intersection of individual human destinies with social upheavals there is genuine truth, a look at the revolution and civil war not from one side, as was the case in most books of that time, but from both. Narrating about the merciless clash of classes in the bloody civil war, the author with unique power expressed thoughts and feelings of the entire people, universally human. He did not try to hide or muffle the bitterness of the tragedy born of the revolution. Therefore, first of all, contemporary readers were drawn to “The Quiet Don,” regardless of their “class” affiliation, since everyone found in it something of their own, personally experienced, felt, and common to all, global, philosophical.

With great national grief, the war with Germany invaded the life of the Cossacks of the Tatar farm. In the spirit of old beliefs, the writer paints a gloomy landscape that foretells trouble: “At night, clouds thickened behind the Don, thunderclaps burst dryly and loudly, but the rain did not fall on the ground, bursting with feverish heat, 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... “It will be bad,” the old men prophesied. “The 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. History inevitably “walks” through the pages of “Quiet Don”; the fates of dozens of characters who find themselves at the crossroads of the war are drawn into the epic action. Thunderstorms rumble, warring parties collide in bloody battles, and against this background the tragedy of the mental trials of Grigory Melekhov plays out, who finds himself a hostage of the war: he is always at the center of terrible events. It is impossible to fully understand the humanistic content of the book without understanding the complexity of the protagonist’s path and the generalizing artistic power of this image.

Gregory did not come into this world for bloodshed. From a young age he was kind, responsive to the misfortune of others, and in love with all living things in nature. Once, in a hayfield, he accidentally killed a wild duckling and with a sudden feeling of acute pity looked at the dead lump lying in his palm. The writer makes us remember Gregory in harmonious unity with the sensitive world of nature. But harsh life placed a saber in his hardworking hands. Gregory experiences the first human blood he shed as a tragedy. In the attack he killed two Austrian soldiers, one of which could have been avoided. The realization of this fell with a terrible weight on the hero’s soul. The mournful appearance of the murdered man later appeared to him in his dreams, causing “visceral pain.” Describing the faces of the young Cossacks who came to the front, the writer found an expressive comparison: they resembled “stems of mown grass, withering and changing its appearance.” Melekhov also became such a beveled, withering stem - the need to kill deprived his soul of moral support in life.

The first meetings with the Bolsheviks (Garanzha, Podtelkov) set Gregory up to accept the ideas of class hatred: they seem fair to him. However, with a sensitive mind, he also discerns in the actions of the Bolsheviks something that distorts the idea of people's liberation. Finding himself the chairman of the Don Revolutionary Committee, Podtelkov became arrogant, cruel, and power went to his head like hops. By his order and with his personal participation, the prisoners of Chernetsov’s detachment were beaten without justice. This unjustified inhumanity pushed Melekhov away from the Bolsheviks, since it contradicted his ideas about conscience and honor. Grigory had to observe the cruelty of both whites and reds many times, so the slogans of the class struggle began to seem fruitless to him: “I wanted to turn away from everything seething with hatred, a hostile and incomprehensible world... I was drawn to the Bolsheviks - I walked, led others with me, and then I began to think, my heart grew cold." To Kotlyarov, who enthusiastically proves that the new government has given the poor Cossacks rights and equality, Grigory objects: “This government, apart from ruin, gives nothing to the Cossacks! Where did this alignment go? Take the Red Army. The platoon leader is in chrome boots, and Vanek is in windings. I saw the commissar covered in leather, both his pants and his jacket, and the other one didn’t have enough leather for his boots. Even if the year of their power has passed, and they will take root, where will equality go?” Melekhov’s soul suffers “because he stood on the brink in the struggle of two principles, denying both of them.” Judging by his thoughts and actions, he was inclined to look for peaceful ways to resolve life’s contradictions. Justifying the “Upper Don Vendee”, which arose as a result of the Bolshevik policy of “decossackization of the Don,” he, nevertheless, did not want to respond with cruelty to cruelty: he ordered the release of the captured Cossack Khoper, released those arrested from prison, and rushed to save the communists Kotlyarov and Koshevoy.

Civil strife exhausted Melekhov, but his human feelings did not fade away. So he, smiling, listened for a long time to the cheerful chirping of the children. “How these kids’ hair smells! The sun, grass, a warm pillow and something else infinitely familiar. And they themselves - this flesh of his flesh - are like tiny steppe birds... Gregory’s eyes were obscured by a foggy haze of tears...” This is universal - the most precious thing in “Quiet Don”, his living soul. The more Melekhov was drawn into the whirlpool of the civil war, the more desirable his dream of peaceful labor became: “...Walking along the soft arable furrow as a plowman, whistling at the bulls, listening to the blue trumpet call of a crane, affectionately removing the deposited silver of cobwebs from his cheeks and continuously drinking the wine smell of autumn, the earth raised by the plow, and in return - bread cut by the blades of the roads.” After seven years of war, after another injury while serving in the Red Army, which gave him the moral right to realize his peaceful dream, Grigory made plans for the future: “... He will take off his overcoat and boots at home, put on spacious chiriki... It would be nice to take the chapigi with his hands and follow the wet furrow behind the plow, greedily taking in with your nostrils the damp and insipid smell of loosened earth...” Having escaped from Fomin’s gang and getting ready for Kuban, he repeated his cherished words to Aksinya: “I don’t disdain any work. My hands need to work, not fight. My whole soul ached..."

From grief, loss, wounds, and wandering in search of social justice, Melekhov grew old early and lost his former prowess. However, he did not lose “the humanity in man”; his feelings and experiences - always sincere - did not dull, but, perhaps, only intensified. Manifestations of his responsiveness and sympathy for people are especially expressed in the final parts of the work. The hero is shocked by the sight of the dead: “baring his head, trying not to breathe, carefully,” he circles around the dead old man, stretched out on the scattered golden wheat. Driving through places where the chariot of War was rolling, he sadly stops in front of the corpse of a tortured woman, straightens her clothes, and invites Prokhor to bury her. He buried the innocently murdered, kind and hardworking grandfather Sashka under the same poplar tree where the latter had buried him and Aksinya’s daughter. “...Gregory lay down on the grass not far from this small, dear cemetery and looked for a long time at the blue sky majestically stretched above him. Somewhere there, in the upper boundless expanses, the winds were blowing, cold clouds illuminated by the sun were floating, and on the earth, which had just received the cheerful horseman and drunkard Grandfather Sashka, life was still boiling furiously..." This picture, full of sadness and deep philosophical content, the mood echoes an episode from L. N. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” when the wounded Andrei Bolkonsky sees the bottomless, calm sky of Austerlitz above him.

In the stunning scene of Aksinya’s funeral, we see a grief-stricken man who has drunk to the brim a full cup of suffering, a man who has aged before his time, and we understand: only a great, albeit wounded, heart could feel the grief of loss with such profound force. Grigory Melekhov showed extraordinary courage in his search for the truth. But for him she is not just an idea, some distant symbol of a better human existence. He is looking for its embodiment in life. Coming into contact with many small private truths, and ready to accept each one, he discovers their inconsistency when confronted with life. The internal conflict is resolved for Gregory by renouncing war and weapons. Heading to his native farm, he threw it away and “carefully wiped his hands on the floor of his overcoat.” What will happen to the man, Grigory Melekhov, who did not accept this warring world, this “bewildered existence”? What will happen to him if he, like a female little bustard, who is unable to frighten off the volleys of guns, having traveled all the roads of war, stubbornly strives for peace, for life, for work on earth? The author does not answer these questions. Melekhov was not trusted when he could still count on it. The truthful artist M. Sholokhov could not change anything in his fate and did not succumb to the temptation to embellish the ending. Melekhov's tragedy, reinforced in the novel by the tragedy of almost all the people close and dear to him, reflects the drama of an entire region that has undergone a violent “class remake.” With his novel, M. Sholokhov also addresses our time, teaching us to look for moral and aesthetic values not on the paths of class intolerance and war, but on the paths of peace and humanism, brotherhood and mercy.