Mikhail Solomintsev. The monstrous absurdity of war in the depiction of Mikhail Sholokhov in the epic novel "Quiet Don" How the monstrous absurdity of war is shown

Sholokhov "Quiet Flows the Don"

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

The epic novel Quiet Flows the 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.

Several families are at the center of Sholokhov's narrative: the Melekhovs, the Korshunovs, the Mokhovs, the Koshevs, and the Listnitskys. This is no coincidence: 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 sharp, 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." From the Turkish war, he brought a Turkish wife. He loved her, in the evenings, when the “dawns wither”, carried her in his arms on the top of the mound, “sat next to her, and for a long time they looked at the steppe.” And when the angry crowd approached their house, Prokofy with a saber stood up for his beloved wife.

From the first pages appear proud, with an independent character, people capable of great feeling. So from the story of grandfather Gregory, the beautiful and at the same time tragic enters the novel "Quiet Flows the Don". 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,” Sholokhov admitted. The writer was also under the influence of the charm of Natalya, Ilyinichna, Aksinya, Dunyashka. The main values of the Melekhovs are moral, human: benevolence, responsiveness, generosity and, most importantly, diligence.

In the Cossack environment, a person was valued in relation to work. “He is a fiance at least somewhere,” Natalya’s mother says about Grigory, “and their family is very hardworking ... A hardworking family and in abundance.” “The Melekhovs are glorious Cossacks,” Grishak’s grandfather echoes her. “In his heart, Miron Grigorievich liked Grishka for his Cossack prowess, for his love for housekeeping and work. The old man singled him out from the crowd of stanitsa guys even when Grishka took the first prize for trick riding at the races.

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

"The monstrous absurdity of war" in the image of Sholokhov. The antithesis of peaceful life in the Quiet Don will be war, first World War I, then civil war. These wars will go through farms and villages, each family will have victims. Sholokhov's family will become a mirror reflecting the events of world history in a peculiar way.

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: the historical date will separate the world from the war. Rumors about her went around the farms: “The war will overtake ...”, “There will be no war, you can see by the harvest”, “But how is the war?”, “War, uncle!” The news of her caught the Cossacks at their usual work - they mowed down the corn (part three, ch. 3). The Melekhovs saw: a horse was walking with a “catchy name”; the rider, jumping up, shouted: “Scream!” Disturbing news gathered a crowd in the square (ch. 4). "One word in a diverse crowd: mobilization."

Sholokhov, in his own way, solves the collision "a man at war." In "The Quiet Don" we will not find descriptions of exploits, admiration for heroism, military courage, rapture 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 acquainted with the heroes of the novel, we will notice that everyone 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 cavalry trampled the ripened bread”, how a hundred “knead bread with iron horseshoes”, how “a black marching column unfolded into a chain between the brown, unharvested rolls of mowed bread”, 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 in heart.”

The novel strongly expresses a moral protest against the senselessness of war, its inhumanity. Drawing episodes of baptism of fire, Sholokhov reveals the state of mind of a person who shed someone else's blood. In a chain of similar episodes, the scene “Gregory kills an Austrian. An Austrian was running along the garden fence. Melekhov caught up with him. “Inflamed by the madness that was going on around, he raised his saber,” lowered it on the temple of an unarmed soldier. “Elongated by fear”, his face “blackened cast-iron”, “skin hung like a red flap”, “blood fell in a crooked stream” - this “frame” was shot as if in slow motion. Grigory met the Austrian's gaze. Eyes drenched in mortal horror stared at him… Grigory, squinting, waved his saber. A blow with a long pull split the skull in two. The Austrian fell, clasping his hands, as if slipping; thumped on the stone of the pavement half of the skull.

The details of this scene are terrible! They don't let Gregory go. He, “I don’t know why myself,” went up to the Austrian soldier he had hacked to death. “He was lying there, by the playful braid of the lattice fence, stretching out his dirty brown palm, as if for alms. Gregory looked him in the face. It seemed to him small, almost childish, despite the drooping mustache and the tormented - whether by suffering, or by the former joyless life - twisted, stern mouth ...

Grigory ... stumbling over to the horse. His step was confused and heavy, as if he were carrying an unbearable load behind his shoulders; I bend and bewilderment crumpled my soul.

A terrible picture in all its details will long stand before Grigory's eyes, painful memories will disturb him for a long time. When meeting with his brother, he confesses: “I, Petro, have worn out my soul. I’m so unfinished all at once… It’s as if I’ve been under the millstones, they crumpled and spat out… My conscience is killing me. I stabbed one with a lance near Leshniuv. In the heat of the moment. It was impossible otherwise... And why did I cut down this entogo? Dreaming at night…”.

Gregory watched with interest the changes that took place with his comrades in a hundred ... Changes were made on every face, each in his own way nurtured and grew the seeds sown by the war.

The changes in Gregory himself were striking: he was "bent ... by the war, sucked the blush from his face, painted him with bile." And inside he became completely different : “Grigory firmly cherished the Cossack honor, caught the opportunity to show selfless courage, took risks, went wild, went disguised to the rear of the Austrians, removed outposts without blood, jigitirovat the Cossack and felt that the pain over the person that crushed him in the first days of the war had gone forever . His heart hardened, 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 someone else's life and with his own; that's why he was known as brave - he served four St. George's crosses and four medals. At rare parades he stood at the regimental banner, fanned by the powder smoke of many wars; but he knew that he would not laugh again, as before, he knew that his eyes had sunken in and his cheekbones were sharply sticking out; he knew that it was difficult for him, kissing a child, to openly look into clear eyes; Gregory knew what price he had paid for the full bow of crosses and production”(part four, ch. 4).

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

The voice of the author breaks into the epic narrative: "They imperiously pulled their native kurens to themselves, and there was no such force that could keep the Cossacks from spontaneous attraction home." Everyone wanted to be at home, "just look with one eye." And, as if fulfilling this desire, Sholokhov draws a farm, "like a widow's bloodless", where "life went on sale - like hollow water in the Don."

So through the battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions, Sholokhov leads us to comprehend the "monstrous absurdity of war."

How does Sholokhov paint the world torn apart by the revolution? One of the author's favorite techniques is the story-preliminary. Thus, at the end of the first chapter of the fifth part of the novel, we read: “Until January, they lived quietly on the Tatarsky farm. The Cossacks who returned from the front rested near their wives, ate, did not feel that at the thresholds of the kurens they were guarded by bitter misfortunes and hardships than those that they had to endure in the war they had gone through.

"The worst troubles" are a revolution and a civil war that broke the usual way of life. The essence of the events depicted in the novel is truly tragic, they affect the fate of vast sections of the population. More than seven hundred characters, main and episodic, named by name and nameless, act in The Quiet Don; and the writer is concerned about their fate.

There is a name for what happened on the Don during the years of the civil war - “cossackization of the Cossacks”, accompanied by mass terror, which caused retaliatory cruelty. "Black rumors" about extraordinary commissions and revolutionary tribunals spread around the farms, the court of which was "simple: an accusation, a couple of questions, a sentence - and under a machine-gun burst." The author writes about the atrocities of the Red Army in the farms (part six, ch. 16). Just as cool were the courts-martial of the Don Cossacks. We see Reds cut down with special cruelty. Informing the facts with great persuasiveness, Sholokhov cites documents: a list of those executed from the Podtelkov detachment (part five, ch. 11) and a list of the executed hostages of the Tatarsky farm (part six, ch. 24).

How do the Cossacks themselves perceive this time?

Petro Melekhov: “Look how the people were divided, bastards! It was as if they had ridden with a plow: one in one direction, the other in the other, as if under a plowshare. Damn life, and terrible time! One does not guess the other...
“Here you are,” he abruptly translated the conversation, “you are my brother, but I don’t understand you, by God!” I feel that you are somehow leaving me ... I'm telling the truth? - and answered himself: - The truth. You're getting muddled... I'm afraid you'll go over to the Reds... You, Grishatka, haven't found yourself yet.
- Did you find it? asked Gregory.
- Found. I fell into my furrow ... You can’t draw me to the red lasso. The Cossacks are against them, and I am against them.”
“Miron Grigorievich spoke in a new way, with ripened anger:
- And through what life collapsed? Who is the cause? What a damn power!.. I worked all my life, wheezing bent, then washed, and in order for me to live equally with the entim, what finger did not stir to get out of poverty? No, we’ll wait a little! .. "

"People pitted"- Gregory will think about what is happening. “The people have grown mad, they have become rabid,” the author adds on his own behalf. He does not forgive cruelty to anyone: neither Polovtsev, who hacked Chernetsov and ordered the killing 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 Tatarsky, burned Korshunov's hut, and then set fire to seven more houses; does not forgive Mitka Korshunov, who "slaughtered the entire Koshevoy family."

"People pitted", - we remember when we read about the execution of the commander of the Likhachev detachment, captured by the rebels: “He was not shot ... Seven miles from Veshenskaya, in sandy, sternly frowning breakers, he was brutally hacked to death by escorts. They gouged out his eyes while alive, cut off his hands, ears, nose, and scratched his face with checkers. They unbuttoned their pants and abused, defiled a large, courageous, beautiful body. They abused the bleeding stump, and then one of the escorts stepped on the flimsy trembling chest, on the body that was thrown on its back, and with one blow cut off the head obliquely” (part six, ch. 31).

"People pitted"- these words about how they killed twenty-five communists, led by Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov? “The escorts beat them, driving them into a heap, like sheep, they beat them for a long time and cruelly ... Then everything was as if in a heavy fog. For thirty versts they walked through continuous farmsteads, met at each farmstead by crowds of torturers. Old men, women, teenagers beat, spat on the swollen, blood-drenched ... faces of captured communists.

And one more execution - Podtelkov and his detachment.

The harsh time confronted them all with the need to make a choice.
What side are you on?
- You seem to have accepted the red faith?
- Were you in white? White! Officer, huh?

These questions were asked to the same person - Grigory Melekhov, and he himself could not answer them to himself. "To whom to lean?" - a question that excites the consciousness of the hero Sholokhov, about this his anxiety and thought, conveyed through an internal monologue:

“He also broke his fatigue, acquired in the war. I wanted to turn away from everything seething with hatred, hostile and incomprehensible world. There, behind, everything was confused, contradictory. It was difficult to grope for 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, and then he took thought, his heart went cold. “Is Izvarin really right? Whom to lean on?" Grigory thought about this indistinctly, leaning against the back of his purse. But, when he imagined how he would prepare harrows for spring, weave a manger out of red steel, and when the earth undresses and dries, he will leave for the steppe; holding on to the chipigi with hands bored with work, he will go after the plow, feeling its lively movement and jolts; imagining how he would inhale the sweet spirit of young grass and black soil raised by plowshares, it warmed his soul. I wanted to clean up cattle, throw hay, breathe in the withered smell of sweet clover, wheatgrass, and the spicy smell of manure. I wanted peace and silence, - that’s why Grigory cherished shy joy in his stern eyes, looking around ... Sweet and thick, like hops, life seemed at that time here, in the wilderness.(part five, ch. 13).

On one fate, the whole fracture of society is shown. Even though he is a Cossack, he is still primarily a peasant, a farmer. He is the breadwinner. And now the breaking of this breadwinner is the whole civil war.

Gregory's dream to live 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 mood of the hero: “Grigory would have a rest, sleep off! And then walk along the soft arable furrow with a plow, whistle at the bulls, listen to the crane's blue trumpet call, gently remove the alluvial silver cobwebs from the cheeks and inseparably drink the wine smell of the earth raised by the plow.

And in return for this - bread cut by the blades of the roads. On the roads there are crowds of undressed, corpse-black from the dust of prisoners ... In the farms, amateurs search the families of the Cossacks who left with the Reds, flog the wives and mothers of the apostates ... Discontent, fatigue, anger accumulated ”(part six, ch. 10).

“The fate of Grigory Melekhov”, “The tragedy of Grigory Melekhov. Why was Grigory Melekhov chosen for the role of the central character. Indeed, 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 characters profess, in the peculiarities of their emotional and psychological make-up.

Grigory Melekhov, unlike other heroes of The Quiet Flows the Don, is a bright personality, a unique individuality, a whole, extraordinary nature. He is sincere and honest in his thoughts and actions (this is especially evident in his relationship with Natalya and Aksinya: Grigory's last meeting with Natalya (part seven, ch. 7), Natalya's death and the experiences associated with it (part seven, ch. 16 -18), the death of Aksinya (part eight, ch. 17). Gregory is distinguished by a sharp emotional reaction to everything that happens, he has a heart that is responsive to the impressions of life. He has a developed sense of pity, compassion, this can be judged from such scenes, for example , as “At the hayfield”, when Grigory accidentally cut a wild duckling (part one, ch. 9), the scene with the murdered Austrian (part three, ch. 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 as a person capable of action. The following episodes can serve as an example: a fight with Stepan Astakhov because of Aksinya (part one, ch. 12), leaving with Aksinya to Yagodnoye (part two, ch. 11-12), a collision with a sergeant-major (part three, ch. 11) , a break with Podtelkov (part three, ch. 12), a clash with General Fitskhalaurov (part seven, ch. 10), a decision, without waiting for an amnesty, to return to the farm (part eight, ch. 18). Bribes the sincerity of his motives - he never lied to himself, in his doubts and throwing. We are convinced of this by his internal monologues (part six, ch. 21, 28). Note that he is the only character who is given the right to monologues - "thoughts" that reveal his spiritual beginning.

"Hero and time", "hero and circumstances", the search for oneself as a person - the eternal theme of art has become the main one in "Quiet Don". In this search - the meaning of the existence of Grigory Melekhov in the novel. “I am looking for a way out,” he says of himself. At the same time, he always faces the need for a choice that was not easy and simple. The very situations in which the hero found himself prompted him to act. So, the entry of Gregory into the rebel detachment is to some extent a forced step. It was preceded by the excesses of the Red Army men who came to the farm, their intention to kill Melekhov.

His relations with friends sharply worsened: Koshevoy, Kotlyarov. The scene of the night dispute in the executive committee is indicative, where Gregory “came out of old friendship to talk, to say that he was boiling in his chest.” The dispute turned out to be sharp, the positions were irreconcilable. Kotlyarov threw in the face of Grigory: “... you have become a stranger. You are an enemy of the Soviet government!.. The Cossacks have nothing to stagger, they stagger anyway. And don't get in our way. Stop!.. Farewell!” Shtokman, who became aware of this collision, said: “Melekhov, although temporarily, slipped away. It is he who should be taken into action! .. 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, feeling as if he had stepped over the threshold, and what seemed unclear suddenly rose with the utmost brightness ... And because he was on the verge of a struggle between two principles, denying both of them, a muffled incessant irritation was born.”

He "painfully tried to sort out the turmoil of thoughts." His "soul rushed about" like "a wolf flagged on a raid in search of a way out, in resolving contradictions." Behind him were days of doubt, "heavy internal struggle", "search for the truth." In it, "its own, Cossack, sucked with mother's milk throughout life, prevailed over great human truth." He knew the "truth of Garangi" and anxiously asked himself: "Is Izvarin really right?" He himself says about himself: “I am thrashing like in a snowstorm in the steppe…” But Grigory Melekhov is “thrashing”, “looking for the truth”, not from emptiness and thoughtlessness. He yearns for such a truth, "under the wing of which everyone could warm up." And, from his point of view, neither the Whites nor the Reds have such a truth: “There is no one truth in life. It can be seen whoever defeats whom will devour him ... And I was looking for the bad truth. My soul ached, it swayed back and forth ... ”These searches, according to him, turned out to be“ in vain and empty. And this also determined the tragedy of his fate.

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

"The monstrous absurdity of war" in the novel "Quiet Flows the Don"

September

Let us recall the scene of Napoleon awarding a randomly selected Russian soldier (“War and Peace”). “It was an explosion of bestial enthusiasm,” as it was written in the diary of a murdered Cossack (entry dated September 2, part 3, ch. 11), over whose life the staff clerks laughed. This diary just mentions "War and Peace", where Tolstoy speaks of a line between two enemy troops - a line of uncertainty, as if separating the living from the dead.

, the inhumanity of war.

The battle scenes in themselves are of no interest to Sholokhov. He is worried about something else - what does war do to a person. A moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute sensation of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, a keen 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 sacrifices laid on the altar of someone's ambition) - that's what the hero thinks about.

What figurative means does the author use?

he shows how the Cossacks are copying page leads diary one of the Cossacks letters from the front; lyrically colored campfire scenes breaks the voice of the author of the hard life of the hair

Sholokhov's visual means are varied: he shows how the Cossacks write off "Prayer from the gun", "Prayer from the battle", "Prayer during the raid"; leads pages diary one of the Cossacks letters from the front; lyrically colored campfire scenes- the Cossacks sing "The Cossack went to a foreign land far away ..."; the voice of the author bursts into the epic narrative, addressing the widows: “Tear on yourself, dear, the collar of the last shirt! Tear your hair, liquid from a bleak, hard life, bite your blood-bitten lips, break your hands mutilated by work and fight on the ground at the threshold of an empty hut!

Gregory's qualities

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

Following the traditions of Russian literature, through battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions (the campfire scene is a soldier's song), Sholokhov leads to an understanding of the strangeness, unnaturalness, inhumanity of war.

Houses

Houses: (according to 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 (pick up episodes).
4) Reread v.2, part 5, ch. 1, 12, 13,24,30
5) Draw up a plan "The fate of Grigory Melekhov."

The scene of the collision of the Cossacks with the Germans resembles the pages of Tolstoy's works. The war in the image of Sholokhov is completely devoid of a touch of romance, a heroic halo. The people didn't do the work. This skirmish of people distraught with fear was called a feat. (Part 3 Ch.9)

Let us recall the scene of Napoleon awarding a randomly selected Russian soldier (“War and Peace”). “It was an explosion of bestial enthusiasm,” as it was written in the diary of a murdered Cossack (entry of September 2, part 3, ch. 11), over whose life the staff clerks laughed. This diary just mentions "War and Peace", where Tolstoy speaks of a line between two enemy troops - a line of uncertainty, as if separating the living from the dead

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, a keen 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 sacrifices laid on the altar of someone's ambition) - that's what the hero thinks about.

Sholokhov's figurative means are varied: he shows how the Cossacks write off "Prayer from the gun", "Prayer from the battle", "Prayer during the raid"; gives pages of the diary of one of the Cossacks, letters from the front; scenes by the fire are lyrically painted - the Cossacks sing "The Cossack went to a foreign land far away ..."; the voice of the author bursts into the epic narrative, addressing the widows: “Tear on yourself, dear, the collar of the last shirt! Tear your hair, which is liquid from a bleak, hard life, bite your blood-bitten lips, break your hands mutilated by work and fight on the ground at the threshold of an empty hut!

Following the traditions of Russian literature, through battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions (the campfire scene is a soldier's song), Sholokhov leads to an understanding of the strangeness, unnaturalness, inhumanity of war.

Homework: (book 2 each) 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 (pick up episodes). 4) Reread v.2, part 5, ch. 1, 12, 13,24,30 5) Make a plan "The fate of Grigory Melekhov."

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

The novel (immortal work) by M. A. Sholokhov “The Quiet Don” among books about pre-revolutionary events, the Civil War stands out for its originality. How 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 devoted to the life and life of the Don Cossacks before and at the very beginning of the imperialist war.

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

What is the role of the epigraph in this work?

In the old Cossack songs, taken by the author as an epigraph to the novel, a story 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 thing (“horse hooves”), is sown with the wrong thing (“Cossack heads”), the wrong watered and the wrong crop will be harvested. In the songs composed by the Cossacks, the inconsistency of their entire unfortunate tribe is indicated - 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 very elegiac structure of the Cossack song is complex according to the formula of negative parallelism at the beginning (“Our glorious little land is not plowed with plows ... our little land is plowed with horse hooves ...”) and is continued by a single-term parallel, the silent part of which is too terrible (“And the glorious little land is sown with Cossack heads"). These are not ordinary peasant everyday life, not sowing, but that terrible, disgusting thing that blows up the peaceful way of life and fills the waves “in the quiet Don with fatherly, motherly tears.” Here, the atmosphere of the Cossack way of life is not simply written out, the main idea of the whole work is anticipated here.

How are the 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 Don, long sown with Cossacks, not knowing peace. And then the “quiet Don” is an oxymoron, a mutually contradictory combination of words: this is exactly what the old Cossack songs are composed of, taken by Sholokhov as an epigraph to the novel .)

Consider how the First World War is depicted in the novel Quiet Flows the Don.

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

The war with Germany invaded the life of the Cossacks of the Tatarsky farm with great national grief. (Message from a history teacher about World War I.)

In the spirit of old beliefs, the writer draws a gloomy landscape, foreshadowing trouble: “At night, clouds thickened beyond the Don, burst dry and rolling thunderclaps, but did not fall on the ground, puffing with feverish heat, rain, lightning fired in vain ... At night, an owl roared on the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible screams hung over the farm, and the owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery ...

To be thin, - the old people prophesied ... - The war will overtake.

And now the well-established peaceful life is sharply violated, events are developing more and more disturbingly and rapidly. In their formidable whirlpool, people whirl like chips in a flood, and the peaceful, quiet Don is shrouded in powder smoke and the burning of conflagrations (we can see this in the mobilization scene - part 3, ch. IV).

As a tragedy, Gregory experienced the first human blood shed by him. Let's see a fragment of the movie "Quiet Flows the Don". And now let's read the episode of the novel - the emotional experiences of the hero (part 3, ch. X).

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

The scene of the collision of the Cossacks with the Germans resembles the pages of the works of L. N. Tolstoy.

- Give examples of the truthful depiction of war in Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace".

The war in the image of Sholokhov is completely devoid of a touch of romance, a heroic halo. The people didn't do the work. This skirmish 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, brave, but there are also cruel ones.

Which officer can be classified as cruel? (Chubaty.) Describe it.

(Such an inhuman position of Chubaty, even in conditions of war, turns out to be unacceptable for Grigory. That is why he shoots at Chubaty when he cut down the captured Magyar for no reason.)

The war in the novel is presented in blood, suffering.

Give examples of the suffering of the heroes of the novel in the war.

How did the war affect Grigory Melekhov?

(“... Grigory firmly cherished the honor of the Cossacks, seized the opportunity to show selfless courage, took risks, went wild, went disguised to the rear of the Austrians, removed outposts without bloodshed<...>the Cossack was horse-riding and felt that the pain over the person that crushed him in the first days of the war had gone irrevocably. The heart became hardened, hardened, and just as the 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, ch. XX.)

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

Fate brings him to Garanzha, who turned Grigory's life upside down.

Why did Garanga's instructions sink into Gregory's soul?

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

Here begins Gregory's attempts to understand the complex structure of life. 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 generalizing report on the topic: “Sholokhov’s depiction of the events of the First World War in the novel “Quiet Flows the Don””.)

Consider how the Civil War is depicted in the novel.

The history teacher tells about the events on the Don after the October Revolution.

Grigory is asked painful questions by the October Revolution, which split the whole world, and the Cossacks in particular, into friends and foes. Sholokhov again puts his hero before a choice, and again different people inspire him with different truths.

How does communication with Izvarin and Podtelkov affect Grigory?

(The centurion Efim Izvarin, a well-educated man, was an “inveterate autonomist Cossack.” 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, ch. II).It is no coincidence that the hero falls under the influence of separatist ideas.

Fedor Podtelkov inspires Grigory quite differently, believing that the Cossacks have common interests with all Russian peasants and workers, and defending the idea of elected people's power. And not so much education and logic, as in the case of Izvarin, but the strength of inner conviction makes Grigory believe Podtelkov. This strength is clearly expressed in portrait details: Grigory felt the “lead weight” of Podtelkov’s eyes when he “fixed his unhappy gaze on his interlocutor” (Part 5, Ch. II). After the conversation with Podtelkov, Grigory painfully tried to sort out the confusion of thoughts, to think over something, to decide.)

The search for truth for Gregory is not an abstract task, but a problem of life choice, because they occur at the moment of the most acute confrontation between various political forces that decide the fate of the Cossacks and the whole country. The tension of this confrontation is evidenced by the scene of the arrival in Novocherkassk for negotiations with the government of Kaledin of the delegation of the Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by the same Podtelkov (Part 5, Ch. X).

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

What will affect the fate of the protagonist of the novel?

(Let's look at a fragment of the movie "The Execution of Officers".)

What is Grigory going through after these tragic events?

(“The weariness acquired in the war also broke. He wanted to turn away from everything seething with hatred, hostile and incomprehensible world. There, behind, everything was confused, contradictory. It was difficult to find the right path; , and there was no certainty - whether he was walking along the right path. He was drawn to the Bolsheviks - he was walking, he led others, and then he took thought, his heart went cold. "Is Izvarin really right? Whom to lean against?" Grigory, leaning against the back of the bag, but when he imagined how he would prepare harrows, carts for spring, weave a manger out of red rattan, and when ... the earth dries up, he will leave for the steppe; its lively beating and tremors; imagining how it would inhale the sweet spirit of young grass and the black soil raised by the plowshares, which had not yet lost the insipid aroma of snowy dampness, it warmed my soul. ika, couch grass, spicy manure scent. I wanted peace and quiet”- part 5, ch. XIII.)

Unjustified inhumanity pushed Melekhov away from the Bolsheviks, as it contradicted his ideas of conscience and honor. Grigory Melekhov many times had to observe the cruelty of both whites and reds, so the slogans of class hatred began to seem fruitless to him: “I wanted to turn away from the whole hostile and incomprehensible world seething with hatred. He was drawn to the Bolsheviks - he walked, he led others, and then he took thought, his heart went cold. Kotlyarov, enthusiastically arguing that the new government gave the poor Cossacks rights, equality, Grigory objects: “This government, besides ruin, does not give anything to the Cossacks!”

Gregory after some time begins his service in the White Cossack units.

Viewing a fragment of the film "The Execution of Podtelkovites" or reading a fragment from the novel (part 5, ch. XXX), from the biography of the writer himself.

Before watching, ask a question:

How does Gregory perceive the execution?

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

From 1918 to the beginning of 1920, the Sholokhov family was alternately in the villages of Elanskaya and Karginskaya in the Verkhnedonsky district. It was a difficult time: white and red waves swept the Don region - the Civil War was raging. The teenager Misha “absorbed” the events that were taking place (and his head is good - his mind is bold and daring, his memory is excellent): battles, executions, poverty. Whites against reds, reds against whites, Cossacks against Cossacks. The stories are one more terrible than the other ... One, Migulin, a handsome, light-haired guy did not want to get under a bullet, he begged: “Do not kill! Have pity! .. Three kids ... a girl ... ”What a pity there is! With a shoed heel in the ear - blood shot out of the other with a tarsal. They lifted it up and put it in the pit... And this guy, they say, deserved four crosses in German, a full Knight of St. George... Here Kharlampy Yermakov entered the hut. Usually cheerful, today he was gloomy and angry. He began to talk about the execution of the Podtelkovites in the Ponomarev farm. And Podtyolkov was also good, he says. Under Glubokaya, on his orders, officers were also shot without any pity ... He was not the only one to tan other people's skins. Regurgitated.

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

“The February days of 1919 on the Upper Don were languid, cold, gray. The inhabitants of the hushed farms and villages, with a kind of nasty, sucking feeling in their stomach, were waiting for the onset of twilight, listening to the footsteps, the screeching of the sleigh runners behind the wall. The hour of arrests was approaching, when the Red Army teams cordoned off the streets, broke into the huts and took the Cossacks to the jail. No one came back from the prison alive. At the same time, when a new batch of arrested people was brought to the cold one, the old ones were taken out of it, and the place was vacated. There were no spacious prison houses on the Don, there was no need for them in the old days. Those sentenced to death were taken out of the basement with their hands tied behind their backs, they were beaten with rifle butts in the back, which made them fall on the sled like sacks of flour, stacked, alive, in piles and carried out of the outskirts.

After midnight, for the inhabitants of the huts, which had already been visited by the Chekists, a terrible torture began. Behind the outskirts, a machine gun started its tatakane - sometimes in short, but frequent bursts, then long, choking, hysterical. Then there was silence, but not for long, it was interrupted by rifle and revolver shots dryly clicking like firewood in the stove - they finished off the wounded. Often after that, at someone's base, a dog began to howl - apparently he smelled the death of the owner-breadwinner. And in the huts, women howled at him, holding their heads, whose son or husband could take a fierce death that night. Until his death, Mikhail remembered this howl, from which the blood ran cold in his veins.

Most of the Cossacks who rebelled against Soviet power in April and did not leave 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 farms and winter quarters, those who were mobilized by Krasnov against their will remained. They arbitrarily withdrew from the front in January, let the Reds into the Upper Don, believing the promises of the Soviet government and its new henchmen Mironov and Fomin that they would all be given an amnesty for this. These people had already fought to the point of nausea - both for the German war and for the 18th year, and now they wanted only a peaceful life in their kurens. They have already forgotten to think about defending their rights before people from other cities, as in December 17, when they supported the Kamensky Revolutionary Committee with this condition. It became clear to everyone - they would have to share, against the red muzhik Russia, with all its might, leaning from the north, you can’t trample. The agreement with the Red Army was simple - you do not touch us, we do not touch you, and whoever remembers the old will be out of sight. The neutrality of the Don was beneficial to Moscow: if successful, the Kubans, exhausted by the war, could follow the example of the Dons, and this promised an early victory for the Red Army in the south, since Denikin's army consisted mainly of Kubans and Dons. But people called “commissioners 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 laid down their arms, but also the “grandfathers” - the Knights of St. George, the living glory of the Don, who refused to take off their crosses, Cossack caps, rip stripes off your pants. Machine guns rattled behind the outskirts of the villages, in which, until recently, on Christmas holidays, lively dark-haired young people in excellent fur coats, with diamond rings on short thick fingers, came from Trotsky’s headquarters, congratulated on a bright holiday, generously treated them to wine brought on a troika, gave packs of royal money, convinced: “You live in peace in your villages, and we will live in peace. 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 in just one week - more than 400 people, and in total about eight thousand people died on the Upper Don at that time. But the executions of the envoys of Sverdlov Syrtsov and Beloborodov-Weisbart, the regicide, were not enough ... In Vyoshenskaya, dark-haired young people ordered the bells to ring, drunken Red Army soldiers herded Cossacks, women and children into the cathedral. Here, a blasphemous act awaited them: an 80-year-old priest, who served in Vyoshenskaya even during the abolition of serfdom, was married with a mare...

The secret directive on "decossackization", signed on January 24, 1919 by Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, was carried out. A cadaverous smell was drawn to the Quiet Don, which in its entire history did not know either enemy occupation or mass executions ...

The next morning mournful caravans were equipped for the outskirts. Relatives of the executed dug them up, somehow covered with earth, convulsively, with difficulty overcoming dizziness and holding back sobs, turned the bodies over, pulled the dead by the arms and legs, looking for their own, peered into the white faces with frosted hair. If they found it, they dragged the dead man to the sleigh under the mittens, and his head, with the pupils stopped forever, dangled like a drunkard's. The horses neighed uneasily, squinting their big eyes at the terrible load. But it was also considered a good thing to get the deceased to relatives in those days of pitch sorrow - Bukanovsky commissar Malkin, for example, left the executed to lie naked in a ravine, and forbade burying ...

Chekists at that time sang a ditty:

Here is your honor in the dead of midnight -
Fast march to rest!
Let the bastard rot under the snow
With us - 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 Pleshakov farm, rented half 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 no one knows where. Chekists were already coming for them from the Yelanskaya village, for a long time, suspiciously asking Alexander Mikhailovich who he was, then they left, leaving before leaving, saying: "Maybe we'll see each other again ..." And now my father had reason to be afraid of such dates, for nothing Cossack. At the very beginning of the 17th year, he received an inheritance from his mother, the merchant's wife Maria Vasilievna, nee Mokhova, but not a small one - 70 thousand rubles. At that time, Alexander Mikhailovich served as the manager of a steam mill in Pleshakovo, and he decided to buy it, along with the mill 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 next to the chapel, under a tussock, under the shaggy cover of an old wormwood, a little bustard female 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, the mutual cruelty of people with the life-giving force of nature. Reading these lines, we involuntarily recall the finale of I. S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”: “No matter how 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 calmness, about that great calmness of “indifferent nature”; they speak of 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 The Quiet Flows the 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 dark will
And the bitter smoke of cities.
Others from the ranks of the military,
Noble ruined nests,
Where they spent on the graveyard
Fathers and brothers of the slain.
In some hitherto not extinguished
Hops of immemorial fires
And the steppe, wild spirit is alive
And Razins, and Kudeyarov.
In others - devoid of all roots -
The pernicious spirit of the capital Neva:
Tolstoy and Chekhov, Dostoevsky -
Anguish and confusion of our days.
Some lift up on posters
Your nonsense about bourgeois evil,
About bright proletariats,
Petty-bourgeois paradise on earth...
In others, all the color, all the rot of empires,
All gold, all the ashes of ideas,
Shine all great fetishes
And all scientific superstitions.
Some go to free
Moscow and bind Russia again,
Others, having unbridled the elements,
They want to remake the whole world.
In both, the war breathed
Anger, greed, the dark drunkenness of revelry.
And after the heroes and leaders
A predator is sneaking in a greedy flock,
So that the power of Russia is boundless
Open and give to enemies;
To rot her heaps of wheat,
To dishonor her heaven
Devour riches, burn forests
And suck out the seas and ores.
And the roar of battles does not stop
All over the southern steppe
Among the golden splendors
Horses trampled reapers.
And there, and here between the rows
The same voice sounds:
“Whoever is not for us is against us.
No one is indifferent: the truth is with us.”
And I stand alone between them
In roaring flames and smoke
And with all your might
I pray for both.
(1919)

"Quiet Flows the Don" by M. A. Sholokhov

(System of lessons)

The significance of the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" is due to the fact that it was written by the greatest writer of the 20th century, who gained worldwide fame. It was for this novel that Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize. Quiet Don is a national contribution to world culture. This circumstance should determine the place of the work in the monographic theme “M. A. Sholokhov. The initial theses that guide the methodological solution of this topic can be formulated as follows:

“The Quiet Flows the Don” should be considered in the context of the entire work of the writer, who came to literature with the theme of the birth of a new society in the throes and tragedies of social struggle. This topic was determined by the scope and significance of the events that took place, a contemporary and participant of which was Sholokhov himself. The contextual principle of the review will make it possible to establish not only problem-thematic, but also aesthetic connections of the writer's works, which will give the reader the opportunity to get to know Sholokhov's artistic world more deeply, to feel the features of his talent.

– The epic novel “Quiet Flows the 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.

“Each generation reads this novel in a new way, interprets the characters' characters, the origins of their tragedy in a new way. The task of the teacher is to help students understand the complex content of a large work, to bring them closer to understanding the author's version of the events "that shook the world." The system of review lessons on the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" can be presented in the following way:

First lesson. Word about Sholokhov. The idea and history of the creation of the novel "Quiet Flows the Don".(Introductory lecture by the teacher.)
Second lesson. Pictures of the life of the Don Cossacks on the pages of the novel. "Family Thought" in the novel "Quiet Flows the Don".(Work on individual episodes of the first part of the novel, determining its place in the general plan of the novel, in its compositional plan.)
Third lesson. "The monstrous absurdity of war" in the image of Sholokhov.(Conversation about what was read, commentary on individual scenes of the third - fifth parts of the novel, a generalization of the teacher.)
Fourth lesson. "In a world split in two." The Civil War on the Don in the image of Sholokhov.(The word of the teacher, a comparative analysis of individual episodes of the sixth and seventh parts of the novel.)
Fifth lesson. The fate of Grigory Melekhov.(Lesson-seminar.)

The novel "Quiet Don" will attract students with the novelty of life material. It very vividly shows the life of a Cossack farm in all its picturesqueness and multicolor, everyday life and in the fullness of human manifestation.

For the second lesson students will complete the following tasks: 1. Find answers to the questions in the first part of the novel: who are the Cossacks? What were they doing? What did they live? Why does Sholokhov write about them with love? Who does he talk about with particular sympathy? 2. Select the brightest episodes of the first part. How do they convey the beauty of the peasant life of the Cossacks, the poetry of their work? In what situations does the writer show his characters? 3. Highlight the description of the Don nature, the Cossack farm. What is their role? It is desirable that students do not pass by such episodes of the first part: “The Story of Prokofy Melekhov” (ch. 1), “Morning in the Melekhov family”, “On a fishing trip” (ch. 2), “On a hayfield” (ch. 9), scenes of courtship and wedding of Gregory and Natalia (ch. 15-22), conscription for military service, Gregory at the medical examination (part two, ch. 21).

Let us draw the students' attention to the fact that several families are at the center of Sholokhov's narrative: the Melekhovs, the Korshunovs, the Mokhovs, the Koshevs, and the Listnitskys. This is no coincidence: the patterns of the era are revealed not only in historical events, but also in the facts of private life, family relationships, where the power of traditions is especially strong and any break in them gives rise to sharp, dramatic conflicts.

The story about the fate of the Melekhov family begins with a sharp, dramatic plot, with the story of Prokofy Melekhov, who struck the farmers with his "outlandish act." From the Turkish war, he brought a Turkish wife. He loved her, in the evenings, when the “dawns wither”, carried her in his arms on the top of the mound, “sat next to her, and for a long time they looked at the steppe.” And when the angry crowd approached their house, Prokofy with a saber stood up for his beloved wife.

From the first pages appear proud, with an independent character, people capable of great feeling. So from the story of grandfather Gregory, the beautiful and at the same time tragic enters the novel "Quiet Flows the Don". 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,” Sholokhov admitted. The general structure of the narrative convinces that the writer was also under the influence of the charm of Natalya, Ilyinichna, Aksinya, Dunyashka. The main values of the Melekhovs are moral, human: benevolence, responsiveness, generosity and, most importantly, diligence.

In the Cossack environment, a person was valued in relation to work. “He is a fiance at least somewhere,” Natalya’s mother says about Grigory, “and their family is very hardworking ... A hardworking family and in abundance.” “The Melekhovs are glorious Cossacks,” Grishaka’s grandfather echoes her. “In his heart, Miron Grigorievich liked Grishka for his Cossack prowess, for his love for housekeeping and work. The old man singled him out from the crowd of stanitsa guys even when Grishka took the first prize for trick riding at the races. Many episodes convince of the validity of such a characterization of the Melekhovs.

The original idea of the novel was connected with the events of 1917, "with the participation of the Cossacks in Kornilov's campaign against Petrograd." In the process of work, Sholokhov significantly expanded the scope of the narrative, returned to the pre-war period, to 1912. In the life of the Cossack village, during everyday life, in the psychology of the Cossacks, he was looking for an explanation for the behavior of the heroes in the days of terrible trials. Therefore, the first part of the novel can be viewed as an expanded exposition of the novel The Quiet Flows the Don, the chronological framework of which is very clearly marked: May 1912 - March 1922. The expansion of the book's concept allowed the writer to capture "the people's life of Russia at its grandiose historical turning point." This conclusion can complete the second lesson on Sholokhov's novel.

"The monstrous absurdity of war" in the image of Sholokhov - such is the theme third lesson. Let's keep the students' attention on this wording: it indicates both the author's view of the event, and the attitude of the Cossacks to the war, and the nature of the narrative. How is this image, which has become a key one in the novel, revealed? This question will guide the analysis of the episodes of the third - fifth parts of the novel.

The antithesis of peaceful life in the Quiet Don will be war, first World War I, then civil war. These wars will go through farms and villages, each family will have victims. Sholokhov's family will become a mirror reflecting the events of world history in a peculiar way. Starting from the third part of the novel, the tragic will determine the tone of the story. For the first time, the tragic motif will sound in the epigraph:

What pages of the novel echo the tune of this old Cossack song? Let us turn to the beginning of the third part of the novel, here the date appears for the first time: "In March 1914 ..." This is a significant detail in the work: the historical date will separate the world from the war. Rumors about her went around the farms: “The war will overtake ...”, “There will be no war, you can see by the harvest”, “But how is the war?”, “War, uncle!” As you can see, the story of the war is born in the farm, in the very thick of people's life. The news of her caught the Cossacks at their usual work - they mowed down the corn (part three, ch. 3). The Melekhovs saw: a horse was walking with a “catchy name”; the rider, jumping up, shouted: “Scream!” Disturbing news gathered a crowd in the square (ch. 4). "One word in a diverse crowd: mobilization." The fourth chapter ends with the episode "At the station", from where trains with Cossack regiments left for the Russian-Austrian border. "War…"

The linkage of short episodes, the alarming tone conveyed by the words: "alarm", "mobilization", "war ..." - all this is connected with the date - 1914. The writer puts the word “War…” “War!” in a separate line twice. Pronounced with different intonation, it makes the reader think about the terrible meaning of what is happening. This word echoes the remark of an old railway worker who looked into the car, where “Petro Melekhov was steaming with the other thirty Cossacks”:

“You are my dear beef! And he shook his head reproachfully for a long time.

The emotion expressed in these words also contains a generalization. It is expressed more openly at the end of the seventh chapter: “Echelons… Echelons… Uncountable echelons! Through the arteries of the country, along the railways to the western border, the turbulent Russia is driving gray overcoat blood.

Let us single out other enlarged images that will appear on the pages of the novel: “the earth crucified by many hooves”, “the field of death”, on which people “have not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind”, “the monstrous absurdity of war” collided. Each of them is associated with separate sketches, episodes, reflections. There are also battle scenes in the "military" chapters, but they are not interesting to the author in and of themselves. Sholokhov, in his own way, solves the collision "a man at war." In "The Quiet Don" we will not find descriptions of exploits, admiration for heroism, military courage, rapture in battle, which would be natural in a story about the Cossacks. Sholokhov is interested in something else - what war does to a person. The isolation of this particular aspect of the topic will make it possible to feel the features of Sholokhov's psychologism.

Let us note in the conversation: the moral protest against the senselessness of war, its inhumanity is strongly expressed in the novel. Drawing episodes of baptism of fire, Sholokhov reveals the state of mind of a person who shed someone else's blood. In a chain of similar episodes, the scene “Gregory kills an Austrian” (part three, ch. 5) stands out for its psychological expressiveness, which caused the hero a strong shock. The commentary of this episode in the lesson is directed by such questions: what psychological shades can be distinguished in the description of the appearance of an Austrian? How does Sholokhov convey Grigory's fortune? What words express the author's assessment of what is happening? What does this scene reveal in the hero of the novel?

It is advisable in reading to convey the most important moments of the episode. An Austrian was running along the garden fence. Melekhov caught up with him. “Inflamed by the madness that was going on around, he raised his saber,” lowered it on the temple of an unarmed soldier. “Elongated by fear”, his face “blackened cast-iron”, “skin hung like a red flap”, “blood fell in a crooked stream” - this “frame” was shot as if in slow motion. Grigory met the Austrian's gaze. Eyes drenched in mortal horror stared at him… Grigory, squinting, waved his saber. A blow with a long pull split the skull in two. The Austrian fell, sticking out his arms, as if he had slipped; thumped on the stone of the pavement half of the skull.

The details of this scene are terrible! They don't let Gregory go. He, “not knowing why himself,” went up to the Austrian soldier he had hacked to death. “He was lying there, by the playful braid of the lattice fence, stretching out his dirty brown palm, as if for alms. Gregory looked him in the face. It seemed to him small, almost childlike, despite the drooping mustache and the tormented—whether by suffering or by the former joyless life—twisted, stern mouth...

Grigory ... stumbling over to the horse. His step was confused and heavy, as if he were carrying an unbearable load behind his shoulders; I bend and bewilderment crumpled my soul.

Several weeks of the war have passed, but the impressionable Grigory already sees its traces everywhere: “August was drawing to a close. In the gardens the leaves turned greasy yellow, from the stalk it was filled with a dying crimson, and from a distance it looked like the trees were in torn wounds and were bleeding with ore tree blood.

Gregory watched with interest the changes that took place with his comrades in a hundred ... Changes were made on every face, each in his own way nurtured and grew the seeds sown by the war.

The changes in Gregory himself were striking: he was "bent ... by the war, sucked the blush from his face, painted him with bile." And internally, he became completely different: “Grigory took a strong hold on the Cossack honor, seized the opportunity to show selfless courage, took risks, went wild, went disguised to the rear of the Austrians, removed outposts without bloodshed, horse-riding a Cossack and felt that the pain for a person that was irrevocably gone crushed him in the first days of the war. His heart hardened, 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 someone else's life and with his own; that's why he was known as brave - he served four St. George's crosses and four medals. At rare parades he stood at the regimental banner, fanned by the powder smoke of many wars; but he knew that he would not laugh again, as before, he knew that his eyes had sunken in and his cheekbones were sharply sticking out; he knew that it was difficult for him, kissing a child, to openly look into clear eyes; Gregory knew what price he had paid for the full bow of crosses and production” (part four, ch. 4).

Sholokhov diversifies the visual means, showing the Cossacks at war. Here they write off "Prayer from the gun", "Prayer from the battle", "Prayer during the raid." The Cossacks kept them under underwear shirts, attached to bundles with a pinch of their native land. “But death stained those who carried prayers with them.” The scene depicting the Cossacks in the field around the fire is lyrically colored: “in the opal June crown” the song “The Cossack went to a distant foreign land” sounds, filled with “thick sadness”. At another fire - a different Cossack song: "Ah, from the violent sea, but from the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov."

The voice of the author bursts into the epic narrative: “The native kurens were imperiously drawn to themselves, and there was no such force that could keep the Cossacks from spontaneous attraction home.” Everyone wanted to be at home, "just look with one eye." And, as if fulfilling this desire, Sholokhov draws a farm, "like a widow's bloodless", where "life went on sale - like hollow water in the Don." The author's text sounds in unison with the words of the old Cossack song, which became the epigraph of the novel.

So through the battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, description-generalization, lyrical digressions, Sholokhov leads us to comprehend the "monstrous absurdity of war."

"All of Russia is in the throes of a great redistribution." "In a world split in two." In Sholokhov's novel, you can find many words to define the theme fourth lesson dedicated to the pictures of the civil war. The introductory part of this lesson might include the following points:

- M. Gorky attributed The Quiet Flows the Don to those "bright works" that "gave a broad, truthful and most talented picture of the civil war." And for more than half a century, the novel has been bringing the reader the light of this truth.
- Defining the essence of Sholokhov's concept of the civil war, let's turn to the reflections of modern writers, historians, who discovered a new vision of the events of those years. Thus, the writer Boris Vasilyev states: “In a civil war there are no right and wrong, there are no just and unjust, there are no angels and no demons, just as there are no winners. There are only the defeated in it - all of us, all the people, all of Russia ... The tragic catastrophe gives rise only to losses ... ”The Quiet Don convinces of the justice of what has been said. Sholokhov was one of those who first spoke of the civil war as the greatest tragedy that had grave consequences.
- The level of truth that marks the novel "Quiet Flows the Don", researchers of Sholokhov's work explain the serious work of the young writer on archival materials, memoirs of participants in the events. It is impossible not to take into account the opinion of M. N. Semanov, who wrote in the book “Quiet Flows the Don” - Literature and History: “The painstaking work of the author of The Quiet Flows the Don on collecting historical material is unconditional and obvious, but the explanation of the unprecedented depth of historicism of the Sholokhov epic follows look in the biography of the writer. M. Sholokhov himself was not only an eyewitness to the events described (like Leo Tolstoy in "Hadji Murad"), but was also - and this should be emphasized - the countryman of his heroes, he lived their life, he was flesh from their flesh and bone from their bones. The thousand-mouthed rumors of the world torn apart by the revolution conveyed to him such "facts" and such "information" that the archives and libraries of the whole world could not compete with.

How does Sholokhov paint this world torn apart by the revolution? This is the central theme of the fourth lesson.

One of the author's favorite techniques is the story-preliminary. So, at the end of the first chapter of the fifth part of the novel, we read: “Until January, they lived quietly on the Tatar farm. The Cossacks who returned from the front rested near their wives, ate, did not feel that at the thresholds of the kurens they were guarded by bitter misfortunes and hardships than those that they had to endure in the war they had gone through.

"The worst troubles" are a revolution and a civil war that broke the usual way of life. In a letter to Gorky, Sholokhov noted: "Without exaggerating my colors, I painted the harsh reality that preceded the uprising." The essence of the events depicted in the novel is truly tragic, they affect the fate of vast sections of the population. More than seven hundred characters, main and episodic, named by name and nameless, act in The Quiet Don; and the writer is concerned about their fate.

There is a name for what happened on the Don during the years of the civil war - “the decossackization of the Cossacks”, accompanied by mass terror, which caused retaliatory cruelty. “Black rumors” about extraordinary commissions and revolutionary tribunals spread around the farms, the court of which was “simple: an accusation, a couple of questions, a sentence - and under a machine-gun burst.” The author writes about the atrocities of the Red Army in the farms (part six, ch. 16). Just as cool were the courts-martial of the Don Cossacks. We see Reds cut down with special cruelty. Informing the facts with great persuasiveness, Sholokhov cites documents: a list of those executed from the Podtelkov detachment (part five, ch. 11) and a list of the executed hostages of the Tatarsky farm (part six, ch. 24).

Many pages of the sixth part of the novel are painted with anxiety, heavy forebodings: "All Obdonye lived a hidden, crushed life ... Mga hung over the future." “Life turned abruptly at the turn”: the richest houses were overlaid with indemnity, arrests and executions began. How do the Cossacks themselves perceive this time?

"People pitted"- Gregory will think about what is happening. Many episodes of the fifth - seventh parts, built on the principle of antithesis, will confirm the correctness of such an assessment. “The people have grown mad, they have become rabid,” the author adds on his own behalf. He does not forgive cruelty to anyone: neither Polovtsev, who hacked Chernetsov and ordered the killing 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 Tatarsky, burned Korshunov's hut, and then set fire to seven more houses; does not forgive Mitka Korshunov, who "slaughtered the entire Koshevoy family."

"People pitted", - we remember when we read about the execution of the commander of the Likhachev detachment, captured by the rebels: “He was not shot ... Seven miles from Veshenskaya, in sandy, sternly frowning breakers, he was brutally hacked to death by the escorts. They gouged out his eyes while alive, cut off his hands, ears, nose, and scratched his face with checkers. They unbuttoned their pants and abused, defiled a large, courageous, beautiful body. They abused the bleeding stump, and then one of the escorts stepped on the flimsy trembling chest, on the body that was thrown on its back, and with one blow cut off the head obliquely” (part six, ch. 31).

"People pitted"- aren't these words about how they killed twenty-five communists, headed by Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov? “The escorts beat them, driving them into a heap, like sheep, they beat them long and cruelly ...

Then it was all, as in the gravest fog. For thirty versts they walked through continuous farmsteads, met at each farmstead by crowds of torturers. Old men, women, teenagers beat, spat on the swollen, blood-drenched ... faces of captured communists.

And one more execution - Podtelkov and his detachment. This episode is given in the following frame: “Cossacks and women were densely poured onto the edge of the farm. The population of Ponomarev, informed of the execution scheduled for six o'clock, went willingly, as if to a rare merry spectacle. The Cossacks dressed up as if for a holiday; many took their children with them… The Cossacks, converging, animatedly discussed the upcoming execution.”

“And in Ponomarev, shots were still puffing with smoke: Veshensky, Karginsky, Bokovsky, Krasnokutsky, Milyutinsky Cossacks shot Kazan, Migulinsky, Discord, Kumshat, Balkan Cossacks.”

Rejecting violent death, Sholokhov will speak more than once about the unnaturalness of such situations; and in all cases of extreme cruelty, he will oppose the harmony of the eternal, boundless world. In one episode, the symbol of this world will be a birch tree, on which “brown buds are already swollen with March sweet juice.” With black bud petals on his lips, Likhachev died. In the other, there is a steppe, above which "an eagle swam high, under a cumulus crest." In his last hour, Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov will see, raising his head, “with a blue vision, the spurs of the chalk mountains that have risen in the distance, and above them, above the flowing stirrup of the ridged Don, in the boundless majestic blue of the sky, in the most inaccessible height - a cloud.” And here the landscape sketch, striking in the purity of its colors, will receive a high philosophical content.

The ending of the second volume is expressive. A civil war is blazing on the Don, people are dying, and the Red Army soldier Jack has also died. The Yablonovsky Cossacks buried him, and after half a month some old man erected a wooden chapel on the grave mound. “Under its triangular canopy, in the darkness, the mournful face of the Mother of God glimmered; below, on the eaves of the canopy, the black ligature of the Slavic letter fluttered:

In a time of turmoil and depravity
Do not judge, brothers, brother.

The old man left, and the chapel remained in the steppe to mourn the eyes of passers-by and passers-by with an eternally dull look, to awaken an indistinct longing in their hearts. And in May, little bustards fought near the chapel, "fought for the female, for the right to life, to love, to reproduce." And right there, near the chapel, the female laid nine smoky blue eggs and sat on them.

In one episode, life and death collide, lofty, eternal and tragic realities that have become familiar and ordinary “in the time of trouble and debauchery”. The increased contrast of the image determined the emotional expressiveness of the author's speech, in which the writer's civic consciousness and his compassion for the heroes of the novel are expressed. The harsh time confronted them all with the need to make a choice.
- Which side are you on?
“You seem to have accepted the red faith?”
- Were you in white? White! Officer, huh?

These questions were asked to the same person - Grigory Melekhov, and he himself could not answer them to himself. Revealing his state, Sholokhov uses such words: “tired”, “overwhelmed by contradictions”, “thick melancholy”, “tedious feeling of something unresolved”. Here he is going home after the break with Podtelkov; "Grigory could neither forgive nor forget the death of Chernetsov and the extrajudicial execution of captured officers."

"To whom to lean?" - a question that excites the consciousness of the hero Sholokhov, about this his anxiety and thought, conveyed through an internal monologue:

“He also broke his fatigue, acquired in the war. I wanted to turn away from everything seething with hatred, hostile and incomprehensible world. There, behind, everything was confused, contradictory. It was difficult to find the right path, and there was no certainty whether he was following the right one. He was drawn to the Bolsheviks - he walked, led others, and then he took thought, his heart went cold. “Is Izvarin really right? Whom to lean on?" Grigory thought about this indistinctly, leaning against the back of his purse. But, when he imagined how he would prepare harrows for spring, weave a manger out of red steel, and when the earth undresses and dries, he will leave for the steppe; holding on to the chipigi with hands bored with work, he will go after the plow, feeling its lively movement and jolts; imagining how he would inhale the sweet spirit of young grass and black earth raised by plowshares, his soul warmed. I wanted to clean up cattle, throw hay, breathe in the withered smell of sweet clover, wheatgrass, and the spicy smell of manure. I wanted peace and silence - that's why Grigory saved the shy joy in the stern eyes, looking around ... Sweet and thick, like hops, life seemed at that time here, in the wilderness "(part five, ch. 13).

The words quoted here can be the best commentary on the characterization that writer B. Vasiliev gives to Sholokhov's novel, interpreting the essence of the civil war in his own way: “This is an epic in the full sense of the word, reflecting the most important thing in our civil war - monstrous fluctuations, throwing normal calm family man. And it's done, from my point of view, great. On one fate, the whole fracture of society is shown. Even though he is a Cossack, he is still primarily a peasant, a farmer. He is the breadwinner. And now the breaking of this breadwinner is the whole civil war in my understanding.

Gregory's dream to live 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 mood of the hero: “Grigory should have a 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, gently remove the alluvial silver cobwebs from the cheeks and inseparably drink the wine smell of the earth raised by the plow.

And in return for this - bread cut by the blades of the road. On the roads there are crowds of unclothed, corpse-black from the dust of prisoners ... In the farms, amateurs search the families of the Cossacks who left with the Reds, whip the wives and mothers of the apostates ... Discontent, fatigue, anger accumulated ”(part six, ch. 10). From episode to episode, the tragic discrepancy between the inner aspirations of Grigory Melekhov and the life around him is growing.

This observation can complete the fourth lesson on the "Quiet Don".

"The Fate of Grigory Melekhov", "The Tragedy of Grigory Melekhov" - these two topics are the main ones in the conversation about Sholokhov's novel in the final, fifth lesson. The final lesson can be held in the form of a lesson-seminar. Its task is to synthesize students' knowledge about the novel "Quiet Don", to look at it from a new angle. To do this, it is necessary to avoid repeating the course of analysis that took place in previous lessons. Not detailing the text, but a look at the work as a whole - this is the direction of work at the lesson-seminar. Students can come to more generalized conclusions by considering not a single episode, but their connection, through lines of the novel, which will be reflected in the lesson plan: 1. "Good Cossack." What meaning does Sholokhov put into these words, speaking like this about Grigory Melekhov? 2. In what episodes is the bright, outstanding personality of Grigory Melekhov most fully revealed? What role does his internal monologues play in the characterization of the hero? 3. Difficult vicissitudes of the fate of the hero - from the circumstances. Compare the situations “Gregory at home”, “Gregory at war”. What does the chaining of these episodes provide for understanding the fate of the hero? 4. The choice that the hero makes, his way of searching for the truth. The origins of the tragedy of Grigory Melekhov. End of the novel.

The first half of the questions proposed for students to consider at home may be related to the motivation for choosing Grigory Melekhov for the role of the central character. Indeed, 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 characters profess, in the peculiarities of their emotional and psychological make-up.

Grigory Melekhov, unlike other heroes of The Quiet Flows the Don, is a bright personality, a unique individuality, a whole, extraordinary nature. He is sincere and honest in his thoughts and actions (this is especially evident in his relationship with Natalya and Aksinya: Grigory's last meeting with Natalya (part seven, ch. 7), Natalya's death and the experiences associated with it (part seven, ch. 16 -18), the death of Aksinya (part eight, ch. 17). Gregory is distinguished by a sharp emotional reaction to everything that happens, he has a heart that is responsive to the impressions of life. He has a developed sense of pity, compassion, this can be judged by such, for example, scenes , as “At the hayfield”, when Grigory accidentally cut a wild duckling (part one, ch. 9), an episode with Franya (part two, ch. 11), a scene with a murdered Austrian (part three, ch. 10), a reaction to the news on the execution of Ivan Alekseevich Kotlyarov (part six).

Always remaining honest, morally independent and straightforward in character, Gregory showed himself as a person capable of action. The following episodes can serve as an example: a fight with Stepan Astakhov because of Aksinya (part one, ch. 12), leaving with Aksinya to Yagodnoye (part two, ch. 11-12), a collision with a sergeant-major (part three, ch. 11) , a break with Podtelkov (part three, ch. 12), a clash with General Fitskhalaurov (part seven, ch. 10), a decision to return to the farm without waiting for an amnesty (part eight, ch. 18). Bribes the sincerity of his motives - he never lied to himself, in his doubts and throwing. We are convinced of this by his internal monologues (part six, ch. 21, 28). Note that he is the only character who is given the right to monologues - "thoughts" that reveal his spiritual beginning.

Gregory's deep attachment to the house, to the land remains his strongest spiritual movement throughout the novel. “I won’t touch the ground anywhere. There is a steppe here, there is something to breathe ... ”This confession of Aksinye echoes another:“ My hands need to work, not fight. The whole soul was sick during these months. Behind these words is the mood of not only Grigory Melekhov. Emphasizing the drama of this situation, the author adds on his own behalf: “The time has come to plow, harrow, sow; the earth called to itself, called tirelessly day and night, and here it was necessary to fight, to die on other people's farms ... "

Sholokhov found his main character in a Cossack farm - this in itself is a remarkable literary phenomenon. As a person, Grigory took a lot from the historical, social and moral experience of the Cossacks, although the author argued: "Melekhov has a very individual fate, in him I do not try to personify the average Cossacks."

"Hero and time", "hero and circumstances", the search for oneself as a person - the eternal theme of art has become the main one in "Quiet Don". In this search lies the meaning of Grigory Melekhov's existence in the novel. “I am looking for a way out,” he says of himself. At the same time, he always faces the need for a choice that was not easy and simple. The very situations in which the hero found himself prompted him to act. So, the entry of Gregory into the rebel detachment is to some extent a forced step. It was preceded by the excesses of the Red Army men who came to the farm, their intention to kill Melekhov. Later, in the last conversation with Koshev, he would say: “If the Red Army men were not going to kill me at the party then, I might not have participated in the uprising.”

This meeting essentially marked a turning point in the fate of Grigory Melekhov. Sholokhov defines its significance in this way: “Grigory walked, feeling as if he had stepped over the threshold, and what seemed unclear suddenly rose with the utmost brightness ... And because he stood on the verge in the struggle of two principles, denying both of them, was born dull incessant irritation.

"Sharply turned life around the bend." The farm looked like a "disturbed beekeeper." "Mishka's heart is dressed with a burning hatred for the Cossacks." The actions of the authorities parted the Cossacks in different directions.

“What are you standing about, sons of the Quiet Don?! shouted the old man, shifting his eyes from Gregory to the others. “Your fathers and grandfathers are shot, your property is taken away, Jewish commissars laugh at your faith, and you husk seeds?..” This call was heard.

In Gregory, “captive, hidden feelings were released. Clear, it seemed, was his path from now on, like a path illuminated by a month. Sholokhov conveys the innermost thoughts of the hero in his internal monologue: “The paths of the Cossacks crossed with the paths of landless masculine Russia, with the paths of the factory people. Fight them to the death! To tear from under their feet the Don soil, soaked with Cossack blood. Drive them like Tatars out of the region! Shake Moscow, impose a shameful world on it! .. And now - for a saber!

In these thoughts - the uncompromising nature of a man who never knew the middle. It had nothing to do with political vacillation. The tragedy of Gregory is, as it were, transferred to the depths of his consciousness. He "painfully tried to sort out the turmoil of thoughts." His "soul rushed about" like "a wolf flagged on a raid in search of a way out, in resolving contradictions." Behind him were days of doubt, "heavy internal struggle", "search for the truth." In it, "its own, Cossack, sucked with mother's milk throughout life, prevailed over great human truth." He knew the "truth of Garangi" and anxiously asked himself: "Is Izvarin really right?" He himself says about himself: “I am thrashing like in a snowstorm in the steppe…” But Grigory Melekhov is “thrashing”, “looking for the truth”, not from emptiness and thoughtlessness. He yearns for such a truth, "under the wing of which everyone could warm up." And, from his point of view, neither the Whites nor the Reds have such a truth: “There is no one truth in life. It can be seen whoever defeats whom will devour him ... And I was looking for the bad truth. My soul ached, it swayed back and forth ... ”These searches, according to him, turned out to be“ in vain and empty. And this also determined the tragedy of his fate.

It is impossible to accept the point of view of those critics of The Quiet Flows the Don who believed that Melekhov survived the tragedy of a renegade, he went against his people and lost all human features. Let's follow the movement of the hero's thoughts in such episodes as "Melekhov interrogates and then orders the prisoner of Khoper to be released", "The division he commands passes in front of Melekhov"; the struggle of conflicting feelings colored one and the other episode. Let's highlight the episodes that became a catharsis for the hero: "Grigory chopped the sailors", "Last meeting with Natalya", "Natalya's death", "Aksinya's death". Any episode of The Quiet Flows the Don reveals the multidimensionality and high humanity inherent in Sholokhov's text. Grigory Melekhov evokes deep sympathy, compassion as a hero of a tragic fate.

Recommended reading

Kolodny L. Who wrote "Quiet Flows the Don": Chronicle of one search. - M., 1995.
Palievsky P. "Quiet Flows the Don" by Mikhail Sholokhov // Literature and theory. - M., 1978.

Women's Portal Flero

Mikhail Solomintsev. The monstrous absurdity of war in the depiction of Mikhail Sholokhov in the epic novel "Quiet Don" How the monstrous absurdity of war is shown

"The monstrous absurdity of war" in the novel "Quiet Flows the Don"

, the inhumanity of war.

The battle scenes in themselves are of no interest to Sholokhov. He is worried about something else - what does war do to a person. A moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute sensation of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, a keen 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 sacrifices laid on the altar of someone's ambition) - that's what the hero thinks about.

What figurative means does the author use?

Gregory's qualities

Gregory's qualities

Pride, independence, anger for everything the war has done

Following the traditions of Russian literature, through battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions (the campfire scene is a soldier's song), Sholokhov leads to an understanding of the strangeness, unnaturalness, inhumanity of war.

Houses

Houses: (according to 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 (pick up episodes).

4) Reread v.2, part 5, ch. 1, 12, 13,24,30

5) Draw up a plan "The fate of Grigory Melekhov."

Women's Portal Flero

"The monstrous absurdity of war" in the novel "Quiet Flows the Don"

, the inhumanity of war.

The battle scenes in themselves are of no interest to Sholokhov. He is worried about something else - what does war do to a person. A moral protest against the senselessness and inhumanity of war is clearly expressed.

acute sensation of someone else's pain

Killing a person, even an enemy in battle, is contrary to the humane nature of Gregory. Love for everything, a keen 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 sacrifices laid on the altar of someone's ambition) - that's what the hero thinks about.

What figurative means does the author use?

Gregory's qualities

Gregory's qualities

Pride, independence, anger for everything the war has done

Following the traditions of Russian literature, through battle scenes, through the sharp experiences of the characters, through landscape sketches, lyrical digressions (the campfire scene is a soldier's song), Sholokhov leads to an understanding of the strangeness, unnaturalness, inhumanity of war.

Houses

Houses: (according to 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 (pick up episodes).

4) Reread v.2, part 5, ch. 1, 12, 13,24,30

5) Draw up a plan "The fate of Grigory Melekhov."

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