home Zoology World literature about the Second World War. Russian literature of the period of the Second World War. "Witch's Cauldron" on the Eastern Front. Decisive… Wolf Aaken

World literature about the Second World War. Russian literature of the period of the Second World War. "Witch's Cauldron" on the Eastern Front. Decisive… Wolf Aaken

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World War II Literature

Udintseva Valentina

Prose about the Great Patriotic War

According to the encyclopedia "The Great Patriotic War", more than a thousand writers served in the army, out of eight hundred members of the Moscow writers' organization, two hundred and fifty went to the front in the first days of the war. Four hundred and seventy-one writers did not return from the war - these are big losses. They are explained by the fact that writers, most of whom became front-line journalists, sometimes happened not only to engage in their direct correspondent duties, but to take up arms - this was how the situation developed (however, bullets and fragments did not spare even those who did not fall into such situations) . Many simply ended up in the ranks - they fought in army units, in the militia, in partisans!

Two periods can be distinguished in military prose: 1) prose of the war years: stories, essays, novels written directly during hostilities, or rather, in short intervals between offensives and retreats; 2) post-war prose, in which there was an understanding of many painful questions, such as, for example, why did the Russian people endure such severe trials? Why did the Russians find themselves in such a helpless and humiliating position in the first days and months of the war? Who is to blame for all the suffering? And other questions that arose with closer attention to the documents and memories of eyewitnesses in a distant time. But still, this is a conditional division, because the literary process is sometimes a contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon, and understanding the topic of war in the post-war period was more difficult than during the period of hostilities.

The war was the greatest test and test of all the forces of the people, and they passed this test with honor. The war was a serious test for Soviet literature as well. During the Great Patriotic War, literature, enriched with the traditions of Soviet literature of previous periods, not only immediately responded to the events, but also became an effective weapon in the fight against the enemy. Noting the tense, truly heroic creative work writers during the war, M. Sholokhov said: “They had one task: if only their word would strike the enemy, if only it would hold our fighter under the elbow, ignite and not let it fade in the hearts Soviet people burning hatred for enemies and love for the motherland. "The theme of the Great Patriotic War remains extremely modern even now.

The Great Patriotic War is reflected in Russian literature deeply and comprehensively, in all its manifestations: the army and the rear, partisan movement and underground, the tragic beginning of the war, individual battles, heroism and betrayal, the greatness and drama of the Victory. The authors of military prose, as a rule, are front-line soldiers; in their works they rely on real events, on their own front-line experience. In books about the war written by front-line soldiers, the main line is soldier friendship, front-line camaraderie, the severity of camp life, desertion and heroism. Dramatic human destinies unfold in war, sometimes life or death depends on a person’s act. Front-line writers are a whole generation of courageous, conscientious, experienced, gifted individuals who have endured military and post-war hardships. Front-line writers are those authors who in their works express the point of view that the outcome of the war is decided by the hero, who recognizes himself as a particle of the warring people, who carries his cross and common burden.

Based on the heroic traditions of Russian and Soviet literature, the prose of the Great Patriotic War reached great creative heights. The prose of the war years is characterized by the strengthening of romantic and lyrical elements, the widespread use by artists of declamatory and song intonations, oratorical turns, and the appeal to such poetic means as allegory, symbol, metaphor.

One of the first books about the war was the story of V.P. Nekrasov "In the trenches of Stalingrad", published immediately after the war in the magazine "Znamya" in 1946, and in 1947 the story "Star" by E.G. Kazakevich. One of the first A.P. Platonov wrote the dramatic story of the return of a front-line soldier home in the story "Return", which was published in the "New World" already in 1946. The hero of the story, Alexei Ivanov, is in no hurry to go home, he has found a second family among his fellow soldiers, he has lost the habit of being at home, of his family. The heroes of Platonov's works "... were now going to live for the first time, vaguely remembering themselves as they were three or four years ago, because they turned into completely different people ...". And in the family, near his wife and children, another man appeared, who was orphaned by the war. It is difficult for a front-line soldier to return to another life, to children.

The most reliable works about the war were created by front-line writers: V.K. Kondratiev, V.O. Bogomolov, K.D. Vorobyov, V.P. Astafiev, G.Ya. Baklanov, V.V. Bykov, B.L. Vasiliev, Yu.V. Bondarev, V.P. Nekrasov, E.I. Nosov, E.G. Kazakevich, M.A. Sholokhov. On the pages of prose works, we find a kind of chronicle of the war, authentically conveying all the stages of the great battle of the Soviet people against fascism. Writers-front-line soldiers, contrary to prevailing in Soviet time tendencies to varnish the truth about the war, portrayed the harsh and tragic military and post-war reality. Their works are true evidence of the time when Russia fought and won.

A great contribution to the development of Soviet military prose was made by the writers of the so-called "second war", front-line writers who entered the big literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These are such prose writers as Bondarev, Bykov, Ananiev, Baklanov, Goncharov, Bogomolov, Kurochkin, Astafiev, Rasputin. In the work of front-line writers, in their works of the 50-60s, in comparison with the books of the previous decade, the tragic accent in the depiction of the war increased. The war in the image of front-line prose writers is not only and not even how much spectacular heroic deeds, outstanding deeds, how much tiring everyday work, hard work, bloody, but vital. And it was in this everyday work that they saw Soviet man writers of the "second war".

The distance of time, helping front-line writers to see the picture of the war much more clearly and in a larger volume, when their first works appeared, was one of the reasons that determined the evolution of their creative approach to the military theme. Prose writers, on the one hand, used their military experience, and on the other hand, artistic experience, which allowed them to successfully realize their creative ideas. It can be noted that the development of prose about the Great Patriotic War clearly shows that among its main problems, the main one, which has been at the center of the creative search of our writers for more than sixty years, has been and is the problem of heroism. This is especially noticeable in the work of front-line writers, who showed in their works the heroism of our people, the resilience of soldiers in close-up.

Front-line writer Boris Lvovich Vasiliev, the author of the books loved by all "The Dawns Here Are Quiet" (1968), "Tomorrow there was a war", "He was not on the lists" (1975), "Aty-baty soldiers were walking", which were filmed in the Soviet time, in an interview Russian newspaper"On May 20, 2004, he noted the demand for military prose. A whole generation of young people was brought up on the military stories of B.L. Vasilyev. Everyone remembers the bright images of girls who combined love of truth and stamina (Zhenya from the story "The dawns here are quiet ..." , Spark from the story "Tomorrow there was a war", etc.) and sacrificial devotion to a high cause and loved ones (the heroine of the story "I was not on the lists", etc.). In 1997, the writer was awarded the A.D. Sakharov Prize "For civil courage".

The first work about the war by E.I. Nosov was the story "Red Wine of Victory" (1969), in which the hero met Victory Day on a government bed in the hospital and received, along with all the suffering wounded, a glass of red wine in honor of this long-awaited holiday. "A genuine comfrey, an ordinary soldier, he does not like to talk about the war ... The wounds of a soldier will speak more and more strongly about the war. You can’t ruffle the holy words in vain. As well, you can’t lie about the war. And it’s a shame to write badly about the suffering of the people." In the story "Khutor Beloglin" Alexey, the hero of the story, lost everything in the war - he had no family, no home, no health, but, nevertheless, remained kind and generous. Yevgeny Nosov wrote a number of works at the turn of the century, about which Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn said, handing him the prize of his own name: “And, conveying the same military theme 40 years later, Nosov stirs up with bitter bitterness what hurts today ... This undivided grief closes Nosov's half-century wound great war and everything that has not been told about it even today." Works: "Apple Saved", "Commemorative Medal", "Fanfares and Bells" - from this series.

In 1992 Astafiev V.P. published the novel Cursed and Killed. In the novel Cursed and Killed, Viktor Petrovich conveys the war not in "correct, beautiful and brilliant formation with music and drums, and battle, with waving banners and prancing generals", but in "its real expression - in blood, in suffering, in of death".

The Belarusian front-line writer Vasil Vladimirovich Bykov believed that the military theme “leaves our literature for the same reason ... why valor, honor, self-sacrifice have gone ... The heroic has been expelled from everyday life, why do we need another war, where is this inferiority most obvious? " Incomplete truth" and outright lies about the war for many years belittle the meaning and significance of our military (or anti-war, as they sometimes say) literature." The depiction of the war by V. Bykov in the story "Swamp" causes protest among many Russian readers. He shows ruthlessness Soviet soldiers towards the locals. The plot is this, judge for yourself: in the rear of the enemy, in occupied Belarus, paratroopers landed in search of a partisan base, having lost their bearings, they took a boy as a guide ... and they kill him for reasons of safety and secrecy of the task. The no less terrible story of Vasil Bykov - "On the Swamp Stitch" - is a "new truth" about the war, again about ruthless and cruel partisans who dealt with a local teacher just because she asked them not to destroy the bridge, otherwise the Germans would destroy the entire village . The teacher in the village is the last savior and protector, but she was killed by partisans as a traitor. The works of the Belarusian front-line writer Vasil Bykov cause not only controversy, but also reflections.

Leonid Borodin published the story "The Detachment Left". The military story also depicts another truth about the war, about partisans, the heroes of which are soldiers surrounded by the first days of the war, in the German rear in a partisan detachment. The author takes a fresh look at the relationship between the occupied villages and the partisans, whom they must feed. The commander of the partisan detachment shot the headman of the village, but not the traitor headman, but his own man for the villagers, with only one word against. This story can be put on a par with the works of Vasil Bykov in depicting a military conflict, a psychological struggle between good and bad, meanness and heroism.

It was not for nothing that front-line writers complained that not the whole truth about the war had been written. Time passed, a historical distance appeared, which allowed us to see the past and experienced in the true light, the necessary words came, other books about the war were written, which will lead us to spiritual knowledge of the past. Now it's hard to imagine contemporary literature about the war without a large number memoir literature, created not just by participants in the war, but by outstanding commanders.

Alexander Beck (1902-1972)

Born in Saratov in the family of a military doctor. In Saratov, he spent his childhood and youth, and there he graduated from a real school. At the age of 16, A. Beck during civil war volunteered for the Red Army. After the war, he wrote essays and reviews for national newspapers. Beck's essays and reviews began to appear in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia. Since 1931, A. Beck collaborated in the editorial offices of Gorky's History of Factories and Plants. During World War II he was a war correspondent. Widely known for the story " volokolamskoe highway" about the events of the defense of Moscow, written in 1943-1944. In 1960, he published the novels "Several Days" and "General Panfilov's Reserve".

In 1971, the novel "The New Appointment" was published abroad. The author finished the novel in mid-1964 and submitted the manuscript to the editors of Novy Mir. After lengthy ordeals in various editions and instances, the novel was never published in the homeland during the author's lifetime. According to the author himself, already in October 1964 he gave the novel to friends and some close acquaintances to read. The first publication of the novel at home was in the Znamya magazine, N 10-11, in 1986. The novel describes life path a major Soviet statesman who sincerely believes in the justice and productivity of the socialist system and is ready to serve it faithfully, despite any personal difficulties and troubles.

"Volokolamsk highway"

The plot of Alexander Beck's "Volokolamsk Highway": after heavy fighting in October 1941 near Volokolamsk, the battalion of the Panfilov division breaks through the enemy ring and joins with the main forces of the division. Beck closes the story with a single battalion. Beck is documentary accurate (this is how he characterized his creative method: "Searching for heroes active in life, long-term communication with them, conversations with many people, patient collection of grains, details, relying not only on one's own observation, but also on the vigilance of the interlocutor .. . "), and in the "Volokolamsk Highway" he recreates the true history of one of the battalions of the Panfilov division, everything corresponds to what was in reality: geography and chronicle of battles, characters.

The narrator is the battalion commander Baurjan Momysh-Uly. Through his eyes we see what happened to his battalion, he shares his thoughts and doubts, explains his decisions and actions. The author recommends himself to readers only as an attentive listener and "a conscientious and diligent scribe", which cannot be taken at face value. This is nothing more than an artistic device, because, talking with the hero, the writer inquired about what seemed important to him, Beck, and assembled from these stories both the image of Momysh-Ula himself and the image of General Panfilov, "who knew how to manage, influence not by shouting , but in the mind, in the past of an ordinary soldier who retained soldier's modesty until his death" - this is how Beck wrote in his autobiography about the second hero of the book, very dear to him.

"Volokolamsk Highway" is an original documentary work related to that literary tradition, which is represented by literature XIX in. Gleb Uspensky. “Under the guise of a purely documentary story,” Beck admitted, “I wrote a work subject to the laws of the novel, did not constrain the imagination, created characters, scenes to the best of my ability ...” Of course, both in the author’s declarations of documentary quality, and in his statement that that he did not constrain the imagination, there is some slyness, they seem to have a double bottom: it may seem to the reader that this is a trick, a game. But Beck's naked, demonstrative documentary is not a stylization, well known to literature (let's recall, for example, "Robinson Crusoe"), not poetic clothes of a sketch-documentary cut, but a way of comprehending, researching and recreating life and man. And the story "Volokolamsk highway" is distinguished by impeccable reliability (even in small things - if Beck writes that on the thirteenth of October "everything was covered in snow", there is no need to turn to the archives of the meteorological service, there is no doubt that this was the case in reality), it is peculiar, but an accurate chronicle of the bloody defensive battles near Moscow (as the author himself defined the genre of his book), revealing why the German army, having reached the walls of our capital, could not take it.

And most importantly, because of what "Volokolamsk highway" should be considered as fiction and not journalism. Behind the professional army, military concerns - discipline, combat training, battle tactics, which Momysh-Uly is absorbed in, for the author there are moral, universal problems, exacerbated to the limit by the circumstances of the war, constantly putting a person on the verge between life and death: fear and courage, selflessness and selfishness, loyalty and betrayal. In the artistic structure of Beck's story, a polemic with propaganda stereotypes, with battle cliches, a controversy overt and hidden, occupies a considerable place. Explicit, because such is the nature of the protagonist - he is sharp, not inclined to bypass sharp corners, does not even forgive himself for weaknesses and mistakes, does not tolerate idle talk and pomp. Here is a typical episode:

"Thinking, he said:" Knowing no fear, the Panfilovites rushed into the first battle ... What do you think: a suitable start?

I don't know, I said hesitantly.

So the corporals of literature write, - he said harshly. - In these days that you live here, I purposely ordered you to take you to such places where two or three mines sometimes burst, where bullets whistle. I wanted you to experience fear. You don't have to confirm, I know without admitting that you had to suppress fear.

So why do you and your fellow writers imagine that some kind of supernatural people are fighting, and not just like you? "

The hidden, authorial controversy that permeates the entire story is deeper and more comprehensive. It is directed against those who demanded that literature "serve" today's "requests" and "instructions", and not serve the truth. In Beck's archive, a draft of the author's preface has been preserved, which states this unambiguously: "The other day I was told: - We are not interested in whether you wrote the truth or not. We are interested in whether it is useful or harmful ... I did not argue. It happens, probably, that a lie is useful. Otherwise, why would it exist? I know that this is how many writing people, my comrades in the shop, act. Sometimes I want to be the same. But at the desk, talking about our cruel and beautiful century, I forget about this intention. At the desk, I see nature in front of me and lovingly copy it, - the way I know it.

It is clear that Beck did not publish this preface, it exposed the position of the author, it contained a challenge that he would not have gotten away with so easily. But what he talks about has become the foundation of his work. And in his story, he was true to the truth.

Alexander Fadeev

Fadeev (Bulyga) Alexander Alexandrovich - prose writer, critic, literary theorist, public figure. Born on December 24 (10), 1901 in the village of Kimry, Korchevsky district, Tver province. He spent his early childhood in Vilna and Ufa. In 1908 the Fadeev family moved to the Far East. From 1912 to 1919, Alexander Fadeev studied at the Vladivostok Commercial School (he left without completing the 8th grade). During the Civil War, Fadeev took an active part in the fighting on Far East. In the battle near Spassk he was wounded. Alexander Fadeev wrote the first completed story "Spill" in 1922-1923, the story "Against the Current" - in 1923. In 1925-1926, while working on the novel "Rout", he decided to engage in literary work professionally.

During the Great Patriotic War, Fadeev worked as a publicist. As a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda and the Soviet Information Bureau, he traveled to a number of fronts. On January 14, 1942, Fadeev published in Pravda a correspondence titled "Destroying Fiends and People-Creators", in which he spoke about what he saw in the region and the city of Kalinin after the expulsion of the fascist occupiers. In the autumn of 1943, the writer traveled to the city of Krasnodon, liberated from enemies. Subsequently, the material collected there formed the basis of the novel "The Young Guard".

"Young guard"

During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Fadeev writes a number of essays, articles about the heroic struggle of the people, creates the book "Leningrad in the days of the blockade" (1944). Heroic, romantic notes, more and more strengthened in the work of Fadeev, sound with special force in the novel "The Young Guard" (1945; 2nd edition 1951; State Prize of the USSR, 1946; film of the same name, 1948) , which was based on the patriotic affairs of the Krasnodon underground Komsomol organization "Young Guard". The novel glorifies the struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazi invaders. The bright socialist ideal was embodied in the images of Oleg Koshevoy, Sergei Tyulenin, Lyubov Shevtsova, Ulyana Gromova, Ivan Zemnukhov and other Young Guardsmen. The writer paints his characters in romantic light; the book combines pathos and lyricism, psychological sketches and author's digressions. In the 2nd edition, taking into account the criticism, the writer included scenes showing the connections of Komsomol members with senior underground communists, the images of which deepened, made more embossed.

Developing best traditions Russian literature, Fadeev created works that have become classic examples of the literature of socialist realism. The last creative idea of Fadeev - the novel "Black Metallurgy", dedicated to the present, remained unfinished. Fadeev's literary-critical speeches are collected in the book "For thirty years" (1957), showing the evolution of the literary views of the writer, who made a great contribution to the development of socialist aesthetics. Fadeev's works have been staged and screened, translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR, many foreign languages.

In a state of mental depression, he committed suicide. For many years, Fadeev was in the leadership of writers' organizations: in 1926-1932. one of the leaders of the RAPP; in 1939-1944 and 1954-1956 - Secretary, in 1946-1954. - General Secretary and Chairman of the Board of the SP of the USSR. Vice President of the World Peace Council (since 1950). Member of the Central Committee of the CPSU (1939-1956); at the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956) he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 2nd-4th convocations and the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of the 3rd convocation. He was awarded 2 orders of Lenin, as well as medals.

“Do not cross out the past, without it there is no present and future” (analysis of Fadeev’s novel “The Rout”)

Time passes - the days of history flow. We change, our ideas about the past, even about ourselves, change. We begin to overestimate and rethink a lot of things, but the main thing is not to erase from our memory what happened to us; we can appreciate the present day only when we know our past well.

The processes of rethinking affected not only socio-political life, but also culture, especially literature. Many works of Soviet literature have become irrelevant for our time, in many ways incomprehensible and contradictory. But whatever they were about, they were, they are a fact of our life, our culture.

Among such works is the novel by A. A. Fadeev "The Rout".

“The Rout” is the first mature and modern work of the writer for that time. The novel is distinguished by the integrity of complex ideological concepts, the depth of the artistic generalization of revolutionary reality. The novel answers questions that worried many writers of that time. What is the content of the revolutionary struggle? How does the fate of the individual correlate with the fate of the revolution? The fate of the people and man? What is the hero of the revolutionary era?

The writer's intention leads us to an understanding of the ideological concept of the work. Telling his readers about the work on "The Defeat", Fadeev singled out the "first" thought: "... in the civil war there is a selection of human material, everything hostile is swept away by the revolution, everything incapable of real revolutionary struggle, accidentally falling into the camp of the revolution, from the millions of people, hardens, grows, develops in this struggle. There is a huge transformation of people. This alteration is successful because the revolution is led by the leading representatives of the working class, the Communists, who clearly see the aim of the movement and who lead the more backward and help them to re-educate. These are, of course, typical words for that time. And from the standpoint of our time, this is the ultimate communist maximalism, but it is part of that time, part of universal thinking.

Of course, this conclusion of the writer does not cover the entire richness of the content of the novel. The value of Fadeev's understanding of reality lies in the fact that he considers the period of revolutionary struggle as a whole era of spiritual change in the masses, their social and moral education. Such an approach to reality already presupposes an analytical depiction of characters, a study of the very process of spiritual growth, the change of a person and a people in a revolution. Of course, Fadeev’s worldview and the worldview of the “epoch”, the country that dominated him, played a decisive role in the artistic conception of the work - but this was how the work of art of that time should have been, this is how they wanted to see it, although this can not always be attributed to Fadeev. The analytical approach to depicting a person during the years of the civil war, and even a hero of the era, was uncharacteristic.

The heroes of the novel are shown at the turn to the new, in the struggle for the socialist transformation of the world. The criterion of the value of a person, the truth of his behavior is the attitude to the revolution, to action. In this sense, the plot of the novel is extremely dynamic: each hero, by the will of circumstances, finds himself on the verge of life and death and is revealed mainly at moments of the highest physical and moral tension.

To understand the origins of the feat of Frost, Metelitsa, Dubov, Levinson, Frolov, the writer makes extensive use of psychological analysis: in the spiritual system, in the movement of thoughts and feelings that are extremely open, naked at critical moments, the writer finds the answer to the question, what are the motives that prompt them to action.

The merit of Fadeev is that the most complex process of the formation of a new person was reflected in the spiritual quest of his heroes. And this process is presented in all its drama: in the clash of contradictions, in the struggle of ideologies, in the contrasts of the new and the old, so obvious at a turning point in history. The use of contrasts allows the author to most clearly emphasize the high and the low, the polarity of the actions and deeds of the characters. Of course, based on the requirements of the time, Fadeev portrays the heroism of the communists, which is shown as the daily performance of duties, as a conscious feat in the name of the revolution; the whole system artistic means the writer rejected naturalism in the depiction of the civil war, the abstract romanticization of heroes. All this is. But we must not forget about something else: the polemical nature of Levinson's image, the spiritual quest of the characters, and psychological analysis. After all, this is also there. And the novel, whatever it may be from the point of view of history and artistry, nevertheless deserves our attention, if only because it exists, that it is a page big book- our history and culture, without which it is impossible to understand the essence of our life fully and completely.

Vasily Grossman

Grossman Vasily Semenovich (real name - Grossman Iosif Solomonovich), prose writer, playwright, was born on November 29 (December 12) in the city of Berdichev in the family of a chemist, which determined the choice of his profession: he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University and graduated from it in 1929. Until 1932, he worked in the Donbass as a chemical engineer, then he began to actively collaborate in the Literary Donbass magazine: in 1934, his first story, Glukauf (from the life of Soviet miners), appeared, then the story In the city of Berdichev. M. Gorky drew attention to the young author, supported him by publishing "Glyukauf" in a new edition in the anthology "Year XVII" (1934). Grossman moves to Moscow, becomes a professional writer.

Before the war, the writer's first novel "Stepan Kolchugin" (1937-1940) was published. During the Patriotic War, he was a correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, having gone along with the army to Berlin, he published a series of essays on the struggle of the people against fascist invaders. In 1942, the "Red Star" published the story "The People is Immortal" - one of the most successful works about the events of the war. The play "According to the Pythagoreans", written before the war and published in 1946, caused sharp criticism. In 1952 he began to publish the novel "For a Just Cause", which was also criticized because it did not correspond to the official point of view on the war. Grossman had to revise the book. The continuation - the novel "Life and Fate" was confiscated in 1961. Fortunately, the book survived and in 1975 came to the West. In 1980, the novel saw the light of day. In parallel, Grossman has been writing another since 1955 - "Everything flows", also confiscated in 1961, but the version completed in 1963 was published in Frankfurt am Main in 1970 through samizdat. V. Grossman died on September 14, 1964 in Moscow.

"People are immortal"

Vasily Grossman began to write the story "The People is Immortal" in the spring of 1942, when the German army was driven away from Moscow and the situation at the front stabilized. It was possible to try to put in some order, to comprehend the bitter experience that burned the souls of the first months of the war, to identify what was the true basis of our resistance and inspired hopes for victory over a strong and skillful enemy, to find an organic figurative structure for this.

The plot of the story reproduces a very common front-line situation of that time - our units caught in the encirclement, in a fierce battle, suffering heavy losses, break through the enemy ring. But this local episode is considered by the author with an eye on Tolstoy's "War and Peace", moves apart, expands, the story acquires the features of a "mini-epos". The action is transferred from the headquarters of the front to the ancient city, which was attacked by enemy aircraft, from the front line, from the battlefield - to the village captured by the Nazis, from the front road - to the location of the German troops. The story is densely populated: our fighters and commanders - and those who turned out to be strong in spirit, for whom the beating trials became a school of "great hardening and wise heavy responsibility", and bureaucratic optimists who always shouted "Hurrah", but broken by defeats; German officers and soldiers intoxicated with the strength of their army and their victories; townspeople and Ukrainian collective farmers - both patriotic and ready to become servants of the invaders. All this is dictated by the "thought of the people", which for Tolstoy in "War and Peace" was the most important, and in the story "The People is Immortal" it is brought to the fore.

"Let there be no word more majestic and holy than the word" people! "- writes Grossman. It is no coincidence that he made the main characters of his story not military personnel, but civilians - a collective farmer from the Tula region Ignatiev and a Moscow intellectual, historian Bogarev. They are significant detail - those drafted into the army on the same day symbolize the unity of the people in the face of the fascist invasion. The ending of the story is also symbolic: "From where the flame burned out, two people walked. Everyone knew them. They were Commissar Bogarev and Red Army soldier Ignatiev. Blood was running down their clothes. They walked, supporting each other, stepping heavily and slowly.

Martial arts are also symbolic - "as if the ancient times of fights were revived" - Ignatiev with a German tankman, "huge, broad-shouldered", "passed through Belgium, France, trampling the land of Belgrade and Athens", "whose chest Hitler himself decorated with an" iron cross ". It reminds later described by Tvardovsky, Terkin’s fight with a “well-fed, shaved, caring, gratuitously well-fed” German: As on an ancient battlefield, Instead of thousands, two fight, Chest to chest, like a shield to a shield, - As if the fight will decide everything. "Semyon Ignatiev, - writes Grossman, - he immediately became famous in the company. Everyone knew this cheerful, tireless man. He was an amazing worker: every instrument in his hands seemed to play, have fun. And he possessed an amazing ability to work so easily, cordially, that a person who even looked at him for a minute wanted to take up an ax, a saw, a shovel himself, in order to do the work just as easily and well, as Semyon Ignatiev did. He had a good voice, and he knew a lot of old songs... "How much Ignatiev has in common with Terkin. Even Ignatiev's guitar has the same function as Terkin's accordion. And the relationship of these heroes suggests that Grossman discovered the features of modern Russian folk character.

"Life and Destiny"

The writer managed to reflect in this work the heroism of people in the war, the fight against the crimes of the Nazis, as well as the full truth about the events that took place then inside the country: exile to Stalinist camps, arrests and everything related to this. In the fates of the main characters of the work, Vasily Grossman captures the inevitable suffering, loss, and death during the war. The tragic events of this era give birth in a person internal contradictions, violate its harmony with outside world. This can be seen on the example of the fate of the heroes of the novel "Life and Fate" - Krymov, Shtrum, Novikov, Grekov, Evgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova.

People's suffering in the Patriotic War in Grossman's "Life and Fate" is more painful and profound than in previous Soviet literature. The author of the novel leads us to the idea that the heroism of a victory won in spite of Stalin's arbitrariness is more weighty. Grossman shows not only the facts and events of the Stalin era: camps, arrests, repressions. The main thing in the Stalinist theme of Grossman is the influence of this era on the souls of people, on their morality. We see the brave turn into cowards kind people- in the cruel, and honest and persistent - in the cowardly. We are no longer even surprised that the closest people are sometimes permeated with distrust (Evgenia Nikolaevna suspected Novikov of denouncing her, Krymov - Zhenya).

The conflict between man and the state is conveyed in the thoughts of the heroes about collectivization, about the fate of the "special settlers", it is felt in the picture of the Kolyma camp, in the thoughts of the author and the heroes about the thirty-seventh year. The truthful story of Vasily Grossman about the tragic pages of our history that were previously hidden gives us the opportunity to see the events of the war more fully. We notice that the Kolyma camp and the course of the war, both in reality and in the novel, are interconnected. And it was Grossman who was the first to show this. The writer was convinced that "a part of the truth is not the truth."

The heroes of the novel have different attitudes towards the problem of life and fate, freedom and necessity. Therefore, they have a different attitude to responsibility for their actions. For example, Sturmbannführer Kaltluft, the executioner at the stoves, who killed five hundred and ninety thousand people, is trying to justify himself by order from above, by the power of the Fuhrer, by fate (“fate pushed ... onto the path of the executioner”). But then the author says: "Fate leads a person, but a person goes because he wants, and he is free not to want." Drawing a parallel between Stalin and Hitler, the fascist concentration camp and the Kolyma camp, Vasily Grossman says that the signs of any dictatorship are the same. And its influence on the personality of a person is destructive. Having shown the weakness of a person, the inability to resist the power of a totalitarian state, Vasily Grossman at the same time creates images of truly free people. The significance of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, won in spite of Stalin's dictatorship, is more weighty. This victory became possible precisely thanks to the inner freedom of a person who is capable of resisting everything, no matter what fate has in store for him.

The writer himself fully experienced the tragic complexity of the conflict between man and the state in the Stalin era. Therefore, he knows the price of freedom: “Only people who have not experienced the similar power of an authoritarian state, its pressure, are able to be surprised at those who submit to it. a broken word, a timid, quick gesture of protest.

Yuri Bondarev

Bondarev Yuri Vasilyevich (born March 15, 1924 in Orsk, Orenburg Oblast), Russian Soviet writer. In 1941 Yu.V. Bondarev, along with thousands of young Muscovites, participated in the construction of defensive fortifications near Smolensk. Then there was an evacuation, where Yuri graduated from the 10th grade. In the summer of 1942 he was sent to study at the 2nd Berdichev infantry school, which was evacuated to the city of Aktyubinsk. In October of the same year, the cadets were sent to Stalingrad. Bondarev was enlisted as the commander of the mortar crew of the 308th regiment of the 98th rifle division.

In the battles near Kotelnikovsky, he was shell-shocked, received frostbite and a slight wound in the back. After treatment in the hospital, he served as a gun commander in the 23rd Kiev-Zhytomyr division. Participated in the crossing of the Dnieper and the liberation of Kyiv. In the battles for Zhytomyr he was wounded and again ended up in a field hospital. From January 1944, Y. Bondarev fought in the ranks of the 121st Red Banner Rylsko-Kyiv Rifle Division in Poland and on the border with Czechoslovakia.

Graduated from the Literary Institute. M. Gorky (1951). The first collection of stories - "On the big river" (1953). In the stories "Battalions Ask for Fire" (1957), "The Last Volleys" (1959; film of the same name, 1961), in the novel "Hot Snow" (1969) Bondarev reveals the heroism of Soviet soldiers, officers, generals , the psychology of participants in military events. The novel "Silence" (1962; film of the same name, 1964) and its sequel, the novel "Two" (1964) depict post-war life in which people who went through the war are looking for their place and vocation. The collection of short stories "Late in the evening" (1962), the story "Relatives" (1969) are dedicated to modern youth. Bondarev is one of the co-authors of the script for the film "Liberation" (1970). In the books of literary articles "Search for Truth" (1976), "A Look into the Biography" (1977), "Keepers of Values" (1978), also in the works of Bondarev recent years"Temptation", "Bermuda Triangle" the talent of the prose writer opened up new facets. In 2004, the writer published new novel titled "No Mercy".

Awarded two orders of Lenin, orders October revolution, Red Banner of Labor, Patriotic War I degree, "Badge of Honor", two medals "For Courage", medals "For the Defense of Stalingrad", "For the Victory over Germany", the Order of the "Big Star of Friendship of Peoples" (Germany), "Order of Honor "(Transnistria), gold medal A.A. Fadeev, many awards from foreign countries. Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1972), two State Prizes of the USSR (1974, 1983 - for the novels "Coast" and "Choice"), the State Prize of the RSFSR (1975 - for the script of the film "Hot Snow").

"Hot Snow"

The events of the novel "Hot Snow" unfold near Stalingrad, south of the 6th Army of General Paulus, blockaded by Soviet troops, in the cold December 1942, when one of our armies withstood a blow in the Volga steppe tank divisions Field Marshal Manstein, who sought to break through the corridor to the army of Paulus and withdraw it from the encirclement. The outcome of the battle on the Volga, and maybe even the timing of the end of the war itself, largely depended on the success or failure of this operation. The duration of the novel is limited to just a few days, during which the heroes of Yuri Bondarev selflessly defend a tiny patch of land from German tanks.

In "Hot Snow" time is squeezed even tighter than in the story "Battalions ask for fire." "Hot Snow" is a short march of General Bessonov's army unloaded from the echelons and a battle that decided so much in the fate of the country; these are cold frosty dawns, two days and two endless December nights. Knowing no respite and lyrical digressions, as if the author's breath was caught from constant tension, the novel "Hot Snow" is distinguished by its directness, the direct connection of the plot with true events Great Patriotic War, with one of its decisive moments. The life and death of the heroes of the novel, their very destinies are illuminated by an alarming light. true history, as a result of which everything acquires a special weight, significance.

In the novel, Drozdovsky's battery absorbs almost all of the reader's attention, the action is concentrated mainly around a small number of characters. Kuznetsov, Ukhanov, Rubin and their comrades - a particle great army They are the people, the people, to the extent that the typified personality of the hero expresses the spiritual, moral features of the people.

In "Hot Snow"

In "Hot Snow" the image of the people who went to war appears before us in a fullness of expression, unprecedented before in Yuri Bondarev, in the richness and diversity of characters, and at the same time in integrity. This image is not exhausted either by the figures of young lieutenants - commanders of artillery platoons, or by the colorful figures of those who are traditionally considered to be people from the people - like the slightly cowardly Chibisov, the calm and experienced gunner Yevstigneev, or the straightforward and rude riding Rubin; nor by senior officers, such as the division commander, Colonel Deev, or the army commander, General Bessonov. Only collectively understood and accepted emotionally as something unified, with all the difference in ranks and ranks, they constitute the image of a fighting people. The strength and novelty of the novel lies in the fact that this unity is achieved as if by itself, imprinted without any special efforts of the author - a living, moving life. The image of the people, as the result of the whole book, perhaps most of all nourishes the epic, novelistic beginning of the story.

Yuri Bondarev is characterized by aspiration for tragedy, the nature of which is close to the events of the war itself. It would seem that nothing answers this aspiration of the artist so much as the most difficult time for the country to start the war, the summer of 1941. But the writer's books are about a different time, when the defeat of the Nazis and the victory of the Russian army are almost certain.

The death of heroes on the eve of victory, the criminal inevitability of death, contains a high tragedy and provokes a protest against the cruelty of the war and the forces that unleashed it. The heroes of "Hot Snow" are dying - the orderly officer of the battery Zoya Elagina, the shy eedov Sergunenkov, a member of the Military Council Vesnin, Kasymov and many others are dying ... And the war is to blame for all these deaths. Let Lieutenant Drozdovsky’s heartlessness be blamed for Sergunenkov’s death, even if the blame for Zoya’s death falls partly on him, but no matter how great Drozdovsky’s fault, they are, first of all, victims of the war.

The novel expresses the understanding of death as a violation of higher justice and harmony. Recall how Kuznetsov looks at the murdered Kasymov: “now there was a shell box under Kasymov’s head, and his youthful, beardless face, recently alive, swarthy, turned deathly white, thinned by the terrible beauty of death, looked in surprise with moist cherry half-open eyes at his chest , on a torn to shreds, excised quilted jacket, as if even after death he did not comprehend how it killed him and why he could not get up to the sight. the calm mystery of death, into which the burning pain of the fragments overturned him when he tried to rise to the sight.

Even more acutely Kuznetsov feels the irreversibility of the loss of the driver Sergunenkov. After all, the mechanism of his death is revealed here. Kuznetsov turned out to be a powerless witness to how Drozdovsky sent Sergunenkov to certain death, and he, Kuznetsov, already knows that he will curse himself forever for what he saw, was present, but failed to change anything.

In "Hot Snow", with all the tension of events, everything human in people, their characters are not revealed separately from the war, but interconnected with it, under its fire, when, it seems, one cannot even raise one's head. Usually the chronicle of battles can be retold separately from the individuality of its participants - the battle in "Hot Snow" cannot be retold except through the fate and characters of people.

The past of the characters in the novel is essential and weighty. For some it is almost cloudless, for others it is so complex and dramatic that the former drama is not left behind, pushed aside by the war, but accompanies a person in the battle southwest of Stalingrad. The events of the past determined Ukhanov's military fate: a gifted, full of energy officer who would have commanded a battery, but he is only a sergeant. The cool, rebellious character of Ukhanov also determines his movement within the novel. Chibisov's past troubles, which almost broke him (he spent several months in German captivity), echoed in him with fear and determine a lot in his behavior. One way or another, the past of Zoya Elagina, and Kasymov, and Sergunenkov, and the unsociable Rubin slips in the novel, whose courage and loyalty to soldier's duty we will be able to appreciate only by the end of the novel.

The past of General Bessonov is especially important in the novel. The thought of his son being taken prisoner by the Germans makes his position both at Headquarters and at the front difficult. And when a fascist leaflet announcing that Bessonov's son was taken prisoner falls into the counterintelligence of the front in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Osin, it seems that there is a threat to Bessonov's service.

All this retrospective material enters the novel so naturally that the reader does not feel its separateness. The past does not require a separate space for itself, separate chapters - it has merged with the present, opened its depths and the living interconnectedness of one and the other. The past does not burden the story about the present, but gives it great dramatic sharpness, psychologism and historicism.

Yuri Bondarev does exactly the same with portraits of characters: the appearance and characters of his characters are shown in development, and only by the end of the novel or with the death of the hero does the author create a complete portrait of him. How unexpected in this light is the portrait of the always taut and collected Drozdovsky on the very last page - with a relaxed, broken-sluggish gait and unusually bent shoulders.

Such an image requires the author to be especially vigilant and immediacy in the perception of the characters, feeling them as real, living people, in whom there always remains the possibility of a mystery or sudden insight. Before us is the whole person, understandable, close, but meanwhile we are not left with the feeling that we have touched only the edge of his spiritual world - and with his death you feel that you have not yet had time to fully understand him inner world. Commissar Vesnin, looking at the truck thrown from the bridge onto the river ice, says: "What a monstrous destruction war is. Nothing has a price." The enormity of war is expressed most of all - and the novel reveals this with brutal frankness - in the murder of a person. But the novel also shows the high price of life given for the Motherland.

Probably the most mysterious of the world of human relations in the novel is the love that arises between Kuznetsov and Zoya. The war, its cruelty and blood, its terms, overturning the usual ideas about time - it was she who contributed to such a rapid development of this love. After all, this feeling developed in those short periods of march and battle, when there is no time for reflection and analysis of one's feelings. And it all starts with a quiet, incomprehensible jealousy of Kuznetsov for the relationship between Zoya and Drozdovsky. And soon - so little time passes - Kuznetsov is already bitterly mourning the deceased Zoya, and it is from these lines that the title of the novel is taken, when Kuznetsov wiped his face wet from tears, "the snow on the sleeve of the quilted jacket was hot from his tears."

Having been deceived at first in Lieutenant Drozdovsky, then the best cadet, Zoya, throughout the novel, opens up to us as a moral person, whole, ready for self-sacrifice, capable of embracing the pain and suffering of many with her heart ... Zoya's personality is known in a tense, as if electrified space, which is almost inevitable arises in the trench with the appearance of a woman. She seems to go through many trials, from intrusive interest to rude rejection. But her kindness, her patience and sympathy reach out to everyone, she is truly a sister to the soldiers. The image of Zoya somehow imperceptibly filled the atmosphere of the book, its main events, its harsh, cruel reality with a feminine principle, affection and tenderness.

One of the most important conflicts in the novel is the conflict between Kuznetsov and Drozdovsky. A lot of space has been given to this conflict, it is exposed very sharply, and is easily traced from beginning to end. At first, tension that goes back to the background of the novel; the inconsistency of characters, manners, temperaments, even the style of speech: it seems difficult for the soft, thoughtful Kuznetsov to endure Drozdovsky's jerky, commanding, indisputable speech. The long hours of battle, the senseless death of Sergunenkov, the mortal wound of Zoya, in which Drozdovsky is partly to blame - all this forms an abyss between the two young officers, the moral incompatibility of their existence.

In the finale, this abyss is indicated even sharper: the four surviving gunners consecrate the newly received orders in a soldier's bowler hat, and the sip that each of them takes is, first of all, a funeral sip - it contains bitterness and grief of loss. Drozdovsky also received the order, because for Bessonov, who awarded him, he is the surviving, wounded commander of a standing battery, the general does not know about Drozdovsky's grave guilt and most likely will never know. This is also the reality of war. But it is not for nothing that the writer leaves Drozdovsky aside from those gathered at the honest soldier's bowler hat.

It is extremely important that all Kuznetsov's connections with people, and above all with people subordinate to him, are true, meaningful and have a remarkable ability to develop. They are extremely non-official - in contrast to the emphatically official relations that Drozdovsky puts so strictly and stubbornly between himself and the people. During the battle, Kuznetsov fights next to the soldiers, here he shows his composure, courage, lively mind. But he also grows spiritually in this battle, becomes fairer, closer, kinder to those people with whom the war brought him together.

The relationship between Kuznetsov and senior sergeant Ukhanov, the gun commander, deserves a separate story. Like Kuznetsov, he had already been fired upon in the difficult battles of 1941, and in terms of military ingenuity and decisive character he could probably be an excellent commander. But life decreed otherwise, and at first we find Ukhanov and Kuznetsov in conflict: this is a collision of a sweeping, sharp and autocratic nature with another - restrained, initially modest. At first glance, it may seem that Kuznetsov will have to fight both the soullessness of Drozdovsky and the anarchist nature of Ukhanov. But in reality, it turns out that without yielding to each other in any principled position, remaining themselves, Kuznetsov and Ukhanov become close people. Not just people fighting together, but knowing each other and now forever close. And the absence of author's comments, the preservation of the rough context of life makes their brotherhood real, weighty.

The ethical, philosophical thought of the novel, as well as its emotional intensity, reaches its highest height in the finale, when Bessonov and Kuznetsov suddenly approach each other. This is a rapprochement without close proximity: Bessonov rewarded his officer on an equal basis with others and moved on. For him, Kuznetsov is just one of those who stood to death at the turn of the Myshkov River. Their closeness turns out to be more sublime: it is the closeness of thought, spirit, outlook on life. For example, shocked by the death of Vesnin, Bessonov blames himself for the fact that, due to his lack of sociability and suspicion, he prevented friendly relations between them from developing (“the way Vesnin wanted, and the way they should be”). Or Kuznetsov, who could do nothing to help Chubarikov's calculation, which was dying before his eyes, tormented by the piercing thought that all this, "it seemed, should have happened because he did not have time to get close to them, understand everyone, fall in love ...".

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Introduction

Every day of life we hear about the Great Patriotic War. About the one that ended almost forty years before we were born. What is it - the memory of the past or "remembrance" of the future? Why do we hear so much about the war? Because the representatives of the older generations cannot forget about it. They did not have an event more tragic than the beginning of the war, and they did not have an event more solemn than the Victory. On Victory Day, they were a little more than we are now. All of them - boys, girls, children, old people, soldiers, men and women, simple people and famous people - wept from happiness and from soul-rending longing for those who did not live to see this day.

Could anyone then imagine that he was going through the most important years of his life? Of course not - they believed that everything is still ahead, in the future, which promises so much. Just live up to it...

Now those who participated in the war behind whole life, and four years - whatever they may be - it's still four years, only four ... But for some reason, contrary to such obvious arithmetic, it seems that the war years took at least half a life, which was experienced at the time when every day was infinitely long and could be your last, much longer than in the rest of your life ...

The war fell on the shoulders of people with a terrible burden: backbreaking work, tears of mothers who have sons at the front, a widow's share of soldiers.

Yes, it is hard to remember those years, but it is necessary. It is absolutely necessary, because the memory of the war is a sacred memory. Holy and imperishable! Until the end of our days, we will remember what our people did in that war, not for nothing called the Patriotic War, when the fate of the Motherland was really in our hands, about the war that brought peace to us and to all mankind.

Very often, congratulating our friends or relatives, we wish them a peaceful sky over their heads. We do not want their families to be subjected to the hardships of the war. War! These five letters carry a sea of blood, tears, suffering, and most importantly, the death of people dear to our hearts. There have always been wars on our planet. The pain of loss has always filled the hearts of people. From everywhere where there is a war, you can hear the groans of mothers, the crying of children and deafening explosions that tear our souls and hearts. To our great happiness, we know about the war only from feature films and literary works.

The world must not forget the horrors of war, separation, suffering and death of millions. It would be a crime against the fallen, a crime against the future, we must remember the war, the heroism and courage that passed its roads, fight for peace - the duty of all living on Earth, therefore one of the most important topics of our literature is the theme of the feat of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic war.

The feat of the Soviet people was also the feat of Soviet literature.

“Every Soviet writer is ready to devote all his strength, all his experience and talent, all his blood, if necessary, to the cause of the holy people’s war against the enemies of our Motherland!” - these words were heard at a meeting on the first day of the war and were justified by deeds and life.

The Great Patriotic War is ordeal that fell to the lot of the Russian people. The literature of that time could not remain aloof from this event.

From the very beginning of the war, Soviet writers felt "mobilized and called up." Hundreds of writers came to the People's Commissariat of Defense, to the political departments of the Leningrad, Kyiv, Belorussian, Baltic military districts, without waiting for mobilization summonses, demanding immediate dispatch to the front. Total number front-line writers reached more than two thousand. It is impossible to find any historical analogy to such a massive participation of writers in direct literary combat work, which was developed by Soviet masters of the word in the days of the struggle against Hitlerism.

More than three hundred writers did not return from the battlefields, among them - E. Petrov, Yu. Krymov, A. Gaidar, V. Stavsky, M. Jalil ... Fascism raised its hand to the future of Soviet literature, wresting dozens of young people from its ranks writers, talented, bright people - V. Kubanev, M. Kulchitsky, N. Mayorov, G. Suvorov, P. Kogan, N. Otrada, V. Shulchev and many others.

And, what is especially important, the Great Patriotic War, despite the immeasurable sacrifices, became for the Soviet people a school of spiritual and moral growth. The Patriotic War raised to the crest all the most truly beautiful that was brought up in the Soviet man.

The importance and effectiveness of the word of writers during the war is also evidenced by the fact that works of prose, poetry and drama took a prominent place in the newspapers. Along with the primary political material, reports of the Soviet Information Bureau and other reports of national importance, on the pages of Pravda, Izvestia, Krasnaya Zvezda, Krasny Fleet, Komsomolskaya Pravda, we see not only songs, poems, journalistic articles, but and short stories, novellas, poems, plays.

In those days, M. Sholokhov and A. Fadeev became war correspondents for central and front-line newspapers, as well as radio, the Soviet Information Bureau, and TASS. A. Platonov, K. Simonov, B. Gorbatov, V. Grossman, B. Polevoy, E. Petrov, L. Sobolev. P. Pavlenko, I. Ehrenburg, S. Mikhalkov, A. Zharov, A. Kalinin and many others. Literature was openly agitational in nature, giving "the people a monstrous charge of hatred for the enemy."

With all the exclusivity and unexpectedness of the tasks that confronted it, Soviet literature of the war years naturally developed the creative principles that determined its path in previous years. The idea of peace has been and remains the dominant idea of Soviet literature, affirming the pathos of peaceful creative labor as the basis for the development of a full-fledged human personality.

This noble humanistic pathos was at the same time the pathos of active humanism, full of the will to live and ready to fight for it. It is not surprising that the words of A. Tvardovsky became winged for the Soviet people who rose to the battle against fascism:

The fight is holy and right.

Mortal combat is not for glory,

For life on earth.

("Vasily Terkin")

The ideological, moral, and psychological qualities discovered by the Soviet people during the days of the war revealed traits that had previously developed in somewhat different forms in the heroism of the revolution, the civil war, and the everyday life of socialist construction. The traditions of Soviet literature and art of the pre-war decades, with their faith in man, love for the Motherland, clarity and grandeur life purpose. The ideal of man, for which Soviet literature had been fighting since its inception, opposed fascist obscurantism with all its being. And actively resisted. The heroes of Soviet literature and their creators, masters of the word, starting with Gorky, felt like anti-fascist fighters. All this, like a baton, was accepted by those who had to go through all the trials of the war. Among them are people who would later join the thinned ranks of writers.

The succession of heroic traditions, which filled the whole atmosphere of the harsh war years, was the condition for the powerful rise of literature. The best works Soviet poetry, art journalism, prose and dramaturgy were true to the harsh truth of the time, they courageously sounded the theme of the party - the true inspirer and leader of the masses, the theme of the people - the hero, the creator of the great victory.

Our writers called the people to defend the Motherland. “All our thoughts are about her,” wrote A. Tolstoy in the article “Motherland”, “all our anger and rage - for her scolding and all our readiness - to die for her.”

The trials of the war were thus a test of civic maturity, the strength of the connection between literary work and life, with the people, and the viability of its artistic method.

Genres capable of most quickly and directly intervening in life came to the fore - an essay, a short story, an artistic and publicistic article and, of course, a lyric poem.

Soviet literature became a true artistic chronicle of the Patriotic War, at the same time it helped the people to fight, expressing the greatness of their ideals and goals, for the sake of which the Soviet people made sacrifices, spared neither their blood nor their lives.

In the war against fascism, the Soviet people defended not only the gains of socialism, but also the civilization of mankind. Soviet literature has taken a worthy part in the realization of this world-historical mission. She with honor and in poetry, and in prose, and in dramaturgy withstood the tests that fell to her lot.

All the years of the Great Patriotic War, writers were where victory was forged. The main weapon of front-line writers was their word.

A special place is occupied by works written in the fascist dungeon. They expressively describe the inflexibility of the will and spirit of the Soviet people, who cannot be broken by captivity, torture, or death itself. Things were written through suffering, containing both information about the war and a burning feeling of love for the Motherland. Songs, poems, journalism, essays, stories, novels were mobile genres of literature that moved to the front.

The literature of the war years is monolithic in its patriotic animation. And yet, in the position of individual national literatures, in their circumstances of participation in the war, there were differences that were expressed in themes, in the dominant genres, in the character literary life. It should not be forgotten that, despite the importance personal experience his writer creative development determined by people's experience, the main thoughts and feelings of the people as a whole. Russian literature most fully expressed the panorama of time, the history of the War in the people's self-consciousness.

The years of the war became a milestone in the national self-consciousness of the peoples, put forward by history to the vanguard of the struggle for humanity, a milestone in the evolution of the patriotism of the Soviet people, which showed a convincing ability to merge the national and socialist, international. The historical experience of the peoples was realized anew, the heroes of the past came to life; national artistic traditions began to be perceived a hundred times wider, on a larger scale, and together with them a new upsurge of literature, a variety of artistic searches, and stylistic trends were determined.

The public need to reflect the scale of events has led to the penetration of historical motifs into the literature of our days.

Soviet multinational literature of the war era was notable for its unity of creative inspiration, commonality of problems, inspired participation of the entire people in the struggle against fascism. It is noteworthy that the writers of most literatures spoke about the feat of 28 Panfilovites in their books. But each, by virtue of traditions and historical fate, went its own way, contributed to the common treasury of the spiritual and moral experience of the Soviet people.

Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945 opened a new page in the history of modern literature.

“The talk that the theme of the war has been exhausted, or that it is about to exhaust itself, has arisen more than once almost since the first post-war year. But some time passed, and suddenly a novel or a story about the Great Patriotic War appeared. The war opened from an unknown side, and we were again convinced for the umpteenth time that far from everything was told about these unforgettable events of people's life, that the source that has been feeding our literature for more than a decade has not dried up, ”wrote V. Kondratiev .

Most of this kind of books belong to the pen of writers who are well known to us, who have long received recognition - K. Simonov and V. Bykov, Yu. Bondarev and D. Granin, V. Astafiev and K. Vorobyov, K. Paustovsky and L. Sobolev.

The ranks of military writers were no longer replenished, but, alas, they were decreasing. More and more rarely, new names appeared in the cohort of writers of the military generation. And this is natural, you can’t do anything about it: the youngest participants in the war are not today eighty tomorrow, those who wanted and could have already written novels or novels about their experiences at the front.

The purpose of this essay is to reveal the theme of man in war based on the analysis of the works of Paustovsky and Sobolev.

Main part

The novel "Smoke of the Fatherland" was written by Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky during the Great Patriotic War. Like many Soviet writers, he went to the front as a war correspondent. The places mentioned in the book - Odessa, Mariupol, Central Asia, the Moscow region, Ryazan and the Russian North, the Baltic states and Western Ukraine - were well known to him from his previous travels, wanderings, business trips of a journalist. He was born in 1892 in Moscow, studied at the Kyiv gymnasium, as a child he visited the Chernihiv region, Polissya, later worked in the Black Sea region and the Caspian regions, in Karelia and Leningrad, he lived for a long time in the Voronezh, Tambov, Kaluga lands, especially for a long time - in Tarusa, where he was buried in 1968.

Paustovsky is a witness of two revolutions, he is a contemporary of two world wars that claimed millions of victims.

By the beginning of the Second World War, he was a mature man who had seen a lot in his lifetime, the author of books that were transparent in language and easy to understand, captivating with their inventiveness of fantasy, with an infectious aspiration for the future. Following Gorky and Mayakovsky, he considered himself one of the artisans of young Soviet art, saw the writer's mission as a "guide to the beautiful" in creating "a completely new and high system of human feelings and relationships." He bowed before the creative power of the immortal human genius and believed in the reality of "brilliant literature, one of the cornerstones of the magnificent world of freedom, justice and culture."

Being in Alma-Ata during the evacuation, the writer came to Barnaul for creative meetings with A.Ya.

Paustovsky also visited Belokurikha, where he lived at the Sixth Children's Dacha - Spanish children evacuated from Artek were settled there - he was twice in Biysk. "Barnaul months", as Paustovsky himself called them, as well as the time of the writer's stay in Belokurikha - the winter of 1942/43. and early spring - were busy not only working on the play. Stories were created, work was underway on the novel "Smoke of the Fatherland", the heroes of which - the Soviet writer Lobachev and the Spanish poetess Maria Alvarez - follow the Spanish children to the Altai Territory.

Paustovsky had a rare gift for finding precious grains of poetry in the most seemingly hopelessly prosaic subjects. The changeable, mobile physiognomy of any edge of our ancient "land of people" - from the environs of "South Palmyra" to the foothills of the snowy Altai - he was able to capture so vividly and accurately that his verbal pictures, as was said about him by one of his friends, it was just right to conclude framed and hung on the wall.

However, in the first difficult months of the fascist "blitzkrieg" his former perception of his native nature changes dramatically; wounded, desecrated by the enemy, mangled and burned, she withers and fades before his eyes.

Paustovsky from the very beginning began to write about how this military reality overtakes civilians in their everyday, "civilian" life, tearing them from their homes, even rolling to where there is also a loudspeaker - a novelty and an airplane - an unprecedented "silver goose". It can break the habitual way of life, irreparably cripple destinies.

"Smoke of the Fatherland" is one of the works whose fate is full of vicissitudes and even secrets. This also applies to other novels by Paustovsky; some of them were lost, burned by the author, or aged for years in a desk drawer, like grape wine in a cellar. Mastering a major genre that was difficult for him, the writer was not always sure of success and himself, like his heroes sometimes, sometimes relied on the will of an almighty chance. But most likely, he was simply more far-sighted than his other critics and understood that over the years, much of the "controversial" would become indisputable.

Belokurikha has long been no longer a "small resort", but a city, but even today you can see the neighborhood of the Sixth Dacha as Paustovsky saw and portrayed them in the novel "Smoke of the Fatherland".

But not only nature interested the writer. The difficult fates of the people he met in Altai naturally and naturally fit into the "Altai pages" of his work. According to the old-timers of Belokurikha, there was a real prototype of the image of the watchman Krynkin from the novel "Smoke of the Fatherland" and the story " Right hand". Meetings in Altai gave material for other stories of the writer - "Dispute in the car", "Order on the military school."

In the "Tale of Life" by Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky there is one remarkable autumn landscape; you involuntarily perceive it as a sad echo of two ill-fated shifting dates at once: 1914 - 1941. This landscape looks like both a warning and a belated spell of imminent disaster:

“Magnificent autumn stood in those days over Moscow. Trees dropped gilded foliage on the barrels of guns. Guns and charging boxes stood in gray lines along Moscow boulevards, waiting to be sent to the front.

The transparent, unprecedentedly thick and blue sky - the road of migratory flocks - stretched over the city in the radiance of the fading sun. And the leaves kept falling and falling, covering roofs, pavements, pavements, rustling under the brooms of janitors, under the feet of passers-by, as if trying to remind people that the land they had forgotten still exists around them, that, perhaps, for the sake of this land, for the sake of the weak the brilliance of the September web, for the clarity of dry and cool horizons, for the calm waters quivering from a piece of bark that has fallen from the trees, for the smell of yellowing willow, for the sake of all this rustling, extraordinarily beautiful Russia, for the sake of her villages, her huts, bluish straw smoking milky smoke river mists, her past and future - for the sake of all this, all honest people of the whole world, with a huge joint effort, will stop this war.

One of the most interesting and most significant works about the war, in my opinion, are the works of Leonid Sobolev. I like the way Sobolev writes about the war. He manages to convey with amazing depth the feelings of an ordinary soldier in the war.

During periods of historical upheavals, as is known, the need of society for journalism increases sharply - the direct, open, passionate word of a journalist, writer, which is distinguished by a special socio-political orientation, agitation, and acute problems. At this time, publicism permeated all genres of prose, poetry, dramaturgy. But the leading role in the literary life of society in such periods, especially at first, is played by journalism itself, intended for publication in periodicals and characterized by political topicality, promptness in covering events, and the power of emotional and ideological impact on the reader.

During the Great Patriotic War, almost all writers turned to its mobile genres. Correspondence, articles, essays, pamphlets, stories by A. Tolstoy, A. Fadeev, I. Ehrenburg, N. Tikhonov, M. Sholokhov, A. Tvardovsky, L. Sobolev, Vs. Vishnevsky, K. Simonov, K. Paustovsky.

Many writers became employees of the army and front-line press, war correspondents, commanders, and political workers. The desire to express the feelings and thoughts that owned each of them led to the open lyricism of A. Tolstoy's articles, the passionate pathos of B. Gorbatov, the journalistic intensity of I. Ehrenburg's speeches, and the philosophical reflections of L. Leonov.

A. Tolstoy became the chronicler of the war. His journalism was her chronicle, reflecting the stages of the struggle and feat of the Soviet people, the whole complex of problems caused by the war. More than others, A. Tolstoy turned to the history of the people, the origins of its ascent through the centuries (“Where did the Russian land come from”, “Shame is worse than death”, “Motherland”). The idea of the responsibility of the Soviet people not only to the future, but also to the past becomes transparent in his articles that recreate the historical pictures of wars and campaigns, the traditions of the military prowess of the Russian people, their culture and morality. The writer also appeals to the spirit of Slavic unity in the name of the fight against fascism (“The entire Slavic world must unite to defeat fascism”). At the same time, A. Tolstoy analyzes the program of the Nazi Party, the reasons for Hitler's popularity and the state of the spirit of German society ("The Nazis will answer for their atrocities", "Who is Hitler and what is he trying to achieve?", "I call for hatred") in order to debunk fascism before the world . A. Tolstoy's articles are imbued with passionate love for the Russian people.

Also, during these years, writers' notes, diaries, notes, and sketches acquired independent artistic value. The nature and content of military diaries were determined by the need to preserve for the history of eyewitness observations, a look at the events of their participants. Such are the "Diaries of the War Years" by Vs. Vishnevsky, “Leningrad in the days of the blockade” by A. Fadeev, “Leningrad diary” by V. Inber, “Motherland and foreign land” by A. Tvardovsky, published with the subtitle “Notebook pages”, a series of sketches by N. Tikhonov “In those days”, K Fedina "Date with Leningrad", etc.

Diaries were a form of essay literature, in which the authenticity of the image, the author's reliance on facts, was combined with his passionate interest.

Being a free, most often chronicle narrative, including a report on events, characteristics of a military, everyday or psychological situation, the diaries of the war years captured the observations and reflections of the participants historical events. "Diaries of the War Years" Vs. Vishnevsky is conquered by the reliability of historical evidence and the scale of generalizations, being also observations on life besieged Leningrad, and thoughts about the present and the future, and an analysis of the contradictions of time, the state of literature. Sun position. Vishnevsky is determined by faith in the "incredible endurance of our people", his "kindness, frankness, simplicity", in which the writer saw the guarantee of victory. The same high pride in the people who stood the first blockade winter makes A. Fadeev write: “It seems to me that there are things in the world that only a Russian person can endure.”

In the novels of the end of the war, interest in the personal principle in man intensifies, becoming predominant in the works of Sholokhov and Fadeev. The qualities of nationality, patriotism, and consciousness were brought to the fore in the hero, regardless of social position, profession, nationality. "Socialist sociality" became the nature of the character of the Soviet man, created by literature during the war years. Man in it always acted first of his fusion with society, and not only as an individual.

The moral climate of society, determined by the struggle for the life and independence of the socialist state, could not but influence literature. Socio-historical events, influencing the ways of cognizing reality, caused a concentration of such features that until now were not leading in them - epic, heroic, lyricism.

The nature of the epic in the prose of the Patriotic War was due to the fusion of the life and struggle of an individual with the life and struggle of the whole people. The events in the stories and tales of the war years appear as a living flow of history. And the social activity of the heroes who created it corresponded to the trend historical development. The epic was associated with the nature of the heroic.

The general tendencies of Soviet literature of the war years in depicting the courage and heroism of the Soviet man, one way or another, were reflected in every significant work of large and small forms.

The war is interpreted in prose as a school of courage and suffering, a school of love and hatred, as the greatest test of humanity, which the Soviet people withstood with honor.

The attraction to authenticity, combined with the broad generalization of the image, is the strength of the heroic stories and stories of the war years. During the war, writers were looking for a form that would create the impression of non-fiction, authenticity of the depicted. The illusion of life authenticity was often created by the fact that the story was told on behalf of the participants in the events, the author's voice merged with the voices of the characters. Writers, above all, strove to be true to the "psychology of facts."

In general, socio-psychological prose was a new stage in the comprehension of man and war, primarily because it was centered on the personality - whole, thinking, creative; events were recreated in their reliability, accuracy, harsh truth. However, having abandoned the romantically generalized view of what is happening, delving into the analysis of events and souls, she limited the breadth of the philosophical understanding of reality. The novels that appeared at the end of the war were supposed to make up for this loss.

These are the most significant works of historical prose of the period of the Patriotic War. They fully manifested the civic spirit and high ideological content of our literature: books about the past strengthened patriotic forces, called for the defense of the historical achievements of the people, for victory. Writers have achieved great success in the embodiment of strong-willed, heroic folk characters. This is how the leading characters of all the works mentioned above are depicted.

Conclusion

On the present stage our literature, following the tried and tested path of enriching artistic forms, thanks to the innovative development of the most fruitful traditions, has greatly expanded the scope of both tradition and innovation. If relatively recently the concept of "tradition" included mainly the classical heritage of past eras, then at the present time the traditions of socialist realism itself already exist and are exerting their influence.

These traditions arose and became stronger not spontaneously, but as a result of intense searches. It is no coincidence that the word "search" has gained such popularity. And it is characteristic that the writers themselves associate artistic searches with the search for truth, and the truth in the usage of Sholokhov, Bondarev and other writers is not just a synonym for truth, but its highest expression.

It is natural that, simultaneously with the unusually increased attention to artistic originality, originality and perfection of the work, the requirement of authenticity has recently sounded so imperiously. And literature willingly responds to this demand, plunging into the study of life, referring to the testimonies of participants in the events that attracted the attention of writers. Suffice it to point out the popularity enjoyed by memoirs about the Great Patriotic War. No writer trying to show the greatness of the feat of the Soviet people, who saved the Motherland, the civilization of mankind at the cost of huge sacrifices, cannot but appreciate the significance of the evidence, reflections, conclusions that these works are so rich in, although most of their authors did not pursue literary goals, but sought to tell truthfully about what fell to their lot and the lot of the country in the formidable war years. But these truthful testimonies, not refracted through the prism of the genre and style canons of the novel, story, drama, stimulated the search for new forms and play a huge role in enriching modern artistic thought, in educating the reader.

Also, artistic thought is often memory - the memory of the people and the memory of the artist himself.

If Time synthesizes into work of art history and modernity, then memory is both the past and a relay race to the future.

The motive of memory resounded especially powerfully and penetratingly in works about the Great Patriotic War. It sounded like a statement of the greatness of the feat in defense of the Fatherland and as a testament to future generations. And the further the events of those heroic years, the more tangible the universal significance of the feat accomplished by the Soviet people becomes, and the role of memory about it grows more and more.

Memory, even the bitterest, raises a person above Time, carries the guarantee of immortality.

The theme of memory, both in art and in the thoughts of cultural figures, is recognized as the theme of a great epic breath, as a driving principle for the development of culture.

The Victory Day is especially dear to every Russian person. Dear memory of those who defended freedom at the cost of their lives. We must always remember the people who gave their lives for the freedom and bright future of our country. The feat of those who fought and defeated fascism is immortal. The memory of their feat will live forever in our hearts and our literature. We must know at what cost our happiness has been won. To know and remember those, almost completely girls from Boris Vasiliev's story "The Dawns Here Are Quiet", who boldly looked death in the eyes, defending their Motherland. Is it possible for them, so fragile, delicate, to wear men's boots or hold machine guns in their hands? Of course not.

Now those who saw the war not on TV, who endured and survived it themselves, are becoming less and less every day. Years make themselves felt, old wounds and experiences that now fall to the lot of old people. The further, the more vivid and majestic they will unfold in our memory, and more than once our heart will want to relive the sacred, heavy and heroic epic of the days when the country fought from small to large. And nothing else but books will be able to convey to us this great and tragic event - the Great Patriotic War.

About the price of victory, which our people paid with the lives of their best sons and daughters, about the price of peace that the earth breathes, you think today, reading bitter and such profound works of Soviet literature.

Bibliography

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