Grigory Melekhova most fully reflected the drama of the fate of the Don Cossacks. He had such cruel ordeals that a person, it would seem, is not able to endure. First, the First World War, then the revolution and the fratricidal civil war, an attempt to destroy the Cossacks, an uprising and its suppression.
In the difficult fate of Grigory Melekhov, Cossack liberty and the fate of the people merged together. The steep disposition inherited from his father, adherence to principles and rebelliousness do not give him peace from his youth. Falling in love with Aksinya, a married woman, he leaves with her, disdaining public morality and his father's prohibitions. By nature, the hero is a kind, brave and courageous person who stands up for justice. The author shows his industriousness in scenes of hunting, fishing, haymaking. Throughout the novel, in severe battles, on one or the other side of the belligerents, he seeks the truth.
The First World War destroys his illusions. Proud of their Cossack army, of its glorious victories, in Voronezh, the Cossacks hear from a local old man a phrase thrown after them with pity: "My dear ... beef!" The old man knew that worse than war there is nothing, this is not an adventure on which you can become a hero, it is dirt, blood, stench and horror. Good arrogance flies from Gregory when he sees how his Cossack friends are dying: “The cornet Lyakhovsky was the first to fall from his horse. Prokhor galloped at him ... With a chisel, like a diamond on glass, she carved the memory of Grigory and held for a long time the pink gums of Prokhorov's horse with bared teeth, Prokhor, who fell flat, trampled by the hooves of a Cossack galloping behind ... More fell. Cossacks fell and horses. "
In parallel, the author shows the events in the homeland of the Cossacks, where their families remained. “And no matter how simple-haired Cossacks will run out into the alleys and look out from under the palms, they will not wait for the dear ones! No matter how many tears flow from swollen and faded eyes - not wash away the melancholy! No matter how many voices in the days of the anniversary and commemoration, the east wind will not carry their screams to Galicia and East Prussia, to the settled hills of mass graves! "
War is presented to the writer and his heroes as a series of hardships and deaths that change all foundations. War cripples from the inside and destroys all the most precious that people have. It makes the heroes look at the problems of duty and justice in a new way, seek the truth and not find it in any of the warring camps. Once with the Reds, Gregory sees everything the same as that of the Whites, cruelty, intransigence, bloodlust of enemies. War destroys the well-ordered life of families, peaceful labor, takes away the last, kills love. Grigory and Pyotr Melekhovs, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy and other heroes of Sholokhov do not understand why the fratricidal war is being fought. For whom and why should they die in their prime? After all, life on the farm gives them a lot of joy, beauty, hope, opportunities. War is only hardship and death. But they see that the burdens of war fall primarily on the shoulders of the civilian population, ordinary people, to starve and die - to them, and not to the commanders.
There are also characters in the work who think in a completely different way. Heroes Shtokman and Bunchuk see the country solely as an arena of class battles. For them, people are tin soldiers in someone else's game, and pity for a person is a crime.
The fate of Grigory Melekhov is a life incinerated by war. The personal relationships of the heroes take place against the backdrop of the tragic history of the country. Gregory cannot forget the first enemy, the Austrian soldier, whom he hacked to death with a saber. The moment of the murder changed him beyond recognition. The hero has lost his foothold, his kind, fair soul protests, cannot survive such violence against common sense. The skull of an Austrian cut in two becomes an obsession for Gregory. But the war goes on, and Melekhov continues to kill. He is not the only one who thinks about the terrible back side military duty. He hears the words of his own Cossack: “It is easier to kill someone else, which hand in this matter has broken, than to crush a louse. The man fell in price for the revolution. " The stray bullet, which kills the very soul of Gregory - Aksinya, is perceived as a sentence to all participants in the massacre. The war is actually being waged against all living things, it is not for nothing that Gregory, having buried Aksinya in a ravine, sees a black sky and a dazzling black disk of the sun above him.
Melekhov rushes between the two warring parties. Everywhere he comes across violence and cruelty, which he cannot accept, and therefore cannot take one side. When his mother reproaches him for taking part in the execution of the captive sailors, he himself admits that he became cruel in the war: “I don’t regret the children either.”
Realizing that war kills the best people of its time and that among thousands of deaths the truth cannot be found, Gregory throws down his weapons and returns to his native farm to work in his native land, raise children. At almost 30 years old, the hero is almost an old man. in his immortal work raises the question of the responsibility of history to the individual. The writer sympathizes with his hero, whose life is broken: “Like the steppe burnt out by the fires, the life of Grigory became black ...” The image of Grigory Melekhov was a great creative success for Sholokhov.

« Quiet Don"Is a work that shows the life of the Don Cossacks in one of the most difficult historical periods in Russia. The realities of the first third of the twentieth century, which turned the whole habitual way of life, like caterpillars, drove through the destinies of ordinary people. Through the life of Grigory Melekhov in the novel "And Quiet Flows the Don" Sholokhov reveals the main idea of \u200b\u200bthe work, which is to depict the collision of the individual and those who do not depend on him historical events, his wounded fate.

The struggle between duty and feelings

At the beginning of the work, the main character is shown as a hardworking guy with a hot temper, which he inherited from his ancestors. Cossack and even Turkish blood flowed in him. Eastern roots endowed Grishka with a bright appearance, capable of turning the head of more than one Don beauty, and the Cossack stubbornness, in places bordering on stubbornness, ensured the firmness and steadfastness of his character.

On the one hand, he shows respect and love for his parents, on the other hand, he does not listen to their opinion. The first conflict between Gregory and his parents happens because of his love affair with his married neighbor Aksinya. To end the sinful relationship between Aksinya and Gregory, his parents decide to marry him. But their choice in the role of sweet and meek Natalia Korshunova did not solve the problem, but only exacerbated it. Despite the official marriage, love for his wife did not appear, and for Aksinya, who, tormented by jealousy, increasingly sought a meeting with him, only flared up.

The blackmail of his father with his house and property forced the hot and impulsive Gregory in his hearts to leave the farm, his wife, relatives and leave with Aksinya. Because of his deed, the proud and unyielding Cossack, whose family from time immemorial cultivated its own land and grew its own bread, had to go to the mercenaries, which made Grigory ashamed and disgusting. But now he had to answer both for Aksinya, who abandoned her husband because of him, and for the child she carried.

War and betrayal of Aksinya

A new misfortune was not long in coming: the war began, and Gregory, who had sworn allegiance to the sovereign, was forced to leave both the old and the new family and go to the front. In his absence, Aksinya remained in the master's house. The death of her daughter and news from the front about the death of Gregory crippled the woman's strength, and she was forced to succumb to the onslaught of the centurion Listnitsky.

Coming from the front and learning about Aksinya's betrayal, Gregory returns to his family again. For a period of time, his wife, relatives and twins who soon appeared delight him. But the time of troubles on the Don, associated with the Revolution, did not allow enjoying family happiness.

Ideological and personal doubts

In the novel "Quiet Don", the path of Grigory Melekhov is full of quests, doubts and contradictions, both politically and in love. He was constantly rushing about, not knowing where the truth was: “Everyone has their own truth, their own furrow. People have always fought for a piece of bread, for a plot of land, for the right to life. We must fight with those who want to take away life, the right to it ... ”. He decided to lead the Cossack division and repair the supports for the advancing Reds. However, the further the Civil War continued, the more Gregory doubted the correctness of his choice, more clearly he understood that the Cossacks were waging a war with windmills. The interests of the Cossacks and their native land were of no interest to anyone.

The same model of behavior is typical in the personal life of the protagonist of the work. Over time, he forgives Aksinya, realizing that he cannot live without her love and takes with him to the front. After he sends her home, where she is forced to return to her husband once again. Arriving on leave, he looks at Natalia with different eyes, appreciating her devotion and loyalty. He was drawn to his wife, and this closeness culminated in the conception of a third child.

But again the passion for Aksinya prevailed over him. His latest betrayal led to the death of his wife. Gregory drowns remorse and the impossibility of confronting feelings in the war, becoming cruel and merciless: “I was so smeared with someone else's blood that I already had no one left to reap. Little kids - and I almost don't regret this one, but I don't even have a thought about myself. The war took everything out of me. I myself have become terrible. Look into my soul, and there is blackness, as in an empty well ... ".

A stranger among his own

The loss of loved ones and the retreat sobered Gregory, he understands: you need to be able to preserve what he has left. He takes Aksinya with him to retreat, but because of typhoid he is forced to leave her.

He again begins to seek the truth and finds himself in the Red Army, taking command of the cavalry squadron. However, even participation in hostilities on the side of the Soviets will not wash away Gregory's past, tarnished by the white movement. He is in danger of being shot, about which his sister Dunya warned him. Taking Aksinya, he attempts to escape, during which his beloved woman is killed. Having fought for his land and on the side of the Cossacks and the Reds, he remained a stranger among his own.

The path of Grigory Melekhov's searches in the novel is the fate of a common man who loved his land, but lost everything that he had and valued, protecting it for the life of the next generation, which in the finale is personified by his son Mishatka.

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Roman M.A. Sholokhov's Quiet Don is a novel about the Cossacks in the era of the Civil War. The main character works - Grigory Melekhov - continues the tradition of Russian classical literature, in which one of the main characters is the hero-seeker of truth (works by Nekrasov, Leskov, Tolstoy, Gorky).
Grigory Melekhov also seeks to find the meaning of life, to understand the whirlwind of historical events, to find happiness. This simple Cossack was born into a simple and friendly family, where centuries-old traditions are sacredly honored - they work a lot and have fun. The basis of the hero's character - love for work, for his native land, respect for the elderly, justice, decency, kindness - is laid down here, in the family.
Nice, hard-working, cheerful, Grigory immediately wins the hearts of those around him: he is not afraid of human talk (he almost openly loves the beautiful Aksinya, the wife of the Cossack Stepan), does not consider it shameful to go to work as laborers in order to maintain a relationship with his beloved woman.
And at the same time, Gregory is a man who tends to hesitate. So, despite his great love for Aksinya, Grigory does not oppose his parents, marries Natalia Korshunova at their will.
Without realizing it himself, Melekhov seeks to exist "in truth." He is trying to understand, to answer for himself the question "how should one live?" The search for the hero is complicated by the era in which it fell to be born - the time of revolutions and wars.
Gregory will experience strong moral vacillations when he gets to the fronts of the First World War. The hero went to war, thinking that he knew on whose side the truth was: it was necessary to defend the fatherland and destroy the enemy. What could be easier? Melekhov does just that. He fights valiantly, he is brave and selfless, he does not disgrace the Cossack honor. But gradually doubts come to the hero. He begins to see in opponents the same people with their hopes, weaknesses, fears, joys. What is all this carnage for, what will it bring to people?
The hero begins to realize this especially clearly when Melekhov's fellow countryman Chubaty kills a captive Austrian, a very young boy. The prisoner tries to establish contact with the Russians, openly smiles at them, tries to please. The Cossacks were pleased with the decision to bring him to headquarters for questioning, but Chubaty simply kills the boy out of love for violence, out of hatred.
For Melekhov, this event becomes a real moral blow. And although he firmly protects the Cossack honor, deserves an award, he understands that he was not created for war. He painfully wants to know the truth in order to find the meaning of his actions. Having fallen under the influence of the Bolshevik Garanji, the hero, like a sponge, absorbs new thoughts, new ideas. He begins to fight for the Reds. But the killing of unarmed prisoners by the Reds repels him from them too.
Gregory's childishly pure soul alienates him from both reds and whites. The truth is revealed to Melekhov: there can be no truth on either side. Reds and whites are politics, class struggle. And where there is a class struggle, blood always sheds, people die, children remain orphans. Truth is peaceful labor in the native land, family, love.
Gregory is a hesitant, doubting nature. This allows him to seek the truth, not to be satisfied with what has already been achieved, not to be limited to other people's explanations. Gregory's position in life is a position "between": between the traditions of the fathers and his own will, between two loving women - Aksinya and Natalya, between white and red. Finally, between the need to fight and the awareness of the senselessness and uselessness of slaughter ("my hands need to plow, not fight").
The author himself sympathizes with his hero. In the novel, Sholokhov objectively describes events, talks about the "truth" of both whites and reds. But his sympathies and emotions are on Melekhov's side. It fell to this person to live at a time when all moral guidelines were shifted. It is this, as well as the desire to search for the truth, that led the hero to such a tragic ending - the loss of everything that he loved: "Why did you, life, cripple me so?"
The writer emphasizes that the civil war is the tragedy of the entire Russian people. In it there are neither the right nor the guilty, because people are dying, a brother goes against a brother, a father - against a son.
Thus, in the novel The Quiet Don, Sholokhov made a person from the people and from the people a truth-seeker. The image of Grigory Melekhov becomes a concentration of the historical and ideological conflict of the work, an expression of the tragic searches of the entire Russian people.

\u003e Compositions based on The Quiet Don

The path of searches of Grigory Melikhov

The epic novel by MA Sholokhov "Quiet Don" (1928-1940) is a work about the life of the Don Cossacks during the Civil War. The main character of the novel, Grigory Melekhov, is a worthy son of his father, a loving and just person, a seeker of truth. Gregory's personal development against the background of changing, often hostile events in the world is the main problem of the novel. The author masterfully depicts the stages of the formation and development of the character of the hero, his exploits and disappointments, and most importantly, the search for a life path.

The image of Grigory Melekhov is complex and contradictory. He combined family and household, socio-historical and love line... He cannot be viewed in isolation from other characters. He is in close unity with his parents, his family and other Cossacks. The "millstones" of the war did not spare Gregory. They walked on his soul, crippling it and leaving traces of blood. On the battlefields, he matured, received many awards, supported the Cossack honor, but at what cost. The kind and humane Gregory hardened, his character hardened, and he became different. If after the first murder he could not sleep at night, tormented by his conscience, then over time he learned to mercilessly kill the enemy and even developed a technique for a fatal blow. However, until the last chapter, he remained a loving, open and fair person.

In search of the truth, Grigory rushed from one camp to another, from “red” to “white”. As a result, he became a renegade. He even envied those who firmly believed in one truth and fought for only one idea. The hero experienced moral vacillations not only at the front, but also at home. On the one hand, a devoted and loving Natalya was waiting for him, and on the other hand, he loved Aksinya, the wife of Stepan Astakhov, all his life. This ambiguous position in various social spheres indicates that Gregory is a doubting nature. He always lived "between two fires." The author himself sympathizes with his hero - a man who lived in times of trouble, when all moral guidelines were shifted.

Still not understanding what the "truth" is and why this senseless war was needed, having lost almost all his relatives and friends, at the end of the novel, Grigory returned to his native land. The only person who made him related to the land and this vast world was his son Mishatka. According to the author, this is exactly what the life of a Cossack could be: the son returned to his mother, that is, the Cossack land. Perhaps this was the "truth" that Gregory had been looking for for so long.

Throughout the novel "Quiet Flows the Don" Grigory Melekhov, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, is in search of the truth. Unlike his entourage, he is not ready to be a soulless murder machine, to kill his compatriots for someone else's interests. Gregory is looking for meaning and justice in the Civil War, in which he had to take part, and, unfortunately, does not find it.

The fate of Grigory Melekhov was largely predetermined by the revolutionary and military events of his time. Before joining the ranks of the white army, Melekhov could not look at death with a shudder - he was even depressed by the death of a duckling by his hand - but during the hostilities he has to kill. I remember the scene with the Austrian he killed: he took a person's life, but for what? Melekhov could not get an answer to this question. Grigory finds simple and obvious answers to the questions that puzzled him from the Bolsheviks.

“Here it is, our lover power! All are equal! ”He, like many of his other compatriots, is tempted by the simple and understandable ideology of the“ red. ”Grigory goes over to the side of the anti-monarchists, he is ready to fight for general equality and happiness, but even here he meets with cruelty and looting that revolts him. A detachment of unarmed prisoners is shot by the "Reds" despite Gregory's attempts to stop this action. When the Bolsheviks begin to commit violence in his native land, he becomes their fierce enemy. But after his transition to the side of the officers, one cannot assume that Grigory considers himself a monarchist, he he cannot choose which side he is on in this war, he cannot choose the lesser of two evils, he rushes about. He says about the whites Koshevoy and Listnitsky: “From the very beginning it was clear to them, but to me everything is still unclear. Both of them have their own straight roads, their ends, and since 1917 I have been walking on forked roads, swinging like a drunken man ... ”Such a neutral position of Grigory does not suit the military bipolar world. Melekhov seems to be dangerous for both the Bolsheviks and the“ whites ” . He tries to escape to the Kuban, but on the way they kill his beloved Aksinya. "And Gregory, dead from horror, realized that everything was over, that the worst thing that could happen in his life has already happened." The war takes away from Grigory The most precious thing is that the "Reds" kill his brother Petro, his beloved Aksinya, his mother and father, daughter Polyushka, legal wife Natalya die. All that remains is his son and sister Dunyasha. Grigory lost a lot in the senseless meat grinder of the revolution and civil war. A man like him, a man loyal to his heart, a seeker of truth deserves happiness. But is there a place in the new world for such a person?

Thus, the Don Hamlet is left by the author shabby and aged, experienced and endured by suffering. Using the example of Melekhov, Sholokhov shows us the cruelty and senselessness of the civil war, the war of brother against brother. You cannot just split the world into white and red, enemies and allies at once, the author claims, that life is multifaceted and complex and that such a separation is simply unacceptable.