How strikingly have disappeared all the Soviet spells and formulas, enumerated above! [cm. article Grossman "For a just cause" - analysis of A. Solzhenitsyn] - and no one will say that this is - from the author's insight at 50? And what Grossman really did not know and did not feel until 1953 - 1956, then he managed to overtake in the last years of work on the 2nd volume and now with passion this all that was left out thrust into the fabric of the novel.

Vasily Grossman in Schwerin (Germany), 1945

Now we learn that not only in Hitler's Germany, but also in our country: mutual suspicion of people towards each other; as soon as people talk over a glass of tea, there is already a suspicion. Yes, it turns out: Soviet people live in appalling housing cramped (the driver reveals this to the prosperous Shtrum), and oppression and tyranny in the police department. And what a disrespect for shrines: a fighter can easily wrap a piece of sausage in a greasy battle sheet. But the conscientious director of Stalgres stood at death post throughout the siege of Stalingrad, left for the Volga on the day of our successful breakthrough - and all his merits went down the drain, and ruined his career. (And the formerly crystal-positive secretary of the regional committee, Pryakhin, is now recoiling from the victim.) It turns out that even Soviet generals may not be brilliant achievements at all, even in Stalingrad (III part, Ch. 7), but just write this at Stalin! Yes, even the corps commander dares to talk to his commissar about the 1937 landings! (I - 51). In general, now the author dares to raise his eyes to the untouchable Nomenclature - and apparently, he thought a lot about it and his soul was very boiling. With great irony, he shows the gang of one of the Ukrainian regional party committees evacuated to Ufa (I - 52, however, as it were, reproaches them for their low village origin and caring love for their own children). But what, it turns out, are the wives of responsible workers: in the convenience of being evacuated by the Volga steamer, they indignantly protest against the landing on the decks of that steamer of a detachment of military men going to battle. And young officers at the quarters hear downright frank recollections of the residents "of complete collectivization." And in the village: "No matter how hard you work, they will take away the bread." And the evacuees, out of hunger, steal collective farm goods. Yes, so the "Questionnaire of questionnaires" got to Strum himself - and how rightly he reflects on it about its stickiness and claw. And here the hospital commissar is being “bugged” that he “did not fight enough against disbelief in victory among some of the wounded, with enemy sorties among the backward part of the wounded, hostile to the collective farm system” - oh, where was that before? oh, how much truth is still behind this! And the hospital funeral itself is cruelly indifferent. But if the coffins are buried by a labor battalion, who is it recruited from? - not mentioned.

Grossman himself - does he remember what he was like in Volume 1? Now? - now he undertakes to reproach Tvardovsky: "how can one explain that a poet, a peasant from birth, writes with sincere feeling a poem that praises the bloody time of suffering of the peasantry"?

And the Russian theme itself, in comparison with the 1st volume, is still pushed aside in the 2nd. At the end of the book, it is well-disposed that “season girls, workers in heavy workshops” - both in the dust and in the dirt, “retain a strong stubborn beauty that a hard life cannot do anything about”. The return from the front of Major Berezkin is also referred to the finale - well, and the Russian unfolded landscape. That, perhaps, is all; the rest is of a different sign. Strum's envious person at the institute, embracing another of the same: "But the most important thing is that we are Russian people." The only very true remark about the humiliation of Russians in their own country, that "in the name of friendship of peoples, we always sacrifice Russian people", Grossman inserts into the crafty and boorish party boss Getmanov - from that new (post-Minternist) generation of party promoters who "loved their Russian They spoke Russian inwardly and spoke incorrectly, "their strength is" in cunning. " (As if the international generation of communists had less cunning, oh-oh!)

From some (late) moment, Grossman is not alone! - deduced for himself the moral identity of German National Socialism and Soviet communism. And honestly strives to give a newfound conclusion as one of the highest in his book. But I have to disguise myself (however, for the Soviet publicity it is all the same extreme courage): to express this identity in a fictitious night conversation between Obersturmbannführer Liss and the prisoner Cominternist Mostovsky: “We are looking in the mirror. Don't you recognize yourself, your will in us? " Here, we will defeat you, we will be left without you, alone against a foreign world, "our victory is your victory." And it makes Mostovsky horrified: does this "full of snake venom" speech contain some truth? But no, of course not (for the safety of the author himself?): "The glamor lasted for several seconds", "the thought turned to dust."

And at some point, Grossman directly calls the Berlin uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian 1956 uprising, but not by themselves, but along with the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka, and only as material for a theoretical conclusion about man's striving for freedom. And then this desire all breaks through: here is Shtrum in 1942, albeit in a private conversation with the trusted academician Chepyzhin, but he directly picks up Stalin (III - 25): "Here the Boss was strengthening his friendship with the Germans." Yes, Shtrum, it turns out, we could not even have imagined, - for years with indignation he has been following the excessive praise of Stalin. So he understands everything for a long time? this has not been communicated to us before. So the politically soiled Darensky, publicly interceding for the captured German, shouts to the colonel in front of the soldiers: "scoundrel" (very implausible). Four little-known intellectuals in the rear, in Kazan, in 1942, discussed at length the massacres of 1937, naming famous sworn names (I - 64). And more than once more generalized - about the whole torn atmosphere of 1937 (III - 5, II - 26). And even Shaposhnikov's grandmother, who is politically completely neutral throughout the entire 1st volume, busy only with work and family, now recalls the “traditions of the Narodnaya Volya family”, and 1937, and collectivization, and even the famine of 1921. That makes her granddaughter, still a schoolgirl, all the more reckless. conducts political conversations with his boyfriend-lieutenant and even hums the Magadan song of prisoners. Now we will meet the mention of the famine of 1932 - 33.

And now - we are striding towards the latter: in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad, the unfolding of the political "case" against one of the highest heroes - Grekov (this is Soviet reality, yes!) And even to the author's general conclusion about the Stalingrad triumph, that after him " the tacit dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continued ”(III - 17). This, however, was not given to everyone in 1960. It is a pity that this was expressed without any connection with the general text, some kind of cursory introduction, and, alas, not developed in the book any more. And even to the very end of the book, excellent: "Stalin said:" brothers and sisters ... "And when the Germans were defeated - the director of the cottage, without a report, do not enter, but brothers and sisters in the dugouts" (III - 60).

But even in the second volume, sometimes from the author one will come across either “world reaction” (II - 32), sometimes quite official: “the spirit of the Soviet troops was unusually high” (III - 8); and let us read a rather solemn praise to Stalin that as early as July 3, 1941, he “was the first to understand the secret of the transformation of war” into our victory (III - 56). And in a lofty tone of admiration, Strum thinks about Stalin (III - 42) after the Stalinist telephone call - you cannot write such lines without the author's sympathy for them. And undoubtedly, with the same complicity, the author shares Krymov's romantic admiration for the ridiculous solemn meeting on November 6, 1942 in Stalingrad - "there was something in it reminiscent of the revolutionary holidays of old Russia." And Krymov's agitated memories of Lenin's death also reveal the author's complicity (II - 39). Grossman himself undoubtedly retains faith in Lenin. And he does not try to hide his direct sympathy for Bukharin.

This is the limit that Grossman cannot cross.

And all this was written - in the calculation (naive) for publication in the USSR. (Isn't that why the unconvincing one is wedged in: "Great Stalin! Perhaps a man of iron will is the most weak-willed of all. A slave of time and circumstances.") So if the "squabblers" are from the district trade union council, but something straight into the forehead of the communist government ? - Yes, God forbid. About General Vlasov - one contemptuous mention of Komkor Novikov (but it is clear that it is also the author's, for who in the Moscow intelligentsia understood anything about the Vlasov movement even by 1960?). And then it was even more untouchable - once the shyest guess: “what was really clever Lenin, and he did not understand,” - but it was said again by this desperate and doomed Grekov (I - 61). Moreover, at the end of the volume, the indestructible Menshevik (the author's wreath in memory of his father?) Dreling, the eternal prisoner, looms like a monument.

Yes, after 1955 - 56 he had already heard a lot about the camps, then it was time to "return" from the Gulag - and now the author of the epic, if only out of conscientiousness, if not considerations of composition, is trying to encompass the lattice world as well. Now the echelon with prisoners (II - 25) opens to the eyes of the passengers of the free train. Now - the author dares to step into the zone himself, to describe it from the inside according to the signs from the stories of the returnees. For this purpose, Abarchuk, who has deafly failed in the 1st volume, emerges, the first husband of Lyudmila Shtrum, however, an orthodox communist, and in his company there is also a conscientious communist Neumolimov, and also Abram Rubin, from the Institute of the Red Professorship (on the preferential idiot post of a paramedic : "I am a lower caste, untouchable"), and the former Chekist Magar, allegedly touched by the late repentance of one ruined dispossessed man, and other intellectuals — such and such returned then to Moscow circles. The author tries to really depict the camp morning (I - 39, some details are correct, some are incorrect). In several chapters, it densely illustrates the insolence of thieves (but why does the power of the criminal over the political ones Grossman call the "innovation of National Socialism"? - no, from the Bolsheviks, since 1918, don’t take away!), And the learned democrat incredibly refuses to stand up during the guard round. These several camp chapters in a row pass like in a gray fog: as if it looks like, but - done. But you cannot reproach the author for such an attempt: after all, he takes no less courage to describe the prisoner of war camp in Germany - both according to the requirements of the epic and for a more persistent goal: to finally compare communism with Nazism. He rightly rises to another generalization: that the Soviet camp and the Soviet will correspond to the "laws of symmetry." (Apparently, Grossman seemed to be staggering in understanding the future of his book: he wrote it for the Soviet publicity! - and at the same time he wanted to be truthful to the end.) Together with his character Krymov, Grossman also enters Bolshaya Lubyanka, also collected from stories ... (Some mistakes in reality and in the atmosphere are also natural here: either the suspect sits right across the table from the investigator and his papers; then, exhausted by insomnia, he does not regret the night for an exciting conversation with a cellmate, and the guards, strangely, do not interfere with them in this. ) He writes several times (erroneously for 1942): "MGB" instead of "NKVD"; and ascribes only 10 thousand victims to the terrifying 501st construction site ...

Probably, several chapters about the German concentration camp should be taken with the same amendments. That there was a communist underground operating there - yes, this is confirmed by witnesses. Impossible in the Soviet camps, such an organization was sometimes created and held in the Germans thanks to the general national rallying against the German guards, and the shortsightedness of the latter. However, Grossman exaggerates that the scale of the underground was through all the camps, almost to the whole of Germany, that parts of grenades and machine guns were brought from the factory to the residential area (this could still be), and “they were assembling in blocks” (this is a fantasy). But what is certain: yes, some communists rubbed into the confidence of the German guards, made their own fools, and could send those they disliked, that is, anti-communists, for reprisals or in penal camps (like Grossman's, they send the people's leader Ershov to Buchenwald).

Now Grossman is much freer about the military topic too; now let’s read something that could not even have been thought of in the 1st volume. As the commander of a tank corps, Novikov arbitrarily (and risking his entire career and orders) delays the attack assigned by the front commander for 8 minutes - so that they can better suppress the enemy's firepower and there would be no big losses for ours. (And it is characteristic: Novikov-brother, introduced in the 1st volume solely to illustrate selfless socialist labor, now the author completely forgets how he failed, in a serious book he is no longer needed.) Now, to the former legendary character of the commander Chuikov, ardent envy is added. him to other generals and dead drunkenness, until the failure in the wormwood. And the company commander spends all the vodka received for the soldiers on his own birthday. And its own aircraft bombed its own. And they send the infantry to the unsuppressed machine guns. And we no longer read those pretentious phrases about the great national unity. (No, there is something left.)

But the receptive, observant Grossman grasped the reality of the battles in Stalingrad enough even from his correspondent position. The battles in the "Grekov's house" are very honestly described, with all the combat reality, just like Grekov himself. The author clearly sees and knows the Stalingrad combat circumstances, faces, and the atmosphere of all headquarters - all the more reliably. Finishing his review of military Stalingrad, Grossman writes: "His soul was freedom." Does the author really think so or inspire himself as he would like to think? No, the soul of Stalingrad was: "for the native land!"

As we can see from the novel, as we know both from witnesses and from other publications of the author, Grossman was sharply blamed by the Jewish problem, the position of Jews in the USSR, and even more so to this were added burning pain, oppression and horror from the destruction of Jews on the German side front. But in the 1st volume, he was numb before the Soviet censorship, and even internally he had not yet dared to break away from Soviet thinking - and we saw how much the Jewish theme was suppressed in the 1st volume, and in any case, not a stroke - either Jewish embarrassment or displeasure in the USSR.

The transition to freedom of expression was given to Grossman, as we have seen, not easily, aimlessly, without balance throughout the entire volume of the book. This is the same in the Jewish problem. Here, the Jewish employees of the Institute are prevented from returning with others from the evacuation to Moscow - Strum's reaction is quite in the Soviet tradition: "Thank God, we do not live in Tsarist Russia." And here - not Shtrum's naivety, the author consistently holds that before the war there was neither spirit nor hearing of any ill will or special attitude towards Jews in the USSR. Strum himself “never thought” about his Jewishness, “never before the war did Strum think that he was a Jew,” “his mother never spoke to him about it - neither in childhood, nor during his student days”; about this "fascism made him think." And where is that “malicious anti-Semitism” that was so vigorously suppressed in the USSR during the first 15 Soviet years? And Shtrum's mother: "forgotten during the years of Soviet power that I am Jewish," "I never felt like a Jew." Persistent repetition loses credibility. And where did that come from? The Germans came - a neighbor in the yard: “Thank God, we are waiting for the end”; and at a meeting of townspeople with the Germans, "how much slander there was against the Jews" - where did it all suddenly break out? and how did it hold out in a country where everyone had forgotten about Jewishness?

If in the 1st volume Jewish surnames were hardly mentioned, in the 2nd we meet them more often. Here is the staff hairdresser Rubinchik playing the violin in Stalingrad, in the Rodimtsevo headquarters. There is also a combat captain Movshovich, the commander of a sapper battalion. Military doctor Dr. Meisel, a top-class surgeon, selfless to such an extent that he conducts a difficult operation when his own attack of angina pectoris begins. An unnamed quiet child, a frail son of a Jewish manufacturer who died sometime in the past. Several Jews in today's Soviet camp have already been mentioned above. (Abarchuk is a former big boss at the Holodomorny Kuzbass construction, but his communist past is served mildly, and today's enviable job as a tool storekeeper in the camp has not been explained.) - Seryozha and Tolya, then about the third granddaughter Nadia in the 2nd volume - and without connection with the action, and unnecessarily - it is underlined: “Well, not a drop of our Slavic blood is in her. An absolutely Jewish girl. " - To strengthen his view that a national characteristic has no real influence, Grossman emphatically opposes one Jew to another in their positions. "Mr. Shapiro, a representative of the United Press agency, asked tricky questions at the conferences to the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky." Between Abarchuk and Rubin there is an invented irritation. The arrogant, cruel and mercenary commissar of the air regiment Berman does not defend, and even publicly denounces the unjustly offended brave pilot of the King. And when Shtrum begins to persecute at his institute, the crafty and fat-ass Gurevich betrays him, at the meeting debunks his scientific achievements and hints at Strum's "national intolerance". This calculated method of placing characters is already taking on the character of a raster by the author of his sore spot. Unknown young people saw Shtrum at the station waiting for a train to Moscow - immediately: "Abram is returning from evacuation", "Abram is in a hurry to receive a medal for the defense of Moscow."

The author gives Tolstoyan Ikonnikov such a course of feelings. “The persecutions that the Bolsheviks carried out after the revolution against the church were useful for the Christian idea” - and the number of victims of that time did not undermine his religious faith; He also preached the Gospel during the general collectivization, observing mass sacrifices, but after all, too, "collectivization was in the name of good." But when he saw "the execution of twenty thousand Jews ... - on that day [he] realized that God could not allow such a thing, and ... it became obvious that he was not."

Now, finally, Grossman can afford to reveal to us the content of Strum's mother's suicide letter, which was passed on to her son in volume 1, but it is only vaguely mentioned that it brought bitterness: in 1952, the author did not dare to give it to publication. Now it occupies a large chapter (I - 18) and with a deep spiritual feeling conveys the experience of the mother in the Ukrainian city captured by the Germans, disappointment in the neighbors, next to which they lived for years; everyday details of the seizure of local Jews into the enclosure of an artificial temporary ghetto; life there, various types and psychology of captured Jews; and self-preparation for unforgiving death. The letter is written with a mean drama, without tragic exclamations - and very expressive. Here the Jews are being driven along the pavement, and on the sidewalks there is a crowd staring; those are dressed in summer clothes, and the Jews, who have taken things in reserve, “in coats, in hats, women in warm scarves”, “it seemed to me that for the Jews walking down the street, the sun had already refused to shine, they were walking among December night cold ".

Grossman undertakes to describe both mechanized destruction, central, and tracing it from the intention; the author is tensely restrained, not a cry, not a jerk: Obersturmbannführer Liss is busily inspecting the plant under construction, and this is in technical terms, we are not anticipated that the plant is intended for the mass destruction of people. The voice of the author breaks down only on the "surprise" to Eichmann and Liss: they are offered a table with wine and snacks in the future gas chamber (this is inserted artificially, into the grid), and the author comments on this as a "sweet invention." On the question of how many Jews are in question, the figure is not named, the author tactfully avoids, and only "Liss, amazed, asked: - Millions?" - the artist's sense of proportion.

Together with Dr. Sophia Levinton, captured in German captivity in the 1st volume, the author now draws the reader into a thickening stream of Jews doomed to destruction. First, it is the reflection in the brain of the maddened accountant Rosenberg of the mass burnings of Jewish corpses. And yet another madness - a girl who was not shot, who got out of a common grave. When describing the depth of suffering and incoherent hopes, and the naive last domestic worries of doomed people, Grossman tries to keep within the bounds of dispassionate naturalism. All these descriptions require an extraordinary work of the author's imagination - to imagine what no one has seen or experienced from the living, there was no one to collect reliable testimony from, but it is necessary to imagine these details - a dropped children's cube or a butterfly pupa in a matchbox. In a number of chapters, the author tries to be as factual as possible, and sometimes even everyday, avoiding an explosion of feelings both in himself and in the characters drawn by forced mechanical movement. He presents us with a plant of destruction - generalized, without calling it by the name "Auschwitz". An outburst of emotions allows himself only when he recalls the music that accompanies the column of the doomed and the outlandish shocks from it in the souls. This is very powerful. And immediately close - about the black-red rotten chemical water, which will wash away the remains of the destroyed into the world ocean. And now - the last feelings of people (old maid Levinton flares up a motherly feeling for someone else's baby, and, in order to be with him, she refuses to go out to the salutary challenge "who is the surgeon here?" And further, further, the author gets used to every detail: a deceiving "dressing room", haircuts for women to collect their hair, someone's wit on the brink of death, "the muscular power of smoothly bending concrete that sucked in a human stream", "some kind of half-asleep sliding ", All denser, all compressed in the chamber," all the shorter steps of people "," hypnotic concrete rhythm "swirling the crowd - and gas death, darkening the eyes and consciousness. (And at that - to cut off. But the author, an atheist, gives the following reasoning that death is "a transition from the world of freedom to the kingdom of slavery" and "the Universe that existed in man has ceased to be" - this is perceived as an offensive breakdown from the spiritual height reached by the previous pages.)

Compared to this powerful self-convincing scene of mass destruction, there is little in the novel a separate chapter (II - 32) of an abstract discourse about anti-Semitism: about its heterogeneity, about its content and reducing all its causes to the mediocrity of the envious. Confused reasoning, not based on history and far from exhausting the topic. Along with a number of correct remarks, the fabric of this chapter is very uneven.

And the plot of the Jewish problem in the novel is more built around the physicist Strum. In the 1st volume, the author did not dare to expand the image, now he decides to do so - and the main line is closely intertwined with Strum's Jewish origin. Now, belatedly, we learn about the "eternal inferiority complex" that he feels in the Soviet situation: "you enter the conference room - the first row is free, but I hesitate to sit down, I go to Kamchatka." Here - and the shaking effect on him of his mother's suicide letter.

The author, according to the laws of the literary text, of course, does not tell us about the very essence of Strum's scientific discovery, and should not. And the poetic chapter (I - 17) on physics in general is good. The moment of guessing the grain of the new theory is described very plausibly - the moment when Strum was busy with completely different conversations and worries. This thought "it seemed that he did not give birth, it rose simply, easily, like a white water flower from the calm darkness of the lake." In deliberately inaccurate expressions, Strum's discovery is raised as an epoch-making (this is well expressed: “gravity, mass, time collapsed, space that has no existence, but only one magnetic meaning collapsed”), “the classical theory itself became just a special case in the new a broad solution ”, the institute employees put Strum right after Bohr and Planck. From Chepyzhin, more practically, we learn that Strum's theory will be useful in the development of nuclear processes.

In order to vitalize the greatness of the discovery, Grossman, with the correct artistic tact, begins to delve into Strum's personal shortcomings, some of his fellow physicists consider him unkind, mocking, arrogant. Grossman lowers it outwardly as well: “scratched and stuck out his lip,” “schizophrenically nipped,” “shuffling gait,” “slob,” loves to tease family members, loved ones, is rude and unfair to his stepson; and once "in a rage he tore his shirt and, entangled in his underpants, on one leg galloped to his wife, raising his fist, ready to strike." But he has "tough, bold directness" and "inspiration." Sometimes the author notes Strum's pride, often - his irritability, and rather petty, that's about his wife. "An agonizing irritation seized Shtrum", "a painful irritation coming from the depths of his soul." (Through Shtrum, the author seems to be discharged from those tensions that he himself experienced in embarrassment for many years.) "Strum was angry with conversations about everyday topics, and at night, when he could not sleep, he thought about being attached to the Moscow distributor." Returning from the evacuation to his spacious, comfortable Moscow apartment, he notes with carelessness that the driver who brought their luggage “apparently was seriously concerned with the housing issue”. And having received the coveted privileged "food package", he is tormented that an employee of a smaller caliber was given no less: "Surprisingly, we can offend people."

What are his political views? (His cousin served his prison term and was sent into exile.) “Before the war, Strum did not have any particularly acute doubts” (according to the first volume, let us remember that during the war they did not arise either). For example, he then believed the wild accusations against the famous professor Pletnev - oh, from the "prayer attitude to the Russian printed word" - this is about Pravda ... and even in 1937? .. (Elsewhere: "I remembered 1937 , when almost every day the names of those arrested last night were called ..-. ") In another place we read that Strum even" groaned about the sufferings of the dispossessed during the collectivization period, "which is completely unimaginable. This is what Dostoevsky "rather did not have to write" The Diary of a Writer "- his opinion is believed in this. Towards the end of the evacuation, in the circle of the institute employees, Shtruma suddenly breaks through that in science he is not the authorities - "the head of the department of science of the Central Committee" Zhdanov "and even ...". Here "they expected him to pronounce the name of Stalin," but he prudently only "waved his hand." Yes, however, already at home: "all my conversations ... blowing in my pocket."

Not all of this is linked by Grossman (perhaps, he did not have time to finalize the book to the last stroke) - and more importantly, he is leading his hero to a difficult and decisive test. And so it came - in 1943, instead of the expected 1948 - 49, an anachronism, but this is a permitted trick for the author, because he is already transferring his own ordeal of 1953 in camouflage. Of course, in 1943 a physical discovery promising a nuclear application could only expect honor and success, and not the persecution that arose among colleagues without an order from above, and even discovered the "spirit of Judaism" in the discovery - but this is how the author needs to reproduce the situation of the end 40s. (In a series of chronologically inconceivable rushes, Grossman already names both the shooting of the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee and the "Doctors' Plot", 1952.)

And - piled on. "A chill of fear touched Shtrum, that which always lived in secret in the heart, fear of the state's anger." A blow is immediately struck at his minor Jewish employees. At first, not yet assessing the depth of the danger, Shtrum undertakes to express to the director of the Institute of insolence - although in front of another academician, Shishakov, the "pyramidal buffalo", he is shy, "like a shtetl Jew before a cavalry colonel." The blow is the more painful that it beats instead of the expected Stalin Prize. Shtrum turns out to be very responsive to the outbreak of persecution and, last but not least, to all its everyday consequences - deprivation of a summer residence, a closed distributor and possible housing constraints. Even earlier than his colleagues tell him, Shtrum, by the inertia of a Soviet citizen, guesses himself: "I would write a letter of repentance, because everyone writes in such situations." Further, his feelings and actions alternate with great psychological fidelity, and are described resourcefully. He tries to unwind in a conversation with Chepyzhin (Chepyzhin's old servant kisses Shtrum on the shoulder: is he telling him to be executed?). And Chepyzhin, instead of encouragement, immediately embarks on the presentation of his confused, atheistically delusional, mixed scientific and social hypothesis: how humanity will surpass God by free evolution. (Chepyzhin was artificially invented and crammed into the 1st volume, he is just the same in this fictitious scene.) But regardless of the emptiness of the hypothesis, Strum's behavior is psychologically very correct, who came for spiritual reinforcement. He half-hears this burden, sadly thinks to himself: "I have no time for philosophy, because they can jail me," he still continues to think: should he go to repent or not? and the conclusion out loud: “people of great soul, prophets, saints should be engaged in science in our time”, “where can I get faith, strength, endurance,” he said quickly, and a Jewish accent was heard in his voice. I feel sorry for myself. He leaves, and on the stairs "tears ran down his cheeks." And soon to go to the decisive Academic Council. Reads and rereads his possible confession statement. He starts a game of chess - and then absentmindedly leaves it, everything is very lively, and the remarks adjacent to it. Already “looking around like a thief, hastily tying a tie with miserable small-town antics”, hurrying to have time for repentance - and finds the strength to push this step away, takes off his tie and jacket - he will not go.

And then fears oppress him - and ignorance of who opposed him, and what they said, and what will they do to him now? Now, in ossification, he does not leave the house for several days - they stopped calling him on the phone, he was betrayed by those on whose support he hoped - and everyday constraints are already suffocating: he was already "afraid of the house manager and the girls from the card bureau" , will take away the surplus living space, the corresponding member's salary, - to sell things? and even, in the last despair, “I often thought that I would go to the military registration and enlistment office, give up the armor of the Academy and ask a Red Army soldier to go to the front” ... And then there is the arrest of the brother-in-law, the ex-husband of his wife's sister Strum will be arrested? Like any prosperous person: they haven't shook him too much, but he feels like the last edge of existence.

And then - a completely Soviet turn: Stalin's magical benevolent call to Strum - and at once everything fabulously changed, and the employees rush to Shtrum to curry favor. So the scientist won and resisted? The rarest example of resilience in Soviet times?

It was not so, Grossman unmistakably leads: and now the next, no less terrible temptation - from a gentle embrace. Although Strum preemptively justifies himself that he is not the same as the pardoned prisoners, who immediately forgave and cursed their former companions. But now he is afraid to cast on himself the shadow of his wife's sister, bustling about the arrested husband, his wife irritates him too, but the goodwill of the authorities and “getting into some special lists” became very pleasant. "The most surprising thing was that" from people "until recently, full of contempt and suspicion towards him," he now "naturally perceived their friendly feelings." Even with surprise I felt: "administrators and party leaders ... unexpectedly these people opened up to Strum from the other, human side." And with such and such a complacent state of his, this new-minded bosses are inviting him to sign the most vile sov-patriotic letter to The New York Times. And Shtrum does not find the strength and twist of how to refuse - and weakly signs. "Some kind of dark sickening feeling of submission", "powerlessness, magnetization, obedient feeling of fed and spoiled cattle, fear of a new ruin of life."

With such a plot twist, Grossman executes himself for his humble signature in January 1953 in the "Doctors' Plot". (Even, for the sake of literality, so that “the doctors' case” remains, - anachronistically, he injects here those long-murdered professors Pletnev and Levin.) It seems that now the 2nd volume will be published, and the repentance will be pronounced publicly.

But instead of that - the KGB officers came and confiscated the manuscript ...

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Litvinova V.I. Furious joy of life (methodological material for conducting lessons based on the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate")

Ministry of Public Education of the RSFSR
Abakan State Pedagogical Institute
Research Sector
Abakan, 1991

Published by the decision of the Scientific and Technical Council of the Abakan NIS of the State Pedagogical Institute from the year. Furious joy of life (methodical material for lessons based on the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate"). Abakan, AGPI, 1991, 54 p.

This issue includes materials for studying at school V. Grossman's novel "Life and Fate". The theoretical part of the work contains literary sections, the practical part helps to comprehend the text, offers the most productive forms of analysis of individual problems, material on the biography of the writer, sets out the history of the creation of the novel, reveals questions that are especially difficult for students to perceive, and indicates literature to help the teacher.

The issue is intended for secondary school teachers, professors and students of philological faculties of higher educational institutions.

Reviewers:

A. N. Kasivanova - teacher of literature at the Abakan State Pedagogical School.

T.A. Nikiforova - teacher of literature at school N 1 in the city of Abakan.

(c) Abakan State Pedagogical Institute, 1991

"... We live in one present in its closest limits, without past and future, in the midst of dead stagnation.

The whole world was rebuilt anew, but we did not create anything. We were still vegetating, huddled in shacks ... In a word, new destinies of the human race were accomplished apart from us. "So Pyotr Chaadaev wrote at the beginning of the last century, expressing an unbearable view for anyone in Russia. A. Pushkin answered him. that he is proud of Russian history and, whatever it may be, he would not want any other history for his people.

National self-consciousness is likely to confirm and today Pushkin's answer to the accursed question: " WHO ARE WE IN HUMANITY?"But the question itself, even after Pushkin's answer does not disappear, it remains painfully open. The answer to the question" who are we? "At all times was given on the basis of recognition of the exclusiveness of Russia's destiny (the triumph of Orthodoxy, the salvation of Europe from the Mongols, from the corrupting slavery of money , from exploitation and inequality, from fascist enslavement).

“We live hard and meagerly, but we do not suffer in vain: we pave the way to a brighter future, we go ahead, cover others with ourselves, this is our morality and our pride,” - such is the content of our attitude. This performance was a fact of public consciousness, it worked.

And by the 90s it suddenly became clear that it was possible to study strikes and labor movements not only in Italy and England, but intercommunal conflicts in Punjab and Ulster. That the foreign word inflation is clear to us and quite even Russian. That the mafia, racketeering, business - have become as common words as the district committee, the party bureau, vegetable warehouse. It was also discovered that "global processes" can explode not somewhere in Sao Paulo, but in Chernobyl, Sverdlovsk or Baku.

And in this panorama it suddenly became clear that we are not the center of the world system, but a country that is unable to feed or clothe itself. The cold, cruel everyday life of history began.

Why so many things all at once and suddenly? The point is that not all at once and not all of a sudden, starting from P. Ya. Chaadaev to AD Sakharov, there was an intense struggle for the fate of Russia. And since a writer in Russia became not only an artist, but also a philosopher, historian, sociologist, sometimes works of art told more about history than professional historians.

But literary texts also have destinies. One of America's Sovietologists once remarked that "Russians are famous for their ability to rewrite their history." This statement is worth pondering. At the beginning of our seventy-three years of existence, individual critics and literary historians called for "throwing off the ship of history" all the classics, starting with A.S. Pushkin and L.N. Tolstoy, then deleting F.M.Dostoevsky, I. Bunin and A. Akhmatov, then hide the books of M. Bulgakov, M. Zoshchenko, E. Zamyatin and others like them. them. Years passed, but disgraced writers continued to appear among writers. Since the war, schoolchildren read the books of B. Polevoy, V. Kozhevnikov, A. Perventsev, and somewhere they were waiting for the reader, the works of V. Bykov, Y. Bondarev, G. Baklanov. The books of the new-opulent poets, as if on command, disappeared and just as suddenly appeared now. Only yesterday we knew little about the literary names of V. Nekrasov, V. Aksenov, B. Pasternak, A. Solzhenitsyn.

After the novel "Life and Destiny" was published in the October magazine in 1988 (N 1-4), the literary star of the Soviet writer Vasily Semenovich Grossman flashed again.

The gaps that the writer undertook to resolve almost thirty years ago are being comprehended only now. It is no coincidence that the critic A. Anninsky noted that Grossman "went ahead. We are only now ripe to publish, understand and accept the truth of this book. Therefore, the novel does not seem outdated. It is still published on time today." 1) This is why the 11th grade literature curriculum released in Moscow recommends this work on the teacher and student reading list.

Some teachers suggest studying the novel in grade 10, after studying "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy. 2) It seems that it is more expedient to get acquainted with the multi-problem and "difficult" for comprehension work of V. Grossman in the 11th grade, when the idea of \u200b\u200bthe difficult fate of Soviet literature is already formed, when graduates learn the works of V. V. Mayakovsky and E. Zamyatin , N. Ostrovsky and M. Bulgakov, A. Fadeev. Everything is learned in comparison, in this combination the authors will widely present a picture of the Soviet way of life of our people. After exploring Young Guard, you can try exploring Grossman's view of the war. At the same time, one more task of the teacher is carried out: the repetition of "War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy, since the parallels here are obvious.

The volume of the work is impressive, the number of texts for work in the classroom is probably not enough even now. This will of course complicate the teacher's work. However, it should be borne in mind that after the teacher's scrupulous review of the entire work, one can stop at the analysis of individual problems solved by the writer: the fate of the people in the works of V. Grossman and L. Tolstoy; problems of the relationship between the state, society and the individual; "Life is freedom ..." and so on. In less prepared classes, the questions studied may be simpler: how does the writer represent collectivization and what questions do the reader have in this connection? What is common in the depiction of collectivization in the novel "Virgin Land Upturned" by M. Sholokhov and "Life and Fate" by Grossman. What do we learn about collectivization from Grossman's work? How is the Stalinist genocide presented by the author? How is the theme of violence conveyed in the letter to Strum's mother?

For discussion of the novel, it is more convenient to use COLLECTIVE ANALYSIS METHOD.

THE TEACHER'S CHALLENGE - to help students in mastering the author's thoughts about the greatness and traditions of the people who conquer fascism, about the tragedy of time and lawlessness.

THE PURPOSE OF THE LESSON will depend on the teacher's choice of individual fragments for analysis or the novel as a whole. This paper presents possible options for the analysis of individual problems, which together will approximately complete the coverage of the novel as a whole.

MATERIAL FOR LESSON... (Questions for analysis are highlighted in petite).

BIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

V. Grossman was born in the city of Berdichev in 1905 in the family of a chemical engineer. Mother taught French. After graduating from the Kiev real school in 1924, young Grossman studied at the chemistry department of the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. With a diploma of a chemical engineer in 1929, he left for Donbass, where he worked at the Makeyevka scientific research institute for the safety of black work and was in charge of a dust and gas laboratory at the deepest mine "Smolyanskaya - II".

In Donbass V. Grossman began writing fiction. But he was in no hurry to publish his works, he was very demanding of himself, did not think that what he had written was worthy of being published.

In 1932, Grossman fell ill with tuberculosis, on the advice of doctors returned to Moscow, where two years later his first story, "In the city of Berdichev," appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. He was immediately noticed by M. Gorky, summoned him and after a long conversation advised him to seriously study literature.

The plot of the story boils down to the relationship of two destinies. At the height of the fighting, the female commissar Vavilova is forced to give birth in Berdichev, which was part of the Russian Pale of Settlement. She leaves the baby in the family of a local Jewish craftsman with many children, who is very far from political passions, but who knows very well what pogroms are and what the commissioner's stay under his roof can mean. Grossman's story about how such socially different people understood and accepted each other.

In 1962, based on this story, director A. Askoldov shot a film in which N. Mordyukova and R. Bykov appeared in all the splendor of their talent. Only in 1989, a miraculously preserved copy of the film was finally allowed to appear before the viewer. The film is called "The Commissar" and, next to the title of the story, the author's thought is revealed: the strength of the impulse of the revolutionaries and the wisdom of the people, "brought out by the revolution from political, social and national settled life" 2) constitute a single whole.

In Gorky's almanac "The Sixteenth Year" soon there was a story about miners with a German sound "Gluckauf" written by Grossman in the Donbass. This is how the German miners go down to the mine, wishing a happy return to the top.

Then came the novel "Stepan Kolchugin", which made Grossman's writer's name known throughout the country.

In the first days of the war, the writer went to the front, becoming one of the most read correspondents of the "Red Star". At the first military certification, he was awarded the rank of quartermaster II rank, and in 1943 he already wears the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel.

Military fate threw V. Grossman across different sectors of the front. But the main thing for him was and remained for the rest of his life - Stalingrad. There he survived everything, from the bitterness of defeat, tragedy and despair of a handful of people, pressed against the Volga by steel and the fire of the military machine of fascism, to the greatest Victory.

In terms of his human character and especially his literary talent, Grossman was not a quick, lively reporter, one of those who "with a" watering can "and a notebook were the first to break into cities." He was an unhurried essayist, deep, thoughtful, who saw and knew how to show the reader in each separate episode of the war the fate of a person, his role and place and the high significance of the specific actions of each in the multi-million pandemonium of war. In order to understand all this himself, to feel the war with a soldier's instinct, the writer considered himself obliged to be together with the soldiers in the trench, the quarter of the dilapidated city defended from the Nazis, on the raft of the fired crossing. Therefore, he was always honest.

The writer's daughter, E. V. Korotkova-Grossman says: "D. Ortenberg, editor of Krasnaya Zvezda, summoned three correspondents - A. Tolstoy, V. Grossman, P. Pavlenko. He gave the task: a decree on deserters was issued, write an essay or a story. Father immediately said: “I will not write such an essay.” Pavlenko suddenly became indignant, jumped up to him: “Proud, Vasily Semyonovich.” But military commander Grossman knew what he was saying. There are many entries in his military diaries about the encircled people, “deserters.” Almost always these people, who were scared on the first day, fight the very next, like everyone else. There is, for example, such a record: the deserters are led by the B tribunal, and the Germans are running into the convoy. The guards fled, and he killed two Germans, the third took him prisoner and brought him to the tribunal. "Who are you - they ask him, -" I came to sue. " 3)

And not only was the author of "Life and Fate" honest, but also brave. "It is we who are brave now - we speak openly about Stalin's crimes, about years of unprecedented terror," A. Ananiev notes. And then, in the days of V. Grossman's work on the novel, who would dare to compare the two regimes - Hitler's and Stalin's - according to those parameters, why are their similarities so obvious to all of us now? Stalinism destroyed the main thing in a person - his dignity. The novel "fighting Stalinism, defends, defends the dignity of the individual, puts it at the center of all burning questions" 4)

E. V. Korotkova-Grossman added that the hero of the novel Grekov "is a person very close to the author in spirit, he is not afraid of either the Germans, or the authorities, or the commissar Krymov, who sews work for him. A brave, internally free person who does not want to live like this after the war. how they lived in the 30s. "

The famous German writer Heinrich Böll, evaluating the work of W. Grossmann, wrote that he was always exactly where the writer ought to be. And these are far from safe places in both peaceful and front-line life.

Relatives of the writer recall the great warmth of Grossman. His memos testify to this. Here is an excerpt from one of them: "If my trip is accompanied by any sad surprises, I ask you to help my family ...".

Grossman loved his mother very much. She died at the hands of fascist executioners. In 1961, nineteen years after the death of his mother, his son wrote her a letter, which was preserved in the archives of the writer's widow: "When I die, you will live in a book that I have dedicated to you, and whose fate is similar to yours."

V. Grossman was the author of one of the first fiction books about the war - "The People are Immortal", the story was published in 1942. Along with the numerous enthusiastic responses to the story of Soviet readers, it is interesting to recall the speech of the famous English translator Harry Stephen, who wrote in August 1943 in the newspaper "British Ally" about Grossman as a writer of "mighty strength and humanity." It is the humanity that permeates the book, its charm values \u200b\u200b... "6).

Vasily Grossman's nutlets, although they were written in the wake of events for the newspaper, which, as you know, lives for one day, were so deep and significant that they passed from the pages of Krasnaya Zvezda to books - "The War Years", "Stalingrad", " The Battle of Stalingrad "," Life "," Treblin Hell ".

The main business of his life was the book "Life and Fate"; “My main work,” he wrote in his autobiography after the war, “is a book about the war, which I decided to write in the spring of 1943. At the same time, I wrote the first chapters. Almost all of them approached this work in the postwar years after demobilization from the army. I devoted my time in the post-war years to this work. Sleep turned out to be very difficult. "

HISTORY OF CREATION

In 1952, the magazine "Novy Mir" published V. Grossman's novel "For the Right Cause", where the main idea was arguing with the song, from which, we know, words cannot be thrown out: "when the country orders to be a hero, anybody becomes a hero in our country" ... Grossman's hero does not consider this to be true: "Is love for freedom, joy of work, loyalty to the Motherland, maternal feeling given only to one hero? Truly great things are done by ordinary people."

Grossman's war is not a game of heroism, not a field for feats, but an environment in which a person with convictions and hopes is revealed.

"Deal" in the old Russian sense is a battle, the essence, the work of life. The writer knew the war firsthand: through the eyes of a military commander he saw Treblinka, with the knowledge of an engineer, he appreciated the mechanics of a sinking floor in a gas chamber, the chemist's experience determined the choice of a kind of deadly gas. The novel contained the truth about the war.

The reader's success was enormous. Grossman received thousands of letters. Among them are many congratulations from writers. I am looking forward to the next issue of Novy Mir, ”Mikola Bazhan wrote to him. - I grab each new issue and read your novel - a large, humane, clever work. I don’t want to write a lot, but let me sincerely thank you and shake hands firmly with the writing of such a book ... ".

A. Tvardovsky wrote to Grossman in June 1944: “I am very glad for you that you are writing, and with great interest I look forward to what else you write. Just to say, I don’t expect from anyone as much as I expect from you. .. ".

The success of the novel "For a Just Cause" caused a powerful opposition, unexpected for the author, by a number of literary men who were officially considered recognized masters of military prose. One of them - the author of the then, but now firmly forgotten book "White Birch" Mikhail Bubennov with a devastating article in "Pravda" gave a signal to obedient literary criticism to smash Grossman's novel as "a non-ideological, anti-popular work that does not correspond to the principles of socialist realism," where images of Soviet people "are impoverished, belittled, discolored", "where the author seeks to prove that ordinary people perform immortal feats ... Grossman does not show the party at all as the organizer of victory - neither in the rear, nor in the army ...". There were also accusations that the author described Hitler, but missed the image of Stalin. We remembered Grossman's play "According to the Pythagoreans", which was criticized in 1945. A. Perventsev, who in his now also forgotten novel "Honor from a Youth", branded all Crimean Tatars as a "nation of traitors", defined Grossman's book as "ideological sabotage." M. Shahinyan criticized the novel for its unusual portrayal of party workers: Commissar Krymov does little to act, "is depicted in isolation from his direct work as a leader and educator of soldiers and commanders."

As a result, the book and the author were "closed". But the life of the novel continued, and letters of approval and support continued to arrive. The letters from the front-line soldiers were especially valuable to Grossman. "From all the literature on the war, I must single out two works: V. Nekrasov" In the trenches of Stalingrad "and your" For a just cause, "wrote A. A. Kedrov-Polyansky from Rostov-on-Don." This is stern, but noble realism, - wrote B. K. Gubarev from the Kharkov region - This is how you need to write about Stalingrad or not write at all. It is disgusting to read an easy book about Stalingrad, but writing is probably criminal. "

"Fearing that the annihilating criticism of Bubennov will affect the writer and he will begin" combing his heroes, "wrote the reader I, Efimov," I ask the editorial board of Novy Mir to convey to Comrade. Grossman that his "gray" heroes are in the eyes of the reader real, living people with all the weaknesses and shortcomings inherent in living people, even if they are three times Heroes of the Soviet Union ... The critic Bubennov does not see in the novel the organizing and guiding role of the party in the defense of Stalingrad ... True, I also did not find generally accepted meetings of the party committee in the novel. But isn't our party made up of the Novikovs, the Krymovs, the battalion commissar Filyashkin, the Rodimtsev division, the StalGRES director Spiridonov and other heroes? "And finally a letter from Viktor Nekrasov:" Dear Vasily Semenovich! I don't think I need to explain to you how I feel about all this. The soul is disgusting to nausea. And why duels are not allowed now ... But the book is still there! And keep it going for heaven's sake! I believe in the victory of a just cause! "

Then Grossman showed loyalty: he admitted the shortcomings, took into account the criticism and, with the help of A. Fadeev, brought the book to a separate publication. Is the magazine or book version now the expression of "the last author's will"? 7)

"For a just cause" is a prelude to the big, this is the first part of the dilogy about the Great Patriotic War.

The dispute about who will create "War and Peace" about 1941-1945 has been going on for a long time: at first they argued who would be the author - a soldier who walked "from and to" or a general appointed "just now." Then they complained that the years went by, but the book was still missing. At one of the writers' congresses G. Baklanov asked: "Will it be easy for the author of the new War and Peace, if even someone suddenly writes?" The subtext then was clear to many front-line soldiers: yes, there was a truthful book about the war, but it was not recognized, it was torn away from the people.

In the meantime, Stalin had died, the charges of ideological harm were removed from the novel "For a Just Cause", but the label of "unreliability" remained with the author. When, in 1960, Grossman submitted the completed manuscript of the new novel to the editorial board of the Znamya magazine, it was read with passion. And those who wanted to read everything there that they needed to start a new persecution. Grossman did not hide his intentions to tell the country and the world the cruel truth that had been hidden for many years about our life, about the tragic fate of the people and about the real cost of Victory. The honored colleagues in the editorial office of the Znamya magazine sent the manuscript of the Life and Fate novel "upward" with the corresponding characteristics.

And then, on a frosty February day, there was a knock on the door of Grossman's apartment and to the question: "Who is there?" - They answered sharply: "Open it! From the house management!" The very words with which trouble entered thousands of houses with "people in civilian clothes", tragedy burst in, and the owner himself was waiting for death, even if it was the 30s, early 50s.

In the Stalinist-Beria times, "in civilian clothes" usually came late at night, often before dawn, to stun people with a search and arrest warrant and take away the next victim in a "black raven" without witnesses.

They came to Grossman in the afternoon. The year was 1961, and the "people in civilian clothes" worked in a new way. Grossman was not taken away in the "funnel", now his novel was arrested. Here are some extracts from the "detention" protocol: "We, employees of the State Security Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers, Lieutenant Colonel Prokopenko, Majors Nefedov and Baranov, on the basis of the order of the State Security Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers No. В-36 dated 4 / II-1961 in the presence of attesting witnesses, search the house of Joseph Solomonovich Grossman at the address: Moscow, Lomonosovsky prospect, 15, building 10 b, apt. 9. During the search, the following was seized:

1. The text of the novel "Life and Fate", printed on a typewriter, 3 parts, 2 copies each ... The specified copies of the novel are in 6 brown bags.
2. Draft materials of the typewritten text in a salad-colored folder ... The search was carried out from 11:40 minutes 14/2 1961. This report on the arrest of an unprinted book actually became the death certificate of the writer V. Grossman, for he could not imagine his life without this novel. The writer was then 56 years old and he devoted all his remaining days until 1964 to the unsuccessful struggle for the release of his work, in which he rightly saw the crown of creativity.

In response to indignation, complaints, protests, many well-wishers said to Grossman: "Do not anger God. It is your happiness that the times are different. Say thank you for arresting the novel and leaving you free." The writer did not consider it normal to be able to do to the author what they did to him with impunity.

He no longer wrote novels. He wrote letters, statements, protests, demanding freedom for his brainchild. Here are some excerpts from a large letter to Nikita Khrushchev after the XXII Party Congress: “I started writing the book even before the XX Party Congress, during Stalin’s lifetime. At that time, it seemed, there was not a shadow of hope for the publication of the book. I wrote it.

Your report at the 20th Congress gave me confidence. After all, the writer's thoughts, his feelings, his pain are a particle of common thoughts, common pain, common truth.

It has been a year since the book was confiscated from me. For a year now, I have been persistently thinking about her tragic fate, looking for an explanation of what happened. I know my book is imperfect, that it cannot be compared with the works of the great writers of the past: But the point is not in the weakness of my talent. The point is the right to write the truth, suffered and matured over the long years of life.

Why is my book, which, perhaps, to some extent responds to the internal needs of Soviet people, a book in which there is no lies and slander, but there is truth, pain, love for people, is a ban imposed ...

If my book is a lie, let it be told to people who want to read it. If my book is slander, let it be said about it.

When my manuscript was confiscated, I was offered to give a signature that I would be responsible for disclosing the fact of the seizure of the manuscript in a criminal procedure.

I was recommended to answer the reader's questions that I had not finished the work on the manuscript yet, that this work would drag on for a long time. In other words, I was asked to tell a lie. The methods by which they want to keep everything that happened to my book a secret are not methods of dealing with untruth and slander. This is not how one fights against lies. So they fight against the truth.

I ask the freedom of my book, so that editors, and not employees of the State Security Committee, speak and argue with me about my manuscript.

There is no sense, there is no truth in the current situation - in my actual freedom, when the book to which I gave my life is in prison - after all, I wrote it, because I do not renounce it. I still believe that I wrote the truth, that I wrote it, loving and pitying people, believing in people. I ask freedom for my book ... ".

Nikita Sergeevich said nothing in response. Only a few months after the letter was sent, Grossman invited M. A. Suslov for a conversation, on whose conscience the broken fates of E. Pasternak, A. Tvardovsky, I. Brodsky were. Judging by the note that Grossman made upon returning home, Suslov told him: “I have not read your book, but I have carefully read numerous reviews, reviews, in which there are many quotes from your novel. All who read your book consider it politically hostile to us.

It is impossible to print your book ... Your book contains direct comparisons between us and Hitler's fascism. Your book speaks positively about religion, about God, about Catholicism. In your book, Trotsky is taken under protection. "

The verdict for the novel "Life and Fate" was final: indefinite confinement. The author's name was mercilessly deleted from all printed publications of the Soviet Union. The name of Grossman was destroyed both after Khrushchev, and under Brezhnev, and after the death of the main ideologist, who survived all the "leaders", and in the first years of glasnost. The device continued to work clearly.

Only in 1988, 24 years after the death of the author, his novel "Life and Fate" was released.

THE MEANING OF THE NAME OF THE NOVEL

The title of the book is deeply symbolic. Our life determines our fate: "a person is free to go through life because he wants, but he is free and not wanting."

"Life and destiny" ... The first word in the author's view is a chaotic list of actions, thoughts, feelings, what gives rise to the "mess of life": childhood memories, tears of happiness, the bitterness of separation, pity for a bug in a box, suspiciousness, maternal tenderness , sadness, sudden hope, happy guess. And in the center of all these events, incalculable as life, is a man. He is the symbol of life, the main event of the novel, life, state. A person is drawn into a whirlpool of events, and therefore, a person's catastrophes are not only his own. In the movement of life, a person is like a small speck of dust, may coincide with the phase of the flow or not. Those who are lucky to be in the main stream are lucky ones, "sons of time", but unfortunate "stepchildren of time" (A. Annensky) are doomed who did not fall into the saving stream. So the word "fate" becomes next to it, meaning at once both the structural orderliness and the doom of any structure. Life and destiny are in a peculiar dependence. Nations converge, armies are fighting, classes collide, the movement of the "stream" becomes unusual. And the elements of the structure that were strong yesterday, making revolutions, governing industry, moving science, today turn out to be knocked out of the usual course. Fate cuts right into life.

THEORETICAL MATERIAL

THEME - a re-read history of the country during the Great Patriotic War. The theme is based on the author's understanding of the crucial battle in the war - the Battle of Stalingrad. But it is also a novel about Peace (about the peaceful life of people in the rear and about Peace in the philosophical meaning of its concept).

PROBLEM - human and society. It includes a lot of questions that the author is trying to answer. Chief among them: how can an individual remain himself in a crushing reality with its totalitarian regime? And what does it mean to be yourself when there is nothing that would not be dictated to you by time, law, or power? In what way is the principle of "good" and "freedom" realized in the conditions of the existing system? The author's task is to reveal the relationship between politics and morality as the main conflict of time.

IDEA - to lead through the test of war, as through a moral X-ray, all the heroes of the novel, in order to find out their true human essence in an extreme situation.

PLOT - Unaccustomed: at first glance, random facts and observations are collected. But there is no kaleidoscopicity, "everything is tightly pressed to each other: events, biographies, collisions, people's connections, their hopes, love, hate, life and death. Everything is explained by a single philosophical meaning. differently: dough, dough, mass, chaos, hot peat. The mass is organized according to laws that kill the individual - state. Lived Grossman to the present day, he might have adopted the term Administrative System from G. Kh. Popov.

The plot bears a general conclusion: the villains overpowered honest people: "Hitler did not change the ratio, but only the state of affairs in the German dough of life." And the age of Einstein and Planck turned out to be the age of Hitler. Grossman sees and understands the era through the actions and thoughts of the heroes. Their fates are incomplete. Life goes on. "8)

COMPOSITION - the short chapters of Grossman's narration are mosaic in appearance, details, author's judgments flow in a stream. Taken together, this provides the plot movement. But one can also feel in the narration a coolly cocked spring of contradictory force: the executioner cries over his victim; the criminal knows that he has not committed a crime, but will be punished; the National Socialist enters the life of people with jokes, with plebeian manners; the camp is built for good; "anti-tank mines are stacked in a cream-colored baby carriage", hell is inhabited; fighters repair walkers between attacks; the mother continues to talk to her deceased son. Madness is no different from the norm.

Grossman's leitmotif is also peculiar: silence on the main thing. It defies words. "A gaping in the place of the target is the leitmotif" (L. Annensky, p. 260).

GROUPING OF IMAGES - Grossman writes his heroes into the era. They represent different peoples, generations, professions, classes and sectors of society. They have a different attitude towards life. They have different fates, but almost all of them are united by fear of destruction, doubts about the correctness of the chosen path, anxiety for relatives and friends, faith in the future.

The writer pays more attention to some characters, less to others, but the usual division into main and secondary characters is inapplicable to the characters of the novel: "everyone carries a particle of a general ideological and artistic concept and each is associated with its philosophical concept" (A. Elyashevich).

The heroes help the author to reveal problematic layers. For example, battle scenes are drawn by the Novikovskaya line. There are also discussions about the strategy and tactics of battle, about the role of soldiers, about the types of military leaders. There is a clear overlap with the traditions of the best military prose (K. Simonov, "Soldiers are not born").

THE DRAMA OF THE SCIENTIST - this layer is revealed by the Strum line. It is based on the torment of reason, powerless before demagoguery. D. Granin, F. Amlinsky will reveal this topic in their works later.

Arrests, as a manifestation of the action of a totalitarian system, are shown by Krymov's line.

Grossman's heroes in many ways anticipate the appearance of famous characters from the best works of Soviet prose. The fate of Zhenya Shaposhnikova echoes "Sophia Petrovna" by L. Chukovskaya; Grossman gave a description of the torment of people in a German concentration camp earlier than A. Solzhenitsyn in "One Day in Ivan Denisovich". And if we further consider literary parallels in this regard, then we can indicate the themes raised by Grossman, which found their further development in other works of famous authors: the famine of 1932 - "The Brawlers" (M. Alekseev), the tragedy of Jewry - "Heavy Sand" , the nature of Stalin's policy is "Children of the Arbat". Grossman spoke about all this in 1961, before A. Rybakov, M. Dudintsev, A. Solzhenitsyn, L. Chukovskaya, K. Simonov, D. Granin began work on their novels. Grossman in his characters revealed what they are all about and each separately.

Grossman's man is a secret of himself: Zhenya Shaposhnikova, having fallen in love with Novikov, left Krymov, but having learned about the fate of her first husband, she refuses love and stands in a long line at the window, sung by poets, from Nekrasov to Anna Akhmatova.

Abarchuk, Mostovsky, Krymov pay for the zealous fulfillment of their own illusions.

A Russian woman, predatory choosing a prisoner to strike, unexpectedly for everyone and for herself in the first place, gives him a piece of bread: "Here, eat!"

A brilliant scientist, sheltered by the state from the front, who received meat, butter, buckwheat on coupons in the most hungry days, draws strength from a letter to his mother that came from the world of the dead: "Where can I get strength, son? Live, live, live. Mom."

In the most difficult times, the heroes do not forget their responsibility not only for another person, but also for everything around them, for society, for the people. That is why Novikov delays the offensive for 8 minutes, so he does not give up his house 6 / I "house manager" of the Greeks, so Ikonnikov preaches the Gospel to the dispossessed.

"But there are characters in his book who have" forgotten "great truths. They were blinded by their power, impunity allowed them to use any means to achieve" revolutionary "goals. Grossman shows the moral fall of such people and indicates the source of the tragedy - the administrative system and its the chief is the father of all nations.

GENRE cannot be determined unambiguously. There is no doubt that Life and Fate is an epic. But this is both a psychological and lyrical-publicistic intellectual, and political, and socio-philosophical novel.

The fate of the heroes is directly linked to the political situation in the country. None of them wants to evade her assessment and choice of their relationship to her.

Grossman analyzes the structure of the socialist state distorted by Stalin. It is difficult for a person who lives under the iron hand of an omniscient power to remain himself. And here comes the psychological analysis of the soul of a person who has betrayed his principles. Shtrum was bullied at work. Suddenly Stalin's call changed everything for the better. And something happens to Strum himself: irreconcilable to untruth, he signs a collective letter accusing honest people. And grave sin gnaws at his soul. And Krymov will not sign false testimony and will remain a man fooled by his belief in the state. Only a free person can be truly strong.

THE EPIC TRADITIONS OF LEO TOLSTOY IN THE ROMAN OF V. GROSSMAN

The writer consciously, consistently and purposefully used the lessons and experience of the great novelist.

In a philosophical sense, both novels are focused on the fate of the people. All the events referred to in the works of Leo Tolstoy and the writer of the sixties are evaluated from the standpoint of national morality. In both cases, we are talking about a liberation struggle, that is, just from the people's point of view.

Grossman, in Tolstoy's style, sharpens the idea of \u200b\u200bthe priority of the people's power, which a commander must understand if he wants to win a battle. The soul of a soldier is the main thing for a commander. The components of success for both writers were the wisdom of the leadership of the troops and the moral strength of the soldiers performing their duty. We read from Grossman: "The secret of secret wars, its tragic spirit were in the right of one person to send another to death ... This right rested on the fact that people went into the fire for a common cause." Let us recall that Kutuzov was guided by the same principles in the epic of L. N. Tolstoy.

The two writers have in common their close attention to everything Russian: nature, song, talents. This can be explained by the ideological position of the authors, which emphasizes that the war awakened people's self-awareness: the history of Russia began to be perceived as the history of Russian glory. The national became the basis of world outlook. In the days of national disasters, human dignity, faith in goodness, and loyalty to freedom flare up. The people who rose up to defend their land (be it in 1812 or 1941) are invincible: "Just as life itself is indestructible, despite everything reviving in people and reviving people incinerated by suffering" 9).

The continuation of the epic tradition was expressed in the novel Life and Fate and in the fact that Grossman portrayed the whole reality of war and peace through the prism of the era, preserving the individuality of social characters, leaving them typologically significant.

Due to the depth and intensity of thought, Grossman's dilogy does not look like a panorama: it is not illustrative. The movement of life in Grossman's work is presented in a multifaceted and variegated manner, as in L.N. Tolstoy, subordinated to the sovereign trend, focused on the fate of the people. It is no accident that the spirit of the army is named the main force in both works.

Both the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace and the Battle of Stalingrad at Grossman concentrated all the fundamental problems of the confrontation between the two camps, absorbed the events preceding the war and predetermined the future. That is, the center of both works is the culmination of the war.

Like the great teacher, Grossman tries to explain the historical patterns that predetermined the final victory over the enemy. Working (on a huge amount of material, L.N. Tolstoy selected for the epic vital events that helped in many respects to the victory over Napoleon: 1805-1807, 1812, 1825, 1856. For this purpose, Grossman selects such moments in the life of the country that influenced on the course of military events: violent collectivization, thoughtless industrialization, repression in 1937 1 ode, the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy (the case of doctors, anti-Semitism, the state of the army and the state as a whole).

The entire chain of events of the era of L. N. Tolstoy embraces the Bolkonsky and Rostov families. In Grossman's novel - the Shaposhnikov and Shtrum families. The novel's epic canvas is wide enough: from Hitler's headquarters to the Kolyma camp, from the Jewish ghetto to the Ural tank forge.

In the first part of the dilogy, all episodes were concentrated around several epic centers: the Red Army soldier Vavilov, stern and implacable; Filyashkin's battalion, which has fulfilled its military duty; August bombing of the city.

In Life and Fate, along with the battle of two irreconcilable camps, the force of the personality cult arose, which fell upon the fate of all heroes. The vitality of Grossman's characters stubbornly resists violence.

Finally, L.N. Tolstoy skillfully knew how to alternate scenes of everyday life and battles, and Grossman develops this tradition in his work. All manifestations of war and peace in the lives and fates of people are investigated by the authors of the works.

But V. Grossman's dilogy is not an imitation of the great Russian writer. What makes Life and Fate different from Leo Tolstoy's epic?

First of all - the original genre: Grossman's novel is lyrical-journalistic, intellectual, political, socio-philosophical. These are new facets in the epic genre. Tolstoy's key move: "at a time when" is absent from Grossman. Tolstoy weaves events and facts, Grossman confronts: Stalin - Hitler, fascist torture chambers - a camp for political prisoners in his homeland, and even Strum is a scientist, Strum is a Jew.

Once General Dragomirov thrashed War and Peace because Tolstoy distorted the deployment of regiments. In "Life and Fate", even from the point of view of a meticulous historian, almost everything is verified. Almost because there are some inaccuracies - for example, Tsatsa lake was named by him Dacey, the newspaper "Edzola" is written with the letter p, the camp shooter Kashketin appears as Kashkotin, Natalya Borisovna was not alone, by the time of Peter II's wheeling she already had children.

But the main thing in the novel is not the events, but the reflections of the heroes over their lives, fate.

LN Tolstoy argued that the horror of life can be endured if the internal order of life is not violated.

V. Grossman's life order of heroes is unstable, and in a time of trials not every person can remain himself. The fate of a person in a totalitarian state is always tragic, because he cannot fulfill his life purpose without first becoming a "cog" of the state machine. If, in a particular human age, a machine commits a crime, the person becomes an accomplice or victim. In house 6 / I, Grekov makes a choice, and Krymov, writing a denunciation, another. (Let us recall why A. Balkonsky and young Kuragin ended up in the army). If the choice is wrong, then, as Magar says before his death, it can no longer be redeemed.

In addition to being tested by war, as was the case with Tolstoy, all the main characters of Grossman are tested by loneliness, by the oppression of a total machine. Shtrum, Krymov, Zhenya Shaposhnikova, Anna Semyonovna pass through this.

So, we followed the artistic depiction of the two Patriotic Wars. Leo Tolstoy is in great trouble. V. Grossman also has trouble, but also a huge cleansing.

The essence of the society built by 1941 is analyzed through the prism of war.

If desired, the teacher can trace the continuation of the traditions of A. P. Chekhov (about dramatic things quietly, without pathos) and F. M. Dostoevsky (who fought over the "damned" questions of life) in the novel by V. Grossman.

PRACTICAL PART

GROSSMAN'S NEW READING OF THE PAGES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

The Soviet people, according to the writer, perceived the war as an obstacle that must be overcome on the way to achieving freedom and peaceful labor, the main components of life. Therefore, the people entered the war with dignity and simplicity.

Grossman was shocked by the miraculous resilience of the Soviet man, by his calm, firm performance of his duty. Starting to portray the truth about the war, Grossman set himself clear tasks: to carry out a critical analysis of the history of the Great Patriotic War; to show the conscious interconnection of two national tragedies: the repressions of 1937 and the retreat to Moscow in 1941-1942; present "real enemies of the people"; direct executors of Stalin's will and the bureaucracy.

In this regard, the narrative expands the usual framework of the canvas of war: the Jewish ghetto in Ukraine and the extermination of Jews to the music of the orchestra in the crematoria of Germany; the fascist camp for Soviet prisoners of war and Dal-Stroy; the year of the great turning point and the famine it caused; Lenin, who until his last days did not understand that "his business would become Stalin's business" and Stalin was the only one who would become Lenin's heir; the nightmares of 1937 and the hope that the war will end the repression. Ilya Ehrenburg in his book "People, Years, Life" recalled that Olga Bergolts told him about this.

DO YOU NEED TO SEARCH THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR IN THE ROMANCE NOW WHEN A LOT OF FACTS AND DOCUMENTS ARE PUBLISHED?

Historians are reluctant to give up their warped positions. Only under the pressure of artistic truth and with the help of readers do they provide explanations. I will cite a quote from Voenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal, where quite recently in an editorial one could read: “Recently, through the efforts of a number of writers, journalists, historians, the initial period of the war, despite the historical” reliability and archival documents, is turning from “difficult” into “tragic” and is mainly associated with the words "failure", "confusion", "confusion". All this will create in millions of people, especially among young people, a misconception about what really happened in the first months of the war. "12) Probably the editorial office of the magazine would live more calmly if the schoolchildren had nothing but Molodaya Gvardiya and Shield and Sword But young people are already informed that Minsk was surrendered on the fifth day of the war, the tanks approached Khimki, a few meters were left to the Volga. Does this inconsistency of the magazine with the correct idea of \u200b\u200bthe war contribute? Now the menacing shout of the military leaders does not work; ! ".

Those who first tried to convey the truth were beaten. They continue to beat those who allow themselves too actively to demonstrate their right to have their own individual judgment on fundamental issues of political and public life, which differs from the opinion of the organized majority, which is still trying to "keep a low profile". Even at the Congress of People's Deputies, Academician Sakharov was branded as a renegade, a slanderer, almost an enemy of the people. The instinct for self-preservation of the system, which it, in disguise, calls class instinct, works flawlessly.

A new reading of the history of the war reveals such biographical pages from the activities of some generals, which are like death to the reader's eyes. The statement of General A. A. Epishev is significant: "There, in Novy Mir, they say, give them the black bread of truth, but why the hell is it needed if it is not profitable." Historians continue to debate whether we know everything about the Great

Patriotic? (see "Political Education", 1988, N 17, pp. 37-43; N 3, 1989, pp. 30-35), refer to the authority of G.K. Zhukov, but each snatches out the quotes necessary for him and there is still no clear picture. For example, N. Kirsanov in polemics proves the "purely amateurish" military knowledge of Stalin and quotes from "Memoirs and Reflections of Zhukov:" A particularly negative side of Stalin throughout the war was that, poorly knowing the practical side of preparing front operations, armies and troops, he set completely unrealistic dates for the start of the operation, as a result of which many operations began poorly prepared, the troops suffered unjustified losses. "

Arguing with N. Kirsanov, R. Kalish cites another quote from these memoirs: "JV Stalin possessed the basic principles of organizing front-line operations ..., led them with knowledge of the matter. Undoubtedly, he was a worthy Supreme Commander-in-Chief." Historians throw quotations like peaks, and science does not tolerate playing with facts, sleep requires deep understanding.

Many "white spots" of the Great Patriotic War have yet to be revealed: the activities of law enforcement agencies - the NKVD, the Court, the Prosecutor's Office, the State Arbitration; the protection of the rear of the country and the protection of the rear of the active Red Army; the problem of war and children (976 orphanages with 167,223 children were evacuated at the beginning of the war).

In the history of the Great Patriotic War, "black spots" have not been revealed: a reassessment of the heroism of the past, the position of General Vlasov towards the country's leadership, and so on. Fiction helps to learn balance and objectivity in assessing history.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE REASONS OF THE RED ARMY RETREATING? (meaning textbooks published before 1990).

• surprise attack by the enemy,
• inexperience of the army and navy (the Germans have fought for 2 years already),
• lack of a second front,
• superiority of the enemy in technology.

From works of fiction, we knew that the failures of the army and navy were also associated with the activities of stupid generals who did not know how to carry out the orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief (Korneychuk, "Front"). To the credit of literature, not all writers took this version on faith. Serpilin from K. Simonov's novel "Soldiers are not born" asked the question where illiterate generals come from: "Did they choose at a general meeting?"

Many authors, in explaining the reasons for the failures of the Red Army, were guided by data from Stalin's report of November 6, 1942, where he pointed out, in particular, that more German and their allied divisions fought against the Soviet Union than on the Russian front in the First World War, that so many of them gathered because there is no second front, because of the absence of a second front and there is a series of failures on all fronts.

WHAT IS NOW KNOWN ABOUT THE FIRST DAYS OF THE WAR?

The reasons for our defeats in the initial period of the war are complex and ambiguous. They are rooted in a number of political, economic and military factors. Political include Stalin's criminal stubbornness in disbelief of the obvious facts about the impending attack coming from various sources, his unjustified hope for a treaty of 23 / VIII-1939. In its desire to gain time to prepare for war, the Soviet government even broke off diplomatic relations with the government countries occupied by Germany.

One of the reasons for the defeat of the Red Army in the first period of the war was Stalin's destruction of the experienced command and political staff of the army, who had gone through the experience of the civil war. Almost the entire Supreme Military Council was destroyed, three out of five marshals. In his memoirs "The Deed of Life" Marshal Vasilevsky pointed out that if the command and political staff of our army had not been destroyed, then perhaps there would have been no war.

Stalin concentrated in his hands the leadership of the country and the Armed Forces. In the USSR, there were several supreme governing bodies, as if they had to act collegially, in fact, there was a brutal centralization, which was closed on Stalin.

During the war there was not a single congress of the CPSU (b), not a single congress of the union republic. (Let's remember how many congresses and party conferences were under Lenin during the Civil War). The Plenum of the Central Committee, scheduled for October 1941, was canceled by Stalin's sole decision, despite the fact that members of the Central Committee had already arrived in Moscow. All wartime questions were decided by the staff of the respective Soviets.

With their direct participation, hundreds of thousands of Soviet people were in prisons and camps, the overwhelming majority of them remained true patriots there too, they wanted to defend their Motherland or work for victory without the stigma of an "enemy of the people". But they were deprived of this right. As a result, the front received fewer armies, and people died in the camps.

To the above-mentioned military factors, one can add: yes, the Red Army had less experience in modern warfare than the Wehrmacht. But even the experience of the Soviet-Finnish war could not be studied and implemented during the time of Stalin's personality cult. A participant in those events, P.G. Gilev recalled that two weeks before the Nazi attack, the head of the NKVD of the Baranovichi region reported that in recent weeks there had been massive cases of crossing our borders, the murder of Soviet citizens. In conclusion, he said that we are in fact at war with Germany. To the question: "Why are we not on the defensive lines?" was the answer: "No order!" - "So give it back!" - "Forbidden!" ... As a result of Stalin's criminal stubbornness, the separate 155th rifle division that participated in the war with Finland was doomed in advance to death. The way to the East was practically open.

In economic terms, we did not fully manage to use at the beginning of the war the industrial potential that was created by the people in 20 years at the cost of incredible efforts. The command-administrative methods used by Stalin during the period of industrialization and collectivization caused enormous damage to the economy and the course of its preparation for war.

As for the superiority in the number of equipment, then there are the following facts:

From British secret intelligence documents recently it became known that "between July and December 1941, more than 200 British aircraft took part in the defense of Moscow. Later, another 400" harricane "took part in the defense of the city. In total, the Allies supplied about 20,000 fighters. not to mention 3,000 air defense guns, 1,500 naval guns and 3,000,000 pairs of British shoes that warmed up Soviet soldiers "... 13) The assistance that Stalin received from England was substantial, it was provided to the detriment and risk of England itself. It was beneficial for Stalin to hide these facts in order to hide the main reason for the retreat. This is how today's scientists - historians interpret the reasons for the retreat.

In the 60s V. Grossman revealed almost all of the above reasons for the retreat of the Red Army at the beginning of the war. In the novel "Life and Fate", the writer identified the main moments in the course of the initial military events and their consequences. We find a roll call of the truthful description of the Battle of Stalingrad in the stories of G. Baklanov, Yu. Bondarev, V. Bykov, V. Nekrasov, K. Simonov.

WHAT CAUSES OF THE RED ARMY'S FAILURE DETERMINED BY V. GROSSMAN?

1. Repression.

In the repressions of 1937, "Madyarov did not justify those commanders and commissars who were then shot as enemies of the people, he did not justify Trotsky, but also in admiration for Krivoruchenko, Dubov, in how respectfully and simply he called the names of commanders and army commissars who were exterminated in In 1937, it was felt that he did not believe that Marshals Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Yegorov, commander of the Moscow military district Muralov, commander of the second rank Lewandovsky, Gamarnik, Dybenko, Bubnov, that Trotsky's first deputy Sklyansky and Unshlikht were enemies of the people and traitors to the motherland. "

The repressions of 1937 decapitated the army, starting with the regiments, and simultaneously disintegrated discipline by these events, giving rise to desertion. Captain Grekov, exposing the true state of affairs in the army, spoke of "pre-war military affairs with purges, attestations, with pulls when receiving apartments, spoke of some people who reached the generals in 1937, wrote dozens of denunciations that exposed imaginary enemies of the people."

Thus, the repressions destroyed the main achievement of socialism - comradeship, loyalty to a friend, which led to the appearance of an army of informers.

Grossman notes that the repression increased the flow of new personnel into the national economy, the system of political administration, and the army.

By the beginning of the war, only 7 percent. commanders remained with higher education, 37 percent. did not complete a full course of study even in secondary military educational institutions. The repressed commanders knew and were able to do a lot, they were well versed in the German military organization, but ... The command staff before the war itself was thrown back to the level of civil war. In 1937, in 1937, those who had gained the favor began to lead the clever and talented specialists. The author says about Novikov: “On this happy day, evil arose heavily in him for many years of his past life, to the position that had become legal for him, when the military-illiterate guys, accustomed to power, food, orders, listened to his reports, mercifully tried to provide people who did not know the caliber of artillery, who could not competently read out loud a speech written to them by someone else's hand, who were confused in a map, who said instead of "percentage" "percentage", "outstanding commander", "Berlin ", they always guided him. He reported to them. Illiteracy, sometimes, it seemed to him, was the strength of these people, it replaced them with education, his knowledge, correct speech, interest in books were his weakness." The war also revealed that such people have little will and faith.

The wave of repressions of the 1930s touched a huge mass of people, and almost all the heroes of the novel were touched in one way or another by it: the father was arrested at the radio operator Katya, the parents and two sisters of Ershov were killed in the special settlement, several people from the Shaposhnikov family were repressed. And Neudobov, who carried out this action, became a general, although he was now "due to lack of military experience" subordinate to the colonel.

Repression is described in the novel as crimes of abuse of power. At that time, Madyarov's reasoning that he did not believe in the guilt of the convicted military leaders looked like "sedition." Today we heard the words of the President: "We must not forgive or justify what happened in 1937-1938." This is the essence of Grossman's reflections on repression: we must see, but not justify or forgive.

2. Forced collectivization.

The literature of recent years has quite often turned to the problems of collectivization: "On the Irtysh" by S. Zalygin, "Men and Women" by B. Mozhaev, "Kasian Ostudny" by I. Akulov, "Kanuny" by V. Belov. There will be lines in the novel "Children of the Arbat" by A. Rybakov, "Greetings to you from Baba Lera" by B. Vasiliev and the story "Vaska" by S. Antonov about the ordeal of the immigrants. Let us evaluate what Grossman said about this earlier than others, already at the turn of the sixties the writer was able to understand and show the cruel truth: "... the Germans are killing Jewish old people and children, and we were in the thirty-seventh year and complete collectivization with the expulsion of millions of unfortunate peasants with hunger, with cannibalism ... ".

Collectivization was carried out against the will of the people. People left without land were dying of hunger. Once again, Grossman draws a terrible parallel: "The state is able to build a dam separating wheat, rye from those who sowed it and thereby cause a terrible pestilence, like the pestilence that killed hundreds of thousands of Leningraders during the Nazi blockade, which killed millions of prisoners of war in Hitler's camps."

The peasants were so tortured by serf labor that they were waiting for liberation from the Germans, "but it turned out that the Germans guessed that collective farms are a good thing for them. They started five-khat, ten-khatki, the same units and brigades."

Some writers-"villagers", conveying the excesses of collectivization, emphasize that the expulsion of the owners undermined the feeling of the proprietor in the entire peasantry and aggravated the state of affairs in agriculture. Grossman's novel does not have the usual fists. Through the memories of a peasant woman, he reproduces a true picture of "dispossession": "There was a rich harvest that year. The wheat stood as a dense wall, high, on the shoulder of Vasily, and Christ was covered with his head."

A quiet, drawn-out groan stood over the village, living skeletons, children, crawling on the floor, whimpering barely audible; peasants with their feet filled with water wandered through the yards, exhausted, hungry shortness of breath. The women were looking for a brew for food, everything was eaten, boiled - nettles, acorns, a linden leaf, hooves, bones, horns lying behind the huts, unmade sheep skins ... And the guys who came from the city walked around the yards, past the dead and half-dead, they opened basements, dug holes in sheds, poked them with iron sticks into the ground, and beat out kulak grain.

On a sultry summer day, Vasily Chunyak calmed down, stopped breathing. At this hour, the lads who had come from the city again entered the hut and the blue-eyed man said, going up to the deceased: "The fist has rested, he does not regret his life."

Grossman shows the tragedy of people dying of hunger next to wheat. Honest people cannot take someone else's. The bread grown by these people is alien here. This is how the idea is carried out that the state is alien to the peasants.

Nearby is the tragedy of people who piously believe in the myth with the fist-the world-eater and therefore destroy it as a class.

Let's pay attention to the phrase used by Grossman - "complete collectivization". The writer is not against the very idea of \u200b\u200bLenin. He worried about how the good goal was perverted by bad means and extraordinary cruelty, having carried out collectivization thoughtlessly, hastily, forcibly, more "for show", and not for a person.

The decision to “destroy as a class” a million peasants with wives and children involuntarily evokes in Grossman an association with Hitler's decision to destroy the Jews as a nation along with children.

3. Persecution based on ethnicity.

Along the way, we are clarifying the question whether V. Grossman distorted history in solving this problem? Therefore, to begin with, let us recall the origins of the Leninist nationalities policy. It is known that in V. I. Lenin dreamed of a voluntary alliance of nations based on complete trust, on the realization of fraternal unity. Such an alliance, in his words, cannot be created immediately; it must be achieved with the greatest caution and patience in order to prevent the revival of national friction.

Lenin's precepts were grossly violated during the years of Stalinism and stagnation. In the pre-revolutionary period, Stalin established himself as one of the theoreticians of the national question, and Lenin positively assessed his work "Marxism and the National Question". But later, Stalin departed from Lenin's teaching.

Lenin was categorically against the idea of \u200b\u200b"autonomization" during the formation of the USSR, which was expressed by Stalin. Forced to accept Lenin's plan, supported by the party, Stalin, in his current policy, slowly began to pursue a course of "autonomization." Instead of a voluntary union of sovereign peoples based on respect, independence and trust, he led a policy of centralizing and depriving peoples of their national rights. Not only social strata of society were subjected to unjustified repressions, but entire peoples as well. In the 1920s, Stalin demarcated the Transcaucasia, in the 30s he liquidated the national village councils and districts (Red Kurdistan disappeared from the map of the Azerbaijan SSR).

The Constitution of the USSR, adopted in 1936, did not contain the criteria of the rule of law. Repressions rained down, they engulfed and destroyed the creative intelligentsia of the peoples of the Volga region, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus.

Collectivization, accompanied by dispossession and exile of millions of peasants, had catastrophic consequences for the Russian and Ukrainian nation.

In 1937-1938. followed by the punishment of the Korean population of the Soviet Far East, he was resettled to Central Asia and Kazakhstan.

The gross violation of the basic principles of Lenin's policy were the deportations of the early 1940s from the Soviet Baltic republics and the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine.

The Stalinist "concept" of the responsibility of peoples for the actions of individual nationalist groups led to the accusation of a whole group of peoples of treason during the Great Patriotic War. By the will of Stalin, the Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachais, Tuvans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Meskhetian Turks, Hemshids, Kurds, Armenians from the Akhaltsikhe-laki and Akhaltsikhe Laki regions were deprived of their national statehood and were expelled without exception.

In the same period, an absurd propaganda of the absolute superiority of Russian science and culture over Western models was carried out; the “doctors' case” was fabricated, which had an anti-Semitic orientation.

Let us trace the presentation of the national problem by V. Grossman through the prism of the listed scientific concepts in order to make sure once again how honest and truthful the writer was in the 60s.

Grossman was keenly aware of the growing national feeling during the war. "Stalingrad, the Stalingrad offensive contributed to a new self-consciousness of the army and the population. The national became the basis of the world outlook."

The war forced people of different nationalities to be treated in a new way. Taking advantage of the national upsurge, Stalin began to introduce the "ideology of state nationalism." Speaking at the Red Army parade 7. XI. 1941, he drew the attention of the protesters to the "spirit of the great Lenin", which inspired the people to the war in 1918 and inspires the Patriotic War: "Let the image of our great ancestors - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, inspire you in this brave war, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov ". It is not difficult to notice that Stalin refers not so much to the traditions themselves as to the great names of Russia, among which he put the spirit of Lenin. "The outstanding civil war leaders Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Blucher, Kovtyuk, Fedko did not inspire, they were declared enemies of the people Outstanding military leaders Frunze and Kamenev did not live to see the period of repression.

At a reception in the Kremlin on 24 May 1945, Stalin again announced that the Russian people were "leading", they had "a clear mind, steadfast character and patience." This "theoretical" thesis was used for the reprisals against some peoples. It is no coincidence that the episode of Shtrum filling out the "royal questionnaire" is described in such detail: "Filling out the fifth point of it," pressing the pen, wrote in decisive letters "ev. rey. "He did not know what it would soon mean for hundreds of thousands of people to answer the fifth question of the questionnaire: a Kalmyk, a Balkarian, a Chechen, a Crimean Tatar ... He did not know that from year to year dark passions would gather around this fifth point, that fear, anger, despair, hopelessness, blood will migrate into it from the next sixth item "social origin", which in a few years many people will fill out the fifth item of the questionnaire with a sense of fate, with which in the past decades the children of Cossack officers answered the next sixth question , nobles and manufacturers, sons of priests. "

Grossman points out how the singling out of the chosen people in the community of equals opposes it to other peoples, hinders their international cooperation, and more often the cause they serve. Getmanov puts Sazonov as commander, not Basangov, who knows the business well, and is guided by the following reasoning: "The deputy commander of the second brigade, an Armenian colonel, his chief of staff will be a Kalmyk, add - in the third brigade, the chief of staff is Lieutenant Colonel Lifshits. Maybe we are without a Kalmyk. will we manage? "

Grossman gives an episode in the novel in which representatives of different nationalities talk about their culture. "Allow me to love Tolstoy not only because he wrote well about the Tatars," Sokolov says. "We Russians, for some reason, cannot be proud of our people, we will immediately fall into the Black Hundreds." Karimov got up, his face was covered with pearly sweat, and he said: "I'll tell you the truth ... If you remember how back in the 1920s they burned out those who are proud of the Tatar people, all our big cultured people ... only people, national culture were destroyed. The present Tatar intelligentsia is savages in comparison with those people ... ".

Getmanov talks about his trip to the liberated territory: "Many Kalmyks sang a German tune. But what did the Soviet power not give them! After all, there was a country of ragged nomads, a country of everyday syphilis, sheer illiteracy. That's really - no matter how feed the wolf, but he looks into the steppe ".

The former and future secretary of the regional committee in Ukraine, speaking about nations, emphasizes: "We always sacrifice the Russian people ... Enough!" He is supported by Neudobnov: "Friendship of peoples ... is a sacred cause, but, you see, a large percentage of nationals are hostile, shaky, obscure people. In our time, a Bolshevik is primarily a Russian patriot." Let's add to the above: General Hudzia identified Soviet patriotism with the "Russian spirit".

Most of the heroes of Grossman's novel "are indifferent - a Russian, a Jew, a Ukrainian, an Armenian - the person with whom he has to work, a worker, a manufacturer, whether his grandfather is a fist; their attitude towards a work comrade does not depend on whether his brother is arrested by the NKVD They don't care whether the sisters of their workmate live in Kostroma or Geneva. The main thing is talent, fire, the spark of God. "

Grossman was convinced that national consciousness manifests itself as a mighty wonderful force in the days of national disasters because it is human: it awakens human dignity, human loyalty to freedom, human faith in goodness. "The history of man is a battle of great evil, striving to grind the seeds of humanity. Kindness ... is invincible. Evil is powerless in front of her."

The "Jewish question" appears in the novel as complex and ambiguous. Sometimes this is expressed in everyday sketches such as: "Abrash is in a hurry to receive a medal for the defense of Moscow," sometimes through official, service relations: "Our mother Russia is the head of the whole world", but to a greater extent the "problem of Jewishness" is revealed through the life of the family of the scientist Strum The image of Strum is to some extent autobiographical: Grossman understood what it means to separate a person from his favorite work, Strum's pain is close to him after signing a false letter (he wrote an explanatory letter to the Writers' Union), the writer, according to friends, experienced a similar "forbidden" love for the wife of his comrade, the mother of the author of the novel died at the hands of the Nazis.

In a letter from Anna Semyonovna Shtrum, the tragedy of the people is revealed.

Before her death, Anna Semyonovna gazes more intently at the faces of people and cannot “really understand them,” many of them amaze her with their difference in characters: “This morning I was reminded of something forgotten during the years of Soviet power that I was Jewish. The Germans were driving a truck and shouted: "Juden kaput!" And then some of my neighbors reminded me of this. The janitor's wife stood under my window and said to the neighbor: "Thank God, the Jews are finished."

Grossman shows how defenseless the Jews were in the very first days of the war. They were moved to the Old Town, allowing them to take 15 kg of things with them. The list of those things that made up the allowed kilograms of Anna Semyonovna is very eloquent. She took the essentials: a spoon, a knife, 2 plates, photographs of her husband and son, volumes of Pushkin, Maupassant, Chekhov, and several medical instruments. It was time to say goodbye to the neighbors: "Two neighbors in my presence began to argue about who would take chairs, who would take a writing table, and began to say goodbye to them, both burst into tears ...".

Hundreds of Jews flocked to the accursed ghetto, many people with mad eyes full of horror. And on the sidewalk people stood and looked ...

Anna Semyonovna draws a border between these people: "... two crowds, Jews in coats and hats, women in warm shawls, and the second crowd on the sidewalk is dressed in summer clothes. It seemed to me that for the Jews walking down the street, the sun refused to shine ... ". The Nazis forbade Jews to walk on the sidewalks, use transport, baths, visit dispensaries, go to the cinema, buy butter, eggs, milk, berries, white bread, meat, all vegetables, excluding potatoes. If a Jew is found in a Russian house, the owner is shot. But Anna Semyonovna's old patient, despite the ban, brought her things and promised that he would bring food to the fence once a week. And before Anna Semyonovna thought that he was a gloomy and callous person.

The ghetto united people of the same fate, but she never ceased to be amazed at the different characters of people: Sperling, at the age of 58, got hold of mattresses, kerosene, firewood and rejoices in every success he has. Epstein goes to searches with the Germans, participates in interrogations. Engineer Raivich, "who is more helpless than a child," dreams of equipping the ghetto with homemade grenades. In the ghetto they know that death awaits all of them, but life takes its toll: they play a wedding, transmit a rumor about the onset of Soviet troops, about Hitler's order not to kill Jews "The world is full and all events, their meaning, reason, are always the same - the salvation of the Jews. wealth of hope! " - exclaims Anna Semyonovna.

The instinct for life makes people hope and believe in a happy tomorrow. “Once you used to come running to me as a child, looking for protection. And now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head in your lap, so that you, smart, strong, cover me, protect me,” the mother confesses to her son. I am not only strong in spirit, Vitya, I am weak. I often think about suicide, but weakness, or strength, or senseless hope keeps me back. "

Like many heroes of the novel, Anna Semyonovna goes through the tests of loneliness: "Vitya, I have always been alone." In the ghetto, being next to people of the same fate, Anna Semyonovna “did not feel lonely. This is because before the war she was an invisible grain of sand in a dusty stream, and behind the barbed wire she felt like a significant part of her people.

Having carefully looked at people, Anna Semyonovna stood next to those who retained the best human qualities. This is a student of a pedagogical college who hid a sweet, exhausted lieutenant with a Volga, okayed speech, these are Jewish youths planning to go behind the front line, the "fiend" Alka, who, according to the passport of a dead Russian, was going to flee the ghetto. Next to them, Anna Semyonovna feels needed, useful to people: "I was so happy, helping this guy, it seemed to me that I was also participating in the war against fascism." Anna Semyonovna understands that the hours of her people's life are numbered, but she goes to the sick at home, gives Yura French lessons, sees in the eyes of patients the reflection of "a sad and kind, grinning and doomed, defeated by violence and at the same time triumphant over violence of a strong soul ! ". She draws strength from her people: "Sometimes it seems to me that it is not I who go to the sick, but on the contrary, the people's kind doctor heals my soul." She instinctively resists death.

The tragedy of the Jews is, in the author's opinion, that they have ceased to feel like a separate people. She is conveyed by the writer in a letter to Anna Semyonovna: “I never felt like a Jew, from childhood I grew up among Russian friends, I loved more than anyone else the poet Pushkin, Nekrasov, and the play over which I cried with the whole audience, the congress of Russians zemstvo doctors, there was "Uncle Vanya" with Stanislavsky. And once, Vitenka, when I was a fourteen-year-old girl, our family was going to emigrate to South America. And I told my dad: "I won't go anywhere from Russia, I'd rather drown." left.

But in these terrible days my heart was filled with maternal tenderness for the Jewish people. I didn't know about this love before. "

Strum himself experiences similar feelings: "Before the war, Shtrum never thought that he was a Jew, that his mother was Jewish. His mother never spoke about this - neither in childhood, nor during his student days. Never during his studies at Moscow University, not one student, professor, leader of the seminar did not talk to him about this.

I never, never had a desire to talk about this with Nadya - to explain to her that her mother was Russian and her father was Jewish. "

These thoughts came to Strum's mind from the fact that he realized: he acts like a scientist, but answers like a Jew. "Is there really no one in Russia to replace you if you cannot do science without Landesman and Vaspapir," his fellow scientists declare to him, and they find that Strum's discovery contradicts "Lenin's views on the nature of matter," they capture the "spirit of Judaism" in him.

Grossman does not idealize Jews. He tells about Rebekah, who strangled the baby so that he would not find a place of hiding by crying, about greed, sloppiness. All this is on the pages of his novel. But there is also Sofya Osipovna, who gave the last seconds of her life to alleviate the fate of little Davyd, there are dying children who "cannot become musicians, shoemakers, cutters. What will it be when everyone is killed? And I clearly imagined tonight how all this the noisy world of wedding customs, sayings, Saturday holidays will go to earth forever ... we will disappear ... ".

The writer appeals to the obligatory humanistic principle: all peoples must be respected, no nation should be belittled. Grossman defended the vital right of every people to live freely and with dignity in the community of all nations.

The writer was looking for an explanation for the fact that tens of millions of people were passive witnesses of the persecution of Jews and explained this by fear: "... this fear is special, heavy, insurmountable for millions of people, this is the one written in ominous, iridescent red letters in the winter leaden sky of Moscow - Gosstrakh ! ".

Fear breeds obedience. Beginning with a description of the obedience of Jews going to the ditches of mass executions from the ghettos, traveling in an echelon to the extermination camp, Grossman rises to general conclusions about mass obedience, forcing me to resignedly wait for arrest, to watch the destruction of prisoners. Obedience disfigures people, let us remember the quiet and sweet old executioner, who, during the executions, asked permission to transfer the clothes of the executed to an orphanage. Let us recall another executor of sentences who drank, yearning (idle, and when he was expelled from work, he began to go to collective farms to prick pigs, brought pig blood with him in bottles, - said that the doctor prescribed him to drink blood for anemia.

Submission and compliance are for the author synonymous with denunciation and cruelty. There are people and non-people in Grossman's novel. He shows how Zhuchenko and Khmelkov operate near the crematorium furnaces in the extermination camp for Soviet prisoners of war. Zhuchenko was one of people with a shifted psyche, he was outwardly unpleasant, his hands with long and thick fingers always seemed unwashed. The former hairdresser went through all the torment of beatings, hunger, bloody diarrhea, bullying in captivity, subconsciously choosing one thing all the time - life, "he didn't want more." And once he realized that he and Zhuchenko are the same, because people are indifferent to the state of mind in which the extermination deed is being performed. Khmelkov "vaguely knew that at the time of fascism, a person who wants to remain a man has an easier choice than a saved life - death." This is another of the main ideas of the book: the correctness of the choice of fate is determined not by heaven, not by the state court, and not even by the judgment of society, but "the highest judgment is the judgment of the sinner over the sinner." "... a dirty and sinful person crushed by fascism, who himself experienced the terrible power of a totalitarian state, who himself fell, bowed, shy, obeyed, will pronounce the verdict. Guilty!" This is where the writer's answer to questions about fate, fate, will and lack of will of a person is concentrated. The one who has survived the mortal combat is judged. V. Grossman did not want a person to get used to betrayal, lies, violence, humiliation, arbitrariness. He was worried that people didn't really want to remember what they went through. We are talking about events big and small: about the mass extermination of Jews in fascist death camps, about the everyday heroism of the defenders of Stalingrad, about the struggle against "cosmopolitans" at the Physics Institute, about the ordeals of the innocent.

That is why Grossman argues that the cruel incommensurability of History and Life is overcome by every life lived with dignity. That is why he leads his protagonists through three of the most important events for the country: collectivization, repression, ethnic persecution. But, in addition to those listed in the novel "Life and Fate", no less important in importance, although less noticeable outwardly, problems are raised. The volume of this work, of course, does not allow us to cover all of them; let us dwell on some, perhaps more interesting for high school students.

There is a key scene in the text that reveals the author's position in the representation of the war: after a powerful explosion, under the incessant bombardment, a Soviet spy and a German appeared in one crater: “They were looking at each other. Both were crushed by the same force, both of them were helpless to fight with this strength, and it seemed, she did not protect one of them, but equally threatened one and the other.

They were silent, two military residents. The perfect and unmistakable kill mechanism that they both possessed did not work.

Life was terrible, and in the depths of their eyes a dull epiphany flashed that even after the war the force that drove them into this pit, pressed their muzzles into the ground, would press not only the conquered.

They, as if by agreement, climbed out of the pit, exposing their backs and skulls for a light shot, unshakably confident in their safety.

Klimov and the German climbed to the surface, and both looked: one to the east, the second to the west, - did not the authorities see that they were climbing out of the same hole, not killing each other. Without looking back, without "adyu" each went to their trenches ... ".

And in that and in the other army, people kill people for some kind of duty not invented by them, and, by all means, there is someone looking after the murder. Grossman has no traditional description of a brutal enemy. The writer is more worried about the psychology of a German soldier who, against his will, found himself in a foreign land: "They walk in a special gait that people and animals who have lost their freedom walk ... It seems that one bluish-gray face for all, one eyes for all, one for all an expression of suffering and anguish. It is amazing how little has appeared among them ,. nosed, low-browed, with funny hare mouths with sparrow heads. how many niggers Aryans, many pimply, in boils, in freckles. " There is no desire of the writer to humiliate enemy soldiers in these words, pain sounds for them; "These were ugly, weak people, people born by mothers and loved by them. And it was as if those non-people, the nation, who walked with heavy chins, with haughty mouths, white-headed and fair-faced, with granite breasts, had disappeared."

Grossman compares the soldiers of the warring armies and finds that they are somewhat similar "to those sad and woeful crowds of unfortunate people born to Russian mothers, whom the Germans drove with twigs and sticks to the camps, to the west, in the autumn of 1941".

The writer understands that not everyone shares his feelings for the Germans, so he does not hide how the exhausted civilians perceived their persecutors: "The feeling of hatred, having arisen, sought and could not find its application ... Such were the views of the people that the Germans with with relief they went to the dark basement and did not rush to leave it, preferring the darkness and stench to the outside air and daylight. "

However, Grossman's sympathies are still on the side of those who have not lost their human dignity, officer honor in a brutal war. Let us recall a German prisoner who crossed the road on all fours: "A piece of blanket, with scraps of cotton wool that had come out, dragged after him. The soldier crawled hastily, like a dog, moving his arms and legs, without raising his head ... The colonel waited until the prisoner was level with him. and kicked him. "And a weak jolt was enough to beat the sparrow's strength ... His arms and legs spread apart. He looked from below at the one who struck him: in the eyes of the German, like in the eyes of a dying sheep, there was no reproach, not even suffering, only humility. "

He who has a soul cannot bear this picture. Among the many Soviet soldiers, there was also one who said to the senior in rank: "The Russian people do not beat lying people. You are a scoundrel." And when the driver, with disdain for the "trick" of his boss, showing off, said: "I have no pity for them. I can shoot", Darensky pulled him back: "You would have shot them in 1941, when you ran away from them, like me, carelessly".

The traditional attitude of Russians to prisoners, familiar to us since 1812 and conveyed in the Tolstoyan aspect.

And there are other examples that Leo Tolstoy did not see in the Russian army during the Patriotic War. The soldier Bulatov told how he saw a German in an embrace with a woman walking along the road, made them fall to the ground and, "before killing, he gave them to rise three times ... And I killed him when he was standing over her, so cross- cross and lay down on the road. "

It has long been considered a great valor to kill more enemies. War veterans revealed their trophies at meetings with young people. But here is an episode from Grossman's book that made us think deeply about the “victory” of Bulatov, who “today” has 78 Fritzes. Someone's children, someone's fathers ...

Stalingrad transformed the conquerors, they were thin from hunger and numb from the cold. They left the Stalingrad people without a roof, without bread. The war equalized the human needs of invaders and conquerors, "... a prisoner tore off cabbage leaves from the ground, looked for tiny, acorn-sized frozen potatoes, which at one time, due to their scanty size, did not fall into the cauldron. From behind the stone wall a tall old woman in a torn a man's coat, belted with a rope, in worn-out men's boots, she walked towards the soldier, gazing intently at the ground, stirring up the snow with a hook made of thick wire.

They saw each other, without raising their heads, through the shadows clashing in the snow.

The huge German raised his eyes to the tall old woman and, trustingly holding the leaky, mica cabbage leaf in front of her, said slowly and then solemnly: "Hello, madam."

The old woman, unhurriedly removing with her hand the clothes that had slipped on her forehead, looked with dark eyes, full of kindness and intelligence, majestically, replied slowly: "Hello, sir."

Me without bitterness and irony ends this episode of Grossman: "It was a meeting at the highest level of representatives of the two peoples."

WHY DOES V. GROSSMAN PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE DEFENSE OF THE HOUSE SIX FRACTIONAL ONE?

Stalingrad in the historical and artistic concept of Grossman was of the greatest importance not only for the war, but also for the whole life of the Soviet and German peoples, the socialist and fascist states. "The tragic glow of Stalingrad illuminated all life, to the lowest points. At these points, the humiliated and insulted according to the old Russian novel tradition more clearly manifest the social" moral essence of the events of social life, "A. Bocharov noted. 14 ).

Analyzing the Battle of Stalingrad, Grossman finds out why the Soviet soldiers retreated to Stalingrad, but remained unbroken. Where did they get the strength to repel the enemy?

The biographies of the defenders of the house 6/1 add up to one common fate, according to which one can discern the fate of Stalingrad. The defenders of the house, being in the balance of death, pacified the fascist pressure. These were people of different ages and professions, but they were convinced that everything in the collapsed house was fragile, brittle, both iron and stone, "but not them." In house 6/1 there was life, here they loved swearing, fought, dreamed, kept a kitten and he "did not complain", he believed that this roar, hunger, fire was life on earth. "

WHAT IS THE STRATEGIC PURPOSE OF HOUSE 6/1?

There was a sapper unit in the house, transmitting important information about the enemy. The Germans could start a general offensive only by eliminating this center of resistance. If the house "six fractions one" holds out for a long time, then the German offensive program will be upset, and the Soviet headquarters in the gained time will be able to strengthen the army.

WHAT ARE THE HOUSEHOLDERS REPRESENTED?

The defenders of the 6/1 house represent a social cut of any military unit that participated in the Stalingrad battle, but there is one detail, there were "special people, or ordinary people, having got into this house, became special." Everything that the Germans did aroused in the "residents" of the house not a feeling of horror, but a condescending, mocking attitude. "Oh, and Fritz is trying," "Look, look, what these hooligans have thought up ...", "Well, a fool, where does he put bombs?"

The defenders of the house were strong, desperate people, although in general they were the most ordinary: Kolomeytsev, who respected scientists and writers more than all the bosses, "in his opinion, those with any position and title did not mean anything to some bald Lobachevsky or shrunken Romain Rolland "; "sloppy lieutenant Batrakov, a former teacher, spoke of ignorant schoolchildren in an arrogant voice"; the commander of a sapper platoon Antsiferov, who loved to remember his pre-war chronic diseases, a former opera singer, a cheeky lieutenant Zubarev, an innocent Bunchuk. What was their strength? They were united by a sense of inner freedom. None of them had to be forced, held by force, each knew his place, his duty, each understood that the hour of the decisive German assault was near, and prepared for it with military dignity.

The organizing link and the soul of the defenders of the house was Grekov: "Some kind of amazing combination of strength, courage, authority with everyday life. He remembers how much children's boots cost before the war, and what salary a cleaner or locksmith received, and how much grain and money were given for a workday. on the farm ".

His biography is usual: he worked as a foreman at a mine, then as a construction technician, became an infantry captain, went to retraining, read books in the evening, drank vodka, played cards, quarreled with his wife. Now he is half-jokingly half-seriously called the house manager. From him, the soldiers adopt calmness and are free in speech and deed. The conversations were not simple: "You cannot lead a person like a sheep, for which Lenin was smart and he did not understand. A revolution is made so that no one can lead a person. And Lenin said:" Before you were led in a stupid way, but I I will be smart. ”People calmly condemned those who killed tens of thousands of innocent people, spoke with pain about the torture of collectivization.

Calmness and self-confidence of the tenants of the house (5/1 eliminated the fear of the concept of “environment.” To radio operator Katya, Grekov’s words do not seem scary: “Hit, hit, so they climbed!” The girl was absolutely calm about the instructions of the house manager: “Who what loves: a grenade, a knife, a shovel. To teach you - to spoil. Just ask - beat, whoever loves what. "Most likely in these words, the house manager takes care of" their boys ", personal protection depends on many individuals, you need to use them as much as possible. outwardly inexplicable maternal instinct. After all, Grekov knew that "the house in which he settled with his people would be on the axis of the German strike," only he did not report this in the report. Didn't count on help? Didn't want to evoke sympathy? Everything that happened? outside his house, he lived according to other laws alien to him. The political instructor reported to the commander that Grekov refused to write a report ("we report only to the Fritzes"): "In general, they have there" you will not understand anything, all this Grekov would They lie, and he with them, like an equal, lie side by side, "you" they say to him and call him "Vanya" ... not a military unit, but some kind of Parisian commune "(note, not in praise, but in condemnation).

Secret "informants" have been installed behind Grekov's fighters, who pay more attention to how "the house manager has completely dissolved", and not how he is dashingly fighting. Constant mistrust on the part of the bosses, suspicion, orders "every day at nineteen zero-zero, give detailed reports" under the constant fire of the enemy, force Grekov to take urgent defensive measures: with a blow of his hand he knocked the radio operator's hand off the key, grinned and said: "A mine fragment hit the radio transmitter , the connection will be improved when Grekov needs it. " House 6/1 was subject not to formal subordination, but to the law of "natural equality, which was so strong in Stalingrad."

The garrison died, having fulfilled its sacred duty - to keep to the last, and fearful reports - denunciations, only reached their addressees. The regimental commissar, comforting Krymov, adds about Grekov, "lowering his voice," that according to the information of the head of the Special Department, he "may have been alive. He could have gone over to the enemy's side."

WHAT IS THIS FORCES ABLE TO OVERLINE THE COURAGE AND HEROISM OF FIGHTERS?

They can be called in one capacious word - bureaucracy. It can manifest itself in a peaceful life, but in war it has extremely ugly forms: the pilot shot down a Messer, jumped out of a burning car, he was safe, and his pants were burnt. "And so, they do not give him pants, the wear period has not expired and that's it!"

"The German thrashes hundreds of people, but as soon as they are taken away for the reverse slope of the height, the people will be safe, and there is no tactical loss, and the equipment will remain. But there is an order:" Not a step back "and they keep them under fire and destroy equipment, they destroy people." ...

Bureaucracy is terrible when the consumptive widow of the hero is thrown out of the apartment, when a person is allowed to fill out 24 questionnaires and he eventually confesses at the meeting: "Comrades, I am not your man," when Cain's stamp is put on a hard worker but that his father or grandfathers were fists: "Our bureaucracy is terrible when you think: this is not a growth on the body of the state - the growth can be cut off. It is terrible when you think: bureaucracy is the state."

BY WHAT WAYS WAS THE SOVIET STATE DEVELOPED IF THE MOST EFFECTIVE INTERNAL FORCE PROVED TO BE BUREAKRATISM?

Investigating this question, Grossman turned to the tasks of the revolution, the names of the leaders.

Through the recollections of one of the main characters of the novel, the author reminds the reader who Lenin was for people: the peasants from Gorki saw off a kind, intelligent worker on their last journey; family and friends buried a white-headed boy with a difficult character, demanding to the point of cruelty, but loving his mother, sisters, brothers; the wife thought that they never had children; workers from “Dynamo” remembered him frightened and mournful in the last days of his life.

The political friends of the great Lenin - Rykov, Kamenev, Bukharin - were still looking absentmindedly at the pockmarked, dark-complexioned man in a long greatcoat. Revealing the tragedy of power, Grossman already here makes a significant remark: "If Stalin were tactful, he should not have come to Gorki, where the relatives and closest friends of the great Lenin have gathered. They did not understand that he, the only one, would become Lenin's heir, push away all of them, even the closest ones, will even drive their wife away from Lenin's inheritance. "

Grossman emphasized that the very death of Lenin made Stalin the master of the country: “It was not they - Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev - that had Lenin's truth. And Trotsky did not have it (went. They were mistaken. None of them became the successor of Lenin's cause. But Until his last days Lenin did not know and did not understand that Lenin's cause would become Stalin's. "

People knew that at his word alone, huge construction projects arose, hundreds of thousands of people dug canals, erected cities, laid roads in the edge of permafrost. He expressed a great state in himself. The great state expressed itself in it, in its character, in its habits. The newspapers wrote: "Stalin is Lenin today", "Stalin is the heir of Razin, Dobrolyubov, Herzen." And only the most notorious skeptics knew that Stalin was building iron terror, arranging medieval witch trials for the speedy construction of socialism in one single country. "They saw how" dozens of people who created the Bolshevik Party together with Lenin turned out to be provocateurs, paid agents of foreign intelligence services. "and were destroyed.

Today, these thoughts of the author are confirmed by the published figures: an almost complete change of leading cadres took place between the 17th and 18th Party Congresses. At the 17th Congress of the Old Bolsheviks there were 80 percent, who joined after 1929 - 2.6 percent. At the 18th Congress of the Party with the right to vote, the old Bolsheviks were 24 percent, who joined after 1929 - 80.6 percent. Stalin remained the leader of the party. One.

In the battle of Stalingrad, the fate of the state founded by Lenin was decided, the centralized rational force of the party was able to exercise for itself in the construction of huge factories, in the creation of nuclear power plants and thermonuclear installations, jet and turboprop aircraft, space and transcontinental missiles, high-rise buildings, palaces of science, new channels , seas, in the creation of polar highways and cities.

The fate of France and Belgium, Italy, the Scandinavian and Balkan states occupied by Hitler was decided, the death sentence was pronounced to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Moabite dungeon, the gates of 900 concentration and labor camps were being prepared to open. "The fate of the German prisoners of war, Soviet prisoners of war in the Nazi camps was decided. , the actor Zuskin, the writers Bergelson, Markin, Ferrer The fate of Wormwood, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania was decided.The fate of the Russian peasants and workers, the freedom of Russian thought, Russian literature and science.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT STALIN MADE A DEFENSE PLAN FOR STALINGRAD?

Grossman debunks the ingenious idea of \u200b\u200bencircling Stalingrad. He appreciates the merit of the organizers of the Stalingrad offensive, who correctly chose the area, the time of the offensive, skillfully arranged the interaction of the three fronts, and worked out the details of the operation.

But he proves that the basis of this work, in which Stalin also took part, "was the principle of the enemy's flank encirclement, introduced into military practice by a primitive hairy man."

The human consciousness, shocked by the grandeur of the military events, identified it with the grandeur of the commanders' thoughts: "The history of battles shows that the generals do not introduce new principles into operations to break through defenses, persecute, encircle, and exhaust them - they apply and use the principles that are still known to people of the Neanderthal era ... Of great importance for the life of airplanes, turbines, jet engines, rockets, and, however, mankind owes its creation to its talent, but not to its genius. "

V. Grossman is against attributing the victory to a genius. Of course, the activity of a talented military leader for the cause of war cannot be belittled, but it is not only stupid and dangerous to count victory to one person. And because the well-worn conclusion sounds like the phrase of the writer: the spirit of the army should be called the genius of success, "this is how the people's victory expressed itself."

According to Grossman, Hitler's character "deeply and fully expressed the character of the fascist state" - this is how the character of Stalin expressed the features of the Soviet state, therefore the author compares fascism and the cult of personality, the essence of the fascist order, with elements of the socialist system. Grossman showed the clash of two states, totalitarian in nature. The struggle for the homeland, freedom, the just revolutionary cause was just and the Soviet people won.

WHY DID THE PARTY ADOPT THE DISTORTION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS?

Honest communists did not agree with Stalin's autocracy in the party, lamented about the bloody trials and disrespectful attitude towards the old party members, but they knew that by opposing the party on any of these issues, they, against their will, would be opposed to Lenin's cause. The appointment of the Stalinist party to mobilize the anger of the masses, rage, aim to beat the enemy. It is no accident that Krymov says: "Christian humanism is not suitable for our business. Our Soviet humanism is harsh. We do not know the ceremonies ...". The faithful Leninist Krymov admires the infallibility of the General Secretary of the Marxist-Leninist Party, who violated the Leninist spirit, who combined party democracy with iron discipline: “Krymov never doubted the right of the party to act with the sword of dictatorship, the holy right of the revolution to destroy its enemies. He never sympathized with the opposition! did not think that Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Kamenev followed the Leninist path. Trotsky, with all the brilliance of his mind and revolutionary temperament, did not outlive his Menshevik past, did not rise to Leninist heights. Here is the power - Stalin! That is why they call him the master. His hand is not. never wavered, there was no Bukharin's intellectual flabbiness in him. The party created by Lenin, smashing enemies, followed Stalin. They do not argue with enemies, they do not listen to their arguments. "

Even realizing that he had essentially written a denunciation against Grekov, Krymov reassures himself: "There is nothing to be done, dear comrade, you are a party member, do your party duty."

For a thousand years Russia was a country of autocracy and autocracy, and during this time respect for a strong hand was cultivated in it. Former Menshevik Chernetsov instills in Mostovsky that cruelty is an inevitable consequence of the revolution.

WHAT DOES V. GROSSMAN SEE THE TRAGEDY OF THE REVOLUTION?

Grossman believed in the need for revolutionary transformations, so the war against fascism for him is a war for a just cause: "Yes, yes. The war that raised the bulk of the national forces was a war for revolution." In the author's opinion, the cleansing war will bring new, free breath to the Soviet people.

Other writers also dreamed about this: the Graninskiy "Zubr" did not return to Russia in 1937, when he was invited, knowing that he would be repressed, but after 1945 he came, believing in a just post-war life.

V. Kondratyev, donating his "Red Gate" to readers, recalled: "After the war, everyone was expecting some kind of change. They hoped that Stalin, convinced of the loyalty and loyalty of the victorious people, would stop repressions, but this did not happen" 10) B. Pasternak continued to work on Doctor Zhivago, making sure that "the expectations of the changes that the war of Russia should bring" did not come true.

Grossman is inclined to believe that collectivization, industrialization and 1937 "were the logical result of the October Revolution." But the new way of life used the old ideas, phraseology. The basis of the new order was its state-national character: "The revolutionary goal liberated in the name of morality from morality, it justified the name of the future of today's Pharisees, informers, hypocrites, it explained why a person, in the name of the happiness of the people, should push the innocent into the pit. the revolution allowed to turn away from children whose parents were in camps, explaining why the revolution wanted a wife who did not denounce her innocent husband to be separated from her children and placed in a concentration camp for 10 years.

The power of the revolution entered into an alliance with the fear of death, with the horror of torture, with the longing that gripped those who felt the breath of distant camps. "

For a long time, going into the revolution, people knew that "consumption and Siberia" awaited them. It is alarming for Grossman to realize that "now the revolution has paid for its loyalty to itself, for its loyalty to a great goal with well-fed rations, Kremlin dinner, People's Commissars' packages, personal cars, vouchers ..., international cars."

The Stalingrad battle, according to the author, should revive the Leninist ideals of the revolution: "the Stalingrad feat is akin to the revolutionary struggle of the Russian workers." Together with howl-howl, they want to bury everything that hinders the development of the conquests of the revolution: “The neighbors in Kazan need the products, and I am taking them to Chita, then they will be delivered from Chita back to Kazan.

Centralization has strangled. "(And how many angry speeches have been made at congresses and sessions on this matter!).

"The wages of the workers are small, but the management knows one thing - come on the plan! Walk swollen, hungry, but come on with the plan. The trade union is silent. Instead of protecting the interests of the workers, it calls for victims: before the war there is preparation for war, during the war - everything for the front, and after the war calls for eliminating the consequences of the war. "

Grossman leads the reader to the conclusion that "for 1000 years the Russian man has seen enough of both greatness and super-greatness, but he has not seen one thing - democracy."

WHAT ARE THE COMMUNISTS REPRESENTED IN ROMAN?

In this regard, Grossman relies on our healthy perceptions, because the characters are presented contrary to the stereotypes for which "allowed" fiction has prepared us. The destinies of almost all heroes are cut short, for it is important for the author not so much to trace specific "life stories" as to highlight their social character.

COMMISSIONER HETMANOV

His biography is poor in interesting events, mainly with a negative particle NOT he participated in the civil war. In the ill-fated 1937 he became the "master of the region" with so much power that the secretary of the regional party organization could not even dream of. As you can see, the biography is typical for the nominees of the late 30s.

Getmanov himself lets go of frontier jokes that dangerously provoke the interlocutor: "It is our happiness that the Germans are more disgusted with the peasants in a year than the communists in 25 years."

He had a disgusting demeanor to always feel like a master, "convinced of his right to speak out verbosely at meetings on technical issues, in which he knew nothing. And just as confidently, convinced of his right, Getmanov could treat someone else's brandy, put the guest to rest on someone else's bed, read someone else's papers on the table. "

He has never been to the front, in the brigades they said about him: "Oh, we have a combat commissar!" Getmanov loved to speak at rallies, bowed low like a village grandfather in front of a gaping tanker who did not have time to greet his superiors, did not tolerate objections.

Before the war, he led the region, spoke on the problems of building renovation, brick production, chicken plague epidemics. Now Getmanov spoke just as confidently about the quality of weapons, about battle tactics, about medical care, about the evacuation of damaged vehicles from the battlefield.

The power of the party leader Getmanov did not require either talent or talent, "it turned out to be above talent, above talent. Hundreds of people with the gift of research, singing, writing books eagerly listened to the leading, decisive word of Getmanov, although he not only did not know how to sing and play piano, create theatrical performances, but did not know how with taste and depth to understand the works of science, poetry, music ... ". Getmanov twists fate, because "the need to sacrifice people for the sake of the cause always seemed to him natural, undeniable, not only during the war."

How did he understand the interests of the party? "The spirit of partisanship, the interests of the party should permeate his decisions in any circumstances ... The spirit of partisanship should permeate the leader's attitude to business, to a book, to a picture, and therefore, no matter how difficult it is, he should not hesitate to abandon his usual favorite book, if the interests of the party conflict with his personal sympathies. ”But Getmanov knew: there was a higher degree of partisanship, its essence was that a person generally had neither inclinations nor sympathies that could conflict with the spirit of partisanship - everything that is close and dear to a party leader is close to him, only because it is dear to him, because it expresses the spirit of the party spirit. Sometimes the sacrifices that Getmanov made in the name of the spirit of party spirit were cruel and harsh. There are no fellow countrymen or teachers who have been from youth is obliged to much, here it should not be considered either with love or pity. Here such words as "turned away", "did not support", "ruined", "betrayed ..." should not disturb. But the spirit of partisanship is manifested in the fact that the sacrifice is just not needed - not needed because personal feelings - love, friendship, fellowship - naturally cannot be preserved if they contradict the spirit of partisanship. "

Getmanov does not doubt anything, does not worry, does not repent. He does meanness easily and deliberately. Congratulates, kisses the corps commander for an important victory and immediately writes a denunciation on him.

At every feast Getmanov manages to be the first to raise a toast: "To our father." Know that Getmanov survived, we would probably find out that after the death of the leader, he raised a glass with the same haste to all subsequent secretaries general. Now he would have marched in the forefront of perestroika. The current hetmans, who once glorified Brezhnev, Chernenko, and other "great leaders of the international communist and workers' movement," do not hesitate to explain the past by the mistakes of their youth or fanatical faith in the party. They deliberately did not go the honest way, fearing to lose their privileges.

GENERAL UNCONVENIENT

Novikov still wanted to understand, for what qualities did Neudobnov become a general?

His biography is better than that of the Hetman: for his participation in the Bolshevik circle in 1916 he ended up in a tsarist prison, after the civil war he worked in the OGPU, served in the border troops, studied at the academy, worked in the military department of the Central Committee, and traveled abroad.

As a nomenclature worker, he very quickly went a long way to a high rank. He is a little embarrassed that the war influenced his career and he is now subordinate to Novikov, but it was clear to him that with the end of the war this abnormal situation would also end.

For some order in 1938, he received a hunting rifle, furniture, carpets, china and a dacha. He had an excellent memory, apparently read a lot, studying the works of Lenin and Stalin. During disputes, he usually said: "Comrade Stalin said at the 17th Congress" and quoted a quote. He talked with pleasure about the exposed pests (doctors, shoemakers, employees of the Tretyakov Gallery and hippodromes).

Neudobnov went through Beria's school and at the end of the war achieved his goal: Novikov was removed and he began to command a tank corps.

LEGAL COMMUNISTS. (MOSTOVSKY, KRYMOV, ABARCHUK)

For them, the indisputable truths were the phrases that revolution is the violence of the majority against the minority, that as socialism is being built, the bitterness of the class struggle increases, that the country is in a capitalist encirclement, trying by any means to blow up the Soviet system from within. In the eyes of the communists, these postulates justified cruelty, terror, the destruction of "potentially" alien estates and groups: first the monarchists, then (white officers, then Mensheviks, kulaks, Trotskyists, Zinovievists - and where is the line at which the line of repression could stop?

MOSTOVSKY I started with small deals with my conscience and gradually came to a double truth. In the name of "higher interests" he has to admit that there is one truth - for the people, another - for a narrow circle of leaders.

The most terrible torture for the conscience of the old party member was the conversation imposed on him in a fascist concentration camp with Obersturmbannführer Liss. By drawing his interlocutor into discussions about fascism and Stalinism, about the suppression of freedoms, about concentration camps in Germany and the USSR, about the need for violence, the Gestapo man brings Mostovsky to the need to recognize these analogies: “When we look at each other's faces, we are looking not only at the hated face , we look in the mirror. This is the tragedy of the era. Don't you recognize yourself, your will in us? " The old party member drives away these thoughts, fearing to cross the line of impermissibility in the subconscious and subconsciously overcomes this line: “We must renounce what we have lived all our life, condemn what we have defended and justified. Not condemn, but with the strength of our whole soul, with all our revolutionary passion. their hatred of the camp, Lubyanka, bloody Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! But not enough - Stalin, his dictatorship! No, no, no, even more! We must condemn Lenin! Edge of the abyss! "

Mostovsky, of course, feels a shared responsibility with the party for the events of 1937 and his specific guilt for not standing up for his repressed comrades. He suffers, suffers, but only continues to do what he did all the previous years - "he steadfastly followed the cause of the party": he refuses trust, condemning the most honest man to death, only because he comes from a kulak family.

Unfortunately, such as Mostovsky are not being rebuilt.

ABARCHUK.

All his life he was irreconcilable with opportunists and hated double-dealing. His mental strength, his faith were in the right of the court. He doubted his wife and left her, did not believe that his son was growing up as an unshakable fighter and refused his name to his son. Abarchuk despised whiners, those who hesitated. He disowned his philistine father and sued 40 dishonest workers who fled from the construction site to their homes in the countryside.

Judging others is sweet. In making judgment, he asserted his strength, his ideal. He wanted to be like Stalin: he wore a tunic, boots.

In the camp, he lost the right to judge, felt that he himself was judged. Abarchuk managed to defeat himself, suppressing animal fear, told the operative who killed Ugarov. And again he acquired the right to court.

But this was not yet the main test of his fate, he had to listen to the will of the teacher Magar, who pointed out, dying, three mistakes committed by the communists: they built a nightmare and called it socialism, did not understand freedom and crushed it: "Without freedom there is no proletarian revolution," "The communists created an idol, put on epaulettes, profess nationalism, raised their hand against the working class, it will be necessary, they will reach the Black Hundreds."

How did Abarchuk take this will? Frightened: "Stop it! They broke you!" I did not hear the most important thing from Magar: "If we cannot live like revolutionaries, we will die, it is worse to live like this." Abarchuk had the courage to end his deceived life. In the last minutes of his life, he turned to his son, whom he did not give his last name: "You are my hope, will you ever know that your father did not bend that night?" He mentally forged the broken ties with his son, until the ancestral shadow of a criminal flashed nearby.

COMMISSIONER OF KRYMOV.

In Krymov, the movement of all Grossman's prose was refracted from pure admiration for the dedication of commissar Vavilova ("In the city of Berdichev"), party organizer of the mine Lunin ("Glukauf"), battalion commissar Bocharov ("The people are immortal"), he comes to understand how different the Getmans turned out to be. and Krymov, Mostovsky and Osipov. Commissioners for Grossman are still the conscience of the people.

Krymov is disinterested and honest, he believes the party so fanatically that he does not notice how he vacillates "along with the party's line." Let's remember the episode in the house 6/1. "I was sent to you by a party," said Krymov to the manager of the Grekov house, bursting with angry paint, "Why did I, say, come to you?" "For the soup, for the sake of the soup," someone suggested in a low, friendly tone. Krymov came to "break" the heroes, but they were not afraid of him, they were not afraid to learn that the party had sent him. This attitude towards him, the commissioner, "aroused in him a feeling of anger, a desire to suppress, twist."

Why was there no connection between the commissar and the soldiers?

Because in the 6/1 house people felt strong and confident. It was a collective united by will, they openly expressed their thoughts, there were no "informers" among them, before they died they could afford to be human. The fighters really did not like the offensive and useless "propaganda" of Krymov, and the defenders turned to the commissioner with "his" questions: "What if under communism everyone starts to receive as needed - everyone gets drunk?" "And what about the collective farms, Comrade Commissar? How can we liquidate them after the war." The enraged commissar once again recalled that he had come here to overcome partisanism. To this Grekov remarked: "Overcome. And who will overcome the Germans?" Krymov's power was to remove Grekov from his post, this gave him confidence and strength, "he knew that he could handle Grekov." But he wanted the building manager to "bend over", to recognize his right to execute and have mercy, so he tries to challenge the unruly commander to a frank conversation: "What do you want?" Grekov looked at him and said cheerfully: "I want freedom, and I am fighting for it."

For many days a small detachment of Red Army men has been holding back the attacks of the powerful colossus of the Nazis, they are all worthy of the highest awards, but Krymov suspects that Grekov shot at him. Grekov's philosophy about the need for freedom of man from the state seems to the commissioner to be wrecking. In the house manager Krymov feels not only a personal enemy, but an enemy of society, which he creates as a commissar. Krymov writes a denunciation of the hero.

Why does the reader have no antipathy for Krymov?

The Commissioner does not feel satisfied with his work, he constantly ponders why this is happening? He put so much effort into building a state, which for some reason honest people are dissatisfied with. Krymov understands that he does something wrong in his life.

When did Krymov realize his mistakes - the commissioner?

All his doubts are resolved after his arrest. Krymov begins to judge himself, remembering those who were sent to be shot and sent to penal battalions only for some phrases. Krymov was rapidly reborn: “The skin of the living body of the revolution was ripped off, the new time wanted to dress in it, and the bloody live meat, the insides of the proletarian revolution went to the dump, the new time did not need them. The skin of the revolution was needed ... But there was a different brain, other lungs, liver, eyes ...

Great Stalin! A slave of time and circumstances ... And those who did not bow before the new time went to the dump ... Now he knows, they split a man. "Krymov was swallowed up by a machine that he himself started and spun. But it is not that , beaten up during interrogation by a communist, "doom" to lose oneself ", as if it was not he who" met his friend Georgy Dimitrov ..., carried Clara Zetkin's coffin, " a stranger, but himself ... This feeling of closeness was truly awful. "He prepared something like this for Grekov, if necessary, he would not hesitate to shoot with his own hand.

Reflecting on his life and the path traveled by the country, he returns to house 6/1 and does not see an enemy in Grekov - he is tormented by remorse for that denunciation.

His own misfortune helps him understand the national drama: "Yes, in general, all this does not look very much like socialism. Why does my party need to destroy me? After all, we made the revolution — not Malenkov, not Zhdanov. We were all merciless towards the enemies of the revolution. Why is the revolution merciless towards us? Or maybe that is why it is merciless ... ".

Why is Krymov dear to Grossman?

Having weighed his way, realizing the mistakes in it, Krymov, in conditions of lack of freedom and violence, did not give his soul to desecration, he managed to preserve his human dignity. "The most difficult thing is to be a stepson of time. There is no harder fate than a stepson who lives at the wrong time. Time loves only those whom it has given birth to - its children, its heroes, its workers."

Krymov made his choice, chose to remain the stepson of time.

But at the same time, Grossman also cherishes an inexpressible sense of loyalty to his word, his duty, his faith, which distinguish the "die-hard" communists. Each of them will face trials similar to those that befell the revolutionaries before October: torture chambers, hard labor, a concentration camp. Hard labor united people who were devoted to the idea that in their youth it had called them so ardently.

Rigidly outlined in the novel is the detachment of communists who entered her career for the sake of, in the name of life's benefits. Grossman, carried away by the revolutionary heroism of his former commissars, was painful to see people capable of meanness. The writer did not forgive them for deviations from the norms of revolutionary morality, he judged them especially harshly (A. Bocharov).

So, having traced the fate of the three heroes, interconnected not only by events and ties of kinship, we share V. Grossman's anxiety and hope: it is very difficult to live in a country where the relationship between man and state is determined by the ideology of a "totalized empire". It seems that there can be no freedom of speech. Then why should we live? The author claims: a person should get freedom (I. Rudakova).

I would like to draw your attention to one more feature of the intellectual novel by V. Grossman.

THE ROLE OF ART IN DISCLOSING THE MAIN PROBLEMS

Grossman's heroes talk about great artists, composers, classic writers, and the theme of art helps the author to deeper reveal the characters of the characters, better understand their philosophy and understand the chain of events taking place in the country.

There is now a lot of discussion about the method of socialist realism. Already in the sixties, Grossman formulated and managed to convey the essence of today's disputes in an original artistic form: "The essence is the same - delight in front of one's own exclusivity. Socialist realism ... is a mirror, which, to the question of the party and the government," Who in the world is lovelier, more beautiful and whiter ? "answers:" You, you, the party, the government, the state, are the most beautiful and nicer of all! "The ingenious state without flaws does not care about everyone who is not like it."

The state corrodes all those writers, in whose work it does not see its glorification, let us recall E. Zamyatin, M. Zoshchenko, M. Bulgakov, A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Nekrasov and many others. But it shamefully omits those writers' names, in whose books it does not see the obvious: "Chekhov lifted the failed Russian democracy on his shoulders. The path of Chekhov is the path of Russian freedom. We took a different path ... Chekhov introduced into our consciousness the whole bulk of Russia, everything her classes, estates, ages ... He introduced these millions as a democrat. He said: we are all people first of all, and then the arch-henchmen, Russians, shopkeepers, Tatars, workers. People are equal, because they are people. Half a century ago, Blinded by the narrowness of the party, people believed that Chekhov was the spokesman for timelessness, while Chekhov was the standard-bearer of the greatest banner that was raised in Russia in 1000 years of its history - true, Russian, good democracy, Russian human dignity, Russian freedom.

Chekhov said: let's start with a man, let us be kind, attentive to a man, whoever he may be - the arch-righteous, the peasant, the millionaire manufacturer, the Sakhalin convict, the lackey from the restaurant; Let's start with the fact that we will respect, regret, love a person, without this nothing will work for us ... the state does not understand the essence of Chekhov, therefore it tolerates him. "

Today, when the question of the development of democracy has become so acute, Grossman's lines sound especially modern.

Mentioning in the context of the names of famous writers and poets reveals the intelligence of the characters, characterizes their worldview. For example, Zhenya Shaposhnikova, listening to an old admirer of Fet and Vladimir Solovyov, compared him with Krymov: “She was amazed that he, indifferent to the charm of a Russian fairy tale, Fet's and Tyutchev's verse, was the same Russian person as the old man Shargo-rodsky. Fet was above all a Russian god. And just as divine for him were the tales about Finist Yasny Sokol, Glinka's "Doubt." And Krymov did not distinguish between Dobrolyubov and Lassalle, Chernyshevsky and Engels. For him, Marx was higher than all Russian geniuses, for him Beethoven's "Heroic" symphony triumphed over Russian music. Perhaps Nekrasov was an exception for him. "

Soviet writers with their works provoke discussions on political topics among the characters of the novel. Krymov listens to how academics speak of Gorky's novel Mother: "And I am not a fan of this work. Georgy Valentinovich said:" The image of the mother created by Gorky is an icon, and the working class does not need icons. "Generations read Mother. "said Krymov," what does the icon have to do with it? Dreling, in the voice of a kindergarten teacher, said: "Icons are needed by all those who want to enslave the working class. Here in your communist icon case there is an icon of Lenin, there is an icon of the Monk Stalin. Nekrasov didn't need icons. "

Bogoleev, angry, said: "In your ideas about poetry, you did not go further than Nekrasov. Since then, Blok, and Mandelstam, and Khlebnikov arose. You are here in our cell, Marxists of different persuasions, but similar in that you are blind to poetry .. . ".

During the years of Stalin's personality cult, art set itself the deification of the "father of all peoples" as its main task. One of Grossman's favorite characters expresses his attitude to this fact in his own way: “Shtrum was outraged that Stalin's name eclipsed Lenin, his military genius was opposed to the civilian mentality of Lenin's mind. In one of Alexei Tolstoy's plays, Lenin obligingly lit a match so that Stalin could light his One artist painted how Stalin walks up the steps of Smolny, and Lenin hastily, like a cock, keeping up with him.If the picture depicted Lenin and Stalin among the people, then only old men, grandmothers and children looked at Lenin affectionately, and armed giants were reaching out to Stalin - workers, sailors, entangled in machine-gun belts ... ".

Art did not serve the people, but the state. The intelligentsia noticed all this, but was overwhelmingly silent. It is no coincidence that Strum ironically defines the role of the intelligentsia: "So I read Hemingway, his intellectuals drink continuously during conversations. Cocktails, whiskey, rum, cognac, again cocktails, again cognac, again whiskey of all systems. And the Russian intelligentsia conducted its main conversation. with a glass of tea ... ".

One of the problems of the novel "The Role of Poetry in Revealing the Ideological Content of Life and Fate" deserves a separate discussion.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

"Life and Fate" is a book about the greatness and tragedy of the people. About the greatness of people who defeated any enemy. About the tragedy they are experiencing in the era of cruel arbitrariness.

The main advantage of Grossman's novel is the merciless truth not only about the heroic defenders of Stalingrad, but also about the wide world of people in whose lives the battle on the Volga banks played a decisive role.

In the trenches of Stalingrad, people continued to live and therefore there is a feeling of strength that lives in a person who did not break under a barrage of fire. The people that V. Grossman talks about do not obey fate; life wins in the fight with it.

LITERATURE

1. Anninsky L. The World of V. Grossman. // Friendship of Peoples. - 1988. - N 10, p. 253.
2. Malchina OI Life and destiny. To the study of V. Grossman's novel. // Russian language and literature in secondary educational institutions of the Ukrainian SSR. - 1990. - N 4, p. 37.
3. Rishina I., Egorov A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom ... // Literaturnaya gazeta. - 1988 - 24. VIII, p. five.
4. Ananiev A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988. - 24. VIII, p. five.
5. Grossman V. Life and destiny. M., 1988.
6. Gurnov B. Just cause of V. Grossman. Feat. - 1990. - N 1, p. 357.
7. Anninsky L. The universe of Grossman // Friendship of peoples. - 1988. - N 10, p. 255.
8. Elyashevich A. Invitation to conversation. // Star. - 1989. N 1, p. 169.
9. Rudakova IA Sons and stepsons of time. // Russian language and literature in secondary educational institutions of the Ukrainian SSR. - 1990. - N 4, p. 37.
10. Bocharov A. Painful zones. // October. - 1988, N 3, p. 156.
11. Bocharov A. The fate of the people. // October. - 1988, N 3, s 156.
12. Editorial. // Military History Journal, - 1988, VI.
13. Korchagan M. "Spitaifer" - take off! // Ogonek, 1990, N 46, p. 25.
14. Bocharov. Freedom against the press. // October. - 1988, N 1, p. 131.

LITERATURE TO HELP THE TEACHER

1. Kulish A., Oskotsky V. Epos of the people's war. // Questions of literature. 1988, No. 10, p. 27-87.
2. Kuzicheva A. Evening light of "Life and Fate". // Book Review. - 1989. - 13/1, N 2, p. five.
3. Zolotussky I. War and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988 - b / VI, N 23, p. 4.
4. Karpov A. The present day and the past day, // Political education. - 1989. - N 1, p. 96-102.
5. Cardin V. Life is freedom. // Ogonek - 1988, N 23, p. 21-24.
6. Kazintsev A. History - uniting or separating. // Our contemporary, 1988, N 11, - p. 163-184.
7. Rishina I., Egorov A. Only he is worthy of life and freedom. // Lit. newspaper. - 1988 - 24 / VIII, N 34, p. five.
8. Shklovsky E.V. Into the depth of the core. // Lit. review. - 1989 - N 2, p. 20-37.

Scanning and recognition Studio KF, when using a link to the site is required!

The novel was first published in 1988.

1 epic novel

2.Political novel

3.Philosophical

4.Social

5.Intelligent

Ideological center: Battle of Stalingrad.

Grossman begins the novel by describing the Hitlerite camp. The camp brings together people of different nationalities, ages and political convictions. This emphasizes the universal nature of what is happening. The conflict between good and evil. A common misfortune does not unite people, misunderstandings still arise between them.

All honest and decent people face one fate - death. Main idea: the question of the relationship between lofty goals and cruel means.

Grossman believes that cruel means do not pay off, even if they are done for lofty goals.

The heroes of the novel have different attitudes towards the problem of life and fate, freedom and violence. Therefore, they have different attitudes towards responsibility for their actions. 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 effect on a person's personality is destructive. The main epic idea of \u200b\u200bthe novel: life is a synonym for the word freedom; death is violence.

The conflict between the individual and the state. Various forms of violence:

1. War is the worst.

2. Fascism (National Socialism) - superviolence.

3. The politics of state nationalism.

It is no coincidence that the author chose such a historical period in the life of our country as the Great Patriotic War to reveal this topic. The writer believed that the war with all its acuteness exposed the problems of our time, exposed the main contradictions of the era, the writer sees in war not only a clash of armies, but a clash of different views on life, on the fate of a person and a people.

The main problems raised by Grossman in the novel are life and fate, freedom and violence, the laws of war and the life of the people.

The conflict between man and the state is conveyed in the reflections of the heroes about collectivization, about the fate of the “special settlers”, it is felt in the picture of the Kolyma camp.

The victorious Battle of Stalingrad in the novel is both a heroic deed and a misfortune for the people, who, while liberating the country, freeing the world from fascism, simultaneously win the glory of Stalin. “The Stalingrad triumph determined the outcome of the war, but the tacit dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continued. The fate of a person and his freedom depended on this dispute ”.

The title of the book is symbolic. Life determines fate. For example, Sturmbannfuehrer Kaltluft, the killer executioner who killed five hundred and ninety thousand people, is trying to justify himself with an order from above, the power of the Fuhrer, fate (“fate pushed ... on 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."

A huge number of problems.

1. The Jewish question: about the position of this people in the camps, in our country, in the world.

2. The problem of choice. Everyone chooses for himself: good or evil. Rebecca's behavior is that of a slave. Fear makes people lose their human form.

3. The theme of violence and fear flows into the theme of submission. The humility with which people go to be shot is striking. The very structure of a totalitarian state is such that it forms obedience. The closer a person is to death, the less the influence of the state.

17) Compositional features, figurative system of Grossman's novel "Life and Fate".
The book is divided into three parts, divided into small chapters. There are no epigraphs, except for one in front of the work itself, but it seems to me that this is the initiative of the publisher, so I will not give it here.

There are few large-scale battle scenes in the work. The emphasis is on the experiences of people, on their relationships with each other. People in the book are shown as they are in life, and not worked according to the scheme of "negative" and "positive". The author seeks to prove that ordinary people perform immortal deeds. Grossman does not show the party as the organizer of victory at all - neither in the rear, nor in the army.

The main circle of philosophical problems of V. Grossman's epic "Life and Fate" is life and destiny, freedom and violence, the laws of war and the life of the people. The writer sees in war not a clash of armies, but a clash of worlds, a clash of different views on life, on the fate of an individual and a people. The war revealed the fundamental problems of our time, revealed the main contradictions of the era.

The novel has two main themes - life and destiny.

“Life” is freedom, uniqueness, individuality; “Fate” - necessity, pressure from the state, lack of freedom. Commissioner Krymov says: “How strange it is to walk along a straight, arrow-shot corridor. And life is such a muddled path, ravines, swamps, streams, steppe dust, uncompressed bread, you wade through, go around, but fate is straight, you walk like a string, corridors, corridors, corridors, doors in the corridors ”.

The fate of the main characters is tragic or dramatic. Grossman sees heroism as a manifestation of freedom. Captain Grekov, the defender of Stalingrad, the commander of the reckless garrison "at home six, fraction one", expresses not only the consciousness of the "just cause of the fight against fascism", the attitude to war as a hard work, dedication and common sense, but also rebelliousness of nature, audacity, independence of actions and thoughts. "Everything about him — his gaze, his quick movements, and the wide nostrils of his flattened nose — was daring, daring." Grekov is the spokesman for not only the national, national, but also the universal, freedom-loving spirit (not without reason his surname is Grekov).

The main conflict of the novel is the conflict between the people and the state, freedom and violence. “The Stalingrad triumph determined the outcome of the war, but the tacit dispute between the victorious people and the victorious state continued. The fate of a person, his freedom depended on this dispute. ” This conflict breaks out in the reflections of the heroes about collectivization, the fate of the "special settlers", in the pictures of the Kolyma camp, in the thoughts of the author and the heroes about the thirty-seventh year and its consequences.

The Kolyma camp and the course of the war are linked. Grossman is convinced that "part of the truth is not the truth." The arrested Krymov catches himself thinking that he hates the special person who tortures him more than the German, because he recognizes himself in him.

Grossman depicts the suffering of the people: it is also an image of camps, arrests and repression, and their corrupting influence on the souls of people and the morality of the people. Brave people turn into cowards, good people turn into cruel, persistent people turn into fainthearted. People are destroyed by double consciousness, disbelief in each other. The reasons for these phenomena are Stalinist autocracy and general fear. Since the time of the revolution, the consciousness and behavior of people have been governed by ideological schemes that have taught us to believe that the goal is higher than morality, the matter is higher than the person, the idea is higher than life. How dangerous such a permutation of values \u200b\u200bis, can be seen from the episodes when Novikov delayed the offensive for eight minutes, that is, risking his head, he goes to non-fulfillment of Stalin's order in order to save people. And for Getmanov "the need to sacrifice people for the sake of the cause always seemed natural, undeniable, not only during the war."

The attitude to fate, to necessity, to the question of the guilt and responsibility of the individual in the face of the circumstances of life is different for the heroes of the novel.

Sturmbannführer Kaltluft, the killer executioner who killed five hundred and ninety thousand people, tries to justify this by an order from above, his bondage, the power of the Fuhrer, fate: “fate pushed him on the path of the executioner”. But the author asserts: "Fate leads a person, but a person goes because he wants, and he is free not to want."

The meaning of the parallels Stalin - Hitler, the fascist camp - the Kolyma camp is to sharpen the problem of the guilt and responsibility of the individual in the broadest, philosophical sense. When evil is happening in society, everyone is to some extent guilty of it. Having gone through the tragic trials of the 20th century - the Second World War, Hitlerism and Stalinism - humanity begins to realize the fact that humility, human dependence on circumstances, slavery turned out to be strong. And at the same time, in the images of the heroes of the Patriotic War, Grossman sees love of freedom and conscience. What will exceed in man and humanity? The end of the novel is open.

The old communist Mikhail Mostovskaya, taken prisoner on the outskirts of Stalingrad, is brought to a concentration camp in West Germany. He falls asleep to the prayer of the Italian priest Gardi, argues with the Tolstoyan Ikonnikov, sees the Menshevik Chernetsov's hatred of himself and the strong will of the "ruler of thoughts" Major Ershov.
Political worker Krymov was sent to Stalingrad, to Chuikov's army. He must sort out a controversial case between the commander and commissar of a rifle regiment. Arriving at the regiment, Krymov learns that both the commander and the commissar died under the bombing. Soon Krymov himself takes part in the night battle.
Moscow physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum and his family are in evacuation in Kazan. Shtruma's mother-in-law, Alexandra Vladimirovna, has retained her spiritual youth even in the grief of war: she is interested in the history of Kazan, streets and museums, and the everyday life of people. Shtrum's wife Lyudmila considers this interest of her mother to be senile egoism. Lyudmila has no news from the front from Tolya, a son from her first marriage. She is saddened by the categorical, lonely and difficult character of her high school daughter Nadia. Lyudmila's sister Zhenya Shaposhnikova ended up in Kuibyshev. Nephew Seryozha Shaposhnikov is at the front. Shtrum's mother Anna Semyonovna remained in the German-occupied Ukrainian town, and Shtrum realizes that she, a Jewess, has little chance of surviving. His mood is heavy, he accuses his wife that, because of her harsh character, Anna Semyonovna could not live with them in Moscow. The only person who softens the difficult atmosphere in the family is Lyudmila's friend, shy, kind and sensitive Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, the wife of Shtrum's colleague and friend.
Strum receives a farewell letter from his mother. Anna Semyonovna tells what humiliations she had to endure in the city where she lived for twenty years, working as an ophthalmologist. The people she had known for a long time startled her. The neighbor calmly demanded to vacate the room and threw out her things. The old teacher stopped greeting her. But a former patient, whom she considered a gloomy and gloomy person, helps her by bringing food to the ghetto fence. Through him, she handed a farewell letter to her son on the eve of the destruction action.
Lyudmila receives a letter from the Saratov hospital, where her seriously wounded son lies. She urgently leaves there, but when she arrives, she learns about Tolya's death. "All people are guilty before the mother, who lost her son in the war, and have tried in vain to justify themselves to her throughout the history of mankind."
The secretary of the regional committee of one of the regions of Ukraine occupied by the Germans, Getmanov, was appointed commissar of the tank corps. Getmanov worked all his life in an atmosphere of denunciations, flattery and falsehood, and now he is transferring these principles of life to the frontline situation. The corps commander, General Novikov, is a straightforward and honest man, trying to prevent senseless human casualties. Getmanov expresses his admiration to Novikov and at the same time writes a denunciation that the corps commander delayed the attack for eight minutes in order to save people.
Novikov loves Zhenya Shaposhnikova, comes to her in Kuibyshev. Before the war, Zhenya left her husband, political worker Krymov. She is alien to the views of Krymov, who approved of dispossession, knowing about the terrible famine in the villages, justified the arrests of 1937. She reciprocates Novikov, but warns him that if Krymov is arrested, he will return to his ex-husband.
Military surgeon Sophia Osipovna Levinton, arrested on the outskirts of Stalingrad, ends up in a German concentration camp. Jews are being taken somewhere in freight cars, and Sofya Osipovna is surprised to see how in just a few days many people go from a man to a "dirty and unhappy cattle deprived of name and freedom." Rebekah Buchman, trying to hide from the raid, strangled her crying daughter.
On the way, Sofya Osipovna meets six-year-old David, who just before the war came from Moscow on vacation to his grandmother. Sofya Osipovna becomes the only support for a vulnerable, impressionable child. She has a motherly feeling for him. Until the last minute, Sofya Osipovna calms the boy, reassures him. They die together in the gas chamber.
Krymov receives an order to go to Stalingrad, to the surrounded house "six fractions one", where the people of Grekov's "house manager" are holding the defense. Reports reached the front political department that Grekov refuses to write reports, is conducting anti-Stalinist conversations with the soldiers and, under German bullets, is showing independence from his superiors. Krymov must establish Bolshevik order in the surrounded house and, if necessary, remove Grekov from command.
Shortly before the appearance of Krymov, the "house manager" Grekov sent the soldier Serezha Shaposhnikov and the young radio operator Katya Vengrova from the surrounded house, knowing about their love and wanting to save them from death. Saying goodbye to Grekov, Seryozha "saw that beautiful, human, intelligent and sad eyes were looking at him, which he had never seen in his life."
But the Bolshevik Commissar Krymov is only interested in collecting dirt on the "uncontrollable" Grekov. Krymov revels in the consciousness of his significance, tries to catch Grekov in anti-Soviet sentiments. Even the mortal danger to which the defenders of the house are exposed every minute does not cool his ardor. Krymov decides to remove Grekov and take command himself. But at night a stray bullet wounds him. Krymov guesses that Grekov was shooting. Returning to the political department, he writes a denunciation of Grekov, but soon learns that he was late: all the defenders of the house "six fractions one" were killed. Because of the Crimean denunciation, Grekov is not awarded the posthumous title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
An underground organization is being created in the German concentration camp where Mostovskaya is sitting. But there is no unity among the prisoners: the brigade commissar Osipov does not trust the non-partisan Major Ershov, who comes from a dispossessed family. He is afraid that the brave, direct and decent Ershov will gain too much influence. Comrade Kotikov, abandoned from Moscow to the camp, gives instructions - to act by Stalinist methods. The communists decide to get rid of Ershov and put his card in the group selected for Buchenwald. Despite the emotional closeness with Ershov, the old communist Mostovskaya obeys this decision. An unknown provocateur betrays the underground organization, and the Gestapo destroys its members.
The institute where Shtrum works is returning from evacuation to Moscow. Strum is writing a work on nuclear physics that is of general interest. The famous academician says at the Academic Council that no work of such importance has yet been born within the walls of the Physics Institute. The work was nominated for the Stalin Prize, Shtrum is on the wave of success, it pleases and worries him. But at the same time, Strum notices that Jews are gradually surviving from his laboratory. When he tries to stand up for his employees, he is given to understand that his own position is not very reliable in connection with the "fifth point" and numerous relatives abroad.
Sometimes Shtrum meets with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova and soon realizes that he loves her and is loved by her. But Marya Ivanovna cannot hide her love from her husband, and he takes her word not to see Shtrum. It was at this time that the persecution of Strum began.
A few days before the Stalingrad offensive, Krymov was arrested and sent to Moscow. Once in a prison cell on the Lubyanka, he cannot recover from surprise: interrogations and torture are intended to prove his treason to the Motherland during the Battle of Stalingrad.
The tank corps of General Novikov is distinguished in the Battle of Stalingrad.
In the days of the Stalingrad offensive, the persecution of Strum intensifies. A devastating article appeared in the institute newspaper, he was persuaded to write a letter of repentance, to come out with a confession of his mistakes at the academic council. Strum collects all his will and refuses to repent, does not even come to the meeting of the academic council. The family supports him and, while awaiting arrest, is ready to share his fate. On this day, as always in the difficult moments of his life, Marya Ivanovna calls Shtrum and says that she is proud of him and longs for him. Shtrum is not arrested, only fired from his job. He finds himself isolated, friends stop seeing him.
But in an instant, the situation changes. Theoretical work in nuclear physics attracted Stalin's attention. He calls Strum and asks if the outstanding scientist is lacking in anything. Shtrum is immediately restored at the institute, all conditions are created for him to work. Now he himself determines the composition of his laboratory, without regard to the nationality of the employees. But when Shtrumu begins to think that he has left the black streak of his life, he again faces a choice. He is required to sign an appeal to British scientists who spoke out in defense of the repressed Soviet colleagues. Leading Soviet scientists, to whom Shtrum is now ranked, must, by the strength of their scientific authority, confirm that there is no repression in the USSR. Shtrum does not find the strength to refuse and signs the appeal. The most terrible punishment for him is a call from Marya Ivanovna: she is sure that Shtrum did not sign the letter, and admires his courage ...
Zhenya Shaposhnikova arrives in Moscow after learning about Krymov's arrest. She stands in all the lines in which the wives of the repressed are standing, and a sense of duty towards her ex-husband fights in her soul with love for Novikov. Novikov learns of her decision to return to Krymov during the Battle of Stalingrad. It seems to him that he will fall dead. But we must live and continue the offensive.
After the torture, Krymov lies on the floor in the Lubyanka office and hears the conversation of his executioners about the victory at Stalingrad. It seems to him that he sees Grekov walking towards him over the broken Stalingrad brick. The interrogation continues, Krymov refuses to sign the accusation. Back in the cell, he finds a transmission from Zhenya and cries.
The Stalingrad winter is ending. In the spring silence of the forest, one can hear the cry for the dead and the fierce joy of life.

V. Grossman in the novel "Life and Fate", published in 1988 (October. 1988. № 1-4). Critics noted that V. Grossman's novel, which continues the first part of the dilogy (For a Just Cause), turned out to be close to the epic tradition of our literature, which was approved by L.N. Tolstoy in War and Peace.

In the center of V. Grossman's work is the Battle of Stalingrad, which became the culmination of the war. Heroic Home Defense Six Fraction One; The "pipe" underground, where Rodimtsev's headquarters live; trench and workshops Stalgres; Eremenko headquarters and Kalmyk steppes; the rear airfield, where pilots are trained to be sent to Stalingrad, and the corps of Colonel Novikov - these are just some of the points of the war, drawn by V. Grossman. The glow of the Battle of Stalingrad illuminated the most varied aspects of life, including the fascist concentration camp and the Jewish ghetto, the camp in Kolyma and the cell in Lubyanka. The whole unusually complex picture of people's lives and destinies is united by the author's idea of \u200b\u200bthe opposition of freedom and violence. The contradiction lies in the name of the city, which has become a symbol of the heroism of our people. Not only the tragic collision of the war, but also the dark shadow of the cult left their mark on the fate of all the main characters of the work.

Grossman's idea of \u200b\u200bfreedom is closely related to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe value and significance of the human personality, which has found itself in the center of historical events. In contrast to the idea of \u200b\u200bpeople as "cogs", the author defends the need for internal independence and freedom of spirit. In this regard, not only the eventful, but also the philosophical center of the work is the story "about the soldier's republic" - the house of six fractions one in Stalingrad, the defense of which is directed by Captain Grekov. Relations between people here are built on the principles of true partnership, here they die in a battle for the idea of \u200b\u200bfreedom. An example of true courage, independence of thought, conscience and honor were eight minutes in the life of Colonel Novikov, when, despite Stalin's anger and the pressure of the generals, he delayed the offensive, enabling artillery to suppress the resistance of the Nazis and thereby avoid unnecessary losses. Without people like Grekov and Novikov, without the labor, suffering and heroism of the people, there could be no Victory. It is the popular point of view on the war that V. Grossman asserts in his work.

Life and Fate is a discussion novel. Seemingly abstract categories of evil, freedom and violence, ends and means are revealed in the work in concrete manifestations, tested by human destinies. Many heroes of the work pass the difficult path of spiritual enlightenment. Difficult questions are posed by the writer, the heroes and the author himself answer them sharply and often controversially in their philosophical reflections. The novel makes you think, argue, develop your own point of view on the most complex problems of the XX century.

Vasily Grossman

"Life and Fate"

The old communist Mikhail Mostovskoy, taken prisoner on the outskirts of Stalingrad, is brought to a concentration camp in West Germany. He falls asleep to the prayer of the Italian priest Gardi, argues with the Tolstoyan Ikonnikov, sees the Menshevik Chernetsov's hatred of himself and the strong will of the "ruler of thoughts" Major Ershov.

Political worker Krymov was sent to Stalingrad, to Chuikov's army. He must sort out a controversial case between the commander and commissar of a rifle regiment. Arriving at the regiment, Krymov learns that both the commander and the commissar died under the bombing. Soon Krymov himself takes part in the night battle.

Moscow physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum with his family was evacuated to Kazan. Mother-in-law Shtruma Alexandra Vladimirovna, even in the grief of war, retained her spiritual youth: she is interested in the history of Kazan, streets and museums, everyday life of people. Shtrum's wife Lyudmila considers this interest of her mother to be senile egoism. Lyudmila has no news from the front from Tolya, a son from her first marriage. Her categorical sad, lonely and heavy nature of the daughter of a high school-Nadi. Lyudmila's sister Zhenya Shaposhnikova ended up in Kuibyshev. Nephew Seryozha Shaposhnikov - at the front. Shtrum's mother Anna Semyonovna remained in the German-occupied Ukrainian town, and Shtrum realizes that she, a Jewess, has little chance of surviving. His mood is heavy, he accuses his wife of the fact that, due to her harsh nature, Anna Semyonovna could not live with them in Moscow. The only person who softens the difficult atmosphere in the family is Lyudmila's friend, shy, kind and sensitive Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, the wife of Shtrum's colleague and friend.

Strum receives a farewell letter from his mother. Anna Semyonovna tells what humiliations she had to endure in the city where she lived for twenty years, working as an ophthalmologist. The people she had known for a long time startled her. The neighbor calmly demanded to vacate the room and threw out her things. The old teacher stopped greeting her. But a former patient, whom she considered a gloomy and gloomy person, helps her by bringing food to the ghetto fence. Through him, she handed a farewell letter to her son on the eve of the destruction action.

Lyudmila receives a letter from the Saratov hospital, where her seriously wounded son lies. She urgently leaves there, but when she arrives, she learns about Tolya's death. "All people are guilty before the mother, who lost her son in the war, and have tried in vain to justify themselves to her throughout the history of mankind."

The secretary of the regional committee of one of the regions of Ukraine occupied by the Germans, Getmanov, was appointed commissar of the tank corps. Getmanov worked all his life in an atmosphere of denunciations, flattery and falsehood, and now he is transferring these principles of life to the frontline situation. The corps commander, General Novikov, is a straightforward and honest man, trying to prevent senseless human casualties. Getmanov expresses his admiration to Novikov and at the same time writes a denunciation that the corps commander delayed the attack for eight minutes in order to save people.

Novikov loves Zhenya Shaposhnikova, comes to her in Kuibyshev. Before the war, Zhenya left her husband, political worker Krymov. She is alien to the views of Krymov, who approved of dispossession, knowing about the terrible famine in the villages, justified the arrests of 1937. She reciprocates Novikov, but warns him that if Krymov is arrested, he will return to her ex-husband.

Military surgeon Sophia Osipovna Levinton, arrested on the outskirts of Stalingrad, ends up in a German concentration camp. Jews are being taken somewhere in freight cars, and Sofya Osipovna is surprised to see how, in just a few days, many people go from a man to a "dirty and unhappy cattle without name and freedom." Rebekah Buchman, trying to hide from the raid, strangled her crying daughter.

On the way, Sofya Osipovna meets six-year-old David, who just before the war came from Moscow on vacation to his grandmother. Sofya Osipovna becomes the only support for a vulnerable, impressionable child. She has a motherly feeling for him. Until the last minute Sofia Osipovna calms the boy, encouraging him. They die together in the gas chamber.

Krymov receives an order to go to Stalingrad, to the surrounded house "six fractions one", where the people of Grekov's "house manager" are holding the defense. Reports reached the front political department that Grekov refuses to write reports, is conducting anti-Stalinist conversations with the soldiers and, under German bullets, is showing independence from his superiors. Krymov must establish Bolshevik order in the surrounded house and, if necessary, remove Grekov from command.

Shortly before the appearance of Krymov, the "house manager" Grekov sent a soldier Serezha Shaposhnikov and a young radio operator Katya Vengrova from the surrounded house, knowing about their love and wanting to save them from death. Saying goodbye to Grekov, Seryozha "saw that beautiful, human, intelligent and sad eyes were looking at him, which he had never seen in his life."

But the Bolshevik Commissar Krymov is only interested in collecting dirt on the "uncontrollable" Grekov. Krymov revels in the consciousness of his significance, tries to catch Grekov in anti-Soviet sentiments. Even the mortal danger to which the defenders of the house are exposed every minute does not cool his ardor. Krymov decides to remove Grekov and take command himself. But at night a stray bullet wounds him. Krymov guesses that Grekov was shooting. Returning to the political department, he writes a denunciation of Grekov, but soon learns that he was late: all the defenders of the house "six fractions one" were killed. Because of the Crimean denunciation, Grekov is not awarded the posthumous title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

In the German concentration camp where Mostovskaya is sitting, an underground organization is being created. But there is no unity among the prisoners: the brigade commissar Osipov does not trust the non-partisan Major Ershov, who comes from a family of dispossessed people. He is afraid that the brave, direct and decent Ershov will gain too much influence. Comrade Kotikov, abandoned from Moscow to the camp, gives instructions - to act by Stalinist methods. The communists decide to get rid of Ershov and put his card in the group selected for Buchenwald. Despite the emotional closeness with Ershov, the old communist Mostovskaya obeys this decision. An unknown provocateur betrays an underground organization, and the Gestapo destroys its members.

The institute where Shtrum works is returning from evacuation to Moscow. Strum is writing a work on nuclear physics that is of general interest. Known academician said at the Academic Council that the walls of the institute of physical work is not born of such values. The work was nominated for the Stalin Prize, Shtrum is on the wave of success, it pleases and worries him. But at the same time, Strum notices that Jews are gradually surviving from his laboratory. When he tries to stand up for his employees, he is given to understand that his own position is not too secure in connection with the "fifth point" and numerous relatives abroad.

Sometimes Shtrum meets with Marya Ivanovna Sokolova and soon realizes that he loves her and is loved by her. But Marya could not hide his love from her husband, and he takes off her word not to see with Shtrum. It was at this time that the persecution of Strum began.

A few days before the Stalingrad offensive, Krymov was arrested and sent to Moscow. Once in a prison cell on the Lubyanka, he cannot recover from surprise: interrogations and torture are intended to prove his treason to the Motherland during the Battle of Stalingrad.

The tank corps of General Novikov is distinguished in the Battle of Stalingrad.

In the days of the Stalingrad offensive, the persecution of Strum intensifies. A devastating article appears in the institute newspaper, he is persuaded to write a letter of repentance, to come out with a confession of his mistakes at the Academic Council. Shtrum collects all his will and refuses to repent, does not even come to the meeting of the scientific council. The family supports him and, while awaiting arrest, is ready to share his fate. On this day, as always in the difficult moments of his life, Marya Ivanovna calls Shtrum and says that she is proud of him and longs for him. Shtrum is not arrested, only fired from his job. He finds himself isolated, friends stop seeing him.

But in an instant, the situation changes. Theoretical work in nuclear physics attracted Stalin's attention. He calls Strum and asks if the outstanding scientist is lacking in anything. Shtrum is immediately restored at the institute, all conditions are created for him to work. Now he himself determines the composition of his laboratory, without regard to the nationality of the employees. But when Shtrumu begins to think that he has left the black strip of his life, he again faces a choice. He is required to sign an appeal to the British scientist, who spoke in defense of the repressed Soviet colleagues. Leading Soviet scientists, to whom Shtrum is now ranked, must confirm by the strength of their scientific authority that there is no repression in the USSR. Shtrum does not find the strength to refuse and signs the appeal. The most terrible punishment for him is a call from Marya Ivanovna: she is sure that Shtrum did not sign the letter, and admires his courage ...

Zhenya Shaposhnikova arrives in Moscow after learning about Krymov's arrest. She stands in all the lines in which the wives of the repressed are standing, and a sense of duty towards her ex-husband fights in her soul with love for Novikov. Novikov learns of her decision to return to Krymov during the Battle of Stalingrad. It seems to him that he will fall dead. But we must live and continue the offensive.

After the torture, Krymov lies on the floor in the Lubyanka office and hears the conversation of his executioners about the victory at Stalingrad. It seems to him that he sees Grekov walking towards him over the broken Stalingrad brick. The interrogation continues, Krymov refuses to sign the accusation. Back in the cell, he finds a transmission from Zhenya and cries.

The Stalingrad winter is ending. In the spring silence of the forest, one can hear the cry for the dead and the fierce joy of life.

The novel describes the fate of the heroes, connected only by the time of concentration camps, bloody battles at Stalingrad and repressions.

Mostovskaya - an ardent communist, was captured at Stalingrad and was taken to a concentration camp. An underground organization is being created there and the Communists, wishing the death of the non-party Ershov, throw his card for those selected for Buchenwald. Soon the organization is exposed and everyone is destroyed.

The family of Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, a talented physicist, is being evacuated to Kazan. His wife is constantly worried about her son Anatolia, who is now at the front. She grieves about her daughter, who, having a difficult character, prefers loneliness and is far from her mother. And Strum himself blames his wife for the fact that she could not make friends with his mother, and she had to stay in Ukraine, instead of living next to her son in Moscow. And now his Jewish mother has practically no chance of surviving in the German-occupied country. Soon Viktor Pavlovich received a letter from his mother, who is now in the ghetto. In it, she says goodbye and talks about all the humiliations she went through. As a respected eye doctor, she was thrown out into the street by her neighbor only because a Jew and now only one of her former patients brings her food to the ghetto fence. Strum's wife, Lyudmila, received a letter from the hospital where her son is, but did not have time to see him - he died.

Soon Strum returns to Moscow to evacuate them. His work in nuclear physics has been spotted and is claiming a Stalinist Prize, but he is a Jew and risks being arrested. He was expelled from the institute. But Stalin personally calls him, interested in his work. Shtrum is restored at the institute. Shtrum by signing a letter of English colleagues, confirms that the Union is not, and never was repression.

The secretary Getmanov transferred to the Armored Corps Commissioner. He used to live his whole life in an atmosphere of lies and denunciations. He transferred this to the war. In the eyes he praises and admires his corps commander Novikov, who prevented the death of people and immediately wrote a denunciation on him that he delayed the attack for 8 hours in order to save people.

Levinton Sophia Osipovna was taken from Stalingrad, and is now being transported in freight trains to a concentration camp. She watches the other arrested, and is amazed at the human baseness. Her neighbor Rebecca Buchman, strangled weeping daughter, trying to be unnoticed raid. And all the way he takes care of 6-year-old David, who ended up in Stalingrad, because he came to his grandmother from Moscow on vacation. All the way to the concentration camp, she took care of it, surrounded by warmth and care as a mother. They died together in the gas chamber.