Approximate plot plan. II

Essay on the topic “The Image of Grigory Melekhov” briefly: characteristics, life story and description of the hero in search of the truth

In Sholokhov's epic novel " Quiet Don» Grigory Melekhov occupies a central place. He is the most complex Sholokhov hero. This is a truth seeker. He suffered such cruel trials that a person, it would seem, is not able to endure. Life path Grigory Melekhov is difficult and tortuous: first there was the First World War, then the civil war, and, finally, the attempt to destroy the Cossacks, the uprising and its suppression.

The tragedy of Grigory Melekhov is the tragedy of a man who broke away from the people and became a renegade. His detachment becomes tragic, because he is a confused person. He went against himself, against millions of workers just like himself.

From his grandfather Prokofy Gregory, he inherited a hot-tempered and independent character, as well as the ability for tender love. The blood of the “Turkish” grandmother manifested itself in his appearance, in love, on the battlefield and in the ranks. And from his father he inherited a tough disposition, and it was because of this that integrity and rebellion haunted Gregory from his youth. He fell in love married woman Aksinya (this is a turning point in his life) and soon decides to leave with her, despite all the prohibitions of his father and the condemnation of society. The origins of Melekhov's tragedy lie in his rebellious character. This is the predetermination of a tragic fate.

Gregory - kind, brave and courageous hero who always tries to fight for truth and justice. But war comes, and it destroys all his ideas about the truth and justice of life. The war appears to the writer and his characters as a series of losses and terrible deaths: it cripples people from the inside and destroys everything dear and dear to them. It forces all the heroes to take a fresh look at the problems of duty and justice, to look for the truth and not find it in any of their warring camps. Once among the Reds, Gregory sees the same cruelty and thirst for blood as the Whites. He can't understand why all this? After all, war destroys the smooth life of families, peaceful work, it takes away the last things from people and kills love. Grigory and Pyotr Melekhov, Stepan Astakhov, Koshevoy and other heroes of Sholokhov are unable to understand why this fratricidal massacre is happening? For whose sake and what should people die when they still have a long life ahead of them?

The fate of Grigory Melekhov is a life incinerated by war. The characters' personal relationships unfold against the backdrop of the country's tragic history. Gregory will never again be able to forget how he killed his first enemy, an Austrian soldier. He cut him down with a saber, it was terrible for him. The moment of murder changed him beyond recognition. The hero has lost his point of support, his kind and fair soul protests, cannot survive such violence against common sense. But the war is on, Melekhov understands that he needs to continue killing. Soon his decision changes: he realizes that the war is killing the best people of his time, that the truth cannot be found among thousands of deaths, Grigory throws down his weapon and returns to his native farm to work for native land and raise children. At almost 30 years old, the hero is almost an old man. The path of Melekhov’s search turned out to be an impassable thicket. Sholokhov in his work raises the question of the responsibility of history to the individual. The author sympathizes with his hero Grigory Melekhov, whose life is already broken in such young years.

As a result of his search, Melekhov is left alone: ​​Aksinya is killed by his recklessness, he is hopelessly distant from his children, if only because he will bring disaster on them with his closeness. Trying to remain true to himself, he betrays everyone: the warring parties, women, and ideas. This means that he was initially looking in the wrong place. Thinking only about himself, about his “truth,” he did not love and did not serve. At the hour when weighty man's word, Gregory could only provide doubts and soul-searching. But the war did not need philosophers, and women did not need a love of wisdom. Thus, Melekhov is the result of a transformation like “ extra person"in conditions of the most severe historical conflict.

At the very beginning of the novel, it becomes clear that Grigory loves Aksinya Astakhova, the married neighbor of the Melekhovs. The hero rebels against his family, who condemn him, a married man, for his relationship with Aksinya. He does not obey his father’s will and leaves his native farm together with Aksinya, not wanting to live a double life with his disliked wife Natalya, who then attempts suicide - she cuts her neck with a scythe. Grigory and Aksinya become hired workers for the landowner Listnitsky.

In 1914 - Gregory’s first battle and the first person he killed. Gregory is having a hard time. In war, he receives not only the St. George Cross, but also experience. The events of this period make him think about the life structure of the world.

It would seem that revolutions are made for people like Grigory Melekhov. He joined the Red Army, but he had no greater disappointment in his life than the reality of the red camp, where violence, cruelty and lawlessness reign.

Gregory leaves the Red Army and becomes a participant in the Cossack rebellion as a Cossack officer. But here too there is cruelty and injustice.

He again finds himself with the Reds - in Budyonny's cavalry - and again experiences disappointment. In his vacillations from one political camp to another, Gregory strives to find the truth that is closer to his soul and his people.

Ironically, he ends up in Fomin's gang. Gregory thinks that bandits are free people. But even here he feels like a stranger. Melekhov leaves the gang to pick up Aksinya and flee with her to Kuban. But Aksinya’s death from a random bullet in the steppe deprives Gregory of his last hope for a peaceful life. It is at this moment that he sees in front of him a black sky and a “dazzlingly shining black disk of the sun.” The writer depicts the sun - the symbol of life - as black, emphasizing the troubles of the world. Having joined the deserters, Melekhov lived with them for almost a year, but longing again drove him to his home.

At the end of the novel, Natalya and her parents die, Aksinya dies. Only a son and a younger sister remained, who married a red man. Gregory stands at the gates of his home and holds his son in his arms. The ending is left open: will his simple dream of living as his ancestors lived ever come true: “to plow the land, take care of it”?

Women's images in the novel.

Women, into whose lives war breaks into, takes away their husbands, sons, destroys their home and hopes for personal happiness, take on their shoulders an unbearable load of work in the field and at home, but do not bend, but courageously carry this load. The novel presents two main types of Russian women: the mother, the keeper of the hearth (Ilyinichna and Natalya) and the beautiful sinner frantically seeking her happiness (Aksinya and Daria). Two women - Aksinya and Natalya - accompany the main character, they selflessly love him, but are opposite in everything.

Love is a necessary need for Aksinya’s existence. Aksinya’s frenzy in love is emphasized by the description of her “shamelessly greedy, plump lips” and “vicious eyes.” The heroine's backstory is scary: at the age of 16, she was raped by her drunken father and married to Stepan Astakhov, a neighbor of the Melekhovs. Aksinya endured humiliation and beatings from her husband. She had neither children nor relatives. It is understandable that she would like “to fall out of bitter love throughout her entire life,” so she fiercely defends her love for Grishka, which has become the meaning of her existence. For her sake, Aksinya is ready for any test. Gradually, almost maternal tenderness appears in her love for Gregory: with the birth of her daughter, her image becomes purer. In separation from Grigory, she becomes attached to his son, and after Ilyinichna’s death she takes care of all Grigory’s children as if they were her own. Her life was cut short by a random steppe bullet when she was happy. She died in Gregory's arms.

Natalya is the embodiment of the idea of ​​home, family, and the natural morality of a Russian woman. She is a selfless and affectionate mother, a pure, faithful and devoted woman. She suffers a lot from her love for her husband. She does not want to put up with her husband’s betrayal, she does not want to be unloved - this forces her to commit suicide. The hardest thing for Gregory to survive is that before her death she “forgave him everything,” that she “loved him and remembered him until the last minute.” Upon learning of Natalya's death, Gregory for the first time felt a stabbing pain in his heart and a ringing in his ears. He is tormented by remorse.

Roman M.A. Sholokhov's "Quiet Don" is a novel about the Cossacks in the era civil war. The main character of the work, Grigory Melekhov, continues the tradition of Russian classical literature, in which one of the main images is a truth-seeking hero (works by Nekrasov, Leskov, Tolstoy, Gorky).
Strives to find the meaning of life, to understand the whirlwind historical events, find happiness and Grigory Melekhov. This simple Cossack was born into a simple and friendly family, where centuries-old traditions are sacred - they work hard and have fun. The basis of the hero's character - love for work, for his native land, respect for elders, justice, decency, kindness - is laid right here, in the family.
Handsome, hard-working, cheerful, Grigory immediately wins the hearts of those around him: he is not afraid of people’s gossip (he almost openly loves the beautiful Aksinya, the wife of the Cossack Stepan), and does not consider it shameful to become a farm laborer in order to maintain a relationship with the woman he loves.
And at the same time, Gregory is a person who tends to hesitate. So, despite its great love to Aksinya, Grigory does not oppose his parents, and according to their will, marries Natalya Korshunova.
Without fully realizing it, Melekhov strives to exist “in truth.” He is trying to understand, to answer for himself the question “how should one live?” The hero's search is complicated by the era in which he happened to be born - a time of revolutions and wars.
Grigory will experience strong moral hesitations when he finds himself on the fronts of the First World War. The hero went to war, thinking that he knew whose side was right: he needed to defend the fatherland and destroy the enemy. What could be simpler? Melekhov does just that. He fights valiantly, he is brave and selfless, he does not disgrace the Cossack honor. But gradually doubts come to the hero. He begins to see in his opponents the same people with their hopes, weaknesses, fears, and joys. Why all this carnage, what will it bring to people?
The hero begins to realize this especially clearly when Melekhov’s fellow countryman Chubaty kills a captured Austrian, a very young boy. The prisoner is trying to establish contact with the Russians, openly smiling at them, trying to please. The Cossacks were pleased with the decision to take him to headquarters for interrogation, but Chubati simply out of love for violence, out of hatred, kills the boy.
For Melekhov, this event becomes a real moral blow. And although he firmly cherishes the Cossack honor and deserves a reward, he understands that he is not created for war. He painfully wants to know the truth in order to find the meaning of his actions. Having fallen under the influence of the Bolshevik Garanji, the hero, like a sponge, absorbs new thoughts, new ideas. He begins to fight for the Reds. But the murder of unarmed prisoners by the Reds pushes him away from them too.
Gregory’s childishly pure soul alienates him from both the Reds and the Whites. The truth is revealed to Melekhov: the truth cannot be on either side. Red and white are politics, class struggle. And where there is a class struggle, blood always flows, people die, children remain orphans. Truth is peaceful work in our native land, family, love.
Gregory is a hesitant, doubting nature. This allows him to search for the truth, not to stop there, and not to be limited by other people’s explanations. Gregory’s position in life is a position “between”: between the traditions of his fathers and his own will, between two loving women - Aksinya and Natalya, between whites and reds. Finally, between the need to fight and the realization of the meaninglessness and uselessness of the massacre (“my hands need to plow, not fight”).
The author himself sympathizes with his hero. In the novel, Sholokhov objectively describes events, talks about the “truth” of both whites and reds. But his sympathies and experiences are on Melekhov’s side. This man happened to live at a time when all moral guidelines were displaced. It was this, as well as the desire to search for the truth, that led the hero to such a tragic ending - the loss of everything he loved: “Why did you, life, cripple me like that?”
The writer emphasizes that the civil war is a tragedy of the entire Russian people. There is no right or wrong in it, because people die, brother goes against brother, father against son.
Thus, Sholokhov in the novel “Quiet Don” made a truth-seeker a person from the people and from the people. The image of Grigory Melekhov becomes the concentration of the historical and ideological conflict of the work, an expression of the tragic searches of the entire Russian people.

(446 words)

The main character of the novel is M.A. Sholokhov is the Don Cossack Grigory Melekhov. We see how dramatically the fate of Gregory develops on one of the most controversial and bloody pages of our history.

But the novel begins long before these events. First, we are introduced to the life and customs of the Cossacks. In this time of peace, Gregory lives a calm life, not caring about anything. However, at the same time the hero’s first mental turning point occurs, when, after a stormy romance with Aksinya, Grishka realizes the importance of family and returns to his wife Natalya. A little later, the First World War begins, in which Gregory takes an active part, receiving many awards. But Melekhov himself is disappointed in the war, in which he saw only dirt, blood and death, and with this comes disappointment in the imperial power, which sends thousands of people to their deaths. Due to this main character falls under the influence of the ideas of communism, and already in the seventeenth year he takes the side of the Bolsheviks, believing that they can build a new, fair society.

However, almost immediately, when the Red commander Podtelkov carries out a bloody massacre of the captured White Guards, disappointment sets in. For Gregory this becomes a terrible blow, in his opinion, one cannot fight for a better future while committing cruelty and injustice. Melekhov’s innate sense of justice repels him from the Bolsheviks. Returning home, he wants to take care of his family and housekeeping. But life does not give him this chance. His native village supports the white movement, and Melekhov follows them. The death of his brother at the hands of the Reds only fuels the hero’s hatred. But when Podtelkov’s surrendered detachment is mercilessly exterminated, Grigory cannot accept such cold-blooded destruction of his neighbor.

Soon, the Cossacks, dissatisfied with the White Guards, including Grigory, deserted and let the Red Army soldiers pass through their positions. Tired of war and murder, the hero hopes that they will leave him alone. However, the Red Army soldiers begin to commit robbery and murder, and the hero, in order to protect his home and family, joins the separatist uprising. It was during this period that Melekhov fought most zealously and did not torment himself with doubts. He is supported by the knowledge that he is protecting his loved ones. When the Don separatists unite with the white movement, Grigory again experiences disappointment.

In the final, Melekhov finally goes over to the Red side. Hoping to earn forgiveness and a chance to return home, he fights without sparing himself. During the war he lost his brother, wife, father and mother. All he has left are his children, and he just wants to return to them so he can forget about the fight and never take up arms. Unfortunately, this is not possible. For those around him, Melekhov is a traitor. Suspicion turns into outright hostility, and soon the Soviet government begins a real hunt for Gregory. During the flight, his still beloved Aksinya dies. After wandering around the steppe, the main character, aged and gray, finally loses heart and returns to his native farm. He has resigned himself, but wishes, perhaps, last time to see his son before accepting his sad fate.

Sections: Literature

Lesson plan.

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

I

In criticism, debates about the essence of the tragedy of Grigory Melekhov still do not stop.

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

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

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

Others explained Melekhov's tragedy as a delusion.

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

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

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

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

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

C: “His feet confidently trampled the ground”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critics' opinions on the ending.

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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