Essay on the topic: “War - there is no crueler word”! The difficult truth about war (“Sotnikov”, “Sign of Trouble”) Preliminary preparation for the lesson.
War is one of the most terrible phenomena in the world. War means pain, fear, tears, hunger, cold, captivity, loss of home, loved ones, friends, and sometimes the whole family.
Let us remember the siege of Leningrad. People starved and died. All the animals in the city were eaten. And someone’s fathers, husbands, sons, brothers fought at the front.
Many men died during the war and during this dark time the number of fatherlessness and widows increased. It is especially scary when a woman, having survived the war, finds out that her son or sons have died and will never return home. This is a huge grief for the mother, and I could not bear it.
Many people returned from the war disabled. But after the war, such a return was considered lucky, because the person did not die, but many, as I already said, died! But what was it like for such people? The blind know that they will never see the sky, the sun, or the faces of their friends again. Deaf people know that they will not hear the singing of birds, the rustling of grass and the voice of a sister or loved one. Those without legs understand that they will no longer stand up and feel solid ground under their feet. Armless people understand that they will never be able to pick up a child and hug him!
And the worst thing is that all those who remain alive and escape from terrible captivity after torture will never be able to smile a truly happy smile, and most will forget how to show their feelings and will put a mask on their face.
But after the war, ordinary people realize how wonderful it is to breathe deeply, eat warm bread and raise children.
Reviews
Anastasia, just now I read you, and realized that you reflected a very relevant topic that is always, but especially in our troubled times, the misfortune and desperation of humanity. Touched me, thank you for the good message. Good luck with your creativity.
The Proza.ru portal provides authors with the opportunity to freely publish their literary works on the Internet on the basis of a user agreement. All copyrights to works belong to the authors and are protected by law. Reproduction of works is possible only with the consent of its author, which you can contact on his author’s page. Authors bear responsibility for the texts of works independently on the basis
Composition
War means grief and tears. She knocked on every house and brought trouble: mothers lost
their sons, wives - husbands, children were left without fathers. Thousands of people went through the crucible of war, experienced terrible torment, but they survived and won. We won the most difficult of all wars that humanity has endured so far. And those people who defended their Motherland in the hardest battles are still alive.
The war emerges in their memory as the most terrible, sad memory. But it also reminds them of perseverance, courage, unbroken spirit, friendship and loyalty. Many writers went through this terrible war. Many of them died or were seriously injured, many survived the fire of trials. That’s why they still write about the war, that’s why they talk again and again about what became not only their personal pain, but also the tragedy of an entire generation. They simply cannot die without warning people about the danger that comes from forgetting the lessons of the past.
My favorite writer is Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev. I like many of his works: “Battalions Ask for Fire”, “The Shore”, “Last Salvos”, and most of all “Hot Snow”, which tells about one military episode. At the center of the novel is a battery, which is given the task of not missing the enemy rushing towards Stalingrad at any cost. This battle may decide the fate of the front, and that is why General Bessonov’s order is so menacing: “Not a step back! And knock out tanks. Stand and forget about death! Don’t think about her under any circumstances.” And the fighters understand this. We also see a commander who, in an ambitious quest to seize a “moment of luck,” dooms the people subordinate to him to certain death. He forgot that the right to control the lives of others in war is a great and dangerous right.
Commanders bear great responsibility for the fate of people, the country has entrusted them with their lives, and they must do everything possible to ensure that there are no unnecessary losses, because every person is a destiny. And this was clearly shown by M. Sholokhov in his story “The Fate of Man.” Andrei Sokolov, like millions of people, went to the front. His path was difficult and tragic. The memories of the B-14 prisoner of war camp, where thousands of people were separated from the world by barbed wire, where there was a terrible struggle not just for life, for a pot of gruel, but for the right to remain human, will forever remain in his soul.
Viktor Astafiev writes about a man in war, about his courage and perseverance. He, who went through the war and became disabled during it, in his works “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”, “Modern Pastoral” and others, talks about the tragic fate of the people, about what he had to endure in the difficult years at the front.
Boris Vasiliev was a young lieutenant at the beginning of the war. His best works are about war, about how a person remains a person only after fulfilling his duty to the end. “Not on the lists” and “The Dawns Here Are Quiet” are works about people who feel and bear personal responsibility for the fate of the country. Thanks to the Vaskovs and thousands of people like him, the victory was won.
All of them fought against the “brown plague” not only for their loved ones, but also for their land, for us. And the best example of such a selfless hero is Nikolai Pluzhnikov in Vasiliev’s story “Not on the Lists.” In 1941, Pluzhnikov graduated from military school and was sent to serve in the Brest Fortress. He arrived at night, and at dawn the war began. Nobody knew him, he was not on the lists, since he did not have time to report his arrival. Despite this, he became the defender of the fortress along with soldiers whom he did not know, and they saw him as a real commander and carried out his orders. Pluzhnikov fought with the enemy until the last bullet. The only feeling that guided him in this unequal battle with the fascists was a sense of personal responsibility for the fate of the Motherland, for the fate of the entire people. Even when left alone, he did not stop fighting, fulfilling his soldier’s duty to the end. When the Nazis saw him a few months later, emaciated, exhausted, unarmed, they saluted him, appreciating the courage and stamina of the fighter. A person can do a lot, a surprising amount, if he knows in the name of what and for what he is fighting.
The theme of the tragic fate of Soviet people will never be exhausted in literature. I don't want the horrors of war to be repeated. Let children grow up peacefully, not afraid of bomb explosions, let Chechnya not happen again, so that mothers don’t have to cry for their lost sons. Human memory stores both the experience of many generations who lived before us, and the experience of everyone. “Memory resists the destructive power of time,” said D. S. Likhachev. Let this memory and experience teach us kindness, peacefulness, and humanity. And let none of us forget who and how fought for our freedom and happiness. We are in your debt, soldier! And while there are still thousands of unburied ones on the Pulkovo Heights near St. Petersburg, and on the Dnieper steeps near Kiev, and on Ladoga, and in the swamps of Belarus, we remember every soldier who did not return from the war, we remember at what cost he achieved victory. He preserved for me and millions of my compatriots the language, culture, customs, traditions and faith of my ancestors.
Loshkarev Dmitry
For 72 years the country has been illuminated by the light of the victory of the Great Patriotic War. She got it at a difficult price. For 1,418 days, our homeland fought the hardest of wars to save all humanity from fascism.
We haven't seen the war, but we know about it. We must remember at what price happiness was won.
There are few left who went through these terrible torments, but the memory of them is always alive.
Download:
Preview:
War - there is no crueler word
I still don't quite understand
How am I, thin and small,
Through the fires to the victory of May
I arrived in my kirzachs.
Many years have passed since the first day of the Great Patriotic War. There is probably not a single family that has not been affected by the war. No one will ever be able to forget this day, because the memory of the war has become a moral memory, again returning to the heroism and courage of the Russian people. War - how much this word says. War is the suffering of mothers, hundreds of dead soldiers, hundreds of orphans and families without fathers, terrible memories of people. Children who survived the war remember the atrocities of the punitive forces, fear, concentration camps, an orphanage, hunger, loneliness, life in a partisan detachment.
War does not have a woman's face, and certainly not a child's one. There is nothing more incompatible in the world than this - war and children.
The whole country is preparing to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Victory. Many books have been written about that unforgettable disaster, and a large number of films have been made. But the most vivid and truthful in my memory for the rest of my life will be the stories about the war of my great-grandmother Valentina Viktorovna Kirilicheva; unfortunately, she is no longer alive.
Her mother worked in the fields for days on horseback instead of men,growing bread for the army, without having the right to eat it herself. Every spikelet was counted.They lived poorly. There was nothing to eat. In the fall, the collective farm digs up potatoes, and in the spring, people go to dig up the field and collect rotten potatoes to eat. Back in the spring, they collected last year's ears of rye, collected acorns and quinoa. Acorns were threshing at the mill. Bread and flatbreads were made from quinoa and ground acorns. It's hard to remember this!
During the war, my great-grandmother was 16 years old. She and her friend worked as a nurse in a hospital. How many bloody bandages and sheets were washed. From morning to evening they worked tirelessly, and in their free time they helped nurses care for the sick. There was one thing in their thoughts: when will all this end, and they believed in victory, they believed in better times.
All people at that time lived by faith, faith in victory. She, who survived the war at a young age, knew the value of a piece of bread. I'm proud of her! After her story, I realized that the main dream of all people who lived on our planet is the same: “If only there was no war. World peace!". I would like to bow to all those who fought and died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War so that peaceful life could continue, so that children could sleep peacefully, so that people would rejoice, love, and be happy.
War takes the lives of millions, billions of people, changes their destinies, deprives them of hope for the future and even the meaning of life. Unfortunately, many modern people laugh at this concept, not realizing the horrors of any war.
The Great Patriotic War... What do I know about this terrible war? I know it was very long and difficult. That many people died. More than 20 million! Our soldiers were brave and very often acted like real heroes.
Those who did not fight also did everything for Victory. After all, those who fought needed weapons and ammunition, clothing, food, medicine. All this was done by the women, old people and even children who remained in the rear.
Why do we need to remember the war? Then, that the exploits of each of these people should live in our souls forever. We must know and remember, respect, appreciate, cherish the memory of those who, without hesitation, gave their lives for our lives, for our future! What a pity that not everyone understands this. They do not value the life given by veterans, they do not value the war veterans themselves.
And we must remember this war, not forget the veterans and be proud of the exploits of our ancestors.
The theme of the Great Patriotic War became for many years one of the main ones in the literature of the 20th century. There are many reasons for this. This is the everlasting awareness of the irreparable losses that the war brought, and the severity of moral conflicts that are possible only in an extreme situation (and the events of war are exactly that!). In addition, for a long time every truthful word about modernity was expelled from Soviet literature, and the theme of war sometimes remained the only island of authenticity in the stream of far-fetched, false prose, where all conflicts, according to instructions “from above,” were supposed to reflect only the struggle between the good and the best. But the truth about the war did not come through easily; something prevented it from being told to the end.
“War is a state contrary to human nature,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, and we, of course, agree with this statement, because war brings pain, fear, blood, tears. War is a test for a person.
The problem of the moral choice of a hero in war is characteristic of the entire work of V. Bykov. It is staged in almost all of his stories: “The Alpine Ballad”, “Obe-lisk”, “Sotnikov”, “Sign of Trouble”, etc. In Bykov’s story “Sotnikov” attention is emphasized to the essence of genuine and imaginary heroism, which is the plot collision of the work.
In the story, it is not representatives of two different worlds who collide, but people of the same country. The heroes of the story - Sotnikov and Rybak - in ordinary, peaceful conditions, perhaps would not have shown their true nature. But during the war, Sotnikov goes through difficult trials with honor and accepts death, without renouncing his convictions, and Rybak, in the face of death, changes his convictions, betrays his Motherland, saving his life, which after betrayal loses all value. He actually becomes an enemy. He enters a world alien to us, where personal well-being is placed above all else, where fear for one’s life forces one to kill and betray. In the face of death, a person remains as he really is. Here the depth of his convictions and his civic fortitude are tested.
Going on a mission, they react differently to the upcoming danger, and it seems that the strong and smart Rybak is more prepared for the feat than the frail, sick Sotnikov. But if Rybak, who all his life “managed to find some way out,” is internally ready for betrayal, then Sotnikov remains faithful to the duty of a man and citizen until his last breath. “Well, I had to muster the last of my strength to face death with dignity... Otherwise, why would there be life? It is too difficult for a person to be careless about its end.”
In Bykov's story, each character took his place among the victims. Everyone except Rybak made it to the end. The fisherman took the path of betrayal only in the name of saving his own life. The traitor investigator sensed Rybak’s passionate desire to live by any means and, almost without hesitation, stunned Rybak point-blank: “Let’s save life. You will serve great Germany." The fisherman had not yet agreed to join the police, but he had already been spared torture. The fisherman did not want to die and told the investigator something. Sotnikov lost consciousness during the torture, but did not say anything. The policemen in the story are depicted as stupid and cruel, the investigator - cunning and just as cruel.
Sotnikov came to terms with death; he would like to die in battle, although he understood that in his situation this was impossible. The only thing that remained for him was to decide on his attitude towards the people who happened to be nearby. Before the execution, Sotnikov demanded an investigator and declared: “I am a partisan, the rest have nothing to do with it.” The investigator ordered Rybak to be brought in, and he agreed to join the police. The fisherman tried to convince himself that he was not a traitor and was determined to escape.
In the last minutes of his life, Sotnikov unexpectedly lost his confidence in the right to demand from others the same thing that he demands from himself. The fisherman became for him not a bastard, but simply a foreman who, as a citizen and a person, did not achieve something. Sotnikov did not look for sympathy in the crowd surrounding the execution site. He did not want anyone to think badly of him, and was only angry with Rybak, who was performing the duties of the executioner. The fisherman apologizes: “Sorry, brother.” - "Go to hell!" - follows the answer.
What happened to Fisherman? He did not overcome the fate of a man lost in war. He sincerely wanted to hang himself. But circumstances got in the way, and there was still a chance to survive. But how to survive? The police chief believed that he had “picked up another traitor.” It is unlikely that the police chief understood what was going on in the soul of this man, confused, but shocked by the example of Sotnikov, who was crystal honest and fulfilled the duty of a man and citizen to the end. The boss saw Rybak's future in serving the occupiers. But the writer left him the possibility of a different path: continuing the struggle through the ravine, possible confession of his fall to his comrades, and ultimately, atonement.
The work is imbued with thoughts about life and death, about human duty and humanism, which are incompatible with any manifestation of selfishness. An in-depth psychological analysis of every action and gesture of the characters, fleeting thoughts or remarks is one of the strongest aspects of the story “Sotnikov”.
The Pope presented the writer V. Bykov with a special prize from the Catholic Church for the story “Sotnikov”. This fact speaks of what kind of universal, moral principle is seen in this work. Sotnikov’s enormous moral strength lies in the fact that he was able to accept suffering for his people, maintain faith, and not succumb to that base thought that Rybak could not resist.
1941, the year of military trials, was preceded by the terrible year of 1929, the “great turning point,” when, after the liquidation of the “kulaks as a class,” they did not notice how all the best in the peasantry was destroyed. Then 1937 came. One of the first attempts to tell the truth about the war was Vasil Bykov’s story “Sign of Trouble.” This story became a milestone in the work of the Belarusian writer. It was preceded by the now classic “Obelisk”, the same “Sot-nikov”, “Until Dawn”, etc. After “Sign of Trouble”, the writer’s work takes on a new breath and deepens into historicism. This applies primarily to such works as “In the Fog”, “Roundup”.
At the center of the story “Sign of Trouble” is a man at war. A person does not always go to war; sometimes war itself comes to his house, as happened with two Belarusian old men, peasants Stepanida and Petrak Bogatko. The farm where they live is occupied. The police come to the estate, followed by the Germans. V. Bykov does not show them as intentionally committing atrocities. They simply come to someone else’s house and settle down there like the owners, following the idea of their Fuhrer that anyone who is not an Aryan is not a person, complete destruction can be caused in his house, and the inhabitants of the house themselves can be perceived as working animals. And therefore, Stepanida’s refusal to obey unquestioningly was unexpected for them. Not allowing yourself to be humiliated is the source of this middle-aged woman’s resistance in a dramatic situation. Stepanida is a strong character. Human dignity is the main thing that drives her actions. “During her difficult life, she nevertheless learned the truth and, little by little, gained her human dignity. And the one who once felt like a human will never become a beast again,” writes V. Bykov about his heroine. At the same time, the writer does not just draw this character to us, he reflects on its origins.
It is necessary to think about the meaning of the title of the story - “Sign of Trouble.” This is a quote from a poem by A. Tvardovsky, written in 1945: “Before the war, as if as a sign of trouble...” What was happening even before the war in the village became the “sign of trouble” that V. writes about. Bykov. Stepanida Bogatko, who “for six years, without sparing herself, worked hard as a farm laborer,” believed in a new life and was one of the first to enroll in a collective farm - it was not for nothing that she was called a rural activist. But she soon realized that the truth that she was looking for and waiting for was not in this new life. When they began to demand new dispossessions in order to avert suspicions of pandering to the class enemy, it was she, Stepanida, who hurled angry words at an unfamiliar man in a black leather jacket: “Isn’t justice needed? Don’t you smart people see what’s going on?” More than once Stepanida tries to intervene in the course of the case, to intercede for Levon, who was arrested on a false denunciation, and to send Petrok to Minsk with a petition to the chairman of the Central Election Commission himself. And every time her resistance to untruth runs into a blank wall.
Unable to change the situation alone, Stepanida finds the opportunity to preserve herself, her inner sense of justice, to move away from what is happening around: “Do what you want. But without me." The source of Stepanida’s character is not that she was a collective farmer activist in the pre-war years, but that she managed not to succumb to the general rapture of deception, words about a new life, fear * she managed to listen to herself, follow her innate sense of truth and preserve the human element in oneself. And during the war years, all this determined her behavior.
At the end of the story, Stepanida dies, but she dies without resigning herself to fate and resists it to the last. One of the critics noted ironically that “the damage Stepanida inflicted on the enemy army was great.” Yes, the visible material damage is not great. But something else is infinitely important: Stepanida, with her death, proves that she is a human being, and not a working beast who can be subjugated, humiliated, and forced into submission. Resistance to violence reveals that strength of character of the heroine, which refutes even death, shows the reader how much a person can do, even if he is alone, even if he is in a hopeless situation.
Next to Stepanida, Petrok is the direct opposite of her; in any case, he is completely different, not active, but rather timid and peaceful, ready to compromise. Petrok's endless patience is based on the deep conviction that it is possible to come to an agreement with people in a kind way. And only at the end of the story, this peaceful man, having exhausted his entire reserve of patience, decides to protest, openly resist. It was violence that prompted him to become disobedient. Such depths of the soul are revealed by the unusual, extreme situation in this person.
The folk tragedy shown in V. Bykov’s stories “The Sign of Trouble” and “Sotnikov” reveals the origins of genuine human characters. The writer continues to create to this day, bit by bit extracting from the treasury of his memory the truth that cannot but be told.