The Civil War as depicted by M. A. Sholokhov
In 1917, the war turned into bloody turmoil. This is no longer a domestic war, requiring sacrificial duties from everyone, but a fratricidal war. With the advent of revolutionary times, relations between classes and estates change dramatically, moral foundations and traditional culture, and with them the state, are rapidly destroyed. The disintegration that was generated by the morality of war covers all social and spiritual ties, leads society into a state of struggle of all against all, to the loss of people of the Fatherland and faith.
If we compare the face of war depicted by the writer before this milestone and after it, then an increase in tragedy becomes noticeable, starting from the moment the world war turned into a civil war. The Cossacks, tired of the bloodshed, hope for a quick end, because the authorities “must end the war, because both the people and we do not want war.”
The First World War is portrayed by Sholokhov as a national disaster,
Sholokhov with great skill describes the horrors of war, which cripples people both physically and morally. Death and suffering awaken sympathy and unite soldiers: people cannot get used to war. Sholokhov writes in his second book that the news of the overthrow of the autocracy did not evoke a joyful feeling among the Cossacks; they reacted to it with restrained anxiety and expectation. The Cossacks are tired of the war. They dream of its end. How many of them have already died: more than one Cossack widow echoed the dead. The Cossacks did not immediately understand historical events. Having returned from the fronts of the World War, the Cossacks did not yet know what tragedy of the fratricidal war they would have to endure in the near future. The Upper Don Uprising appears in Sholokhov's depiction as one of the central events of the civil war on the Don.
There were many reasons. The Red Terror, the unjustified cruelty of representatives of the Soviet government on the Don are shown in the novel with great artistic force. Sholokhov also showed in the novel that the Upper Don uprising reflected a popular protest against the destruction of the foundations of peasant life and the centuries-old traditions of the Cossacks, traditions that became the basis of peasant morality and morality, which had developed over centuries, and were inherited from generation to generation. The writer also showed the doom of the uprising. Already during the events, the people understood and felt their fratricidal nature. One of the leaders of the uprising, Grigory Melekhov, declares: “But I think that we got lost when we went to the uprising.”
The epic covers a period of great upheaval in Russia. These upheavals greatly affected the fate of the Don Cossacks described in the novel. Eternal values determine the life of the Cossacks as clearly as possible in that difficult historical period that Sholokhov reflected in the novel. Love for the native land, respect for the older generation, love for a woman, the need for freedom - these are the basic values without which a free Cossack cannot imagine himself.
Portraying the Civil War as a People's Tragedy
Not only civil war, any war is a disaster for Sholokhov. The writer convincingly shows that the atrocities of the civil war were prepared by four years of the First World War.
The perception of the war as a national tragedy is facilitated by gloomy symbolism. On the eve of the declaration of war in Tatarskoye, “at night an owl roared in the bell tower. Unsteady and terrible cries hung over the farmstead, and an owl flew from the bell tower to the cemetery, fossilized by calves, moaning over the brown, grassy graves.
“It will be bad,” the old men prophesied, hearing owl calls from the cemetery.
“The war will come.”
The war burst into the Cossack kurens like a fiery tornado just during the harvest, when the people valued every minute. The messenger rushed up, raising a cloud of dust behind him. The fateful thing has come...
Sholokhov demonstrates how just one month of war changes people beyond recognition, cripples their souls, devastates them to the very bottom, and makes them look at the world around them in a new way.
Here the writer describes the situation after one of the battles. There are corpses scattered all over the middle of the forest. “We were lying down. Shoulder to shoulder, in various poses, often obscene and scary.”
A plane flies by and drops a bomb. Next, Egorka Zharkov crawls out from under the rubble: “The released intestines were smoking, casting soft pink and blue.”
This is the merciless truth of war. And what a blasphemy against morality, reason, and a betrayal of humanism, the glorification of heroism became under these conditions. The generals needed a “hero”. And he was quickly “invented”: Kuzma Kryuchkov, who allegedly killed more than a dozen Germans. They even began to produce cigarettes with a portrait of the “hero.” The press wrote about him excitedly.
Sholokhov talks about the feat differently: “And it was like this: the people who collided on the field of death, who had not yet had time to break their hands in the destruction of their own kind, in the animal horror that overwhelmed them, stumbled, knocked down, delivered blind blows, mutilated themselves and their horses and fled, frightened by the shot, who killed a man, the morally crippled ones dispersed.
They called it a feat."
People at the front are cutting each other down in a primitive way. Russian soldiers hang corpses on wire fences. German artillery destroys entire regiments to the last soldier. The earth is thickly stained with human blood. There are settled hills of graves everywhere. Sholokhov created a mournful lament for the dead, and cursed the war with irresistible words.
But even more terrible in Sholokhov’s depiction is the civil war. Because she is fratricidal. People of the same culture, the same faith, the same blood began to exterminate each other on an unprecedented scale. This “conveyor belt” of senseless, horribly cruel murders, shown by Sholokhov, shakes to the core.
... Punisher Mitka Korshunov does not spare either the old or the young. Mikhail Koshevoy, satisfying his need for class hatred, kills his hundred-year-old grandfather Grishaka. Daria shoots the prisoner. Even Gregory, succumbing to the psychosis of the senseless destruction of people in war, becomes a murderer and a monster.
There are many stunning scenes in the novel. One of them is the reprisal of forty captured officers by the Podtelkovites. “Shots were fired frantically. The officers, colliding, rushed in all directions. The lieutenant with the most beautiful feminine eyes, wearing a red officer’s cap, ran, clutching his head with his hands. The bullet made him jump high, as if over a barrier. He fell and never got up. Two men chopped down the tall, brave captain. He grabbed the blades of the sabers, blood poured from his cut palms onto his sleeves; he screamed like a child, fell to his knees, on his back, rolling his head in the snow; on the face one could see only blood-stained eyes and a black mouth, drilled with a continuous scream. His face was slashed by flying bombs, across his black mouth, and he was still screaming in a thin voice of horror and pain. Stretching over him, the Cossack, wearing an overcoat with a torn strap, finished him off with a shot. The curly-haired cadet almost broke through the chain - some ataman overtook him and killed him with a blow to the back of the head. The same ataman drove a bullet between the shoulder blades of the centurion, who was running in an overcoat that had opened in the wind. The centurion sat down and scratched his chest with his fingers until he died. The gray-haired podesaul was killed on the spot; parting with his life, he kicked a deep hole in the snow and would have beaten him like a good horse on a leash if the Cossacks, who took pity on him, had not finished him off.” These mournful lines are extremely expressive, filled with horror at what is being done. They are read with unbearable pain, with spiritual trepidation and carry within themselves the most desperate curse of the fratricidal war.
No less terrible are the pages dedicated to the execution of the Podtelkovites. People, who at first “willingly” went to the execution “as if for a rare fun spectacle” and dressed up “as if for a holiday”, faced with the realities of a cruel and inhumane execution, are in a hurry to disperse, so that by the time of the reprisal against the leaders - Podtelkov and Krivoshlykov - there was nothing left few people.
However, Podtelkov is mistaken, arrogantly believing that people dispersed out of recognition that he was right. They could not bear the inhuman, unnatural spectacle of violent death. Only God created man, and only God can take his life.
On the pages of the novel, two “truths” collide: the “truth” of the Whites, Chernetsov and other killed officers, thrown in the face of Podtelkov: “Traitor to the Cossacks! Traitor!" and the opposing “truth” of Podtelkov, who thinks that he is protecting the interests of the “working people.”
Blinded by their “truths,” both sides mercilessly and senselessly, in some kind of demonic frenzy, destroy each other, not noticing that there are fewer and fewer of those left for whose sake they are trying to establish their ideas. Talking about the war, about the military life of the most militant tribe among the entire Russian people, Sholokhov, however, nowhere, not a single line, praised the war. It is not for nothing that his book, as noted by the famous Sholokhov scholar V. Litvinov, was banned by the Maoists, who considered war the best way to socially improve life on Earth. “Quiet Don” is a passionate denial of any such cannibalism. Love for people is incompatible with love for war. War is always a people's disaster.
Death in Sholokhov’s perception is that which opposes life, its unconditional principles, especially violent death. In this sense, the creator of “Quiet Don” is a faithful successor of the best humanistic traditions of both Russian and world literature.
Despising the extermination of man by man in war, knowing what tests the moral sense is subjected to in front-line conditions, Sholokhov, at the same time, on the pages of his novel, painted the now classic pictures of mental fortitude, endurance and humanism that took place in the war. A humane attitude towards one's neighbor and humanity cannot be completely destroyed. This is evidenced, in particular, by many of the actions of Grigory Melekhov: his contempt for looting, the defense of the Polish woman Franya, the rescue of Stepan Astakhov.
The concepts of “war” and “humanity” are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and at the same time, against the background of bloody civil strife, the moral capabilities of a person, how beautiful he can be, are especially clearly outlined. War severely tests moral strength, unknown in days of peace.
Related information.
15 July 2013, 15:31
Dmitry Shmarin
"Self-portrait against the background of the painting "Decossackization"
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Shmarin was born in Moscow in 1967, his father is a native Muscovite, his mother comes from a family of Kuban Cossacks. After graduating from the children's art school and the Moscow Art School at the Surikov Institute, in 1985 Dmitry entered the Moscow State Art Institute named after. IN AND. Surikov. The theme of the tragedy of the Cossacks permeates all of his work.
"Retelling"
By order of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of January 24, 1919, on the complete destruction of the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks began to cold-bloodedly exterminate the Cossack class, starting with the Don villages. Unable to withstand the abuse, the Cossacks rebelled, but the uprising was suppressed with monstrous cruelty. In the early spring of 1919, executions were carried out in the villages of Veshenskaya and Kazanskaya. Cossacks were knocked out by families, from men capable of holding weapons to stupid children. Along with the Cossacks, village priests were also killed. To carry out the bloody order, detachments of Chinese and Latvians were called in as executioners of the Russian people, and the authorities did not disdain criminals. Dmitry Shmarin chose the terrible moment of the Cossacks facing death as the subject for his painting “Decossackization.” Dignified humility before the will of God is no less striking than the stern courage in standing for the truth of the people represented on the canvas. Against the background of the ghostly gray undead, the Bolshevik executioners, the white shirts of the condemned martyrs shine brightly, the cornflower blue skirt of a Cossack woman sobbing on her husband’s shoulder glows blue. In the distance, in a transparent haze, emphasizing the tragic and solemn peace, the domes of the village church quietly glow, bright huts peacefully slumber, and the Don steppe spreads widely. Everything froze... At work
"For Holy Rus'" The image of the “white knights” - Russian children and teenagers, who joined the fighting ranks along with adults, hurts the heart.
"Prayer before the road"
"Ice March"
"The whites have come"
"Execution of whites in Crimea"
"Farewell. Autumn"
Dmitry Belyukin
Dmitry Belyukin was born in Moscow in 1962, the son of a famous artist and book illustrator Anatoly Ivanovich Belyukin. Having graduated from the Moscow Art School named after. Surikov in 1980, entered the Moscow State Art Institute. V. I. Surikov to the Faculty of Painting, Portrait Workshop (headed by Professor I. S. Glazunov). Art critics call Dmitry Belyukin an artist of great themes. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say – the main themes. Indeed, in his works he reflects on the meaning of life and history, tries to look into the future of Russia through its past... At the age of 50, Dmitry Belyukin has been awarded the highest regalia for a Russian artist, his exhibitions are a success, reproductions of paintings are published on book covers and in history textbooks . A permanent gallery of his works has been opened in Moscow. And most importantly, no one can blame him for the fact that over all the years of his creativity he has at least in some way betrayed his original credo.
Excerpt from the interview:
- In the 1990s, your father wrote the series “Gallery of Ancestors”, it also contains a portrait of his grandfather, your great-grandfather Sergei Kuzmich Belyukin from the village of Korablinka, Serebryanoprudsky district, Ryazan (now Moscow) region. It seems to me that this stern old man with delicate facial features reflects the characteristic features of your family...
- Maybe. There was a large family, educated peasants, whom Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin would probably have been happy about... They subscribed to agricultural magazines and bought equipment. My father often recalled his rural childhood. He could easily have cut out a pipe or towns for me. In order to drink water from a spring in the forest, I made a ladle out of birch bark, which we then left on the nearest tree for others.
And now not only is our house in the village of Korablinka gone, the village itself is gone. The 20th century wiped it off the face of the earth...
Some works of Dmitry Belyukin:
Cossack Sukhoi
"Esaul Kostrykin and Biplane"
"Evacuation of Kornilovites from Crimea"
"Exodus"
Fragment of the painting "Exodus"
"Shards"
Artist Ivan Vladimirov (1869 – 1947) the author of the famous painting “Lenin and Stalin in Razliv” is also known for his watercolor sketches of the socialist revolution. He made them in 1917 from life, what he saw with his own eyes.
Here it is shown how the revolutionary masses organize a pogrom in the Winter Palace:
And here the proletarians are robbing a wine warehouse:
A local priest and landowner before a revolutionary court. Soon they will be executed:
The Bolsheviks confiscate bread from the peasants:
February 1917, arrest of White Guard generals:
An agitator in a village with a portrait of Trotsky in his hands, this is how the masses were fooled:
Pavel Ryzhenko
Pavel Ryzhenko (born in 1970) is a graduate and teacher of the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He writes in the style of "classical Russian realism". His teacher Ilya Glazunov says that “Pavel Ryzhenko is a talented artist who is passionate about his work and has a great future.” Ryzhenko himself says about his work: “I invite people to take another look at our controversial past, full of tragic events, in which the great spirit of our people was fully manifested. Understand that we are not a gray mass, not a so-called “electorate,” but a people with a rich history and self-awareness. I want to believe that I offer people an alternative to mass, “tinsel” culture, which makes us forget about the main issues of existence.”
"Farewell to shoulder straps"
Ryzhenko’s paintings are not just talentedly painted pictures. These are armor-piercing shells that destroy the currently instilled indifference to the great history of Russia. These are heavy bells that awaken in us the desire to make ourselves better. Ryzhenko’s paintings are an expression of his inner powerful spirit, his ardent and uncompromising desire, as he himself says, “to see Russia strong and free from sin.”
"Farewell of the Emperor to the troops"
One of the most famous works of Pavel Ryzhenko is a triptych dedicated to the tragic fate of Emperor Nicholas II and his family, which includes the paintings “Farewell of the Emperor to the Troops,” “Imprisonment in Tsarskoye Selo” and “Ipatiev House after the Murder of the Royal Family.” In “The Sovereign’s Farewell...” the artist, with amazing psychologism, managed to convey all the tragedy of the moment. Headquarters in Mogilev. Here, just a few days ago, Nikolai Romanov was the all-Russian autocrat, the ruler of the great Empire. And so, he returned here, having abdicated the throne, returned not as the Emperor, but as Colonel Romanov, returned to say goodbye to the troops dear to his heart. Bent over, he walks along their silent row, looking into the eyes of everyone, looking in them for either support or forgiveness... And for the last time they salute their King, whom they are not destined to see again. A terrible, irreparable disaster is heading towards Russia. According to Solzhenitsyn’s definition, the fatal red wheel is rolling along it... Moloch has been launched, and it cannot be stopped. Russia has stepped into the abyss, and soon it will swallow both it and the Tsar, and the troops loyal to him... And this atmosphere of an impending catastrophe that is gaining momentum is conveyed by the February blizzard depicted in the picture. The sky is shrouded in darkness like smoke, the wind bends the trees, rinses the banners, lifts flakes of snow and throws them into the faces of the Russian soldiers and the Russian Tsar, sweeps them away, blinds their eyes... With his abdication, the Emperor finally opened the doors of the Empire to the frenzied February winds that were now sweeping across it. open spaces. And these winds will soon blow away Great Russia from the face of the earth...
"Imprisonment in Tsarskoe Selo"
"Ipatiev House after the Regicide"
Approximately the same fatal years for the Russian land include Pavel Ryzhenko’s painting “Wreath,” amazing in its deep, inescapable sadness, penetrating into the very soul and evoking in it a strange, inexplicable melancholy and bitterness of loss...
The picture shows early spring. The snow has barely melted, and that is why the whole earth resembles a swamp. The trees are shrouded in a light greenish haze. Behind their branches looms a gray, rainy sky, dull and mournful. It seems that all of nature is crying at this moment, sympathizing with the soldier who has come from the front. He survived a terrible war, reached home, wounded, and there was no one here. No one is waiting for a hero... And the soldier came to the graveyard, bowed to his native grave, shed a stingy tear... He remembered the past peaceful years, remembered how he left here to defend his native land, how he said goodbye to the one who now rests in this swampy cemetery. The soldier remembered a lot. He thought of saying “hello” to someone dear to him, but he had to say goodbye again, now forever... Who rests under this gray wooden cross with a wreath of yellow flowers? Is it the soldier's mother? Or wife? We don’t know this... We can only see the endless sorrow of the hero who came from the war, and mourn with him...
The plot of the painting “Umbrella” is dramatic and touching to the point of tears:
"Umbrella"
What else could touch the soul of a sinner-murderer, yesterday’s sailor from the battleship Gangut? Perhaps the absurdity of the situation and the painful insecurity of the girl who opened her umbrella over her murdered mother? Why should he shoot the girl? But the brave sailor slid down the wall and sank into the snow. He does not have the strength to lift the rifle, and his powerful hand hangs from his knee. He's confused. Will he realize what he has done? And what will happen to him later?
And several more works by different artists dedicated to this topic.
Oleg Ozhogin "Officer"
Yu. Repin "Portrait of Vasily Mikhailovich Maximov"
V. Miroshnichenko. Petr Nikolaevich Wrangel
R.V. Bylinskaya. Alexander Vasilievich Kolchak
D. Trofimov. Anton Ivanovich Denikin
Ilya Glazunov "The destruction of the temple on Easter night"
46. Depiction of revolution and civil war in M. Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard”
The novel's action ends in 1925, and the work tells the story of the revolutionary events in Kyiv in the winter of 1918-1919. It tells about a very difficult time, when it was impossible to immediately sort everything out, understand everything, and reconcile contradictory feelings and thoughts within ourselves. This novel captures the still-still, burning memories of the city of Kyiv during the Civil War.
“The White Guard” (1925) is a work of fiction showing the white army from the inside. These are warriors full of valor, honor, faithful to the duty of defending Russia. They give their lives for Russia, its honor - as they understand it. Bulgakov appears as a tragic and romantic artist at the same time. The Turbins' house, where there was so much warmth, tenderness, and mutual understanding, is interpreted as a symbol of Russia. Bulgakov's heroes die defending their Russia.
A social cataclysm reveals characters - some flee, others prefer death in battle.
The narration is complex and multifaceted: there is an objective narration, a fantastic narration, a fairy-tale style, and lyrical essays. The composition is complex: a montage of various pieces: the history of the Turbin family, the change of authorities, the rampant nature of the elements during the civil war, battle scenes, the fate of individual heroes. The ring composition begins and ends with a premonition of the apocalypse, the symbolism of which permeates the entire novel. The bloody events of the civil war are depicted as the Last Judgment. The “end of the world” has come, but the Turbins continue to live on - their salvation, this is their home, the hearth, which Elena looks after; it is not in vain that the old way of life and details are emphasized (down to the mother’s service).
Through the fate of the Turbins, B reveals the drama of the revolution and civil war. The problem of moral choice in the play: Alexey - either remain faithful to the oath, or save people’s lives, he chooses lives: “Tear off your shoulder straps, throw away your rifles and immediately go home!” Human life is the highest value. B. perceived the revolution of 17 not only as a turning point in the history of Russia, but also in the destinies of the Russian intelligentsia. In “The White Guard,” the largely autobiographical intelligent family of the Turbins finds themselves drawn into the events of the civil war. One distinctive feature of the novel is that the events of the revolution are humanized as much as possible. B's departure from the negative portrayal of the white movement exposed the writer to accusations of trying to justify the white movement. For B, the Turbins’ house is the embodiment of that R that is dear to him. G. Adamovich noted that the author showed his heroes in “misfortunes and defeats.” The events of the revolution in the novel are “humanized as much as possible.” “This was especially noticeable against the background of the familiar image of the “revolutionary masses” in the works of A. Serafimovich, B. Pilnyak, A. Bely and others,” wrote Muromsky.
The main theme is historical catastrophe. B connects the personal principle with the social-historical, puts the fate of an individual in connection with the fate of the country. Pushkin’s principle of depiction is tradition – historical events through the fate of individual people. The death of the City is like the collapse of an entire civilization. Rejection of the revolutionary methods of violence in order to create a society of social harmony, condemnation of the fratricidal war is expressed in the images of Alexei Turbin’s prophetic dream, in which sergeant Zhilin, who died in 1916 along with a squadron of hussars, appears to him, and talks about the paradise in which he found himself and about the events of the civil war. The image of paradise, in which there is a place for everyone, they are “alonely killed”, both white and red. It is no coincidence that in Alexei Turbin’s prophetic dream, the Lord says to the deceased Zhilin: “All of you, Zhilin, are the same with me - killed in the battlefield.”
The turning point for the Turbins and the rest of the heroes of the novel is the fourteenth day of December 1918, the battle with Petliura’s troops, which was supposed to be a test of strength before subsequent battles with the Red Army, but turned out to be defeat, defeat. This is the turning point and climax in the novel. A guess flashes up that everything is a chain of mistakes and delusions, that duty is not in protecting the collapsed monarchy and the traitor hetman, and honor is in something else. Tsarist Russia is dying, but Russia is alive...
One of the comic characters in the play, the Zhytomyr cousin Larion, pronounces a sublime monologue: “...My fragile ship was tossed around for a long time on the waves of the civil war... Until it washed up in this harbor with cream curtains, among the people I liked so much... ." Bulgakov saw the ideal in preserving the “harbour with cream curtains,” although the times had turned. Bulgakov clearly saw in the Bolsheviks a better alternative compared to the Petlyura freemen and believed that the intellectuals who survived the fire of the civil war must, reluctantly, come to terms with the Soviet regime. However, at the same time, the dignity and inviolability of the inner spiritual world should be preserved,
"White Guard" lies entirely in line with the traditions of Russian classical realistic prose. The society is depicted on the eve of its death. The artist’s task is to depict the dramatic reality of the real world as accurately as possible. There was no need for artistic means here.
A novel about a historical shock. Bulgakov managed to portray what Blok once foresaw, only without romantic pathos. There is no distance between the author and his hero - one of the main features of the work (although the novel is written in the 3rd person). Psychologically, it does not exist, because... the death of that part of society to which the author belongs was depicted, and he merges with his hero.
The only depoliticized novel about revolution and civil war. In other works, the confrontation of sides was always depicted, and the problem of choice always arose. Sometimes the psychological complexity of choice was demonstrated, sometimes the right to make mistakes. Complexity was a must, and so was the right to make mistakes. An exception is, perhaps, “Quiet Don”.
Bulgakov portrays what is happening as a universal tragedy, without the possibility of choice. The very fact of revolution for the artist is an act of destruction of the social environment to which the author and heroes belong. "The White Guard" is a novel about the end of life. The destruction of the habitat necessarily entails the destruction of the meaning of existence. Physically a person can be saved, but it will be a different person. The author's attitude to what is happening is open. The last episode is symbolic: a picture close to the apocalypse is what awaits the city. The final scene: night, city, freezing sentry, he sees a red star - Mars - this is an apocalyptic picture.
The novel begins with the quiet ringing of bells, and ends with the funeral, universal thunder of bells. (sic!) , which heralds the death of the city.
M. Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard” (1922-1924) reflects the events of the civil war of the period 1918-1919. in his hometown of Kyiv. Bulgakov views these events not from class or political positions, but from purely human ones. No matter who captures the city - the hetman, the Petliurists or the Bolsheviks - blood inevitably flows, hundreds of people die in agony, while others become even more terribly cruel. Violence begets more violence. This is what worries the writer most of all.
The central image is the House, a symbol of the home. Having gathered the characters in the house on the eve of Christmas, the author thinks about the possible fate of both the characters themselves and all of Russia. “The year 1918 was a great and terrible year since the birth of Christ, but the second since the beginning of the revolution...” - this is how the novel begins, which tells about the fate of the Turbin family. They live in Kyiv, on Alekseevsky Spusk. Young people - Alexey, Elena, Nikolka - were left without parents. But they have a House that contains not just things, but a structure of life, traditions, inclusion in national life. The Turbins’ house was built on the “stone of faith” in Russia, Orthodoxy, the Tsar, and culture. And so the House and the revolution became enemies. The revolution came into conflict with the old House in order to leave children without faith, without a roof, without culture and destitute.
“Cavalry” by I. E. Babel is a collection of short stories related by the theme of the civil war and a single image of the narrator. Stories from this book began to be published in 1923. Different in material, they painted a new and unexpected world. Fate decreed that, having accepted the revolution with its bewitching passion and gone into it, Babel began to publish his stories and correspondence in the St. Petersburg newspaper “New Life”, which was facilitated by M. Gorky. But then, perhaps one of the first, he saw in the revolution a fracture in life, a fracture in history. Babel recognized all this as a fracture in existence. This sense of truth led Babel onto the roads of war. In July 1920, he voluntarily went to the front, to the First Cavalry Army.
Babel came to the front as a correspondent for the newspaper “Red Cavalryman” Kirill Vasilyevich Lyutov. While moving with the units, he kept a diary. Reading it, one cannot help but notice that Babel is stunned: new impressions came into sharp contradiction with his life experience. He saw something that he could not even think about: the troops and Cossacks served with their equipment, with their horses and bladed weapons. The Cossacks, separated from the army, were forced to feed themselves and provide themselves with horses at the expense of the local population, which often led to bloody incidents. They gave vent to their fatigue, anarchism, arrogance, and disregard for the dignity of other people. Violence became commonplace.
Babel saw in the soldiers their immaturity, lack of culture, rudeness, and it was difficult for him to imagine how the ideas of revolution would germinate in the minds of these people. And, judging by the diary, a painful question arose in Babel’s soul: “Why do I have persistent melancholy?” And the answer was this: “Because we are far from home, because we are destroying, we are moving like a whirlwind, like lava... life is scattering, I am at a large, ongoing funeral service.” The stories of “Cavalry” were based on the entries made by Babel in his diary. V The collection opens with the story “Crossing the Zbruch”. The joy of victory from the capture of Novgorod-Volynsk is, as it were, emphasized by the joy of nature itself: “Fields of purple poppies bloom around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowing rye, virgin buckwheat rises on the horizon...” And then: “the orange sun rolls across the sky, like a severed head,” and the “gentle light” that “lights up in the gorges of the clouds” can no longer relieve the anxious anxiety. Pictures of victory take on an unusual cruelty. And then: “The smell of yesterday’s blood of killed horses drips into the evening cool” - this phrase “overturns” the entire triumphant chorus of the story.
All this prepared the ending of the story: the sleeping Jewish neighbor was brutally stabbed to death. In the story “Letter,” a fighter of the First Cavalry, almost a boy, Vasily Kurdyukov dictates a letter to his mother, in which he tells how his brother Senka “finished” the White Guard’s “daddy,” who in turn “finished” his own son Fedya. And this is the truth of a civil war, when fathers and sons become sworn enemies and without.
In the story “Salt,” Nikita Balmashev, in a letter to the editor, describes how he let a woman and a child into a carriage with cavalrymen going to the front and protected her from violence from her comrades, and when he found out that instead of a child she was carrying salt, he threw it out from the carriage and shot: “...I washed away this shame from the face of the working land and the republic.”
Babel describes heroism, equally spontaneous, but necessary in these conditions. Squadron commander Trunov, violating the regulations, arbitrarily and brutally deals with prisoners of war and then, together with a soldier, remains behind the machine gun in order to distract enemy planes from the squadron hiding in the forest.
At the grave of the “world hero Pasha Trunov,” regiment commander Pugachev “shouted a speech about the dead soldiers from the First Cavalry, about this proud phalanx, beating the hammer of history on the anvil of future centuries” (“Squadron Trunov”). Focusing on ordinary participants in the events, Babel says very little about the true leaders of the First Cavalry, who tamed this spontaneous freemen and turned it into an organized force. However, Babel does not hide his admiration for the division commander Savitsky, whose prototype was the legendary Timoshenko.
In all the stories of "Cavalry" there is the presence of the author himself, who, together with her heroes, went through a difficult path to comprehend the meaning of this bloody struggle. In the descriptions of events there is the cruel truth of the mighty bloody stream of life.
For attempting to truthfully describe the events of the civil war, Babel was accused of “anti-Soviet conspiratorial terrorist activities...” and was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1940.
For the anniversary of the October Revolution, we remembered the ten most important works of art of that period - from Lissitzky’s “Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge” to Deineka’s “Defense of Petrograd”.
El Lissitzky,
“Beat the whites with a red wedge”
In the famous poster “Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge,” El Lissitzky uses Malevich’s Suprematist language for political purposes. Pure geometric shapes serve to describe a violent armed conflict. Thus, Lissitzky reduces the immediate event, the action, to text and slogan. All elements of the poster are rigidly intertwined with each other and interdependent. The figures lose their absolute freedom and become geometric text: this poster would be read from left to right even without letters. Lissitzky, like Malevich, designed a new world and created forms into which the new life was supposed to fit. Thanks to its new form and geometry, this work transfers the topic of the day into certain general timeless categories.
Kliment Redko
"Insurrection"
Kliment Redko's work “Uprising” is a so-called Soviet neo-icon. The idea of this format is that the image applied to the plane is, first of all, a kind of universal model, an image of what is desired. As in a traditional icon, the image is not real, but reflects an ideal world. It is the neo-icon that underlies the art of socialist realism of the 30s.
In this work, Redko dares to take a bold step - in the space of the picture he combines geometric figures with portraits of Bolshevik leaders. On the right and left of Lenin are his associates - Trotsky, Krupskaya, Stalin and others. As in an icon, there is no usual perspective here; the scale of a particular figure depends not on its distance from the viewer, but on its significance. In other words, Lenin is the most important here, and therefore the biggest. Redko also attached great importance to light.
The figures seem to emit a glow, making the painting look like a neon sign. The artist designated this technique with the word “cinema”. He sought to overcome the materiality of paint and drew analogies between painting and radio, electricity, cinema and even the northern lights. Thus, he actually sets himself the same tasks that icon painters set themselves many centuries ago. He plays with familiar schemes in a new way, replacing Paradise with the socialist world, and Christ and the saints with Lenin and his minions. The goal of Redko's work is the deification and sacralization of the revolution.
Pavel Filonov
"Formula of the Petrograd proletariat"
“The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat” was written during the Civil War. In the center of the picture is a worker, whose majestic figure rises above the barely visible city. The composition of the painting is built on intense rhythms, creating a feeling of seething and growing movement. All the iconic symbols of the proletariat are captured here, for example, giant human hands - an instrument for transforming the world. At the same time, this is not just a picture, but a generalizing formula that reflects the Universe. Filonov seems to be splitting the world down to the smallest atoms and immediately putting it back together, simultaneously looking through both a telescope and a microscope.
The experience of participating in great and at the same time monstrous historical events (the First World War and the Revolution) had a huge influence on the artist’s work. The people in Filonov’s paintings are crushed in the meat grinder of history. His works are difficult to perceive, sometimes painful - the painter endlessly fragments the whole, sometimes bringing it to the level of a kaleidoscope. The viewer constantly has to keep all the fragments of the picture in his head in order to ultimately grasp the complete image. Filonov’s world is the world of the collective body, the world of the concept “we” put forward by the era, where the private and personal are abolished. The artist himself considered himself an exponent of the ideas of the proletariat, and called the collective body, which is always present in his paintings, “world flourishing.” However, it is possible that even against the will of the author, his “we” is filled with deep horror. In Filonov’s work, the new world appears as a joyless and terrible place where the dead penetrates into the living. The painter’s works reflected not so much contemporary events as a premonition of future ones - the horrors of a totalitarian regime, repression.
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
"Petrograd Madonna"
Another name for this painting is “1918 in Petrograd.” In the foreground is a young mother with a baby in her arms, in the background is a city where the revolution has just ended - and its residents are getting used to the new life and power. The painting resembles either an icon or a fresco by an Italian Renaissance master.
Petrov-Vodkin interpreted the new era in the context of the new fate of Russia, but with his creativity he did not strive to completely destroy the entire old world and build a new one on its ruins. He drew subjects for his paintings from everyday life, but took the form for them from past eras. If medieval artists dressed biblical heroes in contemporary clothes in order to bring them closer to their time, then Petrov-Vodkin does exactly the opposite. He depicts a resident of Petrograd in the image of the Mother of God in order to give an ordinary, everyday plot an unusual significance and, at the same time, timelessness and universality.
Kazimir Malevich
"Head of a Peasant"
Kazimir Malevich came to the revolutionary events of 1917 as an already accomplished master, having passed the path from impressionism, neo-primitivism to his own discovery - Suprematism. Malevich perceived the revolution ideologically; new people and propagandists of the Suprematist faith were to be members of the art group UNOVIS (“Adopters of New Art”), who wore a bandage in the form of a black square on their sleeves. According to the artist’s ideas, in a changed world, art had to create its own state and its own world order. The revolution provided an opportunity for avant-garde artists to rewrite all past and future history in such a way as to occupy a central place in it. It must be said that in many ways they succeeded, because avant-garde art is one of the main calling cards of Russia. Despite the programmatic denial of the visual form as outdated, in the second half of the 20s the artist turned to figurativeness. He creates works from the peasant cycle, but dates them back to 1908–1912. (that is, the period before the “Black Square”), so the rejection of pointlessness does not look here as a betrayal of one’s own ideals. Since this cycle is partly a hoax, the artist appears as a prophet who anticipates future popular unrest and revolution. One of the most noticeable features of this period of his work was the depersonalization of people. Instead of faces and heads, their bodies are topped with red, black and white ovals. These figures emanate, on the one hand, incredible tragedy, and on the other, abstract greatness and heroism. “Head of a Peasant” is reminiscent of sacred images, for example, the icon “Savior’s Ardent Eye.” Thus, Malevich creates a new “post-suprematist icon.”
Boris Kustodiev
"Bolshevik"
The name of Boris Kustodiev is associated primarily with bright, colorful paintings depicting the life of merchants and idyllic holiday festivities with characteristic Russian scenes. However, after the coup, the artist turned to revolutionary themes. The painting “Bolshevik” depicts a gigantic man in felt boots, a sheepskin coat and a hat; behind him, filling the entire sky, flutters the red banner of the revolution. With a gigantic stride he walks through the city, and far below a large crowd is swarming around. The painting has a sharp poster expressiveness and speaks to the viewer in a very pathetic, direct and even somewhat rude symbolic language. The man is, of course, the revolution itself that has burst into the streets. There is no stopping her, no hiding from her, and she will eventually crush and destroy everything in her path.
Kustodiev, despite the tremendous changes in the artistic world, remained faithful to his at that time already archaic imagery. But, oddly enough, the aesthetics of merchant Russia organically adapted to the needs of the new class. He replaced the recognizable Russian woman with a samovar, symbolizing the Russian way of life, with an equally recognizable man in a padded jacket - a kind of Pugachev. The fact is that in both the first and second cases the artist uses image-symbols that are understandable to anyone.
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International
The idea of the tower came to Tatlin back in 1918. It was supposed to become a symbol of the new relationship between art and the state. A year later, the artist managed to receive an order for the construction of this utopian building. However, it was destined to remain unfulfilled. Tatlin planned to build a 400-meter tower, which would consist of three glass volumes rotating at different speeds. Outside, they were supposed to be surrounded by two giant spirals of metal. The main idea of the monument was dynamics, which corresponded to the spirit of the times. In each of the volumes, the artist intended to place premises for “three powers” - legislative, public and informational. Its shape resembles the famous Tower of Babel from a painting by Pieter Bruegel - only the Tatlin Tower, unlike the Tower of Babel, was supposed to serve as a symbol of the reunification of humanity after the world revolution, whose offensive everyone was so passionately awaiting in the first years of Soviet power.
Gustav Klutsis
"Electrification of the entire country"
Constructivism, with more enthusiasm than other avant-garde movements, took responsibility for the rhetoric and aesthetics of power. A striking example of this is the photomontage of constructivist Gustav Klutsis, who combined the two most recognizable languages of the era - geometric structures and the face of the leader. Here, as in many works of the 20s, what is reflected is not the real picture of the world, but the organization of reality through the eyes of the artist. The goal is not to show this or that event, but to show how the viewer should perceive this event.
Photography played a huge role in state propaganda of that time, and photomontage was an ideal means of influencing the masses, a product that was supposed to replace painting in the new world. Unlike the same painting, it can be reproduced countless times, placed in a magazine or on a poster, and thereby conveyed to a huge audience. Soviet montage is created for the sake of mass reproduction; handicraft is abolished here in a huge circulation. Socialist art excludes the concept of uniqueness; it is nothing more than a factory for the production of things and very specific ideas that must be absorbed by the masses.
David Shterenberg
"Sour milk"
David Shterenberg, although he was a commissar, was not a radical in art. He realized his minimalist decorative style primarily in still lifes. The artist’s main technique is a slightly upturned vertical tabletop with flat objects on it. Bright, decorative, very applicative and fundamentally “superficial” still lifes were perceived in Soviet Russia as truly revolutionary, upending the old way of life. However, extreme flatness here is combined with incredible tactility - almost always painting imitates one or another texture or material. The paintings depicting modest, and sometimes meager food, show the modest, and sometimes meager diet of the proletarians. Shterenberg places the main emphasis on the shape of the table, which in a sense becomes a reflection of the cafe culture with its openness and display. Loud and pathetic slogans of a new way of life captured the artist much less.
Alexander Deineka
"Defense of Petrograd"
The painting is divided into two tiers. The bottom depicts soldiers cheerfully walking to the front, the top depicts the wounded returning from the battlefield. Deineka uses the technique of reverse movement - first the action develops from left to right, and then from right to left, which creates a feeling of cyclical composition. Determined male and female figures are depicted powerfully and very voluminously. They personify the readiness of the proletariat to go to the end, no matter how long it takes - since the composition of the picture is closed, it seems that the flow of people going to the front and returning
from it, does not dry out. The harsh, inexorable rhythm of the work expresses the heroic spirit of the era and romanticizes the pathos of the civil war.
