D. Granin "On Mercy". Help to find Essay by D. Granin "On Mercy"
- D. A. Granin "On Mercy"
I got in trouble last year. Walking down the street, slipped and fell... He fell unsuccessfully, worse and nowhere: he broke his nose, his hand jumped out in his shoulder, hung like a whip. It was about seven o'clock in the evening. In the city center, on Kirovsky Prospekt, not far from the house where I live.
With great difficulty he got up, wandered into the nearest entrance, tried to calm the blood with a handkerchief. Wherever there, I felt that I was in a state of shock, the pain was getting stronger and something had to be done quickly. And I can’t speak, my mouth is broken.
Decided to turn back home.
I was walking down the street, I think not staggering. I remember this path about four hundred meters well. There were many people on the street. A woman and a girl, some couple, an elderly woman, a man, young guys walked towards me, all of them at first looked at me with curiosity, and then averted their eyes, turned away. If only someone on this path came up to me, asked what was the matter with me, if I needed help. I remember the faces of many people, apparently, with unaccountable attention, a heightened expectation of help ...
The pain confused my consciousness, but I understood that if I lay down on the sidewalk now, they would calmly step over me, bypass me. We have to get home. So no one helped me.
Later I thought about this story. Could people take me for a drunk? It seems to be no, it is unlikely that I made such an impression. But even if they took me for a drunk, they saw that I was covered in blood, something happened to fall, they hit me, why didn’t they help, didn’t at least ask what was the matter? So, to pass by, not to get involved, not to waste time, effort, it does not concern me, has become a familiar feeling?
Remembering these people with bitterness, at first he was angry, accused, perplexed, then he began to remember himself. Something similar to the desire to move away, to evade, not to get involved was with me. Incriminating himself, he understood how familiar this feeling had become in impudent life, how it warmed up, imperceptibly took root.
I'm not going to announce the next complaints of damage to morals. The level of decline in our responsiveness, however, made me think. There are no personal culprits. Who to blame? I looked around and couldn't find any obvious reason.
Pondering, he recalled the time at the front, when in our hungry trench life it was impossible to walk past him at the sight of a wounded man. From your part, from the other, it was impossible for someone to turn away, pretend not to notice. They helped, dragged on themselves, bandaged, gave a lift ... Some, perhaps, violated this law of front-line life, because there were deserters and crossbows. But we are not talking about them, we are now talking about the main life rules of that time.
I do not know the recipes for the manifestation of mutual understanding that we all need, but I am sure that only from our common understanding of the problem can some concrete solutions emerge. One person, I, for example, can only ring this alarm bell and ask everyone to feel it and think about what to do so that mercy warms our lives.
___The author reflects on the problem of the humane attitude of people towards each other, bitterly shows that people's indifference to their neighbor can lead to fatal consequences, and the final part of the text is a kind of author's appeal to protect everyone's ability to respond to someone else's pain.
D. Granin notes the decline of mercy in our lives and bitterly sums up: If this feeling is not used, not exercised, it weakens and atrophies.
I like English proverb"Mercy begins at home"... If for mercy one has to go far from home, it is no longer mercy... .
To succeed in doing good to loved ones ....
Daniil Granin
Mercy
I got in trouble last year. I was walking down the street, slipped and fell ... I fell unsuccessfully, nowhere worse: my face on the curb, I broke my nose, I smashed my whole face, my hand jumped out in my shoulder. It was about seven o'clock in the evening. In the city center, on Kirovsky Prospekt, not far from the house where I live.
With great difficulty he got up - his face was covered in blood, his hand hung like a whip. Wandered into the nearest entrance, tried to calm the blood with a handkerchief. Wherever there - she continued to whip, I felt that I was in a state of shock, the pain was getting stronger and something had to be done quickly. And I can’t speak - my mouth is broken.
Decided to turn back home.
I walked along the street, I think, without staggering; walked, holding a bloody handkerchief to his face, his coat was already gleaming with blood. I remember this path well - about three hundred meters. There were many people on the street. A woman with a girl walked towards me, some couple, an elderly woman, a man, young guys, all of them at first looked at me with curiosity, and then averted their eyes, turned away. If only someone on this path came up to me, asked what was the matter with me, if I needed help. I remembered the faces of many people - apparently, with unaccountable attention, a heightened expectation of help ...
The pain confused my consciousness, but I understood that if I lay down on the sidewalk now, they would calmly step over me, bypass me. We have to get home.
Later I thought about this story. Could people take me for a drunk? It seems to be no, it is unlikely that I made such an impression. But even if they took me for a drunk ... - they saw that I was covered in blood, something happened - fell, hit - why didn’t they help, didn’t at least ask what was the matter? So, to pass by, not to get involved, not to waste time, effort, “this does not concern me”, has become a familiar feeling?
Pondering, he recalled these people with bitterness, at first he was angry, accused, perplexed, indignant, but then he began to remember himself. And he looked for something similar in his behavior. It is easy to reproach others when you are in a situation of distress, but you must also remember yourself. I can’t say that I had exactly such a case, but I also discovered something similar in my own behavior - a desire to move away, avoid, not get involved ... And, having convicted myself, I began to understand how familiar this feeling had become, how it warmed up, imperceptibly took root .
As I thought about it, I remembered something else. He recalled the time at the front, when in our hungry trench life it was impossible to walk past him at the sight of a wounded man. From your part, from the other - it was impossible for someone to turn away, pretend not to notice. They helped, dragged on themselves, bandaged, brought up ... Some people, perhaps, violated this law of front-line life, because there were deserters and crossbows. But we are not talking about them, we are now talking about the main life rules of that time.
And after the war, this feeling of mutual assistance, mutual obligation remained among us for a long time. But gradually it disappeared. Lost so much that a person considers it possible to pass by a fallen, injured person lying on the ground. We are accustomed to making reservations that not all people are like that, not everyone does this, but I do not want to make a reservation now. Novgorod librarians once complained to me: “Here you write in the Blockade Book how Leningraders raised those who fell from hunger, and the other day our employee twisted her leg, fell in the middle of the square - and everyone walked past, no one stopped, no one picked her up . How is it so? Resentment and even reproach sounded in their words.
And really, what is happening to us? How did we get to this point, how did we move from normal responsiveness to indifference, to callousness, and this also became normal.
I do not dare to name all the reasons why the feeling of mutual assistance, mutual obligation was lost, but I think that in many respects it began with all sorts of social injustice, when lies, window dressing, self-interest acted with impunity. This happened before the eyes of the people and had the most detrimental effect on the spiritual health of people. Indifference to one’s work appeared and took root, the loss of all principles - “Why can’t I?” That very thing that we now call softly began to flourish - lack of spirituality, indifference.
Naturally, this could not but affect the relationship of people within the team, exactingness towards each other, mutual assistance, lies penetrated into the family - everything is interconnected, because human morality does not consist of isolated rules of life. And that spirit of solidarity, mutual assistance, mutual concern, which was preserved from the war, the spirit of the unity of the people, was lost. Starting small, he disappeared.
My friend's mother got sick. She had to be operated on. He heard that the doctor should be "given". He is a shy person, but his anxiety about his mother overcame his shyness, and he, under the guise of needing some kind of medication, drugs, offered the doctor 25 rubles. At this, the doctor shrugged his shoulders and said: “I don’t take that kind of money.” - "What do you need?" - "Ten times more." My friend, a middle-level technical worker, is not a rich man, but since it was about the health of his mother, he got money. What struck him: when he brought the money in an envelope to the doctor, he calmly took it out and counted it.
I got in trouble last year. He was walking down the street, slipped and fell ... He fell unsuccessfully, worse and nowhere: he broke his nose, his hand jumped out in his shoulder, hung like a whip. It was about seven o'clock in the evening. In the city center, on Kirovsky Prospekt, not far from the house where I live.With great difficulty he got up, wandered into the nearest entrance, tried to calm the blood with a handkerchief. Wherever there, I felt that I was in a state of shock, the pain was getting stronger and something had to be done quickly. And I can’t speak - my mouth is broken.
Decided to turn back home.
I was walking down the street, I think not staggering. I remember this path about four hundred meters well. There were many people on the street. A woman and a girl, some couple, an elderly woman, a man, young guys walked towards me, all of them at first looked at me with curiosity, and then averted their eyes, turned away. If only someone on this path came up to me, asked what was the matter with me, if I needed help. I remembered the faces of many people - apparently, with unaccountable attention, a heightened expectation of help ...
The pain confused my consciousness, but I understood that if I lay down on the sidewalk now, they would calmly step over me, bypass me. We have to get home. So no one helped me.
Later I thought about this story. Could people take me for a drunk? It seems to be no, it is unlikely that he made such an impression. But even if they took me for a drunk - they saw that I was covered in blood, something happened - I fell, they hit me - why didn’t they help, didn’t at least ask what was the matter? So, to pass by, not to get involved, not to waste time, effort, it does not concern me” has become a familiar feeling?
Remembering these people with bitterness, at first he was angry, accused, perplexed, then he began to remember himself. Something like that - the desire to move away, to evade, not to get involved - and her? was me. Incriminating himself, he understood how familiar this feeling had become in naked life, how it warmed up, imperceptibly took root.
I'm not going to announce the next complaints of damage to morals. The level of decline in our responsiveness, however, made me think. There are no personal culprits. Who to blame? I looked around and couldn't find any obvious reason.
Pondering, he recalled the time at the front, when in a hungry trench vakhna it was impossible for life to pass him by at the sight of a wounded man. From your part, from the other - it was impossible for someone to turn away, pretend not to notice. They helped, dragged on themselves, bandaged, brought up ... Some people, perhaps, violated this life behind the front, because there were deserters and crossbows. But we are not talking about them, we are now talking about the main clear rules of that time.
I do not know the recipes for the manifestation of mutual understanding that we all need, but I am sure that only from our common understanding of the problem can some concrete solutions emerge. One person - me, for example - can only ring this alarm bell and ask everyone to feel it and think about what to do so that mercy warms our lives. (439 words) (According to D. A. Granin. From the essay “On Mercy”)
Retell the phrase in detail.
Answer HQ, the question: "What do you see as the reasons for the "decline in Our responsiveness"?"
Retell the text concisely.
How would you answer the question asked by D. Granin: "What can be done to warm mercy"
Daniel Granin. Photo: Valery Gende-Rote
"It happened in January 1987. It was seven o'clock in the evening, I was walking along the avenue, tired after my working day. It was a long day of intense writing and other duties, which I had quite a lot at that time. going to my wife, who was in the hospital. I thought about something. A free taxi passed by, I woke up, jerked, raising my hand to stop him, caught my foot on something and flew to the ground. With all my might, I hit my face on the corner of the curb "I felt a terrible pain in my shoulder, I barely got up, blood was gushing from my nose, my nose was broken, my jaw too, my arm hung. I could not move it, I realized that my shoulder was dislocated. With my left hand I tried to calm the blood, went up to the wall of the house, I leaned back in order to somehow come to my senses. Thoughts from the pain were confused, the handkerchief was covered in blood, I tried to calm it down and could not. Pinching my nose, I turned back, decided to get home.
I must have had a terrible view, an evening stream of people was moving towards me, some were coming home from work, others were walking. When they saw me, they smiled and shrugged their shoulders. Curiosity or disgust appeared on the faces of those they met. They probably thought I was drunk or had a fight with someone. There was a woman with a girl. The girl said something to her mother, but her mother explained something to her, shielded her. There was a couple, they were cheerfully surprised, started talking, discussing my appearance. The faces of everyone I met, as it turned out, were imprinted in my memory for a long time, I can reproduce them all even now. Ordinary passers-by, probably nice, sweet in everyday life, I remember them because at that terrible moment for me, each of them had an expression of complete alienation, unwillingness to approach, disgust, coldness, at best - curiosity, but nothing more. No one showed any sympathy. No one has anxiety, no one has taken a step forward, no one has asked...
I understood that if I fell, no one would pick me up, no one would help me. I was in the desert, in the center of the city, crowded with people, among my St. Petersburg people, fellow countrymen, with whom I had lived all my life. A city where I was well known. And so, staggering, holding on to the walls of houses, sometimes stopping to take a breath, because I felt that my consciousness was cloudy, I went to my house, got up with difficulty, opened the door, but there was no one at home. I called the neighbors and lay down on the floor, already poorly understanding what was going on ... An ambulance arrived, the neighbors helped carry me out, put me in an ambulance ... Ordinary city Hospital, poor, neglected, overcrowded. Usually nice, good doctors work in such hospitals. They corrected my dislocation, put a plaster cast on me, made injections, bandaged me, straightened my nose and put me in the ward. The next day I came to my senses a little and began to think: what happened? ..
In the end, nothing special, an ordinary everyday case: a person fell, crashed, got home, called medical care sent him to the hospital. But I couldn't bring myself to. The psychological trauma was stronger than the physical trauma. I could not comprehend why my soul hurt so much. If at least one of those who were walking towards me - and there were several dozen passers-by - stopped, helped - everything would become normal, but not one ... If I went up to any of them and said that I was a writer Granin, help me, they would undoubtedly take me by the arm, take me home, and help me.
But I was an ordinary passer-by with whom something happened, even if he walks covered in blood, staggering, barely standing on his feet, he is indifferent to everyone. What if it's drunk? Why interfere. I wondered: what happened to our people? I know them, before in this city they were not like that. I remember the war, a time when mutual assistance between people was an almost inviolable law, how we helped at the front, when the other was bad, they dragged the wounded; the time when it was necessary to share bread and ammunition, to replace each other in the trenches. I remembered the blockade of Leningrad, about which I collected materials for the "Blockade Book", as the blockade survivors told amazing cases mutual assistance.
In 1942, in the winter, a woman was walking down the street, fell, which means that she would no longer be able to get up, she would freeze. A passer-by, the same goner, the same dystrophic as she is, lifts her up and, leaning his shoulder, leads her to her house, climbs the stairs with her, melts the stove, gives her boiling water to drink, saves her life. I have recorded many such stories of saved people. A man, exhausted from hunger, sits down somewhere, and an unknown person shares a piece of bread with him. Stories about neighbors who helped each other, brought firewood, brought water. The majority of Leningraders in those unheard-of conditions, dying of hunger, did not allow themselves to dehumanize.
There are a great many of these stories, they made up big book. Such was the law of blockade life: you must help another person, because tomorrow it could happen to you too. It was not the result of propaganda or agitation, no one talked about it, it was a natural feeling of people in distress. My co-author Ales Adamovich and I asked the blockade survivors the same question: why did you survive? How could you, on that lethal ration of 125-150 grams of bread, half made of ersatz, fillers like cellulose, when they didn’t give anything else, and there were frosts, continuous air raids, shelling, bombing, how could you survive in these deadly conditions?
If it’s really rude, why didn’t you die? Each had his own answer, his own story, there were more than two hundred of them, the most diverse, always surprising, dissimilar answers. Some for the first time, as it were, thought - really, why? These already elderly men and women peered inquisitively, with bewilderment, into their past, into that fierce winter of 1941-1942, during those more than two years of the Leningrad blockade, during which a million Leningraders died. Different stories had something in common, it loomed clearer and clearer and suddenly appeared before us important discovery: most often those who saved others were saved.
That is, those who stood in line for hours for a piece of bread for their loved ones, for children. Those who went to dismantle wooden buildings for firewood. Those who walked, or rather crawled, for water to the river, to the hole, and then for the snow, which melted on the stove. It would seem that they should have saved their strength, not expended calories, lie down, save every step. Meanwhile, violating all the laws of physiology and energy, those who did not spare themselves won. The wife who gave part of her ration to her husband, the mother who, having nothing to feed her baby, cut her vein and let the baby suck her blood.
Of course, the rescuers also died. But, in any case, they remained human beings, and the feeling of love and compassion prolonged their lives. The doctors we contacted could not explain this phenomenon to us. Those who saved others survived - this amazing moral rule was confirmed by more and more evidence. People did not know about it, they acted, obeying the calls of love and compassion. Extreme conditions blockades, when the totalitarian oppression weakened, moved away, helped to release the natural feeling of mercy. What happened to us during these years of a peaceful well-fed life? Why now, when it is warm, when we live incomparably better, I thought, when we are dressed and there is no war, no blockade, why are we passing by? And I asked myself: would I come up? Or am I thinking about it now only because I stumbled upon this cold indifference of people to their trouble?
One night, when I could not sleep in this hospital, my shoulder was still very sore, I went for a walk along the corridor. The hospital was overcrowded, especially the women's department, there were not enough places, there were beds in the corridor. The patients were asleep, but a soft groan was heard from one of the beds. I came closer, I saw the old gray-haired woman with loose hair. I asked if I should call my sister. She replied, “No need. You'd better sit next to me." I sat down. She slowly, with difficulty, began to talk about herself. She was 75 years old, her daughter lived on Far East, her husband died in the war, she herself worked at a garment factory and sang in the choir. And once she was in prison for beating the director of the factory ... Suddenly she said to me: “You know, I probably won’t live to see the morning. I will die soon. Don't leave me."
I say that I will call the doctor now, she answers: “No, no, this is not necessary, this will not help, they cannot do anything. Just don't leave." She took my hand, closed her eyes, as if she had calmed down, then there was an intermittent sigh, she opened her eyes, almost smiled at me, her eyes stopped, and I felt - I can’t even explain why, I always felt this moment both in the war and in the hospital - the soul flies away. I held her hand, which gradually hardened, cooled down. I called the duty doctor. Yes, she really died.
I thought then how terrible and hard it was for a person, this woman, to die alone, in a hospital bed, at night, when there was no one to say the last word and no one to listen to. After all, you need so little, just something - for someone to hold your hand, for someone to be near. She did not bequeath anything, she did not ask, there were no parting words, it was an ordinary conversation, but still she was, as it were, seen off. People often feel the nearness of death. I remember this from the war, from the blockade. Yes, even in civilian life.
We have completely eliminated the institution of communion, when a priest comes, when a person is being prepared for death, when he says goodbye to his neighbors. People die in complete abandonment, there is no one to tell the last word say goodbye to the world you're in
lived. It's cruel. And then the completely forgotten word “mercy” came back to me. ancient Russian concept, the meaning of which is difficult even to express, so much is included in it. This is a kind heart, that is, that sympathy, cordiality, the innermost disposition of one person to another in moments of misfortune, disaster, grief, loneliness, illness, when a person most of all needs complicity, sympathy, when the feeling of loneliness, his uselessness is unbearable for a person.
The word "mercy" was once extremely common in Russia. There were sisters of mercy who worked in hospitals, that is, those hospital sisters who are now simply called medical sisters used to be called sisters of mercy. There were Relief Societies. I did not know the history of mercy in Russia. I only knew that the word had disappeared from the lexicon. Because the very concept of mercy has disappeared. Why did it disappear? How did it happen? And what appeared instead?.. But how can we live without the concept of mercy?..
These thoughts haunted me. And one day, after putting aside my work on the novel, I sat down to write an article about Mercy. Just like that, for myself, to sort out this problem. I wrote that this word, as well as the concept included in it, was not just forgotten, but forcibly withdrawn from circulation. He was uprooted. I remembered that in Leningrad there used to be Mercy Street, which was later renamed, it became known as Tekstilshchikov Street. I tried to trace how, over the course of our long socialist life, both the terminology and the content of this feeling were withdrawn.
In 1937, during the rampant repressions, many people wanted to somehow help their relatives and friends who were arrested and exiled, to help their families - wives and children. Often both husband and wife were arrested at the same time, leaving their little children all alone. Their relatives and friends tried to take them in, but this was not allowed, and the children were sent to shelters. They were not allowed to send parcels and parcels to the camps, write letters to those arrested. Any form of help from outsiders was seen as aiding the enemies of the people. There were rallies at which they welcomed death penalty"enemies of the people". Applauded, voted for the death penalty, some forced, others willingly. There were more and more enemies of the people. Arrested in every institution, at all enterprises. The account went to hundreds of thousands, then to millions. Those who tried to protect the innocently convicted were also subjected to repression. People were forced to testify against their neighbors and colleagues, to slander them, to testify about their anti-Soviet sentiments. If someone, out of pity, out of a sense of justice, refused to lie, he himself could be punished.
Fear, general fear, fueled by mass executions, took possession of people, reigned in both the village and the city. Fear drowned out feelings of pity. Fear took possession of the human psyche and further controlled all his actions, words, his attitude towards people. Mercy was turned into an outdated concept characteristic of bourgeois society. The false feeling with which the rich, the bourgeois fool the brains of the proletariat. Like any non-class concept, it serves the ruling elite in order to smooth out antagonistic contradictions... And so on.
The Soviet man has no reason to be unhappy. Grief, despondency are not characteristic of a Soviet person. We are building a bright future, the most advanced society, etc. But I was haunted by Pushkin's words in the poem "Monument".
And for a long time I will be kind to the people,
That I aroused good feelings with lyre,
That in my cruel age I glorified freedom
And he called for mercy on the fallen.
As the first duty of the poet, Pushkin bequeathed to awaken good feelings and mercy to the fallen. That's what particularly struck me. Not honesty, truthfulness, love for the motherland and other virtues inspired him, no, the poet must first of all serve goodness, freedom and mercy. And I must say that this covenant is Russian literature XIX performed for centuries. Compassion for the “humiliated and offended,” to use the expression of Dostoevsky, passed through all the work of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky. And behind them, the giants, were Leskov, Bunin, Korolenko, Leonid Andreev, Kuprin and others.
Tolstoy's story "Polikushka" about the wretched, unfortunate, Gogol's "Overcoat", "The Blind Musician" Korolenko, Gorky's play "At the Bottom", Chekhov's plays - no matter how much you name, will be incomplete. The humanism of Russian literature became its distinguishing feature, its strength, and secured a special position for it among the reading people. Russian literature has done a lot to instill sympathy in the souls for those offended by fate, for the poor, the lonely, for those who are considered inferior, who are considered to be the dregs of society. Tramps, prostitutes, blessed, beggars, criminals - for Russian literature there were no outcasts.
This sacred fire corresponded to the customs of the people, the national character. I remember, as a child, in our Novgorod region, in the huts, one could see a wooden tray going down through the wall outward. When someone, invisible from the inside, knocks on such a tray, the owners put potatoes, a piece of bread, a pie down the tray, without seeing who it is. There was even a saying, which we, the children, explained: "So that the beggar is not ashamed, and the owner is not proud." Anonymous help testified to the culture of people's mercy. Beggars, wanderers, fire victims knocked. The village fed its fool, did not let him starve, freeze. Mercy had its own rules in all, the most remote corners of Russia.
I remembered my father. When I was quite small and we were walking down the street, my father would give me a penny or three copper kopecks at the sight of a beggar, and I had to come up to put them in my hat or give them in my outstretched hand. He taught me that one should not pass indifferently past a beggar, a begging person. And so it was in all families. After the revolution, this feeling became unacceptable for the ideological education, or rather, the ideological indoctrination to which the people were subjected. He was raised in hatred. "Death to capital!", "Down with the bourgeoisie!", "Let's eradicate the kulaks as a class!", "If the enemy does not surrender, they will destroy him!". In all the slogans and appeals, from all the posters, it screamed: “No mercy!”, “Down with!”, “Death!”.
There was an upbringing of class hatred towards the exploiters. And it was precisely hatred, although, it would seem, one could cultivate sympathy for the exploited. There was a social system of opposition of socialism to capitalism. Within the framework of this system, it would seem that love and sympathy for the oppressed masses could be born. But hatred was brought up, mainly and above all, it was more necessary, it corresponded to the tasks of the totalitarian system. Naturally, hatred excludes mercy, excludes sympathy.
During the liquidation of the kulaks, when hundreds of thousands of the most industrious, conscientious peasants and peasant families were exiled, all assistance to them was forbidden. Children abandoned their parents - this was encouraged; it was impossible to provide indulgence to the families of the convicted and exiled, they were punished for this. They were expelled from the party, the Komsomol, they were not allowed to enter institutes, to hold responsible positions. Art was forced to take part in the genocide of mercy. Fiction, can be considered, has changed the precepts of Pushkin. Among her heroes, unfortunate people disappeared, illnesses, despair, poverty, heroes that aroused pity, unadapted to life disappeared.
This was the requirement of ideology, and it became more and more rigorous over the years. Censorship carefully removed from the stage, from the screens, from poetry everything that did not correspond to the praise of the socialist way of life of the happiest, most vigorous people, confident in their rightness and their future. No orphans, wretched, blind, weak-minded, nothing mournful. Among the leading artists in those years there was an opinion that totalitarianism must be fought with its own methods, it is useless to appeal to mercy. Struggle - this is what moral problems raged around in the Brezhnev era. The fight against the cult of personality for the rule of law, with the consequences of Stalinism. A legal struggle, an ideological struggle, a struggle, a struggle... Dissidents and dissidents perished in this struggle, both the right and the left became embittered. What kind of mercy could there be if entire nations were sent into exile, regardless of any merit; women, children, old people - everyone was herded into trains and driven to the steppe, to Siberia, to Central Asia. During the war they were expelled Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans, Ingush, Kalmyks, Balkars. They were mercilessly removed from their historical homeland, and this was consecrated by the lofty goals of defending the homeland and the socialist system.
Man was not allowed to show mercy and cordiality. This concerned literally all aspects of everyday life, penetrated into the family and family relations. This also applies to the church. The Church was deprived of the right to mercy - its main function. After leaving the hospital, I began to see the people around me and our everyday life in a different way. I saw the terrible state not only of the city's hospitals, but also of nursing homes. How dirty it is, how badly they feed and mistreat the elderly. How difficult it is for disabled people to live ... I wrote about all this in my article. I gave it to the Literaturnaya Gazeta, and, having shortened it somewhat, the newspaper printed it. The article was called "Mercy". I did not expect that it would cause such an explosion of reader interest, so many responses. Literally within two or three weeks, the editors received hundreds, maybe thousands of letters (I did not count them). Most of them were encouraging, sympathetic to me, from people who were glad
and welcomed the return of the concept of "mercy" into our lives. I, as they say, hit the bull's-eye, the sore spot.
The problem has obviously come up. Mercy was perceived as one of the signs of perestroika, as a return to normal life. My attention was also attracted by opponents. What did they have? First of all, the assertion that the Soviet person does not need mercy, mercy is a bourgeois feeling or a religious feeling, in any case a feeling alien to our reality. It humiliates a person. Mercy is inherent capitalist society where there are poor and forgotten people who are outside of society and outside of its social understanding. I was called an anti-Leninist, a bourgeois humanist, an ideological saboteur, a pacifist. The authors argued that the feeling of mercy is a harmful relic.
To whom is mercy? To the enemies of the fatherland? To ideological enemies? And the Soviet person does not need mercy, but care for him. “The author writes about the poor. But where did he see beggars? The socialist society delivered the Soviet people from poverty, we cannot have beggars, there is work for everyone. And if we have lonely, unhappy people, there are appropriate institutions for them, in which people are provided for. Mercy humiliates the Soviet man. That was the softest criticism addressed to me. There were, of course, even more malicious and crude accusations of complicity with enemies, that an offensive was beginning, a diversion of bourgeois ideology. In one collective letter, I was called an "agent of influence."
I do not want to quote here either letters or extracts from my article. After all, this is just a newspaper article, it is attached to its time, and it is hardly possible to quote from it the impression that it caused in that year, 1987. Discussions began. Republican and regional newspapers reprinted the article. Discussed at the enterprises. The matter did not end there. The fate of the newspaper speech was continued, and it determined a lot for me for several years ... "
