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- Analysis of Rasputin's story The Last Deadline
Rasputin's story "The Deadline" is emotional and truthful. The moral problems of generations, attitudes towards family values, themes of conscience and honor, mercy and duty are very subtly depicted here. This story is about life and death.
The events in the work last only three days. These days are reserved for the dying old woman Anna to say goodbye to her children and rethink her life.
Anna, the main character of the story, is a simple Russian woman who loves her children very much and has lived her 80 years honestly. She is not afraid to die, but feeling her imminent departure, she wants to say goodbye to her children, seeing them one last time.
In Anna's internal monologues, her reflections on the time she has lived, lies the pure, majestic soul of a wise Russian woman. Anna forgives the children everything, even their departure before her death.
Most of the story is devoted to describing the images of Anna's children. They are all busy with their lives, rarely thinking about their mother. Son Mikhail, whom his mother lived to see, gathered them to say goodbye to her before her death. Anna's children all came except her beloved daughter Tatyana, who, due to her busy schedule, never showed up to say goodbye to her loved one. The children were sure that they would bury their mother and leave immediately, but it turned out that Anna lived for three more days. She felt better physically when she saw her children.
And the children were simply waiting for their mother to die so they could go back to their homes and families. During these three days, they argued among themselves, divided the inheritance, and their sons drank the vodka they bought for the funeral. And no one even thought of giving this time to mom, talking to her, feeling sorry for her, thanking her for everything she did for them. They no longer cared about their mother, they stupidly expected her death, and not because they did not love their mother, but simply because of their busyness and callousness of soul.
Anna's children became modern, their generation lost all connection with the village, and with this loss they lost all positive moral qualities. They are selfish and embittered and do not find time for their loved ones. Without waiting for their mother to die, they leave.
Anna is dying. In this prolonged departure from life, in describing the characters of the children, the author showed the moral problems of his contemporaries, the problems of selfishness, anger at everyone, envy, eternal busyness, which does not make it possible to be more attentive to relatives. The tragedy of children is that they themselves do not understand all this.
The title of the story “The Deadline” can be interpreted in different ways. Who is given this last term: a mother who is dying, or children, so that they understand all their shortcomings and honorably accompany their mother on her last journey. But the children never used this “last deadline.”
Analysis 2
In this work, the author, telling a simple story about an old woman who is about to die and wants to say goodbye to her five children, reflects on the death of the Russian village and the moral development of modern society.
Eighty-year-old Anna, who is about to say goodbye to her children before her death, is a bright representative of the old Russian hinterland, a bearer of patriarchal morals. During the course of the story, Rasputin shows that all of her children moved away from this worldview, although they moved in different directions.
Daughter Lucy personifies a pragmatic attitude to life. She, of course, came to say goodbye to her mother, but is only interested in the details of the upcoming funeral. In particular, without wasting any time, she immediately sews herself a dress for this ceremony.
At the same time, using the example of Lucy, who moved to the regional center, the writer shows a craving for roots, for the abandoned village life, which has not completely disappeared from the new townspeople. The sight of her native village awakens in Lucy warm memories of the old horse. However, all this is just nostalgia, her value system and attitude to life have changed.
The other daughter, Varvara, is presented as more sentimental. She expresses deep sorrow, but, being a person of little intelligence, begins to mourn her mother while she is still alive. Varvara did not move to the city, but her inner world also underwent changes under the influence of the trends of the times. The writer saw the root not so much in people changing their place of residence, but in internal changes.
Anna’s third daughter, Tatyana, whom her mother calls Tanchura as a child, does not come from Kyiv at all. This symbolizes a complete break between the old and new way of life. The work emphasizes that Tatyana was the most loving and it is her arrival that the mother wants to wait for. However, the influence of the new society is stronger than family feelings.
The sons of the dying Anna, Ilya and Mikhail, symbolize a new attitude towards life, shown through the scene of their joint drinking session. Despite the fact that Ilya lives in the city, he is constantly looking for something better and wants to get settled in life, and Mikhail is more careless and his native village is enough for him, their views are in many ways similar. The brothers are not hard workers, they are not passionate about any business, so they work only when necessary, carelessly. Of course, with such a life, each of them constantly accumulates a lot of negative emotions, which they relieve in one way - through drinking, which gives them psychological comfort at least for a while.
The death of old Anna symbolizes that the world is steadily changing, and the example of her children, according to Rasputin, should show that spiritually changes do not lead to the better.
Analysis of the story “The Deadline” by Rasputin V.G.
In the story, the catastrophe of death, or rather, its expectation, is softened: the old woman Anna really went through a lot, raised children, she dies in her home, she sees a circle of people close to her (except for her beloved daughter Tanchora, who mysteriously did not appear). And her death itself happened as if behind the scenes: the children did not wait for her and left before the death of their mother. The story as a whole sometimes does not look tragic at all.
Anna’s sons Mikhail and Ilya, having stocked up on vodka for the funeral, could not stand the “downtime”, the prolonged wait, and drank heavily. The daughters—the selfish Lyusya and the simple-minded Varvara—almost quarreled over their share at their mother’s bedside: It seems to Varvara that Lyusya did not care about her mother at all, but placed all the worries on her and her brother Mikhail. These are purely everyday problems, discord among one’s own.
By the way, the motive of the quarrel even at the grave brings the story together
V. Rasputin with A. Platonov’s story “The Third Son” (1938). Platonov’s six sons (“huge men ranging in age from twenty to forty years old”) gathered for their mother’s funeral, and after meeting and reminiscing about their childhood, they began a cheerful romp, imitating each other, and were overcome by the joy of the date. Platonov - also a Christian soul, even more strict, ascetic - sternly “shouted out” to the naughty children: one of them, the “third son,” returned to the darkness of the room where the coffin stood and fell silently (“his head hit like someone else’s) floor boards"), and others got dressed in the middle of the night, scattered around the yard and cried, “as if a mother was standing over everyone”...
Rasputin does not have such pressure on souls; his sadness is light and condescending to the weaknesses of children. Old woman Anna does not know how to judge children, hang over their souls, she, perhaps, does not even see their sins. Her behests are extremely simple, and she prepares for the meeting with the monastery of eternal life, like a hostess for a holiday: she said goodbye to her friend, the same old one, Mironikha, and taught her daughter Varvara how she should mourn her mother according to custom, to “weep.” The only mystery for her: why the kindest, gentle, loving daughter Tatyana (Tanchora) did not come. What's happened? Why didn’t the spiritual call seem to reach her?
Even more tragic, more ambivalent is the state of mind of his son Mikhail (his mother lived and dies in his house). On the one hand, he vaguely guesses about the depth of his mother’s feelings, insights, about her great role in his life: “Let’s say that our mother has long been of no use, but it was believed that her turn came first, then ours. It seemed to be blocking us, there was no need to be afraid... It seemed like he had come out into the open and could see you...” On the other hand, he is already scared for the current generation, for his children: whom he will protect, block, if he no longer feels the work ( it’s not the work that has started, but “just to blow off the day”), and hopelessly surrenders to vodka. Like entire families of others, “carried away by vodka,” living not in life, but in the degradation of pseudo-life: “Life is now completely different, everything, count it, has changed, and they, these changes, demanded supplements from a person... The body demanded rest. It’s not me who drinks, it’s him who drinks...”
Valentin Rasputin objectively captured a situation that was very dramatic for Russian people at the end of the 20th century: he had lost his support in the unshakable, as it seemed before, official ideology, prescribed morality, new forces, incomprehensible to him, were approaching him - the power of money, the stupid voluntarism of all kinds of perestroikas, breakdowns, “floods”, “fires” that illuminated the appearance of “non-humans”... How to resist, where to get strength, faith, to save yourself? Or beg for help from God, or introduce a “supplement” - in the form of vodka - into the body, like Mikhail, that is, slowly kill yourself?
Ilya and Mikhail get drunk
Ilya and Mikhail, having dragged the boat, cannot now decide what to do. Compared to the upcoming event, everything else seemed trivial, and they toiled, letting every minute pass through them. The sons get drunk with almost no snacks, huddled in the barn, snacking only on food that Ninka, Mikhail’s little daughter, carries for them. This circumstance provokes the legitimate anger of women, but shots of vodka give the two brothers a feeling of celebration. The mother is alive after all. They no longer understand, not paying attention to the girl collecting half-drunk and empty bottles, what thought they want to drown out this time. Perhaps fear from the knowledge that their parent will soon die. It is not like other fears; it is most terrible, since it comes from death itself, which, it seemed, had noticed them all in the face and would not forget them.
The work “The Deadline” continues. A summary of further events is as follows. Feeling bad the next day after drinking, the brothers get hungover again. Ilya and Mikhail do not know how to work. They never knew any other joy than from drinking. The common work happened in the village where everyone once lived together - inveterate, friendly, loud, with a discord of axes and saws. It was in the spring, during the firewood harvesting season. But now people are leaving for the city, the collective farm in the village is falling apart, and there is no one to raise and feed livestock.
Moral issues in V. Rasputin’s story “The Deadline”
Many works of modern Russian writers are based on moral and ethical problems. Indeed, despite social, political, and economic changes, the spiritual values of both the people as a whole and the individual individual must remain eternal. One of the contemporary writers who raises these themes in his works is V. Rasputin. He is the author of such famous works as “Money for Maria”, “Fire”, “Farewell to Matera”. But the writer calls the story “The Deadline” the most important of his books.
This work is based on a simple situation - at the bedside of a dying mother, brothers and sisters meet who have long left her in search of a better life. Having tuned into the mournful and solemn mood appropriate for the moment, they appear in the face of an old mother, living out her last days in the house of one of her sons, Mikhail. But you can’t plan the hour of death, and old woman Anna, contrary to all forecasts, is in no hurry to die. “Whether it happened by a miracle or not, no one can say, only when she saw her guys did the old woman begin to come to life.” Being on the edge, she either weakens or comes back to life. The adult children, who had prudently prepared both mourning clothes and a box of vodka for the wake, are discouraged. However, they are in no hurry to take advantage of the hours of delaying death that have fallen to them and communicate with their mother. The tension that shackled everyone in the first minutes of being next to the sick Anna gradually subsides. The solemnity of the moment is disrupted, conversations become free - about earnings, about mushrooms, about vodka. Ordinary life is being revived, revealing both the complexity of relationships and the difference of views. The story intertwines tragic and comic moments, the sublime, the solemn and the ordinary. The author deliberately refrains from commenting on what is happening, conveying only the course of events. And it is unlikely that this situation may require explanation. What about Anna, who is living her last days? Days of summing up, filled with reflections on the experience. Before the eyes of a dying woman passes her whole life with its joys and sufferings. Although did she have many joys? Unless this is something I remember from my youth: a warm steamy river after rain, darkened sand. “And it’s so good, so happy for her to live at this moment, to look at his beauty with her own eyes... that she feels dizzy and sweetly, excitedly aches in her chest.” Sins are also remembered, as in confession. And the most serious sin was that in times of famine she secretly milked her former cow, which, out of habit, wandered into the old yard. She milked what was left after the collective farm milking. But perhaps for yourself? She saved the guys. And so she lived: she worked, suffered unfair insults from her husband, gave birth, mourned her sons who died at the front, and saw off the surviving and grown children to distant lands. In a word, she lived the way millions of women of that time lived - she did what was necessary. She is not afraid of death, because she fulfilled her destiny, she did not live in vain.
You can’t help but be amazed at the skill of the writer who managed to so subtly reflect the experiences of an old woman.
The story “The Deadline” is a work that is ambiguous in its themes. The death of a mother becomes a moral test for her adult children. A test they failed. Callous and indifferent, they not only do not experience joy at the unexpected hope of their mother’s recovery, but they are also annoyed, as if she deceived them, violated plans, and wasted time. As a result of this frustration, quarrels arise. The sisters accuse Mikhail of not treating his mother well enough, taking out nervous tension on him, demonstrating superiority over his uneducated brother. And Mikhail gives his sisters and brother a merciless exam: “What,” he shouts, “maybe one of you will take her? Which of you loves your mother the most?” And no one accepted this challenge. And this betrayal has its roots - callousness, indifference, selfishness. For the sake of their own interests, people for whom the mother sacrificed her life abandoned what makes a person human - kindness, humanity, compassion, love. Using the example of one family, the writer revealed the features inherent in the entire society, reminding us that by betraying our loved ones, abandoning the ideals of goodness bequeathed to us by our ancestors, we, first of all, betray ourselves, our children, who are brought up on the example of moral degeneration.
