Option 1
History and man. How are they related to each other? What is primary? Do historical events influence a person or, on the contrary, does a person create history? It would probably be correct to say that this influence is mutual. Some people become the initiators of historical events, others are forced to submit to the movement of history, becoming active participants or witnesses of what is happening. The further a person is from managing the process, the more sensitive is the influence of history on his life.
Wars are global events in the life of a country, making it impossible to be an outside observer. The epic novel by L.N. Tolstoy describes the era of the early 19th century. It was a time of major changes in public life. France had a huge influence on the mood in society, minds and morals. Napoleon, who came to power, was on everyone's lips. At the beginning of his reign, he caused conflicting rumors. Pierre Bezukhov was delighted with the young French emperor. He speaks of the greatness of his soul, his courage. It's 1812 and Napoleon is trying to take over Russia. Pierre's attitude towards the emperor changes to the diametrically opposite one. He is ready to kill Napoleon. The hero finds himself in the center of events. He visited the battlefield, bullets whistled around him, shells exploded. Once captured, he gets the opportunity to get to know the common people better. Tolstoy elevates Pierre above the other heroes. The attitude towards the people is a measure of the greatness of the human soul for a writer. Communication with the soldiers brought Pierre closer to understanding God. He makes a discovery: a person is poor while he is afraid of death. Suffering, in his opinion, helps to find oneself. Tolstoy gives his beloved hero a meeting with the folk philosopher Platon Karataev. He taught Pierre the simplicity and truth on which life rests. the war changed Pierre's inner world and changed his attitude towards life. The hero realized that his life is like the life of an individual person. It is significant only as a part of common life, as “part of the whole.” War is a grief for the whole country, but if not for it, Pierre would not have come to this wise understanding of the world.
Historical events influence not only the inner world of a person, they change his entire existence. The life of the hero of M. A. Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man” is divided into two halves: before the war and after. In his youth, Andrei Sokolov lived like most other people. He was an orphan, his parents died of hunger. Sokolov went through the Civil War, married a good girl. The children were born. He got to work on the truck. The house was built, but then the Great Patriotic War broke out. Sokolov was captured, but survived, but his family died. After the war, I could not return to my hometown and went to Uryupinsk to visit a friend. One day he saw a boy near a tea shop and became attached to him with his heart. The war orphaned them both and deprived them of their family. Sholokhov shows that during the war years Sokolov’s heart did not harden. He felt sorry for the boy and said that he was his missing father. The author compares father and son with two grains of sand that a military hurricane carried to foreign lands. From Sokolov, the war took away everything that was dear to him. He had to start life from scratch.
These two examples talk about the impact of war on human life. Tolstoy's hero begins to look at life in a new way, and for Sholokhov's hero his whole life begins anew.
To summarize, we can say that historical events do not pass without leaving a trace. They have a great influence on a person’s fate, regardless of his social status. What it will be depends on the person himself, his actions, thoughts, mental organization.
Essay “Man and History”
But everything that happened is not forgotten, not sewn - covered in the world. One lie is to our loss And only the truth is good enough. A. Tvardovsky Recently, we have been turning to our history more and more often, and this interest is easily explained, because not so long ago the “Iron Curtain” of censorship was removed from our literature, and we finally found the long-awaited truth. It was a terrible truth, the truth about countless repressions that claimed millions of lives, about shameful trials, about the dungeons of the NKVD, where they extracted the necessary testimony from people by any means, about prisons and camps. It was this truth that we learned from the pages of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, Yuri Dombrovsky and Georgy Vladimov. These are the writers whose biography was connected with the Gulag - the monstrous creation of the System. For many of us, Solzhenitsyn began with the Gulag Archipelago. This book is a study of the most terrible times for our country - the times of Stalinist repressions. We can trace all the stages of the formation of the Gulag: arrests and executions by the Cheka, the creation of concentration camps, open trials. We will learn how the “processing technology” of prisoners developed during the stages in prisons and camps, how the repressive apparatus was improved. But if “The Gulag Archipelago” is a documentary study that shocks us with accurate statistics and terrifying details, then his story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” impresses with its artistic depth. Before us are descriptions of one day of one prisoner from waking up to lights out. It’s as if we are plunging into camp life, when all human values seem to be turned upside down in our consciousness and the main thing becomes only the desire to survive, to survive at any cost: whether by earning extra money, by “growing up” on extra rations, by “greasing up” to the authorities, and the like. Yes, Shukhov retained a spark of humanity in himself, but how many of his comrades this System broke, deprived them of human dignity! In another work of Solzhenitsyn - the novel “In the First Circle” - the author’s focus is on the fate of an “unbroken” person. The main character, diplomat Innokenty Volodin, reveals an important state secret of the USSR to the Canadian embassy. What made him take such a step? He occupied an excellent position, a brilliant career awaited him, but over time, Volodin feels fed up with endless lies. While sorting through his mother’s archives, Volodin discovers a completely different Russia. The hero begins to understand that his country has been cruelly deceived. That's why he calls the foreign embassy. The recording of Volodin’s telephone conversation ends up in the special institute of the MGB - the “first circle” of the Gulag, popularly called the “sharashka”. Prisoners specially selected from all the islands of the Gulag work here. Life in the “sharashka” is undoubtedly better than in the camp, but each of those arrested is still haunted by the threat of being sent to a prison camp and receiving a second sentence. These prisoners also have no rights, but these people have the opportunity to do the work they love and reflect on the imperfections of the world. Each of the prisoners, be it the convinced communist Lev Rubin, the philosopher Sologdin, the thinker Gleb Nerzhin, does not know real life, fenced off from it by a concrete fence. Reading the novel, you never cease to be amazed at how cheap our lives are. The life of Volodin, who was thrown behind bars, the life of Nerzhin, who refused to work for the State Security Service and was sent to a camp, the life of many others. It is precisely this fragility of human life, its insignificance in the overall System that Varlam Shalamov shows us in his tragic book “Kalym Stories”. A person in a camp, according to Shalamov, changes radically; many concepts inherent in normal people atrophy: love, a sense of duty, conscience; even the vital reflex is completely lost. Let us recall, for example, the story “Single Standstill,” when the hero, on the eve of his death, regrets not the lost life, but the uneaten ration of bread. Shalamov shows how the camp breaks the human personality, but the author does this not as if from the outside, but tragically experiencing everything together with his heroes. It is known that such stories as “To the Exhibition” and “The Snake Charmer” have a clearly autobiographical background. There are no rules or regulations in the camp world. They have been abolished because the main means of the System are violence and fear. Not everyone succeeds in getting out from under their influence. And yet they are there - Personalities: Ivan Shukhov, Major Pugachev (from the story by Varlam Shalamov “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”), Georgy Zybin (from the novel by Yuri Dombrovsky “The Faculty of Unnecessary Things”). They could not be broken, and this inspired and continues to instill in readers faith in victory over evil. Rasul Gamzatov once wrote: “If you shoot at your past with a pistol, the future will shoot at you with a cannon.” These words are worth remembering for us today, because only awareness of our past will help us in spiritual revival
Option 2
Each person has the lot to live in a certain era. Sometimes you think about how life would have turned out if you had been born fifty or a hundred years earlier. Who would you be, what would you be? The character of a person, his spiritual development largely depends on the historical events that he witnesses.
The hero of L. N. Tolstoy's epic novel, Andrei Bolkonsky, lives in the early 19th century. He is young, full of hope, dreams of fame. He is fascinated by the fate of Napoleon. He goes to war to find his Toulon. He is given this opportunity. During the battle of Austerlitz, the soldiers panic and flee from the battlefield. Bolkonsky picks up the banner of the killed standard-bearer and rushes forward, dragging the soldiers with him. It would seem that this is her moment of glory. At this moment, the prince is overtaken by an enemy bullet, and he falls unconscious. When Bolkonsky comes to his senses, the first thing he sees is the high, endless sky. He understands the insignificance of his aspirations. He sees how small Napoleon is compared to this sky. Prince Andrei returned from the war a changed man. He still has a lot to understand, but this military campaign did not pass without a trace for him. She became the first step on Bolkonsky’s path to heaven. He did not yet understand what the meaning of life was, but he took the path of spiritual improvement. The author shares the thoughts and feelings of the hero. He shows how the man who went to war dies, and how a new prince Andrei is born, striving not for glory, but for God.
The hero of B. Pasternak’s novel, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, follows a similar path of spiritual rebirth. He was born a hundred years after Prince Andrei. The beginning of the next century again shakes Russia with a series of cataclysms. The revolution of 1917 plays a decisive role in the fate of Zhivago. At first he accepts her enthusiastically. The hero sees something “evangelical” in her, and he is overcome by a feeling of liberation. Then it turns out that the joy was premature. The revolution moved from beautiful slogans to violence. Dictators gain power, but they recognize neither freedom nor equality. Pasternak makes it clear that in creating the image of Doctor Zhivago, it is not so much the events that are important, but the effect they have on his spiritual development. The life of the hero and his loved ones is destroyed by the elements of the revolution. Revolutionary events came into conflict with life. The idea of the living is opposed to the inanimate, artificial. The hero's surname comes from an adjective in the genitive case, which is taken from the church text “son of the living god.” His life from the very beginning is connected with God, thanks to his uncle the priest. Zhivago remains true to his ideals. He is not an outside observer, but does not join either the Reds or the Whites. As a doctor, he saves both. He prays for the salvation of their souls. The highest values for him are love, nature, poetry and faith in God. He dies, but finds immortality in poetry.
The heroes of these two works represent the elite of society. They are not passive observers of historical events. By participating in them, they understand the futility of their efforts. A person may or may not accept the course of events in his soul, but it is impossible to change or stop history. Everything flows, everything changes, only God is eternal. Such thoughts come to the heroes of two works written a hundred years apart.
To summarize what has been said, we can conclude that global historical events have a degenerative effect on the inner world of a person. They trigger a certain mechanism in the soul that leads to comprehension of oneself, one’s place in the world and an understanding of eternal life values.
