- Essays
- On literature
- Sholokhov
- Life path of Grigory Melekhov
Blessed is he who visited this world in its fatal moments!
F. I. Tyutchev
Grigory Melekhov, the hero of Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novel “Quiet Don,” is one of a whole series of heroes of Russian literature, whose fate and character are largely determined by the turning point in which they happened to live. Pyotr Grinev, Taras Bulba, Hadji Murat, Pierre Bezukhov, Yuri Zhivago... The list goes on.
What is so interesting about the life path of Grigory Melekhov, a man caught in a steep historical mess, forced to find his own path, to be responsible for the life of his family at the moment when the fate of the country is being decided?
At the beginning of the novel, Gregory is depicted inside his small and seemingly unchanging world. The Tatarsky farm is one of thousands of Cossack farms on the Don. The rules and order of life in it have been established by traditions for centuries. Having boldly disrupted the flow of farm life with his sudden passion for Aksinya, Grigory still does not want to completely break away from this world. He refuses to go with her “to the mines, far away,” saying: “Well, where will I go from farming? I won’t move anywhere from the ground.”
News of the war of 1914 shakes the village, making domestic problems secondary and insignificant. The war seems to push Gregory into the big world, and the coming of 1917 completely drags him into the cycle of civil cataclysm. Time turns a simple Cossack Gregory into a fighter. War reveals to him a world of blood and death, betrayal and evil, meanness and cruelty - the inhuman underbelly of life, so different from the peaceful flow of the Quiet Don, full of dignity and tranquility. In this cycle, Gregory tries to preserve the moral foundations of his former life, to save the people dear to him. But friends become enemies, loved ones die, Gregory’s throwing from one camp to another in search of the “right” position leads to nothing.
Gregory has lost his place in this rebellious world and cannot find another. Sholokhov shows, using the example of Gregory’s fate, how easy it is to lose everything that a person, it would seem, did not particularly value. Once upon a time, Grigory himself broke ties with his home, leaving the farm with someone else’s wife. Family ties weighed heavily on him; they seemed to him like chains that fettered his freedom. Now, having gone through hell and death, he understands that he had nothing more sacred and dearer than these family ties, this family hearth.
Gregory’s entire path is a path of self-knowledge, a path of comprehending the true values of life, of acquiring true humanity. It is to this: to an understanding of the highest significance of man, peaceful life, peaceful work, love for his native land - and, according to Sholokhov, the “fatal moments” of the era should lead us, as they led Grigory Melekhov to his son Mishatka, the only thing left to him. him from a world destroyed by civil war.
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Grigory Melekhov is an ordinary Cossack guy. True, maybe too hot. In Gregory’s family, large and friendly, they sacredly honor the age-old Cossack traditions, work hard, and have fun. But already in the first pages of the novel, the character is distinguished from the bright Cossack environment. So Aksinya Astakhova immediately noticed the “black, affectionate guy.”
Or a seemingly everyday episode: while mowing, Melekhov accidentally killed a duckling with a scythe. “Gregory placed the slaughtered duckling in his palm. Yellow-brown, just hatched from an egg the other day. It contained a living warmth in the cannon. There is a pink bubble of blood on the flat open beak, the beads of the eyes are cunningly squinted, and there is a slight trembling of the still hot paws. Grigory looked with a sudden feeling of acute pity at the dead lump lying in his palm.”
Not one of the numerous characters in the novel is capable of such acute pity or responsiveness to the beauty of nature.
Nice, hard-working, cheerful Gregory immediately wins the hearts of readers: he is not afraid of people's gossip, almost openly, without hiding, he loves the beautiful Aksinya, the wife of the Cossack Stepan. He does not consider it shameful to become a farm laborer in order to preserve his love for Aksinya.
What sets him apart from many other Cossacks is his noble, pure attitude towards women. When the Cossacks committed a heinous act during the war - they raped a woman, Grigory alone becomes furious at this act. He was even tied up so that he would not prevent the Cossacks from committing a crime.
And at the same time, Gregory is a person who tends to hesitate. So, despite his great love for Aksinya, Grigory does not resist his parents and marries Natalya according to their will.
Grigory will also experience hesitation in war. He was both an unfinished “Bolshevik” and a fake White Guard, rushing in search of the truth between the Whites and the Reds.
Service in the army and the war that soon began tore Grigory away from his native kuren and abandoned him hundreds of kilometers from his home. And although he firmly cherishes the Cossack honor and deserves a reward, Gregory is not created for war. Longing for his native farm dried up Grigory’s heart. He feels a passionate desire to leave this hated world of violence and rush to his native kuren.
He painfully wants to know the truth, to find out whose side she is on: the whites or the reds? Having fallen under the influence of the Bolshevik Garanja, Grigory, like a sponge, absorbs new thoughts, new ideas. But few people know about his mental fluctuations; Gregory does not speak about them out loud. Only through internal monologues does the reader understand how the hero suffers. He begins to fight for the Reds, trying to sincerely believe in the truth of this fight.
But the murder of unarmed prisoners by the Reds pushes him away from them. And then this happens: Gregory’s kind, childishly pure soul pushes him away from both the Reds and the Whites. He says: “They are all the same! They are all a yoke on the neck of the Cossacks!”
Grigory Melekhov cannot calmly hear how the Reds who stopped at his kuren say vile, cynical things about his wife Natalya.
After long wars, vain exploits, and blood, this man understands that his only support remains his old love. “The only thing that remained for him in life was his passion for Aksinya that flared up with new and irrepressible force. She alone beckoned him to her, as she beckons a traveler on a chilling black night, the distant, quivering flame of a fire.”
The last attempt at happiness for Aksinya and Gregory (flight to Kuban) ends with the death of the heroine: “Like the steppe scorched by the popes, Gregory’s life became black. He lost everything that was dear to his heart. Only the children remained. But he himself still frantically clung to the ground, as if, in fact, his broken life was of some value to him and others.”
Gregory becomes wiser and begins to understand that the truth can be neither on the side of the Reds nor on the side of the Whites. Why? Yes, because the reds and whites are all about politics. And where there is a class struggle, blood is shed, people die, children remain orphans. Truth is peaceful work for the joy of man, family, children, family, love.
The little that Gregory dreamed about during sleepless nights came true. He stood at the gates of his home, holding his son in his arms. This was all he had left in life. “The author leaves the hero on the edge, the line between light and darkness, the black sun of the dead and the cold sun of the vast shining world.”
