A Tale of Farewell to the Mother
Valentin Grigoryevich Rasputin is a wonderful contemporary writer. His pen belongs to works well known to readers: “Money for Mary” (1967), “The Last Term” (1970), “Live and Remember” (1975), “Farewell to Mother” (1976) and others. In the story “Farewell to the Mother,” the writer writes about a “small” homeland, without which there can not be a real person.
In the book “What’s in the word, what’s the word?” Rasputin explains this concept: “Small” homeland gives us much more than we are able to realize. I believe that in my writings as well she played an important role. “The story” Farewell to Mother “is a cry of the soul about ruined, ravaged and flooded villages, people forcibly evicted from their homes, and the great significance of traditions in human life The bearer of centuries-old traditions sees Rasputin as her heroine Daria, who can not and does
In this hut there lived also the parents of her parents, here she spent happy years of marriage and motherhood, here and grief mooed during the war. And now we must quit and go “to the mainland.” Old women living on Matera compare themselves with old trees, which suddenly decided to change. “Who is transplanting the old tree?”, “All of us, the girl, are transplanted, not just you.” Realizing the inevitability of parting, Daria, leaving his native hut, washes and dresses her as a dead man before the burial. “It was always considered a holiday to whitewash the hut, but now she had to cook the hut not for the holiday, no.
Without washing, not having dressed in all the best that only he has, the deceased is not put in a coffin – as is customary. And how can you give to death your own hut, from which you carried your father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, in which she herself lived all her life without small, refusing her the same
Darya is struck, how could a man burn his house: a stone should be used instead of a heart. And it seems to me that Petrukhi does not have a stone, there is only one void inside, which he has nothing to fill, so he fights with the defenseless old people, the village and the cemetery. The writer is horrified, and together with him we are the evil that is created under the guise of rationality and legality. But nature is not as defenseless as it might seem at first glance. She cruelly avenges people who destroy her. Proudly and majestically there is a larch that does not yield to an ax, nor a fire, nor a saw. He will leave only together with the land that gave birth to him so mighty and beautiful. The last pages of the story are symbolic: people have lost courage either in the fog, or in life, do not know what they need and where the right path is. So who gave them the right to dispose of the great nature, if, in their lives can not understand?
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