The civil battle, in my opinion, is the most brutal and bloody battle, because in it sometimes close people who once lived in one whole, one country, who believed in one God and adhered to certain ideals, are fighting. How does it happen that native people rise on different sides of the barricades and how do such wars end? We can trace it on the pages of the novel – the epic MA Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don.
In his novel the author tells us how the Cossacks lived freely on the Don: they worked on the ground, they were a reliable support for the Russian tsars, they fought for them and for the power. Their families lived by their labor, in prosperity and respect. The life of the Cossacks is interrupted by a revolution that is cheerful, joyful, full of labor and pleasant worries. And before people there was a problem of choice that was unknown before: whose side to take, who to believe – the red one, who promised equality in all, but who denied faith in the Lord God;
or white, those to whom their grandfathers and great-grandfathers served as faith and truth. But do you need this revolution and war? Knowing what sacrifices it would be necessary to bring, what difficulties to overcome, the people, probably, would have answered negatively. It seems to me that no revolutionary necessity justifies all the victims, broken lives, and destroyed families. And so, as Sholokhov announces, ” in a mortal fight, the brother goes to his brother, the son to his father. “Even Grigory Melekhov, the protagonist of the novel who had previously resisted bloodshed, easily solves another’s fate. Of course, the first murder of a man hurts him and painfully, makes many sleepless nights, but the battle makes him cruel. “I became terrible to myself… Look at the soul to me, and there is blackness, like in an empty well,” Grigory admits. “All, even more women, are brutal.” At least recall the scene when Daria Melekhova without thinking kills Kotlyarova, considering him a killer of his but not everyone thinks about the reason for the shedding of blood, what is the
meaning of the war, or is it really “driven to death by the rich?” Or, to defend the rights common to all, the meaning of which is not very clear to the people. can only see, that this battle becomes meaningless, because you can not fight for those who rob and kill, rape women and set fire to homes. And such cases were both from the side of the Whites and from the Reds. “They are all the same… they are all yokes on the neck of the Cossacks,” says the protagonist.
In my opinion, the main reason for the tragedy of the Russian people, which affected literally everyone in those days, Sholokhov sees in the dramatic transition from the old, centuries-old way of life, to a new order of life. There are two worlds: everything that was before an integral part of people’s life, the basis of their existence, suddenly collapses, and the new one must still be accepted and accustomed to it.
