Summary “Zone”
Corporal Petrov, nicknamed Fidel – an illiterate man with a broken psyche, he drank with catastrophic speed. He severely wounded his comrade in the service of Alikhanov and does not feel the slightest remorse. In his prayer addressed to God, the hopelessness of the situation in which the hero fell and the cruelty of his self-exposure are shaking: “Dear God, I hope you see this mess. I hope you understood what it means to be vohra.” Make sure I do not get drunk completely ” . Fidel says of his colleagues: “We have an unparalleled audience.” There are scoundrels and hooligans. “
On the eve of New Year in the barracks of the Chekists there is an ugly booze. After that, the main character of the cycle, Boris Alikhanov, remembers how in childhood and youth, violence constantly invaded his life. The hero Dovlatov – the author’s double has enough courage for a hard introspection. He admits to himself that the silent complicity in
People in the camp and at will do not differ from each other, they do the same things. Their presence on different sides of the barbed wire is due to pure chance. Dovlatov recreated a generalized picture of a society that lives under criminal laws. In the center of the narrative is a description of the village of Chebi, in which people released from prison settled who tried to stay near the camp, because they had forgotten how to live at large. The camp experience allowed Dovlatov to rethink the problem of the correlation between good and evil in man. The camp appears in the “Zone” as a spatio-temporal situation,
The character of human perception in the “Zone” cycle pointed to the predecessors of the writer: the reduction of a person to the level of biological existence was the subject of an image in Dostoevsky’s works (Crime and Punishment, The Possessed), Chekhov (The Duel), Platonov (The Pit, “Garbage Wind”), Solzhenitsyn (“One Day of Ivan Denisovich”), Grossman (“Life and Fate”), V. Shalamova (“Kolyma Stories”). Those conclusions, to which Dovlatov came, are in many respects similar to the generalizations of Shalamov. At the same time, the writer enters into a controversy with the author of the Kolyma Stories, believing that in the description of the camp life it is impossible to do without condensation of black tones. In it, in spite of everything, good and unselfishness persists. Dovlatov tells the love story of the teacher Isolda Schukina and the criminal Makeyev, who in his sixty years left to sit still fourteen. Their only meeting in front of a column of prisoners showed that these people kept faith in the sanctity of love.
The author’s double. which runs through all the stories-the head of the “Zone” cycle, forming into “a kind of diary”, reminds the hero of “Cavalry” I. Babel with his “chronicle of everyday atrocities.” The hero of the “Zone” supervisor Boris Alikhanov is an intellectual. Like Liutov, who did not manage to become “his own” for the fighters of the First Cavalry, “he was a stranger to everyone.” For prisoners, soldiers, officers, and free laborers. “Even guard dogs considered him a stranger.” A distracted and unsettling smile constantly wandered on his face. you can learn from it even in the taiga. ” Like the hero of the “Cavalry”, he falls into inhuman circumstances: he is surrounded by criminals and military guards, equally capable of any violence. In Babel, descriptions of the atrocities of the Poles during the Civil War alternated with episodes saying that the soldiers of the Cavalry Army showed no less cruelty: they robbed, killed and took revenge without sparing even relatives. Dovlatov’s cruelty, violence and lies reign on both sides of the barbed wire.
The hero of the “Zone” is rescued by a “defensive reaction”: “I felt better than I could have imagined.” I began to split personality, life turned into a plot.
Dovlatov disingenuous, calling the stories of “Zone” “chaotic notes”: the image of the main character turns them into the heads of the whole work. Genre “Zone” is genetically related to the genre of “Cavalry.” The works are close to the fact that in each of the stories of the cycle there is a new character, considered in the relationship with others and in the context of his era. Dovlatov has a whole system of images: Gustav Pahapil, pilot Mischuk, corporal Petrov, zek Kuptsov, deputy governor Khuriev, captain Pavel Egorov. The author created living characters, refusing to divide characters into “bad” and “good.” Lance-corporal Petrov, a coward and a nonentity, is opposed to Kuptsov, who has remained and is imprisoned a free person. Captain Egorov, “stupid and spiteful animal,”
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