Moral problems in the works of V. Rasputin. Current and eternal problems in V. Rasputin's story "Farewell to Matera" "Farewell to Matera"

This work is based on a simple situation - at the bedside of a dying mother, brothers and sisters meet who have long left her in search of a better life. Having tuned into the mournful and solemn mood appropriate for the moment, they appear in the face of an old mother, living out her last days in the house of one of her sons, Mikhail. But you can’t plan the hour of death, and old woman Anna, contrary to all forecasts, is in no hurry to die.” Whether it was a miracle or not, no one can say, but when she saw her guys, the old woman began to come to life. Being on the edge, she either weakens or comes back to life. The adult children, who had prudently prepared both mourning clothes and a box of vodka for the wake, are discouraged. However, they are in no hurry to take advantage of the hours of delaying death that have fallen to them and communicate with their mother. The tension that shackled everyone in the first minutes of being next to the sick Anna gradually subsides. The solemnity of the moment is disrupted, conversations become free - about earnings, about mushrooms, about vodka. Ordinary life is being revived, revealing both the complexity of relationships and the difference of views. The story intertwines tragic and comic moments, the sublime, the solemn and the ordinary. The author deliberately refrains from commenting on what is happening, conveying only the course of events. And it is unlikely that this situation may require explanation. What about Anna, who is living her last days? Days of summing up, filled with reflections on the experience. Before the eyes of a dying woman passes her whole life with its joys and sufferings. Although did she have many joys? Unless this is something I remember from my youth: a warm steamy river after rain, darkened sand.” And it’s so good, so happy for her to live at this moment, to look at his beauty with her own eyes... that she feels dizzy and sweetly, excitedly aches in her chest. Sins are also remembered, as in confession. And the most serious sin is that in times of famine she quietly milked her former cow, which out of habit wandered into the old yard. She milked what was left after the collective farm milking. But perhaps for yourself? She saved the guys. That’s how she lived: she worked, suffered unfair insults from her husband, gave birth, mourned her sons who died at the front, and saw off the surviving and grown children to distant lands. In a word, she lived the way millions of women of that time lived - she did what was necessary. She is not afraid of death, because she fulfilled her destiny, she did not live in vain.

You can’t help but be amazed at the skill of the writer who managed to so subtly reflect the experiences of an old woman.

The Tale" is a work that is ambiguous in its themes. The death of a mother becomes a moral test for her adult children. A test they failed. Callous and indifferent, they not only do not experience joy at the unexpected hope of their mother’s recovery, but they are also annoyed, as if she deceived them, violated plans, and wasted time. As a result of this frustration, quarrels arise. The sisters accuse Mikhail of not treating his mother well enough, taking out nervous tension on him, demonstrating superiority over his uneducated brother. And Mikhail gives his sisters and brother a merciless exam: “What,” he shouts, “maybe one of you will take her?” Which of you loves your mother the most? And no one accepted this challenge. And this has its roots - callousness, indifference, selfishness. For the sake of their own interests, people for whom the mother sacrificed her life abandoned what makes a person human - kindness, humanity, compassion, love. Using the example of one family, the writer revealed the features inherent in the entire society, reminding us that by betraying our loved ones, abandoning the ideals of goodness bequeathed to us by our ancestors, we, first of all, betray ourselves, our children, who are brought up on the example of moral degeneration.

Rasputin, Essay

Nowadays, the problem of morality has become especially urgent, as the personality is disintegrating. In our society, there is a need for relationships between people, finally, about the meaning of life, which the heroes and heroines of V. Rasputin’s stories and short stories so tirelessly and so painfully comprehend. Now at every step we encounter the loss of true human qualities: conscience, duty, mercy, kindness. And in the works of V.G. Rasputin we find situations close to modern life, and they help us understand the complexity of this problem.

The works of V. Rasputin consist of “living thoughts”, and we must be able to understand them, if only because for us it is more important than for the writer himself, because the future of society and each individual depends on us.

In today's literature there are undoubted names, without which neither we nor our descendants can imagine it. One of these names is Valentin Grigorievich Rasputin. In 1974, in the Irkutsk newspaper “Soviet Youth,” Valentin Rasputin wrote: “I am sure that what makes a person a writer is his childhood, the ability at an early age to see and feel everything that then gives him the right to put pen to paper. Education, books, life experience This gift is nurtured and strengthened in the future, but it should be born in childhood.” And his own example best confirms the truth of these words, because V. Rasputin, like no one else, carried its moral values ​​throughout his life in his work.

V. Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937 in the Irkutsk region, in the village of Ust-Uda, located on the banks of the Angara River, three hundred kilometers from Irkutsk. And he grew up in these same places, in the village, with the beautiful melodious estate of Atalanka. We will not see this name in the writer’s works, but it is she, Atalanka, who will appear to us in “Farewell to Matera”, and in “The Last Term”, and in the story “Live and Remember”, where the consonance of Atamanovka is distantly but clearly discerned. Specific people will become literary heroes. Truly, as V. Hugo said, “the principles laid down in a person’s childhood are like letters carved on the bark of a young tree, growing, unfolding with him, constituting an integral part of him.” And these beginnings, in relation to Valentin Rasputin, are unthinkable without the influence of Siberia-taiga itself, the Angara (“I believe that in my writing it played an important role: once at an integral moment I went out to the Angara and was stunned - and from I was stupefied by the beauty that entered me, as well as by the conscious and material feeling of the Motherland that emerged from it"); without his native village, of which he was a part and which for the first time made him think about the relationships between people; without a pure, unclouded folk language.

His conscious childhood, that very “preschool and school period” that gives a person almost more to live than all the remaining years and decades, partially coincided with the war: the future writer came to the first grade of the Atalan elementary school in 1944. And although there were no battles here, life, like everywhere else in those years, was difficult. “For our generation, the bread of childhood was very difficult,” the writer noted decades later. But about those same years he will also say something more important and generalizing: “It was a time of extreme manifestation of human community, when people stood together against big and small troubles.”

The first story written by V. Rasputin was called “I forgot to ask Leshka...”. It was published in 1961 in the Angara almanac and then reprinted several times. It began as an essay after one of V. Rasputin’s regular trips to the timber industry enterprise. But, as we later learn from the writer himself, “the essay didn’t work out - it turned out to be a story. About what? About the sincerity of human feelings and the beauty of the soul.” It probably couldn’t have been otherwise - after all, it was a matter of life and death. At a logging site, a fallen pine tree accidentally hit a boy, Lyoshka. At first, the bruise seemed minor, but soon pain arose, and the bruised area - the stomach - turned black. Two friends decided to accompany Lyoshka to the hospital - fifty kilometers on foot. On the way, he became worse, he was delirious, and his friends saw that this was no longer a joke, they had no time for abstract conversations about communism, which they had been conducting before, because they realized, looking at the torment of their comrade, that “this is a game of hide and seek with death, when one is looking for death and there is not a single reliable place where one could hide. Or rather, there is such a place - this is a hospital, but it is far, still very far away."

Leshka died in the arms of his friends. Shock. Blatant injustice. And in the story, albeit still in its infancy, there is something that will later become integral in all of Rasputin’s works: nature, sensitively reacting to what is happening in the hero’s soul (“The river was sobbing nearby. The moon, widening its only eye, did not take its eyes off us . The stars blinked tearfully"); painful thoughts about justice, memory, fate ("I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to ask Leshka whether under communism they would know about those whose names are not inscribed on the buildings of factories and power plants, who have remained invisible forever. To me come what may, I wanted to know if under communism they would remember Leshka, who lived in the world for a little over seventeen years and built it for only two and a half months."

In Rasputin's stories, people with a mysterious, albeit simple-looking, inner world increasingly appear - people who talk to the reader, not leaving him indifferent to their fate, dreams, life. Barely outlined, their portraits in the story “They Come to the Sayans with Backpacks” are complemented by picturesque strokes in the guise of an old huntress who cannot and does not want to understand why there are wars on earth (“The song continues”); The theme of the unity of man and nature (“From sun to sun”), the theme of mutually enriching communication between people with each other, becomes deeper. (“Traces remain in the snow”). It is here that the images of Rasputin’s old women first appear - the tuning fork, key, core images of his further works.

This is the old Tofalar woman from the story “And Ten Graves in the Taiga,” who “had fourteen children, fourteen times she gave birth, fourteen times she paid for the torment with blood, she had fourteen children - her own, her own, small, big, boys and girls, boys and girls. Where are your fourteen children?. Two of them survived... two of them lie in the village cemetery... ten of them are scattered throughout the Sayan taiga, the animals stole their bones." Everyone has forgotten about them - how many years have passed; everything, but not her, not her mother; and so she remembers everyone, tries to evoke their voices and dissolve in eternity: after all, as long as someone keeps the deceased in their memory, the thin, ghostly thread connecting these different worlds together will not break.

As soon as her heart could bear those deaths! She remembers each one: this one, four years old, fell from a cliff before her eyes - how she screamed then! This twelve-year-old died at the shaman's yurt because there was no bread and salt; the girl froze on the ice; another one was crushed by a cedar during a thunderstorm...

All this happened a long time ago, back at the beginning of the century, “when all of Tofalaria lay in the arms of death.” The old woman sees that now everything is different, she has lived - maybe that’s why she lived because she “remained their mother, eternal mother, mother, mother,” and no one except her remembers them, and she was kept on earth this memory and the need to leave it behind, to extend it in time; That’s why she names her grandchildren after the names of her dead children, as if she is reviving them to a new life - to another, brighter one. After all, she is a Mother.

Such is the dying shaman from the story “Eh, Old Woman...”. She hasn’t been shamanizing for a long time; they love her because she knew how to work well with everyone else, hunted sable, herded deer. What torments her before her death? After all, she is not afraid to die, because “she fulfilled her human duty... her family continued and will continue; she was a reliable link in this chain, to which other links were attached.” But only this biological continuation is not enough for her; She no longer considers shamanism an occupation, but part of the culture and customs of the people, and therefore she is afraid that it will be forgotten, lost, if she does not convey at least its external signs to anyone. In her opinion, “a person who ends his family line is unhappy. But a person who stole his people’s ancient heritage and took it with him to the ground without telling anyone - what should we call this person?.”

I think that V. Rasputin correctly poses the question: “What to call such a person?” (A person who could take a piece of culture with him to the grave without transferring it into the hands of other people).

In this story, Rasputin raises a moral problem expressed in the attitude of this old woman to man and to the whole society. I think that before her death she had to pass on her gift to people so that it would continue to live, like other cultural assets.

The best work of the sixties is the story "Vasily and Vasilisa", from which a strong and clear thread was drawn to future stories. This story first appeared in the Literary Russia daily at the very beginning of 1967 and has since been reprinted in books.

In him, like in a drop of water, there was collected something that will not be repeated exactly later, but which we will nevertheless encounter more than once in V. Rasputin’s books: an old woman with a strong character, but with a big, merciful soul; nature, sensitively listening to changes in man.

V. Rasputin poses moral problems not only in his stories, but also in his stories. The story “The Last Term,” which V. Rasputin himself called the main one of his books, touched on many moral problems and exposed the vices of society. In the work, the author showed relationships within the family, raised the problem of respect for parents, which is very relevant in our time, revealed and showed the main wound of our time - alcoholism, and raised the question of conscience and honor, which affected every hero of the story.

The main character of the story is the old woman Anna, who lived with her son Mikhail, and was eighty years old. The only goal left in her life is to see all her children before death and go to the next world with a clear conscience. Anna had many children, and they all moved away, but fate wanted to bring them all together at a time when her mother was dying. Anna's children are typical representatives of modern society, busy people with a family and a job, but for some reason they remember their mother very rarely. Their mother suffered greatly and missed them, and when the time came to die, it was only for their sake that she stayed for a few more days in this world and would have lived as long as she wanted, if only they were nearby, if only she had someone to live for. And she, already with one foot in the next world, managed to find the strength to be reborn, to blossom, and all for the sake of her children. “Whether it happened by a miracle or not, no one can say, only when she saw her guys did the old woman begin to come to life.” What are they? And they solve their problems, and it seems that their mother does not really care, and if they are interested in her, it is only for the sake of appearances. And they all live only for decency. Don’t offend anyone, don’t scold anyone, don’t say too much - everything is for the sake of decency, so as not to be worse than others. Each of them, on difficult days for their mother, goes about their own business, and their mother’s condition worries them little. Mikhail and Ilya fell into drunkenness, Lyusya was walking, Varvara was solving her problems, and none of them thought of spending more time with their mother, talking to her, or just sitting next to her. All their care for their mother began and ended with “semolina porridge,” which they all rushed to cook. Everyone gave advice, criticized others, but no one did anything themselves. From the very first meeting of these people, arguments and swearing begin between them. Lyusya, as if nothing had happened, sat down to sew a dress, the men got drunk, and Varvara was even afraid to stay with her mother. And so day after day passed: constant arguments and swearing, insults against each other and drunkenness. This is how the children saw off their mother on her last journey, this is how they took care of her, this is how they took care of her and loved her. They made only one formality out of their mother’s illness. They did not understand the mother’s state of mind, did not understand her, they only saw that she was getting better, that they had a family and work, and that they needed to return home as soon as possible. They couldn't even say goodbye to their mother properly. Her children missed the “last deadline” to fix something, ask for forgiveness, just be together, because now they are unlikely to get together again.

In the story, V. Rasputin very well showed the relationships of the modern family and its shortcomings, which clearly manifest themselves at critical moments, revealed the moral problems of society, showed the callousness and selfishness of people, their loss of all respect and ordinary feelings of love for each other. They, dear people, are mired in anger and envy.

They care only about their interests, problems, only their own affairs. They don’t even find time for their loved ones. They didn’t find time for their mother, the dearest person.

V.G. Rasputin showed the impoverishment of morality of modern people and its consequences. The story "The Last Term", on which V. Rasputin began working in 1969, was first published in the magazine "Our Contemporary", in issues 7, 8 for 1970. She not only continued and developed the best traditions of Russian literature - primarily the traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky - but also imparted a new powerful impetus to the development of modern literature, giving it a high artistic and philosophical level. The story was immediately published as a book in several publishing houses, was translated into other languages, and published abroad - in Prague, Bucharest, Milan and other countries.

One of the best works of the seventies was the story “Live and Remember.” “Live and Remember” is an innovative, bold story - not only about the fate of the hero and heroine, but also about their correlation with the fate of the people at one of the dramatic moments in history. This story touches on both moral problems and problems of relationships between man and society.

So much has been written about this story by V. Rasputin, both in our country and abroad, as probably about no other work of his; it was published about forty times, including in the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR and in foreign languages. And in 1977 she was awarded the USSR State Prize. The strength of this work lies in the intrigue of the plot and the unusualness of the theme.

Yes, the story was highly appreciated, but not everyone immediately understood it correctly, they saw in it the accents that were put by the writer. Some domestic and foreign researchers have defined it as a work about a deserter, a man who escaped from the front and betrayed his comrades. But this is the result of a superficial reading. The author of the story himself emphasized more than once: “I wrote not only and least of all about the deserter, about whom, for some reason, everyone talks incessantly, but about a woman...”

The starting point from which Rasputin's heroes begin to live on the pages of the story is a simple natural life. They were ready to repeat and continue the movement begun before them, to complete the circle of immediate life.

“Nastyona and Andrey lived like everyone else, they didn’t think much about anything,” work, family, they really wanted children. But there was also a significant difference in the characters’ characters, associated with life circumstances. If Andrei Guskov grew up in a wealthy family: “The Guskovs kept two cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, the three of them lived in a big house,” did not know any grief since childhood, was used to thinking and caring only about himself, then Nastena experienced a lot: the death of her parents, hungry thirty-third year, life as a worker with my aunt.

That is why she “threw into marriage like into water, without any extra thought...”. Hard work: “Nastyona endured everything, managed to go to the collective farm and almost carried the household on her own,” “Nastyona endured: in the customs of a Russian woman, she arranges her life one day and endures everything that befalls her” - the main character traits of the heroine. Nastena and Andrey Guskov are the main characters of the story. By understanding them, one can understand the moral problems posed by V. Rasputin. They are manifested both in the woman’s tragedy and in the unjustified act of her husband. When reading the story, it is important to trace how in the “natural” Nastya, who finds herself in a tragic situation, a personality is born with a heightened sense of guilt before people, and in Guskov, the animal instinct of self-preservation suppresses everything human.

The story “Live and Remember” begins with the disappearance of an ax in the bathhouse. This detail immediately sets the emotional mood of the story, anticipates its dramatic intensity, and carries a distant reflection of the tragic ending. The ax is the weapon used to kill the calf. Unlike Guskov’s mother, who was angry with people and lacking even maternal instincts, Nastena immediately guessed who took the ax: “... suddenly Nastena’s heart skipped a beat: who would think of a stranger to look under the floorboard.” From this “suddenly” everything changed in her life.

It is very important that her instinct, instinct, and animal nature prompted her to guess about her husband’s return: “Nastyona sat down on a bench by the window and sensitively, like an animal, began to sniff the bath air... She was like in a dream, moving almost by touch and not feeling neither tension nor fatigue during the day, but she did everything exactly as she had planned... Nastya sat in complete darkness, barely making out the window, and felt in a daze like a little unfortunate animal.”

The meeting, which the heroine waited for three and a half years, imagining every day what it would be like, turned out to be “stealing and creepy from the very first minutes and from the very first words.” Psychologically, the author very accurately describes the woman’s state during her first meeting with Andrei: “Nastyona could hardly remember herself. Everything she said now, everything she saw and heard, happened in some kind of deep and dull stupor, when everyone dies and goes numb feelings, and when a person exists as if not his own, as if connected from the outside, an emergency life. She continued to sit, as in a dream, when you see yourself only from the outside and cannot control yourself, but only wait for what will happen next. All this the meeting turned out to be too unrealistic, powerless, dreamed of in a bad oblivion that will sink away with the first light.” Nastya, not yet understanding, not realizing it with her mind, felt like a criminal in front of people. She came on a date with her husband as if it were a crime. The beginning internal struggle, not yet realized by her, is due to the confrontation of two principles in her - the animal instinct ("little animal") and the moral one. Subsequently, the struggle of these two principles in each of Rasputin’s heroes takes them to different poles: Nastya approaches the highest group of Tolstoy’s heroes with a spiritual and moral principle, Andrei Guskov - to the lower.

Not yet realizing everything that happened, not yet knowing what way out she and Andrei will find, Nastena, completely unexpectedly for herself, signs up for a loan of two thousand: “Maybe she wanted to pay off her man with bonds... It seems that she wasn’t thinking about him at that time, but someone could have thought for her.” If in Guskov the animal nature breaks through from the subconscious during the war (“an animal, insatiable appetite” in the infirmary), then in Nastya, unconsciously, the voice of conscience speaks, the moral instinct.

Nastena lives for now only by feeling, pitying Andrei, close, dear, and at the same time feeling that he is a stranger, incomprehensible, not the one whom she accompanied to the front. She lives in the hope that over time everything will definitely end well, she just has to wait and be patient. She understands that Andrey alone cannot bear his guilt. “She’s beyond his strength. So now, should I give up on him?”

Now let's turn to Guskov. When the war began, “Andrei was taken in the very first days,” and “in three years of war, Guskov managed to fight in a ski battalion, and in a reconnaissance company, and in a howitzer battery.” He “adapted to the war - there was nothing else left for him. He didn’t get ahead of others, but he didn’t hide behind other people’s backs either. Among the intelligence officers, Guskov was considered a reliable comrade. He fought like everyone else - no better and no worse.”

The animal nature in Guskovo showed itself openly only once during the war: “... in the infirmary, he, deaf, was seized by a bestial, insatiable appetite.” After Guskov was wounded in the summer of 1944 and spent three months in a Novosibirsk hospital, he deserted, not receiving the leave he so hoped for. The author speaks openly about the reasons for the crime: “He was afraid to go to the front, but more than this fear was resentment and anger at everything that brought him back to the war, not allowing him to go home.”

The involuntary resentment towards everything that remained in place, from which he was torn and for which he had to fight, did not go away for a long time. And the more he looked, the more clearly and irreparably he noticed how calmly and indifferently the Angara flows towards him, how indifferently, without noticing him, they glide past the banks on which he spent all his years - glide, leaving for another life and for others people, to what will replace it. He was offended: why so soon?

Thus, the author himself identifies four feelings in Guskov: resentment, anger, loneliness and fear, and fear is far from the main reason for desertion. All this lies on the surface of the text, but in its depth there is something else that is revealed later, in the “mutual”, “prophetic” dream of Andrei and Nastya.

Rasputin’s heroes had a dream about how Nastena repeatedly came to Andrei on the front line during the night and called him home: “Why are you stuck here? I’m tortured there with the kids, but you don’t have enough grief. I’ll leave and toss and turn again, and again I'm tossing and turning, but you just can't understand: no and no. I want to give a hint, but I can't. You're angry with me, you're driving me away. But I don't remember how it was the last time. It's a dream, you can see what it's like. For two sides. One night, apparently, I both dreamed about it. Maybe my soul was visiting you. That’s why it all comes together.”

“The natural man” Guskov did not respond to the call of nature itself in the person of Nasten for two years and fought honestly, obeying moral laws - duty and conscience. And so, filled with resentment and anger at the “hospital authorities” who unfairly refused him leave (“Is this right, fair? He would only have one - a single day to be at home, to calm his soul - then he is again ready for anything”), Guskov finds himself at the mercy of natural instincts - self-preservation and procreation. Suppressing the voice of conscience and the sense of duty to people, to the Motherland, he goes home without permission. Guskov cannot resist this call of nature, which also reminds us of the holiness of man’s natural duty: “Let everything go into the ground now, even tomorrow, but if it’s true, if it remains after me... Well, my blood has gone on, it hasn’t ended, didn't dry up, didn't wither away, but I thought, I thought: the end of it all, the last one, ruined the family. And he will live, he will pull the thread further. That's how it happened, eh! How it happened- "Nastyona! You are my Mother of God!"

In the mutual dream of Rasputin’s heroes, two plans can be distinguished: the first is the call of nature. The complexity and non-obviousness of this is explained by the fact that the instinct of self-preservation (fear) declares itself loudly and is recognized by Guskov himself (by the end of the war, “the hope of surviving grew more and more, and fear set in more and more often”), and the instinct of procreation acts subconsciously, like a decree of fate. The second plan is prophetic, as a harbinger of the tragic ending of the story (“Still hoping for something, Nastena continued to inquire: “And never, never once did you see me with the child after that? Remember carefully.” - “No, never ").

“Keeping his eyes and ears sharp every minute,” returning home secretly, along wolf paths, at the very first meeting he declares to Nastya: “Here’s what I’ll tell you right away, Nastya. Not a single soul should know that I’m here. If you tell anyone - I'll kill. I'll kill - I have nothing to lose." He repeats the same thing during the last meeting: “But remember again: if you tell anyone that I was there, I’ll get it.

rasputin lesson french moral

The moral principle in Guskov (conscience, guilt, repentance) is completely supplanted by the bestial desire to survive at any cost, the main thing is to exist, even as a wolf, but to live. And now he has already learned to howl like a wolf

(“It will be useful to scare good people,” Guskov thought with malicious, vindictive pride).

The internal struggle in Guskovo - the struggle between the "wolf" and the "man" - is painful, but its outcome is predetermined. “Do you think it’s easy for me to hide here like a beast? Eh? Easy? When they are fighting there, when I am there too, and not here I have to be! I learned to howl like a wolf here!”

War leads to a tragic conflict between the social and the natural in man himself. War often cripples the souls of people who are weak in spirit, kills the humanity in them, awakening base instincts. Is the war turning Guskov, a good worker and soldier, who “among the intelligence officers was considered a reliable comrade,” into a “wolf,” into a forest beast? This transformation is painful. “All this is war, all of it,” he again began to make excuses and conjure. “The dead and the maimed were not enough for her, she also needed people like me. Where did she fall from? - on everyone at once? - a terrible, terrible punishment. And me, beckoning to the same place , in this heat, - not for a month, not for two - for years. Where could I get the urine to endure it longer? As long as I could, I stood strong, and not right away, I brought my usefulness. Why should I be compared with others, with sworn, who started with harm and ended with harm? Why are we destined for the same punishment? Why are we destined for the same punishment? It’s even easier for them, at least their souls don’t suffer, but here, when it’s still curled up, it becomes insensitive...

Guskov clearly understands that “fate has turned him into a dead end, from which there is no way out.” Anger at people and resentment for oneself demanded an outlet, a desire appeared to annoy those who live openly, without fear or hiding, and Guskov steals fish without extreme necessity, after sitting on a block of wood, rolls it out onto the road (“someone will have to clean up "), has difficulty coping with the “fierce desire” to set fire to the mill (“I really wanted to leave behind a fiery memory”). Finally, on the first of May, he brutally kills the calf with a blow to the head. Involuntarily, you begin to feel a feeling of pity for the bull, which “roared from resentment and fear... became exhausted and strained, strained by memory, understanding, instinct with everything that was in it. In this scene, in the form of a calf, nature itself confronts criminals, murderers and threatens them retribution.

If in Guskovo the struggle between the “wolf” and the “soul”, in which “everything has burned to the ground”, ends with the victory of the animal nature, then in Nastya the “soul” declares itself loudly. For the first time, the feeling of guilt before people, alienation from them, the realization that “he has no right to speak, cry, or sing with everyone” came to Nastya when the first front-line soldier, Maxim Vologzhin, returned to Atomanovka. From that moment on, the painful torment of conscience and the conscious feeling of guilt in front of people do not let go of Nastya either day or night. And the day when the whole village rejoiced, celebrating the end of the war, seemed to Nastya the last “when she could be with people.” Then she is left alone “in a hopeless, deaf emptiness,” “and from that moment Nastya seemed to be touched by her soul.”

Rasputin's heroine, accustomed to living with simple, understandable feelings, comes to realize the endless complexity of man. Nastya now constantly thinks about how to live, what to live for. She fully realizes “how shameful it is to live after everything that happened.” But Nastya, despite her readiness to go to hard labor with her husband, turns out to be powerless to save him, unable to convince him to come out and confess to people. Guskov knows too well: While the war is going on, according to the harsh laws of time, they will not forgive him, they will shoot him. And after the end of the war, it is already too late: the process of “brutality” in Guskov has become irreversible.

Hiding her deserter husband, Nastena realizes this as a crime against people: “The judgment is close, close - is it human, is it God’s, is it our own? - but it is close.

Nothing in this world is given for free." Nastya is ashamed to live, it hurts to live.

“Whatever I see, whatever I hear, it only hurts my heart.”

Nastena says: “It’s a shame... does anyone understand how shameful it is to live when someone else in your place could live better? How can you look people in the eyes after this? Even the child that Nastena is expecting cannot keep her in this life, because and “the child will be born into shame, from which he will not be separated for the rest of his life. And the parental sin will fall on him, a severe, heart-rending sin - where can he go with it? And he will not forgive, he will curse them - according to their deeds."

It is conscience that determines the moral core of the Russian national character. For the non-believer Nastya, as shown above, everything is determined by the voice of conscience; she has no strength left for further struggle to save not her husband, but her child, and she succumbs to the temptation to end everything at once and, thus, commits a crime against the unborn child .

Semyonovna was the first to suspect her, and upon learning that Nastena was expecting a child, her mother-in-law kicked her out of the house. But Nastena “wasn’t offended by Semyonovna - what’s there, really, to be offended? This was to be expected. And she wasn’t looking for justice, but at least a little bit of sympathy from her mother-in-law, her silent and guesswork that the child she had taken up arms against , is not a stranger to her. What can people count on then? "

And the people, themselves tired and exhausted by the war, did not spare Nastya.

“Now, when there was no point in hiding the belly, when everyone who was not too lazy poked their eyes at it and drank, like sweetness, its revealed secret.

No one, not a single person, not even Lisa Vologzhina, one of her own, encouraged:

they say, hold on, don’t bother talking, the child you give birth to is yours, not someone else’s child, you should take care of it, and people, give it time, will calm down. Why should she just complain about people? “She left them herself.” And when people started watching Nastya at night and “didn’t let her see Andrei, she was completely lost; fatigue turned into a desired, vengeful despair. She didn’t want anything anymore, didn’t hope for anything, an empty, disgusting heaviness settled in her soul. “Look, what did you intend,” she gloomily cursed herself and lost her thought. “It serves you right.”

In the story by V.G. Rasputin's "Live and Remember", like no other work, reflects moral problems: this is the problem of the relationship between husband and wife, man and society, and the ability of a person to behave in a critical situation. V. Rasputin's stories greatly help people understand and realize their problems, see their shortcomings, since the situations discussed in his books are very close to real life.

One of V. Rasputin's last works is also devoted to moral problems - this is the story "Women's Conversation", published in 1995 in the magazine "Moscow". In it, the writer showed the meeting of two generations - “granddaughters and grandmothers.”

Granddaughter Vika is a tall, plump girl of sixteen years old, but with a child’s mind: “her head lags behind,” as her grandmother says, “she asks questions where it’s time to live with the answer,” “if you say it, she’ll do it, if you don’t say it, she won’t guess.”

“Some kind of hidden girl, quiet”; in the city “I got in touch with the company, and with the company it would get in the way.” She dropped out of school and started disappearing from home.

And what had to happen happened: Vika became pregnant and had an abortion. Now she was sent to her grandmother “for re-education,” “until she came to her senses.” To better understand the heroine, you need to give her a speech characteristic. Vika is “kind of hidden,” says the author himself, and this is noticeable in her speech. She speaks little, her sentences are short and decisive. He often speaks reluctantly. There are many modern words in her speech: a leader is a person who is not dependent on anyone; chastity - strict morality, purity, virginity; rhyme - consonance of poetic lines; purposefulness - having a clear goal. But she and her grandmother understand these words differently.

Grandmother says about modern life: “A man has been driven out into some cold, windy expanse, and an unknown force is driving him, driving him, not allowing him to stop.” And now this modern girl finds herself in a new environment, in a remote village. The village is apparently small. The houses have stove heating, grandma doesn’t have a TV, and you have to go to a well to get water.

There is not always electricity in the house, although the Bratsk hydroelectric power station is nearby. People go to bed early. Vika was sent here because they wanted to “tear” her away from the company. Maybe they hoped that grandma would be able to make Vika look at life in a new way. So far, no one has been able to find the keys to Vicky’s soul. And there was no time for others to do this in the general rush.

We learn about grandmother Natalya that she lived a long, difficult, but happy life. At the age of eighteen, she “altered her old dress into a new one” and got married unmarried in a hungry year. Grandmother Natalya believes that she was lucky with her husband: Nikolai is a strong man, it was easy for her to live with him: “You know, he will be on the table, in the yard, and a support for the children.” Nikolai loved his wife. He dies in the war, ordering his front-line friend Semyon to take care of Natalya. For a long time Natalya did not agree to marry Semyon, but then she realized that he needed her, that without her “he wouldn’t last long.” “I humbled myself and called him.” "He came and became the owner." It seems that Natalya was happy. After all, she speaks so well about her second husband Semyon: “When he touched me... he fingered me string by string, petal by petal.

Grandmother Natalya’s speech contains many words that she pronounces in her own way, putting deep meaning into them. Her speech contains many expressions filled with knowledge of life and human relationships. “They’re just scratching at the door, where people live, and they’re tired of it!” Spending - spending, giving away part of yourself. Chastity - wisdom, wisdom. Purposeful is the most unhappy woman, like a hound dog who chases through life, not noticing anyone or anything.

“Smiling,” Natalya says about herself. “The sun loved to play in me, I already knew this about myself and gained more sunshine.”

And now these women of different ages, living under the same roof, related by blood, start talking about life. The initiative is in the hands of grandmother Natalia. And throughout their conversation, we understand Vicki’s condition. She says: “I’m tired of everything…”. In her own way, Vika worries about herself, and apparently understands that she did the wrong thing. But he doesn’t know how to do it. Vika talks about determination, but she herself has no goals or interest in life. Something is clearly broken in her, and she doesn’t know how to live on.

It is important for grandma to hear from Vicky the answer to her question: “... was this a trait or a sin? How do you look at yourself?”

Grandmother would never forgive a conscious sin. With every sin a person loses a part of himself. No wonder the grandmother says: “I took on such an expense!”

Natalya wants her granddaughter to pull herself together, preserve herself bit by bit, and prepare herself for marriage. Natalya has her own idea of ​​the bride. “Tender, and clean, and ringing, without a single crack, so white, and looking, and sweet.” We also learn about what it means to love in Natalia’s view and what her love with Semyon was like. “It was love, but it was different, early, it didn’t pick up the pieces like a beggar. I thought: he’s no match for me. Why should I poison myself, make a fool of him, why make people laugh if we’re not a couple? I didn’t want to take a visit to my place, it’s not for me, but for a stable life you need an equal.” There was respect for each other, attention, care, a common goal, pity, sympathy - this was the basis of life, it was “early” love.

This conversation is important for both: the grandmother, talking about herself, conveys her life experience, views on life, supports her granddaughter, instills confidence in her, creates a foundation for her future life - she will stand, as she says, herself.

And for Vika, this conversation is the beginning of a new life, awareness of her “I”, her purpose on earth. The conversation affected Vika, “the girl fell asleep restlessly - her shoulders, left arm, face of the nest were twitching and shuddering at the same time, she was stroking her stomach, her breathing either began to become frequent, or turned into smooth, silent strokes.”

Reading this story, together with the characters you are going through a difficult life situation and you understand that you need to prepare yourself for a “steady life,” as Natalya says, because without “steadiness you will be so destroyed that you won’t find the end.”

V. Rasputin's last work is the story "To the Same Land." It, like other stories, is dedicated to the moral problems of modern society. And throughout the entire work, there is a problem dedicated to the relationship of children to their mothers. V. Rasputin reveals to us the destinies of the people using the example of Pashuta’s mother. The general background of life is a village that personifies antiquity, the Lena and Angora expanses, where THEY do their will, finally destroying all the centuries-old foundations; Rasputin narrates with bitter humor about the gigantic deeds of the representatives of power, who have crushed everything under their control.

“The village still stood under the sky” (it no longer stood under the state). There was no collective farm, no state farm, no store. “They released the village to full heavenly freedom.” In winter everything was covered with snow. The men worked for a living. And they drank and drank.

"Nothing was needed." And the village? Abandoned, she is waiting for someone to give herself to, someone to bring her bread. The complete lack of human rights is noteworthy. First one, then the other rules, but in the name of what? The authorities have brought life to the point of absurdity. The village became a poor consumer, waiting for someone to bring bread.

This is a village. A village that has lost its essence. The authorities, who trumpeted the greatness of communist construction projects, brought the village to this state. And the city? His description is given in the form of a newspaper article. Aluminum plant, timber industry complex. All of the above creates the appearance of a sprawling monster that has no boundaries. The author uses the metaphor “pit”, taken from Platonov.

The main character of the story is Pashuta. She goes to Stas Nikolaevich, who was supposed to make her mother’s coffin (the village is located thirty kilometers from the city, but is within the city limits. Scope in all directions. Chaos and lawlessness. And not only on Earth). They were building a city of the future, but they built a “slow-acting chamber” in the open air. This metaphor enhances the sound of the work. Every living thing dies. The gas chamber has no boundaries, just like the city. This is genocide against an entire people.

So, the great country of communism creates an environment where a conflict has arisen between the people and the government. In the story, the conflict is local, but its central power is felt everywhere. The author does not give them a first or last name, or position. They are a multiple faceless mass, irresponsible in relation to the destinies of the people. They crave dachas, cars, shortages, and they stay in the Angora region until they complete their service, and then go to the south, where houses are built for them in advance. When construction ended, there were no “temporary workers” left there. Their image brings trouble to the people.

Pashuta devoted her whole life to working in the canteen; she is far from politics and power. She is tormented in search of an answer and does not find it. She herself wants to bury her mother, but she doesn’t want to go to THEM. She has no one. She tells Stas Nikolaevich about this. Pashuta is firmly convinced that she is in the grip of arbitrary fate, but she has not lost a thread of common sense, her soul works. She is a romantic, out of touch with the earth. She allowed herself to be introduced into the ranks of the builders of communism. At the age of seventeen, she ran away to a construction site to cook cabbage soup and fry flounder for the voracious builders of communism “towards the morning dawn along the Angara...” Pashuta was left without a husband early on, lost the opportunity to be a mother, and lost contact with her mother. There was only one left - alone.

She grew old early. And then in the story there is a description of the whirlwind, the rhythm of her life. Therefore, naturally, the reader does not have a portrait of Pashenka, Pasha, but immediately Pashut, as if there was no one to look at her, to peer into her. She peers at herself, in an uncurtained mirror after the death of her mother, and finds “traces of some kind of sloppiness - a woman’s mustache.” Further, the author writes that she was kind, disposed towards people, pretty... with a sensually protruding lip... In her youth, her body was not an object of beauty, it was filled with spiritual beauty. And now she could be mistaken for a woman who drinks heavily.

Her physical weakness is emphasized - her legs are not walking, her legs are swollen, she hobbled towards the house, walked with a heavy gait. Pashuta didn’t smoke, but her voice was rough. His figure became overweight and his character changed. There was goodness somewhere deep down, but it couldn’t get out. Pashuta’s life was illuminated by his granddaughter Tanka from his adopted daughter. The author is convinced how important it was for Pashuta to care and love. She failed to comprehend this secret in her entire life. “She didn’t want to give her ice cream, but her soul...” (about Tanka). She rejoices, and Pashuta kicks her out to her friend. Pashuta is smart and understands her inferiority. Their long-term relationship with Stas Nikolaevich breaks up. She was ashamed to show her figure. What happened to this woman? We see her cut off from her roots, finding herself in a pit, homeless, rootless. Femininity, softness, and charm disappear. Her path in life is very simple: from the head of the canteen to the dishwashers, from being well-fed to giving handouts from someone else’s table. There is a process of a woman losing the properties that nature has endowed her with. The second generation plows alone. She shows firmness and conscience, which helps her survive, fulfills her daughter's duty to the limit of her strength and capabilities.

If Pashuta has a rejection of power at the everyday level, then for him it is on a state scale: “They took us with meanness, shamelessness, rudeness.” There is no weapon against this: “I built an aluminum plant with these hands.” His appearance also changed. Pashuta noticed on his face “a smile that looked like a scar. A man from another world, from another circle, is going through the same path as she.” They both reached the point of chaos, in which they remain.

The author hints at the power of money, at its mercy, which gives a piece of bread, at the devaluation of human life. By the will of the author, Stas Nikolaevich says: “They took us with the “meanness, shamelessness, and arrogance” of the authorities.”

In the late 70s - early 80s, Rasputin turned to journalism ("Kulikovo Field", "Abstract Voice", "Irkutsk", etc.) and stories. The magazine "Our Contemporary" (1982 - No. 7) published the stories "Live a Century - Love a Century", "What to Tell a Crow?", "I Can't - U...", "Natasha", opening a new page in the writer's creative biography. Unlike the earlier stories, which centered on the fate or a separate episode of the hero’s biography, the new ones are distinguished by confessionality, attention to the subtlest and mysterious movements of the soul, which rushes about in search of harmony with itself, the world, and the Universe.

In these works, as in the early stories and stories, the reader sees the artistic features inherent in all the work of V.G. Rasputin: journalistic intensity of the narrative; the hero's internal monologues, inseparable from the author's voice; appeals to the reader; conclusions-generalizations and conclusions-evaluations; rhetorical questions, comments.

Contemporaries often do not understand their writers or do not realize their true place in literature, leaving it to the future to make assessments, determine contributions, and place emphasis. There are plenty of examples of this. But in today's literature there are undoubted names, without which neither we nor our descendants can imagine it. One of these names is Valentin Grigorievich Rasputin. The works of Valentin Rasputin consist of living thoughts. We must be able to extract them, if only because it is more important for us than for the writer himself: he has done his job.

And here, I think, the most appropriate thing is to read his books one after another. One of the main themes of all world literature: the theme of life and death. But in V. Rasputin it becomes an independent plot: almost always an old person who has lived a lot and seen a lot in his life passes away from his life, who has something to compare with, something to remember. And almost always this is a woman: a mother who raised children and ensured the continuity of the family. For him, the theme of death is not so much, perhaps, a theme of leaving as a reflection on what remains - in comparison with what was. And the images of old women (Anna, Daria), which became the moral, ethical center of his best stories, old women perceived by the author as the most important link in the chain of generations, are an aesthetic discovery of Valentin Rasputin, despite the fact that similar images, of course, existed before him in Russian literature. But it was Rasputin, like perhaps no one before him, who managed to philosophically comprehend them in the context of time and current social conditions. The fact that this is not a random find, but a constant thought, is evidenced not only by his first works, but also by his subsequent, right up to the present day, references to these images in journalism, conversations, and interviews. Thus, even answering the question “What do you understand by intelligence?”, the writer immediately, as if from the series that is constantly in the sphere of mental activity, gives an example: “Is an illiterate old woman intelligent or unintelligent? She had never read a single book, and had never been to the theater. But she is naturally intelligent. This illiterate old woman absorbed the peacefulness of her soul partly along with nature, partly it was supported by folk traditions and a circle of customs. She knows how to listen, make the right counter movement, carry herself with dignity, and say exactly.” And Anna in “The Deadline” is the clearest example of an artistic study of the human soul, shown by the writer in all its majestic uniqueness, uniqueness and wisdom - the soul of a woman who comprehends and has even comprehended what each of us has thought about at least once in our lives.

Yes, Anna is not afraid to die, moreover, she is ready for this last step, because she is already tired, she feels that “she has lived down to the very bottom, boiled away to the last drop” (“Eighty years, as you can see, is still a lot for one person, if it has become so worn out that now you just have to throw it away..."). And it’s no wonder that I’m tired - all my life I’ve been running, on my feet, in work, in worries: children, house, garden, field, collective farm... And then the time came when there was no strength left at all, except to say goodbye to the children. Anna couldn’t imagine how she could leave forever without seeing them, without saying goodbye to them, without finally hearing their dear voices. The Ionins came to bury Varvara, Ilya and Lyusya. We set ourselves up for exactly this, temporarily dressing our thoughts in clothes appropriate for the occasion and covering the mirrors of the soul with the dark fabric of the upcoming parting. Each of them loved their mother in their own way, but they were all equally unaccustomed to her, separated long ago, and what connected them with her and with each other had already turned into something conventional, accepted by the mind, but not touching the soul. They were obliged to come to the funeral and fulfill this duty.

Having given the work a philosophical mood from the very beginning, conveyed by the mere presence of death next to a person, V. Rasputin, without lowering this level when it comes not to Anna, but, perhaps, drawing subtle psychologism precisely from the philosophical richness, creates portraits the old woman's children, bringing them to filigree with each new page. One gets the impression that with this meticulous work, with this recreation of the smallest details of their faces and characters, he delays the old woman’s death itself: she cannot die until the reader sees with his own eyes, to the last wrinkle, those whom she gave birth to, whom she was proud of, who finally remains on earth instead of her and will continue her through time. So they coexist in the story, Anna’s thoughts and the actions of her children, sometimes - occasionally coming closer, almost to the point of touching, sometimes - more often - diverging to invisible distances. The tragedy is not that they don’t understand it, but that it doesn’t occur to them that they really don’t understand. Neither her, nor the moment itself, nor those deep-seated reasons that can control a person’s condition beyond his will and desire.

So for whom did they gather here: for their mother or for themselves, so as not to look indifferent in the eyes of their fellow villagers? As in “Money for Mary,” Rasputin is concerned here with ethical categories: good and evil, justice and duty, happiness and human moral culture, but at a higher level, because they coexist with such values ​​as death and the meaning of life. And this gives the writer the opportunity, using the example of the dying Anna, in whom there is more extract of life than in her living children, to deeply explore moral self-consciousness, its spheres: conscience, moral feelings, human dignity, love, shame, sympathy. In the same row is the memory of the past and responsibility towards it. Anna was waiting for the children, feeling an urgent inner need to bless them on their further path through life; the children hurried to her, striving to fulfill their external duty as carefully as possible - invisible and, perhaps, even unconscious in its entirety. This conflict of worldviews in the story finds its expression, first of all, in the system of images. It is not possible for grown-up children to understand the tragedy of the breakdown that has been revealed to them and the impending rupture - so what can be done if it is not given? Rasputin will find out why this happened, why they are like this? And he will do this, leading us to an independent answer, surprising in the psychological authenticity of the depiction of the characters of Varvara, Ilya, Lucy, Mikhail, Tanchora.

We must see each of them, get to know them better, in order to understand what is happening, why it is happening, who they are, what they are like. Without this understanding, it will be difficult for us to grasp the reasons for the almost complete loss of strength from the old woman, to fully understand her deep philosophical monologues, often caused by a mental appeal to them, the children, with whom the main thing in Anna’s life is connected.

They are difficult to understand. But it seems to them that they understand themselves, that they are right. What forces give confidence in such correctness, is it not the moral stupidity that has knocked out their former hearing - after all, it once existed, did it exist?! The departure of Ilya and Lucy is a departure forever; now from the village to the city it will not be one day’s journey, but an eternity; and this river itself will turn into Lethe, through which Charon transports the souls of the dead only from one bank to the other, and never back. But in order to understand this, it was necessary to understand Anna.

But her children were not ready to do this. And it’s not for nothing that against the background of these three - Varvara, Ilya and Lucy - Mikhail, in whose house his mother lives out her life (although it would be more correct - he is in her house, but everything has changed in this world, the poles have shifted, deforming the cause-and-effect relationships ), is perceived as the most merciful nature, despite his rudeness. Anna herself “did not consider Mikhail better than her other children - no, this was her fate: to live with him, and wait for them every summer, wait, wait... If you don’t take three years in the army, Mikhail was with his mother all the time, got married with her, he became a man, a father, like all men, he became mature, and with her, he was now approaching old age closer and closer.” Perhaps this is why Anna is brought closer by fate to Mikhail, because he is closest to her in the structure of his thinking, the structure of his soul. The same conditions in which she and her mother live, long communication that unites them through joint work, the same nature for two, prompting similar comparisons and thoughts - all this allowed Anna and Mikhail to remain in the same sphere, without breaking ties, and from only related ones , blood, turning them into a kind of pre-spiritual. Compositionally, the story is structured in such a way that we see Anna’s farewell to the world in an ascending manner - farewell as a strict approach to the most significant, after meeting with which everything else seems petty, vain, insulting this value, located at the highest level of the ladder of farewell. First, we see the old woman’s internal separation from her children (it is no coincidence that Mikhail, as the highest in spiritual qualities among them, will be the last one she sees), then follows her separation from the hut, from nature (after all, through the eyes of Lucy we see the same nature as Anna, while she was healthy), after which comes the turn of separation from Mironikha, as from a part of the past; and the penultimate, tenth, chapter of the story is devoted to the main thing for Anna: this is the philosophical center of the work, after passing through which, in the last chapter, we can only observe the agony of the family, its moral collapse.

After what Anna experienced, the last chapter is perceived in a special way, symbolizing the last, “extra” day of her life, which, in her own opinion, “she had no right to enter.” What happens on this day seems truly vain and agonistic, be it teaching the incompetent Varvara how to weave at a funeral or the untimely, causing departure of children. Perhaps Varvara could mechanically memorize a beautiful, deep folk lamentation. But even if she had memorized these words, she still would not have understood them and given them no meaning. And there was no need to memorize it: Varvara, citing the fact that the guys were left alone, leaves. And Lyusya and Ilya do not explain the reason for their flight at all. Before our eyes, not only the family is collapsing (it fell apart long ago), but the elementary, fundamental moral foundations of the individual are collapsing, turning a person’s inner world into ruins. The mother’s last request: “I’ll die, I’ll die. You'll see. Sedni. Wait a moment, wait a minute. I don't need anything else. Lucy! And you, Ivan! Wait. I tell you that I will die, and I will die” - this last request went unheard, and it will not go in vain for either Varvara, Ilya, or Lyusa. This was for them - not for the old woman - the last of the last terms. Alas... That night the old woman died.

But we all stayed for now. What are our names - aren't they Lyusyas, Barbarians, Tanchors, Ilyas? However, it's not about the name. And the old woman could be called Anna at birth.

Rasputin's work "Fire" was published in 1985. In this story, the writer continues to analyze the life of the people from the story “Farewell to Matera” who moved to another village after the island was flooded. They were moved to the urban-type settlement of Sosnovka. The main character, Ivan Petrovich Egorov, feels exhausted morally and physically: “like in a grave.”

The eventual basis of the story is simple: warehouses caught fire in the village of Sosnovka. Who saves people's property from the fire, and who grabs what they can for themselves. The way people behave in an extreme situation serves as an impetus for the painful thoughts of the main character of the story, driver Ivan Petrovich Egorov, in whom Rasputin embodied the popular character of a lover of truth, suffering at the sight of the destruction of the age-old moral basis of existence.

The situation with the fire in the story allows the author to explore the present and the past. Warehouses are burning, goods that people have not seen on the shelves: sausages, Japanese rags, red fish, a Ural motorcycle, sugar, flour. Some people, taking advantage of the confusion, are stealing what they can. In the story, the fire is a symbol of disaster for the social atmosphere in Sosnovka.

Ivan Petrovich is looking for answers to the questions that the surrounding reality throws at him. Why “has everything turned upside down?.. It was not supposed to, not accepted, it became supposed and accepted, it was impossible - it became possible, it was considered a shame, a mortal sin - it is revered for dexterity and valor.” Ivan Petrovich made the rule of his life “to live according to conscience” the law of his life; it pains him that during a fire, the one-armed Savely drags bags of flour into his bathhouse, and the “friendly guys - Arkharovites” first of all grab boxes of vodka.

But the hero not only suffers, he tries to find the reason for this moral impoverishment. At the same time, the main thing is the destruction of the centuries-old traditions of the Russian people: they have forgotten how to plow and sow, they are accustomed to only taking, cutting down, and destroying.

In all the works of V. Rasputin, a special role is played by the image of the house: the house of the old woman Anna, where her children gather, the Guskovs’ hut, which does not accept a deserter, Daria’s house, which goes under the water. The residents of Sosnovka do not have this, and the village itself is like a temporary shelter: “Uncomfortable and unkempt... bivouac type... as if they were wandering from place to place, stopped to wait out the bad weather, and ended up stuck...”. The absence of a Home deprives people of their life basis, kindness, and warmth. The reader feels acute anxiety from the picture of the ruthless conquest of nature. A large volume of work requires a large number of workers, often random ones. The writer describes a layer of “superfluous” people, indifferent to everything, who cause discord in life.

They were joined by the “Arkharovites” (organizational recruitment brigade), who brazenly put pressure on everyone. And the local residents were at a loss before this evil force. The author, through the reflections of Ivan Petrovich, explains the situation: “people scattered all over themselves even earlier.” Social strata in Sosnovka were mixed. There is a disintegration of the “common and harmonious existence.” Over the twenty years of living in the new village, morality has changed. In Sosnovka, houses don’t even have front gardens, because these are temporary housing anyway. Ivan Petrovich remained faithful to the previous principles, the norms of good and evil. He works honestly, worries about the decline of morals. And it finds itself in the position of a foreign body. Ivan Petrovich's attempts to prevent the Ninth's gang from taking over power end in the gang's revenge. Either they will puncture the tires of his car, then they will pour sand into the carburetor, then they will cut the brake hoses to the trailer, or they will knock out the rack from under the beam, which almost kills Ivan Petrovich.

Ivan Petrovich has to get ready with his wife Alena to leave for the Far East to visit one of his sons, but he will not be able to leave this land.

There are many positive characters in the story: Ivan Petrovich’s wife Alena, old uncle Misha Hampo, Afonya Bronnikov, head of the timber industry section Boris Timofeevich Vodnikov. Descriptions of nature are symbolic. At the beginning of the story (March) she is lethargic and numb. At the end there is a moment of calm, before blossoming. Ivan Petrovich, walking on the spring earth, “as if he had finally been carried out on the right road.”

"Farewell to Matera"

In the story, traditionally for Rasputin, the reader is presented with “old old women”: Daria Pinegina, Katerina Zotova, Natalya, Sima, as well as the male hero Bogodul. Each of them has a hard working life in the past. Now they live as if to continue the family (human) line, considering this their main goal. Rasputin makes them bearers of people's moral values ​​and contrasts them with the “obsevkov” - those who do not care about Matera, who leave their native walls without regret. This is Andrey, Daria’s grandson: the land of his ancestors and its fate do not concern him, his goal is a large construction project, and he argues with his father and grandmother, denying their values.

In general, the composition of the story is rather vague; it is presented as a chain of events connected, so to speak, only by internal meaning, chronology. Everything that happens directly concerns Matera, the fact of its inevitable (as the author emphasizes) disappearance, hence all the experiences of its inhabitants. All characters with a significant degree of confidence submit to the system of opposition between true villagers, with their range of values, and the so-called “residues”. On this basis, we can also consider the means used by the author to ensure that the reader understands how he relates to certain characters. Rasputin gives his favorite heroines original Russian names, evoking something rustic: Daria Pinegina, Natalya Karpova, Katerina. He endows such a colorful character as Bogodul with features similar to the hero of Russian fairy tales, the goblin.

In contrast to them, Rasputin awards derogatory names to heroes unpleasant to him - Klavka Strigunov, Petrukha (in the past - Nikita Zotov, later renamed for greater similarity with the farcical Petrushka). Their speech also adds negative traits to such characters - it is literary poor, with illiterately constructed phrases, and if correct, then full of cliches (“Shall we understand or what shall we?”). It is noteworthy that in the story the positive characters are old women and children (little Kolya). Both are helpless; in fact, they are being replaced by the “young tribe”.

Rasputin writes that the old, dying world is the only abode of holiness and harmony. After all, the residents (or rather, mostly the women) of Matera are really not worried about any external problems; they live in their own closed world. That is why the penetration of the external, cruel and aggressive world is so scary for them. Matera simply dies from its influence.

Composition

The problem of morality has become especially relevant in our time. In our society, there is a need to talk and think about the changing human psychology, about the relationships between people, about the meaning of life that the heroes and heroines of novels and short stories so tirelessly and so painfully comprehend. Now at every step we encounter the loss of human qualities: conscience, duty, mercy, kindness. In Rasputin's works we find situations close to modern life, and they help us understand the complexity of this problem. The works of V. Rasputin consist of “living thoughts”, and we must be able to understand them, if only because for us it is more important than for the writer himself, because the future of society and each individual depends on us.

The story “The Last Term,” which V. Rasputin himself called the main one of his books, touched on many moral problems and exposed the vices of society. In the work, V. Rasputin showed relationships within the family, raised the problem of respect for parents, which is very relevant in our time, revealed and showed the main wound of our time - alcoholism, raised the question of conscience and honor, which affected every hero of the story. The main character of the story is the old woman Anna, who lived with her son Mikhail. She was eighty years old. The only goal left in her life is to see all her children before death and go to the next world with a clear conscience. Anna had many children. They all left, but fate wanted to bring them all together at a time when the mother was dying. Anna's children are typical representatives of modern society, busy people with a family and a job, but for some reason they remember their mother very rarely. Their mother suffered greatly and missed them, and when the time came to die, only for their sake she stayed a few more days in this world and she would have lived as long as she wanted, if only they were nearby. And she, already with one foot in the next world, managed to find the strength to be reborn, to blossom, and all for the sake of her children. “Whether it happened by a miracle or not by a miracle, no one will say, only when she saw her children did the old woman begin to come to life.” What about them? And they solve their problems, and it seems that their mother does not really care, and if they are interested in her, it is only for the sake of appearances.

And they all live only for decency. Don’t offend anyone, don’t scold anyone, don’t say too much – everything is for the sake of decency, so as not to be worse than others. Each of them, on difficult days for their mother, goes about their own business, and their mother’s condition worries them little. Mikhail and Ilya fell into drunkenness, Lyusya was walking, Varvara was solving her problems, and none of them thought of spending more time with their mother, talking to her, or just sitting next to her. All their care for their mother began and ended with “semolina porridge,” which they all rushed to cook. Everyone gave advice, criticized others, but no one did anything themselves. From the very first meeting of these people, arguments and swearing begin between them. Lyusya, as if nothing had happened, sat down to sew a dress, the men got drunk, and Varvara was even afraid to stay with her mother. And so the days passed: constant arguments and swearing, insults at each other and drunkenness. This is how the children saw off their mother on her last journey, this is how they took care of her, this is how they took care of her and loved her. They were not imbued with the mother’s state of mind, did not understand her, they only saw that she was getting better, that they had a family and work, and that they needed to return home as soon as possible. They couldn't even say goodbye to their mother properly. Her children missed the “last deadline” to fix something, ask for forgiveness, and just be together, because now they are unlikely to get together again.

In this story, Rasputin very well showed the relationships of a modern family and their shortcomings, which clearly manifest themselves at critical moments, revealed the moral problems of society, showed the callousness and selfishness of people, their loss of all respect and ordinary feelings of love for each other. They, dear people, are mired in anger and envy. They care only about their interests, problems, only their own affairs. They don’t even find time for their loved ones. They didn’t find time for their mother, the dearest person. For them, “I” comes first, and then everything else. Rasputin showed the impoverishment of morality of modern people and its consequences. The story “The Last Term”, on which V. Rasputin began working in 1969, was first published in the magazine “Our Contemporary”, in issues 7, 8 for 1970. She not only continued and developed the best traditions of Russian literature - primarily the traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky - but also imparted a new powerful impetus to the development of modern literature, giving it a high artistic and philosophical level.

The story was immediately published as a book in several publishing houses, was translated into other languages, and published abroad - in Prague, Bucharest, Milan. The play “The Deadline” was staged in Moscow (at the Moscow Art Theater) and in Bulgaria. The fame brought to the writer by the first story was firmly established. The composition of any work by V. Rasputin, the selection of details and visual aids help to see the image of the author - our contemporary, citizen and philosopher.

One of the most famous modern Russian writers is Valentin Rasputin. I read a lot of his works, and they attracted me with their simplicity and sincerity. In my opinion, among Rasputin’s defining life impressions, one of the most powerful was the impression he received from ordinary Siberian women, especially old women. There were many things that attracted them: calm strength of character and inner dignity, selflessness in difficult village work and the ability to understand and forgive others.

This is Anna in the story The Last Term. The situation in the story is set right away: an eighty-year-old woman is dying. It seemed to me that life, introduced by Rasputin in his stories, is always taken at the moment of a breakthrough in its natural course, when suddenly a great misfortune looms with inevitability. It seems as if the spirit of death is hovering over Rasputin's heroes. The old tofamark from the story And Ten Graves in the Taiga thinks almost exclusively about death. Aunt Natalya is ready for her date with death in the story Money for Maria. Young Leshka dies in the arms of his friends (I forgot to ask Leshka...). A boy accidentally dies from an old mine (There, on the edge of the ravine). Anna in the story The Last Time is not afraid to die, she is ready for this last step, because she is already tired, feels that she has lived down to the very bottom, has boiled away to the last drop. All my life I’ve been running, on my feet, in work, in worries: children, house, garden, field, collective farm... And then the time came when there was no strength left at all, except to say goodbye to the children. Anna couldn’t imagine how she could leave forever without seeing them, without finally hearing her own voices. During her life, the old woman gave birth many times, but now she has only five left alive. It turned out this way because first death began to wander into their family, like a ferret into a chicken coop, and then the war began. They separated, the children scattered, they were strangers, and only the imminent death of their mother forces them to come together after a long separation. In the face of death, not only the spiritual depth of a simple Russian peasant woman is revealed, but also the faces and characters of her children appear before us in a revealing light.

I admire Anna's character. In my opinion, it has preserved the unshakable foundations of truth and conscience. There are more strings in the soul of an illiterate old woman than in the souls of her urban children who have seen the world. There are also heroes in Rasputin who, perhaps, have few of these strings in their souls, but they sound strong and pure (for example, the old Tofamarca woman from the story The Man from This World). Anna and, perhaps to an even greater extent, Daria from the story Money for Maria, in terms of wealth and sensitivity of spiritual life, in intelligence and knowledge of a person, can be compared with many heroes of world and Russian literature.

Take a look from the outside: a useless old woman is living out her life, she hardly gets up in recent years, why should she continue to live? But the writer describes her to us in such a way that we see how in these last, seemingly completely worthless years, months, days, hours of her , minutes there is intense spiritual work going on in her. Through her eyes we see and evaluate her children. These are loving and pitying eyes, but they accurately notice the essence of changes. The change in face is most clearly visible in the appearance of Ilya’s eldest son: Next to his bare head, his face seemed unreal, drawn, as if Ilya had sold his own or lost at cards to a stranger. In him, the mother either finds traits familiar to her, or loses them.

But the middle daughter, Lyusya, became all city, from head to toe, she was born from an old woman, and not from some city woman, probably by mistake, but then she still found her own. It seems to me that she has already been completely reborn to the last cell, as if she had neither childhood nor village youth. She is offended by the manners and rustic language of her sister Varvara and brother Mikhail, and their indelicacy. I remember one scene when Lucy was going to take a healthy walk in the fresh air. A picture of the once native place appeared before her eyes, painfully striking the woman: an abandoned, neglected land lay spread out before her, everything that had once been well-groomed, brought into expedient order by the loving labor of human hands, now converged in one alien, wide desolation. Lucy understands that she has been tormented by some silent long-standing guilt, for which she will have to answer. This is her fault: she completely forgot everything that happened to her here. After all, she was given to know both the joyful dissolution in her native nature, and the daily example of her mother, who felt a deep kinship with all living things (it was not for nothing that Lyusa remembered the incident when her mother, affectionately, like a loved one, raised the hopelessly exhausted horse Igrenka, who had fallen hopelessly behind the plowing), remembered it is also the terrible consequences of national tragedies: split, struggle, war (the episode with the hunted, brutalized Bandera member).
Of all Anna's children, I liked Mikhail the most. He stayed in the village, and Anna is living out her life with him. Mikhail is simpler, ruder than her city children, he gets more shots at him with complaints and complaints, but in fact he is warmer and deeper than the others, not like Ilya, he rolls through life like a cheerful little boy, trying not to touch any corners.

The two chapters in the story are magnificent about how, having bought two boxes of vodka for the supposed wake, the brothers, overjoyed that their mother had suddenly miraculously recovered from death, began to drink them, first alone, and then with their friend Stepan. Vodka is like an animated creature, and, like an evil, capricious ruler, you need to be able to handle it with the least possible losses for yourself: you need to take it out of fear, ... I don’t respect drinking it alone. Then she, cholera, is angrier. The highest moment in the lives of many, especially men, alas, was drinking. Behind all the colorful scenes, behind the picaresque stories of drunkards (here is the story of Stepan, who fooled his mother-in-law and snuck into the underground for moonshine), behind the comical conversations (say, about the difference between a woman and a woman) there arises real social, popular evil. About the reasons for drunkenness, Mikhail said: Life is completely different now, almost everything has changed, and they, these changes, demanded supplements from a person... The body demanded rest. It's not me who drinks, it's him who drinks. Let's return to the main character of the story. In my opinion, old woman Anna embodied all the best aspects of the original Siberian character in her tenacity in carrying out everyday tasks, in her firmness and pride. In the last chapters of the story, Rasputin focuses entirely on his main character and the final segment of her life. Here the writer introduces us to the very depths of a mother’s feelings for her last, most beloved and closest child, her daughter Tanchora. The old woman is waiting for her daughter to arrive, but she, unfortunately, did not arrive, and then something in the old woman suddenly snapped, something burst with a short groan. Of all the children, again only Mikhail was able to understand what was happening to his mother, and he again took sin upon his soul. Your Tanchora will not arrive, and there is no point in waiting for her. I sent her a telegram not to come, overpowering himself, he puts an end to it. It seems to me that this act of his cruel mercy is worth hundreds of unnecessary words.

Under the pressure of all the misfortunes, Anna prayed: Lord, let me go, I will go. Let's go to the mine of my death, I'm ready. She imagined her death, her mortal mother, as the same ancient, emaciated old woman. Rasputin’s heroine envisions her own departure to the far side with amazing poetic clarity, in all its stages and details.

Leaving, Anna remembers her children in those moments when they expressed the best in themselves: young Ilya very seriously, with faith, accepts his mother’s blessing before leaving for the front; Varvara, who grew up such a whiny, unhappy woman, is seen in early childhood digging a hole in the ground just to see what is in it, looking for something that no one else knows about her, Lucy desperately, with all her being, rushes from the departing ship to meet her mother, leaving home; Mikhail, stunned by the birth of his first child, is suddenly pierced by an understanding of the unbreakable chain of generations in which he has thrown a new ring. And Anna remembered herself at the most marvelous moment of her life: She is not an old woman, she is still a girl, and everything around her is young, bright, beautiful. She wanders along the shore along a warm, steamy river after the rain... And it is so good, so happy for her to live at this moment in the world, to look at its beauty with her own eyes, to be among the stormy and joyful action of eternal life, consistent in everything, that she feels dizzy head and a sweet, excited ache in my chest.

When Anna dies, her children literally abandon her. Varvara, citing the fact that she left the boys alone, leaves, and Lyusya and Ilya do not explain the reasons for their flight at all. When the mother asks them to stay, her last request goes unheard. In my opinion, this will not be in vain for either Varvara, Ilya, or Lyusa. It seems to me that this was the last of the last terms for them. Alas…

That night the old woman died.

Thanks to Rasputin's works, I was able to find answers to many questions. This writer remains in my opinion one of the best, leading modern prose writers. Please do not pass by his books, take them off the shelf, ask at the library and read slowly, slowly, thoughtfully.