The novel is written in the dystopian genre, and the main theme is the dramatic fate of the individual in a totalitarian society.
The author showed that a society cannot exist built according to schemes, calculations and plans, that a person cannot be just an integral part of a mechanism with strictly limited functions, because everyone is purely individual, spiritual. He lives in a society of other people with their characteristics and complex relationships. And humanity, turned into a mechanism, loses its human essence.
In the novel, a mechanized society appears before us in a fantastic guise. The world of the One State includes all aspects of this society. There is no freedom, love, real music and poetry in it, no personality and soul. This is a society of uniformity, where there are not even names, they are replaced by numbers and letters - numbers. The state of numbers is subordinate to the Benefactor, who replaces God for them. People in this state are like robots, working and living at the same time.
Since the people of this society are deprived of individuality, they were brought up with the suggestion of certain views on the world, on their lack of freedom, then superficially everything seems to be well-established in a society of obedient numbers.
And even if the minds of the numbers are put in order and their worldview corresponds to the dictatorship of the ruler, then their hearts feel discord between the actions dictated by the cold mind and the impulses of the living human essence. The essence that was taken away from the number, tears him away from the team, outside of which he no longer has a place. Mechanical "art" does not allow the development of the human soul, but it is awakened by love.
The protagonist D-503 is an example of a typical number. Brought up in cruelty and suppression of the individual, he thinks logically, speaks in mathematical formulas, loves the Benefactor and the totalitarian system, and fully shares the public outlook on life.
But from the first pages of his notes, he has a noticeable imagination when he talks about the future of man. Having fallen in love, he is able to do crazy things, and when his mind protests, he feels forces in himself that pull him to other, human relationships. Under the influence of his love, D-503 even heard ancient music in a different way, and he already thought about these strong feelings, thanks to which the smile of a beloved woman can shake the worldview. Nevertheless, speaking about the world, he does not deny the current totalitarian system, he considers it the only correct one.
He simply puts love above the established rules and follows it, breaking the rules and remembering them only later.
However, the author shows the possibility of rebellion in the novel. He introduces the free personality of I-330 into the novel, who sees all the shortcomings of the state and is not afraid to break the rules. She seeks to lead people beyond the Wall to teach them how to live in a new way. The inhabitants of the United State cannot live in the wild and therefore do not know the laws of the living world. To fix this, they must return to Nature, the origins of the world with its indomitable energy and sincerity.
K. Zamyatin's novel "We" was written in 1921, but only in 1988 did Russian readers get the opportunity to read the novel. The main theme of the novel is the dramatic fate of the individual in a totalitarian society.
The world conceived by the author, it seemed, should be perfect and absolutely suit all the people who live in it. But this is the world of technocracy, where a person is a cog in a huge mechanism. All human life in this world is subject to mathematical laws and timetables. People here don't even have their own-in, IX names. But a person cannot be a cog. When he is turned into a cog, he loses much of his humanity. History has shown that the transformation of humanity into a set of cogs leads to a crime against man and humanity.
The novel "We" deals with the problem of power. Zamyatin wrote a very interesting chapter about the Day of Unanimity, about choosing a Benefactor. For the heroes of the novel, the Benefactor is God who descended to earth, who is allowed to think; for him, the concept of love is inseparable from the concept of cruelty. The culmination of the novel is the conversation of the protagonist D-503 with the Benefactor, who told him the formula of happiness: "True algebraic love for a person is certainly inhuman, and an indispensable sign of truth is its cruelty."
Roman Zamyatina is a warning about the double danger threatening humanity: the hypertrophied power of machines and the power of the state.
Zamyatin's writing is imbued with reflections on Russian post-revolutionary reality. To show this, the author introduces a revolutionary situation into the plot of the novel. People who do not want to be cogs, who have not lost their human appearance, are ready to fight the Benefactor in order to free people from the power of technocracy. But this attempt ends in failure.
At the end of the novel, the beloved woman of the protagonist dies in the Gas Bell, and after the operation to remove the fantasy, he regains his lost balance and happiness.
Zamyatin's novel acquired a special price and instructiveness as a warning about possible distortions of socialism, about the danger of deviations from the democratic path and abuses, violence against the human person. Subsequent events in national and world history showed that the writer's anxieties were not in vain.
There is another theme in the novel that is relevant today. This is a topic of environmental concern.
The "anti-society" depicted in the book brings about the destruction of natural life, isolating humanity from nature. The author dreams of expelling people “overgrown with numbers” “naked into the forests, so that they can learn from birds, flowers, and the sun. Only this, according to the author, can restore the essence of man.
Roman Zamyatin "We" - a warning. It shows how dangerous it is not to resist if the human community is to be turned into a collection of cogs. Such works as "We" "squeeze" slavery out of a person, make him a personality.
It remains to be hoped that the cruel lesson of the past will be perceived correctly, and the situation described by E. Zamyatin in the novel "We" "will have no analogues in the future."
Man has traditionally been at the center of the literary universe as the object of observation of the writer, but has it always been like this in the 20th century? The former ideology imposed on society the opinion that the team is a force, and an individual can cause a negative attitude with his individualism. In accordance with this statement, everyone was obliged to strive to become a cog in the wheel of history and be proud of their inseparability from the state.
I became interested in the theme of the existence of the individual in a totalitarian state. How can a person withstand the pressure of social pressure? Will she adapt, or will she break and perish under the pitiless hand of the ruler? Most clearly, in my opinion, this topic is revealed by E.I. Zamyatin in the dystopian novel “We”.
ZAMYATIN Evgeny Ivanovich - Russian writer, one of the most prominent figures in the literary process of the 1920s. , entered the history of Russian literature as the author of the famous dystopian novel "We".
Born January 20 (February 1), 1884 On the eve of the events of 1905, he was involved in revolutionary activities, joined the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDLP), which meant for him "to follow the line of greatest resistance." And in literature, he also deviated from the general ideological line, creating in accordance with his own understanding.
Zamyatin's reality is satirically shifted, detached, mosaic and expressive, the detail is brought to the fore, replacing the portrait with a caricature. In life and in people, Zamyatin did not accept mechanism, which meant for him isolation, inertia and underdevelopment. The writer seemed to play with words, highlights, spots, easily tore the fabric of the narrative, trying to fill it not only with plot, but also with figurative, linguistic dynamics and expression, which he contrasts with philistine mustiness and ordinary everyday life.
Zamyatin's dystopian novel "We" was written in 1920 and marked the beginning of a whole series of dystopias in world literature ("Oh, brave new world!" O. Huxley and others). The novel, written under the fresh impressions of the “strict” era of war communism with its emergency measures, revealed alarming trends in the then political reality and public mentality, which would develop in Stalin's domestic politics. At the same time, it was a work about the future, which was massively dreamed of in those years, bringing the present to it on the altar.
The novel depicts a perfect State, headed by a certain Benefactor, a kind of patriarch endowed with unlimited power, who is annually re-elected by the entire population on the day of unanimity. In this state, citizens live in glass houses, which allows the political police, called "Guardians", to easily oversee them. Marriage is abolished, but the sex life does not appear to be completely disorderly. For love pleasures, everyone has a kind of subscription with pink coupons, and the partner with whom one of the assigned Personal hours has been spent signs the coupon spine.
In this society of “reasonable mechanism” and “mathematical perfection of life”, an impersonal person is nothing more than a cog in an exemplary well-oiled mechanism. There are no tastes and predilections (fashion, cooking, hobbies): everyone wears the same unifu uniform, eats artificial food, and during the hour of rest they march four in a row to the sound of the anthem of the United State, pouring from loudspeakers. The inhabitants of Utopia have lost their individuality, there are no names here, but there are numbers, here order and prescription are above all, and a deviation from generally accepted rules and a sanctioned way of thinking threatens the violator with the Benefactor Machine.
In 1924, due to censorship conditions, the novel "We" was refused to be published in Soviet Russia. In view of this, Zamyatin rejected all proposals to publish "We" in Russian abroad. It was originally published in 1924 in English translation, and in Russia only in 1988.
Unlike utopias depicting an idealized world, an earthly paradise, in Zamyatin's anti-utopia we see the same world. But this is already the world of "ideal lack of freedom", given through the eyes of an ordinary citizen in order to trace and show the feelings of a person under the dictates of the laws of an ideal state.
The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. Man was happy in the Garden of Eden, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven into the wilderness. Now the United State has again granted him happiness, depriving him of his freedom. Gradually, it is discovered that lack of freedom does not at all guarantee heavenly abundance and comfort - it does not guarantee anything but the wretched dullness and poverty of everyday life.
There is one more "but" - a utopian world - a closed world. What is seen "from the inside" turns out to be not at all so perfect, revealing its unsightly underside to ordinary members of a utopian society. The future is depicted from the standpoint of individualism and social pessimism, as the inevitable triumph of a scientifically totalized "hell". The state machine itself, the administrative apparatus, the system in which all evil is concentrated, appears to be a satanic force.
In the United State, literally everything is put on the conveyor, turning into the production of human automata, not people. In Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, there is a Maternal Norm (for example, the heroine of the novel O-90 is ten centimeters short of her, and therefore she has no right to be a mother). Children are brought up in children's factories (not knowing their parents), and only at the end of the novel do the State and the Benefactor achieve a radical solution to the problem of universal happiness: it is established that fantasy is to blame for all human dissatisfaction, and it must be removed.
In turn, it is also necessary to put love passion under control, replacing it with physiology, since true, pure love creates its own world, inaccessible to the all-seeing eye of the State. After the victory over Love, only labor turns out to be one of the means of subjugation, dissolution of the individual in the mass. Ideally, it should turn into a biological need, and already excommunication from work will be tantamount to death. But even here everything is scheduled, regulated, subject to a single schedule.
The same goes for art. Art is not rejected, but centralized, devoid of "hateful freedom", while the creative arbitrariness of the artist is equated with a crime against the State, and inspiration is regarded as an unknown form of epilepsy. Art is called upon by all forms to influence the masses, accustoming them to unanimity. Death turns out to be another ruler of the world, so far undefeated by mankind in the wildest utopian dreams. The fear of death is overcome thanks to the merging of all the same masses for the sake of subjugation: the enthusiasm of merging in a common march, the transformation of the execution into a national holiday, into a colorful theatrical spectacle.
In Zamyatin's dystopia, social solidity is achieved through the absolute agreement of everyone with each other and with the Tablet of the Hour. However, a paradox is revealed here, since guards and faithful servants of the system are inseparable from any trustworthy citizen - the guardian (spy), surgeon and executioner.
Zamyatin's book as a whole is closer in spirit to our present day. Despite the upbringing and vigilance of the Guardians, many ancient human instincts continue to operate. The narrator, D-503, is a talented engineer, but, in essence, an ordinary person lives in constant fear, feeling himself captive to atavistic desires. He falls in love (and this, of course, a crime) with a certain I-330, a member of the underground resistance movement, which manages to temporarily involve him in preparing an uprising.
Ultimately, D-503 manages to avoid the consequences of his reckless move. The authorities announce that the cause of the recent unrest has been identified: it appears that a number of people suffer from a disease called fantasy.
A special nerve center has been organized to combat fantasy, and the disease is cured by X-ray irradiation. D-503 undergoes an operation, after which it is easy for him to do what he always considered his duty, that is, to betray accomplices to the police. In complete calmness, he watches how I-330 is being tortured under a glass cap, pumping air out from under it. “She looked at me, tightly clutching the arms of the chair, looked until her eyes were completely closed. Then they pulled her out, quickly brought her to herself with the help of electrodes and again put her under the Bell. words. Others brought along with this woman turned out to be more honest: many of them began to speak the first time. Tomorrow they will all climb the steps of the Benefactor's Machine.
The Benefactor's Machine is the great granddaughter of the guillotine. In Zamyatin's Utopia, executions are a common thing - an accompaniment necessary for a totalitarian regime. They are performed publicly, in the presence of the Benefactor, and are accompanied by the reading of laudatory odes performed by official poets. The guillotine is, of course, no longer a crude colossus of the past, but an improved apparatus that literally destroys the victim in an instant, from which a cloud of steam and a puddle of clean water remain. Execution, in fact, is a human sacrifice, and this ritual is permeated with the gloomy spirit of the slave-owning civilizations of the Ancient World.
Especially valuable in the novel “We” is the intuitive disclosure of the irrational side of totalitarianism - sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, adoration of the Leader, in whose portrait Zamyatin repeatedly highlights “heavy stone hands”, “slow cast-iron gesture”, the absence of any hint of humanity.
Suffice it to recall the scene of the execution of the disobedient poet during the so-called Feast of Justice: “Upstairs, in Cuba, near the car, there is a motionless, as if made of metal, figure of the one whom we call the Benefactor. From here, from below, one cannot make out the faces: one can only see that it is limited by strict, majestic square outlines. But the hands. This sometimes happens in photographic images: too close, in the foreground, the hands placed come out huge, riveting the eye - obscure everything. These heavy hands, still calmly lying on their knees, are clear: they are stone and the knees can barely support their weight.
There are other passages along the same lines. It is quite probable, however, that E. Zamyatin did not at all think of choosing the Soviet regime as the main target of his satire.
Zamyatin's goal, apparently, is not to portray a specific country, but to show what threatens us with machine civilization, he had no reason to admire contemporary political regimes, but his book is not just the result of anger. This is a study of the essence of the Machine - a genie, which a person mindlessly released from the bottle and cannot drive back. Realizing that perfection is unattainable in a short time, statesmen quickly come to the conclusion that it is much easier to remake a person himself, change his views on life and on himself, limit needs, make him think according to a template, than to create a paradise on earth. However, as it turned out, it is the thinking Personality with a capital letter that becomes a stumbling block and an object of hatred for all utopians who fear any possible manifestations of a free "I" and seek to suppress any free will.
Thus, the work of E. Zamyatin tells about the rebellion of the natural human spirit against the rational, mechanized, insensitive world. One of the main ideas of the writer is the idea of what happens to a person, state, society, civilization, when they, worshiping an abstractly reasonable idea, voluntarily renounce freedom and put an equal sign between lack of freedom and collective happiness. People turn into an appendage of the machine, into cogs and are happy to realize this, or rather, they are suggested that they are happy. E. Zamyatin showed the tragedy of overcoming the human in a person, the loss of a name as the loss of one's own "I". All dystopian novels, and above all the novel We, warn against this.
Already on the first pages of the novel, E. Zamyatin creates a model of an ideal state, from the point of view of utopians, where the long-awaited harmony of public and personal was found, where all citizens finally found the desired happiness. In any case, this is how it appears in the perception of the narrator - the builder of the Integral, the mathematician D-503. What is the happiness of the citizens of the United State? At what point in their lives do they feel happy?
Obviously, in order to create an ideal society from the point of view of utopians, it is necessary to change human nature itself. The authors of utopias most often ignore the ways in which the world order depicted by them is achieved. Even if pictures of the future are included in works about modernity (Chernyshevsky), the gap between the imperfection of today and the ideal tomorrow is huge. At best, utopians rely on reason, but they do not investigate the mechanism of the influence of reason on human nature. In the works of revolutionary utopians, there are hints of the need for a social revolution, but the revolution itself is not depicted. The authors of dystopias pay special attention to the ways of building an “ideal society”, because they are convinced that the world of dystopia is the result of attempts to realize utopia. The One State has deprived a person of personal affections, of a sense of kinship, since all ties, except with the One State, are criminal. Despite the apparent unity, the "numbers" are absolutely alienated from each other, and therefore easily manageable. The Green Wall plays a significant role in creating the illusion of happiness. A person who does not have the ability to compare and analyze becomes manageable and obedient. The state also subjugated the time of each number, creating the Hourly Tablet. The United State took away from its citizens the possibility of intellectual and artistic creativity, replacing it with the Unified State Science, mechanical music and state poetry. The element of creativity is forcibly tamed and placed at the service of society. What are the names of poetic books alone worth: “Flowers of Court Sentences”, the tragedy “Late for Work”, “Stans on Sexual Hygiene”. However, the United State does not feel completely safe, and creates a system of suppression of dissent. This is the Bureau of Guardians (spies make sure that everyone is “Happy”), and the Operational with its Gas Bell, and the Great Operation, and denunciation elevated to the rank of virtue (“They came to accomplish a feat,” the hero writes about scammers) .
This "ideal" social order was achieved by the forcible abolition of freedom. Universal happiness here is not the happiness of every person, but its suppression, leveling and physical destruction.
The state skillfully manipulates people. This aspect of the novel is especially important, since the problem of manipulation of consciousness is relevant in our time. At the very beginning of the novel, we see how delighted the hero-narrator is with the daily march to the sounds of the Music Factory: he experiences absolute unity with the rest. “As always, the Musical Factory sang the March of the United State with all its pipes. In measured rows, four at a time, enthusiastically beating time, there were numbers - hundreds, thousands of numbers, in bluish unifs, with gold plaques on their chests - the state number of each and every one. And I - we four - one of the countless waves in this mighty stream. Note that in the fictional country created by Zamyatin's imagination, not people live, but numbers, devoid of names, dressed in unifs (that is, uniforms). Externally similar, they are no different from each other and internally. It is no coincidence that the hero admires the transparency of dwellings with such pride. Their entire life activity, prescribed by the Tablet of Hours, is distinguished by the sameness, mechanicalness. These are the characteristic features of the depicted world. To deprive people of the opportunity to perform the same functions day in and day out means to deprive them of happiness, doom them to suffering, as evidenced by the story of “The Three Freedmen”. The symbolic expression of the life ideal of the protagonist is a straight line and a plane, a mirror surface, whether it is the sky without a single cloud or faces “not overshadowed by the madness of thought”.
Straightforwardness, rationalism, mechanicalness of the life order of the United State explain why the figure of Taylor is chosen as the object of worship for the number. Admiring the genius of Taylor, the hero of the novel "We" repeatedly pronounces the name of Kant with obvious disdain. Kant's views are interesting: man is not a passive creation of nature or society, he is able to determine his own will and behavior. But, recognizing the right to independence, a person must recognize it for all those around him. Proceeding from this, Kant formulates the moral law: "... act in such a way as to use a person for yourself in the same way as for another, always as an end and never only as a means", "the other person must be holy to you." The opposition between the rationalistic system of thought (Taylor), where man is a means, and the humanistic one (Kant), where man is the end, runs through the whole narrative. Thus, the idea of universal equality, the central idea of any utopia, turns into a dystopia of universal uniformity and averageness. The idea of harmony between the personal and the general is replaced by the idea of absolute subordination to the state of all spheres of human life. “Happiness is in lack of freedom,” the heroes of the novel say. The hero experiences the highest bliss on the Day of Unanimity, which allows everyone to feel like a small part of a huge “we”. The hero ironically reflects on the secret ballot in the elections of the ancients. The author talks about how absurd "elections" without the right to choose, how absurd the society that chose them. In the context of the literature of the 1920s, the desire to subordinate the personal will to the tasks of social progress was a characteristic feature of a person's worldview. The world in Zamyatin's novel is shown through the perception of a person with an awakening soul. Gradually, the positions of the author and the hero are approaching: the moral values that the author himself professes become close to him.
Gradually, like-minded people join the hero - with his behavior he challenges the United State i-330, a nameless poet who composed dangerous poems. O-90 suddenly felt the need for simple human happiness, for the happiness of motherhood. So, the One State, its absurd logic in the novel is opposed by the awakening soul, that is, the ability to feel, love, suffer. The United State would like to rely on slavish obedience, but since we are talking about living people who have the qualities of living people, it is not able to stop the emergence of "seditious" thoughts.
The novel is remarkable not only because the author already in 1920 was able to predict the global catastrophes of the 20th century. The main question that he posed in his work is: will a person withstand the ever-increasing violence against his conscience, soul, will?
Despite the rather sad end of the novel, there is still a certain optimism of the author, who, demonstrating the model of a totalitarian state, all its horror and absurdity, brings out characters who are able to oppose themselves to a zombified society, a rigid machine of state government, capable of thinking and making decisions that go to incision with generally accepted settings. A totalitarian society, this is a single state, has no chance of survival for one simple reason - there are people in it who think differently, who are able to oppose themselves to a deceitful and merciless state. The truth has been revealed to them, and they will no longer be able to live as before. Moreover, they will try to spread this truth, perhaps even at the cost of their lives.
THE THEME OF THE TRAGIC FATE OF A HUMAN IN THE WORKS OF A.P. PLATONOV, A.I. SOLZHENITSYN, V.T.SHALAMOV
The theme of the tragic fate of a Russian person in a totalitarian state arises in Russian literature of the 20th century already in the 1920s, when the very formation of a totalitarian state was only just beginning to take shape. It was predicted by the writer E. Zamyatin in the novel "We", in the image of the United State, in which a person with his individuality is almost destroyed, reduced to a "number", where everyone is dressed in the same clothes and must be happy, whether they like it or not.
E. Zamiatin's novel sounded like a warning that did not reach the Soviet reader. The state soon began to actively interfere in his life, in some ways embodying the gloomy fantasy of E. Zamyatin, in some ways "retreating far from it. There was one thing in common - the attitude towards the individual as a building material, the depreciation of a person, his life. All this acquired a particularly tragic turn in the years when there was a mass extermination of entire sections of the population on various grounds - they destroyed the nobles, organized the decossackization, dispossession or "liquidation of the kulaks as a class", finally, 1937-1938 - the peak of the "great terror", terrible years Ezhovshchina, which were replaced by long decades of Berievism. In Russian literature, all these tragic events were absolutely taboo for many years. The reader never reached the reader O. Mandelstam’s poem, written back in the 30s, exposing Stalin, poems about the tragedy of mothers who raised children "for the chopping block, for the dungeon and prison", A. Akhmatova and her poem "Requiem", L. Chukovskaya's story "Sofya Petrovna" and many other works that have been returned to us only in recent decades. An attempt to break the forced conspiracy of silence, to tell the reader the truth about the terrible years of terror, about the tragedy of the individual, was the work of writers such as Yuri Dombrovsky, author of the novel "Keeper of Antiquities" and its continuation - the novel "Faculty of Useless Things". The writer Varlam Shalamov, a man of tragic fate, who spent many years in the terrible Kolyma camps, addresses this topic.
The writer became the author of works of tremendous psychological impact, a kind of Kolyma epic, which showed the merciless truth about the life of people in the camps. A man in inhuman conditions - this is how you can designate the cross-cutting theme of V. Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales". Getting into the camp, a person, as it were, loses everything that connects him with the normal human environment, with the previous experience, which is now inapplicable. This is how V. Shalamov developed the concept of "first life" (pre-camp) and second life - life in the camp. The writer does not spare the reader, terrible details appear in his stories that cannot be understood without heartache - cold and hunger, sometimes depriving a person of reason, purulent ulcers on the legs, cruel lawlessness of criminals who were considered "friends of the people" in the camps, unlike political prisoners, first of all, the intellectuals, who were called "enemies of the people" and who were given full power to the criminals. In his stories, V. Shalamov shows what was worse than cold, hunger and disease - human humiliation, which reduced people to the level of animals. It simply plunges them into a state of non-existence, when all feelings and thoughts leave a person, when life is replaced by "semi-consciousness, existence." In the story "Sentence" the author, with almost scientific accuracy, analyzes the state of a person in this inhuman life, when anger remains his only feeling.
When death recedes, and consciousness returns to a person, he notices with joy that his brain begins to work, a long-forgotten scientific word "maxim" emerges from the depths of memory. In the story "Typhoid Quarantine", V-Shalamov shows another facet of human humiliation: a willingness to serve the leaders of the thieves' world, to become their lackeys and serfs. These leaders are surrounded by a "crowd of servants", ready to do anything, if only they break off a crust of bread or pour soup. And when in this crowd the hero of the story sees a familiar face, Captain Schneider, a German communist, an expert on Goethe, an educated person who previously supported the spirit of his comrades, and in the camp plays the humiliating role of "scratching heels" at the thief Senechka, he does not want to live. The author describes the experiences of Andreev, the hero of the story: "Although it was a small and not terrible event compared to what he saw and what he was to see, he remembered Captain Schneider forever." V.Shalamov's stories are not just an artistic document.
This is a holistic picture of the world, rather, an anti-world, an absurdity into which a person is thrown by a terrible monster of terror that breaks millions of people. In this anti-world everything is turned upside down. A man dreams of getting out of the camp not to freedom, but to prison. In the story "Tombstone" it is said: "Prison is freedom. This is the only place that I know where people, without fear, said everything they thought. Where they rested their souls." The work of B. Shalamov has become both a historical document and a fact of philosophical reflection on an entire era. In general, Russian literature of the 20th century revealed the fate of a person in a totalitarian state from the standpoint of humanism, in the traditions of Russian classical literature.
The tragedy of man in a totalitarian state (on the example of "Kolyma stories" by V. T. Shalamov)
“Kolyma Tales” is a collection of stories included in the Kolyma epic by Varlam Shalamov. The author himself went through this “most icy” hell of the Stalinist camps, so each of his stories is absolutely reliable.
The Kolyma Tales reflects the problem of confrontation between the individual and the state machine, the tragedy of man in a totalitarian state. Moreover, the last stage of this conflict is shown - a person in the camp. And not just in the camp, but in the most terrible of the camps, erected by the most inhuman of systems. This is the maximum suppression of the human personality by the state. In the story “Dry rations”, Shalamov writes: “nothing worried us anymore,” it was easy for us to live in the power of someone else’s will. We did not even care about saving our lives, and if we slept, we also obeyed the order, the schedule of the camp day ... We had long ago become fatalists, we did not count on our life further than the day ahead ... Any interference in fate, into the will of the gods was indecent.” You cannot say more precisely than the author, and the worst thing is that the will of the state completely suppresses and dissolves the will of man. She deprives him of all human feelings, blurs the line between life and death. By gradually killing a person physically, they also kill his soul. Hunger and cold do things to people that become scary. “All human feelings - love, friendship, envy, philanthropy, mercy, thirst for fame, honesty - came from us with the meat that we lost during our starvation. In that insignificant muscle layer that still remained on our bones ... only anger was different - the most enduring human feeling. In order to eat and keep warm, people are ready for anything, and if they do not commit betrayal, then this is subconscious, mechanical, since the very concept of betrayal, like many other things, has been erased, gone, disappeared. “We have learned humility, we have forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, selfishness, pride, and jealousy and old age seemed to us Martian concepts and, moreover, trifles ... We understood that death is no worse than life. One need only imagine a life that seems no worse than death. Everything human disappears in man. The state will suppresses everything, only the thirst for life, great survival remains: “Hungry and angry, I knew that nothing in the world would force me to commit suicide ... and I realized the most important thing that I became a man not because he was God's creation , but because he was physically stronger, more enduring than all animals, and later because he forced the spiritual principle to successfully serve the physical principle. So, contrary to all theories about the origin of man.
Still, man, as a higher being, and in such hellish conditions, under such heavy oppression, has not forgotten how to think. The story “Sherry Brandy” describes the death of the poet in the camp. He was "pleased to know that he could still think." This poet does not even have a name in the story, but there is something else: before his death, the truth is revealed to him, he understands his whole life. And what is the life of a poet? “Poems were that life-giving force, which is the poet? “Poems were the life-giving force that he lived. Exactly. He did not live for poetry, he lived for poetry. Now it was so clear, so palpably clear, that inspiration was life: before death, it was given to him to know that life was inspiration, namely inspiration. And he rejoiced that it was given to him to know this final truth.”
If in the story “Sherry Brandy” Shalamov writes about the life of the poet, about its meaning, then in the first story, which is called “In the Snow”, Shalamov talks about the purpose and role of writers, comparing it with how they tread the road through the virgin snow. Writers are the ones who trample it. There is the first one who has the hardest time of all, but if you follow only in his footsteps, you get only a narrow path. Others follow him and tread the wide road that readers travel on. “And each of them, even the smallest, the weakest, must step on a piece of virgin snow, and not in someone else's footprint. And it’s not writers who ride tractors and horses, but readers.”
And Shalamov does not follow the trodden path, he steps on the “virgin snow”. “The literary and human feat of Shalamov lies in the fact that he not only endured 17 years of camps, kept his soul alive, but also found the strength in himself to return in thought and feeling to the terrible years, to carve out of the most durable material - Words - truly a Memorial in memory dead, for the edification of posterity.
Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - essay "A Man in a Totalitarian State (Based on the Works of Russian Writers of the 20th Century)"
Let's smoke, friend. Under this howl, something is not asleep, it is not sung. It's February now. And you and I And March will not smile at anything. Lev Platonovich Karsavin.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn became famous in the 60s, during the "Khrushchev thaw". "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" shocked readers with knowledge of the forbidden - camp life under Stalin. One of the countless islands of the Gulag archipelago has opened for the first time. Behind him was the state itself, a ruthless totalitarian system that suppresses man.
The story is dedicated to the resistance of the living to the inanimate, of man to the camp. The Solzhenitsyn hard labor camp is a mediocre, dangerous, cruel machine that grinds everyone who gets into it. The camp was created for the sake of killing, aimed at the extermination of the main thing in a person - thoughts, conscience, memory.
Take, for example, Ivan Shukhov, "the local life ruffled from rise to lights out." And to remember his native hut "there were fewer and fewer reasons for him." So who is whom: camp - man? Or man - camp? The camp defeated many, ground them to dust. Ivan Denisovich goes through the vile temptations of the camp. On this endless day, the drama of resistance plays out. Some win in it: Ivan Denisovich, Kavgorang, convict X-123, Alyoshka the Baptist, Senka Klevshin, pom-brigadier, foreman Tyurin himself. Others are doomed to perish - film director Tsezar Markovich, "jackal" Fetyukhov, foreman Der and others
The camp order mercilessly persecutes everything human and implants the inhuman. Ivan Denisovich thinks to himself: “Work is like a stick, there are two ends in it: if you do it for people, give quality, if you do it for a fool, give it a show. Ivan Shukhov firmly remembered the words of his first foreman Kuzemin, an old camp wolf who had been imprisoned for 12 years since 1943. "Here, guys, the law is the taiga, but people live here too. In the camp, that's who dies: who licks bowls, who hopes for the medical unit, and who goes to knock on the godfather." This is the essence of camp philosophy. The one who loses heart dies, becomes a slave to sick or hungry flesh, unable to strengthen himself from the inside and resist the temptation to pick up leftovers or inform on a neighbor.
How can a person live and survive? The camp is an image both real and surreal, absurd. This is both commonplace and a symbol, the embodiment of eternal evil and the usual low malice, hatred, laziness, dirt, violence, thoughtlessness, adopted by the system.
Man is at war with the camp, for it takes away the freedom to live for himself, to be himself. "Do not expose yourself" to the camp anywhere - this is the tactic of resistance. “Yes, and you should never yawn. You must try so that no guard sees you alone, but only in the crowd,” such is the tactic of survival. Despite the humiliating system of numbers, people stubbornly call each other by their first names, patronymics, and last names. Before us are faces, and not cogs and camp dust, into which the system of people would like to turn.
To defend freedom in a hard labor camp means to depend as little as possible internally on its regime, on its destructive order, to belong to oneself. Apart from sleep, the camper lives for himself only in the morning - 10 minutes at breakfast, and at lunch - 5 minutes, and at dinner - 5 minutes. Such is the reality. Therefore, Shukhov even eats "slowly, thoughtfully." This is also liberation.
The main thing in the story is a dispute about spiritual values. Alyoshka the Baptist says that one should pray "not for a parcel to be sent or for an extra portion of gruel. One should pray for the spiritual, so that the Lord removes evil scale from our hearts..." The story's finale is paradoxical for perception: "Ivan Denisovich fell asleep, quite satisfied ... The day passed, unclouded by anything, almost happy. If this is one of the "good" days, then what are the rest?!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tore a hole in the Iron Curtain and soon became a pariah himself. His books were banned and removed from libraries. By the time of the forced expulsion of the writer, "In the First Circle", "The Cancer Ward", "The Gulag Archipelago" had already been written. This was pursued with all the might of the state punitive machine.
The time for oblivion has passed. The merit of Solzhenitsyn is that he first spoke about the terrible disaster experienced by our long-suffering people and the author himself. Solzhenitsyn lifted the veil over the dark night of our history during the Stalinist period.
Platonov "Pit" - essay "Man and the totalitarian state in the story of A.P. Platonov" Pit ""
The story of Andrei Platonovich Platonov "The Pit" combines a social parable, philosophical grotesque, satire, lyrics. The writer does not give any hope that in the distant future at the site of the pit will grow that at least something will rise from this hole, which the heroes are digging nonstop. The foundation pit expands and, according to the Directive, spreads across the ground - first four times, and then, thanks to Pashkin's administrative decision, six times.
The builders of the “general proletarian home” are literally building their future on children's bones.
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The writer created a merciless grotesque, testifying to the mass psychosis of obedience, insane sacrifice and blindness that have taken possession of the country.
The protagonist is the spokesman for the author's position. Among the fantastic communist leaders and the dead mass, he thought and bitterly doubted the human correctness of what was happening around him. Lost in thought “among the general pace of labor,” Voshchev does not move in accordance with the “general line,” but seeks his own path to the truth. Voshchev never found the truth. Looking at the dying Nastya, Voshchev thinks: "Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of origin, if there is no small faithful person in whom the truth would be joy and movement?" Platonov wants to find out what exactly could move people who continued to dig a hole with such zeal. This new slavery is based on the rituals of a new faith: the religion of the foundation pit as expounded by Stalin.
"Pit" - a dramatic picture of the breakdown of time. Already on the first pages of the story, two words are heard that determined the pathos of time: pace and plan. But next to them, other key words appear in the story, entering into a very difficult relationship with the first: the meaning of what is happening and reflection on universal happiness.
“Happiness comes from materialism, Comrade Voshchev, and not from meaning,” they say in the factory committee. “We can’t defend you, you are an irresponsible person, and we don’t want to find yourself in the tail of the masses ... - You are afraid to be in the tail: he is a limb, but you yourself sat on your neck!”
A turning point gives birth to new relationships between people, all of Russia has moved forward, Voshchev sees “a line of pioneer children with tired music ahead; an invalid rides on his cart “For the second day now, he has been walking around the outskirts of the city and empty places to meet mismanaged peasants and form them into permanent workers; sail away on a raft "kulak" sounding from the mouthpiece "the music of the great
The symbolism of the construction of a pit is expressive - gradual despiritualization: first, living grass is mowed, then shovels cut into the also living upper layer of soil, then dead clay and stone are hammered.
“Comrade Pashkin vigilantly supplied the dwellings of the diggers with a radio horn, so that during their rest everyone could acquire the meaning of class life from the pipe.”
Three parables are very important in the story, which reflect the main ideas of the work.
The love story of artisan Nikita Chiklin, “feeling everything without calculation and consciousness, but with precision” and existing with a “continuously active sense of life”, is sad and short: “Then he didn’t like her, as if she was a hateful creature, - and so he that time without stopping past her, and she, perhaps, wept afterwards, a noble creature. The story of the engineer Prushevsky is just as sad. And here are two dissimilar people who, for various reasons, abandoned their happiness (one neglected him as low, that is, he mistook; the other was ashamed and did not dare), now they are equally unhappy. They doomed themselves to this, stopping the natural course of life.
The story of a blacksmith-bear who has only two qualities - "class instinct" and "diligent diligence"! “Hurry, Mish, otherwise we are with you a shock brigade! - said the blacksmith.
But the bear was already trying so hard that it smelled of singed wool, burning from the sparks of metal, and the bear did not feel it. This is how the metaphor “work like a beast” appears. Another metaphor unfolds next - a disservice. The bear, already overzealous, ruins the forgings.
According to Platonov, if a person is freed from thought, if all of his richest nature is reduced either to functioning in some narrow plane, or to submission, he ceases to be a person.
History of the Organizing Yard of the Collective Farm named after the General Line. man
Elisha suffers from his mind ":" Elisha held in his hand
the longest flag and, after listening obediently to the activist, set off
habitual step forward, not knowing where he needs to
The girl Nastya dies, although Elisha warms her and guards her
Chiklin, who understands "how much the surrounding world should be
insignificant and quiet, so that she was
But first the activist dies, and the collective farm calmly accepts this, “not having pity for him, but not rejoicing either, because the activist always spoke accurately and correctly, completely according to the testament, only he himself was so filthy that when the whole society conceived him once marry in order to reduce his activity, then even the most insignificant women and girls in the face began to cry from sadness.
A destructive attitude towards people and all natural life, that was the harmful essence of the activist.
A person in a totalitarian state loses the most important thing - the ability to think, feel, remain a person. This is a great tragedy. Such a person will never build a House, he is only capable of digging a foundation pit.
Zamyatin "We" - an essay "The dramatic fate of the individual in a totalitarian social order (based on the novel by E. Zamyatin" We ")"
It is human nature to look into the future, to try to recognize its outlines. How many writers from different historical eras tried to open the veil behind which the future is hidden, tried to predict what no one is allowed to know: Campanella in the "City of the Sun", Jules Verne in his novels, Orwell in "1984", N.G. Chernyshevsky in " What to do" and others. E. Zamyatin was such a science fiction writer. Dissatisfaction with the present, with Soviet reality, made him ask himself: what should the future be like in order to feel happy, to fulfill one's hopes, to realize ideals? One of the possible answers to this question is Vera Pavlovna's famous "fourth dream" from Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? Zamyatin seems to be specifically repeating the description of this one of the classic utopias: his characters live as a commune in a city of glass and metal. In the novel "We" in a fantastic and grotesque guise, a possible version of the society of the future appears before the reader. The dream of the powerful of this world is given: "Life should become a harmonious machine and with mechanical inevitability lead us to the desired goal." Unfortunately, in such a society there is nothing that the contemporary reality of the writer would not portend. The "mathematical perfect life" of the United State is unfolding before us. The symbolic image of the "fire-breathing integral", a miracle of technical thought and at the same time a tool of the most cruel enslavement, opens the book. Soulless technology, together with despotic power, turned man into an appendage of the machine, took away his freedom, brought him up in voluntary slavery. A world without love, without a soul, without poetry. A person - a "number" deprived of a name - was inspired that "our lack of freedom" is "our happiness" and that this "happiness" is in the rejection of the "I" and dissolution in the impersonal "we". It is suggested that artistic creativity is "no longer a shameless nightingale whistle", but "public service". And an intimate life is also considered as a state duty, carried out in accordance with the "report card of sexual days." Roman Zamyatina is a warning about the double danger threatening humanity: the hypertrophied power of machines and the power of the state. "Uniformity" undividedly and vigilantly dominates the life of all members of society. This is ensured by perfect technique and the watchful eye of the "keepers". Zamyatin's writing is imbued with reflections on Russian post-revolutionary reality. In it, one can guess the innermost thoughts about the possible perversions of the socialist idea that were already revealed during the life of the writer. The attitude to the policy of war communism became a stumbling block for the writer. This policy, which provides for a purely centralization of political and economic life in the country, a number of cruel measures, was temporary and forced in the conditions of civil war and economic ruin. But Zamyatin (and not only him at that time) imagined that there would be no other choice and that the only model of further movement was imposed on people - a new version of totalitarianism. Zamyatin's novel acquired a special value and instructiveness in the following sense: as a warning about possible distortions of socialism, about the danger of deviations from the democratic path and abuses, violence against the human person. Subsequent events in national and world history showed that the writer's anxieties were not in vain. Our people survived the bitter lessons of collectivization, and Stalinism, and repressions, and general fear. and stagnation. Many scenes of the novel make you remember the recent past. Manifestation in honor of the Benefactor, official elections, "guardians" who follow every step of a person. But Zamyatin shows that in a society where everything is aimed at suppressing the individual, where the human "I" is ignored, where the sole power is unlimited, rebellion is possible. The ability and desire to feel, love, be free in thoughts and actions push people to fight. But the authorities find a way out: with the help of an operation, a person’s fantasy is removed - the last thing that made him raise his head proudly, feel reasonable and strong. Still, there is hope that human dignity will not die under any regime. This hope is expressed by a woman who, with her beauty, incites to struggle. Zamyatin has an idea in the novel that is unusual for many of our contemporaries. The writer insists that there is no ideal society. Life is a pursuit of the ideal. And when this desire is absent, we observe a corrupting time of stagnation. There is another theme in the novel that is consonant with today. This is a topic of environmental concern. The "anti-society" depicted in the book brings destruction to the nature of life, isolating man from nature. The author dreams of expelling people "overgrown with numbers" "naked into the forests" so that they can learn from birds, flowers, and the sun. Only this, according to the author, can restore the inner essence of a person. The author of the novel "We" belongs to those major artists who intensely riveted attention to "eternal values" in the context of global historical shifts of the 20th century. At the time, the novel was not accepted. The frivolity and resentment of the then ideologists in relation to Zamyatin's doubts cost us dearly. The author on his "forbidden" pages builds a continuous chain of time, without tracing which, it is impossible to understand either the present or the future. Works like the novel "We", which have made their way to us from non-existence, will allow us to take a "new" look at the events of history, to comprehend the role of man in them. "We" is a warning against refusing to resist if the human community is to be turned into a collection of "cogs". Such works as "We" "squeeze" slavery out of a person, make him a personality. Leaving for emigration, Zamyatin (as he wrote to Stalin) hoped that, perhaps, he would return soon - "as soon as it becomes possible for us to serve big ideas in literature without serving small people, as soon as our view of the role of the artist of the word changes at least partially ". Zamyatin was able to return to his homeland only with the end of the "yoke of reason" and the beginning of the collapse of the United State. Posthumously.
