I do not see myself - whether I am in the house or near the house. I can only imagine the rubble, the road trampled by hooves - from the house to the river - and the proximity that still bothers me.
But why does this live in me, a city man? All the same shocks of the blood of the steppe ancestors? As an adult, I once asked my mother when was that day, that rain, and the crossing, and the city beyond the river; She replied that I was not in the world then. Or rather, she did not remember that day, just as the father did not remember one night that remained in my memory.
I was lying on a cart in such fragrant hay that my head was spinning and the starry sky circled above me together, so terrifyingly huge, as happens in the night steppe, and the constellations secretly rearranged themselves there. In the heights behind the white smoke, the Milky Way diverged in two streams, something happened, took place, in the depths of heaven, frightening and incomprehensible ...
Our cart waded along the steppe road, I floated between heaven and earth, and below the whole steppe was filled with the metallic ringing of crickets, which did not stop for a second, and it seemed to me that silver was drilling in my ears from the spraying Milky Way.
And in an earthly way beneath me the arba swayed, creaked and moved measuredly, dust seized the wheels, I could hear the snorting of invisible horses. This habitually brought me back to earth, at the same time I could not tear myself away from the sky that drew me in with its starry mysteries.
Then my father stirred beside me, I heard a sleepy grunt, I felt the smoke of tobacco, familiar and tart; father sat down in the hay, looked around, took his rifle and moved the bolt with an iron clatter, took out the clip and snapped it again, wiping the cartridges with his sleeve. Then my father told my mother in an undertone that there was a stanitsa ahead and they were playing pranks in it: three days ago someone had been killed there. It wasn't until a few years later that I put that moment of disequilibrium into words by asking him if he himself had ever killed a man? And how was it? And is it scary to kill?
At twenty-one, after returning from the war, I no longer asked my father this question.
But even then never again was that unity with heaven, that mute delight in front of all that exists, which he experienced then in childhood.
talent and fame
It happens that books of a non-fussy writer live in literature for a long time, but he has neither a big name nor fame.
It happens that there is both fame and name, but there is no talent in the works of a celebrity - a solid, so to speak, banknote, not backed by a gold reserve.
In the period of "mass culture" one rarely comes across a writer of divine fusion of name and talent, talent and fame deserved by books.
A moment's blink
What governs the world and all of us? Perhaps this is the hot abyss of the universe, absorbing the molten bodies of constellations and entire galaxies in the womb? Perhaps it is this highest power that determines all beginnings and endings, life and death, the rotation of the Earth, birth and death, just as earthly nature creates anthills in forests and predetermines their last second, putting a finite term into birth?
It is unthinkable to imagine fire-breathing hurricanes, prominences of solar boilings, incinerating everything in a giant whirlwind, flashes of exploding stars, showers of fiery carousel, and somewhere in the unknowable darkness, at some intersection of cosmic coordinates, a speck of dust flies, rotates - the Earth, to which the highest power of the world order informed certain energy and period of existence according to the general laws of the universal mechanism.
It is impossible to agree that the last moment has already been laid in her birth, that death is the indissoluble shadow of life, its inseparable companion in love, youth, success, and the closer to sunset, the longer and more noticeable the fatal shadow. Eternity is boundless time, and at the same time, eternity has no time.
If the longevity of the Earth is an instant of a microscopic grain of world energy, then human life is an instant of the shortest instant.
On January 26, 1976, a star the size of our Sun exploded in the northern hemisphere of the sky, and the mysterious explosion lasted only forty minutes, throwing out such an amount of energy that would be enough for the Earth and us sinners for a billion years. No one knows what this explosion was connected with - with the death or birth of a new star, maybe the agony became a birth, or maybe there was an incomprehensible release of nuclear energy, the death of a star, its transformation into a black hole, an extraordinary density of a celestial body, which, at the appointed moment, is also destined to explode and die, by its own death, forming a completely mysterious white hole.
Who will answer exactly what laws, what forces of the universe are subject to the elements and evolution, the periods of life and the hour of death, the levers for turning life into death and death into life?
We can hardly explain why a person is given a period not of nine hundred years, but seventy (according to the Bible), why so, youth is fleeting and why old age is so long. We will not be able to find an answer to the fact that sometimes good and evil cannot be separated, as a cause from an effect. It is regrettable, but one should not overestimate a person's understanding of his place on earth - most people are not given to know the meaning of being, the purpose of their own life. After all, you need to live the entire period given to you in order to have reason to say whether you lived correctly. How else to make sense of it? A speculative construction of possibilities and instructive predestinations?
But a person does not want to agree that he is a tiny grain of dust-Earth, invisible from cosmic heights, and, without knowing himself, he is boldly sure that he can comprehend the laws of the universe and, of course, subordinate them to daily use.
This restless thought occasionally flickers in his mind, he pushes it away, he defends himself, calms down with hope - fatal, inevitable, will not happen tomorrow, there is still time, there is still ten years, five years, two years, a year, several months ...
He does not want to part with life, although for most people it does not consist of great suffering and great joys, but of the smell of work sweat and simple carnal pleasures. With all this, many people are separated from each other by bottomless gaps, and thin poles of love and art, breaking every now and then, connect them.
And yet the consciousness of a person endowed with intelligence and imagination also contains the icy horror of the stellar sacraments taking place, the natural tragedy of the short life. But even this does not make his actions futility, just as the ants do not stop their tireless activity, apparently preoccupied with its useful necessity. A person imagines that he has the highest power on Earth, does not think that summer is replaced by autumn, youth - old age, and even the brightest stars go out. In his conviction - springs, actions, passions. In his pride - the frivolity of the viewer, confident that the entertaining film of life will continue uninterrupted.
Is not art full of pride in the arrogant desire to know the moments of the moments of being, in the hope of conveying to man the experience of reason and feeling, and thus remain immortal?
But without this conviction there is no idea of man and no art.
The name of this judge is true
It is unlikely that any of us would dare to define modern literature as a moralizing parable or as an essay commentary on the events of the day, passing off as a philosophical understanding of life.
No, the goal of modern art is the rational organization of consciousness, the introduction of moral order into the world order, the social concept of nature and man.
Today it is impossible to isolate oneself from the world with the stone wall of Ancient China with its deadly ban on penetration into a foreign culture. Therefore, one can hardly find the absolute of isolated, purified national art now on the European, American and Asian continents. Humanity is united by a single globe, it has become surprisingly cramped, reduced by the incredible speed of the new science.
When the well-known Japanese critic Kenji Shimizu says that “modern culture is imported mainly from the USA…”, when the Writers’ Union is created in Canada with the main goal of preventing the import of American book products, when the French intelligentsia complain about the dominance of jazz overseas music, when the largest Italian directors declare that Western cinema “drags behind its back the load of the American dollar”, that they, the Americans, “demand that the cinema does not awaken consciousness, does not call anywhere”. When we come into contact with translated American novels of recent times, we undoubtedly begin to understand: something has happened in world culture (I use the word “something” here, referring to the novel by Joseph Heller), and the concepts of good and evil do not exist, but Beelzebub himself, with a wave of wings burned by recent wars, puts on the pages of books the stamp of civilized melancholy, joyless satiety.
Essays-reasoning on the text of Y. Bondarev "Instant".
Don't let life slip between your fingers
I.S. Turgenev.
The outstanding Russian Soviet writer Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev in his text tells about the important, in my opinion, problem of the transience of human life. This problem has always worried people. Reading the text makes each of us think about this question.
Yu.V. Bondarev, reflecting on the problem of the transience of life, tells that the highest power predetermined the life of the Earth, and therefore the death of a person is inevitable, and life is so lightning fast: “If the longevity of the Earth is only an instant of a microscopic grain of world energy, then a person’s life is an instant of the shortest instant ". The author seeks to convey to the reader the idea that a person should live his life with dignity in the transience of time.
The writer emphasizes that not every person is given to know the meaning of his own life, but people do not want to put up with the fact that they are only part of the Earth. In the text, the author believes that “a person does not want to agree that he is only a tiny grain, a speck of the Earth, invisible from cosmic heights, and, without knowing himself, he is impudently sure that he can comprehend the secrets, the laws of the universe and, of course, subdue them daily use." Without knowing himself, a person is naively convinced that he is capable of learning all the secrets of the universe, that he is immortal.
Yu.V. Bondarev convinces us that a person cannot come to terms with the transience of life, and the naive belief in one's own immortality is the force that drives a person. It is difficult to disagree with the author of this text. I fully share the position of the writer and think that life itself is fleeting, and a person should live a decent life.
The problem under discussion is so important in a person's life that many writers raised it in their works. In particular, I.A. Bunin in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco". The American millionaire never thought about the transience of life, naively believed in his own immortality and spent all his strength on gaining financial independence. It turned out that the accumulated capital has no meaning before the eternal law. Human life is absolutely insignificant in comparison with the world, and man himself is helpless and weak. The image of the modern world depicted in the work makes one think about the meaning of the life of the reader himself.
K.G. talks about the transience of life. Paustovsky in the story "Ilyinsky pool". The author emphasizes how incredibly quickly life flies by: “Indeed, before you have time to come to your senses, youth is already fading and eyes are dimming.” The writer draws attention to the fact that people do not try to save time, as if a lost life can be easily restored. He convinces us that our life is very fleeting, and a person should be careful with time.
Thus, Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev tells about a problem that is important for each of us. I am grateful to the author for prompting me to once again reflect on the problem of the transience of human life. I believe that we, the younger generation, should do everything to live a decent and active life in accordance with certain ideals and beliefs, without wasting time on useless activities.
Attached files
Is it possible to imagine the modern world, devoid of a printed sign, without a sense of tragic loss?
In my opinion, this loss would be more irreplaceable than the disappearance of electric light in our life, because the most important mechanism in the transfer of both scientific knowledge and the feelings accumulated by all epochs would be lost, and the human mind would plunge into the abyss of darkness and moral stagnation. The world would become depressingly impoverished, the threads from one person to another would break, and, presumably, a time of ignorance, suspicion and alienation would come.
Composition
What ways of self-development do we know? Art, creativity, science, business and much more becomes subject to a person exactly at the moment when he begins to take an intense interest in it. However, any process of thinking begins with a book. About what role it plays in a person's life, Yu.V. Bondarev.
Speaking about the book, the writer focuses our attention on the variety of functions that it contains. Discussing her contribution "to the abyss of darkness and moral stagnation", about binding and conductive properties, about philosophical purpose, historical statement, the author leads us to the idea that existence in the modern world is impossible without books, because it is they who create this world. and improve. Thus, Yu.V. Bondarev emphasizes the importance of literature for our historical past, future and present, and, moreover, focuses on satisfying the existential and social needs of a person.
The author's opinion is as follows: books, first of all, help a person to learn about the world around him, get acquainted with the life experience of other people, receive spiritual and moral values and pass them on to future generations. Without books, humanity would not be able to realize itself, it would have no past and future, but would be content with a soulless, insensitive, immoral, unpromising, boring present. The book is a second reality, a second experience, and "one who has not been in the thrall of a serious book is worthy of the greatest regret."
Of course, Yu.V. Bondarev is right. The book plays a central role in our life. With it, the all-round development of a person begins, views and points of view are formed, then reflection and awareness of the role of a person in world history. Books allow the exchange of information and feelings from generation to generation, allowing us modern people to understand the history of mankind and pass on our own experience to our children. Literature in general is a person's best friend, because only in a book can one find answers to any questions of interest, without the risk of receiving a wave of condemnation and misunderstanding instead.
For example, in R.D. Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", using the example of a consumer society in which reading books is a violation of the law, the author shows very clearly what can become of a world without books. Society in the novel does not know how to think and feel, it is very easy to influence and control, it is interested in base things and does not give a damn about its own aspirations and dreams. In this world without books there is no past, people in it are fixated only on their social roles. However, those who did read, such as, for example, one of the heroines, Clarissa MacLellan, were able to help the protagonist of the novel realize the absurdity of what is happening, resist the system and try to save himself and his soul.
Reading books helped the main character of D. London's novel "Martin Eden" to find and realize himself. Being an illiterate and simple worker, Martin did not think about his purpose, about goals other than just getting drunk with friends after work. Books became the initiator and support in the development of the creative potential of the protagonist, his intellectual development, the starting point in his aspirations and desires. He completely changed his views on the world and people, acquired new acquaintances and at the same time was able to realize himself as a writer, remaining the same simple and good-natured Martin that his family always considered him to be.
Based on the foregoing, we can conclude that the book covers our entire life, forms, creates and demonstrates the image of the world and any living, intelligent being in particular. In our age, probably, not a single question that has ever arisen in a person’s head will remain unanswered - everything has long been invented for us. And as the British philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said: "... Everything that mankind has done, changed its mind, everything that it has achieved - all this has been preserved, as if by magic, on the pages of books."
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If in a summer forest a person is able to experience the charm of greenery, sunny chiaroscuro, then he does not notice gnarled branches under his feet, stumps, ugly dry forest in the thicket.
All this does not spoil the general feeling of love for existence, and the pleasure of walking the earth.
So it is in wise prose, which should be called a good judge sworn in by life itself.
Sometimes I try to remember the first touches of the world, to remember with the hope that it can return me to the naive time of surprise, delight and first love, to return what later, as a mature person, I never experienced so purely and piercingly.
From what age do I remember myself? And where was it? In the Urals, in the Orenburg steppe?
When I asked my father and mother about this, they could not accurately recall the details of my early childhood.
One way or another, many years later, I realized that a moment of sparkling mood caught and, as it were, stopped by consciousness is a miraculous contact of a moment of the past with the present, lost with the eternal, childish with adult, just as golden dreams unite with reality. However, perhaps the first sensations are the impulse of the blood of my ancestors in me, my great-great-grandfathers, the voice of the blood that brought me back hundreds of years ago, at the time of some kind of migration, when a wild, robber wind rushed over the steppes at night, whipping the grasses under the blue moonlight. light, and the creak of many carts on dusty roads was mixed with the primitive chirping of grasshoppers, which populated the many-miles-long spaces with an accompanying ringing, in the daytime scorched by the evil sun to the prickly astringency of the air smelling of horses ...
But the first thing I remember is the high bank of the river where we stopped after a night crossing.
I am sitting in the grass, wrapped in a sheepskin coat, sitting among my brothers and sisters huddled in a tight bunch, and next to me, also wrapped in a carpet, sits some kind of grandmother, meek, comfortable, homely. She leaned towards us, warming us with her body and protecting us from the dawn breeze, and we all look, as if enchanted, at the crimson ball of the sun rising from the grass on the other side, so incredibly close, sparkling in the eyes with splashes of rays, that we are all in a hidden ritual delightedly we merge with all this on the bank of a nameless steppe river.
As in a movie or in a dream, I see a high hillock, and we are on that hillock, tilted from left to right, our tight bunch, wrapped in sheepskin coats, and a grandmother or great-grandmother towering above us - I see a face under a village scarf; it gives rise to childish security and devoted love for her and for all the charms of the steppe morning that opened on the river bank, inseparable from the native face of a grandmother or great-grandmother that I never met later, imagined by me ...
When I remember a fragment of half-awake-half-sleep, it is as if all the kindness of the sun rising from the grass, which we met on this long journey somewhere, opened up ahead. Where?
It is doubly strange: I remember the time of moving and approaching an unseen and unknown land, where everything should be joy.
And a wooden house rises from the corners of my memory not far from the crossing over a wide river, behind which some kind of vague city emerges, with churches and gardens, an unfamiliar big city.
I do not see myself - whether I am in the house or near the house. I can only imagine the rubble, the road trampled by hooves - from the house to the river - and the proximity that still bothers me.
But why does this live in me, a city man? All the same shocks of the blood of the steppe ancestors? As an adult, I once asked my mother when was that day, that rain, and the crossing, and the city beyond the river; She replied that I was not in the world then. Or rather, she did not remember that day, just as the father did not remember one night that remained in my memory.
I was lying on a cart in such fragrant hay that my head was spinning and the starry sky circled above me together, so terrifyingly huge, as happens in the night steppe, and the constellations secretly rearranged themselves there. In the heights behind the white smoke, the Milky Way diverged in two streams, something happened, took place, in the depths of heaven, frightening and incomprehensible ...
Our cart waded along the steppe road, I floated between heaven and earth, and below the whole steppe was filled with the metallic ringing of crickets, which did not stop for a second, and it seemed to me that silver was drilling in my ears from the spraying Milky Way.
And in an earthly way beneath me the arba swayed, creaked and moved measuredly, dust seized the wheels, I could hear the snorting of invisible horses. This habitually brought me back to earth, at the same time I could not tear myself away from the sky that drew me in with its starry mysteries.
Then my father stirred beside me, I heard a sleepy grunt, I felt the smoke of tobacco, familiar and tart; father sat down in the hay, looked around, took his rifle and moved the bolt with an iron clatter, took out the clip and snapped it again, wiping the cartridges with his sleeve. Then my father told my mother in an undertone that there was a stanitsa ahead and they were playing pranks in it: three days ago someone had been killed there. It wasn't until a few years later that I put that moment of disequilibrium into words by asking him if he himself had ever killed a man? And how was it? And is it scary to kill?
At twenty-one, after returning from the war, I no longer asked my father this question.
But even then never again was that unity with heaven, that mute delight in front of all that exists, which he experienced then in childhood.
It happens that books of a non-fussy writer live in literature for a long time, but he has neither a big name nor fame.
It happens that there is both fame and name, but there is no talent in the works of a celebrity - a solid, so to speak, banknote, not backed by a gold reserve.
In the period of "mass culture" one rarely comes across a writer of divine fusion of name and talent, talent and fame deserved by books.
What governs the world and all of us? Perhaps this is the hot abyss of the universe, absorbing the molten bodies of constellations and entire galaxies in the womb? Perhaps it is this highest power that determines all beginnings and endings, life and death, the rotation of the Earth, birth and death, just as earthly nature creates anthills in forests and predetermines their last second, putting a finite term into birth?
It is unthinkable to imagine fire-breathing hurricanes, prominences of solar boilings, incinerating everything in a giant whirlwind, flashes of exploding stars, showers of fiery carousel, and somewhere in the unknowable darkness, at some intersection of cosmic coordinates, a speck of dust flies, rotates - the Earth, to which the highest power of the world order informed certain energy and period of existence according to the general laws of the universal mechanism.
It is impossible to agree that the last moment has already been laid in her birth, that death is the indissoluble shadow of life, its inseparable companion in love, youth, success, and the closer to sunset, the longer and more noticeable the fatal shadow. Eternity is boundless time, and at the same time, eternity has no time.
If the longevity of the Earth is an instant of a microscopic grain of world energy, then human life is an instant of the shortest instant.
On January 26, 1976, a star the size of our Sun exploded in the northern hemisphere of the sky, and the mysterious explosion lasted only forty minutes, throwing out such an amount of energy that would be enough for the Earth and us sinners for a billion years. No one knows what this explosion was connected with - with the death or birth of a new star, maybe the agony became a birth, or maybe there was an incomprehensible release of nuclear energy, the death of a star, its transformation into a black hole, an extraordinary density of a celestial body, which, at the appointed moment, is also destined to explode and die, by its own death, forming a completely mysterious white hole.
Who will answer exactly what laws, what forces of the universe are subject to the elements and evolution, the periods of life and the hour of death, the levers for turning life into death and death into life?
We can hardly explain why a person is given a period not of nine hundred years, but seventy (according to the Bible), why so, youth is fleeting and why old age is so long. We will not be able to find an answer to the fact that sometimes good and evil cannot be separated, as a cause from an effect. It is regrettable, but one should not overestimate a person's understanding of his place on earth - most people are not given to know the meaning of being, the purpose of their own life. After all, you need to live the entire period given to you in order to have reason to say whether you lived correctly. How else to make sense of it? A speculative construction of possibilities and instructive predestinations?
But a person does not want to agree that he is a tiny grain of dust-Earth, invisible from cosmic heights, and, without knowing himself, he is boldly sure that he can comprehend the laws of the universe and, of course, subordinate them to daily use.
This restless thought occasionally flickers in his mind, he pushes it away, he defends himself, calms down with hope - fatal, inevitable, will not happen tomorrow, there is still time, there is still ten years, five years, two years, a year, several months ...
He does not want to part with life, although for most people it does not consist of great suffering and great joys, but of the smell of work sweat and simple carnal pleasures. With all this, many people are separated from each other by bottomless gaps, and thin poles of love and art, breaking every now and then, connect them.
And yet the consciousness of a person endowed with intelligence and imagination also contains the icy horror of the stellar sacraments taking place, the natural tragedy of the short life. But even this does not make his actions futility, just as the ants do not stop their tireless activity, apparently preoccupied with its useful necessity. A person imagines that he has the highest power on Earth, does not think that summer is replaced by autumn, youth - old age, and even the brightest stars go out. In his conviction - springs, actions, passions. In his pride - the frivolity of the viewer, confident that the entertaining film of life will continue uninterrupted.
Is not art full of pride in the arrogant desire to know the moments of the moments of being, in the hope of conveying to man the experience of reason and feeling, and thus remain immortal?
But without this conviction there is no idea of man and no art.
It is unlikely that any of us would dare to define modern literature as a moralizing parable or as an essay commentary on the events of the day, passing off as a philosophical understanding of life.
No, the goal of modern art is the rational organization of consciousness, the introduction of moral order into the world order, the social concept of nature and man.
Today it is impossible to isolate oneself from the world with the stone wall of Ancient China with its deadly ban on penetration into a foreign culture. Therefore, one can hardly find the absolute of isolated, purified national art now on the European, American and Asian continents. Humanity is united by a single globe, it has become surprisingly cramped, reduced by the incredible speed of the new science.
When the well-known Japanese critic Kenji Shimizu says that “modern culture is imported mainly from the USA…”, when the Writers’ Union is created in Canada with the main goal of preventing the import of American book products, when the French intelligentsia complain about the dominance of jazz overseas music, when the largest Italian directors declare that Western cinema “drags behind its back the load of the American dollar”, that they, the Americans, “demand that the cinema does not awaken consciousness, does not call anywhere”. When we come into contact with translated American novels of recent times, we undoubtedly begin to understand: something has happened in world culture (I use the word “something” here, referring to the novel by Joseph Heller), and the concepts of good and evil do not exist, but Beelzebub himself, with a wave of wings burned by recent wars, puts on the pages of books the stamp of civilized melancholy, joyless satiety.
The main problem of the West - the abyss between the spiritual needs of man and his material and carnal existence - gives rise to the blurring of a viable moral doctrine.
Modern bourgeois sociologists explain the new ersatz feelings with the steely tread of "industrial society", calling the criminal of the century scientific and technological progress, which crushed a person with machines and things, vulgarizing and replacing his thoughts with either a grasping instinct or a reflex to physiological pleasures.
And in literature there are apocalyptic parabolas, ideas of total destiny, a dim outline of the coming day of mankind on a poisoned, scorched and dehydrated planet, and “the boundaries between the “I” and the “not-I” grow. Alienation arises, for "there are as many truths on earth as there are people." And morality, the primary element of social institutions (the most noble brake of lead instincts), is lost. It was replaced by convulsive entertainment, a diabolical sign of escape from ourselves, from loneliness in the stone labyrinths of cities, where a whole industry of false art has been trying to fill the spiritual vacuum in the last two decades, turning art into a profitable commerce. Therefore, aren't sex, drugs, alcohol helpless doctors of mental loneliness?
The stereotypical standard of "mass literature" has been replaced by individual talents, and this is the threshold of the art of post-industrial society.
We know that entire cultures sooner or later exhausted their capabilities and perished, just like outwardly seemingly omnipotent civilizations buried in the sands of the desert.
Well, perhaps the culture of Europe has passed its zenith and over the past twenty years has been steadily sliding towards a dull sunset, as Oswald Spengler wrote about at the beginning of the century? Or perhaps this bourgeois culture, having suffocated in a machine civilization, has lost its spiritual strength, handing over the marshal's baton to sociological reporting and "mass" novels, the low artistic level of which blurred the criteria? Synthetics, excess of things and greed overturned, buried the aesthetic idol, and Europeanism, anemic, aged, already resembles an eagle with wax wings - where and how long should it fly?
In order to continue to love a person, a modern artist needs strong points of support.
When we talk about the scientific and technological revolution of a developed socialist society, about the highly mechanized civilization of the 20th century, we, of course, think of science as an impulse for progress, as a lever that turns the individual not towards the world of things that absorb him, but towards spiritual wealth for everyone. Obeying moral laws, a person must realize that the age of electronics and cybernetics, the domination of machines is not an end in itself, not progress for the sake of progress, but a step in the historical destiny of mankind, a frontier of knowledge through which he is destined to pass.
People are ready to blame technology, forgetting that technology is subordinate to people, the real perpetrators of the murder and themselves. And here social problems arise.
The theorists of the post-industrial society argue that scientific and technological progress will abolish ideology, replacing it with science, that is, the thesis of "de-ideologization" denies the social transformation of the modern capitalist structure. All these anti-Marxist theories are reminiscent of long-standing and noisy discussions about the mono-novel and centrifugal and centripetal prose, about the anti-novel and the novel-reportage, about the novel-information and the existentialist novel - in all PEN Club disputes there was a lack of "life as it is" and a lack of hope.
Optimism? Faith in good? Faith in man? But is this optimism justified by the era? The nineteenth century was a time of critical realism. Doesn't our industrial age deserve criticism?
In Soviet literature there is no universal pessimism, no black humor, no farcical sacrilege, because our art is subject to an ethical principle, where the hero, as a rule, makes a choice not for the sake of an egocentric "I".
Soviet literature is not characterized by moralizing and the role of the corrector of the human race, which the Bible claimed to be - this most famous book in the world, a set of myths, laws and advice, a dogmatic guide to action, often striking with unceremonious unquestioned authority.
Tomorrow's age, which is no longer sealed with seven seals, will recognize and strengthen our literature as a "doctrine of good" - it tries to say about the revolutionary epoch on earth, about the man of this epoch, to say not something, not something, but to say everything.
In search of truth, we were not prisoners of idealistic irrationalism, we were disappointed in a person and were not adherents of asocial trends.
The word was born before philosophy, politics, sociology and all scientific systems; the word gave birth to the ideas of humanity, without which art and literature, degenerating, turn into a mirror of miserable entertainment, reflecting everyday occurrences at the crossroads of life.
A masterpiece in prose comes into being when the dictatorship of ideas is related to the dictatorship of the image.
Any literature should not be judged by its average level, as sociologists judge a society. What Tolstoy wrote, in comparison with Latin literature, seems trivial to other Western intellectuals, but is it worth arguing against "avant-gardeism in reverse"?
And although it is sometimes difficult to draw a line between the great and the ridiculous, we tend to say that superficial art always pretends to be spicy and coquettishly fashionable, while genuine art is not a depiction of "personal impressions", but the whole world, perceived through the mind and feelings in the constant presence of the sworn Chief Justice. The name of this judge is true.
When we passed the plains of Poland and approached the border of Czechoslovakia, the half-forgotten pre-war green world of youth suddenly approached, began to dream of us in the dead of autumn nights under the gloomy creak of pines, under the sound of machine-gun bursts on the heights. Then the same dreams haunted me - in them everything was "once upon a time" ...
Waking up in a trench, I felt how the morning cold was wafting from the peaks of the Carpathians, how the earth, blackened with funnels, was getting cold under the fog. And, looking at the soldiers sleeping near the guns, he recalled with an effort the dream: grasshoppers crackled sultryly in the grass; then - on a lush green glade, a wet volleyball net, the blue smoke of samovars in a dacha near Moscow.
And as if incompatible with this is another dream - large snow, slowly falling around the lamps in the alleys of Zamoskvorechye, shaggy snow on the collar of her, whose name I have forgotten, turns white on her eyebrows, on her eyelashes, I see an attentively raised face; We both have skates in our hands. We returned from the rink. We are standing on the corner, and I know that in a few minutes we have to leave.
These incoherent visions were not complete dreams, it appeared as a reflection when we were deaf from the explosions of shells, the cutting screech of fragments, automatic bursts, when nothing existed but the iron rumble, the rattle of German tanks crawling towards the guns, trunks heated to a purple glow, sweaty the faces of soldiers, the gunner clinging to the eyecup of the panorama, hoarse commands, burning grass near the fire.
Moving away, leaving the house, we stubbornly walked towards him. The closer Germany was, the closer home was, the faster we returned to our youth interrupted by the war.
We were then both twenty years old and forty at the same time.
During the four years of the war, every hour feeling the fiery breath of death, silently passing by fresh hillocks with inscriptions in indelible pencil on the tablets, we have not lost the former world of youth, but we have matured by twenty years and, it seemed, lived them in such detail, so richly. enough to last two generations.
We learned that the world is both strong and unsteady. Sometimes we hated the sun - it promised flying weather and, therefore, shoals of diving Junkers. We learned that the sun can gently warm not only in summer, but also in late autumn, and in the most severe January frosts, but at the same time indifferently expose in all details the recent picture of the battle, torn apart by direct hits of the guns, the bodies of the dead, whom only yesterday we called after name. We learned the world along with human exploits and suffering.
Who among us could have said before that grass can be slate and spiral from tank shell explosions? Who could imagine that one day he would see on feminine daisies, these symbols of love, a drop of blood of your friend, killed by machine gun fire?
We entered ruined cities, gaping with gaps in windows and porches; fallen lanterns with broken glass did not illuminate the crowds walking on the sidewalks, wounded by funnels, and there was no laughter, no music, no cigarette lights lit under the charred poplars of the parks.
In Poland, we saw a gigantic extermination camp - Auschwitz, a fascist death plant, working day and night with devilish punctuality, all around it the whole air smelled of the smell of human ashes.
We learned what fascism is in all its misanthropic nudity. During the four years of the war, my generation learned a lot, but our inner vision perceived only two colors: sunny white and oil black. The rainbow colors of the spectrum were absent.
We fired at the black crosses of tanks and armored personnel carriers, at the black swastika, at medieval black gothic cities turned into fortresses.
The war was a merciless and rude school, we were not sitting at desks, in classrooms, and in front of us were not notes, but armor-piercing shells and machine-gun triggers. We did not yet have life experience and, as a result, did not know simple things in everyday life - we did not know in which hand to hold the fork, and we forgot everyday norms of behavior, we hid tenderness and kindness. The words “books”, “table lamp”, “thank you”, “please forgive me”, “peace”, “tiredness” sounded to us in an unfamiliar and impossible language.
But our spiritual experience was filled to the limit, we could cry not from grief, but from hatred, and we could rejoice like a child at the spring school of cranes, as we never rejoiced - neither before the war, nor after the war. I remember that in the foothills of the Carpathians, the first triangles of cranes appeared in the sky, stretched out in white, like transparent smoke, spring clouds above our trenches - and we watched in fascination, guessing their way to Russia. We looked at them until the Nazis from their trenches opened automatic fire on these jambs, tracer bullets upset the crane chains, and in anger we opened fire on the Nazi trenches.
The inexhaustible feeling of hatred in our souls was the more bitter, the more vulnerable was the feeling of the young and sunny world of our expectations - all this lived in us, we dreamed. It gave us strength, gave birth to patience. This forced us to take heights that seemed inaccessible.
Our generation - those who survived - returned from the war, having managed to preserve in itself this pure, radiant world, enduring faith in the future, in youth, in hope. But we have become more irreconcilable to injustice, kinder to good, our conscience has become a second heart. After all, this conscience was paid for with blood. And at the same time, for four years of the war, we kept in our souls the natural color of the sky, the smile of a beloved woman, the soft shine of lanterns at dusk and the evening snowfall ...
The war is already history. But is it?
One thing is clear to me: the main participants in history are People and Time. Not to forget Time means not to forget People, not to forget People means not to forget Time. To be historical is to be modern. The number of divisions that participated in a particular battle is calculated by historians with scrupulous accuracy. Yes, they count the number of losses, determine the milestones of Time. But they will not be able to eavesdrop on the conversation of the soldiers in the trenches before the attack, to see the tears in the eyes of an eighteen-year-old medical officer dying in the twilight of a dilapidated dugout, around which German tanks broke through, to feel the crackle of a machine-gun burst that kills life.
The currents of those people who lived in History pulsate in our blood. They did not and could not know what we know, but they felt what we no longer feel. With every second glance into the face of death, everything is sharpened, concentrated in the human soul.
And this focus of feelings is extremely dear to me.
Option 1
The answers to tasks 1–26 are a word, a phrase, a number or a sequence of words, numbers. Write your answer on the right
from the job number without spaces, commas and other additional characters.
Read the text and do tasks 1-3.
(1) The history of the hat in Russia goes back 300 years and is full of incredible events, testifying not so much to
vagaries of fashion, ... .. about the special role of the hat. (2) For a long time, a headdress has been endowed with special properties and
interpreted as a kind of "replacement" of the head. (3) The complex history of the relationship between man and his
headgear allows us to consider the hat not just as an element of the costume, but as a kind of cultural and
artistic phenomenon.
1. Which of the following sentences correctly conveys the MAIN information contained in the text?
1. The history of the relationship between a person and his headdress allows us to consider the hat as a kind of
cultural phenomenon.
2. The hat should be considered as a kind of cultural and artistic phenomenon, since its history in
Russia is 300 years old.
3. For a long time, the headdress has been endowed with special properties and interpreted as a kind of “substitution” for the head.
4. The history of the hat is full of incredible events that allow it to be considered not just as an element of a costume.
5. The hat is considered as a kind of cultural phenomenon, since it is connected with a person by a complex
relationship history.
2. Choose your own union, which should stand in place of the gap in the first (1) sentence of the text?
Write down this word.
3. Read the fragment of the dictionary entry, which gives the meaning of the word ELEMENT. Determine the value in
in which this word is used in the third (3) sentence of the text. Write down the number corresponding to this value
in the given fragment of the dictionary entry.
ELEMENT, - a, m.
1. An integral part of something; component. Break the whole into elements. What are the elements of culture? Nature -
e. production. The constituent elements of something. // Characteristic movement, one figure of some kind. exercise, dance, etc.
Gymnastic, dance elements. Learn e. figure skating.
2. what or what; book. A separate aspect, a characteristic feature of something. Fantastic e. story. drama with
comedy elements. E. unconsciousness in human behavior.
3. Spec. Detail of some structures, devices; unit of some sets. Prefabricated elements of the stairs.
semiconductor elements. International elements of vocabulary.
4. (With def.). About a person, a person as a representative of some kind of environment, social group, etc. progressive elements
society. Foreign elements. Alien e. in a collective. / (Unspecified). Unapproved About bad, harmful, etc. man.
Everyone knows what kind of element you are!
5. Spec. A simple substance that is indecomposable by conventional chemical methods into its component parts. periodic
element system. Light items.
4. In one of the words below, an error was made in the placement of stress: the letter is WRONGLY highlighted,
denoting a stressed vowel. Write out this word.
PLUM/ RESTORED/ OIL PIPELINE/ Boyhood/ endow
5. In one of the sentences below, the underlined word is WRONGLY used. Fix the bug and
write the word correctly.
1. Charsky was one of the INDIGENOUS inhabitants of St. Petersburg.
2. She was the prettiest employee in the department, quiet and UNRESPONSIBLE.
