Moral choice. Essay “Man at war using the example of the story “Live and Remember”

V.G. Rasputin "Live and Remember"

The events described in the story take place in the winter of '45, in the last war year, on the banks of the Angara in the village of Atamanovka. The name, it would seem, is loud, and in the recent past even more intimidating - Razboinikovo. “...Once upon a time, in the old days, the local peasants did not disdain one quiet and profitable trade: they checked the gold miners coming from the Lena.” But the inhabitants of the village had long been quiet and harmless and did not engage in robbery. Against the backdrop of this virgin and wildlife The main event of the story occurs - the betrayal of Andrei Guskov.

Questions that are raised in the story.

Who is to blame for the moral decline of man? What is a person's path to betrayal? What is the extent of a person’s responsibility for his fate and the fate of his Motherland?

The war, as an exceptional circumstance, confronted all people, including Guskov, with a “choice” that everyone had to make.

The path to betrayal

War is a severe test for the people. But if in strong people She cultivated perseverance, inflexibility, heroism, then in the hearts of the weak cowardice, cruelty, selfishness, disbelief, and despair began to sprout and begin to bear their bitter fruits.

In the image of Andrei Guskov, the hero of the story “Live and Remember,” the soul of a weak man is revealed to us, crippled by the harsh events of the war, as a result of which he became a deserter. How did this man, who honestly defended his Motherland from enemies for several years and even earned the respect of his comrades in arms, decide to do an act despised by everyone, always and everywhere, regardless of century and nationality?

V. Rasputin shows the path to the hero’s betrayal. Of all those leaving for the front, Guskov experienced this the hardest: “Andrei looked at the village silently and offended; for some reason he was ready not to blame the war, but the village for being forced to leave it.”. But despite the fact that it’s hard for him to leave home, he says goodbye to his family quickly and dryly: “What has to be cut off must be cut off immediately...”

At first Andrei Guskov had no intention of deserting; he honestly went to the front and was a good fighter and comrade, earning the respect of his friends. But the horrors of war and injury sharpened the egoism of this man, who put himself above his comrades, deciding that it was he who needed to survive, to be saved, to return alive at all costs.

Knowing that the war was already coming to an end, he tried to survive at any cost. His wish came true, but not entirely: he was wounded and was sent to the hospital. He thought that a serious wound would free him from further service. Lying in the ward, he already imagined how he would return home, and he was so sure of this that he did not even call his relatives to the hospital to see him. The news that he was being sent to the front again struck like a lightning strike. All his dreams and plans were destroyed in an instant.

Author Valentin Rasputin does not try to justify Andrei’s desertion, but seeks to explain it from the position of a hero: he fought for a long time, deserved a vacation, wanted to see his wife, but the vacation he was entitled to after being wounded was canceled. The betrayal that Andrei Guskov commits creeps into his soul gradually. At first he was haunted by the fear of death, which seemed inevitable to him: “If not today, then tomorrow, not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow, when his turn comes.” Guskov survived both wounds and shell shock, experienced tank attacks and ski raids. V.G. Rasputin emphasizes that among the intelligence officers Andrei was considered a reliable comrade. Why did he take the path of betrayal? At first, Andrey just wants to see his family, Nastena, stay at home for a while and return. However, having traveled by train to Irkutsk, Guskov realized that in winter you couldn’t turn around in three days. Andrei remembered the demonstration execution, when in his presence they shot a boy who wanted to run fifty miles away to his village. Guskov understands that you won’t get a pat on the head for going AWOL. Thus, unaccounted for circumstances made Guskov’s journey much longer than he expected, and he decided that this was fate, there was no turning back. In moments of mental turmoil, despair and fear of death, Andrei makes a fatal decision for himself - to desert, which turned his life and soul upside down, made him a different person.

Gradually Andrei began to hate himself. In Irkutsk, he settled for some time with a mute woman, Tanya, although he had absolutely no intention of doing this. A month later, Guskov finally found himself in his native place. However, the hero did not feel joy from the sight of the village. V.G. Rasputin constantly emphasizes that, having committed betrayal, Guskov embarked on the path of the beast. After some time, life, which he valued so much at the front, became no longer pleasant to him. Having committed treason, Andrei cannot respect himself. Mental anguish, nervous tension, the inability to relax for a minute turns him into a hunted animal.

Forced to hide in the forest from people, Guskov gradually loses all the human, good beginning that was in him. Only anger and irrepressible egoism remain in his heart by the end of the story; he is only concerned about his own fate.

Andrei Guskov deserts consciously, for the sake of his life, and forces Nastya, his wife, to hide him, thereby dooming her to live a lie: “Here’s what I’ll tell you right away, Nastya. No dog needs to know I'm here. If you tell anyone, I'll kill you. I'll kill - I have nothing to lose. I have a firm hand on this, it won’t go wrong,”- with these words he meets his wife after a long separation. And Nastya had no choice but to simply obey him. She was at one with him until her death, although sometimes she was visited by thoughts that it was he who was to blame for her suffering, but not only for her, but also for the suffering of her unborn child, conceived not at all in love, but in a rude impulse, animal passion. This unborn child suffered along with its mother. Andrei did not realize that this child was doomed to live his whole life in shame. For Guskov it was important to fulfill his manly duty, to leave an heir, but how this child would live further was of little concern to him. The author shows how, having betrayed himself and his people, Guskov inevitably betrays the person closest and most understanding to him - his wife Nastena, who is ready to share the guilt and shame of her husband, and his unborn child, whom he cruelly condemns to tragic death.

Nastena understood that both the life of her child and she herself were doomed to further shame and suffering. Shielding and protecting her husband, she commits suicide. She decides to throw herself into the Angara, thereby killing both herself and her unborn baby. Andrei Guskov is certainly to blame for all this. This moment is the punishment that higher powers everyone can punish the offender moral laws person. Andrei is doomed to a painful life. Nastena’s words: “Live and remember,” will pound in his fevered brain until the end of his days.

Why did Guskov become a traitor? The hero himself would like to shift the blame to “fate”, before which “will” is powerless.

It is no coincidence that the word “fate” runs like a red thread throughout the story, to which Guskov clings so much. He's not ready. He does not want to take responsibility for his actions; he tries with all his might to hide behind “fate” and “fate” for his crime. “This is all war, all of it,” he again began to justify himself and conjure. “Andrei Guskov understood: his fate had turned into a dead end, from which there was no way out. And the fact that there was no way back for him freed Andrei from unnecessary thoughts.” The reluctance to admit the need for personal responsibility for one’s actions is the reason for the appearance of a wormhole in Guskov’s soul, which determines his crime (desertion).

War on the pages of the story

The story does not describe battles, deaths on the battlefield, the exploits of Russian soldiers, or life at the front. Only life in the rear. And yet, this is precisely a story about war.

Rasputin explores the deforming influence on a person of a force whose name is war. If there had been no war, apparently, Guskov would not have succumbed to the fear instilled only by death and would not have reached such a fall. Perhaps, since childhood, the selfishness and resentment that had settled in him would have found a way out in some other forms, but not in such an ugly one. If it weren’t for the war, the fate of Nastena’s friend Nadka, who was left at twenty-seven years old with three children in her arms, would have turned out differently: a funeral came for her husband. If there had been no war... But it was there, it was going on, and people were dying in it. And he, Guskov, decided that it was possible to live by different laws than the rest of the people. And this incommensurable opposition doomed him not just to loneliness among people, but also to inevitable retaliatory rejection.

The result of the war for Andrei Guskov’s family was three shattered lives. But, unfortunately, there were many such families, many of them collapsed.

Telling us about the tragedy of Nastena and Andrei Guskov, Rasputin shows us war as a force that deforms a person’s personality, capable of destroying hopes, extinguishing self-confidence, shaking unstable characters and even breaking the strong. After all, Nastena, unlike Andrei, is an innocent victim, suffering as a result of the impossibility of choosing between her people and the person with whom she once connected her life. Nastena never cheated on anyone, always remaining true to those moral principles that were embedded in her since childhood, and therefore her death seems even more terrible and tragic.

Rasputin highlights the inhumane nature of war, which brings suffering and misfortune to people, without understanding who is right, who is wrong, who is weak, who is strong.

War and love

Their love and war are two driving forces, which determined the bitter fate of Nastena and the shameful fate of Andrei. Although the heroes were initially different - the humane Nastena and the cruel Andrei. She is kindness and spiritual nobility itself, he is blatant callousness and selfishness. The war even brought them closer together at first, but no amount of trials endured together could overcome their moral incompatibility. After all, love, like any other relationship, is broken by betrayal.

Andrey's feeling for Nastya is rather consumerist. He always wants to receive something from her - be it objects of the material world (an axe, bread, a gun) or feelings. It is much more interesting to understand whether Nastena loved Andrey? She threw herself into marriage “like diving into water,” in other words, she didn’t think twice about it. Nastena’s love for her husband was partly built on a feeling of gratitude, because he took her, a lonely orphan, into his home and did not let anyone hurt her. True, her husband’s kindness only lasted for a year, and then he even beat her half to death, but Nastena, following the old rule: if we get together, we must live, she patiently carried her cross, getting used to her husband, to her family, to a new place.

In part, her attachment to Andrei can be explained by a feeling of guilt because they did not have children. Nastena didn’t think that it might be Andrey’s fault. So later, for some reason, she blamed herself for her husband’s crime. But in essence, Nastena cannot love anyone other than her husband, because one of the sacred family commandments for her is marital fidelity. Like all women, Nastena was waiting for her husband, eager for him, worried and afraid for him. He also thought about her. If Andrei had been a different person, he would most likely have returned from the army, and they would have lived an ordinary family life again. Everything happened wrong: Andrey returned ahead of schedule. Returned as a deserter. A traitor. Traitor to the Motherland. In those days, this stigma was indelible. Nastena does not turn away from her husband. She finds the strength to understand him. Such behavior is the only possible form of existence for her. She helps Andrei because it is natural for her to feel sorry, give and sympathize. She no longer remembers the bad things that darkened their pre-war family life. She knows only one thing - her husband is in big trouble, he must be pitied and saved. And she saves as best she can. Fate brought them together again and sent them a child as a huge ordeal.

A child should be sent as a reward, as the greatest happiness. How Nastena once dreamed about him! Now the child - the fruit of the love of his parents - is a burden, a sin, although he was conceived in a legal marriage. And again Andrei thinks only about himself: “We don’t care about him.” He says “we”, but in reality only he “gives a damn”. Nastena cannot be as indifferent to this event. For Andrey, the main thing is that the child is born and the family line continues. At this moment he is not thinking about Nastya, who will have to endure shame and humiliation. This is the extent of his love for his wife. Of course, it cannot be denied that Guskov is attached to Nastya. Sometimes even he has moments of tenderness and enlightenment, when he thinks with horror about what he is doing, into what abyss he is pushing his wife.

Their love was not the kind they write about in novels. These are ordinary relationships between a man and a woman, husband and wife. The war revealed both Nastena’s devotion to her husband and Guskov’s consumerist attitude towards his wife. The war destroyed this family, like the family of Nadka Berezkina and thousands of other families. Although some still managed to maintain their relationship, like Lisa and Maxim Voloshin, And Lisa could walk with her head held high. And the Guskovs, even if they had saved their family, would never have been able to raise their eyes in shame, because in both love and war you need to be honest. Andrey could not be honest. This determined Nastena’s difficult fate. This is how Rasputin solves the theme of love and war in a unique way.

The meaning of the name. The title of the story is associated with the statement of V. Astafiev: “Live and remember, man, in trouble, in grief, in the most difficult days and trials: your place is with your people; any apostasy, whether caused by your weakness or lack of understanding, turns into even greater grief for your Motherland and people, and therefore for you.”

Andrei Guskov is least concerned about the fact that he betrayed his land, his Motherland, abandoned his comrades in arms in a difficult moment, and, in Rasputin’s opinion, deprived him of his life higher meaning. Hence moral degradation Guskov, his savagery. Having left no offspring and having betrayed everything dear to him, he is doomed to oblivion and loneliness; no one will remember him with a kind word, because cowardice combined with cruelty has been condemned at all times. Nastena appears before us completely differently, not wanting to leave her husband in trouble, voluntarily sharing the guilt with him, accepting responsibility for someone else’s betrayal. Helping Andrei, she does not justify either him or herself before the human court, because she believes: betrayal has no forgiveness. Nastena’s heart is torn into pieces: on the one hand, she considers herself not entitled to abandon the person with whom she once connected her life in difficult times. On the other hand, she suffers endlessly, deceiving people, maintaining her terrible secret and therefore suddenly feeling lonely, cut off from the people.

In a difficult conversation on this topic, the symbolically important image of the Angara arises. “You only had one side: people. There, by right hand Hangars. And now there are two: people and me. It is impossible to bring them together: the Angara must dry out“says Andrey Nastene.

During the conversation, it turns out that the heroes once had the same dream: Nastena, in her girlish form, comes to Andrei, who is lying near the birch trees and calls him, telling him that she was tortured with the children.

The description of this dream once again emphasizes the painful intractability of the situation in which Nastena found herself.

The heroine finds the strength to sacrifice her happiness, peace, her life for the sake of her husband. But realizing that by doing so she breaks all ties between herself and the people, Nastena cannot survive this and tragically dies.

And yet, the highest justice triumphs at the end of the story, because people understood and did not condemn Nastena’s actions. Guskov, on the other hand, evokes nothing but contempt and disgust, since “a person who has set foot on the path of betrayal at least once follows it to the end.”

Andrey Guskov pays the ultimate price: there will be no continuation; No one will ever understand him the way Nastena does. From this moment on, it no longer matters how he, having heard the noise on the river and prepared to hide, will live further: his days are numbered, and he will spend them as before - like an animal. Maybe, having already been caught, he will even howl like a wolf in despair. Guskov must die, but Nastena dies. This means that the deserter dies twice, and now forever.

...In all of Atamanovka there was not a single person who simply felt sorry for Nastena. Only before her death does Nastena hear Maxim Vologzhin’s cry: “Nastena, don’t you dare!” Maxim is one of the first front-line soldiers to know what death is and understands that life is the greatest value. After Nastena’s body was found, she was not buried in the cemetery of drowned people, because “the women wouldn’t let her,” but she was buried among her own people, but on the edge.

The story ends with the author’s message, from which it is clear that they don’t talk about Guskov, they don’t “remember” - for him “the connection of times has fallen apart”, he has no future. The author speaks of the drowned Nastena as if she were alive (without ever replacing her name with the word “deceased”): “After the funeral, the women gathered at Nadka’s for a simple wake and cried: they felt sorry for Nasten.”. With these words, which signify the “connection of times” restored for Nastena (the traditional ending for folklore is about the memory of a hero throughout the centuries), V. Rasputin’s story “Live and Remember” ends.

The title of the book is “Live and Remember.” These words tell us that everything that is written on the pages of the book should become a lesson in the life of every person. Live and remember that in life there is betrayal, baseness, human fall, the test of love by this blow. Live and remember that you cannot go against your conscience and that in minutes severe tests you must be with the people. The call “Live and Remember” is addressed to all of us: a person is responsible for his actions!

“Everyone’s duty is to love their Motherland, to be incorruptible and courageous, to remain faithful to it even at the cost of their lives,” - even in the time of Tacitus Publius Cornelius, people learned to value loyalty and kept it in everything: both in love and in war. After all, there, on the verge of life and death, a person realizes everything that he once did and repents of it. Love for the Motherland can even happen more important than love to a person. But there is also counter examples, which are widely represented in the domestic literature.

A person always faces a choice: remain true to his principles and moral convictions or succumb to the opinion of the crowd and change himself.

People often make mistakes and change their lives in the wrong direction. Often we regret the actions we have taken and want to return everything. But having cheated once, a person seems morally degraded, and trust in him disappears. This is how one of the sons of Taras Bulba appears to the reader from the story of the same name by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Honestly speaking, when I was just starting to get acquainted with the heroes, the brothers and their external characteristics seemed very similar, but later the difference between Ostap and Andriy both in character and in actions became obvious. The choice of Andriy, who abandoned his family and service to his country, and fulfilled his duty to his homeland for the sake of love for a beautiful Polish woman, seems to the reader a low act.

Gogol compares him with his brother, who, on the contrary, fights to the end for native land.

Both brothers die, but in completely different ways: one as a traitor, the other as a hero. It is impossible to compare these two deaths, because Andrei is not aware of what was done even at gunpoint. Ostap, on the contrary, honors his native land and, above all, his father until his last breath.

“Betrayal of the Motherland requires extreme baseness of soul,” the words of N. Chernyshevsky very accurately describe the situation in Taras’s family. But even in modern times this phrase will be relevant. A striking example of this is Valentin Rasputin’s story “Live and Remember.” War is a very difficult period in the life of a country. The period when wives have to say goodbye to their husbands, mothers have to accompany their sons to the front. And ahead lies the unknown... Undoubtedly, a person always strives to return home and meet loved ones. The hero of the story, Andrei, wanted this no less than other front-line soldiers. But what price did he pay for this meeting? We see that the hero betrays not only his homeland by returning home without permission, but also his wife. Even after learning about Nastena’s pregnancy, he continues to hide in the forests. But in the village no one knows whose child this is - Nastena’s husband should be at war at this time. Andrey simply cannot appreciate the dedication of his wife, who was there at a difficult moment for him. As a result, Nastya committed suicide due to her husband’s weakness and indecisiveness.

I believe that the main thing is not that Andrei betrayed others, he betrayed himself. Valuables disappear in it human qualities. And the episode in which his wolf howl is described shows his moral decay. It’s not for nothing that the author is silent about the hero’s future - only final collapse personality.

If a person cheated once, you cannot be sure that he will not do it again. On the contrary, you can make the situation even worse; you can lose society’s faith in such a person much faster than making him forget the betrayal and give him another chance.

One of best books O the last war Viktor Astafiev called the story by V. G. Rasputin, noting “stunning, deep tragedy.” "Live and Remember" is like no other work a journey into the depths human soul, revealing the inner tragedy of the individual.

The writer, a sensitive researcher, tries to understand Guskov's character and find the origins of his action - desertion. A hard-working peasant man who, even during the war, did his job honestly for several years in a row and even earned the respect of his comrades: they could take him into reconnaissance for a difficult task, that is, they completely trusted him when it came to life and death. How did he dare to betray them and on what basis did he decide that they could die, but he was obliged to survive? Cowardice, cowardice, cunning, cruelty? First of all, egoism, which M. Gorky called “the father of meanness.” He is offended by everything and everyone, and the author carefully emphasizes these grievances of Guskov, focusing the reader’s attention on them. If a person is focused only on himself, on personal well-being, then he lives in vain, and this wastefulness does not pass unnoticed: it destroys the soul, giving rise to further vices in it, from envy to malice and opportunism.

Guskov, knowing the sin behind himself, tries to judge others (although should he judge?) by standards first of all negative qualities, as if no longer recognizing the existence of good principles and bright feelings in people. His soul, smoked by the constantly smoldering thought of his own meanness, no longer lets in even a ray of light from normal life, to which he opposed himself and which, for the same reason, he hated, as already unattainable, irretrievably lost. Even to his wife Nastena at the first meeting he says cruel words: “Not a single dog should know that I’m here. If you tell anyone, I’ll kill. If I kill, I have nothing to lose. Remember that. I’ll get it from wherever you want. Now I have a firm hand on this, it won’t fall apart.” Now everyone is his enemy.

From the very first pages of the story, a disgust for Guskov, actively supported by the writer, arises in us. It’s not for nothing that the author, even in the first chapter, presents him as something terrible and even inanimate: “something... rustling, crawled into the bathhouse,” - aggravating this with Andrei’s rudeness, his selfishness, and outright consumerism: He needs Nastena only as a breadwinner - bring a gun, matches, salt.

You have to have the character of this woman to understand Guskov. She finds the strength in herself to understand a person who finds himself in an extremely difficult situation, albeit one created by himself. Following her, we gradually come to an understanding. No, not to justification, not to forgiveness - to understanding, which is facilitated by the author’s deep disclosure of the processes occurring in the hero’s soul. A tragedy is opening up before us, and a tragedy, no matter who it happens to, demands respect for itself, because it is not just a duel of life and death, but last fight, in which victory is already a foregone conclusion.

At first, Andrei did not even think about desertion, if only because he perfectly remembered the “demonstration” execution that he had seen in the spring of forty-two: they shot a forty-year-old “self-inflicted gunman” and a very young boy who wanted to run away to his native village, located fifty miles away . But the thought of his own salvation lived in him constantly, increasingly turning into fear for his life: he was already praying to fate that he would be wounded - just to gain time, not to go into battle again, and then, lo and behold, there is war will end. Was it not from this thought that the fatal act was then born?

His original, born on the day he left for war, “resentment towards everything that remained in place, from which he was torn away and for which he had to fight,” now flared up with new strength: resentment towards the doctors, towards the village, towards everyone who lived in it, towards the whole world. And resentment won in him. Or rather, he allowed her to win this victory.

Something happened that V. Rasputin would then say: “A person who has set foot on the path of betrayal at least once follows it to the end.” Guskov set out on this path before the fact of betrayal; he was already prepared internally by admitting the possibility of escape.

Rasputin explores the deforming influence on a person of a force whose name is war. And in this sense, “Live and Remember” is a story about war, and rightfully it stands among the anti-war masterpieces modern classics. If there had been no war, Guskov would not have succumbed to the fear inspired by death alone and would not have reached such a fall.

If there had been no war... But it happened, it went on, people died in it, and we feel this when reading the story, although we do not come across direct descriptions of the battles. And he, Guskov, decided that it was possible to live by different laws than the rest of the people. And this incommensurable opposition doomed him not just to loneliness among people, but also to inevitable retaliatory rejection.

Living in the winter hut and using a gun brought by his wife to hunt for game for food, Guskov gradually ceases to be a man and becomes an armed humanoid beast.

Once while hunting, having shot a roe deer, he “didn’t finish it off as he should have, but stood and watched, trying not to miss a single movement, how the dying animal was suffering, how the convulsions subsided and reappeared, how the head was fiddling with the whitefish. Already just before with the end he lifted her and looked into her eyes - they widened in response..."

It is natural that after this incident, scaring off the wolf who had gotten into the habit of going to the winter hut, Guskov himself howled like a wolf, so much so that he was amazed at the similarity of the voices. “In the end, the wolf could not stand it and retreated from the winter hut,” but a person could already replace him: “when it became completely sickening, he opened the door and, literally fooling around, amusingly, let out a plaintive and demanding animal howl over the taiga.” And then, already in April, he took a step that logically followed from his changed lifestyle, which can only be called murder.

One day he went out to the village, not yet knowing why, but obeying a powerful inner call. The village celebrated the First of May, there were only a few days left until the end of the war, and Guskov, who especially acutely felt his uselessness and abandonment, was filled, perhaps, with the transcendental energy of alienation, which had to find a way out. And then a cow with a small calf caught his eye. He tried to drive the calf away from its mother, but she wouldn’t let him drive it away, and then “the man’s anger turned into rage”: he caught the calf, strangled it, dragged it into the forest, tied it to an aspen tree and, in front of the exhausted cow, hit it with the butt of an ax and chopped it up I cut the carcass into pieces. He himself understood that this was a murder, sadistic, unnatural, and he “didn’t know whether he killed the heifer just for the sake of meat, or for the sake of something else that had since settled in him firmly and powerfully.”

Moral categories gradually become conventions for Guskov, which must be followed when living among people, and a burden when he is left alone with himself. As a result, only biological needs remain, from time to time brightened up by the same attempts at self-justification, without which Guskov is no longer conceivable.

Walking through the fields where he worked before the war and which he remembers by heart, he once again tries to convince himself that he is not a stranger here, that “people should be remembered by the land where they lived. happened to him, for her he is a pure person.” But this self-deception is doomed, because the land does not owe Guskov anything, but he is in debt to it, it was he who betrayed it and refused to protect it.

The image of Guskov leads to the conclusion expressed by Viktor Petrovich Astafiev: “Live and remember, a person in trouble, in distress, in the most difficult days and trials: your place is with your people; any apostasy caused by your weakness, or lack of understanding, turns back a great grief for your Motherland and people, and therefore for you."

Guskov was supposed to die, but Nastena and her unborn child are dying. This means that the deserter dies twice, and now forever.

Guskov pays the ultimate price: he will never continue in anyone; No one will ever understand him the way Nastena does. From this moment on, it no longer matters how he, having heard the noise on the river and prepared to hide, will live on: his days are numbered, and he will spend them, as before, like an animal. Maybe, having already been caught, he will even howl like a wolf in despair.

The writer opened up for us a wormhole in Guskov’s character, which explained his desertion. However, Rasputin elevates a concrete historical fact to the rank of large socio-philosophical generalizations, which makes him similar to such predecessors as Dostoevsky and Gorky. It's about about “overstepping” moral barriers, which leads to the manifestation of extreme individualism “everything is allowed” and to the destruction of the personality of the “overstepper.”

Composition

Showing the reader the tragedy of Nastena and Andrei Guskov, Valentin Rasputin explores the deforming influence on a person of a force whose name is war. The story contains no descriptions of battles, deaths on the battlefield, the exploits of Russian soldiers, and life at the front. Only life in the rear. And yet, this is precisely a story about war. It takes its rightful place among the anti-war masterpieces of modern classics. The war destroyed the family life of Andrei and Nastena, ruined the fate of Nadka, who remained a widow with three children; the war left its indelible imprint on each of the characters in the book. Actually, the war gave the author a plot. After all, if there had been no war, Andrei Guskov would not have become a deserter and would not have ruined Nastena’s life.

Their love and war are the two driving forces of their destinies, what determined Nastena’s bitter fate and Andrei’s shameful fate. Although, to be honest, they were initially incompatible - the humane Nastena and the cruel Andrei. She is kindness and spiritual nobility itself, he is blatant callousness and selfishness. The war even brought them closer together at first, but no amount of trials endured together could overcome their global incompatibility. After all, love, like any other relationship, is broken by betrayal.

Andrey’s feeling for Nastya is rather consumerist. He always wants to receive something from her - be it objects of the material world (an axe, bread, a gun) or feelings. It is much more interesting to understand whether Nastena loved Andrey? She threw herself into marriage “like diving into water,” in other words, she didn’t think twice about it. Nastena’s love for her husband was partly built on a feeling of gratitude, because he took her, a lonely orphan, into his home and did not let anyone hurt her. In part, her attachment to Andrei can be explained by a feeling of guilt because they did not have children. Nastena didn’t think that it might be Andrey’s fault. So later, for some reason, she blamed herself for her husband’s crime. But in essence, Nastena cannot love anyone other than her husband, because one of the sacred family commandments for her is marital fidelity.

It is unknown what their relationship would have come to if there had been no war. Apparently they would improve. But the war radically changed their destinies. Like all women, Nastena was waiting for her husband, eager for him, worried and afraid for him. He also thought about her. If Andrei had been a different person, he would most likely have returned from the army, and they would have lived an ordinary family life again. Everything happened wrong: Andrei returned ahead of schedule. Returned as a deserter. A traitor. Traitor to the Motherland. In those days, this stigma was indelible. Nastena does not turn away from her husband. She finds the strength to understand him. This behavior is the only possible form of existence for her. She helps Andrei because it is natural for her to feel sorry, give and sympathize. She no longer remembers the bad things that darkened their pre-war family life. She knows only one thing - her husband is in big trouble, he must be pitied and saved. And she saves as best she can. Fate brought them together again and sent them a child as a huge ordeal.

But, in fact, a child should be sent as a reward, as the greatest happiness. How Nastena once dreamed about him! Now the child - the fruit of the love of his parents - is a burden, a sin, although he was conceived in a legal marriage. And again Andrei thinks only about himself: “We don’t care about him.” He says “we”, but in reality only he “gives a damn”. Nastena cannot be as indifferent to this event. For Andrey, the main thing is that the child is born and the family line continues. At this moment he is not thinking about Nastya, who will have to endure shame and humiliation. This is the extent of his love for his wife. Of course, it cannot be denied that Guskov is attached to Nastya. Sometimes even he has moments of tenderness and enlightenment, when he thinks with horror about what he is doing, into what abyss he is pushing his wife.

Their love was not the kind they write about in novels. These are ordinary relationships between a man and a woman, husband and wife. If it were not for the war, these relations would never have become so “transparent”. Thanks to the war, both Nastena’s devotion to her husband and Guskov’s consumerist attitude towards his wife were revealed. The war destroyed this family, like the family of Nadka Berezkina and thousands of other families. Although some still managed to maintain their relationship, like Lisa and Maxim Voloshin, And Lisa could walk with her head held high. And the Guskovs, even if they had saved their family, would never have been able to raise their eyes in shame. Because both in love and in war, where, as they say, all means are fair, you still need to maintain your dignity and remain honest. Andrey could not be honest. This determined Nastena’s difficult fate. This is how Rasputin solves the theme of love and war in a unique way. This topic, taken from this perspective, is not hackneyed. Maybe that’s why, from the number of books I’ve read about the Great Patriotic War Rasputin's story "Live and Remember" is remembered so clearly and remains in the memory for so long.

Other works on this work

It so happened that during the last war year, local resident Andrei Guskov secretly returned from the war to a distant village on the Angara. The deserter does not think that father's house he will be greeted with open arms, but he believes in his wife’s understanding and is not deceived. His wife Nastena, although she is afraid to admit it to herself, instinctively understands that her husband has returned, and there are several signs for him. Does she love him? Nastena did not marry for love, the four years of her marriage were not so happy, but she is very devoted to her man, because, having been left without parents early, for the first time in her life she found protection and reliability in his house. “They came to an agreement quickly: Nastena was also spurred on by the fact that she was tired of living with her aunt as a worker and bending her back on someone else’s family...”

Nastena threw herself into marriage like water - without any extra thought: she’ll have to get out anyway, few people can do without it - why wait? And what awaits her in new family and a strange village, I had a bad idea. But it turned out that from a working woman she became a working woman, only the yard was different, the farm was larger and the demand was stricter. “Maybe the attitude towards her in the new family would be better if she gave birth to a child, but there are no children.”

Childlessness forced Nastena to endure everything. Since childhood, she had heard that a hollow woman without children is no longer a woman, but only half a woman. So, by the beginning of the war, nothing came of the efforts of Nastena and Andrei. Nastena considers herself to blame. “Only once, when Andrei, reproaching her, said something completely unbearable, she answered out of resentment that it was still unknown which of them was the reason - she or he, she had not tried other men. He beat her to a pulp." And when Andrei is taken to war, Nastena is even a little glad that she is left alone without children, not like in other families. Letters from the front from Andrei come regularly, then from the hospital, where he is wounded, and maybe he will soon come on vacation; and suddenly there was no news for a long time, only one day the chairman of the village council and a policeman came into the hut and asked to see the correspondence. “Did he say anything else about himself?” - “No... What’s wrong with him? Where is he? - “So we want to find out where he is.”

When an ax disappears in the Guskov family bathhouse, only Nastena wonders if her husband has returned: “Who would think of a stranger to look under the floorboard?” And just in case, she leaves bread in the bathhouse, and one day she even heats the bathhouse and meets someone in it whom she expects to see. The return of her husband becomes her secret and is perceived by her as a cross. “Nastena believed that in Andrei’s fate since he left home, in some way there was also her participation, she believed and was afraid that she probably lived for herself alone, so she waited: here, Nastena, take it "Don't show it to anyone."

She readily comes to her husband’s aid, is ready to lie and steal for him, is ready to take the blame for a crime for which she is not guilty. In marriage you have to accept both the bad and the good: “You and I agreed on life together. When everything is good, it’s easy to be together, when everything is bad - that’s why people come together.”

Nastena's soul is filled with enthusiasm and courage - to fulfill her wifely duty to the end, she selflessly helps her husband, especially when she realizes that she is carrying his child under her heart. Meetings with her husband in the winter hut across the river, long mournful conversations about the hopelessness of their situation, hard work at home, insincerity settled in relations with the villagers - Nastena is ready for anything, realizing the inevitability of her fate. And although love for her husband is more of a duty for her, she pulls her life’s burden with remarkable masculine strength.

Andrei is not a murderer, not a traitor, but just a deserter who escaped from the hospital, from where, without proper treatment, they were going to send him to the front. Set to go on vacation after being away from home for four years, he can’t resist the idea of ​​returning. As a village man, not urban and not a military man, already in the hospital he finds himself in a situation from which the only salvation is escape. This is how everything turned out for him, it could have turned out differently if he had been more steady on his feet, but the reality is that in the world, in his village, in his country there will be no forgiveness for him. Having realized this, he wants to delay until the last minute, without thinking about his parents, his wife, and especially about his unborn child. The deeply personal thing that connects Nastena with Andrey conflicts with their way of life. Nastena cannot raise her eyes to those women who are receiving funerals, she cannot rejoice as she would have rejoiced before when the neighboring men returned from the war. At a village celebration of the victory, she remembers Andrei with unexpected anger: “Because of him, because of him, she has no right, like everyone else, to rejoice in the victory.” The runaway husband posed a difficult and insoluble question to Nastena: who should she be with? She condemns Andrei, especially now, when the war is ending and when it seems that he would have remained alive and unharmed, like everyone who survived, but, condemning him at times to the point of anger, hatred and despair, she retreats in despair: yes after all, she is his wife. And if so, you must either completely abandon him, jumping onto the fence like a rooster: I am not me and the fault is not mine, or go with him to the end. At least on the chopping block. It is not without reason that it is said: whoever marries whom will be born into that one.

Noticing Nastena's pregnancy, her former friends begin to laugh at her, and her mother-in-law completely kicks her out of the house. “It was not easy to endlessly withstand the grasping and judgmental glances of people - curious, suspicious, angry.” Forced to hide her feelings, to restrain them, Nastena is increasingly exhausted, her fearlessness turns into risk, into feelings wasted in vain. It is they who push her to suicide, drag her into the waters of the Angara, shimmering as if from an eerie and beautiful fairy tale river: “She’s tired. If anyone knew how tired she is and how much she wants to rest.”