Who was Dunyasha's fiancé? Women's destinies in the epic novel “Quiet Don. Post-revolutionary changes in the hero

One of the most beloved characters of the work " Quiet Don"for the author and readers is Dunyasha. The author is very sensitive to the heroine, it’s not for nothing that he affectionately calls Evdokia Panteleevna Melekhova Dunyasha.

Sholokhov represents the heroine from an early age. Over time, the girl grows, not only her appearance changes, but also her life.

Outwardly, the author presents Dunyasha as a thin girl with brown eyes and dark hair. The older Dunyasha gets, the more beautiful she becomes. By the age of fifteen she becomes a pretty, prominent girl. She took after her father in her dark skin. The girl's long braids endear her to her; they give her a childlike carefree quality. The girl is particularly kind and calm, but at the same time she is very persistent and strong in character.

Dunyasha always has a lot to do around the house. She is very economical and hardworking. Either she milks the cow, then she lubricates the wheels, then she sorts out the hay, then she sows the wheat. Despite the fact that the heroine always has things to do around the house, Dunyasha is still very educated. There were difficulties with education at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the girl grew up very well-read and educated. In addition to all this, by the age of fifteen she could write and read quickly. The girl learned all this herself.

Dunyasha's life since childhood has not been in the best possible way. From an early age, the heroine loses almost all of her relatives. The only one left alive is her brother Gregory.
At the age of 15, sympathy arises between Dunyasha and her neighbor Misha. They see each other all the time and spend evenings together. Each time Dunyasha falls in love with Misha more and more.

The war begins, but this does not stop the children. They continue to see each other rarely and fleetingly. During the war, Mikhail kills the heroine's brother. Dunyasha's relatives forbid her to see and think about Misha. But you can't order your heart. She continues to love him blindly. Dunyasha is torn between her loved one and her family.
As a result, the wedding took place. Dunyasha managed to persuade the atheist Misha to get married in a church. This once again shows her authority.

From the image of Dunyasha one can understand how in such a complex wartime, maintain kindness, humanity, sincerity. Dunyasha lost all her relatives, but remained strong, strong-willed, but at the same time a good and sensitive person. Deception and bad deeds did not break her.

Essay about Dunyasha (Quiet Don)

Dunya Melekhova is the younger sister of Grigory Melekhov in the novel Quiet Don.

At the beginning of the novel, Dunyasha appears as an angular teenager, her father’s favorite. She is a black-eyed, skinny girl with pigtails. The novel shows how she grows up, from a clumsy teenager Dunya Melekhova turns into a beautiful young girl. She looks like her father, dark-skinned, black-eyed, slender. Dunyasha is a literate girl, which is a rarity among Cossack women. She can read and write. In addition, Dunyasha is a thrifty and smart girl. She is in love with Mishka Koshevoy, who, oddly enough, will later turn out to be the enemy of her family. Time civil war“red” and “white” makes its own adjustments to the lives and relationships of ordinary people.

Dunyasha's relatives die, she loses her parents and brother Peter. The most offensive thing is that her beloved Mikhail is on the opposite side, on the side of the “reds,” but no matter what, Dunya does not give up her love. The Melikhov family flatly refuses to give Dunya to Mikhail Koshevoy; in the end, they still get married in the church at night.

After the wedding, Dunyasha becomes prettier and becomes beautiful with that feminine, calm beauty. But her concern for her brother does not leave her; Grigory is left with her alone. No matter what, Dunya and Grigory are trying to maintain their family relationship, but Dunyasha’s husband is dissatisfied with this. Their relationship begins to go wrong, and Dunyasha, as if caught between two fires, cannot leave either her brother or her husband. It was at this time that it is clear how difficult and unstable her life is; Dunya is torn between her beloved husband and her brother, cannot reconcile them and suffers from this. One day she manages to save Gregory from arrest; after listening to her husband’s conversation, she understands that he wants to extradite Gregory and persuades him to flee from the farm.

When Grigory and Aksinya flee the farm, Dunya takes custody of Grigory's children. It becomes clear that she is a real Russian woman, with a strong will and kind hearted. For Dunyasha, family feelings are very strong, she feels sorry for her brother and his children, she is scared for her husband in such a turbulent time. The image of Dunyasha, the image of a strong Cossack woman who achieves her goal no matter what, does not abandon her brother and his children, despite her husband’s dissatisfaction.

Several interesting essays

State and personality in the works of Pushkin
Relationships individual and states, their opposition and conflict are interesting for consideration and discussion throughout the poet’s work, while in different stages creative activity the author's attitude is changing
The main character of the work is Platon Kuzmich Kovalev, who introduces himself as a collegiate assessor.

Anna Pogudko

In the novel by M. A. Sholokhov, Cossack women are perhaps the only ones who do not succumb to the influence of political passions. However, in “Quiet Don” there is also the heiress of F. Dostoevsky’s “progressives” - the fiery revolutionary Anna Pogudko. M. Sholokhov the artist does not demonize the heroine, she is characterized by human weaknesses, love and pity for Bunchuk, but the spiritual nature, the spiritual essence of this type of personality - the female destroyer - remains unchanged. She volunteers to join a team of Red Guard machine gunners to learn how to kill. M. Sholokhov gives an expressive description: “Anna Pogudko delved into everything with acute curiosity. She persistently pestered Bunyk, grabbed him by the sleeves of his clumsy demi-season, and persistently stuck around the machine gun.”

The author notes the “unfaithful and warm sparkle of Anna’s eyes”, her predilection for speeches covered in sentimental romanticism. This compassion for those who are distant is paradoxically combined with hatred for those close to us. The desire to kill for the sake of a utopian dream is enormous: Pogudko leads people into the attack at an “unfaithful, stumbling trot.” Retribution follows immediately, her death is terrible, naturalism in the description of the agony is deliberately emphasized by the author. From a blooming woman, the heroine turns into a half-corpse, she seems to be burning alive in hell: “Blue-yellow, with streaks of frozen tears on her cheeks, with a pointed nose and a terribly painful fold of her lips,” the dying woman constantly demands water, which is not able to fill her internal, burning fire.

The passion for victory at any cost, including death, is higher than love; even on a date with Bunchuk, Anna did not forget about machine guns. She “bewitches” Bunchuk until his final spiritual and physical death, his behavior after the death of his girlfriend is infernal - he is likened to a beast. It seems symbolic that his volunteer executioner Mitka Korshunov kills him, giving him the following assessment: “Look at this devil - he bit his shoulder until it bled and died, like a wolf, in silence.”

Unfulfilled female ambitions and lack of humility result in the desire to destroy everything and everyone. People with “new” ideas come in handy here.

And yet, in Anna there is a feminine, maternal principle, which is dissolved to varying degrees in almost every true love woman to man: both in the love of Natalya and Aksinya for Gregory, and in the love of “deep-eyed” Anna Pogudko for Bunchuk... If for Bunchuk the three weeks of his typhoid unconsciousness were weeks of wandering “in another, intangible and fantastic world,” then for ideologically the exalted girl became a test of her first feeling, when “for the first time she had to look so closely and so nakedly at the underside of communication with her beloved,” to face in “dirty care” lice-infested, hideously emaciated, foul-smelling flesh and its lower secretions. “Internally, everything reared up in her, resisted, but the dirt of the outside did not stain the deeply and securely stored feeling,” “unexperienced love and pity,” the love here of maternal self-sacrifice. Two months later, Anna herself came to his bed for the first time, and Bunchuk, dried up and blackened from execution work in the revolutionary tribunal (although he left there that day), turned out to be powerless - all the erotic moisture of this executioner, even though he was ideologically playing himself up, service of the revolution burned out into horror and breakdown. Anna, too, managed to step over “disgust and disgust” and, after listening to his stuttering, feverish explanations, “silently hugged him and calmly, like a mother, kissed him on the forehead.” And only a week later Anna’s affection and maternal care warmed Bunchuk and pulled him out of male impotence, burnt-out conditions, and a nightmare. But when Anna painfully dies in the arms of Bunchuk from a wound in battle, the loss of his beloved woman makes sense of everything in him and around him, leading him to a state of complete apathy, dispassionate automatism. It doesn’t help at all what you were holding on to and raging about before: hatred, struggle, ideas, ideals, historical optimism... everything goes to hell! Indifferently and half-asleep, he joins Podtelkov’s expedition, simply “just to move, just to get away from the melancholy that followed him.” And in the scene of the execution of the Podtelkovites, Bunchuk alone kept looking “at the gray distance swaddled with clouds”, “at the gray haze of the sky” - “it seemed that he was waiting for something unrealistic and joyful”, perhaps from childhood superstitions long trampled upon about meetings beyond the grave , madly hoping for the only thing that could satisfy his immense melancholy, that melancholy that had brought him down as an unbending Bolshevik and humanized him.

Dunyasha

After the death of Natalya and Ilyinichna, Dunyashka becomes the owner of the Melekhov kuren; she has to reconcile the antagonistic heroes in the same house: Melikhov and Koshevoy. Dunyashka is especially attractive female image in the novel.

The author introduces us to the youngest of the Melekhovs, Dunyasha, when she was still a long-armed, big-eyed teenager with thin pigtails. Growing up, Dunyasha turns into a black-browed, slender and proud Cossack girl with an obstinate and persistent Melekhov-like character.

Having fallen in love with Mishka Koshevoy, she does not want to think about anyone else, despite the threats of her father, mother and brother. All tragedies with household members are played out before her eyes. The death of his brother, Daria, Natalya, father, mother, and niece takes Dunyash very close to his heart. But despite all the losses, she needs to move on with her life. And Dunyasha becomes the main person in the ruined house of the Melekhovs.

Dunyasha is a new generation of Cossack women who will live in a different world than her mother and brothers, Aksinya and Natalya. She entered the novel as a loud-voiced, omnipresent, hardworking teenage girl and worked her way up to become a beautiful Cossack woman without tarnishing her dignity in any way. The image is permeated with the lyricism and dynamism of youth, openness to the whole world, the spontaneity of manifestation and the trepidation of the first dawn of feelings, which Sholokhov associates with the dawn - the rising hope for life in new conditions. In the daughter’s act, which Ilyinichna was forced to come to terms with, there is a rejection of some outdated elements of the traditionally Cossack (and not only Cossack) family, but there is no destruction of its foundations here. Yes, the personal choice of a future spouse seems “happier” for Dunyasha to create a family. But he also considers parental blessing obligatory, and, despite all the difficulties, receives it. With difficulty, but still, he obtains from the atheist and “extremely angry at himself and everything around him” Mikhail Koshevoy the church consecration of their marriage. She maintains an unshakable faith in the healing power Orthodox canons family love.

Perhaps she managed to understand something in modern times that was not understood by many of her contemporaries: people are embittered and commit actions, sometimes vile and tragic in their consequences, not at all due to natural depravity, but becoming victims of circumstances. We must not only feel sorry for them, but, to the best of our ability, help them become themselves.

Dunyasha is the youngest of the Melekhovs, sister of Gregory, one of the heroines of the novel “Quiet Don”. At the beginning of the work, she appears before the reader as a big-eyed, angular teenager with thin pigtails. Over time, she turns into a slender, black-browed Cossack girl with a proud disposition and obstinate character. This hardworking teenager represents a new generation of Cossack women. She will have a different life, not the same as that of Ilyinichna, Natalya or Daria. The image of Dunyasha is permeated with the lyricism and dynamism of youth. The author associates it with dawn - rising hope. Having gone through a difficult path from a teenage girl to a beautiful Cossack woman, she managed not to tarnish her dignity in any way.

She is characterized by special persistence. Having fallen in love with Mishka Koshevoy, she never thought about anyone else. Despite all his bloody crimes, she still married him, and now she had to reconcile her opponents in the same house: her brother and her husband. At the end of the novel, it is the clear-voiced Dunyasha who remains the mistress of the Melekhovs’ ruined house. She takes the death of all her relatives, including her brother, father, mother, daughter-in-law, and niece, to heart. But, despite this, we must continue to live.

Each female image of Sholokhov's epic fulfills its task. Even nameless Cossack women help us find ourselves in the depths of difficult events.

The image and characterization of Dunyasha Melekhova, the sister of the main character Gregory, is important for understanding the transitional historical time, the breaking of human destinies of an entire generation of Don Cossacks.

Appearance of a Cossack woman

In the text, Evdokia Panteleevna Melekhova is often called Dunyasha. Already in this you can feel the author’s love and tenderness for the heroine. The girl's appearance is not like others:

eyes: black, cheerful, laughing, sparkling;
smile: bright, white teeth;
eyelashes: long, curved;
figure: slim figure;
nose: with a thin hump and two clear longitudinal stripes;
voice: thin, shrill.

Dunyasha's appearance changes as she grows up. On the first pages the reader is greeted by an unformed teenager: big eyes, long arms. But here the girl is already beautiful: she doesn’t walk, but burns a path underneath her. By the age of 15, the Cossack girl straightened out and became stately. The beauty is ripe, and the author compares her to an apple - a precocious one. Dunyasha is squat, dark-skinned and looks like her father. Cheerful braids jumping along the back bring childlike spontaneity and openness to the image. Cossack women have always been distinguished by their ability to dress up. Dunyasha also loves outfits. She dresses modestly but tastefully. You can guess that the Cossack woman creates most of the items of clothing herself.

Character Traits

A girl's character changes with age. She becomes more reserved and secretive. But the look, lively and cheerful, betrays feelings and the depth of emotional experiences.

The main features of the Cossack woman:

Education. Dunyasha can read and write, and does it quickly and easily. In those days only a few were taught to read and write, which means that the girl herself wanted to become smart and educated. She reads letters to her father, sometimes she doesn’t know how to finish the text, realizing what horror lies in the words.

Hard work. The Cossack woman is always in trouble. There are no pages where she sits, looking at her reflection in the mirror. The girl is busy around the house, managing to do everything: lubricating cart wheels, repairing seeders, straightening harrows. She sows grain, turns hay, milks a cow. A housewife manages the housework without men.

Practicality. The Cossack woman inherited her ingenuity and intelligence from her father. Her gaze catches everything important, not only in the household, but also in human relationships.

Feelings for Mikhail Koshevoy

Mishka is a housemate. He begins to show sympathy at the age of 15. The girl reciprocates his feelings. They sit all evenings admiring the countryside nature. Dunyasha fell in love with the guy and began to hope for happiness in marriage. The Civil War made its own adjustments. The lovers meet only briefly, but these snatches of meetings confirmed their devotion to childhood feelings. Koshevoy fights on the side of the Reds. He mercilessly deals with the girl’s brother, Petro. The old Melekhovs forbid their daughter to even think about marrying Mishka. Difficult to understand female soul. She is devoted to her family, but is blindly in love with her brother's killer. The wedding did take place, it took place in an empty church. Dunyasha will have to continue to be between two fires. Koshevoy also hates his second brother, Grigory. The foundations of Cossack education are strong. Brother and sister remain friends. Dunyasha takes care of Gregory's children. There are also lines about the fate of women after the war. She lives with her husband on a farm before Gregory arrives there. Mishatka is with her, she is kind and gentle to her nephew, understanding what a difficult lot the child has suffered.

Special regard from the author

Dunyasha Melekhova is a new generation of Cossack women. They are growing together with the new government and state. During the period of growing up, the girl loses almost all family members. Only brother Gregory and his son remained alive. It’s hard to bury loved ones, to see the tragedy of their fate, to understand that if it weren’t for the war, everything would have been completely different. In a woman strong character, which even a mother can try on. It turns out that Dunya is changing the foundations of the Cossacks, introducing her own laws of life. She manages to achieve the consecration of her marriage in church with the atheist Mikhail. It’s amazing how easily the author shows a complex problem: it is possible to preserve humanity in war. Vile deeds, the tragedy of deceit and debauchery remain aside. The purity and integrity of a girl is the people’s faith in the canons of family happiness, the inviolability true feelings characteristic of Orthodoxy.

What did your young life promise you?

What she gave, what she will give in the future...

Poor thing! Better not look ahead!

N. A. Nekrasov.

The theme of Sholokhov's novel is family, a simple man in a whirlpool historical events. For the first time in Russian literature in " big genre" - the novel - people from the people were not among minor characters, but in the very center.

Women occupy central place in epic; women of different ages, different temperaments, different destinies- mother of Grigory Ilyinichna, Aksinya, Natalya, Daria, Dunyasha.

M.A. Sholokhov in his novel created a very memorable image of Grigory’s mother, Ilyinichna. The old woman, restless and busy, always busy with endless household chores, seemed unnoticed and took little part in the events taking place.

Even her portrait characteristics not in the first chapters of the book, but there are only some details by which one can judge that this woman has experienced a lot in her lifetime: “a portly woman completely entangled in a web of wrinkles”, “knotty and heavy hands”, “shuffles with senile flabby bare feet” . And only in the last parts of “Quiet Don” the rich inner world Ilyinichny.

The writer shows her strength and resilience. “Norov you young people have is great, a true god! Just a little bit - you get mad,” says Ilyinichna to Natalya. – If you lived the way I lived from a young age, what would you do then? Grishka hasn’t laid a finger on you in your entire life, and yet you’re dissatisfied, what a miracle you’ve done: you were about to leave him, and you felt faint, and you didn’t do anything, you confused God in your filthy deeds... Well tell me, tell me, sick, and is this good? And my good idol killed me to death from a young age, but for no reason at all, I was not at all guilty before him. He himself was naughty, but out of spite he took it out. Sometimes he would come at dawn, I would scream with bitter tears, reproach him, and he would give free rein to his fists... For a month, she walked all blue, like iron, and lo and behold, she survived, and fed the children, she never thought of leaving the house.”

In this monologue, Ilyinichna conveyed her entire bitter, hopeless life, but at the same time she does not complain, does not feel sorry for herself, she only wants to awaken the same courage and perseverance in her daughter-in-law.

The strong, wise Ilyinichna is constantly fussing, worrying and caring about all the household members, trying in every possible way to protect them from troubles, adversity, and rash actions; stands between her husband, who is uncontrollable in anger, and his proud, temperamental sons, for which he receives blows from the husband, who, feeling his wife’s advantage in everything, thus asserts himself.

Ilyinichna loves and knows how to dress beautifully, unlike her husband; she keeps the house in strict order, is economical and prudent. She does not approve of Grigory’s relationship with Aksinya: “How long should I accept such suffering in my old age?”

Ilyinichna did not understand the events of the revolution and civil war, but she turned out to be much more humane, smarter, and more perspicacious than Grigory and Pantelei Prokofievich. So, for example, she reproaches youngest son, who chopped up the sailors in battle, is supported by Panteley Prokofievich, who kicks Mitka Korshunov out of his convoy. “So you and I and Mishatka and Polyushka could have been chopped up for Grisha, but if they weren’t chopped up, they had mercy.” - Says the indignant Ilyinichna to Natalya. When Daria shot the captive Kotlyarov, Ilyinichna, according to Dunyasha, “was afraid to spend the night with her in the same hut and went to the neighbors.”

In all these actions, the humanity and morality of this heroine is manifested.

Ilyinichna loves her grandchildren with all her big and kind heart, seeing them as her own blood. All her life she worked, not sparing her health, acquiring goodness bit by bit. And when the situation forces her to give up everything and leave the farm, she declares: “It’s better if they kill you at the doorstep - everything is easier than dying under someone else’s fence!” This is not greed, but the fear of losing one’s nest, roots, without which a person loses the meaning of existence. She understands this with a feminine, maternal instinct, and it is impossible to convince her.

Ilyinichna values honesty, decency, and purity in people. She is afraid that the cruelty surrounding them will affect the soul and consciousness of Mishatka’s grandson. She came to terms with the idea that the killer of her son Peter became a member of their family by marrying Dunyasha. The old mother does not want to go against her daughter’s feelings, and male power needed on the farm. Ilyinichna is reconciled, seeing how Dunyasha is drawn to this man, how Koshevoy’s nervous, hard gaze warms at the sight of her grandson,

Teddy bears. She blesses their seemingly unnatural union, knowing that life as she has known it until now cannot be returned, and she is unable to fix it.

This shows Ilyinichna’s wisdom. The heart of a Russian woman-mother is so tender that Ilyinichna, hating the murderer of her eldest son Mishka Koshevoy, sometimes feels maternal pity for him, either sending him a sackcloth so that he does not freeze, or darning his clothes. However, with the arrival of Koshevoy in the Melekhovo house, she experiences mental torment; she is left alone in her house, unnecessary to anyone. Ilyinichna, overcoming the melancholy and pain of her losses, took a decisive step towards that new thing that will happen after her, which will be witnessed by others, and with them her grandson Mishatka. And how little Koshevoy needed to show tenderness, not to her at all, but to her grandson Mishatka, so that she would make this breakthrough, reuniting Ilyinichna in our minds into a single majestic image - both young and old, and Ilyinichna of the last days of her life... Here , in fact, the culmination of Ilyinichna’s spiritual movement towards the new that will come after her. She now firmly knew that the “murderer” could not smile so tenderly at Mishatka - Grisha’s son, her grandson... With this, Ilyinichna completed her high mission as a working woman, a woman-mother.

IN last chapters Sholokhov reveals the tragedy of a mother who lost her husband, son, and many relatives and friends. “She lived, broken by suffering, aged, pitiful. She had to experience a lot of grief, perhaps even too much...” This line conveys the compassion and love that the author feels for his heroine.

The “steadfast old woman” Ilyinichna “didn’t shed a tear” when she learned about her husband’s death, but only withdrew into herself. Having buried her eldest son, husband, and daughters-in-law within a year, Ilyinichna was most afraid of the death of Grigory. Ilyinichna thinks only about Grigory. She lived only with them for the last days. “I have become old... And my heart hurts for Grisha... It hurts so much that nothing is nice to me and it hurts my eyes to look,” she says to Dunyasha. In longing for her son, who still hasn’t returned, Ilyinichna takes out his old coat and cap, hangs them in the kitchen, “You come in from the base, you look, and somehow it becomes easier... As if he is already with us...” - guiltily and smiling pitifully, she says to Dunyasha.”

A short letter from Grigory with a promise to come on leave in the fall brings great joy to Ilyinichna. She proudly says: “The little one remembered his mother. How he writes! By his patronymic, Ilyinichnaya, he called it... I bow low, he writes to his dear mother and even dear children...”

War, death, anxiety for a loved one reconciled Ilyinichna with Aksinya, and through Aksinya’s eyes we see the grief of the inconsolable mother, who understands that she will never see her son again.

“Ilyinichna stood, holding the fence with her hands, looking into the steppe, where, like an inaccessible, distant star, the fire made by the mowers flickered. Aksinya clearly saw the blue-illuminated moonlight Ilyinichna’s swollen face, a gray strand of hair escaping from under the old woman’s black shawl. Ilyinichna looked for a long time into the twilight blue steppe, and then, not loudly, as if he was standing right there, next to her, she called: “Grishenka! My dear! “She paused and said in a different, low and dull voice: “My little blood...”

If earlier Ilyinichna was restrained in her feelings, then at the end of the novel everything changes, it’s as if she consists entirely of mother's love.

Last days it is described by Sholokhov with great force. “It’s amazing how short and poor life turned out to be and how much hard and sorrowful there was in it; in her thoughts she turned to Gregory... And on her deathbed she lived with Gregory, thinking only about him...”

Ilyinichna is elevated by Sholokhov to the heights of a folk heroine, who throughout her life sacredly observed the commandments of Orthodox morality, the commandments of kindness and love for one’s neighbor. Without hesitation, Ilyinichna can be placed among the mothers who adorn world literature, world painting. These mothers call on people to courageously face the truth.

Daria Melekhova is mentioned already in the first chapter of the novel. But Sholokhov shows her image in a completely different way.

When describing the appearance of his heroes, Mikhail Sholokhov strives to give a memorable visual image, to recreate a person in a unique movement. The picturesque details themselves almost always acquire a distinctly psychological character. What occupies him in a portrait is not only the expressiveness and characteristic appearance, but also the type of life behavior, the person’s temperament, the mood of a given moment. The portrait in Sholokhov's novels shows the hero in a certain life situation and mood.

When Daria first appears, only “calves of white legs” are mentioned. In the chapter of the novel, which describes Aksinya Astakhova’s return home early in the morning from the healer, Sholokhov draws attention to the eyebrows of Daria he met: “Melekhova Daria, sleepy and rosy-cheeked, moving her beautiful arches of her eyebrows, drove her cows into the herd.”