An essay with a plan based on Tvardovsky's poem “Vasily Terkin. Vasily Terkin - analysis of the work Creating the image of the protagonist

The history of the creation of the work of Tvardovsky "Vasily Tyorkin"

From the fall of 1939, Tvardovsky took part in the Finnish campaign as a war correspondent. “It seems to me,” he wrote to M.V. Isakovsky, - that the army will be my second theme for the rest of my life. " And the poet was not mistaken. In the editorial office of the Leningrad Military District "On Guard of the Motherland", a group of poets had an idea to create a series of entertaining drawings about the exploits of a cheerful soldier-hero. “Someone,” recalls Tvardovsky, “suggested calling our hero Vasya Terkin, namely Vasya, not Vasily.” In creating a collective work about a cheerful, successful fighter, Tvardovsky was instructed to write an introduction: "... I had to give at least the most general" portrait "of Terkin and determine, so to speak, the tone and manner of our further conversation with the reader."
This is how the poem "Vasya Terkin" (1940 - January 5) appeared in the newspaper. The success of the feuilleton hero prompted the idea to continue the story of the adventures of the cheerful Vasya Terkin. As a result, the booklet "Vasya Terkin at the front" (1940) was published. During the Great Patriotic War, this image becomes the main one in the work of Tvardovsky. "Vasily Terkin" walked along with Tvardovsky the roads of war. The first publication of "Vasily Terkin" took place in the newspaper of the Western Front "Krasnoarmeiskaya Pravda", where on September 4, 1942, the introductory chapter "From the Author" and "At Rest" were published. From then until the end of the war, the chapters of the poem were published in this newspaper, in the magazines Krasnoarmeets and Znamya, as well as in other print media.
“... My work ends coincidentally with the end of the war. One more effort of a refreshed body and soul is needed - and it will be possible to put an end to it, ”wrote the poet on May 4, 1945. This is how the finished poem “Vasily Terkin. A book about a soldier "(1941-1945). Tvardovsky wrote that working on it gave him a "sense" of the legitimacy of the artist's place in the great struggle of the people ... a sense of complete freedom of treatment with verse and word.
In 1946, almost one after the other, three complete editions of The Book of the Fighter were published.

Genre, genre, creative method of the analyzed work

In the spring of 1941, the poet worked hard on the chapters of the future poem, but the outbreak of the war changed these plans. The revival of the idea and the resumption of work on "Terkin" refers to the middle of 1942. Since that time, a new stage of work on the work begins: “The whole character of the poem, all its content, its philosophy, its hero, its form - composition, genre, plot have changed. The character of the poetic narration about the war has changed - the homeland and the people, the people in the war have become the main themes. " Although, starting to work on it, the poet was not too worried about this, as evidenced by his own words: “I did not languish for long with doubts and fears about the vagueness of the genre, the absence of an initial plan that embraces the entire work in advance, and the weak plot coherence of the chapters. Not a poem - well, let it not be a poem, I decided; there is no single plot - let it be not, don’t; there is no very beginning of a thing - there is no time to invent it; the culmination and completion of the whole story is not planned - even if it is necessary to write about what is burning, does not wait, and then it will be seen, we will figure it out. "
In connection with the question of the genre of Tvardovsky's work, the following judgments of the author seem important: “The genre designation of the Book about the Fighter, on which I stopped, was not the result of a desire to simply avoid the designation of“ poem ”,“ story ”, etc. This coincided with the decision to write not a poem, not a story or a novel in verse, that is, not something that has its legalized and, to a certain extent, obligatory plot, compositional and other features. These signs did not come out to me, but something did come out, and I labeled this something as a "Book about a fighter."
This, as the poet himself called it, "The Book about the Soldier" recreates a reliable picture of frontline reality, reveals the thoughts, feelings, experiences of a person in a war. It stands out among other poems of that time with a special completeness and depth of a realistic depiction of the people's liberation struggle, disasters and suffering, exploits and military life.
Tvardovsky's poem is a heroic epic, with objectivity that corresponds to the epic genre, but permeated with a living authorial feeling, unique in all respects, a unique book, at the same time developing the traditions of realistic literature and folk poetry. And at the same time, this is a free narration - a chronicle ("A book about a soldier, without a beginning, without an end ..."), which covers the entire history of the war.

Subject

The theme of the Great Patriotic War forever entered the work of A.T. Tvardovsky. And the poem "Vasily Terkin" became one of his brightest pages. The poem is dedicated to the life of the people in the war, it is rightfully an encyclopedia of front-line life. In the center of the poem is the image of Terkin, an ordinary infantryman from the Smolensk peasants, uniting the composition of the work into a single whole. Vasily Terkin actually personifies the whole people. In it the Russian national character found its artistic embodiment. An ordinary person, an ordinary soldier, became the symbol of the victorious people in Tvardovsky's poem.
In The Book of the Fighter, war is depicted as it is - in everyday life and heroism, the interweaving of the mundane, sometimes even comic (the chapters "At the Rest", "In the Bath") with the sublime and tragic. The poem is strong, first of all, by the truth about the war as a severe and tragic - at the limit of possibilities - a test of the vital forces of the people, the country, each person.

The idea of ​​the work

Fiction during the Great Patriotic War has a number of characteristic features. Its main features are patriotic pathos and an attitude towards universal accessibility. The poem by Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin" is rightfully considered the most successful example of such a work of art. The feat of a soldier in the war is shown by Tvardovsky as everyday and hard military labor and battle, and the transition to new positions, and overnight in a trench or right on the ground, "shielding himself from death with a black only his own back ...". And the hero who accomplishes this feat is an ordinary, ordinary soldier.
It is in the defense of the Motherland, life on earth that the justice of the People's Patriotic War lies: "The battle is holy and right, mortal combat is not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth." Poem by A.T. Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin" has become truly popular.

Main characters

Analysis of the work shows that the basis of the poem is the image of the main character - private Vasily Terkin. He has no real prototype. This is a collective image that combines the typical features of the spiritual appearance and character of an ordinary Russian soldier. Dozens of people wrote about the typicality of Terkin, making from the lines "there is always a guy of this kind in every company, and in every platoon" the conclusion that this is a collective, generalized image, that one should not look for any individual qualities in it, so much typical of a Soviet soldier. And since “it was scattered partially and partially destroyed,” it means that this is not a person at all, but a symbol of the entire Soviet Army.
Terkin - who is he? Let's face it: He's just a guy by himself. He's ordinary.
However, a guy anywhere, a guy like that
In every company there is always, And in every platoon.
The image of Terkin has folklore roots, it is "a hero, a fathom in the shoulders", "merry man", "experienced man." Behind the illusion of rusticity, jokes, mischief hides moral sensitivity and a sense of filial duty to the Motherland, the ability to accomplish a feat without a phrase or posture at any moment.
The image of Vasily Terkin really captures what is typical for many: "A guy like that / In every company there is always, / Yes, and in every platoon." However, in it the features and properties inherent in many people are embodied brighter, sharper, more distinctive. Folk wisdom and optimism, perseverance, endurance, patience and dedication, everyday ingenuity and skill of a Russian person - a worker and a warrior, finally, inexhaustible humor, behind which something deeper and more serious always appears - all this is fused into a living and integral human character. The main feature of his character is love for his native country. The hero constantly recalls his native places, which are so sweet and dear to his heart. He cannot but attract in Terkin also mercy, the greatness of the soul, in war he finds himself not because of the military instinct, but for the sake of life on earth, the defeated enemy evokes in him only a feeling of pity. He is modest, although he can sometimes boast, telling friends that he does not need an order, he agrees to a medal. But most of all, this person is attracted by his love of life, worldly ingenuity, mockery of the enemy and of any difficulties.
Being the embodiment of the Russian national character, Vasily Terkin is inseparable from the people - the soldiers' masses and a number of episodic characters (grandfather-soldier and grandmother, tankers in battle and on the march, a girl-nurse in a hospital, a soldier's mother returning from enemy captivity, etc.) , it is inseparable from the mother-homeland. And the whole "Book about the Fighter" is a poetic statement of national unity.
Along with the images of Terkin and the people, an important place in the overall structure of the work is occupied by the image of the author-narrator, or, more precisely, the lyrical hero, especially perceptible in the chapters "About Me", "On War", "On Love", in four chapters "From the Author ". So, in the chapter "About Me" the poet directly declares, addressing the reader: "And I will tell you: I will not hide it, / - In this book, there, there, / That which would be said to the hero, / I speak personally myself."
The author in the poem is the mediator between the hero and the reader. A confidential conversation is constantly conducted with the reader, the author respects his friend-reader, and therefore seeks to convey to him the truth about the war. The author feels his responsibility to the readers, he understands how important it was not only to tell about the war, but also to instill in the readers the belief in the invincibility of the spirit of the Russian soldier, optimism. Sometimes the author invites the reader to check the truth of his judgments and observations. Such direct contact with the reader greatly contributes to the fact that the poem becomes understandable to a large circle of people.
In the poem, subtle authorial humor constantly shines through. The text of the poem is filled with jokes, sayings, sayings, and it is generally impossible to determine who their author is - the author of the poem, the hero of the poem Terkin or the people. At the very beginning of the poem, the author calls a joke the most necessary "thing" in a soldier's life:
You can live without food for a day, You can do more, but sometimes In a war one minute Do not live without a joke, The most unwise joke.

The plot and composition of the analyzed work

The originality of the plot-compositional construction of the book is determined by the military reality itself. “There is no plot in the war,” the author noted in one of the chapters. And in the poem as a whole, there really are no such traditional components as an opening, a climax, a denouement. But within chapters with a narrative basis, as a rule, there is a plot, separate plot links arise between these chapters. Finally, the general development of events, the disclosure of the character of the hero, with all the independence of the individual chapters, is clearly determined by the very course of the war, the natural change in its stages: from the bitter days of retreat and the most difficult defensive battles to the hard-won and won victory. Here is how Tvardovsky himself wrote about the compositional structure of his poem:
“And the first thing that I took for the principle of composition and style was striving for a certain completeness of each separate part, chapter, and within a chapter - each period and even a stanza. I had to bear in mind a reader who, even if he was unfamiliar with the previous chapters, would find something whole, rounded in this chapter, published today in the newspaper. Besides, this reader might not have waited for my next chapter: he was where the hero was - in the war. It was this approximate completeness of each chapter that I was most concerned about. I did not keep anything to myself until another time, trying to express myself at each occasion - the next chapter - to the end, fully express my mood, convey a fresh impression, a thought, a motive, an image. True, this principle was not immediately determined - after the first chapters of "Terkin" were printed one after another, and then new ones appeared later as they were written. "
The poem consists of thirty independent and at the same time closely related chapters. The poem is constructed as a chain of episodes from the military life of the protagonist, which do not always have a direct eventual connection with each other. Terkin humorously tells young soldiers about the everyday life of the war; says that he has been fighting since the beginning of the war, was surrounded three times, was wounded. The fate of an ordinary soldier, one of those who bore the brunt of the war on their shoulders, becomes the personification of national strength of mind, the will to live.
The plot of the poem is difficult to trace, each chapter tells about a separate event in the life of a soldier, for example: Terkin swims twice across the icy river to restore contact with the advancing units; Terkin alone occupies a German dugout, but comes under fire from his own artillery; on the way to the front, Terkin finds himself in the house of old peasants, helping them with the housework; Terkin enters into hand-to-hand combat with the German and, with difficulty overcoming, takes him prisoner. Or, unexpectedly for himself, Terkin knocks down a German attack aircraft from a rifle. Terkin takes command of the platoon when the commander is killed, and rushes into the village first; however, the hero is again seriously wounded. Lying wounded in the field, Terkin talks with Death, who persuades him not to cling to life; in the end, the soldiers find him, and he tells them: "Take this woman away, / I am a soldier still alive."
It is no coincidence that Tvardovsky's work begins and ends with lyrical digressions. An open conversation with the reader brings you closer to the inner world of the work, creates an atmosphere of general involvement in events. The poem ends with a dedication to the fallen.
The poem "Vasily Terkin" is distinguished by a kind of historicism. It can be conditionally divided into three parts, coinciding with the beginning, middle and end of the war. Poetic comprehension of the stages of the war creates a lyrical chronicle of events from the chronicle. The feeling of bitterness and grief fills the first part, faith in victory - the second, the joy of the liberation of the Fatherland becomes the leitmotif of the third part of the poem. This is due to the fact that A.T. Tvardovsky created the poem gradually, throughout the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

Artistic identity

Analysis of the work shows that the poem "Vasily Terkin" is distinguished by an extraordinary breadth and freedom of using the means of oral-colloquial, literary and folk poetry speech. This is a truly vernacular language. It naturally uses proverbs and sayings (“I am jack of all trades out of boredom”; “time for business is an hour of fun”; “along which river to sail - to create that and a little slave ...”), folk songs (about a greatcoat, about a river ). Tvardovsky is fluent in the art of speaking simply but poetically. He himself creates phrases that have entered life on the basis of proverbs (“don't look what's on your chest, but look what's ahead”; “war has a short path, love has a long way”; “guns go backwards to battle”, etc.) ...
Freedom - the main moral and artistic principle of the work - is realized in the very construction of the verse. And this is a find - a relaxed ten-verse, eight-, and five-, and six-, and quatrains - in a word, there will be as many rhyming lines as Tvardovsky will need right now in order to express himself in full. The main size of "Vasily Terkin" is a four-legged trore.
S. Ya. Wrote about the originality of Tvardovsky's verse. Marshak: “Look at how one of the best chapters of Vasily Terkin, The Crossing, was built. In this truthful and seemingly unsophisticated story about the authentic events observed by the author, you will nevertheless find a strict form, a clear construction. You will find here a repeating leitmotif that sounds in the most crucial places in the narrative, and each time in a new way - sometimes sad and alarming, then solemn and even menacing:
Ferry, ferry! The bank is left, the bank is right. The snow is rough. The edge of the ice ... To whom the memory, to whom the glory, To whom the dark water.
You will find here a lively, laconic, impeccably well-aimed dialogue built in accordance with all the laws of the ballad. This is where the true poetic culture is reflected, which gives us the means to depict events from the most modern hectic life. "

The meaning of the work

The poem "Vasily Terkin" is the central work in the work of A.T. Tvardovsky, "the best of everything written about war in war" (K. Simonov), one of the heights of Russian epic poetry in general. It can be considered one of the truly popular works. Many lines from this work migrated into oral folk speech or became popular poetic aphorisms: "mortal battle not for the sake of glory - for the sake of life on earth", "forty souls one soul", "crossing, crossing, left bank, right bank" and many other.
The recognition of the “Book of the Fighter” was not only nationwide, but also nationwide: “... This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, precision in everything and what an extraordinary folk soldier's language - no hitch, no a single false, ready-made, that is, literary vulgar word! " - wrote I.A. Bunin.
The poem "Vasily Terkin" has been illustrated several times. The very first were illustrations by O.G. Vereisky, which were created immediately after the text of the poem. Also known are the works of artists B. Dekhterev, I. Bruni, Y. Neprintsev. In 1961, at the Moscow Theater. Moscow City Council K. Voronkov staged "Vasily Terkin". Known literary compositions of the chapters of the poem performed by D.N. Zhuravlev and D.N. Orlova. Excerpts from the poem were set to music by V.G. Zakharov. The composer N.V. Bogoslovsky wrote the symphonic story "Vasily Terkin".
In 1995, a monument to Terkin was unveiled in Smolensk (by the People's Artist of the Russian Federation, sculptor A.G. Sergeev). The monument is a two-figure composition depicting a conversation between Vasily Terkin and A.T. Tvardovsky. The monument was erected using publicly collected money.

It is interesting

The painting by Yu.M. Neprintseva "Rest after the battle" (1951).
In the winter of 1942, in a front-line dugout, barely lit by a home-made lamp, the artist Yuri Mikhailovich Neprintsev first got acquainted with the poem by A.T. Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin". One of the soldiers read the poem aloud, and Neprintsev saw how the concentrated faces of the soldiers brightened, how, forgetting about fatigue, they laughed while listening to this wonderful work. What is the enormous power of the poem's influence? Why is the image of Vasily Terkin so close and dear to the heart of every warrior? The artist was already thinking about this then. Neprintsev re-reads the poem several times and is convinced that its hero is not at all some exceptional nature, but an ordinary guy, in whose image the author expressed all the best, pure and light that is inherent in Soviet people.
A merry fellow and a joker, who knows how to cheer up his comrades in difficult times, to cheer them up with a joke, a sharp word, Terkin also shows resourcefulness and courage in battle. Such living Terkins on the roads of the war could be found everywhere.
The great vitality of the image created by the poet was the secret of his charm. That is why Vasily Terkin immediately became one of the favorite folk heroes. Captivated by this wonderful, deeply truthful way, Neprintsev could not part with him for many years. "He lived in my mind," the artist later wrote, "accumulating new features, enriching himself with new details in order to become the main character of the picture." But the idea of ​​the picture was not immediately born. The artist traveled a long, full of work and thought path before starting to paint the painting "Rest after the Battle". “I wanted,” the artist wrote, “to depict the soldiers of the Soviet Army not at the moment of performing any heroic deeds, when all the mental forces of a person are strained to the limit, to show them not in the smoke of battle, but in a simple everyday atmosphere, in a minute of short rest” ...
This is how the thought of a painting is born. Memories of the war years help determine its plot: a group of fighters, in a short break between battles, settled down in a snow-covered meadow and listens to a cheerful storyteller. In the first sketches, the general nature of the future picture was already outlined. The group was located in a semicircle, deployed towards the viewer, and consisted of only 12-13 people. The figure of Terkin was placed in the center of the composition and highlighted in color. The figures on either side of it formally balanced the composition. There was a lot of far-fetched and conditional in this decision. The small size of the group gave the whole scene a character of chance and did not create the impression of a strong, friendly team of people. Therefore, in the subsequent sketches of the Neprintsy, he increases the number of people and disposes them most naturally. The main character Terkin moves from the center to the right, the group is built diagonally from left to right. Thanks to this, the space increases, its depth is outlined. The viewer ceases to be just a witness of this scene, he becomes, as it were, a participant in it, gets involved in the cool of the fighters listening to Terkin. To give even more authenticity and vitality to the whole picture,
Neprintsev refused solar lighting, since the spectacular contrasts of light and shadow could introduce into the picture elements of theatrical convention, which the artist so avoided. The soft diffused light of a winter day made it possible to more fully and brighter reveal the variety of faces and their expressions. The artist worked a lot and for a long time on the figures of the fighters, on their poses, changing the latter several times. So, the figure of a mustachioed foreman in a sheepskin coat only after a long search turned into a seated soldier, and an elderly soldier with a bowler hat in his hands only in the last sketches replaced the nurse girl bandaging the soldier. But the most important thing for the artist was the work on the depiction of the inner world of the heroes. "I wanted," wrote Neprintsev, "for the viewer to fall in love with my heroes, to feel them as living and close people, so that he would find and recognize his own front-line friends in the picture." The artist understood that only then he would be able to create convincing and truthful images of the heroes, when they would be extremely clear to himself. Neprintsev began to carefully study the characters of the fighters, their manner of speaking, laughing, individual gestures, habits, in other words, he began to "get used to" the images of his heroes. In this he was helped by the impressions of the war years, combat meetings, the memories of his front-line comrades. An invaluable service was rendered to him by his front-line sketches, portraits of combat friends.
Many sketches were made from nature, but they were not transferred directly into the picture, without preliminary revision. The artist was looking for, highlighting the most striking features of this or that person and, on the contrary, removed everything secondary, accidental, interfering with the identification of the main. He strove to make each image purely individual and typical. “In my picture I wanted to give a collective portrait of Soviet people, soldiers of the great liberation army. The real hero of my picture is the Russian people. " Each hero in the artist's view has his own interesting biography. He can talk about them fascinatingly for hours, conveying the smallest details of their life and fate.
So, for example, Neprintsev says that the fighter sitting to the right of Terkin, he imagined a guy who recently came to the army from a collective farm, is still inexperienced, maybe he took part in a battle for the first time, and he, of course, is scared. But now, lovingly listening to the stories of the experienced soldier, he forgot about his fear. Behind Terkin stands a young handsome guy in a wickedly tilted hat. “He,” the artist wrote, “listens to Terkin somewhat condescendingly. He himself could have said as well. Before the war he was a skilled worker of a large factory, an accordion player, a participant in amateur performances, a favorite of girls >>. The artist could tell a lot about the mustachioed foreman who laughs at the top of his lungs, and about an elderly soldier with a bowler hat, and about the cheerful soldier sitting to the left of the narrator, and about all the other characters ... The most difficult task was to find the appearance of Vasily Terkin. The artist wanted to convey the image that had developed among the people, he wanted Terkin to be recognized immediately. Terkin should be a generalized way, it should combine the features of many people. His image is, as it were, a synthesis of all the best, bright, pure that is inherent in Soviet people. The artist worked for a long time on the appearance of Terkin, on the expression of his face, the gesture of his hands. In the first drawings, Terkin was depicted as a young soldier with a good-natured, sly face. There was no dexterity or sharp wit in him. In another sketch, Terkin was too serious, balanced, in the third - he lacked everyday experience, life school. Searches went on from drawing to drawing, gestures were refined, posture was determined. According to the artist, the gesture of Terkin's right hand was supposed to emphasize some sharp strong joke addressed to the enemy. A countless number of drawings have survived, in which a wide variety of figure turns, head tilts, hand movements, individual gestures have been tried - until the artist found something that satisfied him. The image of Terkin in the picture became a significant, convincing and quite natural center. The artist spent a lot of time looking for a landscape for a painting. He imagined that the action takes place in a thin forest with clearings and copses. It is early spring, the snow has not melted yet, but only slightly loosened. He wanted to convey the national Russian landscape.
The painting "Rest after the Battle" is the result of the artist's intense, serious work, excited love for his heroes, and great respect for them. Each image in the picture is a whole biography. And before the gaze of an inquisitive viewer, a whole series of bright, individually unique images pass. The deep vitality of the idea determined the clarity and integrity of the composition, the simplicity and naturalness of the pictorial solution. The painting by Neprintsev revives the difficult days of the Great Patriotic War, full of heroism and severity, hardships and hardships, and at the same time the joy of victories. That is why it will always be dear to the heart of the Soviet people, beloved by the broad masses of the Soviet people.

(Based on the book by V.I.Gapeev, E.V. Kuznetsov. "Conversations about Soviet Artists." - M.-L .: Education, 1964)

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Romanova R.M. Alexander Tvardovsky: Pages of life and work: A book for high school students. - M .: Education, 1989-
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