Thematic ideas
One of the main ideas of "Quiet Don": the course of war and national suffering.
"Quiet Don" examines revolution and war from the perspective of "human nature", squeezing and testing people under the millstone of revolution and war. Through the description of the novel, the author expresses doubts about the curse of war, the doubts about the revolution, and the questioning of Soviet power. As a result of the war, the war caused by the revolution, the originally beautiful and rich Don Plain was deserted, the solid, rich, happy and free life disappeared, the Cossacks went to the front to fight, most of them died on the battlefield, and all that was left in the hometown was orphans, widows, and old people, and everywhere showed a scene of decay, just as the inscription at the beginning of the book reads:
Our glorious land is not ploughed with a plough...
Our land is ploughed with horses' hooves,
The glorious land is planted with the heads of the Cossacks,
The quiet Don River is full of young widows,
Our father, on the quiet Don River, is full of orphans,
The rolling waves of the quiet Don River are Daddy's tears.
Oh, the quiet Don, our father!
Oh, quiet Don, why is your flowing water so muddy?
Ah, how can the flow of my quiet Don River not be muddy!
Cold springs flow outward from the bottom of my quiet Don,
Silvery white fish stirred up my quiet Don River.
- Cossack song
This ancient song is a high portrayal of the suffering life of the Don region and the Cossacks caused by revolution and war, and the specific interpretation is the life of families and individuals.
The war divided the Cossacks, who had originally been born of the same roots, into two camps to fight each other, turning the people who were originally good friends and relatives into enemies, and the six relatives did not recognize: Koshevoi shot and killed Gregory's brother Petro, Petro's wife Dalia shot ivan, and Koshevoy, although he married Gregory's sister, could not spare his uncle. Those who killed and those who were killed by them were originally childhood friends and later became relatives. But the war deprived them of their humanity, their kinship, and their transformation into murderers, just as Koshevoy said: "We are all murderers", and it is this sentence that contains the greatest tragedy of the Russian civil war, tells the destructive side of the war, reveals and condemns the war and the people who started it, and issues the question "We are born from the same roots, why are we too anxious?" "Torture.
The second theme of "Quiet Don" is peace, land, labor.
Loving the land, celebrating labor, calling for humanity, and calling for peace are the ideas expressed by the author in this work. War destroys not only the human body. War makes the land barren, the family is separated, the country is decayed, and it corrupts the human heart, alienates human nature, and turns man into a "beast." [1] The Quiet Don reflects the life and thought of the Cossacks during the October Revolution.
The author describes the history of the Cossacks in the events, especially the impact of the events on the four lifelines of cossack society of war, family and social relations, love and gender, ecology and farming, and describes the tortuous process of Gregory's pursuit of the truth of clan society in line with the trend of history.
Sholokhov was both a socialist and a loyal son of the Don Cossacks, who believed in monism, but by nature was a pluralist, and he stood at the point of convergence of pluralistic thinking with a fearless spirit, seeking the "greatest common denominator" of truth, looking for the social truth of the Cossack clans— the cosmopolitan social model. The adherence to the spirit of the Cossacks, the search for the Cossack truth, the model of a harmonious society in the world, may be the fate of Gregory, the reason why he "never landed".
Gregory began to explore the cossacks against the backdrop of the Second War and Revolution. It all starts with unexpected encounters. It can be both lucky and bad. If war and change were the means by which the Cossacks of their predecessors succeeded, here in Grigore they were the means of ending suffering, the means of ending the fate of the Roman gladiators of the millennia.