Essay: Honor in the work “The White Guard” by Bulgakov. Honor and dishonor: the novel “The White Guard”, the play “Days of the Turbins”

Honor

• Honor— moral qualities of a person worthy of respect and pride; its corresponding principles. (By " Explanatory dictionary" S.I. Ozhegova)
• “The inner moral dignity of a person, valor, honesty, nobility of soul and clear conscience”, “conditional, secular, everyday nobility” (According to V.I. Dahl).
• Honor is a good, unblemished reputation, an honest name. A man of honor will not allow his good opinion, the name of his family, company, or his own person to be tarnished; he will not humiliate himself with lies, flattery,
• Honor - honor, respect. We pay honor to people who survived difficult situations, showed miracles of courage and heroism, defending the people, the country, specific people in one or another difficult situation.
• Soldiers and officers salute - this is a symbol of their loyalty to the Motherland and the people.
• Honor is decency, honesty, conscientiousness. This is a moral quality that allows you to highly value a person for his actions, attitude towards people and country.
• A man of honor acts nobly in any situation, with dignity, gracefully, without humiliating himself with slander, foul language, or insult. He always resists evil, aggression, and is ready to protect the weak, everyone who needs help.
• A man of honor will not ignore injustice, the humiliation of one person by another.
• It is human nature to have his own principles and ideals. A man of honor is always faithful to them. Of course, in in this case We are talking about high moral principles.
• Honor is the one moral basis, the core that keeps a person from betrayal, deceit, and meanness.
• Honor, conscience, nobility, loyalty, decency - they coexist in a person, complementing the moral character of the individual.

Thus, to be a man of honor means to live according to the laws of morality, fulfilling moral, professional and simply human duty.

Dishonor

• Dishonor– desecration of honor and dignity; insult, shame; lack of honor, disgraceful behavior
• Dishonorable - one who lacks honor, dignity, nobility - moral qualities and principles worthy of respect.
• A dishonest person is capable of the most disgusting acts - from lies, hypocrisy, meanness to betrayal. Such people put themselves first; they are egoists who think about their well-being, for which they are ready to sacrifice other people, dishonoring them.
• People without honor and conscience have always been despised by the people. One of the most terrible immoral qualities is dishonor.
• It is very difficult to regain your good name, even if you stumble a little. Therefore, it is no coincidence that there is a proverb among the people: “Take care of your honor from a young age.”

Notice how much you can write and say about honor, and how stingy the words are about dishonor. One definition is enough - “dishonor is the absence of honor and conscience” to understand how low the people who are characterized by this quality are.

We must strive to be better, to improve ourselves. Let the word “dishonor” never be uttered against you!

Material prepared by: Melnikova Vera Aleksandrovna

Novel " White Guard" opens with an image from 1918. Precisely in the image of those terrible and majestic days. This year the summer was very sunny, the winter was full of snow, and two stars stood high in the sky. The house and the city are the two main inanimate characters of the book. The house is replete with family idyll, and the city one day, far from wonderful, crosses out its existence with a terrible war.

In his book, the author avoids direct opposition between whites and reds, emphasizing that they are all united, regardless of which camp they belong to. He tries to convey all the horror in the idea of ​​senseless fratricide. With sadness and regret, he empathizes with both warring sides and does not fully sympathize with either one.

The author brings to the fore the main human values: home, homeland, family. But not all of his heroes agreed to recognize these values. With terrifying realism, he was able to convey the mental anguish of people and the tragedy of the situation. The novelty of the novel also lay in the fact that five years after the end of the civil war, he was able to show the White Guard officers not in the guise of their worst enemy, but as ordinary people, among whom there are good and bad, smart and misguided, honest and selfish. He showed them from the inside, helped to imbue them with sympathy and understanding.

For example, in Alexey, in Malyshev, in Nai-Turs, he valued loyalty to honor, masculinity and directness. For them, the symbol of faith was an unshakable core, which was shaken with the abdication of the throne of Nicholas II.

Nai-Tours is a man of honor. He tears off the young cadet's shoulder straps and covers his retreat with only a machine gun. Nikolka also turns out to be a man of honor. He rushes through the bullet-ridden streets, looking for Nai-Tours' relatives to inform them of his death. And then, risking himself, he steals the body of the murdered commander, removing it from the mountain of frozen corpses, from the basement of the anatomical theater. Malyshev takes a risky step, sending the cadets home when he realizes that this battle is lost, and they are still too young and want to live.

In addition to honor and duty to the fatherland, the author was also concerned with the topic of the afterlife. For some, this faith was persistent and unshakable, for others it faded. The most a shining example pure faith in higher power are Elena's prayers to save her brother's life. An appeal to the Mother of God performs a miracle: Alexey recovers. The semantic culmination of the novel ends with Alexey Turbin’s dream about faith in God. He shows that all people are equal before him and sooner or later, someone will have to answer for the blood shed.

The suffering and torment of the fratricidal war forced Bulgakov to write a novel, which is essentially non-religious, but with obvious features of the Christian faith. Although, despite the lack of faith in the Almighty, people did not forget about true values their lives and continued to observe them sacredly.

Oct 24 2010

M.A. Bulgakov twice, in two different works, recalls how his work on the novel “The White Guard” (1925) began. IN " Theatrical novel“Maksudov says: “It arose at night when I woke up after a sad dream. I dreamed hometown, snow, winter, civil... In a dream, a silent blizzard passed in front of me, and then an old piano appeared and near it people who were no longer in the world.” And in the story “To a Secret Friend” there are other details: “I pulled my barracks lamp as far as possible to the table and put a pink paper cap on top of its green cap, which made the paper come to life. On it I wrote the words: “And the dead were judged according to what was written in the books, according to their deeds.” Then he began to write, not yet knowing very well what would come of it. I remember that I really wanted to convey how good it is when it’s warm at home, the clock chiming like a tower in the dining room, sleepy slumber in bed, books and frost...” It was with this mood that the first pages of the novel were written.

But his plan was hatched for more than one year. In both epigraphs to “The White Guard”: from “ The captain's daughter” (“The evening howled, a blizzard began”) and from the Apocalypse (“... the dead were judged...”) - there are no riddles for the reader. They are directly related to the plot. And the blizzard really rages on the pages - sometimes natural, sometimes allegorical (“Revenge from the north has long begun, and it sweeps and sweeps”). And the trial of those “who are no longer in the world,” and essentially the Russian intelligentsia, continues throughout the novel. He himself speaks on it from the first lines. Acts as a witness. Far from impartial, but honest and objective, not missing either the virtues of the “defendants” or the weaknesses, shortcomings and mistakes.

The novel opens with a majestic image of 1918. Not by date, not by designation of the time of action - precisely by image. “It was a great and terrible year after the birth of Christ, 1918, and the second since the beginning of the revolution. It was full of sun in summer and snow in winter, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars. House and City are the two main inanimate characters of the book. However, not completely inanimate. The Turbins' house on Alekseevsky Spusk, depicted with all the features of a family idyll, crossed out, lives, breathes, suffers like a living being.

It’s as if you feel the warmth from the tiles of the stove when it’s frosty outside, you hear the tower clock striking in the dining room, the strumming of a guitar and the familiar sweet voices of Nikolka, Elena, Alexey, their noisy, cheerful guests... And the City is immensely beautiful on its hills even in winter, snow-covered and flooded with electricity in the evenings. The Eternal City, tormented by shelling, street fighting, disgraced by crowds of soldiers and temporary workers who captured its squares and streets. it was impossible to write without a broad, conscious view, what was called a worldview, and Bulgakov showed that he had it.

The author avoids in his book, at least in the part that was completed, a direct confrontation between the Reds and Whites. On the pages of the novel, the Whites are fighting the Petliurists. But the writer is occupied by a broader humanistic thought - or, rather, a thought-feeling: the horror of fratricide. With sadness and regret, he observes the desperate struggle of several warring elements and does not sympathize with any of them to the end. Bulgakov defended in the novel Eternal values: home, homeland, family. And he remained a realist in his narration - he did not spare either the Petliurites, or the Germans, or the Whites, and he did not say a word of lies about the Reds, placing them as if behind the curtain of the picture. The provocative novelty of the novel was that five years after the end of the civil war, when the pain and heat of mutual hatred had not yet subsided, he dared to show the officers of the White Guard not in the poster guise of the “enemy”, but as ordinary people - good and bad, suffering and misguided, smart and limited - people, showed them from the inside, and the best in this environment - with obvious sympathy.

In Alexei, in Myshlaevsky, in Nai-Turs and in Nikolka, the author most of all values ​​courageous straightforwardness and loyalty to honor. For them, honor is a kind of faith, the core of personal behavior. Officer's honor demanded the protection of the white banner, unreasoning loyalty to the oath, the fatherland and the tsar, and Alexey Turbin painfully experiences the collapse of the symbol of faith, from under which the main support was pulled out with the abdication of Nicholas II. But honor is also loyalty to other people, comradeship, and duty to the younger and weaker. Colonel Malyshev is an honor because he dismisses the cadets to their homes, having realized the pointlessness of resistance: courage and contempt for the phrase are needed for such a decision.

Nai-Turs is a man of honor, even a knight of it, because he fights to the end, and when he sees that the matter is lost, he rips off the shoulder straps of the cadet, almost a boy thrown into a bloody mess, and covers his retreat with a machine gun. Nikolka is also a man of honor, because he rushes through the bullet-riddled streets of the city, looking for Nai-Tours’s loved ones to inform them about his death, and then, risking himself, he almost steals the body of the deceased commander, removing him from the mountain of frozen corpses in the basement of the anatomical theater . Where there is honor, there is courage, where there is dishonor, there is cowardice.

The reader will remember Thalberg, with his “patented smile,” stuffing his travel suitcase. He is a stranger in the Turbino family. People tend to be mistaken, sometimes tragically mistaken, to doubt, to search, to come to new faith. But a man of honor makes this journey out of inner conviction, usually with anguish, with anguish, parting with what he worshiped. For a person devoid of the concept of honor, such changes are easy: he, like Thalberg, simply changes the bow on the lapel of his coat, adapting to changing circumstances.

The author of “The White Guard” was also worried about another question: the bond between the old “ peaceful life", in addition to autocracy, there was also Orthodoxy, faith in God and the afterlife - some were sincere, some faded and remained only as loyalty to rituals. In Bulgakov's first novel there is no break with traditional awareness, but there is no sense of loyalty to it. Elena’s lively, fervent prayer for the salvation of her brother, addressed to the Mother of God, performs a miracle: Alexey recovers.

Before Elena’s inner gaze appears the one whom the author will later call Yeshua Ha-Nozri, “completely resurrected, and blessed, and barefoot.” The light, transparent vision anticipates the late novel in its visibility: “the glass light of the heavenly dome, some unprecedented red-yellow sand blocks, olive trees...” - the landscape of ancient Judea. Much brings the author together with his main character - the doctor Alexei Turbin, to whom he gave a piece of his biography: calm courage, and faith in old Russia, faith to the last, until the course of events destroys it completely, but most of all - the dream of a peaceful life .

The semantic culmination of the novel lies in prophetic dream Alexey Turbin. “I have neither profit nor loss from your faith,” God, who “appeared” to Sergeant Zhilin, simply argues in a peasant manner. “One believes, the other doesn’t believe, but your actions... you’re all the same: now you’re at each other’s throats...” And the whites, the reds, and those who fell at Perekop are equally subject to the highest mercy: “... all of you are the same to me - killed on the battlefield.” The author of the novel did not pretend to be a religious person: both hell and heaven for him were most likely “so... a human dream.” But Elena says in her home prayer that “we are all guilty of blood.” And he was tormented by the question of who would pay for the blood shed in vain.

The suffering and torment of a fratricidal war, the consciousness of the justice of what he called “the clumsy peasant anger,” and at the same time the pain from trampling on the old human values led Bulgakov to create his own 48 literature of unusual ethics - essentially non-religious, but preserving the features of the Christian moral tradition. The motif of eternity, which arose in the first lines of the novel, in one of the epigraphs, in the image of the great and terrible year, rises in the finale. The biblical words about the Last Judgment: “And every one was judged according to his works, and whoever was not written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” “...The cross turned into a threatening sharp sword. But he's not scary. All will pass.

Suffering, torment, blood, famine and pestilence. The sword will disappear, but the stars will remain, when the shadow of our bodies and deeds will not remain on the earth. There is not a single person who does not know this. So why don't we want to turn our gaze to them? Why?"

White Guard. Historical truth in the novel

According to researcher V. Lakshin, Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard” is “something... genuine, charming and original.” What comes to the fore in the novel is not the class principle, but the human one. The author's position is on the side of eternity, which lifts him above the fray. “The White Guard” is a lyrical confessional novel about Russian history, which, according to the author, revealed “those secret bends along which the human soul runs and hides.”

The main theme of the novel is the fate of post-revolutionary Russia, its culture and intelligentsia. At the center of the story is the fate of the Turbin family, Civil War in Russia. But there were many books about the revolution and the Civil War at that time. Therefore, the position from which the novel is written is of great importance. The author himself, when starting to create the work, set the goal of “a persistent portrayal of the Russian intelligentsia as the best layer in our country. In particular, the depiction of an intellectual-noble family, by the will of an immutable historical fate, thrown into the camp of the White Guard during the Civil War, in the tradition of “War and Peace.”

During interrogation at the OGPU, which Bulgakov was subjected to because of his novel, the writer said: “I am keenly interested in the life of the Russian intelligentsia, I love it, I consider it, although a weak, but very important layer in the country. Her fate is close to me, her experiences are dear.” However, in his novel, Bulgakov was able to evaluate this “weak” layer as a talented continuer of the traditions of the school of L.N. Tolstoy.

By calling the stratum of the intelligentsia “the best,” Bulgakov did not at all mean that it was better and higher than everyone else and could decide the destinies of those below. In "The White Guard" the author self-critically discusses the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia, condemning much of it, mainly its love for the people. It is no secret that representatives of the intelligentsia adored the entire people as an abstract concept, and considered each of its specific representatives to be a boor and a thief. Bulgakov’s notes contain an open challenge to the educated class: “It is painful to think that in the country that gave Pushkin and Gogol, there are tens of millions of people who have never heard of them.”

In The White Guard, Bulgakov showed that part of the intelligentsia that, through its own fault, found itself in a historical impasse. Its representatives, wittingly or unwittingly, contributed to the destruction of the state and culture. Many people died because of her honest people. The author of the novel and his relatives were convinced from their own experience that the blow that fell on the intelligentsia was planned and calculated in advance. The writer witnessed how the ranks of the intelligentsia, thinned from the exhausting struggle either with the Red or the White Terror, from hunger and disease, sought to emigrate.

The writer in the novel acts not only as a lawyer for the intelligentsia, but also as a prosecutor. Pseudo-intellectuals like Shpolyansky, Talberg and Lisovich played, in Bulgakov’s opinion, a fatal role in the history of the Russian Troubles. The role of the people in this novel is also ambiguous; on the one hand, the human masses are compared to the “Black Sea”, to the “Black River”, and on the other hand, Bulgakov reflects on the pages of the novel the eternal feelings of justice and kindness of the people. Thus, Sergeant Zhilin, who was killed in the First World War, appears in Alexei Turbin’s dream as a “luminous knight.”

Frightened by the real people, divided by different parties, a significant part of the Russian people, bearers of spiritual culture, lost faith in their homeland and the future, realizing that this was a great sin. And representatives of the intelligentsia faced with all the urgency the question that has always been relevant at all times: “What to do?” This question poses Bulgakov to the heroes of his novel.

When creating the novel, Bulgakov tried to convey historical reality as truthfully as possible. Using the example of the Turbins, he showed that a tragic impasse is an inevitable turn of fate, that the Russian intelligentsia needs to give up illusions and dreams of a bright world of social justice and the victory of democracy, face the truth and, trying to get away from despair, try to find a way out of this situation . By the time Bulgakov himself wrote the novel, he had already said goodbye to illusions, which is confirmed by one of his surviving notes: “A new, completely unknown terrible thing is approaching... It’s just that even if you look out the windows, you immediately feel that nothing will happen anymore...” Such same premonitions torment the soul of the young doctor Alexei Turbin. Maybe not right away, but he will understand that there is no turning back. And time itself brings him, like other heroes of the novel, to this conclusion.

The Turbin family, two brothers and a sister, each of whom reflects their family traits in their own way, is trying to solve the question of how to live. The support of the family in the novel is Elena, the embodiment of femininity, comfort, and devotion, who tries in vain to preserve the old moral structure of the house. Against her background, the older brother, Alexey Turbin, who bears the brunt of confusion and confusion, looks like a person who has difficulty in following a certain line of behavior. Eighteen-year-old Nikolka, in contrast, is more actively looking for his place in events and is capable of active independent actions.

The Revolution and Civil War presented the intelligentsia with a choice: “for” or “against”. Therefore, the conflict in the novel "The White Guard" was defined in two ways: the clash of characters with historical reality and the confrontation of eternal concepts - good and evil, humanism and cruelty. The best people of their time, such as Colonel Malyshev and Colonel Nai-Tours, tragically perceive the collapse of ideals. Malyshev, seeing that all attempts to save the City are unsuccessful, understands that there is no one to protect and no one from whom, and disbands the division, thus saving hundreds of young lives. Covering students and cadets, Nai-Tours also perishes. Alexey Turbin experiences all the events that happen with excruciating pain. Having experienced and comprehended everything that was happening, he comes to the idea that the revolution is not a struggle for the high idea of ​​​​people's happiness, but a senseless bloodshed. And he’s not the only one who thinks so. “The revolution has already degenerated into Pugachevism,” says engineer Lisovich Karasyu. But Vasilisa sees the main danger for society not so much in the destruction of material values ​​as in the destruction of moral principles: “But the point, my dear, is not just about the alarm! No alarm will stop the collapse and decay that has now built a nest in human souls...”

But despite everything, the author’s position is optimistic. Using the example of the Turbins, he shows that neither war nor revolution can destroy Beauty, because it forms the basis of human existence. The turbines, following Pushkin’s behest, managed to preserve their honor from a young age and therefore survived, losing a lot and paying dearly for mistakes and naivety. The epiphany, albeit later, still came. The life of the wonderful book, its characters and author continued, but, as always, it flowed into a different direction.

(333 words) Each of us must be true to our word, otherwise no one can be trusted, and in such a world a person will definitely not be happy. This truth was defended in their own way by many writers, including Bulgakov, who wrote that it would be impossible to live in the world if people were not masters of their own speeches. To argue for this opinion, which I fully share, I will use examples from the literature.

In Kuprin's work "The Duel" main character he kept his word, but his beloved woman mercilessly lied. Shurochka promised Romashov that no one would be wounded in the duel, that he only needed to pretend that the duel was taking place seriously, so that his refusal to fight would not be taken the wrong way by his superiors. The fact is that the woman has long been seeking a promotion for her husband, helping him to enter the Academy, and then a quarrel breaks out between him and her admirer, which, according to all canons, should have ended in a risky showdown. Alexandra understands that her future is at stake, because her husband’s advancement is the only chance to leave the provincial outback. If he loses, it's all over. Then she decided to take advantage of Gregory’s love and asks him to miss, saying that her husband will do the same. However, Romashov was killed in a duel, Shurochka deceived him: Nikolaev shot seriously.

In Karamzin's story " Poor Lisa“Betrayal of the word led to equally terrifying consequences. Erast and Lisa fell in love with each other. Of course, the young man made many promises and vows in order to achieve exceptional favor from the girl. The naive peasant woman thought that their union was virtuous and eternal, so she did not skimp on expressions of feelings. The young man was indeed passionate, but his extravagance led to the fact that he was forced to choose between a wealthy life and love. He chose a marriage of convenience and betrayed the woman he loved, forgetting about all his words. Lisa did not survive the betrayal and drowned herself, because it is impossible to live in a world where lies reign.

Thus, betrayal of one’s word leads to the fact that victims of deception become real people. They leave this world, disappointed in it, and all because of unfulfilled promises that hit the heart so painfully. Liars sow mistrust and anger among us, which sometimes make life in society unbearable and a hypocritical game of shadows and masks.

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