The exhausted woman sat leaning against the clay wall of the barn, and in a voice calm from fatigue spoke about how Stalingrad burned down. Stylistic features of military prose by K. M. Simonov (story “days and nights”) Simonov days and nights first edition

It was dry and dusty. A weak breeze rolled yellow clouds of dust under our feet. The woman’s feet were burned and bare, and when she spoke, she scooped warm dust onto her sore feet with her hand, as if trying to soothe the pain.

Captain Saburov looked at his heavy boots and involuntarily moved back half a step.

He stood silently and listened to the woman, looking over her head to where the train was unloading near the outer houses, right in the steppe.

Beyond the steppe glistened in the sun white stripe salt lake, and all this taken together seemed like the end of the world. Now, in September, here was the last and closest railway station to Stalingrad. Further from the bank of the Volga we had to walk. The town was called Elton, named after the salt lake. Saburov involuntarily remembered the words “Elton” and “Baskunchak” memorized from school. Once upon a time this was only school geography. And here it is, this Elton: low houses, dust, a remote railway line.

And the woman kept talking and talking about her misfortunes, and, although her words were familiar, Saburov’s heart sank. Previously, they left from city to city, from Kharkov to Valuyki, from Valuyki to Rossosh, from Rossosh to Boguchar, and the women cried in the same way, and in the same way he listened to them with a mixed feeling of shame and fatigue. But here was the bare Trans-Volga steppe, the edge of the world, and in the woman’s words there was no longer reproach, but despair, and there was nowhere to go further along this steppe, where for many miles there were no cities, no rivers - nothing.

- Where did they take you, huh? - he whispered, and all the unaccountable melancholy of the last 24 hours, when he was looking at the steppe from the heated vehicle, was cramped into these two words.

It was very difficult for him at that moment, but, remembering the terrible distance that now separated him from the border, he thought not about how he had come here, but precisely about how he would have to go back. And in his gloomy thoughts there was that special stubbornness characteristic of the Russian man, which did not allow either him or his comrades even once during the entire war to admit the possibility in which this “back” would not happen.

He looked at the soldiers hastily unloading from the carriages, and he wanted to get across this dust to the Volga as quickly as possible and, having crossed it, feel that there would be no return crossing and that his personal fate would be decided on the other side, along with the fate of the city. And if the Germans take the city, he will certainly die, and if he does not let them do this, then perhaps he will survive.

And the woman sitting at his feet was still talking about Stalingrad, naming broken and burned streets one after another. Their names, unfamiliar to Saburov, were full of special meaning for her. She knew where and when the houses that were now burned were built, where and when the trees that were now cut down on the barricades were planted, she regretted all this, as if it was not about big city, but about her house, where acquaintances and things that belonged to her personally disappeared and died to the point of tears.

But she didn’t say anything about her house, and Saburov, listening to her, thought how rarely, in fact, during the entire war he came across people who regretted their missing property. And the further the war went, the less often people remembered their abandoned homes and the more often and more stubbornly they remembered only abandoned cities.

Having wiped away her tears with the end of a handkerchief, the woman looked around with a long questioning glance at everyone listening to her and said thoughtfully and with conviction:

- So much money, so much work!

- What work? – someone asked, not understanding the meaning of her words.

“Build everything back,” the woman said simply.

Saburov asked the woman about herself. She said that her two sons had been at the front for a long time and one of them had already been killed, and her husband and daughter probably remained in Stalingrad. When the bombing and fire began, she was alone and has not known anything about them since then.

– Are you going to Stalingrad? – she asked.

“Yes,” answered Saburov, not seeing a military secret in this, because for what else, if not to go to Stalingrad, could the military train now be unloading in this godforsaken Elton.

– Our last name is Klimenko. The husband is Ivan Vasilyevich, and the daughter is Anya. Maybe you’ll meet someone alive somewhere,” the woman said with faint hope.

“Maybe I’ll meet you,” Saburov answered as usual.

The battalion was finishing its unloading. Saburov said goodbye to the woman and, after drinking a ladle of water from a bucket exposed on the street, headed towards the railway track.

The soldiers, sitting on the sleepers, having taken off their boots, were tucking up their foot wraps. Some of them, having saved the rations issued in the morning, chewed bread and dry sausage. The soldier's rumor, true as usual, spread throughout the battalion that after unloading there would be a march immediately, and everyone was in a hurry to finish their unfinished business. Some were eating, others were mending torn tunics, and others were having a smoke break.

Saburov walked along the station tracks. The echelon in which the regimental commander Babchenko was traveling was supposed to arrive any minute, and until then the question remained unresolved: whether Saburov’s battalion would begin the march to Stalingrad without waiting for the rest of the battalions, or whether after spending the night, in the morning, the entire regiment.

Saburov walked along the tracks and looked at the people with whom he was to go into battle the day after tomorrow.

He knew many of them well by sight and name. These were “Voronezh” - that’s what he privately called those who fought with him near Voronezh. Each of them was a jewel because they could be ordered without having to explain unnecessary details.

They knew when the black drops of bombs falling from the plane were flying directly at them and they had to lie down, and they knew when the bombs would fall further and they could calmly watch their flight. They knew that crawling forward under mortar fire was no more dangerous than remaining in place. They knew that tanks most often crush those running from them and that a German machine gunner firing from two hundred meters always hopes to scare rather than kill. In a word, they knew all those simple but saving soldier truths, the knowledge of which gave them confidence that they would not be so easy to kill.

He had a third of his battalion of such soldiers. The rest were about to see war for the first time. Near one of the carriages, guarding the property that had not yet been loaded onto the carts, stood a middle-aged Red Army soldier, who from a distance attracted Saburov’s attention with his guard bearing and thick red mustache, like peaks, sticking out to the sides. When Saburov approached him, he dashingly took “guard” and continued to look into the captain’s face with a direct, unblinking gaze. In the way he stood, the way he was belted, the way he held the rifle, one could feel that soldierly experience that is only given by years of service. Meanwhile, Saburov, who remembered by sight almost everyone who was with him near Voronezh before the division was reorganized, did not remember this Red Army soldier.

- What's your last name? – asked Saburov.

“Konyukov,” the Red Army soldier said and again stared fixedly at the captain’s face.

– Did you take part in the battles?

- That's right.

- Near Przemysl.

- That's how it is. So they retreated from Przemysl itself?

- No way. They were advancing. In the sixteenth year.

- That's it.

Saburov looked carefully at Konyukov. The soldier's face was serious, almost solemn.

- How long have you been in the army during this war? – asked Saburov.

- No, it’s the first month.

Saburov once again glanced with pleasure at Konyukov’s strong figure and moved on. At the last carriage he met his chief of staff, Lieutenant Maslennikov, who was in charge of the unloading.

K. M. Simonov is one of the greatest writers of Russian Soviet literature. Simonov's artistic world has absorbed the very complex life experiences of his generations.

People born on the eve or during the First World War did not have time to take part in the Great War October Revolution and the civil war, although it was these events that determined their future fate. Childhood was difficult, they devoted their youth to the achievements of the first or second five-year plans, and maturity came to them in those very years that D. Samoilov would later call “the fatal forties.” The break between the two world wars lasted only 20 years, and this determined the fate of the generation to which K. Simonov, born in 1915, belongs. These people came into the world before the seventeenth in order to win in the forty-fifth or die for the sake of a future victory. This was their duty, their calling, their role in history.

In 1942, N. Tikhonov called Simonov “the voice of his generation.” K. Simonov was a tribune and agitator, he expressed and inspired his generation. Then he became its chronicler. Decades after the war, Simonov tirelessly continued to create more and more new works, remaining faithful to his main topic, to your favorite heroes. In Simonov's work and fate, history was reflected with such completeness and obviousness as happens very rarely.

Terrible trials befell the Soviet soldiers, and the further we move away from the four war years, the clearer and more majestic their tragic meaning becomes. True to his theme for four decades, Konstantin Simonov did not repeat himself at all, because his books became more and more multifaceted, more and more tragic, more and more emotional, and increasingly richer in philosophical and moral meaning.

But no matter how rich our literature is that comprehends the military theme, the trilogy “The Living and the Dead” (and more broadly, the entire work of K. Simonov) is today the most profound artistic study of the Great Patriotic War, the most convincing evidence of the innovative nature of our literature about the war.

K. Simonov did a lot to talk about the worldview and character, moral character and heroic life of the Soviet soldier who defeated fascism. His artistic achievements, first of all, testify to the extraordinary creative energy of the writer and the diversity of his talent.

In fact, one only has to list what he created, for example, in the 70s. Book of poems “Vietnam, winter of the seventieth.” Novel " Last summer" The stories “Twenty Days Without War” and “We Won’t See You.” Films “Twenty days without war”, “There is no such thing as someone else’s grief”, “A soldier was walking”. And at the same time, numerous essays, critical and journalistic articles were written, television programs Finally, a variety of social activities were carried out on a daily basis.

For the generation to which K. Simonov belongs, the central event that determined his fate, worldview, moral character, character and intensity of emotions was the Great Patriotic War. It was this generation that grew up in the consciousness of its inevitability and largely determined the inevitability of its victorious completion. Simonov's lyrics were the voice of this generation, Simonov's epic was his self-awareness, a reflection of his historical role.

The diversity of Simonov's creativity is probably primarily explained by the fact that his multifaceted knowledge of his hero did not fit only within the framework of poetry, or drama, or prose. Lukonin and Saburov, Safonov, Sintsov, Ovsyannikova - all of them together bring us the truth about how the war tested the strength of their spirit, their ideological conviction and moral purity, their ability for heroic deeds. The historical paradox of their existence lies in the fact that the war became for them a school of socialist humanism. It was this circumstance that dictated Simonov’s need not to limit himself to depicting his peers, but to make the central figure of the trilogy “The Living and the Dead” General Serpilin, who had gone through the school of communism already in the years civil war. This is how the unity of Serpilin’s political, moral-philosophical and military-professional convictions is created - a unity that has both a clear social conditionality and obvious aesthetic consequences.

In Simonov's trilogy, the connections between the individual and society, human fate and people's fate are examined deeply and multifacetedly. The writer sought, first of all, to talk about how, due to the needs of society and under its constant powerful influence, soldiers are born, that is, the spiritual formation of a person - a warrior, a participant in a just war - occurs.

Konstantin Simonov has been in the forefront of Soviet military writers for more than sixty years, and he, tireless, working without pause, obsessed with more and more new ideas, inspired by a clear understanding of how much more he can tell people about the four years of war, to give “to feel what it was” and make “you think that there shouldn’t be a third world war.

K. M. Simonov is a person very close to me in spirit, and in my soul there is a place reserved for this great writer. I have great respect for him and am proud that he studied at our school in 1925-1927. In our gymnasium there is a memorial plaque dedicated to Konstantin Simonov. And in 2005, this great man turned 90 years old, and in connection with this event, a delegation from the gymnasium visited his son Alexei Kirillovich Simonov.

All this, as well as the advice of my teacher Tatyana Yakovlevna Varnavskaya, influenced the choice of the topic for this research work. It also seems to me that this topic is relevant, because our country celebrated 60 years of Victory, and K. Simonov can safely be called the chronicler of the Great Patriotic War, because he conveyed all the pain and suffering, but at the same time, the faith in victory in the best possible way Russian people. Unfortunately, in our time, the works of K. M. Simonov are not popular with modern readers, but this is in vain, because there is a lot to learn from him and his heroes. Our ancestors gave us a clean and peaceful sky above our heads, a world without fascism. Sometimes we don't appreciate it. And Simonov’s works seem to transport us to those terrible and fatal years for Russia, and after reading them, we can feel what our grandfathers and great-grandfathers felt. Simonov's stories, novels, and poems are a great, truly Russian and patriotic reflection of those terrible and heroic days of 1941-1945.

In my work, I would like to consider in more detail the work of K. M. Simonov, to trace the features of his style and storytelling trends. I want to understand how Simonov’s language differs from the styles of other writers. Many researchers of Konstantin Mikhailovich’s work noted that, when creating his great works, he relied on Tolstoy’s style of storytelling. In my work, I tried to see these similarities myself and highlight those stylistic features that are unique to Simonov and determine his unique, personal style.

“Days and Nights” - themes, problems, system of images

“Days and Nights” is a work that raises the question of how soviet people became skilled warriors, masters of victory. The artistic structure of the story and its internal dynamics are determined by the author’s desire to reveal the spiritual image of those who fought to the death in Stalingrad, to show how this character was tempered, becoming invincible. To many, the resilience of the defenders of Stalingrad seemed an inexplicable miracle, an unsolvable mystery. But in reality there was no miracle. “The characters of the peoples, their will, spirit and thought” fought in Stalingrad.

But if the secret of victory lies in the people who defended the city under siege, patriotic inspiration, selfless courage, the meaning of the story is determined by how truthfully and completely Simonov managed to tell about his heroes - General Protsenko, Colonel Remizov, Lieutenant Maslennikov, the experienced soldier Konyukov and, first of all, about captain Saburov, who was constantly at the center of events. The attitude of the heroes to everything that happens is determined not only by the determination to die, but not to retreat. The main thing in them internal state turns out to have unshakable faith in victory.

The main character of the story “Days and Nights” is Captain Saburov. Saburov's integrity and moral purity, his persistence and absolute rejection of compromises with conscience were undoubtedly the qualities that largely determined his behavior at the front. When you read about how Saburov wanted to become a teacher, in order to cultivate truthfulness in people, a sense of self-esteem, the ability to make friends, the ability not to give up one’s words and to face the truth of life, then the character of battalion commander Saburov becomes clearer and more attractive, especially since all these traits completely determine his own actions.

The features of Saburov’s heroic character largely help to understand his conflict with the regiment commander Babenko, whose personal courage is also beyond doubt. But Babenko, demanding fearlessness from himself, considers himself to have the right not to be afraid of the death of others. It seems to him that the thought of the inevitability of losses frees him from the need to think about scale, even about their expediency. Therefore, Babenko once told Saburov: “I don’t think so and I don’t advise you. Is there an order? Eat".

So, perhaps for the first time in his work and, of course, one of the first among our military writers, Simonov spoke about the unity of military leadership principles and humanism Soviet Army. But this was said not in the language of journalism, but with a specific and convincing image of Captain Saburov. He suffered through all his life experience that, striving for victory, one must think about its price. This is strategy, deep thought, concern for tomorrow. Saburov's love for people is not an abstract philosophical principle, but the very essence of his life and military work, the main feature of his worldview, the most powerful of all his feelings. Therefore, the attitude towards nurse Anya Klimenko becomes the core of the story, helping to understand Saburov’s character and highlight his true depth and strength.

The traitor Vasiliev was an alien figure in the story, not psychologically clarified, composed according to the canons of fiction, and therefore unnecessary. And without Anya Klimenko, we would not have learned much about Saburov.

The main thing about Anya is her directness, spiritual openness, complete sincerity in everything. She is inexperienced in life and in love to the point of childishness, and in war conditions such a tender, almost childlike soul requires reciprocal frugality. When a girl directly, without any coquetry, says that she is “brave today” because she met an unfamiliar but already close person, then her attitude is reliably tested moral qualities men.

The deepening of Saburov’s image was also created by a new twist on Simonov’s traditional theme of military friendship. We often see Saburov through the eyes of his closest assistant, Maslennikov, who is in love with him. There is much in the character of the chief of staff that is very typical for young officer, who turned twenty years old in the war. In his youth, he envied those who fought in the civil war, and especially fiercely - people several years older than him. He was ambitious and vain with that vanity for which it is difficult to condemn people in war. He certainly wanted to become a hero and for this he was ready to do anything, the most difficult thing, no matter what was offered to him.

One of the most successful heroes of “Days and Nights,” General Protsenko, came into the story from the story “Maturity.” Its content is one day of offensive. This ordinary day convinces of the growth of the military skill of the army: “everything pre-war is school, and the university is war, only war,” Protsenko rightly says. Not only the commander, but also his entire division matures in battle. And the fact that Protsenko was seriously ill during the decisive hours of the fighting does not affect the implementation of the military operation.

But not only characters and situations passed from Simonov’s essays and stories into his story. The main thing that unites them is a single interpretation of war as a terribly difficult, but necessary task, which the Soviet man does soberly and with conviction.

The feat of Stalingrad shocked the world. It reflects the character, like a drop of water. Soviet man in the war, his courage and sense of historical responsibility, humanity and unprecedented resilience. The truth spoken by Simonov in Stalingrad responded to the most acute social need under these conditions. This truth permeates every line of the story about the seventy days and nights during which Saburov’s battalion defended three Stalingrad houses.

The polemical spirit that colors all of Simonov's military prose was revealed most clearly in Days and Nights.

Having chosen the genre of a story for the story about the defense of Stalingrad, the writer, within this genre, finds a form that is most free from convention, incorporating a diary and close to a diary. Publishing some pages of his military diaries, Simonov himself notes this property of the story “Days and Nights” in the comments to them: “In the spring of 1943, taking advantage of the lull on the fronts, I began to restore the Stalingrad diary from memory, but instead I wrote “Days and Nights” " - a story about the defense of Stalingrad. To some extent, this story is my Stalingrad diary. But facts and fiction are intertwined in it so closely that now, many years later, it would be difficult for me to separate one from the other.”

We can consider the story “Days and Nights” not only as a story dedicated to the people who valiantly guarded Stalingrad, but also as a pure description of everyday life, the pathos of which is in the scrupulous recreation of front-line life. There is no doubt that Simonov pays a lot of attention to the life of war here, many unique details characterizing the life of the heroes in besieged Stalingrad, the book contains. And the fact that at Saburov’s command post there was a gramophone and records, and that in the house defended by Konyukov’s platoon, the soldiers slept on leather seats that they dragged from broken cars, and that the division commander Protsenko adapted to wash himself in his dugout, in the nursery galvanized bath. Simonov also describes the homemade lamps that were used in the dugouts: “The lamp was a shell from a 76-mm shell, it was flattened at the top, a wick was pushed inside, and a little above the middle a hole was cut, plugged with a stopper, through which kerosene or, in the absence of it, gasoline and salt,” and American canned food, which was ironically called the “second front”: “Saburov reached for a beautiful rectangular jar with American canned food: on all four sides of it were depicted colorful dishes that can be prepared from them. A neat bottle opener was soldered to the side. »

But no matter how much space the descriptions of everyday life occupy in the story, they do not acquire independent significance, but are subordinated to a more general and significant task. In a conversation with students of the Gorky Literary Institute, recalling Stalingrad, where people had to overcome “the feeling of enduring danger and enduring tension,” Simonov said that they were supported, in particular, by concentration on the assigned work and everyday worries: “I was especially clear there I felt that everyday life, human employment, which remains in any conditions of battle, play a huge role in human resilience. A person eats, a person sleeps, somehow settles down to sleep. In the fact that people tried to make this life normal, people’s fortitude was manifested.” Fortitude Stalingrad fortitude

That radical change in the course of the war, which marked Battle of Stalingrad, in Simonov’s mind is associated primarily with the invincible strength of spirit, with powerful and inexhaustible spiritual energy, which then made the very word “Stalingrad” superlative to the concepts of “resilience” and “courage”. In the penultimate chapter of the story, the writer seems to sum up what he talks about in the book, “deciphering” the content of the word “Stalingraders”: What they did now, and what they had to do next, was no longer only heroism. The people who defended Stalingrad developed a certain constant force resistance, which arose as a consequence of a variety of reasons - both the further, the more impossible it was to retreat anywhere, and the fact that to retreat meant immediately dying pointlessly during this retreat, and the fact that the proximity of the enemy and almost equal For everyone, the danger was created, if not by the habit of it, then by the feeling of its inevitability, and the fact that all of them, cramped on a small piece of land, knew each other here with all the advantages and disadvantages much closer than anywhere else. All these circumstances taken together gradually created that stubborn force, whose name was “Stalingraders,” and others understood the entire heroic meaning of this word earlier than they themselves.”

If you carefully read the beginning of the story, you will notice that the author in the first two chapters breaks the sequence of the story. It would be natural to start the book with a story about what is happening in Stalingrad, where the division in which Saburov serves is ordered to go. But the reader learns about this only in the second chapter. And the first depicts the unloading of Saburov’s battalion from the train that arrived at Elton station. Simonov sacrifices here not only chronology - this sacrifice is perhaps compensated by the fact that the reader immediately gets to know the main character, but also with greater drama. In the second chapter, the writer shows with what excitement and anxiety Protsenko’s division is awaited at army headquarters. It must somehow rectify the difficult situation in the city center. But the reader from the first chapter already knows that the division has unloaded from the trains, is moving towards the crossing and will be in Stalingrad on time. And this is not a miscalculation of the author, but a conscious sacrifice. Simonov refuses the opportunity to dramatize the narrative, because this would interfere with the solution of a much more important artistic task for him; it would be a deviation from the internal “law” that determines the structure of the book.

Simonov first of all needed to reveal the initial state of mind with which people entered the battle for Stalingrad. He tried to convey how the feeling arose that there was nowhere to retreat further, that here, in Stalingrad, we had to survive to the end. That is why he began the story with a description of the unloading of Saburov’s battalion at Elton station. The steppe, the dust, the white strip of a dead salt lake, a remote railway line - “all this, taken together, seemed like the end of the world.” This feeling of a terrible limit, the edge of the world, was one of the components that absorbed the famous slogan of the defenders of Stalingrad: “There is no land for us beyond the Volga.”

Characteristics of the style features of the story “Days and Nights”

The title of K. M. Simonov’s work “Days and Nights” is based on a comparison of antonyms. They add expressiveness to the title and are used as a means of creating contrast. In his work, K. M. Simonov uses military terminology to create a special effect so that readers better understand the essence and meaning of the story. For example, artillery explosions, machine gun chatter, companies, messenger, division, headquarters, commander, colonel, general, attack, battalion, army, counterattacks, battles, echelon, riflemen, front line, grenade, mortars, captivity, regiment, machine gun and many more. other.

But excessive use of professional and technical vocabulary leads to a decrease in the artistic value of the work, makes it difficult to understand the text and damages its aesthetic side.

In the story “Days and Nights” you can find expressive shades in some words. For example, a face, damn dizziness, torn off, a bloody stump. This gives the work additional figurativeness, helps to reveal the author’s assessment, the expression of thoughts is accompanied by the expression of feelings. The use of expressive vocabulary is related to the general stylistic orientation of the text.

K. M. Simonov often uses such a stylistic device as persistent repetition of one word. It creates a kind of ring, reveals the pathos of the story, reflecting the mood of the defenders of the city, and more broadly, of the entire Soviet people.

“The exhausted woman sat leaning against the clay wall of the barn, and in a voice calm from fatigue spoke about how Stalingrad burned down.” This first phrase of the story contains a kind of key to its style. Simonov talks about the most tragic heroic events calmly and accurately. Unlike writers who gravitate towards broad generalizations and picturesque, emotionally charged descriptions, Simonov is stingy in his use of visual means. While V. Gorbatov in “The Unconquered” creates the image of a crucified, dead city, whose soul was torn out and trampled, “the song was crushed” and “the laughter was shot”, Simonov shows how two thousand German planes, hovering over the city, set fire it shows the components of the smell of ashes: burnt iron, charred trees, burnt brick - accurately determines the location of our and fascist units.

Using the example of one chapter, we see that K. M. Simonov uses complex sentences more than simple ones. But even if the sentences are simple, they are necessarily common, most often complicated by adverbial or participial phrases. He uses a definite personal construction simple sentences. For example, “she collected”, “he woke up”, “I’m sewing”, “I asked”, “you woke up”. These personal constructs contain an element of activity, manifestation of will actor, confidence in performing the action. In sentences, Simonov uses the reverse order of words, the so-called inversion, with the rearrangement of words, additional semantic and expressive shades are created, the expressive function of one or another member of the sentence changes. Comparing the sentences: 1. Build everything back and build everything BACK; 2. Comrade captain, allow me to check my watch with yours and ALLOW me, comrade captain, to check my watch with yours. 3. We will have lunch under the stickies and we will DIN under the stickies, we discover semantic highlighting, an increase in the semantic load of the rearranged words while maintaining them syntactic function. In the first pair this adverbial adverbial is “back”, in the second it is the predicate “allow”, in the third the adverbial adverbial place is “under the stickies”. The change in the semantic load and stylistic expressiveness of the rearranged words is caused by the fact that, despite the significant freedom of word order in a Russian sentence, each member of the sentence has its usual place, characteristic of it, determined by the structure and type of the sentence, the method of syntactic expression of this member of the sentence, its place among other words that are directly related to it, as well as the style of speech and the role of context. On this basis, direct and reverse word order are distinguished.

Let's take this text. The train unloaded at the outermost houses, right in the steppe. Now, in September, here was the last and closest railway station to Stalingrad. If the first sentence has a direct word order (subject, then the predicate), then when constructing the second sentence, its close semantic connection with the previous sentence is taken into account: the adverbial adverbial time in September comes first, followed by the adverbial adverbial place here, then the predicate was and, finally, the composition of the subject. If we take the second sentence without connection with the previous text, then we could say: The last and closest railway station to Stalingrad was here, right in the steppe, where the train was unloading, or: There, in the steppe, where the train was unloading, was the last and closest to Stalingrad railway station. Here we see that a sentence is only a minimal unit of speech and, as a rule, it is connected by close semantic relationships with the context. Therefore, the order of words in a sentence is determined by its communicative role in a given segment of the utterance, primarily by its semantic connection with the previous sentence. Here we are faced with the so-called actual division of the sentence: in the first place we put what is known from the previous context (given, topic), in the second place we put another component of the sentence, for the sake of which it is created (“new”, rheme).

In Simonov's declarative sentences, the subject usually precedes the predicate: On the third day, when the fire began to subside; They ended relatively quickly, because, having burned several new houses, the fire soon reached the previously burned streets, finding no food for itself, it went out.

The relative arrangement of the main members of a sentence may depend on whether the subject denotes a definite, known object or, conversely, an indefinite, unknown object; in the first case, the subject precedes the predicate, in the second, it follows it. Compare: The city was burning (certain); The city was burning (undefined, some kind).

As for the place of the definition in the sentence, Simonov uses mainly agreed definitions and uses the prepositive formulation, that is, when the defined noun is placed after the definition: a painful smell, a night landscape, exhausted divisions, burnt-out streets, a sweltering August day.

In “Days and Nights” you can find the use of a predicate with a subject expressed by a numeral. For example: The first ate, the second mended torn tunics, the third took a smoke break. This is the case when the idea of a specific figure is associated with a numeral.

Stylistic considerations, such as greater expressiveness, caused semantic coordination in the sentence: Protsenko quite clearly imagined that the majority would obviously die here.

In his work, Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov uses a lot geographical names. First of all, this is due to the fact that this story about the war is the diary of a writer who, during these terrible days, visited many cities, and many memories are associated with each of them. It uses city names that are expressed inflected nouns, consistent with generic words. In all cases: from the city of Kharkov to the city of Valuyki, from Valuyki to Rossosh, from Rossosh to Boguchar. The names of the rivers that Simonov uses also, as a rule, agree with the generic names: up to the Volga River, in the bend of the Don, between the Volga and the Don. Regarding homogeneous members sentences, then if in terms of semantic, logical, homogeneous members of the sentence are used mainly to enumerate specific concepts related to the same generic concept, then in terms of stylistics if the role of the effective visual medium. With the help of homogeneous members, details of the overall picture of a single whole are drawn, the dynamics of the action are shown, and a series of epithets are formed that are highly expressive and picturesque. For example, homogeneous members - predicates create the impression of dynamism and tension in speech: “Rushing towards Saburov, Maslennikov grabbed him, lifted him from his seat, hugged him, kissed him, grabbed him by the hands, pulled him away from him, looked, pulled him back again, kissed him and put him back down.” - all in one minute. Simonov actively uses conjunctions with homogeneous members of a sentence; with their help, a closed series is formed. For example, he knew him well by sight and name; stood on the banks of the Volga and drank water from it.

K. M. Simonov also uses addresses, but they are all related to military topics: comrade captain, comrade major, general, colonel.

As for the variants of case forms of the object for transitive verbs with negation, Simonov uses both the accusative case form and the genitive case form. For example, 1. But she didn’t say anything about her business; 2. I hope you don’t think that the calm in you will last long; 3. The army did not admit defeat. Form genitive case emphasizes the negation, the accusative case form, on the contrary, glorifies the meaning of the negation, since it retains the form of the complement when transitive verb, which exists without negation.

Now let's move on to the style of complex sentences. As for the work as a whole, when you read it, it immediately catches your eye that K. M. Simonov uses more complex sentences than simple ones.

Great choice possibilities associated with a variety of structural types of simple and complex sentences, are implemented in context and are determined by semantic and stylistic aspects. Stylistic features related to the nature of the text and linguistic style in general meaning this concept (the distinction between book and conversational styles), and in the private (styles fiction, scientific, socio-political, official business, vocational and technical, etc.)

All types of sentences are presented in artistic speech, and the predominance of some of them characterizes to a certain extent the style of the writer.

In his sentences, Simonov uses a lot of conjunctive words, for example, which and which, so their interchangeability is possible: I don’t know what they were like before the war and what they will be like after it. This is the man who died on his first day of fighting and whom he knew very little before. At the same time, there is a difference in shades of meaning between the words under consideration. Union word which contributes to subordinate clause of a complex sentence is the general defining meaning, and the word which is an additional connotation of use, comparison, qualitative or quantitative emphasis.

Simonov in his work “Days and Nights” makes extensive use of isolated phrases. This is explained by their semantic capacity, artistic expression, stylistic expressiveness.

So involved and participial phrases are primarily a part of book speech.

The stylistic features of participial phrases have been noted for a long time, and their bookish nature was emphasized. M.V. Lomonosov in “Russian Grammar” wrote: “It is absolutely not necessary to make participles from those verbs that are used only in simple conversations, for participles have a certain loftiness in them, and for this reason it is very proper to use them in a high gender of poetry.” The richer the language is in expressions and turns of phrase, the better for a skilled writer.

The participial phrase can be isolated or non-isolated. Simonov uses isolated phrases, because they have a greater semantic load, additional shades of meaning, and expressiveness. For example: German bombers were coming in a goose wedge formation. This participial phrase expresses semi-predicative relations, since the meaning of the phrase is connected with both the subject and the predicate.

According to the existing rules, the participial phrase can be located either after the word being defined (and he himself began to wait, pressed against the wall), or before it (and he himself, pressed against the wall, began to wait).

The participle itself can occupy a different place in a separate structure. The variant with the participle in last place in a separate phrase was typical for writers of the 18th century. Simonov, in the overwhelming majority of cases, puts the participle in first place in circulation. This is typical for modern speech.

The participle, like other forms of strong control verbs, requires explanatory words; this is necessary for the completeness of the statement: Maslennikov, who was sitting opposite.

Like participial phrases, participial phrases are the property of book speech. Their undoubted advantage compared to synonymous or subordinate adverbial parts of a complex sentence is their brevity and dynamism. Compare: When Saburov lay there for a few minutes, he let go bare feet on the floor; After lying there for a few minutes, Saburov lowered his bare feet to the floor.

Considering that the gerund is often built as a function of a secondary predicate, we can talk about the parallelism of the following constructions: gerund is the conjugated form of the verb: Saburov asked, entering the dugout = Saburov asked and entered the dugout.

The paragraph also plays an important compositional and stylistic role in the text of the work. Breaking the text into paragraphs fulfills not only compositional tasks (clear structure of the text, highlighting the beginning, middle part and ending in each part) and logical-semantic (combining thoughts into micro-themes), but also expressive-stylistic (unity of the modal plan of expression, expression of attitude author to the subject of speech). The paragraph is closely related to the types of speech, and since the type of speech of the work “Days and Nights” is narrative, there are mainly dynamic paragraphs, that is, of a narrative type.

In “Days and Nights” you can find direct speech. Direct speech, performing the function of verbatim transmission of someone else's statement, can, at the same time, not only in its content, but also in the way of expressing thoughts and feelings, serve as a means of characterizing the speaker, a means of creating an artistic image.

Vanin, it’s starting again. Call the regiment! – Saburov shouted, leaning towards the entrance to the dugout.

I'm calling! “The connection has been interrupted,” Vanin’s voice reached him.

It must be said that Tolstoy’s traditions - this is more clearly visible in the story than in stories and essays - sometimes serve Simonov not only as an aesthetic guide, but also as a source of ready-made stylistic constructions; he not only relies on Tolstoy’s experience, but also borrows his techniques. Of course, this made the author’s work “easier”; less effort had to be spent on overcoming the resistance of the vital material, but the impressive power of the story did not grow as a result, but fell. When in “Days and Nights” you read: “Saburov was not one of those people who were silent out of gloom or principle: he simply spoke little: and therefore he was almost always busy with work, and because he loved, while thinking, to be alone with his thoughts , and also because, having got into trouble, he preferred to listen to others, deep down believing that the story of his life was not of particular interest to other people,” or: “And when they summed up the day and talked about what two machine guns on the left flank need to be dragged from the ruins of the transformer booth to the basement of the garage, that if you appoint Sergeant Major Buslaev instead of the murdered Lieutenant Fedin, then this would probably be good, that in connection with the losses, according to the old testimony of the foremen for the battalion they let out twice as much vodka as they should, and it doesn’t matter - let them drink because it’s cold - about the fact that yesterday the watchmaker Mazin broke his hand and now if the last surviving Saburov watch in the battalion stops, then there will be no one to fix it, oh that we are tired of all the porridge and porridge - it would be good if we could send at least frozen potatoes across the Volga, that such and such should be nominated for a medal while they are still alive, healthy and fighting, and not later, when it may be too late - in a word, when they were talking every day about the same thing that was always talked about - still Saburov’s premonition of the upcoming great events did not decrease or disappear,” - when you read these and similar phrases, first of all you perceive their Tolstoyan “nature”, Tolstoy’s way of combining disparate causes and phenomena, the uniqueness of what Simonov talks about appears less clearly because of this. Simonov uses extensive periods of parallel turns and generalizations at the end, which carry a great philosophical thought in Tolstoy, for private, unimportant observations.

The story “Days and Nights” - “the work of an artist”

I believe that I have achieved the goal that I set for myself. I examined in detail the work of K. M. Simonov “Days and Nights”, highlighted stylistic features using the example of this story, followed the writer’s narration style and characterized all military prose as a whole.

So, let’s highlight the stylistic features again:

The title of the work is a comparison of antonyms;

Use of military terminology;

Expressiveness of vocabulary;

Repeat one word;

Calm and precise narration;

The use of definite-personal construction of simple sentences;

The role of definition in a sentence;

Use of numerals;

Use of geographical names;

The role of homogeneous members in a sentence;

Use of appeals;

Variants of case forms of addition;

Stylistics of complex sentences;

Use of allied words;

Participial and adverbial phrases;

The role of the paragraph in the work;

Use of direct speech;

Tolstoy's traditions are not only an aesthetic reference point, but also a source of ready-made stylistic designs.

All this serves as a business-like manner of narration, without pathos, with an interest in the details of military life, in issues of the military profession. “From the outside it seems like a dry chronicle, but in essence it is the work of an artist, long unforgettable,” said one of his speeches by M. I. Kalinin

In all the works of K. M. Simonov, the war turned out to be a continuation of one period of peaceful life and the beginning of another, it tested many values and qualities of a person, revealed the failure of some and the greatness of others. The experience of war, comprehended in Simonov’s work, is necessary for us in the formation of a harmonious person, in upholding his values, dignity, in the struggle for moral purity, for spiritual and emotional wealth. Mass heroism during the war demonstrated with indisputable evidence that in real life we have made enormous strides in the most difficult and most important of all social transformations - in fundamentally changing the outlook and character of millions of people. And isn’t this the main source of our military victory!

In his works, Simonov reveals the process of becoming a soldier as a transformation that occurs under the influence of awareness of civic duty, love for the Motherland, responsibility for the happiness and freedom of other people.

The name of Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov, far beyond the borders of our Motherland, is rightfully perceived as a symbol of the fight against militarism, as a symbol of the humanistic truth about war.

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov

Days and nights

In memory of those who died for Stalingrad

...so heavy hammer,

crushing glass, forges damask steel.

A. Pushkin

The exhausted woman sat leaning against the clay wall of the barn, and in a voice calm from fatigue spoke about how Stalingrad burned down.

Captain Saburov looked at his heavy boots and involuntarily moved back half a step.

He stood silently and listened to the woman, looking over her head to where the train was unloading near the outer houses, right in the steppe.

Beyond the steppe, a white strip of salt lake sparkled in the sun, and all this, taken together, seemed like the end of the world. Now, in September, here was the last and closest railway station to Stalingrad. Further from the bank of the Volga we had to walk. The town was called Elton, named after the salt lake. Saburov involuntarily remembered the words “Elton” and “Baskunchak” memorized from school. Once upon a time this was only school geography. And here it is, this Elton: low houses, dust, a remote railway line.

- Where did they take you, huh? - he whispered, and all the unaccountable melancholy of the last 24 hours, when he was looking at the steppe from the heated vehicle, was cramped into these two words.

And the woman sitting at his feet was still talking about Stalingrad, naming broken and burned streets one after another. Their names, unfamiliar to Saburov, were full of special meaning for her. She knew where and when the houses that were now burned were built, where and when the trees that were now cut down on the barricades were planted, she regretted all this, as if it was not about a big city, but about her home, where acquaintances who belonged to things for her personally.

Having wiped away her tears with the end of a handkerchief, the woman looked around with a long questioning glance at everyone listening to her and said thoughtfully and with conviction:

- So much money, so much work!

- What work? – someone asked, not understanding the meaning of her words.

“Build everything back,” the woman said simply.

– Are you going to Stalingrad? – she asked.

“Yes,” answered Saburov, not seeing a military secret in this, because for what else, if not to go to Stalingrad, could the military train now be unloading in this godforsaken Elton.

– Our last name is Klimenko. The husband is Ivan Vasilyevich, and the daughter is Anya. Maybe you’ll meet someone alive somewhere,” the woman said with faint hope.

“Maybe I’ll meet you,” Saburov answered as usual.

The battalion was finishing its unloading. Saburov said goodbye to the woman and, after drinking a ladle of water from a bucket exposed on the street, headed towards the railway track.

Saburov walked along the tracks and looked at the people with whom he was to go into battle the day after tomorrow.

- What's your last name? – asked Saburov.

“Konyukov,” the Red Army soldier said and again stared fixedly at the captain’s face.

– Did you take part in the battles?

- That's right.

- Near Przemysl.

- That's how it is. So they retreated from Przemysl itself?

- No way. They were advancing. In the sixteenth year.

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Konstantin Simonov
Days and nights

In memory of those who died for Stalingrad

...so heavy hammer,
crushing glass, forges damask steel.

A. Pushkin

I

The exhausted woman sat leaning against the clay wall of the barn, and in a voice calm from fatigue spoke about how Stalingrad burned down.

Captain Saburov looked at his heavy boots and involuntarily moved back half a step.

He stood silently and listened to the woman, looking over her head to where the train was unloading near the outer houses, right in the steppe.

- Where did they take you, huh? - he whispered, and all the unaccountable melancholy of the last 24 hours, when he was looking at the steppe from the heated vehicle, was cramped into these two words.

And the woman sitting at his feet was still talking about Stalingrad, naming broken and burned streets one after another. Their names, unfamiliar to Saburov, were full of special meaning for her. She knew where and when the houses that were now burned were built, where and when the trees that were now cut down on the barricades were planted, she regretted all this, as if it was not about a big city, but about her home, where acquaintances who belonged to things for her personally.

Having wiped away her tears with the end of a handkerchief, the woman looked around with a long questioning glance at everyone listening to her and said thoughtfully and with conviction:

- So much money, so much work!

- What work? – someone asked, not understanding the meaning of her words.

“Build everything back,” the woman said simply.

– Are you going to Stalingrad? – she asked.

“Yes,” answered Saburov, not seeing a military secret in this, because for what else, if not to go to Stalingrad, could the military train now be unloading in this godforsaken Elton.

– Our last name is Klimenko. The husband is Ivan Vasilyevich, and the daughter is Anya. Maybe you’ll meet someone alive somewhere,” the woman said with faint hope.

“Maybe I’ll meet you,” Saburov answered as usual.

The battalion was finishing its unloading. Saburov said goodbye to the woman and, after drinking a ladle of water from a bucket exposed on the street, headed towards the railway track.

Saburov walked along the tracks and looked at the people with whom he was to go into battle the day after tomorrow.

- What's your last name? – asked Saburov.

“Konyukov,” the Red Army soldier said and again stared fixedly at the captain’s face.

– Did you take part in the battles?

- That's right.

- Near Przemysl.

- That's how it is. So they retreated from Przemysl itself?

- No way. They were advancing. In the sixteenth year.

- That's it.

Saburov looked carefully at Konyukov. The soldier's face was serious, almost solemn.

- How long have you been in the army during this war? – asked Saburov.

- No, it’s the first month.

Saburov once again glanced with pleasure at Konyukov’s strong figure and moved on. At the last carriage he met his chief of staff, Lieutenant Maslennikov, who was in charge of the unloading.

Maslennikov reported to him that the unloading would be completed in five minutes, and, looking at his hand square watch, said:

- May I, comrade captain, check with yours?

Saburov silently took his watch out of his pocket, fastened to the strap with a safety pin. Maslennikov's watch was five minutes behind. He looked with disbelief at Saburov’s old silver watch with a cracked glass.

Saburov smiled:

- It’s okay, rearrange it. Firstly, the watch is still father’s, Bure, and secondly, get used to the fact that in war the authorities always have the right time.

Maslennikov looked at both watches again, carefully brought his own and, holding up his hands, asked permission to be free.

The trip on the train, where he was appointed commandant, and this unloading were Maslennikov’s first front-line task. Here, in Elton, it seemed to him that he already smelled the proximity of the front. He was worried, anticipating a war in which, as it seemed to him, he had shamefully not taken part for a long time. And Saburov completed everything entrusted to him today with special accuracy and thoroughness.

“Yes, yes, go,” Saburov said after a second of silence.

Looking at this ruddy, animated boyish face, Saburov imagined what it would look like in a week, when the dirty, tiring, merciless life of the trenches would fall with its full weight on Maslennikov for the first time.

The small locomotive, puffing, dragged the long-awaited second train onto the siding.

As always, in a hurry, the regiment commander, Lieutenant Colonel Babchenko, jumped off the step of the class carriage while still moving. Having twisted his leg during a jump, he swore and hobbled towards Saburov, who was hurrying towards him.

- How about unloading? – he asked gloomily, without looking into Saburov’s face.

- Finished.

Babchenko looked around. The unloading was indeed completed. But the gloomy appearance and stern tone, which Babchenko considered it his duty to maintain in all conversations with his subordinates, still required him to make some remark to maintain his prestige.

- What are you doing? – he asked abruptly.

- I'm waiting for your orders.

“It would be better if people were fed for now than to wait.”

“In the event that we set off now, I decided to feed the people at the first halt, and in the event that we spend the night, I decided to organize hot food for them here in an hour,” Saburov answered leisurely with that calm logic that he is not particularly keen on. loved Babchenko, who was always in a hurry.

The lieutenant colonel remained silent.

- Would you like to feed me now? – asked Saburov.

- No, feed me at the rest stop. You will go without waiting for the others. Order them to form up.

Saburov called Maslennikov and ordered him to line up the people.

Babchenko remained gloomily silent. He was used to always doing everything himself, he was always in a hurry and often couldn’t keep up.

Strictly speaking, the battalion commander is not obliged to build a marching column himself. But the fact that Saburov entrusted this to someone else, while he himself was now calmly, doing nothing, standing next to him, the regiment commander, angered Babchenko. He loved his subordinates to fuss and run around in his presence. But he could never achieve this from the calm Saburov. Turning away, he began to look at the column under construction. Saburov stood nearby. He knew that the regiment commander did not like him, but he was already used to it and did not pay attention.

They both stood in silence for a minute. Suddenly Babchenko, still not turning to Saburov, said with anger and resentment in his voice:

- No, look what they do to people, you bastards!

Past them, stepping heavily on the sleepers, a line of Stalingrad refugees walked, tattered, emaciated, bandaged with bandages gray with dust.

They both looked in the direction where the regiment was to go. There lay the same bald steppe as here, and only the dust ahead, curling on the hillocks, looked like distant clouds of gunpowder smoke.

– Gathering place in Rybachy. “Go at an accelerated pace and send messengers to me,” said Babchenko with the same gloomy expression on his face and, turning, went to his carriage.

Saburov went out onto the road. The companies have already formed. While waiting for the march to begin, the command was given: “At ease.” They were talking quietly in the rows. Walking towards the head of the column past the second company, Saburov again saw the red-mustachioed Konyukov: he was animatedly telling something, waving his arms.

- Battalion, listen to my command!

The column started moving. Saburov walked ahead. The distant dust hovering over the steppe again seemed like smoke to him. However, perhaps the steppe was actually burning ahead.

II

Twenty days ago, on a sweltering August day, the bombers of Richthofen’s air squadron hovered over the city in the morning. It is difficult to say how many there actually were and how many times they bombed, flew away and returned again, but in just one day observers counted two thousand aircraft over the city.

The city was burning. It burned all night, all the next day and all the next night. And although on the first day of the fire the fighting took place sixty kilometers from the city, at the Don crossings, it was with this fire that the great battle of Stalingrad began, because both the Germans and us - some in front of us, others behind us - from that moment we saw the glow Stalingrad, and all the thoughts of both fighting sides were henceforth, like a magnet, drawn to the burning city.

On the third day, when the fire began to subside, that special, painful smell of ashes was established in Stalingrad, which then never left it throughout the months of the siege. The smells of burnt iron, charred wood and burnt brick mixed into one thing, stupefying, heavy and acrid. Soot and ash quickly settled to the ground, but as soon as the lightest wind blew from the Volga, this black dust began to swirl along the burnt streets, and then it seemed that the city was smoky again.

The Germans continued the bombing, and in Stalingrad, here and there, new fires broke out, no longer affecting anyone. They ended relatively quickly, because, having burned several new houses, the fire soon reached the previously burned streets and, not finding food for itself, went out. But the city was so huge that, anyway, something was always burning somewhere, and everyone had become accustomed to this constant glow, as a necessary part of the night landscape.

On the tenth day after the fire started, the Germans came so close that their shells and mines began to explode more and more often in the city center.

On the twenty-first day the moment came when a man who believed only in military theory, it might seem that defending the city further is useless and even impossible. To the north of the city the Germans reached the Volga, to the south they were approaching it. The city, stretching sixty-five kilometers in length, was nowhere more than five kilometers wide, and the Germans had already occupied the western outskirts along almost its entire length.

The cannonade, which began at seven in the morning, did not stop until sunset. To the uninitiated, who found himself at army headquarters, it would seem that everything was going well and that, in any case, the defenders still had a lot of strength. Looking at the headquarters map of the city, where the location of the troops was plotted, he would have seen that this relatively small area was densely covered with the numbers of the divisions and brigades standing in the defense. He could hear the orders given by telephone to the commanders of these divisions and brigades, and it might seem to him that all he had to do was carry out all these orders exactly, and success would undoubtedly be guaranteed. In order to really understand what was happening, this uninitiated observer would have to get to the divisions themselves, which were marked on the map in the form of such neat red semicircles.

Most of the divisions retreating from across the Don, exhausted in two months of battles, were now incomplete battalions in terms of the number of bayonets. At headquarters and in artillery regiments there were still quite a lot of people, but in rifle companies every fighter counted. IN last days in the rear units they took everyone who was not absolutely necessary there. Telephone operators, cooks, and chemists were placed at the disposal of regimental commanders and, as necessary, became infantry. But although the chief of staff of the army, looking at the map, knew very well that his divisions were no longer divisions, the size of the sectors they occupied still required that exactly the task that should fall on the shoulders of the division fall on their shoulders. And, knowing that this burden was unbearable, all the bosses, from the largest to the smallest, still placed this unbearable burden on the shoulders of their subordinates, because there was no other way out, and it was still necessary to fight.

Before the war, the army commander would probably have laughed if he had been told that the day would come when the entire mobile reserve at his disposal would amount to several hundred people. And yet today it was exactly like that... Several hundred machine gunners mounted on trucks was all that he could quickly transfer from one end of the city to the other at the critical moment of the breakthrough.

On the large and flat hill of Mamayev Kurgan, some kilometer from the front line, the army command post was located in dugouts and trenches. The Germans stopped their attacks, either postponing them until dark, or deciding to rest until the morning. The situation in general and this silence in particular made us assume that in the morning there would be an inevitable and decisive assault.

“Let’s have lunch,” said the adjutant, with difficulty squeezing into the small dugout where the chief of staff and a member of the Military Council were sitting over the map. They both looked at each other, then at the map, then back at each other. If the adjutant had not reminded them that they needed lunch, they might have sat over her for a long time. They alone knew how dangerous the situation really was, and although everything that could be done had already been foreseen and the commander himself went to the division to check the implementation of his orders, it was still difficult to tear himself away from the map - I wanted to miraculously find out on this on a piece of paper there are still some new, unprecedented possibilities.

“Dine like that,” said member of the Military Council Matveev, a cheerful person by nature who loved to eat when there was time for it amid the hustle and bustle of the headquarters.

They came out into the air. It was starting to get dark. Below, to the right of the mound, against the background of a leaden sky, Katyusha shells flashed like a herd of fiery animals. The Germans prepared for the night by firing the first white rockets into the air, marking their front line.

The so-called green ring passed through Mamayev Kurgan. It was started in 1930 by Stalingrad Komsomol members and for ten years they surrounded their dusty and stuffy city with a belt of young parks and boulevards. The top of Mamayev Kurgan was also lined with thin ten-year-old sticky trees.

Matveev looked around. This warm autumn evening was so beautiful, it was so unexpectedly quiet all around, there was such a smell of the last summer freshness from the sticky trees that were beginning to turn yellow, that it seemed absurd to him to sit in the dilapidated hut where the dining room was located.

“Tell them to bring the table here,” he turned to the adjutant, “we’ll have lunch under the stickies.”

The rickety table was taken out of the kitchen, covered with a tablecloth, and two benches were placed.

“Well, general, let’s sit down,” Matveev said to the chief of staff. “It’s been a long time since you and I dined under the stickies, and it’s unlikely that we will have to soon.”

And he looked back at the burned city.

The adjutant brought vodka in glasses.

“Do you remember, General,” Matveev continued, “once in Sokolniki, near the labyrinth, there were such cages with a living fence made of trimmed lilacs, and in each there was a table and benches.” And the samovar was served... More and more families came there.

“Well, there were mosquitoes there,” the chief of staff, not in the mood for lyricism, inserted, “not like here.”

“But there’s no samovar here,” said Matveev.

- But there are no mosquitoes. And the labyrinth there really was such that it was difficult to get out.

Matveev looked over his shoulder at the city spread out below and grinned:

- Labyrinth...

Below, the streets converged, diverged and became entangled, on which, among the decisions of many human destinies, one great fate was to be decided - the fate of the army.

The adjutant rose in the semi-darkness.

– We arrived from the left bank from Bobrov. “It was clear from his voice that he ran here and was out of breath.

-Where are they? – Matveev asked abruptly, getting up.

- With me! Comrade Major! - the adjutant called.

A tall figure, difficult to distinguish in the darkness, appeared next to him.

- Have you met? – Matveev asked.

- We met. Colonel Bobrov ordered to report that he would now begin the crossing.

“Okay,” Matveev said and sighed deeply and relieved.

What had been worrying him, the chief of staff, and everyone around him for the last few hours was resolved.

– The commander has not returned yet? - he asked the adjutant.

- Search by division where he is, and report that you met Bobrov.

III

Colonel Bobrov was sent in the morning to meet and hasten the very division in which Saburov commanded the battalion. Bobrov met her at noon, before reaching Srednyaya Akhtuba, thirty kilometers from the Volga. And the first person he spoke to was Saburov, who was walking at the head of the battalion. Having asked Saburov for the division number and having learned from him that its commander was following behind, the colonel quickly got into the car, ready to set off.

“Comrade captain,” he said to Saburov and looked into his face with tired eyes, “I don’t need to explain to you why your battalion should be at the crossing by eighteen o’clock.”

And without adding a word, he slammed the door.

At six o'clock in the evening, returning, Bobrov found Saburov already on the shore. After a tiring march, the battalion arrived at the Volga disorganized, stretched out, but already half an hour after the first soldiers saw the Volga, Saburov managed to place everyone along the ravines and slopes of the hilly bank while awaiting further orders.

When Saburov, waiting for the crossing, sat down to rest on the logs lying near the water, Colonel Bobrov sat down next to him and offered him a cigarette.

They started smoking.

- How's it going? – Saburov asked and nodded towards the right bank.

“It’s difficult,” answered the colonel. “It’s difficult...” And for the third time he repeated in a whisper: “It’s difficult,” as if there was nothing to add to this word that exhausted everything.

And if the first “difficult” meant simply difficult, and the second “difficult” meant very difficult, then the third “difficult”, said in a whisper, meant terribly difficult, to the extreme.

Saburov silently looked at the right bank of the Volga. Here it is - high, steep, like all the western banks of Russian rivers. The eternal misfortune that Saburov experienced during this war: all the western banks of Russian and Ukrainian rivers were steep, all the eastern banks were sloping. And all the cities stood precisely on the western banks of the rivers - Kyiv, Smolensk, Dnepropetrovsk, Rostov... And all of them were difficult to defend, because they were pressed against the river, and it would be difficult to take them all back, because they would then find themselves across the river.

It was beginning to get dark, but it was clearly visible how German bombers were circling, entering and exiting a dive over the city, and anti-aircraft explosions covered the sky with a thick layer, similar to small cirrus clouds.

In the southern part of the city a large grain elevator was burning, and even from here one could see the flames rising above it. Its tall stone chimney apparently had a huge draft.

And across the waterless steppe, beyond the Volga, thousands of hungry refugees, thirsting for at least a crust of bread, walked towards Elton.

But all this now gave birth to Saburov’s non-eternal general conclusion about the futility and monstrosity of the war, but a simple clear feeling of hatred towards the Germans.

The evening was cool, but after the scorching steppe sun, after the dusty trek, Saburov still could not come to his senses; he was constantly thirsty. He took a helmet from one of the fighters, went down the slope to the Volga itself, drowning in the soft coastal sand, and reached the water. Having scooped it up for the first time, he thoughtlessly and greedily drank this cold, clean water. But when he, already half cooled down, scooped it up a second time and raised the helmet to his lips, suddenly, it seemed, the simplest and at the same time sharp thought struck him: Volga water! He drank water from the Volga, and at the same time he was at war. These two concepts - war and the Volga - despite all their obviousness, did not fit in with each other. From childhood, from school, all his life, the Volga was something so profound for him, so infinitely Russian, that now the fact that he stood on the bank of the Volga and drank water from it, and there were Germans on the other bank, seemed incredible and wild to him .

With this feeling, he climbed up the sandy slope to where Colonel Bobrov was still sitting. Bobrov looked at him and, as if answering his hidden thoughts, said thoughtfully:

The steamboat, dragging a barge behind it, landed on the shore about fifteen minutes later. Saburov and Bobrov approached a hastily put together wooden pier where loading was to take place.

The wounded were being carried from the barge past the soldiers crowding around the bridge. Some moaned, but most were silent. A young sister walked from stretcher to stretcher. Following the seriously wounded, a dozen and a half of those who could still walk got off the barge.

“There are few lightly wounded,” Saburov said to Bobrov.

- Few? – Bobrov asked and grinned: “The same number as everywhere else, but not everyone gets across.”

- Why? – asked Saburov.

– How can I tell you... they stay because it’s difficult and because of the excitement. And bitterness. No, that's not what I'm telling you. Once you cross, you’ll understand why on the third day.

The soldiers of the first company began to cross the bridge onto the barge. Meanwhile, an unforeseen complication arose: it turned out that a lot of people had accumulated on the shore who wanted to be loaded right now and on this particular barge heading to Stalingrad. One was returning from the hospital; another was carrying a barrel of vodka from a food warehouse and demanded that it be loaded with him; the third, a huge big man, clutching a heavy box to his chest, pressing against Saburov, said that these were caps for mines and that if he did not deliver them today, then his head would be taken off; finally, there were people who simply, for various reasons, had crossed to the left bank in the morning and now wanted to be back in Stalingrad as soon as possible. No persuasion worked. Judging by their tone and facial expressions, one could not possibly assume that there, on the right bank, where they were in such a hurry, was a besieged city, on the streets of which shells were exploding every minute!

Saburov allowed the man with the capsules and the quartermaster with vodka to dive in and dismissed the rest, saying that they would go on the next barge. The last one to approach him was a nurse who had just arrived from Stalingrad and was accompanying the wounded as they were unloaded from the barge. She said that there were still wounded on the other side and that she would have to transport them here with this barge. Saburov could not refuse her, and when the company loaded, she followed the others along a narrow ladder, first onto a barge, and then onto a steamboat.

The captain, an elderly man in a blue jacket and an old Soviet Navy cap with a broken visor, muttered some order into his mouthpiece, and the steamer set sail from the left bank.

Saburov sat in the stern, his legs hanging over the side and his hands wrapped around the rails. He took off his overcoat and put it next to him. It was pleasant to feel how the wind from the river climbed under the tunic. He unbuttoned his tunic and pulled it over his chest so that it inflated like a sail.

“You’ll catch a cold, comrade captain,” said the girl standing next to him, who was riding behind the wounded.

Saburov smiled. It seemed ridiculous to him that in the fifteenth month of the war, while crossing to Stalingrad, he would suddenly catch a cold. He didn't answer.

“And before you know it, you’ll catch a cold,” the girl repeated persistently. - It's cold on the river in the evenings. I swim across every day and have already caught such a cold that I don’t even have a voice.

– Do you swim every day? – Saburov asked, raising his eyes to her. - How many times?

- I swim across as many wounded people as I can. It’s not like it used to be with us - first to the regiment, then to the medical battalion, then to the hospital. We immediately take the wounded from the front line and take them across the Volga ourselves.

She said this in such a calm tone that Saburov, unexpectedly for himself, asked that idle question that he usually did not like to ask:

– Aren’t you afraid to go back and forth so many times?

“It’s scary,” the girl admitted. “When I take the wounded from there, it’s not scary, but when I return there alone, it’s scary.” It’s scarier when you’re alone, right?

“That’s right,” said Saburov and thought to himself that he himself, being in his battalion, thinking about him, was always less afraid than in those rare moments when he was left alone.

The girl sat down next to him, also dangled her legs over the water and, trustingly touching his shoulder, said in a whisper:

– Do you know what’s scary? No, you don’t know... You’re already many years old, you don’t know... It’s scary that they’ll suddenly kill you and nothing will happen. Nothing will happen that I always dreamed about.

– What won’t happen?

- But nothing will happen... Do you know how old I am? I'm eighteen. I haven't seen anything yet, nothing. I dreamed of how I would study, but I didn’t study... I dreamed of how I would go to Moscow and everywhere, everywhere - and I was nowhere. I dreamed... - she laughed, but then continued: - I dreamed of getting married - and none of this happened either... And so I am sometimes afraid, very afraid, that suddenly all this will not happen. I'll die and nothing, nothing will happen.

– And if you were already studying and traveling wherever you wanted, and were married, do you think you wouldn’t be so scared? – asked Saburov.

“No,” she said with conviction. “I know you’re not as scared as I am.” You are already many years old.

- How many?

- Well, thirty-five to forty, right?

“Yes,” Saburov smiled and thought bitterly that it was completely useless to prove to her that he was not forty or even thirty-five and that he also had not yet learned everything he wanted to learn, and had not visited where he wanted to go, and loved as he would like to love.

“You see,” she said, “that’s why you shouldn’t be afraid.” And I'm scared.

This was said with such sadness and at the same time dedication that Saburov wanted right now, immediately, like a child, to pat her on the head and say some empty and kind words about how everything would still be fine and what was wrong with her. nothing will happen. But the sight of the burning city kept him from these idle words, and instead he did only one thing: he really quietly stroked her head and quickly removed his hand, not wanting her to think that he understood her frankness differently than necessary.

“Our surgeon was killed today,” the girl said. – I was transporting him when he died... He was always angry, swore at everyone. And when he was operating, he swore and shouted at us. And you know, the more the wounded moaned and the more pain they felt, the more he cursed. And when he began to die himself, I was transporting him - he was wounded in the stomach - he was in great pain, and he lay quietly, and did not swear, and did not say anything at all. And I realized that he was probably very kind person. He swore because he couldn’t see how people were hurting, and when he himself was in pain, he was silent and said nothing, until his death... nothing... Only when I cried over him, he suddenly smiled. Why do you think?

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov

Days and nights

In memory of those who died for Stalingrad

...so heavy hammer,

crushing glass, forges damask steel.

A. Pushkin

The exhausted woman sat leaning against the clay wall of the barn, and in a voice calm from fatigue spoke about how Stalingrad burned down.

Captain Saburov looked at his heavy boots and involuntarily moved back half a step.

He stood silently and listened to the woman, looking over her head to where the train was unloading near the outer houses, right in the steppe.

- Where did they take you, huh? - he whispered, and all the unaccountable melancholy of the last 24 hours, when he was looking at the steppe from the heated vehicle, was cramped into these two words.

And the woman sitting at his feet was still talking about Stalingrad, naming broken and burned streets one after another. Their names, unfamiliar to Saburov, were full of special meaning for her. She knew where and when the houses that were now burned were built, where and when the trees that were now cut down on the barricades were planted, she regretted all this, as if it was not about a big city, but about her home, where acquaintances who belonged to things for her personally.

Having wiped away her tears with the end of a handkerchief, the woman looked around with a long questioning glance at everyone listening to her and said thoughtfully and with conviction:

- So much money, so much work!

- What work? – someone asked, not understanding the meaning of her words.

“Build everything back,” the woman said simply.

– Are you going to Stalingrad? – she asked.

“Yes,” answered Saburov, not seeing a military secret in this, because for what else, if not to go to Stalingrad, could the military train now be unloading in this godforsaken Elton.

– Our last name is Klimenko. The husband is Ivan Vasilyevich, and the daughter is Anya. Maybe you’ll meet someone alive somewhere,” the woman said with faint hope.

“Maybe I’ll meet you,” Saburov answered as usual.

The battalion was finishing its unloading. Saburov said goodbye to the woman and, after drinking a ladle of water from a bucket exposed on the street, headed towards the railway track.

Saburov walked along the tracks and looked at the people with whom he was to go into battle the day after tomorrow.