Why does Boris Kostyaev - the main character of the story "The Shepherd and the Shepherdess" - die from the most trifling wound? Modern pastoral by Viktor Astafiev.

Along the deserted steppe along the railway line, under a sky in which the Ural ridge appears as a heavy cloudy delirium, a woman is walking. There are tears in her eyes, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to breathe. At the dwarf kilometer post she stops, moving her lips, repeats the number on the post, leaves the embankment and looks for a grave with a pyramid on the signal mound. The woman kneels in front of the grave and whispers: “How long have I been looking for you!”

Our troops finished off the almost strangled group German troops, whose command, as at Stalingrad, refused to accept the ultimatum about unconditional surrender. The platoon of Lieutenant Boris Kostyaev, together with other units, met the breaking through enemy. The night battle with the participation of tanks and artillery, “Katyushas” was terrible - due to the onslaught of the Germans maddened by the cold and despair, due to losses on both sides. Having repulsed the attack, collecting the dead and wounded, Kostyaev’s platoon arrived at the nearest village to rest.

Behind the bathhouse, in the snow, Boris saw an old man and an old woman killed by a volley of artillery barrage. They lay there, covering each other. Local, Khvedor Khvomich said that the dead came to this Ukrainian farm from the Volga region during the famine year. They grazed collective farm cattle. Shepherd and shepherdess. When they were buried, the hands of the shepherd and shepherdess could not be separated. Soldier Lantsov quietly read a prayer over the old men. Khvedor Khvomich was surprised that the Red Army man knew prayers. He himself forgot them, in his youth he was an atheist and he agitated for these old men to liquidate the icons. But they didn't listen to him...

The platoon soldiers stopped in a house where the owner was a girl named Lucy. They warmed up and drank moonshine. Everyone was tired, drunk and eating potatoes; only Sergeant Major Mokhnakov was not drunk. Lucy drank with everyone, saying: “Welcome back... We've been waiting for you for so long. So long..."

The soldiers went to bed one by one on the floor. Those who still retained strength continued to drink, eat, joke, remembering peaceful life. Boris Kostyaev, going out into the hallway, heard a fuss in the darkness and Lucy’s broken voice: “No need. Comrade foreman...” The lieutenant decisively stopped the foreman’s harassment and took him out into the street. Enmity broke out between these people, who had gone through many battles and hardships together. The lieutenant threatened to shoot the sergeant major if he tried to offend the girl again. Angry, Mokhnakov went to another hut.

Lucy called the lieutenant into the house where all the soldiers were already sleeping. She led Boris to the clean half, gave him her robe so he could change, and prepared a trough of water behind the stove. When Boris washed himself and went to bed, his eyelids became heavy and sleep fell on him.

Even before dawn, the company commander called Lieutenant Kostyaev. Lucy didn’t even have time to wash his uniform, which made her very upset. The platoon received orders to knock out the Nazis from the neighboring village, the last strong point. After a short battle, the platoon, together with other units, occupied the village. Soon the front commander arrived there with his retinue. Never formerly Boris I didn’t see the commander about whom legends circulated up close. A man who had shot himself was found in one of the barns German general. The commander ordered the enemy general to be buried with full military honors.

Boris Kostyaev returned with the soldiers to the very house where they spent the night. The lieutenant again fell into a deep sleep. At night, Lucy, his first woman, came to him. Boris talked about himself, read letters from his mother. He recalled how as a child his mother took him to Moscow and they watched ballet in the theater. A shepherd and a shepherdess danced on stage. “They loved each other, were not ashamed of love and were not afraid for it. In their gullibility they were defenseless.” Then it seemed to Boris that the defenseless were inaccessible to evil...

Lucy listened with bated breath, knowing that such a night would not happen again. On this night of love, they forgot about the war - a twenty-year-old lieutenant and a girl who was one war year older than him.

Lyusya found out from somewhere that the platoon would stay on the farm for two more days. But in the morning, the order from the company commander was conveyed: in vehicles to catch up with the main forces that had gone far behind the retreating enemy. Lyusya, struck by the sudden separation, at first remained in the hut, then could not stand it and caught up with the car in which the soldiers were riding. Without being embarrassed by anyone, she kissed Boris and with difficulty pulled away from him.

After heavy fighting, Boris Kostyaev asked the political officer for leave. And the political officer had already decided to send the lieutenant to short-term courses so that he could visit his beloved for a day. Boris had already imagined his meeting with Lyusya... But none of this happened. The platoon was not even taken to reorganize: heavy fighting got in the way. In one of them, Mokhnakov died heroically, throwing himself under a German tank with an anti-tank mine in his duffel bag. On the same day, Boris was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel.

There were a lot of people in the medical battalion. Boris waited a long time for bandages and medicine. The doctor, examining Boris’s wound, did not understand why this lieutenant was not recovering. Boris was consumed by melancholy. One night the doctor came to him and said: “I have assigned you to evacuation. Souls cannot be healed in camping conditions...”

The ambulance train was taking Boris to the east. At one of the stops, he saw a woman who looked like Lyusya... The car's nurse, Arina, looking closely at the young lieutenant, wondered why he was getting worse and worse every day.

Boris looked out the window, felt sorry for himself and his wounded neighbors, felt sorry for Lucy, who remained in the deserted square of the Ukrainian town, and the old man and woman buried in the garden. He no longer remembered the faces of the shepherd and shepherdess, and it turned out: they looked like his mother, like his father, like all the people he had once known...

One morning Arina came to wash Boris and saw that he had died. He was buried in the steppe, making a pyramid out of a signal post. Arina sadly shook her head: “Such a slight wound, but he died...”

After listening to the ground, the woman said: “Sleep. I will go. But I'll come back to you. No one can separate us there..."

“And he, or what he once was, remained in the silent land, entangled in the roots of herbs and flowers that died down until spring. There is only one left - in the middle of Russia."

Composition

How little has been lived
We've been through so much...
S.Ya.Nadson

main topic the story “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” - a man at war^ Usually in military prose The war is depicted as a huge national event, and the individual hero who overcomes it is a grain of sand in this great event. In Astafiev, this usual scheme is inverted: the war becomes a terrible background, and a specific person comes to the fore, in tragic fate which the writer discovers a philosophical, that is, universal, meaning. Such a hero in the story is nineteen-year-old lieutenant, infantry platoon commander Boris Kostyaev.

Due to his age, character, and upbringing, it is difficult for Boris to adapt to a brutal war; it is impossible to protect himself from the soul-shattering impressions of war. But this very young man goes to the front because he considers it unworthy to hide from the war behind other people’s backs. Intelligence and subtle spiritual qualities helped platoon commander Kostyaev understand ordinary soldiers. At first, he, a young, “nimble lieutenant” from the regimental school, mistook the prudence and thoroughness in battle of experienced soldiers for cowardice, but “after many battles, after being wounded, after the hospital, Boris was ashamed of being so daring and awkward, he realized in his head that he was not a soldier behind him, and he behind the soldiers" (II, "Date"). The lieutenant felt the front-line brotherhood and became attached to the soldiers of his platoon: the solid worker from Moscow Lantsov, the good-natured Altai godfathers Karyshev and Malyshev, the young orderly Shkalik, the experienced assistant platoon commander Sergeant Major Mokhnakov.

They had already wanted to promote Boris several times and make him a company commander, but he refused, not wanting to abandon “his own.” In a night battle, when a German tank began to “iron” the confused Red Army soldiers in the trenches, the lieutenant rushed with a grenade at the tank and blew it up. When the night battle ended, Boris first of all took care of the wounded and accommodation for the healthy, but mortally tired soldiers. When he himself was wounded in the shoulder near an unnamed farm, he did not leave his soldiers and remained in the trench for 24 hours until another commander was sent. For his humane attitude towards his subordinates and for his decency, the soldiers love their lieutenant, which is expressed in the touching attention to him: the wounded man is brought beetroot tea and homemade rye cake, and when he goes on foot to the field hospital, the soldiers get a cart so that Shkalik can take the platoon commander at least to the dressing station.

Boris was born into a teacher's family with long traditions, preserved from the Decembrist ancestors. Culture, education, and spirituality are valued here. It is not for nothing that a through-symbol image appears in the story - a pastoral shepherdess and shepherdess, personifying refined feelings and beautiful, true love. This symbol accompanies the main character from childhood to death: Boris tells Lyusa about his impression of the pastoral ballet, which he saw as a boy in Moscow; V last time images of murdered old men - a shepherd and a shepherdess - appear in the fading consciousness of the hero on the ambulance train. This sentimental symbol, ridiculed by Soviet ideologists, helps to reveal the sensitivity, vulnerability, romanticism of Boris, his dream of only love. In life, Boris, as befits a romantic young man, immediately falls in love with a strange young woman with mysteriously changeable eyes, and falls in love for life. The story contains a scene invented by the hero himself, when he asks the regimental political officer for leave and goes to the place where Lucy lives. In the lieutenant’s imagination, this scene seems completely real, which once again proves the strength of his love and the depth of his longing for his beloved.

For all his spiritual sophistication (Mokhnakov more than once calls the commander “mumbler”), Boris is a determined person. He forbids Sergeant Major Mokhnakov from pestering Lyusya, and the seasoned Sergeant Major obeys, faced with the inflexible will of the lieutenant. At first, however, Mokhnakov was very angry, but then he admitted to Boris: “You are a bright guy! I honor you. For this I honor that I myself do not have...” (II, “Date”). Mokhnakov means kindness, the ability to compassion and love, which the lieutenant retains in his soul, but the sergeant himself lost during three years of war.

In the story “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” not only the usual scheme of man - war is violated, but also the usual plot device: usually in war stories the love of the heroes stronger than death, and for Astafiev, even extraordinary love could not overcome mortal melancholy at all young man, military impressions “broke” him. All the platoon soldiers (except Malyshev), who are close to Boris, die before his eyes. Pafnutyev is blown up in a minefield, Altai resident Karyshev is killed by a German sniper, Mokhnakov explodes along with a fascist tank. The last to be blown up by a mine was Shkalik, who was in a hurry to deliver the wounded lieutenant to the dressing station and, out of excitement, did not notice the signs of the mine fence. In the field hospital, Boris felt an insulting and suspicious attitude from the medical staff: here he was considered a burden and a cunning person who was hiding from the front in a hospital tent: “Yes, it turns out that he is taking someone’s place, eating someone’s bread in vain, breathing someone’s air...” (IV, “Assumption”). The medical staff, it seems to the lieutenant, care about him only because he is needed at the front. This “double-hearted mercy”, the world’s hatred of man, shocked Boris: he does not die from trifling wound, but from nervous and moral exhaustion. That's why war is disgusting human nature- Astafiev also comes to this conclusion, expressed by L.N. Tolstoy in his epic novel “War and Peace” (3, 1, I), in his story. It is not the hero’s fault that the war crushed him: he turned out to be weaker, but no rougher than the war.

To summarize, we note that the writer clearly expressed the most important idea in his story: victory in the Great Patriotic War paid more than it seems at first glance. A soldier can be killed not only by a bullet, but also by the moral stress associated with war.

This happened with Boris Kostyaev. In the bloody hell of the night battle (I, “Battle”), the hero survived: he forgets the man in himself, acts with some kind of animal strength and instinct, and, together with his platoon, repels the attack of the fascists, who were also brutalized with fear and despair. But after the fight, Boris regains his human feelings: feels sorry for the wounded, looks sympathetically at the mortally tired nurse girl. In the hospital (IV, “Assumption”), having distanced himself a little from the war, that is, looking at it from the outside, he was horrified by the cruelty of the world to the point that he did not want to live, did not want to cling to “the young grass” (ibid.), as he advised he has an elderly soldier neighbor in the ambulance car. The lieutenant's soul turned out to be more merciful than his time.

V. Astafiev - the story “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess”. The main motive of the story is the confrontation between the creative power of love and the destructive power of war. This antithetical nature of the narrative is emphasized by the content of the chapters. Conventionally, they can be divided into military (“Battle”, “Assumption”) and peaceful (“Date”, “Farewell”).

In the center of the story is the image of the young lieutenant Boris Kostyaev. He is depicted by the author in battle, on vacation, in the hospital. This is a clean, intelligent boy, kind, well-read, romantic, trying to build a life in accordance with his ideals. Fate brings him together with a young girl, Lyusya (the fighters live in her house), and this meeting, the short time they spent together, is perceived by him as real happiness. Love settles in the soul of the hero, completely taking possession of him. Raised in a family of teachers, Boris is imbued with a romantic attitude; he imagines love as a spiritual unity with a loved one. He is able to dream, carry his beloved in his arms, and open his soul to her. But all around is war, devastation, rough soldier’s life. Astafiev follows the tradition of L.N. Tolstoy's depiction of war. War is portrayed by the writer as hell, something contrary to the human mind. “In the ravines, girthy open, from above looking like fallen branchy spruce trees, in the hollows of the stream, everything is dug up, mangled by bombs and shells. In the mixed clay and snow lay dead horses, people, weapons, wheels, cans, mugs, photographs, books, scraps of newspapers, leaflets, gas masks, glasses, helmets, helmets, rags, blankets, cauldrons and kettles, even a pot-bellied Tula samovar lay on the side, icons with Russian saints, pillows in rustic patched pillowcases - everything was torn, crushed, beaten, exactly as after the end of the world - the bottom of the ravines looked like a fresh cutting area, where the forest had been chopped down, taken away, only scraps, stumps, and stumps remained. Corpses, corpses, covered with clods of earth, heaps of hay. Many corpses have already been uprooted from the snowdrifts, taken off their shoes, and undressed.”

All this in the story is opposed by the hero’s dreams, his dreams, the motif of the shepherd and the shepherdess, which sounds increasingly louder in the work. This theme appears already in the first chapter of the story, it develops in the image of a murdered married couple - an old man and an old woman who did not have time to hide from a shell explosion. Having moved to these places from the Volga region, they grazed cattle, were a shepherd and a shepherdess. Then this motive appears in Boris’s memories of the ballet, he talks about this with Lyusya: “The music was lilac, and two people danced - he and she, a shepherd and a shepherdess. The lawn is green. The sheep are white. The shepherd and the shepherdess... loved each other, were not ashamed of love and were not afraid for it. In their gullibility they were defenseless. The defenseless are inaccessible to evil..” The love of Lucy and Boris turns out to be just as defenseless in the face of war. Blood is pouring all around, the time has come for unheard-of cruelty, violence, the struggle between Life and Death. The people around the hero are also far from ideal. Sergeant Major Mokhnakov is engaged in looting and does not spare himself or those around him. Soldier Pafnutyev wrote a denunciation against the lieutenant and the sergeant major. In the finale, many die: the boy Shkalik is killed, Sergeant Major Mokhnakov dies when he blows up an enemy tank, Pafnutyev is seriously injured after being blown up by a mine. And the motive of confrontation sounds more and more sharply in the story inner world hero and cruel reality. And with this, V. Astafiev’s story reminds us of L.N.’s novel. Tolstoy "War and Peace". The same striving for the “heavenly ideal” was present in Tolstoy in the soul of Prince Andrei, who, as critics noted, was “too good for real, earthly life.” And Tolstoy’s hero receives a mortal wound in the Battle of Borodino. We see a similar ending in Astafiev’s story. Boris Kostyaev dies with a minor, non-dangerous wound. However, according to the doctor, the soul cannot be healed. Why didn't love save Boris? He shows no will to live and dies. The war devastated him, broke him. “The thirst for life gives rise to unheard-of perseverance - a person can overcome captivity, hunger, injury, death, lift a burden beyond his strength. But if it’s gone, then that’s it—all that’s left of the person is a bag of bones.” And Boris feels how this thirst for life is drying up in him. His soul and body were tired of the habit of “constantly killing” and the readiness to constantly “be killed.” He loses his comrades without finding an answer to the question: “Why? Why is this happening? The death of the hero was prepared by spiritual moral reasons, and not his injury. Love is a symbol of life. War kills this life every hour and every minute, “thinners a person,” taking away his vitality, energy, strength, and dreams. Astafiev's hero is unbearably tired of the war. “It became even harder for Boris to bear his soul.” Separation from Lyusya, longing for her make him detached, disconnect him from the world, people, from the entire Universe. A quiet submission to fate is born in his soul. Therefore he goes into oblivion.

Astafiev's story has ring composition- it begins and ends with our modernity. Lucy finds the grave of her beloved and falls to it, noting that she will meet him soon. This is how the author’s position is manifested in the work. Astafiev's love conquers death, time, and cruelty.

Viktor Petrovich Astafiev

The Shepherd and the Shepherdess

- Beat him! Hit! - Boris backed along the trench, fired from a pistol and could not hit, rested his back against the wall, moved his legs, as if in a dream, and did not understand why he could not escape, why his legs did not obey him.

The one on fire with the crowbar was scary. His shadow darted, now increasing, now disappearing; he himself, like a native of the underworld, now flared up, now darkened, and fell into fiery Gehenna. He howled wildly, baring his teeth, and it seemed like Thick hair, the crowbar was no longer a crowbar, but a torn-out oak tree. Long hands with claws...

Coldness, darkness, and leish antiquity wafted from this monster. A blazing torch, as if the reflection of those fire storms from which the monster arose, rose from all fours, came to our times with the unchanged appearance of a cave dweller, embodied this vision.

“We are walking in blood and flame...” - suddenly the words from Mokhnakov’s song came to mind, and he himself showed up right there. He rushed out of the trench, wandered, scooping up the snow with felt boots, came across the fact that he was already burning, and collapsed at his feet.

- Sergeant-major-ah-ah-ah! Mohnako-o-ov! “Boris tried to stuff a new clip into the pistol grip and jump out of the trench. But someone was holding him from behind, pulling him by the overcoat.

- Karau-u-ul! – Shkalik, Boris’s orderly, the youngest fighter in the platoon, subtly said with his last breath. He did not let go of the commander and tried to drag him into a snow hole. Boris threw Shkalik aside and waited, raising his pistol, for the rocket to flare up. His hand became rigid, did not swing, and everything in him suddenly became ossified, clinging together into a hard lump - now he would hit, he knew for sure that he would hit.

Rocket. Another. Rockets splashed out in a bunch. Boris saw the foreman. He was trampling something that was burning. A ball of fire rolled from under Mokhnakov’s feet, scraps scattered to the sides. It went out. The foreman fell heavily into the trench.

- Are you alive! - Boris grabbed the foreman and felt him.

- All! All! The Fritz has gone crazy! He’s gone crazy!.. – the sergeant-major shouted breathlessly, sticking a shovel into the snow and wiping it on the ground. – The sheet on him flared up... Passion!..

Black powder swirled overhead, grenades screamed, gunfire rained down, guns roared. It seemed that the whole war was now here, in this place; boiled in the trampled pit of the trench, emitting choking smoke, roaring, the squealing of fragments, the bestial growl of people.

And suddenly for a moment everything fell down and stopped. The howl of the blizzard intensified...

A suffocating fume came out of the darkness. Tanks emerged from the night like eyeless monsters. They grinded their tracks in the cold and immediately skidded, going mute in the deep snow. The snow bubbled and melted under the tanks and on the tanks.

There was no turning back for them, and they crushed and ground everything that got in their way. The guns, two of them, had just turned around and were lashing after them. With an insinuating hum that made the heart skip a beat, a volley of heavy eres fell on the tanks, blinding the battlefield with an electric welding flash, shaking the trench, melting everything that was in it: snow, earth, armor, living and dead. Both our own and foreign soldiers fell into a prone position, huddled close to each other, pushed their heads into the snow, tearing off their nails, dug the frozen ground with their hands like a dog, tried to squeeze in deeper, to be smaller, pulled their legs under them - and all without a sound, in silence, only a driven wheeze was heard everywhere.

The noise grew. Near a heavy tank, a howitzer shell hit and struck with fire. The tank shuddered, clinked iron, ran left and right, swung the gun, dropped the muzzle brake knob into the snow and, drilling a living, rolling heap in front of it, rushed into the trench. From him, already uncontrollable, both foreign soldiers and Russian fighters scattered in panic. The tank appeared, its eyeless carcass moved over the trench, the tracks clanged, turned with a squeal, throwing lumps of dirty snow on the foreman, on Boris, dousing them with hot smoke from the exhaust pipe. Having fallen with one caterpillar into the trench, skidding, the tank rushed along it.

The engine was howling at the limit, the tracks were cutting, grinding the frozen ground and everything dug into it.

- What is this? What is this? “Boris, breaking his fingers, clawed his way into the hard crack. The foreman shook him, pulled him out of his hole like a gopher, but the lieutenant broke free and climbed back into the ground.

- A grenade! Where are the grenades?

Boris stopped struggling and struggling somewhere, and remembered: under his overcoat, two anti-tank grenades were hanging on his belt. He handed out two to everyone in the evening and took two for himself, but forgot about them, and the foreman either lost his or had already used it. Pulling off his mitten with his teeth, the lieutenant put his hand under his overcoat - there was already one grenade hanging on his belt. He grabbed it and began to cock the pin. Mokhnakov fumbled along Boris's sleeve, tried to take the grenade away, but the platoon commander pushed the sergeant-major away, crawled on his knees, helping himself with his elbows, following the tank, which was plowing the trench, gnawing the ground meter by meter, groping for support for the second caterpillar.

- Wait! Wait, bitch! Now! I you... - The platoon leader threw himself behind the tank, but his legs, evenly twisted in the joints, did not hold him, he fell, stumbling over crushed people, and again crawled on his knees, pushing with his elbows. He lost his mittens, ate too much earth, but held the grenade like a glass filled with drink, afraid of spilling it, barking, crying because he could not overtake the tank.

The tank fell into a deep crater and twitched in convulsions. Boris got up, got down on one knee and, playing smart, threw a grenade under the gray exhaust of the car. It whined, doused the lieutenant with snow and flame, hit him in the face with lumps of earth, filled his mouth, and rolled along the trench like a little hare.

The tank twitched, sank, and fell silent. The caterpillar fell with a ringing sound and unfurled like a soldier's coil. The armor, on which the snow was melting with a hiss, was thickly streaked with bullets, and someone else fired a grenade into the tank.

The revived armor-piercers frantically hit the tank, striking blue bursts of flame from the armor, annoyed that the tank did not catch fire. A German appeared without a helmet, black-headed, in a torn uniform, with a sheet tied around his neck. Scribbling at the tank with a machine gun from his stomach, he shouted something, jumping up and down. The cartridges in the horn of the machine gun ran out, the German threw it away and, peeling off the skin, began pounding the cemented armor with his bare fists. That's when he was hit by a bullet. Having hit the armor, the German slid under the track, twitched in the snow and calmed down calmly. The sheet, worn instead of a camouflage suit, fluttered once or twice in the wind and covered crazy face soldier

The battle rolled back somewhere into darkness, into the night. The howitzers moved the fire; heavy eres, shuddering, screeching and howling, were already pouring flames on other trenches and fields, and those Katyushas that had stood near the trenches in the evening were burning, stuck in the snow. The surviving SR men were swept away with the infantry, fought and died near the vehicles that were shot at.

Ahead, the regimental cannon kept yapping, already alone. A crumpled, torn trench of infantrymen led a rare gunfire, and the battalion mortar gurgled like a pipe, and soon two more pipes began to throw mines. The light machine gun crackled happily and belatedly, but the tank gun was silent, and the armor-piercing men were exhausted. From the trenches, here and there, dark figures jumped out, seemingly headless from their low-slung, flat helmets, screaming, crying, rushing into the darkness, following their own, as if small children were chasing their mother.

They were rarely shot at, and no one caught up with them.

Stacks of straw flared in the distance. Multi-colored rockets splashed into the sky like fireworks. And someone’s life was broken, disfigured in the distance. And here, at the position of Kostyaev’s platoon, everything became quiet. The dead were covered in snow. On the burning cars of the ER men, cartridges and grenades crackled and exploded; hot cartridges spilled out of the smoking cars, smoked, hissed in the snow. A damaged tank, a cold carcass, darkened over the trench; the wounded were reaching out to it, crawling to it to hide from the wind and bullets. Unknown girl with a sanitary bag hanging on her chest, she made bandages. She dropped her hat and her mittens, blowing on her numb hands. The girl's short-cropped hair was covered in snow.

It was necessary to check the platoon, prepare to repel a new attack if it arose, and establish communications.

The foreman had already lit a cigarette. He squatted down - his favorite relaxed position in a moment of oblivion and rest, closed his eyes, pulled a cigarette, occasionally looked without interest at the carcass of the tank, dark, motionless, and again closed his eyes and dozed off.

- Give me! – Boris extended his hand.

The platoon sergeant did not give the platoon sergeant a cigarette butt, he first took out the platoon sergeant's mittens from his bosom, then the pouch and the paper, without looking, thrust it in, and when the platoon sergeant clumsily rolled a damp cigarette, lit a cigarette, coughed, the sergeant major cheerfully exclaimed:

- Okay, take him! – and nodded towards the tank.

Boris looked incredulously at the subdued car: such a huge thing! - such a small grenade! Such small man! The platoon commander still heard poorly. And there was earth in his mouth, his teeth were crunching, his throat was clogged with mud. He was coughing and spitting. It hit my head and rainbow circles appeared in my eyes.

“The wounded...” Boris cleaned his ear. - Collect the wounded! They'll freeze.

- Let's! - Mokhnakov took the cigarette from him, threw it into the snow and pulled it closer to him by the collar of the platoon commander’s overcoat. “We have to go,” Boris heard, and he again began to clean his ear, picking out the ground with his finger.

- Something... There's something here...

- Okay, I’m still intact! Who throws grenades like that!

Mokhnakov's back and shoulder straps were covered in dirty snow. The collar of his sheepskin coat, half with the meat torn off, was flapping in the wind. Everything swayed in front of Boris, and this flapping collar of the foreman, like a board, hit him on the head, not painfully, but deafeningly. Boris scooped up snow with his hand as he walked, ate it, which was also clogged with smoke and gunpowder, his stomach did not cool down, on the contrary, it burned more.

Snow was swirling like a funnel over the open hatch of the damaged tank. The tank was cooling down. The iron rang and cracked, shooting painfully into my ears. The sergeant major saw the female medical instructor without a hat, took off his and casually placed it on her head. The girl didn’t even look at Mokhnakov, she only paused her work for a second and warmed her hands, putting them under her sheepskin coat to her chest.

Karyshev and Malyshev, soldiers from Boris Kostyaev’s platoon, dragged the wounded to the tank in the wind.

- Alive! – Boris was delighted.

- And you are alive! – Karyshev also responded joyfully and pulled the air with his nose so that the ribbon of his untied hat flew into his nostril.

“And our machine gun was smashed,” Malyshev either reported or apologized.

Mokhnakov climbed onto the tank, pushed an overweight, still limp officer in a black uniform, cut by bursts, into the hatch, and he rattled as if in a barrel. Just in case, the sergeant-major fired a burst into the inside of the tank from a machine gun, which he managed to get somewhere, shined a flashlight and, jumping into the snow, said:

- The officers jammed it! Full womb! Look how cleverly: the man-soldier forward, for meat, gentlemen, under the armor... - He leaned towards the medical instructor: - What about the packages?

She waved him off. The platoon commander and sergeant major dug up the wire and moved along it, but soon they pulled the tattered wire out of the snow and reached the signalman’s cell at random. The signalman was crushed in the cell by a caterpillar. A German non-commissioned officer was immediately killed. The phone drawer was crushed into splinters. The sergeant major picked up the signalman's hat and pulled it on his head. The hat turned out to be small; it was piled like an old kite’s nest on top of the sergeant-major’s head.

The signalman held an aluminum pin in his surviving hand. Such pins were used by the Germans to secure tents, and by our telephone operators as grounding conductors. The Germans were given crooked communications knives, grounding conductors, wire cutters and other equipment. Ours replaced all this with hands, teeth and peasant ingenuity. The signalman was hammering the non-commissioned officer with a pin when he jumped on top of him, and then both of them were crushed by the caterpillar.

Four tanks remained at the platoon positions, with corpses half-covered in snow lying around them. Sticking out of the fresh bags were arms, legs, rifles, thermoses, gas mask boxes, broken machine guns, and burnt Katyushas were still smoking thickly.

- Connection! – the half-deaf lieutenant shouted loudly and hoarsely and wiped his nose with a mitten that was frozen on his finger.

The author of the story "The Shepherd and the Shepherdess" himself defined the genre of the work - "modern pastoral", thus defining its semantic composition: the clash of sentimentality (the shepherd and the shepherdess, sensitivity, the uniqueness of love) and the severity of war.

At the center of the story is a platoon under the command of Lieutenant Boris Kostyaev. The entire plot fits into a few days (after the separation of Boris and Lucy, some time was missed, which can be ignored). But this does not mean that it [the plot] is confined to a clear time frame. The text contains references to more early period- These are Boris’s memories of his childhood, as well as a letter from his mother, which he reads to Lucy. This, by the way, is an extra-plot element, which is also part of the composition and introduces new characters into the story - Boris’s parents. In addition, there are other elements “from outside” - this is a quote from Pushkin about “ fleeting vision" and Fetov's famous "At dawn, don't wake her up..." Such small transfers to the past create a peculiar atmosphere of some kind of patriarchal memories, sentimental, and contribute to the reader's understanding of the story, indeed, as a pastoral.

Symbolism is also present in the work. The title itself hints to the reader about a certain shepherd and shepherdess; subsequently Boris stumbles upon the murdered old men (who, as it became known, were shepherds). But as the plot develops, the shepherd and shepherdess become not so much an unpleasant obsessive memory of Boris, but also an image-symbol of everything bright and sublime that the author associated with the feeling of love. Love, friendship, family feelings are shown in the story surrounded by death, evil, suffering, everything that war leads to.

The author's sympathy is undoubtedly on the side of Boris, godfathers Karyshev and Malyshev, he is sympathetic to Lantsov and Shkalik. The characters he condemns are drawn no less vividly: this is Pafnutyev, who sought and found profit even in the death of those around him, and a very expressive image of the “stuck up lady” who Boris met in the hospital. He also has an antipode - foreman Mokhnakov, but, according to the author, such people have no place on earth, and he dies. He was a kind of victim of war - he got so used to it that he forgot how to be a normal, ordinary person.

The writer has masterfully portrayed Various types behavior of people in war, and also truthfully (and sometimes even naturalistically) showed the picture of the battle. Astafiev’s war is a tragedy of simple, innocent people, and the whole mood of the story is anti-war (this can be seen in the depiction of scenes such as the shooting of prisoners by a certain person whose family and house were burned by the Germans). But, nevertheless, the author manages to combine the realism of war with romance, pointing out that the feeling does not die in a collision with death. A soldier is a man destroyed by war, but at the same time, the writer with his work creates, as it were, a poem to a soldier, revealing the subtleties of a soldier’s psychology, the psychology of people poorly adapted to war - those who were the majority in the army.

Only someone who was a soldier himself and took part in battles could write so truthfully and reliably about the war and the soldier. Thus, Boris’s understanding of the war should have coincided with the author’s. Moreover, he (and Lucy, who has similar views) is central character story, because with this the author wanted to emphasize, highlight his figure, and draw attention to it. In addition, Astafiev often retreats from the role of an impassive narrator and turns to the soldier, expressing his emotions - pity, desire to support in Hard time. The writer bestows love on Boris and Lyusa, the heroes he likes, condemns Pafnutyev (who is engaged in looting) with wounds, and leads Mokhnakov, who has a hardened soul, to heroic death.

Thus, according to Astafiev, it turns out that love and war are compatible, but with this comparison the latter seems even more terrible, and love becomes “defective” - distorted, disfigured by war. And modern pastoral loses its original sentimental innocence in terms of war time and becomes not touching, but rather worthy of pity.