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영어

Military service, the front, the civil war - regardless of which camp he finds himself in - all of these are unnatural obstacles to genuine, natural life. His struggle, his choice, is not a choice between the Reds and the Whites, officers or peasants; it's always a choice primarily between death, war, cruelty, violence - and life, love, attachment to the land. Perhaps, it's this path through the civil war that can be designated as the "third" way, as a search for his own truth. But Grigory Melekhov's truth doesn't need to be found or acquired - it's inherent in the characters from the beginning. However, in the complex historical circumstances, the hero needs to prove his allegiance to it. In the end, Grigory comes back to what he left for the front - his family (from which only his son and sister survived), to his ancestral home. This path through death, violence, and loss didn't reveal new truths to Grigory other than the ones he already knew; the previous truths just became even more evident. The hero of Sholokhov does not align himself with either of the warring factions, remaining true only to his own truth. When evaluated from these positions, the hero managed to carry his ideal through all the years of the war, at times becoming fierce, aggressive, and unmotivatedly malicious under the influence of war and its horrors. However, the ideal, his loyalty to it, given to him by nature at the instinctual level, Grigory Melekhov preserved throughout his long journey through the civil war. If during the Soviet period it was necessary to provide a unequivocal assessment of the main character's image, at the moment, such violence against the text, against Sholokhov's attempts to provide an objective picture, seems to us unmotivated and contradictory to the author's intention. The absence of answers to many of life's questions, the mere posing of these questions themselves, is already an important artistic achievement. From a contemporary perspective, Grigory Melekhov's path may appear contradictory and convoluted, but nonetheless, it is quite logical and explicable in light of the horrors and cruelty of the historical processes that occurred during that period in Russia.