CC BY
5Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 5 (2016 9) 1181-1190
УДК 82.09
Conceptualization of the Fear of Non-Being in the Book About War "My Lieutenant" by Daniil Granin
(on Actualization of Universal Binary Oppositions)
Maya M. Polekhina*
Odintsovo Branch of MGIMO University 3 Novo-Sportivnaya, Odintsovo, 143005, Russia
Received 26.01.2016, received in revised form 25.02.2016, accepted 12.04.2016
The concept of war represented in the composition of D. Granin's book, introduces a number of universal binary oppositions. The most significant ones are war and peace, good and evil, life and death, being and non-being. The war is considered as a monstrous crime against humanity destroying human in a human being. Substantiality conflict reveals the deep opposition of the individual and the state system. The concept of war is associated in Granin's book with the comprehension of some existential problems. The author explores the fear of non-being as a state in which a person is aware of the possibility of his non-existence, a state of something absorbing and disembodying human in a human being. The origin of the fear of non-being is not in the transient nature of everything, but in the awareness of the inevitability of his own death, understanding his own mortality, his eschatology. At war, death is always just around the corner. It changes the perception of the world, shows the fragility of human life, makes one feel and appreciate every moment, and at the same time devalues life as an act of existence. The fear of death at war becomes all-consuming, raising the questions of human behaviour in the face of death. Every time a human being faces death, he behaves in a different way, but according to Granin, the fear of non-being defines human identity and his willingness to meet eternity. Taking away a human life like an arbiter is a point of no return to the inner self. Those who have experienced the fear of non-being, those who have been on the edge of life and death, cannot return to their former inner world, they become aliens in it, doomed for eternal wandering in another reality. According to Granin, overcoming the fear of non-being leads to the awareness of the world's and human eternity, to the faith in the creation of the world, to the eternal life and God's infinite mercy.
Keywords: Daniil Granin, concept, binary oppositions, war, fear, death, non-being. DOI: 10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-5-1181-1190. Research area: philology.
In the Russian worldview the phrases a has noted that "with time the theme of war has holy war, a war of liberation, a just war reflect not exhausted and simplified, and the very word the specific national attitude to war. V. Astafiev 'war' has not disappeared from the life and
© Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved Corresponding author E-mail address: illusio2008@yandex.ru
*
consciousness of people" (Astafiev, 1986, 5). It is known that the concept of war represented in the composition of the literary text introduces a number of universal binary oppositions. The most significant among them are war - peace, good -evil, life - death, being - non-being.
The tragic has become a natural part of the artistic worldview of Daniil Granin who turned to historical events of the siege of Leningrad in the book "My Lieutenant". It was important for the writer to show his own idea of war as a heinous crime against humanity that has no justification. Half-truth about war, false covering of its episodes and actions of the high command of the army, the emphasis on winning, which ignores the issue of colossal sacrifices, did not allow to see the real picture of events. Granin was one of the first to raise the question of the victory price that had been worrying him all the following years, and that predetermined the tragic pathos of his book. He wanted to talk about the war full of fear of death, dehumanization, incessant pain and bitterness of unjustified hopes. Psychological sketches of participants of military events, artistic and philosophical understanding of existential problems are the most valuable materials in the work of Daniil Granin like in the novels "Cursed and Killed" by Viktor Astafiev (Astafiev, 2013), "In the Trenches of Stalingrad" by Viktor Nekrasov (Nekrasov, 2013), "160 Pages of the Diary of a Soldier" by Mansur Abdulin (Abdulin, 1985), "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman (Grossman, 2013), "The War's Face Is Not the One of a Woman" by Svetlana Aleksievich (Aleksievich, 2013), etc.
Daniil Granin's book was the artistic comprehension of the national tragedy, the so-called "lieutenant's prose", where not the scale of military actions, panoramic battles with many nameless faces and figures of military leaders were in the first place, but a true war hero in the foreground, an ordinary Soviet soldier from the
trenches, junior officers, who ensured the victory in this war having shown the incredible courage in the most extreme situations. The confessional novel of the writer is a look at the war with its everyday life, death and retreats, betrayal and love, short friendship and oblivion. The story in the book is very close to the diaries in a retrospective manner, which at times is a bit fragmentary and stylistically rough. The polyphony of worldviews, feelings, likes and dislikes organizes the complete composition of the work. The novel consists of three parts, each represented by separate pieces, sketches, psychological characteristics of the war scenes. Each episode is a flash displaying the most intimate and tragic in the everyday war life, which always refers to the eternal problems of life and death, good and evil, duty and destiny of the human, and it is almost always the insight and experience.
The story is preceded by an epigraph, which is a compositional key to the book: "-Are you writing about yourself? - No, it's been long since this man has been gone" (Granin, 2013, 3). Granin's young lieutenant forever stayed at war in the space-time continuum, where everyone was killed and devastated by what was happening long before their own death; the protagonist evaluates and tries to understand his former self, condemning, justifying and empathizing with the person who has got to know the horror of non-being, the horror of what is beyond having crossed the life and destiny of the like. The problem of the author's position is mainly fulfilled through the image of the author-narrator: his rhetoric -assessment and ideological opinions, publicistic digressions, generalizations and dictums -defines and addresses critical issues of universal human significance. What is a human life at war? What is death at war? How to resist the grandiose and monstrous machine of destruction? How to stay human in the last moment when the borders between here and there are erased, when there
is nothing, non-being ahead, which is a part of this world and at the same time the absence of the world as such? How to resist the fear of non-being when it is unbearably painful to realize its all-consuming power and growing omnipotence? The author explores the fear of non-being as a state in which a person is aware of the possibility of his non-existence, a state of something absorbing and disembodying human in a human being. The origin of the fear of non-being is not in the transient nature of everything, but in the awareness of the inevitability of his own death, understanding his own mortality, his eschatology.
Granin begins his story with the description of aerial bombing, which is repeated many times throughout the book in different variations, showing a little man in the face of great danger, in the face of the fascist beast trying to destroy everything that is alive. For the first time the protagonist felt the fear of death at the first bombing, he felt this fear in himself and was shocked by this discovery. The fear was real, burning, vile, shameful and omnipotent. It humiliated, paralyzed consciousness, transformed the man into "a quivering slime, tiny creature full of horror" (Granin, 2013, 9). "... hot air of propellers was ruffling my hair. Planes howled, bombs falling howled even more hysterically. Their shrieks screwed into the brain penetrating into the chest, pulling apart the insides ... Horror swallowed all of me" (Granin, 2013, 9). The fear of death, the approaching abyss of "non-being", the feeling of being crushed, abandonment and loneliness were preceding the feeling of horrific suffering and existential fear that this world would disappear. And in that moment between two abysses, the ground he tried to press into for the debris to whistle above, and talking to the sky that at that moment betrayed him, the protagonist turns to God he had never believed in during all his previous life, due to "his brand new higher
education, astronomy, marvelous laws of physics ... But here, in the battle, when he was left alone with death approaching him from all sides, his parched lips whispered: "Lord, I beg your mercy! Save me, don't let me die, I beg you that it goes past and doesn't hit, Lord, have mercy upon me" (Granin, 2013, 8). And he suddenly discovered the meaning of the words that seemed so well known: Lord, have mercy upon me! The man discovered the depth he had not been aware of before, and he found the words that he had not known before: "Lord, save me, I beg you, for Heaven's sake ..." (Granin, 2013, 9). Crushed by the fear of the impending death, the man experiences a tremendous emotional stress that precedes internal degeneration, gaining a new look at familiar things. And the brighter and more significant personality has the man, the stronger he feels the emotional shock of the imminent catastrophe.
In Granin's book, war and death are opposed to the life of nature, its naturalness and beauty: "... I looked at the green stems where between the blades of grass a small red ant was crawling, a thick pale caterpillar was hanging from a branch. There was a common summer life going on in the grass, slow, beautiful and intelligent. God could not be in the sky filled with hatred and death. God was here, among flowers, grubs, insects ... " (Granin, 2013, 9). The world of nature remained intact, immune to the tragic confrontation of people, attitudes, systems. And the scary thing was that he could not be here, in this space and time, and he was not there, he could not be there, and the fear of the approaching something, the abandonment of God in this new world of non-being was even more awful in its manifestations. And it is especially unbearable to become aware of it all when you are twenty years old, and you have not lived yet and have seen nothing in this life, and all your hopes are connected with tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes, and you die every day
with every death of your companion, and your life like shagreen skin shrinks and loses its meaning.
Death in the novel by Daniil Granin is a normal thing, its smell absorbs all other smells, penetrating everything that is alive, thus emphasizing its everyday dominant position. Life amazing in its manifestations, seemed almost accidental. War had become the smell of fear to lose the touch with the world forever. The man always felt inevitability, the certainty of the end. The fear of non-being was in the acute awareness of man's own finitness. The end as the limit of all things stated the full horror of what was happening: there was only emptiness ahead. Non-being threatened the integrity of the human, his spiritual self-affirmation. But non-being has a future in a different reality, and about this future in the universe the dying soldier asked God: soldiers were often praying not even knowing the prayers, referring to the absolute and consubstantial. "There are no atheists in trenches" (Granin, 2013, 80), claimed Granin. Everybody became faithful, everyone asked God for salvation and preservation, and the life they prayed for, prolonged for another day seemed a miracle, a gift.
Granin oposses personal fear to the collective one. Such fear creates panic, paralyzes the thought, entails apocalyptic events. "During the battle when the nerves are tense, one shriek, one coward was enough to cause overall panic" (Granin, 2013, 12). Later, with the acquisition of the skill to get out of the environment this fear was gone. What could be opposed to the fear in extreme situations? The author recalls a story told by M. Zoshchenko shortly before his death, the story of a German soldier who suddenly finds himself rolling into the trench to the Russians during shooting. He was very scared when he saw the red stars on the forage caps of the soldiers, rushed about, cried out in fear, quickly jumped out of the trench with a huge, almost record jump
and ran to his soldiers. The Russians laughed watching the young soldier run, but so laughed the Germans. Granin notes that after that it was impossible to continue shooting. Laughing united enemies with the common feeling, returned the human to them, their former selves.
The experience of the first clashes with the German army is noted with fear and hatred. Once at school, the protagonist was asked why it was so important for Tolstoy to show not the victory of Kutuzov over Napoleon, not the capture of Paris, but the story of the defeat of the Russians near Moscow, the story of derogation, burning of Moscow ... At that time the Soviet schoolchildren perceived many things differently, but now it is clear that through retreat, defeat, shame and frustration Tolstoy wanted to show the "treasures of the peoples' spirit", the "reserves of consciousness and love for the motherland" (Granin, 2013, 27).
The first bombing, the first battle, the first flight. It was possible to break, definitively lose oneself, make sure of the inability to control oneself, but others behaved the same way: they also fled ducking to the ground, without raising their heads, they also urinated and sweated, fell and died. In the summary of the army newspaper of those days, the days of shame and retreat, the following information appeared: "Under the pressure of superior enemy forces our army was forced to retreat with fights to the preliminarily prepared positions" (Granin, 2013, 40). After such reports, the situation with the flight appeared even more humiliating to the protagonist.
Granin's narration draws together the direct personal experience of the writer and the historical experience of the war. Remaining especially sensitive to the truth, to the utmost reliability of the images of events and characters, their thoughts and feelings, Granin makes the personality of the young man the main and determining feature in the content and structure of the novel. This
personality combines the author-narrator, biased observer of himself yesterday and himself today, and an independent hero, a young lieutenant for whom there is only the present. Granin does not give a name to his hero, we may only assume that short D. stands for Daniil. Nevertheless, what is quite typical, the fate of the hero shows some features of the fates of other heroes of the war from the books by Astafiev, Abdulin, Aleksievich, Aksenov, Belov, Grossman and Nekrasov. Granin refers to the past to find himself in the present, to establish himself in the elusive time uncontrolled by human consciousness. And the darker and more desparate seems the present to him, the more important appears the link between yesterday and today, an ongoing dialogue between the living and the dead.
The significance of death in Granin's book was determined by the memory of the living. Overcoming the existential horror of death is shown through human constant inclusion in the fate of the dying people in this war. Granin highlights the figures of the heroes making them immortal. The heroic behaviour of Podrezov who met his death as a challenge measured in terms of his former life: before the war he had been convicted, military leaders had treated him unfriendly. After another deadly shelling the body of Podrezov was not found to bury it properly, and commanders had doubts: he could have gone to the Germans. For our lieutenant Podrezov's courageous deed was obvious: he stood in the trench up to his full length, firing wildly and cursing. "... He was sick and tired of this war, escape, shameful war" (Granin, 2013, 45), he heroically defended his position trying to stop the retreating Russian soldiers, following the "not a step back" order.
Author's insights into the past encourage to think about the fates of the heroes: behind each human life there was its present. If you are killed, your past is justified, you are a hero, and it was
terrible if you go missing or are taken prisoner. The episode with the supply officer, personnel commander, who begged to shoot him while he was seriously wounded, having lost his regiment: "Everyone is gone ... It's the end" (Granin, 2013, 55). The end, as the end of all things, was indicated for the character at the moment with certainty, but the thought that the debt was not fully paid was echoing in the mind: "My God, such an army, and what"? The order "not to be captured alive" was for him unconditional, but to commit a suicide was beyond his powers.
The lieutenant remembers the scene of the fighters being shot: "The chairman of the tribunal stood up and read the sentence: "The first one to be shot for self-inflicted wound, the second for cowardice, the flight from the battlefield and alarmism, the third for the intention to go to the Germans" (Granin, 2013, 122). The corpses were not taken away for a long time. This scene, almost everyday, did not cause any special emotions among the soldiers. Moreover, the reaction to what was happening was full of bitter irony: "They are finalizing the documents. Making copies, otherwise they won't be accepted in the other world, they require two copies there. And why did you close your eyes?
"I could not look at that. I'm sorry for the guys, they were scared .... "
"It was for us to see", continued Zhenia Levashov. "We'll teach you to love your motherland. And what is motherland, where is it?" (Granin, 2013, 122).
Granin's heroes are guided by the only truth at war: "We have to defend our moetherland!", but casual phrases painfully sound in the hearts: "Motherland! It is interesting what this motherland had given us? ... Hungry workdays? Dekulakization? Death notices?" (Granin, 2013, 63). Granin's heroes feel complicated, contradictory feelings not being able to determine their final attitude to the motherland. The concept
of motherland is connected with the sense of kinship, spiritual intimacy, sincerity. It is the maternal origin, which needs requires protection and patronage from the external threat. The concept of motherland is connected with the notions of duty, honour and dignity. An officer fulfilling his trust for the motherland is committed to the multiplication of his fame at any cost, while the motherland requires self-affirmation and self-sacrifice.
Granin paints pictures of rural life on the way of the retreating troops, they were disappointing: "Gray huts were partially covered with shingles and straw. Hurdles, sandy unpaved streets. Everything was saged and fallen into despair. Probably it had looked the sameway a hundred, two hundred years ago" (Granin, 2013, 65). References to Radishchev are not accidental. "I looked around the neighbourhood, and my soul was hurt by sufferings of the humanity. My God, it seemed if I saw the poverty of our life again. Moss-covered logs of a well. A tousled haystack. Nothing helped. Neither revolution, nor collective farms, nor dekulakization" (Granin, 2013, 66). It was symptomatic that each such episode gives the sense of men's abandonment by God, the violation of the natural course of life, the paradoxes of an inverted world. "We were retreating on all fronts. Fled leaving guns, machine guns, missiles, vehicles. It was hot. The retreat was designated with fires, swollen corpses of horses and soldiers. In short, it was stinking. The defeat stinked. Clothing, hair - everything was permeated with the pungent smoke, the stench of rotting human flesh, horsemeat. They did not teach the Red Army to retreat ... Our army was a machine without reversing" (Granin, 2013, 49-50). Confronting death and fear of death the soldier was reborn at war, the hero took on a new status; outgrowing himself, overcoming the negative in himself, through the experience of fearlessness and manifestation of human
dignity, he moved to understanding of what is happening: the fear disappeared in the awareness of his power and the threat that he constituted to the foe. Hatred was generating hatred, the desire to give an adequate response to what was happening. Thus, Granin's hero got the idea that war means killing. Killing point blank, from the back was the first killing of the foe for the hero. The German soldiers did not understand what had happened and then he fled: the hero was sick to his stomach, he was sweating and vice versa. Killing two Germans in breeches would stalk his sleep and in his memories this scene would be always accompanied by another one: "A white church under the blue sky singing from bullets" (Granin, 2013, 45). With every awakening this image in representation of the hero will aqcuire new details. In the end, the image of the white church becomes apocalyptic: the projectile strikes the bell tower of the white church, and it breaks wrapped in a brick dust. Thus, the world in the mind of the hero is broken, the old values are narrowed down. The man who took upon himself the right to kill another person, the right to finish the life of another, his existence in this world opening the way to emptiness for him, interrupts the meaning of his own life, discovers the line after which he will never be the same as he crossed out his own path and the meaning of his own existence. Therefore, the senselessness and brutality of any claim to human life, of an armed clash is emphasized once again: war is the denial of life as such, ignoring the flow of life, it does not matter to the war, whether you are Russian or German, the righteous or the fallen.
The hero perceives the tragic death of Zhenya Levashov as distancing of life, its impoverishment: there was one huge second, when the bullet reached him, this cheerful joker, "an unusually tall guard", "fortune's darling": "It was not death that came, it was life that went away, took Zhenya Levashov, his whole world, the only,
unusual, all his unbelievable stories. It was this body that remained of him cooling in my hands" (Granin, 2013, 182). It is significant that with each loss of comrades the hero's own life finished, got thinner and destroyed, the present lost its sense due to constant willingness to meet with nothing promising the end, emptiness, darkness and non-being.
What could confront death, its inevitability? The writer has repeatedly asked himself why he has survived and could not find any other answer, except one: because he was loved and he loved too, and at war he tried not to break one important law: Thou shalt not kill. And when an unknown girl after the war, asked him: "How many people have you killed?", her question sounded almost unnatural for him: he did not kill people, he killed the Nazis. It should be noted that in the trenches the Nazis were perceived as a far-away target, and one considered it as a potential enemy, almost without correlating to the human. And of course, there always had been the sense of justice. This is your land, your house, your destiny, and nobody has the right to encroach on the natural things (Polekhina 2015).
On the pages of his book, Granin considers an event that is very important for his understanding of the world: the fateful day of September 17, 1941, when Leningrad was open, vulnerable to the enemy, and that the Nazis did not enter the city, which was perceived as a miracle. These historical materials initiated active discussions regarding a possible surrender of Leningrad: there were people who had decided that if Leningrad, like Paris, was declared an open city, then the hundreds of thousands of the Siege victims could have been avoided. Granin gives quite a definite answer to this assumption: the Nazis hated Soviet Leningrad, they would have staged a massacre there, the fate of the Jewish people in the occupied city would be horrible. Many years later Granin gets acquainted with the son of von Leeb, the
Commander of the Group North during the war. From the diary of the German Field Marshal General, he discovered the extent of upcoming operations and unexpected Hitler's order to relocate the air corps targeting at Moscow, to the Centre for the preparation of the German army to capture the city. The situation was critical, the walls of the houses in Leningrad were covered with leaflets: "The enemy is at the gates", but the Germans were given an order "Do not enter the city!"
Granin leads his hero through the streets of besieged Leningrad, the "city of martyrs", as Dmitry Likhachev who survived the most difficult military months in Leningrad, called it. The Siege drama was composed, according to his opinion, of heroism, self-sacrifice and martyrdom. The death in besieged Leningrad, which was an ordinary phenomenon, showed the illusory nature of life and nothingness, meaninglessness of any kind of desires. The human discovered his own vulnerability, fragility, imperfection. Physically and morally humiliated, he had a negligible chance not to lose his human nature. Granin draws a terrible picture of hunger: a man with dull, motionless, unseeing eyes is chewing a glove, black leather fingers are hanging out of his mouth ... Passers-by are seen as "meat, skeletons on which there still was some meat" (Granin, 2013, 198). "There were days when I understood cannibalism", the hero confesses. "I defended it. All of me turned into an empty stomach, which writhed, screamed from the mad desire to chew anything. Rubbish, just dirt, a handful of soil, sawdust. Disgust was gone ..." (Granin, 2013, 198). It required a lot of courage and strength to walk this path and stay alive.
V. Astafiev once said that no one knows the whole truth about the war, there are still many documents that have not been published (Astafiev, 1986, 5). In 2011 in Moscow, the house-museum of Marina Tsvetaeva hosted a scientific conference on
the topical issues of the Second World War within the framework of the IV Cultural Readings. In 2013 a collection of materials "Russian Abroad and World War II" was published, which included archival documents from private collections of the combatants, unpublished letters from the representatives of the Russian diaspora, as well as new research of the prewar events, the analysis of historical, political and philosophical aspects of the war.
Today, the issue of revival of the world lost by the warrior-defender becomes very important. The tragedy of the post-war life was that the soldiers who had survived in the war and defeated fascism, were destroyed by the totalitarian system in the peacetime. The writer believes that each of those who came back from the war needed efforts to live and be themselves, it took a lot more courage than during the war itself. Substantiality conflict thus reveals deep opposition between an individual and the state in the book. The state leaving its people to fend for themselves, resembles Cronus eating his own children.
The war made soldiers who returned from the front, lost for everyday life; the borders of acceptable values became expanded: death had become a part of their lives, taking the dominant position. Those were right who were not here anymore, who had forever disappeared from the list of the living. Granin touches upon a very important topic regarding the post-war syndrome. The man that has stepped over the life of another violates the most important principles, and he cannot remain the same, his values are crashed: there is a feeling of guilt for the killed, dead friends. He should necessarily live this life for them. The commandment not to kill is absolute, it is difficult to accept the possibility of a retroactive effect, even understanding the psychological mechanism of justification of a sin, justification of violence in order to prevent more
violence. It is well known that the criteria for a just war were formulated in the Middle Ages, and one of them testified that the supposed burden of war should be appropriate to the purposes of war, that is, death and destruction that war causes should be less than those it prevents. It is not Caeser who determines the rationale for military actions, but the ratio of the caused/prevented damage. The commandment to love your enemies and the rules of war are incompatible. The war in Daniil Granin's novel is presented as the greatest evil, crippling and destroying both material and spiritual values. It is opposed to the beauty of the world and destroys this beauty, it stands against the common sense of love and forgiveness, and distorts the human soul inflicting irreparable damage. Any attempt to justify the good purpose by bloody means are doomed to failure.
The author relates the picture of the war with ontological pictures of life, creates an image of the divine universe, spiritual nature as the basis of the man's salvation and return to the lost integrity and harmony of the triad "man - nature - God". Daniil Granin remains faithful to Tolstoy's concept of war as the event against human reason and all human nature (Tolstoy, 1962). The deep conviction of Tolstoy that both the French and the Russian are first and foremost people, "the children of mankind, that they are brothers" defined D. Granin's humanistic position as well. In his book, both the Germans and the Russians are the victims of a dictatorial regime. The concept of the writer aims at the destruction of the myth of justifying war - just, liberation, whatever kind it may be, it is always evil, contrary to the divine plan for the man and the world. Senselessness, inhumanity, unnaturalness of war are opposed by the pictures of inviolability of the universe: thus comes the realization that war is a temporary phenomenon, and the sky above, the earth, the stars created by God, love and spring are eternal. Every fact of human confrontation with death at
war generates different reactions, but the fear of non-being or lack thereof, according to Granin, is a marker of identity. Shortly before the death, one of Granin's heroes, a simple Russian soldier Medvedev, opens his innermost to the lieutenant: "I do not ask, but I thank the Lord", he smiled, "for breathing life into me, for the opportunity to admire his creation. Of course, for the love. I do not beg, 'Give me more time to spend here', but 'Thank younfor inviting me to this feast ..." (Granin, 2013, 175). He was free from the fear of death, from the horror of non-being, from the anxiety that at the most important moment in his life he would not be able to confront the
fate, naturally showing courage and fortitude. Thus, the fear of non-being is an important philosophical and aesthetic concept of Granin's work about the war reflecting the ontological challenges of the man and the world at critical moments in history. The fear of non-being is the fear of disappearing, the fear of awareness of the finite stay on this earth. Achieving human courage at war is the supreme manifestation of human personality. Overcoming the fear of non-existence, according to Granin, is associated with understanding of peace and human infinity, belief in the creation of the world, eternal life, love and the infinite mercy of God.
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Концептуализация страха не-бытия в книге о войне Даниила Гранина «Мой лейтенант» (об актуализации универсальных бинарных оппозиций)
М.М. Полехина
Одинцовский филиал МГИМО МИД России 3 Новоспортивная, Одинцово, 143005, Россия
Концепт «война», репрезентируясь в художественной структуре книги Даниила Гранина, актуализирует целый ряд универсальных бинарных оппозиций, наиболее значимыми среди которых оказываются война - мир, добро - зло, жизнь - смерть, бытие - не-бытие. Война рассматривается как чудовищное преступление против человечества, уничтожающее в человеке человека. Субстанциальный конфликт вскрывает глубинное противостояние личности и государственной системы. Концепт «война» сопряжен в книге Гранина с осмыслением целого ряда экзистенциальных проблем. Страх не-бытия художественно исследуется писателем как состояние, в котором человек осознает возможность своего небытия, нечто поглощающее и развоплощающее человека в человеке. Страх не-бытия порождается не мыслью о том, что все имеет преходящий характер, а осознанием неизбежности собственной гибели, это переживаемая человеком его собственная конечность, его эсхатология. Смерть, которая на войне всегда рядом, изменяет представление героев о мире, показывает хрупкость человеческой жизни, заставляет по-особенному ощущать каждое ее мгновение и одновременно обесценивает жизнь как акт существования. Ощущение страха смерти на войне обретает всепоглощающий характер, поэтому так остро встает вопрос о поведении человека перед лицом смерти. Каждый факт столкновения человека со смертью порождает разные реакции, но страх не-бытия, его мера или его отсутствие являются, по Гранину, маркером индивидуальности. Посягательство на жизнь другого, когда человек выступает в роли вершителя чужой судьбы, является рубежом, точкой невозвращения к себе прежнему. Познавшие страх не-бытия, переступившие грань между жизнью и смертью, не могут вернуться в свой прежний мир, остаются чужими в нем, вечными странниками другой реальности. Преодоление страха не-бытия, по Гранину, сопряжено с осознанием бесконечности мира и человека, верой в творение мира, вечную жизнь, любовь и беспредельную милость Бога.
Ключевые слова: Даниил Гранин, концепт, бинарные оппозиции, война, страх, смерть, небытие.
Научная специальность: 10.00.00 - филологические науки.
