The problem of nature and people in the story of a fire. Rasputin Fire Analysis Fire Rasputin Brief Analysis
In 1985, Valentin Rasputin wrote "Fire". A summary of this story is presented in this article.
The start of the fire
Ivan Petrovich, tired, was returning home. He had never been so tired before, although today he was not straining, there was even no screaming, no hassle. The "edge" just opened. Ivan Petrovich finally got home, and suddenly heard shouts: "Warehouses are burning!", "Fire!" The summary of the first chapter ends here.
At first he did not see the fire, but then he noticed that the warehouse buildings were burning. There has never been such a serious fire in the history of the village.
The warehouses were built in this way, and they caught fire in such a place that everything burned out without a trace. Buildings diverged to the sides: industrial and food. The fire went down the roof to the food supply area, but the main heat was in the industrial area.
Ivan Petrovich helps on the roof
When Ivan Petrovich walked through the yard of the warehouses, the groups began to cobble together in only two places. One rolled motorcycles off the shelf, the other dismantled the roof in order to interrupt the fire. The main character climbed onto the roof, where Afonya Bronnikov commanded, who put him on the edge overlooking the courtyard. Ivan Petrovich began to rip off the boards. The guy sent for the crowbar returned and instead of the crowbar brought the news that the Ural, a burned motorcycle, had been rolled out.
The main character looked around, knocking out the last bit. The children ran madly around the yard, screaming and rushing figures at the manufactured goods warehouses. But the bosses were already running in. The timber industry enterprise, the head of the section came up. This is discussed in the third chapter. The entire village fled, but no one has yet been found who could organize it into a single intelligent force that could stop the fire.
Meeting with Boris Timofeich
The main character jumped down and went to the place where he had just seen Boris Timofeich, the head of the section. He found him in the crowd by shouting, at the food warehouse. He asked to open the warehouse doors to Valya the storekeeper. Rasputin ("Fire") tells about this in the fifth chapter. The content of the work is presented briefly - we note only the main events. Valya did not agree. Boris Timofeich then shouted to the Arkharovites to break down the doors. And they began to break with pleasure. The main character suggested that Boris Timofeich put Misha Hampo at the gate so that he would guard. The head of the section did just that.
Memories of Egorovka
The sixth chapter describes the memories of Egorovka, an old village, which washed over Ivan Petrovich. He left his village for a long time only once - during the war. The main character fought for two years, and for another year after the Russians won, he held the defense of Germany. He returned home in the fall of 1946. And he did not recognize his village - it seemed to him deprived and inconspicuous. Here everything remained unchanged and seemed to have stopped forever. Soon he met Alena in a neighboring village. When the collective farm received the new car, it turned out that, besides him, there was no one to plant for it. And Ivan Petrovich began to work. Soon his mother fell ill in a long and severe illness. The younger brother of the protagonist went to a construction site and drank himself out of a lot of money. Ivan Petrovich decided to stay in Egorovka. When it was flooded, all residents were taken to the new village. Six more people like his native village were brought here. The timber industry enterprise immediately established itself here, which was named Sosnovka.
Ivan Petrovich entered the food warehouse
The summary continues. Rasputin describes the fire in chapters in the work, interrupting it with the protagonist's memories and his reflections. The seventh chapter tells us about the following. When Ivan Petrovich popped into the extreme food warehouse, it was already in full blaze. It buzzed terribly over the crevice ceiling. Several ceiling blocks were ripped off near the wall, and fire burst into the opening. Ivan Petrovich had never been inside the warehouses, and he was amazed at the abundance: dumplings were piled on the floor in a large pile. The sausage circles lay nearby. The butter was in heavy cubes, and the red fish was in crates. Ivan Petrovich wondered where it all went. Dancing from the heat and wrapping himself in a quilted jacket, the main character threw circles of sausage to the door. Here, in the yard, someone picked them up and carried them somewhere. We pass to the eighth chapter, describing the summary ("Fire"). Rasputin in it describes how the fire grew stronger.
Relationship with Boris Timofeich
The fever grew more and more intolerable. It seems that no one put out more - they backed down. They only pulled out what could still be borne. The main character thought that the warehouses cannot be saved, but the store can be defended. Suddenly he saw Boris Timofeich. He quarreled with the Arkharovite. He interfered with the scuffle.
Ivan Petrovich once spoke with the head of the section. Rasputin tells about this in the ninth chapter of the story "Fire". The summary of this conversation is as follows. Boris Timofeich started talking about the plan. And then the main character could not resist: "It would be better if we lived without him!" In his opinion, it would be better to start another plan - not for cubic meters alone, but for souls! ”, That is, it would take into account how many souls were lost. The head of the section did not agree with him. However, the main character was arranged differently. In it, as if under daily pressure, the spring was compressed and reached such a degree of elasticity that it became unbearable to withstand it. And then Ivan Petrovich began to speak, hating himself and terribly nervous, realizing that all this was in vain.
Ivan Petrovich helps to endure butter and flour
The fire continues. A summary of the chapters of the work of interest to us has already come to the tenth chapter. They completely pushed the fire out of the first food warehouse. Now we have moved on to the second. When Ivan Petrovich first dropped in here, it was already smoky and hot, but still bearable, without fire. It was crowded here. The boxes of vodka were passed along a chain. The shouts of Vali the storekeeper came from somewhere. She begged to take out the vegetable oil, which was in an iron barrel, from the building. Ivan Petrovich knocked it down with difficulty, but was unable to roll it out. Then he grabbed someone from the chain, and together they rolled the barrel.
Ivan Petrovich returned for the second, but his partner returned to the chain. The protagonist noticed, trying to find him, that not only the boxes are being passed along the chain, but also the opened bottles. And again Ivan Petrovich rolled out the barrel with the help of someone, but it turned out when it was rolled out that it was without a cork. A wriggling trail of oil went into the warehouse. Afonya Bronnikov told Ivan Petrovich that it was necessary to save the flour. Sugar was kept in a low building behind the third warehouse. There was also flour, which was piled up in a shapeless heap. The first bag he came across was taken over by Ivan Petrovich and carried it out. Together with Sashka the Ninth, he knocked down the connection of the fence and put it on the road along the slope. This is how the bridge turned out. After that, another one was torn off and laid next to him. The main character of the story "Fire" (Rasputin) decided to find Alena. The summary of the work continues with the main character's reflections on family life.
Ivan Petrovich thinks about the family
In the thirteenth chapter, he recalls how he and Alena celebrated the 30th anniversary of their marriage two years ago. We went to the children, taking a vacation. The eldest daughter lived in Irkutsk. She was in the hospital, where they did not stay long. His son Boris lived in Khabarovsk. He got married. The son and daughter-in-law asked the parents to move in with them, and Ivan Petrovich agreed. It became completely unbearable in the last year, when a new brigade of Arkharovtsy was established in the timber industry. When they broke the front garden in front of the hut, Ivan Petrovich decided to write a letter of resignation. There was only one salvation: to leave.
Misha Hampo
A brief summary continues with the events of the fifteenth chapter (Rasputin's "Fire" consists of 19 chapters). The main character pulled off the bag and carried it. At first there were about ten people who endured the flour. But then only four of them remained: Ivan Petrovich, Savely, Afonya and some unfamiliar guy. After a while, Boris Timofeich also tuned in. The main character decided to take one by one: then cereal, then flour. When there was no strength left, he stopped near the building, which was Savely's bathhouse. He carried sacks of flour into it. The main character also noticed an old woman picking up bottles from the yard - of course, not empty. Ivan Petrovich saw Misha Hampo in the middle of the yard. We have described this hero in just a few words, making up a summary. Rasputin's "Fire" is a work in which this character plays an important role. He was paralyzed from childhood and dragged his right hand with a whip. The only thing this man could utter was "Hampo-oh!" He lived alone, having buried his wife long ago. His nephew left for the North. Misha Hampo was powerful and used to do whatever he wanted with one left hand. This man was a born watchman.
Reflections of Ivan Petrovich
The sixteenth chapter begins with the reflections of Ivan Petrovich, who began to think more and more meticulously and more often, deciding to move: what does a person need in order to live peacefully? And he decided: work, wealth, home. Afonya persuades him to stay, but Ivan Petrovich does not listen to him.
Death of Hampo and Sonya
Sacks were thrown out the door, and he dragged them to the fence. Someone called Ivan Petrovich in a drunken voice, but he did not answer. Valentin Rasputin ("Fire") writes about this in Chapter 17. The summary of it continues with the fact that the men began to linger more and more often - in order to take a breath of air. The main character stood without feeling either hands or feet.
We managed to get everything out of the last warehouse. Uncle Misha noticed two people playing with a ball made of colored rags. And then the blow fell on him. It was Sonya. Several Arkharovites beat him. When the main character saw that Hampo and Sonya were lying in an embrace in the snow, they were already both dead. The mallet was lying five meters away.
The final
The last two chapters (18 and 19) conclude the summary. Rasputin's "Fire" ends with the main character not even lying down after returning from the fire. He just sat, looking out the window, seeing the smoke drifting from the shore. The next day, the main character left the village. It seemed to him that he was entering loneliness, that the earth was silent, either meeting or seeing him off. Thus ends the story "Fire", a summary of which was presented in this article.
Moral issues are a range of issues. associated with personality changes under the influence of external circumstances. Where, in a situation of choice, is the only criterion that helps to distinguish the moral from the immoral? And there is only one criterion - conscience. The eternal human law, which people have always followed, were afraid to break it, they were afraid of sin.
And if a person decides that it is better to suffer forever than to act against his conscience, then such a person is worthy of respect.
The main character of Valentin Rasputin's story "Fire" Ivan Petrovich Egorov lives by this moral law. Egorov from the village of Egorovka. .. The coincidence of the name and the toponym is not accidental. The village has been flooded for 20 years as a result of the construction of a dam and a power plant on the Angara River. But the heart of the former front-line soldier remained there, in his native village, where people lived in harmony, worked on the land, sacredly kept moral laws, and always acted according to their conscience. The driver of the timber industry enterprise is an honest and conscientious person.
It is always difficult to live by conscience, especially when you see that you are alone in the struggle for the truth, that no one cares about anything, that you are powerless to resist the destructive elements of evil.
In the village of Sosnovka, uncomfortable and unkempt, neither urban nor rural, and of a bivouac type, the "Arkharovtsy" - a brigade of the organizational set, newcomers, former criminals, shabashniks, lovers of easy money and long rubles are in charge. All Egorov's attempts to resist their atrocities end in failure for him. A premonition of the brutal revenge of the "Arkharovtsy", the offensiveness of the forced communication with them, the pain for the desecrated land prompted Ivan Petrovich to look for a new place of residence. For a long time already in the soul of the hero there has been a discord with himself, for a long time the soul has been dreary and intoxicated, he feels an insurmountable moral fatigue. The soul burns with injustice and pain. Disorders reign in the timber industry: registration, rushwork, eyewash, slovenliness, drunkenness, theft, predatory attitude towards nature and the earth.
Conscience does not allow Yegorov to be silent, he cannot follow the advice of Afoni Bronnikov: "What are you, Ivan Petrovich, are you fuming? To whom will you prove? Our business is to live correctly, to set an example of life, and not to drive a stick into our flock." Yegorov cannot be silent, but he is tired of fighting alone. So he leaves ...
And then there was a fire. The timber industry warehouses caught fire. Ivan Petrovich rushed to save the people's property. The fire highlighted a lot. First of all, on which side of good and evil people are, what moral choice they made in their life. Some selflessly fight fire, not thinking about themselves. These are Egorov and his wife Alena, Afonya Bronnikov, Semyon Koltsov, Teplyakov, Misha Hampo. Others try to grab more for themselves, take away the goods taken out of the fire, throw bottles of vodka over the fence like grenades, immediately drink a hot potion, fill their pockets with some boxes, most likely with jewelry. These are Arkharovtsy, headed by Brigadier Sashka Devyaty, a criminal without a name nicknamed Sonya, storekeeper Klavka Strigunova, one-armed Savely.
And it all ends with a terrible tragedy - murder. Seventy-year-old Misha Hampo, an honest and unselfish watchman, tries to prevent the archarovets Sonia, who throws a bundle of colored rags - Japanese blouses over the fence. An elderly man catches up with a thief and crushes him under him. Someone beats both the watchman and the robber, without disassembling, with a mallet over the heads until he beats them to death. I just want to shout at the top of my voice: "People! Come to your senses! What are you doing? Where is your conscience?"
Will Yegorov leave the village of Sosnovka? The writer does not give a direct answer. At the end of the story, the hero sees himself as if from the outside: "... a small lost man is walking along the spring land, desperate to find his home, and now he will go behind the woods and hide forever."
Think. that Ivan Petrovich will remain in the village, because now he feels the reliable support of the overwhelming majority of workers, many of whom, before the fire, had already come to terms with the ugliness that reigns around.
Updated: 2017-10-01
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Note that the use of conventional forms of creativity is characteristic of modern literature. Such are, for example, the images of the "royal larch" and the mysterious creature - the Master of the island in the aforementioned novel by V. Rasputin "Farewell to Matera".
"You will remember, oh, you will remember Matera ..." V. Rasputin foresaw and warned, who was worried about the question of "how everything will be", whether we are paying too high a price for hasty economic decisions. Not only in works of art, but also in real life, writers S. Zalygin, V. Astafiev, V. Belov, V. Rasputin, O. Gonchar fought against numerous "projects of the century" that threaten to disrupt the ecological balance and unpredictable consequences for humans. The active position of the writers helped to attract public attention to environmental problems, the cancellation of a number of unreasonable projects for the transfer of rivers, the construction of canals and dams that pollute the environment of enterprises.
Such a long inattention to the problems of nature and to people could not but affect the spiritual world of man, which was convincingly shown by V. Rasputin in the story "Fire" (1986). The author seemed to have glanced twenty years later into the village where residents from many flooded, like Matera, villages were resettled. Not only lands and forests went under water. The laws of human society, which had been developed for centuries, were destroyed, which gave people support in the harsh trials of life. As a result, "what the whole world was holding on to until recently, what was a common unwritten law, the earthly firmament, turned into a relic, into some kind of abnormality and almost a betrayal." Just like the hero of F. Abramov Mikhail Pryaslin, Rasputin's Ivan Petrovich is most worried about the lack of a habit of work in many people, their desire to live without taking deep roots, without a family, without friends, without attachments, the desire to "snatch" more for themselves ... It is not by chance that V. Rasputin chose the plot method of fire. He highlighted both the uncomfortable, unkempt appearance of this village, which was not being built in a human way, and the economic confusion, and, most importantly, the disorder in the souls of people, in their relationships. The phenomenon, terrible in its consequences, is investigated by V. Rasputin, showing "Arkharovtsy" - people without memory, without conscience, united not for the sake of a common good cause, but for the sake of drunkenness. In the first place, they saved not bread and food in the fire, but vodka and colorful rags. The episode concluding the story of extinguishing the fire is filled with a symbolic meaning: the good and reliable grandfather Misha Khampo, who was trying to stop the thieves, and with him one of the "Arkharovtsy", was killed.
The fire, like any misfortune, has long rallied people, and this time it has revealed the deepest abyss separating them. But the author did not stop only at stating this phenomenon.
“And until when are we going to give up what we have always held on to? Where, from what rear services and supplies will the coveted help come from? " - Ivan Petrovich reflects. The writer places his hope on people like his hero - a conscientious, hardworking, caring person who feels a blood connection with people and his native land. “A person has four props in life: a home with family, work, people with whom you rule holidays and weekdays together, and the land on which your house stands.”
The story "Fire" was published in 1985. In this story, the author, as it were, continues his consideration of the life of people who moved after the flooding of the island from the story "Farewell to Matera." People were relocated to an urban-type settlement (Sosnovka). The protagonist of the story, Ivan Petrovich Yegorov, feels morally and physically exhausted: "like in a grave." The fire situation in the story allows the author to explore the present and the past.
Warehouses are burning, goods that people have not seen on the shelves (sausages, Japanese rags, red fish, Ural motorcycle, sugar, flour). Some of the people, taking advantage of the confusion, take away what they can. In the story, the fire is a symbol of disaster for the social atmosphere in Sosnovka.
Rasputin tries to explain this in retrospective analysis. In Sosnovka, they do not engage in agricultural work, they harvest the forest, and do not ensure its reproduction. The forest won't last long. Therefore, the village is not monitored.
He is "uncomfortable and unkempt", the dirt was mixed with the technique "to black-sour cream foam." The story reveals the transformation of the psychology of the farmer, the grain grower into the psychology of a dependent who destroys nature. "It would be better if we started a different plan - not for cubic meters alone, but for souls! So that it is taken into account how many souls have been lost, to hell, passed to the devil, and how many are left!
"- Ivan Petrovich gets excited in the dispute. The reader feels acute uneasiness at the picture of the ruthless conquest of nature. A large volume of work requires a large number of working hands, often of any kind. The writer describes a layer of "superfluous", indifferent to everything people, from whom there is discord in life.
people scattered all by themselves even earlier ... ”The social strata in Sosnovka got mixed up. The disintegration of "common and harmonious existence" takes place. Over twenty years of life in the new village, morality has changed.
What “was not supposed, not accepted, it became necessary and accepted. In Sosnovka, houses don't even have front gardens, because it's still temporary housing. Ivan Petrovich remained faithful to the old principles, norms of good and evil. He works honestly, worries about the decline in morals.
And he finds himself in the position of a foreign body. Ivan Petrovich's attempts to prevent the Ninth's gang from exercising power end in the gang's revenge. They will puncture the tires of his car, then they will pour sand into the carburetor, then they will chop up the brake hoses to the trailer, then they will knock out the rack from under the beam, which will almost kill Ivan Petrovich.
Ivan Petrovich has to get ready with his wife Alena to leave for the Far East to one of his sons. Afonya Bronnikov reproachfully asks him: “You will leave, I will leave - who will stay? .. Eh!
Really and leave it ?! Let's clean it up to the thread and throw it! And here you go - take it, who is not lazy! " Ivan Petrovich will never be able to leave.
There are many positive characters in the story: Ivan Petrovich's wife Alena, old uncle Misha Hampo, Afonya Bronnikov, head of the timber industry section Boris Timofeevich Vodnikov. Descriptions of nature are symbolic. At the beginning of the story (March), she is sluggish, numb.
At the end - a moment of calm, before the heyday. Walking on the spring land, Ivan Petrovich "seemed to be finally carried out onto the right path." It is difficult to imagine contemporary Russian literature without books by Valentin Rasputin. In his works, he reveals the taiga romance, the unity of people with nature, depicts characters that fascinate with their strength, primordiality, and naturalness.
Rasputin discovered such characters in Siberian villages. Such stories as "" (1970), "Money for Maria" (1967), "Upstream and Downstream" were written based on the material of a Siberian village. However, Rasputin is interested not only in the personality with its spiritual world, but also in the future of this personality. The author raises the lofty moral problems of goodness and justice, sensitivity and generosity of the human heart, purity and frankness in relations between people.
"The village is burning, the native is burning ..." These lines, taken from a folk song, are the epigraph to the work of V. Rasputin. Fires have long been a common thing in Russia.
The houses were wooden, and sometimes half the village burned out. And now fires happen often, they seem to be a common occurrence. Why write about it? Perhaps something special interested Rasputin?
Or perhaps the fire is just an excuse for thinking about life. The writer's heroes are native Siberians. The main problem that worries the best of them and the author is moral: the experience accumulated over the centuries, the points of contact with the new that has come today, the interaction of the old and the new, gains and losses. This story is a heart-to-heart talk about what hurts today and what we can and must do immediately.
One of the compositional features is that V. Rasputin puts his thoughts about the past and the present, about moral and economic problems into the mouth of the protagonist - a veteran of war and labor of the driver Yegorov. Ivan Petrovich sees that the flame covers not only buildings, it burns out the souls of people, leaving emptiness and rabble. Egorov is confident in the correctness of his views, it is not in vain that the author selects for him solid, weighty words: “Truth is a river, the bed of which is lined with solid stone ...
Truth stems from nature itself ... it cannot be corrected. " Valentin Rasputin, talking about current events, often refers to memories.
And his hero cannot understand why in the flooded village of Yegorovka all the inhabitants were zealous, thrifty owners, conscientious workers, loving their land, standing firmly on their feet. Maybe because it was their home, their land, bequeathed to them by their ancestors. And the relationship between people was empathetic, fair and trusting. And this village would stand if ...
If it had not been destroyed, the old village had not been flooded, if the "Arkharovtsy" had not arrived - irresponsible people who do not have a home and family, strong moral convictions. Their goal is to make money and have fun. With the emergence of new disorderly residents, guided by the principle "not your own - do not mind", the appearance of the village and the psychology of people are changing. The habitual honesty, "conscientiousness, attitude to work as to a holy vocation" began to be called archaism, and what was a shame and a sin - considered "for valor and dexterity."
An easy and thoughtless life leads to theft and drunkenness. A rethinking of moral values is taking place: the Sosnovites look askance at anyone who, in the old fashioned way, “shakes his rights and talks about conscience”. The "Arkharovtsy" are using threats to keep the entire village under control.
People scattered, everyone lives on their own. The scary thing is that Afonya Bronnikov, saying: “I work honestly, I live honestly ...”, continues: “...
and that's enough". He doesn't give a damn about the rest. And Ivan Petrovich wants to live honestly himself, and for others to live like that. How did this moral discord begin in Sosnovka?
Sosnovka is a temporary refuge, uncomfortable and unkempt. The hopelessness of work gives rise to uncertainty in the future, a predatory attitude towards nature, and corrupts the inhabitants. In addition, the former grain growers are busy doing something unusual for them: they uproot, cut down the forest. Destroy, not create!
Trees are cut down savagely and mercilessly, leaving neither undergrowth nor young growth. Everybody has a plan and earnings first. According to Yegorov, the “uncollapsed truth” is that mismanaged deforestation will entail severe economic consequences: the river will become shallower, and the area will become swamped.
The forest is not only trees, it is mushrooms, berries, nuts, game and furs, clean air. "Plan!? - Ivan Petrovich is indignant.
- It would be better if we started a different plan - not only for cubic meters, but for the soul! ” Growing up among Russian nature, Valentin Rasputin knows how to appreciate its beauty, its originality. Wanting to bring the reader closer to the origins of his native speech, he skillfully uses dialect expressions: “fleshy, quiet evening”, “as it warmed up in the daytime, it didn’t tighten” in the evening - you read this and you feel like a resident of the village. ... And there was a fire in Sosnovka.
The village was built in a hurry, somehow, they did not think about means of extinguishing the fire. And it turned out that in a critical situation there is no one to organize people, and it is even beneficial for individuals to burn down the warehouses. In my opinion, the fire highlighted the social and moral disunity of the residents.
The author divides his heroes into "Arkharovtsy" - visitors and "thieves in law" - indigenous Sosnovites. There are many who defend state property to the end: Afonya Bronnikov, Semyon Koltsov - "a reliable man", Boris Timofeevich Vodnikov - his own man ", uncle Misha Hampo. They all go into the fire as if they were on the attack.
But there are those who just came to “warm their hands”. The "Arkharovtsy" seem to work recklessly, "with inspiration", but they work where they can profit. Drunk, succumbing to the general impulse, they behave almost heroically.
But this does not last long: some sleep, others, without hiding, steal vodka, felt boots - whatever they can, they kill Hampo. Uncle Misha dies saving good, and Sonya dies as a marauder and murderer. The fire is the result of general ill-being: the old order is burning, the souls of honest workers, who cherish their native land, are burning.
But this is not only scary. I think it is also scary that all this leads to mental fatigue and confusion "within oneself." Ivan Petrovich feels "a terrible ruin", "as if a foreign host passed through him," trampled everything down, leaving only pieces of what used to be an established life. From this disorder, he decides to leave the village.
“To feel“ bearable ”, you have to be at home,” says the main character. At home - in yourself, in your domestic economy, at home - in a hut, apartment, at home - on your native land. Having these three “houses”, a person gains confidence in life, “the firmament under his feet,” takes deep roots, protects and adorns the land on which he lives. According to V.
Rasputin, a fire is not only a natural disaster, it is also a warning. Think people! Is it necessary to ruin the native land, destroy the old, violate the laws of society and nature in order to create a new one ?!
At the end of the story, the protagonist asks the question: "What are we going to do?" - and hears Afoni's answer: "We will live ..."
And for these changes to take place, a person needs "... a home with a family, work, people with whom to rule holidays and weekdays, and the land on which your house stands."
Two feelings are marvelously close to us -
In them, the heart finds food -
Love for the native ashes,
Love for fatherly coffins.
Based on them from the ages
By the will of God himself
Self-stability of a person
The guarantee of his greatness.
A.S. Pushkin
According to the genre, VG Rasputin's story "Fire" (1985) can be defined as a parable, because the village of Sosnovka, where the action of the work takes place, is depicted by the author as a reduced model of a huge country - the Soviet Union.
The plot of the story is very simple: on a March evening in the village of loggers on the banks of the Angara, warehouses at the only village store caught fire. All residents ran to extinguish the fire, because, firstly, there was food in the warehouses and, secondly, the fire could spread to residential buildings. Thus, the story describes one event and several options for the behavior of people in the same circumstances, as it should be in a parable, where philosophical problems concerning the world and man are reflected in a simple plot. The narrative in the parable should be compressed to the limit, but the author violates this artistic principle: the main character Ivan Petrovich Egorov, being in the fire, notices important details in the behavior of people he knows and does not know, recalls his native village Egorovka and recent events from his own life. In other words, the picture of the fire is overgrown with numerous additional episodes, which deepens the content of the parable and turns the work into a socio-philosophical story-parable.
Fire refers to those dangerous situations in which the characters and relationships of people are manifested very clearly. The fire in Sosnovka divided the inhabitants of the village into three unequal groups. The first includes "fair" and honest people, making the right decisions, skillfully fighting fire, selflessly saving public good. From this group, Rasputin describes in detail Ivan Petrovich, his neighbor and fellow countryman Afonya Bronnikov, the head of the logging site Boris Timofeevich Vodnikov (it was he who turned out to be an informal leader, whose orders are carried out by people who fled to the fire), tractor driver Semyon Koltsov, "independent" (15) watchman uncle Misha Hampo. These people understand that first of all it is necessary to save not the wine department of the warehouse, not Japanese consumer goods, but products - flour, butter, sugar. They quickly and skillfully dismantle the roof of the flour warehouse in order to cut off the fire, and then, with their last strength, pull the bags out into the yard. As a result of such friendly actions, only a few people save the main food supplies.
The second group should include the confused Sosnovites, who rush about near the warehouses, pull out whatever they get from the fire and dump it all onto the dirty snow in the middle of the yard. There is little sense from such actions, because the good saved from fire still deteriorates - it is trampled into the mud. In this group was the wife of Ivan Petrovich - Alena; here you can also include the guy that Afonya Bronnikov sent for a crowbar. The guy returned quickly, without scrap, but with amazing news: the men rolled out the Ural motorcycle from the manufactured goods warehouse - the dream of any taiga worker. Quite recently, the store director Kachaev swore and swore that he did not have a motorcycle, but he himself, it turns out, was harnessing a scarce car for some right person. The outraged guy will run away without getting involved in useful work.
The third group includes those who came to the fire to “warm their hands”. These are alien shabashniks, whom Ivan Petrovich calls "arkharovtsy", and local residents who steal in the midst of a general panic. Arkharovtsy deftly knock down the locks from the wine warehouse, cheerfully save the boxes of vodka, having time to get drunk at the same time. There is little help from them in a fire, on the contrary, they need an eye and an eye so that some drunken daredevil does not burn in the fire or steal something. Ivan Petrovich did not expect anything sensible from these dissolute fellows who were not attached to anything, but he was deeply indignant when he saw a local old man, one-armed Savely, dragging a bag of flour saved from the fire into his bathhouse, and some old woman was collecting bottles with vodka, which the Arkharovtsy stole in the general turmoil and threw over the warehouse fence into the alley in reserve.
So, the inhabitants of Sosnovka did not manage to defeat the fire, save the warehouses: there were very few standing, useful people, useless - most of them, thieves and drunkards - to the offensive many. The fire showed complete discord among the Sosnovites, even in the face of common misfortune. This exhausts the content of the parable, but Rasputin does not just fix the discord, he ponders its causes. The wife of Ivan Petrovich Alyona, seeing the behavior of people at the fire, asks her husband a question: "Why are we, Ivan, such and such?" (5). This question can be clarified: why are we so socially and morally disunited, “why are there so many nerves and personal belongings in the world? And how did it happen that we surrendered at their mercy, how did it happen? " (7).
Rasputin, talking about the history of Sosnovka, discusses the moral problems of modern society. The settlement consists of residents of six villages, flooded by the reservoir of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. The settlers received new houses and jobs, but the old friendly village life in Sosnovka did not work out. Because, Rasputin believes, a person needs a sense of roots, a sense of stability, which he was deprived of with the resettlement. Residents know that in five to ten years the entire forest around will be cut clean and they will have to move to a new place. Hence the reluctance of people to equip, decorate their life: Ivan Petrovich notes that in Sosnovka, in the front gardens, no one grows flowers, few people cultivate their garden, keep cattle. Peasant thriftiness and solidity gave way to an easy, predatory attitude to life: you can buy food in a store, you don't need to save the forest around for your children and grandchildren, there is no need to hold on to the whole world either. In other words, high state authorities and people themselves mindlessly squander the wealth of the land, and at the same time lose the main moral values. As a result, the whole village could not cope with the fire, and the Arkharovtsy began to establish the rules of life in Sosnovka. “How did it happen that they took possession of the entire village? Hundreds of people in the village, and a dozen seized power ... - thinks Ivan Petrovich and answers to himself: - People scattered all in their own way even earlier "(13).
Why did it happen? Rasputin is convinced that it is not enough for a person to have a home and a job, that is, the necessary material conditions for existence; no less important for a person is the moral foundations of life. All this together Ivan Petrovich calls “the four props of a person”: “a house with a family, work, people with whom you rule holidays and weekdays together, and the land on which your house stands. All four are more important than the other. Something limps - the whole world is inclined ”(16). The validity of these arguments is confirmed by Ivan Petrovich's recollections of life in his native village - the flooded Yegorovka. Memory should be added to the “four props”, which logically follows from the memoirs of Ivan Petrovich. Memoryless people turn into Arkharovtsy, who come to the cemetery to relieve themselves.
The fire highlighted not only the moral problems of modern life, but also social ones. The blatant mismanagement of the village authorities was revealed: the only fire engine had long been dismantled for parts, fire extinguishers in store warehouses had dried up long ago, and they could not find a water truck at the right time. The head of the timber industry and the director of the store are in the city at a regular meeting. Nobody listens to the chief engineer who began to give orders on the fire, since he does not enjoy the authority of people. Unpunished theft and covetousness are created not only by the one-armed Savely, but also by the store bosses themselves: when they opened the burning warehouses, they saw deposits of such goods that had never been on the shelves. Work in the timber industry turned into a show: the Arkharovites laugh at the "hero of struggle and labor" (13) Ivan Petrovich, and at the meeting he himself demonstratively refuses the carpet - an award to the winner of socialist competition (13).
The moral climate in the village has changed: the Sosnovites have learned to look askance at anyone who "in the old fashioned way shakes his rights and repeats about his conscience" (9). Ivan Petrovich is experiencing this for himself: someone deliberately tore his front garden, another time ruined the car, and in the cutting area he barely had time to bounce off the heavy support falling on him. A hopeless, unrighteous and at the same time thoughtless life naturally leads to unrestrained drunkenness. The Arkharovtsy found time to get drunk even in the confusion of the fire, and Ivan Petrovich is amazed by the calculations of the director of the Sosnovsk school: an approximately equal number of Sosnovtsy died in four years of the Patriotic War and in the last four years of peaceful life (9). Only now people are dying not for the freedom of the Motherland, but from drunken shooting and stabbing, from drunken bathing in the river or from drunken work in a felling area, that is, due to their own negligence and carelessness.
It should be noted an important artistic feature of the story "Fire" - its journalism, which consists in the fact that the author's ideas and assessments are expressed not only through artistic images and scenes, but also openly, through direct statements. These statements are given in the story on behalf of the protagonist, but it is clear that the writer fully shares them. This refers to the reasoning of Ivan Petrovich about "easy people", about drunkenness, about changing moral guidelines in modern society, about human happiness, about a modern "good person" (16) and others. Rasputin considered it necessary to openly express his attitude to the social and moral issues raised in the work, although these journalistic judgments-interruptions violate the artistic integrity of the story, complicate the plot and weaken the compositional unity of the entire work.
Summing up the above, it is necessary to repeat that "Fire" is a socio-philosophical story-parable that presents the taiga village of Sosnovka as a Soviet society in miniature at a certain historical moment - in the 80s of the XX century. As it should be in a parable, there is no plot dynamics in the story, but there are reflections of the protagonist, developing into the author's journalistic digressions, about the order (or rather, the riots) and people in Sosnovka. In the story, Rasputin depicts not a process, but a certain result of the social and moral development of society: the fire exacerbated what had long existed in life - discord between people and in the souls of people.
The writer offers his own explanation of the social changes taking place before his eyes: the world is changing rapidly, thanks to technical progress, so the person himself inevitably changes. Rasputin understands that it is impossible to stop technical progress, but at the same time he does not want to put up with the fact that Russian people are losing their best moral qualities: collegiality, conscientiousness, understanding of nature, and truth seeking. These traits of the Russian character helped the people to survive various calamities in the past: wars, famine, ruin. Now is the time for the test of satiety and disunity. Will the Russians be able to overcome this attack? Rasputin leaves the ending of the story open: the reader himself must decide this.
