"A golden cloud spent the night", Pristavkin. Analysis of the story "A golden cloud spent the night"

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin is a representative of the generation of "children of war". And not just those living in their families in the midst of military devastation, but children from an orphanage, where everyone is for himself from childhood. The writer grew up in conditions in which it was easier to die than to survive.

This bitter childhood memory gave rise to a number of painfully truthful works describing poverty, vagrancy, hunger and the early maturation of children and adolescents of that cruel time. One of them was the story "A golden cloud spent the night", the analysis of which will be discussed below.

Prose by A. I. Pristavkin in world literature

Pristavkin's works were published in different years in Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, France, Czech Republic, Finland. In December 2001, he became an adviser to the President of the Russian Federation. The writer is a laureate of the State Prize of the USSR, as well as a number of literary Russian andforeign awards. Pristavkin was awarded the national German prize for youth literature.

His autobiographical prose is close and understandable to the young reader. In modern schools with children, not only the analysis of the work “A golden cloud spent the night” is being worked out. Other stories are included in the circle of youthful reading: “Portrait of a Father”, “Between the Lines”, “Stars”, “Shard”, “Kindred Baby”, “Doctor”, “Steps for Yourself”, “Shurka”, etc. All of them poignant, lyrical, revealing a person from the deepest, sometimes the most unexpected side.

The theme of the work

In 1981, A. Pristavkin created his most famous work, which reached the mass reader only in 1987. The analysis of the story "A golden cloud spent the night" is carried out in extracurricular reading lessons, its study is included in many author's literature programs for secondary schools. Along with the general theme of the war, the writer talks about the harsh and difficult childhood of the military generation, reflects on friendship and camaraderie, about love for his native land.

The most vivid feeling of the tragedy of life and the constant will to overcome it are seen precisely in the story “A golden cloud spent the night” (Pristavkin). The analysis of the work is carried out in the context of the drama of the difficult orphanage years, wartime, where, in spite of everything, lies a huge charge of optimism, faith in a person, his strength, stamina, reason, faith in good. The story included the development of the theme of homeless orphanage childhood, which subsequently brought Pristavkin a widefame.

The main characters of the story

The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmin, pupils of the orphanage. They go to the North Caucasus, where they subsequently find themselves drawn into the terrible, even tragic realities of the mass migration of the North Caucasian peoples. It was undertaken in our country in 1943-1944. This is how the description of the boys begins in the story “A Golden Cloud Spent the Night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of which follows below: “… The brothers were called Kuzmyonyshi, they were eleven years old, and they lived in an orphanage near Moscow. There, the life of the guys revolved around the found frozen potato, rotten potato peelings and, like the pinnacle of desire and dream, a bread crust, just to exist, to wrest an extra war day from fate.”

Moving and road theme

At the beginning of the story, the director of the orphanage invites the brothers to go to the Caucasus, which has just been liberated from the Germans. Naturally, the guys were attracted by adventure, and they did not miss this opportunity. And so the brothers go through the war, completely destroyed and the land that has not yet had time to rise after the fascist raids on an amazing, insanely fun train.

The theme of the road in his work is not accidentally touched upon by A. Pristavkin. “A golden cloud spent the night”, the analysis of which includes the problems of the road and the life path of the heroes, is a story-remembrance. The author complains: “There were half a thousand of us in that composition! Hundreds then, right before my eyes, have already begun to disappear,simply die in that distant new land where we were brought at that time.”

Even on the way of the twin brothers to the Caucasus, a strange, ominous meeting took place - on the neighboring tracks at one of the stations Kolka Kuzmyonysh found wagons. Black-eyed children's faces looked out of the barred windows, hands were stretched out, incomprehensible cries were heard. Kolka, not really understanding that they are asking for a drink, hands out blackthorn berries to someone. Only a homeless boy abandoned by everyone is capable of such a touching, sincere impulse. The description of the child's soul torn to pieces runs through the whole story, complementing its literary analysis. “A golden cloud spent the night” (Pristavkin) is a contradictory story, where parallels are drawn between essentially opposite phenomena.

Science of Survival: Children's Eyes on Warfare

During the war years, hunger overtook both children and adults, but for people like Kuzmyonyshi, orphanage orphans, food was the main dominant of life. Hunger drives the actions of the brothers, pushes them to theft, to desperate and cunning actions, sharpens the senses and imagination.

Kuzmenyshi comprehend the science of survival, so they have a special system of values - counted "from the meal." And contact with adults begins with this: you didn’t take it away, but fed it, which means it’s good, you can trust. In the story “A Golden Cloud Spent the Night,” the analysis is based on the vision of military reality and the people in it with children's eyes.

Dramatic twist in fateheroes

It was difficult for the little Kuzmens to figure out what was happening around, what they were eyewitnesses to. When the worst happened to Kolka (he saw his brother killed, hung by the armpits on the edge of the fence, and fell ill from shock), then Sashka's place was taken by the same eleven-year-old orphan Alkhuzor - a Chechen.

Kolka calls him her brother, first to save him from Russian soldiers, and then out of a deeper feeling, when Alkhuzor saved Kolka from a Chechen gun aimed at him. This is the brotherhood of children and ex alts A. Pristavkin.

"A golden cloud spent the night": analysis

The main leitmotif of the work is the friendship of lonely children who are in danger from everywhere, but who defend their right to love and affection with all their might. Kolka and Alkhuzor were not the only ones in the orphanage where they were taken, having been picked up half-dead in the mountains. The Crimean Tatar Musa, the German Lida Gross “from the big river”, and the Nogai Balbek already lived there. They all had a common bitter and terrible share.

Children from orphanages, abandoned by the war in the Caucasian regions far from their native places, are tragically faced with what they are not yet able to understand, to understand - with an attempt by a totalitarian system to exterminate the life of entire peoples. That's what "red thread" runs through the story, complementing its analysis.

“A golden cloud spent the night” (Pristavkin) is a story in which constantly hungry, ragged, ignorant of warmth and home comfort, the boys learn from their own bitterest experience the price of severe social injustice. They learn the lessons of spiritual warmth, blackhuman hatred and unexpected mercy, cruelty and great spiritual brotherhood. The history of the Tomilinsky orphanage is only a small part of this tragic and inhuman process. But even in such cruel conditions, the colonists received lessons in eternal values: morality, kindness, justice, compassion.

Link of times

The main characters of the story, Sashka and Kolka Kuzmina, go through many adventures and difficulties. In them - street children - the features of early growing up are manifested, which is so characteristic of the entire generation of children of the 1940s, who were faced with problems that were not at all childish. The story leaves a feeling of the indissoluble unity of the child with the adult world.

If you touch more deeply on the work “A golden cloud spent the night” (Pristavkin), the analysis of the story should be completed by indicating the main idea. In his story, Anatoly Pristavkin tries to show that the war and everything connected with it did not grow past. “I will not hide,” the author writes, “more than once the thought came that they are alive, that somewhere there are all these people who, without thought and fear from His (Stalin’s) name, were doing His will.”

Conclusion

Having told the truth, exposing it in all its terrible guise, the writer may have removed some of the burden from his own soul, but he definitely did not lighten the souls of the readers. Although this is the whole A. Pristavkin (“A golden cloud spent the night”) - everyone has his own analysis of his works, this is what the author sought. According to the writer, the meaning of real literature is not to delight the ear, not to “inspirea golden dream, but in every possible way encourage the reader to think, feel, sympathize and draw conclusions. The book encourages spiritual work, to the birth of doubts within oneself, to a reassessment of the familiar world. It serves not only as a description of "that present", but also as a warning to the future.