Other characters
Maria Sintsova is Ivan’s wife, a desperate woman who decided to go to the front.
Fedor Fedorovich Serpilin is a general, a military man with extensive experience, and a deeply decent person.
Tanya Ovsyannikova is a fragile girl, a military doctor, very brave and cold-blooded.
Zolotarev is a young guy, a Red Army soldier, Sintsov’s comrade in arms.
Alexey Denisovich Malinin is an experienced personnel officer, political instructor, a person who took an active part in the fate of Sintsov.
Summary
Chapter 1
The news of the start of the war took “the Sintsov family by surprise, like millions of other families.” Ivan and his wife Masha had just arrived on vacation in Crimea when news of the attack by the fascist invaders became known. The situation was very serious - “their one-year-old daughter remained there, in Grodno, next to the war.”
Masha could not forgive herself for leaving her daughter. It was decided that she would remain in the Moscow apartment, where her mother and granddaughter were to return, and Sintsov would try to get to Grodno earlier and pick them up.
Only military personnel were allowed on the train to Minsk, and Sintsov, being the secretary of the army newspaper, received a ticket. Having reached the place, he found himself in the thick of things - “everything was mixed up and moved from its place.” All routes to Grodno were cut off, and it was impossible to find out about the fate of the daughter and mother-in-law.
After five days of wandering under bombing, Sintsov finally arrived at the unit and was glad that “he could not look for anything else, stay here, receive orders, do what he went to war for.” He was terribly tormented by the thought that now the chances of finding his daughter or getting news about her were negligible.
Chapter 2
The next day, Sintsov, together with junior political instructor Lyusin, went to distribute a front-line newspaper. Journalists witnessed an air battle between Soviet "hawks" and German "Messerschmitts" and the crash of a downed bomber.
Journalists went in search and were able to save the two pilots. Sintsov, who received a through wound, was taken to the hospital.
Chapter 3
Returning to the front two weeks later, Sintsov decided to go to the location of Fedor Fedorovich Serpilin’s regiment, where several dozen German tanks were knocked out. On the way, he met “a classmate from KIZH, the famous Moscow photo reporter Mishka Weinstein.”
Chapter 4
“While Mishka was filming, Sintsov was wandering around the tanks,” memorizing everything he saw. Serpilin wanted to quickly get rid of the correspondents, and Sintsov realized that an important battle was soon ahead. He asked the brigade commander to stay, and he began to dissuade him, because he knew that fierce fighting would soon begin in the encirclement. Sintsov insisted and stayed, but Mishka Weinstein hurried to the Moscow editorial office and was killed on the way.
Chapter 5
Serpilin “was a man with one of those biographies that breaks but does not bend.” He was a service man in the full sense of the word - he went through the First World War and the Civil War, commanding regiments and divisions. Until his arrest in 1937, he lectured at the Academy. Frunze. Then he spent four years in a camp in Kolyma on charges of “propaganda of the superiority of the fascist army.”
However, the monstrous injustice did not change Serpilin’s attitude towards Soviet power. He considered his conclusion to be some kind of unfortunate mistake and, upon returning home on the first day of the war, he went to the front.
Soon the Germans “broke through the front both to the left and to the right of Mogilev.” Having cut off three regiments of the division from each other, they began to methodically destroy them. The command staff began to thin out before our eyes, and Serpilin appointed Sintsov as a political instructor in the company of Lieutenant Khoryshev. Now “they no longer expected him to describe how others fought, but they expected him to fight like others.”
With the help of aviation, the Germans decided “to mix Serpilin’s regiment into the ground without loss to themselves.” Huge losses forced Serpilin to begin a breakthrough. Six hundred people were under his command. Serpilin appointed Sintsov as his adjutant so that he would keep “a daily strict count of people, both departing and arriving.”
Chapter 6
After a fierce night battle, only one and a half hundred fighters remained from the Serpilinsky regiment. Soon they were joined by a group of soldiers who managed to save the division’s banner, as well as artillerymen with a gun and a female military doctor - she was “young and so tiny that she seemed like just a girl.”
Colonel Baranov was brought to Serpilin, who had no documents with him. Serpilin was a classmate of Baranov, but without a shadow of a doubt he demoted him to the ranks of soldiers, since he realized that he had deliberately destroyed documents and was fleeing from the Germans.
Chapter 7
Under the leadership of Serpilin, the group was able to fight through to the location of the tank brigade and “Serpilin was wounded in both legs in the last battle.” After he was taken to the hospital, the captured weapons were taken away from the soldiers and sent to the rear.
Chapter 8
On the way to the Yukhnovskoe highway, the column was divided into two parts by a bomb explosion, dividing “everyone, or almost everyone, into the living and the dead.” The cut off part of the column was fired upon by German tanks and armored personnel carriers. Sintsov was riding in a car with the young Red Army soldier Zolotarev and the little doctor Tanya Ovsyannikova, who was suffering from a fever.
Chapter 9
Sintsov, Zolotarev and Tanya “walked through a dense forest, about fifty kilometers from the scene of the disaster.” In addition to the high temperature, the doctor had a dislocated leg, and the men took turns carrying her. They managed to place the sick doctor with decent people, and then they continued on their way.
Zolotarev and Sintsov came under fire, and Sintsov was wounded in the head. Then “Zolotarev put his unconscious body on his shoulders and walked forward, towards the sound of the machine gun.” Realizing that he still couldn’t get his comrade, the Red Army soldier took off Sintsov’s tunic, took his documents and went in search of help. He managed to get to his own, but by that time the place where Sintsov remained was already occupied by the Germans.
Chapter 10
When he came to, he could not understand “how long he lay unconscious, five minutes or an hour.” Trying to get his bearings, he was captured by the Germans. At the first opportunity, during the bombing, Sintsov managed to escape to his own.
Sintsov ended up at the location of the construction battalion, where they were wary of his story about the lost documents. He decided to go to the “Special Department - that’s exactly the place where you need to go, since they don’t believe him.” Sintsov got to the last checkpoint by hitchhiking, but then was forced to get to Moscow on his own.
Chapter 11
Since mid-July, Masha studied at a communications school, where she was trained for sabotage work behind German lines. On October 16, she went to Moscow to get her things so that she could soon begin the task. By that time, the city was in the grip of panic: the Germans had come very close.
In the apartment, Masha saw Sintsov, who was “sleeping in a dead sleep, not moving, breathing heavily, breathing with a cold.” At the sight of her husband, alive and unharmed, Masha began to cry with happiness.
Chapter 12
Sintsov told his wife about everything that he had experienced since the day of their separation - “he told her everything, without sparing her, just as the war did not spare him.” The next morning Masha went to school, and soon she was transferred to the German rear.
Chapter 13
Sintsov went to the district committee to resolve the issue with the lost documents. He was very lucky, and his case was taken over by an experienced personnel officer, Alexey Denisovich Malinin, who enjoyed great authority in the district committee.
Malinin invited Sintsov to enlist in a volunteer communist battalion, and after some paperwork, Sintsov again went to the front.
Chapter 14
Malinin was appointed political instructor of the company, and he insisted that Sintsov be included here, who, “as it soon became clear, turned out to be an experienced man and knew how to handle weapons.”
There were continuous battles near Moscow, but over time the situation began to stabilize. During the next shelling, a German shell hit the unfinished brick factory where the company was located. Malinin survived because he was covered with bricks a couple of seconds before the explosion. At that time, Sintsov was installing a machine gun on a factory chimney. Together with Malinin, he began to repel German infantry attacks one after another.
Chapter 15
During the parade on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution, Serpilin learned that Sintsov had gone missing and most likely died. However, Sintsov himself was present at the same parade, and for his bravery he received the rank of junior lieutenant and an order. Malinin promised him “before future battles, he will apply for reinstatement in the party.”
Chapter 16
Members of the regiment's party bureau believed Sintsov's story about the circumstances under which he lost his documents. They “gave him a severe reprimand for losing his party card” and told him to apply for a new one. Sintsov was sure that the matter had been settled, and did not even realize that “the issue of issuing him a new party card did not pass through the regiment’s bureau as smoothly as it seemed to him.” For his part, Malinin did everything possible to help Sintsov with his problem.
Chapter 17
“Serpilin was assigned to the front only after the second medical commission,” taking the place of the tragically deceased general. He goes to the site of the fighting and on the way passes by Malinin and Sintsov, who were going on the offensive.
Chapter 18
Serpilin gets up to speed on things at the front and learns that “things leave much to be desired. The skill of commanders lags behind the morale of the troops.”
Before the offensive, several party tickets were brought, but among them there was no ticket for Sintsov. The angry Malinin “with great difficulty took ten minutes and wrote a short letter about Sintsov directly to the political department of the army,” in which he sharply expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the issue of a party card was delayed for an excellent fighter.
Chapter 19
At the very beginning of the fierce battle, “a bullet hit Malinin in the stomach.” He never had time to say goodbye to Sintsov and tell him about his letter to the political department - Sintsov knew about the injury of his senior comrade, but “he could not leave his position without an order.” The battle resumed, and at dawn Malinin, along with other wounded, was sent to the rear.
Malinin worried in vain: the divisional party commission had already found out all the details regarding the Sintsov case, and the issue of his reinstatement in the party was successfully resolved.
Serpilin's regiments managed to liberate Voskresenskoye station, after which they moved on. Due to large losses in the command staff, Sintsov was appointed platoon commander. Despite the first victories, it was difficult for him to come to terms with the idea that “there was still a whole war ahead”...
Simonov "The Living and the Dead" - summary
Simonov
- all works
On the twenty-fifth of June 1941, Masha Artemyeva saw off her husband Ivan Sintsov to the war. Sintsov travels to Grodno, where their one-year-old daughter remained and where he himself served as secretary of the editorial office of an army newspaper for a year and a half. Situated close to the border, Grodno is included in reports from the very first days, and it is not possible to get to the city. On the way to Mogilev, where the Front Political Directorate is located, Sintsov sees many deaths, comes under bombing several times, and even keeps records of interrogations carried out by the temporarily created “troika”. Having reached Mogilev, he goes to the printing house, and the next day, together with the junior political instructor Lyusin, he goes to distribute a front-line newspaper. At the entrance to the Bobruisk Highway, journalists witness an air battle between a trio of “hawks” and significantly superior German forces and then try to provide assistance to our pilots from a downed bomber. As a result, Lyusin is forced to remain in the tank brigade, and the wounded Sintsov ends up in the hospital for two weeks. When he checks out, it turns out that the editorial office has already managed to leave Mogilev. Sintsov decides that he can return to his newspaper only if he has good material on his hands. By chance, he learns about thirty-nine German tanks, knocked out during the battle in the regiment of Fedor Fedorovich Serpilin, and goes to the 176th division, where he unexpectedly meets his old friend, photo reporter Mishka Weinstein. Having met brigade commander Serpilin, Sintsov decides to stay in his regiment. Serpilin tries to dissuade Sintsov, because he knows that he is doomed to fight surrounded if the order to retreat does not come in the coming hours. Nevertheless, Sintsov remains, and Mishka leaves for Moscow and dies on the way.
...The war brings Sintsov together with a man of tragic fate. Serpilin ended the civil war, commanding a regiment near Perekop, and until his arrest in 1937, he lectured at the Academy. Frunze. He was accused of promoting the superiority of the fascist army and exiled to a camp in Kolyma for four years.
However, this did not shake Serpilin’s faith in Soviet power. The brigade commander considers everything that happened to him an absurd mistake, and the years spent in Kolyma were wasted. Freed thanks to the efforts of his wife and friends, he returns to Moscow on the first day of the war and goes to the front, without waiting for either recertification or reinstatement in the party.
The 176th Division covers Mogilev and the bridge over the Dnieper, so the Germans throw significant forces against it. Before the start of the battle, Divisional Commander Zaichikov came to Serpilin’s regiment and was soon seriously wounded. The battle lasts three days; The Germans manage to cut off three regiments of the division from each other, and they begin to destroy them one by one. Due to losses in the command staff of Serp%E
