Non-military themes of wartime in the works by A. A. Plastov

The author explores the problem of the content of works by Soviet artists during the Great Patriotic War. Theanalysis covers themes not directly related to the battle narrative, but abstractly narrating about the disasters and horrors of military confrontation. The question is raised about the origin of the leitmotif of peasant ore in the paintings of Arkady Aleksandrovich Plastov, even in those works that were painted in 1941–1945. The world of nature and everyday field concerns, the vulnerability of the fragile beauty of village life, is opposed to the universal malice embodied in the master’s most famous canvas, "The Fascist Flew By", in the form of a retreating enemy plane. The rejection of death as an unnatural process intruding into the measured flow of children’s life testifies to the deeply humanistic worldview of the Soviet man. The revival, a new round of creative activity of A.A. Plastov, falls on the post-war years. The article considers the possibility of subjecting the "simple" plots of the paintings of a rural artist to a cultural-philosophical analysis based on the realities of war, its machinery, and technical features of aviation in the mid-20th century. The machine turns into a symbol of grief and suffering, deprives people of humanity, becomes an intermediary in along technological chain of mass murder, replacing rational reflection of moral and ethical actions with blind manipulations of technical means of warfare. The anti-fascist pathos of works of Soviet art is due to the personal experience of artists – either eyewitnesses of the events of those distant years, or contemporaries of historical vicissitudes and social catastrophes of the last century. The inclusion of peaceful themes in the agenda of domestic artistic culture is due to the rejection of war as a social evil that brings destruction to the processes of building a developed socialist state.