And Bunin’s main themes of creativity. Life and work of Bunin IA
1870 , October 10 (22) - born in Voronezh into the old impoverished noble family of the Bunins. He spent his childhood on the Butyrki farm in the Oryol province.
1881 - enters the Yeletsk gymnasium, but, without completing four classes, continues his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius, an exiled Narodnaya Volya member.
1887 – the first poems “The Village Beggar” and “Over the Grave of Nadson” are published in the patriotic newspaper “Rodina”.
1889 - moves to Oryol, begins working as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, and newspaper reporter.
1890 - Bunin, having independently studied English language, translates G. Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”
1891 – the collection “Poems of 1887-1891” is published in Orel.
1892
– Bunin, together with his common-law wife V.V. Pashchenko, moves to Poltava, where he serves in the city land administration. Articles, essays, and stories by Bunin appear in the local newspaper.
In 1892–94 Bunin's poems and stories begin to be published in metropolitan magazines.
1893–1894 – Bunin is greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, who is perceived by him as a “demigod”, the highest embodiment of artistic power and moral dignity; The apotheosis of this attitude would later become Bunin’s religious and philosophical treatise “The Liberation of Tolstoy” (Paris, 1937).
1895 – Bunin leaves the service and leaves for St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, meets N.K. Mikhailovsky, A.P. Chekhov, K.D. Balmont, V.Ya. Bryusov, V.G. Korolenko, A.I. Kuprin etc. Initially friendly relations with Balmont and Bryusov in the early 1900s. acquired a hostile character, and until recent years Bunin's life was extremely harsh in his assessment of the work and personalities of these poets.
1897 – release of Bunin’s book “To the End of the World” and other stories.”
1898 - collection of poems "Under the Open Air".
1906 – acquaintance with V.N. Muromtseva (1881–1961), future wife and author of the book “The Life of Bunin.”
1907 – travel to Egypt, Syria, Palestine. The result of his trips to the East is the series of essays “Temple of the Sun” (1907–1911)
1909 – The Academy of Sciences elects Bunin as an honorary academician. During a trip to Italy, Bunin visits Gorky, who then lived on the island. Capri.
1910 - Bunin’s first big work comes out, which became an event in literary and public life, - the story "Village".
1912
– the collection “Sukhodol. Tales and Stories” is published.
Subsequently, other collections were published (“John the Rydalec. Stories and Poems of 1912-1913,” 1913; “The Cup of Life. Stories of 1913-1914,” 1915; “The Gentleman from San Francisco. Works of 1915-1916.” , 1916).
1917 – Bunin is hostile to the October Revolution. Writes a diary-pamphlet “Cursed Days”.
1920 – Bunin emigrates to France. Here he is in 1927-33. working on the novel "The Life of Arsenyev".
1925–1927
– Bunin writes a regular political and literary column in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie.
In the second half of the 20s, Bunin experienced his “ last love" She became the poetess Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova.
1933
, November 9 - Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated the typical Russian character in artistic prose."
By the end of the 30s. Bunin increasingly feels the drama of the break with his homeland and avoids direct political statements about the USSR. He sharply condemns fascism in Germany and Italy.
World War 2 period– Bunin in Grasse, in the south of France. He greets victory with great joy.
Post-war period– Bunin returns to Paris. He is no longer an adamant opponent of the Soviet regime, but he also does not recognize the changes that have occurred in Russia. In Paris, Ivan Alekseevich visits the Soviet ambassador and gives an interview to the newspaper “Soviet Patriot”.
In recent years he has been living in great poverty, starving. During these years, Bunin created a cycle of short stories “Dark Alleys” (New York, 1943, in its entirety – Paris, 1946), published a book about Leo Tolstoy (“The Liberation of Tolstoy”, Paris, 1937), “Memoirs” (Paris, 1950) etc.
1953 , November 8 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin dies in Paris, becomes the first emigration writer, who in 1954 begins to be published again in his homeland.
1. Childhood and youth. First publications.
2. Family life and creativity of Bunin.
3. Emigrant period. Nobel Prize.
4. The significance of Bunin’s work in literature.
Can we forget our Motherland?
Can a person forget his homeland?
She is in the soul. I am a very Russian person.
This does not disappear over the years.
I. A. Bunin
I. A. Bunin was born in Voronezh on October 10, 1870. Bunin's father Alexei Nikolaevich, a landowner in the Oryol and Tula provinces, a participant in the Crimean War, went bankrupt because of his love for cards. The impoverished nobles Bunins had ancestors such as the poetess A.P. Bunina and V.A. Zhukovsky’s own father, A.I. Bunin. At the age of three, the boy was transported to an estate on the Butyrki farm in the Yeletsky district of the Oryol province; the memories of his childhood are closely connected with him.
From 1881 to 1886, Bunin studied at the Yelets Gymnasium, from where he was expelled for failing to appear during the holidays. He did not finish high school, receiving home education under the guidance of his brother Julius. Already at the age of seven he wrote poetry, imitating Pushkin and Lermontov. In 1887, his poem “Over the Grave of Nadson” was first published in the newspaper “Rodina”, and they began to publish it critical articles. His older brother Julius became his best friend, mentor in study and life.
In 1889, Bunin moved to his brother in Kharkov, who was associated with the populist movement. Having become carried away by this movement, Ivan soon leaves the populists and returns to Oryol. He does not share Julius' radical views. Works at Orlovsky Vestnik, lives in civil marriage with V.V. Pashchenko. Bunin's first book of poems appeared in 1891. These were poems filled with passion for Pashchenko - Bunin was experiencing his unhappy love. At first, Varvara’s father forbade them to marry, then Bunin had to recognize many disappointments in family life and become convinced of the complete dissimilarity of their characters. Soon he settled in Poltava with Yuli, and in 1894 he broke up with Pashchenko. The period of creative maturity of the writer begins. Bunin's stories are published in leading magazines. He corresponds with A.P. Chekhov, is carried away by the moral and religious preaching of L.N. Tolstoy and even meets with the writer, trying to live according to his advice.
In 1896, a translation of “The Song of Hiawatha” by G. W. Longfellow was published, which received high praise from his contemporaries (Bunin received the Pushkin Prize of the first degree for it). Especially for this work, he independently studied English.
In 1898, Bunin remarried the Greek woman A. N. Tsakni, the daughter of an emigrant revolutionary. A year later they divorced (Bunin’s wife left him, causing him suffering). Their only son died at age five from scarlet fever. His creative life much richer than the family - Bunin translates Tennyson's poem "Lady Godiva" and "Manfred" by Byron, Alfred de Musset and Francois Coppet. At the beginning of the 20th century, the most famous stories were published - “Antonov Apples”, “Pines”, the prose poem “Village”, the story “Sukhodol”. Thanks to the story “Antonov Apples,” Bunin became widely known. It so happened that for the topic of ruining noble nests, which was close to Bunin, he was subjected to a critical review by M. Gorky: “Antonov apples smell good, but they do not smell democratic at all.” Bunin was alien to his commoner contemporaries, who perceived his story as a poeticization of serfdom. In fact, the writer poeticized his attitude towards the fading past, towards nature, native land.
In 1909, Bunin became an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. A lot has also changed in his personal life - he met V.N. Muromtseva at the age of thirty-seven, finally creating a happy family. The Bunins travel through Syria, Egypt, and Palestine; based on their travel impressions, Bunin writes the book “Shadow of the Bird.” Then - a trip to Europe, again to Egypt and Ceylon. Bunin reflects on the teachings of Buddha, which is close to him, but with many of whose postulates he does not agree. The collections “Sukhodol: Tales and Stories 1911 - 1912”, “John the Rydalec: Stories and Poems 1912-1913”, “The Gentleman from San Francisco: Works 1915-1916”, a six-volume collected works were published.
The First World War was for the writer the beginning of the collapse of Russia. He expected a disaster from the Bolshevik victory. October Revolution he did not accept, all thoughts about the coup are reflected by the writer in his diary “Cursed Days” (he is depressed by what is happening). Unable to imagine their existence in Bolshevik Russia, the Bunins left Moscow for Odessa, and then emigrated to France - first to Paris, and then to Grasse. The unsociable Bunin had almost no contact with Russian emigrants, but this did not hinder his creative inspiration - ten books of prose were the fruitful result of his work in exile. They included: “Rose of Jericho”, “Sunstroke”, “Mitya’s Love” and other works. Like many books by emigrants, they were imbued with homesickness. Bunin’s books contain nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, a different world that remains forever in the past. Bunin also headed the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in Paris and ran his own column in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie.
While emigrating, Bunin was overtaken by an unexpected feeling - he met his last love, G.N. Kuznetsova. She lived with the Bunin couple in Grasse for many years, helping Ivan Alekseevich as a secretary. Vera Nikolaevna had to put up with this; she considered Kuznetsova to be something like an adopted daughter. Both women valued Bunin and agreed to live voluntarily under such conditions. Also, the young writer L. F. Zurov lived with his family for about twenty years. Bunin had to support four.
In 1927, work began on the novel “The Life of Arsenyev,” Kuznetsova helped Ivan Alekseevich in rewriting. After seven years of living in Grasse, she left. The novel was completed in 1933. This is a fictional autobiography with many real and fictional characters. Memory, which travels the length of the hero’s life, is the main theme of the novel. “Stream of consciousness” is a feature of this novel that makes the author similar to M. J. Proust.
In 1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize “for the rigorous skill with which he developed the traditions of Russian classical prose” and “for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated the typically Russian character in artistic prose.” This was the first prize for a Russian writer, especially an exiled writer. The emigration considered Bunin's success to be theirs; the writer allocated 100 thousand francs in favor of Russian emigrant writers. But many were unhappy that they were given no more. Few people thought about the fact that Bunin himself lived in unbearable conditions, and when the telegram about the bonus arrived, he didn’t even have a tip for the postman, and the bonus he received was only enough for two years. At the request of readers, Bunin published an eleven-volume collected works in 1934-1936.
In Bunin's prose, a special place was occupied by the theme of love - the unexpected element of “sunstroke” that cannot be withstood. In 1943, a collection of love stories was published. Dark alleys" This is the pinnacle of the writer's creativity.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a very extraordinary personality and in many ways turned the course of development of everything around literary world. Of course, many critics with their characteristic skepticism regard the achievements of the great author, but to deny his significance in all Russian literature It's simply impossible. Like any poet or writer, the secrets of creating great and memorable works are closely connected with the biography of Ivan Alekseevich himself, and his rich and multifaceted life largely influenced both his immortal lines and all Russian literature in general.Brief Biography of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
The future poet and writer, but for now just young Vanya Bunin, was lucky to be born into a fairly decent and wealthy family of a noble noble family, who had the honor of living in a luxurious noble estate, which fully corresponded to the status of the noble family of his family. Also in early childhood the family decided to move from Voronezh to the Oryol province, where Ivan spent his early years, without attending any educational institutions until the age of eleven, the boy successfully studied at home, read books and improved his knowledge, delving into good, high-quality and educational literature. In 1881, at the request of his parents, Ivan nevertheless entered a decent gymnasium, however, studying at educational institution did not bring the boy any pleasure at all - already in the fourth grade, during the holidays, he declared that he did not want to return to school, and that studying at home was much more pleasant and productive for him. He nevertheless returned to the gymnasium - perhaps this was due to the desire of his father, an officer, perhaps a simple desire to gain knowledge and be brought up in a team, but already in 1886 Ivan still returned home, but did not give up his education - now his teacher, mentor and leader Elder brother Julius became involved in the educational process, and he followed the successes of the future famous Nobel laureate.
Ivan began writing poetry at a very early age, but then he himself, being well-read and educated, understood that such creativity was not serious. At the age of seventeen, his creativity moved to a new level, and that’s when the poet realized that he needed to become one of the people, and not put his works of art on the table.
Already in 1887, Ivan Alekseevich published his works for the first time, and, satisfied with himself, the poet moved to Orel, where he successfully got a job as a proofreader in a local newspaper, gaining access to interesting and sometimes classified information and ample opportunities for development. It is here that he meets Varvara Pashchenko, with whom he falls madly in love, together with her he abandons everything that he has acquired through back-breaking labor, contradicts the opinions of his parents and others, and moves to Poltava.
The poet meets and communicates with many famous personalities - for example, for quite a long time he was with the already famous Anton Chekhov at that time, with whom, in 1895, Ivan Alekseevich was lucky enough to meet personally. In addition to personal acquaintance with an old pen pal, Ivan Bunin makes acquaintances and finds common interests and common ground with Balmont, Bryusov and many other talented minds of his time.
Happy and measured family life did not at all prevent the poet and writer from traveling a lot, getting to know new cities and countries, recording his impressions on paper and sharing his emotions with his surroundings. The trips that took place during these years of the writer’s life were largely reflected in his creative path- Bunin often created his works either on the road or at the time of arrival at a new place - in any case, creativity and travel were inextricably and tightly linked.
Bunin. Confession
Bunin was nominated for a surprising number of various awards in the field of literature, thanks to which at a certain period he was even subjected to straightforward condemnations and harsh criticism from others - many began to notice the writer’s arrogance and inflated self-esteem, however, in fact, Bunin’s creativity and talent were quite corresponded to his ideas about himself. Bunin was even awarded Nobel Prize in the field of literature, but he did not spend the money he received on himself - already living abroad in exile or getting rid of the Bolshevik culture, the writer helped the same creative people, poets and writers, as well as people, just like him, who fled the country .Bunin and his wife were distinguished by their kindness and open hearts - it is known that during the war years they even hid fugitive Jews on their plot, protecting them from repression and extermination. Today there are even opinions that Bunin should be given high awards and titles for many of his actions related to humanity, kindness and humanism.
Almost all of his adult life after the Revolution, Ivan Alekseevich spoke quite sharply about new government, thanks to which he ended up abroad - he could not tolerate everything that was happening in the country. Of course, after the war his ardor cooled down a little, but, nevertheless, until his very last days, the poet worried about his country and knew that something was wrong in it.
The poet died calmly and quietly in his sleep in his own bed. They say that next to him at the time of his death was a volume of a book by Leo Tolstoy.
The memory of the great literary figure, poet and writer is immortalized not only in his famous works, which are passed down from generation to generation in school textbooks and a variety of literary publications. The memory of Bunin lives in the names of streets, crossroads, alleys and in every monument erected in memory of the great personality who created real changes in all Russian literature and pushed it to a completely new, progressive and modern level.
Works of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
The creativity of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is that necessary component, without which today it is simply impossible to imagine not only domestic, but also the entire world literature. It was he who made his constant contribution to the creation of works, a new, fresh look at the world and endless horizons, from which poets and writers around the world still take their example. Oddly enough, today the work of Ivan Bunin is much more revered abroad; for some reason he has not received such wide recognition in his homeland, even despite the fact that his works are quite actively studied in schools from the earliest grades. His works have absolutely everything that a lover of exquisite, beautiful style, unusual play on words, bright and pure images and new, fresh and still relevant ideas are looking for.
Bunin, with his characteristic skill, describes his own feelings - here even the most experienced reader understands what exactly the author felt at the moment of creating this or that work - the experiences are so vividly and openly described. For example, one of Bunin’s poems talks about a difficult and painful parting with his beloved, after which all that remains is to make a faithful friend - a dog that will never betray, and succumb to reckless drunkenness, ruining oneself without stopping.
Women's images in Bunin's works are described especially vividly - each heroine of his works is depicted in the reader's mind in such detail that one gets the impression of personal acquaintance with this or that woman.
The main distinguishing feature of the entire work of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is the universality of his works. Representatives of the most different classes and interests can find something close and dear, and his works will captivate both experienced readers and those who have taken up the study of Russian literature for the first time in their lives.
Bunin wrote about absolutely everything that surrounded him, and in most cases the themes of his works coincided with different periods of his life. Early works often described the village simple life, native spaces and surrounding nature. During the Revolution, the writer, naturally, described everything that was happening in his beloved country - this is what became the real heritage not only of the Russian classical literature, but also all national history.
Ivan Alekseevich wrote about himself and his life, described his own feelings passionately and in detail, often plunged into the past and recalled pleasant and negative moments, trying to understand himself and at the same time convey to the reader a deep and truly great thought. There is a lot of tragedy in his lines, especially for love works - here the writer saw tragedy in love and death in it.
The main themes in Bunin's works were:
Revolution and life before and after it
Love and all its tragedy
The world surrounding the writer himself
Of course, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin left a contribution of unimaginable proportions to Russian literature, which is why his legacy is still alive today, and the number of his admirers never decreases, but, on the contrary, is actively progressing.
Works of Ivan Bunin (1870-1953)
- The beginning of Bunin's work
- Bunin's love lyrics
- Bunin's peasant lyrics
- Analysis of the story “Antonov Apples”
- Bunin and revolution
- Analysis of the story “Village”
- Analysis of the story “Sukhodol”
- Analysis of the story “Mr. from San Francisco”
- Analysis of the story “Chang's Dreams”
- Analysis of the story “Easy Breathing”
- Analysis of the book “Cursed Days”
- Emigration of Bunin
- Foreign prose of Bunin
- Analysis of the story “Sunstroke”
- Analysis of the collection of stories “Dark Alleys”
- Analysis of the story “Clean Monday”
- Analysis of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev”
- Bunin's life in France
- Bunin and the Great Patriotic War
- Bunin's loneliness in exile
- Bunin's death
- The beginning of Bunin's work
The creative path of the outstanding Russian prose writer and poet of the late 19th - first half of the 20th centuries, a recognized classic of Russian literature and its first Nobel laureate I. A. Bunin is distinguished by great complexity, understanding which is not an easy task, because the writer’s fate and books were refracted in their own way the fate of Russia and its people, the most acute conflicts and contradictions of the time.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 10 (22), 1870 in Voronezh, into an impoverished noble family. He spent his childhood on the Butyrki farm in the Yelets district of the Oryol province.
Communication with the peasants, with his first educator, home teacher N. Romashkov, who instilled in the boy a love of fine literature, painting and music, life among nature gave the future writer inexhaustible material for creativity, and determined the themes of many of his works.
Studies at the Yeletsk gymnasium, where Bunin entered in 1881, were interrupted due to financial need and illness.
He completed his high school course in science at home, in the Yelets village of Ozerki, under the guidance of his brother Julius, a well-educated man distinguished by his democratic views.
In the fall of 1889, Bunin began collaborating with the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik, then lived for some time in Poltava, where, by his own admission, “he corresponded a lot to newspapers, studied hard, wrote…”.
A special place in the life of young Bunin is occupied by a deep feeling for Varvara Pashchenko, the daughter of an Yelets doctor, whom he met in the summer of 1889.
The writer would later tell the story of his love for this woman, complex and painful, ending in a complete break in 1894, in the story “Lika,” which formed the final part of his autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev.”
Bunin began his literary activity as a poet. In poems written in his adolescence, he imitated Pushkin, Lermontov, as well as the idol of the youth of that time, the poet Nadson. In 1891, the first book of poems was published in Orel, in 1897 - the first collection of stories “To the End of the World”, and in 1901 - again the collection of poems “Falling Leaves”.
The predominant motifs of Bunin's poetry of the 90s - early 900s are the rich world of native nature and human feelings. In landscape poems it is expressed life philosophy author.
The motif of the frailty of human existence, sounding in a number of the poet’s poems, is balanced by the opposite motif - the affirmation of the eternity and incorruptibility of nature.
My spring will pass, and this day will pass,
But it's fun to wander around and know that everything passes,
Meanwhile, the happiness of living will never die, -
he exclaims in the poem “Forest Road”.
In Bunin's poems, unlike the decadents, there is no pessimism, disbelief in life, or aspiration to “other worlds.” They contain the joy of being, a feeling of the beauty and life-giving power of nature and the surrounding world, the colors and colors of which the poet strives to reflect and capture.
In the poem “Falling Leaves” (1900), dedicated to Gorky, Bunin vividly and poetically painted the autumn landscape and conveyed the beauty of Russian nature.
Bunin's descriptions of nature are not dead, frozen wax casts, but dynamically developing paintings, filled with various smells, noises and colors. But nature attracts Bunin not only with the variety of shades of colors and smells.
In the world around him, the poet draws creative strength and vigor, and sees the source of life. In his poem “The Thaw” he wrote:
No, it’s not the landscape that attracts me,
It’s not the colors that I’m trying to notice,
And what shines in these colors -
Love and joy of being.
The feeling of beauty and greatness of life in Bunin’s poems is determined by the author’s religious worldview. They express gratitude to the Creator of this living, complex and diverse world:
For everything, Lord, I thank you!
You, after a day of anxiety and sadness,
Give me the evening dawn,
The spaciousness of the fields and the gentleness of the blue distance.
A person, according to Bunin, should be happy simply because the Lord has given him the opportunity to see this imperishable beauty dissolved in God’s world:
And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn,
And the azure and the midday heat - The time will come -
The Lord will ask the prodigal son:
“Were you happy in your earthly life?”
And I’ll forget everything - I’ll only remember these
Field paths between ears and grasses -
And from sweet tears I won’t have time to answer,
Falling to the merciful knees.
(“And flowers and bumblebees”)
Bunin's poetry is deeply national. The image of the Motherland is captured in it through discreet but bright pictures of nature. He lovingly describes the expanses of central Russia, the freedom of his native fields and forests, where everything is filled with light and warmth.
In the “satin shine” of the birch forest, among the smells of flowers and mushrooms, watching how the cranes stretch to the south in late autumn, the poet with particular strength feels aching love for the Motherland:
Native steppes. Poor villages -
My homeland: I returned to it,
Tired of wandering alone,
And realized the beauty in her sadness
And happiness lies in sad beauty.
("In the steppe")
Through the feeling of bitterness over the troubles and hardships suffered by his homeland, Bunin’s poems sound filial love and gratitude for it, as well as a stern rebuke to those who are indifferent to its fate:
They mock you
They, O Motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity,
Poor looking black huts.
So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother -
Tired, timid and sad
Among his city friends.
Looks with a smile of compassion
To the one who wandered hundreds of miles
And for him, on the date of the date,
She saved her last penny.
("Motherland")
- Bunin's love lyrics
Bunin’s poems about love are just as clear, transparent and concrete. Bunin's love lyrics are small in quantity. But she is distinguished by healthy sensuality, restraint, vivid images lyrical heroes and heroines who are far from good-heartedness and excessive enthusiasm, avoiding pomposity, phrases, and poses.
These are the poems “I entered her at the midnight hour...”, “Song” (“I am a simple girl on the bashtan”), “We met by chance on the corner...”, “Loneliness” and some others.
Nevertheless, Bunin’s lyrics, despite the outward restraint, reflect the diversity and fullness of human feelings, a rich range of moods. There is the bitterness of separation and unrequited love, and the experiences of a suffering, lonely person.
Poetry of the early 20th century is generally characterized by extreme subjectivism and increased expressiveness. Suffice it to recall the lyrics of Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and other poets.
In contrast to them, Bunin the poet, on the contrary, is characterized by artistic secrecy, restraint in the manifestation of feelings and in the form of their expression.
An excellent example of such restraint is the poem “Loneliness” (1903), which tells about the fate of a man abandoned by his beloved.
...I wanted to shout after him:
“Come back, I have become close to you!”
But for a woman there is no past:
She fell out of love - and became a stranger to her -
Well! I’ll light the fireplace and drink...
It would be nice to buy a dog!
What attracts attention in this poem is, first of all, its amazing simplicity. artistic means, complete absence of tropes.
Stylistically neutral, deliberately prosaic vocabulary emphasizes the everydayness of the situation - an empty cold dacha, a rainy autumn evening.
Bunin uses only one paint here - gray. The syntactic and rhythmic patterns are also simple. A clear alternation of three-syllable meters, calm narrative intonation, lack of expression and inversion create an even and seemingly indifferent tone of the entire poem.
However, with a whole range of techniques (sharpening, repeating the word “one”, using impersonal verb forms “it’s dark for me”, “I wanted to scream”, “it would be nice to buy a dog”).
Bunin emphasizes the acute, pent-up pain of a person experiencing a drama. The main content of the poem thus disappeared into the subtext, hidden behind a deliberately calm tone.
The range of Bunin's lyrics is quite wide. In his poems he refers to Russian history (“Svyatogor”, “Prince Vseslav”, “Mikhail”, “Medieval Archangel”), recreates the nature and life of other countries, mainly the East (“Ormuzd”, “Aeschylus”, “Jericho” , “Flight to Egypt”, “Ceylon”, “Off the Coast of Asia Minor” and many others).
These lyrics are philosophical at their core. Peering into the human past, Bunin strives to reflect the eternal laws of existence.
Bunin did not abandon his poetic experiments all his life, but to a wide circle Readers know him “primarily as a prose writer, although the poetic “vein” was definitely reflected in his prose works, where there is a lot of lyricism and emotionality, undoubtedly brought into them by the poetic talent of the writer.
Already in Bunin's early prose his deep thoughts about the meaning of life and the fate of his native country were reflected. His stories of the 90s clearly demonstrate that the young prose writer sensitively captured many of the most important aspects of the reality of that time.
- Bunin's peasant lyrics
The main themes of Bunin's early stories are the depiction of the Russian peasantry and the bankrupt petty landed nobility. There is a very close connection between these themes, determined by the author’s worldview.
He painted gloomy pictures of the resettlement of peasant families in the stories “On the Foreign Side” (1893) and “To the End of the World” (1894); the joyless life of peasant children is depicted in the stories “Tanka” (1892), “News from the Motherland.” The life of a peasant is impoverished, but the fate of the local nobility is no less hopeless (“New Road”, “Pines”).
All of them - both peasants and nobles - are threatened with death by the arrival of a new master of life in the village: a boorish, uncultured bourgeois who knows no pity for the weak of this world.
Not accepting either the methods or the consequences of such capitalization of the Russian village, Bunin seeks an ideal in that way of life when, according to the writer, there was a strong blood connection between the peasant and the landowner.
The desolation and degeneration of the noble nests evokes in Bunin a feeling of deepest sadness about the lost harmony of patriarchal life, the gradual disappearance of an entire class that created the greatest national culture.
- Analysis of the story “Antonov Apples”
The epitaph for the past is especially vivid old village sounds in a lyrical story "Antonov apples"(1900). This story is one of the writer’s remarkable works of art.
After reading it, Gorky wrote to Bunin: “And thank you very much for “Apples.” This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young God, sang. Beautiful, juicy, soulful.”
In “Antonov Apples,” one is struck by the subtlest perception of nature and the ability to convey it in clear visual images.
No matter how Bunin idealizes the life of the old nobility, this is not the most important thing in his story for modern reader. The feeling of the homeland, born from the feeling of its unique, peculiar, slightly sad autumn nature, invariably arises when reading “Antonov Apples”.
Such are the episodes of collecting Antonov apples, threshing and especially skillfully written hunting scenes. These paintings are organically combined with autumn landscape, in the descriptions of which Bunin’s frightening signs of the new reality penetrate in the form of telegraph poles, which “alone constitute a contrast with everything that surrounded the aunt’s old-world nest.”
For the writer, the arrival of the predatory ruler of life is a cruel, irresistible force, bringing with it the death of the former, noble way of life. In the face of such a danger, this way of life becomes even more dear to the writer, his critical attitude towards the dark sides of the past weakens, and the idea of unity between peasants and landowners, whose destinies, in Bunin’s opinion, are now at risk, strengthens.
Bunin wrote a lot in these years about old people (“Kastriuk”, “Meliton”, etc.), and this interest in old age, the decline of human existence, is explained by the writer’s increased attention to the eternal problems of life and death, which did not cease to worry him until the end of his days .
Already in Bunin’s early work his extraordinary psychological mastery, the ability to build a plot and composition, a special way of depicting the world and spiritual movements of a person is formed.
The writer, as a rule, avoids sharp plot devices; the action in his stories develops smoothly, calmly, even slowly. But this slowness is only external. As in life itself, passions boil in Bunin’s works, different characters collide, and conflicts arise.
A master of an extremely detailed vision of the world, Bunin forces the reader to perceive the surroundings with literally all the senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, giving free rein to a whole stream of associations.
“The light chill of dawn” smells “sweetly, of forest, flowers, herbs,” the city on a frosty day “all creaks and squeals from the steps of passers-by, from the runners of peasant sledges,” the pond glistens “hot and boring,” the flowers smell with a “feminine luxury,” the leaves “babble like a quiet flowing rain outside the open windows,” etc.
Bunin's text is full of complex associations and figurative connections. A particularly important role in this method of depiction is played by artistic detail, which reveals the author’s view of the world, the psychological state of the character, the beauty and complexity of the world.
- Bunin and revolution
Bunin did not accept the revolution of 1905. She horrified the writer with her cruelty on both sides, the anarchic willfulness of some of the peasants, the manifestation of savagery and bloody malice.
The myth of the unity of peasants and landowners was shaken, and the idea of the peasant as a meek, humble being was destroyed.
All this sharpened Bunin’s interest in Russian history and the problems of Russian national character, in which Bunin now saw complexity and “variegation,” an interweaving of positive and negative features.
In 1919, after the October Revolution, he wrote in his diary: “There are two types of people. In one, Rus' predominates, in the other - Chud, Merya. But in both there is a terrible changeability of moods, appearances, “shakyness,” as they said in the old days.
The people themselves said to themselves: “We, like wood, are both a club and an icon,” depending on the circumstances, on who processes this wood: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelyan Pugachev.”
It is these “two types of people” that Bunin will deeply explore in the 1910s in his works “Village”, “Sukhodol”, “ Ancient man”, “Night Conversation”, “Merry Courtyard”, “Ignat”, “Zakhar Vorobyov”, “John the Weeper”, “I am still silent”, “Prince of Princes”, “Thin Grass” and many others, in which, according to According to the author, he was interested in “the soul of the Russian person in a deep sense, the image of the features of the Slav’s psyche.”
- Analysis of the story “Village”
The first in a series of such works was the story “The Village” (1910), which caused a flurry of controversy among both readers and critics.
Gorky very accurately assessed the meaning and significance of Bunin’s work: “The village,” he wrote, “was the impetus that forced the broken and shaken Russian society to think seriously no longer about the peasant, not about the people, but about the strict question - to be or not to be Russia?
We have not yet thought about Russia as a whole, this work showed us the need to think about the entire country, to think historically... No one has taken the village so deeply, so historically...” Bunin's "Village" is a dramatic reflection on Russia, its past, present and future, on the properties of the historically established national character.
The writer’s new approach to his traditional peasant theme also determined his search for new means of artistic expression. In place of the soulful lyricism characteristic of Bunin's previous stories about the peasantry, in "The Village" there came a stern, sober narrative, capacious, laconic, but at the same time economically rich in depictions of the everyday trifles of village life.
The author’s desire to reflect in the story a large period in the life of the village of Durnovka, which symbolizes, in Bunin’s view, the Russian village in general, and more broadly, the whole of Russia (“Yes, it’s the whole village,” says one of the characters in the story about Russia), - required him to new principles for constructing a work.
At the center of the story is an image of the life of the Krasov brothers: the landowner and innkeeper Tikhon, who rose from poverty, and the wandering, self-taught poet Kuzma.
Through the eyes of these people, all the main events of the time are shown: the Russian-Japanese War, the revolution of 1905, the post-revolutionary period. There is no single continuously developing plot in the work; the story is a series of pictures of village, and partly county life, which the Krasovs have been observing for many years.
The main plot line of the story is the life story of the Krasov brothers, the grandchildren of a serf. It is interspersed with many inserted short stories and episodes telling about the life of Durnovka.
Important role to understand ideological meaning The work plays the image of Kuzma Krasov. He is not only one of the main characters of the work, but also the main exponent of the author's point of view.
Kuzma is a loser. He “dreamed of studying and writing all his life,” but his fate was such that he always had to do something alien and unpleasant. In his youth, he was a peddler, traveled around Russia, wrote articles for newspapers, then worked in a candle shop, was a clerk, and, in the end, moved in with his brother, with whom he had once fiercely quarreled.
The consciousness of a life lived aimlessly and the bleak pictures of the surrounding reality weigh heavily on Kuzma’s soul. All this prompts him to think about who is to blame for such a structure of life.
A look at the Russian people and their historical past was first expressed in the story by Kuzma’s teacher, the tradesman Balashkin. Balashkin utters words that make us remember Herzen’s famous “martyrology”: “Merciful God! Pushkin was killed, Lermontov was killed, Pisarev was drowned... Ryleev was strangled, Polezhaev became a soldier, Shevchenka was caulked for 10 years as a soldier... Dostoevsky was dragged to execution, Gogol went crazy... And Koltsov, Reshetnikov, Nikitin, Pomyalovsky, Levitov?
The list of the best representatives of the nation who passed away untimely is extremely convincing, and the reader has every reason to share Balashkin’s indignation against this state of affairs.
But the end of the tirade unexpectedly rethinks everything that has been said: “Oh, is there still such a country in the world, such a people, be they thrice damned?” Kuzma vehemently objects to this: “Such people! Greatest people, and not “like that,” let me tell you... After all, these writers are the children of this very people.”
But Balashkin defines the concept of “people” in his own way, placing next to Platon Karataev and Razuvaev with Kolupaev, and Saltychikha, and Karamazov with Oblomov, and Khlestakov, and Nozdrev. Subsequently, while editing the story for a foreign publication, Bunin added the following characteristic words to Balashkin’s first remark: “Will you say that the government is to blame? But after all, a master is like a slave, and a hat is like Senka.” This view of the people later becomes decisive for Kuzma. The author himself is inclined to share it.
Not lower value has in the story the image of Tikhon Krasov. The son of a serf peasant, Tikhon became rich in trade, opened a tavern, and then bought the estate Durnovka from an impoverished descendant of his former masters.
From a former beggar and orphan, he turned into a master, a threat to the entire county. Strict, tough in dealing with servants and men, he stubbornly goes towards his goal, gets rich. “Fierce! But he’s also the owner,” the Durnovites say about Tikhon. The feeling of ownership is indeed the main thing in Tikhon.
Every slacker evokes in him acute feeling hostility: “I wish I could hire this slacker as an employee!” However, the all-consuming passion of accumulation obscured the diversity of life from him and distorted his feelings.
“We live, we don’t waste time, if you get caught, we’ll turn you around,” is his favorite saying, which has become a guide to action. But over time, he begins to feel the futility of his efforts and his entire life.
With sorrow in his soul, he confesses to Kuzma: “My life is lost, brother! I had, you know, a dumb cook, I gave her, the fool, a foreign scarf, and she took it and wore it inside out... Do you understand? From stupidity and greed. It’s a pity to wear it on weekdays, - I’ll wait for the holiday, - but the holiday came - only rags were left... So here I am... with my life.”
This worn, topsy-turvy scarf is a symbol of the aimlessly lived life not only of Tikhon. It extends to his brother, the loser Kuzma, and to the dark existence of many peasants depicted in the story.
We will find here many gloomy pages where the darkness, downtroddenness, and ignorance of the peasants are shown. This is Gray, perhaps the poorest man in the village, who never got out of poverty, having lived his entire life in a small smoking hut, more like a den.
These are episodic, but vivid images of guards from a landowner's estate, suffering from diseases from eternal malnutrition and a miserable existence.
But who is to blame for this? This is a question that both the author and his central characters. “Who should I collect from? - asks Kuzma. “Unhappy people, first of all - unhappy!..” But this statement is immediately refuted by the opposite train of thought: “Yes, but who is to blame for this? The people themselves!”
Tikhon Krasov reproaches his brother for contradictions: “Well, you no longer know the measure of anything. You say it yourself: unhappy people, unhappy people! And now - an animal." Kuzma is really confused: “I don’t understand anything: he’s either unfortunate or not...”, but he is still inclined (and so is the author) to the conclusion of “guilt.”
Take the same Gray again. Having three acres of land, he cannot and does not want to cultivate it and prefers to live in poverty, indulging in idle thoughts that, perhaps, wealth will flow into his hands.
Bunin especially does not accept the Durnovites’ hope for the mercy of the revolution, which, in their words, will give them the opportunity “not to plow, not to mow, but for girls to wear damsels.”
Who, in Bunin’s understanding, is the “driving force of the revolution”? One of them is the son of the peasant Sery, the rebel Denisk. This young slacker was attracted to the city. But he did not take root there either, and after a while he returned back to his poor father with an empty knapsack and pockets full of books.
But what kind of books are these: the songbook “Marusya”, “The Debaucherous Wife”, “The Innocent Girl in the Chains of Violence” and next to them - “The Role of the Proletariat (“Protaleriat”, as Deniska pronounces) in Russia.”
Deniska’s own written exercises, which he leaves for Tikhon, prompting him to remark: “What a fool, forgive me, Lord,” are extremely ridiculous and caricatured. Deniska is not only stupid, but also cruel.
He beats his father “to the death” only because he stripped the ceiling, which Deniska had covered with newspapers and pictures, for cigarettes.
However, there are bright spots in the story. folk characters, drawn by the author with obvious sympathy. For example, the image of the peasant woman Odnodvorka is not without attractiveness.
In the scene when Kuzma sees Odnodvorka at night, carrying away railway shields that she uses for fuel, this dexterous and argumentative peasant woman is somewhat reminiscent of the brave and freedom-loving women of the people in Gorky’s early stories.
With deep sympathy and sympathy, Bunin also drew the image of the widow Bottle, who comes to Kuzma to dictate letters to her son Misha, who has forgotten her. The writer achieves significant strength and expressiveness in his depiction of the peasant Ivanushka.
This very old man, firmly determined not to succumb to death and retreating before it only when he learns that his relatives have already prepared a coffin for him, a seriously ill person, is a truly epic figure.
In the depiction of these characters, one can clearly see the sympathy for them both of the author himself and of one of the main characters of the story, Kuzma Krasov.
But these sympathies are especially fully expressed in relation to the character who runs through the entire story and is of primary interest for understanding the positive ideals of the author.
This is a peasant woman nicknamed Young. She stands out from the mass of Durnov women primarily because of her beauty, which Bunin talks about more than once in the story. But the beauty of Young appears under the pen of the author as beauty trampled upon.
The young woman, we learn, is beaten “daily and nightly” by her husband Rodka, she is beaten by Tikhon Krasov, she is tied naked to a tree, she is finally given in marriage to the ugly Deniska. The image of Young is a symbolic image.
Bunin's Young is the embodiment of desecrated beauty, kindness, hard work, she is a generalization of the bright and good principles of peasant life, a symbol of young Russia (this generalization is already reflected in her very nickname - Young). Bunin's "Village" is also a warning story. It is no coincidence that it ends with the wedding of Deniska and Molodoy. In Bunin's depiction, this wedding resembles a funeral.
The ending of the story is desolate: a blizzard is raging outside, and the wedding trio is flying to an unknown destination, “into the dark darkness.” The image of a blizzard is also a symbol, meaning the end of that bright Russia that Molodaya personifies.
Thus, with a whole series of symbolic episodes and paintings, Bunin warns of what could happen to Russia if it “gets engaged” to rebels like Deniska the Gray.
Later, Bunin wrote to his friend, the artist P. Nilus, that he predicted the tragedy that happened to Russia as a result of the February and October coups in the story “The Village”.
The story “Village” was followed by a whole series of Bunin’s stories about the peasantry, continuing and developing thoughts about the “variegation” of the national character, depicting the “Russian soul, its peculiar interweavings.”
The writer depicts with sympathy people who are kind and generous-hearted, hardworking and caring. The bearers of anarchic, rebellious principles, self-willed, cruel, lazy people evoke in him constant antipathy.
Sometimes the plots of Bunin's works are based on the collision of these two principles: good and evil. One of the most characteristic works in this regard is the story “The Cheerful Yard,” where two characters are contrastingly depicted: the humble, hardworking peasant woman Anisya, who lived a bitter life, and her mentally callous, unlucky son, “empty-talk” Yegor.
Long-suffering, kindness, on the one hand, and cruelty, anarchy, unpredictability, self-will, on the other - these are the two principles, two categorical imperatives of the Russian national character, as Bunin understood it.
Positive folk characters are the most important in Bunin’s work. Along with the depiction of dull humility (the stories “Lichard”, “I am still silent” and others), in the works of 1911 -1913 there appear characters who have a different kind of humility, Christian.
These people are meek, long-suffering and at the same time attractive with their kindness; warmth, beauty of the inner appearance. In an unprepossessing, humiliated, at first glance, man, courage and moral fortitude are revealed (“Cricket”).
The dense inertia is opposed by deep spirituality, intelligence, and extraordinary creative talent (“Lyrnik Rodion”, “Good Bloods”). Significant in this regard is the story “Zakhar Vorobyov” (1912), about which the author informed the writer N.D. Teleshov: “He will protect me.”
His hero is a peasant hero, the owner of enormous but unidentified potential: a thirst for achievement, longing for the extraordinary, gigantic strength, spiritual nobility.
Bunin openly admires his character: his beautiful, spiritual face, open gaze, stature, strength, kindness. But this hero, a man of noble soul, burning with the desire to do something good to people, never finds use for his powers and dies absurdly and senselessly, having drunk a quarter of vodka on a dare.
True, Zakhar is unique among the “small people”. “There is another one like me,” he sometimes said, “but he is far away, near Zadonsk.” But “in the old man, they say, there were many like him, but this breed is translated.”
The image of Zakhar symbolizes the inexhaustible forces hidden in the people, but which have not yet truly come into the necessary movement. The dispute about Russia waged by Zakhar and his occasional drinking companions is noteworthy.
In this dispute, Zakhar was struck by the words “our oak tree has grown very large...”, in which he sensed a wonderful hint of Russia’s capabilities.
One of Bunin’s most remarkable stories in this regard is “The Thin Grass” (1913). Revealed here with heartfelt humanity spiritual world farm laborer Averky.
Having become seriously ill after 30 years of hard work, Averky gradually passes away, but perceives death as a person who fulfilled his destiny in this world, living his life honestly and with dignity.
The writer shows in detail his character’s parting with life, his renunciation from everything earthly and vain and his ascent to the great and bright truth of Christ. Averky is dear to Bunin because, having lived a long life, he did not become a slave to acquisitiveness and profit, did not become embittered, and was not tempted by self-interest.
With his honesty, gentleness, and kindness, Averky is closest to Bunin’s idea of the type of Russian common man who was especially common in Ancient Rus'.
It is no coincidence that Bunin chose the words of Ivan Aksakov, “Ancient Rus' has not yet passed away,” as the epigraph to the collection “John the Weeper,” which included the story “The Thin Grass.” But with its content, both this story and the entire collection are addressed not to the past, but to the present.
- Analysis of the story “Sukhodol”
In 1911, the writer created one of his largest works of the pre-October period - the story “Sukhodol”, called by Gorky a “memorial service” for the noble class, a memorial service that Bunin “despite his anger, his contempt for the powerless deceased, still served with great heartfelt pity for them."
Like “Antonov Apples,” the story “Sukhodol” is written in the first person. In his spiritual appearance, Bunin's narrator from Sukhodol is still the same person, yearning for the former grandeur of the landowners' estates.
But unlike “Antonov Apples,” Bunin in “Sukhodol” not only regrets the dying nests of the nobility, but also recreates the Sukhodol contrasts, the lack of rights of the courtyards and the tyranny of the landowners.
At the center of the story is the story of the Khrushchev noble family, the story of its gradual degradation.
In Sukhodol, Bunin writes, terrible things were happening. The old master Pyotr Kirillich was killed by his illegitimate son Geraska, his daughter Antonina went crazy from unrequited love.
The stamp of degeneration also lies on the last representatives of the Khrushchev family. They are portrayed as people who have lost not only connections with the outside world, but also family ties.
Pictures of Sukhodolsk life are given in the story through the perception of the former serf Natalya. Poisoned by the philosophy of obedience and humility, Natalya does not rise not only to protest against the master's arbitrariness, but even to simply condemn the actions of her masters. But her entire fate is an indictment against the owners of Sukhodol.
When she was still a child, her father was sent to serve as a soldier for misbehavior, and her mother died of a broken heart, fearing punishment because the turkey chicks she was tending were killed by hail. Left an orphan, Natalya becomes a toy in the hands of the masters.
As a girl, she fell in love with the young owner Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life. But not only did he whip her with a whip when she “got under his feet once,” but he also exiled her in disgrace to a remote village, accusing her of stealing a mirror.
In its artistic features, “Sukhodol”, more than any other work of Bunin the prose writer of these years, is close to Bunin’s poetry. The harsh and harsh style of narration characteristic of “The Village” is replaced in “Sukhodol” by the soft lyrics of memories.
To a large extent, the lyrical sound of the work is facilitated by the fact that the author’s voice is included in the narrative, commenting and supplementing Natalya’s stories with her observations.
1914-1916 is an extremely important stage in Bunin’s creative evolution. This is the time of finalization of his style and worldview.
His prose becomes capacious and refined in its artistic perfection, philosophical - in meaning and significance. The man in Bunin's stories of these years, without losing his everyday connections with the world around him, is simultaneously included by the writer in the Cosmos.
Bunin would later clearly formulate this philosophical idea in his book “The Liberation of Tolstoy”: “A person must recognize his personality not as something opposite to the world, but as a small part of the world, huge and forever living.”
This circumstance, according to Bunin, puts a person in a difficult situation: on the one hand, he is part of the infinite and eternal life, on the other hand, human happiness is fragile and illusory before incomprehensible cosmic forces.
This dialectical unity of two opposing aspects of worldview determines the main content of Bunin’s creativity of this time, which simultaneously tells about the greatest happiness of living and the eternal tragedy of existence.
Bunin significantly expands the range of his creativity, turning to the depiction of countries and peoples far from Russia. These works were the result of the writer’s numerous travels to the countries of the Middle East.
But it was not the tempting exoticism that attracted the writer. With great skill in depicting the nature and life of distant lands, Bunin is primarily interested in the problem of “man and the world.” In his 1909 poem “Dog,” he confessed:
I am a man: like God, I am doomed
To experience the melancholy of all countries and all times.
These sentiments were clearly reflected in Bunin’s masterpieces of the 1910s - the stories “Brothers” (1914) and “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915), united by a common concept of life.
The author formulated the idea of these works with an epigraph to "To the gentleman from San Francisco"“Woe to you, Babylon, strong city” - these terrible words of the Apocalypse sounded relentlessly in my soul when I wrote “Brothers” and conceived “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” a few months before the war,” the writer admitted.
The acute sense of the catastrophic nature of the world and cosmic evil that Bunin possessed during these years reaches its apogee here. But at the same time, the writer’s rejection of social evil deepens.
Bunin subordinates the entire figurative system of works, which is characterized by a pronounced two-dimensionality, to the dialectical depiction of these two evils that dominate man.
The landscape in stories is not only the background and place of action. This is at the same time a concrete embodiment of that cosmic life to which human destiny is fatally subordinated.
The symbols of cosmic life are the images of the forest, in which “everything chased each other, rejoiced in a short joy, destroying each other,” and especially the ocean - “bottomless depth,” “unsteady abyss,” “about which the Bible speaks so terribly.”
The writer simultaneously sees the source of disorder, catastrophism, and fragility of life in social evil, which is personified in his stories in the images of an English colonialist and an American businessman.
The tragedy of the situation depicted in the story “Brothers” is emphasized by the epigraph to this work, taken from the Buddhist book “Sutta Nipata”:
Look at the brothers beating each other.
I want to talk about sadness.
It also determines the tone of the story, inlaid with intricate oriental script. The story of one day in the life of a young Ceylonese rickshaw puller who committed suicide because rich Europeans took his beloved away from him sounds in the story “Brothers” as a verdict on rigidity and selfishness.
The writer draws with hostility one of them, an Englishman, who is characterized by mercilessness and cold cruelty. “In Africa,” he cynically admits, “I killed people, in India, robbed by England, and therefore, partly by me, I saw thousands dying of hunger, in Japan I bought girls as monthly wives, in China I beat defenseless monkey-like old men on the heads with a stick. , in Java and Ceylon, he drove rickshaws until his death rattle...”
Bitter sarcasm can be heard in the title of the story, in which one “brother,” who is at the top of the social ladder, drives and pushes another, huddling at its foot, to commit suicide.
But the life of the English colonialist, being devoid of a high internal goal, appears in the work as meaningless, and therefore also fatally doomed. And only at the end of his life does insight come to him.
In a painfully excited state, he denounces the spiritual emptiness of his civilized contemporaries, speaks of the pitiful powerlessness of the human personality in that world “where everyone is either a murderer or being killed”: “We elevate our Personality above the heavens, we want to concentrate the whole world in it, so that there they didn’t talk about the coming world brotherhood and equality, - and only in the ocean... you feel how a person melts, dissolves in this blackness, sounds, smells, in this terrible All-Unity, only there we understand in a weak way what this personality of ours means.” .
In this monologue, Bunin undoubtedly put his perception of modern life, torn apart by tragic contradictions. It is in this sense that we must understand the words of the writer’s wife V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina: “What the Englishman (Bunin - A. Ch.) felt in “Brothers” is autobiographical.”
The coming death of the world, in which “for centuries the winner has stood with a strong heel on the throat of the vanquished,” in which the moral laws of human brotherhood are mercilessly trampled upon, is symbolically foreshadowed at the end of the story by the ancient Eastern legend about a raven who greedily pounced on the carcass of a dead elephant and died, being carried along with her far out to sea.
- Analysis of the story “Mr. from San Francisco”
The writer’s humanistic thought about the depravity and sinfulness of modern civilization is even more acutely expressed in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco.”
The poetics of the title of the work is already noteworthy. The hero of the story is not a person, but a “master”. But he is a gentleman from San Francisco. By accurately designating the character’s nationality, Bunin expressed his attitude towards American businessmen, who even then were for him synonymous with anti-humanism and lack of spirituality.
"The Mister from San Francisco" is a parable about life and death. And at the same time, the story is about someone who, while living, was already spiritually dead.
The hero of the story is deliberately not given a name by the author. There is nothing personal or spiritual in this man, who devoted his whole life to increasing his wealth and who, by the age of fifty-eight, had turned into the likeness of a golden idol: “Dry, short, poorly cut, but tightly sewn... His large teeth glittered with gold fillings, his strong teeth with old ivory bald head".
Devoid of any human feelings, the American businessman himself is alien to everything around him. Even the nature of Italy, where he goes to relax and enjoy “the love of young Neapolitan women - even if not completely disinterestedly,” greets him unfriendly and coldly.
Everything that surrounds him is deathly and disastrous; he brings death and decay to everything. In an effort to give a particular case a great social generalization, to show the power of gold that depersonalizes a person, the writer deprives his character of individual characteristics, turning him into a symbol of lack of spirituality, businessmanship and practicality.
Confident in the right choice life path, a gentleman from San Francisco, who has never entertained the thought of death, suddenly dies in an expensive Capri hotel.
This clearly demonstrates the collapse of his ideals and principles. The strength and power of the dollar, which the American had worshiped all his life and which he had turned into an end in itself, turned out to be illusory in the face of death.
The ship itself is also symbolic, on which the businessman went to have fun in Italy and which carries him, already dead, in a soda box, back to the New World.
A steamship floating in the middle of a boundless ocean is a micromodel of a world where everything is built on corruption and falsehood (what is, for example, a beautiful young couple hired to portray as lovers), where ordinary working people languish from hard work and humiliation and spend their time in luxury and fun the powers of this world: “... the siren suffocated by the fog moaned in mortal anguish, the watchmen on their watchtower were freezing from the cold and went crazy from the unbearable strain of attention, the gloomy and sultry depths of the underworld, its last, ninth circle was like the underwater womb of a steamship... and here, in the bar , carefreely threw their feet on the arms of the chairs, sipped cognac and liqueurs, swam in waves of spicy smoke, everything in the dance hall shone and shed light, warmth and joy, couples either twirled in waltzes, or twisted in tango - and the music insistently, in some way... then with sweet, shameless sadness she kept praying for one thing, all for the same thing...”
This capacious and meaningful period perfectly conveys the author’s attitude towards the lives of those who inhabit this Noah’s Ark.
The plastic clarity of what is depicted, the variety of colors and visual impressions is what is constantly inherent in artistic style Bunin, but in these stories it acquires special expressiveness.
The role of detail in “The Lord from San Francisco” is especially great, in which general patterns are revealed through the private, concrete, and everyday, and a great generalization is contained.
Thus, the scene of the gentleman from San Francisco dressing up for dinner is very specific and at the same time has the character of a symbolic foreshadowing.
The writer describes in detail how the hero of the story squeezes himself into a suit that constrains his “strong old man’s body,” fastens the “excessively tight collar that is squeezing his throat,” and painfully catches the cufflink that “bites firmly on the flabby skin in the recess under the Adam’s apple.”
In a few minutes the gentleman will die of suffocation. The costume in which the character dresses is an ominous attribute of a false existence, like the ship Atlantis, like this entire “civilized world”, the imaginary values of which the writer does not accept.
The story “Mr. from San Francisco” ends with the same picture with which it began: the giant “Atlantis” makes its way back across the ocean of cosmic life. But this ring composition does not at all mean that the writer agrees with the idea of the eternal and unchanging cycle of history.
With a whole system of images and symbols, Bunin asserts exactly the opposite - the inevitable death of a world mired in selfishness, corruption and lack of spirituality. This is evidenced by the epigraph to the story, drawing a parallel between modern life and the sad outcome of ancient Babylon, and the name of the ship.
Having given the ship the symbolic name “Atlantis,” the author directed the reader to a direct comparison of the steamship - this world in miniature - with the ancient continent, which disappeared without a trace in the abyss of water. This picture is completed by the image of the Devil, who watches from the rocks of Gibraltar a ship leaving into the night: Satan “rules the show” on the ship of human life.
The story "Mr. from San Francisco" was written during the First World War. And it quite clearly characterizes the mood of the writer of this time.
The war forced Bunin to look even more closely into the depths of human nature, into a thousand-year history marked by despotism, violence, and cruelty. On September 15, 1915, Bunin wrote to P. Nilus: “I don’t remember such dullness and mental depression in which I have been for a long time...
War languishes, torments, and worries. And a lot of other things too.” Actually, Bunin has almost no works about the First World War, except for the stories “The Last Spring” and “The Last Autumn,” where this topic finds some coverage.
Bunin wrote not so much about the war, but, in the words of Mayakovsky, “wrote about the war,” revealing in his pre-revolutionary work the tragedy and even the catastrophic nature of existence.
- Analysis of the story “Chang's Dreams”
Bunin's story from 1916 is also typical in this regard. "Chang's Dreams" Chang the Dog is chosen by the writer as central character not at all out of a desire to evoke kind and tender feelings towards animals, which was usually guided by realist writers of the 19th century.
From the first lines of his work, Bunin translates the story into outline philosophical reflections about the mysteries of life, about the meaning of earthly existence.
And although the author accurately indicates the location of the action - Odessa, describes in detail the attic where Chang lives with his owner - a drunken retired captain, memories and dreams of Chang enter the story on an equal footing with these pictures, giving the work a philosophical aspect.
The contrast between the pictures of the past happy life Changa with his master and their current pathetic existence is a concrete expression of the dispute between two truths of life, the existence of which we learn at the beginning of the story.
“There were once two truths in the world, constantly replacing each other,” writes Bunin, “the first is that life is unspeakably beautiful, and the other is that life is conceivable only for crazy people. Now the captain claims that there is, was and forever will be only one truth, the last one...” What kind of truth is this?
The captain tells his friend the artist about her: “My friend, I have seen the whole globe - life is like this everywhere! All this is lies and nonsense, which is how people supposedly live: they have neither God, nor conscience, nor a reasonable purpose for existence, nor love, nor friendship, nor honesty - they do not even have simple pity.
Life is a boring winter day in a dirty tavern, nothing more..." Chang essentially agrees with the captain's conclusions.
At the end of the story, the drunken captain dies, and the orphaned Chang ends up with a new owner - an artist. But his thoughts are directed to the last Master - God.
“In this world there should be only one truth, the third,” writes the author, “and what it is, the last one knows about that. The owner, to whom Chang should return soon.” The story ends with this conclusion.
He leaves no hope for the possibility of reorganizing earthly life in accordance with the laws of the first, bright truth and trusts in the third, higher, unearthly truth.
The whole story is permeated by a feeling of the tragedy of life. The sudden change in the captain's life, which led to his death, occurred due to the betrayal of his wife, whom he dearly loved.
But the wife, in essence, is not to blame, she is not even bad at all, on the contrary, she is beautiful, the whole point is that it is so predetermined by fate, and there is no getting away from it.
One of the most controversial issues in Bunin studies is the question of the positive aspirations of the writer of the pre-revolutionary years. What does Bunin oppose - and does he oppose it - to the universal tragedy of existence, the catastrophic nature of life?
Bunin's concept of life is expressed in the formula about two truths from “Chang's Dreams”: “life is unspeakably beautiful” and at the same time “life is conceivable only for crazy people.”
This unity of opposites - a bright and fatally gloomy view of the world - coexist in many of Bunin’s works of the 10s, defining a kind of “tragic major” of their ideological content.
Condemning the inhumanity of the soulless, egoistic world, Bunin contrasts it with the morality of ordinary people living a difficult, but morally healthy, working life. This is the old rickshaw puller from the story “Brothers,” “driven by love not for himself, but for his family, for his son he wanted happiness that was not destined, that was not given to him.”
The gloomy flavor of the narrative in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” gives way to enlightenment when it comes to the ordinary people of Italy:
about the old boatman Lorenzo, “a carefree reveler and handsome man,” famous throughout Italy, about the bellhop of the Capri hotel Luigi, and especially about two Abruzzese highlanders giving “humbly joyful praises to the Virgin Mary”: “they walked - and the whole country, joyful, beautiful , sunny, stretched over them."
And in these years, Bunin persistently searches for a positive beginning in the character of a simple Russian person, without shying away from depicting his “variegation.” On the one hand, with the merciless sobriety of a realist, he continues to show the “denseness of village life.”
And on the other hand, it depicts that healthy thing that makes its way through the thickness of ignorance and darkness in the Russian peasant. In the story “Spring Evening” (1915), an ignorant and drunken man kills an old beggar for money.
And this is an act of human desperation, when “at least die of hunger.” Having committed a crime, he realizes the horror of what he has done and throws away the amulet of money.
The poetic image of the young peasant girl Parasha, whose romantic love was roughly trampled by the predatory and cruel tradesman Nikanor, is created by Bunin in the story "On the Road"(1913).
Researchers are right in emphasizing the poetic, folklore basis of the image of Parasha, who personifies bright sides Russian folk character.
Nature plays a large role in identifying the life-affirming principles of life in Bunin’s stories. She is a moral catalyst for the bright, optimistic traits of existence.
In the story “The Mister from San Francisco,” nature is renewed and purified after the death of an American. When the ship with the body of the rich Yankee left Capri, “the author emphasizes that peace and quiet reigned on the island.”
Finally, the pessimistic forecast for the future is overcome in the writer’s stories by the apotheosis of love.
Bunin perceived the world in the indissoluble unity of its contrasts, in its dialectical complexity and inconsistency. Life is both happiness and tragedy.
For Bunin, the highest, mysterious and sublime manifestation of this life is love. But for Bunin, love is a passion, and in this passion, which is the pinnacle manifestation of life, a person burns. In torment, the writer claims, there is bliss, and happiness is so piercing that it is akin to suffering.
- Analysis of the story “Easy Breathing”
Bunin's short story of 1916 is indicative in this regard. "Easy breath". This is a story full of high lyricism about how the blossoming life of a young heroine - high school student Olya Meshcherskaya - was unexpectedly interrupted by a terrible and at first glance inexplicable catastrophe.
But this surprise - the death of the heroine - had its own fatal pattern. To expose and reveal the philosophical basis of the tragedy, your understanding of love as the greatest happiness and at the same time greatest tragedy, Bunin constructs his work in a unique way.
The beginning of the story carries the news of the tragic outcome of the plot: “In the cemetery, above a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth...”.
“Embedded in it... is a convex porcelain medallion, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.”
Then a smooth retrospective narrative begins, full of the jubilant joy of life, which the author slows down and restrains with epic details: as a girl, Olya Meshcherskaya “did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown school dresses... Then she began to blossom... by leaps and bounds. ...No one danced at balls like Olya Meshcherskaya, no one ran on skates like she did, no one at balls was looked after as much as she was.
During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium...” And then one day, during a big break, when she was rushing around the school hall like a whirlwind from the first-graders enthusiastically chasing her, she was unexpectedly called to the head of the gymnasium. The boss reprimands her for not having a high school hairstyle, but a woman’s hairstyle, and for wearing expensive shoes and combs.
“You are no longer a girl... but not a woman either,” the boss tells Ole irritably, “... you completely lose sight of the fact that you are still only a high school student...”. And then a sharp change in the plot begins.
In response, Olya Meshcherskaya utters significant words: “Forgive me, madam, you are mistaken: I am a woman. And do you know who is to blame for this? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother is Alexey Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer in the village.”
At this moment of highest reader interest story line ends abruptly. And without filling the pause with anything, the author hits us with a new stunning surprise, outwardly in no way connected with the first - the words that Olya was shot by a Cossack officer.
Everything that led to the murder, which should, it would seem, constitute the plot of the story, is set out in one paragraph, without details and without any emotional overtones - in the language of the court record: “The officer told the forensic investigator that Meshcherskaya lured him, was close to him , swore to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, seeing him off to Novocherkassk, she suddenly told him that she had never thought of loving him...”
The author does not provide any psychological motivation for this story. Moreover, at the moment when the reader’s attention is directed along this very main plot line (Oli’s connection with the officer and her murder), the author interrupts it and deprives it of the expected retrospective presentation.
The story about the heroine’s earthly journey is over - and at this moment the bright melody of Olya, a girl full of happiness and expectation of love, bursts into the narrative.
The cool lady Olya, an overripe maiden who goes to her student’s grave every holiday, remembers how she once unwittingly overheard Olya’s conversation with her friend. “I was in one of my dad’s books,” says Olya, and read what kind of beauty a woman should have.
Black eyes boiling with resin, eyelashes black as night, a gentle blush, a thin figure, longer than an ordinary arm... a small leg, sloping shoulders... but most importantly, you know what? - Easy breath! But I have it,” listen to how I sigh, “I really do?”
So convulsively, with sharp breaks, the plot is presented, in which much remains unclear. For what purpose does Bunin deliberately not observe the temporal sequence of events, and most importantly, breaks the cause-and-effect relationship between them?
To emphasize the main philosophical thought: Olya Meshcherskaya died not because life confronted her first with an “old womanizer, and then with a rude officer. That is why there is no plot development for these two love encounters, because the reasons could receive a very specific, everyday explanation and lead the reader away from the main thing.
The tragedy of Olya Meshcherskaya's fate lies in herself, in her charm, in her organic unity with life, in her complete subordination to her spontaneous impulses - blissful and catastrophic at the same time.
Olya was driven towards life with such frantic passion that any collision with her was bound to lead to disaster. The overstrained expectation of the utmost fullness of life, of love as a whirlwind, as dedication, as “easy breathing” led to disaster.
Olya burned out like a moth, frantically rushing towards the scorching fire of love. Not everyone is given this feeling. Only for those who have easy breathing - a frantic expectation of life and happiness.
“Now this light breath,” Bunin concludes his story, “has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.”
- Analysis of the book “Cursed Days”
Bunin did not accept the February and then the October Revolution. On May 21, 1918, he and his wife left Moscow for the south and for almost two years lived first in Kyiv and then in Odessa.
Both of these cities were scenes of violent civil war and changed hands more than once. In Odessa, during the stormy and menacing months of 1919, Bunin wrote his diary - a kind of book, which he called “Cursed Days.”
Bunin saw and repelled the civil war from only one side - from the side of the Red Terror. But we know enough about white terror. Unfortunately, the Red Terror was as much a reality as the White Terror.
Under these conditions, the slogans of freedom, brotherhood, and equality were perceived by Bunin as a “mocking sign” because they were stained with the blood of many hundreds and thousands of often innocent people.
Here are a few of Bunin’s notes: “D. arrived and fled from Simferopol. There, he says, there is indescribable horror, soldiers and workers walk knee-deep in blood.
Some old colonel was roasted alive in a locomotive furnace... they rob, rape, commit dirty tricks in churches, cut belts from officers’ backs, marry priests with mares... In Kyiv... several professors were killed, among them the famous diagnostician Yanovsky.” “Yesterday there was an “emergency” meeting of the executive committee.
Feldman proposed “using bourgeoisie instead of horses to transport heavy loads.” And so on. Bunin's diary is replete with entries of this kind. Much here, unfortunately, is not fiction.
Evidence of this is not just Bunin’s diary, but also Korolenko’s letters to Lunacharsky and Gorky’s “Untimely Thoughts”, Sholokhov’s “ Quiet Don", I. Shmelev's epic "Sun of the Dead" and many other works and documents of the time.
In his book, Bunin characterizes the revolution as the unleashing of the basest and wildest instincts, as a bloody prologue to the inexhaustible disasters that await the intelligentsia, the people of Russia, and the country as a whole.
“Our children, grandchildren,” writes Bunin, “will not be able to even imagine that Russia... truly fabulously rich and prospering with fabulous speed, in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understood - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness...”
Journalistic and literary-critical articles, notes and notebooks of the writer, only recently published for the first time in our country (collection “The Great Datura”, M., 1997), are imbued with similar feelings, thoughts and moods.
- Emigration of Bunin
In Odessa, Bunin faced the inevitable question: what to do? Flee from Russia or, no matter what, stay. The question is painful, and these torments of choice were also reflected on the pages of his diary.
At the end of 1919, approaching menacing events led Bunin to an irrevocable decision to go abroad. On January 25, 1920, on the Greek steamship Patras, he left Russia forever.
Bunin left his homeland not as an emigrant, but as a refugee. Because he took Russia and its image with him. In “Cursed Days” he will write: “If I had not loved this “icon”, this Rus', had not seen it, why would I have gone so crazy all these years, why would I have suffered so continuously, so fiercely? "10.
Living in Paris and in the seaside town of Grasse, Bunin felt a sharp, aching pain throughout Russia until the end of his days. His first poems, created after an almost two-year break, are permeated with longing for his homeland.
His 1922 poem “The Bird Has a Nest” is filled with special bitterness of the loss of his homeland:
The bird has a nest, the beast has a hole.
How bitter it was for the young heart,
When I left my father's yard,
Say goodbye to your home!
The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.
How the heart beats, sadly and loudly,
When I enter, being baptized, into someone else's rented house
With his already old knapsack!
Acute nostalgic pain for his homeland forces Bunin to create works that are addressed to old Russia.
The theme of pre-revolutionary Russia becomes the main content of his work for three whole decades, until his death.
In this regard, Bunin shared the fate of many Russian emigrant writers: Kuprin, Chirikov, Shmelev, B. Zaitsev, Gusev-Orenburgsky, Grebenshchikov and others, who devoted all their work to depicting old Russia, often idealized, cleared of everything contradictory.
Bunin turns to his homeland and memories of it in one of the first stories created abroad - “Mowers”.
Telling about the beauty of the Russian folk song, which is sung by Ryazan mowers while working in a young birch forest, the writer reveals the origins of that wonderful spiritual and poetic power that is contained in this song: “The beauty was that we were all children of our homeland and all We were together and we all felt good, calm and loving, without a clear understanding of our feelings, because they don’t need to be understood when they exist.”
- Foreign prose of Bunin
I. Bunin's foreign prose develops primarily as lyrical, that is, prose of clear and distinct expressions of the author's feelings, which was largely determined by the writer's acute longing for his abandoned homeland.
These works, mainly short stories, are characterized by a weakened plot, the ability of their author to subtly and expressively convey feelings and moods, deep penetration into the inner world of the characters, a combination of lyricism and musicality, and linguistic precision.
In exile, Bunin continued the artistic development of one of the main themes of his work - the theme of love. The stories “Mitya’s Love” are dedicated to her.
“The Case of Cornet Elagin”, the stories “Sunstroke”, “Ida”, “Mordovian Sarafan” and especially the cycle of short short stories under the general title “Dark Alleys”.
In his treatment of this eternal theme for art, Bunin is deeply original. Among the classics of the 19th century - I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy and others - love is usually given in an ideal aspect, in its spiritual, moral, even intellectual essence (for the heroines of Turgenev’s novels, love is not only a school of feeling, but also a school of thought ). As for the physiological side of love, the classics practically did not touch upon it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, in a number of works of Russian literature, another extreme emerged: an unchaste image love relationship, savoring naturalistic details. Bunin’s originality lies in the fact that his spiritual and physical are fused in an inextricable unity.
Love is portrayed by the writer as a fatal force, which is akin to a primordial natural element, which, having bestowed a person with dazzling happiness, then deals him a cruel, often fatal blow. But still, the main thing in Bunin’s concept of love is not the pathos of tragedy, but the apotheosis of human feeling.
Moments of love are the pinnacle of life for Bunin's heroes, when they learn the highest value of existence, the harmony of body and spirit, and the fullness of earthly happiness.
- Analysis of the story “Sunstroke”
The story is dedicated to the depiction of love as passion, as a spontaneous manifestation of cosmic forces "Sunstroke"(1925). A young officer, having met a young married woman on a Volga steamship, invites her to get off at the pier of the town they are sailing past.
Young people stay at a hotel, and this is where their intimacy takes place. In the morning the woman leaves without even saying her name. “I give you my word of honor,” she says, saying goodbye, “that I am not at all what you might think of me.
Nothing even similar to what happened to me has ever happened and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely hit me... Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke.” “Indeed, it’s like some kind of sunstroke,” the lieutenant, left alone, reflects, stunned by the happiness of the past night.
A fleeting meeting of two simple, unremarkable people (“What’s special about her?” the lieutenant asks himself) gives both of them a feeling of such great happiness that they are forced to admit: “Neither one nor the other has ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.” "
It is not so important how these people lived and how they will live after their fleeting meeting, what is important is that a huge all-consuming feeling suddenly entered their lives - it means this life happened, because they learned something that not everyone is given the opportunity to know.
- Analysis of the collection of stories “Dark Alleys”
A collection of Bunin's stories is dedicated to the philosophical and psychological understanding of the theme of love. "Dark alleys"(1937-1945). “I think that this is the best and most original thing that I have written in my life,” this is what the author said about these works.
Each story in the collection is completely independent, with its own characters, plots, and range of problems. But there is an internal connection between them, which allows us to talk about the problematic and thematic unity of the cycle.
This unity is defined by Bunin’s concept of love as a “sunstroke” that leaves an imprint on a person’s entire future life.
The heroes of “Dark Alleys” rush into a hurricane of passion without fear or looking back. In this brief moment they are given the opportunity to comprehend life in all its fullness, after which others burn out without a trace (“Galya Ganskaya”, “Saratov Steamship”, “Henry”), others eke out an ordinary existence, remembering as the most precious thing in the life that visited them once upon a time great love (“Rusya”, “ Cold autumn»).
Love, in Bunin’s understanding, requires a person to exert maximum effort on all his spiritual and physical strength. Therefore, it cannot be long-lasting: often in this love, as already said, one of the heroes dies.
Here is the story "Henry". The writer Glebov met a woman translator, Heinrich, remarkable in intelligence and beauty, subtle and charming, but soon after they experienced the greatest happiness of mutual love, she was unexpectedly and absurdly killed out of jealousy by another writer - an Austrian.
The hero of another story - “Natalie” - fell in love with a charming girl, and when she, after a whole series of ups and downs, became his actual wife, and he seemed to have achieved the desired happiness, she was overtaken by sudden death from childbirth.
In the story “In Paris” there are two. Lonely Russians - a woman who worked in an emigrant restaurant and a former colonel - having met by chance, found happiness in each other, but soon after they became close, the colonel suddenly dies in a subway car.
And yet, despite the tragic outcome, love is revealed in them as the greatest happiness of life, incomparable to any other earthly joys. The epigraph to such works can be taken from Natalie’s words from the story of the same name: “Is there such a thing as unhappy love, doesn’t the most mournful music give happiness?”
Many stories in the cycle (“Muse”, “Russia”, “Late Hour”, “Wolves”, “Cold Autumn”, etc.) are characterized by such a technique as reminiscence, the turning of their heroes to the past. And they consider the most significant thing in their former life, most often during their youth, to be the time when they loved, brightly, passionately and completely.
The old retired military man from the story “Dark Alleys,” who still retains traces of his former beauty, meeting by chance with the hostess of the inn, recognizes in her the one whom thirty years ago, when she was an eighteen-year-old girl, he passionately loved.
Looking back at his past, he comes to the conclusion that the moments of intimacy with her were “the best... truly magical moments,” incomparable to his entire subsequent life.
In the story “Cold Autumn,” the woman narrating her life lost her beloved person at the beginning of the First World War. Remembering many years later the last meeting with him, she comes to the conclusion: “And that’s all that happened in my life - the rest is an unnecessary dream.”
With the greatest interest and skill, Bunin depicts first love, the emergence of love passion. This is especially true for young heroines. In similar situations, he reveals completely different, unique female characters.
These are Muse, Rusya, Natalie, Galya Ganskaya, Styopa, Tanya and other heroines from the stories of the same name. The thirty-eight short stories in this collection present us with a magnificent variety of unforgettable female types.
Next to this inflorescence, male characters are less developed, sometimes only outlined and, as a rule, static. They are characterized rather reflectively, in connection with the physical and mental appearance of the woman they love.
Even when only “he” acts in the story, for example, the officer in love from the story “Steamboat “Saratov””, “she” still remains in the reader’s memory - “long, wavy”, and her “bare knee in section hood."
In the stories of the “Dark Alleys” series, Bunin writes a little about Russia itself. The main place in them is occupied by the theme of love - “sunstroke”, passion that gives a person a feeling of supreme bliss, but incinerates him, which is associated with Bunin’s idea of eros as a powerful elemental force and the main form of manifestation of cosmic life.
An exception in this regard is the story “Clean Monday”, where, through the external love story Bunin's deep thoughts about Russia, its past and possible paths of development shine through.
Often, Bunin’s story contains, as it were, two levels - one plot, upper, the other - deep, subtextual. They can be compared to icebergs: with their visible and main, underwater parts.
We see this in “Easy Breathing” and, to some extent, in “Brothers”, “The Mister from San Francisco”, “Chang’s Dreams”. The same is the story “Clean Monday”, created by Bunin on May 12, 1944.
The writer himself considered this work the best of all that he had written. “I thank God,” he said, “that he gave me the opportunity to write “Clean Monday.”
- Analysis of the story “Clean Monday”
The external event outline of the story is not very complex and fits well into the theme of the “Dark Alleys” cycle. The action takes place in 1913.
Young people, he and she (Bunin never mentions their names), met one day at a lecture in a literary and artistic circle and fell in love with each other.
He is open in his feelings, she restrains her attraction to him. Their intimacy still occurs, but after spending just one night together, the lovers part forever, for the heroine on Clean Monday, i.e., on the first day of pre-Easter Lent in 1913, makes the final decision to go to the monastery, parting with her past.
However, the writer, with the help of associations, meaningful details and subtext, inserts his thoughts and forecasts about Russia into this plot.
Bunin views Russia as a country with a special path of development and a unique mentality, where European features are intertwined with the features of the East and Asia.
This idea runs like a red thread through the entire work, which is based on a historical concept that reveals the most significant aspects of Russian history and national character for the writer.
With the help of everyday and psychological details that abound in the story, Bunin emphasizes the complexity of the way of Russian life, where Western and Eastern features are intertwined.
In the heroine’s apartment there is a “wide Turkish sofa”, next to it there is an “expensive piano”, and above the sofa, the author emphasizes, “for some reason there was a portrait of a barefoot Tolstoy.”
A Turkish sofa and an expensive piano are East and West (symbols of the Eastern and Western way of life), and barefoot Tolstoy is Russia, Rus' in its unusual, peculiar, appearance that does not fit into any framework.
Arriving on the evening of Forgiveness Sunday at Egorov’s tavern, which was famous for its pancakes and actually existed in Moscow at the beginning of the century, the girl says, pointing to the icon of the Mother of God with three hands hanging in the corner: “Good! There are wild men below, and here are pancakes with champagne and the Mother of God of Three Hands. Three hands! After all, this is India!
The same duality is emphasized here by Bunin - “wild men”, on the one hand (Asian), and on the other - “pancakes with champagne” - a combination of national and European. And above all this is Rus', symbolized in the image of the Mother of God, but again unusual: the Christian Mother of God with three arms resembles the Buddhist Shiva (again a peculiar combination of Rus', West and East).
Of the characters in the story, the heroine most significantly embodies the combination of Western and Eastern features. Her father is “an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, he lived in retirement in Tver,” writes Bunin.
At home, the heroine wears arkhaluk - oriental clothing, a type of short caftan trimmed with sable (Siberia). “The inheritance of my Astrakhan grandmother,” she explains the origin of these clothes.
So, the father is a Tver merchant from central Russia, the grandmother is from Astrakhan, where the Tatars originally lived. Russian and Tatar blood merged together in this girl.
Looking at her lips, at the “dark fluff above them,” at her figure, at the garnet velvet of her dress, smelling some spicy smell of her hair, the hero of the story thinks: “Moscow, Persia, Turkey. She had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty,” the hero concludes.
When they once arrived at the Moscow Art Theater skit, the famous actor Kachalov approached her with a glass of wine and said: “Tsar Maiden, Queen of Shamakhan, your health!” In Kachalov’s mouth, Bunin put his point of view on the appearance and character of the heroine: she is at the same time the “Tsar-Maiden” (as in Russian fairy tales), and at the same time the “Shamakhan Queen” (like the oriental heroine of Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”) . What is the spiritual world of this “Shamakhan queen” filled with?
In the evenings, she reads Schnitzler, Hoffmann-Stall, Przybyshevsky, and plays Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” i.e., she is closely close to Western European culture. At the same time, she is attracted to everything primordially Russian, especially ancient Russian.
The hero of the story, on whose behalf the story is told, never ceases to be amazed that his beloved visits cemeteries and Kremlin cathedrals, is well versed in Orthodox and schismatic Christian rituals, loves and is ready to endlessly quote ancient Russian chronicles, immediately commenting on them.
Some kind of internal intense work is constantly happening in the girl’s soul and surprises, sometimes discourages her lover. “She was mysterious, incomprehensible to me,” the hero of the story notes more than once.
When asked by her lover how she knows so much about Ancient Rus', the heroine replies: “It’s you who don’t know me.” The result of all this work of the soul was the heroine’s departure to the monastery.
In the image of the heroine, in her spiritual quest, Bunin’s own search for an answer to the question of the ways of salvation and development of Russia is concentrated. Having turned in 1944 to the creation of a work where the action takes place in 1913, the original year for Russia, Bunin offers his own way to save the country.
Finding itself between the West and the East, at the point of intersection of somewhat opposing historical trends and cultural structures, Russia retained the specific features of its national life, embodied in chronicles and Orthodoxy.
This third side of the spiritual appearance turns out to be dominant in behavior and inner world his heroines. Combining Western and Eastern features in her appearance, she chooses life outcome service to God, i.e. humility, moral purity, conscientiousness, deep love for Ancient Rus'.
Russia could have gone exactly this way, in which, as in the heroine of the story, three forces also united: Asian spontaneity and passion; European culture and restraint and primordial national humility, conscientiousness, patriarchy in the very in a good way this word and, of course, the Orthodox worldview.
Russia, unfortunately, did not follow Bunin, mainly the first path, which led to a revolution in which the writer saw the embodiment of chaos, explosion, and general destruction.
By the act of his heroine (by entering a monastery), the writer proposed a different and very real way out of the current situation - the path of spiritual humility and enlightenment, curbing the elements, evolutionary development, strengthening religious and moral self-awareness.
It was on this path that he saw the salvation of Russia, its assertion of its place among other states and peoples. According to Bunin, this is a truly original, unaffected by foreign influences, and therefore a promising, saving path that would strengthen the national specificity and mentality of Russia and its people.
In such a unique way, in Bunin’s subtle way, the writer told us in his work not only about love, but, most importantly, about his national-historical views and forecasts.
- Analysis of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev”
Bunin's most significant work created in a foreign land was the novel "The Life of Arsenyev" on which he worked for over 11 years, from 1927 to 1938.
The novel “The Life of Arsenyev” is autobiographical. It reproduces many facts from Bunin’s own childhood and youth. At the same time, this is a book about the childhood and youth of a person from a landowner family in general. In this sense, “The Life of Arsenyev” is adjacent to such autobiographical works of Russian literature as “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth". L. N. Tolstoy and “The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson” by S. T. Aksakov.
Bunin was destined to create the last autobiographical book in the history of Russian literature by a hereditary writer-nobleman.
What themes concern Bunin in this work? Love, death, power over the soul of a person, memories of childhood and youth, native nature, the duty and calling of a writer, his attitude towards the people and homeland, a person’s attitude towards religion - this is the main range of topics covered by Bunin in “The Life of Arsenyev”.
The book tells about twenty-four years of life of the autobiographical hero, the young man Alexei Arsenyev: from birth to the break with his first deep love - Lika, the prototype of which was the first love of Bunin himself, Varvara Pashenko.
However, in essence, the time frame of the work is much wider: they are expanded by excursions into the prehistory of the Arsenyev family and individual attempts by the author to stretch the thread from the distant past to the present.
One of the features of the book is its monologue and sparsely populated characters, in contrast to the autobiographical books of L. Tolstoy, Shmelev, Gorky and others, where we see a whole gallery of different characters.
In Bunin's book, the hero talks mainly about himself: his feelings, sensations, impressions. This is the confession of a man who lived an interesting life in his own way.
Another characteristic feature of the novel is the presence in it of stable images - leitmotifs - that run through the entire work. They connect disparate pictures of life with a single philosophical concept - reflections not so much of the hero as of the author himself about the happiness and at the same time the tragedy of life, its short duration and transience.
What are these motives? One of them is the motif of death that runs through the entire work. For example, Arsenyev’s perception of the image of his mother in early childhood is combined with the subsequent memory of her death.
The second book of the novel also ends with the theme of death - the sudden death and funeral of Arsenyev's relative, Pisarev. The fifth and most extensive part of the novel, which was originally published as separate work entitled “Lika”, tells the story of Arsenyev’s love for a woman who played a significant role in his life. The chapter ends with the death of Lika.
Connected with the theme of death in the novel, as in all of Bunin’s later works, is the theme of love. This is the second leitmotif of the book. These two motives are connected at the end of the novel by the message about Lika’s death shortly after she left Arsenyev, exhausted from the torments of love and jealousy.
It is important to note that death in Bunin’s work does not suppress or subjugate love. On the contrary, it is love as the highest feeling that triumphs in the author’s view. In his novel, Bunin again and again acts as a singer of healthy, fresh youthful love, leaving a grateful memory in a person’s soul for a lifetime.
The love interests of Alexei Arsenyev go through three stages in the novel, which generally correspond to the stages of formation and formation of youthful character.
His first love for the German girl Ankhen is just a hint of a feeling, the initial manifestation of a thirst for love. Alexei’s brief, suddenly interrupted carnal relationship with Tonka, his brother’s maid, is devoid of a spiritual principle and is perceived by him as a necessary phenomenon “when you are already 17 years old.” And, finally, love for Lika is that all-consuming feeling in which both the spiritual and the sensual principles inextricably merge.
The love of Arsenyev and Lika is shown comprehensively in the novel, in complex unity and at the same time discord. Lika and Alexey love each other, but the hero increasingly feels that they are spiritually very different people. Arsenyev often looks at his beloved like a master at a slave.
A union with a woman appears to him as an act in which all rights are defined for him, but almost no responsibilities. Love, he believes, does not tolerate peace or habit; it needs constant renewal, which involves sensual attraction to other women.
In turn, Lika is far from the world in which Arsenyev lives. She does not share his love for nature, sadness for the passing of the old noble estate life, is deaf to poetry, etc.
The spiritual incompatibility of the heroes leads to the fact that they begin to get tired of each other. It all ends with the lovers breaking up.
However, Lika's death sharpens the hero's perception of failed love and is perceived by him as an irreparable loss. The final lines of the work are very indicative, telling about what Arsenyev experienced when he saw Lika in a dream, many years after breaking up with her: “I saw her vaguely, but with such power of love, joy, with such physical and mental closeness, which was not never felt for anyone."
The poetic affirmation of love as a feeling over which even death has no power is one of the most remarkable features of the novel.
Psychologized pictures of nature are also beautiful in the work. They combine the brightness and richness of colors with the feelings and thoughts of the hero and author that permeate them.
The landscape is philosophical: it deepens and reveals the author’s concept of life, the cosmic principles of existence and the spiritual essence of man, for whom nature is an integral part of existence. It enriches and develops a person, heals his spiritual wounds.
The theme of culture and art, perceived by the consciousness of young Arsenyev, is also of significant importance in the novel. The hero enthusiastically talks about the library of one of the neighboring landowners, which contained many “wonderful volumes in thick bindings made of dark golden leather”: works by Sumarokov, Anna Bunina, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Venevitinov, Yazykov, Baratynsky.
The hero recalls with admiration and reverence the first works of Pushkin and Gogol he read as a child.
The writer draws attention in his work to the role of religion in strengthening the spiritual principles of the human personality. Without calling for religious asceticism at all, Bunin nevertheless points to the desire for religious and moral self-improvement that heals the human soul.
The novel contains many scenes and episodes related to religious holidays, and all of them are imbued with poetry, written carefully and spiritually. Bunin writes about the “storm of delight” that invariably arose in Arsenyev’s soul every time he visited church, about “the explosion of our highest love both for God and for our neighbor.”
The theme of the people also appears on the pages of the work. But as before, Bunin poeticizes the humble peasants, kind hearted and soul. But as soon as Arsenyev starts talking about people protesting, especially those who sympathize with the revolution, tenderness gives way to irritation.
This reflected the political views of the writer himself, who never accepted the path of revolutionary struggle and especially violence against the individual.
In a word, the entire book “The Life of Arsenyev” is a kind of chronicle of the hero’s inner life, starting from infancy and ending with the final formation of character.
The main thing that determines the originality of the novel, its genre, and artistic structure is the desire to show how, in contact with diverse life phenomena - natural, everyday, cultural, socio-historical - the identification, development and enrichment of emotional and intellectual personality traits occurs.
This is a kind of thought and conversation about life, which contains many facts, phenomena and emotional movements. In the novel “The Life of Arsenyev”, through the thoughts, feelings, and moods of the main character, one can hear that poetic feeling of the homeland that has always been inherent the best works Bunina.
- Bunin's life in France
How did Bunin’s personal life develop during his years in France?
Having settled in Paris since 1923, Bunin spends most of his time, summer and autumn, with his wife and a narrow circle of friends in the Alpes-Maritimes, in the town of Grasse, where he bought a dilapidated villa “Jeanette”.
In 1933, an unexpected event invaded the Bunins' meager existence - he was awarded the Nobel Prize - the first of the Russian writers.
This somewhat strengthened Bunin’s financial position, and also attracted wide attention to him not only among emigrants, but also among the French public. But this did not last long. A significant part of the prize was distributed to fellow emigrants in distress, and the interest of French critics in Nobel laureate was short-lived.
Homesickness did not let Bunin go. On May 8, 1941, he writes to Moscow to his old friend, writer N.D. Teleshov: “I am gray, dry, but still poisonous. I really want to go home." He also writes about this to A.N. Tolstoy.
Alexei Tolstoy made an attempt to help Bunin in his return to his homeland: he sent a detailed letter to Stalin. Having given a detailed description of Bunin’s talent, Tolstoy asked Stalin about the possibility of the writer returning to his homeland.
The letter was handed over to the Kremlin expedition on June 18, 1941, and four days later the war began, pushing far aside everything that had nothing to do with it.
- Bunin and the Great Patriotic War
During the Great Patriotic War Bunin took a patriotic position without hesitation. Using radio reports, he eagerly followed the progress of the great battle that unfolded in the vastness of Russia. His diaries of these years are replete with messages from Russia, because of which Bunin moves from despair to hope.
The writer does not hide his hatred of fascism. “Bestial people continue their devilish work - killing and destroying everything, everything! And this began by the will of one person - the destruction of the entire globe - or rather, the one who embodied the will of his people, who should not be forgiven until the 77th generation,” he writes in his diary on March 4, 1942. “Only a crazy cretin can think that he will reign over Russia,” Bunin is convinced.
In the fall of 1942, he met with Soviet prisoners of war, whom the Nazis used for labor in France. Subsequently, they visited the Bunins several times, secretly listening to Soviet military radio reports together with their owners.
In one of his letters, Bunin notes about his new acquaintances: “Some... were so charming that we kissed them every day as if we were family... They danced a lot and sang - “Moscow, beloved, invincible.”
These meetings intensified Bunin's long-standing dream of returning to his homeland. “I often think about returning home. Will I make it?" - he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1943.
In November 1942, the Nazis occupied France. Taking advantage of Bunin's difficult financial situation, pro-fascist newspapers vied with each other to offer him cooperation, promising mountains of gold. But all their attempts were in vain. Bunin almost fainted from hunger, but did not want to make any compromises.
The victorious completion of the Patriotic War by the Soviet Union was greeted with great joy. Bunin looked closely at Soviet literature.
His high assessments of Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin” and the stories of K. Paustovsky are known. His meetings in Paris with journalist Yu. Zhukov and writer K. Simonov date back to this time. He visits the USSR Ambassador to France Bogomolov. He was issued a passport as a citizen of the USSR.
- Bunin's loneliness in exile
These steps caused a sharply negative attitude towards Bunin in anti-Soviet emigrant circles. On the other hand, it turned out to be impossible for the writer to return to Soviet Union, especially after the repressive party resolution in the field of literature of 1946 and Zhdanov’s report.
Lonely, sick, half-impoverished, Bunin found himself between two fires: many emigrants turned away from him, while the Soviet side, irritated and disappointed that Bunin did not beg to be sent home, remained deeply silent.
This bitterness of resentment and loneliness was intensified by thoughts of the inexorable approach of death. Motifs of farewell to life are heard in the poem “Two Wreaths” and in Bunin’s last prose works, philosophical meditations “Mistral”, “In the Alps”, “Legend” with their characteristic details and images: the grave chamber, grave crosses, dead face, similar to a mask, etc.
In some of these works, the writer seems to sum up his own earthly labors and days. IN little story“Bernard” (1952) tells the story of a simple French sailor who worked tirelessly and died with a feeling of honestly fulfilling his duty.
His last words were: “I think I was a good sailor.” “What did he want to express with these words? The joy of knowing that, while living on earth, he brought benefit to his neighbor, being a good sailor? - asks the author.
And he answers: “No: the fact that God gives each of us, along with life, this or that talent and places on us the sacred duty not to bury it in the ground. Why, why? We don't know. But we must know that everything in this world, incomprehensible to us, must certainly have some meaning, some high God’s intention, aimed at ensuring that everything in this world “is good” and that the diligent fulfillment of this God’s intention is all our merit is before Him, and therefore joy and pride.
And Bernard knew and felt it. All his life he diligently, worthily, faithfully fulfilled the modest duty entrusted to him by God, serving Him not out of fear, but out of conscience. And how could he not say what he said at his last minute?”
“It seems to me,” Bunin concludes his story, “that I, as an artist, have earned the right to speak about myself, in my own last days, something similar to what Bernard said when he died.”
- Bunin's death
On November 8, 1953, at the age of 83, Bunin dies. An outstanding artist of words, a wonderful master of prose and poetry, has passed away. “Bunin is the last of the classics of Russian literature, whose experience we have no right to forget,” wrote A. Tvardovsky.
Bunin's creativity is not only filigree skill, the amazing power of plastic image. This is love for the native land, for Russian culture, for the Russian language. In 1914, Bunin created a wonderful poem in which he emphasized the enduring significance of the Word in the life of every person and humanity as a whole:
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Ivan Alekseevich Bunin in 1933, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature
Bunin's prose is more subjective and “poetic” than poetry. In all his books one can find purely lyrical compositions in prose. This lyrical style was main feature his prose, which attracted general attention to him. In the first collections (1892–1902), the lyrical stories were undoubtedly the most interesting - everything else was either realistic-sentimental stories in the traditional spirit, or attempts to surpass Chekhov in depicting “minor pricks” that do not give life ( Teacher; in early editions - Tarantella). Lyrical stories went back to the tradition of Chekhov ( Steppe), Turgenev ( Forest and steppe) and Goncharova ( Oblomov's dream), but Bunin further strengthened the lyrical element, freeing himself from the narrative backbone, and at the same time studiously avoided (everywhere, with the exception of some stories with a touch of “modernism”) the language of lyrical prose. The lyrical effect is achieved by Bunin's poetry of things, not by rhythm or choice of words. The most significant of these lyrical prose poems is Antonov apples(1900), where the smell of a special variety of apples leads him from association to association, which recreate a poetic picture of the dying life of his class - the middle nobility Central Russia. The tradition of Goncharov, with his epic manner of depicting stagnant life, is especially alive in Bunin’s lyrical “stories” (one of them is even called Dream of Oblomov's grandson). In subsequent years, the same lyrical manner was transferred from dying Central Russia to other topics: for example, Bunin's impressions of Palestine (1908) were written in the same restrained, muted and lyrical “minor key”.
Damned days. Ivan Bunin. Documentary film by Alexey Denisov
Village, which appeared in 1910, showed Bunin in a new light. This is one of the harshest, darkest and most bitter books in Russian literature. This is a “social” novel, the theme of which is poverty and the barbarity of Russian life. The narrative hardly develops in time, it is static, almost like a painting, but at the same time it is constructed masterfully, and the gradual filling of the canvas with a deliberate series of strokes gives the impression of an irresistible, self-conscious force. At the center of the “poem” are two Krasov brothers, Tikhon and Kuzma. Tikhon is a successful shopkeeper, Kuzma is a loser and a “truth-seeker.” The first part is written from Tikhon’s point of view, the second from Kuzma’s point of view. Both brothers at the end come to the conclusion that their lives were in vain. The background is a Central Russian village, poor, wild, stupid, rude, without any moral foundations. Gorky, condemning Russian peasantry, speaks of Bunin as the only writer who dared to tell the truth about the “peasant” without idealizing him.
Despite his strength, Village is not a perfect work of art: the story is too long and uncollected, there is too much purely “journalistic” material in it; characters Villages, like Gorky's heroes, they talk and think too much. But in his next work, Bunin overcame this shortcoming. Sukhodol- one of the masterpieces of Russian prose, in it, more than in any other works, Bunin’s true talent is visible. As in Village, Bunin takes the plotless tendency of Russian prose to the limit and builds a story in defiance of the temporal order. This is a perfect work of art, quite unique. There are no parallels to it in European literature. This is the story of the “fall of the house” of the Khrushchevs, the story of the gradual death of a landowner family, told from the point of view of a servant. Short (it contains only 25,000 words) and compressed, it is at the same time spacious and elastic, it has the “density” and strength of poetry, without losing for a moment the calm and even language of realistic prose. Sukhodol like a duplicate Villages, and the themes in both “poems” are the same: cultural poverty, lack of “roots,” emptiness and savagery of Russian life.
The same theme is repeated in a series of stories written between 1908 and 1914, many of which stand at a similarly high level, although none of them achieve perfection. Sukhodola. Theme of the stories Devil's Desert (1908), Night conversation(1911) and Spring evening(1913) – the primordial callousness of the peasant, his indifference to everything except profit. IN More than life(1913) – a joyless and hopeless life county town. A good life (1912) - the story told by the heroine herself, a heartless (and naively self-satisfied in her heartlessness) woman of peasant origin, about how she succeeded in life after causing the death of a rich young man in love with her, and then causing the death of her son. The story is remarkable, among other things, for its language - an accurate reproduction of the Yelets bourgeois dialect with all its phonetic and grammatical features. It is remarkable that even when reproducing the dialect, Bunin manages to remain a “classic” and keep the words subordinate to the whole. In this sense, Bunin's manner is opposite to that of Leskov, who always plays with language and whose words are always protruded to such an extent that they overshadow the plot of the story. It is interesting to compare two writers using the example Have a good life Bunin and Leskov’s sketches of approximately the same nature - Warrior. A good life- Bunin’s only story built entirely on dialect, but the speech of the Yelets peasants, reproduced just as accurately and just as “non-protrudingly,” appears in the dialogues of all his rural stories (especially in Night conversation). Apart from the use of dialect, Bunin’s own language is “classical”, sober, concrete. His only means of expression– an accurate depiction of things: language is “objective” because the effect it produces depends entirely on the objects in question. Bunin is perhaps the only modern Russian writer whose language would be admired by the “classics”: Turgenev or Goncharov.
An almost inevitable consequence of “dependence on the subject” is that when Bunin transfers the action of his stories from the familiar and home realities of the Yelets district to Ceylon, Palestine or even Odessa, his style loses strength and expressiveness. In exotic stories, Bunin often turns out to be untenable, especially when he tries to be poetic: the beauty of his poetry suddenly turns into tinsel. To avoid inconsistency when describing foreign (and even Russian urban) life, Bunin has to ruthlessly suppress his lyrical inclinations. He is forced to be bold and edgy, at the risk of being simplistic. In some stories he succeeds in sharpness and insolence, for example, in Mr. from San Francisco(1915), which most of Bunin's readers (especially foreign ones) consider his unsurpassed masterpiece.
This wonderful story continues the line of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, and his plan is fully consistent with the teachings of Tolstoy: civilization is vanity, the only reality is the presence of death. But in Bunin’s stories (unlike best stories Leonid Andreev) there is no direct influence of Tolstoy. Bunin is not an analyst or a psychologist, that’s why Mister from San Francisco not an analytical work. This is a masterpiece of artistic economy and strict “Doric” style. Mister from San Francisco(like two “rural poems” - Village And Sukhodol) is surrounded by a constellation of other stories in foreign and urban theme, similar to it stylistically: the same boldness of drawing and strict prosaicism. Among the best Kazimir Stanislavovich(1915) and Looped ears(1916) is a bold study of the psychology of the criminal.
Among the most lyrical foreign and urban stories stand out Chang's Dreams(1916) and Brothers(1914). In them, Bunin's poetry, cut off from its native soil, loses its vitality, becomes unconvincing and conventional. The language also loses its colorfulness, becoming “international”. And still Brothers – strong work. This is the story of a Sinhalese rickshaw driver from Colombo and his English rider. Here the author masterfully avoids sentimentality.
The best of Bunin's post-revolutionary stories - Exodus(1918), in density and richness of fabric and in the effectiveness of the atmosphere almost approaching Sukhodolu. After 1918, Bunin did not write anything like this. Some of his stories from this period ( Gautami, In some kingdom) are wonderful works of “objective” lyricism, but most of the others are flabby and “sag” more. It seems that the lyrical element, growing, explodes the boundaries of the very restraint that makes it powerful.
Bunin's diary of the era is also well known civil war – Damn days, full of stunning images of these tragic years.
