Essay on the theme of love in Bunin's stories. Why is love in Bunin’s works a tragic feeling (Bunin I
Literature
Features of the theme of love in the works of I.A. Bunin
Completed:
9th grade student
Teacher:
Markovich L.V.
1 Introduction 3
2 Main part
1) Views of Bunin 6
2) “Dark Alleys” 10
3) "Natalie" 12
4) " Clean Monday» 14
3 Conclusion 17
4 Bibliography 20
introduction
“Love is an intimate and deep feeling directed at another person, human community or idea. Love includes impulse and the will to constancy, taking shape in the ethical demand for fidelity. Love arises as the most free and “unpredictable” expression of the depths of personality; it cannot be forced or overcome,” - this is exactly the definition of love that I.T. Frolov’s philosophical dictionary gives us, but how can a person who has never experienced love, after reading this definition, understand what kind of feeling it is. Certainly not. Love is a feeling that cannot be defined. Each person will have his own, because love is individual and in some sense unique, reflecting the unique features of each person’s life path. In addition, we can say that love is the pursuit of an ideal. When a person falls in love, his love becomes the living embodiment of an ideal that already exists for him not somewhere in the distant future, but today, now, this minute. Having fallen in love, a person begins to see and appreciate in his beloved what sometimes others do not see or appreciate. Love inspires people to write poetry, music, paintings. A person always thinks about love, needs it, waits for it, strives for it. And people have no stronger feeling than love. Neither fear, nor envy, nor malicious hatred - nothing can overcome love.
In literature, the theme of love is one of the eternal themes. An endless number of works have been and will be written about love.
The topic of my essay is “Features of the theme of love in the collection of stories by I.A. Bunin “ Dark alleys»».
Bunin's stories made a strong impression on me. When you read works on the same topic by different authors, you seem to involuntarily compare them, noticing similarities and differences. Most often it happens that the plots are different, the authors present the problem differently, but they see it the same way. However, the first time I read Bunin’s stories, I was amazed at how he not only presents, but also sees love. I discovered a completely different, unlike anything else, “Bunin’s love.” I wanted to understand and understand Bunin’s views on love, which is why I chose this topic for the essay.
I believe that the theme of love is relevant, and I would like to express its relevance in the words of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky: “Life without love is not life, but existence. It is impossible to live without love; that is why the soul was given to man, to love.” Indeed, as long as Peace exists on Earth, people will experience this great feeling - love. After reading the collection of stories “Dark Alleys,” I found out that love for Bunin is the greatest happiness bestowed on man. But eternal doom hangs over her. Love is always associated with tragedy; true love does not have a happy ending, because a person has to pay for moments of happiness. To prove this, I set myself the following tasks:
Study the biography of Bunin and his views on love.
Research critical literature related to the topic of the essay.
Analyze some of the stories included in the collection “Dark Alleys”.
Draw conclusions and present material on this topic
Bunin's views
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is one of the most prominent Russian writers of the twentieth century. In 1933 he was awarded Nobel Prize in the field of literature. He was excellent at both poetry and prose, both short stories and novels. Speaking about Bunin, one cannot remain silent about the main circumstance of his literary and everyday fate. In 1917, the social drama of a writer who always lived in the interests of Russia began. Not understanding October Revolution, the writer left his homeland forever in 1920. Emigration became a truly tragic milestone in Bunin’s biography. Poverty and indifference were painful to bear for Ivan Alekseevich. However, the terrible events with the Nazis coming to power were perceived immeasurably more acutely. Bunin constantly monitored the front and hid people persecuted by the Nazis. He saw the victory of the Russian people over the Germans. In 1945, he was happy for his Fatherland. A. Bobrenko cites the bitter words of Ivan Alekseevich, spoken on March 30, 1943: “... the days pass in great monotony, in weakness and idleness. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a whole book of new stories in a very short time, now I only occasionally pick up the pen - my hands fall off: why and for whom should I write?” We are talking here about stories published under the general title “Dark Alleys.” The first version of the collection appeared in the USA in 1943. Then Bunin, also in a “short time,” enlarges it and publishes it in 1946 in Paris. Working on the collection was a source of spiritual inspiration for Bunin during the war years. The author himself considered the works of the collection “Dark Alleys”, begun and completed
from 1937 to 1944, its highest achievement. I.V. Odintsova recalled “Bunin’s heated objections to a remark about his fame: “What did this Nobel Prize - and how much I dreamed about it - bring me? Some damn shards. And did foreigners appreciate me? So I wrote my best book, “Dark Alleys,” but not a single French publisher wants to take it.” The stories in this cycle are fictional, which Bunin himself emphasized more than once. However, everything, including their retrospective form, is caused, as always in art, by the state of the author’s soul. A.V. Bakhrakh once asked: “Ivan Alekseevich, have you ever tried to compile your Don Juan list?” To which Bunin replied: “Then it would be better to make a list of unused opportunities, but your tactless question awakened a swarm of memories in me. What an amazing time - youth! There were so many meetings, unforgettable moments! Life passes quickly, and we begin to appreciate it only when everything else is behind us.” Such moments of return to the most vivid, powerful experience are reproduced in the cycle. The mood for him is given by N.P. Ogarev’s poem “An Ordinary Tale,” to which Bunin does not very accurately refer when explaining the origin of his story “Dark Alleys.” The collection “Dark Alleys” became the embodiment of all the writer’s many years of thoughts about love, which he saw everywhere, since for him this concept was very broad. He sees love in a special light. At the same time, it reflects the feelings that each person experienced. From this point of view, love is not some special, abstract concept, but, on the contrary, common to everyone. The main theme of the cycle is the theme of love, but this is no longer just love, but love that reveals the most secret corners human soul, love as the basis of life and as that illusory happiness that we all strive for, but, alas, so often miss. “Dark Alleys” is a multifaceted, diverse work. Bunin shows human relationships in all manifestations: sublime passion, quite ordinary desires, novels “out of nothing to do,” animal manifestations of passion.
Bunin is in love with love. For him, this is the most beautiful feeling on earth, incomparable to anything else. And yet love destroys destinies. The writer never tired of repeating that every strong love avoids marriage. An earthly feeling is only a short flash in a person’s life, and Bunin tries to preserve these wonderful moments in his stories. In the collection “Dark Alleys” we will not find a single story where love would end in marriage. Lovers are separated either by relatives, or by circumstances, or by death. It seems that death for Bunin is preferable to a long life family life side by side. It shows love at its peak, but never at its decline.
Critics have repeatedly spoken about the tragic nature of Bunin’s views, which united love and death. But this is how he himself explained to I.V. Odoevtseva this motive: “Don’t you really know that love and death are inseparable? Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide. This means that the writer did not at all initially, not naturally, connect the light of life and the darkness of non-existence. But only in a catastrophic situation.
The words of one unknown philosopher are very close to the views of the writer: “They sought and idolized love. She was lost and not taken care of. “Love doesn’t exist,” people said, but they themselves died of love.”
According to Bunin, love is a kind of highest main point existence, which illuminates a person’s life, and Bunin sees in the face of love the opposition to death: if a person’s life is filled with love, then it lasts longer. But for Bunin, “happy, lasting” love, with which he simply has nothing to do, is not so important as short-lived love, which, like a flash, illuminates a person’s life, filling it with joyful emotions. Such love in Bunin quickly breaks off, but does not die, and with this idea of love, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin writes a series short stories under the general name "Dark Alleys". First of all, all the stories are united by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all of the stories in “Dark Alleys” are told in the past tense. Sometimes it is explicitly stated that past events are being reproduced. “In that distant time, he spent himself especially recklessly...” - “Tanya.” “He didn’t sleep, lay there, smoked and mentally looked at that summer” - “Rusya” “That summer I put on a student cap for the first time” - “Natalie.” In another case, the effect of the past is conveyed more subtly. For example, in "Clean
Monday” “Every evening the coachman rushed me at this hour on a stretching trotter...”, and in the end
definitely: “In the fourteenth year, under New Year, it was the same quiet, sunny evening as that unforgettable one...” Everywhere we talk about what human memory has retained.
At first glance, it may seem that all the stories are similar to each other and satisfy only such thematic divisions of the book as: love, life, death. But these themes coexist and intertwine in every story. Bunin himself designated parts of “Dark Alleys” with Roman numerals: I, II, III, placing the stories under them, probably in a strict sequence known only to him. Vyacheslav Shugaev, in his book “The Experiences of a Reading Person,” tried to decipher Roman numerals in more detail so that the connections and differences between the parts would become clearer. Perhaps we can assume that the main motive, indicated by the number I, is whimsicality, the whimsicality of the emergence of passion, its inappropriateness in the world around us and the necessity of retribution for this inappropriateness: broken, ruined destinies. Number II - the impossibility of separation for those who love - they can
either die, or fill your future life with the torment of memories and longing for departed love. Number III - the inscrutability of the female soul, its dark, sublime frantic service to passion. But perhaps all this is not true. In Bunin, kindred spirits unite in love, there is so much sacrificial devotion in this union, so much frenzied tenderness in the “struggle not equal to two hearts,” that love seems to overflow beyond the limits prepared for it by nature and tragically extinguishes. It was these inexpressible heartaches, caused not by a lack of love, but by its excess, that worried Bunin most of all, as a manifestation, it is appropriate to assume, of a purely Russian understanding of feeling. For love, or rather, tormented by love, Russian people went to the chopping block, to hard labor, shot themselves, went on a spree, and became a monk. We need fervor, akin to religious, in the service of love - this is what Bunin stood for and preached in “Dark Alleys”.
For analysis, I chose, in my opinion, the most striking works from each part.
"Dark Alleys"
This story depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman from his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. Throughout her life she carried her love for the master who had once seduced her. He is not able to rise to her high feelings, to understand why Nadezhda did not marry “with such beauty that she had.” How can you love one person all your life? Meanwhile, for Nadezhda Nikolenka remained an ideal, the one and only, for the rest of her life. “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone,” she confesses to Nikolai Alekseevich. Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost “the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his words and the fact that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it was difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the St. Petersburg house, the mother of his children. This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.
How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich, this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda, not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.
Yes, perhaps Nadezhda is not happy now, many years later, but how strong that feeling was, how much joy it brought, that it is impossible to forget about it. That is, love for the heroine is happiness, but happiness with the constant, aching pain of memories.
"Natalie"
The love story of first-year student Meshchersky for the young beauty Natalie Senkevich is conveyed in his memoirs about a long period - from his first acquaintance with the girl to her untimely death. Memory brings out the unusual, incomprehensible in the past and helps to understand it. Meshchersky's friends called him a “monk.” He himself did not want to “violate his purity, to seek love without romance.” Natalie is not only not vicious, but has a proud, refined soul. They immediately fell in love with each other. And the story is about their breakup and long loneliness. There is only one external reason - an unexpectedly awakened feeling on the eve of a meeting with Natalie, the young man’s attraction to the bodily charms of his cousin Sonya. The internal process is very complex. As always with Bunin, all the eventual turns are barely indicated. The phenomenon that occupies the author is deeply comprehended in its internal development. Already at the end of the second chapter, a contradiction is felt in the hero’s thoughts:
“... how can I now live in this duality - in secret meetings with Sonya and next to Natalie, the very thought of whom already covers me with such pure love delight.” Why is there a rapprochement with Sonya? The writer reveals its external causes - the common desire among young people for early sensuality, the girl’s premature female maturity, her courageous and free disposition.
But the main thing is not in them. Meshchersky himself cannot tear himself away from the hot embrace. His memory preserves the intoxication of these meetings. Fully aware of the criminality of his dual behavior, he cannot choose one thing for himself.
The question, “why did God punish me so much, why did he give me two loves at once, so different and so passionate, such painful beauty of Natalie’s adoration and such bodily rapture for Sonya,” seems painfully insoluble to the young man. He first calls both experiences love. Only time will tell the poverty and deceitfulness of purely physical intimacy. It was enough for Meshchersky not to see Sonya for five days, and he forgot his sensual obsession, but it happened too late; Natalie found out about the betrayal. And Natalie’s long-term separation (her marriage with an unloved person, Meshchersky’s own relationship with a peasant woman) only fueled an unquenchable high feeling, giving both a genuine, albeit secret and short, marriage. The author ends the happiness of the lovers with the last, as if casually mentioned, phrase of the story: “In December, she died on Lake Geneva in premature birth.”
The main character, and this is where he differs from many, carries in his soul the rare gift of adoration for his beloved, and has the ability to understand his mistakes (even if not immediately, with great losses). And yet Meshchersky is unhappy for a long time, lonely, shocked by his own, so unexpected guilt.
The story “Natalie” revealed a new facet of the writer’s artistic generalizations. For the first time in Bunin, a person overcomes the imperfection of his consciousness, feels dissatisfaction from purely carnal pleasures, and the memory of them brings sobering. But such an experience is rare. For the most part, other feelings win out. Apparently, this is why the author ends the union of Meshchersky and Natalie with her death.
"Clean Monday"
Recognition of a hero, but how impulsive they are, internally abrupt, uncertain. And the reader immediately understands why to the Narrator (he is nameless, like her) everything seems like an obsession and a surprise. “I don’t know how all this should end”; “For some reason she studied at the courses...”; “What was left for me but hope”; “...for some reason we went to Ordynka.” Moreover, from the very beginning he admits that he “tried not to think, not to overthink it.” Only he is more open, kind, but frankly frivolous, subject to the power of chance and the elements. It was not for him to understand his friend, the complete opposite of himself. The refined skill of the writer was reflected here in the fact that in the language of such a person he was able to convey all the complex, serious nature of the heroine. Wouldn't it have been easier to tell the story from her perspective? But then we would not feel the exclusivity of this female character. “And as much as I was inclined to talkativeness, she was so silent: she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be mentally delving into something” - this is the first impression of mysterious woman. The inconsistency of her behavior is immediately apparent: mockery of abundant food, luxury and participation in lunches and dinners “with a Moscow understanding of the matter”; irony over theatrical and other tinsel and constant social entertainment; accepting a man’s impudent caresses and refusing to have a serious conversation about their relationship. “I didn’t resist anything, but I was silent all the time.” The heroine’s hidden desires also suddenly shocked the fan. They spent every evening in the best restaurants in Moscow, taking advantage of their wealth, youth, striking everyone with their rare beauty. And then, at her suggestion, they ended up in the Novodevichy Convent. It turned out that she goes to the Rogozhskoe cemetery, where the flavor of pre-Petrine Russia is so strong, to the Kremlin cathedrals, to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and is fascinated by ancient Russian texts.
The author expands his impressions of this internally contradictory nature of the heroine with reference to the no less different origins of the capital. Moscow of those years, indeed, was a combination of the hoary antiquity of monasteries and cathedrals with the latest cultural achievements: the Art Theater, the work of the Symbolists, the works of L. Andreev, the translated works of Spitzler. The realities of such a varied environment are unobtrusively included in the narrative. Unobtrusively, because the heroine’s inner gaze is directed towards these contradictions. The writer speaks not so much about the intellectual development of this strange woman, how much about the struggle in her soul of different aspirations. It is not for nothing that V. Bryusov is mentioned with his not devoid of vulgarity novel “Fire Angel”. Przybyshevsky, who spoke out against the “old” morality, “drunken” skits: And on the other hand, the Orthodox monasteries, finally, the heroine uttered the words of the Russian legend: “And the Devil instilled in his wife a flying serpent for fornication. And this serpent appeared to her in human nature, extremely beautiful...” This is the peak of the clash of opposites: “permissiveness,” the vulgarity of pleasures and suppression of the flesh, asceticism, purification of the spirit. It is these incompatible impulses that a woman unites in her being. Again, the subtext expresses the dream of merging the healthy demands of human happiness with the highest spiritual beauty. A dream that goes back to the ideal of love.
The heroine, however, believes in the wisdom of Tolstoy’s Platon Karataev: “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing.” Nevertheless, she tries to “drink” her share of joy.
In a kaleidoscope of changing scenes: a restaurant, an evening living room, Novodevichy Cemetery, Egorov’s tavern, the skit party of the Art Theater - the decision of the heroine of the story sprouts in separate “seeds”: from grinning at the talkativeness of her admirer, to submission to his caresses, to the exclamation: “It’s true, how you love me!”, to admiring him, “very beautiful” , to the final step – sharing his passion. But, apparently, she got little from that night; in the morning she left for a monastery forever. And there she did not find peace - she continued to grieve.
What does the heroine of the story “Clean Monday” cleanse herself of? It seems clear - from an idle worldly life. Then why, after “Forgiveness Sunday,” does she find herself in the arms of a man? No, there were other sins behind her: pride, contempt for people. She wanted to trust them and her feminine strength, to love the best one she met on life path. And I couldn’t. The story is written with unusual conciseness and virtuosic depiction. Every stroke, color, detail plays an important role in the external movement of the plot and becomes a sign of some internal trends (what is the last black-velvet secular outfit of the heroine in combination with the hairstyle of the Shamakhan queen). In vague forebodings and mature thoughts, the bright, changeable appearance of this woman, the author embodied his ideas about a contradictory atmosphere, about the complex layers of the human soul, about the birth of something new. moral ideal. It is not surprising that Bunin considered “Clean Monday” best story collection.
Conclusion
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul that is wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many word artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them has found something unique and individual in this theme. From my work it follows that the peculiarity of Bunin, the artist, is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of infinitely elevating and destroying a person. Bunin also especially sees the images of the heroes of his stories.
The image of a woman is the attractive force that constantly attracts Bunin. He creates a gallery of such images, each story has its own. The writer addresses the destinies of completely different women. Social status ceases to matter when feelings come into play. A woman is inseparable from nature. It is almost always connected to a forest, a field, the sea, or clouds. She is part of it and therefore, apparently, is endowed with such spontaneous, uncontrollable power as wind, lightning, flood. Perhaps, under the influence of this force, so much mental torment was brought into “Dark Alleys”? all the images delight, it seems that the author is in love with each of them. All the feelings that these women experience have a right to exist. Let this be the first bright love, passion for an unworthy person, a feeling of revenge, lust and worship. And it makes absolutely no difference whether you are a peasant or a lady. The main thing is that you are a woman.
Men's images in Bunin's stories they are somewhat darkened, blurred, the characters are not too defined. In almost all the stories, the man is the same: ardent, spiritually vigilant, full of compassion for a woman and somewhat contemplative - this is how a man should be who is worthy of love and finds it. Bunin deliberately does not endow him with characteristic uniqueness, so that it does not prevent the hero in all love searches and adventures from being heartily attentive, sensually observant and tirelessly admiring a woman, worshiping her spiritual secrets. It is important for the writer to understand what feelings these men experience, what pushes them towards women, why they love them. The reader does not need to know what this or that man is like, what he looks like, what his advantages and disadvantages are. He participates in the story insofar as love is a feeling of two.
Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his fate a unique flavor against the backdrop of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning. Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a writer, is not given to everyone. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, will touch great secret love. This is what makes the author of “Dark Alleys” always modern writer, arousing deep reader interest. Readers may sometimes have a question: does the writer create artificial barriers on the heroes’ path to happiness? No, the fact is that people themselves do not strive to fight. They can experience happiness, but only for a moment, and then it disappears like water into sand. And that’s why many of Bunin’s stories are so tragic. Sometimes in one short line the writer reveals the collapse of hopes, the harsh mockery of fate. The stories of the “Dark Alleys” series are an example of amazing Russian psychological prose, in which love has always been one of the eternal secrets that word artists sought to reveal. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, in my opinion, was one of those brilliant writers who came closest to solving this mystery.
Bibliography
1. Arkhangelsky A.A.; Russian writers - Nobel laureates bonuses;
Moscow, 1991
2. Adamovich G.V.; Loneliness and freedom./ Comp., author. preface and approx. V. Kreid / M.: Republic, 1996.
3. Bunin I.A.; Collected works in 9 volumes; Moscow, " Fiction", 1967
4. Bunin I.A.; Poems, stories, novellas; Moscow, “Fiction”, 1973.
5.Russian writers; Bio-bibliographic dictionary./Ed. P.A.Nikolaeva / Moscow, “Enlightenment”, 1990.
6. Smirnova L.A.; I.A.Bunin: Life and creativity; Book for teachers; Moscow, “Enlightenment”, 1991.
7. Philosophical Dictionary./ Ed. I.T. Frolova. – 6th ed. reworked and additional/. Moscow, Politizdat, 1991.
8. Shugaev V.M.; Experiences of a reading person; Moscow, Sovremennik, 1988.
What is love? “A strong attachment to someone, ranging from inclination to passion; strong desire, desire; the choice and preference of someone or something by will, by will (not by reason), sometimes completely unaccountably and recklessly,” V. I. Dahl’s dictionary tells us. However, every person who has experienced this feeling at least once will be able to add something of their own to this definition. “All the pain, tenderness, come to your senses, come to your senses!” - I. A. Bunin would add.
The great Russian emigrant writer and prose poet has a very special love. She is not the same as his great predecessors described her: N. I. Karamzin, V. A. Zhukovsky, I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev. According to I. A. Bunin, love is not an idealized feeling, and his heroines are not “Turgenev’s young ladies” with their naivety and romance. However, Bunin’s understanding of love does not coincide with today’s interpretation of this feeling. The writer does not consider only the physical side of love, as the majority of the media do today, and with them many writers, considering this to be in demand. He (I.A. Bunin) writes about love, which is the merging of “earth” and “sky,” the harmony of two opposite principles. And it is precisely this understanding of love that seems to me (as, I think, to many who are familiar with the writer’s love lyrics) the most truthful, faithful and necessary for modern society.
In his narration, the author does not hide anything from the reader, does not hold back anything, but at the same time does not stoop to vulgarity. Speaking about intimate human relationships, I. A. Bunin, thanks to his highest skill and ability to choose the only true, necessary words, never crosses the line that separates high art from naturalism.
Before I. A. Bunin in Russian literature, “no one had ever written about love like this.” He not only decided to show the always remaining secret sides of the relationship between a man and a woman. His works about love also became masterpieces of the classical, strict, but at the same time expressive and capacious Russian language.
Love in the works of I. A. Bunin is like a flash, insight, “sunstroke.” More often than not, it does not bring happiness; it is followed by separation or even the death of the heroes. But, despite this, Bunin’s prose is a celebration of love: each story makes you feel how wonderful and important this feeling is for a person.
The cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” is the pinnacle of the writer’s love lyrics. “She talks about the tragic and many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life,” said I. A. Bunin about his book. And, indeed, the collection, written in 1937-1944 (when I. A. Bunin was about seventy), can be considered an expression of the writer’s mature talent, a reflection of his life experience, thoughts, feelings, personal perception of life and love.
In this research work I set myself the goal of tracing how Bunin’s philosophy of love was born, considering its evolution and, at the end of my research, formulating the concept of love according to I. A. Bunin, highlighting its main points. To achieve this goal, I needed to solve the following tasks.
First, consider the writer’s early stories, such as “At the Dacha” (1895), “Velga” (1895), “Without Family and Tribe” (1897), “In the Autumn” (1901), and, identifying them characteristic features and finding commonalities with more late creativity I. A. Bunin, answer the questions: “How did the theme of love arise in the writer’s work? What are they, these thin trees, from which, forty years later, “Dark Alleys” will grow?”
Secondly, my task was to analyze the writer’s stories of the 1920s, paying attention to which features of I. A. Bunin’s work, acquired during this period, were reflected in the writer’s main book about love, and which were not. In addition, in my work I tried to show how in the works of Ivan Alekseevich, relating to this period of time, two main motifs are intertwined, which became fundamental in the writer’s later stories. These are the motives of love and death, which in their combination give rise to the idea of the immortality of love.
As the basis for my research, I took the method of systemic-structural reading of Bunin’s prose, considering the formation of the author’s philosophy of love from early works to later ones. Factor analysis was also used in the work.
Literature Review
I. A. Bunin was called “a poet in prose and a prose writer in poetry,” therefore, in order to show his perception of love from various sides, and somewhere in order to confirm my assumptions, in my work I turned not only to collections of stories writer, but also to his poems, in particular to those published in the first volume of the collected works of I. A. Bunin.
The work of I. A. Bunin, like any other writer, is in undoubted connection with his life and destiny. Therefore, in my work I also used facts from the writer’s biography. They were suggested to me by Oleg Mikhailov’s books “The Life of Bunin. Only the word is given life” and Mikhail Roshchin “Ivan Bunin”.
“Everything is known by comparison,” these wise words prompted me to, in a study devoted to the philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, also turn to the positions of other famous people: writers and philosophers. “Russian Eros or the philosophy of love in Russia,” compiled by V.P. Shestakov, helped me do this.
To find out the opinion of literary scholars on issues that interested me, I turned to criticism from various authors, for example, articles in the magazine “Russian Literature”, the book by Doctor of Philology I. N. Sukhikh “Twenty Books of the 20th Century” and others.
Of course, the most important part of the source material for my research, its basis and inspiration were the very works of I. A. Bunin about love. I found them in books such as “I. A. Bunin. Novels, stories”, published in the series “Russian classics about love”, “Dark Alleys. Diaries 1918-1919" (series "World Classics"), and collected works edited by various authors (A. S. Myasnikov, B. S. Ryurikov, A. T. Tvardovsky and Yu. V. Bondarev, O. N. Mikhailov , V. P. Rynkevich).
Philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin
Chapter 1. The appearance of the theme of love in the writer’s work
“The problem of love has not yet been developed in my works. And I feel an urgent need to write about this,” says I. A. Bunin in the fall of 1912 to a Moscow newspaper correspondent. 1912 – the writer is already 42 years old. Was it possible that before this time the topic of love had not interested him? Or perhaps he himself did not experience this feeling? Not at all. By this time (1912), Ivan Alekseevich had experienced many days, both happy and full of disappointment and suffering from unrequited love.
We were then - you were sixteen,
I am seventeen years old,
But do you remember how you opened
Door on moonlight? – this is what I. A. Bunin wrote in his 1916 poem “On a quiet night the late moon came out.” It is a reflection of one of those hobbies that I. A. Bunin experienced when he was very young. There were many such hobbies, but only one of them grew into a truly strong, all-consuming love, which became the sadness and joy of the young poet for four whole years. It was love for the doctor’s daughter Varvara Pashchenko.
He met her at the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik in 1890. At first he perceived her with hostility, considering her “proud and foppish,” but they soon became friends, and a year later the young writer realized that he was in love with Varvara Vladimirovna. But their love was not cloudless. I. A. Bunin adored her frantically, passionately, but she was changeable towards him. Everything was further complicated by the fact that Varvara Pashchenko’s father was much richer than Ivan Alekseevich. In the fall of 1894, their painful relationship ended - Pashchenko married I. A. Bunin’s friend Arseny Bibikov. After the break with Varya, I. A. Bunin was in such a state that his loved ones feared for his life.
If only it were possible
To love yourself alone,
If only we could forget the past, -
Everything you've already forgotten
Wouldn't embarrass, wouldn't frighten
Eternal darkness of eternal night:
Satisfied eyes
I would love to close it! - I. A. Bunin will write in 1894. However, despite all the suffering associated with her, this love and this woman will forever remain in the writer’s soul as something, although tragic, but still beautiful.
On September 23, 1898, I. A. Bunin hastily married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni. Two days before the wedding, he ironically writes to his friend N.D. Teleshov: “I’m still single, but - alas! “I’ll soon turn into a married man.” The family of I. A. Bunin and A. N. Tsakni lasted only a year and a half. At the beginning of March 1900, their final break occurred, which I. A. Bunin took very hard. “Don’t be angry at the silence - the devil will break a leg in my soul,” he wrote to a friend at that time.
Several years have passed. The bachelor life of I. A. Bunin has exhausted itself. He needed a person who could support him, an understanding life partner who shared his interests. Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the daughter of a professor at Moscow University, became such a woman in the writer’s life. The date of the beginning of their union can be considered April 10, 1907, when Vera Nikolaevna decided to go with I.A. Bunin on a trip to the Holy Land. “I dramatically changed my life: from a sedentary life I turned it into a nomadic one for almost twenty years,” wrote V.N. Muromtseva about this day in her “Conversations with Memory.”
So, we see that by the age of forty, I. A. Bunin managed to experience a passionate love for V. Pashchenko to the point of oblivion, and an unsuccessful marriage with Anya Tsakni, many other novels and, finally, a meeting with V. N. Muromtseva. How could these events, which, it seems, should have brought the writer so many experiences related to love, not affected his work? They were reflected - the theme of love began to sound in Bunin’s works. But why then did he say that it was “not being developed”? To answer this question, let's take a closer look at the stories written by I. A. Bunin before 1912.
Almost all works written by Ivan Alekseevich during this period are of a social nature. The writer tells the stories of those who live in the village: small landowners, peasants, and compares the village and the city and the people living in them (the story “News from the Motherland” (1893)). However, these works cannot do without love themes. Only the feelings experienced by the hero for a woman disappear almost immediately after they appear, and are not the main ones in the plots of the stories. The author does not seem to allow these feelings to develop. “In the spring, he noticed that his wife, an impudently beautiful young woman, began to have some special conversations with the teacher,” writes I. A. Bunin in his story “Teacher” (1894). However, literally two paragraphs later on the pages of this work we read: “But somehow a relationship did not develop between her and the teacher.”
The image of a beautiful young girl, and with it the feeling of slight love, appears in the story “At the Dacha” (1895): “Either smiling or grimacing, she absentmindedly looked with her blue eyes at the sky. Grisha passionately wanted to come up and kiss her on the lips.” We will see “her”, Marya Ivanovna, on the pages of the story only a few times. I. A. Bunin will make her feelings for Grisha, and his feelings for her, nothing more than flirting. The story will be of a socio-philosophical nature, and love will play only an episodic role in it.
In the same year, 1895, but a little later, “Velga” (originally “Northern Legend”) also appears. This is a story about the unrequited love of a girl Velga for her childhood friend Irvald. She confesses her feelings to him, but he replies: “Tomorrow I will go to sea again, and when I return, I will take Sneggar’s hand” (Sneggar is Velga’s sister). Velga is tormented by jealousy, but when she finds out that her beloved has disappeared at sea and that only she can save him, she sails away to the “wild cliff at the end of the world,” where her beloved is languishing. Velga knows that she is destined to die and that Irvald will never know about her sacrifice, but this does not stop her. “He instantly woke up from a scream - his friend’s voice touched his heart - but, looking, he saw only a seagull flying up screaming above the boat,” writes I. A. Bunin.
By the emotions evoked by this story, we recognize in it the predecessor of the “Dark Alleys” series: love does not lead to happiness, on the contrary, it becomes a tragedy for a girl in love, but she, having experienced feelings that brought her pain and suffering, does not regret anything , “joy sounds in her lamentations.”
In style, “Velga” differs from all works written by I. A. Bunin both before and after it. This story has a very special rhythm, which is achieved through inversion, the reverse order of words (“And Velga began to sing ringing songs on the seashore through her tears”). The story resembles the legend not only in its style of speech. The characters in it are depicted schematically, their characters are not described. The basis of the narrative is a description of their actions and feelings, however, the feelings are quite superficial, often clearly indicated by the author even in the speech of the characters themselves, for example: “I want to cry that you were gone for so long, and I want to laugh that I see you again” (words Velgi).
In his first story about love, I. A. Bunin is looking for a way to express this feeling. But a poetic narrative in the form of a legend does not satisfy him - there will no longer be such works as “Velga” in the writer’s work. I. A. Bunin continues to search for words and forms to describe love.
In 1897, the story “Without Family or Tribe” appeared. It, unlike “Velga”, is written in the usual Bunin style - emotional, expressive, with a description of many shades of mood that add up to a single feeling of life at one time or another. In this work the narrator is main character, which we will subsequently see in almost all Bunin’s stories about love. However, when reading the story “Without Family or Tribe,” it becomes clear that the writer has not yet finally formulated for himself the answer to the question: “What is love?” Almost the entire work is a description of the hero’s state after he learns that Zina, the girl he loves, is marrying someone else. The author's attention is focused precisely on these feelings of the hero, while love itself, the relationship between the characters, is presented in the light of the breakup that occurred and is not the main thing in the story.
There are two women in the life of the main character: Zina, whom he loves, and Elena, whom he considers his friend. Two women and the different, unequal relationships towards them that appeared in I. A. Bunin in this story can also be seen in “Dark Alleys” (stories “Zoika and Valeria”, “Natalie”), but in a slightly different light.
To conclude the conversation about the emergence of the theme of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, one cannot help but mention the story “In Autumn,” written in 1901. “Made by an unfree, tense hand,” A.P. Chekhov wrote about him in one of his letters. In this statement, the word “tense” sounds like criticism. However, it is precisely the tension, the concentration of all feelings in a short period of time and the style, as if accompanying this situation, “unfree”, that make up the whole charm of the story.
“Well, I have to go!” - she says and leaves. He follows. And, full of excitement, unconscious fear of each other, they go to the sea. “We quickly walked through leaves and puddles, along some high alley towards the cliffs,” we read at the end of the third part of the story. “alley” seems to be a symbol of future works, “Dark Alleys” of love, and the word “precipice” seems to personify everything that should happen between the heroes. And indeed, in the story “In Autumn” we see for the first time love the way it will appear to us in the writer’s later works - a flash, an insight, a step over the edge of a cliff.
“Tomorrow I will remember this night with horror, but now I don’t care. I love you,” says the heroine of the story. And we understand that he and she are destined to part, but that both of them will never forget these few hours of happiness that they spent together.
The plot of the story “In Autumn” is very similar to the plots of “Dark Alleys,” as well as the fact that the author does not indicate the names of either the hero or the heroine and that his character is barely outlined, while she occupies the main place in the story. This work also has in common with the “Dark Alleys” cycle the way the hero, and with him the author, treats a woman - reverently, with admiration: “she was incomparable,” “her pale, happy and tired face seemed to me like the face of an immortal " However, all these obvious similarities are not the main thing that makes the story “In Autumn” similar to the stories of “Dark Alleys”. There is something more important. And this is the feeling that these works evoke, a feeling of fragility, transience, but at the same time the extraordinary power of love.
Chapter 2. Love as a fatal shock
The works of I. A. Bunin in the 1920s
Works about love written by Ivan Alekseevich Bunin from the autumn of 1924 to the autumn of 1925 (“Mitya’s Love”, “Sunstroke”, “Ida”, “The Case of Cornet Elagin”), despite all the striking differences, are united by one idea that underlies each of them. This idea is love as a shock, “sunstroke,” a fatal feeling that brings, along with moments of joy, enormous suffering, which fills a person’s entire existence and leaves an indelible mark on his life. This understanding of love, or rather its prerequisites, can be seen in early stories I. A. Bunin, for example, in the story “In Autumn,” discussed earlier. However, the theme of the fatal predetermination and tragedy of this feeling is truly revealed by the author precisely in the works of the 1920s.
The hero of the story “Sunstroke” (1925), a lieutenant accustomed to taking love adventures lightly, meets a woman on a ship, spends the night with her, and in the morning she leaves. “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. It was as if an eclipse had come over me, or rather, we both got something like sunstroke", she tells him before driving away. The lieutenant “somehow easily” agrees with her, but when she leaves, he suddenly realizes that this is not a simple road adventure. This is something more, making him feel “the pain and uselessness of his entire future life without her,” without this “little woman” who remained a stranger to him.
“The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older,” we read at the end of the story, and it becomes clear that the hero experienced a strong, all-consuming feeling. Love, Love with a capital letter, capable of becoming the most precious thing in a person’s life and at the same time his torment and tragedy.
We will see love-moment, love-flash in the story “Ida”, also written in 1925. The hero of this work is a middle-aged composer. He has a “stocky body”, a “wide peasant face with narrow eyes”, a “short neck” - the image of a seemingly rather rude man, incapable, at first glance, of sublime feelings. But this is only at first glance. While in a restaurant with friends, the composer conducts his story in an ironic, mocking tone; it is awkward and unusual for him to talk about love, he even attributes the story that happened to him to his friend.
The hero talks about events that took place several years ago. Her friend Ida often visited the house where he and his wife lived. She is young, pretty, with “rare harmony and naturalness of movements”, lively “violet eyes”. It should be noted that it is the story “Ida” that can be considered the beginning of I. A. Bunin’s creation of full-fledged female images. This short work notes, as if in passing, in passing, those traits that the writer extolled in a woman: naturalness, following the aspirations of her heart, frankness in her feelings towards herself and her loved one.
However, let's return to the story. The composer does not seem to pay attention to Ida and, when one day she stops visiting their house, he does not even think to ask his wife about her. Two years later, the hero accidentally meets Ida on railway station and there, among the snowdrifts, “on some farthest side platform,” she unexpectedly confesses her love to him. She kisses him “with one of those kisses that is remembered later not only to the grave, but also in the grave,” and leaves.
The narrator says that when he met Ida at that station, hearing her voice, “he understood only one thing: that, it turns out, he had been brutally in love with this same Ida for many years.” And it is enough to look at the end of the story to understand that the hero still loves her, painfully, tenderly, nevertheless knowing that they cannot be together: “the composer suddenly tore off his hat and, with all his strength, shouted at entire area:
My sun! My beloved! Hurray!”
Both in “Sunstroke” and in “Ida” we see the impossibility of happiness for lovers, a kind of doom, a fate that dominates them. All these motifs are also found in two other works by I. A. Bunin, written around the same time: “Mitya’s Love” and “The Case of the Cornet Elagin.” However, in them these motives seem to be concentrated, they form the basis of the narrative and, ultimately, lead the heroes to a tragic outcome - death.
“Don’t you already know that love and death are inextricably linked?” - wrote I. A. Bunin and convincingly proved this in one of his letters: “Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe, “I was close to suicide.” These words of the writer himself can best demonstrate the idea of his works such as “Mitya’s Love” and “The Case of Cornet Elagin”, and become a kind of epigraph for them.
The story “Mitya's Love” was written by I. A. Bunin in 1924 and marked a new period in the writer’s work. In this work, for the first time, he examines in detail the evolution of his hero’s love. As an experienced psychologist, the author records the slightest changes in a young man’s feelings.
The narrative is built only to a small extent on external aspects; the main thing is the description of the thoughts and feelings of the hero. It is on them that all attention is focused. However, sometimes the author forces his reader to look around, to see some seemingly insignificant details that characterize the hero’s internal state. This feature of the narrative will manifest itself in many of I. A. Bunin’s later works, including “Dark Alleys.”
The story “Mitya’s Love” tells about the development of this feeling in the soul of the main character, Mitya. When we meet him, he is already in love. But this love is not happy, not carefree, this is what the very first line of the work sets up: “In Moscow, Mitya’s last happy day was on March 9.” How to explain these words? Maybe this is followed by the separation of the heroes? Not at all. They continue to meet, but Mitya “persistently thinks that something terrible has suddenly begun, that something has changed in Katya.”
The whole work is based on internal conflict main character. The beloved exists for him as if in a double perception: one is close, beloved and loving, dear Katya, the other is “genuine, ordinary, painfully different from the first.” The hero suffers from this contradiction, which is subsequently joined by rejection of both the environment in which Katya lives and the atmosphere of the village where he will go.
In “Mitya’s Love,” for the first time, the understanding of the surrounding reality as the main obstacle to the happiness of lovers is clearly visible. The vulgar artistic environment of St. Petersburg, with its “falseness and stupidity,” under the influence of which Katya becomes “all stranger, all public,” is hated by the main character, just like the village one, where he wants to go to “give himself a rest.” Running away from Katya, Mitya thinks that he can also run away from his painful love for her. But he is mistaken: in the village, where everything seems so sweet, beautiful, and expensive, the image of Katya haunts him constantly.
Gradually, the tension increases, the psychological state of the hero becomes more and more unbearable, step by step leading him to a tragic denouement. The ending of the story is predictable, but no less terrible: “This pain was so strong, so unbearable that, wanting only one thing - to get rid of it at least for a minute, he fumbled and pushed aside the drawer of the night table, caught the cold and heavy lump of a revolver and, taking a deep and joyful breath, opened his mouth and fired with force and pleasure.”
On the night of July 19, 1890, in the city of Warsaw, at house number 14 on Novgorodskaya Street, a cornet of the hussar regiment, Alexander Bartenev, killed Maria Visnovskaya, an artist of the local Polish theater, with a revolver shot. Soon the criminal confessed to his crime and said that he committed the murder at the insistence of Visnovskaya herself, his beloved. This story was widely covered in almost all newspapers of that time, and I. A. Bunin could not help but hear about it. It was Bartenev’s case that served as the basis for the plot of the story created by the writer 35 years after this event. Subsequently (this will especially manifest itself in the “Dark Alleys” cycle), when creating stories, I. A. Bunin will also turn to his memories. Then the image and detail that flashed in his imagination will be enough for him, in contrast to “The Case of Cornet Elagin,” in which the writer will leave the characters and events practically unchanged, trying, however, to identify real reasons the act of the cornet.
Following this goal, in “The Case of Cornet Elagin” I. A. Bunin for the first time focuses the reader’s attention not only on the heroine, but also on the hero. The author will describe in detail his appearance: “a small, puny man, reddish and freckled, with crooked and unusually thin legs,” as well as his character: “a very keen man, but as if he was always expecting something real, extraordinary,” “then he modest and shyly secretive, he fell into some recklessness and bravado.” However, this experience turned out to be unsuccessful: the author himself wanted to call his work, in which it was the hero, and not his feeling, that occupied the central place, “Boulevard Novel.” I. A. Bunin will no longer return to this type of narration - in his further works about love , in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, we will no longer see stories where spiritual world and the character of the hero - all the author’s attention will be focused on the heroine, which will serve as a reason for recognizing “Dark Alleys” as “a string of female types.”
Despite the fact that I. A. Bunin himself wrote about “The Case of Cornet Elagin”: “It’s just very stupid and simple,” this work contains one of the thoughts that became the basis of the formed Bunin philosophy of love: “Is it really unknown that there is a strange is the property of any strong and generally not quite ordinary love to even, as it were, avoid marriage?” And indeed, among all the subsequent works of I. A. Bunin, we will not find a single one in which the heroes would come to a happy life together not only in marriage, but also in principle. The “Dark Alleys” cycle, considered the pinnacle of the writer’s work, will be dedicated to love that dooms to suffering, love as a tragedy, and the prerequisites for this should undoubtedly be sought in early works I. A. Bunina.
Chapter 3. Cycle of stories “Dark Alleys”
It was a wonderful spring
They sat on the shore
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black
The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around,
There was a dark linden alley
N. Ogarev “An Ordinary Tale.”
These lines, once read by I. A. Bunin, evoked in the writer’s memory what one of his stories begins with - Russian autumn, bad weather, a high road, a carriage and an old military man passing in it. “The rest all somehow worked out on its own, came up very easily, unexpectedly,” I. A. Bunin will write about the creation of this work, and these words can be attributed to the entire cycle, which, like the story itself, bears the name “Dark alleys."
“Encyclopedia of love”, “encyclopedia of love dramas” and, finally, in the words of I. A. Bunin himself, “the best and most original” that he wrote in his life - all this is about the cycle “Dark Alleys”. What is this cycle about? What philosophy underlies it? What ideas do the stories share?
First of all, this is the image of a woman and her perception by the lyrical hero. The female characters in Dark Alleys are extremely diverse. These are “simple souls” devoted to their beloved, such as Styopa and Tanya in works of the same name; and brave, self-confident, sometimes extravagant women in the stories “Muse” and “Antigone”; and heroines, rich spiritually, capable of strong, high feelings, whose love can give unspeakable happiness: Rusya, Heinrich, Natalie in the stories of the same name; and the image of a restless, suffering, languishing “some kind of sad thirst for love” woman - the heroine of “Clean Monday”. However, with all their apparent alienness to each other, these characters, these heroines are united by one thing - the presence in each of them of primordial femininity, “easy breathing ", as I. A. Bunin himself called it. This trait of some women was identified by him in his early works, such as “Sunstroke” and the story “Easy Breathing” itself, about which I. A. Bunin said: “We call this womb, but I called it easy breathing.” How to understand these words? What is the womb? Naturalness, sincerity, spontaneity and openness to love, submission to the movements of your heart - all that is the eternal secret of female charm.
By turning in all the works of the “Dark Alleys” cycle specifically to the heroine, to the woman, and not to the hero, making her the center of the narrative, the author, like every man, in this case lyrical hero, trying to solve the riddle of the Woman. He describes many female characters, types, but not at all in order to show how diverse they are, but in order to get as close as possible to the mystery of femininity, to create a unique formula that would explain everything. “Women seem somewhat mysterious to me. The more I study them, the less I understand,” I. A. Bunin writes these words of Flaubert into his diary.
The writer creates “Dark Alleys” already at the end of his life - at the end of 1937 (the time of writing the first story in the series, “Caucasus”) I. A. Bunin is 67 years old. He lives with Vera Nikolaevna in Nazi-occupied France, far from his homeland, from friends, acquaintances and just people with whom he could talk in his native language. All that remains with the writer is his memories. They help him not only relive once again what happened then, a long time ago, almost a century ago. past life. The magic of memories becomes for I. A. Bunin a new basis for creativity, allowing him to work again, write, and thereby giving him the opportunity to survive in the joyless and alien environment in which he finds himself.
Almost all the stories in “Dark Alleys” are written in the past tense, sometimes even with an emphasis on this: “In that distant time, he spent himself especially recklessly” (“Tanya”), “He did not sleep, lay, smoked and mentally looked at that summer ” (“Rusya”), “In the fourteenth year, on New Year’s Eve, there was the same quiet, sunny evening as that unforgettable one” (“Clean Monday”) Does this mean that the author wrote them “from life”, remembering the events own life? No. I. A. Bunin, on the contrary, always claimed that the plots of his stories were fictional. “Everything in it, from word to word, is made up, as in almost all of my stories, both previous and present,” he said about “Natalie.”
Why then was this look from the present to the past needed, what did the author want to show with this? The most accurate answer to this question can be found in the story “ Cold autumn", which tells about a girl who saw off her fiancé to the war. Having lived a long, difficult life after she learned that her loved one had died, the heroine says: “What happened in my life after all? Only that cold autumn evening. the rest is an unnecessary dream.” True love, true happiness are only moments in a person’s life, but they can illuminate his existence, become the most important and important thing for him and, ultimately, mean more than the entire life he has lived. This is exactly what I. A. Bunin wants to convey to the reader, showing in his stories love as something that has already become a part of the past, but left an indelible mark in the souls of the heroes, like lightning illuminated their lives.
Death of the hero in the stories “Cold Autumn” and “In Paris”; the impossibility of being together in “Rus”, “Tana”; the death of the heroine in “Natalie”, “Henry”, the story “Dubki” Almost all the stories in the cycle, with the exception of works that are almost plotless, such as “Smaragd”, tell us about the inevitability of a tragic ending. And the reason for this is not at all that misfortune and grief are more diverse in their manifestations, in contrast to happiness, and, therefore, it is “more interesting” to write about it. Not at all. The long, serene existence of lovers together in the understanding of I. A. Bunin is no longer love. When a feeling turns into a habit, a holiday into everyday life, excitement into calm confidence, Love itself disappears. And, in order to prevent this, the author “stops the moment” at the highest rise of feelings. Despite the separation, grief and even death of the heroes, which seem to the author less terrible for love than everyday life and habit, I. A. Bunin never tires of repeating that love is the greatest happiness. “Is there such a thing as unhappy love? Doesn’t the most sorrowful music in the world give happiness?” - says Natalie, who survived the betrayal of her beloved and a long separation from him.
“Natalie”, “Zoyka and Valeria”, “Tanya”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Dark Alleys” and several other works - these are, perhaps, all the stories out of thirty-eight in which the main characters: he and she - have names. This is due to the fact that the author wants to focus the reader’s attention primarily on the feelings and experiences of the characters. External factors, such as names, biographies, sometimes even what is happening around them, are omitted by the author as unnecessary details. The heroes of “Dark Alleys” live, captured by their feelings, not noticing anything around them. The rational loses all meaning, all that remains is submission to feeling, “not thinking.” The style of the story itself seems to adapt to such a narrative, letting us feel the irrationality of love.
Details, such as descriptions of nature, the appearance of the characters, and what is called the “background of the narrative,” are still present in “Dark Alleys.” However, they are again intended to draw the reader’s attention to the feelings of the characters, to complement the picture of the work with bright touches. The heroine of the story “Rusya” clutches her brother’s tutor’s cap to her chest when they go boating, saying: “No, I’ll take care of him!” And this simple, frank exclamation becomes the first step towards their rapprochement.
Many stories in the cycle, such as “Rusya”, “Antigone”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Clean Monday”, show the final rapprochement of the heroes. In the rest, it is implied to one degree or another: in “The Fool” it is said about the relationship of the deacon’s son with the cook and that he has a son from her; in the story “One Hundred Rupees” the woman who amazed the narrator with her beauty turns out to be corrupt. It was precisely this feature of Bunin’s stories that probably served as the reason for identifying them with cadet poems, “literature not for ladies.” I. A. Bunin was accused of naturalism and eroticization of love.
However, when creating his works, the writer simply could not set himself the goal of making the image of a woman as an object of desire mundane, simplifying it, thereby turning the narrative into a vulgar scene. A woman, like a woman’s body, always remained for I. A. Bunin “wonderful, unspeakably beautiful, absolutely special in everything earthly.” Amazing with your skill artistic expression, I. A. Bunin balanced in his stories on that subtle border where true art does not even descend to hints of naturalism.
The stories of the “Dark Alleys” series contain the problem of gender because it is inseparable from the problem of love in general. I. A. Bunin is convinced that love is the union of the earthly and heavenly, body and spirit. If different sides of this feeling are concentrated not on one woman (as in almost all the stories in the cycle), but on different ones, or if only the “earthly” (“Fool”) or only the “heavenly” is present, this leads to an inevitable conflict, as, for example, in the story “Zoika and Valeria”. The first, a teenage girl, is the object of the hero’s desire, while the second, “a real Little Russian beauty,” is cold towards him, inaccessible, arouses passionate adoration, devoid of hope for reciprocity. When Valeria, out of a sense of revenge for the man who rejected her, gives herself to the hero, and he understands this, a long-overdue conflict between two loves breaks out in his soul. “He decisively rushed, pounding on the sleepers, downhill, towards the steam locomotive that had burst out from under him, rumbling and blinding with lights,” we read at the end of the story.
The works included by I. A. Bunin in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, for all their dissimilarity and heterogeneity at first glance, are valuable precisely because when read, they form, like multi-colored mosaic tiles, a single harmonious picture. And this picture depicts Love. Love in its integrity, Love that goes hand in hand with tragedy, but at the same time represents great happiness.
Concluding the conversation about the philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, I would like to say that it is his understanding of this feeling that is closest to me, as, I think, to many modern readers. In contrast to the writers of romanticism, who presented the reader only with the spiritual side of love, from the followers of the idea of the connection of gender with God, such as V. Rozanov, from the Freudians, who put the biological needs of man first in matters of love, and from the symbolists, who worshiped the Beautiful woman. The lady, I.A. Bunin, in my opinion, was closest to the understanding and description of love that really exists on earth. As a true artist, he was able not only to present this feeling to the reader, but also to point out in it what made and is forcing many to say: “He who did not love did not live.”
The path of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin to his own understanding of love was long. In his early works, for example, in the stories “Teacher”, “At the Dacha”, this topic was practically not developed. In later ones, such as “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “Mitya’s Love,” he searched for himself, experimented with style and manner of storytelling. And finally, at the final stage of his life and work, he created a cycle of works in which his already formed, integral philosophy of love was expressed.
Having gone through a rather long and fascinating path of research, I came to the following conclusions in my work.
In Bunin’s interpretation of love, this feeling is, first of all, an extraordinary rise of emotions, a flash, a lightning of happiness. Love cannot last long, which is why it inevitably entails tragedy, grief, separation, without giving the opportunity to everyday life and habit to destroy itself.
For I. A. Bunin, it is precisely the moments of love, the moments of its most powerful expression that are important, so the writer uses the form of memories for his narration. After all, only they are able to hide everything unnecessary, small, superfluous, leaving only a feeling - love, which illuminates a person’s whole life with its appearance.
Love, according to I. A. Bunin, is something that cannot be rationally comprehended, it is incomprehensible, and nothing except the feelings themselves, no external factors are important for it. This is precisely what can explain the fact that in most of I. A. Bunin’s works about love, the heroes are deprived not only of biographies, but even names.
The image of a woman is central in the writer’s later works. She is always of greater interest to the author than he is; all attention is focused on her. I. A. Bunin describes many female types, trying to comprehend and capture on paper the secret of a Woman, her charm.
When speaking the word “love,” I. A. Bunin means not only its spiritual and not only its physical side, but their harmonious combination. It is precisely this feeling, which combines both opposite principles, that, according to the writer, can give a person true happiness.
I. A. Bunin's stories about love could be analyzed endlessly, since each of them is a work of art and is unique in its own way. However, the purpose of my work was to trace the formation of Bunin’s philosophy of love, to see how the writer went towards his main book “Dark Alleys”, and to formulate the concept of love that was reflected in it, identifying the common features of his works, some of their patterns. That's what I tried to do. And I hope that I succeeded.
Bunin is a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late 19th – first half of the 20th centuries. His genius talent, skill as a poet and prose writer, which became classic, amazed his contemporaries and captivates us living today. His works preserve the real Russian literary language, which is now lost.
Works about love occupy a large place in Bunin’s work in exile. The writer has always been worried about the mystery of this strongest of human feelings. In 1924 he wrote the story “Mitya’s Love”, the following year - “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “Sunstroke”. And at the end of the 30s and during the Second World War, Bunin created 38 short stories about love, which made up his book “Dark Alleys,” published in 1946. Bunin considered this book his “ the best work in the sense of conciseness, painting and literary skill.”
Love in Bunin’s depiction amazes not only with the power of artistic representation, but also with its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. They rarely break through to the surface: most people will not experience their fatal effects until the end of their days. Such a depiction of love unexpectedly gives Bunin’s sober, “merciless” talent a romantic glow. The proximity of love and death, their conjugation were obvious facts for Bunin and were never subject to doubt. However, the catastrophic nature of existence, the fragility of human relationships and existence itself - all these favorite Bunin themes after the gigantic social cataclysms that shook Russia were filled with a new formidable meaning, as is, for example, seen in the story “Mitya’s Love”. “Love is beautiful” and “Love is doomed” - these concepts, having finally come together, coincided, carrying in the depths, in the grain of each story, the personal grief of Bunin the emigrant.
Bunin's love lyrics are not great in quantity. It reflects the poet's confused thoughts and feelings about the mystery of love... One of the main motives of love lyrics is loneliness, unattainability or the impossibility of happiness. For example, “How bright, how elegant spring is!..”, “A calm gaze, like the gaze of a doe...”, “At a late hour we were in the field with her...”, “Loneliness”, “Sadness of eyelashes, shining and black...” etc.
Bunin's love lyrics are passionate, sensual, saturated with a thirst for love and are always filled with tragedy, unfulfilled hopes, memories of past youth and lost love.
I.A. Bunin has a very unique view of love relationships that distinguishes him from many other writers of that time.
In Russian classical literature At that time, the theme of love always occupied an important place, with preference given to spiritual, “platonic” love
before sensuality, carnal, physical passion, which was often debunked. The purity of Turgenev's women became a household word. Russian literature is predominantly the literature of “first love”.
The image of love in Bunin’s work is a special synthesis of spirit and flesh. According to Bunin, the spirit cannot be comprehended without knowing the flesh. I. Bunin defended in his works a pure attitude towards the carnal and physical. He did not have the concept of female sin, as in “Anna Karenina”, “War and Peace”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” by L.N. Tolstoy, there was no wary, hostile attitude towards the feminine, characteristic of N.V. Gogol, but there was no vulgarization of love. His love is an earthly joy, a mysterious attraction of one sex to another.
The works devoted to the theme of love and death (often touching in Bunin) are “The Grammar of Love”, “Easy Breathing”, “Mitya’s Love”, “Caucasus”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Henry”, “Natalie”, “Cold Autumn”, etc. It has long been and very correctly noted that love in Bunin’s work is tragic. The writer is trying to unravel the mystery of love and the mystery of death, why they often come into contact in life, what is the meaning of this. Why does the nobleman Khvoshchinsky go crazy after the death of his beloved, the peasant woman Lushka, and then almost deify her image (“The Grammar of Love”). Why does the young high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who, as it seemed to her, have the amazing gift of “easy breathing”, die, just starting to blossom? The author does not answer these questions, but through his works he makes it clear what is in it certain meaning human earthly life.
The complex emotional experiences of the hero of the story “Mitya’s Love” are described with brilliance and stunning psychological tension by Bunin. This story caused controversy; the writer was reproached for excessive descriptions of nature and for the implausibility of Mitya’s behavior. But we already know that Bunin’s nature is not a background, not a decoration, but one of the main characters, and in “Mitya’s Love” especially. Through the depiction of the state of nature, the author surprisingly accurately conveys Mitya’s feelings, mood and experiences.
One can call “Mitya’s Love” a psychological story in which the author accurately and faithfully embodied Mitya’s confused feelings and the tragic end of his life.
“Dark Alleys,” a book of stories about love, can be called an encyclopedia of love dramas. “She talks about the tragic and about many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life...” - Bunin admitted to Teleshov in 1947.
The heroes of “Dark Alleys” do not resist nature; often their actions are completely illogical and contradict generally accepted morality (an example of this is the sudden passion of the heroes in the story “Sunstroke”). Bunin’s love “on the brink” is almost a violation of the norm, going beyond the boundaries of everyday life. For Bunin, this immorality can even be said to be a certain sign of the authenticity of love, since ordinary morality turns out, like everything established by people, to be a conventional scheme into which the elements of natural, living life do not fit.
When describing risky details related to the body, when the author must be impartial so as not to cross the fragile line separating art from pornography, Bunin, on the contrary, worries too much - to the point of spasm in the throat, to the point of passionate trembling: “... it just went dark in the eyes at the sight of her pinkish body with a tan on shiny shoulders... her eyes turned black and widened even more, her lips parted feverishly” (“Galya Ganskaya”). For Bunin, everything connected with gender is pure and significant, everything is shrouded in mystery and even holiness.
As a rule, the happiness of love in “Dark Alleys” is followed by separation or death. The heroes revel in intimacy, but
it leads to separation, death, murder. Happiness cannot last forever. Natalie "died on Lake Geneva in premature birth." Galya Ganskaya was poisoned. In the story “Dark Alleys,” the master Nikolai Alekseevich abandons the peasant girl Nadezhda - for him this story is vulgar and ordinary, but she loved him “all century.” In the story "Rusya", the lovers are separated by the hysterical mother of Rusya.
Bunin allows his heroes only to taste the forbidden fruit, to enjoy it - and then deprives them of happiness, hopes, joys, even life. The hero of the story “Natalie” loved two people at once, but did not find family happiness with either one. In the story “Henry” there is an abundance of female characters for every taste. But the hero remains lonely and free from the “women of men.”
Bunin's love does not go into the family channel and is not resolved by a happy marriage. Bunin deprives his heroes of eternal happiness, deprives them because they get used to it, and habit leads to loss of love. Love out of habit cannot be better than lightning-fast but sincere love. The hero of the story “Dark Alleys” cannot tie himself into family ties with the peasant woman Nadezhda, but having married another woman from his circle, he does not find family happiness. The wife cheated, the son was a spendthrift and a scoundrel, the family itself turned out to be “the most ordinary vulgar story.” However, despite its short duration, love still remains eternal: it is eternal in the hero’s memory precisely because it is fleeting in life.
A distinctive feature of love in Bunin’s depiction is the combination of seemingly incompatible things. It is no coincidence that Bunin once wrote in his diary: “And again, again such an unspeakable - sweet sadness from that eternal deception of another spring, hopes and love for the whole world that you want with tears
gratitude to kiss the ground. Lord, Lord, why are you torturing us like this?”
The strange connection between love and death is constantly emphasized by Bunin, and therefore it is no coincidence that the title of the collection “Dark Alleys” here does not mean “shady” at all - these are dark, tragic, tangled labyrinths of love.
About the book of stories “Dark Alleys” G. Adamovich rightly wrote: “All love is great happiness, a “gift of the gods,” even if it is not shared. That’s why Bunin’s book exudes happiness, that’s why it’s imbued with gratitude to life, to the world, in which, despite all its imperfections, happiness can happen.”
True love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, and tragedy. This conclusion, albeit late, is reached by many of Bunin’s heroes who have lost, overlooked, or destroyed their love. In this late repentance, late spiritual resurrection, enlightenment of the heroes lies that all-purifying melody that speaks of the imperfection of people who have not yet learned to live, recognize and value real feelings, and of the imperfection of life itself, social conditions, environment, circumstances that often interfere with truly human relationships, and most importantly - about those high emotions that leave an unfading trace of spiritual beauty, generosity, devotion and purity.
Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his destiny uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning.
This mystery of existence becomes the theme of Bunin’s story “The Grammar of Love” (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on the way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “an incomprehensible love that turned an entire human life into some kind of ecstatic life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life,” if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushki. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good-looking,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some dazed, focused soul?” According to neighboring landowners. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the district as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and sat on her bed for more than twenty years...” What can you call it? is this a twenty year seclusion? Insanity? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all clear.
The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakening in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint.” What made Ivlev buy from Khvoshchinsky’s heir “at an expensive price” a small book “The Grammar of Love”, which the old landowner never parted with, cherishing memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what his orphaned soul fed for many years. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandsons” who have heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved,” and along with them the reader of Bunin’s work, will try to reveal the secret of this inexplicable feeling.
An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure” shakes the lieutenant’s soul. Having parted with a beautiful stranger, he cannot find peace. At the thought of the impossibility of meeting this woman again, “he felt such pain and the uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.” The author convinces the reader of the seriousness of the feelings experienced by the hero of the story. The lieutenant feels “terribly unhappy in this city.” “Where to go? What to do?" - he thinks lost. The depth of the hero’s spiritual insight is clearly expressed in the final phrase of the story: “The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.” How to explain what happened to him? Maybe the hero came into contact with that great feeling that people call love, and the feeling of the impossibility of loss led him to realize the tragedy of existence?
The torment of a loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the destinies of Bunin's heroes by love, and time has no power over it.
The story “Dark Alleys” (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. – Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost “the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the Petegbug house, the mother of his children... This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.
How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.
A passionate and deep feeling permeates the last, fifth book of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” - “Lika”. It was based on the transformed experiences of Bunin himself, his youthful love for V.V. Pashchenko. In the novel, death and oblivion recede before the power of love, before the heightened sense - of the hero and the author - of life.
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.
Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always a modern writer who arouses deep reader interest.
Abstract on literature
Topic: “The theme of love in the works of Bunin”
Completed
Student of the “” class
Moscow 2004
List of used literature
1. O.N. Mikhailov – “Russian literature of the 20th century”
2. S.N. Morozov - “The Life of Arsenyev. Stories"
3. B.K. Zaitsev - “Youth - Ivan Bunin”
4. Literary critical articles.
Love in the works of Bunin
Bunin is a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late 19th – first half of the 20th centuries. His genius talent, skill as a poet and prose writer, which became classic, amazed his contemporaries and captivates us living today. His works preserve the real Russian literary language, which is now lost.
Works about love occupy a large place in Bunin’s work in exile. The writer has always been worried about the mystery of this strongest of human feelings. In 1924 he wrote the story “Mitya’s Love”, the following year - “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “Sunstroke”. And in the late 30s and during the Second World War, Bunin created 38 short stories about love, which made up his book “Dark Alleys,” published in 1946. Bunin considered this book his “best work in terms of conciseness, painting and literary skill "
Love in Bunin’s depiction amazes not only with the power of artistic representation, but also with its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. They rarely break through to the surface: most people will not experience their fatal effects until the end of their days. Such a depiction of love unexpectedly gives Bunin’s sober, “merciless” talent a romantic glow. The proximity of love and death, their conjugation were obvious facts for Bunin and were never subject to doubt. However, the catastrophic nature of existence, the fragility of human relationships and existence itself - all these favorite Bunin themes after the gigantic social cataclysms that shook Russia were filled with a new formidable meaning, as is, for example, seen in the story “Mitya’s Love”. “Love is beautiful” and “Love is doomed” - these concepts, having finally come together, coincided, carrying in the depths, in the grain of each story, the personal grief of Bunin the emigrant.
Bunin's love lyrics are not great in quantity. It reflects the poet's confused thoughts and feelings about the mystery of love... One of the main motives of love lyrics is loneliness, unattainability or the impossibility of happiness. For example, “How bright, how elegant spring is!..”, “A calm gaze, like the gaze of a doe...”, “At a late hour we were in the field with her...”, “Loneliness”, “Sadness of eyelashes, shining and black...” etc.
Bunin's love lyrics are passionate, sensual, saturated with a thirst for love and are always filled with tragedy, unfulfilled hopes, memories of past youth and lost love.
I.A. Bunin has a very unique view of love relationships that distinguishes him from many other writers of that time.
In Russian classical literature of that time, the theme of love always occupied an important place, with preference given to spiritual, “platonic” love
before sensuality, carnal, physical passion, which was often debunked. The purity of Turgenev's women became a household word. Russian literature is predominantly the literature of “first love”.
The image of love in Bunin’s work is a special synthesis of spirit and flesh. According to Bunin, the spirit cannot be comprehended without knowing the flesh. I. Bunin defended in his works a pure attitude towards the carnal and physical. He did not have the concept of female sin, as in “Anna Karenina”, “War and Peace”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” by L.N. Tolstoy, there was no wary, hostile attitude towards the feminine, characteristic of N.V. Gogol, but there was no vulgarization of love. His love is an earthly joy, a mysterious attraction of one sex to another.
The works devoted to the theme of love and death (often touching in Bunin’s works) are “The Grammar of Love”, “Easy Breathing”, “Mitya’s Love”, “Caucasus”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Henry”, “Natalie”, “Cold Autumn”, etc. It has long been and very correctly noted that love in Bunin’s work is tragic. The writer is trying to unravel the mystery of love and the mystery of death, why they often come into contact in life, what is the meaning of this. Why does the nobleman Khvoshchinsky go crazy after the death of his beloved, the peasant woman Lushka, and then almost deify her image (“The Grammar of Love”). Why does the young high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who, as it seemed to her, have the amazing gift of “easy breathing”, die, just starting to blossom? The author does not answer these questions, but through his works he makes it clear that this has a certain meaning in human earthly life.
The complex emotional experiences of the hero of the story “Mitya’s Love” are described with brilliance and stunning psychological tension by Bunin. This story caused controversy; the writer was reproached for excessive descriptions of nature and for the implausibility of Mitya’s behavior. But we already know that Bunin’s nature is not a background, not a decoration, but one of the main characters, and especially in Mitya’s Love. Through the depiction of the state of nature, the author surprisingly accurately conveys Mitya’s feelings, his mood and experiences.
One can call “Mitya’s Love” a psychological story in which the author accurately and faithfully embodied Mitya’s confused feelings and the tragic end of his life.
“Dark Alleys,” a book of stories about love, can be called an encyclopedia of love dramas. “She talks about the tragic and about many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life...” - Bunin admitted to Teleshov in 1947.
The heroes of “Dark Alleys” do not resist nature; often their actions are completely illogical and contradict generally accepted morality (an example of this is the sudden passion of the heroes in the story “Sunstroke”). Bunin’s love “on the brink” is almost a violation of the norm, going beyond the boundaries of everyday life. For Bunin, this immorality can even be said to be a certain sign of the authenticity of love, since ordinary morality turns out, like everything established by people, to be a conventional scheme into which the elements of natural, living life do not fit.
When describing risky details related to the body, when the author must be impartial so as not to cross the fragile line separating art from pornography, Bunin, on the contrary, worries too much - to the point of spasm in the throat, to the point of passionate trembling: “... it just went dark in the eyes at the sight of her pinkish body with a tan on shiny shoulders... her eyes turned black and widened even more, her lips parted feverishly” (“Galya Ganskaya”). For Bunin, everything connected with gender is pure and significant, everything is shrouded in mystery and even holiness.
As a rule, the happiness of love in “Dark Alleys” is followed by separation or death. The heroes revel in intimacy, but
it leads to separation, death, murder. Happiness cannot last forever. Natalie "died on Lake Geneva in premature birth." Galya Ganskaya was poisoned. In the story “Dark Alleys,” the master Nikolai Alekseevich abandons the peasant girl Nadezhda - for him this story is vulgar and ordinary, but she loved him “all century.” In the story "Rusya", the lovers are separated by the hysterical mother of Rusya.
Bunin allows his heroes only to taste the forbidden fruit, to enjoy it - and then deprives them of happiness, hopes, joys, even life. The hero of the story “Natalie” loved two people at once, but did not find family happiness with either one. In the story “Henry” there is an abundance of female characters for every taste. But the hero remains lonely and free from the “women of men.”
Bunin's love does not go into the family channel and is not resolved by a happy marriage. Bunin deprives his heroes of eternal happiness, deprives them because they get used to it, and habit leads to loss of love. Love out of habit cannot be better than lightning-fast but sincere love. The hero of the story “Dark Alleys” cannot tie himself into family ties with the peasant woman Nadezhda, but having married another woman from his circle, he does not find family happiness. The wife cheated, the son was a spendthrift and a scoundrel, the family itself turned out to be “the most ordinary vulgar story.” However, despite its short duration, love still remains eternal: it is eternal in the hero’s memory precisely because it is fleeting in life.
A distinctive feature of love in Bunin’s depiction is the combination of seemingly incompatible things. It is no coincidence that Bunin once wrote in his diary: “And again, again such an unspeakable - sweet sadness from that eternal deception of another spring, hopes and love for the whole world that you want with tears
gratitude to kiss the ground. Lord, Lord, why are you torturing us like this?”
The strange connection between love and death is constantly emphasized by Bunin, and therefore it is no coincidence that the title of the collection “Dark Alleys” here does not mean “shady” at all - these are dark, tragic, tangled labyrinths of love.
About the book of stories “Dark Alleys” G. Adamovich rightly wrote: “All love is great happiness, a “gift of the gods,” even if it is not shared. That’s why Bunin’s book exudes happiness, that’s why it’s imbued with gratitude to life, to the world, in which, despite all its imperfections, happiness can happen.”
True love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, and tragedy. This conclusion, albeit late, is reached by many of Bunin’s heroes who have lost, overlooked, or destroyed their love. In this late repentance, late spiritual resurrection, enlightenment of the heroes lies that all-purifying melody, which speaks of the imperfection of people who have not yet learned to live, recognize and value real feelings, and of the imperfection of life itself, social conditions, the environment, circumstances that often interfere with truly human relationships, and most importantly - about those high emotions that leave an unfading trace of spiritual beauty, generosity, devotion and purity.
Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his destiny uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning.
This mystery of existence becomes the theme of Bunin’s story “The Grammar of Love” (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on the way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “an incomprehensible love that turned an entire human life into some kind of ecstatic life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life,” if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushki. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good-looking,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some dazed, focused soul?” According to neighboring landowners. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the district as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and sat on her bed for more than twenty years...” What can you call it? is this a twenty year seclusion? Insanity? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all clear.
The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakening in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint.” What made Ivlev buy from Khvoshchinsky’s heir “at an expensive price” a small book “The Grammar of Love”, which the old landowner never parted with, cherishing memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what his orphaned soul fed for many years. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandsons” who have heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved,” and along with them the reader of Bunin’s work, will try to reveal the secret of this inexplicable feeling.
An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure” shakes the lieutenant’s soul. Having parted with a beautiful stranger, he cannot find peace. At the thought of the impossibility of meeting this woman again, “he felt such pain and the uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.” The author convinces the reader of the seriousness of the feelings experienced by the hero of the story. The lieutenant feels “terribly unhappy in this city.” “Where to go? What to do?" - he thinks lost. The depth of the hero’s spiritual insight is clearly expressed in the final phrase of the story: “The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.” How to explain what happened to him? Maybe the hero came into contact with that great feeling that people call love, and the feeling of the impossibility of loss led him to realize the tragedy of existence?
The torment of a loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the destinies of Bunin's heroes by love, and time has no power over it.
The story “Dark Alleys” (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. – Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost “the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and the fact that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the Petegbug house, the mother of his children... This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.
How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.
A passionate and deep feeling permeates the last, fifth book of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” - “Lika”. It was based on the transformed experiences of Bunin himself, his youthful love for V.V. Pashchenko. In the novel, death and oblivion recede before the power of love, before the heightened sense - of the hero and the author - of life.
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.
Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always a modern writer who arouses deep reader interest.
Abstract on literature
Topic: “The theme of love in the works of Bunin”
Completed
Student of the “” class
Moscow 2004
List of used literature
1. O.N. Mikhailov – “Russian literature of the 20th century”
2. S.N. Morozov - “The Life of Arsenyev. Stories"
3. B.K. Zaitsev - “Youth - Ivan Bunin”
4. Literary critical articles.
Love in the works of Bunin Bunin is a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late XIX - first half of the XBunin wrote a lot about love, its tragedies and rare moments of true happiness.” These works are marked by an extraordinary poeticization of human feelings, they revealed the wonderful talent of the writer, his ability to penetrate into the intimate depths of the heart, with their unknown and unknown laws.
For Bunin in true love there is something in common with the eternal beauty of nature, therefore only such a feeling of love is beautiful, which is natural, not false, not fictitious; for it, love and existence without it are two hostile lives, and if it dies
Love, that other life, is no longer needed.
Exalting love, Bunin does not hide the fact that it brings not only joy and happiness, but also very often conceals torment, grief, disappointment, and death. In one of his letters, he himself explained precisely this motive in his work and not only explained, but convincingly proved: “Don’t you still know that love and death are inextricably linked? Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide.”
Bunin told the story of tragic love in a short story
"Sunstroke". A chance acquaintance on a ship, an ordinary “road adventure”, a “fleeting meeting”. But how did all this random and fleeting end for the heroes? “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely hit me. Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke,” admits the lieutenant’s companion. But this blow has not yet touched the hero.
Having seen off his friend and carefreely returned to the hotel, he suddenly felt that his heart “squeezed with an incomprehensible tenderness” at the memory of her. When he realized that he had lost her forever (after all, he didn’t even know her first and last name), “he felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.” And again Bunin’s motif intensifies the tragedy of a person: love and death are always nearby. Struck, as if by a blow, by this unexpected love, the lieutenant is ready to die, just to return this dear and beloved creature to him: “He, without hesitation, would die tomorrow, if by some miracle he could return her, spend another “To spend this day only to express to her and somehow prove, convince her how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her.”
The collection of stories “Dark Alleys” can be called an encyclopedia of love dramas. The writer created it during the Second World War (1937-1944). Later, when the book was published and readers were shocked by the “eternal drama of love,” Bunin admitted in one of his letters: “She talks about the tragic and many tender and beautiful things,” I think this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life.” And although in many stories the love that the writer spoke about is tragic, Bunin claims that all love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, or tragedy. Many Bunin heroes come to this conclusion, having lost, overlooked, or destroyed their love themselves.
But this insight, enlightenment comes to the heroes too late, as, for example, to Vitaly Meshchersky, the hero of the story “Natalie”. Bunin told the story of student Meshchersky’s love for the young beauty Natalie Stankevich, about their breakup, about long loneliness. The tragedy of this love lies in the character of Meshchersky, who feels sincere and sublime feeling, and to the other - “passionate bodily intoxication”, both seem to him to be love. But it is impossible to love two at once. Physical attraction to Sonya quickly passes, big, true love stays with Natalie for life. Only for a short moment were the heroes given the true happiness of love, but the author ended the idyllic union of Meshchersky and Natalie with the untimely death of the heroine.
In stories about love, I. A. Bunin affirmed true spiritual values, the beauty and greatness of a person capable of great, selfless feeling, he portrayed love as a high, ideal, beautiful feeling, despite the fact that it brings not only joy and happiness, but more often - grief, suffering, death.
