He opened new horizons for the most demanding readers. He skillfully wrote fascinating stories and short stories. He subtly felt literature and native language. Ivan Bunin is a writer, thanks to whom people took a different look at love.

On October 10, 1870, the boy Vanya was born in Voronezh. He grew up and was brought up in the family of a landowner in the Oryol and Tula provinces, who became impoverished because of his love for cards. However, despite this fact, the writer did not just feel aristocratic, because his family roots lead us to the poetess A.P. Bunina and the father of V.A. Zhukovsky - A.I. Bunin. The Bunin family was a worthy representative of the noble families of Russia.

Three years later, the boy's family moved to the estate on the Butyrka farm in the Oryol province. Many childhood memories of Bunin are connected with this place, which we can see between the lines in his stories. For example, in "Antonov apples" he describes with love and awe the family nests of relatives and friends.

Youth and education

In 1881, having successfully passed the exams, Bunin entered the Yelets gymnasium. The boy showed interest in learning and was a very capable student, but this did not apply to the natural and exact sciences. In his letter to his older brother, he wrote that the math exam was “the most terrible” for him. He did not graduate from the gymnasium, as he was expelled due to absence from the holidays. He continued his studies with his brother Julius at the Ozerki parental estate, with whom he subsequently became very close. Knowing about the preferences of the child, the relatives focused on the humanities.

His first literary works belong to this period. At 15, the young writer creates the novel "Passion", but it is not published anywhere. The very first published poem was “Over the Grave of S. Ya. Nadson” in the Rodina magazine (1887).

creative path

Here begins the period of wanderings of Ivan Bunin. Starting in 1889, he worked for 3 years in the Orlovsky Vestnik magazine, in which his small literary works and articles were published. Later he moved to his brother in Kharkov, where he arranged for him in the provincial government as a librarian.

In 1894 he went to Moscow, where he met with Leo Tolstoy. As mentioned earlier, the poet even then subtly feels the surrounding reality, therefore, in the stories “Antonov apples”, “New road” and “Epitaph”, nostalgia for the passing era will be so sharply traced and dissatisfaction with the urban environment will be felt.

1891 is the year of the publication of the first collection of poems by Bunin, in which the reader first encounters the theme of bitterness and sweetness of love, which permeate the works dedicated to unhappy love for Pashchenko.

In 1897, the second book appeared in St. Petersburg - "To the End of the World and Other Stories".

Ivan Bunin also distinguished himself as a translator of the works of Alcaeus, Saadi, Francesco Petrarch, Adam Mickiewicz and George Byron.

The writer's hard work paid off. In Moscow in 1898, a poetry collection "Under the open sky" appeared. In 1900, a collection of poems "Leaf Fall" was published. In 1903, Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize, which he received from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Every year the talented writer enriched literature more and more. 1915 is the year of his creative success. His most famous works were published: "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Easy Breath", "Chang's Dreams" and "Grammar of Love". The dramatic events in the country greatly inspired the master.

In his book of life, he began a new page after moving to Constantinople in the 1920s. Later he ends up in Paris as a political exile. He did not accept the coup and condemned the new government with all his heart. The most significant novel created during the period of emigration is Arseniev's Life. For him, the author received the Nobel Prize in 1933 (the first for a Russian writer). This is a grandiose event in our history and a big step forward for Russian literature.

During the Second World War, the writer lives very poorly in the Villa Janet. His work abroad does not find such a response as at home, and the author himself is sick of longing for his native land. Bunin's last literary work was published in 1952.

Personal life

1. The first was Varvara Pashchenko. This love story is not a happy one. At first, the young lady's parents became an obstacle to their relationship, who were categorically against the marriage of their daughter to a failed young man, who, moreover, was a year younger than her. Then the writer himself became convinced of the dissimilarity of the characters. As a result, Pashchenko married a wealthy landowner, with whom she had a close relationship secretly from Bunin. The author dedicated poems to this gap.
2. In 1898 Ivan marries the daughter of a migrant revolutionary A. N. Tsakni. It was she who became the "sunstroke" for the writer. However, the marriage did not last long, since the Greek woman did not experience the same strong attraction to her husband.
3. His third muse was his second wife, Vera Muromtseva. This woman truly became Ivan's guardian angel. As after the crash of a ship during a storm, a calm lull follows, so Vera appeared at the most necessary moment for Bunin. They have been married for 46 years.
4. But everything was smooth only until the moment when Ivan Alekseevich brought his student into the house - the beginning writer Galina Kuznetsova. It was a fatal love - both were not free, both were separated by an abyss in age (she was 26, and he was 56 years old). Galina left her husband for him, but Bunin was not ready to do the same with Vera. So the three of them lived for 10 years before the appearance of Marga. Bunin was in despair: another woman took his second wife away. This event was a big blow for him.

Death

In the last years of his life, Bunin is nostalgic for Russia and really wants to go back. But his plans never came to fruition. November 8, 1953 - the date of death of the great writer of the Silver Age, Ivan Bunin.

He made a huge contribution to the development of literary creativity in Russia, became a symbol of Russian émigré prose of the 20th century.

If you missed something in this article, write in the comments - we will add it.

V.A. Meskin

The Central Russian zone, Orlovshchina, is the birthplace of many remarkable word artists. Tyutchev, Turgenev, Leskov, Fet, Andreev, Bunin - all of them were brought up by this region, which lies in the very heart of Russia.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953) was born and raised in a family that belonged to an old noble family. This is a significant fact of his biography: impoverished by the end of the 19th century. the noble nest of the Bunins lived with memories of past greatness. The cult of ancestors was maintained in the family, romantic legends about the history of the Bunin family were carefully kept. Is it not here that the nostalgic motifs of the writer's mature work on the "golden age" of Russia originate? Among Bunin's ancestors were prominent statesmen and artists, such as, for example, the poets Anna Bunina, Vasily Zhukovsky. Isn't it their creativity that engendered in the soul of the young man the desire to become the "second Pushkin"? He told about this desire in his declining years in the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1933).

However, it did not take long for him to find his theme and that unique style that delighted Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Simonov, Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn, and millions of grateful readers. First there were years of apprenticeship, fascination with fashionable social and political ideas, imitation of popular fiction writers. The young writer is attracted by the desire to speak out on topical issues. In such stories as "Tanka", "Katryuk" (1892), "To the End of the World" (1834), one can feel the influence of populist writers - the brothers Uspensky, Zlatovratsky, Levitov; the stories "At the Dacha" (1895), "In August" (1901) were created during the period of passion for the ethical teachings of Tolstoy. The journalistic beginning in them is clearly stronger than the artistic one.

Bunin made his debut as a poet, but even here he did not immediately find his theme and tone. It is difficult to assume that it is he, the future author of the collection "Leaf Fall" (1901), for which in 1903 the Academy of Sciences will award him the Pushkin Prize, in a poem created "under Nekrasov" - "The Village Beggar" (1886) wrote: " You will not see this in the capital: / Here, indeed, weary of need! Behind the iron bars in the dungeon / Such a sufferer is rarely seen. The young poet wrote both “under Nadson” and “under Lermontov”, as, for example, in the poem “Over the Grave of S. Ya. Nadson” (1887): his crown / And she carried him into the darkness of the grave.

It is important for the reader to be able to separate the writer's student things from the works that became classic during Bunin's lifetime. The writer himself in his autobiographical story "Lika" (1933) resolutely rejected what was only a test of the pen, a "false" note.

In 1900, Bunin wrote the story "Antonov apples", which overshadowed a lot, if not all, of what the writer had done in previous years. This story concentrates so much truly Bunin that it can serve as a kind of visiting card of the artist - a classic of the 20th century. It gives a completely different sound to the themes that have long been known in Russian literature.

For a long time, Bunin was considered among a number of social writers who, together with him, were part of the Sreda literary association, published the Knowledge collections, but his vision of life conflicts is decisively different from the vision of the masters of the word of this circle - Gorky, Kuprin, Serafimovich, Chirikov, Yushkevich and others. As a rule, these writers depict social problems and outline ways of solving them in the context of their time, pass biased judgments on everything they consider evil. Bunin can touch on the same problems, but at the same time, he more often covers them in the context of Russian or even world history, from Christian, or rather from universal, positions. He shows the ugly sides of current life, but very rarely takes the liberty of judging or blaming someone .

Bunin's lack of an active authorial position in depicting the forces of evil introduced a chill of alienation into relations with Gorky, who did not immediately agree to place the stories of the "indifferent" author in Knowledge. At the beginning of 1901, Gorky wrote to Bryusov: "I love Bunin, but I don't understand - how talented, handsome, like matte silver, he won't sharpen the knife, won't poke them in the right place?" In the same year, referring to the "Epitaph", a lyrical requiem for the outgoing nobility, Gorky wrote to K.P. Pyatnitsky: "Antonov apples smell good - yes! - but - they smell by no means democratically ..."

"Antonov apples" not only open a new stage in Bunin's work, but also mark the emergence of a new genre, which later won a large layer of Russian literature - lyrical prose. Prishvin, Paustovsky, Kazakov and many other writers worked in this genre.

In this story, as later in many others, Bunin abandons the classical type of plot, which, as a rule, is tied to the specific circumstances of a particular time. The function of the plot - the core around which the living tie of paintings unfolds - is performed by the author's mood - a nostalgic experience of the irretrievably gone. The writer turns back and in the past rediscovers the world of people who, in his opinion, lived differently, more worthy. And in this conviction he will remain all his creative path. Most of the artists - his contemporaries - peered into the future, believing that there was a victory for justice and beauty. Some of them (Zaitsev, Shmelev, Kuprin) after the catastrophic events of 1905 and 1917. turn back with sympathy.

Attention to eternal questions, the answers to which lie outside the current time - all this is typical for the author of the classic stories "The Village" (1910), "Dry Valley" (1911) and many stories. The artist's arsenal includes poetic devices that allow him to touch entire epochs: this is either an essayistic style of presentation that gives space and retrospection ("Epitaph" (1900), "Pass" (1902), the aforementioned "Antonov apples"), or, when the need arises describe modernity, the method of parallel-sequential development in the narrative of several storylines associated with different time periods (in many stories and in these stories), or a direct appeal in his work to the eternal themes of the mysteries of love, life, death, and then questions when and where it happened are of no fundamental importance ("The Brothers" (1914), created two years later by the masterpiece "Chang's Dreams"), or, finally, the method of interspersing memories of the past into the plot of the present (the cycle "Dark Alleys" and many stories late work).

Bunin contrasts the doubtful, speculative future with an ideal that, in his opinion, follows from the spiritual and worldly experience of the past. At the same time, he is far from reckless idealization of the past. The artist only contrasts the two main trends of the past and the present. The dominant of the past years, in his opinion, was creation, the dominant of the present years was destruction. Of the contemporary thinkers of the writer, Vl. was very close to his position in his later articles. Solovyov. In The Secret of Progress, the philosopher defined the nature of the disease of his contemporary society in this way: “Modern man, in the hunt for fleeting momentary blessings and volatile fantasies, has lost the right path of life. The thinker suggested turning back to lay the foundation of life from enduring spiritual values. San Francisco" (1915) could hardly object to these thoughts of Solovyov, who, as you know, was a constant opponent of his teacher - Tolstoy. Lev Nikolaevich was, in a sense, a "progressive", therefore Solovyov is closer to Bunin in the search for an ideal.

How come why man lost the "right way"? These questions worried Bunin, his narrator and his heroes all his life more than questions of where to go and what to do. The nostalgic motif associated with the realization of this loss will sound stronger and stronger in his work, starting with Antonov Apples. In the work of the 10s, in the emigrant period, he reaches a tragic sound. In the still bright, albeit sad narrative of the story, there is a mention of a beautiful and business-like elder, "important, like a Kholmogory cow." “The economic butterfly!” the tradesman says about her, shaking his head. in a few years, the narrator himself will scream with pain that the will to live is weakening, the strength of feeling is weakening in all classes: both noble ("Dry Valley", "Last Date" (1912), "Grammar of Love" (1915), and peasant ("Merry Yard", "Cricket" (both - 1911), "Zakhar Vorobyov" (1912), "Last Spring", "Last Autumn" (both - 1916). The main, according to Bunin, estates are becoming smaller - becoming a thing of the past once great Russia ("All Russia is a village," says the main character of the story "The Village"). In many of the writer's works, a person degrades as a person, perceives everything that happens as the end of life, as its last day. The story "The Last Day" (1913) - about how a worker, on the orders of a master who squandered the village, hangs a pack of greyhounds, the long-standing pride and glory of the owner, receiving "a quarter for each" hanged.The story is notable not only for its expressive content, the poetics of its title is significant in the context of so many of the writer's works.

The premonition of a catastrophe is one of the constant motifs of Russian literature at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The prophecy of Andreev, Bely, Sologub, and other writers, among whom was Bunin, may seem all the more surprising because at that time the country was gaining economic and political power. Russia mastered the pace of industrialization unprecedented in world history, fed a quarter of Europe with its bread. Patronage flourished, and the "Russian Seasons" in Paris and London largely determined the cultural life of Western countries.

Did Bunin in the terrible story "The Village" show "the whole of Russia", as it has been written about for a long time (referring to the words of one of its characters)? Most likely, it did not even cover the entire Russian village (as, on the other hand, Gorky did not cover it in the story "Summer" (1909), where the whole village lives in hope for socialist changes). A huge country lived a complicated life, the possibility of its rise was balanced by the possibility of its fall due to contradictions.

The potential for collapse was shrewdly predicted by Russian artists. And the "Village" is not a sketch from nature, but, above all, an image-warning of an impending catastrophe. It remains to be seen whether the writer listened to his inner voice or to a voice from above, or whether the knowledge of the village, the people simply helped.

As Turgenev's heroes are tested by love, so Bunin's ones are tested by freedom. Having finally received what the slave ancestors dreamed of (their author presents them as strong, courageous, beautiful, daring, even long-lived elders often bear the stamp of epic heroes), freedom - personal, political, economic - they can not stand it, they are lost. Bunin continued the theme of the dramatic collapse of what was once a single social organism, begun by Nekrasov in the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia": At the same time, one writer looked at this process as a historical necessity, the other as a tragedy.

There are other people from the people in the artist's prose - bright, kind, but internally weak, confused in the maelstrom of current events, often suppressed by the bearers of evil. Such, for example, is Zakhar from the story "Zakhar Vorobyov" - a character especially beloved by the author himself. The constant search for the hero, where to apply his remarkable strength, ended in a wine shop, where he overtook his death, sent by an evil, envious, according to the hero, "petty people." Such is the Young from the "Village". With all the beatings and bullying, she kept her "soul alive", but an even more terrible future awaits her - she, in fact, was sold as a wife to Deniska Sery.

Zakhar, Young, old man Ivanushka from the same story, Anisya from The Merry Yard, the saddler Cricket from the story of the same name, Natalya from Sukhodol - all these Bunin heroes seem to have lost their way in history, were born a hundred years later than they would it should have been so strikingly different from the gray, mentally deaf mass. What the author-narrator said about Zakhar is not only about him: "... in the old days, they say, there were many such ... yes, this breed is translated."

You can believe in Buddha, Christ, Mohammed - any faith elevates a person, fills his life with a meaning higher than the search for warmth and bread. With the loss of this high meaning, a person loses a special position in the world of wildlife - this is one of the initial principles of Bunin's creativity. His "Epitaph" speaks of the decades of the golden era of "peasant happiness" under the shadow of the cross outside the outskirts with the icon of the Virgin. But now the time has come for noisy cars and the cross has fallen. This philosophical study ends with an alarming question: "Will the new people consecrate their new life with something?" In this work (a rare case), Bunin acts as a moralist: a person cannot remain a person if there is nothing sacred in his life.

Usually, he makes the reader himself come to this statement, unfolding in front of him pictures of the animal existence of a person, devoid of any faith and even a faint bright hope. At the end of the story "The Village" there is a terrible scene of the blessing of the young. In the atmosphere of a diabolical game, the imprisoned father suddenly feels that the icon seems to burn his hands, he thinks with horror: “Now I will throw the icon on the floor ...” with which the shawl was covered - the tablet turned out to be an icon ... A defeated cross, a defeated (in a dirty shawl!) face of a saint, and as a result - a defeated person. Bunin does not seem to have happy characters. Those who believed that with personal freedom, with material prosperity, happiness would come, he, having received both, experiences even greater disappointment. So, Tikhon Krasov, in the end, sees wealth itself as a "golden cage" ("Village"). The problem of a spiritual crisis, of a godless person, was of concern at that time not only to Bunin and not only to Russian literature.

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Europe was going through a period that Nietzsche described as "the twilight of the gods." The man doubted that somewhere there is He, the absolute principle, strict and just, punishing and merciful, and most importantly, filling this life full of suffering with meaning and dictating the ethical norms of the community. The rejection of God was fraught with tragedy, and it broke out. In the work of Bunin, who captured the dramatic events of Russian public and private life at the beginning of the 20th century, the tragedy of the European man of that time was refracted. The depth of Bunin's problems is more significant than it seems at first glance: the social issues that agitated the writer in his works on the theme of Russia are inseparable from religious and philosophical issues.

In Europe, the recognition of the greatness of man - the bearer of progress has been on the rise since the Renaissance. People found confirmation of this greatness in scientific achievements, in the transformations of nature, in the works of artists. The works of Schopenhauer, and then Nietzsche, were logical milestones on the path of human thought in this direction. And yet the cry of the "superman" singer: "God is dead" gave rise to confusion and fear. Of course, not everyone was afraid. The "human worshiper" Gorky, who believed in the triumph of the now absolutely free man, wrote to I.E. Repin: "He (man. - V. M.) is everything. He even created God. ... Man is capable of infinite perfection..." (that is, himself, without reference to the Absolute Beginning) 4 . However, this optimism was shared by very few artists and thinkers.

Teachings about the life of a number of major European thinkers of the late XIX - early XX century. called the "philosophy of sunset". They denied movement in history, no matter how the direction of this movement was explained: they denied progress both according to Hegel and according to Marx. Many thinkers of the turn of the century generally denied the ability of human thinking to cognize the causality of the phenomena of the world (after doubts arose about the divine root cause). God was leaving a person's life, and the moral imperative that commanded this person to realize himself as a particle of the human world was also leaving. It was then that the philosophy of personalism arises, denying the importance of uniting people. Its representatives (Renouvier, Royce, James) explained the world as a system of individuals freely asserting their independence. Everything ideal, according to their forerunner Nietzsche, is born in a person and dies with him, the meaning of things, life is the fruit of the individual imagination of the person himself, and nothing more. The existentialist Sartre concludes that, abandoned by God, man has lost direction: it is not known from anywhere that there is goodness, that one must be honest... A terrible conclusion. The modern philosopher claims that at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. "not overcoming fear, but fear has become ... one of the big topics that go beyond the narrow boundaries of philosophical interpretation" 5 . Fear of hopelessness, loneliness oppresses Bunin's characters in everyday life.

A contemporary of Bunin, the singer of the outgoing nobility and the former greatness of Russia, was the "philosopher of sunset" Spengler. Idealizing the era of Western European feudalism, he argued that eternal progress, eternal goals exist only in the minds of philistines. Spengler's work "The Decline of Europe", created during the years when Bunin was working on the Calrian cycle of stories ("Saints", "Spring Evening", "Brothers", later - the short story "Mr. Din from San Francisco"), had a strong resonance. Similar problems of European spiritual life occupy both contemporaries. Spengler, a supporter of the biological philosophy of history, sees in it only the neighborhood and alternation of different cultures. Culture is an organism in which the laws of biology operate; it is going through a period of youth, growth, flourishing, aging and decay. In his opinion, no influence from outside or from within can stop this process. Bunin represents world history very similarly.

The author of the most interesting book about Bunin, N. Kucherovsky, shows that the writer considers Russia as a link in the chain of Asian civilizations ("Asia, Asia! - such a cry of anguish, despair ends the story of 1913" Dust"), inscribed in the biblical "circle of being", and a person is not able to change anything in the fateful movement of history. Indeed, in vain the Sukhodolsk nobles are trying to prevent ruin and degradation, the peasant Yegor Minaev ("The Merry Yard") cannot resist some kind of mystical force that has been pushing him out of the rut of normal life all his life and, finally, forcing him to throw himself, as if unexpectedly for himself, under a train: “In the past there was a great biblical East with its great peoples and civilizations, in the present it all became a“ dead sea ”of life, frozen in anticipation of its destined future. In the past there was great Russia with its noble culture and agricultural people, in the present this Asian country ... is doomed ... ("He had a mysterious attraction to Asia ..." - said Bunin's friend writer Zaitsev.) Consistent liberation of the peasants from the landowner, the landowner from the peasants, the whole people from God, from moral responsibility - these, according to Bunin, are the reasons for the disastrous fall of the country, but the reasons themselves are caused by the rotation of the "circle of being", that is, they are the consequences of metalaw. So the German philosopher and the Russian artist simultaneously come to close views on history.

Bunin had common moments in the direction of thinking with Toynbee, another well-known contemporary of his, a follower of Spengler. The philosophical and historical works of this English scientist became famous in the late 20s - in the 30s. His theory of "local civilizations" (dramas playing out in a new way each time) proceeds from the fact that each culture relies on a "creative elite", its heyday and decline are due both to the internal state of the very top of society, and the ability of the "inert masses" to imitate, follow the elitist driving force. The ideas that agitated Toynbee clearly have points of contact with the view of history expressed a decade earlier by the author of Dry Valley and many stories about the rise and fall of noble culture. These examples already show that Bunin sensitively reacted not only to the mentality of his people (his researchers have said a lot about this), but also to the mentality of the European peoples.

As the writer's talent develops, more and more topics are in the center of attention - man and history, man and freedom. Freedom, according to Bunin, is first of all responsibility, it is a test. The well-known contemporary of Bunin, the philosopher N. Berdyaev, understood it in the same way (for the passion with which he wrote about the significance of freedom in the life of the individual, the thinker was called, not without irony, "a prisoner of freedom"). However, they drew different conclusions from the same premise. In his book The Philosophy of Freedom (1910), Berdyaev argues that a person must pass the test of freedom, that, being free, he acts as a co-creator... says the fact that such famous German philosophers as R. Steiner, A. Wenzel published their polemical works a little earlier under the same title. Bunin's ideological position seems to be very complex and contradictory. The artist himself, it seems, nowhere clearly formulated it and did not describe it. He showed the diversity of the world, where there is always a place for mystery. Perhaps that is why, no matter how much they write about his works, researchers one way or another talk about the mysteries of his problematics and artistic skill (this was first pointed out by Paustovsky).

One of the mysteries of his work is the coexistence of the tragic and the bright, life-affirming beginnings in his prose. This coexistence is manifested either in different works of the same period, or even in one work. In the 1910s he also creates the stories "Merry Yard", "Spear of the Lord", "Klasha"; in 1925 - the delightful "Sunstroke", and in the 30s - the cycle "Dark Alleys". In general, Bunin's books give rise to the reader's desire to live, to reflect on the possibility of other relationships between people. The element of fatalism is present in a number of the artist's works, but does not dominate in his work.

Many of Bunin's works end in the collapse of the heroes' hopes, murder or suicide. But nowhere does the artist reject life as such. Even death appears to him as a natural imperative of being. In the story "Thin Grass" (1913), the dying person realizes the solemnity of the moment of departure; suffering relieves the feeling of a fulfilled, difficult duty on earth - a worker, a father, a breadwinner. The mourning imagined before death is a welcome reward for all ordeals. "Thin grass out of the field" - the law of nature, this proverb serves as an epigraph to the story.

The author of the "Hunter's Notes" had a man rather against the background of the landscape, then the famous Kalinich, who knew how to "read" nature, was her grateful reader. Bunin focuses on the internal connection between man and nature, in which "there is no ugliness." She is the key to immortality. Man, civilization are dying, but nature is in perpetual motion and renewal, and therefore humanity is immortal, which means that new civilizations will arise. And the East did not die, but only "froze in anticipation of the predetermined ... future." The writer sees the prerequisites for the tragedy of the peasantry in the fact that it breaks away from nature, from the land-breadwinner. A rare worker Anisya ("Merry Yard") sees the world around her as God's grace, but Yegor, Akim, Sery are blind, indifferent to him. The hope of Russia, according to Bunin, is in the peasants, who regard labor on the land as the main business of life, as creativity. He gave an example of such an attitude in the stories Kastryuk (1892), Mowers (1921). However, he believes not only rural residents with a connection with nature or its absence.

Bunin's story "Light Breath" (1916) has been the subject of hundreds of studies. What is the secret of his deepest influence on the reader, the secret of universal love for this girl-girl who paid with her life for her carelessness and frivolity? “And if I could,” Paustovsky wrote in The Golden Rose, “I would cover this grave with all the flowers that only bloom on earth.” Of course, Olya Meshcherskaya, "a rich and happy girl," was not a victim of "bourgeois debauchery." But what? Probably the most difficult of all the questions that arise will be the following: why, despite the dramatic denouement of the plot, does this story leave such a bright feeling? Is it because "the life of nature is heard there"?

What is the story about? About the murder of a pretty schoolgirl by a "plebeian-looking" officer? Yes, but the author devoted only a paragraph to their "novel", while the fourth part of the short story was given to the description of the life of a classy lady in the epilogue. About the immoral act of an elderly gentleman? Yes, but let's note that the "victim" herself, who poured out her indignation on the pages of the diary, after all that had happened, "fell fast asleep." All these collisions are components of that hidden, but determining the development of the narrative, the confrontation between the heroine and the world of the people around her.

Among all the people surrounding the young heroine, the author did not see a single living soul capable of understanding Olya Meshcherskaya; only twice it is mentioned that she was loved, first-graders were drawn to her, that is, creatures not dressed in the uniform of internal and external secular conventions. In the exposition of the story, we are talking about Olya's next call to the boss for non-compliance with etiquette, uniforms, and hairstyles. The cool lady herself is the complete opposite of the pupil. As follows from the narrative, she is always "in black kid gloves, with an ebony umbrella" (the author evokes a very definite and meaningful association with this description). Having dressed in mourning after Olya's death, she is "in the depths of her soul ... happy": the ritual relieves the anxieties of life, fills her voids. The world of conventions can be violated only if you are sure that no one will know about it. Of course, it is no coincidence that the author "makes" Mr. Malyutin not an acquaintance, but the closest relative of the boss.

The conflict of the heroine with this world is predetermined by the whole structure of her character - living, natural, unpredictable, like nature itself. She rejects conventions not because she wants to, but because she cannot do otherwise, she is a living shoot, swelling asphalt. Meshcherskaya is simply not capable of hiding something, acting. She will be confused by all the prescriptions of etiquette (nature does not know them), even "old" books, about which it is customary to speak with trepidation, she calls "ridiculous." After a strong hurricane, nature restores itself and still rejoices. Olya returned to her past and after everything that had happened to her. She dies from a shot by a Cossack officer.

Dies ... Somehow this verb does not fit with the image created by Bunin. Note that the author does not use it in the narrative. The verb "shot" seems to be lost in a long complex sentence describing the killer in detail; figuratively speaking, the shot sounded almost inaudibly. Even the sensible cool lady mystically doubted the death of the girl: "This wreath, this mound, an oak cross! Is it possible that under it is the one whose eyes shine so immortally from this convex porcelain medallion ..?" The word “again” that seems to be suddenly inserted into the final phrase says a lot: “Now this light breath has again scattered in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.” Bunin poetically endows his beloved heroine with the possibility of reincarnation, the opportunity to come into this world as a herald of beauty, perfection and leave it. "Nature in Bunin's work," the well-known researcher correctly noted, "is not a background, ... but an active, effective principle that powerfully invades a person's being, determining his views on life, his actions and deeds."

Bunin entered the history of Russian and world literature as a talented prose writer, while he himself tried all his life to draw the attention of readers to his lyrics, claiming that he was "mainly a poet." The artist also spoke about the connection between what he created in prose and poetry. Many of his stories seem to grow out of lyrical works. "Antonov's Apples", "Dry Valley" - from "Desolation" (1903), "Wasteland" (1907), "Light Breath" - from "Portrait" (1903), etc. However, more important than the external thematic connection is the internal connection. Constantly emphasizing the significance of his poetry, Bunin, in our opinion, prompted the reader that it was in it that the key to understanding his work as a whole.

The lyrical hero of Bunin, unlike the lyrical hero, for example, Fet, not only admires the beauty of the earth, he is overwhelmed by the desire, as it were, to dissolve in this beauty: "Open your arms to me, nature, / So that I merge with your beauty!" (“Open your chest wider to accept “Sand is like silk ... I cling to a clumsy pine ...” (“Childhood”); “I see, I hear, I’m happy. Everything is in me” (“Evening”). Wanting to strengthen the dialogic relations between man and nature, the poet often turns to the method of personification: "How mysterious you are, thunderstorm! / How I love your silence, / Your sudden brilliance, / Your crazy eyes!" ("It smells like fields - fresh herbs ...") ; "But the waves, foaming and swaying, / They go, run towards me / - And someone with blue eyes / Looks in a flickering wave" ("On the open sea"); "Carries - and does not want to know for himself, / What is there, under a pool in the forest, / Crazy Water rumbles, / Headlong flying along the wheel ... "(" River ").

Nature - that's where, according to Bunin, the law of beauty operates, and while it exists, so wise, majestic, charming, there is hope for the healing of sick humanity.

* * *

The contact of different genres in Bunin's work has been talked about for a long time. Already contemporaries noted that to a large extent he acts as a prose writer in poetry and as a poet in prose. The lyrical subjective beginning is very expressive in his artistic and philosophical miniatures, which can be called prose poems without exaggeration. Dressing the thought in an exquisite verbal form, the author here also seeks to raise eternal questions.

Most often, he is tempted to touch the mysterious border where existence and non-existence converge - life and death, time and eternity. However, even in his "plot" works, Bunin showed such attention to this boundary, which, perhaps, no other Russian writer showed. And in everyday life, everything connected with death aroused in him a genuine interest. The writer's wife recalls that Ivan Alekseevich always visited the cemeteries of cities and villages, where he happened to be, looked at the tombstones for a long time, read the inscriptions. Bunin's lyrical and philosophical sketches on the theme of life and death say that the artist looked at the inevitability of the end of all life with a bit of distrust, surprise and inner protest.

Probably the best that Bunin created in this genre is "The Rose of Jericho", a work that the author himself used as an introduction, as an epigraph to his stories. Contrary to custom, he never dated the writing of this piece. The thorny shrub, which, according to Eastern tradition, was buried along with the deceased, which for years can lie somewhere dry, without signs of life, but is able to turn green, give tender leaves as soon as it touches moisture, Bunin perceives as a sign of all-conquering life, as a symbol of faith in resurrection : "There is no death in the world, there is no death to what was, what once lived!"

Let's get a grasp of a small miniature created by the writer in his declining years. Bunin describes the contrasts of life and death in a childish way, with alarm and surprise. The mystery, somewhere in the subtext states the artist, completing his earthly journey, remains a mystery.

L-ra: Russian literature. - 1993. - No. 4. - S. 16-24.

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870-1953) - Russian poet and writer, his work belongs to the Silver Age of Russian art, in 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Childhood

Ivan Alekseevich was born on October 23, 1870 in the city of Voronezh, where the family rented housing on Dvoryanskaya Street in the German estate. The Bunin family belonged to a noble landowner family, among their ancestors were the poets Vasily Zhukovsky and Anna Bunina. By the time Ivan was born, the family was impoverished.

Father, Bunin Alexey Nikolaevich, served as an officer in his youth, then became a landowner, but in a short time he squandered the estate. Mother, Bunina Lyudmila Alexandrovna, nee belonged to the Chubarov family. The family already had two older boys: Julius (13 years old) and Evgeny (12 years old).

The Bunins moved to Voronezh three cities before Ivan's birth to educate their eldest sons. Julius had an unusually amazing ability in languages ​​and mathematics, he studied very well. Eugene was not at all interested in studying, due to his boyish age he liked to chase pigeons through the streets, he left the gymnasium, but in the future he became a gifted artist.

But about the younger Ivan, mother Lyudmila Alexandrovna said that he was special, from birth he was different from older children, “no one has such a soul as Vanechka.”

In 1874 the family moved from the city to the countryside. It was the Oryol province, and on the Butyrka farm of the Yelets district, the Bunins rented an estate. By this time, the eldest son Julius graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal and in the fall he was going to go to Moscow to enter the university at the mathematical faculty.

According to the writer Ivan Alekseevich, all his childhood memories are peasant huts, their inhabitants and endless fields. His mother and servants often sang folk songs and told him stories. Vanya spent whole days from morning to evening with peasant children in the nearest villages, he was friends with many, grazed cattle with them, and traveled at night. He liked to eat with them radish and black bread, bumpy rough cucumbers. As he later wrote in his work “The Life of Arseniev”, “without realizing it, at such a meal the soul was attached to the earth.”

Already at an early age, it became noticeable that Vanya perceives life and the world around him artistically. He liked to show people and animals with facial expressions and gestures, and was also known in the village as a good storyteller. At the age of eight, Bunin wrote his first poem.

Studies

Until the age of 11, Vanya was brought up at home, and then he was sent to the Yelets gymnasium. Immediately the boy began to study well, the subjects were given to him easily, especially literature. If he liked a poem (even a very large one - a whole page), he could remember it from the first reading. He was very fond of books, as he himself said, “read anything at that time” and continued to write poetry, imitating his favorite poets ─ Pushkin and Lermontov.

But then the training began to decline, and already in the third grade the boy was left for the second year. As a result, he did not graduate from the gymnasium, after the winter holidays in 1886 he announced to his parents that he did not want to return to the educational institution. Julius, at that time a candidate of Moscow University, took up further education of his brother. As before, literature remained Vanya's main hobby, he re-read all the domestic and foreign classics, even then it became clear that he would devote his future life to creativity.

First creative steps

At the age of seventeen, the poet's poems were no longer youthful, but serious, and Bunin made his debut in print.

In 1889, he moved to the city of Oryol, where he got a job in the local publication "Orlovsky Vestnik" to work as a proofreader. Ivan Alekseevich was in great need at that time, since literary works did not yet bring good earnings, but he had nowhere to wait for help. The father completely went bankrupt, sold the estate, lost his estate and moved to live with his own sister in Kamenka. The mother of Ivan Alekseevich with his younger sister Masha went to relatives in Vasilyevskoye.

In 1891, the first poetry collection of Ivan Alekseevich, entitled "Poems", was published.

In 1892, Bunin and his common-law wife Varvara Pashchenko moved to live in Poltava, where his elder brother Julius worked as a statistician in the provincial zemstvo council. He helped Ivan Alekseevich and his civil wife get a job. In 1894, Bunin began to publish his works in the newspaper Poltavskiye Provincial Gazette. And also the zemstvo ordered him essays on grain and grass harvests, on the fight against pests.

literary path

While in Poltava, the poet began to collaborate with the Kievlyanin newspaper. In addition to poetry, Bunin began to write a lot of prose, which was increasingly published in quite popular publications:

• "Russian wealth";
• "Bulletin of Europe";
• "World of God".

The luminaries of literary criticism drew attention to the work of the young poet and prose writer. One of them spoke very well about the story "Tanka" (at first it was called "The Village Sketch") and said that "the author will make a great writer."

In 1893-1894, there was a period of special love for Bunin in Tolstoy, he traveled to the Sumy district, where he communicated with sectarians who, in their views, were close to the Tolstoyans, visited the Tolstoy colonies near Poltava, and even went to Moscow to meet the writer himself, which produced on Ivan Alekseevich made an indelible impression.

In the spring and summer of 1894, Bunin took a long trip around Ukraine, he sailed on the steamer "Chaika" along the Dnieper. The poet, in the literal sense of the word, was in love with the steppes and villages of Little Russia, longed to communicate with the people, listened to their melodic songs. He visited the grave of the poet Taras Shevchenko, whose work he loved very much. Subsequently, Bunin did a lot of translations of Kobzar's works.

In 1895, after breaking up with Varvara Pashchenko, Bunin left Poltava for Moscow, then for St. Petersburg. There he soon entered the literary environment, where in the autumn the first public performance of the writer took place in the hall of the Credit Society. At a literary evening with great success, he read the story "To the End of the World."

In 1898, Bunin moved to Odessa, where he married Anna Tsakni. In the same year, his second collection of poetry, Under the Open Air, was released.

In 1899, Ivan Alekseevich traveled to Yalta, where he met Chekhov and Gorky. Subsequently, Bunin visited Chekhov in the Crimea more than once, stayed for a long time and became "their own person" for them. Anton Pavlovich praised Bunin's works and was able to discern in him the future great writer.

In Moscow, Bunin became a regular member of literary circles, where he read his works.

In 1907, Ivan Alekseevich made a trip to the eastern countries, visited Egypt, Syria, Palestine. Returning to Russia, he published a collection of short stories "The Shadow of a Bird", where he shared his impressions of a long journey.

In 1909, Bunin received the second Pushkin Prize for his work and was elected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the category of fine literature.

Revolution and emigration

Bunin did not accept the revolution. When the Bolsheviks occupied Moscow, he left with his wife for Odessa and lived there for two years, until the Red Army came there too.

In early 1920, the couple emigrated on the ship "Sparta" from Odessa, first to Constantinople, and from there to France. The whole further life of the writer passed in this country, the Bunins settled in the south of France not far from Nice.

Bunin passionately hated the Bolsheviks, all this was reflected in his diary called "Cursed Days", which he kept for many years. He called "Bolshevism the basest, despotic, evil and deceitful activity in the history of mankind."

He suffered greatly for Russia, he wanted to go home, he called his entire life in exile an existence at the junction station.

In 1933, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent 120,000 francs from the money he received to help emigrants and writers.

During World War II, Bunin and his wife hid Jews in their rented villa, for which in 2015 the writer was posthumously nominated for a prize and the title Righteous Among the Nations.

Personal life

Ivan Alekseevich's first love happened at a fairly early age. He was 19 years old when at work he met Varvara Pashchenko, an employee of the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, where the poet himself worked at that time. Varvara Vladimirovna was more experienced and older than Bunin, from an intelligent family (she is the daughter of a famous Yelets doctor), she also worked as a proofreader, like Ivan.

Her parents were categorically against such a passion for their daughter, they did not want her to marry a poor poet. Varvara was afraid to disobey them, so when Bunin suggested that she get married, she refused to get married, but they began to live together in a civil marriage. Their relationship could be called "from one extreme to the other" - sometimes passionate love, sometimes painful quarrels.

Later it turned out that Varvara was unfaithful to Ivan Alekseevich. Living with him, she secretly met with the wealthy landowner Arseny Bibikov, whom she later married. And this despite the fact that Varvara's father, in the end, gave his blessing to the marriage of his daughter with Bunin. The poet suffered and was disappointed, his youthful tragic love was later reflected in the novel "The Life of Arseniev". But all the same, relations with Varvara Pashchenko remained pleasant memories in the soul of the poet: "First love is a great happiness, even if it is unrequited".

In 1896, Bunin met with Anna Tsakni. A stunningly beautiful, artistic and wealthy woman of Greek origin, men spoiled her with their attention and admired her. Her father, Nikolai Petrovich Tsakni, a rich Odessan, was a populist revolutionary.

In the autumn of 1898, Bunin and Tsakni got married, a year later they had a son, but in 1905 the baby died. The couple lived together very little, in 1900 they parted, ceased to understand each other, their outlook on life was different, alienation occurred. And again Bunin experienced this painfully, in a letter to his brother he said that he did not know if he could continue to live.

Calmness came to the writer only in 1906 in the person of Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, whom he met in Moscow.

Her father was a member of the Moscow City Council, and her uncle presided over the First State Duma. Vera was of noble origin and grew up in an intelligent family of professors. At first glance, she seemed a little cold and always calm, but it was this woman who was able to become Bunin's patient and caring wife and be with him until the end of his days.

In 1953, in Paris, Ivan Alekseevich died in his sleep on the night of November 7-8, next to the body on the bed lay Leo Tolstoy's novel "Sunday". Bunin was buried in the French cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.

1870 , October 10 (22) - was born in Voronezh in the old impoverished noble family of the Bunins. He spent his childhood on the Butyrka farm in the Oryol province.

1881 - enters the Yelets gymnasium, but, without completing four classes, continues his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius, an exiled Narodnaya Volya.

1887 - the first poems "The Village Beggar" and "Over the Grave of Nadson" are published in the patriotic newspaper "Motherland".

1889 - moves to Oryol, starts working as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, newspaper reporter.

1890 - Bunin, having studied English on his own, translates G. Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha".

1891 - in Orel, the collection "Poems of 1887-1891" is published.

1892 - Bunin, together with his common-law wife V.V. Pashchenko, moved to Poltava, where he served in the land municipal government. Bunin's articles, essays, stories appear in the local newspaper.
In 1892–94 Bunin's poems and stories begin to be published in the capital's magazines.

1893–1894 - Bunin is greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, who is perceived by him as a "demigod", the highest embodiment of artistic power and moral dignity; Bunin's religious-philosophical treatise "The Liberation of Tolstoy" (Paris, 1937) would later become the apotheosis of such an attitude.

1895 - Bunin leaves the service and leaves for St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, gets acquainted with N.K. Mikhailovsky, A.P. Chekhov, K.D. Balmont, V.Ya. Bryusov, V.G. Korolenko, A.I. Kuprin and others. Initially friendly relations with Balmont and Bryusov in the early 1900s. acquired a hostile character, and until the last years of his life, Bunin extremely sharply assessed the work and personality of these poets.

1897 - the release of Bunin's book "To the End of the World" and other stories.

1898 - poetry collection "Under the open sky".

1906 - Acquaintance with V.N. Muromtseva (1881–1961), future wife and author of the book "The Life of Bunin".

1907 travel to Egypt, Syria, Palestine. The result of trips to the East is a cycle of essays "Temple of the Sun" (1907-1911)

1909 - The Academy of Sciences elects Bunin an honorary academician. During a trip to Italy, Bunin visits Gorky, who then lived on about. Capri.

1910 - Bunin's first big thing comes out, which has become an event in literary and social life - the story "The Village".

1912 - the collection "Dry Valley. Novels and Stories" is published.
In the future, other collections were published ("John Rydalets. Stories and Poems 1912-1913", 1913; "The Cup of Life. Stories 1913-1914", 1915; "The Gentleman from San Francisco. Works 1915-1916." , 1916).

1917 - Bunin takes the October Revolution with hostility. Writes a pamphlet diary "Cursed Days".

1920 - Bunin emigrates to France. Here he is in 1927-33. working on the novel "The Life of Arseniev".

1925–1927 - Bunin maintains a regular political and literary column in the Vozrozhdenie newspaper.
In the second half of the 1920s, Bunin experienced his "last love". She became the poetess Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova.

1933 , November 9 - Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated a typical Russian character in fiction."
By the end of the 30s. Bunin increasingly feels the dramatic nature of the break with the Motherland, avoids direct political statements about the USSR. Fascism in Germany and Italy is sharply condemned by him.

Period of the 2nd World War- Bunin in Grasse, in the south of France. Victory meets with great joy.

post-war period Bunin is returning to Paris. He is no longer a staunch opponent of the Soviet regime, but he does not recognize the changes that have taken place in Russia either. In Paris, Ivan Alekseevich visits the Soviet ambassador and gives an interview to the Soviet Patriot newspaper.
In recent years, he has been living in great lack of money, starving. During these years, Bunin created a cycle of short stories "Dark Alleys" (New York, 1943, in full - Paris, 1946), published a book about Leo Tolstoy ("Liberation of Tolstoy", Paris, 1937), "Memoirs" (Paris, 1950), etc.

1953 November 8 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin dies in Paris, becomes the first emigration writer, who in 1954 begins to be published again in his homeland.

Creativity of Ivan Bunin (1870-1953)

1. The beginning of Bunin's work
2. Bunin's love lyrics
3. Bunin's peasant lyrics
4. Analysis of the story "Antonov apples"
5. Bunin and the revolution
6. Analysis of the story "Village"
7. Analysis of the story "Sukhodol"
8. Analysis of the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
9. Analysis of the story "Chang's Dreams"
10. Analysis of the story "Easy breathing"
11. Analysis of the book "Cursed Days"
12. Bunin's emigration
13. Foreign prose of Bunin
14. Analysis of the story "Sunstroke"
15. Analysis of the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys"
16. Analysis of the story "Clean Monday"
17. Analysis of the novel "The Life of Arseniev"
18. Bunin's life in France
19. Bunin and the Great Patriotic War
20. Bunin's loneliness in exile
21. Bunin's death

1. The beginning of Bunin's work

The creative path of the outstanding Russian prose writer and poet of the late 19th - first half of the 20th century, the recognized classic of Russian literature and its first Nobel laureate I.A. the fate of Russia and its people, the most acute conflicts and contradictions of the time.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 10 (22), 1870 in Voronezh, into an impoverished noble family. He spent his childhood on the Butyrki farm in the Yelets district of the Oryol province.

Communication with the peasants, with his first tutor, home teacher N. Romashkov, who instilled in the boy a love for fine literature, painting and music, life in the midst of nature gave the future writer inexhaustible material for creativity, determined the themes of many of his works.

Studying at the Yelets Gymnasium, where Bunin entered in 1881, was interrupted due to material need and illness.

He completed the gymnasium course of sciences at home, in the Yelets village of Ozerki, under the guidance of his brother Julius, a man of excellent education and democratic views.

Since the autumn of 1889, Bunin began to collaborate in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, then lived for some time in Poltava, where, by his own admission, "corresponded a lot to newspapers, studied hard, wrote ...".

A special place in the life of young Bunin is occupied by a deep feeling for Varvara Pashchenko, the daughter of a Yelets doctor, whom he met in the summer of 1889.

The story of his love for this woman, complex and painful, ending in a complete break in 1894, the writer will later tell in the story "Lika", which made up the final part of his autobiographical novel "Arseniev's Life".

Bunin began his literary activity as a poet. In poems written in his teenage years, he imitated Pushkin, Lermontov, as well as the idol of the then youth, the poet Nadson. In 1891, the first book of poems was published in Orel, in 1897 - the first collection of stories "To the End of the World", and in 1901 - again the poetry collection "Falling Leaves".

The predominant motifs of Bunin's poetry of the 90s - early 900s are the rich world of native nature and human feelings. The life philosophy of the author is expressed in landscape poems.

The motif of the transience of human existence, sounding in a number of the poet's poems, is balanced by the opposite motif - the affirmation of the eternity and incorruptibility of nature.

My spring will pass, and this day will pass,

But it's fun to wander around and know that everything passes,

Meanwhile, as the happiness of living forever will not die, -

he exclaims in the poem "Forest Road".

In Bunin's poems, unlike the decadents, there is no pessimism, disbelief in life, aspiration to "other worlds". They sound the joy of being, a sense of the beauty and life-giving power of nature and the surrounding world, the colors and colors of which the poet seeks to reflect and capture.

In the poem "Leaf Fall" (1900), dedicated to Gorky, Bunin vividly and poetically painted the autumn landscape, conveyed the beauty of Russian nature.

Bunin's descriptions of nature are not dead, frozen wax casts, but dynamically developing paintings filled with various smells, noises and colors. But nature attracts Bunin not only with a variety of shades of colors and smells.

In the surrounding world, the poet draws creative strength and vivacity, sees the source of life. In the poem "The Thaw" he wrote:

No, it's not the landscape that attracts me,

Not the colors I seek to notice,

And what shines in these colors -

Love and joy of being.

The feeling of beauty and grandeur of life in Bunin's poems is due to the author's religious attitude. They express gratitude to the Creator of this living, complex and diverse world:

Thank you for everything, Lord!

You, after a day of anxiety and sadness,

Give me the evening dawn

The expanse of fields and the meekness of the blue distance.

A person, according to Bunin, should be happy already because the Lord gave him the opportunity to see this imperishable beauty dissolved in God's world:

And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn,

And azure, and midday heat - The time will come -

The Lord will ask the prodigal son:

“Were you happy in your earthly life?”

And I will forget everything - I will remember only these

Field paths between ears and grasses -

And from sweet tears I will not have time to answer,

Falling to merciful knees.

("Both Flowers and Bumblebees")

Bunin's poetry is deeply national. The image of the Motherland is captured in it through discreet, but vivid pictures of nature. He lovingly describes the expanses of central Russia, the freedom of his native fields and forests, where everything is filled with light and warmth.

In the “satin sheen” of the birch forest, among the floral and mushroom smells, watching the cranes reaching south in late autumn, the poet feels with special force the aching love for the Motherland:

native steppes. The poor villages

My homeland: I returned to her,

Tired of lonely wanderings

And realized the beauty in her sorrow

And happiness is in sad beauty.

("In the steppe")

Through the feeling of bitterness over the troubles and hardships endured by his homeland, in Bunin's poems, filial love and gratitude for her, as well as a harsh rebuke to those who are indifferent to her fate, sound:

They mock you

They, oh motherland, reproach

You with your simplicity

Wretched view of black huts.

So son, calm and impudent,

Ashamed of his mother -

Tired, timid and sad

Among his urban friends.

Looks with a smile of compassion

To the one who wandered hundreds of miles

And for him, by the day of goodbye,

Saved the last penny.

("Motherland")

1. Bunin's love lyrics

Bunin's poems about love are just as clear, transparent and concrete. Bunin's love lyrics are quantitatively small. But it is distinguished by healthy sensuality, restraint, vivid images of lyrical heroes and heroines, far from beautiful souls and excessive enthusiasm, avoiding pomp, phrase, pose.

These are the poems “I entered her at the midnight hour ...”, “Song” (“I am a simple girl on the tower”), “We met by chance on the corner ...”, “Loneliness” and some others.

Nevertheless, Bunin's lyrics, despite external restraint, reflect the diversity and fullness of human feelings, a rich range of moods. Here is the bitterness of separation and unrequited love, and the experience of a suffering, lonely person.

The poetry of the beginning of the 20th century is generally characterized by extreme subjectivism and increased expressiveness. Suffice it to recall the lyrics of Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and other poets.

In contrast, Bunin the poet, on the contrary, is characterized by artistic secrecy, restraint in the manifestation of feelings and in the form of their expression.

An excellent example of such restraint is the poem "Loneliness" (1903), which tells about the fate of a man abandoned by his beloved.

... I wanted to shout after:

"Come back, I'm related to you!"

But for a woman there is no past:

She fell out of love - and became a stranger to her -

Well! I'll flood the fireplace, I'll drink ...

It would be nice to buy a dog!

In this poem, attention is drawn primarily to the amazing simplicity of artistic means, the complete absence of paths.

Stylistically neutral, deliberately prosaic vocabulary emphasizes everyday life, the everyday life of the situation - an empty cold cottage, a rainy autumn evening.

Bunin uses only one paint here - gray. The syntactic and rhythmic patterns are also simple. A clear alternation of three-syllable meters, a calm narrative intonation, the absence of expression and inversion create an even and seemingly indifferent tone of the entire poem.

However, there are a number of tricks (honoring, repeating the word “one”, using impersonal verb forms “it’s dark for me”, “I wanted to shout”, “it would be nice to buy a dog”).

Bunin emphasizes the acute emotional pent-up pain of a person experiencing a drama. The main content of the poem thus went into subtext, hidden behind a deliberately calm tone.

The range of Bunin's lyrics is quite wide. In his poems, he refers to Russian history (“Svyatogor”, “Prince Vseslav”, “Michael”, “Medieval Archangel”), recreates the nature and life of other countries, mainly the East (“Ormuzd”, “Aeschylus”, “Jericho” , "Flight to Egypt", "Ceylon", "Off the coast of Asia Minor" and many others).

This lyric is philosophical in its essence. Peering into the human past, Bunin seeks to reflect the eternal laws of being.

Bunin did not leave his poetic experiments all his life, but he is known to a wide circle of readers “first of all as a prose writer, although the poetic “vein” definitely affected his prose works, where there is a lot of lyricism, emotionality, undoubtedly brought into them by the poetic talent of the writer.

Already in Bunin's early prose, his deep reflections on the meaning of life, on the fate of his native country, were reflected. His stories of the 1990s clearly show that the young prose writer sensitively captured many of the most important aspects of the reality of that time.

1. Bunin's peasant lyrics

The main themes of Bunin's early stories are the depiction of the Russian peasantry and the ruined petty nobility. Between these themes there is a close connection, due to the author's worldview.

Sad pictures of the resettlement of peasant families were drawn by him in the stories "On the Other Side" (1893) and "To the End of the World" (1894), the bleak life of peasant children is displayed in the stories "Tanka" (1892), "News from the Motherland". The peasant life is impoverished, but the fate of the local nobility is no less hopeless (New Road, Pines).

All of them - both peasants and nobles - are threatened with death by the arrival in the village of a new master of life: a boorish, uncultured bourgeois who does not know pity for the weak of this world.

Not accepting either the methods or the consequences of such a capitalization of the Russian countryside, Bunin is looking for an ideal in that way of life when, according to the writer, there was a strong blood connection between a peasant and a landowner.

The desolation and degeneration of noble nests causes in Bunin a feeling of deepest sadness about the bygone harmony of patriarchal life, the gradual disappearance of an entire class that created the greatest national culture.

1. Analysis of the story "Antonov apples"

The epitaph for the old village that is fading into the past sounds especially bright in the lyrical story "Antonov apples"(1900). This story is one of the writer's remarkable works of art.

After reading it, Gorky wrote to Bunin: “And also thank you very much for Yabloki. This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young God, sang. Beautiful, juicy, heartfelt."

In "Antonov's apples" the subtlest perception of nature and the ability to convey it in clear visual images are striking.

No matter how Bunin idealizes the life of the old nobility, this is not the most important thing in his story for the modern reader. The feeling of the motherland, born from the feeling of its unique, peculiar, slightly sad autumn nature, invariably arises when you read Antonov Apples.

Such are the episodes of picking Antonov apples, threshing, and especially skillfully painted hunting scenes. These paintings are organically combined with the autumn landscape, in the descriptions of which the signs of a new reality that frighten Bunin penetrate in the form of telegraph poles, which "only contrast with everything that surrounded the aunt's old-world nest."

For the writer, the arrival of the predatory ruler of life is a cruel, irresistible force, bringing with it the death of the former, noble way of life. In the face of such a danger, this way of life becomes even more dear to the writer, his critical attitude towards the dark sides of the past is weakening, the idea of ​​​​unity of peasants and landowners is strengthened, whose fates are equally, according to Bunin, now at risk.

Bunin writes a lot in these years about the elderly ("Kastryuk", "Meliton", etc.), and this interest in old age, the decline of human existence, is explained by the writer's increased attention to the eternal problems of life and death, which did not cease to excite him until the end of his days. .

Already in the early work of Bunin, his outstanding psychological skill, the ability to build a plot and composition, is manifested, his own special way of depicting the world and the spiritual movements of a person is formed.

The writer, as a rule, avoids sharp plot moves; the action in his stories develops smoothly, calmly, even slowly. But this delay is only external. As in life itself, passions boil in Bunin's works, various characters collide, conflicts ensue.

A master of an extremely detailed vision of the world, Bunin makes the reader perceive the environment with literally all the senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, giving free rein to a whole stream of associations.

“The light chill of dawn” smells “sweet, forest, flowers, herbs”, the city on a frosty day “creaks and squeals from the steps of passers-by, from the skids of peasant sledges”, the pond shines “hot and boring”, the flowers smell with “feminine luxury”, the leaves “babble like a quiet flowing rain outside the open windows”, etc.

Bunin's text is full of complex associations and figurative connections. A particularly important role in this way of depicting is played by an artistic detail that reveals the author's view of the world, the psychological state of the character, the beauty and complexity of the world.

1. Bunin and the revolution

Bunin did not accept the revolution of 1905. She horrified the writer with her cruelty on both sides, the anarchic willfulness of some of the peasants, the manifestation of savagery and bloody malice.

The myth of the unity of peasants and landlords was shaken, and ideas about the peasant as a meek, humble creature collapsed.

All this sharpened Bunin's interest in Russian history and in the problems of the Russian national character, in which Bunin now saw complexity and "diversity", an interweaving of positive and negative features.

In 1919, after the October Revolution, he wrote in his diary: “There are two types among the people. In one, Russia predominates, ”in the other - Chud, Merya. But in both there is a terrible changeability of moods, appearances, “shakyness”, as they used to say in the old days.

The people themselves said to themselves: “From us, as from a tree, both a club and an icon,” depending on the circumstances, on who processes this tree: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelyan Pugachev.

These “two types among the people” Bunin will deeply explore in the 1910s in his works “The Village”, “Dry Valley”, “Ancient Man”, “Night Talk”, “Merry Yard”, “Ignat”, “Zakhar Vorobyov", "John Rydalets", "I'm still silent", "Prince in princes", "Thin Grass" and many others, in which, according to the author, he was occupied by "the soul of a Russian person in a deep sense, the image of the traits of the psyche of a Slav" .

1. Analysis of the story "Village"

The first in a series of such works was the story "The Village" (1910), which caused a flurry of controversy and readers, and criticism.

Gorky very accurately assessed the meaning and significance of Bunin's work, Gorky: “The Village,” he wrote, “was the impetus that made the broken and shattered Russian society seriously think not about the peasant, not about the people, but over the strict question - to be or not to be Russia ?

We have not yet thought about Russia as a whole, this work showed us the need to think specifically about the whole country, to think historically ... No one took the village so deeply, so historically ... ”. Bunin's "Village" is a dramatic reflection on Russia, its past, present and future, on the properties of a historically developed national character.

The writer's new approach to the traditional peasant theme also determined his search for new means of artistic expression. The heartfelt lyrics, characteristic of Bunin's previous stories about the peasantry, were replaced in The Village by a harsh, sober narrative, capacious, concise, but at the same time economically saturated with the image of everyday details of village life.

The author's desire to reflect in the story a large period in the life of the village of Durnovka, symbolizing, in Bunin's view, the Russian village in general, and more broadly - all of Russia ("Yes, it is the whole village," one of the characters in the story says about Russia) - demanded from him and new principles for the construction of the work.

In the center of the story is the image of the life of the Krasov brothers: the landowner and tavern keeper who escaped from the poor, and the self-taught wandering poet Kuzma.

Through the eyes of these people, all the main events of the time are shown: the Russo-Japanese war, the revolution of 1905, the post-revolutionary period. There is no single continuously developing plot in the work, the story is a series of pictures of village, and partly county life, which the Krasovs have been observing for many years.

The main plot line of the story is the life story of the Krasov brothers, the grandsons of a serf. She is interrupted by many inserted short stories and episodes that tell about the life of Durnovka.

An important role for understanding the ideological meaning of the work is played by the image of Kuzma Krasov. He is not only one of the main characters of the work, but also the main exponent of the author's point of view.

Kuzma is a loser. He “dreamed all his life of studying and writing,” but his fate was such that he always had to deal with an alien and unpleasant business. In his youth, he was a merchant-peddler, wandered around Russia, wrote articles for newspapers, then served in a candle shop, was a clerk and, in the end, moved in with his brother, with whom he had once violently quarreled.

A heavy burden falls on Kuzma's soul and the consciousness of an aimlessly lived life, and bleak pictures of the surrounding reality. All this prompts him to think about who is to blame for such a device of life.

A look at the Russian people and their historical past was first expressed in the story by Kuzma's teacher, the tradesman Balashkin. Balashkin utters words that make one recall the famous "martyrology" of Herzen: "Good God! Pushkin was killed, Lermontov was killed, Pisarev was drowned... Ryleev was strangled, Polezhaev became a soldier, Shevchenko was caulked into a soldier for 10 years... Dostoevsky was dragged to execution, Gogol went crazy... And Koltsov, Reshetnikov, Nikitin, Pomyalovsky, Levitov?"

The list of the best representatives of the nation who have died untimely has been selected extremely convincingly, and the reader has every reason to share Balashkin's indignation against this state of affairs.

But the end of the tirade unexpectedly rethinks everything that was said: “Oh, is there still such a country in the world, such a people, be it thrice cursed?” Kuzma vehemently objects to this: “Such a people! The greatest people, and not "such", let me tell you ... After all, these writers are the children of this very people.

But Balashkin defines the concept of “people” in his own way, placing next to Platon Karataev and Razuvaev with Kolupaev, and Saltychikha, and Karamazov with Oblomov, and Khlestakov, and Nozdrev. Subsequently, while editing the story for a foreign publication, Bunin introduced the following characteristic words into Balashkin's first remark: “Would you say the government is to blame? But after all, a master is a slave, a hat is a cap according to Senka. Such a view of the people becomes decisive for Kuzma in the future. The author himself is inclined to share it.

The image of Tikhon Krasov is no less important in the story. The son of a serf, Tikhon became rich in trade, opened a tavern, and then bought the Durnovka estate from an impoverished descendant of his former masters.

From a former beggar, an orphan, the owner turned out, a thunderstorm of the whole county. Strict, hard in dealing with servants and peasants, he stubbornly goes to his goal, grows rich. Lut! On the other hand, he is also the owner, ”the Durnovites say about Tikhon. The feeling of the owner is indeed the main thing in Tikhon.

Every loafer evokes in him a sharp feeling of hostility: “This loafer would be a worker!” However, the all-consuming passion of accumulation obscured the diversity of life from him, distorted his feelings.

“We live - we don’t shake, if we get caught - we turn back,” is his favorite saying, which has become a guide to action. But over time, he begins to feel the futility of his efforts and his entire life.

With grief in his soul, he confesses to Kuzma: “My life is gone, brother! I had, you know, a dumb cook, I gave her, a fool, a foreign scarf, and she took it and pulled it inside out ... Do you understand? From foolishness and greed. It’s a pity to wear it on weekdays - I’ll wait for the holiday, they say, - but the holiday has come - only rags are left ... So here I am ... with my own life.

This worn, topsy-turvy handkerchief is a symbol of the aimlessly lived life of not only Tikhon. It extends to his brother - the loser Kuzma, and to the dark existence of many peasants depicted in the story.

We will find here many gloomy pages, where the darkness, downtroddenness, and ignorance of the peasants are shown. Such is Gray, perhaps the most impoverished peasant in the village, who never got out of poverty, having lived all his life in a small chicken hut, rather like a lair.

Such are the episodic, but vivid images of guards from the landowner's estate, suffering from diseases from eternal malnutrition and a miserable existence.

But who is to blame for this? This is a question over which both the author and his central characters struggle. “From whom to charge something? - asks Kuzma. - Unfortunate people, first of all - unfortunate! ..». But this statement is immediately refuted by the opposite train of thought: “Yes, but who is to blame for this? The people themselves!"

Tikhon Krasov reproaches his brother for contradictions: “Well, you already don’t know the measure of anything. You yourself are hammering: unfortunate people, unfortunate people! Now it's an animal." Kuzma is really confused: “I don’t understand anything: it’s either unfortunate, or that ...”, but all the same (the author and him) inclines to the conclusion about “guilty”.

Take again the same Gray. Having three acres of land, he cannot and does not want to cultivate it and prefers to live in poverty, indulging in idle thoughts that, perhaps, wealth will come into his hands on its own.

Bunin especially does not accept the hopes of the Durnovites at the mercy of the revolution, which, according to them, will give them the opportunity "not to plow, not to mow - the girls should wear zhamkas."

Who, in Bunin's understanding, is the "driving force of the revolution"? One of them is the son of the peasant Gray, the rebel Denisk. This young idler was beckoned by the city. But he did not take root there either, and after a while he returned to his impoverished father with an empty knapsack and pockets full of books.

But what kind of books are these: the songbook "Marusya", "The Debauched Wife", "Innocent Girl in Chains of Violence" and next to them - "The role of the proletariat ("protaleriat", as Deniska says) in Russia.

Deniska's own writing exercises, which he leaves to Tikhon, are extremely ridiculous and caricatured, prompting a remark from him: "Well, you're a fool, forgive me, Lord." Deniska is not only stupid, but also cruel.

He beats his father with a “mortal combat” only because he tore the ceiling off with cigarettes, which Deniska pasted over with newspapers and pictures.

However, there are bright folk characters in the story, drawn by the author with obvious sympathy. The image of the peasant woman Odnodvorka, for example, is not without attractiveness.

In the scene when Kuzma sees Odnodvorka at night, taking away the shields that she uses for fuel from the railway, this dexterous and arguing peasant woman is somewhat reminiscent of the brave and freedom-loving women of the people in Gorky's early stories.

With deep sympathy and sympathy, Bunin also painted the image of the widow Bottle, who comes to Kuzma to dictate letters to her son Misha, who has forgotten her. The writer achieves significant power and expressiveness in the depiction of the peasant Ivanushka.

This deep old man, who firmly decided not to succumb to death and retreats before it only when he finds out that a coffin has already been prepared for him, a seriously ill person, is a truly epic figure.

In the depiction of these characters, sympathy for them is clearly visible both by the author himself and by one of the main characters of the story, Kuzma Krasov.

But these sympathies are especially fully expressed in relation to the character, who runs through the whole story and is of paramount interest for understanding the positive ideals of the author.

This is a peasant woman nicknamed Young. She stands out from the mass of Durnovsky women primarily for her beauty, about which Bunin speaks more than once in the story. But the beauty of the Young appears under the author's pen as a trampled beauty.

The young one, we learn, is beaten “every day and nightly” by her husband Rodka, she is beaten by Tikhon Krasov, she is tied naked to a tree, she is finally given in marriage to the ugly Deniska. The image of the Young is an image-symbol.

Young in Bunin is the embodiment of desecrated beauty, kindness, hard work, she is a generalization of the bright and good beginnings of peasant life, a symbol of young Russia (this generalization is already evident in her very nickname - Young). Bunin's "Village" is also a warning story. It is no coincidence that it ends with the wedding of Deniska and Young. In the Bunin image, this wedding resembles a funeral.

The ending of the story is bleak: a blizzard rages on the street, and the wedding trio flies to no one knows where, “into the dark haze”. The image of a blizzard is also a symbol, meaning the end of that bright Russia, which Young personifies.

Thus, in a whole series of symbolic episodes and pictures, Bunin warns of what could happen to Russia if she "betrothed" to rebels like Denis Sery.

Later, Bunin wrote to his friend, the artist P. Nilus, that he predicted the tragedy that happened to Russia as a result of the February and October coups in the story "The Village".

The story "The Village" was followed by a whole series of Bunin's stories about the peasantry, continuing and developing thoughts about the "diversity" of the national character, depicting "the Russian soul, its peculiar interweaving."

With sympathy, the writer draws people who are kind and generous at heart, hardworking and caring. The carriers of the same anarchic, rebellious principles, people willful, cruel, lazy cause him invariable antipathy.

Sometimes the plots of Bunin's works are built on the collision of these two principles: good and evil. One of the most characteristic works in this respect is the story “Merry Yard”, where two characters are depicted in contrast: the humble, hardworking peasant woman Anisya and her mentally callous, unlucky son, the “empty talker” Yegor.

Long-suffering, kindness, on the one hand, and cruelty, anarchism, unpredictability, self-will, on the other - these are the two principles, the two categorical imperatives of the Russian national character, as Bunin understood it.

The most important in Bunin's work are positive folk characters. Along with the image of stupid humility (the stories "Lichard", "I keep silent" and others), characters appear in the works of 1911-1913, whose humility is of a different plan, Christian.

These people are meek, long-suffering and at the same time attractive with their kindness; warmth, beauty of the inner appearance. In a nondescript, humbled, at first glance, man, courage and moral stamina are revealed (“Cricket”).

The dense inertness is opposed by deep spirituality, intelligence, and outstanding creative talent (“Lirnik Rodion”, “Good Bloods”). Significant in this regard is the story "Zakhar Vorobyov" (1912), about which the author informed the writer N. D. Teleshov: "He will protect me."

His hero is a peasant hero, the owner of enormous, but unrevealed possibilities: a thirst for achievement, longing for the extraordinary, gigantic strength, spiritual nobility.

Bunin frankly admires his character: his beautiful, spiritual face, open look, article, strength, kindness. But this hero, a man of a noble soul, burning with a desire to do something good to people, never finds the use of his strength and dies absurdly and senselessly, having drunk a quarter of vodka on a dare.

True, Zakhar is unique among the “small people”. “There is another one like me,” he said at times, “but that one is far away, near Zadonsk.” But "in the old man, they say, there were many like him, but this breed is translated."

The image of Zakhar symbolizes the inexhaustible forces lurking in the people, but not yet truly set in motion. Noteworthy is the dispute about Russia, which is conducted by Zakhar and his random drinking companions.

In this dispute, Zakhar was struck by the words “our oak tree has grown quite large ...”, in which he sensed a wonderful hint at the possibilities of Russia.

One of Bunin's most remarkable stories in this regard is "Thin Grass" (1913). With penetrating humanity, the spiritual world of the farm laborer Averky is revealed here.

Seriously ill after 30 years of hard work, Averky gradually passes away, but perceives death as a person who has fulfilled his destiny in this world, having lived his life honestly and with dignity.

The writer shows in detail the parting of his character with life, his renunciation of everything earthly and vain and his ascent to the great and bright truth of Christ. Averky is dear to Bunin because, having lived a long life, he did not become a slave to money-grubbing and gain, he did not become embittered, he was not tempted by self-interest.

With his honesty, gentleness, kindness, Averky is closest to Bunin's idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe type of Russian common man who was especially common in Ancient Russia.

It is no coincidence that Bunin chose the words of Ivan Aksakov "Ancient Russia has not yet passed" as the epigraph to the collection "John Rydalets", which also included the story "Thin Grass". However, both this story and the entire collection are addressed not to the past, but to the present by their content.

1. Analysis of the story "Sukhodol"

In 1911, the writer creates one of his largest works of the pre-October period - the story "Sukhodol", called by Gorky a "requiem" for the noble class, a memorial service that Bunin "despite anger, in contempt for the powerless deceased, nevertheless served with great heart pity for them."

Like "Antonov apples", the story "Sukhodol" is written in the first person. In his spiritual appearance, the Bunin narrator from Sukhodol is still the same person, longing for the former greatness of the landowners' estates.

But unlike Antonov Apples, Bunin in Sukhodol not only regrets the dying noble nests, but also recreates the contrasts in Sukhodol, the lack of rights of the courtyards and the tyranny of the landowners.

In the center of the story is the history of the Khrushchev noble family, the history of its gradual degradation.

In Sukhodol, writes Bunin, terrible things were happening. The old master Pyotr Kirillich was killed by his illegitimate son Geraska, his daughter Antonina went crazy from unrequited love.

The stamp of degeneration also lies on the last representatives of the Khrushchev family. They are portrayed as people who have lost not only ties with the outside world, but also family ties.

Pictures of Sukhodolsk life are given in the story through the perception of the former serf Natalya. Poisoned by the philosophy of humility and humility, Natalya does not rise not only to a protest against the master's arbitrariness, but even to a simple condemnation of the actions of her masters. But her whole fate is an indictment against the owners of Sukhodol.

When she was still a child, her father was sent to the soldiers for offenses, and her mother died of a broken heart, fearing punishment because the turkeys she pastured were killed by hail. Left an orphan, Natalia becomes a toy in the hands of the masters.

As a girl, she fell in love with the young master Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life. But not only did he whip her with a rapnik when she “came under his feet once,” but he also exiled in disgrace to a remote village, accusing her of stealing a mirror.

In terms of its artistic features, Sukhodol, more than any other work by Bunin the prose writer of these years, is close to Bunin's poetry. The harsh and harsh manner of narration, characteristic of the "Village", is replaced in "Dry Valley" by the soft lyrics of memories.

To a large extent, the lyrical sound of the work is facilitated by the fact that the narration includes the voice of the author, who comments and supplements Natalia's stories with his observations.

1914-1916 is an extremely important stage in Bunin's creative evolution. This is the time for the finalization of his style and worldview.

His prose becomes capacious and refined in its artistic perfection, philosophical - in meaning and meaning. The man in Bunin's stories of these years, without losing his everyday ties with the world around him, is simultaneously included by the writer in the Cosmos.

This philosophical idea Bunin later clearly formulated in the book "The Liberation of Tolstoy": "A person must be aware of his personality not as something opposite to the world, but as a small part of the world, huge and eternally living."

This circumstance, according to Bunin, puts a person in a difficult situation: on the one hand, he is a part of infinite and eternal life, on the other hand, human happiness is fragile and illusory before incomprehensible cosmic forces.

This dialectical unity of two opposite aspects of world perception determines the main content of Bunin's creativity of this time, which tells both about the greatest happiness of living and about the eternal tragedy of being.

Bunin significantly expands the range of his work, referring to the image of countries and peoples far from Russia. These works were the result of the writer's numerous travels to the countries of the Middle East.

But it was not the tempting exoticism that attracted the writer. Depicting the nature and life of distant lands with great skill, Bunin is primarily interested in the problem of "man and the world." In the 1909 poem "Dog" he confessed:

I am a man: like God, I am doomed

To know the longing of all countries and all times.

These sentiments were clearly reflected in Bunin's masterpieces of the 1910s - the stories The Brothers (1914) and The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915), united by a common concept of life.

The idea of ​​these works was formulated by the author as an epigraph to "To the Lord from San Francisco": “Woe to you, Babylon, strong city” - these terrible words of the Apocalypse sounded relentlessly in my soul when I wrote “The Brothers” and conceived “The Gentleman from San Francisco”, a few months before the war, ”the writer admitted.

The acute sense of the catastrophic nature of the world, of cosmic evil, which possessed Bunin during these years, reaches its climax here. But at the same time, the writer's rejection of social evil deepens.

To the dialectical image of these two evils that dominate a person, Bunin subordinates the entire figurative system of works, which is characterized by a pronounced two-dimensionality.

The landscape in the stories is not only the background and the scene. It is at the same time a concrete embodiment of that cosmic life to which human destiny is fatally subordinated.

The symbols of cosmic life are the images of the forest, in which “everything was chasing each other, rejoicing in a short joy, destroying each other”, and especially the ocean - “bottomless depth”, “unsteady abyss”, “about which the Bible speaks so terribly”.

The writer simultaneously sees the source of disorder, catastrophicity, and fragility of life in social evil, which is personified in his stories in the images of an Englishman-colonizer and an American businessman.

The tragedy of the situation depicted in the story "The Brothers" is already emphasized by the epigraph to this work, taken from the Buddhist book "Sutta Nipata":

Look at the brothers beating each other up.

I want to talk about sadness.

It also determines the tone of the story, encrusted with intricate lace of the Oriental style. The story of a day in the life of a young Ceylon rickshaw who committed suicide because rich Europeans took his beloved away from him sounds like a sentence of cruelty and selfishness in the story "Brothers".

With hostility, the writer draws one of them, an Englishman, who is characterized by ruthlessness, cold cruelty. “In Africa,” he cynically admits, “I killed people, in India, robbed by England, and therefore, partly by me, I saw thousands dying of hunger, in Japan I bought girls for monthly wives, in China I beat defenseless ape-like old men with a stick on the heads , in Java and Ceylon, he drove a rickshaw to his death rattle ... ".

Bitter sarcasm can be heard in the title of the story, in which one "brother", who is at the top of the social ladder, half to death drives and pushes another, who huddles at its foot, to suicide.

But the life of the English colonialist, being deprived of a high inner goal, appears in the work as meaningless, and therefore also fatally doomed. And only at the end of his life does enlightenment come to him.

In a painfully agitated state, he denounces the spiritual emptiness of his civilized contemporaries, speaks of the pitiful impotence of the human personality in that world, “where everyone is either a murderer or a murdered one”: “We raise our Personality above the heavens, we want to concentrate the whole world in it, so that there they didn’t talk about the coming world brotherhood and equality, - and only in the ocean ... you feel how a person melts, dissolves in this blackness, sounds, smells, in this terrible All-One, only there we understand, in a weak way, what this our personality means ” .

In this monologue, Bunin undoubtedly put his perception of modern life, torn apart by tragic contradictions. It is in this sense that the words of the writer's wife V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina should be understood: "What he (Bunina. - A. Ch.) felt as an Englishman in The Brothers is autobiographical."

The coming death of the world, in which "for centuries the victor stands with a strong heel on the throat of the vanquished", in which the moral laws of human brotherhood are mercilessly violated, is symbolically foreshadowed in the finale of the story by an ancient oriental legend about a raven that greedily pounced on the carcass of a dead elephant and died, being carried together. with her far out to sea.

1. Analysis of the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco"

The writer's humanistic thought about the depravity and sinfulness of modern civilization is even more acutely expressed in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco".

The poetics of the title of the work is already noteworthy. The hero of the story is not a man, but a "master". But he's a gentleman from San Francisco. With the exact designation of the nationality of the character, Bunin expressed his attitude towards American businessmen, who were already synonymous with anti-humanism and lack of spirituality for him.

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is a parable about life and death. And at the same time, the story of someone who, even while living, was already spiritually dead.

The hero of the story is deliberately not endowed with a name by the author. There is nothing personal, spiritual in this man, who devoted his whole life to increasing his fortune and turned into a kind of golden idol by the age of fifty-eight: bald head".

Deprived of any human feelings whatsoever, the American businessman himself is alien to everything around him. Even the nature of Italy, where he goes to relax and enjoy "the love of young Neapolitan women - even if not entirely unselfishly", meets him unfriendly and cold.

Everything that surrounds him is deadly and disastrous; he brings death and decay to everything. In an effort to give a particular case a great social generalization, to show the power of gold that depersonalizes a person, the writer deprives his character of individual characteristics, turning him into a symbol of lack of spirituality, businesslikeness and practicality.

Confident in the right choice of life path, a gentleman from San Francisco, who had never thought about death, suddenly dies in an expensive Capri hotel.

This clearly demonstrates the collapse of his ideals and principles. The strength and power of the dollar, which the American worshiped all his life and which he turned into an end in itself, turned out to be illusory in the face of death.

The ship itself is also symbolic, on which the businessman went to have fun in Italy and which carries him, already dead, in a soda box, back to the New World.

A steamboat sailing in the midst of a boundless ocean is a micromodel of that world where everything is built on venality and falsehood (what is worth, for example, a beautiful young couple hired to portray lovers), where ordinary working people languish from hard work and humiliation and spend time in luxury and fun the powerful of this world: “... in mortal anguish, a siren choked by fog was moaning, the watchmen on their tower, the gloomy and sultry bowels of the underworld, were like the underwater womb of a steamer ... and here, in the bar , carelessly threw their legs on the arms of their chairs, sipped cognac and liqueurs, swam in waves of spicy smoke, everything in the dance hall shone and poured out light, warmth and joy, couples either whirled in waltzes, then bent into tango - and the music insistently, in some then sweetly shameless sadness prayed all about one thing, all about the same ... ".

In this capacious and meaningful period, the author's attitude to the life of those who inhabit this Noah's ark is perfectly conveyed.

The plastic clarity of the depicted, the variety of colors and visual impressions - this is what is constantly inherent in Bunin's artistic style, but in the named stories it acquires special expressiveness.

Particularly great in "The Lord from San Francisco" is the role of the detail, in which general patterns shine through through the private, concrete, everyday, and contain a great generalization.

Thus, the scene of the dressing up for dinner of a gentleman from San Francisco is very concrete and at the same time has the character of a symbolic foreshadowing.

The writer paints in detail how the hero of the story squeezes himself into a suit that binds the “strong senile body”, fastens the “tight collar that squeezes his throat too much”, painfully catches the cufflink, “strongly biting the flabby skin in the recess under the Adam's apple”.

In a few minutes, the master will die of suffocation. The costume in which the character is dressed is an ominous attribute of a false existence, like the ship "Atlantis", like the whole "civilized world", the imaginary values ​​​​of which the writer does not accept.

The story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" ends with the same picture with which it began: the giant "Atlantis" makes its return journey through the ocean of cosmic life. But this circular composition does not at all signify the writer's agreement with the idea of ​​the eternal and unchanging cycle of history.

With a whole system of image-symbols, Bunin claims just the opposite - the inevitable death of the world, mired in selfishness, venality and lack of spirituality. This is evidenced by the epigraph to the story, which draws a parallel between modern life and the sad outcome of ancient Babylon, and the name of the ship.

Giving the ship the symbolic name "Atlantis", the author oriented the reader to a direct comparison of the steamer - this world in miniature - with the ancient mainland, which disappeared without a trace in the abyss of waters. This picture is completed by the image of the Devil, who watches from the rocks of Gibraltar for the ship leaving into the night: Satan "rules the show" on the ship of human life.

The story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was written during the First World War. And he quite clearly characterizes the mood of the writer of this time.

The war forced Bunin to peer even more closely into the depths of human nature, into a thousand-year history marked by despotism, violence, and cruelty. On September 15, 1915, Bunin wrote to P. Nilus: “I don’t remember such stupidity and spiritual depression, in which I have been for a long time ...

War both torments, and torments, and disturbs. Yes, and many other things too.” Actually, Bunin has almost no works about the First World War, except for the stories “The Last Spring” and “The Last Autumn”, where this topic finds some coverage.

Bunin wrote not so much about the war as, in the words of Mayakovsky, "wrote with war", exposing in his pre-revolutionary work the tragedy and even the catastrophic nature of life.

1. Analysis of the story "Chang's Dreams"

Bunin's 1916 story is also characteristic in this regard. "Chang's Dreams". Dog Chang was chosen by the writer as the central character not at all out of a desire to evoke kind and tender feelings for animals, which was usually guided by realist writers of the 19th century.

Bunin from the first lines of his work translates the story into a plane of philosophical reflections on the secrets of life, on the meaning of earthly existence.

And although the author accurately indicates the place of action - Odessa, describes in detail the attic in which Chang lives with his owner - a drunken retired captain, Chang's memories and dreams enter the story on an equal footing with these pictures, giving the work a philosophical aspect.

The contrast between the pictures of Chang's past happy life with his master and their current miserable existence is a concrete expression of the dispute between two life truths, the existence of which we learn at the beginning of the story.

“There were once two truths in the world, constantly replacing each other,” writes Bunin, “the first is that life is inexpressibly beautiful, and the other is that life is conceivable only for madmen. Now the captain claims that there is, was, and forever and ever there will be only one truth, the last ... ". What is this truth?

The captain tells his Friend the artist about her: “My friend, I have seen the whole globe - life is like this everywhere! All this is a lie and nonsense, which is how people seem to live: they have neither God, nor conscience, nor a reasonable goal of existence, nor love, nor friendship, nor honesty, - there is not even a simple pity.

Life is a boring winter day in a dirty tavern, nothing more ... ". Chang essentially leans towards the captain's conclusions.

At the end of the story, the drunken captain dies, the orphaned Chang ends up with a new owner - the artist. But his thoughts are directed towards the last Master — God.

“In this world there should be only one truth, - the third, - the author writes, - and what it is - that last one knows about. The owner, to whom Chang should soon return. This is how the story ends.

He does not leave any hope for the possibility of reorganizing earthly life in accordance with the laws of the first, bright truth and hopes for a third, higher, unearthly truth.

The whole story is permeated with a sense of the tragedy of life. The sudden turning point in the life of the captain, which led him to his death, occurred due to the betrayal of his wife, whom he dearly loved.

But the wife, in fact, is not to blame, she is not even bad at all, on the contrary, she is beautiful, the whole point is that it is so predetermined by fate, and you can’t get away from it.

One of the most controversial issues of Bunin studies is the question of the positive aspirations of the writer of the pre-revolutionary years. What does Bunin oppose - and does he oppose - to the universal tragedy of being, the catastrophic nature of life?

Bunin's concept of life finds its expression in the formula of two truths from Chang's Dreams: "life is unspeakably beautiful" and at the same time "life is conceivable only for madmen."

This unity of opposites - a bright and fatally gloomy view of the world - coexist in many of Bunin's works of the 10s, defining a kind of "tragic major" of their ideological content.

Condemning the inhumanity of the unspiritual egoistic world, Bunin opposes to it the morality of ordinary people living a difficult, but morally healthy, working life. Such is the old rickshaw man from the story "Brothers", "driven by love not for himself, but for his family, he wanted happiness for his son that was not destined, was not given to him."

The gloomy coloring of the narrative in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" gives way to the enlightened when it comes to the ordinary people of Italy:

about the old boatman Lorenzo, “a carefree reveler and handsome man”, famous throughout Italy, about the bellhop of the Capri hotel Luigi, and especially about two Abruzzi highlanders, giving “humbly joyful praises to the Virgin Mary”: “they walked - and the whole country, joyful, beautiful , solar, stretched over them.

And in the character of a simple Russian person, Bunin persistently seeks a positive beginning in these years, without departing from the image of his "variegation". On the one hand, with the merciless sobriety of a realist, he continues to show the "denseness of village life."

And on the other hand, it depicts that healthy thing that breaks through the thickness of ignorance and darkness in the Russian peasant. In the story "Spring Evening" (1915), an ignorant and intoxicated peasant kills a beggar old man for money.

And this is an act of desperation of a person, when "even with hunger to die." Having committed a crime, he realizes the horror of what he has done and throws the amulet with money.

The poetic image of the young peasant girl Parasha, whose romantic love was rudely trampled on by the predatory and cruel tradesman Nikanor, is created by Bunin in the story "On the road"(1913).

The researchers are right, emphasizing the poetic, folklore basis of the image of Parasha, personifying the bright sides of the Russian folk character.

A large role in identifying the life-affirming beginnings of life belongs to nature in Bunin's stories. She is a moral catalyst for bright, optimistic traits of being.

In the story The Gentleman from San Francisco, nature is renewed and cleansed after the death of an American. When the ship with the body of a wealthy Yankee left Capri, "on the island, the author emphasizes, peace and tranquility reigned."

Finally, the pessimistic forecast for the future is overcome in the writer's stories with the apotheosis of love.

Bunin perceived the world in the indecomposable unity of its contrasts, in its dialectical complexity and inconsistency. Life is both happiness and tragedy.

For Bunin, love is the highest, mysterious and sublime manifestation of this life. But Bunin's love is a passion, and in this passion, which is the apex manifestation of life, a person burns out. In flour, the writer claims, there is bliss, and happiness is so piercing that it is akin to suffering.

1. Analysis of the story "Easy breathing"

Bunin's short story of 1916 is indicative in this regard. "Easy breath". This is a story full of high lyricism about how the flourishing life of a young heroine - schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya - was unexpectedly interrupted by a terrible and at first glance inexplicable catastrophe.

But in this surprise - the death of the heroine - there was a fatal pattern. In order to expose and reveal the philosophical basis of the tragedy, his understanding of love as the greatest happiness and at the same time the greatest tragedy, Bunin builds his work in a peculiar way.

The beginning of the story carries the news of the tragic denouement of the plot: "At the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth ...".

It "has been embedded ... a convex porcelain medallion, and in the medallion there is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes."

Then a smooth retrospective narrative begins, full of jubilant joy of life, which the author slows down, restrains with epic details: as a girl, Olya Meshcherskaya “did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown gymnasium dresses ... Then she began to flourish ... not by the day, but by the hour. ... No one danced at balls like Olya Meshcherskaya, no one ran as fast as she did, no one was looked after at balls as much as she was.

During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium ... ". And then one day, at a big break, when she was running like a whirlwind around the school hall from the first-graders enthusiastically chasing her, she was unexpectedly called to the head of the gymnasium. The boss reprimands her for the fact that she does not have a gymnasium, but a woman's hairstyle, that she wears expensive shoes and combs.

“You are no longer a girl ... but not a woman either,” the headmistress says irritably to Olya, “... you completely lose sight of the fact that you are still only a schoolgirl ...”. And here begins a sharp plot twist.

In response, Olya Meshcherskaya utters significant words: “Forgive me, madam, you are mistaken: I am a woman. And you know who is to blame? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother is Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer in the village.”

At this moment of supreme reader interest, the storyline ends abruptly. And without filling the pause with anything, the author strikes us with a new stunning surprise, outwardly in no way connected with the first - with the words that Olya was shot by a Cossack officer.

Everything that led to the murder, which should, it would seem, be the plot of the story, is set out in one paragraph, without details and without any emotional coloring - in the language of the court record: “The officer told the judicial investigator that Meshcherskaya lured him, was close to him , swore to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, seeing him off to Novocherkassk, she suddenly told him that she never thought to love him ... ".

The author does not give any psychological motivation for this story. Moreover, at the moment when the reader's attention rushes along this - the most important plot channel (Oli's connection with the officer and her murder), the author cuts it off and deprives the expected retrospective presentation.

The story about the earthly path of the heroine is over - and at this moment the bright melody of Olya bursts into the narrative - a girl full of happiness, waiting for love.

Cool lady Olya, an overripe maiden who goes every holiday to the grave of her student, recalls how one day she unwittingly overheard a conversation between Olya and her friend. “I’m in one of my father’s books,” says Olya, having read what beauty a woman should have.

Black, resin-boiling eyes, eyelashes as black as night, a gently playing blush, a thin figure, longer than an ordinary arm ... a small leg, sloping shoulders ... but most importantly, you know what? - Easy breath! But I have it, - you listen to me sigh, - is it true, is there?

So convulsively, with sharp breaks, the plot is presented, in which much remains unclear. For what purpose does Bunin deliberately not observe the temporal sequence of events, and most importantly, violates the causal relationship between them?

To emphasize the main philosophical idea: Olya Meshcherskaya did not die because life pushed her first with “an old womanizer, and then with a rude officer. Therefore, the plot development of these two love meetings was not given, because the reasons could receive a very specific, everyday explanation and lead the reader away from the main thing.

The tragedy of the fate of Olya Meshcherskaya is in herself, in her charm, in her organic fusion with life, in complete subordination to her elemental impulses - blissful and catastrophic at the same time.

Olya was striving towards life with such violent passion that any collision with her was bound to lead to disaster. An overstrained expectation of the ultimate fullness of life, love as a whirlwind, as self-giving, as "easy breathing" led to a catastrophe.

Olya burned out like a moth frantically rushing towards the sizzling fire of love. Not everyone has that feeling. Only for those who have a light breath - a frantic expectation of life, happiness.

“Now this light breath,” Bunin concludes his story, “is scattered again in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.”

1. Analysis of the book "Cursed Days"

Bunin did not accept the February, and then the October Revolution. On May 21, 1918, he and his wife left Moscow for the south and for almost two years lived first in Kyiv and then in Odessa.

Both of these cities were the scene of a fierce civil war and changed hands more than once. In Odessa, during the stormy and terrible months of 1919, Bunin wrote his diary - a kind of book, which he called "Cursed Days".

Bunin saw and repelled the civil war from only one side - from the side of the Red Terror. But we know enough about white terror. Unfortunately, the Red Terror was as real as the White Terror.

Under these conditions, the slogans of freedom, brotherhood, equality were perceived by Bunin as a "mocking sign", because they turned out to be stained with the blood of many hundreds and thousands of often innocent people.

Here are some of Bunin's notes: “D. arrived - fled from Simferopol. There, he says, is indescribable horror, soldiers and workers walk up to their knees in blood.

Some old colonel was roasted alive in a locomotive firebox ... they rob, rape, foul in churches, cut belts from officer backs, marry priests with mares ... In Kyiv ... several professors were killed, among them the famous diagnostician Yanovsky. “Yesterday there was an “emergency” meeting of the executive committee.

Feldman proposed "to use bourgeois instead of horses to transport heavy loads." And so on. Bunin's diary is replete with entries of this kind. Much here, unfortunately, is not fiction.

Evidence of this is not just Bunin's diary, but also Korolenko's letters to Lunacharsky and Gorky's "Untimely Thoughts", Sholokhov's "Quiet Flows the Don", I. Shmelev's epic "The Sun of the Dead" and many other works and documents of the time.

In his book, Bunin characterizes the revolution as the unleashing of the basest and wildest instincts, as a bloody prologue to the inexhaustible disasters that await the intelligentsia, the people of Russia, and the country as a whole.

“Our children, grandchildren,” Bunin writes, “will not even be able to imagine that Russia ... truly fabulously rich and prospering with fabulous speed, in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understood - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness ... ".

Similar feelings, thoughts and moods pervade journalistic and literary-critical articles, notes and notebooks of the writer, only recently published for the first time in our country (collection "Great Datura", M., 1997).

1. Bunin's emigration

In Odessa, Bunin faced the inevitable question: what to do? Run away from Russia or, in spite of everything, stay. The question is painful, and these torments of choice are also reflected in the pages of his diary.

The impending formidable events lead Bunin at the end of 1919 to an irrevocable decision to go abroad. January 25, 1920 on the Greek steamer "Patras" he leaves Russia forever.

Bunin left his homeland not as an emigrant, but as a refugee. Because he took Russia, her image with him. In Cursed Days, he writes: “If I didn’t love this “icon”, this Russia, didn’t see it, why would I go so crazy all these years, because of which I suffered so continuously, so fiercely? "ten.

Living in Paris and in the seaside town of Grasse, Bunin until the end of his days felt a sharp, aching pain in Russia. His first poems, created after an almost two-year break, are permeated with homesickness.

His poem of 1922 “The bird has a nest” is filled with special bitterness of the loss of the homeland:

The bird has a nest, the beast has a hole.

How bitter was the young heart,

When I left my father's yard,

Say sorry to your home!

The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.

How the heart beats, sadly and loudly,

When I enter, being baptized, into a strange, rented house

With his old knapsack!

Acute nostalgic pain for the homeland makes Bunin create works that are addressed to old Russia.

The theme of pre-revolutionary Russia becomes the main content of his work for three whole decades, until his death.

In this regard, Bunin shared the fate of many Russian emigrant writers: Kuprin, Chirikov, Shmelev, B. Zaitsev, Gusev-Orenburgsky, Grebenshchikov and others, who devoted all their work to depicting old Russia, often idealized, cleansed of everything contradictory.

Bunin refers to his homeland, to memories of her already in one of the first stories created abroad - "Mowers".

Narrating the beauty of a Russian folk song that Ryazan mowers sing while working in a young birch forest, the writer reveals the origins of that wonderful spiritual and poetic power contained in this song: “The charm was that we were all children of our homeland and all were together and we all felt good, calm and loving, without a clear understanding of our feelings, because they do not need to be understood when they are.

1. Foreign prose of Bunin

The foreign prose of I. Bunin develops primarily as a lyrical one, that is, a prose of clear and precise expressions of the author's feelings, which was largely determined by the writer's acute longing for his abandoned homeland.

These works, mostly stories, are characterized by a weakened plot, the ability of their author to subtly and expressively convey feelings and moods, a deep penetration into the inner world of the characters, a combination of lyricism and musicality, and linguistic refinement.

In exile, Bunin continued the artistic development of one of the main themes of his work - the theme of love. The story "Mitina's Love" is dedicated to her,

“The Case of Cornet Yelagin”, the stories “Sunstroke”, “Ida”, “Mordovian Sundress” and especially a cycle of small short stories under the general name “Dark Alleys”.

In covering this eternal theme for art, Bunin is deeply original. Among the classics of the 19th century - I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy and others - love is usually given in an ideal aspect, in its spiritual, moral, even intellectual essence (for the heroines of Turgenev's novels, love is not only a school of feeling, but also a school of thought ). As for the physiological side of love, the classics practically did not touch it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in a number of works of Russian literature, another extreme was indicated: an unchaste depiction of love relationships, savoring naturalistic details. The originality of Bunin is that his spiritual and physical are merged in an inseparable unity.

Love is portrayed by the writer as a fatal force, which is akin to a primordial natural element, which, having bestowed a person with dazzling happiness, then inflicts a cruel, often fatal blow on him. But still, the main thing in Bunin's concept of love is not the pathos of tragedy, but the apotheosis of human feeling.

Moments of love are the pinnacle of the life of Bunin's heroes, when they learn the highest value of being, the harmony of body and spirit, the fullness of earthly happiness.

1. Analysis of the story "Sunstroke"

The story is devoted to the image of love as a passion, as a spontaneous manifestation of cosmic forces. "Sunstroke"(1925). A young officer, having met a young married woman on a Volga steamer, invites her to get off at the pier of the town they are passing by.

Young people stay at a hotel, and this is where their intimacy takes place. In the morning, the woman leaves without even giving her name. “I give you my word of honor,” she says, saying goodbye, “that I am not at all what you might think of me.

There has never been anything even like what happened to me, and there never will be again. It’s like an eclipse hit me ... Or, rather, we both got something like a sunstroke. “Indeed, it’s like some kind of sunstroke,” the lieutenant reflects, left alone, stunned by the happiness of the past night.

A fleeting meeting of two simple, unremarkable people (“And what is special about her?” The lieutenant asks himself) gives rise to both a feeling of such great happiness that they are forced to admit: “Neither one nor the other has ever experienced anything like this in all his life. ".

It is not so important how these people lived and how they will live after their fleeting meeting, it is important that a huge all-consuming feeling suddenly entered their lives - this means that this life took place, because they learned something that not everyone is given to know.

1. Analysis of the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys"

The collection of stories by Bunin is devoted to the philosophical and psychological understanding of the theme of love. "Dark alleys"(1937-1945). “I think that this is the best and most original of what I wrote in my life,” the author said about these works.

Each story in the collection is completely independent, with its own characters, plots, range of problems. But there is an internal connection between them, which allows us to talk about the problematic and thematic unity of the cycle.

This unity is defined by Bunin's concept of love as a "sunstroke" that leaves an imprint on a person's entire future life.

The heroes of "Dark Alleys" without fear and looking back rush into a hurricane of passion. In this brief moment, they are given to comprehend life in its entirety, after which others burn out without a trace (“Galya Ganskaya”, “Steamboat “Saratov”, “Heinrich”), others eke out an ordinary existence, remembering as the most precious thing in life that visited them once a great love ("Rusya", "Cold Autumn").

Love in the understanding of Bunin requires a person to exert maximum effort of all his spiritual and physical forces. Therefore, it cannot be long: often in this love, as already mentioned, one of the heroes dies.

Here is the story of Heinrich. The writer Glebov met a wonderful in mind and beauty, subtle and charming woman translator Heinrich, but soon after they experienced the greatest happiness of mutual love, she was unexpectedly and absurdly killed out of jealousy by another writer - an Austrian.

The hero of another story - "Natalie" - fell in love with a charming girl, and when, after a series of ups and downs, she became his actual wife, and he seemed to have achieved the desired happiness, she was overtaken by a sudden death from childbirth.

In the story "In Paris" there are two. lonely Russians - a woman who worked in an émigré restaurant and a former colonel - having met by chance, found happiness in each other, but soon after their rapprochement, the colonel suddenly dies in a subway car.

And yet, despite the tragic outcome, love is revealed in them as the greatest happiness of life, incomparable with any other earthly joys. The epigraph to such works can be taken from the words of Natalie from the story of the same name: “Is there an unhappy love, doesn’t the most mournful music give happiness?”

Many stories of the cycle (“Muse”, “Rus”, “Late Hour”, “Wolves”, “Cold Autumn”, etc.) are characterized by such a technique as recollection, the appeal of their heroes to the past. And the most significant in their former life, most often at the time of youth, they consider the time when they loved, brightly, ardently and without a trace.

The old retired military man from the story “Dark Alleys”, who still retains traces of his former beauty, meets by chance with the owner of the inn, recognizes in her the one whom thirty years ago, when she was an eighteen-year-old girl, he loved passionately.

Looking back at his past, he comes to the conclusion that the moments of intimacy with her were "the best ... truly magical minutes", incomparable with all his later life.

In the story "Cold Autumn", a woman who tells about her life lost her beloved person at the beginning of the First World War. Remembering many years later the last meeting with him, she comes to the conclusion: "And this is all that was in my life - the rest is an unnecessary dream."

With the greatest interest and skill, Bunin depicts first love, the birth of love passion. This is especially true for young heroines. In similar situations, he reveals completely different, unique female characters.

Such are Muse, Rusya, Natalie, Galya Ganskaya, Styopa, Tanya and other heroines from the stories of the same name. The thirty-eight short stories in this collection present us with a magnificent variety of unforgettable female types.

Next to this inflorescence, male characters are less developed, sometimes only outlined and, as a rule, static. They are characterized more reflectively, in connection with the physical and mental appearance of the woman they love.

Even when only “he” acts in the story, for example, the officer in love from the story “Steamboat Saratov”, all the same, “she” remains in the reader’s memory - “long, wavy”, and her “bare knee in the section hood".

In the stories of the Dark Alleys cycle, Bunin writes a little about Russia itself. The main place in them is occupied by the theme of love - "sunstroke", passion, which gives a person a feeling of supreme bliss, but incinerates him, which is associated with Bunin's idea of ​​eros as a powerful elemental force and the main form of manifestation of cosmic life.

An exception in this regard is the short story "Clean Monday", where Bunin's deep thoughts about Russia, its past and possible ways of development shine through through an external love plot.

Often Bunin's story contains, as it were, two levels - one is plot, the upper one, the other is deep, subtext. They can be compared with icebergs: with their visible and main, underwater, parts.

We see this in Easy Breath and, to some extent, in Brothers, The Gentleman from San Francisco, Chang's Dream. The story “Clean Monday”, created by Bunin on May 12, 1944, is the same.

The writer himself considered this work to be the best of all that he had written. “I thank God,” he said, “that he gave me the opportunity to write Clean Monday.”

1. Analysis of the story "Clean Monday"

The external event outline of the story is not very complex and fits perfectly into the theme of the "Dark Alleys" cycle. The action takes place in 1913.

Young people, he and she (Bunin does not mention their names anywhere), met once at a lecture in a literary and artistic circle and fell in love with each other.

He is wide open in his feeling, she holds back her attraction to him. Their intimacy still happens, but after spending only one night together, the lovers part forever, because the heroine on Pure Monday, that is, on the first day of the pre-Easter Lent in 1913, makes the final decision to go to the monastery, parting with her past.

However, with the help of associations, significant details and subtext, the writer enters his thoughts and forecasts about Russia into this plot.

Bunin considers Russia as a country with a special path of development and a peculiar mentality, where European features are intertwined with features of the East and Asia.

This idea runs like a red thread through the entire work, which is based on a historical concept that reveals the most significant aspects of Russian history and national character for the writer.

With the help of everyday and psychological details that abound in the story, Bunin emphasizes the complexity of the way of Russian life, where Western and Eastern features are intertwined.

In the heroine’s apartment there is a “wide Turkish sofa”, next to it is an “expensive piano”, and above the sofa, the author emphasizes, “for some reason, a portrait of barefoot Tolstoy hung”.

A Turkish sofa and an expensive piano are the East and the West (symbols of the Eastern and Western way of life), and the barefoot Tolstoy is Russia, Russia in its unusual, original, out-of-bounds appearance.

Having arrived in the evening on Forgiveness Sunday at Yegorov’s tavern, which was famous for its pancakes and actually existed in Moscow at the beginning of the century, the girl says, pointing to the icon of the Mother of God with three hands hanging in the corner: “Good! Below are wild men, and here are pancakes with champagne and the Three-Handed Mother of God. Three hands! After all, this is India!”

The same duality is emphasized here by Bunin - "wild men", on the one hand (Asian), and on the other - "pancakes with champagne" - a combination of national and European. And above all this - Russia, symbolized in the image of the Mother of God, but again unusual: the Christian Mother of God with three arms resembles the Buddhist Shiva (again, a peculiar combination of Russia, the West and the East).

Of the characters in the story, the heroine most significantly embodies the combination of Western and Eastern features. Her father, “an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver,” writes Bunin.

At home, the heroine wears arkhaluk - oriental clothes, a kind of short caftan trimmed with sable (Siberia). “The legacy of my Astrakhan grandmother,” she explains the origin of these clothes.

So, the father is a Tver merchant from central Russia, a grandmother from Astrakhan, where the Tatars originally lived. Russian and Tatar blood merged in this girl.

Looking at her lips, at “the dark fluff above them,” at her figure, at the pomegranate velvet of her dress, smelling some spicy smell of her hair, the hero of the story thinks: “Moscow, Persia, Turkey. She had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty, ”the hero concludes.

When they once arrived at the Moscow Art Theater skit, the famous actor Kachalov approached her with a glass of wine and said: “Tsar Maiden, Queen of Shamakhan, your health!” In the mouth of Kachalov, Bunin put his point of view on the appearance and character of the heroine: she is both a “tsar-maiden” (as in Russian fairy tales), and at the same time a “Shamakhani queen” (like the eastern heroine of Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”) . What is the spiritual world of this “Shamakhi Queen” filled with?

In the evenings she reads Schnitzler, Hoffmann-stahl, Przybyszewski, plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, that is, she is closely related to Western European culture. At the same time, everything primordially Russian, primarily Old Russian, attracts her.

The hero of the story, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted, never ceases to be surprised that his beloved visits cemeteries and Kremlin cathedrals, is well versed in Orthodox and schismatic Christian rituals, loves and is ready to endlessly quote ancient Russian chronicles, immediately commenting on them.

Some kind of internal intense work is constantly being done in the soul of a girl and surprises, sometimes discourages her lover. “She was mysterious, incomprehensible to me,” the hero of the story remarks more than once.

When asked by her lover how she knows so much about Ancient Russia, the heroine replies: “You don’t know me.” The result of all this work of the soul was the departure of the heroine to the monastery.

In the image of the heroine, in her spiritual quest, the search for the answer of Bunin himself to the question of the ways of salvation and development of Russia is concentrated. Turning in 1944 to the creation of a work where the action takes place in 1913 - the initial year for Russia, Bunin offers his own way to save the country.

Having found itself between the West and the East, at the point of intersection of somewhat opposing historical trends and cultural structures, Russia has retained the specific features of its national life, embodied in the annals and in Orthodoxy.

This third side of the spiritual appearance turns out to be dominant in the behavior and inner world of his heroine. Combining Western and Eastern features in her appearance, she chooses serving God as her life outcome, that is, humility, moral purity, conscientiousness, deep love for Ancient Russia.

It is precisely in this way that Russia could go, in which, as in the heroine of the story, three forces also united: Asiatic spontaneity and passion; European culture and restraint and primordially national humility, conscientiousness, patriarchy in the best sense of the word and, of course, the Orthodox worldview.

Russia, unfortunately, did not follow Bunin, mainly the first way, which led to a revolution in which the writer saw the embodiment of chaos, explosion, and general destruction.

By the act of his heroine (leaving for a monastery), the writer offered a different and quite real way out of the current situation - the path of spiritual humility and enlightenment, curbing the elements, evolutionary development, and strengthening religious and moral self-awareness.

It was on this path that he saw the salvation of Russia, the assertion by her of her place among other states and peoples. According to Bunin, this is a truly original, unaffected by foreign influences, and therefore a promising, saving way that would strengthen the national specifics and mentality of Russia and its people.

So peculiarly, in Bunin's subtle way, the writer told us in his work not only about love, but, most importantly, about his national-historical views and forecasts.

1. Analysis of the novel "The Life of Arseniev"

The most significant work of Bunin, created in a foreign land, was the novel "The life of Arseniev", on which he worked for over 11 years, from 1927 to 1938.

The novel "The Life of Arseniev" is autobiographical. It reproduces many facts of childhood and youth of Bunin himself. At the same time, this is a book about the childhood and youth of a native of a landowner's family in general. In this sense, "The Life of Arseniev" is adjacent to such autobiographical works of Russian literature as "Childhood. Adolescence. Youth". L. N. Tolstoy and “Childhood of Bagrov-grandson” by S. T. Aksakov.

Bunin was destined to create the last autobiographical book in the history of Russian literature by a hereditary nobleman writer.

What topics concern Bunin in this work? Love, death, power over the soul of a person of memories of childhood and youth, native nature, duty and vocation of the writer, his attitude to the people and homeland, the attitude of a person to religion - this is the main circle of topics that are covered by Bunin in "The Life of Arseniev".

The book tells about twenty-four years of the life of the autobiographical hero, a young man Alexei Arseniev: from birth to a break with his first deep love - Lika, the prototype of which was Bunin's first love, Varvara Pashenko.

However, in essence, the time frame of the work is much wider: they are pushed apart by excursions into the prehistory of the Arseniev family and individual attempts by the author to stretch the thread from the distant past to the present.

One of the features of the book is its monologue and sparsely populated characters, in contrast to the autobiographical books of L. Tolstoy, Shmelev, Gorky and others, where we see a whole gallery of various characters.

In Bunin's book, the hero narrates mainly about himself: his feelings, sensations, impressions. This is the confession of a man who lived an interesting life in his own way.

Another characteristic feature of the novel is the presence in it of stable images passing through the entire work - leitmotifs. They connect the heterogeneous pictures of life with a single philosophical concept - reflections not so much of the hero as of the author himself about the happiness and at the same time the tragedy of life, its short duration and transience.

What are these motives? One of them is the motif of death that runs through the whole work. For example, Arseniev's perception of the image of his mother in early childhood is combined with the subsequent memory of her death.

The second book of the novel also ends with the theme of death - the sudden death and funeral of Arsenyev's relative Pisarev. The fifth, most extensive part of the novel, which was originally published as a separate work called "Lika", tells the story of Arseniev's love for a woman who played a significant role in his life. The chapter ends with the death of Lika.

The theme of death is connected in the novel, as in all of Bunin's later works, with the theme of love. This is the second theme of the book. These two motifs are connected at the end of the novel by the announcement of Lika's death shortly after she left Arsenyev, who was exhausted from the pangs of love and jealousy.

It is important to note that death in Bunin's work does not suppress or subjugate love. On the contrary, it is love as the highest feeling that triumphs in the author's mind. In his novel, Bunin again and again acts as a singer of healthy, fresh youthful love, leaving a grateful memory in a person’s soul for life.

The love interests of Alexei Arseniev go through three stages in the novel, as it were, corresponding in general to the stages of formation and formation of a youthful character.

His first love with the German girl Ankhen is just a hint of a feeling, the initial manifestation of a thirst for love. Alexei's brief, suddenly interrupted carnal relationship with Tonka, his brother's maid, is devoid of a spiritual beginning and is perceived by him as a necessary phenomenon, "when you are already 17 years old." And, finally, love for Lika is that all-consuming feeling in which both spiritual and sensual principles inseparably merge.

The love of Arseniev and Lika is shown in the novel comprehensively, in a complex unity and at the same time discord. Lika and Aleksey love each other, but the hero increasingly feels that they are very different people spiritually. Arseniev often looks at his beloved, like a master at a slave.

Union with a woman appears to him as an act in which all rights are defined for him, but almost no duties. Love, he believes, does not tolerate rest, habit, it needs constant renewal, involving a sensual attraction to other women.

In turn, Lika is far from the world in which Arseniev lives. She does not share his love for nature, sadness for the outgoing old noble estate life, is deaf to poetry, etc.

The spiritual incompatibility of the characters leads to the fact that they begin to get tired of each other. It all ends with the break of lovers.

However, Lika's death sharpens the hero's perception of failed love and is perceived by him as an irreparable loss. The final lines of the work are very indicative, telling about what Arseniev experienced when he saw Lika in a dream, many years after breaking up with her: “I saw her vaguely, but with such power of love, joy, with such bodily and spiritual intimacy I have never experienced it for anyone."

In the poetic affirmation of love as a feeling, over which even death has no power, is one of the most remarkable features of the novel.

Beautiful in the work and psychologized pictures of nature. They combine the brightness and richness of colors with the feelings and thoughts of the hero and the author penetrating them.

The landscape is philosophical: it deepens and reveals the author's concept of life, the cosmic principles of being and the spiritual essence of man, for whom nature is an integral part of existence. It enriches and develops a person, heals his spiritual wounds.

The theme of culture and art, perceived by the consciousness of the young Arseniev, is also of significant importance in the novel. The hero enthusiastically tells about the library of one of the neighbors-landlords, in which there were many "wonderful volumes in thick bindings of dark golden leather": works by Sumarokov, Anna Bunina, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Venevitinov, Yazykov, Baratynsky.

With admiration and reverence, the hero recalls the first works of Pushkin and Gogol he read in childhood.

The writer draws attention in his work to the role of religion in strengthening the spiritual principles of the human personality. Far from calling for religious asceticism, Bunin nevertheless points to the desire for religious and moral self-improvement that heals the human soul.

There are many scenes and episodes in the novel related to religious holidays, and all of them are imbued with poetry, written out carefully and spiritually. Bunin writes about the "storm of delight" that invariably arose in Arseniev's soul at every visit to church, about "an explosion of our highest love for both God and neighbor."

The theme of the people also appears on the pages of the work. But as before, Bunin poeticizes humble peasants, kind hearts and souls. But as soon as Arseniev starts talking about people who are protesting, especially those who sympathize with the revolution, tenderness is replaced by irritation.

Here the political views of the writer himself, who never took the path of revolutionary struggle and especially violence against the individual, were affected.

In a word, the entire book "The Life of Arseniev" is a kind of chronicle of the inner life of the hero, starting from infancy and ending with the final formation of character.

The main thing that determines the originality of the novel, its genre, artistic structure is the desire to show how, in contact with diverse life phenomena - natural, everyday, cultural, socio-historical - the emotional and intellectual personality traits are revealed, developed and enriched.

This is a kind of thought and conversation about life, which contains many facts, phenomena and spiritual movements. In the novel "The Life of Arseniev" through the thoughts, feelings, moods of the protagonist, that poetic feeling of the homeland, which has always been inherent in the best works of Bunin, sounds.

1. Bunin's life in France

How does Bunin's personal life develop during the years of his stay in France?

Having settled in Paris since 1923, Bunin spends most of his time, summer and autumn, with his wife and a narrow circle of friends in the Alpes-Maritimes, in the town of Grasse, having bought the dilapidated villa Jeannette there.

In 1933, an unexpected event invades the meager existence of the Bunins - he is awarded the Nobel Prize - the first of Russian writers.

This somewhat strengthened Bunin's financial position, and also attracted wide attention to him not only from emigrants, but also from the French public. But this did not last long. A significant part of the prize was distributed to compatriot emigrants in distress, and the interest of French criticism in the Nobel laureate was short-lived.

Homesickness did not let Bunin go. On May 8, 1941, he wrote to Moscow to his old friend, writer N. D. Teleshov: “I am gray, dry, but still poisonous. I really want to go home." He also writes about this to A. N. Tolstoy.

Alexei Tolstoy made an attempt to help Bunin in his return to his homeland: he sent a detailed letter to Stalin. Having given a detailed description of Bunin's talent, Tolstoy asked Stalin about the possibility of returning the writer to his homeland.

The letter was handed over to the Kremlin expedition on June 18, 1941, and four days later the war began, pushing far aside everything that had nothing to do with it.

1. Bunin and the Great Patriotic War

During the Great Patriotic War, Bunin took a patriotic position without hesitation. According to radio reports, he eagerly followed the course of the great battle that unfolded in the vastness of Russia. His diaries of these years are full of messages from Russia, because of which Bunin turns from despair to hope.

The writer does not hide his hatred of fascism. “Brutal people continue their devilish work - killing and destruction of everything, everything! And it began at the will of one person - the destruction of the entire globe - or rather, the one who embodied the will of his people, who should not be forgiven until the 77th generation, ”he writes in his diary on March 4, 1942. "Only a crazy cretin can think that he will reign over Russia," Bunin is convinced.

In the autumn of 1942, he met with Soviet prisoners of war, whom the Nazis used for labor in France. In the future, they repeatedly visited the Bunins, secretly listening to Soviet military radio reports together with the owners.

In one of the letters, Bunin remarks about his new acquaintances: “Some ... were so charming that we kissed them every day, as with relatives ... They danced a lot, sang - “Moscow, beloved, invincible.”

These meetings sharpened Bunin's long-standing dream of returning home. “I often think about returning home. Will I live? - he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1943.

In November 1942, the Nazis occupied France. Taking advantage of Bunin's difficult financial situation, pro-fascist newspapers vied with each other to offer him cooperation, promising mountains of gold. But all their attempts were in vain. Bunin went to the point of fainting from hunger, but did not want to make any compromises.

The victorious conclusion of the Patriotic War by the Soviet Union was greeted by him with great joy. Bunin carefully looked at Soviet literature.

Known for his high evaluation of Tvardovsky's poem "Vasily Terkin", the stories of K. Paustovsky. By this time, his meetings in Paris with the journalist Y. Zhukov, the writer K. Simonov belong. He visits the USSR Ambassador to France Bogomolov. He was issued a passport of a citizen of the USSR.

1. Bunin's loneliness in exile

These steps caused a sharply negative attitude towards Bunin in anti-Soviet emigre circles. On the other hand, the return of the writer to the Soviet Union was also impossible, especially after the repressive party resolution in the field of literature in 1946 and Zhdanov's report.

Lonely, sick, half-destitute Bunin found himself between two fires: many emigrants turned away from him, while the Soviet side, irritated and disappointed that Bunin did not beg to be sent to his homeland, kept a deep silence.

This bitterness of resentment and loneliness was intensified by thoughts of the inexorable approach of death. The motifs of parting with life are heard in the poem "Two Wreaths" and in Bunin's last prose works, philosophical meditations "Mistral", "In the Alps", "Legend" with their characteristic details and images: a coffin, grave crosses, a dead face, similar to mask, etc.

In some of these works, the writer, as it were, sums up his own earthly labors and days. In the short story "Bernard" (1952), he tells the story of a simple French sailor who worked tirelessly and passed away with a sense of honorably fulfilled duty.

His last words were: "I think I was a good sailor." What did he mean by these words? The joy of knowing that he, while living on earth, benefited his neighbor, being a good sailor? - asks the author.

And he answers: “No: the fact that God gives each of us this or that talent along with life and imposes on us the sacred duty not to bury it in the ground. Why, why? We don't know. But we must know that everything in this world, which is incomprehensible to us, must certainly have some meaning, some high intention of God, aimed at ensuring that everything in this world "be good" and that the diligent fulfillment of this God's intention is the whole our merit before Him, and therefore joy, pride.

And Bernard knew and felt it. All his life he diligently, dignifiedly, faithfully fulfilled the modest duty assigned to him by God, served Him not out of fear, but out of conscience. And how could he not say what he said at his last minute?

“It seems to me,” Bunin concludes his story, “that I, as an artist, have earned the right to say about myself, in my last days, something similar to what Bernard said when he was dying.”

1. Bunin's death

On November 8, 1953, at the age of 83, Bunin dies. An outstanding artist of the word, a wonderful master of prose and poetry, has died. “Bunin is the last of the classics of Russian literature, whose experience we have no right to forget,” wrote A. Tvardovsky.

Bunin's work is not only filigree craftsmanship, the amazing power of the plastic image. This is love for the native land, for Russian culture, for the Russian language. In 1914, Bunin created a wonderful poem in which he emphasized the enduring significance of the Word in the life of every person and humanity as a whole:

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