Coursework on Russian literature:

“Themes of love and homeland in I. A. Bunin’s cycle “Dark Alleys.” Originality of genre and composition"

Introduction

Life and work of I. A. Bunin

Poetry and tragedy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin

Philosophy of love in the cycle “Dark Alleys”

1Story “Dark Alleys”

2"Raven"

3"The Romance of the Hunchback"

The theme of Russia in the works of I. A. Bunin

Conclusion

Introduction

Bunin love creativity tragedy

In recent years, I. A. Bunin’s books have been repeatedly published and reprinted in huge numbers. The growing interest in his poetry and prose is due not only to the restoration of justice (Bunin was practically not published in Russia for 35 years, from 1921 to 1956) and not only to the fact that he was the first Nobel laureate, but also to the fact that his books have a spiritual content , consonant with our modern times. Literary scholars have far from exhausted the Bunin theme, as evidenced by numerous publications published in recent decades, which reveal various aspects of the artist’s life and work.

Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual in this theme.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the theme of love and homeland in the works of I. A. Bunin using the example of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.

The task is to trace the evolution of the theme of love and homeland in Bunin’s work.

In our Russian literature, before Bunin, there was, perhaps, no writer in whose work the motives of love, passion, and feelings would play such a significant role. Busy with solving social, moral, religious and philosophical problems, Russian literature seemed to be ashamed for a long time to pay exclusive attention to love, or even (as was the case with the late L. Tolstoy) to reject it altogether as an unworthy “temptation.”

1.Life and work of I. A. Bunin

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (October 10 (22), 1870, Voronezh - November 8, 1953, Paris) - Russian writer; prose writer, poet, translator.

The childhood of the future writer took place in the conditions of the impoverished life of the nobility (the Butyrki farm of the Yelets district of the Oryol province). He learned to read early, had imagination since childhood and was very impressionable. Having entered the gymnasium in Yelets in 1881, he studied there for only five years, since the family had no funds. A nobleman by birth, Ivan Bunin did not even receive a high school education, and this could not but affect his future fate.

In 1889, an independent life began - with a change of professions, with work in both provincial and metropolitan periodicals. While collaborating with the editors of the newspaper "Orlovsky Vestnik", the young writer met the newspaper's proofreader, Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, who married him in 1891. The young couple, who lived unmarried (Pashchenko's parents were against the marriage), subsequently moved to Poltava (1892) and began to serve as statisticians in the provincial government. In 1891, Bunin's first collection of poems, still very imitative, was published.

The year is a turning point in the fate of the writer. After Pashchenko got along with Bunin’s friend A.I. Bibikov, the writer left his service and moved to Moscow, where his literary acquaintances took place (with L.N. Tolstoy, whose personality and philosophy had a strong influence on Bunin, with A.P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, N.D. Teleshov, whose “environments” the young writer became a member of). Bunin was friends with many famous artists.

In 1900, Bunin's story "Antonov Apples" appeared, which was later included in all anthologies of Russian prose. During this period, wide literary fame came: for the collection of poems "Falling Leaves" (1901), as well as for the translation of the poem by the American romantic poet G. Longfellow "The Song of Hiawatha" (1896), Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences (later, in 1909 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences). [Sokolov 1999: 279]

Bunin's family life with Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (1896-1900) also turned out unsuccessfully; their son Kolya died in 1905. In 1906, Bunin met Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva (1881-1961), who became the writer’s companion throughout his subsequent life. Muromtseva, possessing extraordinary literary abilities, left wonderful literary memories of her husband (“The Life of Bunin”, “Conversations with Memory”). In 1907, the Bunins went on a trip to the countries of the East - Syria, Egypt, Palestine.

If in his earlier works - the stories in the collection "To the End of the World" (1897), as well as in the stories "Antonov Apples" (1900), "Epitaph" (1900), Bunin turns to the theme of small-scale impoverishment, nostalgically tells about the life of impoverished noble estates , then in the works written after the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the main theme becomes the drama of Russian historical fate (the stories “Village”, 1910, “Sukhodol”, 1912). Both stories were a huge success among readers. In 1910, the Bunins traveled first to Europe, and then to Egypt and Ceylon. The echoes of this journey, the impression that Buddhist culture made on the writer, are palpable, in particular, in the story “Brothers” (1914). In the fall of 1912 - spring of 1913 again abroad (Trebizond, Constantinople, Bucharest), then (1913-1914) - to Capri. In 1915-1916, collections of stories “The Cup of Life” and “The Mister from San Francisco” were published.

The Bunins leave Moscow for Odessa (1918), and then abroad, to France (1920). The break with the Motherland, as it turned out later, forever, was painful for the writer. The works of this period are permeated with thoughts about Russia, about the tragedy of Russian history of the 20th century, about the loneliness of modern man, which is only for a short moment broken by the invasion of love passion (collections of stories "Mitya's Love", 1925, "Sunstroke", 1927, "Dark Alleys" , 1943, autobiographical novel "The Life of Arsenyev", 1927-1929, 1933). In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1939, the Bunins settled in the south of France, in Grasse, at the Villa Jeannette, where they spent the entire war. In 1927-1942, Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova lived side by side with the Bunin family, who became the writer’s deep, late affection. In 1945 the Bunins returned to Paris. The greatest writers of France and other European countries highly appreciated Bunin's work even during his lifetime (F. Mauriac, A. Gide, R. Rolland, T. Mann, R.-M. Rilke, J. Ivashkevich, etc.). The writer's works have been translated into all European languages ​​and some oriental ones. [Smirnova 1991:54]

He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.

2.Poetry and tragedy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin

How, Lord, can I thank you?

You for everything that is in this world

You gave me to see and love

On a sea night, under the starry sky.

Bunin wrote a lot about love, its tragedies and rare moments of true happiness. These works are marked by an extraordinary poeticization of human feeling; they revealed the writer’s wonderful talent, his ability to penetrate intimate depths, hearts with their unknown and unknown laws. For Bunin, true love has something in common with the eternal beauty of nature, therefore only such a feeling of love is beautiful that is natural, not false, not fictitious. For him, love and existence without it are two hostile lives, and if love dies, then another life is no longer needed.

Exalting love, Bunin does not hide the fact that it brings not only the joy of happiness, but also very often conceals torment, grief, disappointment, and death. That is why the writer combined in his work the most beautiful and the most terrible - love and death. In one of his letters, he himself explained exactly this motive in his work, and not only explained, but convincingly argued: Don’t you really know yet that love and death are inextricably linked? Every time I experienced a love catastrophe, and there were quite a few of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide . [Mikhailov 1991:7] In stories about love, I. A. Bunin affirmed the true, spiritual values, beauty and greatness of a person capable of great selfless feelings, portrayed love as a high, ideal, beautiful feeling, despite the fact that it does not carry only joy and happiness, but more often - grief, suffering, death.

.Philosophy of love in the cycle “Dark Alleys”

I. A. Bunin devoted a significant part of his works to the theme of love, from the earliest to the last. Collection Dark alleys became the embodiment of all the writer’s many years of thoughts about love. He saw it everywhere, because for him this concept was very broad.

Bunin's stories are precisely philosophy. He sees love in a special light. At the same time, it reflects the feelings that each person experienced. From this point of view, love is not some special, abstract concept, but, on the contrary, common to everyone.

Dark alleys - a work of many faces, diverse. Bunin shows human relationships in all manifestations: sublime passion, quite ordinary desires, novels having nothing to do , animal manifestations of passion. In his characteristic manner, Bunin always finds the necessary, suitable words to describe even the basest human instincts. He never stoops to vulgarity, because he considers it unacceptable. But, as a true master of the Word, he always accurately conveys all shades of feelings and experiences. He does not shy away from any aspects of human existence; you will not encounter any sanctimonious silence about any topics. Love for a writer is a completely earthly, real, tangible feeling. Spirituality is inseparable from the physical nature of human attraction to each other. And this is no less beautiful and attractive for Bunin. [Mikhailov 1991:4]

The naked female body often appears in Bunin's stories. But even here he knows how to find the only correct expressions, so as not to descend to ordinary naturalism. And the woman appears beautiful, like a goddess, although the author is far from turning a blind eye to shortcomings and overly romanticizing nudity.

The image of a woman is the attractive force that constantly attracts Bunin. He creates a gallery of such images, each story has its own. A simple girl from a village in a story Tanya as beautiful as the bright Spanish woman from Camargue . The writer also addresses the fates of fallen women; they are no less interesting to him than ladies who keep up appearances. Love makes everyone equal. Prostitutes do not cause disgust, and vice versa, the behavior of some women from decent families are perplexed. Social status ceases to matter when feelings come into play.

It is surprising that the action of the story can last for a very short time. In several stories, Bunin simply describes women he accidentally saw in a train carriage. And this is no less interesting than if some action were taking place. The images are vivid and immediately imprinted in the memory. This is typical for Bunin. He always knows how to choose the right words, and not a single one will be superfluous.

All the images delight, it seems that the author is in love with each of them. It is possible that he embodied real-life personalities on paper. All the feelings that these women experience have a right to exist. Let it be the first timid love, passion for an unworthy person, a feeling of revenge, lust, worship. And it makes absolutely no difference whether you are a peasant, a prostitute or a lady. The main thing is that you are a woman.

The male images in Bunin's stories are somewhat darkened, blurred, and the characters are not too defined. It doesn't matter. It is much more necessary for the writer to understand what feelings these men experience, what pushes them towards women, why they love them. The reader does not need to know what this or that man is like, what he looks like, what his advantages and disadvantages are. He participates in the story insofar as love is a feeling between two. [Basinsky 2000:415]

Bunin is in love with love. For him, this is the most wonderful feeling on earth, incomparable to anything else. And yet love destroys destinies. The writer never tired of repeating that every strong love avoids marriage. An earthly feeling is only a short flash in a person’s life, and Bunin tries to preserve these wonderful moments in his stories. Even before the appearance Dark alleys he's writing: The blissful hours pass, and it is necessary, necessary... to preserve at least something, that is, to oppose death, the fading of the rosehip . The last image is taken from a poem by N. Ogarev An ordinary story . That's where the name came from Dark alleys.

Bunin strives in his stories to stop the moment, to prolong the flowering of the rosehip, because the fall of flowers is inevitable. [Lavrov 1989:199]

In the collection Dark alleys we will not find a single story where love would end in marriage. Lovers are separated either by relatives, or by circumstances, or by death. It seems that death for Bunin is preferable to a long family life side by side. He shows us love at its peak, but never at its fading, since fading does not happen in his stories. Only the instantaneous disappearance of a bright flame by the will of circumstances.

Dark alleys I would like to name it exactly philosophy of love . There is no better definition. Bunin subordinated all his work to this philosophy.

Book Dark alleys has become an integral part of not only Russian, but also world literature, dedicated to the eternal, ageless theme of love.

1 Story “Dark Alleys”

The story “Dark Alleys” (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. “No matter how much time passed, I still lived alone,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. - Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and the fact that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the St. Petersburg house, the mother of his children... This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness. How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love. Nevertheless, the “thorn” in Nikolai’s heart will still not disappear.

Already in this first story of the cycle, one of the main themes of the cycle appears: life moves inexorably forward, dreams of lost happiness are illusory, because a person cannot influence the development of events. The man in the works of I. A. Bunin is in a vicious circle of everyday life, vulgarity and melancholy. Only occasionally does happiness smile at him, and then it leaves forever. The heroes of the writer’s works have a keen sense of beauty, but never enter into a fight for it. The philosophy of Bunin's heroes is based on the feeling of the impossibility of changing anything in life, and therefore they only greedily catch moments of happiness, suffer if it passes by, but never fight for it.

As the doctor from the story “The River Inn” will say: “... after all, cruel traces remain in the soul, that is, memories that are especially cruel and painful if something happy is remembered...”

3.2 "Raven"

How strange: you start leafing through a volume of “Dark Alleys” by I.A. Bunin and you can’t tear yourself away. It seems that you know in detail “Caucasus”, and “Muse”, and “Late Hour”, and not just “Natalie” or “Clean Monday”, but reading these stories awakens some strange feeling: as if not only these stories you know, but I once knew and loved these young people, as if you had lived a long time ago in the world and it seems that you haven’t really loved yet, but tomorrow or even tonight this could happen. Such is the story “The Raven,” also included in the book “Dark Alleys.”

It seems that the author is unsophisticated in his narration, explaining the meaning of the title from the very beginning: “My father looked like a raven.” Well, then what does “alley of love” have to do with it? Apparently, this question is the main intrigue of the story. In the house where yesterday's lyceum student returns for the holidays, his eight-year-old sister, a peer, yesterday's high school student, has a new "nanny". This is how a strange “love triangle” arises: yesterday’s high school student and lyceum student are in love with each other, and the “raven” father turns out to be a predatory homewrecker. The story is banal, if not vulgar, if not for the writer’s style, which makes the ordinary and trivial poetic, and turns the cliches of a love triangle into the sublime and tragic.

Here is the tensely prim atmosphere at dinner, the theatrically cutesy atmosphere at evening tea: there is not a single look, word, sigh; there is a “filled to the brim” cup, “how he loved”, there are strange moral teachings of the owner of the house, which seem to sound out of place: “If only a black satin dress with a jagged, standing collar a la Maria Stuart, studded with small diamonds, would suit your face very well ... or a medieval dress of punched velvet with a small neckline and a ruby ​​cross...” Or other speeches already addressed to the son, completely unflattering... Everything is so believable, as if it is only now unfolding before our eyes. However, in Bunin’s early works there seem to be variants of the prototypes of the heroine of “The Crow”. This is Olya Meshcherskaya from “Easy Breathing”, and Vera from “The Last Date”, Aglaya... All of them at the beginning of the story are caught by the author in moments of waiting for love, but fate will reward each of them differently.

The plot twist in “The Crow” is also unusual; it will make the reader remember Chekhov’s “The Jumper,” for example. The scene of her love confession will be the reason for her son to leave his home forever, renounce his inheritance, and then learn that his father left the service and moved to St. Petersburg “with a lovely young wife.” One day at the Mariinsky Theater he will see them: his father, sitting like a raven, and her... How much is said about the detail once noticed by a young lover: “On her neck a ruby ​​cross sparkled with dark fire...”

Here they are: dark, inscrutable alleys of love... She, once madly in love with a young man, today seems to be in love... with herself. The Raven Predator is the owner of a beautiful doll, but not a beautiful living loving soul. The “Ruby Cross” is like a dream at the beginning of the story for her and a “trap” for the predator - and at the end as a payment for power over youth and beauty, in essence, makes this story a kind of elegy. “Youth is retribution,” Ibsen once said very accurately. For the raven father, the retribution is doubly: he has lost his son forever, his power over the sweet creature, who looks around with curiosity in the theater whose name is life, is also illusory.

And yet, how sweet even a moment of recollection of the unsaid! How quiet is the sadness of the unrealizable!

3 "The Hunchback's Romance"

The book of short stories “Dark Alleys” was published in 1943 in New York. Then it included eleven stories, and three years later for the Paris edition of I.A. Bunin gave 38 stories; essentially, it was already a different book in some ways. Although it is called “Dark Alleys,” there is a lot of light in it, and also that many stories written earlier or later also, for some reason, “ask” to be included in this book. Perhaps this is because the central theme of Bunin’s work in general is Love. He always talks about love, even when there are no love collisions in the plot. Bunin himself, a connoisseur of the human heart, creates a whole gallery of “portraits of love”, one of the halls of which he will later call “Dark Alleys”. But on the other hand, there is so much music and poetry in this book that the “dark alleys” can involuntarily be read as some kind of revelation, like the secret writing of your own soul.

Open at random “The Hunchback’s Romance,” which ends with the exclamation: “Someone is merciless to man!” Just one page... and that's the whole novel. For the first time in his life, the hunchback receives a love note, an invitation to a date, in which the girl in love with him names her characteristics: “... a gray English suit, a purple silk umbrella in his left hand, a bouquet of violets in his right...” So much tact and sophistication and even magic in the combination of colors: gray, lilac!.. How much poetry is only in a bouquet of violets, what a fragrant and joyful spring opens up to an almost happy eternity ahead... And he strives to get in tune with this love melody, this wondrous picture: “I bought lilac gloves, a new gray tie with a red sparkle to match the color of the suit...” Everything that the human imagination draws speaks of the future happy excitement of lovers. By all external signs, it seems that they are made for each other. In order to harmonize even in clothes, I think, you need to be mentally and emotionally similar, tuned in to the same wavelength... It is impossible not to anticipate that happiness has finally smiled on the hunchback. But the reader, it turns out, is mistaken: the hunchback’s first glance at the woman in love with him... - and happiness is gone. He sees a hunchback walking towards him. The writer deliberately uses the technique of disappointed expectations: this story, written in the early thirties, is not included in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, not only because it was written earlier, but also because its plot itself contains an allegory. It is not only and not so much about the hunchback and the hunchback, but about the vicissitudes of fate, the vicissitudes of love, about self-deception, about the fact that the gap between dreams and reality can be overcome only in fantasies and can never be overcome in real life. In essence, this most intimate thought of the writer and lyricist I.A. Bunin is realized in his own way in “Cold Autumn”, and in “Dark Alleys”, and in “Clean Monday”, but it seems that the writer has never completed his work so sadly. Reflecting on the mercilessness of fate towards a person, the author more often makes a person remember happy moments, which, like tiny stars, are scattered in the huge, endless black sky, but without which our life would, without a doubt, be completely different. Perhaps this thought was best expressed by the artist himself in the poem “And Flowers and Bumblebees...”:

And I will forget everything. I only remember these

Field paths between ears of grain and grass...

And from sweet tears I won’t have time to answer,

Falling to the merciful knees.

And in this story, the hero is caught at a time when he still does not know how to appreciate the happiness given by God for only a moment. Perhaps the most mysteriously dark state of the soul reveals itself to itself in anticipation of the Happiness of love, the Light of Love. Time will pass, and they will remember the same story with a completely different feeling.

“The Romance of the Hunchback” is a kind of parable about the happiness of a love dream and the sorrows of ordinary life, about that tragic discrepancy in love, about which much has been written in world literature, but, as the work of I.A. Bunina, cannot be exhausted...

.The theme of Russia in the works of I. A. Bunin

Like any Russian poet, I. A. Bunin absorbed the classical tradition of singing Russia. For him, who grew up on his father’s estate, among the dim and inaudible beauty of Russian nature, his homeland began here. We find echoes of this fascination already in the poet’s early poems, which are called: “To the Motherland” (1891), “Motherland” (1896). In the poem “Motherland” (1891), still largely imitative and decorative, Russia appears in the image of a poor peasant woman:

They mock you

They, O Motherland, reproach

You with your simplicity,

Poor looking black huts.

In the poem “Motherland,” the familiar Russian distance evokes a vague melancholy:

Under the sky of deathly lead

The winter day is gloomily fading,

And there is no end to the pine forests,

And far from the villages.

Many of Bunin’s early poems contain epic and fairy-tale motifs that take us back to Ancient Rus' and pre-Christian times - “At the Crossroads” (1900), “Vir” (1900), “After the Battle” (1903), “Eve of Kupala” (1903) ), "Steppe" (1912). In the poem “Steppe” you can even feel the epic chant:

The blue raven drinks his eyes dry,

Collects tribute piece by piece.

You are my side, my side,

My age-old wilderness!

This return to the roots was also characteristic of Russian culture at the beginning of the last century (suffice it to recall the paintings of V. Vasnetsov and the early N. Roerich, Russian fairy tales of A. N. Tolstoy). The epic ancient Rus' was gradually superimposed in the poet’s mind on modern Russia with its backwardness and poverty. The outbreak of World War aggravated the impending crisis. The premonition of disaster is evident in the poem “Eve”:

Here comes the demon-possessed army

And, like Mamai, he will pass through all of Rus'...

But the world is empty - who will save?

But there is no God - who should be punished?

But Russia revealed itself to Bunin not only in poverty and the abandonment of wretched villages. He saw it in the multicolored spring steppes, the scarlet evening sky, and the golden autumn groves:

A long whip shoots in a dry forest,

Cows are chattering in the bushes,

And blue snowdrops are blooming,

And an oak leaf rustles underfoot.

(“Youth”, 1916)

A sad long evening in October!

I loved late autumn in Russia.

I loved the crimson forest on the mountain,

The expanse of fields and dull twilight...

(“Desolation”, 1903)

The open spaces and landscapes are inspired by people, peaceful peasant farmers. Bunin describes them with tenderness:

Along the furrow, hurrying after the coulters

I leave soft traces -

So good with bare feet

Step onto the velvet of the warm furrow!

(“Plowman”, 1903-1906)

Bunin writes about his old nanny:

Why in the eyes

So much sorrow, meekness?...

Bast shoes on the feet,

Head wrapped up

Printed shawl,

Old short fur coat...

“Hello, dear friend!..”

(“Nanny”, 1906-1907)

Bunin, like his other contemporaries, was concerned about the fate of Russia. Already in one of his early stories, written in the 1900s, Bunin asked himself, looking sadly into the “terrible distances” of Russia: “What do we have in common with this wilderness? She is infinitely great, and should I understand her sorrows, should I help them? (“New Road”). Nevertheless, already in those years he intensively studied Russian reality, looking for something bright and worthy in it. This is how the stories “Antonov Apples”, “Pines”, “Meliton”, “Birds of Heaven” appeared. Unlike many contemporary writers, Bunin did not have a sense of the age-old guilt of an intellectual before the downtrodden and impoverished Russian peasantry. Therefore, in his stories about village life, in particular in “Antonov Apples,” they sometimes see a poeticization of serfdom. In fact, the fresh smell of Antonov apples symbolized for the writer, first of all, the health, simplicity and homeliness of the peasants, a reasonable working life, and the healthy foundations of village life. These foundations are based on inextricable ties with the earth. It was they who created a unique layer of national folk culture, which is gradually disappearing and being corroded by urban civilization. Therefore, the story “Antonov Apples” has the subtitle “Epitaph”. The village is humbled and orphaned. And Bunin’s stories seem to be a poem of the desolation of landowners’ nests and remote villages. [Mikhailov 1991:3]

But Bunin’s heroes suffer not only and not so much from social injustice, from ruin and oppression. For the most part, his heroes (men, bankrupt landowners, priests, young ladies) think about the eternal questions of existence. The writer is keenly interested in the worldview of representatives of different social strata (peasants, commoners, landowners), the correlation of their spiritual experience, its origins and prospects. These interests did not take Bunin away from reality, for it was precisely this that determined the views and feelings of his characters. And the gap between external motivations and the actual state of affairs is especially painful for Bunin. At the same time, Bunin is far from idealizing the peasantry. He showed how centuries of slavery equally crippled the souls of both peasants and landowners, and how slave labor had a destructive effect on the human personality. The stories “Village” (1910), “Sukhodol” (1911), “Merry Yard” (1911), “Zakhar Vorobyov” (1912) and others, which the author himself later called “merciless,” showed readers a different, unusual Russia, revealed the self-consciousness of the masses at a turning point, revealed the contradictions of the Russian soul. Such, for example, is the main character of the story “Village” Kuzma Krasov, striving for light and goodness, but crushed by the stupid and difficult life and anger of the rest of the inhabitants of Durnovka. And “Sukhodol” mercilessly talks about the spiritual impoverishment of the barchuks, the decline of the “nests of the nobility” at the beginning of the last century.

Fate doomed Bunin to part with his homeland. However, his stories and poems, written far from Russia, are still inextricably linked with it, its breadth and absurdity. The heroes and heroines of his stories simply lived a natural life, trying to comprehend their own purpose on earth. At the same time, the writer’s own thoughts on the existing connections between the past and the future, the national and the universal, the momentary and the eternal, which determine the fate of Russia, are organically woven into the fabric of Bunin’s stories. He tried to understand what the character of a Russian person, the Russian soul, is. Bunin saw that life was changing, that there was no and could not be a return to the past. Therefore, in his stories, time inexorably counts down the time allotted to the old world. But he could not foresee what the new world would be like, what awaited Russia, describing with horror the bloody turmoil of the revolution in “Cursed Days.” Therefore, Bunin’s Russia remained a protected country of inspired landscapes and broken people, seeking and not finding their place in the new world order. [Basinsky 2000:410]

The literary fate of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is an amazing fate. During his lifetime, he was not as famous as Gorky, they did not argue about him like L. Andreev, he did not evoke such contradictory, sometimes noisily enthusiastic, and sometimes unconditionally condemning assessments, like the Symbolists. In literary and reading circles, with unusual unanimity, he was recognized as a Master. The Second World War found Bunin in Paris. Poverty and the indifference of publishing houses were painful for Ivan Alekseevich. This is how he himself talks about it: “Of course, my life is very, very bad: loneliness, hunger, cold and terrible poverty...” The only thing that saves me is work. Yes, the creation of the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” was a source of spiritual inspiration for Bunin during the war years. The author himself considered the works in the collection, written in 1937-1944, to be his highest achievement.

Critics defined the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” as an “encyclopedia of love” or, more precisely, an encyclopedia of love dramas. Love here is depicted as the most beautiful, highest feeling. In each of the stories (“Dark Alleys”, “Russia”, “Antigone”, “Tanya”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Natalie”, “Clean Monday”; this also includes the one written before “Dark Alleys” "The story "Sunstroke") shows the moment of the highest triumph of love. All the stories in the collection are united by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All of them are fictional, which the author himself has repeatedly emphasized. However, all of them, including their retrospective form, are caused by the state of the author’s soul. “What an amazing time to be young! Life passes quickly, and we begin to appreciate it only when everything is left behind,” says I. A. Bunin. Such moments of return to the most vivid, powerful experience are reproduced in the cycle. Bunin writes about the unforgettable, which left a deep mark on the human soul.

Often the very moment of remembrance is captured, a sad touch to a long-gone joy. It is given by love, and preserved for the rest of one’s life by a special, sensory memory, which makes one perceive differently over the years much of what is “left behind.” However, Bunin's conviction in the purity, uncloudedness, and healthy naturalness of love remained unchanged.

True, sometimes in Bunin’s depiction of love the “earthly”, sensual character prevailed, but this never happened at the expense of reducing the main, spiritual significance of love. Only in this quality does it constitute the best moments of life. “Love is the highest judge in human relations,” says Bunin. The author wrote about the book “Dark Alleys” in April 1947: “It talks about the tragic and about many tender and beautiful things, I think that this is the best and most beautiful thing that I have written in my life.” We must learn from Bunin how to express soulfully, on the highest emotional wave, the most extraordinary and beautiful feeling of a person. Bunin does not intrigue with a complex plot; he awakens feelings with a lyrical monologue and confession. What he yearns for has long ago become history, and the way he knows how to express feelings is our imperishable spiritual wealth. This facet of the spiritual is the inviolability and eternity of Russia.

I. A. Bunin is called the last Russian classic, a representative of the outgoing noble culture. His works are truly imbued with a tragic sense of the doom of the old world of Russia, close and related to the writer, with whom he was connected by origin and upbringing. The artist was especially dear to those features of the past that bore the stamp of a refined noble perception of the beauty and harmony of the world. “The spirit of this environment, romanticized by my imagination, seemed all the more beautiful to me because it disappeared forever before my eyes,” he would later write. But, despite the fact that for Bunin the past of Russia became a kind of ideal example of spirituality, he belonged to his contradictory, disharmonious time. The most striking works on the theme of Russia are the stories “Village” and “Sukhodol”. [Lavrov 1989: 217]

The real features of his controversial time were embodied with remarkable force in “The Village.” In this “cruel” story, using the example of the fate of the Krasov brothers, the author shows the decomposition and death of the peasant world, and the decomposition is both external, everyday, and internal, moral. Peasant life is full of ugliness and savagery. The ruin and poverty of the majority of men is highlighted even more clearly by the rapid enrichment of those like Tikhon Krasov, who subordinated his entire life to the pursuit of money. But life takes revenge on the hero: material well-being does not make him happy and, moreover, turns into a dangerous deformation of his personality.

Bunin's story is full of events from the time of the first Russian revolution. A multivocal gathering of peasants is seething, incredible rumors are spreading, landowners' estates are on fire, and the poor are walking around desperately. All these events in the “Village” bring discord and confusion into the souls of people, disrupt natural human connections, and distort age-old moral concepts. The soldier, who knows about Tikhon Krasov’s relationship with his wife, humiliatingly asks the owner not to kick him out of service, brutally beating Young. All his life, the self-taught poet Kuzma Krasov has been searching for the truth, painfully experiencing the senseless and cruel behavior of men. All this speaks of the disunity of the peasants, their inability to rationally arrange their fate. In an effort to understand the reasons for the current state of the people, Bunin turns to the serfdom past of Russia in the story “Sukhodol”. But the writer is far from idealizing that era.

In the center of the image is the fate of the impoverished noble family of the Khrushchevs and their servants. In the life of the heroes of this story, as in the story “The Village,” there is a lot of strange, wild, and abnormal things. The fate of Natalya, the former serf nanny of the young Khrushchevs, is indicative. This extraordinary, gifted nature is deprived of the opportunity to realize itself. The life of a serf girl is mercilessly broken by her masters, who condemn her to shame and humiliation for such a “terrible” offense as love for the young master Pyotr Petrovich. After all, it was this feeling that was the reason for the theft of the folding mirror, which amazed the yard girl with its beauty. [Sokolov 1999:338]

There is a great contrast between the feeling of unprecedented happiness that overwhelms Natasha, who furrowed her eyebrows in front of the mirror to please her idol, and the shame and disgrace experienced by a village girl with a face swollen from tears, who, in front of the entire servants’ eyes, was put on a dung cart and sent to a distant place. farm After returning, Natalya is subjected to cruel bullying from the young lady, which she endures with stoic submission to fate. Love, family happiness, warmth and harmony of human relationships are inaccessible to a serf woman. Therefore, all the strength and depth of Natalya’s feelings are realized in her touching affection for the masters and devotion to Sukhodol. This means that the poetry of the “noble nests” hides the tragedy of souls disfigured by the cruelty and inhumanity of serfdom, which the writer reproduced with stern truthfulness in “Sukhodol”.

But the inhumane social system also cripples representatives of the nobility. The fate of the Khrushchevs is absurd and tragic. Young lady Tonya goes crazy, Pyotr Petrovich dies under the hooves of a horse, and the feeble-minded grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich dies at the hands of a serf. The perversity and ugliness of the relationship between masters and servants was very accurately expressed by Natalya: “Gervaska bullied the barchuk and grandfather, and the young lady bullied me. Barchuk, and, to tell the truth, grandfather themselves, doted on Gervaska, and I doted on her.” Violation of normal, natural concepts even leads to deformation of the feeling of love. What fills the life of a person in love with joy, tenderness, and a sense of harmony, in “Sukhodol” leads to dementia, madness, shame, and devastation. What is the reason for the distortion of moral concepts? Of course, feudal reality is largely to blame for this.

But Bunin’s story, without sharpening social contradictions, reveals this problem more widely and deeply, transferring it to the plane of human relations characteristic of any time. The point is not only in the socio-political system, but also in the imperfection of man, who often lacks the strength to fight circumstances. Thus, Bunin did not idealize Russia, but also did not deny it poetry. The homeland gave birth to many contradictory feelings in his soul, which he tried to understand in a way accessible to him - by attracting the attention of the readership to the problems of existence through his creativity.

Conclusion

Love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories, telling about the most intimate things, will not leave readers of the 21st century indifferent. Each person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with their own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Dark Alleys” always a modern writer who arouses deep reader interest. In the extremely difficult conditions of emigration, Bunin’s talent did not ossify in despair and melancholy, but, constrained and cut off from his homeland, he continued to search for something new. One can even say that it was in foreign countries that the personal, coming directly from Bunin, began to break through in his works stronger and more clearly than before. During the years of loneliness, the memories of a slow, but, as it might have seemed then, oblivion that surrounded him for a long time, Bunin’s work concentrated attention on several fundamental problems - love, death, the memory of Russia.

The book “Dark Alleys” is the most important proof of this.

Handing it over to journalist Andrei Sedykh for publication in the United States, Bunin said: “This book is about love with some bold passages. In general, she talks about the tragic and in many ways tender and beautiful. I think that this is the best and most original thing that I have written in my life...” [Smirnova 1991:82]

Bibliography

1. Basinsky P. Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX centuries and the first emigration / P. Basinsky, S. Fedyakin. - M.: Academy, 2000. - 525 p.

Lavrov V.V. Cold autumn. Ivan Bunin in exile 1920-1953: Roman-chronicle.-M.: Mol. Guard, 1989.-384p.

Mikhailov O. Bunin’s Song of Songs: introductory article//Bunin I.A. Dark alleys.-M.: Khud. Literary, 1991.-P.3-8

Smirnova L.A. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin: Life and creativity: A book for teachers.-M.: Education, 1991.-192p.

Sokolov A.G. History of Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Textbook.-4th ed., additional. And revised - M.: Higher school; Ed. Center Academy, 1999.-432p.

They mock you
They, O Motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity,
Poor looking black huts...

So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother -
Tired, timid and sad
Among his city friends,

Looks with a smile of compassion
To the one who wandered hundreds of miles
And for him, on the date of the date,
She saved her last penny.
____
1891

Analysis of the poem

From the very first lines of the poem, the reader feels the poet’s concern for his homeland, for the house where he was born. In the first quatrain, Bunin makes it clear that his homeland is wretched and too simple at first glance. Reading these lines, I imagined abandoned huts in late autumn from which smoke was pouring out. And although the field work is completed, people are gradually creating comfort at home from what they have. But they don’t have much - simplicity and “black huts”. The poem was written in the poet’s youth; Bunin was then only 21 years old. But already at this age, judging by the poem, Ivan Bunin felt his civic duty and could not remain indifferent to the state of affairs in Russia. It was during these years that famine swept across Russia. Russia, already “poor”, was starving. How can you not mock?

But no matter what this Motherland is, it remains the Motherland forever. Like a mother... And the poet, without sorrow, makes it clear that he is proud of such a mother who saves her last pennies “for the date.” And you, who mock her, continue to mock her. And “be ashamed” if that’s what you want...

Most of the epithets of the poem are painted in dark tones and carry a negative load.. It’s as if the poet lacks a “wretched” appearance and he gives the huts of his Motherland a black color.. Then it’s even “sadder”, the mother, the closest and most beloved person to each of us, appears in a humiliating manner in front of his “impudent” son.. What is this? What does Bunin want to say? Really, personifying the Motherland with his mother, the poet could not find a softer comparison. If you truly experience the words spoken by the poets, you become uneasy. I want to shout: “Where is your soul?! O son! Son of a mother, son of his Motherland.”

“Emigration became a truly tragic milestone in the biography of Bunin, who broke forever with his native Russian land, to which he, like few others, owed his wonderful gift and to which he, like few others, was attached “with love to the point of heartache.” Beyond this border there was not only a premature and inevitable decline in his creative power, but his literary name itself suffered a certain moral damage and was covered with duckweed of oblivion, although he lived for a long time and wrote a lot.”

This is the general position. It has long been customary to talk in this way about talented writers who did not understand and did not accept the revolution, although their best creations belong to Russia, to the Russian people. But is it true for some of them, and in particular for Ivan Bunin?

The ideological and spiritual fall of the writer is understandable and explainable. And in his largest works of the emigrant period, Bunin seemed to move away from the topic of the day and find harmony in the past, continuing to develop his main themes. However, this does not mean that the revolution and the construction of a new life in Russia did not have any influence on Bunin’s work.

Those changes in the now distant homeland, which he did not want to understand and accept, the longing for it prompted the writer to look for more and more new angles on the themes of love and death, human loneliness, to indulge in reminiscences of the past, so charming and becoming not only chronologically so distant.

Tvardovsky believes that in the early story “To the End of the World,” the writer “is not free from that somewhat aestheticized philosophy that involuntarily brought him closer to the “fashionable” art of decadence that he hated.” As we have seen, the tendency to recreate the objective world through the sick subjective perception of the heroes of works arose in the pre-emigrant years. And it is quite natural that the influence on

Bunin's Freudianism and literature, based on the analysis of the subconscious and pathological phenomena, noticeably intensified in emigration. This should not be underestimated because the struggle that the writer waged with himself in the field of artistic creativity will remain unidentified.

Bunin's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis was closely connected with the desire to penetrate even deeper into the inner world of man and find there answers to the damned questions of life. But contrary to the good intentions of the writer, there was a departure from the facts of reality, from public life into the sphere of the personal, subconscious. However, even here things were far from simple. When Bunin turned to his own life, to the experiences of childhood and youth, he did not go beyond the great traditions of such remarkable masters of psychological analysis as Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. But the ideological impossibility of a single emigrant led to the explanation of some life phenomena by the irrational properties of human nature.

All this to a certain extent affected one of the largest works of the emigrant period - the story “Mitya’s Love” and especially the story “The Case of the Cornet Elagin”.

“Mitya’s Love” is not an autobiographical work in the literal sense of the word. It does not contain those facts and phenomena that accompanied the writer’s first and, apparently, greatest feeling - his unhappy love for Varya Pashchenko.

Subsequently, in the fifth book of the autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev,” he will talk about his love for her, recalling the details and facts of those years of his life. But the story “Mitya’s Love” is also full of the tart aroma of the never-faded flowers of youth.

In the disclosure of the theme of love here, as in previous works, there is a clear discrepancy between the high tension of the hero’s feelings and the bourgeois essence of his beloved.

Katya is a bourgeois who lives in other people's thoughts and greedily absorbs the falsehood of artistic bohemia. She is charming on the outside, but empty on the inside. Her flirtatiousness is mannered, and her femininity barely hides her selfish and petty nature.

She calls Mitya’s eyes “Byzantine,” and he answers her with sarcasm: “I look like a Byzantine just like you look like the Chinese Empress. You’re all just obsessed with these Byzantiums and Renaissances.” He tells her about the vulgarity of her friends. “How do you not understand that you are still the best for me, the only one? - she asked quietly and insistently, already looking into his eyes with feigned seduction, and thoughtfully and slowly recited:

There's a sleeping secret between us,
The soul gave the soul a ring..."

The ability to succinctly describe a person through dialogue is one of the characteristic features of Bunin's talent. Katya’s words “the best of all, the only one” are deadly both in their erasure, vulgarity, and in the incompatibility of the concepts of “the best of all” and “the only one.” And her look, as it were, completes the revelation of a petty nature, incapable of love.

It would seem that Katya is clear enough from one or two such characteristics, but Bunin focuses the fire of criticism on her. The writer had serious reasons for this.

Compositionally, the story is divided into two parts unequal in volume. The first and smaller of them ends with Mitya’s departure from Moscow to the village. Mitya is no longer destined to see Katya, but everything that happens in the second part is inextricably linked with her.

Hundreds of books have been written about the tragedy of love that befalls a person due to the discrepancy between his cherished ideal and its real embodiment. But talent overcomes the danger of repetition and, turning to an old topic, reveals it freshly, in a new way. In the first part of the story, in a few lines, Bunin seems to define its theme, not embarrassed by the fact that many have “played up” it: “January, February swirled Mitya’s love in a whirlwind of continuous happiness... But even then something happened (and that’s all more and more often) to confuse, to poison this happiness. Even then, it often seemed as if there were two Katyas: one was the one that Mitya began to persistently desire and demand from the first minute of his acquaintance with her, and the other was genuine, ordinary, painfully different from the first.”

This “other” Katya leads to the death of the hero. Already in the first part of the story there are a number of hints about what is about to happen. Mitya is jealous of the girl he loves, and his jealousy has serious grounds. She talks about her successes at the theater school, about the attention that the director of this institution pays to her, a talented student, and Mitya understands that the matter is completely different, that the elderly rake is going to seduce her, as he has already seduced other students more than once. But this world is spiritually close to Katya; she is irresistibly drawn to a superficial, easy life. She, in fact, is a part of this world and is ready to rush into its arms without any hesitation.

The meeting with Mitya is an episode in her life, nothing more. Mitya’s love briefly catches her, so susceptible to being considered better and more beautiful than everyone else, so selfish that she is flattered by any attention. She is a product of an environment where everything is completely false, lifeless, tightly packaged into ready-made concepts. She constantly utters common maxims: “Jealousy is disrespect for the one you love,” “You only love my body, not my soul!” and so on.

In the first part of “Mitya’s Love,” two narrative lines develop, closely intertwined. One of them is a depiction of Katya’s further philistinization, her transformation from a “young lady” into a young society lady, preoccupied with new outfits, visits, and acquaintances with the luminaries of “refined” art.

Bunin does not name names, does not give an exact “address”, but from a number of hints we can say with confidence that we are talking about figures of the “newest” decadent art. Here is a certain sculptor who proposes to sculpt Katya “in the form of... a dying sea wave,” here is Katya’s performance at an exam at a theater school, very expressively described by the author: “She read with that vulgar melodiousness, falseness and stupidity in every sound, which were considered the highest art of reading in that environment that Mitya hated, in which Katya already lived with all her thoughts: she did not speak, but exclaimed all the time with some kind of annoying, languid passion, with an immoderate, unfounded plea in her insistence... "

Speaking against modernism, showing in beautiful realistic images its deadness, its corrupting influence, its cliches of bad taste, the writer, however, unnoticed for himself, accepted some of its philosophical and aesthetic dogmas.

This was expressed primarily in the fact that, rejecting mannered, artificial, far from life art, he himself led his hero away from living and complex reality, locked his “I” in a vicious circle of heightened love experiences, gave these experiences a painful, depressing character .

At the beginning of the story, Mitya, passionately loving, greedily striving to possess his beloved, constantly jealous of her, still realistically assesses her negative qualities and poverty of intellect. His love is darkened and drops of poison are poured into it by vulgarity, lies and the ugliness of life. But in the second part, a certain shift begins towards the idealization of the beloved, in whom, as Mitya begins to think, everything good is embodied, without whom it is unthinkable to live. Katya now appears in his imagination as if cleansed from the filth of the environment that sucked her in.

The love that “struck” Mitya is given the following explanation through the lips of his friend Protasov: “...Katya is, first of all, the most typical feminine nature... You, masculine nature, climb the wall, make the highest demands of the instinct of procreation, and, of course , all this is completely legal, even in a sense sacred. Your body is the highest mind, as Herr Nietzsche rightly noted. But it is also legal that you can break your neck on this sacred path. There are individuals in the animal world who, even according to the state, are supposed to pay the price of their own existence for their first and last love act.”

The narration in “Mitya’s Love” is told in the third person, the writer almost never leaves his hero and only recedes somewhat into the background in dialogues. But when Bunin needs to express some trivial truth, he “passes the floor” to an episodic character, who presents it either in a humorous or ironically edifying form. Protasov appears only to say these few words, to weave into the theme of love the first thought about the possibility of a tragic outcome.

However, this is not the end of the preparation for what is to come later. A student living opposite Mitya sings the song “Azru”. And the words of the song ending with a tragic cry:

I am from a family of poor Azrovs,
Having fallen in love, we die! -

They intrusively creep into Mitya’s head and give rise to some vague premonitions.

From accepting the formula “the body is the higher mind” to recognizing the instinctive, subconscious as the main impulse of human behavior is just one step. The writer does it in the second part of the story.

And here the realism of the story is fully preserved. The real world is recreated by the writer himself with Bunin’s usual accuracy and novelty of detail. The writer pays a lot of attention to the landscape. And every time nature is called upon to contrast with the mental state of man, increasingly falling under the power of an omnipotent instinct.

Instinct leaves in memory the “ideal” Katya, her lovely body, her femininity, everything that aroused such a strong desire and brought harmony to the world around her. “This spring, the spring of his first love, was also completely different from all previous springs. The world was again transformed, again filled as if with something extraneous, but not hostile, not terrible, but on the contrary, even merging with the joy and youth of spring. And this stranger was Katya, or rather, the most beautiful thing in the world that Mitya wanted and demanded from her.”

The beauty that Mitya wanted to see in Katya continues to be associated with the colors of spring nature for a long time. And these associations arise from any push from the outside. Here Mitya receives a letter from her. It begins with the words: “My beloved, my only one!” Even in Moscow, he knew for sure that this was not so, that her infatuation was passing, that he was far from the only one in her thoughts and desires. But in the village all this has been forgotten. And the delight from the letter received, which, despite everything, is perceived as truth, is complemented by a pure vision of nature, the song of a nightingale.

The unfulfilled desire for love gradually becomes an obsession. No matter what Mitya comes into contact with, no matter where he casts his gaze, no matter what he picks up, the image of Katya invariably appears and the thirst to possess her becomes even more unbearable. All reasonable considerations recede into the background. Opening the book, he does not catch any thoughts in it, but finds lines about the main thing in the world, what he expects from Katya. The strength of his desire becomes stronger than his love, the instinct demands satisfaction at all costs.

Despite the always beautiful and seemingly illuminated landscapes, the internal mood of the story takes on an increasingly gloomy coloring with each page. But approximately in its middle part, a new storyline is introduced, closely linked to the main theme and creating a release. Thus, characters appear who carry within them the living characteristics of the people, good and bad, temporarily distracting him from thoughts about Katya.

And again Bunin reveals his inexhaustible and deep knowledge of the Russian village at the turn of two centuries. The expressively and laconically sculpted figures of peasants appear again, the rich speech of central Russia, sharply seasoned with sayings and jokes, sounds again.

Mitya asks the young girl Sonya, who is in love with him, why she opposes the will of her parents and rejects her groom. She answers:

“- Rich, but stupid, my head gets dark early... I may have someone else on my mind....”

Sonya is interrupted by her friend Glashka, more serious and silent:

“You’re already carrying it, girl, both from the Don and from the sea! “- she said quietly. “You’re making all sorts of noises here, but fame will spread throughout the village...”

And Sonya retorts:

“- Be silent, don’t cackle!.. Maybe I’m not a crow, there is a defense!”

The dense imagery of Sonya’s speech is due to her character and feelings. She shows off in front of the barchuk with whom she is in love, fools around, gets excited, wants to please, is jealous of his maid Parashka, with whom, as she imagines, he lives.

She behaves boldly, somewhat defiantly, apparently believing that being in love with a young master gives her the right to do so, she cheerfully sings ditties, jokes rudely, declaring: “Come with me to the salash to relax, I agree to everything!”

The simplicity of the attitude of peasant women to gender issues is perceived by the author as a kind of opposition to the spiritual reflection of the intelligentsia.

Naturally, in such a contrast, the writer gives preference to the intelligentsia. This can be seen at least from the way he shows his attitude towards the “sacrament” of love of a young and attractive peasant woman.

The playfulness of Sonya in love either distracts Mitya from the subject of his constant thoughts and torments, or sharpens the desire that lives in him, the desire for happiness. He lies on the grass, with his head in the girl’s lap, “...and Katya’s desire and desire, the demand that she immediately give this superhuman happiness at any cost, gripped her so violently that Mitya, to Sonya’s extreme surprise, He jumped up impulsively and walked away with long steps.”

The power of instinct overwhelms Mitya, when the possibility of real intimacy with a woman opens up, the image of Katya at that moment moves away somewhere and only one indomitable desire remains.

In essence, from the very first lines of the story, Mitya is a victim of the subconscious. Be it in Moscow, in a relationship with Katya, be it in the village, when the headman offers him the attractive Alenka, the forester’s daughter-in-law, Mitya does not try to resist instinct, sort out his feelings, or cast off his obsession. This explains that in the story about the short life and death of a young nobleman there are almost completely no internal reflections. Mitya’s thoughts are limited to one succinctly expressed thought, which is repeated in several places in the story: “If there is no letter in a week, I’ll shoot myself!”, “I’ll shoot myself!” - thought Mitya, looking firmly at the book and seeing nothing.”

This thought prepares a tragic outcome.

His meetings in the hut with Alenka lead to the strengthening of the barchuk’s hopeless mood.

Alenka, the wife of a peasant who went to work in the mines, is as charming as she is unconsciously cynical. It personifies the simplicity of the love customs of the village, reduced to the formula: “sale - purchase.”

Thus, putting Alenka in Katya’s place, the writer confronts his hero with two forms of degeneration of intimate feelings. Katya is, in essence, a doll. Alenka is a primitive animal, a bundle of idiocy of village life.

The author does not offer anything else to his hero, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to get out of the impasse in which he finds himself. On the pages devoted to the “deal” between Mitya and Alenka, the “problem” of gender appears in the most unsightly light.

Mitya does not sleep at night, tormented by unrequited love, moves from hope to despair, hopes again, although, as he understands, he has nothing to expect from Katya. Beautiful nature tells him: rejoice, live, look how good it is around you. And for a moment he succumbs to her charm, and then the feelings tormenting him become even more painful.

In “Mitya’s Love,” the pure beauty of nature does not evoke bright hopes for happiness. It only beckons and inspires for a very short time, so that soon the tragedy of life, where there is no place for love, looms even darker against its bright background.

This artistic technique is repeated many times in the story.

“Mitya walked along the alley straight into the sun, which shone dryly on the threshing floor and in the field... And the fact that Mitya had just washed himself, combed his wet, glossy black hair and put on a student’s cap, everything suddenly seemed so good that Mitya, again Having not slept all night and again going through many different thoughts and feelings at night, he was suddenly overcome with hope for some kind of happy resolution to all his torments, for salvation, liberation from them. The bells were playing and calling, the threshing floor ahead was shining hotly, the woodpecker, pausing, raising its crest, quickly ran up the gnarled trunk of the linden tree to its light green, sunny top, velvet black and red bumblebees carefully buried themselves in the flowers in the meadows, in the sunshine, the birds began to sing all over the garden it was sweet and carefree... Everything was as it had happened many, many times in childhood, in adolescence, and I remembered so vividly all the lovely, carefree times of the past that suddenly there was a certainty that God was merciful, that perhaps it was possible live in the world without Katya.”

There is something of pagan worship in this celebration of the beautiful landscape given to man.

But what follows this picture?

The theme of a love “deal” immediately arises, seeming especially unnatural when everything around is so beautiful and pure.

“The poetic tragedy of love,” as Mitya himself defines his state, every now and then turns into a rough, purely physiological side. Mitya feels with disgust the humiliation of bargained love, but the power of sensual attraction is merciless, and he follows her lead.

It is generally accepted that Bunin, suffering from separation from his homeland, embellished the life of the Russian village in the works of the emigration period, paying excessive tribute to elegiac moods. The truth is much more complex than this rather elementary idea. Already in “Mitya’s Love,” the ugliness of village life appears in fairly detailed descriptions with Bunin’s usual accuracy of details and characteristics. Moreover, the base, primitive appears through the seductive shell. The beautiful form contains the ugly.

Alenka, who becomes the first woman he knows, immediately evokes the image of Katya in his memory. In the appearance of a country girl and a refined Muscovite, he seems to have something in common, although one of them flaunts clothes from expensive dressmakers, and the other in a cotton sweater and skirt. This is common - small stature, mobility, the shine of dark eyes. In fact, a more significant comparison emerges. In essence, behind the charming appearance of both young women lies a spiritual emptiness. Ultimately, Mitya dies because, by the power of his feelings, love for Katya, he rose above this low level, saw how vulgarity in its hidden and open manifestations corroded the human soul, deprived a person of high and pure aspirations.

Bunin the thinker is inclined to explain the “poetic tragedy of love” by the unknowable, the dark power of sexual desire, which often leads a person into a dead end of pathology. Bunin the artist turns out to be much stronger than Bunin the thinker and reveals the “tragedy of love” as a conflict between man and society. In the struggle that, without knowing it, Bunin the artist wages with Vunin the thinker, the artist ultimately wins. He wins, first of all, because his artistic generalizations create truthful and impressive pictures, and his ideological position leads to repeatedly used schemes or to cases that are out of the ordinary, explaining illnesses of the spirit that distort the human psyche.

It cannot be said that Bunin’s works depicting pathology were written untruthfully. And you can feel the hand of a master in them. But they significantly narrow Bunin’s panorama of the world and do not throw a sufficiently wide and strong bridge into the everyday world in order to reveal its vices.

The story “Mitya’s Love” is one of Bunin’s works where there is a struggle between the artist and the thinker, and at the same time, it is here that the artist’s victory is especially convincing.

Mitya's languor, his thoughts of suicide every time the long-awaited letters from Katya do not arrive - all this is in the sphere of the subconscious, for with his consciousness Mitya has long ago realized that Katya is superficial, frivolous, and incapable of sincerely responding to his love. Mitya's affair with Alenka completes the collapse of his hopes for happiness. What in Katya’s behavior was shrouded in pompous phrases about vocation and art appears in its original, naked form in Alenka.

Katya differs from Alenka only in that she came into contact with “new” trends in culture and imagined herself to be a priestess of art.

In Mitya’s relationship with Alenka, the final collapse of the ideal occurs, spiritual and moral clothes are thrown off, and the inconsistency of feelings resting only on the call of sex is exposed.

The theme of buying and selling in the relationship between Mitya and Alenka deals a severe blow to the moral foundations of the old village. This time, Bunin recreates not the dull cruelty of rural existence, as in “Night Conversation,” but its spiritual poverty, cynicism and simplicity of morals, the power of the pure.

Ordinary and vulgar pimping acquires deep social meaning under the pen of a great artist. In Alenka, a young woman who has barely entered into life, the poetry of love is brutally and completely killed.

Guessing that the headman is bringing her together with Mitya, she willingly agrees to bargain and, flirting with the young man, says: “Is it true that you, barchuk, don’t live with women? What kind of sexton?” And, making an appointment with him, she very cynically declares: “... Do you want to go to the salash in the hollow in your garden? Just watch, don’t deceive me, - for nothing I don’t agree... This is not Moscow for you,” she said, looking at him from below with laughing eyes, “there, they say, the women do the carving themselves...”

The love scene in the hut was written by Bunin in detail, with frank details. And they are all subordinated to a common aesthetic concept. There is no perfect love that would give perfect happiness. Alenka is charming with her youth and freshness. As with Katya, harmony was felt with her only for moments, and it was all the more difficult to lose moments of happiness every time, to realize their ephemerality.

Like any Russian poet, I. A. Bunin absorbed the classical tradition of singing Russia. For him, who grew up on his father’s estate, among the dim and inaudible beauty of Russian nature, his homeland began here. We find echoes of this fascination already in the poet’s early poems, which are called: “To the Motherland” (1891), “Motherland” (1896). In the poem “Motherland” (1891), still largely imitative and decorative, Russia appears in the image of a poor peasant woman:

They mock you
They, O Motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity,
Poor

The view of black huts.

In the poem “Motherland,” the familiar Russian distance evokes a vague melancholy:

Under the sky of deathly lead
The winter day is gloomily fading,
And there is no end to the pine forests,
And far from the villages.

Many of Bunin’s early poems contain epic and fairy-tale motifs that take us back to Ancient Rus' and pre-Christian times - “At the Crossroads” (1900), “Vir” (1900), “After the Battle” (1903), “Eve of Kupala” (1903) ), "Steppe" (1912). In the poem “Steppe” you can even feel the epic chant:

The blue raven drinks his eyes dry,
Collects tribute piece by piece.
You are my side, my side,
Century-old

My wilderness!

This return to the roots was also characteristic of Russian culture at the beginning of the last century (suffice it to recall the paintings of V. Vasnetsov and the early N. Roerich, Russian fairy tales of A. N. Tolstoy). The epic ancient Rus' was gradually superimposed in the poet’s mind on modern Russia with its backwardness and poverty. The outbreak of World War aggravated the impending crisis. The premonition of disaster is evident in the poem “Eve”:

Here comes the demon-possessed army
And, like Mamai, he will pass through all of Rus'...
But the world is empty - who will save?
But there is no God - who should be punished?

But Russia revealed itself to Bunin not only in poverty and the abandonment of wretched villages. He saw it in the multicolored spring steppes, the scarlet evening sky, and the golden autumn groves:

A long whip shoots in a dry forest,
Cows are chattering in the bushes,
And blue snowdrops are blooming,
And an oak leaf rustles underfoot.
(“Youth”, 1916)
A sad long evening in October!
I loved late autumn in Russia.
I loved the crimson forest on the mountain,
The expanse of fields and dull twilight...
(“Desolation”, 1903)

The open spaces and landscapes are inspired by people, peaceful peasant farmers. Bunin describes them with tenderness:

Along the furrow, hurrying after the coulters
I leave soft traces -
So good with bare feet
Step onto the velvet of the warm furrow!
("Plowman", 1903–1906)
Bunin writes about his old nanny:
Why in the eyes
So much sorrow, meekness?...
Bast shoes on the feet,
Head wrapped up
Printed shawl,
Old short fur coat...
“Hello, dear friend!..”
("Nanny", 1906–1907)

Bunin, like his other contemporaries, was concerned about the fate of Russia. Already in one of his early stories, written in the 1900s, Bunin asked himself, looking sadly into the “terrible distances” of Russia: “What do we have in common with this wilderness? She is infinitely great, and should I understand her sorrows, should I help them? (“New Road”). Nevertheless, already in those years he intensively explored Russian reality, looking for something bright and worthy in it. This is how the stories “Antonov Apples”, “Pines”, “Meliton”, “Birds of Heaven” appeared. Unlike many contemporary writers, Bunin did not have a sense of the age-old guilt of an intellectual before the downtrodden and impoverished Russian peasantry. Therefore, in his stories about village life, in particular in “Antonov Apples,” they sometimes see a poeticization of serfdom. In fact, the fresh smell of Antonov apples symbolized for the writer, first of all, the health, simplicity and homeliness of the peasants, a reasonable working life, and the healthy foundations of village life. These foundations are based on inextricable ties with the earth. It was they who created a unique layer of national folk culture, which is gradually disappearing and being corroded by urban civilization. Therefore, the story “Antonov Apples” has the subtitle “Epitaph”. The village is humbled and orphaned. And Bunin’s stories seem to be a poem of the desolation of landowners’ nests and remote villages.

But Bunin’s heroes suffer not only and not so much from social injustice, from ruin and oppression. For the most part, his heroes (men, bankrupt landowners, priests, young ladies) think about the eternal questions of existence. The writer is keenly interested in the worldview of representatives of different social strata (peasants, commoners, landowners), the correlation of their spiritual experience, its origins and prospects. These interests did not take Bunin away from reality, for it was precisely this that determined the views and feelings of his characters. And the gap between external motivations and the actual state of affairs is especially painful for Bunin. At the same time, Bunin is far from idealizing the peasantry. He showed how centuries of slavery equally crippled the souls of both peasants and landowners, and how slave labor had a destructive effect on the human personality. The stories “Village” (1910), “Sukhodol” (1911), “Merry Yard” (1911), “Zakhar Vorobyov” (1912) and others, which the author himself later called “merciless,” showed readers a different, unusual Russia, revealed the self-consciousness of the masses at a turning point, revealed the contradictions of the Russian soul. Such, for example, is the main character of the story “Village” Kuzma Krasov, striving for light and goodness, but crushed by the stupid and difficult life and anger of the rest of the inhabitants of Durnovka. And “Sukhodol” mercilessly talks about the spiritual impoverishment of the barchuks, the decline of the “nests of the nobility” at the beginning of the last century.

Fate doomed Bunin to part with his homeland. However, his stories and poems, written far from Russia, are still inextricably linked with it, its breadth and absurdity. The heroes and heroines of his stories simply lived a natural life, trying to comprehend their own purpose on earth. At the same time, the writer’s own thoughts on the existing connections between the past and the future, the national and the universal, the momentary and the eternal, which determine the fate of Russia, are organically woven into the fabric of Bunin’s stories. He tried to understand what the character of a Russian person, the Russian soul, is. Bunin saw that life was changing, that there was no and could not be a return to the past. Therefore, in his stories, time inexorably counts down the time allotted to the old world. But he could not foresee what the new world would be like, what awaited Russia, describing with horror the bloody turmoil of the revolution in “Cursed Days.” Therefore, Bunin’s Russia remained a protected country of inspired landscapes and broken people, seeking and not finding their place in the new world order.

Love for people, for native places is the main direction in the poetry of the wonderful Russian writer I.A. Bunina. The most important motive of this poetry is the superiority of natural existence over social life. “It is possible to change society for the better only through rapprochement with nature, which is the source of the moral rebirth of people,” this is exactly what the great poet believed.

A lot of poems by I.A. Bunin dedicated to such a high feeling on earth as love. In his poem “And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn...” the poet shows nature, which is so dear to the heart of every person:

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

And the azure and the midday heat...

The time will come - the Lord will ask the prodigal son:

“Were you happy in your earthly life?”

And I’ll forget everything - I’ll only remember these

Wildflowers between ears and grasses

And from sweet tears I won’t have time to answer,

Falling to the merciful knees...

Bunin is a wonderful master of poetry, whose poems paint not a fictitious, but a real world, full of a high feeling - love. His poems are beautiful in their amazing, incredible accuracy. In them we find ourselves in the multicolored, joyfully bright world of nature. I.A. Bunin shows both his love for flocks of birds and his love for the sky, the steppe, and the sun. All this is love for his native land, love that the poet was able to convey in beautiful poems.

In one of these poems, Bunin admits how close the smell of lily of the valley is to him:

And forever became related to the pure one,

Young at heart

Damp-fresh, watery

Your sour smell!

Here are three definitions of smell, in place of which it is completely impossible to offer three others. And here we see with what feeling and how the poet relates to his beloved nature, in this case to the lily of the valley, the smell of which is so dear to man.

The poet loves the world around him and appreciates its beauty. In his poems, he selects words that create a sound image of the main thing he writes about. When we read a poem, we hear, for example, the buzzing of a beetle:

Coleoptera rustle -

And the dozing beetle

Pulled sadly

But a calm sound...

In this poem, the writer also made us understand how dear nature and his native land are to him.

In his poems I.A. Bunin is a great lover of life. Love for him is a sacred feeling, a state of his soul. The poet shows both man’s love for man and his love for nature, which made him truly happy. In the poem “Childhood” Bunin is happy about everything that happens, he is in a cheerful, joyful mood:

The hotter the day, the sweeter it is in the forest

Breathe in the dry, resinous aroma,

And I had fun in the morning

Wander through these sunny chambers!

Love and once again love - an eternal theme, which received such a touching and enlightened embodiment in the lyrics of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, worries us even today.