Life and death are eternal themes of art; writers have returned and will return to them, especially in crisis, transitional eras, such as the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in Russia. In the prose works of I. A. Bunin, these themes sound especially intense.
All true art affirms that life is beautiful. The prose of I. A. Bunin is no exception in this regard. Life is beautiful in all its manifestations, in every little thing you can feel the beat of its pulse. That is why Bunin’s most favorite word is “freshness”. For example, in the story “Antonov Apples” we read: “fresh morning”, “fresh winter crops”, “fresh forest”. Freshness means, above all, physical health. A fruitful, healthy life is the highest earthly blessing. And the “holiday of autumn” in “Antonov Apples” is a celebration of a lifetime.
However, in the prose of I. A. Bunin, life and death are not opposite to each other. Organism, naturalness of life is the key to a dignified death. For example, the story “Pines” tells about the death of the peasant hunter Mitrofan. Everything about him gives rise to a feeling of inner harmony and moral health: his brown face with turquoise eyes, and the way he enters the room, filling it with the freshness of the forest air. Before his death, when asked to go to the hospital, he replies: “You can’t hold on to the grass.” His non-vanity, inner majesty is akin to eternal nature. He came out of it and went into it, and the grave mound that covered his ashes is seen by the writer as “thinking and feeling.”
And in the story “The Mister from San Francisco,” the attitude towards death becomes a criterion for the consistency of life.
The death of the millionaire in the plot of the story is the only important event; it is described in great detail, and the main feeling that this description evokes is ugliness. The hero dies like an animal because he has no internal readiness for the end. Other characters also reveal their attitude towards death. Death is perceived by them as an unfortunate incident. According to I. A. Bunin, a person only feels the strength and richness of life when he feels the inevitability of death.
In the prose of I. A. Bunin, love becomes the point of intersection of life and death. The writer finds a mysterious connection between them. The more pessimistic he looks at life, the more often love in his depiction leads a person to the final, fatal point - to death. Love and death are united in human destiny itself, where, according to the writer, there is an inevitable payment for happiness. For example, the story “Natalie” ends with the unexpected death of the heroine, but her words remain in the memory for a long time: “Is there such a thing as unhappy love?.. Doesn’t the most mournful music in the world give happiness?” Life and love conquer death.
A. Tvardovsky called I. A. Bunin “in time the last of the classics of Russian literature.” This definition means not only the power of words and harmony of form inherent in the writer. He corresponded to his great predecessors with a deep philosophical understanding of the theme of life and death, their inextricable connection and incomprehensible mystery.
THEME OF LIFE AND DEATH. Speaking about the work of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, deeply pessimistic moods, sadness, and tragic thoughts about life and death are often noted. In the stories published during the Civil War (two collections - “The Cup of Life” and “The Gentleman from San Francisco”), the sense of the catastrophic nature of human life, the vanity of the search for “eternal happiness” is extremely acute. The contradictions of social life in these works are reflected in the sharp contrast of characters and opposition of the basic principles of existence. “He was painfully preoccupied with the fluidity of time, old age, death...” - confirmed the writer V. Nabokov. In this regard, one cannot help but recall the difficult fate of Bunin himself. Emigration became a tragic milestone in the writer’s biography, which influenced not only his future life, but also his worldview, views and ideas, which, of course, were reflected in his work. Bunin had to suddenly and forever leave his native Russian land, to which he was attached “with love to the point of heartache.” The tragedy of life was reflected in gloomy moods in the works of this period, in which the writer began to increasingly delve into philosophical reflections on the meaning of life and death.
Already in one of the first stories dedicated to parting with his native places (“To the ends of the world”), Bunin turns his mind’s eye to the endless Universe: “And only the stars and mounds listened to the dead silence on the steppe and the breathing of people who had forgotten their grief and distant roads..." And all the worries and worries of a person become meaningless in the face of eternity, in the face of inevitable death. But why does the topic of death arise so acutely in I. Bunin’s prose? Why does he speak with such heart-aching pain about the tragic fate of a people torn from their native land? Without a doubt, only a person who is wholeheartedly devoted to his homeland, whose life can only fully take place surrounded by native forests, fields, rivers, lakes and quiet village streets, can feel and acutely experience a people's tragedy so subtly. Yes, this person actually loves life with all his heart, and therefore a break with his homeland for him is tantamount to a break with life.
“People are not at all equally sensitive to death,” writes Bunin in “The Life of Arsenyev.” “There are people who live all their lives under its sign, and from infancy have a heightened sense of death (most often due to an equally heightened sense of life) ... I belong to such people.” The writer speaks on behalf of his hero, but in reality these are his own thoughts, his own deep feelings. It is no coincidence that “The Life of Arsenyev” is often classified as Bunin’s autobiographical works. It was this “heightened sense of death,” based on the same “heightened sense of life,” that was characteristic of the author himself. Constantly observing the irreversibly passing life, Bunin at the same time tries to combine, connect the existence of an individual person, an individual destiny with “eternity” and “infinity”. He tries to find in any transitory life signs of its continuation in historical development, signs of its infinity.
It is the realization that death is inevitable, combined with a great love for people and love for life, that makes the writer seriously think about his purpose, about what needs to be done in this life so as not to be forgotten, in order to “continue” in the future. That is why Bunin sees a certain “extension” of life in the inseparability of man and humanity, in building strong bridges between one and many, between the past, present and future of the entire people, the entire earth. “Blessed hours pass and... it is necessary, necessary... to preserve at least somehow and at least something, that is, to oppose death...” the writer noted. It is this idea that continues in many of his works.
For Bunin, the expression of unfulfilled hopes and the general tragedy of life becomes the feeling of love, in which he sees the only justification of existence. The idea of love as the highest value of life is the main pathos of Bunin’s works of the emigrant period. “Everything passes. “Everything is forgotten,” says the hero of the story “Dark Alleys” Nikolai Alekseevich, but Nadezhda objects to him: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.”
We cannot allow everything to be forgotten - this is the firm position of the author. This position was not always correctly understood by critics during the writer’s lifetime.
Bunin was openly outraged and upset by the misinterpretations of his works as “decadent,” “pessimistic,” and “joyless.” He did not agree that his work was the work of “fading”; it did not contain that “sadness of desolation”, which was often mentioned in reviews of his stories and stories. They wrote about the story “The Village” precisely as a work “frozen with light sadness and the lyricism of withering and desolation.” Bunin categorically disagreed with this: “This is a completely incorrect characterization. In fact, in “The Village” there is no trace of sadness or lyricism, just as there is no withering or desolation.” The story, as well as the writer’s other works, reflects only reality, and the sadness is caused precisely by the fact that this reality, the actual life of the Russian village, Bunin’s beloved homeland, is not as joyful as he would like.
As already mentioned, life for the writer was inextricably linked with his homeland. And only this life could he describe in his works. Bunin was homesick. A painful process of revaluation of values took place in him. The same Bunin, who in the first years after the revolution decided never to return to Soviet Russia, on the eve of the attack of Nazi Germany on his homeland in May 1941, wrote to N.D. Teleshov: “I really want to go home,” a few days later to A.N. Tolstoy - about the same thing. The latter began to work for permission for Bunin to return, but war broke out... Bunin suffered in separation from his homeland, which is why sometimes it seems that he is writing about the completion, the end of this life. That's how it was, in general. For a Russian writer, the need to leave his homeland can only be justified by the good for the homeland, the dream of its freedom and happiness. Bunin did not have this excuse. That is why the main motives for him are the finitude of existence, philosophical delving into the problems of life and death.
Despite all the leading role of tragic motives in different periods of creativity, this tragedy appears only when the author realizes the bitterness of life’s hardships and the hopelessness of wasted efforts. Then, when Bunin sees the significance of human activity, he comes to the idea of the eternal, including the eternal life of humanity. The work of I. A. Bunin is dear to us because his works capture life in its diverse manifestations. The main tone of his poetic words about Russia is sad: from elegy to extreme melancholy and despair. Nevertheless, in his poetry and prose, praise loudly sounds to everything living, blooming, everything human - that which is always dear and sacred. Bunin’s optimism can be expressed in the words of the hero of the sketch “Blind”, offended by life and yet glorifying it: “I walk, I breathe, I see, I feel - I carry life within me, its fullness and joy... This means that I perceive, accept everything that surrounds me, that is sweet, pleasant, related to me, evokes love in me. So life is, undoubtedly, love, kindness, and a decrease in love, kindness is always a decrease in life, there is already death.”
Life and death are eternal themes of art; writers have returned and will return to them, especially in crisis, transitional eras, such as the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in Russia. In the prose works of I. A. Bunin, these themes sound especially intense.
All true art affirms that life is beautiful. The prose of I. A. Bunin is no exception in this regard. Life is beautiful in all its manifestations, in every little thing you can feel the beat of its pulse. That is why Bunin’s most favorite word is “freshness”. For example, in the story “Antonov Apples” we read: “fresh morning”, “fresh winter crops”, “fresh forest”. Freshness means, above all, physical health. A fruitful, healthy life is the highest earthly blessing. And the “holiday of autumn” in “Antonov Apples” is a celebration of a lifetime.
However, in the prose of I. A. Bunin, life and death are not opposite to each other. Organism, naturalness of life is the key to a dignified death. For example, the story “Pines” tells about the death of the peasant hunter Mitrofan. Everything about him gives rise to a feeling of inner harmony and moral health: his brown face with turquoise eyes, and the way he enters the room, filling it with the freshness of the forest air.
Before his death, when asked to go to the hospital, he replies: “You can’t hold on to the grass.” His non-vanity, inner majesty is akin to eternal nature. He came out of it and went into it, and the grave mound that covered his ashes is seen by the writer as “thinking and feeling.”
And in the story “The Mister from San Francisco,” the attitude towards death becomes a criterion for the consistency of life.
The death of the millionaire in the plot of the story is the only important event; it is described in great detail, and the main feeling that this description evokes is ugliness. The hero dies like an animal because he has no internal readiness for the end. Other characters also reveal their attitude towards death. Death is perceived by them as an unfortunate incident. According to I. A. Bunin, a person only feels the strength and richness of life when he feels the inevitability of death.
In the prose of I. A. Bunin, love becomes the point of intersection of life and death. The writer finds a mysterious connection between them. The more pessimistic he looks at life, the more often love in his depiction leads a person to the final, fatal point - to death. Love and death are united in human destiny itself, where, according to the writer, there is an inevitable payment for happiness. For example, the story “Natalie” ends with the unexpected death of the heroine, but her words remain in the memory for a long time: “Is there such a thing as unhappy love?.. Doesn’t the most mournful music in the world give happiness?” Life and love conquer death.
A. Tvardovsky called I. A. Bunin “in time the last of the classics of Russian literature.” This definition means not only the power of words and harmony of form inherent in the writer. He corresponded to his great predecessors with a deep philosophical understanding of the theme of life and death, their inextricable connection and incomprehensible mystery.
Speaking about the work of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, deeply pessimistic moods, sadness, and tragic thoughts about life and death are often noted. In the stories published during the Civil War (two collections - "The Cup of Life" and "The Gentleman from San Francisco"), the sense of the catastrophic nature of human life, the vanity of the search for "eternal happiness" is extremely acute. The contradictions of social life in these works are reflected in the sharp contrast of characters and opposition of the basic principles of existence. “He was painfully preoccupied with the fluidity of time, old age, death...” - confirmed the writer V. Nabokov. In this regard, one cannot help but recall the difficult fate of Bunin himself. Emigration became a tragic milestone in the writer’s biography, which influenced not only his future life, but also his worldview, views and ideas, which, of course, were reflected in his work. Bunin had to suddenly and forever leave his native Russian land, to which he was attached “with love to the point of heartache.” The tragedy of life was reflected in gloomy moods in the works of this period, in which the writer began to increasingly delve into philosophical reflections on the meaning of life and death.
Already in one of the first stories dedicated to parting with his native places (“To the End of the World”), Bunin turns his mind’s eye to the infinite Universe: “And only the stars and mounds listened to the dead silence on the steppe and the breathing of people who had forgotten in their sleep their grief and distant roads..." And all the worries and worries of a person become meaningless in the face of eternity, in the face of inevitable death. But why does the topic of death arise so acutely in I. Bunin’s prose? Why does he speak with such heart-aching pain about the tragic fate of a people torn from their native land? Without a doubt, only a person who is wholeheartedly devoted to his homeland, whose life can only fully take place surrounded by native forests, fields, rivers, lakes and quiet village streets, can feel and acutely experience a people's tragedy so subtly. Yes, this person actually loves life with all his heart, and therefore a break with his homeland for him is tantamount to a break with life.
“People are not at all equally sensitive to death,” writes Bunin in “The Life of Arsenyev.” “There are people who live under its sign throughout their entire century, and from infancy have a heightened sense of death (most often due to an equally heightened sense of life) ... I belong to such people." The writer speaks on behalf of his hero, but in reality these are his own thoughts, his own deep feelings. It is no coincidence that “The Life of Arsenyev” is often classified as Bunin’s autobiographical works. It was this “heightened sense of death,” based on the same “heightened sense of life,” that was characteristic of the author himself. Constantly observing the irreversibly passing life, Bunin at the same time tries to combine, connect the existence of an individual person, an individual destiny with “eternity” and “infinity”. He tries to find in any transitory life signs of its continuation in historical development, signs of its infinity.
It is the realization that death is inevitable, combined with a great love for people and love for life, that makes the writer seriously think about his purpose, about what needs to be done in this life so as not to be forgotten, in order to “continue” for centuries. That is why Bunin sees a certain “extension” of life in the inseparability of man and humanity, in building strong bridges between one and many, between the past, present and future of the entire people, the entire earth. “The blissful hours pass and... it is necessary, it is necessary... to preserve at least somehow and at least something, that is, to oppose death...” the writer noted. It is this idea that continues in many of his works.
For Bunin, the expression of unfulfilled hopes and the general tragedy of life becomes the feeling of love, in which he sees the only justification of existence. The idea of love as the highest value of life is the main pathos of Bunin’s works of the emigrant period. “Everything passes. Everything is forgotten,” says the hero of the story “Dark Alleys” Nikolai Alekseevich, but Nadezhda objects to him: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.”
We cannot allow everything to be forgotten - this is the firm position of the author. This position was not always correctly understood by critics during the writer’s lifetime.
Bunin was openly outraged and upset by the misinterpretations of his works as “decadent,” “pessimistic,” and “joyless.” He did not agree that his work was the work of “fading”; he did not have that “sadness of desolation” that was often mentioned in reviews of his stories and novels. It was precisely as a work “frozen with light sadness and the lyricism of withering and desolation” that they wrote about the story “The Village”. Bunin categorically disagreed with this: “This is a completely incorrect characterization. In reality, in “The Village” there is no trace of sadness or lyricism, just as there is no withering or desolation.” The story, as well as the writer’s other works, reflects only reality, and the sadness is caused precisely by the fact that this reality - the actual life of the Russian village, Bunin’s beloved homeland - is not as joyful as he would like.
As already mentioned, life for the writer was inextricably linked with his homeland. And only this life could he describe in his works. Bunin was homesick. A painful process of revaluation of values took place in him. The same Bunin, who in the first years after the revolution decided never to return to Soviet Russia, on the eve of the attack of Nazi Germany on his homeland in May 1941, wrote to N.D. Teleshov: “I really want to go home,” a few days later to A.N. Tolstoy - about the same thing. The latter began to work for permission for Bunin to return, but war broke out... Bunin suffered in separation from his homeland, which is why sometimes it seems that he is writing about the completion, the end of this life. That's how it was, in general. For a Russian writer, the need to leave his homeland can only be justified by the good for the homeland, the dream of its freedom and happiness. Bunin did not have this excuse. That is why the main motives for him are the finitude of existence, philosophical delving into the problems of life and death.
Despite all the leading role of tragic motives in different periods of creativity, this tragedy appears only when the author realizes the bitterness of life’s hardships and the hopelessness of wasted efforts. Then, when Bunin sees the significance of human activity, he comes to the idea of the eternal, including the eternal life of humanity. The work of I. A. Bunin is dear to us because his works capture life in its diverse manifestations. The main tone of his poetic words about Russia is sad: from elegy to extreme melancholy and despair. Nevertheless, in his poetry and prose, praise loudly sounds to everything living, blooming, everything human - that which is always dear and sacred. Bunin’s optimism can be expressed in the words of the hero of the sketch “The Blind Man,” who is offended by life and yet glorifies it: “I walk, I breathe, I see, I feel - I carry within me life, its fullness and joy... This means that I perceive “I accept everything that surrounds me, that it is sweet, pleasant, related to me, that evokes love in me. So life is, undoubtedly, love, goodness, and a decrease in love, kindness is always a decrease in life, there is already death.”
In the works of I. A. Bunin, life is revealed in all its diversity, in the interweaving of dark and light sides. Two principles fight in his works: darkness and light, life and death. A premonition of death and upheaval, a feeling of tragedies and catastrophes in the life of society and in the life of every person emanates from Bunin’s stories.
"Easy breathing." What do these words in the title of the story mean? What is this? Behavior, character trait, sense of life? Or something else?
Already from the first lines of the story, a dual feeling arises: “a sad deserted cemetery”, “a gray April day”, “a cold wind” - and “on the cross... a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.” Death and life. They were a symbol of the fate of Olya Meshcherskaya.
A strange composition - from the fact of death to the heroine’s childhood and adolescence, to her recent past, to her origins.
Olga was young, naive, charming, easy-going. She circled through life: at balls, at the skating rink, at the gymnasium. She did unexpected things: the half-childish behavior of a high school student and the admission that she was a woman; a cheerful conversation in the strict office of a classy lady and an entry in the diary after a connection with my father’s 56-year-old friend Milyutin: “I don’t understand how this could happen. I've lost my mind..." Even today Olya was talking with inspiration with her friends about the charm of a woman, and already “a month later a Cossack officer, ugly and plebeian in appearance...
shot her on the platform." Olya's death was as unexpected and easy as her life.
Why? Why did this happen? The author does not talk about the reasons; he directs us to the secret springs of Olya’s life. Yes, she had that light and natural breathing that neither her schoolgirl friends, nor Milyutin, nor the classy lady lacked. But pure and light impulses in the real world, sadly, are doomed.
In another story - “The Master from San Francisco” - the epigraph already reflects the tragedy of not just one person, but of the modern world: “Woe to you, Babylon, strong city.” Bunin reflects on life and death, on the meaning of life, on the true values of life, on its instantaneity and the inevitability of death. “Life is the road to death,” wrote I. A. Bunin.
The gentleman from San Francisco devoted his entire life, fifty-eight years, to personal enrichment and accumulation of capital, and “did not live at all, but existed.” And one day, deciding that he had earned the right to rest and pleasure, he went on a trip with his wife and daughter. A rich American could afford everything: luxurious cabins and hotel rooms, gourmet meals, and first-class service. He felt like one of those “masters of life”; on which depend “the style of tuxedos, the declaration of wars, and the welfare of hotels.” Although “no one remembered his name either in Naples or Capri...” The gentleman from San Francisco was of little interest in the history and culture of the countries where he arrived. It was important to show oneself: “And how the Gentleman from San Francisco walked across the stage among them towards some medieval arch.” Treating everything arrogantly, he felt superior in this luxurious world. And the world rewarded him according to his money. But the gentleman from San Francisco never thought about another world - about the spiritual. I never thought about the true values of life. And when he died, unexpectedly, suddenly, he became a burden to everyone. And they sent him on his way back in a soda box in the hold of the Atlantis, hiding him from the society in which he had recently shone.
What awaits the Atlantis on its way, with death lurking in its hold?
What awaits this world?
Its fate is tragic, just like the fate of the steamship, “heavily overcome by the darkness, the ocean, the blizzard...” - Bunin leads the reader to this conclusion.