Bunin is a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late 19th – first half of the 20th centuries. His genius talent, skill as a poet and prose writer, which became classic, amazed his contemporaries and captivates us living today. His works preserve the real Russian literary language, which is now lost.
Works about love occupy a large place in Bunin’s work in exile. The writer has always been worried about the mystery of this strongest of human feelings. In 1924 he wrote the story “Mitya’s Love”, the following year - “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “Sunstroke”. And in the late 30s and during the Second World War, Bunin created 38 short stories about love, which made up his book “Dark Alleys,” published in 1946. Bunin considered this book his “best work in terms of conciseness, painting and literary skill "
Love in Bunin’s depiction amazes not only with the power of artistic representation, but also with its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. They rarely break through to the surface: most people will not experience their fatal effects until the end of their days. Such a depiction of love unexpectedly gives Bunin’s sober, “merciless” talent a romantic glow. The proximity of love and death, their conjugation were obvious facts for Bunin and were never subject to doubt. However, the catastrophic nature of existence, the fragility of human relationships and existence itself - all these favorite Bunin themes after the gigantic social cataclysms that shook Russia were filled with a new formidable meaning, as is, for example, seen in the story “Mitya’s Love”. “Love is beautiful” and “Love is doomed” - these concepts, having finally come together, coincided, carrying in the depths, in the grain of each story, the personal grief of Bunin the emigrant.
Bunin's love lyrics are not great in quantity. It reflects the poet's confused thoughts and feelings about the mystery of love... One of the main motives of love lyrics is loneliness, unattainability or the impossibility of happiness. For example, “How bright, how elegant spring is!..”, “A calm gaze, like the gaze of a doe...”, “At a late hour we were in the field with her...”, “Loneliness”, “Sadness of eyelashes, shining and black...” etc.
Bunin's love lyrics are passionate, sensual, saturated with a thirst for love and are always filled with tragedy, unfulfilled hopes, memories of past youth and lost love.
I.A. Bunin has a very unique view of love relationships that distinguishes him from many other writers of that time.
In Russian classical literature of that time, the theme of love always occupied an important place, with preference given to spiritual, “platonic” love
before sensuality, carnal, physical passion, which was often debunked. The purity of Turgenev's women became a household name. Russian literature is predominantly the literature of “first love”.
The image of love in Bunin’s work is a special synthesis of spirit and flesh. According to Bunin, the spirit cannot be comprehended without knowing the flesh. I. Bunin defended in his works a pure attitude towards the carnal and physical. He did not have the concept of female sin, as in “Anna Karenina”, “War and Peace”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” by L.N. Tolstoy, there was no wary, hostile attitude towards the feminine, characteristic of N.V. Gogol, but there was no vulgarization of love. His love is an earthly joy, a mysterious attraction of one sex to another.
The works devoted to the theme of love and death (often touching in Bunin) are “The Grammar of Love”, “Easy Breathing”, “Mitya’s Love”, “Caucasus”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Henry”, “Natalie”, “Cold Autumn”, etc. It has long been and very correctly noted that love in Bunin’s work is tragic. The writer is trying to unravel the mystery of love and the mystery of death, why they often come into contact in life, what is the meaning of this. Why does the nobleman Khvoshchinsky go crazy after the death of his beloved, the peasant woman Lushka, and then almost deifies her image (“The Grammar of Love”). Why does the young high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who, as it seemed to her, have the amazing gift of “easy breathing”, die, just starting to blossom? The author does not answer these questions, but through his works he makes it clear that this has a certain meaning in human earthly life.
The complex emotional experiences of the hero of the story “Mitya’s Love” are described with brilliance and stunning psychological tension by Bunin. This story caused controversy; the writer was reproached for excessive descriptions of nature and for the implausibility of Mitya’s behavior. But we already know that Bunin’s nature is not a background, not a decoration, but one of the main characters, and especially in “Mitya’s Love.” Through the depiction of the state of nature, the author surprisingly accurately conveys Mitya’s feelings, mood and experiences.
One can call “Mitya’s Love” a psychological story in which the author accurately and faithfully embodied Mitya’s confused feelings and the tragic end of his life.
“Dark Alleys,” a book of stories about love, can be called an encyclopedia of love dramas. “She talks about the tragic and about many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing that I have written in my life...” - Bunin admitted to Teleshov in 1947.
The heroes of “Dark Alleys” do not resist nature; often their actions are completely illogical and contradict generally accepted morality (an example of this is the sudden passion of the heroes in the story “Sunstroke”). Bunin’s love “on the brink” is almost a violation of the norm, going beyond the boundaries of everyday life. For Bunin, this immorality can even be said to be a certain sign of the authenticity of love, since ordinary morality turns out, like everything established by people, to be a conventional scheme into which the elements of natural, living life do not fit.
When describing risky details related to the body, when the author must be impartial so as not to cross the fragile line separating art from pornography, Bunin, on the contrary, worries too much - to the point of spasm in the throat, to the point of passionate trembling: “... it just went dark in the eyes at the sight of her pinkish body with a tan on shiny shoulders... her eyes turned black and widened even more, her lips parted feverishly” (“Galya Ganskaya”). For Bunin, everything connected with gender is pure and significant, everything is shrouded in mystery and even holiness.
As a rule, the happiness of love in “Dark Alleys” is followed by separation or death. The heroes revel in intimacy, but
it leads to separation, death, murder. Happiness cannot last forever. Natalie "died on Lake Geneva in premature birth." Galya Ganskaya was poisoned. In the story “Dark Alleys,” the master Nikolai Alekseevich abandons the peasant girl Nadezhda - for him this story is vulgar and ordinary, but she loved him “all century.” In the story "Rusya", the lovers are separated by the hysterical mother of Rusya.
Bunin allows his heroes only to taste the forbidden fruit, to enjoy it - and then deprives them of happiness, hopes, joys, even life. The hero of the story “Natalie” loved two people at once, but did not find family happiness with either one. In the story “Henry” there is an abundance of female characters for every taste. But the hero remains lonely and free from the “women of men.”
Bunin's love does not go into the family channel and is not resolved by a happy marriage. Bunin deprives his heroes of eternal happiness, deprives them because they get used to it, and habit leads to loss of love. Love out of habit cannot be better than lightning-fast but sincere love. The hero of the story “Dark Alleys” cannot tie himself into family ties with the peasant woman Nadezhda, but having married another woman from his circle, he does not find family happiness. The wife cheated, the son was a spendthrift and a scoundrel, the family itself turned out to be “the most ordinary vulgar story.” However, despite its short duration, love still remains eternal: it is eternal in the hero’s memory precisely because it is fleeting in life.
A distinctive feature of love in Bunin’s depiction is the combination of seemingly incompatible things. It is no coincidence that Bunin once wrote in his diary: “And again, again such an unspeakable - sweet sadness from that eternal deception of another spring, hopes and love for the whole world that you want with tears
gratitude to kiss the ground. Lord, Lord, why are you torturing us like this?”
The strange connection between love and death is constantly emphasized by Bunin, and therefore it is no coincidence that the title of the collection “Dark Alleys” here does not mean “shady” at all - these are dark, tragic, tangled labyrinths of love.
About the book of stories “Dark Alleys” G. Adamovich rightly wrote: “All love is great happiness, a “gift of the gods,” even if it is not shared. That’s why Bunin’s book exudes happiness, that’s why it’s imbued with gratitude to life, to the world, in which, despite all its imperfections, happiness can happen.”
True love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, and tragedy. This conclusion, albeit late, is reached by many of Bunin’s heroes who have lost, overlooked, or destroyed their love. In this late repentance, late spiritual resurrection, enlightenment of the heroes lies that all-purifying melody, which speaks of the imperfection of people who have not yet learned to live, recognize and value real feelings, and of the imperfection of life itself, social conditions, the environment, circumstances that often interfere with truly human relationships, and most importantly - about those high emotions that leave an unfading trace of spiritual beauty, generosity, devotion and purity.
Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his destiny uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning.
This mystery of existence becomes the theme of Bunin’s story “The Grammar of Love” (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on the way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “an incomprehensible love that turned an entire human life into some kind of ecstatic life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life,” if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushki. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good-looking,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some dazed, focused soul?” According to neighboring landowners. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the district as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and sat on her bed for more than twenty years...” What can you call it? is this a twenty year seclusion? Insanity? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all clear.
The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakening in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint.” What made Ivlev buy from Khvoshchinsky’s heir “at an expensive price” a small book “The Grammar of Love”, which the old landowner did not part with, cherishing the memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what his orphaned soul was fed for many years. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandsons” who have heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved,” and along with them the reader of Bunin’s work, will try to reveal the secret of this inexplicable feeling.
An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure” shakes the lieutenant’s soul. Having parted with a beautiful stranger, he cannot find peace. At the thought of the impossibility of meeting this woman again, “he felt such pain and the uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.” The author convinces the reader of the seriousness of the feelings experienced by the hero of the story. The lieutenant feels “terribly unhappy in this city.” “Where to go? What to do?" - he thinks lost. The depth of the hero’s spiritual insight is clearly expressed in the final phrase of the story: “The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling himself ten years older.” How to explain what happened to him? Maybe the hero came into contact with that great feeling that people call love, and the feeling of the impossibility of loss led him to realize the tragedy of existence?
The torment of a loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the destinies of Bunin's heroes by love, and time has no power over it.
The story “Dark Alleys” (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. – Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost “the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and the fact that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the Petegbug house, the mother of his children... This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.
How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.
A passionate and deep feeling permeates the last, fifth book of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” - “Lika”. It was based on the transformed experiences of Bunin himself, his youthful love for V.V. Pashchenko. In the novel, death and oblivion recede before the power of love, before the heightened sense - of the hero and the author - of life.
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.
Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always a modern writer who arouses deep reader interest.
Abstract on literature
Topic: “The theme of love in the works of Bunin”
Completed
Student of the "" class
Moscow 2004
List of used literature
1. O.N. Mikhailov – “Russian literature of the 20th century”
2. S.N. Morozov - “The Life of Arsenyev. Stories”
3. B.K. Zaitsev - “Youth - Ivan Bunin”
4. Literary critical articles.
All love is happiness
even if it is not divided.
I. Bunin
Many of I. A. Bunin’s works, and above all his stories about love, reveal to us his subtle and observant soul as a writer-artist, writer-psychologist, writer-lyricist.
The “Dark Alleys” cycle is a collection of short stories, life sketches, the main theme of which is a high and bright human feeling. And here Bunin appears as a bold innovator, how frank, naturalistically distinct and at the same time light, transparent, elusive love is in these stories.
All Bunin's stories about love have a unique plot and original lyrical characters. But they are all united by a common “core”: the suddenness of love insight, the passion and short duration of the relationship, the tragic outcome. This happens because true love, as the writer believed, is doomed to be only a flash and cannot be prolonged.
Love is spoken of as the highest gift of fate in the story “Sunstroke.” But here, too, the tragedy of a high feeling is aggravated precisely by the fact that it is mutual and too beautiful to last without turning into commonplace.
Surprisingly, despite the unhappy endings of the stories, Bunin’s love is almost always perfect, harmonious, mutual, and neither quarrels nor the prose of life can spoil or undermine it. Maybe that's why it's so short? After all, these moments of relationships that elevate both a man and a woman do not pass without a trace, they remain in memory as landmarks and reliable light beacons to which people return throughout their lives. Material from the site
The dissimilarity of the “love plots” of Bunin’s stories helps us understand the diversity, individuality, uniqueness of each love story: happy or unhappy, mutual or unrequited, elevating or destroying... Throughout life, a person can more than once touch this mystery that arises deeply in the heart and turning it over, painting the whole world in bright colors - and every time his love will be new, fresh, unlike the past... I think this is exactly what I. A. Bunin wanted to convey in his stories.
What is love? “A strong attachment to someone, ranging from inclination to passion; strong desire, desire; the choice and preference of someone or something by will, by will (not by reason), sometimes completely unaccountably and recklessly,” V. I. Dahl’s dictionary tells us. However, every person who has experienced this feeling at least once will be able to add something of their own to this definition. “All the pain, tenderness, come to your senses, come to your senses!” - I. A. Bunin would add.
The great Russian emigrant writer and prose poet has a very special love. She is not the same as his great predecessors described her: N. I. Karamzin, V. A. Zhukovsky, I. A. Goncharov, I. S. Turgenev. According to I. A. Bunin, love is not an idealized feeling, and his heroines are not “Turgenev’s young ladies” with their naivety and romance. However, Bunin’s understanding of love does not coincide with today’s interpretation of this feeling. The writer does not consider only the physical side of love, as the majority of the media do today, and with them many writers, considering this to be in demand. He (I. A. Bunin) writes about love, which is the merging of “earth” and “sky,” the harmony of two opposite principles. And it is precisely this understanding of love that seems to me (as, I think, to many who are familiar with the writer’s love lyrics) the most truthful, faithful and necessary for modern society.
In his narration, the author does not hide anything from the reader, does not hold back anything, but at the same time does not stoop to vulgarity. Speaking about intimate human relationships, I. A. Bunin, thanks to his highest skill and ability to choose the only true, necessary words, never crosses the line that separates high art from naturalism.
Before I. A. Bunin in Russian literature, “no one had ever written about love like this.” He not only decided to show the always remaining secret sides of the relationship between a man and a woman. His works about love also became masterpieces of the classical, strict, but at the same time expressive and capacious Russian language.
Love in the works of I. A. Bunin is like a flash, insight, “sunstroke.” More often than not, it does not bring happiness; it is followed by separation or even the death of the heroes. But, despite this, Bunin’s prose is a celebration of love: each story makes you feel how wonderful and important this feeling is for a person.
The cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” is the pinnacle of the writer’s love lyrics. “She talks about the tragic and about many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life,” said I. A. Bunin about his book. And, indeed, the collection, written in 1937-1944 (when I. A. Bunin was about seventy), can be considered an expression of the writer’s mature talent, a reflection of his life experience, thoughts, feelings, personal perception of life and love.
In this research work, I set myself the goal of tracing how Bunin’s philosophy of love was born, considering its evolution and, at the end of my research, formulating the concept of love according to I. A. Bunin, highlighting its main points. To achieve this goal, I needed to solve the following tasks.
First, consider the writer’s early stories, such as “At the Dacha” (1895), “Velga” (1895), “Without Family and Tribe” (1897), “In the Autumn” (1901), and, identifying their characteristic features and Having found common features with the later work of I. A. Bunin, answer the questions: “How did the theme of love arise in the writer’s work? What are they, these thin trees, from which, forty years later, “Dark Alleys” will grow?”
Secondly, my task was to analyze the writer’s stories of the 1920s, paying attention to which features of I. A. Bunin’s work, acquired during this period, were reflected in the writer’s main book about love, and which were not. In addition, in my work I tried to show how in the works of Ivan Alekseevich, relating to this period of time, two main motives are intertwined, which became fundamental in the writer’s later stories. These are the motives of love and death, which in their combination give rise to the idea of the immortality of love.
As the basis for my research, I took the method of systemic-structural reading of Bunin’s prose, considering the formation of the author’s philosophy of love from early works to later ones. Factor analysis was also used in the work.
Literature review
I. A. Bunin was called “a poet in prose and a prose writer in poetry,” therefore, in order to show his perception of love from various sides, and somewhere in order to confirm my assumptions, in my work I turned not only to collections of stories writer, but also to his poems, in particular to those published in the first volume of the collected works of I. A. Bunin.
The work of I. A. Bunin, like any other writer, is in undoubted connection with his life and destiny. Therefore, in my work I also used facts from the writer’s biography. They were suggested to me by Oleg Mikhailov’s books “The Life of Bunin. Only the word is given life” and Mikhail Roshchin “Ivan Bunin”.
“Everything is known by comparison,” these wise words prompted me to, in a study devoted to the philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, also turn to the positions of other famous people: writers and philosophers. “Russian Eros or the philosophy of love in Russia,” compiled by V.P. Shestakov, helped me do this.
To find out the opinion of literary scholars on issues that interested me, I turned to criticism from various authors, for example, articles in the magazine “Russian Literature”, the book by Doctor of Philology I. N. Sukhikh “Twenty Books of the 20th Century” and others.
Of course, the most important part of the source material for my research, its basis and inspiration were the very works of I. A. Bunin about love. I found them in books such as “I. A. Bunin. Novels, stories”, published in the series “Russian classics about love”, “Dark Alleys. Diaries 1918-1919" (series "World Classics"), and collected works edited by various authors (A. S. Myasnikov, B. S. Ryurikov, A. T. Tvardovsky and Yu. V. Bondarev, O. N. Mikhailov , V. P. Rynkevich).
Philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin
Chapter 1. The appearance of the theme of love in the writer’s work
“The problem of love has not yet been developed in my works. And I feel an urgent need to write about this,” says I. A. Bunin in the fall of 1912 to a correspondent of the “Moskovskaya Gazeta”. 1912 – the writer is already 42 years old. Was it possible that before this time the topic of love had not interested him? Or perhaps he himself did not experience this feeling? Not at all. By this time (1912), Ivan Alekseevich had experienced many days, both happy and full of disappointment and suffering from unrequited love.
We were then - you were sixteen,
I am seventeen years old,
But do you remember how you opened
Moonlight door? – this is what I. A. Bunin wrote in his 1916 poem “On a quiet night the late moon came out.” It is a reflection of one of those hobbies that I. A. Bunin experienced when he was very young. There were many such hobbies, but only one of them grew into a truly strong, all-consuming love, which became the sadness and joy of the young poet for four whole years. It was love for the doctor’s daughter Varvara Pashchenko.
He met her at the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik in 1890. At first he perceived her with hostility, considering her “proud and foppish,” but they soon became friends, and a year later the young writer realized that he was in love with Varvara Vladimirovna. But their love was not cloudless. I. A. Bunin adored her frantically, passionately, but she was changeable towards him. Everything was further complicated by the fact that Varvara Pashchenko’s father was much richer than Ivan Alekseevich. In the fall of 1894, their painful relationship ended - Pashchenko married I. A. Bunin’s friend Arseny Bibikov. After the break with Varya, I. A. Bunin was in such a state that his loved ones feared for his life.
If only it were possible
To love yourself alone,
If only we could forget the past, -
Everything you've already forgotten
Wouldn't embarrass, wouldn't frighten
Eternal darkness of eternal night:
Satisfied eyes
I would love to close it! - I. A. Bunin will write in 1894. However, despite all the suffering associated with her, this love and this woman will forever remain in the writer’s soul as something, although tragic, but still beautiful.
On September 23, 1898, I. A. Bunin hastily married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni. Two days before the wedding, he ironically writes to his friend N.D. Teleshov: “I’m still single, but - alas! “I’ll soon turn into a married man.” The family of I. A. Bunin and A. N. Tsakni lasted only a year and a half. At the beginning of March 1900, their final break occurred, which I. A. Bunin took very hard. “Don’t be angry at the silence - the devil will break a leg in my soul,” he wrote to a friend at that time.
Several years have passed. The bachelor life of I. A. Bunin has exhausted itself. He needed a person who could support him, an understanding life partner who shared his interests. Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the daughter of a professor at Moscow University, became such a woman in the writer’s life. The date of the beginning of their union can be considered April 10, 1907, when Vera Nikolaevna decided to go with I.A. Bunin on a trip to the Holy Land. “I dramatically changed my life: from a sedentary life I turned it into a nomadic one for almost twenty years,” wrote V.N. Muromtseva about this day in her “Conversations with Memory.”
So, we see that by the age of forty, I. A. Bunin managed to experience a passionate love for V. Pashchenko to the point of oblivion, and an unsuccessful marriage with Anya Tsakni, many other novels and, finally, a meeting with V. N. Muromtseva. How could these events, which, it seems, should have brought the writer so many experiences related to love, not affected his work? They were reflected - the theme of love began to sound in Bunin’s works. But why then did he say that it was “not being developed”? To answer this question, let's take a closer look at the stories written by I. A. Bunin before 1912.
Almost all works written by Ivan Alekseevich during this period are of a social nature. The writer tells the stories of those who live in the village: small landowners, peasants, and compares the village and the city and the people living in them (the story “News from the Motherland” (1893)). However, these works cannot do without love themes. Only the feelings experienced by the hero for a woman disappear almost immediately after they appear, and are not the main ones in the plots of the stories. The author does not seem to allow these feelings to develop. “In the spring, he noticed that his wife, an impudently beautiful young woman, began to have some special conversations with the teacher,” writes I. A. Bunin in his story “Teacher” (1894). However, literally two paragraphs later on the pages of this work we read: “But somehow a relationship did not develop between her and the teacher.”
The image of a beautiful young girl, and with it the feeling of slight love, appears in the story “At the Dacha” (1895): “Either smiling or grimacing, she absentmindedly looked with her blue eyes at the sky. Grisha passionately wanted to come up and kiss her on the lips.” We will see “her”, Marya Ivanovna, on the pages of the story only a few times. I. A. Bunin will make her feelings for Grisha, and his feelings for her, nothing more than flirting. The story will be of a socio-philosophical nature, and love will play only an episodic role in it.
In the same year, 1895, but a little later “Velga” (originally “Northern Legend”) also appears. This is a story about the unrequited love of a girl Velga for her childhood friend Irvald. She confesses her feelings to him, but he replies: “Tomorrow I will go to sea again, and when I return, I will take Sneggar’s hand” (Sneggar is Velga’s sister). Velga is tormented by jealousy, but when she finds out that her beloved has disappeared at sea and that only she can save him, she sails away to the “wild cliff at the end of the world,” where her beloved is languishing. Velga knows that she is destined to die and that Irvald will never know about her sacrifice, but this does not stop her. “He instantly woke up from a scream - his friend’s voice touched his heart - but, looking, he saw only a seagull flying up screaming above the boat,” writes I. A. Bunin.
By the emotions evoked by this story, we recognize in it the predecessor of the “Dark Alleys” series: love does not lead to happiness, on the contrary, it becomes a tragedy for a girl in love, but she, having experienced feelings that brought her pain and suffering, does not regret anything , “joy sounds in her lamentations.”
In style, “Velga” differs from all works written by I. A. Bunin both before and after it. This story has a very special rhythm, which is achieved through inversion, the reverse order of words (“And Velga began to sing sonorous songs on the seashore through her tears”). The story resembles the legend not only in its style of speech. The characters in it are depicted schematically, their characters are not described. The basis of the narrative is a description of their actions and feelings, however, the feelings are quite superficial, often clearly indicated by the author even in the speech of the characters themselves, for example: “I want to cry that you were gone for so long, and I want to laugh that I see you again” (words Velgi).
In his first story about love, I. A. Bunin is looking for a way to express this feeling. But a poetic narrative in the form of a legend does not satisfy him - there will no longer be such works as “Velga” in the writer’s work. I. A. Bunin continues to search for words and forms to describe love.
In 1897, the story “Without Family or Tribe” appeared. It, unlike “Velga”, is written in the usual Bunin style - emotional, expressive, with a description of many shades of mood that add up to a single feeling of life at one time or another. In this work, the protagonist becomes the narrator, which we will subsequently see in almost all Bunin’s stories about love. However, when reading the story “Without Family or Tribe,” it becomes clear that the writer has not yet finally formulated for himself the answer to the question: “What is love?” Almost the entire work is a description of the hero’s state after he learns that Zina, the girl he loves, is marrying someone else. The author's attention is focused precisely on these feelings of the hero, while love itself, the relationship between the characters, is presented in the light of the breakup that occurred and is not the main thing in the story.
There are two women in the life of the main character: Zina, whom he loves, and Elena, whom he considers his friend. Two women and the different, unequal relationships towards them that appeared in I. A. Bunin in this story can also be seen in “Dark Alleys” (stories “Zoika and Valeria”, “Natalie”), but in a slightly different light.
To conclude the conversation about the emergence of the theme of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, one cannot help but mention the story “In Autumn,” written in 1901. “Made by an unfree, tense hand,” A.P. Chekhov wrote about him in one of his letters. In this statement, the word “tense” sounds like criticism. However, it is precisely the tension, the concentration of all feelings in a short period of time and the style, as if accompanying this situation, “unfree”, that make up the whole charm of the story.
“Well, I have to go!” - she says and leaves. He follows. And, full of excitement, unconscious fear of each other, they go to the sea. “We quickly walked through leaves and puddles, along some high alley towards the cliffs,” we read at the end of the third part of the story. “alley” seems to be a symbol of future works, “Dark Alleys” of love, and the word “precipice” seems to personify everything that should happen between the heroes. And indeed, in the story “In Autumn” we see for the first time love the way it will appear to us in the writer’s later works - a flash, an insight, a step over the edge of a cliff.
“Tomorrow I will remember this night with horror, but now I don’t care. I love you,” says the heroine of the story. And we understand that he and she are destined to part, but that both of them will never forget these few hours of happiness that they spent together.
The plot of the story “In Autumn” is very similar to the plots of “Dark Alleys,” as well as the fact that the author does not indicate the names of either the hero or the heroine and that his character is barely outlined, while she occupies the main place in the story. This work also has in common with the “Dark Alleys” cycle the way the hero, and with him the author, treats a woman - reverently, with admiration: “she was incomparable,” “her pale, happy and tired face seemed to me like the face of an immortal " However, all these obvious similarities are not the main thing that makes the story “In Autumn” similar to the stories of “Dark Alleys”. There is something more important. And this is the feeling that these works evoke, a feeling of fragility, transience, but at the same time the extraordinary power of love.
Chapter 2. Love as a fatal shock
The works of I. A. Bunin in the 1920s
Works about love written by Ivan Alekseevich Bunin from the autumn of 1924 to the autumn of 1925 (“Mitya’s Love”, “Sunstroke”, “Ida”, “The Case of Cornet Elagin”), despite all the striking differences, are united by one idea that underlies each of them. This idea is love as a shock, “sunstroke,” a fatal feeling that brings, along with moments of joy, enormous suffering, which fills a person’s entire existence and leaves an indelible mark on his life. This understanding of love, or rather its prerequisites, can be seen in the early stories of I. A. Bunin, for example, in the story “In Autumn,” discussed earlier. However, the theme of the fatal predetermination and tragedy of this feeling is truly revealed by the author precisely in the works of the 1920s.
The hero of the story “Sunstroke” (1925), a lieutenant accustomed to taking love adventures lightly, meets a woman on a ship, spends the night with her, and in the morning she leaves. “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. It’s like an eclipse hit me, or rather, we both got something like sunstroke,” she tells him before leaving. The lieutenant “somehow easily” agrees with her, but when she leaves, he suddenly realizes that this is not a simple road adventure. This is something more, making him feel “the pain and uselessness of his entire future life without her,” without this “little woman” who remained a stranger to him.
“The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older,” we read at the end of the story, and it becomes clear that the hero experienced a strong, all-consuming feeling. Love, Love with a capital letter, capable of becoming the most precious thing in a person’s life and at the same time his torment and tragedy.
We will see love-moment, love-flash in the story “Ida”, also written in 1925. The hero of this work is a middle-aged composer. He has a “stocky body”, a “wide peasant face with narrow eyes”, a “short neck” - the image of a seemingly rather rude man, incapable, at first glance, of sublime feelings. But this is only at first glance. While in a restaurant with friends, the composer conducts his story in an ironic, mocking tone; it is awkward and unusual for him to talk about love, he even attributes the story that happened to him to his friend.
The hero talks about events that took place several years ago. Her friend Ida often visited the house where he and his wife lived. She is young, pretty, with “rare harmony and naturalness of movements”, lively “violet eyes”. It should be noted that it was the story “Ida” that can be considered the beginning of I. A. Bunin’s creation of full-fledged female images. This short work notes, as if in passing, in passing, those traits that the writer extolled in a woman: naturalness, following the aspirations of her heart, frankness in her feelings towards herself and her loved one.
However, let's return to the story. The composer does not seem to pay attention to Ida and, when one day she stops visiting their house, he does not even think to ask his wife about her. Two years later, the hero accidentally meets Ida at the railway station and there, among the snowdrifts, “on some farthest, side platform,” she unexpectedly confesses her love to him. She kisses him “with one of those kisses that is remembered later not only to the grave, but also in the grave,” and leaves.
The narrator says that when he met Ida at that station, hearing her voice, “he understood only one thing: that, it turns out, he had been brutally in love with this same Ida for many years.” And it is enough to look at the end of the story to understand that the hero still loves her, painfully, tenderly, nevertheless knowing that they cannot be together: “the composer suddenly tore off his hat and, with all his strength, shouted at entire area:
My sun! My beloved! Hurray!”
Both in “Sunstroke” and in “Ida” we see the impossibility of happiness for lovers, a kind of doom, a fate that dominates them. All these motifs are also found in two other works by I. A. Bunin, written around the same time: “Mitya’s Love” and “The Case of the Cornet Elagin.” However, in them these motives seem to be concentrated, they form the basis of the narrative and, ultimately, lead the heroes to a tragic outcome - death.
“Don’t you already know that love and death are inextricably linked?” - wrote I. A. Bunin and convincingly proved this in one of his letters: “Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe, “I was close to suicide.” These words of the writer himself can best demonstrate the idea of such works as “Mitya’s Love” and “The Case of Cornet Elagin”, and become a kind of epigraph for them.
The story “Mitya’s Love” was written by I. A. Bunin in 1924 and marked a new period in the writer’s work. In this work, for the first time, he examines in detail the evolution of his hero’s love. As an experienced psychologist, the author records the slightest changes in a young man’s feelings.
The narrative is built only to a small extent on external aspects; the main thing is the description of the thoughts and feelings of the hero. It is on them that all attention is focused. However, sometimes the author forces his reader to look around, to see some seemingly insignificant details that characterize the hero’s internal state. This feature of the narrative will manifest itself in many of I. A. Bunin’s later works, including “Dark Alleys.”
The story “Mitya’s Love” tells about the development of this feeling in the soul of the main character, Mitya. When we meet him, he is already in love. But this love is not happy, not carefree, this is what the very first line of the work sets up: “In Moscow, Mitya’s last happy day was on March 9.” How to explain these words? Maybe this is followed by the separation of the heroes? Not at all. They continue to meet, but Mitya “persistently thinks that something terrible has suddenly begun, that something has changed in Katya.”
The entire work is based on the internal conflict of the main character. The beloved exists for him as if in a double perception: one is close, beloved and loving, dear Katya, the other is “genuine, ordinary, painfully different from the first.” The hero suffers from this contradiction, which is subsequently joined by rejection of both the environment in which Katya lives and the atmosphere of the village where he will go.
In “Mitya’s Love,” for the first time, the understanding of the surrounding reality as the main obstacle to the happiness of lovers is clearly visible. The vulgar artistic environment of St. Petersburg, with its “falseness and stupidity,” under the influence of which Katya becomes “all stranger, all public,” is hated by the main character, just like the village one, where he wants to go to “give himself a rest.” Running away from Katya, Mitya thinks that he can also run away from his painful love for her. But he is mistaken: in the village, where everything seems so sweet, beautiful, and expensive, the image of Katya haunts him constantly.
Gradually, the tension increases, the psychological state of the hero becomes more and more unbearable, step by step leading him to a tragic denouement. The ending of the story is predictable, but no less terrible: “This pain was so strong, so unbearable that, wanting only one thing - to get rid of it at least for a minute, he fumbled and pushed aside the drawer of the night table, caught the cold and heavy lump of a revolver and, taking a deep and joyful breath, opened his mouth and fired with force and pleasure.”
On the night of July 19, 1890, in the city of Warsaw, at house number 14 on Novgorodskaya Street, a cornet of the hussar regiment, Alexander Bartenev, killed Maria Visnovskaya, an artist of the local Polish theater, with a revolver shot. Soon the criminal confessed to his crime and said that he committed the murder at the insistence of Visnovskaya herself, his beloved. This story was widely covered in almost all newspapers of that time, and I. A. Bunin could not help but hear about it. It was Bartenev’s case that served as the basis for the plot of the story created by the writer 35 years after this event. Subsequently (this will especially manifest itself in the “Dark Alleys” cycle), when creating stories, I. A. Bunin will also turn to his memories. Then the image and detail that flashed in his imagination will be enough for him, in contrast to “The Case of the Cornet Elagin,” in which the writer will leave the characters and events practically unchanged, trying, however, to identify the true reasons for the cornet’s action.
Following this goal, in “The Case of Cornet Elagin” I. A. Bunin for the first time focuses the reader’s attention not only on the heroine, but also on the hero. The author will describe in detail his appearance: “a small, puny man, reddish and freckled, with crooked and unusually thin legs,” as well as his character: “a very keen man, but as if he was always expecting something real, extraordinary,” “then he modest and shyly secretive, he fell into some recklessness and bravado.” However, this experience turned out to be unsuccessful: the author himself wanted to call his work, in which it was the hero, and not his feeling, that occupied the central place, “Boulevard Novel.” I. A. Bunin will no longer return to this type of narration - in his further works about love , in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, we will no longer see stories where the spiritual world and the character of the hero are examined in such detail - all the author’s attention will be focused on the heroine, which will serve as a reason for recognizing “Dark Alleys” as “a string of female types.”
Despite the fact that I. A. Bunin himself wrote about “The Case of Cornet Elagin”: “It’s just very stupid and simple,” this work contains one of the thoughts that became the basis of the formed Bunin philosophy of love: “Is it really unknown that there is a strange is the property of any strong and generally not quite ordinary love to even, as it were, avoid marriage?” And indeed, among all the subsequent works of I. A. Bunin, we will not find a single one in which the heroes would come to a happy life together, not only in marriage, but also in principle. The cycle “Dark Alleys,” considered the pinnacle of the writer’s work, will be dedicated to love that dooms suffering, love as tragedy, and the prerequisites for this should undoubtedly be sought in the early works of I. A. Bunin.
Chapter 3. Cycle of stories “Dark Alleys”
It was a wonderful spring
They sat on the shore
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black
The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around,
There was a dark linden alley
N. Ogarev “An Ordinary Tale.”
These lines, once read by I. A. Bunin, evoked in the writer’s memory what one of his stories begins with - Russian autumn, bad weather, a high road, a carriage and an old military man passing in it. “The rest all somehow worked out on its own, came up very easily, unexpectedly,” I. A. Bunin will write about the creation of this work, and these words can be attributed to the entire cycle, which, like the story itself, bears the name “Dark alleys."
“Encyclopedia of love”, “encyclopedia of love dramas” and, finally, in the words of I. A. Bunin himself, “the best and most original” that he wrote in his life - all this is about the cycle “Dark Alleys”. What is this cycle about? What philosophy underlies it? What ideas do the stories share?
First of all, this is the image of a woman and her perception by the lyrical hero. The female characters in Dark Alleys are extremely diverse. These include “simple souls” devoted to their beloved, such as Styopa and Tanya in the works of the same name; and brave, self-confident, sometimes extravagant women in the stories “Muse” and “Antigone”; and heroines, rich spiritually, capable of strong, high feelings, whose love can give unspeakable happiness: Rusya, Heinrich, Natalie in the stories of the same name; and the image of a restless, suffering, languishing “some kind of sad thirst for love” woman - the heroine of “Clean Monday”. However, with all their apparent alienness to each other, these characters, these heroines are united by one thing - the presence in each of them of primordial femininity, “easy breathing ", as I. A. Bunin himself called it. This trait of some women was identified by him in his early works, such as “Sunstroke” and the story “Easy Breathing” itself, about which I. A. Bunin said: “We call this womb, but I called it easy breathing.” How to understand these words? What is the womb? Naturalness, sincerity, spontaneity and openness to love, submission to the movements of your heart - all that is the eternal secret of female charm.
By turning in all the works of the “Dark Alleys” cycle specifically to the heroine, to the woman, and not to the hero, making her the center of the narrative, the author, like every man, in this case the lyrical hero, tries to unravel the riddle of the Woman. He describes many female characters, types, but not at all in order to show how diverse they are, but in order to get as close as possible to the mystery of femininity, to create a unique formula that would explain everything. “Women seem somewhat mysterious to me. The more I study them, the less I understand,” I. A. Bunin writes these words of Flaubert into his diary.
The writer creates “Dark Alleys” already at the end of his life - at the end of 1937 (the time of writing the first story in the series, “Caucasus”) I. A. Bunin is 67 years old. He lives with Vera Nikolaevna in Nazi-occupied France, far from his homeland, from friends, acquaintances and just people with whom he could talk in his native language. All that remains with the writer is his memories. They help him not only relive what happened then, a long time ago, almost in a past life. The magic of memories becomes for I. A. Bunin a new basis for creativity, allowing him to work again, write, and thereby giving him the opportunity to survive in the joyless and alien environment in which he finds himself.
Almost all the stories in “Dark Alleys” are written in the past tense, sometimes even with an emphasis on this: “In that distant time, he spent himself especially recklessly” (“Tanya”), “He did not sleep, lay, smoked and mentally looked at that summer ” (“Rusya”), “In the fourteenth year, on New Year’s Eve, there was the same quiet, sunny evening as that unforgettable one” (“Clean Monday”) Does this mean that the author wrote them “from life”, remembering the events your own life? No. I. A. Bunin, on the contrary, always claimed that the plots of his stories were fictional. “Everything in it, from word to word, is made up, as in almost all of my stories, both previous and present,” he said about “Natalie.”
Why then was this look from the present to the past needed, what did the author want to show with this? The most accurate answer to this question can be found in the story “Cold Autumn,” which tells about a girl who saw her fiancé off to war. Having lived a long, difficult life after she learned that her loved one had died, the heroine says: “What happened in my life after all? Only that cold autumn evening. the rest is an unnecessary dream.” True love, true happiness are only moments in a person’s life, but they can illuminate his existence, become the most important and important thing for him and, ultimately, mean more than the entire life he has lived. This is exactly what I. A. Bunin wants to convey to the reader, showing in his stories love as something that has already become a part of the past, but left an indelible mark in the souls of the heroes, like lightning illuminated their lives.
Death of the hero in the stories “Cold Autumn” and “In Paris”; the impossibility of being together in “Rus”, “Tana”; the death of the heroine in “Natalie”, “Henry”, the story “Dubki” Almost all the stories in the cycle, with the exception of works that are almost plotless, such as “Smaragd”, tell us about the inevitability of a tragic ending. And the reason for this is not at all that misfortune and grief are more diverse in their manifestations, in contrast to happiness, and, therefore, it is “more interesting” to write about it. Not at all. The long, serene existence of lovers together in the understanding of I. A. Bunin is no longer love. When a feeling turns into a habit, a holiday into everyday life, excitement into calm confidence, Love itself disappears. And, in order to prevent this, the author “stops the moment” at the highest rise of feelings. Despite the separation, grief and even death of the heroes, which seem to the author less terrible for love than everyday life and habit, I. A. Bunin never tires of repeating that love is the greatest happiness. “Is there such a thing as unhappy love? Doesn’t the most sorrowful music in the world give happiness?” - says Natalie, who survived the betrayal of her beloved and a long separation from him.
“Natalie”, “Zoyka and Valeria”, “Tanya”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Dark Alleys” and several other works - these are, perhaps, all the stories out of thirty-eight in which the main characters: he and she - have names. This is due to the fact that the author wants to focus the reader’s attention primarily on the feelings and experiences of the characters. External factors such as names, biographies, sometimes even what is happening around them are omitted by the author as unnecessary details. The heroes of “Dark Alleys” live, captured by their feelings, not noticing anything around them. The rational loses all meaning, all that remains is submission to feeling, “not thinking.” The style of the story itself seems to adapt to such a narrative, letting us feel the irrationality of love.
Details, such as descriptions of nature, the appearance of the characters, and what is called the “background of the narrative,” are still present in “Dark Alleys.” However, they are again called upon to draw the reader’s attention to the feelings of the characters, to complement the picture of the work with bright touches. The heroine of the story “Rusya” clutches her brother’s tutor’s cap to her chest when they go boating, saying: “No, I’ll take care of him!” And this simple, frank exclamation becomes the first step towards their rapprochement.
Many stories in the cycle, such as “Rusya”, “Antigone”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Clean Monday”, show the final rapprochement of the heroes. In the rest, it is implied to one degree or another: in “The Fool” it is said about the relationship of the deacon’s son with the cook and that he has a son from her; in the story “One Hundred Rupees” the woman who amazed the narrator with her beauty turns out to be corrupt. It was precisely this feature of Bunin’s stories that probably served as the reason for identifying them with cadet poems, “literature not for ladies.” I. A. Bunin was accused of naturalism and eroticization of love.
However, when creating his works, the writer simply could not set himself the goal of making the image of a woman as an object of desire mundane, simplifying it, thereby turning the narrative into a vulgar scene. A woman, like a woman’s body, always remained for I. A. Bunin “wonderful, unspeakably beautiful, absolutely special in everything earthly.” Amazing with his mastery of artistic expression, I. A. Bunin balanced in his stories on that subtle border where true art does not even reduce to hints of naturalism.
The stories of the “Dark Alleys” series contain the problem of gender because it is inseparable from the problem of love in general. I. A. Bunin is convinced that love is the union of the earthly and heavenly, body and spirit. If different sides of this feeling are concentrated not on one woman (as in almost all the stories in the cycle), but on different ones, or if only the “earthly” (“Fool”) or only the “heavenly” is present, this leads to an inevitable conflict, as, for example, in the story “Zoika and Valeria”. The first, a teenage girl, is the object of the hero’s desire, while the second, “a real Little Russian beauty,” is cold towards him, inaccessible, arouses passionate adoration, devoid of hope for reciprocity. When Valeria, out of a sense of revenge for the man who rejected her, gives herself to the hero, and he understands this, a long-overdue conflict between two loves breaks out in his soul. “He decisively rushed, pounding on the sleepers, downhill, towards the steam locomotive that had burst out from under him, rumbling and blinding with lights,” we read at the end of the story.
The works included by I. A. Bunin in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, for all their dissimilarity and heterogeneity at first glance, are valuable precisely because when read, they form, like multi-colored mosaic tiles, a single harmonious picture. And this picture depicts Love. Love in its integrity, Love that goes hand in hand with tragedy, but at the same time represents great happiness.
Concluding the conversation about the philosophy of love in the works of I. A. Bunin, I would like to say that it is his understanding of this feeling that is closest to me, as, I think, to many modern readers. In contrast to the writers of romanticism, who presented the reader only with the spiritual side of love, from the followers of the idea of the connection of gender with God, such as V. Rozanov, from the Freudians, who put the biological needs of man first in matters of love, and from the symbolists, who worshiped the Beautiful woman. The lady, I.A. Bunin, in my opinion, was closest to the understanding and description of love that really exists on earth. As a true artist, he was able not only to present this feeling to the reader, but also to point out in it what made and is forcing many to say: “He who did not love did not live.”
The path of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin to his own understanding of love was long. In his early works, for example, in the stories “Teacher”, “At the Dacha”, this topic was practically not developed. In later ones, such as “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “Mitya’s Love,” he searched for himself, experimented with style and manner of storytelling. And finally, at the final stage of his life and work, he created a cycle of works in which his already formed, integral philosophy of love was expressed.
Having gone through a rather long and fascinating path of research, I came to the following conclusions in my work.
In Bunin’s interpretation of love, this feeling is, first of all, an extraordinary rise of emotions, a flash, a lightning of happiness. Love cannot last long, which is why it inevitably entails tragedy, grief, separation, without giving the opportunity to everyday life and habit to destroy itself.
For I. A. Bunin, it is precisely the moments of love, the moments of its most powerful expression that are important, therefore the writer uses the form of memories for his narration. After all, only they are able to hide everything unnecessary, small, superfluous, leaving only a feeling - love, illuminating a person’s whole life with its appearance.
Love, according to I. A. Bunin, is something that cannot be rationally comprehended, it is incomprehensible, and nothing except the feelings themselves, no external factors are important for it. This is precisely what can explain the fact that in most of I. A. Bunin’s works about love, the heroes are deprived not only of biographies, but even names.
The image of a woman is central in the writer’s later works. She is always of greater interest to the author than he is; all attention is focused on her. I. A. Bunin describes many female types, trying to comprehend and capture on paper the secret of a Woman, her charm.
When speaking the word “love,” I. A. Bunin means not only its spiritual and not only its physical side, but their harmonious combination. It is precisely this feeling, which combines both opposite principles, that, according to the writer, can give a person true happiness.
I. A. Bunin's stories about love could be analyzed endlessly, since each of them is a work of art and is unique in its own way. However, the purpose of my work was to trace the formation of Bunin’s philosophy of love, to see how the writer went towards his main book “Dark Alleys”, and to formulate the concept of love that was reflected in it, identifying the common features of his works, some of their patterns. That's what I tried to do. And I hope that I succeeded.
The theme of love occupies perhaps the main place in Bunin’s work. This topic allows the writer to correlate what is happening in a person’s soul with the phenomena of external life, with the requirements of a society that is based on the relationship of purchase and sale and in which wild and dark instincts sometimes reign. Bunin was one of the first in Russian literature to speak not only about the spiritual, but also about the physical side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, hidden aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that physical passion does not necessarily follow a spiritual impulse, that in life it happens the other way around (as happened with the heroes of the story “Sunstroke”). And no matter what plot moves the writer chooses, love in his works is always a great joy and a great disappointment, a deep and insoluble mystery, it is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.
Over the years, Bunin spoke about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early prose, the heroes are young, open and natural. In such stories as “In August”, “In Autumn”, “Dawn All Night”, everything is extremely simple, brief and significant. The feelings that the heroes experience are dual, colored in halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, way of life, relationships, we immediately recognize and understand in a new way our own feelings of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual turns. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony; more often it disappears as soon as it arises. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. A sad farewell to my beloved ends with dreams (“In August”): “Through tears I looked into the distance, and somewhere I dreamed of sultry southern cities, a blue steppe evening and the image of some woman who merged with the girl I loved...” . The date is memorable because it testifies to a touch of genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“In Autumn”). And the story “Dawn All Night” talks about the premonition of love, about the tenderness that a young girl is ready to pour out on her future chosen one. At the same time, it is common for youth not only to get carried away, but also to quickly become disappointed. Bunin shows us this painful gap between dreams and reality for many. After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistles and spring trepidation, young Tata suddenly, through her sleep, hears her fiancé shooting jackdaws, and realizes that she does not at all love this rude and ordinary-down-to-earth man.
And yet, in most of Bunin’s early stories, the desire for beauty and purity remains the main, genuine movement of the heroes’ souls. In the 20s, already in exile, Bunin wrote about love, as if looking back into the past, peering into a bygone Russia and those people who no longer exist. This is exactly how we perceive the story “Mitya’s Love” (1924). Here Bunin consistently shows how the spiritual formation of the hero occurs, leading him from love to collapse. In the story, life and love are closely intertwined. Mitya’s love for Katya, his hopes, jealousy, vague forebodings seem to be shrouded in special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, got caught up in the false life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which his connection with another woman, the beautiful but down-to-earth Alenka, could not save him, led Mitya to suicide. Mitya’s insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to confront harsh reality, and inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and unacceptability of what happened.
A number of Bunin's stories about love describe a love triangle: husband - wife - lover ("Ida", "Caucasus", "The Fairest of the Sun"). An atmosphere of the inviolability of the established order reigns in these stories. Marriage turns out to be an insurmountable obstacle to achieving happiness. And often what is given to one is mercilessly taken away from another. In the story “Caucasus,” a woman leaves with her lover, knowing for sure that from the moment the train departs, hours of despair begin for her husband, that he will not be able to stand it and will rush after her. He is really looking for her, and not finding her, he guesses about the betrayal and shoots himself. Already here the motif of love as a “sunstroke” appears, which has become a special, ringing note of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.
The stories in the “Dark Alleys” cycle are similar to the prose of the 20s and 30s by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all stories are told in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate the depths of the characters’ subconscious. In most of the stories, the author describes bodily pleasures, beautiful and poetic, born of true passion. Even if the first sensual impulse seems frivolous, as in the story “Sunstroke,” it still leads to tenderness and self-forgetfulness, and then to true love. This is exactly what happens with the heroes of the stories “Dark Alleys”, “Late Hour”, “Rusya”, “Tanya”, “Business Cards”, “In a Familiar Street”. The writer writes about lonely people and ordinary lives. That is why the past, overshadowed by young, strong feelings, is depicted as a truly finest hour, merging with the sounds, smells, and colors of nature. It’s as if nature itself leads to the spiritual and physical rapprochement of people who love each other. And nature itself leads them to inevitable separation, and sometimes to death.
The skill of describing everyday details, as well as a sensual description of love is inherent in all the stories in the cycle, but the story “Clean Monday” written in 1944 appears not just as a story about the great mystery of love and the mysterious female soul, but as a kind of cryptogram. Too much in the psychological line of the story and in its landscape and everyday details seems like an encrypted revelation. The accuracy and abundance of details are not just signs of the times, not just nostalgia for Moscow lost forever, but a contrast between East and West in the soul and appearance of the heroine, leaving love and life for a monastery.
Bunin's heroes greedily seize moments of happiness, grieve if it passes by, and lament if the thread connecting them with their loved one breaks. But at the same time, they are never able to fight with fate for happiness, to win an ordinary everyday battle. All stories are stories about escaping life, even for a brief moment, even for one evening. Bunin's heroes can be selfish and unconsciously cynical, but they still lose what is most precious to them - their loved ones. And they can only remember the life they had to give up. Therefore, Bunin’s love theme is always permeated with the bitterness of loss, parting, and death. All love stories end tragically, even if the heroes survive. After all, at the same time they lose the best, valuable part of the soul, lose the meaning of existence and find themselves alone.
The prose of I.A. Bunin is considered a synthesis of prose and poetry. It has an unusually strong confessional beginning (“Antonov Apples”). Often, lyrics replace the plot basis, and as a result, a portrait story appears (“Lyrnik Rodion”).
Among Bunin's works there are stories in which the epic, romantic principle is expanded - the whole life of the hero comes into the writer's field of vision ("The Cup of Life"). Bunin is a fatalist, irrationalist; his works are characterized by the pathos of tragedy and skepticism. His work echoes the modernists’ concept of the tragedy of human passion. Like the Symbolists, Bunin’s appeal to the eternal themes of love, death and nature comes to the fore. The cosmic flavor of the writer’s works and the permeation of his images with the voices of the Universe bring his work closer to Buddhist ideas. Bunin's works synthesize all these concepts.
Bunin's concept of love is tragic. Moments of love, according to Bunin, become the pinnacle of a person’s life. Only by loving can a person truly feel another person, only feeling justifies high demands on himself and his neighbor, only a lover is able to overcome his selfishness. The state of love is not fruitless for Bunin’s heroes; it elevates souls. One example of an unusual interpretation of the theme of love is the story “Chang’s Dreams,” which is written in the form of a dog’s memories. The dog feels the inner devastation of the captain, his master. The image of “distant hard-working people” (Germans) appears in the story. Based on a comparison with their way of life, the writer talks about possible ways of human happiness: firstly, work in order to live and reproduce without experiencing the fullness of life; secondly, endless love, which is hardly worth devoting oneself to, since there is always the possibility of betrayal; thirdly, the path of eternal thirst, search, in which, however (according to Bunin) there is also no happiness.
The plot of the story seems to be opposed to the mood of the hero. Through real facts, a dog’s faithful memory breaks through, when there was peace in the soul, when the captain and the dog were happy. Moments of happiness are highlighted. Chang carries the idea of loyalty and gratitude. This, according to the writer, is the meaning of life that a person is looking for.
Bunin's love is most often sad and tragic. A person is not able to resist it; the arguments of reason are powerless against it, for there is nothing comparable to love in strength and beauty. The writer surprisingly accurately defines love, comparing it to sunstroke. This is the title of the story about the unexpected, impetuous, “crazy” romance of a lieutenant with a woman he accidentally met on the ship, who does not give her name or address. The woman leaves, saying goodbye forever to the lieutenant, who at first perceives this story as a random, non-binding affair, a charming road accident. Only over time does he begin to feel “insoluble torment,” experiencing a sense of bereavement. He tries to fight his condition, takes some actions, fully aware of their absurdity and uselessness. He is ready to die just to somehow miraculously bring her back, to spend one more day with her.
At the end of the story, the lieutenant, sitting under a canopy on the deck, feels ten years older. Bunin's wonderful story expresses with great power the uniqueness and beauty of love, which a person is often unaware of. Love is a sunstroke, the greatest shock that can radically change a person’s life, making him either the happiest or the most unhappy.
Bunin's work is characterized by an interest in ordinary life, the ability to reveal its tragedy, and the richness of the narrative with details. Bunin is considered to be the successor of Chekhov's realism, but his realism differs from Chekhov's in its extreme sensitivity. Like Chekhov, Bunin addresses eternal themes. Nature is important to him, however, in his opinion, the highest judge of man is human memory. It is memory that protects Bunin’s heroes from inexorable time, from death.
Bunin's favorite heroes are endowed with an innate sense of the beauty of the earth, an unconscious desire for harmony with the world around them and with themselves. This is the dying Averky from the story “The Thin Grass”. Having worked as a farm laborer all his life, having experienced a lot of torment, grief and anxiety, this peasant has not lost his kindness, the ability to perceive the beauty of nature, or the feeling of the high meaning of existence. Memory constantly returns Averky to those “distant twilight on the river” when he was destined to meet “that young, dear one who now looked at him indifferently and pitifully with senile eyes.” A short, humorous conversation with a girl, filled with deep meaning for them, could not be erased from their memory by either the years they had lived or the trials they had endured.
Love is the most beautiful and bright thing that the hero had throughout his long, difficult life. But, thinking about this, Averky remembers both the “soft twilight in the meadow” and the shallow creek, turning pink from the dawn, against the background of which a girl’s figure can barely be seen, surprisingly in harmony with the beauty of the starry night. Nature, as it were, participates in the hero’s life, accompanying him in both joy and sorrow. The distant twilight on the river at the very beginning of life is replaced by autumn melancholy, the expectation of imminent death. Averky’s condition is close to the picture of fading nature. “Dying, the grass dried up and rotted. The threshing floor became empty and bare. A mill in a homeless field became visible through the vines. The rain sometimes gave way to snow, the wind hummed in the holes of the barn, evil and cold.”
For ten years (1939 - 1949) Bunin wrote the book “Dark Alleys” - stories about love, as he himself said, “about its “dark” and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys.” This book, according to Bunin, “talks about the tragic and many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life.”
Bunin followed his own path, did not join any fashionable literary movements or groups, as he put it, “did not throw out any banners” and did not proclaim any slogans. Critics noted Bunin's powerful language, his art of raising “everyday phenomena of life” into the world of poetry. For him there were no “low” topics unworthy of the poet’s attention.
Shortly before his death, in his memoirs, Bunin wrote: “I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my writing memories would not have been like this. I would not have had to go through... 1905, then the First World War, followed by the 17th year and its continuation, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler... How not to envy our forefather Noah! Only one flood befell him..."
“You are a thought, you are a dream. Through the smoky snowstorm
Crosses are running - arms outstretched.
I'm listening to the pensive spruce -
A melodious ringing...
Everything is just thoughts and sounds!
What lies in the grave, is it you?
Marked by separations and sadness
Your difficult path. Now they are gone.
Crosses store only ashes.
Now you are a thought. You are eternal. »