The great German philosopher W.F. Hegel defined love as the highest “moral unity”, as a feeling of complete harmony, renunciation of one’s own selfish interests, oblivion of oneself, and in this oblivion - the acquisition of one’s own “I”. This means that without fidelity there is no love. Moreover, fidelity is not only physical, but also spiritual, because to love means to completely devote oneself to another, remaining devoted to the loved one both in body and in thought. This is the idea of many works of Russian classics, dedicated to the problem of the relationship between these two moral categories: love and fidelity, their inseparability and unity.
- Love knows neither time nor barriers. In the story by I.A. Bunin's "Dark Alleys" the heroine meets the one who once abandoned her and consigned their union to oblivion. He turns out to be a random guest at her inn. Behind long years separation, they both changed, becoming completely different life paths. He hardly recognizes the woman he loved in the past. However, she carries her love for him through the years, remains lonely, preferring a life full of hard everyday work and everyday life to family happiness. And only the very first and most important feeling that she once experienced becomes the only happy memory, that very attachment, the fidelity of which she is ready to defend at the cost of loneliness, while realizing the inconsistency and tragic doom of such an approach. “Everyone’s youth passes, but love is a different matter,” the heroine drops as if in passing. She will not forgive her failed lover for betrayal, but at the same time she will still be faithful to love.
- In the story by A.I. Kuprin "Garnet Bracelet" fidelity to love reaches unprecedented heights, is the source of life, however, elevating the hero above everyday life, destroys him. At the center of the story is a petty official, Zheltkov, suffering from an unrequited passion that drives his every action. He is in love with a married woman who barely suspects his existence. Having met Vera by chance one day, Zheltkov remains true to his high feeling, devoid of everyday vulgarity. He realizes his lack of rights and the impossibility of reciprocity on the part of his beloved, but cannot live otherwise. His tragic devotion is exhaustive proof of sincerity and respect, because he still finds the strength to let go of the woman he loves, yielding, for the sake of her happiness. Zheltkov is convinced that his loyalty does not oblige the princess to anything, it is only a manifestation of endless and selfless love for her.
- In the novel by A.S. Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, the embodiment of love and fidelity in Pushkin’s “encyclopedia of Russian life” becomes an archetypal image in Russian literature - Tatyana Larina. This is an integral nature, sincere in its impulses and feelings. Having fallen in love with Onegin, she writes him a letter, without fear of being ridiculed and rejected. Evgeniy turns out to be untenable in his choice. He is afraid of sincere feelings, does not want to get attached, therefore, he is incapable of decisive action and mature feelings, and therefore rejects the heroine. Having survived the refusal, Tatyana, nevertheless, is devoted to her first love to the end, although she gets married at the insistence of her parents. When Onegin comes to her again, but already overwhelmed by passion, she refuses him, because she cannot betray her husband’s trust. In the struggle between fidelity to love and fidelity to duty, the first wins: Tatyana rejects Eugene, but does not stop loving him, remaining mentally devoted to him, despite the external choice in favor of duty.
- Love and fidelity also found their place in the works of M. Bulgakov, in the novel “The Master and Margarita”. Indeed, this book is largely about love, eternal and perfect, expelling doubt and fear from the soul. The heroes are torn between love and duty, but remain true to their feelings to the end, choosing love as the only possible salvation from the evil of the outside world, full of sin and vices. Margarita leaves the family, abandons her former life, full of peace and comfort - we do everything and sacrifice everything, just to find happiness at the cost of selfless devotion. She is ready to take any step - even to make a contract with Satan and his entourage. If this is the price of love, she is ready to pay it.
- In the novel L.N. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, the paths of love and fidelity in the storyline of each of the many characters are very confusing and ambiguous. Many of the characters in the novel fail to remain faithful to their feelings, sometimes due to their young age and inexperience, sometimes due to mental weakness and inability to forgive. However, the fates of some heroes prove the existence of true and pure love, untainted by hypocrisy and betrayal. So, taking care of Andrei, wounded on the battlefield, Natasha makes up for the mistake of her youth and becomes a mature woman, capable of sacrificial and devoted affection. Pierre Bezukhov, in love with Natasha, also remains unconvinced, not listening to dirty gossip about running away with Anatole. They got together after Bolkonsky’s death, being already mature people, ready to honestly and steadfastly guard their home from the temptations and evil of the world around them. One more fateful meeting is the meeting of Nikolai Rostov and Marya Bolkonskaya. And even if their joint happiness did not happen right away, however, thanks to the sincere unselfish love of both, these two loving hearts were able to overcome conventional barriers and build a happy family.
- In love, a person’s character is learned: if he is faithful, then he is strong and honest; if not, he is weak, vicious and cowardly. In the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", where the characters are tormented by a sense of their own imperfection and irresistible sinfulness, nevertheless, there was a place for pure and true love, capable of giving consolation and peace of mind. Each of the heroes is sinful, but the desire to atone crimes committed pushes them into each other's arms. Rodion Raskolnikov and Sonya Marmeladova together fight the cruelty and injustice of the outside world, defeating them, first of all, within themselves. Therefore, it is not surprising that they, connected spiritually, are faithful to their love no matter what. Sonya and Rodion accept the cross together and go to hard labor to heal their souls and start living again.
- A. Kuprin’s story “Olesya” is another vivid example of pure, sublime love. The heroine lives in solitude, so in her feelings she is natural and spontaneous. The customs of village people are alien to her, adherence to outdated traditions and deep-rooted prejudices is alien to her. Love for her is freedom, a simple and strong feeling, independent of laws and opinions. Due to her sincerity, the girl is not capable of pretense, so she loves Ivan selflessly and sacrificially. However, faced with the superstitious anger and hatred of fanatical peasants, the heroine runs away with her mentor and does not want to drag her chosen one into an alliance with the “witch”, so as not to bring trouble on him. In her soul, she forever remains faithful to the hero, since in her worldview there are no barriers to love.
- Love transforms the human heart, makes it compassionate and vulnerable, but at the same time incredibly brave and strong. In the novel by A.S. Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter”, outwardly weak and insolvent heroes ultimately change and improve each other, showing miracles of loyalty and courage. The love that arose between Pyotr Grinev and Masha Mironova turns a provincial teenager into a real man and a soldier, and out of a sickly and sensitive captain’s daughter, a faithful and devoted woman. So, for the first time Masha shows her character when she refuses Shvabrin’s offer. And the refusal to marry Grinev without parental blessing reveals the spiritual nobility of the heroine, ready to sacrifice personal happiness for the well-being of her loved one. A love story against the backdrop of significant historical events only enhances the contrast between external circumstances and the true affection of hearts, which is not afraid of obstacles.
- The theme of love and fidelity is a source of inspiration for literature that raises the question of the relationship between these moral categories in the context of life and creativity. One of the archetypal images of eternal love in world literature are the main characters of Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet.
Young people strive for happiness, despite the fact that they belong to warring families. In their love they are far ahead of their time, full of medieval prejudices. Sincerely believing in the triumph of noble feelings, they challenge conventions, proving at a cost own life that love can overcome any obstacles. To refuse feelings for them means to commit betrayal. Consciously choosing death, each of them puts loyalty above life. The readiness for self-sacrifice makes the heroes of the tragedy immortal symbols of ideal, but tragic love. - In M. A. Sholokhov’s novel “Quiet Don”, the relationships and feelings of the characters allow the reader to appreciate the power of passion and devotion. The ambiguity of the circumstances in which the heroes find themselves is complicated by the interweaving of emotional connections that connect the characters in the novel and prevent them from finding long-awaited happiness. The relationships between the characters prove that love and loyalty can come in many forms. Aksinya, in her devotion to Gregory, appears as a passionate nature, ready for self-sacrifice. She is able to follow her loved one anywhere, is not afraid of universal condemnation, and leaves her home, rejecting the opinion of the crowd. Quiet Natalya also loves faithfully, but hopelessly, tormented and tormented by unrequited feelings, while remaining faithful to Grigory, who does not ask her to do so. Natalya forgives her husband's indifference and his love for another woman.
is devoted to the study of how their idealistic ideas about female beauty, love, and marriage are expressed in the concepts of Russian writers of the 19th century. This chapter (this is due to the logic of the work) is entirely devoted to the analysis of works of Russian literature of the 19th century, i.e. pre-Chekhov tradition. Such a review is necessary in order to show what Chekhov started from when rethinking and reevaluating the existing ideas about the ideal of female beauty. The dissertation examines the most representative, from our point of view, works that reflect these trends. Of course, this review does not pretend to be comprehensive.
Despite the fact that the idea of female beauty changes from era to era, the writer’s desire for the ideal remains constant. Beauty in Russian XIX literature century - an ethical category, it is inextricably linked with good. The vector for two directions in the perception and depiction of female beauty was set by Pushkin and Gogol. On the one hand, there is the ideal, supermundane image created by the poet, on the other, the tragic antinomy of the ideal and the real, the spiritual - the carnal, the Divine - the devilish. Oleg Kling rightly says that the antinomy “high - low” in the depiction of love runs through all Russian literature - Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. The researcher shows how this antinomy was refracted differently in the works of symbolists and post-symbolists 31 . We consider how these two trends were embodied in the works of Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century. We also show the influence of George Sand and her novels on the formation of a new type of women and marital relationships, which were reflected in the works of Russian writers of the 19th century.
Poem by A.S. Pushkin’s “I Remember a Wonderful Moment” is an example of how creative fiction and fantasy embellish reality. The poet creates a legend, exalting love, the inspiration of which is not even a woman, but some unearthly, angel-like substance - “the genius of pure beauty” - an ethereal creature, ephemeral, like a “vision”, a spirit hovering in the empyrean. This is a deity with real female name rises above reality, setting the reader up for sublime ideal love. Although real prototype and Pushkin’s attitude towards a specific woman - A.P. Kern - disagreed with the glorified poetic image 32; what is important for us is that the poet created the cult of the sublime woman in accordance with the ethical and aesthetic ideas of his era.
In his early essay “Woman” (1829), Gogol refers to Plato’s dialogue with his student Telecles about the essence of female beauty and asserts the superiority of the feminine principle - physical beauty, art and love, which spiritualize a man. Together, masculine and feminine create a perfect harmonious unity. This is close to Schiller's concept. However, in the writer’s later works, material beauty evokes sodomite passions and is destructive to the soul. Beauty and holiness in Gogol, as a rule, are incompatible. According to Gogol, female earthly beauty is evil. Wanting to establish the harmony of relationships in marriage as a spiritual unity of masculine and feminine principles, Gogol paradoxically destroys the idyll. His Philemon and Baucis - old-world landowners - live in complete harmony and agreement with each other, but their relationship is absolutely devoid of any eroticism.
In the 1840s - 1860s of the 19th century, the “women’s issue” became clearly and acutely evident in Russian society. The works of George Sand were a kind of cultural detonator. The views of George Sand, who affirmed carnal love, conflicted with the religious-patriarchal idea of the position and role of women in the family and society. With her works, the writer established a new morality in relation to women.
Chernyshevsky was directly influenced by the works and personality of George Sand. The novel “Jacques,” in which “the problem of a love triangle was solved in accordance with the principle of a “free heart,” inspired Chernyshevsky to practical use literary model both in his own marriage and in the novel “What is to be done?” Chernyshevsky was not only an ardent supporter and follower of the ideas of George Sand in the liberation of women and the new ethics of relations in marriage, he also developed the main thoughts of the writer and gave them a more global meaning, transforming them into a theory about the reorganization of society on the basis of universal equality (I. Paperno ). Destroying the public and Christian code of morality, Chernyshevsky in his works rationalized and “legalized” a woman’s right to adultery. Despite all the utopianism and vulnerability, especially from an artistic point of view, Chernyshevsky’s novel, his position in relation to the emancipation of women was not ignored by Russian writers and philosophers.
Dostoevsky reacted sharply to how the ideas of George Sand were transformed by Chernyshevsky. The way the author of a social utopia solved the complex problems of love triangles, directly linking the project of reorganizing society with the transformation of relationships in family and marriage, evokes a rebuke full of sarcasm in the story “The Eternal Husband.” Dostoevsky showed how, on the one hand, love relationships fit into familiar literary patterns and how, on the other hand, the motives of human behavior can be unexpected and unpredictable in real life. Directing us along the path of well-known schemes of love triangles described in literature (Turgenev's "Provincial Woman"), or referring us to the images of noble robbers and avengers of Hugo and Schiller, Dostoevsky unexpectedly explodes the situation with a farcical scene in which it turns out that the deceived husband was in love into your opponent. Dostoevsky opens the underground of the human psyche, which cannot be calculated, as the architects of heaven on earth, a new society in which everyone will coexist in harmony, want to do. Dostoevsky is interested in such cases of behavior that do not fit into the usual patterns, but which cannot be ignored when it comes to love and marriage.
Goncharov had an ambivalent attitude towards George Sand and argued with Belinsky. The ideas of women's emancipation undoubtedly did not leave Goncharov indifferent. However, he believed that the issue was more complex than simple declarations of equality between women and men.
Love is the basis of all three of Goncharov's novels. In disputes about what is artistic truth and how to depict reality, as well as on the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic components in a work of art, Goncharov consistently continued to defend the positions of idealism even in those years when attacks on idealism from naturalism began. Soberly aware of the abyss that separates reality from the ideal, the writer believed that it was necessary to piece of art led the reader to the ideal, unity truth, goodness and beauty. For Goncharov, these are the truisms of aesthetics, the foundations of Schiller’s concept. In his novels, Goncharov strives to present to the reader an image of a harmonious personality, in which a sober, enlightened mind, active energy, morality, spirituality, a sense of beauty and physical beauty are combined. And this, as the German scientist P. Tiergen convincingly proves using the example of the novel “Oblomov,” coincides with Schiller’s ideas about the connection between spirit and matter, more specifically, about the inseparable connection between the physical and moral-aesthetic state of a person. The Russian writer believed in the high, transformative power of love, which gives impetus to the mind and heart, awakens from sleep, inspires creativity and art. Goncharov's novels are built on the opposition sleep - awakening, life - death, fossilization. In the novel “Oblomov,” Olga Ilyinskaya, taking on the role of Pygmalion, tries to breathe life into the inactive soul of Ilya Ilyich. However, having failed like Pygmalion in her relationship with Oblomov, Olga becomes Galatea in her love and marital relationship with Stolz and successfully plays this role. Goncharov did not stop at the ideal married couple he created in the novel “Oblomov” as the standard of love and the image of Olga Ilyinskaya as the ideal of female beauty. In the latest novel, “The Precipice,” the writer shows the endless process of searching for the female ideal that embodies the harmony of the trinity truth, goodness and beauty. Boris Raisky is an artist obsessed with the idea of finding an artistic image that would unite ideal and reality as an indivisible whole. In the novel "The Precipice" he takes on the role of Pygmalion, only he cannot find his only Galatea. Pygmalion of Paradise dreams of combining physical beauty with spiritual beauty. Undoubtedly, for Goncharov, as well as for his hero, the artist Raisky, the highest type of beauty is embodied in the image of the Sistine Madonna. It was precisely the Renaissance, earthly beginning, combined with spirituality in the image of Raphael’s Madonna, that attracted Goncharov.
Turgenev presented the contradiction between the ideal and the real in two types of women: a bacchante woman who awakens irrational feelings in a man, and a woman who embodies the harmonious rational principle of the ideal world of antiquity. Love captures Turgenev's heroes, depriving them of individuality. In the prose poem “Love,” Turgenev briefly and succinctly formulates the state of a person in love, who feels the invasion of someone else’s “I” as the death of his own “I” . Therefore, love is perceived by Turgenev as a feeling that is tragic for an earthly creature whose flesh is finite. Turgenev's female bacchantes enslave men (“Correspondence”, “Smoke”, “Spring Waters”). Love-slavery, depicted by Turgenev, evokes associations with the works of Sacher-Masoch. The similarity was already noted by Turgenev’s contemporaries, and the Austrian writer himself considered himself a successor to his Russian colleague. Nostalgia for the lost Greek world, its integrity and beauty is undoubtedly present in Turgenev’s discourse. Let us recall that even in an early poem dedicated to Venus, Turgenev says that for modern man Venus is a myth, and he worships not Venus the goddess, but her copy, the beauty of a man-made image created by an artist from marble. Meeting the perfection of ancient beauty in real life (“Three Meetings”) is a dream, a poetic illusion. The narrator loves a dream, a myth, a statue, an ideal, the image that is constructed by his imagination, art, and not a real woman - a creation of nature. Turgenev's philosophical reflections are close to Schiller's, his idea that art is a game, and also that a return to natural principles, the “golden age” is enriched with knowledge, moral responsibility, and freedom of choice. According to Schiller, a cultured person can return to his integrity through an ideal.
The evolution of Tolstoy’s views from the affirmation of the ideal of harmonious relations between a man and a woman to the complete denial of marriage is examined using the example of two, in our opinion, iconic works of the writer. The work is the first to make a complete comparative analysis showing the evolution of Tolstoy's views on marital relations. “Family Happiness” (1859) and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) are two milestones on the path of Tolstoy’s comprehension of the dialectics of love, the entire complexity of the relationship between a man and a woman united in marriage. The story “Family Happiness” is a prelude to “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” is an afterword. “Family Happiness” was written by Tolstoy before his marriage in 1862 and before he became acquainted with the ideas of Schopenhauer, which he accepted with great sympathy. “The Kreutzer Sonata” reflected the ideas and moods of not only Tolstoy the man who experienced a crisis in family relationships, but also of the writer-philosopher who revised his previous ideals, ideas about love and marriage at the turn of the era. Both works are confessions: in the early story - a woman’s reflection on marital relations, in the later - the confession of a man who became the murderer of his wife. Beethoven's sonata Quasi una fantasia (Moonlight Sonata) sounds twice in “Family Happiness”: at the beginning, at the moment of the birth of love between the characters, and at the end of the story after the trials of “family happiness”; Sonata No. 9 for violin and piano in A major, opus 47, by the same composer defines the dramatic conflict of the story “The Kreutzer Sonata”. Both considered verbal works- a kind of parallel to music. Musical inclusions in the structure of Tolstoy's narrative explicate the subconscious of the human psyche, opening up the subtle world of the characters' intuition in those moments of emotional tension when, according to Schopenhauer, a person's desires and sensations do not lend themselves to logical, rational awareness. In “Family Happiness,” Tolstoy presents his concept of the family, which is close to J. J. Rousseau’s idea that love passions are destructive to family happiness. Tolstoy's understanding of femininity and marital relations is opposed to those that were gaining strength in mid-19th century century in Russia to ideas about gender equality, free love and new ideas about marriage, inspired by George Sand. The ideal of motherhood and family, which received its highest positive embodiment in War and Peace, and then put to the test by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, has not lost its significance for the writer. By creating the image of a woman caught in a whirlwind of passions, who has lost her integrity, faced with a choice between feelings and marital duty, between love and motherhood, the writer showed the crisis of the patriarchal family and defended female virtue in marriage. According to Tolstoy, beauty without virtue is evil. “The Kreutzer Sonata” was written by Tolstoy at a time when society was discussing questions about marriage and the right to divorce, about a woman’s ability to choose a spouse for love, when the crisis that arose in his own family relationships coincided with a deeper spiritual conflict, with a feeling of the meaninglessness of earthly things. existence, the result of which is death. Earthly existence is deprived of harmony, where there is a constant struggle between living beings. Man, Tolstoy shows in articles of this period, is by nature a carnivorous creature, capable of destroying his own kind. A man and a woman, who differ from each other both in physiological structure and in upbringing, cannot come to mutual understanding. The war between the sexes, according to Tolstoy, is a war at the biological level. Naturalistic features in the depiction of carnal love, biological determinism, as well as the undermining of the foundations of the patriarchal family corresponded to new trends in European literature. Therefore, it is not surprising that Tolstoy, along with Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner and other representatives of modernism, was classified by Max Nordau as degenerates. The main thing that distinguished Tolstoy from naturalist writers, whom he himself criticized, was that the Russian writer gave the reader a positive, ideal. Deconstructing and overthrowing the carnal beauty of the female body, as well as destroying the very idea of marital relations, Tolstoy, together with his hero, protests against nature - the division of people into two warring sexes. Tolstoy leads his hero (and himself identifies with him in the “Afterword” to the “Kreutzer Sonata”) to the idea of sexless marriages, to brotherhood. This was an extreme expression of the writer’s awareness of the crisis of previous ideas about the ideal of femininity. Exposing marriage, which, according to Tolstoy, is based on pleasure, the writer says that love between the sexes alienates a person from the love of God. After the turning point of the 1880s, the ideal for Tolstoy became sexless love for all people and for God. On the ashes of their former ideals - the patriarchal family, motherhood - consecrated by the trinity truth, goodness and beauty, Tolstoy affirms the Christian ideal of God, in whose perfect image this triad was embodied. The story "The Kreutzer Sonata" caused controversy. In this regard, the story of N.S. deserves attention. Leskova “About the Kretzer Sonata” (1890), which affirms the ideal of motherhood.
IN IVChapter “Demythologizing the female ideal and marital relations in an era of skepticism” examines how Nietzsche's ideas, social and cultural modernization of society, women's emancipation aggravated the problem of gender relations and how this is reflected in the works of Western European writers who influenced the new idea of women. In Chekhov's work, the idealistic tendencies of Russian writers of the 19th century are subject to revision.
Chekhov's emergence as a writer occurred during the period when in post-reform Russia there was a rapid development of capitalism and a change in the sociocultural paradigm of life. A new culture is being formed that meets the bourgeois tastes and demands of the “marginal” people who have poured into big cities. With the destruction of the supremacy of elite classical culture, the boundaries of “high” and “low” are blurred, a situation of cultural polycentrism is emerging, and culture is developing “broadly” and horizontally. With the development of new genres of mass literature, the communication space is expanding. Russia is entering into closer interaction with Western culture. Moreover, the dialogue of cultures took place not only at the level high art. Chekhov began his journey in literature by collaborating in mass publications in the 1880s. Work in humorous magazines, as well as other factors, in particular, natural science education, influenced the formation of a different worldview, different from the “classics” who assigned a high educational mission to literature.
Men reacted differently to the change in the social role of women at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: from destructive irony (Nietzsche) to serious polemics in the works of philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. This most important theme has found expression in both works of high and popular literature. The “women's question” polarized society. We consider how the works of two major writers of the turn of the century, Ibsen and Strindberg, expressed opposing points of view on the problem of women's emancipation and the role of women in the family. Ibsen, in whose works there are images of strong independent women who help a man find his “I”, find love and fulfillment in creativity (Hilda, Irena), women for whom freedom of choice is necessary (Nora, Elida, Hedda), received a reputation as a feminist. The drama A Doll's House, which questioned the patriarchal traditions of the family, shocked Victorian society and gave impetus to controversy: Max Nordau responded by writing the play The Right to Love, which defended the interests of a “healthy” family, and Strindberg wrote the novella A Doll's House. In contrast to Nordau's moralizing, Strindberg shows the confrontation between man and woman as an eternal conflict, a “fatal duel” - this theme runs like a red thread through the entire work of the Swedish writer. Strindberg, a supporter of the patriarchal family, in his book “Marriages” (1884-1885) defends the need for the proper education of women from an early age. Many of the ideas of Strindberg, a consistent Darwinist, are also close to Chekhov, although he did not take such a radical position on the women's issue. The depiction of family breakdown is something new that is included in the drama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the change in the balance of roles in society and the emancipation of women.
Using the examples of plays by Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, the dissertation shows how the change in the social role of women affected dramatic techniques -
the relationship between roles in the character system. The idea of a strong woman displacing a man from the stage of life is embodied in the dramaturgy of Ibsen (Ghosts, Hedda Gabler), Strindberg (Frène Julie, The Father, Pelican). The father in these plays is presented as an off-stage character or, as in Strindberg’s “The Father,” a man defeated by a woman who has lost his masculine properties. In Chekhov's plays, the significantly absent image of the father is a plot-forming element (The Seagull), a semantic marker indicating the collapse of the patriarchal family in "Three Sisters", where adult children turn out to be unviable, in "The Cherry Orchard", where the role of "patriarch" is taken on by the old servant Firs.
The frustration of men towards a strong woman, femme fatale, is reflected in the works of many decadent mystics, such as Octave Mirbeau, Ganz Gaines Evers, and others. The dominance of a woman causes mystical horror. Sadism in a woman is presented as a physiological exaltation of love - “The Garden of Torment” by O. Mirbeau. In Evers's mystical story, the image of a spider woman, luring men into her web and killing them as a female spider, acquires symbolic significance. The Swedish writer Ola Hansson, one of whose stories “The Split Self” was published in Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya, tries to understand the psychophysiological basis of split personality, the cause of instinctive fear, sexual nightmare, and what love becomes for his male characters. His stories show the types of broken men defeated by women, often driven to suicide. Sexual relationships create fear in the souls of sophisticated, nervous men of a new type of Amazon woman. Chekhov's works, like Hansson's, show the dual psychophysiological nature of men with feminine traits and women with masculine ones. The French researcher J. de Prouillard well demonstrated this apparent paradox using the example of “Drama on the Hunt” 33. Dominant women and weak men are present in both early and late works of Chekhov (“Champagne”, “The Witch”, “Tina”, “The Jumper”, “The Wife”, “Anna on the Neck”, “Ariadne”, “The Seagull”, "Three sisters"). A woman’s sexual dominance drives a high school student (“Volodya”) to suicide. Zoological comparisons illustrating the essence of men and women are often found in the writer’s works. But unlike the decadent mystics, Chekhov’s zoomorphism in the characteristics of the characters testifies to the writer’s connection with Darwinism. For example, in Chekhov we find a metaphor characterizing gender relations: a female fly drinks blood from a spider (“Neighbors”), but this metaphor does not grow to the scale of a sexual nightmare, as in Evers, and the image is not the basis of the plot.
We do not have direct evidence that Chekhov was familiar with Hansson’s works, so we cannot say with complete confidence that Chekhov’s “Fear” is a response to Ola Hansson’s story “The Split Self,” although this possibility cannot be ruled out either, because Chekhov was undoubtedly familiar with the publications of the newspaper “Novoye Vremya”. Most likely, Chekhov’s “Fear” is a response to the topical problem of interaction between the sexes, which has been widely discussed in literature. Silin's fear is due to the fact that he does not understand his relationship with his wife and he develops neurosis, a fear of life. Fear, as follows from the content of the story, is a consequence of the Fall. However, despite the fact that both men, led into sin by a woman, begin to experience fear of life, in Chekhov’s story, unlike Hansson, Evers, Mirbeau, there is no demonization of women. On the contrary, we know that Silin’s wife, who entered into a loveless marriage, is unhappy. The story has an almost vaudeville ending: the husband, who forgot his cap in a friend’s room, incriminates his lovers and leaves home, “as if afraid of being chased.” The fear is transmitted to the friend. The irony of guilty exiles from paradise permeates the narrative.
Skalkovsky’s book “About Women. Thoughts old and new" is interesting as an alternative view of gender relations. In contrast to the decadent tendency, in Skalkovsky’s book - a product of mass literature - the current problem of the time is presented in a lightly ironic form. Skalkovsky’s compilation book “On Women” went through six editions in a year and was very popular. From the standpoint of male chauvinism, the author discredits women. His book judges women for infidelity in marriage, examines the problems of divorce, prostitution, assesses the economic dependence of women on men in marriage as a manifestation of legalized prostitution, affirms the harm of women's education and emancipation, criticizes the inability of women to art and their inability to manage money, as well as engage in economic issues in the family. The book caused a resonance, both serious and mass publications responded to it. Grassroots culture picked up the themes and tone of irony towards women. Chekhov's story "About Women" is an irony over Skalkovsky's male chauvinism. Quotes and allusions to Skalkovsky’s treatise are also found in other works of Chekhov. Although the book ran counter to the progressive ideas of the time and was not an original conceptual work, it is nevertheless a valuable evidence of the understanding and popularization of pressing issues of the time.
In the story “The Joke” (in its first edition) there are not only references to Skalkovsky’s book, but also the very type of behavior of the hero, which expresses the clear gender superiority of a man, reminiscent of the position of an expert on women’s hearts, the author of the treatise “On Women”. Subsequently, having reworked the story, Chekhov gave it an elegiac ending in the spirit of Turgenev’s and his own works, such as “Vera”, “House with a Mezzanine”, etc.
The story “Verochka” is usually interpreted as a variation on the theme “Russian man on rendez-vous”. However, Chekhov showed the situation as an outdated cliché, where both heroes - he and she - are ridiculous. Verochka is a literary type of girl who has internalized bookish ideals, which she tries to realize on a date, but the hero does not understand her. A similar situation often occurs in Chekhov, both in his early works (“Fatherlessness”) and in his later ones (“Ionych”, “With Friends”), etc. The hero of the story “On the Way” was associated both with Chekhov’s contemporaries and subsequent interpreters, with Rudinsky type. There is undoubtedly a connection with Turgenev, but with another work - the story “A Strange Story”. The plot, in which a girl from a good family with fanatical self-denial followed her holy fool teacher for the sake of faith, was transformed by Chekhov. It is with the story of his own faith that Likharev captivates his random interlocutor. Changing ideals, Likharev every time makes them his religion. He sees himself as an ideological mentor to the women who become his victims (wife, mother, daughter). Chekhov showed a very important feature of such people - the inconstancy of ideological passions. This is due to the fact that ideals cannot be eternal; over time they become outdated, and then the need for a new faith arises. Ilovaiskaya did not take the path of self-denial in the name of ideals; she woke up in time from the sleep into which Likharev plunged her with the magic of his speeches. The fact that the writer gives the heroine the opportunity to sober up and escape the spell of sublime ideas was Chekhov’s dispute with the popular Tolstoyan and populist concepts of the relationship between a man and a woman, built on a common ideal. Chekhov leads this debate both in the ironic feuilleton “In Moscow” and in the story “The Wife.” Chekhov showed that not only the ideal of a woman who completely dissolves in the thoughts and deeds of a man, a “noble slave”, an associate of her ideological mentor, is outdated, but also that any ideals are not eternal. The influence of a man's ideas on a woman, and then liberation from his influence, is also shown in the earlier story “Good People” (1886). The author is ironic both towards the heroes of the story and towards the ideals in which they fanatically believe and turn them into dogmas. It gives the heroine the opportunity to realize through personal experience that ideals eventually turn into “old trash.” In these stories, as in his last work, “The Bride” (1903), Chekhov shows the liberation of a woman from the influence of an ideological mentor. The influence of the hero on women in the story “My Life” is not so clearly shown. Misail Poloznev does not seek to play the role of a mentor who re-educates women. In general, Misail Poloznev, who defends moral laws in a polemic with Dr. Blagovo, which he places above all else and himself strictly follows, is fairly interpreted by A. P. Skaftymov as a character close not only to the ideas of Tolstoy, but also of Chekhov. He is often perceived by researchers as a positive hero (I.N. Sukhikh). However, in our opinion, the ending of the story does not allow us to conclude that Chekhov views the path of his hero as a positive experience that must be followed. Misail himself says about himself that he “has become like Radish and, like him, causes boredom with his useless instructions” (P. 9, 279). Although the author sympathizes with his hero, women who are initially inspired by his ideas are not on the same path with him. Masha Dolzhikova leaves her husband, citing biblical wisdom that “everything passes”; sister Cleopatra dies, unable to bear the role of an ideological worker and a free woman without prejudice; Anyuta Blagovo, in love with Misail, meets him at Cleopatra’s grave and caresses their common niece, however, entering the city, she walks alone “respectable, stern.” One cannot but agree with the witty observation of Canadian researcher Douglas Clayton, who showed that Likharev failed in the role of Pygmalion. Let us add on our own that Chekhov and all other heroes like him failed in this role. However, Chekhov shows that the emancipation of women is a complex process that leads not only to the frustration of men, but also of women in new role do not feel happy (“A Boring Story”, “The Indian Kingdom”, “On the Cart”, “The Story of an Unknown Man”, “In My Own Corner”, “Case from Practice”, “Three Years”, “The Seagull”, “Three Sisters” ").
In the stories “Darling”, “Ariadne”, “Lady” with a Dog”, in our opinion, Chekhov’s break with the idealistic idea of the relationship between a man and a woman is most clearly expressed. All three stories are an argument with Tolstoy's concepts of femininity, family and marriage.
The story “Darling” is Chekhov’s hidden polemic with Tolstoy’s ideal
femininity and motherhood. Regardless of whether or not readers of the story “Darling” share Tolstoy’s well-known point of view that Chekhov wanted to curse, but instead blessed his heroine, her image is perceived as an archetype. Modern literary scholars correlate the “darling” with the mythological images of Psyche, Echo, the heroine of Flaubert’s story “A Simple Soul,” and Olenka’s happy marriage with an old-world idyll. The correlation of the heroine with mythological and literary prototypes convinces that the Chekhov heroine condenses in herself not individual, unique traits, but universal, eternal ones. In the typology of the complex maternal complex developed by Jung, the darling coincides with the type of “daughter,” a woman who is completely dependent on a man. The deepest archetypal patriarchal idea of the lack of form in a woman, as the essence of her nature, receives theoretical understanding in Jung's concept. According to Jung, female formlessness, emptiness is the key to understanding the mystery of the union of the masculine and feminine principles by analogy with how opposites - Yin and Yang - are united. In Chekhov's story, the heroine is the embodiment of femininity, the expression of gender in its pure form. Olenka is a hollow vessel, which, Tolstoy is right, can be filled with any content - a spirit that carries the masculine principle. She feels her integrity, fullness only when she is a member of a couple, in unity with the male spirit that fertilizes her. Left with an “empty nest”, Olenka suffers from depression; her inner unfulfillment changes her outer form - she loses weight, becomes dull, and ages. With each new loss of a member of a couple, the outside world around her—the house and the yard—changes. The word "emptiness", which appears very often on the pages of this a short story, is the key. It coexists in tandem with completeness, fullness. In the story “Darling,” Chekhov expressed what he was unable to accomplish in his dissertation “The History of Sexual Authority,” conceived during his student years. As in the outline of a dissertation written under the influence of Darwin's works, in the story Chekhov indirectly draws analogies between the processes occurring during evolution in the animal world and in human society. It is impossible not to see the physiological dominant in the description of Olenka Plemyannikova, as well as in the perception of the heroine by others. It is characteristic that Tolstoy, in his edition of Chekhov's story, removed the erotic details in the portrait of Olenka and softened the irony. Chekhov's view of the physiological basis of the nature of relations between a man and a woman is objective and devoid of Tolstoy's revealing pathos. The physiological component of a person, like all living things, cannot be assessed. In “Darling,” Olenka’s maternal feelings for high school student Sashenka are a natural continuation of her organic need to love, forgetting about her own “I,” the need to dissolve in the “Other.” Chekhov showed that the maternal instinct in a woman is the strongest instinct. But Chekhov presents motherhood not as an ideal, but as a natural part of female nature, and therefore does not raise motherhood to the height to which Tolstoy raises it. Chekhov's story is polemical in relation to Tolstoy's concept of femininity. However, the writer’s irony is also addressed to modern people who have lost touch with nature, that naive and natural perception of the world that was characteristic of ancient man and which is so fully embodied in Olenka. This “complexity of simplicity” (V.B. Kataev) gives rise to a striking effect of volume and multidimensionality of the image, despite all its seeming primitiveness and deliberate schematism.
The story “Ariadne”, the substantive essence of which, at first glance, is a love triangle and the misogynistic reasoning of the hero, to which he comes after a collapse in love, receives very important overtones in the cultural context. The context of the story helps to show how Chekhov undermines the idealistic ideas of the hero, debunks the dogmas formed by upbringing and cultural tradition. “Ariadne” is a good example of depicting the process of demythologizing exhausted ideals, taken for granted, which lead into an illusory world. Chekhov's text is replete with cultural associations and allusions. And if the connection with ancient Greek mythology is not so obvious, the position that “Ariadne” is Chekhov’s polemical response to the “Kreutzer Sonata” has almost become a commonplace in literary criticism. If we compare Chekhov's story with the myth of Ariadne, then, in our opinion, Chekhov is not so much interested in the plot and characters of the heroes of the myth as in the image and idea of the labyrinth. Chekhov distanced himself from Tolstoy's moralizing, from whose authority he had finally freed himself by the time he created Ariadne. Unlike Tolstoy's work, at the end of the story the hero-narrator dreams not of how to punish the temptress Ariadne, who, as it seems to him, led him into the labyrinth of vice, idleness, vulgarity, and not of how to take revenge on his rival, but of , how to free yourself from the web you are caught in by throwing away the thread holder. But the hero of the story, Shamokhin, got entangled not only in love networks. He also found himself in a labyrinth of his own ideas, illusions and dogmas. He, like many men in his circle, had an idealistic vision of women and love. Like his literary predecessors, who fell in love with the image of an ancient statue, Shamokhin, who associated the name of a mythological heroine who embodies perfection with a real girl, creates a sexual fetish. However, as Shamokhin recognizes the object of his adoration, the gap with the mythological image increases and deepens. Seeing the grin of a beast in the revived marble figurine, he becomes a misogynist and now preaches a different morality, close to the hero of the “Kreutzer Sonata,” and repeats Strindberg’s ideas outlined in “Marriages” almost verbatim. Ariadne in a new guise, as Shamokhin talks about her, reminds us of Turgenev’s women - priestesses of sensual love who enslave weak men. By mythologizing his chosen one, Shamokhin becomes a participant in the myth he himself created, moving further and further away from reality. Thus, Chekhov uses myth not so much to show the universality of human characters and situations, but rather to expose the type of consciousness of the hero, who thinks in mythologems, stereotypes, and clichés. Chekhov debunks the idol of his time, created by men - the vamp woman, femme fatale. The dominant woman is not dramatized by the writer, but is portrayed ironically. Chekhov's goal is not to expose female vices that are revealed to a man, not to moralize on the “women's issue,” but to debunk the scholastic dogmas by which the hero lives. Unlike the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, Chekhov talks with operetta-like ease about the relationships between lovers and destroys melodrama.
Turning to the story “The Lady with the Dog,” we consider how Chekhov uses the chronotope of the holiday romance, compromised by mass literature, to reduce the melodrama of high love relationships.
Article by N.K. Mikhailovsky’s “Darwinism and Offenbach’s operettas,” which paradoxically united two seemingly unrelated phenomena of scientific and cultural life, reflects the essence of the mentality of the era of the collapse of the idealistic worldview. Mikhailovsky proves in his article that Offenbach is not only the author of frivolous music on frivolous subjects reflecting the spirit of his time, but also an exposer, an innovator, equal in the strength of the revolutionary spirit to Voltaire, a satirist-educator who destroyed old social and moral dogmas. What is the similarity between Offenbach and Darwin? Darwin is a subverter of old ideas in science, Offenbach in art. Lawrence Senelick is right that Chekhov was close to Offenbach's anti-idealism 34 . The story “The Lady with the Dog” is associated not with a specific operetta, but with bourgeois boulevard culture in the broad sense, its ideology aimed at entertainment, looseness, festivity, pleasure, and disregard for moral taboos. Resorts, which at the end of the 19th century began to develop in Russia following the European model, also belong to this culture. Chekhov conceived the story “The Lady with the Dog” when he lived in Paris and the resorts of France. In "The Lady with the Dog" the action takes place at a resort in Yalta. The resort chronotope as a plot-forming element of the narrative, actualized for the first time in Russian literature by Lermontov, 35 partly resembles that characterized by M.M. Bakhtin's provincial chronotope with its stagnation and cyclical everyday time 36. However, unlike the provincial chronotope, where monotonous routine prevails, in the resort, time for vacationers is compressed and compressed. Although the events that take place are predictable in advance and, from the point of view of an outside observer, have a monotonous, repetitive nature, for the characters involved in the events, time moves rapidly. The resort topos is a foreign space for vacationers, so all events that occur are perceived by them as simultaneous. The atmosphere of the resort chronotope has features of festivity, carnival, and adventurousness. Resort guests, finding themselves in an unusual environment, live in anticipation of adventure, new thrills, and passions. Chekhov's story is examined in comparison with the story by V. Mikulich (L.I. Veselitskaya) “Mimochka on the Waters,” in which the “resort romance” is presented in all its cynicism as a very ordinary phenomenon. Mikulich ironizes the exhausted model of romantic relationships that fit into the formula “cunning and love” and devalues the tragedy. The resort relationship in “The Lady with the Dog” is also depicted by Chekhov without any romantic flair, its essence is naked. The behavioral model of Chekhov's resort guests, like that of V. Mikulich, destroys the archetype of romantic passions of heroes that have developed in Russian literature, involved in love conflicts, which rapidly develop in accordance with the regulations of the resort chronotope in an exotic setting. In “The Lady with the Dog,” the program of resort love relationships is known in advance to all vacationers and is cynically passed on by word of mouth. The behavior of the characters fits into the clichés, only these are different cultural and behavioral clichés. Gurov is an integral part of bourgeois culture. Anna Sergeevna represents the idealistic model of ideas about a woman and her behavior, which by the end of the 19th century turned into a stamp that has become common property popular culture. Chekhov equalizes the heroes, without endowing one with a high way of thinking and the other with vulgarity. The narrator's remark that “love changed them both” shows that both equally had something to change in themselves. The writer abandons the plot stereotype about a hero awakening to a new life, about a life that is better and purer than the previous one. Unlike “Mimochka on the Waters,” where the ending is closed to the development of high relationships between the characters, in “The Lady with the Dog,” a new type of narrative without completion sprouts from the low boulevard genre. With his ending, Chekhov removes the idealistic idea of love, which promises wonderful life. Destroying illusory ideas about love, Chekhov confronts his heroes with problems and shows that they are soberly aware of this. Chekhov's innovation lies in this anti-idealistic ending. By showing adultery in the story, Chekhov happily avoided extremes. He is far from viewing adultery as a woman’s protest against the “dark kingdom.” He also avoided, like Tolstoy, demonizing women who cheat on their husbands. He does not openly condemn adultery as such, starting with the story “Agafya”, right up to his last works. In “The Lady with the Dog,” “tabloid” culture is the context that performs a destructive function in relation to the idealistic worldview, which had exhausted itself by the end of the 19th century. Chekhov, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, does not collide, but balances the high and low, and therefore the conflict in his works is smoothed out and does not reach the tension of tragedy. The reaction to Tolstoy’s story, who saw the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas in the work, is indicative.
So, Chekhov’s heroes live as idealistic chimeras, building projects for the education of women, floating in the illusory world of dreams, thinking in stereotypes. The writer distances himself from his characters and deconstructs ideologemes that had become obsolete by the end of the 19th century, turning them into schemes and clichés. It can be said that Chekhov, like Offenbach, whose role Mikhailovsky not by chance compared with the role of Voltaire, turning to high images, mercilessly lowered them and killed them with irony, debunked the exhausted ideals existing in society, which had turned into dogmas.
Having examined Chekhov in the context of the idealistic paradigm of the 19th century, we tried to show that he destroyed the previous canon of relations between the writer and the reader. The idea that goes back to Schiller’s concept that a work of art should elevate the reader above reality and lead him to the ideal experienced a crisis at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, and Chekhov was precisely the writer in whose work this intention of art revealed its inconsistency. Rejection of the previous system of values and, moreover, the debunking of exhausted ideals is precisely what is new in Chekhov’s work that separated him from his predecessors and contemporaries. That is why, in our opinion, Chekhov should not be considered a writer who completed realism. In the axiological system of modernism, disbelief, disappointment and denial are assessed not so much as negative manifestations of the spirit, but as necessary stages on the path to ascension. In his last, unfinished work, “The Will to Power,” Nietzsche writes about nihilism and decadence as phenomena that are “necessary and inherent” to every people, every era for ascension and movement. Chekhov's work formed a new ethical and aesthetic paradigm, dialogical in relation to the previous, idealistic one. The paradox of the reception of Chekhov’s work is that both his contemporaries and the subsequent generation of readers tried to squeeze the works of the innovator into idealistic formulas, which over time turned into dogmas, and with them to measure his artistic potential, in the very dogmas that the reformer of prose and drama categorically rejected. The figure of Chekhov, standing at the intersection of eras, is lonely. This disposition once again confirms the idea that literary process- this is not an evolutionary forward movement and Chekhov approaches us when consciousness is freed from ready-made truths taken on faith.
IN Conclusion The main results of the study are formulated.
The main content of the dissertation is reflected in the following publications:
Monographic research
Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and the problem of the ideal / M.M. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2010.
Compilation and editing
Russia and the USA: forms of literary dialogue / Ed. MM. Odessa and Irene Masing-Delitzsch. – M.: RSUH, 2000. 205 p.
At the turn of the century. Russian-Scandinavian literary dialogue / Comp. MM. Odessa. Ed. MM. Odesskaya, T.A. Chesnokova. – M.: RSUH, 2001. 336 p.
Among the greats. Literary meetings / Comp., intro. article and comment. MM. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2001. 445 p.
Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov. Collection of articles / Compiled, ed., intro. note by M.M. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2007. 402 p.
Yu. Fridshtein. Three in one century, not counting the theater // Modern dramaturgy. 2009. No. 1, January – March. pp. 257 – 258.
Articles published in publications recommended by the Higher Attestation Commission
Odesskaya M.M. Nikolai Uspensky and his “seditious” book / M. Odesskaya // Questions of literature. 1994. No. 5. P. 304 – 317.
Odesskaya M.M. Gun and lyre (Hunting story in Russian literature of the 19th century) / M. Odesskaya // Questions of literature. 1998. No. 3. P.239 – 252.
Odesskaya M.M. Did Mr. Chekhov have ideals? / MM. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Journalism. Literary criticism". 2008. No. 11. P.219 – 227.
Odesskaya M.M. Tolstoy's treatise “What is art?” in the context of the collapse of idealistic aesthetics / M. M. Odesskaya // Philological Sciences. 2009. No. 2. P. 20 – 29.
Odesskaya M.M. Where does Ariadne's thread lead? /MM. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Philological Sciences. Literary studies and folklore." 2010. No. 2. P. 118 – 126.
12. Odesskaya M.M. The ideal of beauty and love in the works of I.A. Goncharova / M.M. Odessa // Philological sciences. 2010. No. 2. pp. 49 – 60.
Odesskaya M.M.“Everything should be beautiful in a person”: Chekhov and Marxist
Odesskaya M. Chekhov’s Tatyana Repina: From Melodrama to Mystery Play /
15. Odesskaya M. Leo Tolstoy's Treatise What Is Art? In the Context of the Disintegration
of Idealistic Aesthetics / M. Odesskaya // Social Sciences. 2009. #4. P. 47 – 55.
Articles in other publications
16. Odesskaya M.M. Immodest guesses about “Immodest guesses” by I.L. Leontieva-
Shcheglova / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana: Chekhov and his entourage. – M.: Nauka, 1996. WITH.
17. Odesskaya M.M. N. Hawthorne, A. Chekhov, F. Sologub. Archetype of the garden / M. Odessa //
Young researchers of Chekhov: Materials of the III international. conf. 1998. M.: MSU,
1998. pp. 260 -- 266
18. Odesskaya M.M.“Fly the ship, carry me to the distant limits”: The sea in poetics
A.S. Pushkin and A.P. Chekhov / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana: Chekhov and Pushkin. – M.:
Science, 1998. pp. 102 – 106
19. Odesskaya M.M. Mythologization of reality by the heroes of A. Chekhov and N. Sadur
/M. Odessa // Russian language, literature and culture at the turn of the century. IX
International Congress MAPRYAL. Abstracts of reports and messages. Bratislava,
1999. T. 1. P. 237.
20. Odesskaya M.M. E.N. Opochinin/ M.M. Odessa // Russian writers 1880 – 1917.
Bibliographic Dictionary. – M.: Russian Encyclopedia, 1999. T. 4. P. 441 –
Odesskaya M.M.., Bokova V.M.. ON THE. Osnovsky. / Odesskaya M.M., Bokova V.M.//
Odesskaya M.M. Tatyana Repina A.P. Chekhov: the problem of genre / M. Odesskaya
Odesskaya M.M.“Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev: the problem of genre / M. Odesskaya //Literaria Humanitas VII. Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin v evropskych kulturnich souvislostech. – Brno: Mosarikova univerzita, 2000. pp. 195 – 205.
Odesskaya M.M. Henry Thoreau and Anton Chekhov: forest and steppe / M. Odesskaya // Russia and the USA: forms of literary dialogue. – M.: RSUH, 2000. P. 122 – 131.
Odesskaya M.M. Introductory article. Classics and “ordinary talents”. Comments/ M. Odesskaya // Among the greats. Literary meetings. – M.: RSUH. 2001. P. 5 – 16. 401 -- 417
Odesskaya M.M. Anton Chekhov and Ulla Hansson: fear and love / M. Odesskaya // At the turn of the century. Russian-Scandinavian literary dialogue. – M.: RSUH, 2001. P.214 – 227
Odesskaya M. A. P. Chekhov’s Three Sisters: Symbolic Numerals /M. Odesskaya // AATSEEL. 2001. P. 148 – 149.
Odesskaya M.M.“Three Sisters”: symbolic and mythological subtext / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana. "Three Sisters" - 100 years. – M.: Nauka, 2002. P. 150–158.
Odesskaya M.M.“Tatyana Repina” by Chekhov: from melodrama to mystery / M.M. Odessa // Drama and theater. – Tver: Tver. state univ., 2002. pp. 81 – 93
Odesskaya M.M. Fools and jesters in the works of A.P. Chekhov / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov: Baikal meetings. Sat. scientific tr. – Irkutsk: RIO Irkut. Univ., 2003. P.56 – 63.
Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and modern Russian theatrical remakes / M.M. Odessa // Century after Chekhov. 1904 – 2004. International scientific. conf. Abstracts of reports. – M.: MSU, 2004. P. 140–141.
Odesskaya M.M. Ibsen and Chekhov: myth, fairy tale, reality / M. Odesskaya //Drittes Internationales Čechov –Symposium in Badenweiler. – Badenweiler, 14-18. Abstracts. October 2004. P. 44–45.
Odesskaya M.M. Shakespearean images in “The Cherry Orchard” / M.M. Odessa // Chekhovina. “The Sound of a Broken String”: to the 100th anniversary of the play “The Cherry Orchard.” – M.: Nauka, 2005. P. 494 – 505.
Odesskaya M. Hedda Gabler: Life in Time / M/ Odesskaya //Acta Ibseniana. Ibsen and Russian Culture. Ibsen Conference in St. Petersburg 2003. 1–4 October / Edited by Knut Brynhildsvoll. – Oslo: Center for Ibsen Studies. University of Oslo, 2005. pp. 85 – 96.
Odesskaya M.M. A book about Sakhalin - Chekhov’s tribute to medicine / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov in the historical and cultural space of the Asia-Pacific region. Mat. International scientific-practical conf. 21 – 30 Sep. 2005. – Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Publishing house. "Lukomorye", 2006. P.59-64.
Odesskaya M.M. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov in the light of Max Nordau’s concept of degeneration / M. Odesskaya // Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov. Sat. articles dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Chekhov’s death. - M.: Russian State University for the Humanities, 2007. pp. 211-226.
Odesskaya M. Let Them Go Crazy: Madness in the Works of Chekhov / Margarita Odesskaya // Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture /Edited by A. Brintlinger and I. Vinitsky. – Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2007. pp. 192-207.
Odesskaya M.M. Father as an off-stage character in the dramaturgy of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov / M. Odesskaya // The work of Henrik Ibsen in the world cultural context. Mat. Intl. conf. – St. Petersburg: Pushkin House, 2007. pp. 144-156.
Odesskaya M. Ibsen and Chekhov: Myth, Fairytale and Plot Structure / Margarita Odesskaya //Studi Nordici. 2007. X1V. - Pisa-Roma, 2007. P.11-17.
Odesskaya M.M. Walden hermit and steppe wanderer: philosophy of nature / M.M. Odessa // Taganrog Bulletin. “Steppe” A.P. Chekhov: 120 years. Mat. Intl. scientific-practical conf. – Taganrog: Taganrog State. lit. and Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, 2008. pp. 78-86
/ MM. Odessa // Chekhov readings in Yalta. Chekhov's world: sound, smell, color. Sat. scientific tr./ House-museum of A.P. Chekhov in Yalta. – Simferopol: Share, 2008. Vol. 12. pp. 155-164.
42. Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and Edgar Allan Poe: themes, motifs, images / M. Odesskaya //
Canadian American Slavic Studies. Current Issues in Chekhov Scholarship. -California
2008. Vol. 42.Nos. 1-2. P.119 – 146.
43 .Odesskaya M.M. Jesters, holy fools and madmen in the works of Chekhov / M.M. Odesskaya // A.M. Panchenko and Russian culture. – St. Petersburg: Pushkin House, 2008. P. 266–277.
44. Odesskaya M.M. The myth of Ariadne and Chekhov’s “Ariadne” / M.M. Odessa //
Chekhov readings in Yalta. Chekhov's world: myth, fashion, ritual. Sat. scientific tr./House-museum
A.P. Chekhov in Yalta. – Simferopol: Share, 2009. Vol. 13. pp. 167-178.
45. Odesskaya M.M. Gogol and Chekhov: sacred and profane / M.M. Odessa // Dialogue with
Chekhov. Sat. articles dedicated to the 70th anniversary of V.B. Kataeva. – M.: MSU, 2009. P.
46. Odesskaya M. M. Father and fatherlessness in the dramaturgy of Chekhov, Vampilov and
Petrushevskaya / M. Odesskaya // Modern dramaturgy. 2009. No. 1. pp. 180-183.
47. Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and Gogol: the ideal of female beauty / M.M. Odessa //
Chekhov readings in Yalta. Chekhov and Gogol: To the 200th anniversary of the birth of N.V.
Gogol. Sat. scientific tr./ House-museum of A.P. Chekhov in Yalta. – Simferopol: Share, 2009.
Vol. 14. pp. 37 – 47.
Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and emptiness: vector of construction and deconstruction /
49.Odesskaya M.M. Resort chronotope in “The Lady with the Dog” / M.M. Odessa //
Taganrog Bulletin. The origins of A.P.’s creativity Chekhov: biography and poetics. Mat.
Intl. scientific-practical conf. – Taganrog: Taganrog State. lit. And
Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, 2010. pp. 60–73.
Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov in post-Soviet culture // Flexible model of foreign language
51.Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and the controversy about the art of his time // The image of Chekhov and Chekhov’s Russia in the modern world: To the 150th anniversary of the birth of A.P. Chekhov. Sat. articles - St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Petropolis", 2010. pp. 48 - 57.
52.Odesskaya M.M.“Tatyana Repina” / M.M. Odessa // A.P. Chekhov. Encyclopedia.- M.: Education, 2011. P. 235 – 237.
53. Odesskaya M.M. Leontiev / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov. Encyclopedia. – M.:
Education, 2011.P. 437 –439.
Odesskaya M.M. Ibsen / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov. Encyclopedia. – M.:
55. Odesskaya M.M. Strindberg / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov. Encyclopedia. M.: Education, 2011. pp. 521 – 522.
56. Odesskaya M.M. Thoreau / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov. Encyclopedia. – M.: Education, 2011. P. 522 – 523.
57. Odesskaya M.M. The stories “Student” and “Rothschild’s Violin” in the context of the controversy about truth and beauty / M.M. Odessa // Creativity of A.P. Chekhov: text, context, intertext. To the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birth. Sat. materials of the International Scientific Conference. – Rostov-on-Don: NMC “Logos”, 2011. P. 231 – 237.
Odesskaya M.M. Tolstoy and Chekhov: ideals and meeting with “nothing” / M.M. Odessa //
Reviews and messages
59. Odesskaya M.M. V. Linkov. Skepticism and faith of Chekhov / M. Odesskaya // Chekhov Bulletin. 1998. No. 2. P. 11-12.
60. Odesskaya M.M. Michael C. Finke. Metapoesis. The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov. Durham and London. Duke University Press, 1995. 221 pp / M. Odesskaya // Chekhov Bulletin. 1999. No. 4. P. 40 – 42.
61.Odessa M. M. "Tatiana Repina" Two Translated Texts by Aleksei Suvorin and Anton Chekhov. Translated and Edited by John Racin. Mc. Farland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London. 1999, 272pp./ M. Odesskaya // Chekhov Bulletin. 1999. No. 5. P. 44 – 49.
62. Odesskaya M.M. Tampere. Chekhov section at the international congress / M. Odesskaya // Chekhov Bulletin. 2000. No. 7. P. 76 – 77.
63. Odesskaya M.M. Two “Seagulls”, “Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya” / M.M. Odessa // Chekhov Bulletin. 2001. No. 9. P.93 – 94.
64. Odesskaya M. News Of The Profession. Chekhov Conferences in Russia / M. Odesskaya // North American Chekhov Society Bulletin. Winter, 2001 – 02. Vol. X, NO. 1.PP. 8 – 10.
65. Odesskaya M.M. Third international conference in Irkutsk / M. Odesskaya // Chekhov Bulletin. 2002. No. 11. P. 93 – 95.
Another aspect of relationships involving large age differences are marriages in which the husband is much younger than the wife. It is a widely known fact that experienced mature women often become mistresses of young men who begin sexual relations. I will cite one of the letters published in Speed-info.
"I am 22 years old. I'm happy with life. But one “but”! I'm not at all interested in girls my age. On the contrary, they are attracted to more mature women, 35–45 years old. As soon as you see a pretty woman of this age on the street, an erection occurs. And fantasies fill your head. But not just ordinary fantasies, but a desire to rape this woman. At any age, I have always been attracted to women older than me. At school - to the teachers. And I never fell in love with someone my age. But the problem is that when I fall in love with women 35–45 years old, I don’t date them, that is, I don’t sleep with them, because I’m very afraid and don’t know how to approach them. I’ll come up and she’ll say: you’re a brat, the milk on your lips hasn’t dried, etc. Therefore, you have to relax with people your own age, but during sexual intercourse I think, I fantasize that it’s the right woman nearby, i.e. 35–45 years old, otherwise nothing will not work".
The specialist’s comments on this letter say that the young man’s experiences are normal and do not contain any pathology. And the main fear is the fear of being rejected. Not believing that desirable woman can voluntarily recognize him as a sexual partner, in his fantasies he takes possession of her by force. In principle, there are many middle-aged women who would like to marry a man younger than themselves. But they, just like this young man, avoid the situation of real acquaintance. They are either shy or do not consider themselves attractive to young men. Or, finally, they are afraid of encountering a maniac. It is possible that the author of the letter was not an “early child” and his mother was just 35–45 years old when he was 4–6. And at that age he considered his mother not only seductive, but also a very smart woman. And at school he fell in love with teachers, that is, with those who had the right to intellectually dominate him. Can he fall in love with someone the same age? This option is possible. But she will most likely be intellectually and experience-wise older than her passport age.
If such relationships develop into family relationships, then, as a rule, the woman takes the dominant maternal position, and the man takes the role of the “evergreen” boy. However, in many cases, such positions do not interfere at all with building mutually satisfying relationships. Female sexuality reaches its peak by the age of 35–40, and it is a young, energetic, albeit not very sophisticated lover who is ideal for a mature woman. Especially if she has a strong character, is self-confident and has achieved something in life (it doesn’t matter whether on her own or with the help of her ex-husbands). Then there is no need to shift the burden of responsibility for material and everyday problems, raising children on the fragile shoulders of a young husband. As one lady said, 8 years older than her husband, “when my husband is young, then I am young.” And it's not just about sexual relationships. Such a marriage constantly keeps a woman in good shape, forces her to take care of her figure, face, and wardrobe, because there is not a single woman who could “forget” about her age.
Men who enter into such a marriage, as a rule, are distinguished by a certain immaturity, a beautiful and somewhat feminine appearance and claim to be a kind of “darling of fate”, since when choosing a woman older than themselves, they make a certain compromise. Although, it is probably difficult to give a single assessment of such marriages, given how many options for relationships there can be among such families - after all, even people are not the same, and marriages even more so. The list of people who entered into such unequal marriages includes Isadora Duncan and Sergei Yesenin (18 years difference), Gala and Salvador Dali (10 years), Edith Piaf and Theo Sarapo (20 years), Liza Minnelli and Scott Baio (16 years ). Or take at least the most legendary couple of our stage: Alla Pugacheva and Philip Kirkorov. How many spears were broken by journalists and idle ordinary people around them, how many versions of their union were proposed, and in spite of everyone they lived long enough in their marriage - longer than other ordinary couples. So, if love has arisen between people and they are psychologically suitable for each other, you should not strictly focus on the usual stereotypes. Fate gives out its lottery tickets to people in a very whimsical way - if you refuse the unusual, you may not get any.
Alla Pugacheva and Philip Kirkorov - in the first period of their marriage There is another aspect of such marriages: often partners, for one reason or another, do not want or cannot have children, and this form of family is very “convenient” for implementing a “childless program.” When a MK correspondent asked if the widow of the poet Levitansky now wanted to find a husband younger than her, she replied that she considered such a union unnatural. According to her, the situation “old man - young woman” does not go beyond the natural norm. And the situation “old woman - young man” is unnatural, because it is not natural. An older man can have a child with a younger woman. Playing with a different goal does not work.
However, real life is difficult to squeeze into any framework, not in all cases psychological portraits similar families correspond to those described. I knew a couple in which the wife was 12 years older than her chosen one. This lady, outwardly fragile and childish, was very smart and enterprising, and her favorite role in the family was the image of a “capricious girl.” Her 22-year-old husband took on all the household responsibilities, earned money, and, in general, behaved like an experienced, caring and responsible “father of the family,” while at the same time he was quite satisfied with his life and sincerely considered his wife the most defenseless and touching girl in the world.
And finally, one more example - from history. Russian people have always been distinguished by maximalism in their views on the past of their country. The French, for example, sacredly honor the memory of their Great Revolution and not only regularly celebrate its anniversary for more than 200 years, but also remember all its heroes and anti-heroes. With us, everything happens differently. The heroes of the Great October Socialist Revolution were either raised to the shield and praised uncontrollably, or their role in this very Great October Revolution was completely denied (as was the case with Trotsky and Bukharin), or their biographies were taught as the lives of saints, or they were easily erased from textbooks. Thus, today’s schoolchildren no longer know the once legendary figure of the Russian revolution, A. M. Kollontai, who not only was the world’s first female ambassador, but also made a significant contribution to the Russian sexual revolution.
In December 1917, A. M. Kollontai met with P. E. Dybenko in the turbulent stream of revolutionary events. Their acquaintance soon turned into friendship, and then into stormy love. She was then 45 years old, he was 28, but this did not stop them from being passionately interested in each other. “Our relationship,” Kollontai recalled years later, “has always been overflowing joy; our partings were full of torment and heart-breaking emotions. It was this power of feeling that passionately, strongly, powerfully attracted me to Pavel.” When A. M. was once asked how she decided to have a sexual relationship with Dybenko, despite the fact that she was 28 years older than him, Kollontai answered without hesitation: “We are young as long as they love us.”
A. Kollontai and P. Dybenko A shadow of the past
Memory of the past kills hopes for the future.
(V. Bruskov)
In the relationship between spouses, their previous sexual relationships can sometimes play an important role. Sometimes the past, seemingly left behind forever, actively interferes with the present and destroys the future of the new family. Problems can arise even when young spouses get married for the first time and do not have a long trail of sexual partners behind them. Well, if the marriage is not the first, and the number of past sexual partners exceeds a dozen or two, then mutual quarrels and disagreements arise during this period. soil are almost inevitable.
In this case, the spouses, like the ancient Greek heroes, find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis: to talk honestly about all past connections means to awaken jealousy and kill in the partner such a soul-warming feeling of their exclusivity, and if you hide it, then where is the guarantee that the old connection will not emerge at the very beginning? the wrong moment for this, causing the effect of a bomb exploding. And yet, the truth about a loved one’s past sexual relationships is such a powerful and ruthless remedy that it should be used with more caution than arsenic or mercury preparations, which are sometimes used in medicine. The slightest overdose of such “truth” can lead to severe “poisoning” of mutual love, and even its death.
To illustrate such a categorical statement, I would like to cite an excerpt from A. Kuprin’s story “Loneliness,” in which a young husband, out of vanity and a desire to show off, talks about his affair that happened in the recent past.
“Vera Lvovna listened to him without interrupting with a single word and at the same time experiencing a bad feeling, similar to jealousy. It pained her to think that he had at least one happy moment left in his memory from his former life, not destroyed, not smoothed over by their current common happiness.
The gazebo suddenly seemed to be hidden around the bend. Vera Lvovna was silent, and Pokromtsev, carried away by his memories, continued:
Well, of course, they played at love, you can’t live without it at the dacha. Everyone played, starting with the old prince and ending with the beardless lyceum students, my students. And everyone patronized each other, turned a blind eye.
And you? Did you also... look after someone? - Vera Lvovna asked in an unnaturally calm tone.
He ran his hand over his mustache. This smug gesture, so familiar to Vera Lvovna, suddenly seemed vulgar to her.
Nah... me too. I have a little novel with Princess Kat, a very funny novel and, perhaps, if you like, even a little immoral. You see: the girl is not even sixteen years old, but her swagger, self-confidence, etc. are simply amazing. She expressed her views to me directly. “I’m bored here, he says, because I can’t live a single day without realizing that everyone around me is in love with me. You're the only one here I like. You are not bad-looking, you can talk to you, and so on. You, of course, understand that I cannot be your wife, but why don’t we spend this summer fun and pleasant?”
So what? It was fun? - Vera Lvovna asked, trying to speak casually, and she herself was frightened by her suddenly hoarse voice.
This voice made Pokromtsev wary. As if apologizing for hurting her, he pulled his wife's head towards him and touched her temple with his lips. But some vile, uncontrollable attraction, swarming in his soul, some vague and disgusting feeling, similar to boastful youth, pulled him to talk further.
So we played at love with this lad and broke up at the end of the summer. She thanked me completely indifferently for helping her not to get bored, and regretted that she had not met me after she had already gotten married. However, she, according to her, did not lose hope of meeting me later.
And he added with a fake laugh:
In general, this story is one of the most unpleasant memories for me. Isn’t it true, Verochka, that all this is disgusting?
Vera Lvovna did not answer him. Pokromtsev felt pity for her and began to repent of his frankness. Wanting to make amends for the unpleasant impression, he kissed his wife on the cheek again...
Vera Lvovna did not resist, but did not respond to the kiss... A strange, painful and incomprehensible feeling took possession of her soul. There was also partly jealousy for the past - the most terrible kind of jealousy - but it was only partly. Vera Lvovna had long heard and known that every man has affairs and relationships before marriage, that what is a huge event for women is a simple case for a man, and that one must inevitably put up with this terrible order of things. There was also indignation at the humiliating and depraved role that befell her husband in this novel, but Vera Lvovna remembered that her kisses with him, when they were still the bride and groom, were not always of an innocent and pure nature. The most terrible thing about this new feeling was the consciousness that Vladimir Ivanovich had suddenly become a stranger, a distant man to his wife, and that their former closeness could never return.
“Why did he tell me all this nasty stuff? - she thought painfully, squeezing and tormenting her cold hands. - He turned my whole soul upside down and filled it with dirt, but what can I say to him about this? How will I know what he was experiencing during his story? Regret about the past? Bad anxiety? Disgust? (No, in any case, not disgusting: his tone was smug, although he tried to hide it...) The hope of meeting this Kat again someday? And why not? If I ask him about this, he, of course, will hasten to reassure me, but how to penetrate into the very depths of his soul, into the most distant bends of his consciousness? How can I know that, speaking to me sincerely and truthfully, he at the same time does not deceive - and, perhaps, completely unwittingly - his conscience? ABOUT! What would I give for the opportunity to live at least for one moment his inner life, alien to me, to eavesdrop on all the shades of his thoughts, to spy on what is happening in this heart ... "
Vera Lvovna felt terrified and sad. For the first time in her life, she came across today the terrible consciousness that sooner or later comes to the head of every sensitive, thoughtful person - the consciousness of that inexorable, impenetrable barrier that always stands between two close people. “What do I know about him? - Vera Lvovna asked herself in a whisper, squeezing her hot forehead with her hands. - What do I know about my husband, about this man with whom I eat, drink, and sleep, and with whom I must spend my whole life together? Suppose I know that he is handsome, that he loves his physical strength and grooms his muscles, that he is musical, that he recites poetry, I know even more - I know his kind words, I know how he kisses, I know five or six his habits... Well, what else? What more do I know about him? Do I know what imprint his former hobbies left on his heart and mind? Can I guess from him those moments when a person internally suffers while laughing or when external, hypocritical sadness covers up gloating? How to understand all these subtle twists of someone else's thoughts, this monstrous whirlwind of feelings and desires that constantly, quickly and elusively rushes through the soul of a stranger?
Suddenly she felt such a deep inner melancholy, such a painful consciousness of her eternal loneliness, that she wanted to cry.”
Dynamics of Marriage Relationships
I was single - I dreamed of odalisques, bacchantes, whores, geishas, pussies. Now my wife lives with me, and at night I dream of silence.
(I. Guberman)
The beginning of a journey together
The only thing better than a honeymoon is the first month after a divorce.
I found the shortest and most succinct description of the evolution of relationships in marriage in Eric Berne. He wrote: “Marriage means six weeks of excitement and a world record in sex. Five more weeks to get to know each other, time for fences, rushing and running back, finding each other's weaknesses, and then the games begin. After six months, everyone makes a decision. The honeymoon is over, marriage or divorce begins - until next notice.”
Bill Lawrence wrote that the honeymoon comes to an end when He tells him on the phone that he will be late for dinner, and She has already left a note that dinner is in the refrigerator. According to many sexologists, marriage is a serious test for love, and there are several objective reasons for this.
The first of these is “habit”. By this completely everyday term I understand the loss of freshness of perception, as a result of which the vision of the sexual partner loses the pristine freshness and brightness observed in the initial period of the relationship. As the French poet Edmond Rostand said, “living with the person you love is as difficult as loving the person you live with.” After all, when love just flares up, all a person’s feelings towards his loved one acquire special sharpness and multicoloredness. He can spend hours admiring the face of his beloved, listen to her voice endlessly, study her body with delight, etc. But then the first months and then years of marriage pass. The wife’s face is already known to the smallest detail, her voice is depressing with its predictability, her body has been studied inside and out. Sensations fade, become “gray” and “one-color.” There is a purely physiological explanation for this. In the human central nervous system there is a special part of the brain - the thalamus, which filters all signals entering consciousness, allowing only new or particularly important information to pass into the cerebral cortex. It's like clothes that we feel only when we put them on, but then we stop feeling, or new curtains in the house that we first pay attention to, but after a few days we stop noticing. Approximately the same thing happens with the spouse, who over the years becomes only part of the familiar background, an element of the home environment, which reduces the intensity of sensations and leads to an increase in boredom and indifference.
The second reason: the duty to love, for, as Helen Rowland wrote, “marriage is the miracle of transforming a kiss from pleasure into duty.” The very phrase “marital duty” already makes you sad and reduces potency. It is difficult to find words so opposite in emotional and volitional mood than “love” and “duty.” As soon as you try to force yourself to sleep just because you have to get up early tomorrow, you are dooming yourself to long-term insomnia. If you should be grateful to someone for doing something kind to you, you run the risk of hating them. Our subconscious is very stubborn, it can sometimes be deceived, but it is almost impossible to force it to do something. And emotions, including love, are exclusively under his control. Therefore, attempts to make you love your spouse just because he has the corresponding entry in his passport are doomed to failure.
I. Anchukov “The age of freedom cannot be seen...” The third reason why love can gradually melt away is that at home we look unvarnished, the way we really are. If you take a photograph of a woman before “going out” in all the splendor of high-quality makeup and then compare it with a photograph taken in the morning, immediately after waking up, then this comparison will be simply stunning. (This is a purely speculative experience, and, for God’s sake, do not try to bring this crazy idea to life! In addition, this is not a stone thrown into a woman’s garden, it’s just that this example is more indicative among the “fair sex.”) But the point is not even that cosmetics, but in the roles we play in society and at home. There is a seducer in every man (big or small, talented or untalented - it doesn’t matter), just as there is a seductress in every woman. This fact does not require moral assessments - it is and will be so, because it is determined by the genetic program, activated at the subconscious level. This program requires you to cast your charms and vibes on any person of the opposite sex who has not yet been conquered.
Thus, outside the home, men and women instinctively strive to make the best impression on other people; To do this, they dress smartly, comb their hair, use perfumes and cosmetics, take seductive poses and make significant faces. When they come home, they shed all this like snake skin (there is no longer any need to conquer anyone within their own walls), and appear before their wife or husband in a rather unattractive background, especially compared to other people. Worn sports trousers with blisters at the knees, a wrinkled old shirt and worn-out slippers for the husband and an old dressing gown for the wife or her nightgown two sizes too big are completely different from the evening suit of the groom or the French lingerie of the bride during their premarital relationship. A sharp lowering of the bar soon after the wedding can cause resentment in one or both spouses, which can gradually lead to a cooling of feelings.
The fourth reason for the fading of love in marriage is the availability of sexual desires. On this occasion, I recall the statement of Emil Krotky: “Caring for his own wife seemed to him as absurd as hunting for fried game.” The law of motivational psychology says: “When there are no obstacles, interest disappears.” Sex in marriage should not take place at the first request of one of the spouses; it must be earned, as with open relationship. Sigmund Freud wrote that the longer the interval between the emergence of a desire and its satisfaction, the stronger the emotional experience, the more powerful the release. If the desire is satisfied immediately after it arises, then the pleasure from sex is minimal. Normally, a free woman does not give herself up at the first request of a man, but being married, she is, as it were, obliged to do this. Women feel the absurdity of such a situation especially acutely, as exemplified by Anita Ekberg’s aphorism: “You can’t understand men: before marriage they behave as if everything is allowed to them; after the wedding - as if they were not allowed anything.”
Henri Cadiou. Lost illusions The fifth reason for the death of love is quarrels over the desire to “improve” a partner. As Gilbert Chesterton said, “Your friends love you just the way you are; your wife loves you, but wants to make you a different person.” On this occasion, more than two centuries ago, Nicolas Chamfort wrote: “Love, even the most sublime, puts you at the mercy of your own passions, and marriage - at the mercy of your wife’s passions: ambition, vanity and everything else.” Apparently, the French thinker hit the nail on the head, as centuries pass and women do not change. One of my friends quite seriously said to her husband: “I love you very much, dear! But no matter how much I would love you, if only you had a beautiful new foreign car!” The man was at a loss for words, but the great English playwright John Priestley already answered for him when he stated: “A loving wife will do everything for her husband, with one exception: she will never stop criticizing and educating him.”
The sixth reason for the death of love is quarrels due to mismatched lifestyles. As strange as it may seem at first glance, arguments over the order of washing dishes or attitudes towards pets can destroy the feeling that seemed huge and unshakable to the newlyweds. In this case, slogans like “If you love me, then you must...” are often used (you can insert something from your experience here, ranging from “take out the bucket” to “buy a mink coat”). But listen, gentlemen, the concepts “love” and “should” cannot be put side by side in the same sentence, it’s like measuring butterflies in kilograms and time in meters. A truly loving person does something for his loved one not because he has to do it, but because he wants to. He does not need to be forced or blackmailed to do this; it is a joy for him to please his loved one. Therefore, if such conversations begin in the family, then this is an alarm signal, indicating that love has begun to crack and needs to be saved. Unfulfilled hopes can also be included in this category of reasons that destroy a marriage. “I got married because I didn’t want to cook breakfast in the morning, and I got divorced because I didn’t want to cook two breakfasts,” wrote Alexander Kulich.
Marriage with experience: fatigue and habit - how to resist them?
Family life began: washing, cleaning, ironing and marital duties.
(A.K., Samara (From letters to Speed-info))
Breaking stereotypes
Only being alone with himself does a person become natural and free from the need to play some role. This only happens when he is left completely alone - it doesn’t matter where: in a deep forest or in his own house. If there are people nearby, then the person automatically, most often unconsciously, tries on one of his many roles: “husband”, “father”, “work colleague”, “lover”, “stamp collector”, “dental patient” etc. Each of these roles involves a certain behavior, its own special jargon, facial expression, mood and inner feeling. When talking to his own children, a person assumes the role of an all-knowing, strict, but fair “Father”; being called “on the carpet” to his boss, he hastily puts on the mask of a hardworking and respectful “Subordinate” while still in the reception room; talking with a pretty fellow passenger in a train carriage, he happily plays the role of a charming, laid-back and slightly frivolous “Playboy”, etc.
“The whole world is a theater, and the people in it are actors,” - this brilliant phrase of Shakespeare has more meaning than is commonly believed, for not only does a person play this or that role, but over time the role begins to be played by a person, changing his personality, deforming character and developing new habits. For example, a woman who is accustomed to being a strict teacher at school automatically brings home a demanding tone and mentoring notes in her voice, and as a result encounters resistance from her husband, who plays the role of “Master of the House.” Agree that the roles of “Lovers” or even “Groom” and “Bride” are significantly different from the role of “Spouses” who have been living together for a long time, and accordingly the whole atmosphere of their relationship is different, including tone of voice, vocabulary, clothing and, most importantly, the energy of communication . Putting on the role masks of exemplary spouses every morning, people do not notice that a boring and gray disease called “Habit” has already settled in the air they breathe, like rust, systematically and mercilessly corroding their former love.
To prevent relationships from becoming covered in a web of dull habits, spouses should change behavioral patterns more often, especially in their sex life. You should periodically change the ways of having sex and the roles of partners in bed (not only according to the position occupied - “who is on top” and “who is below”, but also according to the functions performed in the love game. If the husband was usually active, then let him then the wife will take this function, and vice versa). You can change the time you have sex and the place where it happens. Along the way, you can change home clothes, their styles, styles, etc. A woman can change her hair color, and a man can grow a mustache or beard (or both at the same time). More frequent visits (or invitations) to guests, concerts, discos, expanding your social circle, etc. give good results.
The problem of addiction, which has a detrimental effect on family sex, is very acute throughout the world. Spouses, as a rule, do not share their concerns with others and, as best they can, try to find a way out of the situation. Psychologists and sexologists help them with this, for example Dagmar O’Connor, who wrote the wonderful book “How to make love with the same person all your life and have fun.” In it, she analyzes numerous conversations with her clients who have lost faith in marital sex. In this book, she cites statements from people who came to see her: “What kind of spontaneity can we talk about if every day in front of you is the same body, the same smell, the same as always?” - say her patients. Other statements in the same spirit: “He doesn’t excite me anymore. I don’t feel anything when he touches me”… “Her body is not the same anymore”… “I’m too tired, and so is she”…. "I don't have time for sex."
“For all these people, sex has lost its magic,” the writer notes. - If they make love, it is solely to maintain the “weekly rhythm” and not to argue with their spouse. These people rarely have sex for pleasure. However, you should not equate sex with food or drink, this makes it unattractive. People who turn sex into a purely genital act consider caresses and tenderness only a means to bring their partner to a certain state, after which their need is satisfied.
I devote at least 15 minutes to sexual play, and never jump into it without preparation, Jack told me.
In fact, "sex play" is the most anti-sexual expression I know. It is something that is considered mandatory to do in order to later get everything you really want. Jack was not attracted to the process of making love, but to the end result.”
Some clients told Dagmar O’Connor that they only have real, vibrant sex, filled with strong emotions, on vacation, and at home in the marital bed it is gray and unmemorable. In such cases, Dagmar O’Connor advised spouses not to wait for “holiday sex”, but to periodically arrange a one-night vacation away from home. As a rule, the result was excellent. That's what Terry and Borden, a married couple who tried to change the way they used to have sex, told her. They played the role of a couple in love who ran away out of town to have sex without interference.
The first time we arrived at the motel in the evening, the administrator looked at us very suspiciously and without approval. We tried our best to hold back our laughter and spent half the evening laughing in our room and then making love. Next time we went to another motel and checked in as George and Martha Washington. This time the administrator winked at us, and we had a simply amazing time.
After these vacations, Terry and Borden also had better “at-home” sex; it became more intense and varied.
“A little prank can make a big difference,” says Dagmar O’Connor. - Some couples don’t just leave home, but look for a new place every time. One woman told me:
We spent one evening in a very elegant hotel, the other in a terrible one, there were even bedbugs. And one day we came across an old-style inn that turned our trip into a secret love affair, and we felt like characters in a novel.”
Spontaneity
Spontaneity is the most important principle of sex. If any person rummages through his memory, he will probably find that the most recent and vivid impressions from sexual relations with a familiar partner he received in the case of unplanned sexual intercourse, performed under the influence of a powerful and quick desire. If this flame of passion, which has engulfed one partner, spreads to the second, then the sensations from such spontaneous sex can be extremely strong, no matter where it occurs - in the bedroom, in the kitchen or in the toilet stall of the conservatory after listening to Tchaikovsky's First Concerto (among readers' letters after the publication of the first edition of this book happened!).
The problem is that most often a sudden desire seizes one person, while the other at this moment may be completely unprepared for intercourse and, moreover, takes offense at such a violent and unplanned manifestation of passion, accusing his ardent partner of “exploiting” himself. Most often, such an accusation is heard from women’s lips.
You are using me!
You're just a brute animal! I don’t understand how you can have sex at half past seven in the morning?
Are you crazy? My mother is in the next room! You can't wait until evening. Let's go to bed - and then, humanly, like all people...
I don’t want to throw stones only at women’s gardens, so I fully admit that the remarks may be of a different kind:
Darling, I’m so tired at work, and here you are with your caresses... - Where did you put your hand? Now you will excite me, and soon my daughter should return from school! What will we do then?
Accusations of selfishness and sexual use of one spouse by another are very often present in family relationships. As a result, spouses develop a not very positive attitude towards their sudden sexual desires and a wary and fearful attitude towards the possible reactions of the other spouse to them. People are afraid of appearing shameless or intrusive and carefully suppress their secret desires instead of telling their spouse about them. I would like to remind you once again about the fundamental postulate of Sigmund Freud’s theory: suppressed sexual desire does not disappear anywhere, it only plunges into the dark depths of our subconscious in order to emerge from there at the most unexpected time and in the most unpredictable way in a different guise - a voluptuous dream, an accidental a slip of the tongue, an obsessive desire or an unexpected act. Therefore, in order to preserve and improve the relationship between husband and wife, it is much better to openly tell each other about your desires, even secret ones, which, at first glance, seem indecent or shameful, than to bury them within yourself, at the same time digging a grave for future sexual relationships in marriage.
How can we cultivate openness and spontaneity in our marital relationships without being accused of selfishness and exploitation? Dagmar O'Connor calls this method "Contractual Selfishness" and describes it in the above-mentioned book.
“An attractive couple, about 35, Penny and Rick, came to me complaining of a complete “lull” in their sex life.
What's something you did before that you don't do now? - I asked.
“We always do about the same thing,” Rick said, “we just can’t do the same things now that we used to.”
Maybe the time has come to try something different, I suggested. - Your sexual tastes change, just as tastes in food, literature and everything else change. Have you ever confided in each other your deepest sexual fantasies? What would you like to experience? What kind of caresses do you prefer?
They shrugged and shifted in their chairs. After a few questions from me, Penny explained what was stopping her from talking to Rick about it.
It seems to me that when you start explaining something, sex loses its magic, and then, it’s so disgusting to say, for example: “You know, I want you to stroke me here like this, and there in another way.” In the past, Rick always knew exactly what I needed without me having to ask him.
What if he can’t read your thoughts now? - I asked with a smile. -You still won't tell him anything? You believe that if he truly loved you, he would guess your desires, right? Too many people fail because of this common myth.”
When there is special spiritual closeness between spouses, another myth arises: “We are so similar,” the spouses say, “that I am sure that what I like, my half also likes.” These romantic myths are very harmful and absurd in nature. Then why are they so popular?
Lovers. From an engraving by the Japanese artist Sushmura. XVII century It's all about a feeling of shame: we are embarrassed to say what we would like in bed, because we do not want to seem selfish to both our spouse and ourselves. Selfishness is considered the worst sin in sex. Expressing what you want, without complexes and excuses, only means that we want to enjoy the joys of sex as much as possible. Meanwhile, selfish sex by mutual agreement is the best way for both to enjoy it. In bed, two selfish creatures achieve what everyone wants. Therefore, spouses must agree to satisfy each other, and in the way that the other suggests. This “agreement” is very serious and difficult for many to enter into, but if you turn it into a game or a fun exercise of your abilities, it can radically change the way a couple approaches sex. You just need to agree with each other that within two weeks everyone, without hesitation, asks for what they want. If sexual desire arises in one spouse, you should not wait until the second spouse “guesses his thoughts” and is ready to fulfill his request. You need to explain clearly and unambiguously, without unnecessary modesty, what you want. For the duration of the agreement, you should give each other permission to ask for anything at any time, even to wake you up at two in the morning or to do “this,” at first glance, in an unusual environment. At the same time, you should not subject your desires to moral or other censorship, and do not try to guess whether your partner likes your whim or not. On the other hand, don't be surprised if your partner's secret desire turns out to be too ordinary or incomprehensible to you. To ensure that no one feels unfairly offended, before starting the contract, you can discuss how many times during these two weeks each spouse can ask the other for a “sex service.” In order to avoid possible conflicts, it makes sense to agree on the permissibility of refusal by one of the partners if the desire of the second spouse seems completely impossible to him at this stage of development of their relationship. Let the second person have the right to say: “I’m not ready for this fantasy yet,” but this should be a refusal in the form of “not yet,” and not “no, never.”
During this game, psychologists advise giving up the feeling of guilt for “exploiting” your partner, because with this form of sexual communication, the roles of the spouses periodically change - today one shows generosity and generosity, tomorrow the other. Sometimes the second partner immediately accepts the sexual desires of the first, and then new forms of sex by mutual consent are quickly introduced into the general repertoire, and sometimes it takes a lot of time for the other spouse to abandon the usual stereotypes and want the same thing. There is no need to rush in this matter. Taste comes with eating. And even if some of the sexual fantasies are not accepted by the other party, at least they will be realized at least occasionally during the validity of such “agreements”, which means that such thoughts will not be suppressed and go into the subconscious, threatening family well-being from there.
Keep yourself in shape, don’t let yourself get loose at home
Men should always remember that a wife is not only the mother of his children and a companion in household chores, but first of all a woman, which means she constantly needs to be conquered (or other men will do it for him). Of course, it is not necessary to wear a tuxedo and evening dress at home, and a woman’s face should take a break from makeup during the evening, but, on the one hand, you can always choose quite beautiful and fresh clothes for home use, and on the other hand, who is stopping the spouses at least On weekends, have festive and even slightly formal dinners, or at least put on something smart?
But clothes are just an outer shell, a skin that peels off every evening, or even more often. What's underneath is even more important. Unfortunately, we have largely lost the love and respect for the human body that was inherent in the ancient Greeks. They knew how, on the one hand, to groom and caress him with aromatic oils, massage and rubbing, and on the other hand, to train, educate and harden him. In ancient times, people were not ashamed to appear naked, and the soul and body were two equal halves of human nature. Nowadays, many of us have undeservedly forgotten about our bodies, and such neglect of our body causes a corresponding reaction on its part. After all, scientists have long established that a significant part of diseases - hypertension, bronchial asthma, ulcerative colitis and even cancer - reflect the rebellion of our subconscious to the ruthless exploitation of the body, to inattention to its needs.
Therefore, taking care of your body is the primary task of any person who wants to live happily ever after. But we are now interested in another aspect of a healthy lifestyle - the influence of the state of our body on sexual life in marriage. Why do many spouses stop experiencing sexual arousal at the sight of their better halves? One of the common reasons for this is the physical condition of their bodies: flabby, flabby, and suffering from excessive obesity. Yes, working on your body takes time and sometimes money. But usually the third component is missing - willpower. And then a dubious argument comes into play: “Let him (she) love me for who I am.” Or even cooler: “I want my wonderful soul to be loved, and the physical shell is secondary.” With such words, people justify their laziness and weakness of will, forgetting that beauty and love have always been inseparable twin sisters, and by deliberately killing one of them, we often doom her sister to death as well.
It’s better to save on alcohol or an extra dress and buy a gym membership or shaping course. If the financial situation is absolutely critical, there are still morning exercises, jogging, a bicycle, home dumbbells and a horizontal bar in the yard.
You have to win a partner
A wife should not give herself to her husband at his first request. If she wants to be appreciated, for her husband to experience a full-fledged bright orgasm, she must show considerable ingenuity and coquetry in order to “inflame” her husband and bring the strength of his desire to such a level when he would passionately want her, but at the same time not he felt that he was simply being “dumped” and would not run to seek solace with another, more accessible woman. Here tact and understanding are required from the wife. With proper behavior, mutual flirting followed by sex can give spouses new and vibrant sensations forgotten in the routine of marital duties.
Accept a person as he is
Sometimes it happens that, looking up from the TV, which is showing the film “Basic Instinct” or “Pretty Woman,” the husband stumbles upon his wife wiping dust from the dressing table, and, quickly comparing her with Sharon Stone or Julia Roberts, thinks: “ Yes... there are women in their villages... Look what they do in bed. And the external data is an A plus. And my…". And he sadly realizes that he is doomed to spend the rest of his days with a far from perfect female representative.
Or maybe there is a different picture. On March 8th, all women are given gifts at work. And so, receiving flowers and chocolate from a handsome colleague who is generous with compliments, someone’s wife thinks: “Well, someone got a guy: he’s handsome, and gallant, and not boring. And mine is a bear-bear. He'll pour some borscht in the evening and won't even say thank you. And now I’ll have to suffer with him all my life.”
What can you say to this? Of course, there are about three billion women and about the same number of men living on Earth. And perhaps, somewhere in Louisiana, Stockholm or Uryupinsk, your ideal half is waiting impatiently for its fate... But again, because there are three billion of them (these potential halves), the chances of finding your ideal in this life are too small. If you don’t want to be single your whole life, you still have to make a choice, and preferably not at the age of seventy. Therefore, if you are already married, then, most likely, your spouse at one time had quite certain advantages - otherwise you would not have chosen him. And to be sad because it does not contain all the virtues of the world is, to say the least, stupid. Going this way can only poison family life, nothing more. Better think more often that your spouse is the one and only!!!
On the other hand, it would be much more constructive not to focus on what you don’t like, but together to determine how you would like to see each other? What qualities should be accepted as they are (height, nose shape, eye color, etc.). What qualities can, in principle, be changed if one of the partners wants it, and the other doesn’t mind acquiring new features (pump up muscles, lose five extra kilograms of weight, dye your hair black, get ceramic crowns instead of metal ones, quit smoking, etc. ).
The combination of delicacy and openness is very important here. If you are not sure that your spouse is capable of changing in the desired direction, it is better not to torment him needlessly. If his normal weight is 80 kg, and he feels great, then it’s better not to torment him with daily weighing and banning his favorite pies. And then: it is extremely difficult to force another person to change; it is much easier (and more interesting) to make him want to do it himself. Show your spouse the benefits of the new position, encourage him along the way, and you will mutually enjoy the change. Instead of the words spoken in a grumbling, dissatisfied tone: “Look at who you look like! If you don’t lose weight by Sunday, I won’t go to the theater with you! And stop slouching!” It’s better to exclaim enthusiastically: “I can imagine how elegant you will look if you lose a little here, at the waist. You'll look a lot like a young Sean O'Connery. And if you can, straighten your shoulders a little, dear. Right now you’re great.”
Connect play and imagination
Fantasy in sex is not necessarily a way to replace a boring partner in your imagination with another - an invented one. In fact, you may well have a rainbow of fantasies about your sex life with your spouse. Without fiction and imagination, sex becomes prosaic over time; in the end, it is fantasies that distinguish us from animals, for only a person can turn ordinary intercourse into an amazing performance. Best performances in this area, these are joint fantasies that shatter all norms. For example, spouses may play the role of lovers during their intimate encounters outside the home. One woman told Dagmar O'Connor:
Sometimes my husband calls me at the office and briefly says: “At five at the Lexington Hotel.” And this is enough to give me goosebumps.
Another couple played the same game at home:
One day my wife, in the midst of events, whispered to me: “Hurry up, otherwise my husband will come soon.” It was cool and witty at the same time. Now she sometimes complains to me about her husband, and I don’t defend myself. I am a sympathetic lover, and, you know, surprisingly, I understand her husband's shortcomings very well.
For some people, fulfilling fantasies is the only way to achieve complete satisfaction. One woman began to experience orgasm only after she and her husband began playing prostitute and client:
When we finish making love, I always tell my husband to leave the money on the dresser. There is something about this game that liberates me and my husband. Now I always have an orgasm.
Dagmar O'Connor notes that by playing "whore," this woman was able to put aside the "good girl" complexes that were preventing her from enjoying sex. The fantasy worked, and as a result, both spouses received a new quality of sex.
Return to earlier periods of the relationship
Before having sex, don't try to take off all your clothes at once. Play seduction. Remember your early experiences with each other, when you slowly undressed each other, anticipating the delicious pleasure of long-awaited sex. Usually, when going to bed, spouses “incidentally” intend to have sex and undress for this. Boring! But once upon a time it seemed so tempting and electrifying to us to stroke our breasts through a sweater or rub our buttocks clad in jeans against each other, run our hands under a blouse or stroke our swollen fly, and even in a place where it would be completely indecent to have sex! After all, it promised so much ahead! Why do we now avoid wonderful touches? Is it really necessary to start and end everything so urgently? The more games there are in sex, the longer the path to what is expected, the better the coitus will be. First of all, because during a long game more blood will flow to the genitals, therefore, the deeper the subsequent relaxation will be. After all, having sex in clothes means playing seduction, and this is so pleasant and so exciting. Try playing this game with your spouse - seduce by undressing. Women especially miss the magnetic excitement that occurs when the buttons on a blouse are undone one after another, the zipper on a skirt comes down - and all this with constant stroking and caressing.
Understand and give in
At the very beginning of the conflict, when anger or irritation has not yet gripped the soul, you need to ask yourself: “Do I love this person?” After all, a man in love was once ready to perform a feat in the name of his chosen one and even give his life for her. In family life, both less and more of this is required: just to give in to an argument. Remember that you yourself periodically change your point of view - and nothing bad happens. Why do you deny the right to have your point of view to another, and the person closest to you?
Think about the people who have ever liked your spouse. Think about how he (she) could be attractive to another: face, figure, voice, charm... Imagine that you are a co-worker of your wife (an employee working in the same office as your husband). How could you start an affair with the person you like? Look at your spouse through the eyes of another person (interested in closer contact). Think about how you can attract him and win his sympathy. Use your imagination and ingenuity, and you will see a lot of new details in a seemingly long-known person. A slight amount of jealousy (unfounded), which may arise at the thought of how your wife (husband) may be viewed, will not hurt, but will only invigorate and tone up a slightly withered relationship.
You can apply this rule at a party or holiday where you and your spouse communicate with a large number of people. Look at how other men talk to your wife, how they dance with her, how they want her. A wife can do the same, assessing the attractiveness of her husband, which can be read in the eyes of strangers. At the same time, flirt with your guests from the heart - all this energy in the evening can turn into an excellent love session at home.
Pay attention to how others interact with your spouse: how they feel his attractiveness, how they take his arm, laugh at his jokes. Imagine that you need to “picture” him (her) and start flirting. And save all these feelings until you come home...
Tact and patience
In the relationship between spouses in marriage, patience and the desire to restore a shaken relationship are very important. If a wife notices that her husband has reduced sexual activity, she should under no circumstances blame him for incipient impotence or immediately take a lover (if, of course, this wife wants to save the marriage and make it not just tolerable, but, if possible, happy ). First of all, she must understand what is behind a man’s reduced sexual activity: a decrease in his libido or an inability to realize it (for simplicity, let’s reduce this dilemma to two main questions: “Doesn’t want to?” or “Can’t?”).
If “can’t,” then, paradoxically, this is a more desirable option for the wife. The main thing is that he wants his wife. The rest will follow. Illness, spring vitamin deficiency, overwork, problems at work, even a word spoken in the heat of the moment by the wife - all this can cause a temporary decrease in potency. The most important thing for the wife is not to focus on this, to be affectionate and patient. Show that a gentle look and a gentle touch are enough for her (even if this is not entirely true). This unpleasant event can become a reason for a mutual search for new forms of sexual games and experiments, which will only enrich married life after the problem disappears. Under no circumstances should a wife throw phrases at her husband like: “What else can you expect at your age?” or “Well, if you can’t do it the way a man should do it, let’s try something new.” Remember: a man who finds himself in such a delicate position becomes very vulnerable and sensitive to ridicule. A woman, on the contrary, should notice any positive signs of restoration of potency and encourage her husband in every way. Anything can be used: massage, lace lingerie, erotic videos, a gentle whisper in the ear before bed and much more. A woman should not offer sex, but even slightly shy away from it, tease the man, saying that “the doctor has temporarily forbidden them to do this” until potency is completely restored. Believe me, nothing increases this potency more than prohibitions!
Now let’s look at another situation: “He doesn’t want to!” Here the options arise: “Doesn’t want a wife” and “Doesn’t want anyone.” If “no one,” then perhaps, as in the first case, depression or problems at work are to blame (especially if the man has his own business, and the country is called “Russia.” With our officials and taxes, the presence of sexual desire in relatively honest businessmen is perceived as an inexplicable natural phenomenon). In this case, libido will be restored along with the submission of the annual balance sheet or the long-awaited customs clearance of important cargo. The wife’s task during this period is not to demand the impossible from her husband and to help him endure life’s difficulties.
If the husband doesn’t exactly want his wife, and when he sees a pretty butt on the TV screen his tights begin to move, then the situation here is more serious. The worst option for a wife is if the husband is in love. It is clear that he is not into her, and blinded by the sudden outbreak of passion, he does not want to have any sexual relations with his former “half”. Here the prognosis may be the most unfavorable, and victory, even if it goes to the legal spouse, may come at a great cost to her.
A more common version of a man’s gradual cooling towards his own wife is based on the loss of this wife’s former athletic and erotic form: curlers on her head, a torn robe on her body and holey slippers on her feet. If you add to this a saggy belly, a hunched back and a lack of makeup, then you can at least partially understand a man who, with a sad sigh, watches his neighbor working as a secretary in a luxurious office. What should the wife do in this case? Out with the curlers, replace the greasy robe or at least wash it and shorten it to a “mini” format, buy shoes for the house. Remove the belly with the help of shaping, straighten the shoulders, light up the eyes, and put on makeup on the lips. And don’t forget about the hypnosis of French lingerie and a drop of good perfume before bed.
Marriage is the only union from which one can only leave by dissolving the entire organization.
(Wladislaw Grzeszyk)
Recently, attitudes towards the institution of marriage have undergone certain changes. It began to be perceived by some sociologists and psychologists not as a mutually beneficial union, in which each of its members strives to provide the second spouse with the most optimal conditions of existence, but as a forced union of two beings striving, first of all, to satisfy their purely selfish goals and forced to resort to to certain compromises. This view also finds support among ethologists - scientists who study animal behavior. On this occasion, Richard Dawkins wrote in his book “The Selfish Gene”: “... Thus, each of the partners can be viewed as an individual who seeks to exploit the other, trying to force him to make a greater contribution to the cultivation of offspring. Ideally, every individual would "like" (I do not mean that he would experience physical pleasure in doing so, although this is possible) to copulate with a possible a large number representatives of the opposite sex, leaving the rearing of children in each case to their partner.”
This view of sexual partnership as a relationship characterized by mutual mistrust and mutual exploitation is especially emphasized by Trivers. For ethologists, this view is relatively new. We are accustomed to viewing sexual behavior, copulation and the courtship ceremonies that precede it as a kind of essentially joint activity undertaken in the name of mutual benefit and even for the benefit of the species!
From this rather pessimistic view of the union of the two sexes follows the almost predetermined prospect of divorce - that is, the return of marriage partners to their original individual existence. However, the positive impact of divorce on the institution of marriage should not be overlooked.
Divorce can be the gravedigger of a family union, and then the person who survives it decides never to marry again, or it can become the beginning of a new family, stronger and happier than the one that existed before. Only one of the spouses may want a divorce, and then for the other it is perceived as a tragedy, or maybe both - and then the divorce will become for both a long-awaited liberation from unnecessary legal shackles, as was the case with Woody Allen, who told reporters: “We were thinking about what to do: go to the Bahamas or get a divorce. But, in the end, they decided that the Bahamas is only a pleasure for two weeks, and a good divorce lasts a lifetime.”
Therefore, depending on the specific circumstances, divorce can be both good and bad. Joseph Collins said: “Divorce is not the enemy of marriage, but its ally,” believing that it is the possibility of “early” termination of a marriage that makes the latter more durable, because it deprives it of the elements of doom and lifelongness. Adrian Decourcel shared the same point of view, arguing that “divorce is a safety valve in the marital cauldron.”
On the other hand, there is another opinion: divorces, they say, weaken marriage and push people to have a frivolous attitude towards it. This view is primarily characteristic of cultures with a strong influence of the church (Italy), as well as with established national traditions (China). In Catholic countries, marriage is considered to be overshadowed by divine grace, and therefore its destruction is a sin. In countries with a focus on material values (USA), difficulties in the path of divorce are associated with a very complex and expensive procedure for dividing property. However, even practical Americans understand that it is better to spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers than to live with a psychologically incompatible person. All that remains is to treat the situation with a bit of humor, as did the American millionaire Tommy Manville, who was divorced thirteen times. Once, after another divorce case, he noted with slight sadness: “She cried - and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.”
Non-traditional forms of marriage
The bonds of marriage are so heavy that only two, and sometimes three, can bear them.
(Alexandre Dumas son)
When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Wilheim Reich, one might say, for the first time seriously began to study family relationships on a mass scale, he was surprised to discover that not only men, but also women, in their dreams and fantasies, were happy to paint pictures of adultery. In the book “Sexual Revolution” W. Reich wrote: “There is not a single woman who does not have so-called “fantasies on the topic of prostitution.” This should not be understood in the literal sense. Few women see themselves in their fantasies as prostitutes. We are almost always talking about the desire to have sexual intercourse with several men, without limiting your sexual experience to one partner. It is clear that such a desire is associated with the idea of prostitution. The data obtained from clinical character analysis completely destroys the belief in the monogamous predisposition of women." Alas, the belief in the monogamous predisposition of men was buried much earlier.
Trying to find a compromise between the need for marriage as a social institution that gives stability to society, and the desire of people not to be limited to only one sexual partner, people came up with various “non-traditional” forms of marriage relations.
Such exotic forms, for example, include “temporary marriages,” which until the beginning of the 20th century were widespread among Shiites, especially in Persia. Johann Bloch in his History of Prostitution wrote about this:
“A temporary wife has the right to enter into a new marriage every 25 days. A temporary marriage can last even one hour. According to custom, a Persian, going on a trip or expedition, never takes his wife with him, but at almost every station where he stays for a longer time, he enters into a temporary marriage.
“Marriages for an hour” are especially common in villages. Villagers willingly give their daughters or sisters to rich people for this kind of connections, which bring a lot of income to both them and the intermediaries, the mullahs. Even in the brothels of Persia, every evening the imam marries his clients with the ladies of their choice according to the ritual and writes a contract in which a mandatory remuneration is established.”
If you think that such “fleeting” marriages are a thing of the distant past, then you are slightly mistaken. I will not talk about the great Elizabeth Taylor, who married almost every time she liked a man - her eight marriages are described in detail by reporters. There are cooler stories in life, for example, the 28 marriages of American Scotty Wolf. His stunning story was described in Speed Info several years ago. Mr. Wolfe celebrated his last wedding when he turned 85 years old. His last wife is also one of the record-breaking breed, she was married 22 times. According to Scotty Wolf, the main desire in his many marriage experiments was to make his future wife happy and then prepare her for an independent life. He preferred to marry young people. His wife No. 27 was 14 years old when they were married. When she turned 20, she filed for divorce.
True, wife No. is 28–53 years old. Since she has a wealth of experience behind her and knows well how to please a man, the bride is confident that their marriage will be stable. But why did she choose Scotty Wolf? What can an 85-year-old pensioner give her? Attention, warmth, tenderness - this is firstly, and secondly financial security (even despite the fact that Scotty regularly pays alimony to all his 19 offspring from different wives, he is a wealthy man). And Scotty himself believes that, quite possibly, this marriage of his may not last forever. Marriage, he says, is an experiment, a journey into the unknown, which he intends to continue until his last breath.
"Swedish-Russian" family. I. I. Panaev, A. Ya. Panaeva and N. A. Nekrasov Among the “non-standard” forms of marriage that exist in our time, we can name polygamy, which officially exists in Muslim countries, the so-called “Swedish family”, in which several couples live peacefully sexually, same-sex families consisting of gays or lesbians, Mormon families, in which there is one husband and several wives, etc.
In the history of Russian literature of the 19th century, a rather noticeable phenomenon was the “triple” union of the great Russian poet N. A. Nekrasov, A. Ya. Panaeva and her husband, I. I. Panaev. Avdotya Yakovlevna Panaeva had problems with her husband immediately after the wedding. Her husband was not going to give up his bachelor habits. Elegantly dressed, with carefully styled hair, he wandered around fashionable living rooms, restaurants and actors' restrooms, making friends with hussars, actresses and “ladies of the demimonde.” As a result, A. Ya Panaeva began to feel increasingly lonely and abandoned. Nekrasov began visiting her house in 1845 and almost immediately was fascinated by the elegant, dark-skinned hostess, who, in addition to her attractive appearance, also had excellent literary taste. Nekrasov soon admitted his feelings for Panaeva, but she continued to be faithful to her frivolous husband and did not make reciprocal steps towards the poet.
A year later, N.A. Nekrasov takes an unprecedented step for that time: he settles in the same apartment with the Panaev couple, and there, on Liteiny Prospekt, the rapprochement between the poet and Avdotya Yakovlevna begins, which ended in their civil marriage. It took Nekrasov almost a year and a half to win the heart of his beloved, and the day of their sexual intimacy became a real holiday for Panayeva. She wrote:
Happy day! I distinguish him
In a family of ordinary days,
I count my life from him
And I celebrate in my soul!
Panaev, famous for his secular frivolity, was a kind fellow and, according to the reviews of his contemporaries, reacted to what had happened with calm indifference. The whole trio not only met every day in the evenings in their apartment on Liteiny, but also worked together on the Sovremennik magazine, which was published by Nekrasov. Panaev ran the fashion department there, and he did it with soul and invention.
The union of N. A. Nekrasov and A. Ya. Panaeva, which went through love and hatred, coldness and violence of feelings, lasted almost 16 years! In the best years of their life together, they not only enjoyed the joys of love together, but also created together, creating several novels. In his poems, Nekrasov called Avdotya Yakovlevna his “second muse,” which was the highest sign of recognition for the poet. Nevertheless, their life together was by no means strewn with roses: the great Russian poet was partial to female beauty, and sometimes this led to family quarrels. One day he became seriously interested in the French actress Selina Lefren, who was distinguished not so much by her beauty as by her lively disposition, brilliant outfits and good musical abilities. Nekrasov communicated with Selina more than once both in St. Petersburg and abroad, and much later she wrote to the poet from Paris: “Don’t forget that I am all yours. And if it ever happens that I can be useful to you in Paris... don’t forget that I will be very, very happy.” In another letter, Selina Lefren wrote: “I understand here how empty everything is around, and that it is necessary to have a true friend in the world.” Apparently, they were connected not only by friendship, for Nekrasov remembered the actress all his life and in his posthumous will assigned her ten and a half thousand rubles, which at that time was a very impressive sum.
Naturally, Avdotya Panayeva did not like such passages on the part of her partner, and very stormy scenes took place between them. One of Nekrasov’s poems, written by Panaeva in moments of repentance, has reached us, in which the great Russian poet admits his guilt and asks to forgive him:
Sorry! Don't remember the days of the fall,
Melancholy, despondency, embitterment, -
Don't remember the storms, don't remember the tears,
Don't remember the jealousy of threats!
But the days when love shone
It rose tenderly above us
And cheerfully we made our way -
Bless and don't forget!
Celibacy as a way of life
And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone; Let us create for him a helper suitable for him.
(Genesis 2; 18.)
It is not good for a person to be alone. But, Lord, what a relief this is!
(John Barrymore)
To begin with, here is an excerpt from Alexander Meshkov’s comic story “If you are thinking of getting married”: “Current times make us think about the appropriateness of marriage relations and the institution of marriage in general. It should be remembered that the wife will have to be fed. It costs from 500 to 1000 US dollars to feed an average-sized adult woman. Add also the costs of clothes and tights, medical care. Some women also need to have their hair cut and dyed. In addition, you will have to pay with your time and sacrifice many amenities. You need to walk your wife several days a week, you will have to change the warm comfort of a lonely bed, but many wives toss and turn and snore while sleeping.
Do you need to go on a business trip? And how many jokes and life situations begin with the words “My husband is returning from a business trip”?! You will have to carefully monitor your wife’s health, otherwise she may become pregnant, and this will be an additional expense. In addition, wives constantly steal money from their husbands - sometimes entire salaries.
There is an opinion that blondes are dumber and difficult to train. You should take a wife who is both big and charming. But keep in mind that brunettes are more sociable and mobile, and this threatens the possibility of adultery. Big, big women eat a lot. Balance your financial capabilities. Moreover, big wives fight. However, this also happens: they take a small wife, and she grows into a large, portly woman. Less often it happens the other way around. Sometimes, after marriage, some husbands become stressed because their wives do not participate in beauty pageants and do not become supermodels. In this case, you should take your wife directly from the exhibition. However, this will come at a cost. This is only available to business people..."
Now do you understand why sociologists are sounding the alarm about the steady increase in the number of singles - people who, for one reason or another, do not enter into a registered marriage? In the USSR, from 1959 to 1970, the number of men who did not enter into a registered marriage at the age of 25–29 years old increased by 14%, and 30–39 years old - by 45%. The famous sexologist I. S. Kon explains this phenomenon for various reasons. In his major work “Introduction to Sexology” he writes: “Some people do not marry because they are not psychologically or physiologically adapted to it. Others simply avoid the responsibilities of marriage, preferring to satisfy their sexual needs in casual relationships (this was more difficult in the past). Still others (there are quite a lot of them) are actually married, but do not register it. These types are socially and psychologically different, but their prevalence is a rather serious symptom. It should be added that the motivations for avoiding sexual relations between men and women in some respects differ quite greatly. Therefore, it makes sense to separately examine “hardened bachelors” and “old maids.”
Confirmed bachelors
You must always be in love. This is why you should never get married.
(Oscar Wilde)
People who do not marry and remain single for the rest of their lives can be divided into two groups: those who “want to, but cannot” and those who “can, but do not want.” The first group includes persons with physical and mental defects who themselves “gave up on themselves” and decided (in most cases unreasonably) that it is unlikely that there will be a woman who will agree to marry them. In fact, the problem of such people most often lies in their inferiority complex and weakness of character. There are a lot of examples of how strong-willed people overcame their physical disabilities and found wonderful life partners. Among the “textbook” ones we can recall the Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot Alexei Maresyev, and among those closer to us in time - academician Svyatoslav Fedorov. The latter had a foot amputated in his youth, which did not interfere to a young guy from a modest family to become a world famous scientist, the wealthiest doctor in the Soviet Union and a favorite of women.
There are many more representatives of the second group (“can, but doesn’t want to”), as well as reasons why various men stubbornly avoid the bonds of Hymen.
Firstly, these are people with complex characters who experience difficulties in social adaptation. As a rule, in their life baggage they have the experience of unsuccessful love or marriage, which had a huge negative impact on them (for example, the betrayal of a beloved woman or a sharp dissimilarity of characters in their first marriage). Such people unreasonably spread their unsuccessful experience to other women, believing that subsequent marriages will not be better.
Secondly, the “hardened bachelors” include the so-called “mama’s boys”, for whom the image of a mother is capable of completely crowding out any other woman from the soul. Oddly enough, this happens in two opposite scenarios: if the mother of the future bachelor is a domineering woman, overly protective of her beloved child, who cannot find an “ideal wife” for her over-aged son, or the son himself idolizes his mother and cannot find a bride, similar to her.
Thirdly, opponents of marriage include people with low sex drive who do not feel a craving for frequent sexual contact and therefore do not see the need to get married. In addition, they often have an interesting job or hobby with which they fill their leisure time, which also reduces the need to communicate with people of the opposite sex.
The fourth group of men who avoid marriage should include people with a non-traditional sexual orientation (primarily homosexuals) or people prone to various sexual anomalies.
The fifth group of bachelors includes people of certain professions (sailors, polar explorers, geologists, special forces soldiers), who are characterized by many months of business trips and who understand that because of this their marriage has little chance of becoming happy.
Single life has both pros and cons. On the one hand, a bachelor does not have to support his wife and children; he can spend more money on himself. He should not “get used to” another person, adjust his life and habits to the woman living nearby. He can change sexual partners as often as he likes, without worrying about conspiracy or jealousy. He is unfamiliar with the concept of “marital duty”; he owes no one and makes love solely of his own free will. On the other hand, at times he experiences a feeling of painful loneliness, he is deprived of a family atmosphere, he feels some social rejection from others. Due to promiscuity, single men have a higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases; According to statistics, they live several years less than married people. So the price for freedom is quite high - years of life. But, again, the most inveterate bachelors claim that, firstly, their lives are much brighter and richer in events than those of “married” people, and secondly, life after seventy is not particularly attractive to them, because what is a life without sex? ?
In general, there are plenty of arguments for and against marriage; the only correct solution to this problem, as ancient as the world, has not yet been found. “Get married in any case,” advised the wisest Socrates. “If you marry successfully, you will be an exception; if you are unlucky, you will become a philosopher.”
The most famous people who avoided marriage for a long time include the great French writer Balzac, who for a long time was passionately in love with the Polish aristocrat Anna Hanska and at the same time avoided marriage with her in every possible way. M. Zoshchenko in the book “Before Sunrise” describes this relationship as follows:
“For years he corresponded with this woman. He loved her with the intensity of which a man of great heart and mind is capable.
At a distance (they lived in different countries), she was not “dangerous” to him. But when she wanted to leave her husband to come to him, he wrote to her: “Poor tethered lamb, do not leave your stall.”
However, she "left her stall." She came to Switzerland to see Balzac. However, it was an unhappy meeting; Balzac almost avoided Ganskaya.
Biographers were baffled by his behavior.
- He felt afraid to recognize the one he loved.
- He was afraid of too much happiness.
- He had a nasty room, and he was embarrassed to invite her to his place.
But Ganskaya’s husband died. All moral motivations have disappeared. There could be no more retreats.
Balzac had to go to Poland to marry Hanska.
The biographer writes that this decision to go greatly worried him. “Once Balzac got into the carriage, he almost stayed there forever.” With each city, approaching the goal of the journey, Balzac felt worse and worse.
He began to feel suffocated to such an extent that further travel seemed unnecessary.
He arrived in Poland almost a ruin.
The servants supported him by the arms as he entered Ganskaya's room.
He muttered: “My poor Anna, it seems that I will die before I give you my name.” However, this condition of his did not protect him from the wedding, which was scheduled in advance. The last days before this, Balzac was almost paralyzed. He was carried into the church sitting in a chair. He died soon after, at the age of fifty. He was a man of enormous physical strength and enormous temperament. But that didn’t save him from defeat.”
Old maids
If there is anything sadder in the world than a lonely woman, it would be a woman who claims that she likes it.
(Stanley Shapiro)
“Old maids” are not born, they become them, and most often through the fault of their parents. The reasons that lead to such a life scenario can be divided into several categories: defects in upbringing, personality traits, incorrect behavior strategies.
Defects in education
Very often, the formation of the psychological attitude of an “old maid” begins in very early childhood. This often happens if a woman whose husband left her is raising her only daughter, and the man’s departure from the family occurred shortly after the birth of the child, and the girl does not remember him. In this case, the image of the father, which will subsequently serve as a kind of “matrix” for the formation of the image of men in general, will be surrounded by a negative halo. If a mother does not hide her negative attitude towards her father from her child, and expresses her negative emotions in a generalized and harsh form (“all men are scoundrels...”, “your dad was a decent brute, however, the rest are no better...”, “they you need one, and then look for their fistulas - only the trace has disappeared...", "daughter, for God's sake, be more careful in communicating with men, otherwise you will end up, like me, on the beans..."). When a girl is protected from the sexual side of life from childhood, raised to fear men and distrust them, then over time she develops a fear of members of the opposite sex, a misunderstanding of male psychology, and an unwillingness to have anything in common with them. The prognosis becomes especially difficult if the mother, of course, with the best of intentions, protects her daughter from contact with boys, does not allow her to go out with peers, to discos, or into nature. The greatest Chinese of the 20th century, Mao Tse-Tung said: “To learn to swim, you must swim!” In order to learn how to successfully communicate with members of the opposite sex, there is no other way other than communication. Of course, it is desirable if there is friendly advice and help from the mother, tactful advice and adequate reactions to inevitable mistakes and failures. Only in this case the daughter will not repeat the sad experience of her mother.
A completely different scenario, which is less common but can still lead to loneliness, develops when a girl is raised by her father. In this case, the father figure (especially if he is kind, affectionate and handsome) grows to epic proportions and the girl develops an “Electra complex”. For her, her father becomes the best man, next to whom the rest of the stronger sex pales. The situation can be complicated if the father also experiences subconscious sexual feelings for his daughter (and this should not be treated as something dirty and perverted - these are natural, biologically determined attractions that are present to one degree or another in a significant part of fathers in relation to to his beloved daughters). Another thing is that these subconscious motivations are suppressed by the Super-Ego and pushed out of consciousness, however, in the case of an incomplete family, the father often experiences jealousy towards his daughter’s men, and the girl herself loves her father more than her fans. In order to untie this tangle of biological and social attachments and provide his daughter with a happy family life, it is advisable for the father to be aware of the real relationships in the family and show tact and wisdom.
Another factor that can complicate a girl’s life may be, strange as it may sound at first glance, an excessive passion for classical literature. What was relevant in the 19th century is an anachronism for our time. It is stupid to behave at a school disco the way well-bred young ladies behaved at the ball of a noble assembly. I understand that such words can cause a negative reaction from teachers of Russian literature, but the books of Turgenev and Tolstoy sometimes only interfere with social adaptation. In order to get closer to modern life, I would recommend diluting the classics more with modern literature. Yes and then - classic literature can be different too. For sex education, it is much more useful to read Nabokov, Kuprin and Bunin than many writers with whom the school curriculum is saturated.
Personality Features
This may include a number of psychological qualities, and primarily low self-esteem. It is undesirable for a woman to have an overly critical attitude towards her appearance, or to try to look for and find defects in her appearance.
The second personality trait that makes intimate contacts with men difficult is a “masculine” type of behavior combined with a low assessment of men. The desire for independence, the desire to control a man, to teach him. Lack of femininity, softness. Only a henpecked husband is suitable for such women, but similar men they despise, and this contradiction is sometimes insoluble.
The third feature that prevents marriage is the desire to maintain one’s independence at any cost (especially among active women engaged in “free” professions: lawyer, artist, journalist). Often, such women have a conscious desire to get married, but various “fatal” circumstances prevent them from doing so. In fact, these are jokes of their subconscious, which does not want to lose the freedom that is so dear to them. They can “lose” their passport on the eve of the wedding, go on a spree before an important conversation with the groom, accidentally introduce their best friend to the candidate for husband, and then hotly accuse both of them of betrayal. In public, such women (as a rule, relaxed and excellent-looking) loudly complain about the fate that prevents them from arranging their personal life, but after another breakup with a candidate for the role of a husband, they sigh to themselves with relief.
Wrong behavior strategies
This, in particular, includes the inability to use cosmetics and clothing to shape one’s appearance, as well as the lack of coquetry skills. Some women do not understand that with the help of these means and with the same initial external data, you can radically change your appearance and create the image of an attractive and sexy woman. But their trouble is that, thanks to defects in their upbringing, their assessment of “sexy woman” is extremely negative. They want to please men, but are embarrassed to be attractive, considering coquetry a low means, and quite sincerely believe that a man should love them solely for their high “spiritual qualities,” although they clearly explain what this is and why their spiritual qualities should be highly valued can not.
This category also includes straightforwardness in behavior and a clear demonstration of one’s desire to get married (which scares off men); inflated demands on men and a quick cessation of contacts when one’s ideals do not coincide with a real person; persistent reluctance to engage in premarital sex.
On the other hand, the opposite tactic - readiness to surrender at the first request of a man, also does not bring success. Often suffering from low self-esteem and doubting one's external attractiveness or the presence of other advantages, such women strive to win over the man they like, easily entering into an intimate relationship with him. But such behavior sharply reduces the value of a given woman in men’s eyes, since her partner thinks: “If she went to bed with me on the first evening, then she can easily do it with any other man.” As a result, such a “super-available” woman falls into the category of “cheap”, and there is no talk of any marriage anymore.
Summing up the “debriefing”, we can make the following generalization, suitable for both men and women: in order to successfully marry, that is, to find a person with whom you can live your life relatively happily, you need to: a) love yourself, realize your worth and uniqueness; b) constantly improve, be interesting person, take care of your body; c) do not hesitate to present yourself in the best possible way, helping yourself with this with the help of clothes and cosmetics; d) communicate more often with representatives of the opposite sex and remember that the experience of live communication cannot be replaced by books or films.
Notes:
However, there are other points of view - not in favor of romantic love. For example, psychotherapist S. Peel considers romantic love to be a manifestation of social and individual pathology, which is akin to a drug and resembles insanity.
This confirms the popular observation that all good things in life fly by very quickly.
The only alternative can be celibacy, but we will talk about this form of protest at the end of the chapter.
By the way, the name of the venerable scientist’s young friend was Lola, almost according to Nabokov.
Almost like her parents!
Borisov Yu. V. Charles Maurice Talleyrand. M.: International relations, 1986.
The theme of love in Russian literature is one of the main ones. A poet or prose writer reveals to his reader the yearnings of the soul, experiences, suffering. And she was always in demand. Indeed, one may not understand the theme of the author’s attitude to his own work, aspects of philosophical prose, but the words of love in literature are spoken so clearly that they can be applied in various life situations. In what works is the theme of love most clearly reflected? What are the characteristics of the authors’ perception of this feeling? Our article will talk about this.
The place of love in Russian literature
Love has always existed in fiction. If we talk about domestic works, then Peter and Fevronia of Murom from the story of the same name by Ermolai-Erasmus, related to ancient Russian literature, immediately come to mind. Let us remember that other topics then, besides Christian ones, were taboo. This art form was strictly religious.
The theme of love in Russian literature arose in the 18th century. The impetus for its development was Trediakovsky’s translations of works by foreign authors, because in Europe they were already writing with might and main about the wonderful feeling of love and the relationship between a man and a woman. Next were Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Karamzin.
The theme of love in works of Russian literature reached its special peak in the 19th century. This era gave the world Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and many other luminaries. Each writer had his own, purely personal attitude to the topic of love, which can be read through the lines of his work.
Pushkin's love lyrics: innovation of a genius
The theme of love in Russian literature of the 19th century reached special heights in the works of A. Pushkin. His lyrics glorifying this bright feeling are rich, multifaceted and contain a whole series of features. Let's sort them out.
Love as a reflection of personal qualities in "Eugene Onegin"
“Eugene Onegin” is a work where the theme of love in Russian literature sounds especially expressive. It shows not just a feeling, but its evolution throughout life. In addition, the main images of the novel are revealed through love.
At the center of the story is the hero whose name is in the title. The reader is forced throughout the novel to be tormented by the question: is Eugene capable of love? Brought up in the spirit of the morals of high society metropolitan society, he is devoid of sincerity in his feelings. Being in a “spiritual dead end,” he meets Tatyana Larina, who, unlike him, knows how to love sincerely and selflessly.
Tatyana writes a love letter to Onegin, he is touched by this act of the girl, but no more. Disappointed, Larina agrees to marry the unloved and leaves for St. Petersburg.
The last meeting of Onegin and Tatyana happens after several years. Eugene confesses his love to the young woman, but she rejects him. The woman admits that she still loves, but is bound by the obligations of marriage.
Thus, main character Pushkin's novel fails the exam with love, he was frightened by the all-consuming feeling and rejected it. The epiphany came too late.
Lyubov Lermontova - an unattainable ideal
Love for a woman was different for M. Lermontov. For him, this is a feeling that completely absorbs a person, it is a force that nothing can defeat. According to Lermontov, love is something that will definitely make a person suffer: “Everyone cried who loved.”
These lyrics are inextricably linked with the women in the life of the poet himself. Katerina Sushkova is a girl with whom Lermontov fell in love at the age of 16. The poems dedicated to her are emotional, talking about unrequited feelings, the desire to find not only a woman, but also a friend.
Natalya Ivanova, the next woman in Lermontov’s life, reciprocated his feelings. On the one hand, there is more happiness in the poems of this period, but even here there are notes of deception. Natalya in many ways does not understand the deep spiritual organization of the poet. There have also been changes in the themes of such works: they are now focused on feelings and passions.
The relationship with Love is reflected in a completely different way; the poet’s entire being is permeated here; nature, even the Motherland, speaks about it.
Love becomes a prayer in poems dedicated to Maria Shcherbatova. Only 3 works were written, but each of them is a masterpiece, a hymn of love. According to Lermontov, he has found the very woman who understands him completely. Love in these poems is contradictory: it can heal, but also wound, execute and bring back to life.
The hard path to happiness of the heroes of Tolstoy's War and Peace
Considering how love is presented in fiction, one should pay attention to the work of L. Tolstoy. His epic “War and Peace” is a work where love touched each of the heroes in one way or another. After all, the “family thought,” which occupies a central place in the novel, is inextricably linked with love.
Each of the images goes through a difficult path, but in the end finds family happiness. There are exceptions: Tolstoy puts a kind of equal sign between a person’s ability to love unselfishly and his moral purity. But this quality must also be achieved through a series of sufferings and mistakes, which will ultimately purify the soul and make it crystalline, capable of love.
Let us remember the difficult path to happiness of Andrei Bolkonsky. Captivated by Lisa's beauty, he marries her, but quickly loses interest and becomes disillusioned with the marriage. He understands that he chose an empty and spoiled wife. Next comes war, and the oak tree is a symbol of spiritual blossoming and life. Love for Natasha Rostova is what gave Prince Bolkonsky a breath of fresh air.
Test of love in the works of I. S. Turgenev
Images of love in the literature of the 19th century are also the heroes of Turgenev. The author of each of them goes through the test of this feeling.
The only one who passes it is Arkady Bazarov from Fathers and Sons. Maybe that's why he is Turgenev's ideal hero.
A nihilist who denies everything around him, Bazarov calls love “nonsense”; for him it is only an illness from which one can be cured. However, having met Anna Odintsova and fallen in love with her, he changes not only his attitude towards this feeling, but his worldview as a whole.
Bazarov confesses his love to Anna Sergeevna, but she rejects him. The girl is not ready for a serious relationship, she cannot renounce herself for the sake of another, even a loved one. Here she fails in Turgenev's test. And Bazarov is the winner, he became the hero that the writer was looking for for himself in “The Noble Nest”, “Rudin”, “Ace” and other works.
"The Master and Margarita" - a mystical love story
The theme of love in Russian literature of the 20th century is growing and developing, becoming stronger. Not a single writer or poet of this era avoided this topic. Yes, it could transform, for example, into love for people (remember Gorky’s Danko) or the Motherland (this is, perhaps, most of Mayakovsky’s work or works of the war years). But there is exceptional literature about love: these are the heartfelt poems of S. Yesenin, poets of the Silver Age. If we talk about prose, this is primarily “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov.
The love that arises between the heroes is sudden, it “jumps out” out of nowhere. The master draws attention to Margarita’s eyes, so sad and lonely.
Lovers do not experience all-consuming passion; rather, on the contrary, it is quiet, calm, homely happiness.
However, at the most critical moment, only love helps Margarita save the Master and their feelings, even if not in the human world.
Yesenin's love lyrics
The theme of love in Russian literature of the 20th century is also poetry. Let us consider the work of S. Yesenin in this vein. The poet inextricably linked this bright feeling with nature; his love is extremely chaste and strongly tied to the biography of the poet himself. A striking example is the poem “Green Hairstyle”. Here, all the features of L. Kashina that are dear to Yesenin (the work is dedicated to her) are presented through the beauty of the Russian birch tree: a thin figure, braided branches.
“Moscow tavern” reveals to us a completely different love, now it is “infection” and “plague”. Such images are associated, first of all, with the emotional experiences of the poet, who feels useless.
Healing comes in the series “Love of a Bully.” The culprit is A. Miklashevskaya, who cured Yesenin from torment. He again believed that there is true love, inspiring and reviving.
In his last poems, Yesenin condemns the deceit and insincerity of women; he believes that this feeling should be deeply sincere and life-affirming, giving a person ground under his feet. Such, for example, is the poem “Leaves are falling, leaves are falling...”.
about love
The theme of love in Russian literature of the Silver Age is the work of not only S. Yesenin, but also A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Blok, O. Mandelstam and many others. All of them have one thing in common, and suffering and happiness are the main companions of the muses of poets and poetesses.
Examples of love in Russian literature of the 20th century are the great A. Akhmatova and M. Tsvetaeva. The latter is a “quivering doe,” sensual, vulnerable. Love for her is the meaning of life, what makes her not only create, but also exist in this world. “I like that you are not sick with me” is her masterpiece, full of bright sadness and contradictions. And that’s what Tsvetaeva is all about. The poem “Yesterday I looked into your eyes” is imbued with the same soulful lyricism. This is, perhaps, a kind of anthem for all women who fall out of love: “My dear, what have I done to you?”
A completely different theme of love in Russian literature is depicted by A. Akhmatova. This is the intensity of all human feelings and thoughts. Akhmatova herself gave this feeling a definition - “the fifth season.” But if it had not been there, the other four would not have been visible. The poetess's love is loud, all-affirming, returning to natural principles.
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- Introduction
- Conclusion
Introduction
The theme of feelings is eternal in art, music, and literature. In all eras and times, many different creative works were dedicated to this feeling, which became inimitable masterpieces. This topic remains very relevant today. Particularly relevant in literary works- theme of love. After all, love is the purest and most beautiful feeling, which has been sung by writers since ancient times.
The lyrical side of the works is the first thing that attracts the attention of most readers. It is the theme of love that inspires, inspires and evokes a number of emotions, which are sometimes very contradictory. All great poets and writers, regardless of writing style, theme, or time of life, dedicated many of their works to the ladies of their hearts. They contributed their emotions and experiences, their observations and past experiences. Lyrical works are always full of tenderness and beauty, bright epithets and fantastic metaphors. The heroes of the works perform feats for the sake of their loved ones, take risks, fight, and dream. And sometimes, watching such characters, you become imbued with the same experiences and feelings of literary heroes.
1. The theme of love in the works of foreign writers
In the Middle Ages foreign literature The chivalric romance was popular. The chivalric novel, as one of the main genres of medieval literature, originates in the feudal environment during the era of the emergence and development of chivalry, for the first time in France in the mid-12th century. Works of this genre are filled with elements of the heroic epic, boundless courage, nobility and bravery of the main characters. Often, knights went to great lengths not for the sake of their family or vassal duty, but in the name of their own glory and the glorification of the lady of their heart. Fantastic adventure motifs, abundance exotic descriptions makes the chivalric romance partly similar to a fairy tale, the literature of the East and the pre-Christian mythology of Northern and Central Europe. The emergence and development of the chivalric romance was greatly influenced by the work of ancient writers, in particular Ovid, as well as the reinterpreted tales of the ancient Celts and Germans.
Let us consider the features of this genre using the example of the work of the French philologist-medievalist, writer Joseph Bedier, “The Novel of Tristan and Isolde.” Let us note that in this work there are many elements alien to traditional chivalric romances. For example, the mutual feelings of Tristan and Isolde are devoid of courtliness. In the chivalric novels of that era, the knight went to great lengths for the sake of love for the Beautiful Lady, who for him was the living physical embodiment of the Madonna. Therefore, the knight and that same Lady had to love each other platonically, and her husband (usually the king) was aware of this love. Tristan and Isolde, his beloved, are sinners in the light of Christian morality, not only medieval ones. They only care about one thing - to keep their relationship secret from others and to prolong their criminal passion by any means. This is the role of Tristan’s heroic leap, his constant “pretense,” Isolde’s ambiguous oath at “God’s court,” her cruelty towards Brangien, whom Isolde wants to destroy because she knows too much, etc. Tristan and Isolde are overcome by a strong desire to be together, they deny both earthly and divine laws, moreover, they condemn not only their own honor, but also the honor of King Mark to desecration. But Tristan’s uncle is one of the noblest heroes, who humanly forgives what he must punish as a king. He loves his wife and nephew, he knows about their deception, but this does not reveal his weakness at all, but the greatness of his image. One of the most poetic scenes of the novel is the episode in the forest of Morois, where King Mark found Tristan and Isolde sleeping, and, seeing a naked sword between them, readily forgives them (in the Celtic sagas, a naked sword separated the bodies of the heroes before they became lovers , in the novel this is a deception).
To some extent, it is possible to justify the heroes, to prove that they are not at all to blame for their suddenly flared passion, they fell in love not because, say, he was attracted by Isolde’s “blond hair”, and she was attracted by Tristan’s “valor”, but because the heroes drank a love drink by mistake, intended for a completely different occasion. Thus, love passion is depicted in the novel as the result of the action of a dark force that penetrates the bright world of the social world order and threatens to destroy it to the ground in this clash of two irreconcilables. The principles already contain the possibility of a tragic conflict, making “The Romance of Tristan and Isolde” a fundamentally pre-courtly work in the sense that courtly love can be as dramatic as desired, but it is always joy. The love of Tristan and Isolde, on the contrary, brings them nothing but suffering.
“They languished apart, but suffered even more” when they were together. “Isolde became a queen and lives in grief,” writes the French scholar Bedier, who retold the novel in prose in the nineteenth century. “Isolde has passionate, tender love, and Tristan is with her whenever he wants, day and night.” Even while wandering in the forest of Morois, where the lovers were happier than in the luxurious castle of Tintagel, their happiness was poisoned by heavy thoughts.
Many other writers have been able to capture their thoughts about love in their works. For example, William Shakespeare gave the world a whole series of his works that inspire heroism and risk in the name of love. His "Sonnets" are filled with tenderness, luxurious epithets and metaphors. The unifying feature of the artistic methods of Shakespeare's poetry is rightly called harmony. The impression of harmony comes from all of Shakespeare's poetic works.
The expressive means of Shakespeare's poetry are incredibly diverse. They inherited a lot from the entire European and English poetic tradition, but introduced a lot of absolutely new things. Shakespeare also shows his originality in the variety of new images he introduced into poetry, and in the novelty of his interpretation of traditional plots. He used poetic symbols common to Renaissance poetry in his works. Already by that time there was a significant number of familiar poetic techniques. Shakespeare compares youth with spring or sunrise, beauty with the beauty of flowers, withering of a person with autumn, old age with winter. The description of the beauty of women deserves special attention. “Marble whiteness”, “lily tenderness”, etc. These words contain boundless admiration for female beauty, they are filled with endless love and passion.
Undoubtedly, the best embodiment of love in a work can be called the play "Romeo and Juliet." Love triumphs in the play. The meeting of Romeo and Juliet transforms them both. They live for each other: "Romeo: My heaven is where Juliet is." It is not languid sadness, but living passion that inspires Romeo: “All day long some spirit carries me high above the earth in joyful dreams.” Love transformed them inner world, affected their relationships with people. The feelings of Romeo and Juliet are severely tested. Despite the hatred between their families, they choose boundless love, merging in a single impulse, but individuality is preserved in each of them. The tragic death only adds to the special mood of the play. This work is an example of a great feeling, despite early age main characters.
2. The theme of love in the works of Russian poets and writers
This topic is reflected in the literature of Russian writers and poets of all times. For more than 100 years, people have been turning to the poetry of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, finding in it a reflection of their feelings, emotions and experiences. The name of this great poet is associated with tirades of poems about love and friendship, with the concept of honor and Motherland, images of Onegin and Tatyana, Masha and Grinev appear. Even the most strict reader will be able to discover something close to him in his works, because they are very multifaceted. Pushkin was a man who passionately responded to all living things, a great poet, creator of the Russian word, a man of high and noble qualities. In the variety of lyrical themes that permeate Pushkin’s poems, the theme of love is given so much significant place that the poet could be called a glorifier of this great noble feeling. In all of world literature you cannot find a more striking example of a special passion for this particular aspect of human relations. Obviously, the origins of this feeling lie in the very nature of the poet, responsive, able to reveal in each person the best properties of his soul. In 1818, at one of the dinner parties, the poet met 19-year-old Anna Petrovna Kern. Pushkin admired her radiant beauty and youth. Years later, Pushkin again met with Kern, as charming as before. Pushkin gave her a newly printed chapter of Eugene Onegin, and between the pages he inserted poems written especially for her, in honor of her beauty and youth. Poems dedicated to Anna Petrovna “I remember a wonderful moment” is a famous hymn to a high and bright feeling. This is one of the peaks of Pushkin's lyrics. The poems captivate not only with the purity and passion of the feelings embodied in them, but also with their harmony. Love for a poet is a source of life and joy, the poem “I loved you” is a masterpiece of Russian poetry. More than twenty romances have been written based on his poems. And let time pass, the name of Pushkin will always live in our memory and awaken the best feelings in us.
With the name of Lermontov a new era of Russian literature opens. Lermontov's ideals are limitless; he desires not a simple improvement in life, but the acquisition of complete bliss, a change in the imperfections of human nature, an absolute resolution of all the contradictions of life. Eternal life - the poet will not agree to anything less. However, love in Lermontov's works bears a tragic imprint. This was influenced by his only, unrequited love for his friend from his youth, Varenka Lopukhina. He considers love impossible and surrounds himself with a martyr's aura, placing himself outside the world and life. Lermontov is sad about his lost happiness “My soul must live in earthly captivity, Not for long. Maybe I will never see Your gaze, your sweet gaze, so tender for others.”
Lermontov emphasizes his distance from everything worldly: “No matter what is earthly, but I will not become a slave.” Lermontov understands love as something eternal, the poet does not find solace in routine, fleeting passions, and if he sometimes gets carried away and steps aside, then his lines are not the fruit of a sick fantasy, but just a momentary weakness. “At the feet of others I did not forget the gaze of your eyes. Loving others, I only suffered from the Love of former days.”
Human, earthly love seems to be an obstacle for the poet on his path to higher ideals. In the poem “I will not humiliate myself before you,” he writes that inspiration is more valuable to him than unnecessary quick passions that can throw the human soul into the abyss. Love in Lermontov's lyrics is fatal. He writes, “Inspiration saved me from petty vanities, but there is no salvation from my soul in happiness itself.” In Lermontov's poems, love is a high, poetic, bright feeling, but always unrequited or lost. In the poem "Valerik" the love part, which later became a romance, conveys the bitter feeling of losing contact with the beloved. “Is it crazy to wait for love in absentia? In our age, all feelings are only temporary, but I remember you,” the poet writes. The theme of betrayal of a beloved who is unworthy of great feelings or has not stood the test of time becomes traditional in Lermontov’s literary works related to his personal experience.
The discord between dream and reality penetrates this wonderful feeling; love does not bring joy to Lermontov, he receives only suffering and sadness: “I’m sad because I love you.” The poet is troubled by thoughts about the meaning of life. He is sad about the transience of life and wants to do as much as possible in the short time allotted to him on earth. In his poetic reflections, life is hateful to him, but death is also terrible.
Considering the theme of love in the works of Russian writers, one cannot help but appreciate Bunin’s contribution to the poetry of this topic. The theme of love occupies perhaps the main place in Bunin’s work. In this topic, the writer has the opportunity 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 devote his works not only to the spiritual, but also to 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.
At different periods of his work, Bunin speaks about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early works the characters are open, young and natural. In such works as “In August”, “In Autumn”, “Dawn All Night”, all events are extremely simple, brief and significant. The characters' feelings are ambivalent, colored in halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, way of life, relationships, we immediately recognize and realize in a new way our own feelings of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual changes. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony; as soon as it appears, it most often disappears. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. The sad parting with my beloved is completed by dreamy 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 in the story “Dawn All Night,” Bunin talks about the premonition of love, about the tenderness that a young girl is ready to give to her future lover. At the same time, it is common for youth not only to get carried away, but also to quickly become disappointed. Bunin's works show 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.”
Most of Bunin's early stories tell about the desire for beauty and purity - this remains the main spiritual impulse of his characters. In the 20s, Bunin wrote about love, as if through the prism of past memories, peering into a bygone Russia and those people who no longer exist. This is exactly how we perceive the story “Mitya’s Love” (1924). In this story, the writer consistently shows the spiritual formation of the hero, leading him from love to collapse. In the story, feelings and life 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"). There is an atmosphere of inviolability in these stories established order. 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.
Memories of youth and the Motherland bring the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” closer to the prose of the 20-30s. These stories are narrated in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate into the depths of the subconscious world of his characters. In most of the stories, the author describes bodily pleasures, beautiful and poetic, born of genuine 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 “Business Cards”, “Dark Alleys”, “Late Hour”, “Tanya”, “Rusya”, “In a Familiar Street”. The writer writes about ordinary lonely people and their lives. That is why the past, filled with early, strong feelings, seems to be truly golden times, merges with the sounds, smells, 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.
3. The theme of love in literary works of the 20th century
The theme of love continues to be relevant in the 20th century, in the era of global catastrophes, political crisis, when humanity is making attempts to re-shape its attitude towards universal human values. Writers of the 20th century often portray love as the last remaining moral category of a then destroyed world. In the novels of the writers of the “lost generation” (including Remarque and Hemingway), these feelings are the necessary incentive for the sake of which the hero tries to survive and live on. "Lost Generation" - a generation of people who survived the First World War and were left spiritually devastated.
These people abandon any ideological dogma and search for the meaning of life in simple human relationships. The feeling of a comrade’s shoulder, which almost merged with the instinct of self-preservation, guides the mentally lonely heroes of Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” through the war. It also determines the relationships that arise between the heroes of the novel “Three Comrades”.
Hemingway’s hero in the novel “A Farewell to Arms” renounced military service, what is usually called a person’s moral obligation, renounced for the sake of a relationship with his beloved, and his position seems very convincing to the reader. Man of the 20th century is constantly faced with the possibility of the end of the world, with the expectation own death or the death of a loved one. Catherine, the heroine of the novel A Farewell to Arms, dies, just like Pat in Remarque's novel Three Comrades. The hero loses his sense of necessity, his sense of the meaning of life. At the end of both works, the hero looks at the dead body, which has already ceased to be the body of the woman he loves. The novel is filled with the author's subconscious thoughts about the mystery of the origin of love, about its spiritual basis. One of the main features of literature of the 20th century is its inextricable connection with the phenomena of social life. The author's reflections on the existence of such concepts as love and friendship appear against the background of socio-political problems of that time and, in essence, are inseparable from thoughts about the fate of humanity in the 20th century.
In the works of Françoise Sagan, the theme of friendship and love usually remains within the framework of a person’s private life. The writer often depicts the life of Parisian bohemians; Most of her heroes belong to her.F. Sagan wrote her first novel in 1953, and it was then perceived as a complete moral failure. In Sagan’s artistic world there is no place for strong and truly strong human attraction: this feeling must die as soon as it is born. It is replaced by something else - a feeling of disappointment and sadness.
love theme literature writer
Conclusion
Love is a high, pure, beautiful feeling that people have sung since ancient times, in all languages of the world. They have written about love before, they are writing now and will continue to write in the future. No matter how different love is, this feeling is still wonderful. That’s why they write so much about love, write poems, and sing about love in songs. The creators of wonderful works can be listed endlessly, since each of us, whether he is a writer or an ordinary person, has experienced this feeling at least once in his life. Without love there will be no life on earth. And while reading works, we come across something sublime that helps us consider the world from the spiritual side. After all, with every hero we experience his love together.
Sometimes it seems that everything has been said about love in world literature. But love has thousands of shades, and each of its manifestations has its own holiness, its own sadness, its own fracture and its own fragrance.
List of sources used
1. Anikst A.A. Shakespeare's works. M.: Allegory, 2009 - 350 p.
2. Bunin, I.A. Collected works in 4 volumes. T.4/ I.A. Bunin. - M.: Pravda, 1988. - 558 p.
3. Volkov, A.V. Prose of Ivan Bunin / A.V. Volkov. - M.: Moscow. worker, 2008. - 548 p.
4. Civil Z.T. "From Shakespeare to Shaw"; English writers of the 16th-20th centuries. Moscow, Education, 2011
5. Nikulin L.V. Kuprin // Nikulin L.V. Chekhov. Bunin. Kuprin: Literary portraits. - M.: 1999 - P.265 - 325.
6. Petrovsky M. Dictionary literary terms. In 2 volumes. M.: Allegory, 2010
7. Smirnov A.A. "Shakespeare". Leningrad, Art, 2006
8. Teff N.A. Nostalgia: Stories; Memories. - L.: Fiction, 2011. - P.267 - 446.
9. Shugaev V.M. Experiences of a reading person / V.M. Shugaev. - M.: Sovremennik, 2010. - 319 p.
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