The fate of the hero in "Clean Monday" is pushed aside, as if covered by something more significant, which inspired us from the fate of the heroine. We clearly felt that it was not for nothing and not by chance that Bunin prepared such an unexpected ending for stories about love - renunciation of “worldly” affairs and departure to the monastery. And one more feature strikes the eye when getting acquainted with this Bunin masterpiece - the complete absence of fictitious names. Not names at all and not only the names of the main characters, which is typical of most stories about love, but fictitious names, which cannot but give the impression of a kind of demonstrativeness. There is only one fictitious name in the story - the name occasional person, Fedora, the main character's coachman. All other names belong to real persons.
These are either the authors of fashionable works (Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmeier, Przybyszewski); or fashionable Russian writers of the beginning of the century (A. Bely, Leonid Andreev, Bryusov); or genuine figures Art Theater(Stanislavsky, Moskvin, Kachalov, Sulerzhitsky); or Russian writers of the last century (Griboyedov, Ertel, Chekhov, L. Tolstoy); or heroes of ancient Russian literature (Peresvet and Oslyabya, Yuri Dolgoruky, Svyatoslav Seversky, Pavel Muromsky); the characters of “War and Peace” are mentioned in the story - Platon Karataev and Pierre Bezukhov; Chaliapin's name was mentioned once; The real name of the owner of the tavern in Okhotny Ryad, Yegorov, has been revealed.
In such an environment, deliberately nameless heroes act, pushed into a certain chronological frame. At the end of the story, Bunin even pinpoints the year in which the action takes place, although the chronological discrepancy between the facts mentioned in the story immediately catches the eye (obviously, chronological accuracy was the last thing on his mind). Bunin calls the time of action of his story the spring of the thirteenth year? approaching the end of the story, the hero casually remarks: “Almost two years have passed since that clean Monday... In the fourteenth year, under New Year, it was the same quiet, sunny evening..." Clean Monday-- the first Monday after Maslenitsa, therefore, the action takes place in early spring (late February - March).
The last day of Maslenitsa is “Forgiveness Sunday”, on which people “forgive” each other for insults, injustices, etc. Then comes “Clean Monday” - the first day of fasting, when a person, cleansed of filth, enters a period of strict performance of rituals, when Maslenitsa festivities end and the fun is replaced by the rigor of life's routine and self-focus. On this day, the heroine of the story finally decided to go to the monastery, parting with her past forever. But all these are spring rites. Counting back “almost two years” from the end of 1914, we get the spring of 1913.
The story was written exactly thirty years after the events described, in 1944, a year before the end of the Second World War. Obviously, according to Bunin, Russia has again found itself at some important historical milestone, and he is busy thinking about what now awaits his homeland along its path. He turns back, trying to within the boundaries a short story to reproduce not only the diversity, but the diversity and “restlessness” of Russian life, the general feeling of an impending catastrophe. He brings together facts that were actually separated by several years in order to further strengthen the impression of the diversity of Russian life at that time, the diversity of faces and people who had no idea what a great test history was preparing for them.
1913 is the last pre-war year in Russia. This year is what Bunin chooses as the time for the action of the story, despite its obvious discrepancy with the details of the Moscow life described. In the minds of the people of that era who lived through it, this year generally grew into a historical milestone of enormous significance. Standing at the window in the heroine’s apartment, the hero reflects on Moscow, looking at the opening view, the central part of which is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Kremlin wall: “Strange city!” I said to myself, thinking about Okhotny Ryad, about Iverskaya, about St. Basil’s. - St. Basil and Savior on Bor, Italian cathedrals - and something Kyrgyz in the tips of the towers on the Kremlin walls..." An important and telling reflection. This is a kind of result that Bunin comes to as a result of many years of observations of the “East-West” features of the appearance of Russia.
From the story “The Bonfire,” written in 1902, to “Clean Monday” (1944), Bunin is accompanied by the idea that his homeland, Russia, is a strange but clear combination of two layers, two cultural ways - “Western” and "Eastern", European and Asian. The idea that Russia, in its appearance, as well as in its history, is located somewhere at the intersection of these two lines of world historical development - this idea runs like a red thread through all fourteen pages of Bunin’s story, which, contrary to the original impression, lies a complete historical concept that touches on the most fundamental aspects of Russian history and the character of the Russian person for Bunin and the people of his era.
In the numerous hints and half-hints with which the story abounds, Bunin emphasizes the duality, contradictory nature of the way of Russian life, the combination of the incongruous. In the heroine’s apartment there is a “wide Turkish sofa”, next to it is an “expensive piano”, and above the sofa, the writer emphasizes, “for some reason there was a portrait of a barefoot Tolstoy.” A Turkish sofa and an expensive piano are East and West, barefoot Tolstoy is Russia, Rus' in its unusual, “clumsy” and eccentric appearance that does not fit into any framework. The hero of the story, “coming from the Penza province,” that is, from the very heart of provincial Russia, is handsome, as he himself says about himself, “with southern, hot beauty,” even “indecently handsome,” as “one famous actor", adding at the same time: "The devil knows who you are, some kind of Sicilian."
The Sicilian comes from the Penza province! The combination is incredible, unusual, but hardly accidental in the context of the story. Finding herself on the evening of “Forgiveness Sunday” at the Yegorov tavern, famous for its pancakes, the heroine says, pointing to the icon of the Mother of God of Three Hands hanging in the corner: “Good! There are wild men below, and here are pancakes with champagne and the Mother of God of Three Hands. Three hands! After all, this is India !" The same duality is emphasized here by Bunin: “wild men” - on the one hand, “pancakes with champagne” - on the other, and next to it is Rus', but again extraordinary, as if correlated with the appearance of the Christian Mother of God, reminiscent of the Buddhist Shiva .
Like a pendulum, the narrative in “Clean Monday” deviates, now towards Europe, now towards Asia, now towards the West, now towards the East, somewhere in the middle, in the very center, denoting an elusive feature, line, point of Russia. Hearing the striking of the clock on the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower, the heroine notes: “What a ancient sound, something tin and cast iron. And just like that, with the same sound, three o’clock in the morning struck in the fifteenth century. And in Florence there was exactly the same battle, it reminded me of Moscow..." And everything in Moscow is like in Europe, like in Asia, like in Italy, like in India.
How densely everything is intertwined and rich in this story! Here every word is calculated, every insignificant detail is taken into account and carries a semantic load. Griboyedov, who was included in the story because he, Russian by origin, but European by education and culture, died in Asia - in Persia, at the very moment when he was busy developing a project by which it would be possible to connect Europe with Asia through Russia and Transcaucasia. And he died terribly, brutally killed by an enraged crowd of Persians. Persia, the constantly emphasized Persian beauty of the heroine, has a very special character in the story. symbolic meaning something menacing, spontaneously passionate. Then Ordynka itself, where Griboedov’s house is found, is nothing more than a former Tatar settlement (Ordynka - horde - Horde). And, finally, Egorov’s tavern in Okhotny Ryad (a purely Russian establishment!), where, however, they serve not just pancakes, but with champagne, and in the corner hangs an icon of the Mother of God with three hands...
The most significant and profound indicator of this two-sidedness (or rather, duality) historical process, in whose power, according to Bunin, Russia finds itself, the heroine herself appears in the story. The duality of her appearance is so persistently emphasized by the writer that in the end the question arises: isn’t there some kind of hidden, not directly expressed, but perhaps main idea story? The heroine's father is "an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, who lived in retirement in Tver." At home, the heroine wears a silk archaluk trimmed with sable: “The inheritance of my Astrakhan grandmother,” she explains (although, we note in parentheses, no one asks her about this).
So, the father is a Tver merchant, the grandmother is from Astrakhan. Russian and Tatar blood merged in the veins of this young woman. Looking at her lips, “at the dark fluff above them, at the garnet velvet of the dress, at the slope of her shoulders and the oval of her breasts, smelling some slightly spicy smell of her hair,” the hero thinks: “Moscow, Astrakhan, Persia, India!” Moreover, the distribution of shades here is such that what is Russian and Tver is hidden inside, dissolved in the mental organization, while the appearance is entirely given over to the power of Eastern heredity.
And the hero himself, on whose behalf the story is told, never tires of emphasizing that the beauty of his beloved “was somehow Indian, Persian”: “... a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness, softly shining, like black sable fur, eyebrows, eyes as black as velvet coal; her captivating velvety-crimson lips were shaded with dark down; when going out, she most often wore a garnet velvet dress and the same shoes with gold clasps..."
This is an oriental beauty in all the splendor of her non-Russian, non-Slavic beauty. And when she “in a black velvet dress” appeared at the skit party of the Art Theater and “pale from drunkenness,” Kachalov came up to her with a glass of wine and, “looking at her with feigned gloomy greed,” said to her: “The Tsar-Maiden, the Shamakhan Queen, your health!" - we understand that it was Bunin who put into his mouth his own concept of duality: the heroine is, as it were, both the “Tsar-Maiden” and the “Shamakhan Queen” at the same time. In Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel,” which Bunin is guided by, it is said differently: “maiden, Shamakhan queen.” It’s just that “maiden” or “tsar-maiden” are different things; in the first case there is semantic and stylistic neutrality, in the second there is a clear focus on Slavic folklore. But in Bunin’s heroine, at least in her appearance, there is nothing of the “Tsar Maiden”, that is, of a Russian, Slavic, folklore root.
A very important dialogue, and it is important primarily for its hidden allegory. Indeed, where did Eastern wisdom come from here? After all, there is nothing specifically oriental either in the appearance of Platon Karataev, or in the content of his speeches, or in the above proverb. We can consider his surname Karataev to be eastern - Tatar - which is truly of Tatar origin.
“Clean Monday” I.A. Bunin considered it his best work. Largely due to its semantic depth and ambiguity of interpretation. The story occupies an important place in the “Dark Alleys” cycle. The time of its writing is considered to be May 1944. During this period of his life, Bunin was in France, far from his homeland, where the Great Patriotic War.
In this light, it is unlikely that the 73-year-old writer devoted his work only to the theme of love. It would be more correct to say that through the description of the relationship between two people, their views and worldviews, the truth is revealed to the reader modern life, its tragic background and the urgency of many moral problems.
At the center of the story is the story of a relationship quite wealthy men and women who develop feelings for each other. They have an interesting and pleasant time visiting restaurants, theaters, taverns, and many others. etc. The narrator and the main character in one person are drawn to her, but the possibility of marriage is immediately ruled out - the girl clearly believes that she is not suitable for family life.
One day on the eve of Clean Monday on Forgiveness Sunday, she asks to pick her up a little earlier. After which they go to the Novodevichy Convent, visit the local cemetery, walk among the graves and remember the funeral of the archbishop. The heroine understands how much the narrator loves her, and the man himself notices the great religiosity of his companion. The woman talks about life in a monastery and herself threatens to go to the most remote of them. True, the narrator does not attach much importance to her words.
The next day in the evening, at the girl’s request, they go to a theatrical skit. A rather strange choice of place - especially considering that the heroine does not like and does not recognize such gatherings. There she drinks champagne, dances and has fun. After which the narrator brings her home at night. The heroine asks the man to come up to her. They are finally getting closer.
The next morning the girl reports that she is leaving for Tver for a while. After 2 weeks, a letter arrives from her in which she says goodbye to the narrator, asking not to look for her, since “I won’t return to Moscow, I’ll go to obedience for now, then maybe I’ll decide to take monastic vows.”
The man fulfills her request. However, he does not disdain spending time in dirty taverns and taverns, indulging in an indifferent existence - “he got drunk, sinking in every possible way, more and more.” Then he comes to his senses for a long time, and two years later he decides to go on a trip to all the places that he and his beloved visited on that Forgiveness Sunday. At some point, the hero is overcome by a kind of hopeless resignation. Arriving at the Marfo-Maryinsky monastery, he finds out that there is a service going on there and even goes inside. Here in last time the hero sees his beloved, who is participating in the service along with other nuns. At the same time, the girl does not see the man, but her gaze is directed into the darkness, where the narrator stands. After which he quietly leaves the church.
Story composition
The composition of the story is based on three parts. The first serves to introduce the characters, describe their relationships and pastimes. The second part is dedicated to the events of Forgiveness Sunday and Clean Monday. The shortest, but semantically important third part completes the composition.
Reading the works and moving from one part to another, one can see the spiritual maturation of not only the heroine, but also the narrator himself. At the end of the story, we are no longer a frivolous person, but a man who has experienced the bitterness of parting with his beloved, capable of experiencing and comprehending his actions of the past.
Considering that the hero and the narrator are one person, you can see changes in him even with the help of the text itself. The hero's worldview changes radically after a sad love story. Talking about himself in 1912, the narrator resorts to irony, showing his limitations in the perception of his beloved. Only physical intimacy is important, and the hero himself does not try to understand the woman’s feelings, her religiosity, outlook on life, and much more. etc.
In the final part of the work we see a narrator and a man who understands the meaning of the experience. He evaluates his life retrospectively and the general tone of writing the story changes, which speaks of the inner maturity of the narrator himself. When reading the third part, one gets the impression that it was written by a completely different person.
By genre features Most researchers classify “Clean Monday” as a short story, because in the center of the plot there is a turning point that forces a different interpretation of the work. We are talking about the heroine leaving for a monastery.
Novella I.A. Bunin is distinguished by a complex spatio-temporal organization. The action takes place at the end of 1911 - beginning of 1912. This is supported by the mention of specific dates and textual references to real historical figures who were known and recognizable at the time. For example, the heroes first meet at a lecture by Andrei Bely, and at a theatrical skit the artist Sulerzhitsky appears before the reader, with whom the heroine dances.
The time range of a small work is quite wide. There are three specific dates: 1912 - the time of the plot events, 1914 - the date of the last meeting of the heroes, as well as a certain “today” of the narrator. The entire text is filled with additional time references and references: “the graves of Ertel, Chekhov”, “the house where Griboyedov lived”, pre-Petrine Rus' is mentioned, Chaliapin’s concert, the schismatic Rogozhskoe cemetery, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky and much more. It turns out that the events of the story fit into the general historical context and turn out to be not just a specific description of the relationship between a man and a woman, but represent an entire era.
It is no coincidence that a number of researchers call to see in the heroine the image of Russia itself, and to interpret her act as the author’s call to follow not a revolutionary path, but to seek repentance and do everything to change the life of the whole country. Hence the title of the short story “Clean Monday”, which, as the first day of Lent, should become the starting point on the path to better things.
Main characters in the story “Clean Monday” there are only two. This is the heroine and the narrator himself. The reader never learns their names.
At the center of the work is the image of the heroine, and the hero is shown through the prism of their relationship. The girl is smart. He often says philosophically wisely: “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing.”
Opposite essences coexist in the heroine; there are many contradictions in her image. On the one hand, she likes luxury, social life, visiting theaters, restaurants. However, this does not interfere with the internal craving for something different, significant, beautiful, religious. She's addicted literary heritage, and not only domestic, but also European. Often quoted famous works world classics, hagiographic literature tells about ancient rituals and funerals.
The girl categorically denies the possibility of marriage and believes that she is not fit to be a wife. The heroine is looking for herself, often in thought. She is smart, beautiful and wealthy, but the narrator was convinced every day: “it looked like she didn’t need anything: no books, no lunches, no theaters, no dinners outside the city...” In this world she is constantly and to some extent pores pointlessly searching for oneself. She is attracted to luxurious fun life, but at the same time she is disgusted with her: “I don’t understand how people won’t get tired of this all their lives, having lunch and dinner every day.” True, she herself “had lunch and dinner with a Moscow understanding of the matter. Her obvious weakness was only good clothes, velvet, silk, expensive fur...” It is precisely this contradictory image of the heroine that I.A. creates. Bunin in his work.
Wanting to find something different for herself, she visits churches and cathedrals. The girl manages to break out of her usual environment, albeit not thanks to love, which turns out to be not so sublime and omnipotent. Faith and withdrawal from worldly life help her find herself. This act confirms the strong and strong-willed character of the heroine. This is how she responds to her own thoughts about the meaning of life, understanding the futility of the one she leads into secular society. In the monastery, the main thing for a person becomes love for God, service to him and people, while everything vulgar, base, unworthy and ordinary will no longer bother her.
The main idea of the story by I.A. Bunin "Clean Monday"
In this work, Bunin brings to the fore the history of the relationship between two people, but the main meanings are hidden much deeper. It is impossible to interpret this story unambiguously, since it is simultaneously dedicated to love, morality, philosophy, and history. However, the main direction of the writer’s thought comes down to questions of the fate of Russia itself. According to the author, the country must be cleansed of its sins and reborn spiritually, as the heroine of the work “Clean Monday” did.
The story “Clean Monday,” written in 1944, is one of the author’s favorite stories. I. A. Bunin recounts the events of the distant past on behalf of the narrator - a young wealthy man with no special occupation. The hero is in love, and the heroine, as he sees her, makes a strange impression on the reader. She is good-looking, loves luxury, comfort, expensive restaurants, and at the same time she is a “modest student” and has breakfast in a vegetarian canteen on Arbat. She has a very critical attitude towards many fashionable works of literature, famous people. And she is clearly not in love with the hero as much as he would like. To his proposal of marriage, she replies that she is not fit to be a wife. “Strange love!” - the hero thinks about this. Reveals inner world The heroine is completely unexpected for him: it turns out that she often visits churches, is deeply passionate about religion and church rituals. For her, this is not just religiosity - it is the need of her soul, her sense of homeland, antiquity, which is internally necessary for the heroine. The hero believes that these are just “Moscow quirks”, he cannot understand her
and is deeply shocked by her choice when, after their only night of love, she decides to leave and then enter a monastery. For him, the collapse of love is a catastrophe of his entire life, unimaginable suffering. For her, the power of faith and the preservation of her inner world turned out to be higher than love; she decides to devote herself to God, renouncing everything worldly. The author does not reveal the reasons for it moral choice, what influenced her decision - social circumstances or moral and religious quests, but he clearly shows that the life of the soul is not subject to reason. This is especially emphasized in the episode of the last meeting of the heroes in the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. The heroes not only see how much they feel each other, they do not control their feelings: the hero “for some reason” wanted to enter the temple, the heroine internally feels her presence. This riddle, the mystery of human feelings, is one of the inherent properties of love in Bunin’s depiction, a tragic and powerful force that can turn a person’s whole life upside down.
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Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is the greatest writer of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. He entered literature as a poet and created wonderful poetic works. 1895 ...The first story “To the End of the World” is published. Encouraged by the praise of critics, Bunin begins to study literary creativity. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a laureate of various awards, including laureate Nobel Prize on literature 1933
In 1944, the writer created one of the most wonderful stories about love, about the most beautiful, significant and lofty thing that exists on Earth - the story “Clean Monday”. Bunin said about this story of his: “I thank God that He gave me to write, Clean Monday.”
In the story “Clean Monday,” the psycho-logism of Bunin’s prose and the features of “external depiction” were especially clearly manifested.
“The Moscow gray winter day was darkening, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the store windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening Moscow life, freed from daytime affairs, flared up, the cabbies' sleighs rushed thicker and more vigorously, the crowded, diving trams rattled more heavily - in the dusk one could already see green stars falling from the wires with a hiss - dimly blackened passers-by hurried more animatedly along the snowy sidewalks...” - these are the words with which the author begins his narrative, taking the reader to old Moscow at the beginning of the 20th century. Writer with greatest detail, without losing sight of the slightest detail, reproduces all the signs of this era. And from the very first lines the story is given a special sound by the constant mention of details of deep antiquity: about ancient Moscow churches, monasteries, icons (the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Iveron Church, the Martha and Mary Convent, the icon of the Mother of God of Three Hands), about names outstanding personalities. But next to this antiquity, eternity, we notice signs of a later way of life: the restaurants “Prague”, “Hermitage”, “Metropol”, “Yar”, known and accessible to the wealthiest layers of citizens; books by contemporary authors; “Motla” by Ertel and Chekhov... Judging by how the action unfolds in the story, we can judge that the past for the heroes is extremely clear, the present is vague, and the future is absolutely unclear.
There are two heroes in the story: he and she, a man and a woman. The man, according to the writer, was healthy, rich, young and handsome for some reason with a southern, hot beauty, he was even “indecently handsome.” But the most important thing is that the hero is in love, so in love that he is ready to fulfill any whim of the heroine, just not to lose her. But, unfortunately, he cannot and does not try to understand what is going on in the soul of his beloved: he “tried not to think, not to think about it.” The woman is portrayed as mysterious, enigmatic. She is mysterious, just as the soul of a Russian woman with her spirituality, devotion, dedication, self-denial is generally mysterious... The hero himself admits: “She was mysterious, strange to me.” Her whole life is woven from inexplicable contradictions and tossing. “It looked like she didn’t need anything: no flowers, no books, no lunches, no theaters, no dinners out of town,” the narrator says, but immediately adds: “Although there were still flowers she has favorites and least favorites, all the books... she always read, she ate a whole box of chocolate a day, she ate as much as me at lunches and dinners...” When going somewhere, she most often did not know where she would go next, what she would do, in a word, he doesn’t know with whom, how and where he will spend his time.
The writer tells us quite fully about her origins and her current activities. But in describing the heroine’s life, Bunin very often uses indefinite adverbs (for some reason there was a portrait of a barefoot Tolstoy hanging above her sofa).
All a woman’s actions are spontaneous, irrational and at the same time as if planned. On the night of Clean Monday, she gives herself to the hero, knowing that in the morning she will go to the monastery, but whether this departure is final is also unclear. Throughout the entire story, the author shows that the heroine does not feel comfortable anywhere, she does not believe in the existence of simple earthly happiness. “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing,” she quotes Platon Karataev.
The emotional impulses of the heroes of “Clean Monday” often defy logical explanation. It seems as if both the man and the woman have no control over themselves, are not able to control their feelings. Material from the site
The story centers on the events of Forgiveness Sunday and Clean Monday. Forgiveness Sunday is a religious holiday revered by all believers. They ask each other for forgiveness and forgive their loved ones. For the heroine, this is a very special day, not only a day of forgiveness, but also a day of farewell to worldly life. Clean Monday is the first day of Lent, on which a person is cleansed of all filth, when the joy of Maslenitsa gives way to introspection. This day becomes a turning point in the hero’s life. Having gone through the suffering associated with the loss of his beloved, the hero experiences the influence of surrounding forces and realizes everything that he had not noticed before, being blinded by his love for the heroine. Two years later, the man, remembering the events of days long gone, will repeat the route of their long-standing joint trip, and “for some reason” he will really want to go to the church of the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery. What unknown forces draw him towards his beloved? Does he strive for the spiritual world into which she goes? We don’t know this, the author does not lift the veil of secrecy for us. He only shows us the humility in the soul of the hero, their last meeting ends with his humble departure, and not with the awakening of his former passions.
The future of the heroes is unclear. Besides everything, the writer does not even directly indicate anywhere that the nun the man met is his former lover. Only one detail - dark eyes - resembles the appearance of the heroine. It is noteworthy that the heroine goes to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. This monastery is not a monastery, but the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady on Ordynka, which had a community of secular ladies who took care of the orphans who lived at the church and those wounded in the first world war. And this service in the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God, perhaps, is a spiritual insight for the heroine of “Maundy Monday”, because it was the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God who warned the world against war, death, blood, orphanhood...
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
- love is a mysterious word according to Bunin's stories
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- details clean monday
- meaning of the title of the story clean monday essay
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Love theme - eternal theme. Poets and writers of different times turned to it, and each tried to interpret this multifaceted feeling in their own way.
He gives his vision of the topic in the cycle of stories “ Dark alleys"I. A Bunin. The collection includes thirty-eight stories, all of them are about love, but none of them creates a feeling of repetition, and after reading all the works in the cycle there is no feeling of exhaustion of the topic.
At the center of the story “Clean Monday” is a mysterious and mysterious love story. Its heroes are a young couple of lovers. Both of them are “rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that in restaurants and at concerts” those around them watched them go. But the inner world of the heroes is not so similar.
He is blinded by his love. Every Saturday he brings flowers to his beloved, every now and then pampers her with boxes of chocolate, tries to please her with new books he brought, every evening he invites her to a restaurant, then to the theater, or to some party. Completely absorbed in the feeling of adoration, he cannot and does not really try to understand what complex inner world lies behind the beautiful appearance of the one he fell in love with. He repeatedly thinks about the unusualness and strangeness of their relationship, but never once puts an end to these thoughts. "Strange love!" - he notes. Another time he says: “Yes, after all, this is not love, not love...”. He is surprised why she “once and for all stopped talking about their future”; he is surprised at how she perceives his gifts, how she behaves in moments of rapprochement. Everything about her is a mystery to him.
The image of the hero is devoid of the psychological depth that the heroine is endowed with. There is no logical motivation in her actions. Every day visiting those establishments where a young lover invites her, she one day notices that she wants to go to the Novo Maiden Convent, because “it’s all taverns and taverns.” The hero has no idea where these thoughts come from, what they are for, what suddenly happened to his chosen one. And a little later she declares that there is nothing to be surprised about, that he simply does not know her. It turns out that she often visits the Kremlin cathedrals, and this happens when her lover “doesn’t drag” her to restaurants. There, and not in entertainment venues, she finds a sense of harmony and peace of mind. She loves “Russian chronicles, Russian legends” and her stories about this are filled with depth. She says she is not fit to be a wife. Thinking about happiness, quotes Platon Karataev. But the hero still cannot understand what is going on in her soul, he is “indescribably happy with every hour spent near her” and that’s all.
As in the other stories of the “Dark Alleys” series, Bunin does not show in “Clean Monday” love that develops into a state of lasting earthly happiness. Love here also does not end with a happy marriage, and we do not find the image of a woman-mother here. The heroine, having entered into a physically intimate relationship with her beloved, silently leaves, begging him not to ask anything, and then informs him by letter of her departure to the monastery. For a long time she rushed between the momentary and the eternal and, on the night of Clean Monday, surrendering to the hero, she made her final choice. On Clean Monday, the first day of fasting, a person begins to cleanse himself of everything bad. This holiday became a turning point in the relationship between the heroes.
Love in “Clean Monday” is happiness and torment, a great mystery, an incomprehensible riddle. This story is one of the pearls of Bunin's work, captivating the reader with its rare charm and depth.