At all times, the theme of love has been the main one; many writers glorified the relationship between a man and a woman. Ivan Alekseevich was no exception; he writes about love in many stories. Love is the purest and brightest feeling in the world. The theme of love is eternal in any era.

In Bunin's works, the writer describes the intimate and secret things that happen between two people. The work of Ivan Alekseevich can be divided into periods. So the collection " Dark alleys"Written during the World War, it is dedicated entirely to love. The collection contains so much love and warm feelings, it is simply filled with love.

Bunin believes that love is a great feeling, even if this love is unrequited. The writer believes that any love has the right to life. Also, having read the stories of Ivan Alekseevich, you can see that love in his works goes next to death. He seems to draw the line that behind a great bright feeling there can be death.

In some of his stories, Bunin writes that love is not always beautiful and sunny, and maybe the love story will end tragically. So, for example, in the story “ Sunstroke“His characters meet on a ship, where a wonderful feeling flares up between them. The girl in love tells the lieutenant that the feeling that visited them was like a sunstroke that clouded their minds. She says that she has never experienced anything like this and is unlikely to ever experience it. Unfortunately, the lieutenant realizes very late how much he fell in love with the girl, because he did not even know her last name or where she lives.

The lieutenant was ready to die for one more day spent with the girl he loved so much. He was overwhelmed with feelings, but they were big and bright.

In another story, Bunin describes unrequited love young guy to a girl who doesn't pay any attention to him. Nothing pleases a girl and even a guy’s love doesn’t make her happy. At the end of the story, she goes to a monastery, where she thinks she will find happiness.

In another story, Ivan Alekseevich writes about a triangle in which a guy cannot choose between passion and love. The whole story he rushes between girls and everything ends tragically.

In Bunin's works, where he writes about love, all aspects of this feeling are described. After all, love is not only joy and happiness, but also suffering and grief. Love is a great feeling that you often have to fight for.

Essay Theme of love in the works of Bunin

The theme of love has always been and is an integral part of any work. I. A. Bunin revealed it especially clearly in his stories. The writer described love as a tragic and deep feeling; he tried to reveal to the reader all the secret corners of this strong attraction.

In Bunin’s works, such as “Dark Alleys”, “Cold Autumn”, “Sunstroke”, love is shown from several sides. On the one hand, this feeling can bring great happiness, on the other hand, a bright and ardent feeling inflicts deep wounds on a person’s soul, causing days of only suffering.

For the author, love was not just a naive feeling, it was strong and real, often accompanied by tragedy, and in some moments, death. The theme of love, in different times creative path, opened from different sides. At the beginning of his work, Bunin described love between young people as something easy, natural and open. She is beautiful and gentle, but at the same time she can bring disappointment. For example, in the story “Dawn All Night” he describes the strong love of a simple girl for a young man. She is ready to give all her youth and soul to her loved one, to completely dissolve in him. But reality can be cruel, and as often happens, falling in love passes and a person begins to look at many things differently. And in this work he clearly describes the breakdown of a relationship that brought only pain and disappointment.

At a certain period of his time, Bunin emigrated from Russia. It was at this time that love became a mature and deep feeling for him. He began to write about her with sadness and longing, remembering his past years of life. This is clearly reflected in the novel “Mitya’s Love,” written by him in 1924. At first everything goes well, feelings are strong and reliable, but later they will lead the main character to death. Bunin wrote not only about mutual love two young people, but in some of his works one can also find love triangle: “Caucasus” and “The Fairest of the Sun.” The happiness of some inevitably brings heartache and disappointment for the third.

Love played a special role in his great work, “Dark Alleys,” written during the war years. In it, it is depicted as great happiness, despite the fact that it ends in tragedy in the end. The love of two people who met each other in adulthood is shown in the story “Sunstroke.” It was during this period of life that they so needed to experience this true feeling. The love of a lieutenant and a mature woman was doomed in advance and could not unite them for life. But after parting, she left the sweet bitterness of pleasant memories in their hearts.

In all his stories, Bunin glorifies love, its diversity and contradictions. If there is love, a person becomes infinitely bright, manifests true beauty his inner world, values ​​in relation to a loved one. Love in Bunin’s understanding is a true, selfless, pure feeling, even if after a sudden outbreak and attraction it can lead to tragedy and deep disappointment.

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The theme of love occupies perhaps the main place in Bunin’s work. This topic allows the writer to correlate what is happening in a person’s soul with the phenomena of external life, with the requirements of a society that is based on the relationship of purchase and sale and in which wild and dark instincts sometimes reign. Bunin was one of the first in Russian literature to speak not only about the spiritual, but also about the physical side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, hidden aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that physical passion does not necessarily follow a spiritual impulse, that in life it happens the other way around (as happened with the heroes of the story “Sunstroke”). And no matter what plot moves the writer chooses, love in his works is always great joy and great disappointment, deep and unsolvable mystery, she is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.

IN different years Bunin spoke about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early prose, the heroes are young, open and natural. In such stories as “In August”, “In Autumn”, “Dawn All Night”, everything is extremely simple, brief and significant. The feelings that the heroes experience are dual, colored in halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, way of life, relationships, we immediately recognize and understand in a new way our own feelings of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual turns. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony; more often it disappears as soon as it arises. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. A sad farewell to my beloved ends with dreams (“In August”): “Through tears I looked into the distance, and somewhere I dreamed of sultry southern cities, a blue steppe evening and the image of some woman who merged with the girl I loved...” . The date is memorable because it testifies to a touch of genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“Autumn”). And the story “Dawn All Night” talks about the premonition of love, about the tenderness that a young girl is ready to pour out on her future chosen one. At the same time, it is common for youth not only to get carried away, but also to quickly become disappointed. Bunin shows us this painful gap between dreams and reality for many. After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistles and spring trepidation, young Tata suddenly, through her sleep, hears her fiancé shooting jackdaws, and realizes that she does not love this rude and ordinary man at all.

And yet in the majority early stories Bunin's desire for beauty and purity remains the main, genuine movement of the heroes' souls. In the 20s, already in exile, Bunin wrote about love, as if looking back into the past, peering into a bygone Russia and those people who no longer exist. This is exactly how we perceive the story “Mitya’s Love” (1924). Here Bunin consistently shows how the spiritual formation of the hero occurs, leading him from love to collapse. In the story, life and love are closely intertwined. Mitya’s love for Katya, his hopes, jealousy, vague forebodings seem to be shrouded in special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, got caught up in the false life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which his connection with another woman, the beautiful but down-to-earth Alenka, could not save him, led Mitya to suicide. Mitya’s insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to confront harsh reality, and inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and unacceptability of what happened.

A number of Bunin's stories about love describe a love triangle: husband - wife - lover ("Ida", "Caucasus", "The Fairest of the Sun"). 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 stand it and will rush after her. He is really looking for her, and not finding her, he guesses about the betrayal and shoots himself. Already here the motif of love as a “sunstroke” appears, which has become a special, ringing note of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.

The stories in the “Dark Alleys” cycle are similar to the prose of the 20s and 30s by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all stories are told in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate the depths of the characters’ subconscious. In most of the stories, the author describes bodily pleasures, beautiful and poetic, born of 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 “Dark Alleys”, “Late Hour”, “Russia”, “Tanya”, “ Business cards", "In one familiar street." The writer writes about lonely people and ordinary lives. That is why the past, overshadowed by young, strong feelings, is depicted as truly finest hour, merges with the sounds, smells, colors of nature. As if nature itself leads to mental-physical rapprochement loving friend people's friend. 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 written in 1944 “ Clean Monday"is not just a story about the great mystery of love and the mysterious female soul, but some kind of cryptogram. Too much in the psychological line of the story and in its landscape and everyday details seems like an encrypted revelation. The accuracy and abundance of details are not just signs of the times, not just nostalgia for Moscow lost forever, but a contrast between East and West in the soul and appearance of the heroine, leaving love and life for a monastery.

Bunin's heroes greedily seize moments of happiness, grieve if it passes by, and lament if the thread connecting them with their loved one breaks. But at the same time, they are never able to fight with fate for happiness, to win an ordinary everyday battle. All stories are stories about escape from life, even for a short moment, even for one evening. Bunin's heroes can be selfish and unconsciously cynical, but they still lose what is most precious to them - their loved ones. And they can only remember the life they had to give up. Therefore, Bunin’s love theme is always permeated with the bitterness of loss, parting, and death. All love stories end tragically, even if the heroes survive. After all, at the same time they lose the best, valuable part of the soul, lose the meaning of existence and find themselves alone.

Bunin wrote a lot about love, its tragedies and rare moments of true happiness.” These works are marked by an extraordinary poeticization of human feelings, they revealed the wonderful talent of the writer, his ability to penetrate into the intimate depths of the heart, with their unknown and unknown laws.

For Bunin in true love there is something in common with the eternal beauty of nature, therefore only such a feeling of love is beautiful, which is natural, not false, not fictitious; for it, love and existence without it are two hostile lives, and if love dies, then that other life is no longer needed .

Exalting love, Bunin does not hide the fact that it brings not only joy and happiness, but also very often conceals torment, grief, disappointment, and death. In one of his letters, he himself explained precisely this motive in his work and not only explained, but convincingly proved: “Don’t you still know that love and death are inextricably linked? Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide.”

Bunin told the story of tragic love in a short story"Sunstroke". A chance acquaintance on a ship, an ordinary “road adventure”, a “fleeting meeting”. But how did all this random and fleeting end for the heroes? “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely hit me. Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke,” admits the lieutenant’s companion. But this blow has not yet touched the hero.

Having seen off his friend and carefreely returned to the hotel, he suddenly felt that his heart “squeezed with an incomprehensible tenderness” at the memory of her. When he realized that he had lost her forever (after all, he didn’t even know her first and last name), “he felt such pain and such uselessness of all his later life without her, that he was overcome by horror and despair,” And again Bunin’s motif intensifies the tragedy of man: love and death are always nearby. Struck, as if by a blow, by this unexpected love, the lieutenant is ready to die, just to return this dear and beloved creature to him: “He, without hesitation, would die tomorrow, if by some miracle he could return her, spend another “To spend this day only to express to her and somehow prove, convince her how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her.”

The collection of stories “Dark Alleys” can be called an encyclopedia love dramas. The writer created it during the Second World War (1937-1944). Later, when the book was published and readers were shocked by the “eternal drama of love,” Bunin admitted in one of his letters: “She talks about the tragic and many tender and beautiful things,” I think this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life.” And although in many stories the love that the writer spoke about is tragic, Bunin claims that all love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, or tragedy. Many Bunin heroes come to this conclusion, having lost, overlooked, or destroyed their love themselves.

But this insight, enlightenment comes to the heroes too late, as, for example, to Vitaly Meshchersky, the hero of the story “Natalie”. Bunin told the story of student Meshchersky’s love for the young beauty Natalie Stankevich, about their breakup, about long loneliness. The tragedy of this love lies in the character of Meshchersky, who feels sincere and sublime feeling, and to the other - “passionate bodily intoxication”, both seem to him to be love. But it is impossible to love two at once. Physical attraction to Sonya quickly passes, big, true love stays with Natalie for life. Only for a short moment were the heroes given the true happiness of love, but the author ended the idyllic union of Meshchersky and Natalie with the untimely death of the heroine.

In stories about love, I. A. Bunin affirmed true spiritual values, the beauty and greatness of a person capable of great, selfless feeling, he portrayed love as a high, ideal, beautiful feeling, despite the fact that it brings not only joy and happiness, but more often - grief, suffering, death.

I.A. Bunina

composition

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is rightly called the greatest writerXXcentury. From his pen came wonderful poems, novels and stories. The most important theme in the work of I.A. Bunin's theme was love. The cycle of stories “Dark Alleys”, created by the writer already in exile, during the Second World War, is entirely dedicated to her. This collection is a kind of summing up. Written at the end of his life, it collected Bunin’s innermost thoughts and feelings, his experiences and beliefs, embodied in short stories amazing in form and content.

The main idea of ​​“Dark Alleys” can be formulated as follows: “All love is happiness, even if it is unrequited and brings suffering.” Let's take for example two stories from the cycle - “Clean Monday” and “Cold Autumn”.

In the first work, the relationship between a man and a woman is placed at the center of the plot. Main character in love with the heroine, he pampers her with gifts, flowers, trips to expensive restaurants and theaters, although he feels that all this is of little interest to the young woman:

A man loves a woman passionately, with all his heart, love for her becomes the meaning of his existence. There is a kind of alienation in the heroine, she is more interested in spiritual life rather than material wealth, even the hero’s love does not bring her satisfaction. She loves ancient temples, singers, and the ringing of bells, so literally overnight the young woman disappears from his life. Having tried everything that worldly life can give a person, and not finding purity and true spirituality in it, the heroine decides to abandon the past and goes to a monastery, where, as she thinks, she can find peace of mind and become happy. The hero does not understand her choice, and he continues to live, feeling only the constant pain of loss:

Bunin shows how separation literally “knocks down” the hero, driving him crazy. Talking about young man after breaking up with his girlfriend, he notes the purposelessness of his existence. A handsome, rich and intelligent man, he finds himself in mental isolation after his beloved leaves. With all this, the author proves how much love can mean to a person. Love is life itself, which means its loss is equivalent to the loss of the meaning of existence.

In the story "Cold Autumn" before us a lifelong love story. The theme of love here is closely related to the theme of death. It should be noted that in his works Bunin often brings these two motives together, as if wanting to emphasize that in terms of its significance in a person’s life, love is on a par with death, and just like death, it represents for him one of the greatest mysteries. Main character"Cold Autumn" sees off to the First world war her fiancé and says that she will not be able to survive his death... Nevertheless, she experiences not only the death of her lover, but also the revolution of 1917, emigration, wandering through the endless cities of Europe, where no one needed her and her companions, making a hard living labor, lonely old age. But, despite the fact that the heroine’s life was full of events, she only remembers that cold autumn evening when she said goodbye to her beloved. The composition of the story is structured in such a way as to confirm the importance of this moment for the woman. If the description of the farewell evening in September 1914 takes up most of the work, then the story of the heroine’s wanderings after it is only one paragraph. She herself says:

And after many years, the heroine waits for death as a joyful moment of meeting with the first and only love, which became the main “event” in her life, which helped her survive in an endless series of losses, disappointments and insults.

I. A. Bunin - the theme of love

In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.

Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his destiny uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning.

This mystery of existence becomes the theme of Bunin’s story “The Grammar of Love” (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on the way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “an incomprehensible love that has turned a whole life into some kind of ecstatic life.” human life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life,” if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushka. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good-looking,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some dazed, focused soul?” According to neighboring landowners. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the district as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then unexpected death her - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and sat on her bed for more than twenty years...” How can this twenty-year seclusion be called? Insanity? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all clear.

The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakening in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint.” What made Ivlev buy from Khvoshchinsky’s heir “at an expensive price” a small book “The Grammar of Love”, which the old landowner never parted with, cherishing memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what he ate for many years his orphaned soul. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandsons” who have heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved”, and along with them the reader of Bunin’s work, will try to reveal the secret of this inexplicable feeling.

An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure” shakes the lieutenant’s soul. Having parted with a beautiful stranger, he cannot find peace. At the thought of the impossibility of meeting this woman again, “he felt such pain and the uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair.” The author convinces the reader of the seriousness of the feelings experienced by the hero of the story. The lieutenant feels “terribly unhappy in this city.” “Where to go? What to do?" - he thinks lost. The depth of the hero's spiritual insight is clearly expressed in final phrase story: “The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.” How to explain what happened to him? Maybe the hero came into contact with that great feeling that people call love, and the feeling of the impossibility of loss led him to realize the tragedy of existence?

Torment loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the destinies of Bunin’s heroes by love, and time has no power over it.

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

How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.

Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story,” while others will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers of the late 20th century indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always modern writer, arousing deep reader interest.