Bunin's collection of dark alleys. "Dark Alleys": analysis of the story by Ivan Bunin

Composition

The book " Dark alleys"It is customary to call it the "encyclopedia of love." In this cycle of stories, Bunin tried to show the relationship between the two in all its diversity of manifestations. This was the topic to which Bunin devoted all his creative forces. The book is as multifaceted as love itself.

The name “Dark Alleys” was taken by Bunin from N. Ogarev’s poem “An Ordinary Tale”. It is about first love, which did not end with the union of two lives. The image of "dark alleys" came from there, but the book does not contain a story with that title, as one might expect. It's just a symbol general mood all the stories.

Bunin believed that a true, high feeling not only never has a successful ending, but also has the property of even avoiding marriage. The writer repeated this several times. He also quite seriously quoted Byron's words: “It is often easier to die for a woman than to live with her.” Love is the intensity of feelings and passions. A person, alas, cannot constantly be on the rise. He will certainly begin to fall precisely when he has reached highest point in whatever it is. After all, you can’t rise higher than the highest peak!

In “Dark Alleys” we do not find a description of the irresistible attraction of two people, which would end in a wedding and a happy family life. Even if the heroes decide to link their destinies, at the last moment a catastrophe occurs, something unexpected that destroys both lives. Often such a catastrophe is death. It seems that it is easier for Bunin to imagine the death of a hero or heroine at the very beginning life path than their coexistence during for long years. To live to old age and die on the same day - for Bunin this is not at all an ideal of happiness, rather the opposite.

Thus, Bunin seems to stop time at the highest rise of feelings. Love reaches its climax, but it knows no fall. We will never come across a story that talks about the gradual extinction of passion. It breaks off at the moment when everyday life has not yet had time to have a detrimental effect on feelings.

However, such fatal outcomes do not in any way exclude the persuasiveness and verisimilitude of the stories. It was claimed that Bunin spoke about cases from own life. But he did not agree with this - the situations are completely fictitious. He often based the characters of his heroines on real women.

The book “Dark Alleys” is a whole gallery women's portraits. Here you can meet girls who have matured early, and self-confident young women, and respectable ladies, and prostitutes, and models, and peasant women. Each portrait, painted with short strokes, is surprisingly real. One can only marvel at the talent of the author, who could present it in a few words! 1am so different women. The main thing is that all the characters are surprisingly Russian and the action almost always takes place in Russia.

Female characters play in stories main role, male - auxiliary, secondary. More attention is paid to men's emotions, their reactions to various situations, their feelings. The heroes of the stories themselves retreat into the background, into the fog.

The stories also amaze with the huge variety of shades of love: the simple-minded but unbreakable affection of a peasant girl for the master who seduced her (“Tanya”); fleeting dacha hobbies (“Zoyka and Valeria”); a short one-day novel (“Antigone”, “ Business Cards"); passion leading to suicide (“Galya Ganskaya”); simple-minded confession of a minor prostitute (“Madrid”). In a word, love in all possible manifestations. It appears in any form: it can be a poetic, sublime feeling, a moment of enlightenment, or, conversely, an irresistible physical attraction without spiritual intimacy. But whatever it is, for Bunin it is only a short moment, a lightning in fate. The heroine of the story " Cold autumn", who lost her fiancé, loves him for thirty years and believes that in her life there was only one autumn evening, everything else is “unnecessary sleep.”

In many stories of the cycle, Bunin describes female body. This is something sacred for him, an embodiment true beauty. These descriptions never descend into crude naturalism. The writer knows how to find words to describe the most intimate human relationships without any vulgarity. Without a doubt, this comes only at the cost of great creative torment, but it is easy to read, in one breath.

I. A. Bunin in the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” managed to display many facets human relations, created a whole galaxy of female images. And all this diversity is united by the feeling to which Bunin dedicated most creativity, - Love.

Other works on this work

Annotation

Collection of short stories “Dark Alleys” by Ivan Bunin, winner of the most prestigious award in the world Nobel Prize, is rightfully considered the standard of love prose. Bunin was the only writer of his time who dared to speak so openly and beautifully about the relationship between a man and a woman - about love that can last just a moment, or maybe a lifetime... “Dark Alleys” shocks with its frankness and exquisite sensuality. This is probably one of the best books Russian literature of the twentieth century.

Ivan Bunin

Dark alleys

Late hour

Gorgeous

Antigone

Business Cards

Zoyka and Valeria

Galya Ganskaya

River Inn

"Madrid"

Second coffee pot

Cold autumn

Steamship "Saratov"

One hundred rupees

Clean Monday

Spring, in Judea

Ivan Bunin

Dark alleys

Dark alleys

In cold autumn weather, on one of the big Tula roads, flooded with rain and cut by many black ruts, to a long hut, in one connection there was a state postal station, and in the other a private room, where you could rest or spend the night, dine or ask for a samovar , a carriage covered in mud with the top half-raised, three rather simple horses with their tails tied up from the slush, rolled up. On the box of the tarantass sat a strong man in a tightly belted overcoat, serious and dark-faced, with a sparse pitch beard, looking like old robber, and in the carriage there was a slender old military man in a large cap and a Nikolaev gray overcoat with a beaver stand-up collar, still black-browed, but with a white mustache that was connected to the same sideburns; his chin was shaved, and his whole appearance bore that resemblance to Alexander II, which was so common among the military during his reign; the look was also questioning, stern and at the same time tired.

When the horses stopped, he threw his leg in a military boot with a straight top out of the tarantass and, holding the hem of his overcoat with his hands in suede gloves, ran up to the porch of the hut.

- To the left, Your Excellency! - the coachman shouted rudely from the box, and he, bending slightly on the threshold due to his height, entered the entryway, then into the upper room to the left.

The upper room was warm, dry and tidy: a new golden image in the left corner, under it a table covered with a clean, harsh tablecloth, behind the table there were cleanly washed benches; the kitchen stove, which occupied the far right corner, was new white with chalk; closer to it stood something like an ottoman, covered with piebald blankets, resting with its blade against the side of the stove; from behind the stove damper there was a sweet smell of cabbage soup - boiled cabbage, beef and bay leaves.

The newcomer threw off his overcoat on the bench and found himself even slimmer in his uniform and boots, then he took off his gloves and cap and, with a tired look, ran his pale, thin hand over his head - White hair His hair was slightly curly at the temples and at the corners of his eyes; his handsome, elongated face with dark eyes bore here and there small traces of smallpox. There was no one in the upper room, and he shouted with hostility, opening the door to the hallway:

- Hey, who's there?

Immediately after that, a dark-haired, also black-browed and also still beautiful woman for her age, who looked like an elderly gypsy, with dark down on her face, entered the room. upper lip and along the cheeks, light on the move, but full, with large breasts under a red blouse, with a triangular belly, like a goose’s, under a black woolen skirt.

“Welcome, Your Excellency,” she said. - Would you like to eat or would you like a samovar?

The visitor glanced briefly at her rounded shoulders and light legs in worn red Tatar shoes and answered abruptly, inattentively:

- Samovar. Is the mistress here or are you serving?

- Mistress, Your Excellency.

– So you’re holding it yourself?

- Yes sir. Herself.

- What’s so? Are you a widow, are you running the business yourself?

- Not a widow, Your Excellency, but you have to live somehow. And I love to manage.

- So. So. This is good. And how clean and pleasant your place is.

The woman looked at him inquisitively all the time, squinting slightly.

“And I love cleanliness,” she answered. “After all, I grew up under the masters, but I don’t know how to behave decently, Nikolai Alekseevich.”

He quickly straightened up, opened his eyes and blushed:

- Hope! You? - he said hastily.

“I, Nikolai Alekseevich,” she answered.

- My God, my God! - he said, sitting down on the bench and looking at her point-blank. - Who would have thought! How many years have we not seen each other? Thirty-five years old?

- Thirty, Nikolai Alekseevich. I’m forty-eight now, and you’re nearly sixty, I think?

– Like this... My God, how strange!

-What's strange, sir?

- But everything, everything... How don’t you understand!

His fatigue and absent-mindedness disappeared, he stood up and walked decisively around the room, looking at the floor. Then he stopped and, blushing through his gray hair, began to say:

“I haven’t known anything about you since then.” How did you get here? Why didn't you stay with the masters?

“The gentlemen gave me my freedom soon after you.”

-Where did you live later?

- It's a long story, sir.

– You say you weren’t married?

- No, I wasn’t.

- Why? With such beauty as you had?

– I couldn’t do it.

- Why couldn’t she? What do you want to say?

- What is there to explain? You probably remember how much I loved you.

He blushed to tears and, frowning, walked again.

“Everything passes, my friend,” he muttered. – Love, youth – everything, everything. The story is vulgar, ordinary. Over the years everything goes away. How does it say this in the book of Job? “You will remember how water flowed through.”

– What does God give to whom, Nikolai Alekseevich. Everyone's youth passes, but love is another matter.

He raised his head and, stopping, smiled painfully:

– After all, you couldn’t love me all your life!

- So, she could. No matter how much time passed, she lived alone. I knew that you had not been the same for a long time, that it was as if nothing had happened for you, but... It’s too late to reproach me now, but, really, you abandoned me very heartlessly - how many times did I want to lay hands on myself out of resentment from one, really not to mention everything else. After all, there was a time, Nikolai Alekseevich, when I called you Nikolenka, and you remember me? And they deigned to read all the poems to me about all sorts of “dark alleys,” she added with an unkind smile.

- Oh, how good you were! - he said, shaking his head. - How hot, how beautiful! What a figure, what eyes! Do you remember how everyone looked at you?

- I remember, sir. You were also excellent. And it was I who gave you my beauty, my passion. How can you forget this?

- A! Everything passes. Everything is forgotten.

– Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.

“Go away,” he said, turning away and going to the window. - Please go away.

And, taking out the handkerchief and pressing it to his eyes, he added quickly:

- If only God would forgive me. And you, apparently, have forgiven.

She walked to the door and paused:

- No, Nikolai Alekseevich, I didn’t forgive you. Since our conversation touched on our feelings, I’ll say frankly: I could never forgive you. Just as there was nothing more expensive than you in the world at that time, so there was nothing later. That's why I can't forgive you. Well, why remember, they don’t carry the dead from the graveyard.

“Yes, yes, there’s no need, order the horses to be brought,” he answered, moving away from the window with a stern face. – I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve never been happy in my life, please don’t think about it. Sorry that I may be hurting your pride, but I’ll tell you frankly - I loved my wife madly. And she cheated on me, abandoned me even more insultingly than I did you. He adored his son - while he was growing up, he didn’t have any hopes for him! And what came out was a scoundrel, a spendthrift, an insolent person, without a heart, without honor, without a conscience... However, all this is also the most ordinary, vulgar story. Be healthy, dear friend. I think that I, too, have lost in you the most precious thing I had in life.

Among the Russian classics of the early 20th century, I. Bunin can be called one of the most read. Honed, bewitching style, skill in creation landscape sketches, high psychologism, the artist’s approach (due to his passion for painting) to depicting the world... All this makes Bunin’s stories recognizable to many generations of readers. The strength of the writer’s love for the Motherland, which rejected him, is also striking. After October revolution Ivan Alekseevich ended up in exile and never returned to Russia.

Main themes of prose

At the early stage of Bunin's creativity, poetry predominates. However, very soon poetry will give way to stories, in the creation of which the writer is unconditionally recognized as a master. Their themes have changed little over the years. The fate of the country and love are the two main questions that worried Ivan Alekseevich throughout his life.

Bunin's stories from the turn of the century are often about a bankrupt Russia (“Tanka”, “ Antonov apples"). His heroes are small landed nobles and simple men, whose lives are increasingly changing with the advent of bourgeois relations. Early works They also contain echoes of the first revolution: they are filled with the expectation of something new, tragic. During the First World War, the feeling of the catastrophic nature of existence (“Mr. from San Francisco”) evokes in the writer attention to love as the highest value of life. This theme is most fully manifested in emigrant creativity, including Bunin’s stories from the “Dark Alleys” series.

Since the 20s, notes of loneliness and the same doom and hopelessness have penetrated into the works.

Portrayal of Russian character

The writer, a nobleman by birth, was always concerned about the fate of Russian estates, where a special way of life existed. Very often, serfs and their masters were connected by almost family relations, as evidenced by Bunin’s story “Lapti,” written in exile.

Its plot is simple. The lady's child fell ill. He was delirious and kept asking for some red bast shoes. Nefed, who brought straw to the firebox, sympathetically inquired about the boy’s condition and, having learned about his strange desire, said: “We need to get it. This means that the soul desires.” On the street for the fifth day “it was blowing like an impenetrable blizzard.” After hesitating, the peasant nevertheless decided to hit the road - to Novoselki, which was six miles away. The lady spent the whole night in anxious anticipation, hoping that he would remain there until dawn. And the next morning, Nefedushka, frozen, “clogged with snow,” with children’s bast shoes and magenta paint in his bosom, was brought by men: they came across him in a snowdrift two steps from the house. Thus, in the image of a simple peasant, Bunin highlights the traits of a truly Russian character: a sympathetic person, good soul capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of those he loves.

Collection of stories "Dark Alleys"

The book was published in 1943 and included 11 short stories about love. Three years later it was expanded and now has 38 stories. The collection was a kind of result of aesthetic and ideological plans Bunina.

Pure, beautiful, sublime love, often tragic. Vivid, memorable, not similar friend on a friend female images. Emphasizing their beauty and highlighting the sincerity of a man’s feelings. This is how you can briefly characterize the book that you considered the best in your work, including in terms of “ literary excellence", I. Bunin.

The story "Dark Alleys"

Nikolai Alekseevich, gray-haired, but still cheerful and fresh, stops at an inn and recognizes in the owner the woman with whom he was in love in his youth. Nadezhda served as a maid in their house, and social differences played a role fatal role in their destiny. The hero left his beloved, then got married. But the wife ran away, the son caused nothing but problems. He was tired of life, and a chance meeting caused him an incomprehensible languor and thoughts that everything could have turned out differently.

Nadezhda never got married. She always loved only one person, but she could never forgive him for his betrayal. And these words sound in the story as a sentence to someone who is not able to fight for their feelings. At some point, there is a feeling that Nikolai Alekseevich repented. However, then, from a conversation with the coachman, it becomes clear that all these memories are nothing more than nonsense for him. Don't return the same ones anymore happy moments life when there were no lies and pretense.

So already in the first work of the cycle, which opens Bunin’s stories “Dark Alleys”, the image of sincerely appears loving woman, capable of carrying a feeling throughout life.

"Tragic praise to existence..."

These words of F. Stepun about the writer’s work can be fully attributed to another work in the collection - “Caucasus”. Bunin's story tells about tragic love, which initially violates moral norms. The heroes are young lovers and jealous husband. She (the characters have no names) is constantly tormented by the realization that she is an unfaithful wife, and at the same time she is infinitely happy next to Him. He looks forward to every meeting, his heart skips a beat when a plan for an escape trip together comes to mind. The husband, suspecting something, is ready to do anything to defend his honor.

The lovers dream of spending at least two or three weeks somewhere in a secluded place and decide to leave for the Caucasus. Bunin's story ends with the husband seeing his wife off and then rushing after her. Having failed to find her, he shoots himself in the temples with two revolvers. And here a number of questions arise. What does such an act indicate? About the fact that love was the meaning of life for him and he gives freedom to his wife, instead of fighting with a rival? How can He and She live on, whose relationship became the cause of someone else’s tragedy?

In such a multifaceted and ambiguous way the writer depicts one of the most bright feelings on earth in their stories.

“All the stories in this book,” Bunin wrote about the cycle of short stories “Dark Alleys,” “are only about love, about its dark and most often gloomy and cruel alleys.” The catastrophic nature of existence, the fragility of human relationships and existence itself are Bunin’s favorite motifs of late creativity, which is reflected in the concept of love.

“Love is beautiful” and “love is doomed” are the central ideas of the cycle, consisting of thirty-eight short stories written in exile. The highest happiness can suddenly end in tragedy, catastrophe - death or separation equal to death. Great love seems to be incompatible with an ordinary, measured life, and the death that takes away one of the lovers confirms this. The main motive of the cycle is the motive of the suddenness of love, the short duration of happiness. Love is just a moment, an intoxicating moment that can illuminate your whole life and remain in your memory forever.

Love, tragic, cut short by chance or fate, not leading to family happiness, but divided, the only one that gives rapture, becomes the best, brightest, most joyful in the lives of Bunin’s heroes. Happy moments of love live in the memory for a long time and suddenly suddenly pop up, breaking through the routine and everyday life. What happened once warms the soul and gives strength for many years. A meeting with former love, the memory of it becomes an instant epiphany, the realization that nothing better and purer, more joyful and more expensive has ever been in life and never will be.

Bunin is interested in strong, free, independent characters. All the heroes live in anticipation of love, search for it, and most often, scorched by it, die. There is nothing ordinary or faded in either the feelings or appearance of the heroes of “Dark Alleys”. The women are beautiful with some kind of otherworldly – ​​oriental, gypsy, Indian – beauty. These are most often tragic characters, people who have known love-passion, mysterious, inevitable, fatal. Without knowing such love, it is impossible to talk about real happiness, but for knowledge there is a high price: death or loss of a loved one. Love and happiness, love and suffering are inseparable - Bunin’s heroes learned this, and the author himself is sure of this.

"Dark alleys"

Many of these themes and motifs are already outlined in the first story of the collection - “Dark Alleys”. The story begins emphatically prosaically: autumn bad weather, black ruts, a tarantass covered in mud, horses with their tails tied up from the slush, fatigue in the look of a military man. However, already in this first description one can feel the second plane of the narrative - not everyday, but existential: here are the traditional images of “road”, “autumn”, “troika” for Russian and world art, and a rhythmic and intonation pattern reminiscent of the beginning of Gogol’s poem “ Dead Souls" And there is a lot in a military man’s appearance that catches your attention: his slimness, black eyebrows combined with a white mustache, a beautiful elongated face, sophistication of manners.

This combination of the everyday and the existential is felt throughout the entire story. The upper room is cozy, but quite ordinary and prosaic, which is worth, for example, the smell of cabbage soup. And in Nadezhda, “a woman who looks like an elderly gypsy... with a triangular belly, like a goose’s, under a black woolen skirt,” nothing foreshadows what we will later learn about her. And the word she used to call herself - “hostess” - is quite prosaic. Not-ordinary and Not- everything turns out to be prosaic instantly - from the moment of recognition, which, like a lightning strike, transformed this everyday sphere of life and transferred it to another - outside of this space and this time - to that distant time of youth and love, which, it turns out, was real life.

The short story contained the whole life of the characters. The happy youth of Nikolai Alekseevich gives way to restless maturity, then loneliness. It seems impossible to him to break out of the cruel confines of his environment, conventions, his fate, and finally, perhaps that is why there is fatigue in his gaze. “The story is vulgar, ordinary,” Nikolai Alekseevich will say about his life and only now will he understand that there was meaning and joy in it only in that youthful love. “Over the years, everything passes,” he will mechanically utter a common phrase, but everything that happened to him was a denial of this everyday truth.

The image of Nadezhda is portrayed in a story with true dramatic power: her life, outwardly emphatically prosaic, turns out to be tragic in essence. Nadezhda not only remembers her long-standing love - she still lives by it; there has not been a single moment in her life that was not illuminated by the secret light of this dramatic and happy love: “Just as I had nothing more precious than you in the world at that time , and then it didn’t happen. That’s why I can’t forgive you.” “Forgive” means spiritually letting go, moving away, freeing yourself. Hope is unable to do this; time turns out to be powerless in the face of the element of indestructible, unchanging human feeling. Love, squeezed into the wretched framework of everyday existence and false conventions, does not cease to be love and does not lose its true nature.

It would seem that at the end of the story the world has not changed externally: still the same “pale sun”, “empty fields”, “puddles”, even Nikolai Alekseevich’s fatigue and disbelief, but behind all this something else is visible - love, the eternal spiritual element, soul and the meaning of human life. “Yes, of course, the best moments. And not the best, but truly magical!” “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys...” This world of “scarlet rose hips and linden alleys” triumphs over the vain, prosaic, everyday human life, illuminates it with a different light, gives it meaning.