Cycle of stories dark alleys list. Analysis of “Dark Alleys” Bunin

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich is one of best writers our country. The first collection of his poems appeared in 1881. Then he wrote the stories “To the End of the World”, “Tanka”, “News from the Motherland” and some others. In 1901 it was published new collection"Falling Leaves", for which the author received the Pushkin Prize.

Popularity and recognition come to the writer. He meets M. Gorky, A. P. Chekhov, L. N. Tolstoy.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Ivan Alekseevich created the stories “Zakhar Vorobyov”, “Pines”, “Antonov Apples” and others, which depict the tragedy of the disadvantaged, impoverished people, as well as the ruin of the estates of the nobles.

and emigration

Bunin perceived the October Revolution negatively, as social drama. He emigrated in 1920 to France. Here he wrote, among other works, a cycle of short stories called " Dark alleys"(We will analyze the story of the same name from this collection below). main topic cycle - love. Ivan Alekseevich reveals to us not only its bright sides, but also its dark ones, as the name itself suggests.

Bunin's fate was both tragic and happy. In his art he reached unsurpassed heights, the first of domestic writers received the prestigious Nobel Prize. But he was forced to live for thirty years in a foreign land, with longing for his homeland and spiritual closeness with her.

Collection "Dark Alleys"

These experiences served as the impetus for the creation of the “Dark Alleys” cycle, which we will analyze. This collection, in a truncated form, first appeared in New York in 1943. In 1946, the next edition was published in Paris, which included 38 stories. The collection differed sharply in its content from how the topic of love was usually covered in Soviet literature.

Bunin's view of love

Bunin had his own, different from others, own view to this feeling. Its ending was one - death or separation, no matter how much the characters loved each other. Ivan Alekseevich thought that it looked like a flash, but that’s what was wonderful. Over time, love is replaced by affection, which gradually turns into everyday life. Bunin's heroes lack this. They experience only a flash and part, having enjoyed it.

Let's consider the analysis of the story that opens the cycle of the same name, starting with brief description plots.

The plot of the story "Dark Alleys"

Its plot is simple. General Nikolai Alekseevich, already an old man, arrives at the postal station and meets here his beloved, whom he has not seen for about 35 years. He will not recognize hope right away. Now she is the mistress of where their first meeting once took place. The hero finds out that all this time she loved only him.

The story "Dark Alleys" continues. Nikolai Alekseevich is trying to justify himself to the woman for not visiting her for so many years. “Everything passes,” he says. But these explanations are very insincere and clumsy. Nadezhda wisely answers the general, saying that youth passes for everyone, but love does not. A woman reproaches her lover for leaving her heartlessly, so she wanted to commit suicide many times, but she realizes that it is now too late to reproach.

Let us dwell in more detail on the story “Dark Alleys”. shows that Nikolai Alekseevich does not seem to feel remorse, but Nadezhda is right when she says that not everything is forgotten. The general also could not forget this woman, his first love. In vain he asks her: “Please go away.” And he says that if only God would forgive him, and Nadezhda, apparently, has already forgiven him. But it turns out that no. The woman admits that she could not do this. Therefore, the general is forced to make excuses, apologize to his ex-lover, saying that he was never happy, but he loved his wife madly, and she left Nikolai Alekseevich and cheated on him. He adored his son, had high hopes, but he turned out to be an insolent man, a spendthrift, without honor, heart, or conscience.

Is the old love still there?

Let's analyze the work "Dark Alleys". Analysis of the story shows that the feelings of the main characters have not faded away. It becomes clear to us that it has been preserved old love, the heroes of this work still love each other. Leaving, the general admits to himself that this woman gave him best moments life. Fate takes revenge on the hero for betraying his first love. Doesn't find happiness in life family Nikolai Alekseevich (“Dark Alleys”). An analysis of his experiences proves this. He realizes that he missed the chance once given by fate. When the coachman tells the general that this landlady gives money at interest and is very “cool”, although she is fair: he didn’t return it on time - that means you have yourself to blame, Nikolai Alekseevich projects these words onto his life, reflects on what would have happened , if he had not left this woman.

What prevented the happiness of the main characters?

At one time, class prejudices prevented the future general from uniting his fate with a commoner. But love did not leave the protagonist’s heart and prevented him from becoming happy with another woman and raising his son with dignity, as our analysis shows. "Dark Alleys" (Bunin) is a work that has a tragic connotation.

Nadezhda also carried love throughout her life and in the end she also found herself alone. She could not forgive the hero for the suffering he caused, since he remained the most important thing in her life. dear person. Nikolai Alekseevich was unable to break the rules established in society and did not risk acting against them. After all, if the general had married Nadezhda, he would have met with contempt and misunderstanding from those around him. A poor girl there was nothing left to do but submit to fate. In those days, bright alleys of love between a peasant woman and a gentleman were impossible. This problem is already public, not personal.

The dramatic destinies of the main characters

In his work, Bunin wanted to show the dramatic destinies of the main characters, who were forced to part, being in love with each other. In this world, love turned out to be doomed and especially fragile. But she illuminated their whole life and forever remained in their memory as the best moments. This story is romantically beautiful, although dramatic.

In Bunin's work "Dark Alleys" (we are now analyzing this story), the theme of love is a cross-cutting motif. It permeates all creativity, thereby connecting the emigrant and Russian periods. It is this that allows the writer to correlate spiritual experiences with the phenomena of external life, and also to get closer to the secret of the human soul, based on the influence of objective reality on him.

This concludes the analysis of “Dark Alleys”. Everyone understands love in their own way. This amazing feeling has not yet been solved. The theme of love will always be relevant because it is driving force many human actions, the meaning of our lives. In particular, our analysis leads to this conclusion. “Dark Alleys” by Bunin is a story that even in its title reflects the idea that this feeling cannot be fully understood, it is “dark”, but at the same time beautiful.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin’s story “Dark Alleys” was written in 1938 and was included in the collection of short stories “Dark Alleys” dedicated to the theme of love. The work was first published in 1943 in the New York publication “New Land”. The story “Dark Alleys” is written in the traditions literary direction neorealism.

Main characters

Nikolai Alekseevich- a tall, thin man of sixty years old, a military man. In his youth he loved Nadezhda, but abandoned her. He was married and has a son.

Hope- a woman of forty-eight years old, the owner of an inn. She loved Nikolai Alekseevich all her life, which is why she never got married.

Klim- coachman of Nikolai Alekseevich.

“In cold autumn weather,” a “tarantass with a half-raised top” pulled up to a long hut located on one of the roads in Tula. The hut was divided into two halves - a postal station and a private upper room (inn), where travelers could stop, rest, and spend the night.

The tarantass was driven by a “strong man”, a “serious and dark-faced” coachman, “resembling old robber“, while in the carriage itself sat a tall and “slender old military man”, outwardly similar to Alexander II with an inquiring, stern and tired look.

When the coachman stopped the carriage, the military man entered the room. Inside it was “warm, dry and tidy”, in the left corner there was a “new golden image”, in the right there was a chalk-whitened stove, from behind the damper of which came the sweet smell of cabbage soup. The visitor took it off outerwear, and shouted to the owners.

Immediately a “dark-haired”, “black-browed”, “beautiful woman beyond her age, looking like an elderly gypsy” entered the room. The hostess offered the visitor something to eat. The man agreed to drink tea, asking for the samovar. Questioning the woman, the visitor learns that she is not married and runs the household herself. Unexpectedly, the hostess calls the man by name - Nikolai Alekseevich. “He quickly straightened up, opened his eyes and blushed,” recognizing in his interlocutor his old love - Nadezhda.

Excited, Nikolai Alekseevich begins to remember how long they have not seen each other - “thirty-five years?” . Nadezhda corrects him - “Thirty, Nikolai Alekseevich.” The man knew nothing about her fate since then. Nadezhda said that soon after they separated, the gentlemen gave her her freedom, and she was never married because she loved him too much. Blushing, the man muttered: “Everything passes, my friend.<…>Love, youth - everything, everything." But the woman did not agree with him: “Everyone’s youth passes, but love is another matter.” Nadezhda says that she could not forget him, “she lived alone,” she recalls that he left her “very heartlessly” - she even wanted to commit suicide more than once, that she called him Nikolenka, and he read her poems about “all sorts of” dark alleys"" .

Delving into his memories, Nikolai Alekseevich concludes: “Everything passes. Everything is forgotten,” to which Nadezhda replied: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.” Tearing up, the man asks for the horses, saying: “If only God would forgive me. And you obviously forgave." However, the woman did not forgive and could not forgive: “just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later.”

Nikolai Alekseevich asks the woman for forgiveness and says that he was also unhappy. He loved his wife madly, but she cheated and abandoned him even more insultingly than he did Nadezhda. He adored his son, “but he turned out to be a scoundrel, a spendthrift, an insolent person, without a heart, without honor, without a conscience.” “I think that I, too, have lost in you the most precious thing I had in life.” In parting, Nadezhda kisses his hand, and he kisses hers. Afterward, the coachman Klim recalled that the hostess was looking after them from the window.

Already on the road, Nikolai Alekseevich becomes ashamed that he kissed Nadezhda’s hand, and then feels ashamed of this shame. The man remembers the past - “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys...”. He thinks about what would have happened if he had not abandoned her, and “this same Nadezhda was not the innkeeper, but my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children?” “And, closing his eyes, he shook his head.”

Conclusion

I. A. Bunin called the story “Dark Alleys” the most successful work of the entire collection, his best creation. In it, the author reflects on the questions of love, on whether a true feeling is subject to the flow of time - is it capable of real love live for decades or it remains only in our memories, and everything else is “a vulgar, ordinary story.”

A brief retelling of “Dark Alleys” will be useful for preparing for a lesson or when familiarizing yourself with the plot of the work.

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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 an old robber, and in the tarantass a slender old military man in a large cap and in a Nikolaev gray overcoat with a beaver stand-up collar, still black-browed, but with a white mustache that connected with 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 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 been gone 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 quickly added:

- 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, there was nothing more valuable then. 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.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is one of the greatest masters of the short story in modern Russian literature and outstanding poet. In 1933, he became the first Russian laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature - “for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated the typical Russian character in prose” - but already in exile. Author " Antonov apples" and "The Man from San Francisco", he, together with Russia, survived " damn days» October revolution and lived half his life in a foreign land. The disc contains the collection of short stories “Dark Alleys” (1943), which became the pinnacle late creativity writer. “All the stories in this book are only about love, about its “dark” and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys,” Bunin wrote in one of his letters to N.A. Teffi. Love in Bunin's prose is a mysterious and incompatible element with life, an invasion of everyday world otherworldly existence, " sunstroke", carrying with it such tension mental strength which is neither life nor human personality unable to accommodate. Even if you have read I.A. Bunin’s collection “Dark Alleys,” listen to these stories performed by the brilliant actress, People’s Artist of the RSFSR, Alla Demidova, and new facets of a beautiful style will open up for you classical literature late XIX- first half of the 20th century.

The work belongs to the Prose genre. It was published in 2007 by the World of Books publishing house. The book is part of the "Collector's Library" series. On our website you can download the book “Dark Alleys” for free in epub, fb2, pdf, txt format or read online. The book's rating is 4.16 out of 5. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner’s online store you can buy and read the book in paper version.

Bunin’s collection “Dark Alleys” includes stories created between 1937 and 1944. Most of of them was created during the Second World War, during the occupation of the south of France, where the writer lived, by Italian and then German troops.

However, despite the difficult world situation, hunger and devastation, Bunin chooses for all his stories a theme that is detached from all these cataclysms - the theme of love. It is this theme, present in each story and being conceptual, that united all forty of them into a single cycle.

The writer himself considered “Dark Alleys” his best creative creation. Which is not without reason: the four dozen stories in the collection seem to tell about one thing - about love, but absolutely each of them presents its own unique shade of this feeling. The collection contains sublime “heavenly” love, love-infatuation, love-passion, love-madness, and love-lust. And this is no coincidence, because in the author’s understanding, love is endless complicated feeling, “dark alleys” of human life.

And yet, with all the variety of shades of love captured in the stories of the cycle, there is one predominant feature in it. This is a comparison of the power of love with the irresistible force of the elements, which not everyone can accommodate. The love created by Bunin on the pages of “Dark Alleys” would most accurately be compared to a thunderstorm - a powerful but short-lived element that, flaring up in the soul, shakes it to its core, but soon disappears.

That is why in all the stories in the collection, love ends on a dramatic or deep melancholy note - parting, death, disaster, resignation. So, Natalie dies during childbirth, as soon as her love reaches its dawn (“Natalie”), the officer puts a bullet in his forehead, having learned about his wife’s betrayal (“Caucasus”), from a Russian Parisian, who met warmth and affection in his declining years, in a carriage subway there is a heart break (“In Paris”), the novelist’s girlfriend, Heinrich, dies at the hands of her former lover on the threshold of a new life (“Henry”), etc.

At first glance, all these endings are unexpected; for many readers they give the impression of a stab with a knife, as if the writer, not knowing what to do with his characters, forcibly condemns them to a sad ending. love stories. But internally, such endings are completely justified, since in the writer’s understanding, mere mortals are not given the opportunity to live long in the atmosphere of this extraterrestrial feeling. True feeling, according to Bunin, is always tragic.

The stories in the cycle are also united by the fact that in most of them Bunin uses the motif of memory: memories of a passion that once flared up, of an irrevocable past. Bunin describes what seems to him the most important and almost weightless in memories of the past: the excitement of love, that trembling tension of a human being, from which everything visible world suddenly it becomes dazzlingly sonorous and unique. The heroes of the cycle remember only what was cut off on the fly, what did not have time to decline and retained the wonderful brightness of the rise.

Thus, the stories included in the “Dark Alleys” cycle are united by the fact that in each of them Bunin speaks with great graphic power about the diversity of faces of love and enormous power this feeling.