Composition on the theme “Love in the stories of Bunin. Why love in Bunin's works is a tragic feeling (Bunin I. A.) Bunin's love theme

The theme of love occupies almost the main place in Bunin's work. This theme allows the writer to correlate what is happening in the soul of a person 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 bodily side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, intimate aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that bodily passion does not necessarily follow a spiritual impulse, which happens in life and vice versa (as happened with the heroes of the story "Sunstroke"). And no matter what plot moves the writer chooses, love in his works is always a great joy and a great disappointment, a deep and insoluble mystery, it is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.

Over the years, Bunin spoke about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early prose, the characters 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 characters experience are ambiguous, colored with halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, life, relationships, we immediately recognize and understand in a new way our own premonitions of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual turns. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony, more often it disappears as soon as it has arisen. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. A sad farewell to his 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 remembered because it testifies to a touch of a genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than the others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“Autumn”). And in the story "Dawn all night" it is said 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, youth tends not only to get carried away, but also quickly disappointed. Bunin shows us this painful for many gap between dreams and reality. After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistling and spring trembling, young Tata suddenly hears in her sleep how her fiancé shoots jackdaws, and realizes that she does not love this rude and mundane man at all.

Nevertheless, in most of Bunin's early stories, the desire for beauty and purity remains the main, genuine movement of the characters' souls. In the 1920s, already in exile, Bunin wrote about love, as if looking back into the past, peering into the departed Russia and those people who are no longer there. This is how we perceive the story "Mitina's Love" (1924). Here Bunin consistently shows how the spiritual formation of the hero takes place, leads 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 covered with a special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, spun in the fake life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which he could not save the connection with another woman - the beautiful but down to earth Alenka, led Mitya to commit suicide. Mitin's insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to face harsh reality, inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and inadmissibility of what happened.

In a number of Bunin's stories about love, a love triangle is described: husband - wife - lover ("Ida", "Caucasus", "The most beautiful sun"). In these stories, an atmosphere of inviolability of the established order reigns. Marriage is an insurmountable barrier to achieving happiness. And often what is given to one is ruthlessly taken away from another. In the story "Caucasus", a woman leaves with her lover, knowing for sure that from the moment the train leaves, hours of despair begin for her husband, that he will not stand it and rush after her. He is really looking for her, and not having found her, he guesses about the betrayal and shoots himself. Already here, the motif of love appears as a “sunstroke”, which has become a special, ringing note of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.

With the prose of the 1920s and 1930s, the stories of the cycle "Dark Alleys" are brought together by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all stories are in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate into the depths of the subconscious of the characters. In most 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”, “Rusya”, “Tanya”, “Business Cards”, “In a Familiar Street”. The writer writes about lonely people and ordinary lives. That is why the past, overshadowed by young, strong feelings, is drawn in a truly high point, merges with the sounds, smells, colors of nature. As if nature itself leads to the spiritual and physical rapprochement of people who love each other. And nature itself leads them to inevitable separation, and sometimes to death.

The skill of describing everyday details, as well as a sensual description of love, is inherent in all the stories of the cycle, but the story “Clean Monday” written in 1944 appears not just as a story about the great mystery of love and a mysterious female soul, but as a kind of cryptogram. Too much in the psychological line of the story and in its landscape and everyday details seems like a ciphered revelation. Accuracy and abundance of details are not just signs of the times, not just nostalgia for forever lost Moscow, but the opposition of East and West in the soul and appearance of the heroine, leaving love and life for a monastery.

Bunin's heroes greedily catch moments of happiness, grieve if it passes by, lament if the thread that connects them with their loved one breaks. But at the same time, they are never able to fight fate for happiness, to win an ordinary worldly battle. All stories are stories of escape from life, even for a brief moment, even for one evening. Bunin's heroes are selfish and unconsciously cynical, but they still lose the most precious thing - their beloved. 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, death. All love stories end tragically, even if the characters 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.

Literature

Features of the theme of love in the work of I.A. Bunin

Performed:

9th grade student

Teacher:

Markovich L.V.

1 Introduction 3

2 Main body

1) Bunin's views 6

2) "Dark alleys" 10

3) "Natalie" 12

4) "Clean Monday" 14

3 Conclusion 17

4 References 20

introduction

“Love is an intimate and deep feeling directed at another person, human community or idea. Love includes the impulse and the will to constancy, which take shape in the ethical requirement of fidelity. Love arises as the freest and "unpredictable" expression of the depths of the personality; it cannot be forcibly evoked or overcome, ”- this is precisely the definition of love that is given to us by the philosophical dictionary of I.T. Frolov, but how can a person who never experiences love, after reading this definition, understand what kind of feeling it is. Certainly not. Love is a feeling that cannot be defined. Each person will have his own, because love is individual and in some sense unique, reflects the unique features of the life path of each person. In addition, we can say that love is the pursuit of an ideal. When a person falls in love, his love becomes a living embodiment of an ideal that already exists for him not somewhere in the distant future, but today, now, this minute. Having fallen in love, a person begins to see and appreciate in a loved one that sometimes others do not see and do not appreciate. Love inspires people to poetry, music, paintings. A person always thinks about love, needs it, waits for it, strives for it. And people have no stronger feeling than love. Neither fear, nor envy, nor malicious hatred - nothing will overcome love.

In literature, the theme of love is one of the eternal themes. An infinite number of works have been written and will be written about love.

The topic of my essay is “Features of the theme of love in the collection of stories by I.A. Bunin “Dark Alleys””.

Bunin's stories made a strong impression on me. When you read works of the same theme by different authors, you seem to involuntarily compare them, note similarities and differences. Most often it happens that the plots are different, the authors present the problem in different ways, but they see it the same way. However, the first time I read Bunin's stories, I was amazed at how he not only presents, but also sees love. I discovered for myself a completely different, unlike anything, "Bunin's love." I wanted to understand, to understand Bunin's views on love, which is why I chose such a topic for my essay.

I believe that the topic of love is relevant, and I would like to express its relevance in the words of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky: “Life without love is not life, but existence. It is impossible to live without love, for this the soul was given to a person in order to love. Indeed, as long as there will be Peace on Earth, so many people will experience this great feeling - love. After reading the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys", I found out that love for Bunin is the greatest happiness bestowed on a person. But eternal fate hangs over it. Love is always associated with tragedy, true love does not have a happy ending, because a person has to pay for moments of happiness. To prove this, I set myself the following tasks:

To study the biography of Bunin and his views on love.

Examine the critical literature related to the topic of the essay.

To analyze some of the stories included in the collection "Dark Alleys".

Draw conclusions and present material on this topic

Bunin's views

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is one of the most prominent Russian writers of the twentieth century. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He remarkably turned out both poetry and prose, both short stories and novels. Speaking of Bunin, one cannot remain silent about the main circumstance of his literary and everyday life. In 1917, the social drama of the writer began, who always lived in the interests of Russia. Not understanding the October Revolution, the writer left his homeland forever in 1920. Emigration became a truly tragic milestone in Bunin's biography. Poverty and indifference were painfully endured by Ivan Alekseevich. Immeasurably sharper, however, were perceived terrible events with the coming to power of the Nazis. Bunin relentlessly followed the front, hiding people persecuted by the Nazis. He saw the victory of the Russian people over the Germans. In 1945 he was happy for his Fatherland. A. Bobrenko cites the bitter words of Ivan Alekseevich, said on March 30, 1943: “... the days pass in great monotony, in weakness and idleness. A year and a half ago I wrote a whole book of new stories in a very short time, now I only occasionally take up the pen - my hands fall off: why and for whom to write? We are talking here about the stories that came out under the general title "Dark Alleys". In the first version, the collection appeared in the USA in 1943. Then Bunin, also in a "short time", replenishes it and publishes it in 1946 in Paris. Work on the collection was for Bunin during the war years a source of spiritual uplift. The author himself considered the works of the collection "Dark Alleys", begun and completed

from 1937 to 1944, his highest achievement. I.V. Odintsova recalled “Bunin's heated objections to a remark about his fame: “What did this Nobel Prize bring to me - and how much I dreamed about it - brought? Some damn crocks. And did foreigners appreciate me? So I wrote my best book, Dark Alleys, and not a single French publisher wants to take it. The stories of this cycle are fictitious, which Bunin himself emphasized more than once. However, everything, including their retrospective form, is caused, as always in art, by the state of mind of the author A.V. Bahrakh once asked: “Ivan Alekseevich, have you ever tried to make your Don Juan list?” To which Bunin replied: “Then it would be better to make a list of unused opportunities, but your tactless question woke up a swarm of memories in me. What an amazing time - youth! How many meetings, unforgettable moments! Life passes quickly, and we begin to appreciate it only when the rest is behind. Similar moments of return to the brightest, most powerful experience are reproduced in the cycle. The mood gives him a poem by N.P. Ogaryov "An Ordinary Tale", to which Bunin does not very accurately refer, explaining the origin of his story "Dark Alleys". The collection "Dark Alleys" became the embodiment of all the writer's many years of reflection on love, which he saw everywhere, since for him this concept was very broad. He sees love in a special light. At the same time, it reflects the feelings that each person experienced. From this point of view, love is not just some special, abstract concept, but, on the contrary, common to all. The main theme of the cycle is the theme of love, but this is no longer just love, but love, revealing the most secret corners of the human soul, love as the basis of life and like that ghostly happiness that we all strive for, but, alas, so often miss. "Dark Alleys" is a multi-faceted, diverse work. Bunin shows human relations in all manifestations: sublime passion, quite ordinary inclinations, novels “for nothing to do”, animal manifestations of passion.

Bunin is in love with love. For him, this is the most beautiful feeling on earth, incomparable with anything else. And yet love destroys destinies. The writer never tired of repeating that all strong love avoids marriage. The earthly feeling is only a short flash in a person's life, and Bunin tries to keep these wonderful moments in his stories. In the collection "Dark Alleys" we will not find a single story where love would end in marriage. Lovers are separated either by relatives, or circumstances, or death. It seems that death is preferable for Bunin than a long family life side by side. He shows love at its peak, but never at its waning.

Critics have repeatedly spoken about the tragic views of Bunin, who combined love and death. But here is how he himself explained to I.V. Odoevtseva this motive: “Don't you know yet that love and death are inseparable? Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every one of my loves was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide. This means that the writer did not initially, not naturally connect the light of life and the darkness of non-existence. But only in a catastrophic situation.

The words of an unknown philosopher are very close to the views of the writer: “Love was sought and idolized. She was lost and not cared for. Love does not exist - people said, but they themselves died of love "

According to Bunin, love is a certain supreme main moment of being that illuminates a person’s life, and Bunin sees the opposition of death in the face of love: if a person’s life is filled with love, then it lasts longer. But for Bunin, “happy, lasting” love is not so much important, with which he simply has nothing to do, but short love is important, which, like a flash, illuminates a person’s life, filling it with joyful emotions. Such love in Bunin quickly breaks off, but does not die, and with this idea of ​​\u200b\u200blove, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin writes a series of short stories under the general title "Dark Alleys". First of all, all the stories are connected by the motive of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all of the stories in Dark Alleys are in the past tense. Sometimes it is explicitly stated that past events are being reproduced. “In that distant time, he spent himself especially recklessly ...” - “Tanya”. “He did not sleep, lay, smoked and mentally looked at that summer” - “Rusya” “That summer I put on a student cap for the first time” - “Natalie”. In another case, the effect of the past is conveyed more subtly. For example, in Pure

Monday "" Every evening the coachman raced me at this hour on a stretching trotter ... ", and at the end already

definitely: "In the fourteenth year, on New Year's Eve, there was the same quiet, sunny evening, like that one, unforgettable ...". Everywhere we talk about what human memory retained.

At first glance, it may seem that all the stories are similar to each other and satisfy only such thematic divisions of the book as: love, life, death. But these themes are side by side, intertwined in each story. Bunin himself marked the parts of "Dark Alleys" with Roman numerals: I, II, III, placing the stories under them, probably in a strict and only known to him sequence. Vyacheslav Shugaev, in his book "Experiences of a Reading Man", tried to decipher the Roman numerals in more detail, so that the connections and differences between the parts could be more clearly seen. Perhaps it can be assumed that the main motive, indicated by the number I, is the whimsicality, the quirkiness of the emergence of passion, its inappropriateness in the world around us and the obligatory retribution for this inappropriateness: broken, ruined destinies. Number II - the impossibility of separation for lovers - they can

either die, or fill the future life with the torment of memories and longing for the departed love. The number III is the inscrutableness of the female soul, its gloomy, sublime, frantic service of passion. But perhaps all this is not so. In Bunin, kindred souls unite in love, there is so much sacrificial devotion in this union, so much frenzied tenderness in the “struggle not equal to two hearts”, that love, as it were, overflows beyond the limits prepared for it by nature, and tragically goes out. These inexpressible anguish of the heart, caused not by a lack of love, but by its excess, worried Bunin most of all, as a manifestation, it is appropriate to assume, of a purely Russian understanding of feeling. For love, or rather, tormented by love, a Russian man went to the chopping block, to hard labor, shot himself, went on a spree, took monasticism. We need zealousness, akin to religious, in the service of love - this is what Bunin insisted and preached in "Dark Alleys".

For analysis, I chose, in my opinion, the most striking works from each part.

"Dark alleys"

This story depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: the young nobleman easily broke up with the serf girl Nadezhda, who was in love with him, and married a woman from his circle. And Nadezhda, having received freedom from the masters, became the mistress of the inn and never married, had no family, children, did not recognize ordinary worldly happiness. She carried through her whole life love for the master, who had once seduced her. He is not able to rise to her high feelings, to understand why Nadezhda did not marry "with such beauty that she had." How can you love one person all your life? Meanwhile, for Nadezhda, Nikolenka remained an ideal for life, the one and only. “No matter how much time passed, everyone 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, so I didn’t have it later. ” She could not change herself, her feeling. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that he had lost in Nadezhda "the most precious thing that he had in life." But this is a momentary insight. Leaving the inn, he "remembered with shame his words and the fact that he had kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame." And yet it was difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, mistress of the St. Petersburg house, mother of his children. This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feeling to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.

How differently the heroes of the story comprehend what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich, this is “a vulgar ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda, undying memories, long-term devotion to love.

Yes, perhaps Nadezhda is not happy now, after many years, but how strong that feeling was, how much joy it brought, that it is impossible to forget about it. That is, love for the heroine is happiness, but happiness with a constant, aching pain of memories.

"Natalie"

The love story of a first-year student Meshchersky for the young beauty Natalya Senkevich is conveyed in his memoirs of a long period - from the first acquaintance with a girl to her untimely death. Memory causes unusual, incomprehensible in the past and helps to realize it. Meshchersky's friends called him a "monk." He himself did not want to "violate his purity, seek love without romance." Natalie is not only not vicious, but has a proud, refined soul. They immediately fell in love with each other. And the story is about their breakup and long loneliness. There is only one external reason - an unexpectedly awakened feeling on the eve of the meeting with Natalie, the young man's attraction to the bodily charms of his cousin Sonya. The internal process is very complex. As always with Bunin, all eventual turns are barely indicated. The phenomenon, which occupies the author, is deeply comprehended in its internal development. Already at the end of the second chapter, there is a contradiction in the thoughts of the hero:

“... how can I live now in this duality - in secret dates with Sonya and next to Natalie, one thought about which already seizes me with such pure love delight.” Why is there a rapprochement with Sonya? The writer reveals its external causes - the common desire among young people for early sensuality, the premature female maturity of the girl, her bold and free disposition.

But the main thing is not in them. Meshchersky himself cannot tear himself away from the hot embrace. His memory keeps the intoxication of these meetings. Perfectly aware of the criminality of his dual behavior, he cannot choose one thing for himself.

The question seems painfully insoluble to the young man, “why God punished me so, for which he gave me two loves at once, so different and so passionate, such a painful beauty of Natalie’s adoration and such bodily intoxication with Sonya.” He initially calls both experiences love. Poverty and deceptiveness of purely physical intimacy will show only time. It was enough for Meshchersky not to see Sonya for five days, and he forgot his sensual obsession, but it happened too late Natalie found out about the betrayal. And Natalie’s many years of separation (her marriage to an unloved person, Meshchersky’s connection with a peasant woman) only kindled an insatiable high feeling, giving both a genuine, although secret and short marriage. The author ends the happiness of the lovers with the last, as if casually mentioned, phrase of the story “In December, she died on Lake Geneva in premature birth.”

The main character, and in this he differs from many, carries in his soul a rare gift of adoration for his beloved, has the ability to understand his delusions (albeit not immediately, with great losses). And yet Meshchersky was unhappy for a long time, lonely, shocked by his own, so unexpected guilt.

In the story "Natalie" a new facet of the writer's artistic generalizations was opened. For the first time in Bunin, a person overcomes the imperfection of his consciousness, feels dissatisfaction with purely carnal pleasures, and the memory of them brings sobering. But such an experience is rare. In the mass, other feelings win. Apparently, therefore, the author completes the union of Meshchersky and Natalie with her death.

"Clean Monday"

The recognition of the hero, but how impulsive they are, internally jerky, is uncertain. And immediately the reader understands why to the Narrator (he is nameless, like her) everything seems like an obsession with unexpectedness. “How all this should end, I don’t know”; “For some reason, she studied at the courses ...”; “What was left for me but hope”; "... for some reason we went to Ordynka." Moreover, from the very beginning, he admits that he "tried not to think, not to think." Only he is more open, kind, but frankly frivolous, subject to the power of chance, the elements. It was not for him to understand a friend who was the complete opposite of himself. The refined skill of the writer was reflected here in the fact that in the language of such a person he was able to convey all the complex, serious nature of the heroine. Wouldn't it have been easier to tell the story from her point of view? But then we would not feel the exclusivity of this female character. “And as far as I was prone to talkativeness, she was so silent: she kept thinking something, everything seemed to delve into something mentally” - this is the first impression of the mysterious woman. The inconsistency of her behavior is immediately caught: a mockery of plentiful food, luxury and participation in lunches and dinners "with a Moscow understanding of the matter"; irony over theatrical and other tinsel and constant social entertainment; accepting a man's cheeky caresses and refusing to have a serious conversation about their relationship. “I didn’t resist anything, but I was silent all the time.” The hidden inclinations of the heroine also suddenly shocked the fan. Every evening they spent in the best restaurants in Moscow, using their wealth, youth, striking everyone with their rare beauty. And then, at her suggestion, they ended up in the Novodevichy Convent. It turned out that she goes to the Rogozhskoye cemetery, where the color of pre-Petrine Russia is so strong, to the Kremlin cathedrals, to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, she is fascinated by ancient Russian texts.

The author expands his impressions of this internally contradictory nature of the heroine with a reference to the capital's no less heterogeneous structure. Moscow of those years, indeed, was a combination of the hoary antiquity of monasteries, cathedrals with the latest achievements of culture: the Art Theater, the work of the Symbolists, the works of L. Andreev, the translated works of Spitzler. The realities of such a colorful environment are unobtrusively included in the narrative. Unobtrusively, because the inner gaze of the heroine is directed to these contradictions. The writer speaks not so much about the intellectual development of this strange woman, but about the struggle in her soul of different aspirations. It is not in vain that V. Bryusov is mentioned with his novel “The Fiery Angel”, which is not without vulgarity. Przybyshevsky, who spoke out against the “old” morality, “drunk” skits: And on the other hand, Orthodox monasteries, finally, the words of the Russian legend spoken by the heroine: “And the Devil instilled in his wife a flying snake for fornication. And this serpent appeared to her in human nature, very beautiful…” Here is the peak of the collision of opposites: “permissiveness”, vulgarity of pleasures and suppression of the flesh, asceticism, purification of the spirit. It is these incompatible impulses that a woman unites in her being. Again, in the subtext, the dream of merging the healthy demands of human happiness with the highest spiritual beauty is expressed. A dream that goes back to the ideal of love.

The heroine, however, believes in the wisdom of Tolstoy’s Platon Karataev: “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in a delusion: if you pull, it puffs up, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing.” However, she tries to "drink" her share of joy.

In the kaleidoscope of changing scenes: the restaurant, the evening lounge, the Novodevichy Cemetery, the Yegorov tavern, the skit shop of the Art Theatre, the decision of the heroine of the story sprouts as separate “seeds”: from a grin at the talkativeness of her admirer, to submission to his caresses, to the exclamation: “True, how do you like me love!", to admiring him, "very beautiful", to the last step - sharing his passion. But, apparently, she received little from this night, in the morning she left for the monastery forever. And there she did not find peace - she continued to yearn.

What is the heroine of the story "Clean Monday" cleansed of? It seems clear - from an idle worldly life. Then why, after the "forgiveness Sunday" she finds herself in the arms of a man? No, there were other sins behind her: pride, contempt for people. She wanted to trust them and her feminine strength, to love the best one she met on her life path. And she couldn't. The story is written with unusual brevity and virtuosity. Each stroke, color, detail plays an important role in the external movement of the plot and becomes a sign of some internal trends (which is the last black and velvet secular outfit of the heroine in combination with the hairstyle of the Shamakhan queen). In vague forebodings and mature thought, the bright changeable appearance of this woman, the author embodied his ideas about the contradictory atmosphere, about the complex layers of the human soul, about the birth of some new moral ideal. Not surprisingly, Bunin considered "Clean Monday" the best story in the collection.

Conclusion

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, which is wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many artists of the word dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique, individual in this topic. It follows from my work that the peculiarity of Bunin, the artist, is that he considers love a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person. Bunin also especially sees the images of the heroes of his stories.

The image of a woman is that attractive force that constantly attracts Bunin. He creates a gallery of such images, each story has its own. The writer addresses the fate of completely different women. Social status ceases to matter when feelings come into play. A woman is inseparable from nature. It is almost always connected with the forest, with the field, with the sea, with the clouds. She is a part of it and therefore, apparently, is endowed with such an elemental, uncontrollable force as wind, lightning, flood. Perhaps, under the influence of this force, so much mental anguish has been brought into the "Dark Alleys"? all images delight, it seems that the author is in love with each of them. All the feelings that these women experience have a right to exist. Let it be the first bright love, passion for an unworthy person, a sense of revenge, lust for worship. And it makes absolutely no difference whether you are a peasant woman or a lady. The main thing is that you are a woman.

Male images in Bunin's stories are somewhat darkened, blurred, the characters are not very definite. In almost all stories, the man is the same: ardent, mentally sharp-sighted, full of compassion for a woman and somewhat contemplative - such should be a man who is worthy of love and finds it. Bunin deliberately does not endow him with a characteristic uniqueness, so that it does not interfere with the hero in all love searches and adventures to be cordially attentive, sensually observant and tirelessly admire a woman, worship her spiritual secrets. It is important for the writer to understand what feelings these men experience, what pushes them towards women, why they love them. The reader does not need to know what this or that man is like, what he looks like, what his advantages and disadvantages are. He participates in the story insofar as love is a feeling of two.

Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, gives his fate a unique flavor against the background of ordinary everyday stories, and fills his earthly existence with a special meaning. Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal riddle, and each reader of Bunin's works is looking for his own answers, reflecting on the secrets of love. The perception of this feeling is personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a “vulgar story”, and someone will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a writer, is not given to everyone. Every young person will find in Bunin's works something consonant with their own thoughts and feelings, they will touch the great secret of love. This is what makes the author of "Dark Alleys" always a modern writer, arousing deep reader interest. Readers may sometimes have a question: does the writer create artificial barriers to the heroes' path to happiness? No, the fact is that people themselves do not want to fight. They can experience happiness, but only for a moment, and then it goes away like water in the sand. And that is why many of Bunin's stories are so tragic. Sometimes, in one short line, the writer reveals the collapse of hopes, the harsh mockery of fate. The stories of the cycle "Dark Alleys" are an example of amazing Russian psychological prose, in which love has always been one of the eternal secrets that the artists of the word sought to reveal. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, in my opinion, was one of those brilliant writers who came closest to unraveling this mystery.

Bibliographic list

1. Arkhangelsky A.A; Russian writers - Nobel laureates premiums;

Moscow, 1991

2. Adamovich G.V.; Loneliness and freedom./ Comp., ed. foreword and approx. V.Kreid / M.: Respublika, 1996.

3. Bunin I.A; Collected works in 9 volumes; Moscow, "Fiction", 1967.

4. Bunin I.A; Poems, stories, novels; Moscow, "Fiction", 1973.

5.Russian writers; Biobibliographic Dictionary./Ed. P.A. Nikolaeva / Moscow, "Enlightenment", 1990.

6. Smirnova L.A; I.A. Bunin: Life and work; The book for the teacher; Moscow, "Enlightenment", 1991.

7. Philosophical Dictionary./ Ed. I.T.Frolova. – 6th ed. revised and additional /. Moscow, Politizdat, 1991.

8. Shugaev V.M; Experiences of a reading person; Moscow, Sovremennik, 1988

Bunin is a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late 19th - first half of the 20th century. His brilliant talent, the skill of a poet and prose writer, which has become a classic, amazed his contemporaries and conquers us, living today. In his works, the real Russian literary language, which is now lost, is preserved.

A large place in the work of Bunin in exile is occupied by works about love. The writer has always been concerned about the mystery of this strongest of human feelings. In 1924, he wrote the story "Mitya's Love", the following year - "The Cornet Elagin Case" and "Sunstroke". And in the late 30s and during the Second World War, Bunin created 38 short stories about love, which made up his book “Dark Alleys”, published in 1946. Bunin considered this book to be his “best work in terms of conciseness, painting and literary skill ".

Love in the image of Bunin is striking not only by the power of artistic depiction, but also by its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. Infrequently they break through to the surface: most people will not experience their fatal effects until the end of their days. Such an image of love unexpectedly gives Bunin's sober, "merciless" talent a romantic glow. The closeness of love and death, their conjugation were obvious facts for Bunin, they were never in doubt. However, the catastrophic nature of life, the fragility of human relations and existence itself - all these favorite Bunin themes after the gigantic social cataclysms that shook Russia, were filled with a new formidable meaning, as can be seen, for example, in the story "Mitya's Love". "Love is beautiful" and "Love is doomed" - these concepts, finally combined, coincided, carrying in the depths, in the grain of each story, the personal grief of Bunin the emigrant.

Bunin's love lyrics are not large quantitatively. It reflects the poet's confused thoughts and feelings about the mystery of love... One of the main motives of love lyrics is loneliness, inaccessibility or impossibility of happiness. For example, “How bright, how elegant spring is! ..”, “A calm look, similar to the look of a doe ...”, “At a late hour we were with her in the field ...”, “Loneliness”, “Sorrow of eyelashes, shining and black ...” and etc.

Bunin's love lyrics are passionate, sensual, saturated with a thirst for love and are always full of tragedy, unfulfilled hopes, memories of past youth and departed love.

I.A. Bunin has a very peculiar view of love relationships that distinguishes him from many other writers of that time.

In Russian classical literature of that time, the theme of love has always occupied an important place, and preference was given to spiritual, "platonic" love.

before sensuality, carnal, physical passion, which was often debunked. The purity of Turgenev's women has become a household word. Russian literature is predominantly the literature of "first love".

The image of love in Bunin's work is a special synthesis of spirit and flesh. According to Bunin, the spirit cannot be comprehended without knowing the flesh. I. Bunin defended in his works a pure attitude towards the carnal and bodily. He did not have the concept of female sin, as in Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Kreutzer Sonata by L.N. Tolstoy, there was no wary, hostile attitude towards the feminine, characteristic of N.V. Gogol, but there was no vulgarization of love. His love is an earthly joy, a mysterious attraction of one sex to another.

The theme of love and death (often in contact with Bunin) is devoted to works - “Grammar of Love”, “Easy Breath”, “Mitina Love”, “Caucasus”, “In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Heinrich”, “Natalie”, "Cold Autumn", etc. It has long been and very correctly noted that love in Bunin's work is tragic. The writer is trying to unravel the mystery of love and the mystery of death, why they often come into contact in life, what is the meaning of this. Why does the nobleman Khvoshchinsky go crazy after the death of his beloved, the peasant woman Lushka, and then almost deifies her image (“Grammar of Love”). Why does the young high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who, as it seemed to her, have an amazing gift of “easy breathing” die, just starting to blossom? The author does not answer these questions, but through his works he makes it clear that there is a certain meaning to human earthly life in this.

The complex emotional experiences of the hero of the story "Mitya's Love" are described by Bunin with brilliance and tremendous psychological stress. This story caused controversy, the writer was reproached for excessive descriptions of nature, for the implausibility of Mitya's behavior. But we already know that Bunin's nature is not a background, not a decoration, but one of the main characters, and especially in "Mitya's Love". Through the depiction of the state of nature, the author surprisingly accurately conveys Mitya's feelings, his mood and feelings.

You can call "Mitya's Love" a psychological story in which the author accurately and correctly embodied Mitya's confused feelings and the tragic end of his life.

An encyclopedia of love dramas can be called "Dark Alleys" - a book of stories about love. “She speaks of the tragic and of many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing that I wrote in my life ...” Bunin admitted to Teleshov in 1947.

The heroes of "Dark Alleys" do not oppose nature, often their actions are absolutely illogical and contrary to generally accepted morality (an example of this is the sudden passion of the heroes in the story "Sunstroke"). Bunin's love "on the verge" is almost a transgression of the norm, going beyond the ordinary. This immorality for Bunin, one might even say, is a certain sign of the authenticity of love, since ordinary morality turns out, like everything established by people, to be a conditional scheme that does not fit into the elements of natural, living life.

When describing risky details related to the body, when the author must be impartial so as not to cross the fragile line that separates art from pornography, Bunin, on the contrary, worries too much - to a spasm in the throat, to a passionate trembling: “... it just went dark in eyes at the sight of her pinkish body with a tan on her shiny shoulders ... her eyes turned black and widened even more, her lips parted feverishly ”(“ Galya Ganskaya ”). For Bunin, everything connected with sex is pure and significant, everything is shrouded in mystery and even holiness.

As a rule, the happiness of love in "Dark Alleys" is followed by parting or death. Heroes revel in intimacy, but

it leads to separation, death, murder. Happiness cannot be eternal. Natalie "died on Lake Geneva in a premature birth". Galya Ganskaya got poisoned. In the story “Dark Alleys”, the master Nikolai Alekseevich abandons the peasant girl Nadezhda - for him this story is vulgar and ordinary, and she loved him “all century”. In the story "Rusya", the lovers are separated by the hysterical mother of Rusya.

Bunin allows his heroes only to taste the forbidden fruit, to enjoy it - and then deprives them of happiness, hopes, joys, even life. The hero of the story "Natalie" loved two at once, but did not find family happiness with any of them. In the story "Heinrich" - an abundance of female images for every taste. But the hero remains alone and free from the "wives of men."

Bunin's love does not go into a family channel, it is not resolved by a happy marriage. Bunin deprives his heroes of eternal happiness, deprives them because they get used to it, and the habit leads to the loss of love. Love out of habit cannot be better than lightning-fast love, but sincere. The hero of the story "Dark Alleys" cannot bind himself by family ties with the peasant woman Nadezhda, but by marrying another woman of his circle, he does not find family happiness. The wife cheated, the son is a wast and a scoundrel, the family itself turned out to be "the most ordinary vulgar story." However, despite the short duration, love still remains eternal: it is eternal in the memory of the hero precisely because it is fleeting in life.

A distinctive feature of love in the image of Bunin is a combination of seemingly incompatible things. It is no coincidence that Bunin once wrote in his diary: “And again, again, such indescribably - sweet sadness from that eternal deception of another spring, hopes and love for the whole world, which you want with tears

gratitude to kiss the earth. Lord, Lord, why do you torment us like this.

The strange connection between love and death is constantly emphasized by Bunin, and therefore it is no coincidence that the title of the collection "Dark Alleys" here does not mean "shady" at all - these are dark, tragic, intricate labyrinths of love.

G. Adamovich rightly wrote about the book of stories “Dark Alleys”: “All love is a great happiness, a gift of the gods, even if it is not shared. That is why Bunin's book breathes with happiness, that is why it is imbued with gratitude for life, for the world in which, for all its imperfections, this happiness happens.

True love is a great happiness, even if it ends in separation, death, tragedy. To this conclusion, albeit late, but many Bunin's heroes come, who have lost, overlooked or destroyed their love themselves. In this late repentance, late spiritual resurrection, the enlightenment of heroes, lies that all-cleansing melody that speaks of the imperfection of people who have not yet learned to live, recognize and value real feelings, and of the imperfection of life itself, social conditions, the environment, circumstances that often interfere with truly human relationships, and most importantly - about those high emotions that leave an unfading trace of spiritual beauty, generosity, devotion and purity.

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

This mystery of being becomes the theme of Bunin's story "Grammar of Love" (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on his way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “incomprehensible love, which turned a whole human life into some kind of ecstatic life, which, perhaps, should have been the most ordinary life”, if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushki. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good in herself,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some kind of dazed, all-on-one soul?” According to neighbors-landlords. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the county as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death, - 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 ... ” Is this twenty years of seclusion? Madness? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all unambiguous.

The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakened in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of one saint.” What made Ivlev buy from the heir of Khvoshchinsky “for a high price” a small book “Grammar of Love”, with which the old landowner did not part, cherishing the memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what his orphaned soul fed for many years. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandchildren” who heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved” will try to uncover the secret of this inexplicable feeling, and with them the reader of Bunin’s work.

An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure”, shakes the soul of the lieutenant. After parting 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 seized 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 lostly. The depth of the hero's spiritual insight is clearly expressed in the final phrase of the 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 being?

The torment of a loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the fate 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 rather ordinary: the young nobleman easily broke up with the serf girl Nadezhda, who was in love with him, and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received freedom from the masters, became the mistress of the inn and never married, had no family, children, did not recognize ordinary worldly happiness. “No matter how much time passed, she lived all the same,” 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, so I didn’t have it later. ” She could not change herself, her feeling. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that he had lost in Nadezhda "the most precious thing that he had in life." But this is a momentary insight. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and the fact that he had 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 importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feeling to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.

How differently the heroes of the story comprehend what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich, this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda, it is undying memories, long-term devotion to love.

A passionate and deep feeling permeates the last, fifth book of the novel "The Life of Arseniev" - "Lika". It was based on the transformed experiences of Bunin himself, his youthful love for V.V. Pashchenko. In the novel, death and oblivion recede before the power of love, before the heightened feeling - the hero and the author - of life.

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 artists of the word dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique, individual to this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.

Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal riddle, and each reader of Bunin's works is looking for his own answers, reflecting on the secrets 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”, and someone 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, which tell about the most secret, will not leave readers indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin's works something consonant with their own thoughts and feelings, they will touch the great secret of love. This is what makes the author of Sunstroke always a contemporary writer of deep reader interest.

Literature abstract

Topic: “The theme of love in the works of Bunin”

Fulfilled

Student “” class

Moscow 2004

Bibliography

1. O.N.Mikhailov - “Russian literature of the XX century”

2. S.N.Morozov - “The life of Arseniev. Stories”

3. B.K.Zaitsev - "Youth - Ivan Bunin"

4. Literary-critical articles.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin stands out among Russian writers and poets. This, of course, is no coincidence. The future writer received an excellent education.

His creative activity began in the early years, when the boy was only 8 years old. The son of a noble family was born in the city of Voronezh, in October 1870. He received his first education at home, and at the age of 11, little Ivan became a pupil of the Yelets district gymnasium, where he studied for only 4 years.

Further training was carried out under the watchful guidance of an older brother. With particular interest, the boy studied the works of domestic and world classics. In addition, Ivan devoted a lot of time to self-development. Literature has always interested Bunin, and from childhood the boy determined his destiny. This choice was quite conscious.

Ivan Bunin wrote his first poem at the age of eight, and serious works appeared a little later, when the young talent was barely seventeen years old. During the same period, his first printed love debut took place.

When Ivan was 19 years old, the family moved to the city of Orel. Here, the future writer and poet began to engage in correctional work in the local newspaper. This activity brought young Bunin not only the first experience, but also the first true love. Varvara Pashchenko became his chosen one, she worked in the same publishing house. The office romance was not approved by Ivan's parents, so the young lovers had to leave the city for Poltava. But even there, the couple failed to build relationships similar to family ones. This union, so objectionable to parents on both sides, broke up. But the author carried many personal experiences through his whole life and showed them in his works.

The first collection of poems was published in 1891, when the writer was 21 years old. A little later, the country saw other masterpieces of the young poet, each verse was filled with special warmth and tenderness.

Love for Varvara inspired the young poet, each of his poems conveyed sincere feelings of two hearts in love. When the relationship broke up, the young writer met the daughter of a famous revolutionary, Anna Tsakni, who in 1898 became his legal wife.

In this marriage, Ivan Alekseevich had a son, but the child died at the age of five, and soon the young spouses broke up. Literally a year later, the poet began to cohabit with Vera Muromtseva, but only in 1922 did the couple officially marry.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was a famous poet, translator, prose writer. He traveled a lot, and these trips endowed a talented person with new knowledge, which he used with inspiration in his poetry and prose.

In the 1920s, he had to emigrate to France. It was a forced measure, justified by the socio-political situation in Russia. In a foreign country, he continued to write and print journalistic articles of interesting content, compose new poems on the theme of love and just live, because he was no longer destined to return to his homeland.

In 1933, Ivan Alekseevich was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was given a monetary reward for the development of Russian classical prose. This money solved many problems of the impoverished nobleman. And Bunin transferred part of the money as assistance to emigrants and needy writers.

Bunin survived the Second World War. He was proud of the courage and exploits of the Russian soldiers, whose courage made it possible to win this terrible battle. It was the most significant event for every person, and the famous writer could not but react to such great feats of our people.

The great Russian poet, the last classic who glorified Russia of the 19th-20th centuries in his works, died in 1953 in Paris.

In many of Bunin's works, the theme of great love and tragedy was openly touched upon. A man who has lived for more than one year with different women managed to extract many frank feelings from these relationships, which he managed to convey in detail in his work.

Vivid works of Ivan Alekseevich do not leave indifferent any reader. They reveal the whole secret of true love, sing excellent images of women and the human soul. He conveys to the reader sincere love and hatred, tenderness and rudeness, happiness and tears of sorrow...

All these feelings are familiar to many romantics, because love never brings only pleasant emotions. Real relationships are built on different feelings that are experienced by two lovers, and if they can endure all the trials sent by fate, real happiness, love and fidelity await them.

This essence was caught by the writer during the period of a love relationship with his civil, and later legal wife, Vera Muromtseva.

Ivan Alekseevich wrote many works dedicated to love and devotion: "Mitya's Love", "Light Breath", "Dark Alleys" (collection of stories) and other works.

"Sunstroke" - a story of passion

An atypical attitude to love is captured in Bunin's famous story "Sunstroke". The slightly ordinary and somewhat ordinary plot turned out to be exciting for the reader.

In this work, the main character is a young and pretty woman who is legally married. During a road trip, she meets a young lieutenant, who was famous for his addiction to fleeting novels. This is a selfish and self-confident young man.

Acquaintance with a married woman aroused an instinctive interest in the lieutenant. He knew practically nothing about her, only that she had a beloved husband and a little daughter, who was waiting for her mother to return from Anapa. The young officer managed to arouse interest in his person, and their casual acquaintance ended in an intimate relationship in a hotel room. In the morning, the travelers parted and never met again.

It would seem that the love story ended there, but the main meaning of the work, which Ivan Bunin wanted to convey to the reader, is revealed in further events.

A married lady, after waking up in a hotel room, hastened to leave for her hometown, and at parting, she said to her casual lover the mysterious phrase "it was something like a sunstroke." What did she mean?

The reader can draw his own conclusion. Perhaps the young woman was afraid of continuing the relationship with her lover. At home, a large family, a child, marital duties and life were waiting for her. Or maybe she was inspired by this night of love? A tender and sudden connection with a strange man radically changed the well-established lifestyle of a young lady and left only pleasant memories that will become the brightest moment in her everyday life?

The protagonist of the work also experiences extraordinary feelings. A young and rather sophisticated lover experienced unknown feelings on the night of love with a charming stranger. This chance meeting radically changed his life, only now he realized what true love is. This wonderful feeling brought him pain and suffering, now, after a single night with a married woman, he could not imagine his future without her. His heart was filled with sadness, all thoughts were about his beloved, but such a stranger ...

The writer represented the feeling of love as carnal and spiritual harmony. Having found it, the soul of the protagonist seemed to be reborn.

Bunin appreciated sincere and true love, but he always praised this magical feeling as a temporary happiness, often with a tragic end.

In another work by Ivan Alekseevich, called "Mitya's Love", we come to know such feelings, filled with the pangs of jealousy of the main character. Mitya was seriously in love with the beautiful girl Ekaterina, but, by the will of fate, they had a long separation. The guy went crazy, unable to withstand the agonizing days of waiting. His love was sensual and sublime, truly spiritual and special. Carnal feelings were secondary, because, as you know, physical love cannot bring true romance of sincere happiness and peace.

The heroine of this story, Katya, was seduced by another person. Her betrayal tore Mitya's soul apart. He tried to find love on the side, but these attempts could not calm the pain in the heart of a young man in love.

Once, he had a date with another girl, Alena, but the meeting brought only disappointment. Her words and actions simply destroyed the romantic world of the protagonist, their physiological relationship was perceived by Mitya as something vulgar and dirty.

Terrible mental anguish, pain from hopelessness, from the inability to change your fate and return your beloved woman, gave rise to an idea that, as it seemed to the main character, was the only way out of this situation. Mitya decided to commit suicide...

Ivan Bunin boldly criticized love, showed it to the reader in a variety of situations. His work leaves a special imprint in the mind of the reader. After reading the next story, you can think about the meaning of life, reconsider your attitude to seemingly ordinary things, which are now beginning to be perceived in a completely different light.

The rather impressive story "Light Breath" tells about the fate of a young girl, Olga Meshcherskaya. She believes in true and sincere love from an early age, but soon, the heroine will face a harsh reality filled with pain and human selfishness.

The young lady is inspired by the world around her, she sees her soulmate in her interlocutor, completely trusting the hypocritical words of a vile deceiver who fell for an inexperienced and very young girl. This man is already in adulthood, so he quickly managed to seduce Olga, who had never been conquered before. This inhuman and treacherous attitude caused disgust in the young heroine to herself, to the people around her and to the whole world.

The tragic story ends with a scene in the cemetery, where, among the grave flowers, the cheerful and still lively eyes of the young beauty Olga are clearly visible in the photograph ...

Love is a strange feeling experienced in different ways. It brings incredible joy and happiness, and then, abruptly changes its direction and transports a person in love into a world of terrible pain, disappointment and tears ...

This topic was quite clearly sung in his intriguing, and often tragic works, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. To feel the love experiences and passion of the main characters, you need to independently read the stories of the great Russian writer and poet, who gave the world many magnificent creative masterpieces on the theme of love!

The theme of love occupies almost the main place in Bunin's work. This theme allows the writer to correlate what is happening in the soul of a person 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 bodily side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, intimate aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that bodily passion does not necessarily follow a spiritual impulse, which happens in life and vice versa (as happened with the heroes of the story "Sunstroke"). And no matter what plot moves the writer chooses, love in his works is always a great joy and a great disappointment, a deep and insoluble mystery, it is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.

Over the years, Bunin spoke about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early prose, the characters are young, open and natural. In such stories as "In August", "Autumn", "Dawn all night", everything is extremely simple, brief and significant. The feelings that the characters experience are ambiguous, colored with halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, life, relationships, we immediately recognize and understand in a new way our own premonitions of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual turns. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony, more often it disappears as soon as it has arisen. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. A sad farewell to his 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 remembered because it testifies to a touch of a genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than the others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“Autumn”). And in the story "Dawn all night" it is said 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, youth tends not only to get carried away, but also quickly disappointed. Bunin shows us this painful for many gap between dreams and reality. After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistling and spring trembling, young Tata suddenly hears in her sleep how her fiancé shoots jackdaws, and realizes that she does not love this rude and mundane man at all.

Nevertheless, in most of Bunin's early stories, the desire for beauty and purity remains the main, genuine movement of the characters' souls. In the 1920s, already in exile, Bunin wrote about love, as if looking back into the past, peering into the departed Russia and those people who are no longer there. This is how we perceive the story "Mitina's Love" (1924). Here Bunin consistently shows how the spiritual formation of the hero takes place, leads 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 covered with a special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, spun in the fake life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which he could not save the connection with another woman - the beautiful but down to earth Alenka, led Mitya to commit suicide. Mitin's insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to face harsh reality, inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and inadmissibility of what happened.

In a number of Bunin's stories about love, a love triangle is described: husband - wife - lover ("Ida", "Caucasus", "The most beautiful sun"). In these stories, an atmosphere of inviolability of the established order reigns. Marriage is an insurmountable barrier to achieving happiness. And often what is given to one is ruthlessly taken away from another. In the story "Caucasus", a woman leaves with her lover, knowing for sure that from the moment the train leaves, hours of despair begin for her husband, that he will not stand it and rush after her. He is really looking for her, and not having found 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.

With the prose of the 20-30s, the stories of the cycle "Dark Alleys" are brought together by the motive of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all stories are in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate into the depths of the subconscious of the characters. In most 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", "Rusya", "Tanya", "Business Cards", "In a familiar street". The writer writes about lonely people and ordinary lives. That is why the past, overshadowed by young, strong feelings, is drawn as a truly high point, merges with the sounds, smells, colors of nature. As if nature itself leads to the spiritual and physical rapprochement of people who love each other. And nature itself leads them to inevitable separation, and sometimes to death.

The skill of describing everyday details, as well as a sensual description of love, is inherent in all the stories of the cycle, but the story "Clean Monday" written in 1944 appears not just as a story about the great secret of love and a mysterious female soul, but as a kind of cryptogram. Too much in the psychological line of the story and in its landscape and everyday details seems like a ciphered revelation. Accuracy and abundance of details are not just signs of the times, not just nostalgia for forever lost Moscow, but the opposition of East and West in the soul and appearance of the heroine, leaving love and life for a monastery.

Bunin's heroes greedily catch moments of happiness, grieve if it passes by, lament if the thread that connects them with their loved one breaks. But at the same time, they are never able to fight fate for happiness, to win an ordinary worldly battle. All stories are stories of escape from life, even for a brief moment, even for one evening. Bunin's heroes are selfish and unconsciously cynical, but they still lose the most precious thing - their beloved. 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, death. All love stories end tragically, even if the characters 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.