Analysis lesson Bunin damned days. “Cursed days”: features of the work of I.A. Bunin with factual material
The article is based on a report read by the author in May 2012 in Kazan within the framework of the IV International scientific conference"Synthesis of documentary and fiction in literature and art." Using “Cursed Days” as an example, the article examines the basic principles and techniques of I.A. Bunin with factual material, which the writer serves as the texts of other people’s newspaper publications, as well as his own diary entries of 1915-1922. and journalistic works from the period of the Civil War and the first years of emigration. By comparing the primary sources with their “equivalents” in “Cursed Days,” the author reveals the nature of the literary transformations to which Bunin subjected the original factual material.
Keywords: I.A. Bunin, “Cursed Days”, factual material, artistic adaptation
“Cursed Days” is one of the most complex (from a literary point of view) Bunin’s books. In particular, neither its genre affiliation, nor literary nature. The opinions of researchers, and critics, differ greatly on this matter. In the literature about the “Cursed Days” the following definitions are found: “diary” [Kryzhitsky, 1974, p. VI; Kochetov, 1990, p. 3; Primochkina, 2003, p. 67], “diary entries” [Maltsev, 1994, p. 249], “art diary” [Mikhailov, 1991, p. 6; Ebert, 1996, p. 105], “work of art” [Oshar, 1996, p. 104; Georgievsky, 1999, p. 54], “book of journalism” [Mikhailov, 1991, p. 5], “a document of the era” [Kling, 2003, p. 19], “excerpts”, “essays” [Höntzsch, 2010, p. 760]. However, in our opinion, these definitions, with all their diversity, have the same drawback, namely the lack of universality: each of them reflects only one side of Bunin’s book. In this regard, the concept of the German Bunin scholar D. Riniker, who considers “Cursed Days” as a synthetic work, seems more acceptable to us - in the sense that it simultaneously has documentary, journalistic and artistic features or, in the researcher’s terminology, “dominants”, which, being merged together and forming some kind of indissoluble whole, “they determine the entire structure of “Cursed Days”” [Riniker, 2001, p. 631].
This view of Bunin’s book, it seems to us, is fully consistent with the author’s judgment about “Cursed Days”, which was expressed in a letter to I.A. Bunin dated July 5, 1925 to P.B. Struve (this letter was accompanied by another “feuilleton” (i.e. fragment) of “Cursed Days”, intended for publication in the newspaper “Vozrozhdenie”): “I think that I am doing the right thing by giving “Cursed Days” - they contain fiction , and everything else that is necessary, still very necessary for the time.” By the expression “everything else, necessary, still very necessary for the time,” the writer most likely meant not only the relevance and journalistic orientation of his work, but also its documentary basis.
Much has been written about the journalistic nature of “Cursed Days.” It was the journalistic sharpness of this book that was the reason that until the end of the 1980s. the domestic reader was deprived of the opportunity to get acquainted with her, and even if he knew about her existence, then for the most part only from the harsh and, moreover, absentee reviews of such figures Soviet literature, like V.V. Vishnevsky, L.V. Nikulin, K.M. Simonov, A.K. Tarasenkov, A.T. Tvardovsky.
The documentary nature of “Cursed Days” is also beyond doubt. As D. Riniker rightly writes, “Bunin wanted in his work to record and convey as accurately as possible the events that he witnessed during the revolution and civil war"[Riniker, 2001, p. 632]. Indeed, in "Cursed Days" there are many real facts and persons, the toponymy of Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, and the Russian provinces is widely represented. Great place Also occupied are extracts from the writer’s personal diaries and from the press - both Bolshevik and ideologically hostile to it - including from the newspapers “Izvestia of the Odessa Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”, “Voice of the Red Army Man”, “Nabat”, “Yuzhny Rabochiy”, " Russian word”, “Power of the People”, “New Life”, etc. It is not without reason that some historians of the Civil War sometimes turn to “The Damned of the Day” as historical evidence of the era. There are certainly reasons for such an appeal, since there are very few other sources of information about what happened, for example, in Odessa during the time of Bolshevik rule there.
Bunin achieves the documentary effect by various means: not only by recording what is happening “here and now,” but also by periodic excursions into the more or less distant past. Here, for example, is an entry dated May 24, 1919: “I’m sorting out and tearing up some papers, clippings from old newspapers. Very nice poems addressed to me in “Yuzhny Rabochiy” (Menshevik newspaper published before the arrival of the Bolsheviks):
You are frightened and with chaotic praise
He suddenly bent down servilely before the Varangian...
This is about my poems published in the Odessa List last December, on the day the French landed in Odessa...”
The “cute poems” that Bunin cites here are absolutely reliable: composed by a certain feuilletonist poet Nikita, they were actually published in the Odessa Menshevik newspaper “Yuzhny Rabochiy” on December 17 (30), 1918 and were a response to Bunin’s poem “December 22, 1918 ", with which he welcomed the entry of allied troops into Odessa.
At the same time, as D. Riniker correctly notes, “Bunin did not recognize the yoke of documentaryism over himself” [Riniker, 2001, p. 632]. This is probably one of the reasons why there are occasional factual inaccuracies in his book. Thus, in an entry dated April 21, 1919, Bunin claims that the author of humorous poems
What self-control
Horses of simple rank,
Oblivious
To the difficulties of existence! -
“one young poet, a student who entered the police last winter (i.e., according to Bunin, in the winter of 1918 - A.B.) - ideologically,” was killed by the Bolsheviks. In fact, the Odessa poet and part-time criminal investigation officer Anatoly Fioletov, who wrote these poems, fell at the hands of ordinary criminals, not the Bolsheviks, and this happened on November 14, 1918, five months before the capture of Odessa by the Reds.
What are we dealing with in this case? With a trivial “memory error” - or with a conscious, deliberate distortion of facts due to authorial bias? It is no secret that in his book Bunin, at all costs, sought to collect and present to the reader as many examples of the bloodthirstiness of the “workers’ and peasants’ power” as possible.
One way or another, the question about the nature of the factual inaccuracies in “Cursed Days” remains open, and it is very doubtful that we will ever be able to answer it, because the drafts of “Cursed Days” have not survived. And yet there are not so many obvious inaccuracies in Bunin’s book. True facts, including historically reliable evidence of Bolshevik atrocities, still prevail in it. Here is one such evidence (entry dated April 24, 1919): “By the way, about the Odessa emergency. There is now a new style of shooting - over the closet cup." How true these lines are can be judged by the following excerpt from a note compiled during the work of the Special Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia: “In the first days after the evacuation of the French from Odessa and the capture of the city by the Bolsheviks, when the Odessa Cheka had no own premises and execution had to be done hastily, the following method was practiced. The doomed person was brought into the closet and his head was bent over a cup. The executioner from behind shot him in the head. The lifeless body was held over the cup until all the blood drained out. Thus, the murder did not leave any traces and did not cause the executioners the hassle of cleaning up” [Volkov, 2010, p. 95].
However, it is not only the author’s errors or deliberate (even with a good purpose) distortion of the truth that does not allow “Cursed Days” to be (or be considered) a full-fledged historical document. According to conventional wisdom, a historian must be impartial. Bunin, on principle, eschewed impartiality. Moreover, it was partiality that he made, as it were, the “cornerstone” of his book. At its very beginning, in an entry dated February 19, 1918, the writer says: “The time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution impartially, objectively...” You hear this now every minute. Impartially! But there will never be real impartiality. And most importantly: our “bias” will be very, very dear to the future historian. Is the “passion” of only the “revolutionary people” important? But we’re not people, are we?” . In this sense, scientifically speaking, “Cursed Days” is not the history of the “great Russian revolution”, but only “materials” for it.
It is also no coincidence that for his book Bunin chose the form of a diary, which, by the way, from a literary point of view seemed very promising to the writer long before the start of work on “ Damned days" Back in 1916, Bunin wrote: “...the diary is one of the most beautiful literary forms. I think that in the near future this form will supplant all others.”
Bunin had in mind in this case, of course, not the diary as such - i.e. a collection of certain more or less regular records, which, as a rule, are of a documentary nature and are not intended for prying eyes. Bunin spoke about the artistic and literary imitation of a diary, which, on the contrary, presupposes an indispensable “public appearance.” From this point of view, “Cursed Days” is not a diary, but a work that only has the appearance of a diary or imitates a diary. Conventionally, its genre could be designated as a documentary novel-essay, in which genuine historical facts are not only considered and interpreted by the author with conscious, strict subjectivity and bias, but are also inextricably intertwined, and in some places fused with fiction, so that it is sometimes difficult to determine where one thing ends and another begins.
In fact, as we have already noted, Bunin’s book, as a rule, is based on true events, true names and titles are mentioned on its pages, quotes from genuine poems and articles are given, and there is not a single false note in the author’s voice. Nevertheless, in Damned Days almost anyone historical fact to one degree or another artistically rethought. In general, one of the main features of Bunin’s work with factual material was that in most cases, facts as such were for the writer nothing more than literary “raw materials”, which he subjected to creative processing, transformation, but did it very subtly and at the same time boldly, without fear of reproaches for either excessive subjectivism or fraud.
Bunin’s methods of quotation are especially indicative in this sense. There are a lot of quotes in The Damned Days. However, what in scientific world It is customary to call accuracy of citation, but in Bunin it is very rare. In “Cursed Days” (as, indeed, in most of Bunin’s other formally “non-fictional” works), the fragments of other people’s texts quoted by the author usually appear in a carefully edited - as a rule, greatly condensed - form. Bunin does not so much quote as he summarizes the corresponding text, omitting and cutting off everything, in his opinion, that is superfluous and leaving only the quintessence of the quoted statement.
Below is the original text of the sarcastic “Memoirs” of a certain Alexander F. (presumably the secretary of the Odessa Executive Committee, anarchist A. Feldman), published on April 20, 1919 in the “News of the Odessa Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”, and Bunin’s interpretation of this text in “Cursed Days” "
When comparing these two texts, it is clear that Bunin significantly edited the original text, expressing in five lines what took up an entire column in the Odessa Izvestia
In another entry, dated May 9, 1919, Bunin cites, as he puts it, an “article” adjacent to another list of those executed in some Bolshevik newspaper he did not name. In this case, the writer quoted not only the text of a real article, published, as we found out, on May 21, 1919 in the Odessa newspaper “Voice of the Red Army Man,” but also own article“The Notorious Pig,” published on October 30, 1920 in the Parisian newspaper “Common Cause.” It was in “The Notorious Pig” that Bunin’s interpretation of this “article” first saw the light of day. When “quoting,” Bunin shortened the original, original text by almost three times, but he conveyed its essence very accurately, preserving all its “semantic nodes.”
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It is possible to give other examples of Bunin’s similar treatment of quoted texts, but this would take up too much space.
Along with press materials, Bunin’s diary entries made on the eve of and in the first months of the revolution were subjected to more or less significant authorial processing in “Cursed Days.” The book includes many such recordings. With their help, Bunin wanted to show that he foresaw the approach of an all-Russian catastrophe long before it actually broke out. However, the documentary quality of this evidence of Bunin’s insight is also very relative, since they were also edited by the writer to one degree or another. As in the case of others’ texts, including newspaper texts, Bunin made changes to his own diary entries, highlighting, sharpening main idea. See for example:
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In “Cursed Days” there are examples of a more complex “influence” of the writer on factual material gleaned from personal diaries. And here Bunin is no longer content with “note-taking” and editing - he approaches this material like a true artist, transforming and organizing it in accordance with a specific plan. In this sense, especially indicative are those passages in “Cursed Days” that take the form of extracts from Bunin’s diary for the second half of 1917. D. Riniker in his article suggests that Bunin restored these “extracts” from memory: after all, the diary itself was at the time he did not have work on “Cursed Days” on his hands.
However, it seems doubtful to us that when writing “Cursed Days,” Bunin “remembered” his diary entries that were lost before leaving for a foreign land. There is too much difference between the original recordings and their “equivalents” in Damned Days. Of course, it can be explained by “defects” or “errors” in Bunin’s memory. However, another consideration seems more plausible. In his articles dedicated to Bunin’s lecture “The Great Datura” [see: Bakuntsev, 2011; Bakuntsev, 2012a; Bakuntsev, 20126; Bakuntsev, 2012c], we pointed out that “traces” and “echoes” of this lecture are found in a number of the writer’s journalistic works. And in “Cursed Days” there are many direct textual matches with “The Great Datura”.
Unlike “Cursed Days,” “The Great Datura” was written based on those very diary entries that were inaccessible to the writer in emigration. In this sense, Bunin’s lecture played the role of a kind of intermediary text between the writer’s authentic diary and “Cursed Days.” But in any case, what Bunin presented in both “The Great Dope” and “Cursed Days” as extracts from his personal diaries, in fact, is the result of a very significant literary and artistic processing. A clear example of this is the unique “living pictures” present in both works of the writer. Created by Bunin on the basis of diary entries, they were initially included in the text of “The Great Datura”, and then in full “migrated” to “Cursed Days” [see: Bakuntsev, 2012c].
At the same time, along with the recordings made on the eve and in the first months of the revolution, “the writer included in “Cursed Days” also recordings from a later time in a revised form. Such records are not accompanied by an indication of the time of their writing" [Riniker, 2001, p. 643]. In other words, we're talking about about records of an anachronistic nature, i.e. those that arose in more late period than the one presented in Bunin’s book. Their inclusion became possible because “Cursed Days” - let us remember - were written starting in 1925.
D. Riniker, in his article on “Cursed Days,” refers to two such records dated January 1922. In “Cursed Days” they are given in a modified form and are dated: one - March 1918, the other - April 1919. In this article we will limit ourselves to one example.
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“The writer,” D. Riniker believes, not without reason, “did not consider it necessary and possible to indicate a later time when these records appeared: such indications would have destroyed the entire semantic structure of “Cursed Days”” [Riniker, 2001, p. 644]. However, we cannot agree with the statement that “most of these records..., as a rule, are not directly related to the events described” [ibid.]. Quite the contrary: such a connection always exists, in a sense, it is thanks to it that the artistic and documentary space of Bunin’s book is created.
It is impossible not to notice that in the original diary entry, Bunin speaks only about himself and his incredibly sensual worldview. This is indeed a largely “irrelevant” record (from the category of “by the way” or “by the way”), an almost random recording of artistic introspection. In “Cursed Days” this Bunin auto-characteristic takes on additional meaning. It was not just “rewritten” anew, but also included in the historical and artistic context of the book, linked with its entire spiritual structure and content, with the main, dominant feeling and frame of mind of the author, namely with his intransigence towards the “Russian Cain”, who took possession of the whole country. From the entry in “Cursed Days” it is clear that the author “somehow physically” feels not some abstract, but very concrete people whom he encounters every day on the streets and squares of first red Moscow, then red Odessa.
Also anachronistic are those lines of “Cursed Days” in which Bunin, in essence, settles scores with one of his long-time ideological opponents - with the Odessa socialist journalist P.S. Yushkevich, who in October 1919 allowed himself to speak very disapprovingly of Bunin’s lecture “The Great Datura” in the Menshevik newspaper “The Coming Day” [see: Bakuntsev, 2012a, p. 107-109].
Bunin then, in the fall of 1919, in his “Notes” in the “Southern Word” very sharply responded to Yushkevich’s criticism. But, apparently, the offense inflicted on the writer was so deep that he did not forget about it for several decades. He also reflected his polemics with Yushkevich in “Cursed Days” - of course, keeping silent about both true reasons, and about the time of its occurrence.
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P.S. Yushkevich did not write about any peacocks in his response to Bunin’s “The Great Datura”. These peacocks first appeared in Bunin himself, at the end of the “Notes” cited here. But in “Cursed Days,” it was the Yelets peacocks that became the plot-forming detail, to which Yushkevich’s statements were tendentiously tied and significantly “turned around,” trimmed, and edited by the author.
Why did Bunin do this? And why did he even need to include such an obvious anachronism in his historically almost flawless text? It seems that Bunin did this because the very essence of his long-standing dispute with the Odessa journalist was of fundamental importance to him. So fundamental that the writer was not deterred even by the possibility that one of his informed contemporaries would accuse him of dishonesty and falsification of facts. Represented by P.S. Yushkevich, whose name meant nothing to most emigrants and therefore seemed to become a household name, Bunin responded to all his opponents who justified the “great Russian revolution” and its “excesses.” He himself was absolutely confident that he was right and, finding himself in a foreign land, he became even more entrenched in his rejection of any revolutionism.
In “Cursed Days,” perhaps, the features of Bunin’s work with factual material were most fully reflected. It is obvious that in his main work about the “great Russian revolution” the writer did not strive for absolute documentary accuracy. However, the presence in “Cursed Days” of a strong “fictional” element (which the author himself pointed out), as well as obvious factual errors, does not at all make this book unreliable. In general, when applied to “Cursed Days” (and other works similar in spirit - such as, for example, “Petersburg Diaries” by Z. N. Gippius, “Sun of the Dead” by I. S. Shmelev), it is advisable to talk about a special kind of authenticity. This is not so much the reliability of a fact as the reliability of a feeling, the reliability of the author’s purely personal and very honest attitude to contemporary reality.
Bibliography
Bakuntsev A.V. Lecture by I.A. Bunin's "The Great Datura" and its role in personal and creative destiny writer // Yearbook of the House of Russian Abroad named after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 2011. M., 2011.
Bakuntsev A.V. Lecture by I.A. Bunin “The Great Datura” in reviews of the Odessa press // Vestn. Moscow un-ta. Ser. 10. Journalism. 2012a. No. 1.
Bakuntsev A. Journalism I.A. Bunin: from “The Great Dope” to “The Damned Days” // Powrocic do Rosji wierszami i pros^: Literatura rosyjskiej emigraracji / pod red. G. Nefaginy. Slupsk, 20126.
Bakuntsev A.B. The relationship between fiction and documentary in I. A. Bunin’s lecture “The Great Datura” // Vestn. Moscow un-ta. Ser. 10. Journalism. 2012c. No. 6.
Red terror through the eyes of eyewitnesses / Comp., author. entry Art. S.V. Volkov. M., 2010.
Georgievsky A.S. Bunin and Russia // Russian literary journal. 1999. No. 12.
Ilyinsky I.M. White Truth of Bunin (Notes on Bunin’s journalism) // Knowledge. Understanding. Skill. 2009. No. 4.
Kochetov V.P. Furious Bunin // Bunin I.A. Damned days. M., 1990.
Kling O. Prophetic sign // Bunin I.A. Hegel, tailcoat, blizzard. St. Petersburg, 2003.
Kryzhitsky S. Bunin and “Cursed Days” // Bunin I.A. Damned days. London (Canada), 1974.
Maltsev Yu.V. Ivan Bunin. 1870-1953. Frankfurt/Main; M., 1994.
Mikhailov O.N. Damned days I.A. Bunina // Bunin I.A. Damned days. M., 1991.
Morozov S. “Cursed days” by I.S. Bunina: On the history of the text // Textological vremennik. Russian literature of the 20th century: Questions of textual criticism and source study. Book 2. M., 2012.
Oshar K. “Cursed days” as the beginning of a new period in Bunin’s work // Russian literature. 1996. No. 4.
Primochkina N.N. Gorky and writers of Russian diaspora. M., 2003.
Riniker D. “Cursed days” as part creative heritage I.A. Bunina // I.A. Bunin: pro et contra / Comp. B.V. Averina, M.N. Virolainen, D. Riniker. St. Petersburg, 2001.
Hyo"tzsh F. Ivan Bunin, singer of bygone Russia // Classic without retouching: Literary world about the work of I.A. Bunin: Critical reviews, essays, parodies (1890-1950s): Anthology / Ed. ed. N.G. Melnikova. M., 2010.
Received by the editor 03/05/2013
G.N. Kuznetsova in her “Grasse Diary” also calls “Cursed Days” a diary. See: Kuznetsova G.N. Grasse diary. Stories. Olive Garden. M., 1995.P.83
« A work of art“M. A. Aldanov also considered “Cursed Days” (mostly). See: Aldanov M. and A. Bunin. Collected works. Publishing house "Petropolis", 1935. T. IX and X // Modern Notes (Paris). 1935. Book. LIX. P. 472.
See: Smirnov-Sokolsky N.P. Latest find / Prep. text by S.P. Bliznikovskaya // New World. 1965. No. 10. P. 220.
Correspondence of I.A. Bunina with P.B. Struve (1920-1943). To the 100th anniversary of their birth / Publ. BP. Struve // Notes of the Russian Academic Group in the USA. N.Y., 1968. P. 75.
For example, K.M. Simonov “when reading this book of notes about the civil war, there was a heavy feeling: as if the earth was giving way under you, and you were collapsing from great literature into the quagmire of petty bitterness, envy, disgust and stubborn to the point of blindness misunderstanding of the simplest things” (Simonov K.M. Collected works: In 10 volumes. M., 1984. T. 10. P. 360). This point of view, oddly enough, continues to exist in our time. Its faithful adherent is the rector of the Moscow Humanitarian University and at the same time the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the literary Bunin (!) Prize I.M. Ilyinsky. He expressed his indignation at Bunin’s journalism in general and “Cursed Days” in particular in a verbose, openly biased, pseudoscientific article “Bunin’s White Truth.” However, nothing fundamentally new - compared to what his ideological predecessors wrote - I.M. Ilyinsky did not say. Although he did make one independent conclusion: according to the “researcher,” Yeltsin’s “ultra-democratic revolution of 1991” and the “reforms” that followed became the realization of Bunin’s dream, the expression of his “white truth” [see: Ilyinsky, 2009, p. 19]. It is hardly worth commenting on this absurd, blasphemous judgment in all respects.
6 Bunin I. A. Damned days. M., 1990. P. 136 (reprint).
Right there. P. 69.
His real name is Nathan Benyaminovich Shor.
However, some among them considered themselves “an element socially close to the Bolsheviks.” For example, the well-known Odessa raider Mishka Yaponchik (M.V. Vinnitsky), outraged by the fact that in one of the issues of the Izvestia of the Odessa Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies his “honest name” was “defamed,” wrote in response: “Regarding my activities since the day I was released from prison by decree of the Provisional Government, before which I was sentenced for revolutionary activities to 12 years, of which I served 10 years - I can show documents that were in the counterintelligence, as well as the order of the same counterintelligence, in which it is said that for my capture they promised 100 thousand rubles as an organizer of detachments against counter-revolutionaries, but only thanks to the working masses I could, hiding in their shacks, avoid execution.<...>I personally will be glad with all my heart when one of the workers and peasants responds and says that he was offended by me. I know in advance that such a person will not exist. As for the bourgeoisie, even if I took active actions against it, I think none of the workers and peasants will blame me for this. Because the bourgeoisie, accustomed to robbing the poor, made me its robber, but I am proud of the name of such a robber, and as long as my head is on my shoulders, I will always be a thunderstorm for the capitalists and executioners of the people...” (Vinnitsky M. (Mishka Yaponchik). Letter to editor // News of the Odessa Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. 1919. May 31. No. 51. P. 3).
A.J.I. At the Red Army Theater Club // Voice of the Red Army Man (Odessa). 1919. May 21. No. 30. S. 4.
11 Bunin I.A. Damned days. P. 121.
Through the mouth of the Bunins. T. 1. P. 121.
Bunin I.A. Damned days. P. 18.
For some unknown reason, this diary remained in Russia, passed from hand to hand, and eventually ended up in the possession of the pop artist and bibliophile N.P. Smirnov-Sokolsky (1898-1962). Now it is stored in NIOR RSL. In 1965, excerpts from Bunin’s diary, apparently prepared in advance by Smirnov-Sokolsky for publication, were published in Novy Mir. The preamble to this publication says: “Recently, the old writer-ethnographer Barashkov-Engeley came to me and brought me a draft notebook that he kept, written in Bunin’s hand. The notebook-album contained sketches, notes “for memory,” poems begun but unfinished, and so on.<...>The entries are dated from August 2, 1917, to May 1918. According to the writer who brought me Bunin’s notebook, it came to him about thirty years ago from a person close to the editors of the Rosehip almanacs, published in 1907-1916.<...>The notebook I have is obviously from the writer’s papers, which he couldn’t take with him when he went abroad and either scattered among his friends or simply threw them away. So she lay there for almost forty years, perhaps waiting for her rightful owner...” (Smirnov-Sokolsky N.P. Op. op. p. 213). In an undated letter to emigrant writer L.F. Zurova, researcher of the life and work of Bunin A.K. Baboreko reported that N.P. Smirnov-Sokolsky “bought an autograph of the diary from some Barashkov, who stole the diary from the Muromtsevs. The widow of Pavel Nikolaevich Muromtsev told me about the kidnapping ( sibling V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina. - A.B.). This Barashkov is no longer alive. For his atrocities, he took advantage of the conditions of war” (DRZ. F. 3. On. 1. Card. 1. Item 34. JI. 123-123 vol.).
Through the mouth of the Bunins. T. 2. P. 62.
Bunin I.A. Damned days. pp. 51-52.
Bunin Iv. Notes // Southern Word (Odessa). 1919. 20 Oct. (Nov 2). No. 51. P. 2.
Bunin I.A. Damned days. pp. 161-162.
“And Herzen was right a thousand times:
"...Our trouble is the dissolution of theoretical life
and practical..."
Bunin I.A., "Cursed days"
August 2001 Advice
Ten years ago, after the publication of “Cursed Days” in our country
Ivan Bunin, I have prepared what I offer to the attention of readers today
an essay about this work and the fate of the writer, his complex spiritual
searching and thinking about the fate of the Fatherland.
More than ten editors refused to publish this article, and
one suggested corrections - (“Now there is no censorship! The press is free-
na!"), which, in my opinion, distorted the whole meaning as considering
of the work being created in all its versatility, as a result of which
could not be accepted by me.
Then I realized how painfully difficult it is to “write on the table”, without
hopes to see my creation published...
Now, I hope, the passions have subsided to the level that
wills from political bias go to a calm source
Rico-literary analysis of one of the works that became their own
time is one of the 3 frontiers of perestroika.
Let me remind you once again that I offer the readers a text written
sledged in early 1990.
The hundred-twentieth anniversary of the birth of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953) was marked by the publication in our country of his diary entries from 1918-1919, which formed the book “Cursed Days”.
Helpful criticism, not always balanced in its assessments, has already called this publication “the return of Bunin to his homeland,” the revival of the “complete” Bunin.
There are no words - “Cursed Days” is an important, complex work that opened a significant stage in the life and work of the writer. I cannot agree with those who saw in it only a “merciless criticism of Bolshevism,” although it was precisely this orientation of the book that was the reason for its many years of imprisonment in the special storage cabinets of libraries.
Such an interpretation of this multifaceted and, in many ways, contradictory work of the writer greatly simplifies and even trivializes the writer’s painful thoughts and spiritual quests, turning him into only one of the opponents of October and an ally (remember that this text was prepared in early 1990, - O.Kh.), modern “subverters of immutable truths.”
In my opinion, the writer’s diary submitted for publication is, first of all, valuable historical evidence.
No, not only about the years of revolution and civil war, but about an entire era in the history of Russia, his painful thoughts about its difficult, sometimes tragic fate.
And it is in this capacity that it helps to better understand both the author himself and the time of his writing.
“There will be no price for these records,” a contemporary said to the writer, to which the latter answered, impartially for the reader: “Does it really matter?” The same human creature will live in a hundred years - now I already know its value! At the same time, the author's spelling and punctuation are preserved).
It seems that before deciding to judge the writer, contemporaries should have tried to understand him, to see the time through the eyes of Bunin himself, who wrote: “The time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution impartially, objectively...” You hear this now every minute. But there will never be real impartiality. And most importantly: our “bias” will be very, very dear to the future historian. Is the “passion” of only the “revolutionary people” important? But aren’t we people or what?” (p.14)
So, the author did not intend to deny biased criticism of modernity. And, perhaps, this kind of even belligerently flagellating partiality, which does not recognize any discounts on personal friendship, affection, is especially valuable in Bunin, fills what is read with new meaning, makes you think about a lot.
In my opinion, “Cursed Days” is a testimony to a whole generation and about a whole generation of people, against their will, captured by the whirlwind of the revolution and confused, having lost their former ideals and the meaning of life. The evidence, at times, does not at all add sympathy to this generation, but nevertheless forces us to look at it in a new way.
In this work of the writer, a number of large, although intersecting, ideological, semantic and thematic blocks can be distinguished:
- actual diary entries, sketches modern life from life (February 6, 1918: “In places there are “rallies.” A red-haired man, in a coat with an astrakhan collar, with red curly eyebrows, with a freshly shaved face covered in powder and with gold fillings in his mouth, monotonously, as if reading, speaks about the injustices of the old regime ". A snub-nosed gentleman with bulging eyes angrily objects to him. The women intervene heatedly and inappropriately, interrupting the argument (a matter of principle, as the red-haired man puts it) with particulars that should prove that the devil knows what is going on..." (p.5).
….To my generation, which experienced the “revolutions” of both 1991 and 1993, I will now add on my own behalf, such “everyday” scenes are well known, and what we read from Bunin even evokes a feeling of deja vu, that is, of something already seen and experienced);
- memories of days gone by (entry dated February 22, 1915: “How cruel, disgusting we live!”);
- painful thoughts about the fate and tragedy of Russia, about the Russian intelligentsia (“If I hadn’t loved this “icon”, this Rus', hadn’t seen why I was so crazy all these years, why I suffered so continuously, so fiercely?” p.62);
- thoughts about literature (“Russian literature is corrupted for last decades extraordinary. The street and the crowd began to play a very big role."
Thus, before us are not the notes of an idle observer, but the work of a thinker looking around him with anxiety.
On May 5, 1919, Ivan Alekseevich wrote in his diary: “Klyuchevsky notes the extreme “repetition” of Russian history. Unfortunately, no one even noticed this “repetition” ...” (p. 113). If we agree with this opinion of the great Russian historian, academician - and there are many reasons for this today - then Bunin’s memories take on a completely different character. They become, as it were, a foresight directed from the past to the future, that is, in our time.
This makes us especially carefully read and think about some pages of the writer’s diary.
The life of the Russian intelligentsia in the post-October days was, according to Bunin, filled to the limit with all kinds of rumors:
9 - 22 new style February 1918: “Yesterday we were at B. Quite a lot of people gathered - and all with one voice: the Germans, thank God, are advancing, they took Smolensk and Bologoe...
Rumors about some Polish legions, which are also supposedly coming to save us. By the way, why exactly “legion”? What an abundance of new and increasingly pompous words! Everything is a game, a farce, “high style,” pompous lies...” (pp. 11, 12).
Here we will interrupt Ivan Alekseevich’s recording for a brief historical background:
- the “Polish Legion” under the command of the headquarters captain Bulak-Balakhovich was formed by decision of the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917. In January 1918, Bulak-Balakhovich swore allegiance to the Belarusian National Rada, and a month later to the German Kaiser.
The "Legion" was included in the German troops that launched an attack on the Soviet Republic.
February 27, 1918: “Everyone is sure that the occupation of Russia by the Germans has already begun. The people also talk about this: “Well, the German will come and restore order.” (p. 14).
In the book, which was sent to press ten years after the events described in it, which is very important, Ivan Alekseevich does not want to seem better than he was in those days, does not want to tint and embellish the bitter truth, is not afraid to tell the truth about himself, about people of their generation, even about the “people”, whose name they swore and in whose name they wanted to decide the fate of the country. It is this circumstance that makes his book an invaluable eyewitness account.
Rumors about the “Germans,” that is, about the beginning of the Kaiser’s army, the attitude of various segments of the population towards the first foreign intervention against Soviet republic, defined this way after the signing of the Brest Peace, occupy a lot of space in Bunin’s notes.
It seems that these recordings allow us to better understand the mood of certain strata of Russian society close to the writer himself:
February 28: “After yesterday’s news that St. Petersburg had already been taken by the Germans, the newspapers were very disappointed...” (p. 15).
And, as it turns out, they disappointed those “patriots of Russia” who had recently called on the people to die “for the one and indivisible...”.
“I returned with Chirikov. He has the most reliable and up-to-date information... On Povorskaya there is the main German headquarters... The Bolsheviks are working in contact with monarchists and merchant aces; by agreement with Mirbach, it was decided to elect Samarin to the kingdom... With whom in this case there will be a hot battle?” (p. 17).
Here, for the sake of historical truth, it should be noted that it was not the Bolsheviks, but the Cadets who came into contact with German circles, and in order to fight the Bolsheviks, about which there is also a lot of evidence from foreign Russian memoirists.
Such “reliable information” (and how much does it bother the minds of our fellow citizens even today?), naturally, could not confuse both contemporaries of the events described and modern readers of Bunin, who ask in bewilderment the question: So who fought with whom? ? "Reds" with "whites"?
Let us, however, continue quoting Ivan Alekseevich’s diary:
“March 5. Rumors: in two weeks there will be a monarchy and a government of Andrianov, Sandetsky and Mishchenko; all the best hotels are being prepared for the Germans.
The Social Revolutionaries are allegedly preparing an uprising. The soldiers seem to be on their side... There will be German police in St. Petersburg; in Moscow too" (p. 24).
There is reason for the heart to be indignant" true patriot"!
March 6: “Again they say that there are many monarchists among the Bolsheviks and that in general all this Bolshevism is designed to restore the monarchy...” (p. 27).
March 8: “The Germans will be in Moscow in a few days. But it’s scary, they say, they will send the Russians to the front against the allies. Yes, everyone too. And everything is also an anxious, tedious, unresolved wait” (p. 25-26).
April 3: “News from Sretenka - German soldiers have occupied the Spassky barracks. A German corps seems to have entered St. Petersburg. Tomorrow there will be a decree on the nationalization of banks...”
April 14: “They say that Moscow will be in the power of the Germans on March 17 (p. 31).
Bunin pointedly declared the non-recognition of the new style, the new spelling, the new time... This naive protest expressed the confusion that gripped part of the Russian intelligentsia, who looked around them in fear and confusion.
If the writer looked at the world with alarm and concern, then other representatives of the intelligentsia sought to join the active “anti-Bolshevik” struggle.
True, the writer does not favor people “from his own circle”, who, in his opinion, are guilty of the ruin of the country.
In May-June 1917, he recalls, “it was scary to walk along the street, every night here and there the red glow of a fire on the black horizon...” (p. 31).
On March 15, he wrote: “The libertine, the drunkard Rasputin, the evil genius of Russia. Of course, he was a good little man. Well, what about you, who never got out of “Bears” and “Stray Dogs”?” (p. 32).
March 24: “Now V.V.V... has again carried something that I am already completely tired of reading and listening to:
- Russia was destroyed by an inert, self-interested government that did not take into account the people's desires, hopes, aspirations... Because of this, the revolution was inevitable...
I answered:
- It was not the people who started the revolution, but you. The people didn’t care at all about everything we wanted, what we were unhappy with. I’m not talking to you about revolution - let it be inevitable, beautiful, whatever. But don’t lie to the people - they needed your responsible ministries, replacing the Shcheglovitykhs with Malyantovichs and the abolition of all kinds of censorship, like summer snow, and he proved this firmly and harshly, throwing to hell the provisional government, and the constituent assembly, and “everything for which generations of the best Russian people perished,” as you put it, and yours “to the bitter end” (p. 35-36).
The tragedy of the great writer, like many other people of his generation, was that they understood both the impossibility of the “lower classes to live in the old way” and the insignificance of the “higher classes”; they judged them no less harshly for their lack of understanding of the people, for their inability to respond to their fundamental aspirations .
In 1919, in Odessa (the first part of the diaries from February 5 to March 27, 1918 was written in Moscow), Bunin recalled: during the war, he was returning from the editorial office with the future minister F.F. Kokoshkin, “they started talking about the people. I didn’t say nothing terrible, he only said that the people were already tired of the war, that all the newspaper cries that he was rushing into battle were criminal lies. And suddenly he cut me off with unusual sharpness for him:
- Let's leave this conversation. Your views on the people have always seemed to me, well, excuse me, too exceptional or something...
I looked at him with surprise and almost horror. No, I thought, our nobility will not go in vain! "(p. 150).
Bunin recalls that the intelligentsia close to him accused him of misunderstanding, and even slandering his own people:
- “But they said that I only hate! And who? Those who, in essence, did not give a damn about the people - unless it was the reason for their manifestation wonderful feelings, - and which they not only did not know and did not want to know, but they simply did not even notice, just as they did not notice the faces of the cab drivers in which they went to some Free Economic Society...
Even the famous “help for the hungry” took place in our country somehow literary, only out of thirst once again kick the government, create an extra tunnel under it. It’s scary to say, but it’s true: if it weren’t for the people’s disasters, thousands of intellectuals would simply be the most unfortunate people. How then to sit, protest, what to shout and write about?
And without this there would be no life.
Also during the war. There was, in essence, the same cruel indifference to the people. The "toy soldiers" were an object of amusement...
They were terribly indifferent to the people during the war, they criminally lied about their patriotic upsurge, even when even a child could not help but see that the people were fed up with the war. Where does this indifference come from? By the way, and from the terribly inherent carelessness, frivolity, lack of habit and unwillingness to be serious in the most serious moments..." (p. 62-63).
It seems that in this passionate denunciatory monologue, Bunin correctly conveyed the difference in worldview and attitude of various layers and groups of Russian society, which reflected the real processes of differentiation and polarization of political forces.
However, unfortunately, this is now forgotten by those who see in pre-revolutionary Russia only a “society of universal harmony”, forgetting about the real contradictions, differences in position and views among representatives of various groups of the population.
And if some saw in the Provisional Government the exponent of “people’s aspirations,” then others, including Bunin, were only manifestations of general decline, decay, betrayal of those lofty ideas and ideals that inspired the asceticism of the best representatives of the Russian intelligentsia.
“What was it?” the writer asks. “Stupidity, ignorance, which came not only from ignorance of the people, but also from the unwillingness to know them? Everything was there. Yes, there was also the usual self-interest of lies, for which they were rewarded in one way or another. “I believe in Russian people! " They applauded for this.
A certain part of society suffered especially from such deceit.
They became so perverted in their profession of being “friends of the people, youth and everything bright” that they themselves thought that they were quite sincere. Almost from adolescence I lived with them, it was as if I was completely with them - and constantly, every minute I was indignant, feeling their deceitfulness, and they often shouted at me:
- Is it him who is deceitful, this crystal man, who gave his whole life to the people!?
Indeed: what is called “honest”, a handsome old man, glasses, a large white beard, a soft hat... But this is a special deceit, almost unconscious to the person himself, a habitual life with fictitious feelings, which have long since, of course, become second nature , but still fictitious.
What a huge number of such “liars” are in my memory! An extraordinary plot for a novel, and a terrible novel” (p. 61).
As if for the edification of us, descendants, Ivan Alekseevich wrote about those days: “There are so many lies that you can suffocate. All friends, all acquaintances, whom you would not have dared to think of as liars before, now lie at every step. Not a single the soul cannot help but lie, cannot help but add its own (hereinafter italics by A.I. Bunin) lies, its distortion to a deliberately false rumor. And all this from an unbearable thirst for it to be the way it is unbearably wanted. A person is delusional, like a feverish person, and, listening to this nonsense all day, you still greedily believe it and become infected by it” (p. 59).
It must also be admitted that the writer does not really understand the people, and the faces seen on the streets, the judgments heard and snatches of phrases do not add to the author’s sympathy for his contemporaries:
In an impromptu street debate, “some oiled bitch naively intervened and began to say that the Germans were about to come and everyone would have to pay for what they had done.
“Before the Germans come, we will cut you all off,” the worker said coldly and walked away.
The soldiers confirmed: “That’s right!” - and they also left” (p.6).
"A cab driver near "Prague" with joy and laughter:
- Well, let him come. He, a German, still owned us before. Already there, they say, he arrested thirty of the main Jews. What do we need? We are a dark people. Tell one “touch”, and then everyone else will follow” (p. 15).
I hear it on the streets,” Bunin wrote on March 14, 1918:
"- No, now they started letting the soldiers wear trousers. That is, everyone was bragging, careless, - let the German come, to hell with him - and now, as it has become serious, they are very afraid. They say we will be punished greatly, and rightly so, to tell the truth: we have become very angry!
Yes, if there really was a whiff of something “serious,” all this “spontaneity of the great Russian revolution” would quickly subside. How the village went wild last year in the summer, how terrible it was to live in Vasilyevskoye! And suddenly a rumor: Kornilov introduced death penalty and almost all of July Vasilyevskoye was quieter than water, lower than the grass..." (p. 31).
Not at all embarrassed by what he had previously written about the “weariness” of the people from the war, on June 9, 1919, Bunin wrote in his diary: “And so a company of boys from all sorts of indoctrinated bastards who did not want to go to the front came to the Duma - and we,” endowed with the trust and sovereign will of the people,” shouted to the whole world that a great thing had happened Russian revolution“that the people will now lay down their lives for us and for all kinds of freedoms, and most importantly, now they will properly crush the Germans to the bitter end” (p. 150-151).
There are many such contradictions in the writer’s notes. And it is not our task to try them on - Ivan Alekseevich himself, like many other representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, involved in the rapid whirlpool of revolutionary events, failed to do this.
“Here is Voloshin,” Bunin gives an example, “The day before yesterday he called the “Angel of Vengeance” to Rus', who was supposed to “put the delight of murder into the heart of a girl and bloody dreams into a child’s soul.” And yesterday he was a White Guard, and now he is ready to sing the Bolsheviks "(p.76).
“We all learned little by little, something and somehow,” Bunin writes bitterly, “and we also only did something that had to, sometimes very ardently and very talentedly, but still for the most part like God will put on the soul... We disdained long, everyday work, the white-handed ones were, in essence, terrible. And hence, by the way, our idealism, in essence, is very lordly, our eternal opposition, criticism of everything and everyone: to criticize, after all much easier than working... What an old Russian disease this is, this languor, this boredom, this looseness - the eternal hope that some frog will come with a magic ring and do everything for you: you just have to go out onto the porch and throw it from your hand a ring on your hand!” (p.64).
The writer recalls his last visit to Petrograd in April 1917:
“There was no longer any life in Moscow, although on the part of the new rulers there was a crazy, stupid and feverish imitation of some supposedly new system, a new rank and even a parade of life. The same, but in superlatives It happened in St. Petersburg too. Meetings, sessions, rallies were going on continuously, appeals and decrees were issued one after another, the famous “direct wire” worked frantically...
Nevsky was flooded with a gray crowd, soldiers in caped greatcoats, idle workers, walking servants and all sorts of hawkers selling from stalls and cigarettes, and red bows, and obscene cards, and sweets and everything you ask. And on the sidewalks there was manure ice, there were humps and potholes. And halfway there, the cab driver suddenly said to me what many men with beards had already said:
“Now the people, like cattle without a shepherd, will screw everything up and destroy themselves.”
I asked:
- So what should we do?
- Do? - he said. - There is nothing to do now. Now the Sabbath. Now there is no government.
...But deep down in my heart I still hoped for something and still didn’t quite believe in the complete absence of a government. However, it was impossible not to believe” (p. 79).
Everything, absolutely everything irritates the writer even after October 17th:
“How viciously, how reluctantly the doorman opened the door for us! Everyone has a fierce aversion to any kind of work” (p. 37).
Even “spring is somehow cursed. The main thing is that there is no feeling at all (hereinafter italics by I.A. Bunin) of spring. And what is spring for now?” (p. 46).
Yes, Bunin perceived the Bolsheviks exclusively negatively, but it is hardly worth focusing the attention of readers on this circumstance - a lot has been said and written about this.
Much more interesting, in our opinion, are the writer’s thoughts about the causes of the catastrophe that befell his Russia.
“The spirit of materialism, unreflective will, and gross self-interest blew destruction over Rus'... The hands of the good were taken away, the hands of the evil were freed to do all sorts of evil... Crowds of outcasts, the scum of society were drawn to devastate their own home under the banners of different tribal leaders, impostors, liars, atamans from degenerates, criminals, ambitious..." (p. 115).
Do you think this is about the Bolsheviks? No, this is from Solovyov, about the Time of Troubles. But this tragic repetition national history remained ununderstood by his contemporaries and descendants. In the summer of 1917, “...the “Minister of Labor” appeared for the first time - and then all of Russia stopped working.”
(To be continued………
Something was constantly being destroyed and desecrated in the country. All this points to cynicism historical figures influencing the course of history. They did not always kill, but despite this, Russia periodically found itself knee-deep in blood. And sometimes death was the only deliverance from never-ending suffering.
The life of the population in the renewed Russia was a slow death. Having quickly destroyed values, including religious ones, created over centuries, the revolutionaries did not offer their national, spiritual wealth. But the virus of anarchy and permissiveness was actively developing, infecting everything in its path.
Chapter "Moscow 1918"
The work itself is written in the form of diary notes. This style very colorfully reflects a contemporary’s vision of the current reality. The post-revolutionary period was triumphant on the street, changes were taking place in government activities. Bunin was very worried about his homeland. This is exactly what is reflected in the lines. The author felt pain for the suffering of his people, he felt it himself in his own way.
The first entry in the diary was made in January 18. The author wrote that the damned year is already over, but the people still have no joy. He cannot imagine what awaits Russia next. There is no optimism at all. And those small gaps that do not lead to a bright future do not improve the situation at all.
Bunin notes that after the revolution, bandits were released from prison, who felt the taste of power in their guts. The author notes that having driven the king from the throne, the soldiers became even more cruel and punished everyone, indiscriminately. These hundred thousand people took power over millions. And although not all the people share the views of the revolutionaries, it is not possible to stop the insane machine of power.
Chapter "Impartiality"
Bunin did not hide the fact that he did not like revolutionary changes. At times, the public both in Russia and abroad accused him of the fact that such judgments were very subjective. Many said that only time can indicate impartiality and objectively assess the correctness revolutionary directions. To such statements, Ivan Alekseevich had one answer: “impartiality actually does not exist, and in general such a concept is incomprehensible, and his statements are directly related to terrible experiences.” Having thus a clear position, the writer did not try to please the public, but described what he saw, heard, and felt as it really is. Bunin noted that the people have every right to individual hatred, anger and condemnation of what is happening around them. After all, it is very easy to just watch what is happening from a distant corner and know that all the cruelty and inhumanity will not reach you.
Once in the thick of things, a person’s opinion changes radically. After all, you don’t know whether you will return alive today, you experience hunger every day, you are thrown out onto the street from your own apartment, and you don’t know where to go. Such physical suffering is not even comparable to mental suffering. A person realizes that his children will never see the homeland that was before. Values, views, principles, beliefs change.
Chapter “Emotions and Feelings”
The plot of the story “Cursed Days,” like the life of that time, is filled with devastation, facts of depression and intolerance. The lines and thoughts are presented in such a way that a person, after reading them, sees in all the dark colors not only negative sides, but also positive. The author notes that dark pictures, in which there are no bright colors, are perceived much more emotionally and sink deeper into the soul.
The revolution itself and the Bolsheviks, who are placed on snow-white snow, are represented as black ink. Such a contrast is painfully beautiful, at the same time causing disgust and fear. Against this background, people begin to believe that sooner or later there will be someone who can defeat the destroyer of human souls.
Chapter "Contemporaries"
The book contains a lot of information about Ivan Alekseevich’s contemporaries. Here he gives his statements and thoughts about Blok, Mayakovsky, Tikhonov and many other literary figures of that time. Most often, he condemns writers for their incorrect (in his opinion) views. Bunin cannot forgive them for bowing to the new usurper government. The author does not understand what kind of honest business can be conducted with the Bolsheviks.
He notes that Russian writers, on the one hand, are trying to fight, calling the government adventurist, betraying their views common people. On the other hand, they live as before, with Lenin posters hung on the walls and are constantly under the control of security organized by the Bolsheviks.
Some of his contemporaries openly declared that they intended to join the Bolsheviks themselves, and they did. Bunin considers them stupid people who previously exalted autocracy, and now adhere to Bolshevism. Such dashes create a kind of fence, from under which it is almost impossible for people to get out.
Chapter "Lenin"
It should be noted that the image of Lenin is described in a special way. It is imbued with strong hatred, although the author did not particularly skimp on all kinds of epithets addressed to the leader. He called him insignificant, a swindler, and even an animal. Bunin notes that various leaflets were hung around the city many times, describing Lenin as a scoundrel, a traitor who was bribed by the Germans. Bunin doesn’t really believe these rumors and considers people. Those who hung up such advertisements were simple fanatics, obsessed beyond the bounds of reason, standing on the pedestal of their adoration. The writer notes that such people never stop and always go to the end, no matter what the disastrous outcome of events.
Bunin pays special attention to Lenin as a person. He writes that Lenin was afraid of everything like fire; he imagined conspiracies against him everywhere. He was very worried that he would lose power or life and until recently did not believe that there would be victory in October.
Chapter “Russian Bacchanalia”
In his work, Ivan Alekseevich gives the answer to why such nonsense arose among the people. He relies on the well-known works of world critics at that time - Kostomarov and Solovyov. The story gives clear answers to the reasons for the occurrence of spiritual fluctuations among the people. The author notes that Russia is a typical brawler state.
Bunin presents the reader with the people as a society constantly thirsting for justice, as well as change and equality. People who wanted a better life periodically stood under the banners of impostor kings who had only selfish goals.
Although the people were of the most diverse social orientation, by the end of the bacchanalia only thieves and lazy people remained. It became completely unimportant what goals were set initially. The fact that previously everyone wanted to create a new and fair order was suddenly forgotten. The author says that ideas disappear over time, and only various slogans remain to justify the resulting chaos.
The work created by Bunin described facts from the writer’s life until January 1920. It was at this time that Bunin, together with his family members, was fleeing from new government in Odessa. Here part of the diary was lost without a trace. That is why the story ends at this stage.
In conclusion, it is worth noting the exceptional words about the Russian people. Bunin had immense respect for his people, as he was always connected by invisible threads with his homeland, with his fatherland. The writer said that in Russia there are two types of people. The first is dominance, and the second is weird fanatics. Each of these species can have a changeable character, changing their views many times.
Many critics believed that Bunin did not understand and did not love people, but this is absolutely not true. The anger arising in the writer’s soul was directed at dislike for the people’s suffering. And the reluctance to idealize the life of Russia during the period of revolutionary changes makes Bunin’s works not only literary masterpieces, but also historical information sources.
Damned days in the life of I.A. Bunina
State Committee of the Russian Federation for higher education
Khakassian State University them. N. F. Katanova
Abakan, 1995
This paper analyzes I. A. Bunin’s essay “Cursed Days” taking into account the requirements of literature programs high school and philological faculties of universities. Its goal is to help students of philology understand the complexities literary process 1918-1920s, to trace the fate of the Russian intellectual in the revolution, to delve into the essence of the problems raised by the journalism of the beginning of the century.
"Untimely thoughts" M. Gorky and "Cursed Days" by I. Bunin are among those artistic and philosophical-journalistic works in which, in living traces historical events captures the “Russian structure of the soul” during the revolution and civil war of 1917-1921, about which A. Blok spoke: “It is confused and dark at times, but behind this darkness and confusion... new ways of looking at human life will be revealed to you ..." The poet called to "stop missing out on the Russian structure of the soul that opens up new horizons." The literature of 1917-1920 responded vividly to all the events taking place in Russia; let us recall at least some names in this regard. V. Korolenko, A. Blok, S. Yesenin, V. Mayakovsky, E. Zamyatin, A. Platonov, I. Bunin...
But the “missing” did happen; it began after the revolution, when works declared anti-Soviet were banned. They were not allowed to be published because the works pointed to the negative aspects of the revolution and warned of their danger for the future of Russia. From literature and public life the novel "We" by E. Zamyatin, the collection "From the Depths", letters from V. Korolenko to A. Lunacharsky, and "Untimely Thoughts" by M. Gorky were deleted. And one can only imagine what their impact on the public and individual consciousness of people would be. Perhaps knowledge of these works in due time would have stopped the mass intoxication of people with the idea of building communism.
Understanding the state of the soul of the Russian intellectual in the revolutionary era is also hampered by the fact that the literature of those years is read and studied by few people, and is poorly studied.
As a result of ideological brainwashing, we were deprived of the opportunity to know our literature, and therefore ourselves, the peculiarities of our national character, the uniqueness of the psychology of their people. For such indifference to what is happening in revolutionary years, our people paid a high price for social, spiritual, aesthetic blindness: destruction the best people, the awakening of base instincts, the collapse of high ideals.
Apparently, it was necessary to understand the so-called " new era", the era of refusal universal human values in favor of class struggle; understand the “birth of a new man.” This was probably possible for those individuals who were able to resist ideological pressure. Life experience convinces us that a person can make forecasts, make serious predictions, if he knows how to penetrate deeply into the previous history of the country, find a vector of development in it, then he can judge the future.
Perhaps I. A. Bunin had such a worldview. His entire life and work are expressed in the words that we take as the epigraph of the work.
RUSSIA! WHO DARE TO TEACH ME LOVE FOR HER?
IN Last year of his life, on one of the sleepless January nights, I. A. Bunin wrote in a notebook: “Wonderful! You think about everything about the past, about the past, and most often all about the same thing in the past: about the lost, missed, happy, invaluable, about about his irreparable actions, stupid and even insane, about the insults he suffered because of his weaknesses, his lack of character, short-sightedness and lack of revenge for these insults, about the fact that he forgave too much, was not vindictive, and still is. “That’s all, everything will be swallowed up by the grave!” (1)
This brief confession reveals the secret of I. A. Bunin’s character and confirms the complexity of his contradictory nature, clearly revealed in “Cursed Days.” Bunin called the days of the revolution and civil war cursed.
WHAT IS THE MAIN MOTIVE OF THE BOOK?
The author was thinking about Russia, the Russian people in the most intense years of their life, so the prevailing intonation is depression, humiliation at what is happening. Bunin conveys to the reader a feeling of a national catastrophe, does not agree with the official description of the leader, historical figures, writers.
HOW COULD SUCH A BOOK EXPOSE THE TRIUMPH OF OCTOBER. TO APPEAR IN A COUNTRY OF DEVELOPED SOCIALISM?
“Cursed Days” was known to official Soviet literary criticism, and researchers of I. A. Bunin’s work had to somehow link the author’s confessions with socialist reality. The “simplest” decision was made by Literary Review, reducing “unbearably rude attacks against Lenin” - and there is no need to comment on anything. More daring critics tried to ignore "Cursed Days", without noticing or without giving them due importance. For example, A. Ninov argued that “Cursed Days” have no artistic value: “There is neither Russia nor its people here in the days of the revolution. There is only a person obsessed with hatred. This book is true only in one respect - as a frank a document of Bunin's internal break with the old liberal-democratic tradition." (2)
O. Mikhailov compared Bunin to a holy fool; who, “moving his tops, to the ringing of a stupid bell, frantically shouts blasphemies... curses the revolution” (3).
But there was also a selection of material for the 120th anniversary of the birth of “Unknown Bunin” in the literary, artistic and socio-political magazine Slovo,” which stated “the prophetic thoughts of the unforgettable Bunin, who did not hesitate to speak the lofty truth about October revolution and its leaders,” and there was the opinion of M. Aldanov, who believed that “Cursed Days” contains the best pages of everything written by the writer.
Such a diverse reflection of the “Cursed Days” in our modern literary criticism makes you pay more attention to the book, form your own opinion about the writer, who in his life overcame the brink of revolution and civil war.
Why did these days become cursed for I. A. Bunin? How did he perceive the revolution? Why didn’t his fate become similar to the fate of, say, Yesenin or Mayakovsky?
Let's try to answer these questions and others related to them by opening for analysis full text Bunin's book - Collected works of I. A. Bunin, vol. X, Damned days, "Petropolis", Berlin, 1935. (reprint edition).
"Cursed Days" was written in one of the "most beautiful literary forms" - the diary. It is in personal notes that the author is extremely sincere, laconic, and truthful. Everything that happened around him in the first days of 1918 and until June 1919 was reflected on the pages of the book.
WHAT IS I. A. BUNINA’S ATTITUDE TO THE REVOLUTION?
In general, “revolutionary times are not merciful: they beat you and you are not told to cry.” The writer reflected on the essence of the revolution, comparing these events in different countries at different times and came to the conclusion that they are “all the same, all these revolutions!” They are identical in their desire to create an abyss of new administrative institutions, to open a waterfall of decrees, circulars, to increase the number of commissars - “certainly for some reason commissars” - to establish numerous committees, unions, parties.
Bunin is sad to note that revolutions are created even new language, “consisting entirely of the most pompous exclamations mixed with the most vulgar abuse directed at the dirty remnants of a dying tyranny.” (4)
Perhaps Bunin used the most accurate definition of the essence of revolutions: “one of the most distinctive features revolution - a mad thirst for games, acting, poses, booths." (5)
For a person far from politics, many phenomena of life that were common just yesterday become inexplicable; he becomes embittered, withdraws into his own little world, and cultivates obvious vices in himself. Bunin expressed all this in one sentence: “A monkey awakens in a person.”
As we see, during the days of the revolution a person really enters a new world, but according to Bunin, this is not a “bright tomorrow”, but a Paleolithic.
On June 9, Bunin records Napoleon's statement about the revolution: "ambition gave birth to and will destroy the revolution. Freedom remains an excellent excuse to fool the crowd. The revolution fooled Russia. It is no coincidence that in 1924 Bunin dwelt in detail on the essence of the revolution and tried to prove that due to Revolutionary transformations brought about the great fall of Russia, and at the same time the fall of man in general." (4)
According to Bunin, there was no need to transform life, “for, despite all the shortcomings, Russia blossomed, grew, developed and changed in all respects with fabulous speed... There was Russia, there was a great house, bursting with all sorts of belongings, inhabited by a huge and "in every sense a powerful family, created by the blessed labors of many, many generations, sanctified by God, the memory of the past and everything that is called culture. What did they do with it?"
With pain and bitterness, Bunin states that the overthrow of the old regime was carried out “terrifyingly”, an international banner was raised over the country, “that is, claiming to be the banner of all nations and to give the world, instead of the Sinai tablets and the Sermon on the Mount, instead of the ancient divine statutes, something new and devilish. The foundations are destroyed, the gates are closed and the lamps are extinguished. But without these lamps there will be no Russian land - and one cannot criminally serve its darkness." (5)
Bunin does not deny the fact that the ideologist of the socialist revolution was V.I. Lenin.
WHAT ASSESSMENT DOES I. A. BUNIN GIVE TO THE PROLETARIAN LEADER IN THE “CURSED DAYS”?
On March 2, 1918, he makes a short entry: “Congress of Soviets. Lenin’s speech. Oh, what an animal this is!” [With. 33] And as if comparing his impressions of meeting this person, he makes two more notes. From March 13: I recorded in my diary the words of Tikhonov, “a person very close to them”: “Lenin and Trotsky decided to keep Russia tense and not stop the terror and civil war until the European proletariat appeared on the stage. They are fanatics, they believe in a world fire.. ... they dream of conspiracies everywhere... they tremble both for their power and for their lives..." [p. 39] The idea that the Bolsheviks “did not expect their victory in October” was repeatedly recorded in the diary. [With. 38, 39].
Second entry, night of April 24: “Another celebration happened in St. Petersburg then - the arrival of Lenin. “Welcome!” Gorky told him in his newspaper. And he came as another claimant to the inheritance. The richest Russia died in October 1917, and immediately crowds of heirs of the deceased “crazy with worries and orders” appeared, Bunin reckons
to them and Lenin. “His claims were very serious and frank. However, they greeted him at the station with a guard of honor and music and allowed him to squeeze into one of the best St. Petersburg houses, which, of course, did not belong to him at all.” [With. 83]
Irony and outright hostility towards Lenin is conveyed through the selection of emotionally charged verbs - “committed”, “allowed to worm my way in”. Five years later, emotions will give way to thoughtful and hard-won conclusions: “A degenerate, a moral idiot from birth, Lenin showed the world something monstrous, amazing; he ruined the greatest country in the world and killed several million people...” (b)
Comparing leaders french revolution from the Russian one, Bunin notes: “Saint-Just, Robespierre, Couthon... Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky... Who is meaner, more bloodthirsty, nastier? Of course, still the Moscow ones. But the Parisians were not bad either.” [With. 125] Bunin considers it madness to call Lenin a benefactor of humanity; he polemicizes with those who insist on the genius of the theory of the leader of the proletariat, not forgiving him even when he was dead: “On his bloody throne he was already standing on all fours; when English photographers took pictures of him, he constantly stuck out his tongue : it doesn’t mean anything, they argue! Semashko himself foolishly blurted out publicly that in the skull of this new Nebuchadnezzar they found green slurry instead of brain; on the death table, in his red coffin, he lay with a terrible grimace on his gray-yellow face: it doesn’t mean anything, they argue! And his comrades-in-arms write just like that: “He died new god, creator of the New World! "(7)
Bunin cannot forgive Lenin, a “mad and cunning maniac,” for neither the red coffin, nor the news “that the City of St. Peter is being renamed Leningrad, a truly biblical fear covers not only Russia, but also for Europe.” For Bunin, Petersburg was a special city, connecting his ideas about modern Russia with its historical past. Until recently, the city was understandable, familiar, and therefore familiar. The revolution made its own adjustments to it, and Bunin does not accept “Lenin’s cities, Lenin’s commandments” and cannot endure the Bolshevik for the sake of Russia: “It was possible to endure Batu’s headquarters, but Leningrad cannot be endured.” With the voice of Lenin, “the voice of a boor, a predator and a Komsomol member and muffled sighs” began to be heard in Russia. (7)
Bunin calls Lenin a “planetary villain”, who, covered with a banner with a mocking call for freedom, brotherhood and equality, sat high on the neck of the Russian savage and called on the whole world to trample conscience, shame, love, mercy into the dirt, to crush the tablets of Moses and Christ into dust, erect monuments to Judas and Cain, teach the “Seven Commandments of Lenin” (8).
Probably for a long time there will be no defenders of Lenin, no one willing to bring up a medical report from experts to explain the “green goo” in Lenin’s skull or his “horrible grimace on his gray-green face.” But we, teachers, will not be forgiven if we leave these phrases of Bunin without comment. Still, behind the word “Lenin” there lived a specific person, V.I. Ulyanov; his fate probably had both good and bad, like all people. Let’s deal with the memory of a person in a Christian way, forgive the dead, explain the intensity of Bunin’s emotionality with the peculiarities of the controversy, his subjective perception of what is happening in Russia: let us note for ourselves that any person has the right to love and hate and the forms of manifestation of these feelings remain on the conscience of everyone. Having rejected Lenin, rejecting the revolution, I. A. Bunin carefully peers into the life of the city. His diary presents Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa. Urban motifs determine the entire mood of “Cursed Days.” People, faces, and actions convey the revolutionary intensity of the time and the nervousness of Bunin’s perception of everything that was happening.
WHAT CHANGES DOES THE REVOLUTION MAKE INTO THE LIFE OF THE CITY, IN BUNINA'S OPINION?
The city has been represented since 1917 by “whites,” “reds,” and “street faces” in their complex relationships. Bunin notes the very different attitudes of townspeople towards the revolution. For twenty years the servant Andrei “has been invariably sweet, simple, reasonable, polite, cordial... Now he’s as if he’s gone crazy. He still serves carefully, but apparently through force, he can’t look at us, he’s all trembling internally with anger... ."(10). A black polisher with greasy hair laments that “the Tsar was imprisoned, and now you can’t fight these Bolsheviks. The people have weakened. There are only a hundred thousand of them, but there are so many millions of us and we can’t do anything” [p. 26].
Bunin is trying to answer the question, what happened? “About 600 bandy-legged boys came, led by a bunch of convicts and swindlers, who took over the richest city of a million. Everyone died from fear...” [p. 48].
Fear gripped many people because yesterday's cooks came to rule the country, appearance who are longing for yesterday’s beautiful faces, so dear to Bunin. Here is a famous speaker speaking, and Bunin looks at his listeners with disgust: “Standing idly all day with sunflowers in his fist, all day long mechanically eating these sunflowers is a deserter. Overcoat saddled, cap on the back of his head. Wide, short-legged. Calmly impudent, eats from time to time asks questions for a long time and does not believe a single answer, suspects lies in everything. And it physically hurts from disgust for him, for his thick thighs in thick winter khaki, for calf eyelashes, for the milk from chewed sunflowers on young, animal-primitive lips." [With. 57].
Unlikable to Bunin new owner country, he is not picky about food, although he screams from stomach cramps after “horrible pea bread”, and if he eats sausage, he “tears pieces right off with his teeth”, he demands that the bourgeoisie be banned from going to theaters, because “we don’t go”( 9).
“At the demonstrations there are banners, posters, music - and some go into the forest, some drink hundreds of firewood: “Get up, rise up, working people!” The voices are uterine, primitive, the faces are all criminal, some are straight out of Sakhalin” [p. 28].
Bunin believes that “as soon as the city becomes “red,” the crowd filling the streets immediately changes dramatically.” There is no routine or simplicity on their faces. All of them, almost entirely, are repulsive, frightening with their evil stupidity, with some kind of gloomy, servile challenge to everyone and everything" [p. 73].
He sees the revolutionary sailors from St. Petersburg, “heirs of a colossal inheritance,” as maddened by drunkenness, cocaine, and self-will. “I somehow physically feel people,” L.N. Tolstoy wrote to himself. Bunin said the same thing about himself: “They didn’t understand this in Tolstoy, they don’t understand it in me either, which is why they are sometimes surprised at my passionate “bias.” For the majority, even to this day, “people”, “proletariat” are just words, but for me it’s always eyes, mouths, the sounds of voices; for me, a speech at a rally is the whole nature that pronounces it” [p. 52]. For Bunin, the faces of the Red Army soldiers, the Bolsheviks, who sympathized with them, are completely bandit: “The Romans put brands on the faces of their convicts. There is no need to put anything on these faces, and you can see without any brand” [p. 28]. For Bunin, any revolutionary is a bandit. In general, he quite accurately captured the real problem of the Russian revolution - the participation of the criminal element in it: “They let criminals out of prison, so they rule us, but they should not be released, but long ago they should have been shot with a filthy gun” [p. 26].
The demonic red color irritates Bunin; the May Day festive spectacles “literally turn his whole soul upside down” [p. 51], red flags drooping from the rain are “especially vile.” Every reminder of past life gives a feeling of lightness, youth: “And in the cathedral they were married, sang women's choir. I came in and, as always, Lately, this church beauty, this island of the “old” world in the sea of dirt, meanness and baseness of the “new” was incredibly moving. What an evening sky in the windows! In the altar, in the depths, the windows were already lilac blue. Sweet girlish faces of those singing in the choir, white veils on their heads with a golden cross on the forehead, notes and golden lights of little ones in their hands wax candles- everything was so lovely that listening and looking, I cried a lot. And along with this - what melancholy, what pain!" [p. 68]. Beauty remained for Bunin in his former life, everything is falling apart, no one sees the plan for creation. The terrible feeling of losing his homeland is felt in the phrase recorded on April 12, 1919: " Our children and grandchildren will not be able to even imagine the Russia in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understand - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness" [p. 44 ].
The new owners who have appeared are rude, fraudulent, narrow-minded, and ignorant. They will survive in the revolutionary turmoil, thanks to their indiscriminateness in choosing a life ideal. The Soviet government does not allow an unemployed person from the people to perish from hunger: “They say there are no places, but here are two search warrants for you, you can make a great profit” [p. thirty]. It’s hard for Bunin in such an environment, he understands people who yesterday were still involved in culture, today they are sick from rudeness and ignorance, but trying to somehow behave with dignity: “A young officer entered the tram car and, blushing, said that he “can’t, unfortunately,” to pay for a ticket (9). Many of Bunin’s acquaintances serve on the board at “Agitprosvet.” The board is called upon to ennoble art, but for now “it takes rations of moldy bread, rotten herrings, rotten potatoes” [p. 135]. it turns out that the Bolsheviks have strengthened, and the others have weakened, “look how the former gentleman or lady is now walking down the street: dressed in anything, his collar is wrinkled, his cheeks are not shaved, and the lady without stockings, on her bare feet, carries a bucket of water across the whole city drags - no one cares, they say" [p. 164]. The author bitterly states: "How amazingly quickly everyone gave up, lost heart!" It is unbearably hard to see the pale old general in silver glasses and a black hat, he is trying to then sell it and “stand timidly, modestly, like a beggar." How to survive the blindly ruining new government: “I worked all my life, somehow managed to buy a piece of land, got into debt with real blood pennies to build a house - and now it turns out that it’s a house" people's" that some "workers" will live there with your family, with your whole life [p. 54].
With dull melancholy, Bunin writes a postscript: “You can hang yourself from rage!”
A. Blok, V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin are trying to somehow catch the sprouts of a new life in the gloomy revolutionary everyday life. In I. Bunin’s words, “Russia went crazy” in October 1917, because it experienced thousands of brutal and senseless people’s lynchings, “the greatest trampling and dishonor of all foundations in the world.” human existence, which began with the murder of Dukhonin and the “obscene peace” in Brest.” “In a silent reproach to yesterday’s Russia, a military giant in a magnificent gray overcoat, tightly tied with a good belt, rises above the “red heirs”, in a gray round military cap, as worn by Alexander the Third. He is all large, purebred, with a shiny brown beard like a shovel, and holds the Gospel in his gloved hand. A complete stranger to everyone, the last of the Mohicans" [p. 23]. Next to him, the red officer typical of Bunin looks like a pygmy: "a boy of about twenty, his face is all bare, shaved, his cheeks are sunken, his pupils are dark and dilated; not lips, but some kind of vile sphincter, almost entirely gold teeth; on the chick's body there is a tunic with officer's marching belts over the shoulders, on thin, skeletal legs - the most depraved bladder-breeches and dandy, thousand-thousand boots, on the fire - a ridiculously huge Browning" [p. 153]
So in “Cursed Days” another problem is outlined - BUNINS PERCEPTION OF THE “RED” BY “WHITES”: “You cannot blaspheme the people.” But “whites”, of course, are possible. Everything is forgiven to the people, to the revolution, - “all these are just excesses. And for the “whites”, from whom everything has been taken away, abused, raped, killed - their homeland, native cradles and graves, mothers, fathers, sisters - “of course, there will be excesses.” should not" [p. 73]. The "Soviets" are compared with Kutuzov - "the world has never seen more impudent swindlers" [p. 14].
WHY DOES BUNIN STAND IN DEFENSE OF “WHITES”? BECAUSE YOU ARE FROM THEIR ENVIRONMENT?
The author of "Cursed Days" notes how with the advent Soviet power the creation of centuries is collapsing: “Russian mail ended in the summer of 17, since the first time, in a European manner, we had a Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. Then the Minister of Labor appeared - and then Russia stopped working” [p. 44]. “Everyone has a fierce aversion to work” [p. 36]. Russia itself began to crumble before Bunin’s eyes “precisely in those days when brotherhood, equality, and freedom were proclaimed” [p. 44]. Therefore, Bunin demands a unified moral trial of “ours” and “not ours”; what is a crime for one side is also criminal for the other. In a divided public consciousness"white" Bunin defends universal human rights moral ideals: "Attack any an old house where a large family lived for decades, kill or take over the owners, housekeepers, servants, take over family archives, start analyzing them and generally searching about the life of this family - how much dark, sinful, unrighteous will be revealed, what a terrible picture can be drawn, and especially with a certain bias, if you want to disgrace at any cost, put every bast in line! So the old Russian house was taken completely by surprise" [p. 137].
Shout: we are people too! - runs through the entire book. Bunin’s hatred for the “Reds” knows no bounds, he ferociously longs for their destruction from Gurko, Kolchak, the Germans and lives in the hope that “something will certainly happen at night, and you pray so frantically, so hard, so intensely, to the point of pain.” the whole body, which seems, cannot help but be helped by God, a miracle, heavenly powers... someone, perhaps, attacked the city - and the end, the collapse of this damned life! "[p. 59]. A miracle does not happen, the next morning there are still the same “street faces” and “again stupidity, hopelessness,” “in their world, in the world of a total boor and beast, I don’t need anything,” Bunin states. In Russia, distraught from revolutions, the writer hears everywhere: “the people who gave Pushkin, Tolstoy...”, he is offended: “And the whites are not the people? And the Decembrists, but the famous Moscow University, the first Narodnaya Volya, the State Duma? And the editors of famous magazines? the whole flower of Russian literature? And its heroes? No country in the world has given such nobility" [p. 74]. Bunin does not agree with the “decomposition of the whites” formula. What monstrous audacity to say this after the unprecedented “decay” in the world that the “red” people showed.” [p. 74].
Bunin has many reasons to hate the “Reds”, comparing them with the Whites. In the entry dated April 24 we read: “The youngest of the tenants, a modest and timid man, took the rank of commissar out of fear, began to tremble at the words “revolutionary tribunal.” He had to carry out the order to compact the apartment with the proletariat: “All the rooms of the whole city are being measured, damned monkeys" [p. 94]. Another mockery, during which Bunin “did not utter a word, lay silently on the sofa,” resulted in palpable pain near the left nipple.” The heartache, of course, is not only from the fact that yesterday’s quiet neighbor is taking away housing today, but from the fact that blatant injustice is happening: “Under the protection of such sacred revolutionary words (“revolutionary tribunal” - V.L.) one can so boldly to walk knee-deep in blood, which thanks to them even the most reasonable and decent revolutionaries, who are indignant at ordinary robbery, theft, murder, who understand perfectly well that they need to tie up, drag to the police the tramp who grabbed a passerby by the throat IN NORMAL TIMES, with delight choke in front of this tramp, if he does the same thing IN A TIME CALLED REVOLUTIONARY, there is always a tramp absolutely right to say that he carries out “the wrath of the lower classes, the victims of social justice” [p. 95].
“The victims took out furniture, carpets, paintings, flowers, robbed the “whites” of their property, and committed horrific atrocities. Bunin constantly felt the need to restrain himself “so as not to rush madly at the screaming crowd” [p. 32].
The moral filth of the townspeople is combined with street squalor: “there was rubbish and sunflower husks on the sidewalks, and manure ice, humps and potholes on the pavement.” Human warmth was felt in the bustle of the city even through the cab drivers: you could talk to the driver, admire the well-groomed and decorated horse. The Bolsheviks who came are devoid of cordiality, sincerity, they are more suited to driving cold cars, so the city of Bunin rumbles with overcrowded trucks and is replete with red flags on speeding government cars. The revolution entered the city on a truck: “The truck - what a terrible symbol it has remained for us!.. From its very first day, the revolution was associated with this roaring and stinking animal...” [p. 56]. Coarseness modern culture Bunin perceived it the same way through the truck.
The city never tired of striking the writer with everyday cruelty, with its BLACK INJUSTICE: the famous artist was dying in a shirt blackened by dirt, scary as a skeleton, lousy, surrounded by doctors with burning splinters in their hands; the old neighbor, stealthily, raking it out of the jar with his finger, gobbled up the ointment for rubbing in; another neighbor was taken out of the noose, a note was clutched in his petrified hand: “There will be no end to Lenin’s reign”; the family of a famous scientist was given a corner in the hallway behind the cabinets in their former house, “captured long ago and inhabited by men and women. There is dirt on the floor, the walls are torn, smeared with bedbug blood” (9).
Science, art, technology, every little bit of human labor that creates anything - everything perished: “The skinny cows of Pharaoh’s fat ones devoured them and not only did they not become fat, but they themselves died. Now in the village mothers scare their children like this: “Tsits!” Otherwise I’ll send you to Odessa to join the commune!” [p. 153].
HOW DID THE VILLAGE RECEIVE THE REVOLUTION?
Bunin believes that the revolutionary fire that engulfed the city might not have touched the village: “After all, in the village there was still some reason, some shame” [p. 84]. The men viewed soldiers fleeing from the front with passion: “Why haven’t you fought enough?” - a man shouted behind him, “Well, did you put on a government-issued hat and government-issued trousers to sit at home?” I'm glad you don't have a boss now, you scoundrel! Why did your father and mother feed you?" This question arose more than once with all its philosophical acuteness before the author himself.
The entire Bunin family had to suffer under the new government: Evgeniy Alekseevich wasted his talent as a portrait artist in a peasant’s hut with a collapsed roof, where, for a pound of rotten flour, he painted portraits of yesterday’s slaves in a frock coat and top hat, which they got from robbing their masters. “Evgeny Alekseevich paid with his life for the portraits of the Vasek Zhokhovs: he once went for something, probably for the rotten flour of some other Valka, fell along the road and gave his soul to God.” Julius Alekseevich died in Moscow: a beggar, starving, barely alive physically and mentally from the “color and smell of a new squall,” he was placed in some kind of almshouse “for elderly intelligent workers.” Maria Alekseevna “died under the Bolsheviks in Rostov-on-Don” (10).
Native Nikolskoye collapsed in the shortest possible time. The former gardener, “a forty-year-old red-haired man, smart, kind, neat,” in three years “turned into a decrepit old man with a beard pale with gray, a face yellow and swollen from hunger,” asked to be placed somewhere, not realizing that Bunin was now not a master. In the diary dated March 1st there is an entry: “The men are returning the loot to the landowners” [p. 31]. Bunin himself received a letter from a village teacher in 1920, who, on behalf of the peasants, offered to “settle in your native ashes, renting their former estate and living in good neighborly relations... now no one will lay a finger on you,” he added. Bunin, with a sinking heart, rode to his native “ashes”: “It was very strange to see everything that was before, one’s own, someone else’s... it’s strange to look at all these people who were so brutally savage during the five-year muzhik rule... to enter that the house where he was born, grew up, spent almost his entire life, and where now there were as many as three new families: women, men, children, bare darkened walls, the primitive emptiness of the rooms, trampled dirt on the floor, troughs, tubs, cradles, beds of straw and torn piebald blankets... The glass of the windows... looked as if they were covered with black lace - that’s how the flies sat there” (I).
The village men reacted sympathetically to the arrival of the former owner, and the women “declared without any embarrassment: “We won’t leave the house!” And Bunin immediately realized, “that I really somehow brazenly and stupidly got into this house, into this someone else’s life. Spent in my former estate two days and left, knowing that I was now leaving forever" [p. 12]. Now the estate has disappeared from the face of the earth; there is no house, no garden, not a single linden tree on the main alley, not a hundred-year-old birch trees, not Bunin's beloved maple...
For what was destroyed and desecrated, Bunin brings the bill not only to the revolutionaries, but also to the people. In his writings about the people, he is harsh and unsentimental, just as there is no sentimentality in his pre-revolutionary stories “Sukhodol” and “Village”.
HOW DOES BUNIN SEE THE PEOPLE TRANSFORMED BY THE REVOLUTION AS A WHOLE?
"Evil people!" - he notes in the fall of 1917. Note that the writer himself is angry. “I will never forget, I will turn over in my grave!” This is how he reacts to a sailor’s cap, wide flares and the play of nodules on his cheekbones. Intellectuals of the Bunin type cannot be like that, “and if we can’t, it’s the end of us! It’s high time for all of us to hang ourselves, - so we are downtrodden, for Mordovans, deprived of all rights and laws, we live in such vile slavery, amid incessant bullying. That’s what my bloodthirstiness and that’s the whole point” [p. 69].
However, it would be unfair to talk only about hatred of the people. He himself admitted: “If I didn’t love this Rus', didn’t see it, why would I have gone so crazy all these years, why would I have suffered so continuously and so fiercely?” [With. 62].
The essence of the Russian tragedy is that brother stood up against brother, son against father.
WHAT DOES BUNIN SEE AS THE SOURCES OF PEOPLE'S DISCOVERY?
In disregard for HISTORY LESSONS. To his stories about the people, Bunin took as an epigraph the words of I. Aksakov “Hasn’t passed yet Ancient Rus'!" He proceeded from the premise of the professor and historian Klyuchevsky about the extreme "repetition" of Russian history. Exploring the pattern of repeatability of history in his diaries, Bunin found the following lines in Tatishchev: "Brother against brother, sons against fathers, slaves against masters, seeking to kill each other in one for the sake of greed, lust and power, seeking brother to deprive brother of property, not knowing, as the wise one says: seeking someone else’s, on that day he will weep for his own...” There were already lessons, but the trouble is that no one wanted to study “Russian history "Tatishchev and today" how many fools are convinced that in Russian history there was a great shift to something completely new, hitherto unprecedented” [p. 57].
The people, according to Bunin, were of two types: “Rus predominates in one, Chud in the other.” The people said to themselves: “from us, like from wood, there is both a club and an icon, depending on the circumstances, on the who processes this wood: Sergei Rodonezhsky or Emelka Pugachev" [p. 62]
To Bunin’s great regret, no one paid attention to these history lessons. And, meanwhile, N.I. Kostomarov wrote about Stenka Razin: “The people followed Stenka, not really understanding much. Complete robbery was allowed. Stenka and his army were drunk with wine and blood. They hated laws, society, religion, everything , which constrained personal motives..., breathed revenge and envy... were made up of fugitive thieves, lazy people. Stenka promised complete freedom to all this bastard and rabble, but in reality he took them into complete slavery, the slightest disobedience was punished by death..." [ With. 115].
Academician S. M. Solovyov warned in “History of Russia since Ancient Times”, describing “ Time of Troubles": "Among the spiritual darkness of a young, unbalanced people, dissatisfied everywhere, unrest, hesitation, and instability arose especially easily. And so they appeared again. The spirit of thoughtless will, of crude self-interest breathed destruction upon Rus'... The hands of the good were taken away, the hands of the evil were freed to do all sorts of evil. Crowds of outcasts, the scum of society, flocked to devastate their own home under the banner of impostors, false kings..., criminals, ambitious people" [p. 115].
The people did not take a closer look at the “liberation movement,” which, according to Bunin, “was done with amazing frivolity, with an indispensable, obligatory optimism. And everyone” put on laurel wreaths on lousy heads", according to Dostoevsky" [p. 113].
Bunin agrees with A.I. Herzen, who stated that “our misfortune is the dissolution of practical and theoretical life: “Didn’t many know that revolution is only a bloody game, always ending only in the fact that the people, even if they succeeded for some time to sit, feast and rage in the master's place, will always end up falling from the frying pan into the fire" [p. 113]. According to Bunin, smart and cunning leaders in modern times came up with a tempting trap for the people, making a camouflage sign over it: " Freedom, fraternity, equality, socialism, communism." And inexperienced youth "simply" responded to the "Holy motto forward" and created the revolutionary chaos of 1917. Bunin did not doubt the well-read and educated leader of the proletariat, therefore, summing up the analysis of the lessons of history, he writes: “I can’t believe that the Lenins didn’t know and didn’t take all this into account!” [p. 115].
Bunin’s analysis of the history of Russia allows him to declare that from Chudi, from these very Russians, since ancient times famous for their ANTI-SOCIALITY, who gave so many “daring robbers”, so many tramps..., tramps, it was from them that we recruited the beauty, pride and hope of the Russian SOCIAL revolution", (emphasized by the author V.L.) [p. 165].
In the past of Russia, Bunin saw continuous sedition, and insatiable ambition, and a fierce thirst for power, and deceptive kissing of the cross, and flight to Lithuania and Crimea “to raise the filthy ones to their own Father's house", but post-revolutionary existence cannot be compared with the past: "Every Russian revolt (and especially the current one) first of all proves how old everything is in Rus' and how much it craves, first of all, FORMlessness. There was a holy man, there was also a builder... but in what a long and constant struggle they were with the destroyer, with all sorts of sedition, quarrel, “bloody confusion and absurdity!” [With. 165]. Bunin concludes: “Rus is a classic country of brawlers.” He even cites contemporary criminal anthropology data on accidental and natural-born criminals, classifying Stepan Razin and Lenin among the latter (pale faces, large cheekbones, deep-set eyes): “In Peaceful time they are in prisons, in yellow houses. But now the time comes when the “sovereign people” triumphed. The doors of prisons and yellow houses open, the archives of the detective departments are burned - an orgy begins. The Russian bacchanalia surpassed all that had come before it..." [p. 160]. Prophetically, Bunin predicted a "new long-term struggle" with "born criminals" - the Bolsheviks: "I bought a book about the Bolsheviks. The terrible gallery of convicts 1" [p. 42].
Bunin suggests that he even discovered the secret of the people's madness in the revolution. Madness, which descendants should not forgive, “but everything will be forgiven, everything will be forgotten,” because people lack “real sensitivity”: “This is the whole hellish secret of the Bolsheviks - to kill sensitivity. People live by measure, and sensitivity, imagination, are measured by it, - go beyond the limit. It’s like the price of bread, beef. “What? Three ruble pounds!?" And assign a thousand - and the end of amazement, screaming. Tetanus, insensibility" [p. 67]. And then Bunin argues by analogy: seven hanged? No, seven hundred. “And certainly tetanus - you can still imagine seven hanging, but try seven hundred...” [p. 67].
Due to the people's confusion, a huge, centuries-old life suddenly ended throughout Russia and "causeless idleness, unnatural freedom from everything that lives" reigned. human society"[p. 78]. The people stopped raising bread and building houses, instead of normal human life“an imitation of some supposedly new system, crazy in its stupidity and fever,” began: meetings, meetings, rallies began, decrees poured out, the “direct line” began ringing, and everyone rushed to command. The streets were filled with “idle workers, walking servants and all sorts of hawkers selling cigarettes from stalls, and red bows, and obscene cards, and sweets...” [p. 79]. The people became like “cattle without a shepherd, they will screw up everything and destroy themselves.”
“There was Russia! Where is it now...” is the running theme of the book “Cursed Days.” To the question "who is to blame?" Bunin replies: “The people.” And at the same time he places a lot of blame for what is happening on the intelligentsia. Bunin quite historically accurately determined that the intelligentsia at all times provoked the people to the barricades, but they themselves turned out to be unable to organize a new life. Already in 1918, he declared: “It was not the people who started the revolution, but you. The people did not care at all about everything we wanted, what we were dissatisfied with. Don’t lie to the people - they needed your responsible ministries, replacing the Shcheglovitykhs with Malyantovichs and the abolition of all kinds of censorship. , like summer snow, and he proved it firmly and cruelly, throwing the provisional government to hell, and constituent Assembly and "everything for which generations of the best died Russian people"as you put it..."
WHAT IS BUNINA'S ASSESSMENT OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE IN THE REVOLUTION?
Bunin sympathizes with the intelligentsia and reproaches them for political myopia: “What are our old eyes! How little they saw!” [With. 108]. The writer considers the years 17 and 18 to be borderline years for the intelligentsia: “Millions of people have gone through this corruption and humiliation over these years. And all our time will become a legend” [p. 127].
Bunin reproaches, first of all, the intelligentsia for not seeing an individual person behind “humanity” and “the people.” Even aid to the famine was carried out “theatrically”, “literarily”, only in order to “kick the government once again.” “It’s scary to say,” Bunin writes on April 20, 1918, “but it’s true: if it weren’t for the people’s disasters, thousands of intellectuals would be downright miserable people. How then can they sit down, protest, what can they write and shout about? And without this, life wouldn’t be possible.” " [With. 63]. A theatrical attitude to life did not allow the intelligentsia, according to Bunin’s conclusions, to be more attentive to the soldiers during the war. The “soldiers” were treated as objects of amusement: they cooed with them in the infirmaries, pampered them with rolls, sweets, even ballet dancing. They played “grateful,” and the soldiers pretended to be meek, submissively suffering, and agreed with the sisters, ladies, and reporters. Mutual flirting destroyed faith in the truth, everyone stopped feeling, acting, and became indifferent. "Where does this indifference come from?" - Bunin asks himself a question. And he answers: “... from our inherent carelessness, frivolity, lack of habit and unwillingness to be serious in the most serious moments. Just think how carelessly, carelessly, even festively all of Russia reacted to the beginning of the revolution” [p. 63].
The intelligentsia, along with the peasants, lived with their bast shoes raised, with complete carelessness, “fortunately, the needs were savagely limited”: “We disdained long everyday work, the white-handed ones were, in essence, terrible, and hence our idealism, very lordly, our eternal opposition, criticism of everything and everyone: it’s much easier to criticize than to work” [p. 64].
WHERE DO THE INTELLIGENTSIA HAVE SUCH A LIGHTWEIGHT ATTITUDE TO LIFE?
Bunin believes that the system of upbringing and education is to blame for this: “The literary approach to life simply poisoned us. What, for example, did we do with the enormous and varied life that Russia lived? last century? They broke it down, divided it into decades - twenties, thirties, forties, sixties, each decade defined it literary hero: Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin, Bazarov..." [p. 92]. Bunin adds to them his Nikolka from "The Village" and emphasizes that what they have in common is that they are all languishing and waiting " of this work". This is a kind of Russian nervous disease, this languor, this boredom, this spoilage - the eternal hope that some frog will come with a magic ring and do everything for you" [p. 64].
“Literary” education is frivolous, just as ideals are frivolous: “Isn’t this a joke for the chickens, especially if you remember that these heroes (Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin, Bazarov) were one “eighteen” years old, the other nineteen, the third, the oldest, twenty!" [With. 92].
These modern youths took up, like a banner, “The Workers’ Marseillaise”, “Warsaw”, “The International”, “everything evil, insidious to the extreme, deceitful to the point of nausea, flat and wretched beyond belief,” comments Bunin. Entire generations of boys and girls, who hammered Ivanyukov and Marx, came up with an occupation for themselves - “building” the future. They tinkered with secret printing houses, collected pennies for the Red Cross, and read literary texts Mayakovsky, Blok, Voloshin and “shamelessly pretended that they were dying of love for the Pakhoms and Sidors and constantly kindled in themselves hatred for the landowner, for the manufacturer, for the inhabitants, for all these “bloodsuckers, spiders, oppressors, despots, satraps, philistines, knights of darkness and violence!" [p. 99].
The intelligentsia could subscribe to the words of A. I. Herzen: “I did nothing, because I always wanted to do more than usual” [p. 64].
But Bunin also recognizes the importance of the intelligentsia: “With us, humanity is sobering up... With our disappointment, our suffering, we relieve the next generation from the sorrows” [p. 65], only this process is very, very long, “sobering up is still far away...”
At birth new intelligentsia, in the education of the worker, “the flower of the nation,” Bunin does not believe and does not want to deal with the “forge of personnel”: “We must also prove that you cannot sit next to the emergency, where almost every hour someone’s head is broken, and educate about” the latest achievements in the instrumentation of poetry, some KRYAPU (emphasis added by me - V.L.) with hands wet from sweat. Let leprosy strike her to the seventy-seventh generation, if she is even “interested” in poetry! Isn’t it extreme horror that I have to prove, for example, that it is better to die a thousand times from hunger than to teach this bogeyman iambs and trochees..."Bunin explains his hostility to the new literary elite by the fact that he sees its purpose in glorifying robbery , robbery and violence.
We have come to another important problem raised by Bunin in “Cursed Days”, the place of the writer in the literature of the 20s.
HOW DOES BUNIN EVALUATE CONTEMPORARY LITERATORS?
During the period of revolutionary transformations, the writer notices a breakdown of the previous literary canons, a metamorphosis in the writing talents themselves: “In Russian literature now there are only “geniuses”. An amazing harvest! The genius of Brasov, the genius of Gorky, the genius of Igor Severyanin, Blok, Bely... so easily and quickly you can jump out into genius... and everyone strives to push forward with his shoulder, to stun, to attract attention" [p. 76].
Bunin recalls the statement of A.K. Tolstoy: “When I remember the beauty of our history before the damned Mongols, I want to throw myself on the ground and roll in despair” and bitterly notes: “In Russian literature yesterday there were Pushkins, Tolstoys, and now almost only “damned Mongols” [p. 77].
Writers of the older generation did not accept the “depths of thought” of Gorky and Andreev. Tolstoy believed that they were sinning with complete nonsense (“what is in their heads, all these Bryusovs, Belys”). “Now success in literature is achieved only by stupidity and arrogance” [p. 90]. The Russian intellectual A.P. Chekhov admitted to Bunin that after reading two pages of Andreev, he felt the need to walk in the fresh air for two hours.
Bunin laments that literature is judged by ignorant people, reviews of masters “don’t put a penny on the word,” and how often the writer dreams of the day of vengeance and a general, all-human curse on the present day: “What can you believe in now, when such an unspeakable terrible truth about a person?" [p. 91]
The most famous tradition of Russian literature of feelings good lyre to awaken the trampled, poetry began to serve base feelings: “A new literary baseness, below which, it seems, there is nowhere to fall, has opened in the tavern “Musical Snuffbox” - speculators, sharpers, public girls are sitting, eating pies for a hundred rubles each, drinking hypocrites from teapots , and poets and fiction writers (Alyoshka Tolstoy, Bryusov, etc.) read to them their own and other people’s works, choosing the most obscene ones” [p. 32].
Bunin’s contemporary literature amazes him with its deceitfulness, pretentiousness, “exhausts” him with “observation” and such an excessive “nationality” of the language and the whole manner of telling in general that he wants to spit” [p. 33]. But no one wants to notice this; on the contrary, everyone admires it.
Literature will help glorify the “cursed days,” Bunin suggests, and above all “that most harmful tribe on earth called poets, in which for every one true saint there are always ten thousand empty-headed saints, degenerates and charlatans” [p. 91].
Among them, Bunin includes the hated singer of the revolution, V. Mayakovsky, whom he more than once calls the Idiot Polyphemovich (the one-eyed Polyphemus intended to devour Odysseus who wandered towards him - V.L.). Mayakovsky feels comfortable in the new conditions, possessing “boorish independence, Stoeros-like directness of judgment”, wearing the clothes of “badly shaven individuals living in nasty rooms” (4). “Mayakovsky sensed in his gut what the Russian feast of those days would soon turn into; it was not for nothing that Mayakovsky called himself a futurist, that is, a man of the future: the polythemic future of Russia belonged to them, the Mayakovskys” [p. 83].
Bunin believes that the revolution broke the enthusiastic Gorky. "Honor to the madman who will bring a golden dream to humanity." How Gorky loved to growl! And the whole dream is about breaking the head of the manufacturer, turning out his pockets and becoming an even worse bitch than this manufacturer” [p. 50].
In the revolution, Bryusov “is constantly moving to the left, almost a full-fledged Bolshevik: in 1904 he extolled autocracy, in 1905 he wrote “The Dagger”, from the beginning of the war with the Germans he became a jingoist, it is not surprising that now he is a Bolshevik.”
The writer is indignant at the phrase he read: “The bloc hears Russia and the revolution like the wind.” From everywhere there are a flurry of reports about Jewish pogroms, murders, robbery, and “this is called according to the Bloks, “the people are embraced by the music of the revolution - listen, listen to the music of the revolution” [p. 127]. Instead of condemning what is happening, Bunin believes, “people are wise and philosophize about Blok: indeed, his hawks, who killed a street wench, are the apostles..." [p. 91]. "Oh, verbiage," he notes on this occasion in another entry, "Rivers of blood, a sea of tears, and to them everything no matter" [p. 49].
Refuels new literature and the culture of “the reptile Lunacharsky, under whose leadership even a holiday turns into a “booth” with chariots painted in paper flowers, ribbons and flags.” The revolution introduced nonsense and bad taste into literature and culture.
WHAT MAKES BUNIN STAND OUT IN THE PRESS?
Gorkovskaya " New life": "From today on, even for the most naive simpleton it becomes clear that... about the most basic honesty in relation to politics people's commissars there is no need to talk. Before us is a company of adventurers who, for the sake of their own interests, are committing outrages on the vacant throne of the Romanovs" [p. 7].
“Power of the People”, editorial: “The terrible hour has come - Russia is perishing...” [p. 8].
Next to these newspaper excerpts, there is a reflection on the words from the Bible: “The wicked are among my people,... they set traps and ensnare people. And my people love this. Listen, earth: behold, I will bring destruction upon this people, fruit their thoughts..." Amazing..." [p. 12].
In Izvestia the Soviets are compared to Kutuzov.
From the editorial office of Russian Vedomosti: “Trotsky is a German spy” [p. 29].
Kolchak was recognized by the Entente as the Supreme Ruler of Russia.
In Izvestia there is an obscene article “Tell us, you bastard, how much have you been given?” [With. 142].
“The Communist” writes “about the unheard of, panicky flight of the Red Army from Denikin [p. 168].
Every day, unfolding the newspaper with “jumping hands,” Bunin felt that he was “simply dying from this life, both physically and mentally” [p. 162]. Newspapers pushed him to Europe: “I need to leave, I can’t bear this life - physically” [p. 36].
There were hopes that the Bolsheviks would be destroyed by the Germans, Denikin, Kolchak, but they melted away, and then passionate desire go to a foreign land. In Russia, even native speech became alien, “a completely new language was formed, entirely consisting of the most pompous exclamations mixed with the most vulgar abuse addressed to the dirty remnants of a dying tyranny” [p. 45], “the Bolshevik jargon is completely intolerable” [p. 71].
“How many poets and prose writers make the Russian language sickening, taking precious folk tales, fairy tales, “golden words” and shamelessly passing them off as their own, desecrating them by retelling them in their own way and with their own additions, rummaging through regional dictionaries and compiling some kind of obscene language from them? in its arch-Russianism a mixture that no one has ever spoken in Rus' and which is even impossible to read!” [With. 123].
Bunin left his homeland with tears, “he cried with such terrible and abundant tears that he could not even imagine... he cried with tears of fierce grief and some kind of painful delight, leaving behind both Russia and his entire former life, having crossed the new Russian border, having escaped from this flooded sea of terrible, unfortunate people who had lost all human image, violently, with some kind of hysterical passion, screaming savages, with whom all the stations were flooded, where all the platforms and paths from Moscow to Orsha itself were literally filled with vomit and feces... " [With. 169].
Bunin was a convinced anti-communist until the end of his days; this is a fact, not a reproach or accusation. “Cursed Days” conveys the intensity of hatred that burned Russia during the days of the revolution. This is a book of curses, retribution and revenge, and in temperament, bile and rage it surpasses much of what is written by “white journalism”, because even in his frenzy, Bunin remains a magnificent artist. He managed to convey his pain, his agony of exile in his diary. Boundless internal honesty, self-esteem, inability to compromise with one’s conscience - all this contributed to the truthfulness of the depiction of reality: the white terror is equal in strength and cruelty to the red one.
Strange as it may seem, Bunin was deeply statesman. He passionately wanted to see Russia strong, beautiful, independent, and the picture of life pricked his eyes, convinced him of the death of the country.
Bunin was unable to adapt to new Russia, for him it was tantamount to abandoning himself. Hence the directness of judgment in “Cursed Days,” which manifested itself in the subsequent years of his life (“Fadeev, perhaps, is no less a scoundrel than Zhdanov,” 1946; “the fascists have a complete absence of such “old-fashioned concepts” as honor and conscience , Law and Ethics, 1940; Hitler lies about establishing new Europe for thousands of years", 1941; "The Japanese, as scoundrels are supposed to be, attacked without warning", 1941; "Only a crazy cretin can think that he will reign over Russia", 1942.
Last diary entry dated May 2, 1953: “This is still amazing to the point of tetanus! In a very short time, I will be gone - and the affairs and fate of everything, everything will be unknown to me.”
In "Cursed Days" Bunin reveals to us a page in the history of Russia, eliminates the blind spots of part of the literature and spirituality of the creature.
Bibliography
V. Lavrov. I carried the banner of love high. Moscow, - 1986, - N6, p. 104
A. Vasilevsky. Devastation. New World, - N2, p. 264.
O. Mikhailov. "Cursed days" by Bunin Moscow, - 1989, p. 187.
I. Bunin. Mission of Russian emigration Slovo, - 1990, - N10, p. 67.
I. Bunin. Ibid., page 68.
I. Bunin. Ibid., page 68.
I. Bunin. Ibid., page 68.
I. Bunin. Ibid., page 69.
I. Bunin. Hegel, tailcoat, meshel. Word, - 1990, - N10, p. 65.
I. Bunin. Ibid., page 66.
I. Bunin. Under the hammer and sickle. Word, - 1990, - N10, p. 62.
I. Bunin. There, p. 62.
We present to you a review of the work of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin “Cursed Days” - summary the main events he writes about in his diary in 1918. This book was first published in 1926.
In 1918-1920, Bunin recorded his impressions and observations regarding the events taking place in our country at that time in the form of diary notes.
Moscow records
So, on January 1, 1918 in Moscow, he wrote that this “damned year” was over, but perhaps something “even more terrible” was coming.
On February 5 of the same year he notes that they introduced a new style, so it must already be the 18th.
On February 6, a note was written that the newspapers were talking about the German offensive, the monks were breaking ice on Petrovka, and passers-by were gloating and celebrating.
History in a tram car
A young officer entered the tram car and said, blushing, that he could not pay for the ticket. It was the critic Derman who fled from Simferopol. According to him, there is “indescribable horror”: workers and soldiers are walking “knee-deep in blood”; they roasted an old colonel alive in a locomotive furnace.
Bunin writes that, as they say everywhere, the time has not yet come to understand the Russian revolution objectively, impartially. But there will never be real impartiality. In addition, our “bias” is very valuable for the future historian, notes Bunin (“Cursed Days”). We will briefly describe the main content of Ivan Alekseevich’s main thoughts below.
There are heaps of soldiers with big bags on the tram. They flee Moscow, fearing that they will be sent to defend St. Petersburg from the Germans.
Bunin met a boy soldier on Povarskaya, skinny, ragged and drunk. He poked his muzzle into his chest and spat at Ivan Alekseevich, telling him: “Despot, son of a bitch!”
Someone has pasted posters on the walls of houses incriminating Lenin and Trotsky in connection with the Germans, that they were bribed.
Conversation with floor polishers
Let us continue to present a brief summary of Bunin’s essay “Cursed Days.” In a conversation with the floor polishers, he asks them a question about what will happen next in the opinion of these people. They answer that they released criminals from the prisons that they run; they shouldn’t have done this, but instead they should have been shot long ago. This did not happen under the Tsar. And now you can’t drive out the Bolsheviks. The people have weakened... There will only be about a hundred thousand Bolsheviks, but ordinary people- millions, but they can't do anything. If they gave the floor polishers freedom, they would take everyone out of their apartments piece by piece.
Bunin records a conversation overheard by chance on the phone. In it, a man asks what to do: he has Kaledin’s adjutant and 15 officers. The answer is: “Shoot immediately.”
Again there is a demonstration, music, posters, banners - and everyone calls: “Rise up, working people!” Bunin notes that their voices are primitive, uterine. Women have Mordovian and Chuvash faces, for men - criminal, for some, downright Sakhalin.
Lenin's article
Read Lenin's article. Fraudulent and insignificant: either “Russian national upsurge” or the international.
Everything sparkles in the sun. Liquid mud splashes from under the wheels. Boys, soldiers, trading halva, gingerbread, cigarettes... Triumphant "faces" of the workers.
The soldier in P.’s kitchen says that socialism is impossible now, but the bourgeoisie still need to be cut off.
1919 Odessa
We continue to describe Bunin's work "Cursed Days". The summary consists of the following further events and thoughts of the author.
12th of April. Bunin notes that almost three weeks have passed since our death. Empty port dead city. Just today a letter dated August 10 arrived from Moscow. However, the author notes, Russian mail ended a long time ago, back in the summer of 17, when the Minister of Telegraphs and Posts appeared in a European manner. The “Minister of Labor” appeared - and all of Russia immediately stopped working. The Satan of bloodthirstiness and Cain's malice breathed upon the country in those days when freedom, equality and brotherhood were proclaimed. Immediately there was insanity. Everyone threatened to arrest each other for any contradiction.
Portrait of the people
Bunin recalls the indignation with which his supposedly “black” depictions of the Russian people were greeted at that time by those who had been fed and nourished by this literature, which for a hundred years had disgraced all classes except the “people” and tramps. All the houses are now dark, the whole city is in darkness, except for the robber dens, where balalaikas are heard, chandeliers are blazing, walls with black banners are visible, on which white skulls are depicted and “Death to the bourgeoisie!” is written.
Let us continue to describe the work written by I.A. Bunin. (“Cursed Days”), abbreviated. Ivan Alekseevich writes that there are two among the people. In one of them, Rus' predominates, and in the other, as he puts it, Chud. But in both there is changeability of appearances, moods, “unsteadiness”. The people said to themselves that from it, like from wood, “both a club and an icon.” It all depends on who processes it, on the circumstances. Emelka Pugachev or Sergius of Radonezh.
Extinct city
We continue our brief retelling in abbreviation. Bunin I.A. "Cursed Days" supplements as follows. In Odessa, 26 Black Hundreds were shot. Creepy. The city sits at home, few people go out into the streets. Everyone feels as if they have been conquered by a special people, more terrible than the Pechenegs seemed to our ancestors. And the winner sells from stalls, staggers, spits seeds.
Bunin notes that as soon as a city turns “red,” the crowd filling the streets immediately changes greatly. A selection is made of persons who do not have simplicity or routine. They are all almost repulsive, frightening with their evil stupidity, their challenge to everyone and everything. They performed a “comedy funeral” for supposedly heroes who died for freedom. It was a mockery of the dead, because they were deprived of Christian burial, buried in the center of the city, nailed into red coffins.
"Warning" in newspapers
We continue to present a brief summary of the work of I.A. Bunin "Cursed days". Next, the author reads a “warning” in the newspapers that there will soon be no electricity due to fuel depletion. Everything was processed in one month: there was not a single railways, no factories, no clothing, no bread, no water. Late in the evening they came with the “commissar” of the house to measure the rooms “for the purpose of densification by the proletariat.” The author asks why there is a tribunal, a commissioner, and not just a court. Because you can walk in knee-deep blood under the protection of the sacred words of the revolution. Promiscuity is the main thing in the Red Army. The eyes are impudent, cloudy, there is a cigarette in his teeth, a cap on the back of his head, dressed in rags. In Odessa, another 15 people were shot, two trains with food were sent to the defenders of St. Petersburg, when the city itself was “dying of hunger.”
This concludes the work “Cursed Days”, a brief summary of which we set out to present to you. In conclusion, the author writes that his Odessa notes end at this point. He buried the next sheets of paper in the ground when leaving the city, and then could not find it.
Brief Bunin "Cursed days"
Ivan Alekseevich in his work expressed his attitude towards the revolution - sharply negative. In the strict sense, Bunin's "Cursed Days" is not even a diary, since the entries were restored from memory by the writer and artistically processed. He perceived the Bolshevik revolution as a break in historical time. Bunin felt himself to be the last one capable of sensing the past of his grandfathers and fathers. He wanted to juxtapose the fading, autumnal beauty of the past with the formlessness and tragedy of the present time. In the work “Cursed Days” by Bunin, it is said that Pushkin bows his head low and sadly, as if again noting: “My Russia is sad!” There is not a soul around, only occasionally obscene women and soldiers.
For the writer, the Gehenna of the revolution was not only the triumph of tyranny and the defeat of democracy, but also the irreparable loss of the harmony and structure of life itself, the victory of formlessness. In addition, the work is colored by the sadness of the parting that Bunin faces with his country. Looking at the orphaned author, he recalls his departure to Russia and notes that descendants will not be able to even imagine the Russia in which their parents once lived.
Behind the collapse of Russia, Bunin guesses the end of world harmony. He sees only religion as the only consolation.
The writer did not at all idealize his former life. Her vices were captured in “Sukhodol” and “Village”. He also showed the progressive degeneration of the nobility class. But compared to the horrors of civil war and revolution pre-revolutionary Russia in Bunin’s mind it became almost a model of order and stability. He felt, almost back in “The Village,” that he had announced the coming disasters and waited for their fulfillment, as well as an impartial chronicler and eyewitness of the next merciless and senseless Russian revolt, in the words of Pushkin. Bunin saw that the horrors of the revolution were perceived by the people as retribution for oppression during the reign of the House of Romanov. And he also noted that the Bolsheviks could go to the extermination of half the population. That’s why Bunin’s diary is so gloomy.
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