Female images of Bunin's late prose. Female images in the works of Turgenev and Bunin The image of the main character in Bunin’s story the killer

Female images in works

I.A. Bunina.

Introduction

A woman is a subtle, elusive world, beyond the understanding of men. And the only one who can reveal the secret of a woman is a writer, we see evidence of this in literature.

Women in the literature of the 19th century very often act as bearers of moral and spiritual qualities and values ​​affirmed by the author. They are undoubtedly more humane, more sublime, spiritually richer and even, at times, stronger than men.

A woman’s inner world, as a rule, is formed in relative independence from the influence of the social environment, from the bustle of everyday life, in a girlish oasis, sublime book impressions, ideal dreams. The sphere of her interests and aspirations is the sphere of feeling, high love, and moral ideality. Writers of the 19th century very vividly and emotionally reveal female nature. One of these writers is Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. A connoisseur of female character, a singer of beauty, he gives us a wonderful gallery of female images in his poetic prose.

Relevance

The works of I. A. Bunin cannot leave anyone indifferent - neither a young reader nor a person wise with life experience. They are sad and sublime, full of reflection, truthful. Bunin does not exaggerate when he talks about loneliness, about sorrows, about the troubles that haunt a person throughout his life. High school students read Bunin's poetic prose with interest. After all, all the problems: issues of morality, love, and purity, revealed in Bunin’s works, are relevant to this day.

Purpose of the work: Consider and analyze female images in the prose of I.A. Bunina. And also to explore some patterns of the intersection of material, everyday and spiritual, to find and understand the spiritual and philosophical subtext of Bunin’s story “Clean Monday”.

Female characters are especially attractive in Bunin’s stories. The theme of love in Bunin's work occupies a leading place. It can be traced, one way or another, in a variety of stories and stories. And we understand what the writer wanted to say when he showed how close death and love are in our lives. Bunin always sought to comprehend the miracle of femininity, the secret of irresistible female happiness. “Women seem somewhat mysterious to me. “The more I study them, the less I understand,” he writes this phrase from Flaubert’s diary

Bunin always sought to comprehend the miracle of femininity, the secret of irresistible female happiness. This is especially characteristic of the book “Dark Alleys.” The creation of the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” was a source of spiritual elation for Bunin during the war years. The author himself considered the works in the collection, written in 1937-1944, to be his highest achievement. Critics defined the cycle of stories as an “encyclopedia of love” or, more precisely, an encyclopedia of love dramas. Love here is depicted as the most beautiful, highest feeling. In each of the stories ("Dark Alleys", "Russia", "Antigone", "Tanya", "In Paris", "Galya Ganskaya", "Natalie", "Clean Monday"; this also includes the one written before "Dark Alleys" "The story "Sunstroke") shows the moment of the highest triumph of love. All the stories in the collection are united by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All of them are fictional, which the author himself has repeatedly emphasized. However, all of them, including their retrospective form, are caused by the state of the author’s soul. Women play a major role here. With amazing skill, Bunin finds the right words and images. They seem to have color and shape. A few precise and colorful strokes - and before us is a portrait of a woman.

Here in front of us is Nadezhda from the story “Dark Alleys”: “...a dark-haired, also black-browed and also still beautiful woman for her age, who looked like an elderly gypsy, with dark fluff on her upper lip and along her cheeks, walked lightly, but was plump. , with large breasts under a red blouse, with a triangular belly, like a goose’s, under a black woolen skirt.”

In the book “Dark Alleys” there are many other charming female characters: sweet gray-eyed Tanya, a “simple soul”, devoted to her beloved, ready to make any sacrifice for him (“Tanya”); the tall, stately beauty Katerina Nikolaevna, the daughter of her age, who may seem too bold and extravagant (“Antigone”); simple-minded, naive Polya, who retained the childish purity of her soul, despite her profession (“Madrid”) and so on.

The fates of most of Bunin's heroines are tragic. Suddenly and soon the happiness of Olga Alexandrovna, an officer's wife, who is forced to serve as a waitress ("In Paris"), breaks up with her beloved Rusya ("Rusya"), and Natalie ("Natalie") dies from childbirth.

The ending of another short story in this cycle, “Galya Ganskaya,” is sad. The hero of the story, the artist, never tires of admiring the beauty of this girl. At thirteen years old, she was “sweet, playful, graceful... extremely, with a face with light brown curls along her cheeks, like an angel.” But time passed, Galya matured: “... no longer a teenager, not an angel, but an amazingly pretty thin girl... Her face under a gray hat is half covered with an ashen veil, and aquamarine eyes shine through it.” Her feeling for the artist was passionate, and his attraction to her was great. However, he soon got ready to leave for Italy for a long time, for a month and a half. In vain does the girl persuade her lover to stay or take her with him. Having been refused, Galya committed suicide. Only then did the artist realize what he had lost.

It is impossible to remain indifferent to the fatal charm of the Little Russian beauty Valeria (“Zoika and Valeria”): “...she was very beautiful: strong, well-spoken, with thick dark hair, with velvet eyebrows, almost fused, with menacing eyes the color of black blood, with a hot a dark blush on a tanned face, with a bright shine of teeth and full cherry lips.” The young woman from the short story “One Hundred Rupees” is no less beautiful. Her eyelashes are especially beautiful: “...like those heavenly butterflies that twinkle so magically on the heavenly Indian flowers.” When the beauty reclines in her reed chair, “measurably flickering with the black velvet of her butterfly eyelashes,” waving her fan, she gives the impression of a mysteriously beautiful, unearthly creature: “Beauty, intelligence, stupidity - all these words did not suit her, just as it did not suit her.” everything human: truly she was as if from some other planet.”

The string of charming female characters in Bunin's short stories is endless. It is impossible not to mention the unfortunate, abandoned, still “green” girl Parashka (“On the Road”, 1913). The girl gives herself to the first person she meets, who turns out to be a thief and a scoundrel. The author does not obscure her instinctive attraction to the masculine strong principle, the desire to “spill the wine” of her blossoming femininity. But that is not where the origin of the unfolding drama lies. The lack of clarity of the simplest concepts, loneliness, and the unclean environment in which Parashka lives make her easy and lifeless for a potential criminal. The unfortunate woman, as soon as she falls under his power, painfully feels the terrible instability and depravity of her existence.

At the other “pole” of life, compared to Parashka, is the beauty, daughter of wealthy aristocrats Olya Meshcherskaya, the heroine of the story “Easy Breathing”. The story itself is light and transparent, like Olya Meshcherskaya’s whole life. Only what happened to Olya cannot be deciphered so easily.

From the first lines of the story, one gets a dual impression: a sad, deserted cemetery, where on one of the crosses there is “a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.” Life and death, joy and tears - a symbol of the fate of Olya Meshcherskaya

This contrast is further developed. Cloudless childhood, adolescence of the heroine: Olya stood out from the carefree and cheerful crowd of girls of her age. She loved life, accepting it as it was. The young schoolgirl has much more joys and hopes than sorrows and disappointments. Besides, she was really lucky: she was pretty, from a rich family. “Yuna was not afraid of anything” and therefore she was always open, natural, light, attracting the attention of those around her with her love of life, the sparkle of her clear eyes, and the grace of her movements.
Having developed physically early, turning into a charming girl, Olya Meshcherskaya intuitively strove to fill her soul with something sublime, bright, but she had neither experience nor reliable advisers, so true to herself, she wanted to try everything on her own. Not distinguished by either cunning or cunning, she flitted frivolously between gentlemen, receiving endless pleasure from the awareness of her own femininity. It’s more than unusual to combine her half-childish state as a student running around during recess, and then her almost proud admission that she is already a woman. Yes, she felt like a woman very early. “But is that bad?” – asks the author. To love and be loved, to find happiness and strength in the inner feeling of belonging to the weaker sex - don’t many people need to be taught this specifically even today? However, not yet able to stop her experiments in time, Olya learned the physical side of love too early for her still fragile soul, which became the most unpleasant surprise for her: “I don’t understand how this could happen, I’m crazy, I never thought what am I like! Now I have only one way out... I feel such disgust for him that I can’t get over it!..” It seems that what happened was for Olga the first heavy blow in her life, causing a cruel spiritual drama. Unable to do anything half-heartedly, giving herself over to thoughts and feelings completely, without reserve, Olya probably hated herself for her unconscious transgression. There is no vice, no revenge, no firmness of decision in Olya’s actions. But just such a turn is terrible: a creature perishes, not understanding the horror of its situation.

Bunin compares Olya with a light breath that “dissipated in the world,” in the sky, the wind, that is, in life to which she always completely belonged.

And how contrasting the image of another woman seems, her classy lady, an “middle-aged girl” whose name we don’t even know. She had long lived “by some kind of fiction that replaced her real life.” Now her dream, the subject of her persistent thoughts and feelings, has become Olya, whose grave she visits so often.
Two female images, so different, stand before your eyes after reading a short story: Olya - a precociously developed woman and the head of the gymnasium - a gray-haired “middle-aged girl”, life and a dream about life, a flood of feelings and an invented, illusory world of her own sensations. Easy breathing and oxygen mask. It awakens thoughts about the perishable and the eternal, about life and its transience. It helps to see the beauty of the world behind simple phenomena and objects, to realize the value of an ever-changing life.

A.I. Bunin’s story “Clean Monday” is very interesting and unusual in its own way. Bunin put his soul into the creation of this story. According to his wife, on one of the sleepless nights he left his confession on a piece of paper: “I thank God that he gave me the opportunity to write “Clean Monday.”

Heroes: He and she are Russians, they live in Russia, but they are beautiful not with Russian, but with exotic beauty: “At that time I was beautiful for some reason, with hot southern beauty.” “She had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness...” “Most often silent...” "The Tsar-Maiden Queen of Shamakhan."

In her apartment, overlooking the oldest part of Moscow, languages, styles, objects from all over the world were mixed: a Turkish sofa, an expensive piano, “Moonlight Sonata”, books by Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmeier, Przybyshevsky, a portrait of the anathematized Tolstoy.

These interior details emphasize that the heroine herself has mixed “high” and “low”. She loved delicious dishes, entertainment, drank a lot, smoked, wore beautiful expensive clothes, and allowed him impudent caresses. Before the reader is a modern woman, born of the New Time. And yet there was a lot in her that was incomprehensible, mysterious, romantic, dreamy, and wise. It seems that incompatible things have been combined in one image.

Who will win in it: a patriarchal woman or an emancipated person?

She was unattainable in her perfection: she was so beautiful that people followed her, wore a garnet velvet dress or black velvet, shoes with gold clasps, diamond earrings emphasized the exquisite beauty of the heroine. It seems that thoughts about the everyday are never born in this perfect form. How simple, earthly, her confession sounds: “It’s not clear why,” she said thoughtfully, stroking my beaver collar, “but it seems that nothing can be better than the smell of winter air...”

The author helps the reader to see a tender, trembling soul in the heroine. Her physical appearance, bright, bold, catchy, frivolous, does not correspond to the depth of her spiritual experiences. It turns out that there is not a single historical place in Moscow and the surrounding area where she has not been or would not like to be - from the schismatic cemetery to Griboyedov’s apartment. She is interested in the history of the Fatherland, this is not clear to the hero: “... There was not a soul passers-by, and who would Of these, Griboyedov could be needed.” She is interested in the life of Peter and Fevronia, as a symbol of eternal love. She reflects on the purpose of man together with Platon Karataev, tries to understand the philosophical views of L. Tolstov, and admires the heroes of the Battle of Kulikovo, Peresvet and Oslyabya. Pays tribute to Chekhov, a true Russian intellectual. She loves “Russian, chronicle, Russian legends”, rereads them so often that she memorizes them. She remembers how last year, on Holy Day, she went to the Miracle Monastery: “There are puddles everywhere, the air is already soft, spring, my soul is somehow tender, sad, and all the time there is this feeling of the homeland of her ancient times.” The heroine says about herself: “I often go in the mornings or evenings, when you don’t drag me to restaurants and Kremlin cathedrals.”

At the beginning of the story, the heroine speaks in short sentences that end with an ellipsis:

You don't like everything!

Yes, a lot...

No, I'm not fit to be a wife. I'm not good, I'm not good...

The image of the heroine gradually develops, and so does her speech: from short sentences to complex constructions with philosophical concepts and definitions:

How good. And now only this Rus' remains in some northern monasteries. Yes, even in church hymns. Recently I went to the Conception Monastery - you can’t imagine how wonderfully the stichera are sung there! And in Chudovoy it’s even better. Last year I kept going there for Strastnaya. Oh, how good it was! There are puddles everywhere, the air is already soft, my soul is somehow tender, sad, and all the time there is this feeling of the homeland, its antiquity... All the doors in the cathedral are open, all day long ordinary people come and go, all day long the service... Oh, I’ll leave I’m going somewhere to a monastery, to some very remote one, in Vologda, Vyatka!

But what remains unchanged is that she still doesn’t say something, holds something back, leaving the unsaid for speculation,

Bunin, gradually changing his narrative style, leads the reader to the idea that the heroine’s departure from the worldly bustle is natural and deliberate. And it’s not all about religiosity, in her opinion, but about the desire to live a spiritual life. Giving up life “here” is not a spiritual impulse, but a thoughtful decision that the heroine can justify. She knows everything about the modern world, but rejects what she learns. Yes, the heroine is trying to find meaning, support in the world around her, but she doesn’t find it, even the hero’s love does not bring her happiness. She cannot respond to her strong feelings and, surrendering to him, goes to the monastery.

Description of work

A woman is a subtle, elusive world, beyond the understanding of men. And the only one who can reveal the secret of a woman is a writer, we see evidence of this in literature.
Women in the literature of the 19th century very often act as bearers of moral and spiritual qualities and values ​​affirmed by the author. They are undoubtedly more humane, more sublime, spiritually richer and even, at times, stronger than men.
A woman’s inner world, as a rule, is formed in relative independence from the influence of the social environment, from the bustle of everyday life, in a girlish oasis, sublime book impressions, ideal dreams. The sphere of her interests and aspirations is the sphere of feeling, high love, and moral ideality. Writers of the 19th century very vividly and emotionally reveal female nature. One of these writers is Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. A connoisseur of female character, a singer of beauty, he gives us a wonderful gallery of female images in his poetic prose.

At all times, Russian writers raised “eternal questions” in their work: life and death, love and separation, the true purpose of man, paying close attention to his inner world, his moral quest. The creative credo of writers of the 19th-20th centuries was “an in-depth and essential reflection of life.” They came to the knowledge and understanding of the individual and national from the eternal, universal.

One of these eternal universal values ​​is love - a unique state of a person when a feeling of personal integrity, harmony between the sensual and spiritual, body and soul, beauty and goodness arises in him. And it is a woman who, having felt the fullness of being in love, is able to make high demands and expectations for life.

In Russian classical literature, female characters have more than once become the embodiment of the best features of the national character. Among them is a gallery of colorful female types created by A. N. Ostrovsky, N. A. Nekrasov, L. N. Tolstoy; expressive images of the heroines of many works by I. S. Turgenev; captivating female portraits by I. A. Goncharov. A worthy place in this series is occupied by wonderful female characters from the stories of I. A. Bunin. Despite the undeniable differences in life circumstances, the heroines of the works of Russian writers undoubtedly have the main common feature. They are distinguished by the ability to love deeply and selflessly, revealing themselves as individuals with a deep inner world.

Let us remember Nadezhda, the heroine of the story that gave its name to the cycle “Dark Alleys”. Her love story, unfortunately, is “vulgar,” “ordinary”: a former serf, “heartlessly” and “insultingly” abandoned by a young master. In her youth, she was “magically” beautiful, “wonderful”, “hot”, sincerely in love with Nikolenka, as she then called Nikolai Alekseevich. And he seemed to love her. He admired her beauty and youth, her slender figure, wondrous eyes, read beautiful poems about “dark alleys”... She gave him “her beauty” and “her fever,” and he betrayed her, not wanting to neglect social norms, married a woman from his circle. Soon after separation from her beloved, Nadezhda received her freedom. With her beauty, youth, and newfound freedom, she could also get married, have children, and live a completely happy life, but she didn’t want to.

Throughout her life she carried a deep feeling of first love. Nadezhda’s life path was not easy, but she did not lose heart and retained her self-esteem. She runs an inn, “gives money on interest,” “gets rich,” but lives according to her conscience, is strict and fair, for this people respect her. But the woman meets the autumn of life alone, with hidden resentment and unfulfilled hopes for love, which is still alive in her heart. Just as in her youth she had no one dearer than Nikolenka, “and then it was not the same,” but Nadezhda could not forgive, could not forget the insult inflicted. A chance meeting after thirty years of separation was given to Nadezhda by fate itself as an opportunity to understand and forgive, because nothing can be corrected.

It is clear that the social inequality of the heroes is only the external reason for their failed happiness. “Over the years, everything passes,” says the hero. “As it is said in the book of Job? “How will you remember the flowing water.” “What does God give to whom, Nikolai Alekseevich,” Nadezhda argues with him. “Everyone’s youth passes, but love is another matter.” Love remains in the soul forever, the author tells us, because love is a huge force that can turn a person’s whole life and worldview upside down. Love is tragic and often brings suffering, but it also gives unforgettable moments of happiness, elevating a person, lifting him above the world of everyday vanity and being remembered for a lifetime.The power of love lies in its spiritual significance for a person.

In love, in the peculiarities of a person’s experience of this feeling, Bunin saw the manifestation of the most general laws of life, the connection of the individual with the life of the Universe. The story of the young schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya from the story “Easy Breathing” seems to have nothing to do with the stated themes, but this is only at first glance. Already at the very beginning of the story, the theme of the work emerges - the theme of life and death, their inextricable connection and incomprehensible mystery: “In the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth... A rather large one is embedded in the cross itself. a convex porcelain medallion, and in the medallion there is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes." And then follows the story about the main character, Olenka Meshcherskaya.

Bunin did not build the life story of his heroine in chronological order. He highlighted only a few episodes in which its essence is most clearly manifested. Olya is depicted against the general background of life, gradually standing out from it. As a girl, she was no different from other “pretty, rich and happy” schoolchildren. Just like many of them, she was capable, playful and careless to the instructions of a classy lady, but then she began to “bloom and develop by leaps and bounds” and at the age of fifteen she was already known as a real beauty. “Without any of her worries or efforts, and somehow imperceptibly, everything that had so distinguished her from the entire gymnasium in the last two years came to her - grace, elegance, dexterity...” Olenka’s charm has an irresistible effect on those around her. First-graders love her, high school student Shenshin is in love with her, and both 56-year-old Malyutin and a young Cossack officer are fascinated by her.

In the gymnasium, Olya’s actions, her “flighty” behavior become the subject of general discussion and condemnation. No one is given rest by her irrepressible thirst for life, fun, and the clear sparkle of her eyes. “She’s gone completely crazy,” they say about her. Olya herself is having a hard time growing up unexpectedly. Yes, Meshcherskaya does not listen to instructions, does not try to live in accordance with the norms, but these norms are also conditional. It is no coincidence that the girl’s seducer turns out to be “daddy’s friend and neighbor,” the brother of the headmistress of the gymnasium.

A page from the diary, where Olya first describes her joy and happiness from communicating with the outside world, and then her disgust after she was seduced by an elderly man, indicates that the heroine is stunned by the discovery of her own essence. “I don’t understand how this could happen, I’m crazy, I never thought I was like this! Now I have only one way out... I feel such disgust for him that I can’t get over it!..” It seems to the girl, that it is impossible to live any longer, and her death does not seem to be accidental. One gets the impression that she herself is striving towards her death.

At the end of the work, Olya tells her friend that she read in one of her father’s books what kind of beauty a real woman should have: “There, you know, there’s so much said that you can’t remember everything... but the main thing is, do you know what?” - Light breathing ! But I have it..." Olya Meshcherskaya really had light, natural breathing. It was as if she was preparing for some special, unique fate, which is worthy only of the chosen ones, but Olino’s “light breathing”, her joyful and carefree perception of life turns out to be incompatible with life itself: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky , in this cold spring wind", became an integral part of it.

The word “again” seems to emphasize the transience of life, the ease of disappearance, and at the same time there is a sense of invincible eternity in it: youth and beauty are doomed to destruction (death or old age), but they remain to live forever (in memory, in new manifestations). Thus, the confrontation between life and death is ultimately resolved in favor of life, since the craving for the beautiful, bright, perfect, embodied in the image of Olya Meshcherskaya, will never disappear.

Throughout Bunin’s work there runs the motif of longing for the passing past and man’s opposition to the soulless civilization of modern times. And if in most of his works the only saving force is love, then the only force worthy of competing with love is the power of faith and religion. The image of the main character of the story “Clean Monday” convincingly proves that there are feelings no less high and strong than love, but this is also a riddle, a secret beyond the control of the human mind.

The heroine of the story "Clean Monday" is young, rich and unusually pretty. Admiring the girl’s appearance, the hero emphasizes that her beauty was somehow oriental - “Indian, Persian: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness, softly shining like black sable fur, eyebrows as black as velvet.” coal, eyes..." Her life has everything - comfort, grace, independence, the opportunity to enjoy life, but literally from the first lines it is felt that there is no happiness and peace in her soul. Her dissatisfaction with life is obvious. “It looked like she didn’t need anything,” explains the hero, “neither flowers, nor books, nor dinners, nor theaters, nor dinners outside the city, although still she had flowers that she liked and didn’t like, all the books, which I brought it to her, she always read, ... had lunch and dinner with a Moscow understanding of the matter,” attended balls and theaters, her obvious weakness was “good clothes, velvet, silk, expensive fur.”

The heroine is painfully searching for her calling, trying to combine the pleasure of beautiful clothes, delicious food, flowers, bohemian life with the desire for purity, rigor, and asceticism characteristic of Russian Orthodox culture. In her life, erotic novels of modern times (Przybyshevsky, Tetmeier, Schnitzler) and the work of her contemporaries - Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov, Leonid Andreev - coexist side by side with a gravitation towards the ancient Russian "pre-Petrine" culture, which resulted in an open comparison of her life with the poetic "Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom". Despite the fact that the heroine favorably accepts the advances of a lover in love, she herself does not love, or rather, cannot love, not seeing in realized love the path to a meaningful life. Her dream of a single, pure and sublime love that unites spouses even after death coexists with the idea of ​​the person who loves her as a devilish temptation, a fiery serpent who is “deeply beautiful” in human form. The duality of the heroine’s nature is explained not only by the incompatibility of external everyday life and deep internal work (the hero says that she read a lot, “she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be delving into something mentally”), but also by the intersection in the then Moscow, yes and in Russia in general, two opposing cultures with mutually exclusive traditions. Hence the coexistence of the mutually exclusive, at first glance, images of the heroine, a true Moscow resident (a modest student, a socialite, the “Shamakhan Queen” and a nun), her desires and aspirations. She herself languishes, wanting to understand, to clarify the only path acceptable for herself, but initially does not believe in the possibility of a final choice: “Why is everything done in the world? Do we understand anything in our actions?” Even such an unusual choice of life path - serving God - does not bring her peace. This choice does not seem final to her.

The searching gaze in the final scene speaks of the lack of harmony in the soul of the young nun, of the incompleteness of the search.

Bunin considered the story “Clean Monday” to be the best of all that he had written. “I thank God,” he said, “that he gave me the opportunity to write “Clean Monday.” Behind the simple plot of this story lies an allegorically, symbolically expressed idea about the historical path of Russia. The mysterious heroine embodies not the idea of ​​love-passion, but a longing for moral ideal, which is why the combination of Eastern and Western principles is so significant in it as a reflection of this combination in the life of Russia.

The heroine’s unexpected departure to a monastery, which so stunned the man in love with her, symbolizes the special, “third path” that Bunin chose for Russia. This is the path of labor and humility, curbing passions, in which the writer sees an opportunity to go beyond the limits of Western and Eastern doom, a path of great suffering in which Russia will purify itself and find its own, the only true path.

The works of Turgenev and Bunin are in many ways a striking example of a clear reflection of the traditions of Russian literature. A depiction of the character of a Russian person, a manner of showing a free, broad soul, ready to undertake great feats, forgive, learn new things, and most importantly, capable of true love, sincere and not demanding anything in return. This is especially successfully expressed through the female images of both writers, which we will now try to get closer to by examining several heroines known to us.
Turgenev's female characters are shown to the reader as strong-willed, warm-hearted, thirsting for discoveries and exploits, but often dying from their love. This is the poetic and inspired image of Asya, who dreams of “living not in vain, leaving a mark behind her...” But her dreams remained unfulfilled. How pure and beautiful Asya’s first love is, her faith and desire for freedom, for her own happiness... But, faced with reality, with the selfishness and silence of a person mistaken for a hero, her best aspirations crumble and die. The action of the “usual order” turned out to be destructive for ideal, bright dreams.
Another heroine, Elena Stakhova, from the novel “On the Eve” is the same dreamy, simple girl, but she is strong in spirit and ready to do extraordinary things in order to accomplish a feat. Its peculiarity was that its sacrifice would not be in vain, but would certainly bring benefit to society. In this novel, the writer responded to pure and sincere love and reduced the events to the fact that this feeling found a response in the heart of another person. Now Insarov and his struggle for the liberation of the Motherland become dearer to her than anything in the world, and she follows him to share his difficult and dangerous life. Elena’s dream came true, and even after her husband’s death she remains in Bulgaria to continue his work.
Bunin's female images are distinguished by tender, maternal love. Such a feeling does not die under any circumstances and is not afraid of either trials or death itself. She pushes his characters to actions close to heroic deeds, despite any illnesses. Thus, the sick Anisya from the story “The Cheerful Courtyard,” overcoming pain and suffering, goes to a distant village to see her beloved son, who has left home. However, in his work, Bunin does not write about happy, uniting love, probably believing that such love over time flows into other, more fundamental feelings of affection, kinship, etc. The main shades of his works contain a considerable amount of feelings of loss, bitterness and longing for the past . The writer strives to express the immeasurable value of every moment of a person’s life, as long as he is happy, but at the same time he seems to leave them far behind, showing that everything passes, remaining only in the fickle human memory. It is these moments that become the center of his descriptions; they are the source of his inspiration and the goal of his passing life.
“All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared” - a quote from “Dark Alleys”, which, it would seem, could be repeated by every hero of both writers, whose female images embodied all the aspirations and experiences of ordinary Russian women who lived at that time time. The work of Bunin and Turgenev can confidently be called a great legacy, a model and an example to follow.

Salmanov Gymnasium, 11 "B"

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FEMALE IMAGES IN PROSE. At all times, Russian writers raised “eternal questions” in their work: life and death, love and separation, the true purpose of man, paying close attention to his inner world, his moral quest. The creative credo of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries was “an in-depth and essential reflection of life.” They came to the knowledge and understanding of the individual and national from the eternal, universal.

One of these eternal universal values ​​is love - a unique state of a person when a feeling of personal integrity, harmony between the sensual and spiritual, body and soul, beauty and goodness arises in him. And it is a woman who, having felt the fullness of being in love, is able to make high demands and expectations for life.

In Russian classical literature, female characters have more than once become the embodiment of the best features of the national character. Among them is a gallery of colorful female types created by A. N. Ostrovsky, N. A. Nekrasov, JI. N. Tolstoy; expressive images of the heroines of many works by I. S. Turgenev; captivating female portraits by I. A. Goncharov. A worthy place in this series is occupied by wonderful female characters from the stories of I. A. Bunin. Despite the undeniable differences in life circumstances, the heroines of the works of Russian writers undoubtedly have the main common feature. They are distinguished by the ability to love deeply and selflessly, revealing themselves as individuals with a deep inner world.

Let us remember Nadezhda, the heroine of the story that gave its name to the cycle “Dark Alleys”. Her love story, unfortunately, is “vulgar,” “ordinary”: a former serf, “heartlessly” and “insultingly” abandoned by a young master. In her youth, she was “magically” beautiful, “wonderful”, “hot”, sincerely in love with Nikolenka, as she then called Nikolai Alekseevich. And he seemed to love her. He admired her beauty and youth, her slender figure, wondrous eyes, read beautiful poems about “dark alleys”... She gave him “her beauty” and “her fever,” and he betrayed her, not wanting to neglect social norms, and married a woman in her circle. Soon after separation from her beloved, Nadezhda received her freedom. With her beauty, youth, and newfound freedom, she could also get married, have children, and live a completely happy life, but she didn’t want to.

Throughout her life she carried a deep feeling of first love. Nadezhda’s life path was not easy, but she did not lose heart and retained her self-esteem. She runs an inn, “gives money in interest,” “gets rich,” but lives according to her conscience, is strict and fair, for this people respect her. But the woman faces the autumn of life alone, with hidden resentment and unfulfilled hopes for love, which is still alive in her heart. Just as in her youth she had no one dearer than Nikolenka, “and then it wasn’t like that,” but Nadezhda could not forgive, could not forget the insult inflicted. A chance meeting after thirty years of separation was given to Nadezhda by fate itself as an opportunity to understand and forgive, because nothing can be corrected.

It is clear that the social inequality of the heroes is only the external reason for their failed happiness. “Everything passes over the years,” says the hero. - How is it said in the book of Job? “You will remember how water flowed through.” “What does God give to whom, Nikolai Alekseevich,” Nadezhda argues with him. “Everyone’s youth passes, but love is another matter.” Love remains in the soul forever, the author tells us, because love is a huge force that can turn a person’s whole life and worldview around. Love is tragic and often brings suffering, but it also gives unforgettable moments of happiness, elevating a person, lifting him above the world of everyday vanity and being remembered for a lifetime. The power of love lies in its spiritual significance for a person.

In love, in the peculiarities of a person’s experience of this feeling, Bunin saw the manifestation of the most general laws of life, the connection of the individual with the life of the Universe. The story of the young schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya from the story “Easy Breathing” seems to have nothing to do with the stated themes, but this is only at first glance. Already at the very beginning of the story, the theme of the work emerges - the theme of life and death, their inextricable connection and incomprehensible mystery: “In the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth... A rather large convex porcelain cross is embedded in the cross itself. medallion, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.” And then follows the story about the main character, Olenka Meshcherskaya.

Bunin did not build the life story of his heroine in chronological order. He highlighted only a few episodes in which its essence is most clearly manifested. Olya is depicted against the general background of life, gradually standing out from it. As a girl, she was no different from other “pretty, rich and happy” schoolchildren. Just like many of them, she was capable, playful and careless to the instructions of a classy lady, but then she began to “bloom and develop by leaps and bounds” and at the age of fifteen she was already known as a real beauty. “Without any of her worries or efforts, and somehow imperceptibly, everything that distinguished her from the entire gymnasium in the last two years came to her - grace, elegance, dexterity...” Olenka’s charm has an unfailing effect on those around her. First-graders love her, high school student Shenshin is in love with her, and both 56-year-old Malyutin and a young Cossack officer are fascinated by her.

In the gymnasium, Olya’s actions, her “flighty” behavior become the subject of general discussion and condemnation. No one is given rest by her irrepressible thirst for life, fun, and the clear sparkle of her eyes. “She has gone completely crazy,” they say about her. Olya herself is having a hard time growing up unexpectedly. Yes, Meshcherskaya does not listen to instructions, does not try to live in accordance with the norms, but these norms are also conditional. It is no coincidence that the girl’s seducer turns out to be “daddy’s friend and neighbor,” the brother of the head of the gymnasium.

A page from the diary, where Olya first describes her joy and happiness from communicating with the outside world, and then her disgust after she was seduced by an elderly man, indicates that the heroine is stunned by the discovery of her own essence. “I don’t understand how this could happen, I’m crazy, I never thought I was like this! Now I have only one way out... I feel such disgust for him that I cannot survive this!..” It seems to the girl that it is impossible to live any longer, and her death does not seem accidental. One gets the impression that she herself is striving towards her death.

At the end of the work, Olya tells her friend that she read in one of her father’s books what kind of beauty a real woman should have: “There, you know, so much is said that you can’t remember everything... but the main thing is, do you know what? - Easy breathing! But I have it...” Olya Meshcherskaya really had easy, natural breathing. She seemed to be preparing for some special, unique fate, which is worthy only of the chosen ones, but Olino’s “light breathing”, her joyful and carefree perception of life turns out to be incompatible with life itself: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky , in this cold spring wind,” became an integral part of it.

The word “again” seems to emphasize the transience of life, the ease of disappearance, and at the same time there is a sense of invincible eternity in it: youth and beauty are doomed to destruction (death or old age), but they remain to live forever (in memory, in new manifestations). Thus, the confrontation between life and death is ultimately resolved in favor of life, since the craving for the beautiful, bright, perfect, embodied in the image of Olya Meshcherskaya, will never disappear.

Throughout Bunin’s work there runs the motif of longing for the passing past and man’s opposition to the soulless civilization of modern times. And if in most of his works the only saving force is love, then the only force worthy of competing with love is the power of faith and religion. The image of the main character of the story “Clean Monday” convincingly proves that there are feelings no less high and strong than love, but this is also a riddle, a secret beyond the control of the human mind.

The heroine of the story “Clean Monday” is young, rich and unusually pretty. Admiring the girl’s appearance, the hero emphasizes that her beauty was somehow oriental - “Indian, Persian: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness, softly shining like black sable fur, eyebrows as black as velvet.” coal, eyes..." Her life has everything - comfort, grace, independence, the opportunity to enjoy life, but literally from the first lines it is felt that there is no happiness and peace in her soul. Her dissatisfaction with life is obvious. “It looked like she didn’t need anything,” explains the hero, “neither flowers, nor books, nor dinners, nor theaters, nor dinners outside the city, although still she had flowers that she liked and didn’t like, all the books that I brought it to her, she always read, ... had lunch and dinner with a Moscow understanding of the matter,” attended balls and theaters, her obvious weakness was “good clothes, velvet, silk, expensive fur.”

The heroine is painfully searching for her calling, trying to combine the pleasure of beautiful clothes, delicious food, flowers, bohemian life with the desire for purity, rigor, and asceticism characteristic of Russian Orthodox culture. In her life, erotic novels of modern times (Przybyshevsky, Tetmeier, Schnitzler) and the work of her contemporaries - Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov, Leonid Andreev - coexist side by side with a gravitation towards the ancient Russian “pre-Petrine” culture, which resulted in an open comparison of her life with the poetic “ The Tale of Peter and Fevronia of Murom." Despite the fact that the heroine favorably accepts the advances of a lover in love, she herself does not love, or rather, cannot love, not seeing in realized love the path to a meaningful life. Her dream of a single, pure and sublime love that unites spouses even after death coexists with the idea of ​​the person who loves her as a devilish temptation, a fiery serpent who is “deeply beautiful” in human form. The duality of the heroine’s nature is explained not only by the incompatibility of external everyday life and deep internal work (the hero says that she read a lot, “she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be delving into something mentally”), but also by the intersection in the then Moscow, yes and in Russia in general, two opposing cultures with mutually exclusive traditions. Hence the coexistence of the mutually exclusive, at first glance, images of the heroine, a true Moscow resident (a modest student, a socialite, the “Shamakhan Queen” and a nun), her desires and aspirations. She herself languishes, wanting to understand, to clarify the only path acceptable for herself, but initially does not believe in the possibility of a final choice: “Why is everything done in the world? Do we understand anything in our actions? “Even such an unusual choice of life path - serving God - does not bring her peace. This choice does not seem final to her.

The searching gaze in the final scene speaks of the lack of harmony in the soul of the young nun, of the incompleteness of the search.

Bunin considered the story “Clean Monday” to be the best of all that he had written. “I thank God,” he said, “that he gave us the opportunity to write “Clean Monday.” Behind the simple plot of this story lies an allegorically, symbolically expressed idea about the historical path of Russia. The mysterious heroine embodies not the idea of ​​love-passion, but a longing for a moral ideal, which is why the combination of Eastern and Western principles in her is so significant as a reflection of this combination in the life of Russia.

The heroine’s unexpected departure to a monastery, which so stunned the man in love with her, symbolizes the special, “third path” that Bunin chose for Russia. This is the path of labor and humility, curbing passions, in which the writer sees an opportunity to go beyond the limits of Western and Eastern doom, a path of great suffering in which Russia will purify itself and find its own, the only true path.

At the very beginning of Bunin’s work “,” a cemetery and the fresh grave of the main character of the story, Olya Meshcherskaya, opens before us. All further narration takes place in the past tense and describes to us a small, but very bright life of a young girl.

Olya was an open and very kind person who loved life to the fullest. The girl was from a rich family. At the beginning of the story, Bunin shows us Olya as a simple, no different high school student in a colorful dress. One thing made her stand out from the crowd - her childish spontaneity and large eyes burning with joy and fun. Olya was not afraid of anything and was not shy. She was not ashamed of her disheveled hair, ink stains on her hands, or her knees. Nothing overshadowed her lightness and airiness.

Later, Bunin describes the process of Olya’s sharp maturation. In a short period of time, an inconspicuous girl turned into a very beautiful girl. But even though she was a beauty, she did not abandon her childish spontaneity.

Throughout her short life, Olya strived for something sublime and bright. Lacking wise advice from her environment, the girl sought to learn everything from personal experience. It cannot be said that Olya was a cunning and insidious person, she simply enjoyed life, fluttering like a butterfly.

Ultimately, all this brought the girl severe mental trauma. Olya became a woman too early and for this act she reproached herself for the rest of her life. Most likely, she was looking for an opportunity to commit suicide. After all, how can one explain her action when she gave a page from her diary, which described the moment of her intimacy with Malyutin, to the officer whom she had planned to marry? The officer then shot and killed the girl in front of hundreds of witnesses.

Olya Meshcherskaya became a “light breath” that dissipated in her carefree and spontaneous life.

In completely different colors, Bunin shows us Olina, a cool lady. The author does not name her. All we know about her is that she was no longer a young woman with gray hair and that she lived in some kind of imaginary world of her own. At the end of the story, the author tells us that a cool lady came to the girl’s grave every Sunday and thought about something for a long time.

In these two female images, Bunin showed us two worlds: one is cheerful and real, filled with feelings, and the second is invented, perishable. Light breathing and a suffocating sigh.