I.A. Bunina

composition

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is rightly called the greatest writerXXcentury. From his pen came wonderful poems, novels and stories. The most important theme in the work of I.A. Bunin's theme was love. The series of stories is entirely dedicated to her. Dark alleys", created by the writer already in exile, during the Second World War. This collection is a kind of summing up. Written at the end of his life, it collected Bunin’s innermost thoughts and feelings, his experiences and beliefs, embodied in short stories amazing in form and content.

The main idea of ​​“Dark Alleys” can be formulated as follows: “All love is happiness, even if it is unrequited and brings suffering.” Let’s take, for example, two stories from the cycle - “ Clean Monday" And " Cold autumn».

In the first work, the relationship between a man and a woman is placed at the center of the plot. The main character is in love with the heroine, he pampers her with gifts, flowers, trips to expensive restaurants and theaters, although he feels that all this is of little interest to the young woman:

A man loves a woman passionately, with all his heart, love for her becomes the meaning of his existence. There is a kind of alienation in the heroine, she is more interested in spiritual life rather than material wealth, even the hero’s love does not bring her satisfaction. She loves ancient temples, singers, and the ringing of bells, so literally overnight the young woman disappears from his life. Having tried everything that worldly life can give a person, and not finding purity and true spirituality in it, the heroine decides to abandon the past and goes to a monastery, where, as she thinks, she can find peace of mind and become happy. The hero does not understand her choice, and he continues to live, feeling only the constant pain of loss:

Bunin shows how separation literally “knocks down” the hero, driving him crazy. Talking about young man after breaking up with his girlfriend, he notes the purposelessness of his existence. A handsome, rich and intelligent man, he finds himself in mental isolation after his beloved leaves. With all this, the author proves how much love can mean to a person. Love is life itself, which means its loss is equivalent to the loss of the meaning of existence.

In the story "Cold Autumn" before us a lifelong love story. The theme of love here is closely related to the theme of death. It should be noted that in his works Bunin often brings these two motifs together, as if wanting to emphasize that in terms of its significance in a person’s life, love is on a par with death, and just like death, it represents for him one of the greatest mysteries. The main character of “Cold Autumn” escorts her to the First world war her fiancé and says that she will not be able to survive his death... Nevertheless, she experiences not only the death of her lover, but also the revolution of 1917, emigration, wandering through the endless cities of Europe, where no one needed her and her companions, making a hard living labor, lonely old age. But, despite the fact that the heroine’s life was full of events, she only remembers that cold autumn evening when she said goodbye to her beloved. The composition of the story is structured in such a way as to confirm the importance of this moment for the woman. If the description of the farewell evening in September 1914 is given most of work, then the story about the heroine’s wanderings after it is just one paragraph. She herself says:

And after many years, the heroine waits for death as a joyful moment of meeting with the first and only love, which became the main “event” in her life, which helped her survive in an endless series of losses, disappointments and insults.

Thus, for Bunin, love is the highest value that life can give to a person. But, reading “Dark Alleys,” we are convinced that love for a writer is always a tragedy. Bunin does not believe in long and happy relationships, for him love is fleeting, behind the first joys there is always either addiction or disappointment. It also happens that insurmountable circumstances force the heroes to separate. Therefore, the heroes of his works cheat on each other, separate, or die. And, despite all this, they continue to search for love - this is the best feeling on earth, uplifting, reconciling with all adversity, giving hope and support in life. Search the way their creator, I.A., did. Bunin.

Bunin is unique creative person in the history of Russian literature of the late XIX - first half of the XX century. His genius talent, skill as a poet and prose writer, which became classic, amazed his contemporaries and captivates us living today. His works preserve the real Russian literary language, which is now lost.

Works about love occupy a large place in Bunin’s work in exile. The writer was always worried about the secret of this strongest of human feelings. In 1924 he wrote the story “Mitya’s Love”, the following year - “The Case of Cornet Elagin” and “ Sunstroke" And in the late 30s and during the Second World War, Bunin created 38 short stories about love, which made up his book “Dark Alleys,” published in 1946. Bunin considered this book his “ the best work in the sense of conciseness, painting and literary skill.”

Love in Bunin’s depiction amazes not only with the power of artistic representation, but also with its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. They rarely break through to the surface: most people will not experience their fatal effects until the end of their days. Such a depiction of love unexpectedly gives Bunin’s sober, “merciless” talent a romantic glow. The proximity of love and death, their conjugation were obvious facts for Bunin and were never subject to doubt. However, the catastrophic nature of existence, the fragility of human relationships and existence itself - all these favorite Bunin themes after the gigantic social cataclysms that shook Russia were filled with a new formidable meaning, as is, for example, seen in the story “Mitya’s Love”. “Love is beautiful” and “Love is doomed” - these concepts, having finally come together, coincided, carrying in the depths, in the grain of each story, the personal grief of Bunin the emigrant.

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

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

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

In Russian classical literature At that time, the theme of love always occupied important place, and preference was given to spiritual, “platonic” love

before sensuality, carnal, physical passion, which was often debunked. The purity of Turgenev's women became a household name. Russian literature is predominantly the literature of “first love”.

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

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

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

One can call “Mitya’s Love” a psychological story in which the author accurately and faithfully embodied Mitya’s confused feelings and the tragic end of his life.

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

The heroes of “Dark Alleys” do not resist nature; often their actions are completely illogical and contradict generally accepted morality (an example of this is the sudden passion of the heroes in the story “Sunstroke”). Bunin’s love “on the brink” is almost a violation of the norm, going beyond the boundaries of everyday life. For Bunin, this immorality can even be said to be a certain sign of the authenticity of love, since ordinary morality turns out, like everything established by people, to be a conventional scheme into which the elements of natural, living life do not fit.

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

As a rule, the happiness of love in “Dark Alleys” is followed by separation or death. The heroes revel in intimacy, but

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

Bunin allows his heroes only to taste the forbidden fruit, to enjoy it - and then deprives them of happiness, hopes, joys, even life. The hero of the story “Natalie” loved two people at once, but did not find family happiness with either one. In the story “Henry” there is abundance female images for every taste. But the hero remains lonely and free from the “women of men.”

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

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

gratitude to kiss the ground. Lord, Lord, why are you torturing us like this?”

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

About the book of stories “Dark Alleys” G. Adamovich rightly wrote: “All love is great happiness, a “gift of the gods,” even if it is not shared. That’s why Bunin’s book exudes happiness, that’s why it’s imbued with gratitude to life, to the world, in which, despite all its imperfections, happiness can happen.”

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

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

This mystery of existence becomes the theme of Bunin’s story “The Grammar of Love” (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, having stopped on the way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on “an incomprehensible love that has turned a whole life into some kind of ecstatic life.” human life, which perhaps should have been the most everyday life”, if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushka. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who “was not at all good-looking,” but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. “But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some dazed, focused soul?” According to neighboring landowners. Khvoshchinsky “was known in the district as a rare clever man. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then her unexpected death - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and sat on her bed for more than twenty years...” What can you call it? is this a twenty year seclusion? Insanity? For Bunin, the answer to this question is not at all clear.

The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakening in him “a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of a saint.” What made Ivlev buy from Khvoshchinsky’s heir “at an expensive price” a small book “The Grammar of Love”, which the old landowner never parted with, cherishing memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what his orphaned soul was fed for many years. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandsons” who have heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved,” and along with them the reader of Bunin’s work, will try to reveal the secret of this inexplicable feeling.

An attempt to understand the nature of love feelings by the author in the story “Sunstroke” (1925). “A strange adventure” shakes the lieutenant’s soul. Having parted with a beautiful stranger, he cannot find peace. At the thought of the impossibility of meeting this woman again, “he felt such pain and uselessness of all his later life without her, that he was seized by horror and despair.” The author convinces the reader of the seriousness of the feelings experienced by the hero of the story. The lieutenant feels “terribly unhappy in this city.” "Where to go? What to do?" - he thinks lost. The depth of the hero’s spiritual insight is clearly expressed in the final phrase of the story: “The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.” How to explain what happened to him? Maybe the hero came into contact with that great feeling that people call love, and the feeling of the impossibility of loss led him to realize the tragedy of existence?

Torment loving soul, the bitterness of loss, the sweet pain of memories - such unhealed wounds are left in the destinies of Bunin’s heroes by love, and time has no power over it.

The story “Dark Alleys” (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is quite ordinary: a young nobleman easily parted with the serf girl Nadezhda who was in love with him and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received her freedom from the masters, became the owner of an inn and never got married, had no family, no children, and did not know ordinary everyday happiness. “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. – Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten... I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later.” She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that in Nadezhda he had lost “the most precious thing he had in life.” But this is a momentary epiphany. Leaving the inn, he “remembered with shame his last words and that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame.” And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the Petegbug house, the mother of his children... This gentleman attaches too much great importance class prejudices in order to prefer genuine feelings to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.

How differently the characters in the story interpret what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich this is “a vulgar, ordinary story,” but for Nadezhda it is not dying memories, many years of devotion to love.

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

In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.

Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as “ vulgar story”, and someone will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, and will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always modern writer, arousing deep reader interest.

Abstract on literature

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

Completed

Student of the “” class

Moscow 2004

Bibliography

1. O.N. Mikhailov – “Russian literature of the 20th century”

2. S.N. Morozov - “The Life of Arsenyev. Stories"

3. B.K. Zaitsev - “Youth - Ivan Bunin”

4. Literary critical articles.

The theme of love occupies perhaps the main place in Bunin’s work. This topic allows the writer to correlate what is happening in a person’s soul with the phenomena external life, with the demands of a society that is based on the relationship of buying and selling and in which wild and dark instincts sometimes reign. Bunin was one of the first in Russian literature to speak not only about the spiritual, but also about the physical side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, hidden aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that it is not necessary bodily passion follows a spiritual impulse, which happens in life and vice versa (as happened with the heroes of the story “Sunstroke”). And what plot moves no matter what the writer chooses, love is always in his works great joy and great disappointment, a deep and insoluble mystery, it is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.

IN different years Bunin spoke about love with to varying degrees frankness. In his early prose the heroes are young, open and natural. In such stories as “In August”, “In Autumn”, “Dawn All Night”, everything is extremely simple, brief and significant. The feelings that the heroes experience are dual, colored in halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, way of life, relationships, we immediately recognize and understand in a new way our own feelings of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual turns. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony; more often it disappears as soon as it arises. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. A sad farewell to my beloved ends with dreams (“In August”): “Through tears I looked into the distance, and somewhere I dreamed of sultry southern cities, a blue steppe evening and the image of some woman who merged with the girl I loved...” . The date is memorable because it testifies to a touch of genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“Autumn”). And the story “Dawn All Night” talks about the premonition of love, about the tenderness that a young girl is ready to pour out on her future chosen one. At the same time, it is common for youth not only to get carried away, but also to quickly become disappointed. Bunin shows us this painful gap between dreams and reality for many. After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistles and spring trepidation, young Tata suddenly, through her sleep, hears her fiancé shooting jackdaws, and realizes that she does not at all love this rude and ordinary-down-to-earth man.

And yet in the majority early stories Bunin's desire for beauty and purity remains the main, genuine movement of the heroes' souls. In the 20s, already in exile, Bunin wrote about love, as if looking back into the past, peering into a bygone Russia and those people who no longer exist. This is exactly how we perceive the story “Mitya’s Love” (1924). Here Bunin consistently shows how it happens spiritual formation hero, leads him from love to ruin. In the story, life and love are closely intertwined. Mitya’s love for Katya, his hopes, jealousy, vague forebodings seem to be shrouded in special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, got caught up in the false life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which his connection with another woman, the beautiful but down-to-earth Alenka, could not save him, led Mitya to suicide. Mitya’s insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to confront harsh reality, and inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and unacceptability of what happened.

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

The stories in the “Dark Alleys” cycle are similar to the prose of the 20s and 30s by the motif of memories of youth and homeland. All or almost all stories are told in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate the depths of the characters’ subconscious. In most of the stories, the author describes bodily pleasures, beautiful and poetic, born of genuine passion. Even if the first sensual impulse seems frivolous, as in the story “Sunstroke,” it still leads to tenderness and self-forgetfulness, and then to true love. This is exactly what happens with the heroes of the stories “Dark Alleys”, “Late Hour”, “Russia”, “Tanya”, “ Business Cards", "In one familiar street." The writer writes about lonely people and ordinary lives. That is why the past, overshadowed by the young, strong feelings, is depicted as a truly finest hour, merging with the sounds, smells, and colors of nature. As if nature itself leads to mental-physical rapprochement loving friend people's friend. And nature itself leads them to inevitable separation, and sometimes to death.

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

Bunin's heroes greedily seize moments of happiness, grieve if it passes by, and lament if the thread connecting them with their loved one breaks. But at the same time, they are never able to fight with fate for happiness, to win an ordinary everyday battle. All stories are stories about escape from life, even for a short moment, even for one evening. Bunin's heroes can be selfish and unconsciously cynical, but they still lose what is most precious to them - their loved ones. And they can only remember the life they had to give up. That's why love theme Bunin's work is always permeated with the bitterness of loss, parting, and death. All love stories end tragically, even if the heroes survive. After all, at the same time they lose the best, valuable part of the soul, lose the meaning of existence and find themselves alone.

I. A. Bunin devoted a significant part of his works to the theme of love, from the earliest to the last. The collection “Dark Alleys” became the embodiment of all the writer’s many years of thoughts about love. He saw it everywhere, because for him this concept was very broad.

Bunin's stories are precisely philosophy. He sees love in a special light. At the same time, it reflects the feelings that each person experienced. From this point of view, love is not some special, abstract concept, but, on the contrary, common to everyone.

“Dark Alleys” is a multifaceted, diverse work. Bunin shows human relations in all its manifestations: sublime passion, completely ordinary desires, novels “out of nothing to do,” animal manifestations of passion. In his characteristic manner, Bunin always finds the necessary, suitable words to describe even the basest human instincts. He never stoops to vulgarity, because he considers it unacceptable. But, as a true master of the Word, he always accurately conveys all shades of feelings and experiences. He bypasses no sides human existence, you won’t find any sanctimonious reticence about certain topics from him. For a writer, love is a completely earthly, real, tangible feeling. Spirituality is inseparable from the physical nature of human attraction to each other. And this is no less beautiful and attractive for Bunin.

Nude female body often appears in Bunin's stories. But even here he knows how to find the only correct expressions, so as not to descend to ordinary naturalism. And the woman appears as beautiful as a goddess, although the author is far from turning a blind eye to shortcomings and overly romanticizing nudity.

The image of a woman is the attractive force that constantly attracts Bunin. He creates a gallery of such images, each story has its own. Ordinary girl from the village in the story “Tanya” is as beautiful as the bright Spanish woman from “Camargue”. The writer also addresses the fates of fallen women; they are no less interesting to him than ladies who keep up appearances. Love makes everyone equal. Prostitutes do not cause disgust, and on the contrary, the behavior of some women from “decent” families is perplexing. Social status ceases to matter when feelings come into play.

It's surprising that the action of a story can last for a very long time. a short time. In several stories, Bunin simply describes women he accidentally saw in a train carriage. And this is no less interesting than if some action were taking place. The images are vivid and immediately imprinted in the memory. This is typical for Bunin. He always knows how to pick the right words, and not a single one will be superfluous.

All the images delight, it seems that the author is in love with each of them. It is possible that he embodied real-life personalities on paper. All the feelings that these women experience have a right to exist. Let it be the first timid love, passion for an unworthy person, a feeling of revenge, lust, worship. And it makes absolutely no difference whether you are a peasant, a prostitute or a lady. The main thing is that you are a woman.

The male images in Bunin's stories are somewhat darkened, blurred, and the characters are not too defined. It doesn't matter. It is much more necessary for the writer to understand what feelings these men experience, what pushes them towards women, why they love them. The reader does not need to know what this or that man is like, what he looks like, what his advantages and disadvantages are. He participates in the story insofar as love is a feeling of two.

Bunin is in love with love. For him this is the most wonderful feeling on earth, incomparable to anything else. And yet love destroys destinies. The writer never tired of repeating that every strong love avoids marriage. An earthly feeling is only a short flash in a person’s life, and Bunin tries to preserve these wonderful moments in his stories. Even before the appearance of “Dark Alleys,” he writes: “Blissful hours pass, and it is necessary, necessary... to preserve at least something, that is, to oppose death, the fading of the rose hips.” The last image is taken from N. Ogarev’s poem “An Ordinary Tale.” This is where the name “Dark Alleys” came from.

Bunin strives in his stories to stop the moment, to prolong the flowering of the rosehip, because the fall of flowers is inevitable.

In the collection “Dark Alleys” you will not find a single story where love would end in marriage. Lovers are separated either by relatives, or by circumstances, or by death. It seems that death for Bunin is preferable to a long life family life side by side. He shows us love at its peak, but never at its fading, since fading does not happen in his stories. Only the instantaneous disappearance of a bright flame by the will of circumstances.

“Dark Alleys” would like to be called “philosophy of love.” There is no better definition. Bunin subordinated all his work to this philosophy.

The book “Dark Alleys” became integral part not only Russian, but also world literature dedicated to the eternal, ageless theme of love.

Having worked on the “Dark Alleys” cycle for many years, I. A. Bunin was already at the end of his life creative path admitted that he considers this cycle “the most perfect in craftsmanship.” In my opinion, indeed, the stories included in the collection are an example greatest talent writer and, in addition, a look at life for real wise man, a person who is closer to the solution greatest secrets peace. The main theme of the cycle is the theme of love, but this is no longer just love, but love that reveals the most secret corners human soul, love as the basis of life and somehow illusory happiness that we all strive for, but, alas, so often miss.

Already in the first story, which, like the entire collection, received the name “Dark Alleys,” one of the main themes of the cycle appears: life moves inexorably forward, dreams of lost happiness are illusory, because a person cannot influence the development of events. The hero of the story meets a woman at an inn whom he seduced and abandoned in his youth. Now, after many years, he can say that he has never been happy in his life. But was he wrong then? Apparently, this is not the case.

Man in the works of A. I. Bunin is in vicious circle routine, vulgarity and melancholy. Only occasionally does happiness smile at him, and then it leaves forever. The heroes of the writer’s works have a keen sense of beauty, but never enter into a fight for it. The philosophy of Bunin's heroes is based on the feeling of the impossibility of changing anything in life, and therefore they only greedily catch moments of happiness, suffer if it passes by, but never fight for it.

According to the writer, humanity is given only a limited amount of happiness, and therefore what is given to one is taken away from another. In the story “Caucasus,” the heroine, running away with her lover, buys her happiness at the cost of her husband’s life. I. A. Bunin describes the last hours of the hero’s life in amazing detail and prosaically: “The next day... he swam in the sea in the morning, then shaved, put on clean underwear, a snow-white jacket, had breakfast... drank a bottle of champagne, drank coffee with chartreuse , slowly smoked a cigar. Returning to his room, he lay down on the sofa and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers.” All this is undoubtedly connected with Bunin’s general concept of life. A person dies not in a state of passion, but because he has already received his share of happiness in life and has no need to live anymore. Running away from life, from pain, I. A. Bunin’s heroes experience joy, because the pain sometimes becomes unbearable. All the will, all the determination that a person so lacks in life is invested in suicide.

In an effort to get their share of happiness, the heroes of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin are often selfish and cruel. They realize that it is pointless to spare a person, because there is not enough happiness for everyone, and sooner or later you will experience the pain of loss - it doesn’t matter. The writer is even inclined to remove responsibility from his heroes. Acting cruelly, they only live according to the laws of life, in which they are unable to change anything. In the story “Muse,” the heroine lives according to the principle that is dictated to her by the morality of society. The main theme of the story is the theme of a brutal struggle for short happiness, and great tragedy The hero is that he perceives love differently from his beloved, an emancipated woman who does not know how to take into account the feelings of another person. But, despite this, even the slightest glimpse of love can become for Bunin’s heroes that moment that a person will consider the happiest all his life. A few minutes of happiness are always the highest rise in a person’s life, during which he temporarily gets rid of sorrows.

For Bunin, love is the greatest happiness bestowed on man. But eternal doom always hangs over her. Love is always associated with tragedy; true love does not have a happy ending, because a person has to pay for moments of happiness.

Loneliness becomes the inevitable fate of a person who fails to discern in another close soul. Only love gives happiness in spiritual communication. But - alas! - how often found happiness turns into loss, as happened with the heroes of the story “In Paris”.

In many stories in the series, the writer seeks to understand the inner nature of love and comes to the conclusion that complete happiness can only be achieved by a combination of spiritual and physical intimacy. He was never a supporter of platonic feelings, understanding that the basis of love is instinct. In some stories (“Antigone”, “Kuma”, “Business Cards”) we're talking about precisely about the predominance of the carnal principle in passion. Bunin does not condemn his heroes in them, because in their attraction there is still something that opposes the everyday life, there is a desire to capture their piece of happiness at least for one night.

I. A. Bunin surprisingly accurately knows how to describe the complexity and diversity of those feelings that arise in loving person. And the situations described in his stories are very different. In the stories “Steamboat Saratov”, “Raven”, Bunin shows how intricately love can be intertwined with a sense of possessiveness. In the story “Natalie” the writer talks about how terrible passion is that is not warmed up. true love. Love in Bunin's stories can lead to destruction and grief, because it arises not only when a person “has the right” to love (“Russia”, “Caucasus”). The story “Galya Ganskaya” talks about the tragedy that can result from the lack of spiritual closeness in people when they feel differently. And the heroine of the story “Dubki” deliberately goes to her death, wanting to feel true love at least once in her life.

Readers may sometimes have a question: does the writer create artificial barriers on the heroes’ path to happiness? No, the point is that people themselves do not strive to fight. They can experience happiness, but only for a moment, and then it disappears like water into sand. That is why many of I. A. Bunin’s stories are so tragic. Sometimes in one short line the writer reveals the collapse of hopes, the cruel mockery of fate.

The stories of the “Dark Alleys” cycle are an example of amazing Russian psychological prose, in which love has always been one of those eternal secrets, which word artists sought to reveal. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, in my opinion, was one of those brilliant writers, who came closest to solving this mystery.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a subtle lyricist, capable of conveying any shades state of mind. Almost all of his works are dedicated to love. The “Dark Alleys” cycle is like an album that contains life sketches rather than stories. There is no sense of completeness in them, but still each... unique story love. Bunin does not have a story that would end happily. I consider love to be a great happiness that befalls people. That’s why I don’t understand the author’s position. He gives the heroes only moments of pleasure, forcing them to pay a very high price for it. Perhaps Bunin considers it important to show the reader not so much love itself, but the feelings that it entails. Yes, the works are dedicated to simple and ordinary love, with its passions and experiences, but all this is conveyed by the author through the prism of real time at a turning point. There is no writer in the stories happy endings, since Bunin does not see them in life. After all, when everything around collapses, a person cannot create peace within himself, and without this the happiness of being is impossible. Take, for example, the story “Dark Alleys.” The author tells with all truthfulness about love, enormous in its power and, alas, unequal in the social status of the lovers. Years pass and people meet again, but now they are united only by warm memories. In “Sunstroke,” love just arose and turned into passion, but, unfortunately, it came at the wrong time, and people, having played it, break up. It seems to me that for Bunin the main tragedy a person is the loss of love, faith in it. But the feeling leaves a mark on souls, and not only a sad one.

So what is love? Is this the instrument that fate teaches people about life and punishes them strictly for mistakes? This question is difficult to answer.

Bunin created a magnificent cycle of stories that could outshine love story. The author may be laconic, but in specific phrases he expresses all the feelings that would not fit in volumes. In general, I believe that every person feels and perceives love in their own way. It’s difficult for me to convey the feelings I experienced after reading Bunin’s stories. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I have not yet matured, but most likely due to the immensity of the topic. Main feature works of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, which attracts me to his works, I consider the variety of situations in which the heroes find themselves. This gives the stories more reality.

An essay on the works of I. A. Bunin using the examples of the stories “Cold Autumn” and “Sunstroke”.

The theme of love in the stories of I. A. Bunin

Love has always occupied key position in the works of many writers. This is how it was with I. A. Bunin. In his works, she is assigned a special role: love is always tragic, it reveals the innermost, even what a person would like to hide from everyone. About this amazing feeling, capable of bringing both great happiness and extreme suffering, I. A. Bunin wrote a series of stories “Dark Alleys”, each of which understands Bunin’s love from different sides.

In the story “Cold Autumn” main character fell in love with a man who soon died in the war. He knew that this could happen, and advised his beloved to live without him, to be happy in the world while he waited for her on the other side. The heroine lives, gets married, takes care of her husband’s nephew, but in her own twilight she understands that the time that has passed since the death of her true love cannot be called life, it is only existence. The heroine asks herself: “Yes, and what happened in my life? Only that cold autumn evening.” She's ready to die because death better than life without love. The story ends with a very strong phrase: “I lived, I was happy, now I’ll come back soon.” She is not afraid of death, she waits for it as salvation, the opportunity to finally be with her loved one, even if not in this life.

Also clearly the tragedy of love in the perception of I. A. Bunin is shown in his separate story “Sunstroke”. This is a story of two already mature people who met each other precisely at that moment in life when they needed this meeting. There are no accidents in Bunin's work, it was fate. But the heroes are not teenagers, the woman is bound by obligations, and although the reader sees that this true love, this meeting leads to absolutely nothing. The heroes get off the ferry in order to be together for at least a few hours, however, parting with the one whom he has already fallen in love with, the lieutenant no longer knows what to do in this city. “It was all so stupid, so ridiculous that he fled from the market.” Nothing makes sense anymore. “The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.” The love of the heroes is mutual, their feelings are sincere, but their meeting leads nowhere, leaving in the heart the sweet bitterness of the feelings they experienced.

“All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared,” says I. A. Bunin. In his understanding, love is a spontaneous feeling, a person cannot control it, but without it life is empty and meaningless. It’s better to burn with love, break your heart, but fall in love, than not experience this feeling at all!