Ivan Bunin. Business Cards

(University of Southern California; Professor of the Department of Slavic Studies; Candidate of Philology)

(University of Southern California; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Professor; PhD)

Keywords: Bunin, “Dark Alleys”, invariants, sex, experimentation, Chekhov, bovarism, author’s character, improvisation, erotic poses, Maupassant
Key words: Bunin, “Dark Alleys,” invariants, sex, experimentation, Chekhov, Bovarism, authorial character, improvisation, erotic positions, Maupassant

UDC/UDC: 821.161.1

annotation: The article consists of two parts. The first provides a systematic overview of the invariant motifs of the late cycle of stories by I.A. Bunin's "Dark Alleys", which implement the central theme - cataloging different options relationship between sexual partners and their consequences; the main parameters of variation are outlined - plot and narrative. The second part of the article is devoted to a holistic analysis of one of the signature stories of the cycle, “Business Cards”; its plot, a frequent story of a fleeting love affair in Bunin, appears as a staging of an erotic experiment carried out by the author’s character-improviser in interaction with the heroine, who willingly accompanies him in a Bovary-like mood.

Abstract: Professor Zholkovsky’s article comprises two parts. The first overviews the recurrent motifs of Ivan Bunin’s 1940s collection of short stories The Dark Alleys— manifestations of the cycle’s central theme: cataloging the various types of relationships among sexual partners and their consequences. The scholar identifies the set of principal narrative parameters that underlie the variation. The second part focuses on the structure of “Visiting Cards,” one of the signature pieces of the cycle. The typically Buninian story of a brief love affair is shown to unfold as an erotic experiment staged by the improvising authorial protagonist in tandem with a consenting - Madame Bovary-style - heroine.

Alexander Zholkovsky. The Place of “Calling Cards” in Bunin’s Erotic Rolodex

"Business Cards" ( VC), written in the fall of 1940, were published as part of the first New York edition of “Dark Alleys” ( TA; 1943), and at home - with a typical delay of more than twenty years. Not included in Bunin's thaw publications (1956, 1961), they appeared in the 7th volume of Bunin's thorough nine-volume edition (1966). Then they were included in the Moscow collection of Bunin’s stories (1978), in his three-volume set (1982, 1984) and in the collection “ Antonov apples"(1987). So they - very gradually - took their rightful place in the Russian canon.

There was a reason for such retardation - the extremely frank, even by the standards of the late Bunin, eroticism of the short, five book pages, story. VC They captivate with their outward ingenuousness, but in reality - with the virtuoso perfection of the love narrative. This complex simplicity, full of mysteries, the very presence of which eludes the inexperienced reader, cries out for detailed analysis.

The proposed commentary is structured as follows. An outline of the main content and structural features of 40 texts TA(and a number of other Bunin masterpieces) follows a slow, fragment by fragment, reading VC with references to parallel passages from other stories - an attempt to do justice to the original concept VC and its sophisticated implementation.

I. "Dark Alleys"

1. Fables. Let's outline the general outline TA, paying special attention to the motives essential to our story.

(1) Bunin’s love prose is distinguished by a combination

intense concentration to the point of insolence on the sexual side of existence, with its physiological realities and exceptional outbursts of love, lust, violence, shamelessness, death,

projection of the corresponding plots onto the widest range of everyday and literary situations and the refined finishing of the narrative fabric, which allows the material to be elevated on the verge of light porn into a pearl of creation.

Same drama fatal love is played out between representatives of different social groups and nationalities. IN TA appear

nobles, high-ranking officials, poor nobles, priests, merchants, students, serfs, maids, nurses, tutors, poets, artists...

Russians in Russia and in exile, a French gypsy, Indians, Spaniards, Bedouins, Moroccans...

Various characters are in different social relationships with each other, equal or hierarchical - this is

older and younger relatives, cousins, spouses, lovers, superiors and subordinates, hosts and guests, hotel owners and guests...

The action takes place in a variety of places, united by a certain common property of “outside the home”; these are

restaurants, hotels, trains, ships, artists' studios, dachas, relatives' estates...

(2) The plots that develop the central theme vary it with almost encyclopedic completeness.

Love conflicts sometimes lead to a carnal connection, sometimes not, in some cases they come down to a single date, in others to a dotted or continuously lasting relationship (“Galya Ganskaya”, “Tanya”, “Natalie”).

Consummation/continuation of communication may be hindered by owners, older relatives, the second spouse, other rivals, helpful animals, circumstances of acquaintance, lack of reciprocity, abandonment of one partner by another, sometimes leaving for a third, death of a partner...

Death can be natural (“Late Hour,” “In Paris”), in particular the result of an unsuccessful birth following the happy reunion of the heroes (“Natalie”), or violent - death in war (“ Cold autumn"), the result of murder (shot, hit with a bottle...) or suicide (poisoning, shot, thrown under a train...).

Love/connection can be remembered throughout your life, even if it was not something exceptional at the time (“Wolves”).

Love conflicts are variously superimposed on social ones, giving, as it were, a continuous continuum of variations. Thus, the sexual rapprochement of partners, one of whom, for example a man, is socially higher than the object of his desires, but lower than the older character, can have a range of outcomes:

- intimacy begins and its continuation is expected, but the heroine’s husband suspects nothing (“Kuma”);

- intimacy comes, the heroine’s father does not interfere with anything; but the heroine commits suicide, suspecting her lover of insufficient affection (“Galya Ganskaya”);

— intimacy ensues, but the heroine’s jealous husband shoots himself (“Caucasus”);

- intimacy comes, but ends - at the request of the mother, supported by inept shooting (“Rusya”);

- intimacy comes, but the connection is interrupted - another lover, who is also the employer, shoots the heroine (“Henry”);

- intimacy does not occur, - the protagonists’ plans are unraveled by the heroine’s husband, who kills her (“Oaks”);

- intimacy does not occur - under pressure from the hero’s father/heroine’s employer, who later marries her (“The Raven”);

- a seminarian, later a successful professional, rapes the cook, and she gives birth; his parents allow the boy to grow up among the serfs, but the seminarian drives the mother and child out parents' house(“Fool”).

(3) Female types are diverse, both socially and sexually, but the interest in erotically proactive heroines is noteworthy:

- independently moving towards rapprochement and dictating the course of the novel (“Muse”: the words of the heroine who boldly kissed the hero are typical: “Well,<…>Nothing more is possible for now”; “Zoyka and Valeria”; Sonya in "Natalie"; "Galya Ganskaya"; “Clean Monday”, where dictation is capricious to the point of sadism),

- or, at a minimum, willingly responding to courtship (“Caucasus”, “Rus”, “Antigone”, “Henry”, Natalie in “Natalie”, “Kuma”, “Dubki”, “Swing”, “In Paris” ", "In the spring, in Judea", and outside TA- “Sunstroke” and “Easy Breathing”); this includes stories about x (“Madrid”, “Young Lady Clara”, “One Hundred Rupees”; however, in the last two readiness is complicated by the contrast: Clara is willful, cf. the heroine of “Clean Monday”, and the exotic beauty looks like an unearthly creature) .

A characteristic motive that realizes the heroine’s “initiative” is her almost maternal concern for the convenience of a date. Wed:

- a blanket brought into the forest (“Rusya”);

- a shawl thrown to the ground by Valeria (“Zoyka and Valeria”);

- a warning against the hero’s attempt to put the heroine on the sofa, from where they would not see potential witnesses to their embrace (“Antigone”);

- the efficiency of the heroine, who stays overnight with the hero (“In Paris”).

(4) The plots are not reduced to love on the verge of death - there are stories with a positive outcome:

- the hero dissuades a woman, abandoned by a scoundrel, from plans for revenge, and they begin a love affair (“Revenge”); cf., on the contrary: revenge of husbands in other cases, including the murder by a believing husband of a newlywed who lost her virginity with a bear (“Iron Wool”);

- the hero is touched by the naivety that is ready to come only to him, and is going to get her a decent job (“Madrid”); cf.: saving a simple model from a brothel (“Second Coffee Pot”) and a pure girl from a famous libertine (“River Inn”).

However, sometimes salvation comes at the cost of someone’s life, cf.:

attempts at rape made by the prince-daughter-in-law (“Ballad”) and a foreign guest (“Overnight”), but both times stopped by an animal (wolf, dog).

Finally, there are stories where it doesn’t come to the real drama of love-death, limiting itself to a portrait sketch (usually of an attractive woman - “One Hundred Rupees”, “Camargue”, “Beginning”) or a sketch of a potential development of events (“Swing”, “Smaragd” ).

(5) Love conflicts in TA are not limited to attempts by a third party on marital fidelity and can be created by multi-figure rivalry (“Zoyka and Valeria”, “Natalie”, “Henry”).

The relationship between the protagonists can be:

- as mutual, based on love, jealousy (“Zoyka and Valeria”) or calculation (“Young Lady Clara”, “Madrid”, “The Raven”),

- and the consequences of deception and even direct violence (“Styopa”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Overnight”).

The paradoxical combination of motives is noteworthy:

- emotions brought into relationships with us, both positive (“Madrid”; cf.: “In the Spring, in Judea”, where sex begins with an offer of money) and negative, up to and including murder (“Young Lady Clara”) ;

- the victim’s attachment to the rapist (“Styopa”, “Guest”, “Tanya”, “Iron Wool”);

and the devastating emotional consequences of abandonment:

- the heroine does not forgive the hero even after 30 years (“Dark Alleys”);

— in the finale, the hero-narrator can barely stand on his feet (“Muse”);

— the heroine seeks revenge (“Revenge”).

2. Narratives. This range of characteristic plots is presented by Bunin in a variety of narrative variations, angles and compositional techniques.

(1) The story is usually told in an objective 3rd person, often close to the point of view of the male protagonist.

The female gaze dominates only in one story (“Cold Autumn”) and in some places comes forward in several others (in “Zoika and Valeria” - Zoika’s gaze, in “Wolves” and “Nochlega” - the nameless heroine). In a number of shocking cases, the third-person narrator maintains a distance cold to the point of cruelty (“Styopa”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Overnight”).

As a result, the same conflict, for example, “rape of a defenseless girl,” can be presented in completely different ways:

- in two cases the girl remains fascinated by the rapist and waits - in vain! — continuation of communication (“Styopa”, “Guest”);

— in “Tana,” a long-term love affair arises from the narrator’s rape of a sleeping maid (the question of whether she was sleeping or pretending occupied him for a long time), and the reader unwittingly takes on the point of view of a character initially similar to real or potential rapists (“Styopa,” “Guest” , "Overnight").

The plot does not always focus on the description of a love/carnal relationship. A number of stories are written in a deliberately cursory manner and are devoted not so much to the delights of sex as to its serious consequences, in particular for posterity (“Beauty”, “Fool”). Such conciseness, readily used by Bunin in certain sections of the narrative (remember the “silencing” of the shot in “Easy Breathing”), becomes in these cases the main narrative device.

(2) All kinds of modalities occupy a large place in the organization of plots - dreamy anticipations, jealous threats, memories.

Some stories are constructed as memories of the distant past (“Late Hour”, “In a Familiar Street”, “The Beginning”, “Cold Autumn”, “Clean Monday”), sometimes edited with scenes of the present (“Rusya”, “Galya Ganskaya” , “In the spring, in Judea”).

Sometimes the narrative voyeuristically focuses on one static board, giving its event potential a minimal place (again, “fluency”). These are

— visual initiation of a teenager reveling in the sight of his compartment neighbor’s partial nudity (“Beginning”);

— the narrator’s admiration of an exotic beauty, ending with a servant’s certificate of her availability (“One Hundred Rupees”);

— and the collective devouring by the eyes of a spectacular passenger, whose suppressed libidinousness emerges in the final remark tormented by her beauty, powerful as a bull, Provençal("Camargue")

The powerful virtual plan of Bunin’s narrative is formed by threats:

— serious and partially or completely coming true (“Rusya”, “Henry”);

- frankly exaggerated: the thought of raping the heroine flashing in the hero’s head (“Natalie”);

- or comic: the hero’s threat to kill a naive prostitute (“Madrid”);

as well as various plans and dreams,

- sometimes come true, for example, Sonya’s demand that the hero love her and pretend that he is caring for Natalie;

- sometimes not: dreams of further life together in "Henry".

In general, for TA characteristically experimentally sorting through modal variants of one motive, for example, “lethal”:

- from comic threats to kill to ridiculous shooting (“Rusya”), to real injury (“In the Spring, in Judea”) and death (“Caucasus”, “Henry”, “Steamboat Saratov”).

Such variability was apparently realized by the author, cf. her ironic play on in “Rus”:

- Why didn’t you marry her? <…> - Well, because I shot myself, and she stabbed herself with a dagger...

The “scenarios” outlined by the characters correspond to the literary strategies of the author himself, who emphasized that most of the plots of TA were invented by him - and only partly based on his own biography. Bunin even has a special story about a character indulging in the “author’s” love fantasies - “In a Certain Kingdom.”

(3) Bunin, especially the late one, is known for going beyond the traditional boundaries of decency in the depiction of female appearance and loving embraces. He insisted on his right to write physiologically adequately, without avoiding references to menstruation and pain during defloration (why can you write about blowing your nose, but not about this?!). Wed:

- “Henry”, where 16-year-old Nadya admits that, thank God I got sick last night But Nowadays it's still possible;

— “Natalie”, where a forced break in dating sick Sonya and the hero are motivated by her subsequent passion, leading to a love date and breakup with the title character);

- “Clean Monday”, where is the heroine every month... for three or four days she did not leave the house at all, she lay and read, forcing me to sit in a chair near the sofa and read silently b ;

— “Rusya”: She hugged him frantically... After lying there in exhaustion, she... with a smile of happy fatigue and pain that hasn't subsided yet said: “Now we are husband and wife.”

But the frankness of the descriptions is combined with secrecy - much is given only by hint, the author seems to enjoy telling the reader erotic riddles. And this applies to the whole gamut of descriptions - the appearance of a clothed woman, her gradual undressing, complete nudity and, finally, the act of love.

In portraits of clothed (and then scantily clad and completely naked) heroines, beauty and seductive details are always emphasized, and peeking is usually emphasized through the dress / robe / sundress / blouse / shirt / skirt / hem / stockings intimate places female anatomy. Mentioned:

body, waist, neck, bare arms, shoulders, forearm, waist, bones, rumps, bare legs, feet, full knees, bare heels, ankles, ankles, thighs, calves, thighs, armpits, moles , (full / high / small) breasts (with a hardened unripe strawberry point), points / oval / beginning of the breasts, nipples, full / soft butt, halves of the butt, lyre of the butt, flat stomach, dark toe under the belly, golden hair below.

An interesting parallel to the half-hidden voyeurism of such descriptions is the mutual mental and auditory voyeurism of the heroes who find themselves in neighboring rooms at night (Antigone).

Undressing can begin with a small detail - the hero turns away the heroine’s glove and kisses the naked part of the hand (“In Paris”, “Galya Ganskaya”), helps her take off her boots, etc. Gradually, the reader is given a view of more intimate parts of the body, the hem is lifted, etc. A repeat of the turned-down glove can be a kiss above the stocking, cf.:

I went By… the stocking up, to the clasp on it, to the elastic band, unfastened it, kissed the warm pink body of the beginning of the thighs A(“Galya Ganskaya”);

...she shyly pulled her hem down black stocking... And, quickly pulling off his boots one after another along with his shoes, he pulled the hem off his feet, kissed deeply on the naked body above the knee… (""Madrid"").

Sometimes there is complete nudity (not counting shoes and sometimes stockings), cf.:

— love dates in “Rus”, coupled with night swimming;

— reflection in the mirror of the heroine undressing in the bathroom (“In Paris”);

- nude in “Clean Monday” - before the heroine finally bestows intimacy on the hero;

— an episode in “Revenge” where the heroine agrees not to be ashamed, since the hero is an artist;

— posing naked for the painting “Bather” (“Second Coffee Pot”).

In other cases, contemplation of the naked female body limited to imaginary or real spying, for example, on bathers (“Natalie”).

The sexual act itself is never described, hidden behind the traditional ellipsis, followed by a decent Then or in one hour, after half an hour, or even In a minute. But sometimes the idea of a love position is given - in passing.

Usually this refers to the missionary position, cf.:

- short but succinct supine(“Styopa”, “In the Spring, in Judea”, “Tanya”; in “Tanya” the hero separated her legs, their tender, hot warmth; another time they lie breasts with breasts);

— detailed description: Immediately after last minute she sharply and disgustingly pushed him away and remained lying as she was, only lowered her raised and spread knees… (“Zoyka and Valeria”; cf. also the attempted rape in “Young Lady Clara” and the rape of a newlywed by her husband in “Iron Wool”).

In one case, the capture of a woman from behind is directly described:

[The goblin,] knowing that horror and lust are taking over her, he dances like a goat towards her and takes her with gaiety, with rage: she will fall face down on the ground... and he will throw the ports off his shaggy legs, fall from behind... and inflames her so much that she is already fainting under him("Iron Wool")

And in another, behind the usual ellipsis, an erotic pose is clearly read, standing, face to face:

And with cheerful insolence he grabbed her right hand with his left hand. She… looked over his shoulder into the living room and didn’t take her hand away, looking at him with a strange smile, as if expecting: Well, what next? He… right hand grabbed her lower back. She... threw her head back slightly, as if protecting her face from the kiss, but pressed herself against him with her arched waist. He, with difficulty catching his breath, reached out to her. half-opened lips and moved her towards the sofa. She, frowning, shook her head, whispering: “No, no, it’s impossible, lying down we won’t see or hear anything...” - and with dull eyes slowly spread her legs... A minute later he fell face down on her shoulder. She stood still, gritting her teeth., then quietly freed herself from him("Antigone").

But even in this risqué passage, there is a characteristic tension between the implied sexual content and the outward propriety of the narrative that is generally inherent in sophisticated erotic discourse. And in the case of Bunin, it also significantly corresponds to his virtual-experimental
tator's interest in enumerating potential variations on the one he is interested in love theme. A creative flight of fancy needs believable naturalization and finds it in following the conventions of the image. carnal love, built on omissions and leaving room for imagination.

(4) In some stories, an important narrative device is the choice of title. True, many stories TA entitled without pretension:

- by the names of the heroines: “Styopa”, “Rusya”, “Zoyka and Valeria”, “Tanya”, “Natalie”;

- or according to the place / circumstances / meaning of the action: “Caucasus”, “Fool”, “Wolves”, “Beginning”, “River Inn”, “Dubki”, “Madrid”, “In Paris”, “Camargue” ", "Revenge", "In the spring, in Judea", "Overnight", "Swing", "Chapel".

But in many cases the title contains an ironic charge, ambiguity or quotative reference, which is revealed only as the story progresses. These are:

- “Clean Monday”, the purity of which is violated;

— “Dark Alleys”: the heroine remembers a quote from Ogarev with resentment;

- “Ballad”: the story appears to fall under this genre;

- “Muse”: this is the name of the heroine, who willfully controls the feelings of the hero-artist;

— “Late Hour”: quote from the character’s words;

— “Beauty”: the title character appears as a soulless destroyer of her stepson;

— “Antigone”: the nurse, named after the noble ancient heroine, turns out to be an imperturbable voluptuous woman;

— “Henry”: a passionate woman is hidden under a man’s name;

— “In a Familiar Street”: characters quote Polonsky’s poem;

— “Godfather”: the heroine coldly plans to betray her husband with her godfather;

— “Second coffee pot”: it interrupts the sitter’s story about her life, marking the end of the break in posing;

— “Cold Autumn”: quote from Fet;

— “Steamboat “Saratov””: in the epilogue of the story, the murderer of the lover who left him is found as a prisoner on it;

— “Raven”: it turns out to be the father who took the hero’s beloved away and deprived him of his inheritance;

— “One hundred rupees”: the price of the services of an unearthly beauty.

This technique is evident, as we will see, in VC.

3. Intertexts. “Real” events are always projected into the literary plane, which is predisposed by the large place given to virtual scenarios in the narrative, in particular the initiative of heroines who follow ready-made patterns of behavior.

(1) Quoted titles and episodes associated with quoting poems and romances are only the most visible manifestation of the literary nature of Bunin’s plots . Wed:

The title of “Easy Breathing”, referring to Fet (“Whisper, timid breathing. The trill of a nightingale...") and to ancient, funny book, which determined the heroine’s life strategy.

Partial undermining of the cited source (usually cited inaccurately), but also an ambivalent recognition of its value is a constant feature of Bunin’s work with intertexts. Thus, in the title story of the cycle, the first mention of Ogarev’s poem is accompanied by an open negative comment heroine, and the last - the sad duality of the hero:

Yes, of course, the best moments<…> truly magical! “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were alleys of dark linden trees...” But, my God, what would happen next? <…>This very Hope <…> my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children?("Dark alleys").

But the intertextual background of the story is not limited to a direct reference to Ogarev.

Behind meeting again“His Excellency”, a handsome military man with a serf lover abandoned thirty years ago, reads the venerable tradition represented by “Why are you greedily looking at the road...” by Nekrasov, “I remember, I was still young...” Combs and, of course, “Resurrection” by Tolstoy. The “Nekhlyudov” motif one way or another runs through several more stories (“Tanya”, “Styopa”, partly “Antigone”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Raven”).

Akin to quotations, they are direct references in the text to literary works and even the authors themselves, read or even encountered by the characters. So,

- the motive for reading Maupassant and even imitating him is in “Gala Ganskaya” and “Antigone”, and the reading of “The Precipice” is woven into the plot of “Natalie”;

- in "Rus" memories of past love are crowned with a quote from Catullus ( Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla);

— in “The Guest,” rape/defloration is “motivated” by a playful reference to the history of painting (“Flemish Eve”) and the biblical name of the hero (Adam Adamych);

— Chaliapin, Korovin and Malyavin act in “The Second Coffee Pot”;

— Bryusov is involved in “The River Inn”;

- appear in “Clean Monday” famous figures Silver Age, in particular a whole company of artists Art Theater, the latest literature is read and discussed, including Bryusov’s “Fire Angel,” and the heroine focuses her life strategy on “The Tale of Peter and Fevronia.”

References to other authors and topoi may be hidden, not always conscious, and even more so require identification. Not to mention the general romantic topos of sudden and fatal mutual passion behind “Sunstroke” and many plots TA, I’ll name, in addition to “Nekhlyudov’s”, a few more:

— the tutor’s love for the owner’s daughter, going back to Rousseau and Chernyshevsky (“Russia”, partly “In Spring, in Judea”);

- Raskolnikov’s motive for saving an innocent girl from an experienced libertine (“River Inn”);

- Chekhov’s motif of a dacha courtship with a friend’s wife (“Kuma”).

As specificity weakens, these and many other literary plots, so to speak, dissolve into the general “ready-made scenario” TA.

Bunin, as it were, briefly outlines the reliance on situations known from literature in order to focus on what is special that interests him. “Readiness” serves as a motivation for, as he admits, deliberately fictitious, often implausible, constructions. So,

— the freedom of movement and behavior enjoyed by the Bedouin heroine of “In Spring, in Judea” is unlikely, but it is naturalized by the archetypal, almost from “A Thousand and One Nights”, motif of the abduction of a beautiful princess kept under lock and key by a visiting wanderer;

- Bunin’s attempt to rely on his acquaintance with Provence and the study of “Don Quixote” in the story he was commissioned about Spain, where he had never been, is known.

Ready-made techniques for depicting intimacy that connects partners include the transition from “you” to “you” and back, reflected by Pushkin (in “You and You”), cf.: “Dark Alleys”, “Caucasus”, “Muse” , “Zoyka and Valeria”, “Galya Ganskaya”, “Kuma”.

(2) Essential aspect of intertextuality TA form numerous internal echoes between the stories of the cycle. As we have seen,

— Maupassant and Bryusov appear in two stories;

- such a detail as turning away a glove when kissing a hand passes from one story to another;

— the rivalry between two women over the hero is repeated, with different outcomes (“Zoyka and Valeria”, “Natalie”);

- sometimes it is not the setting and style of the narrative that are similar, but the denouement, cf. “Ballad” and “Overnight”, where an animal saves from rape; however, the invasion of an animal into the love life of the characters can be negative (cf. “Iron Wool”, whose “natural” motive, by the way, has a completely literary background - “Lokis” by Merimee) or simply impressive (“Wolves”);

- stories can be written on similar material, but in a distinctly different way, for example, about extremely different x (“Madrid”, “Young Lady Clara”, “One Hundred Rupees”);

- even such a small motive as the lustful impatience of a male client is used twice, leading either to murder (“Young Lady Clara”) or only to playful prodding (“Madrid”).

Bunin seems to be consciously experimenting with collisions that interest him; So,

A woman’s self-will can play out not only in an educated circle (“Clean Monday,” “Muse”), but also in relationships with a client who paid for her services (“Young Lady Clara”).

So, the collection “Dark Alleys” is a kind of systematic study of the serious consequences of love/lust, giving the reader a representative set of substantive, structural and stylistic variations on a single theme. Let's see what place our story occupies in this general catalogue.

II. "Business Cards"

VC belong to the core of the cycle - stories with a beginning, middle and end; with a full-fledged love story unfolding rapidly and at the same time slowly; with close-ups and dialogues; with filigree verbal decoration; with repetitions, build-ups, climax, denouement and epilogue; with a strong mutual feeling - once and for life, but without deaths; with undressing and the act of love intimacy; with “scripted” - creative - behavior of characters, one of which is famous writer, a kind of alter ego of the author; with a rich intertextual orchestration of the plot and a crowning narrative tour-de-force, echoing the plot.

The text is naturally divided into 16 narrative and dialogic fragments - plus the title. Let's take a closer look at them in order. So,

"Business Cards". The direct meaning of the title will become clear in the fragment, and the symbolic meaning will become clear towards the end, and then only partially.

It was the beginning of autumn ran along... Volga steamship "Goncharov"...cold wind, chattering... clothes walking on the deck, wrinkling their faces... And... she was the only one who saw off the ship gull…askew washed away... to the side, for sure not knowing what to do with myself in this desert great river…

Exposition; isolated public scene outside the home; minimalist references to Goncharov (cf. “Break” in “Natalie”) and to “The Seagull” - harbingers of the heroine’s love affairs; exposure of people to intense natural phenomena; first appearance of a verbal motif askew and verb ran(he will respond in ).

...an artel of men on bottom deck, and on top walked... those two of second class, What both swam... to the same place... were inseparable... similar to each other invisibly, And passenger first class... recently famous writer,perceptible yours... not that sad, not that angry seriousness… he was tall, strong... well dressed... handsome: brunette togo eastern the type that occurs in Moscow among… trading people; He and left this crowd, Although nothing in common no longer had it with him.

Continuation of the exhibition, the appearance of a hero who stands out from the environment socially, physically and creatively: strong, handsome, famous, noticeable against the background of the artel workers and a pair of indistinguishable ones - same-sex? (cf. lesbian prostitutes - girlfriends of the heroine of “Madrid”) - second class passengers; his seriousness will develop; his oriental appearance and merchant origin mark his difference from Bunin himself (and a nod towards Chekhov, Kuprin, Gorky, Bryusov?). The emphasized distancing of the author from the “author’s” character is especially relevant in the light of the history of the creation of the story, based on the episode of Bunin’s steamship acquaintance with a provincial fan, which caused his brother’s ridicule of his vain unfurling of feathers .

He… walked hard step, in Expensive And durable shoes…breathing... strong air autumn and the Volga... reached to the stern... and... sharp turning, walked towards the nose, on wind... Finally he suddenly stopped And smiled gloomily: seemed rising… With bottom decks, from third class, black cheap hat and under it worn out, sweet the face of the one he's with met by chance last night. He went to her towards wide steps. All risen on deck awkward she went too on him and also with a smile, driven by the wind, all askew from the wind, holding thin hand hat, V lung coat, under which visible were thin legs.

The hero is emphatically strong, partly thanks to the absorbed force of the wind, he has expensive, durable shoes, his movements are sharp, wide, he frowns, but also smiles - the heroine who grows impressively in front of him, in contrast to him, who is fragile, awkward, worn out, dressed cheaply, but sweet. She, like a seagull (from), squints from the wind, which attacks her and infects her with its power. She appears at full height and comes towards the hero - the first sign of reciprocity and the first appearance of an important verbal motif all, all, everything. Holding a hat and seeing your legs under a coat are the first signs of voyeurism and undressing.

In the middle of a paragraph, starting with the word finally, the exposition (descriptio) unexpectedly turns into the actual narration (narratio): then he generally walked(in imperfect form), and here all of a sudden once paused, smiled And went, and this narrative shift is combined with the first appearance of the heroine. At the same time, it turns out that this is not the beginning of the action, which happened the day before - there is also a time loop (a flashback will follow). This narrative enjambment will be symmetrically reflected in a similar shift within the fragment (also the third, but from the end). Placing an important plot twist deep in a long paragraph is a typical Bunin technique (cf. the technique of silencing the shot, noted by Vygotsky in “Easy Breathing”).

- How did you like to rest? — loud and courageous he said... - Great! - she answered immoderately fun... He held her hand in his big hand and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with joyful effort.“Why are you so sleepy…” he said familiarly… — I dreamed everything! - she answered smartly, at all inappropriate... to my kind... - Oh, look! “This is how little children drown while swimming in the summer, a Chechen walks across the river" - Here I'm waiting for a Chechen!.. “Let’s go drink vodka and eat fish soup,” he said, thinking: she should have breakfast, right? no matter what.

She stomped her feet flirtatiously: - Yes, yes, vodka, vodka!..

And they quickly walked to the first class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already with some looking at her greedily.

The hero emphasizes strength, wealth, protective familiarity - and the ability to read his partner; she responds to this with a liveliness unusual for her, right down to a defiant readiness to meet the symbolic “Chechen” from Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (and Alyabyev’s popular romance) and flirtatious foot stamping (which will return in a new way in). They look into each other's eyes, and she with joyful effort, following the attitude of reciprocity, dreams and departure from the usual mode of behavior. The greed of looking around emphasizes the animal aspect of the passion that arises in him and partly contradicts her counter movements and glances.

Yesterday... he... sat with her on... a bench running along the first class cabins, under their windows with white through shutters, but sat few and at night I regretted it... I realized that already wanted her. Why? By habit road attraction to random... companions? Now... he already knew why he was so attracted to her, and impatiently waited finishing the job. Because... her swagger... was in an amazing contradictions with her, he internally I was getting more and more worried.

The narrative looks back into yesterday’s superficial acquaintance (i.e., such as in Bunin’s real meeting with the reader), and the hero realizes its insufficiency in view of more (than in the standard, as at the beginning of “The Lady with the Dog,” scenario of an affair with a random companion ) attraction to the heroine, excited by the inconsistency of her manner. The hero begins to worry (remember him sad seriousness) and impatiently (cf. impatience in “Madrid” and “Miss Clara”) to anticipate something else (note the repetition of the pronoun All), and a parallel is drawn between his unexpected desire for something more and her unusual courage. Moreover, the writer-character begins to behave “creatively” - like the author who described in TA not real episodes from your life, but fictitious stories; the reader is intrigued. The through shutters of the first class cabins will appear again, this time from the inside (see).

...She touched him because... was amazed… meeting a famous writer, - to feel... this confusion was... Nice, this... creates... intimacy between you and with her, gives... some right to her... But... he, apparently, struck her and like a man, and she touched him precisely with all her poverty and simple-heartedness. He has already mastered... a quick transition... to freedom treatment, supposedly artistic, and this one feigned simplicity... [He] smelled the smoke, thinking: “ This must be remembered“In this haze you can immediately smell the smell of fish soup.”

The hero reads with pleasure the motives for the heroine’s disposition towards him - as a reader and as a woman. The scenario familiarity of his reactions and strategies (including feigned artistry), but there is also a peculiarity emerging: the combination of his male success and rights at her with her touching vulnerability, fueling the reader's interest in how it is right will be implemented. In the behavior of the heroine, the topos of “The Seagull” and, more broadly, “Madame Bovary” are obvious. The implied closeness of the author-narrator to the hero is simultaneously indicated - by the use of the pronoun by you, and is disguised by the splitting of his attention between the heroine and the writer’s professionalism (in the spirit of Trigorin).

Motive schoolgirls works towards the beginning rejuvenation/infantilization of the heroine.

He squeezed teeth and tightly took her handle, under thin the skin of which was felt all the bones, but she... herself, like an experienced seductress, brought it to his lips and volume but looked at him.

— Let's go to to me...

— Let's go to... It’s true that it’s kind of stuffy and smoky here!

AND, shaking her hair, she took the hat.

The counterpoint of his strength and physical determination continues ( grabbed it tightly, clenched his teeth) and its weaknesses ( handle, thin, bones), against the background of which her increasingly active connection to the Bovarist scenario appears in contrast ( experienced seductress, languidly); the line of the hat and hair is picked up, as well as meeting glances and readiness for rapprochement ( Let's go - Let's go).

He's in the hallway hugged her. She proudly, she looked at him over her shoulder. He with hate passion and love almost bit her on the cheek. She, over the shoulder, bacchanalian offered him her lips.

From conversations, glances, shaking and kissing hands, the characters move on to their first hugs. The ironically described bacchanalian theatrical behavior of the heroine and gloomy, contradictory up to hatred(isn't this an echo of the classic odi et amo? - remember Catullus in "Rus"!) and animalism right up to bites (following clenching teeth) - the passion of the hero. Half-turn repeated twice ( over shoulder) is not only theatrical, but also effectively combines a meeting of glances and a contradictory hug from behind.

In the half-light of the cabin with a through grille lowered on the window she immediately, in a hurry please to him until the end dare to use all the unexpected happiness that suddenly befell her with this handsome, strong and famous man, she unbuttoned and stopped dropped from oneself onto the floor dress, stayed, slim like a boy, V light shirt, with bare shoulders and arms and in white pantaloons, and he was painfully pierced innocence all this.

The love date takes place in his cabin, on this side of the through bars, outside of which the heroes sat the night before (see), which emphasizes the heroine’s entry into a first-class cabin and the completeness of intimacy. The heroine is trying please hero, cf. the same verb in love scene in another story:

They lay for a long time... kissing with such strength that it hurt my teeth. She remembered that he had not told her to close her mouth, and, trying to please to him, revealed him like a little pebble(“Tanya”).

However, the heroine VC Not only pleases partner, but also boldly (her line courage) enjoys him (cf. the same lexeme in relation to his strategy in) to realize his Bovarist dreams; There is such complete reciprocity of counter scenarios that it is unclear where to expect a novelistic surprise. The next stage of undressing begins, and faded the heroine continues (cf.) gradually getting younger and prettier ( slim like a boy), almost return to innocence, so that the upcoming intimacy is also given the character of initiation/defloration. Diminutive suffixes that emphasized her pitifulness (remember pens, bones), now work for grace and attractiveness ( in a light shirt... and white trousers), and the spectacular trampling of the dress is reminiscent of the old flirtatious stamping of feet (see).

— Take everything off? — in a whisper she asked, quite like a girl.

— Everything, everything, - he said, getting more and more gloomy.

Her rejuvenation and attitude towards pleasing continue, the total lexeme is picked up All, passing four times in two short lines, and the motive of the hero’s gloominess decisively increases. The touching quality of the “children’s” question, whether to film everything, is aggravated by the motive of following the “correct” script: she asks in a whisper (= not in public), like an actress to a director, what the next stage direction is in the script!

But this question can also have a practical meaning: did I undress enough? The fact is that those remaining on it knickers, were, most likely, with a slit in the step, which allowed the woman, without removing them, to urinate and perform marital duties in her provincial life. Wed. undressing scene in “Gala Ganskaya”:

[She] pulled off... her hat... [I] began... to undress her... threw off her silk... blouse, and my... eyes darkened at the sight of her pinkish body... [She] quickly pulled out of her fallen skirts... slender legs... in openwork cream stockings, in these, you know, wide cambric trousers with a slit in the step, as they wore at that time…

IN VC The “innocent” heroine, trying to play out the Bovary scenario according to all the rules, asks the hero for authoritative instructions (cf. “Tanya,” where the capital’s hero teaches his “simple” mistress to unclench her lips when kissing).

The hero’s next despondency reinforces the reader’s guess that we can expect some kind of cruel turn in the course of events, anticipated by the hero, but what kind is unknown, apparently, to the hero himself, with whose thoughts the narrator systematically introduces us. Doesn't he feel like a virtual rapist-deflorator of a heroine caught in his network, combining feigned readiness for anything with almost virginal innocence?

She obediently... stepped out of Total laundry thrown on the floor remained all naked... in some cheap gray stockings With simple garters, V cheap black shoes, And looked at him victoriously and drunkenly, taking hold of the hair and taking out of them hairpins. He, getting cold, I watched her. Body she turned out to be better, younger… Thin collarbones and ribs allocated according to thin face and thin legs. But hips there were even large. The stomach... was sunken, convex triangle of dark beautiful hair matched underneath abundance dark hair on the head. She took out her hairpins, her hair fell thickly on her thin back in the protruding vertebrae. She leaned over to pick up falling stockings - small breasts with chilled... nipples hanging like skinny pears, lovely in their poverty. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness, which was so unbecoming to her and therefore so excited him with pity, tenderness, passion... Between window grille slats sticking out askew up, nothing could be seen, but she glanced sideways with ecstatic horror on them, heard careless talk... passing along the deck right under the window, and that's more scarier increased delight her depravity. ABOUT, how close they talk and walk - and it doesn’t even occur to anyone, what is being done one step away from them, in this white cabin!

This is the climax. The final exposure occurs (with a double “all”: all underwear, all naked), according to the customs of the time, does not apply to stockings and shoes, cf. in “Clean Monday” the scene of the lavish striptease of the headstrong heroine:

She's clinging to hairpins, over the head pulled off her dress... only wearing only swan slippers, stood... naked back to me...

“He kept saying that I don’t think much about him,” she said... throwing your hair back.

IN VC nudity is carried out along all the already familiar lines (hairpins, hair, thinness, back), to which breasts are now added, and the contrast between the pitifulness of the heroine is maximally emphasized (cheap shoes, thin shins, falling stockings, cold small breasts) and her increasing acquisition of youth and beauty ( better body, younger; thighs are large; convex triangle of thick beautiful hair crowns the line of thick hair).

Heroine obediently, but also victoriously drunk looking at him, plays the proposed piece; the hero looks at her and continues with mysterious tension ( getting colder) hatch your daring plan.

Epiphany occurs within the same paragraph (cf. enjambment in): hero forces(in the spirit of successful rapes of other stories) an inexperienced, seemingly virgin, heroine experience(this verbal motif is picked up) something shamelessness(this word appears only here, marking the culmination of the Bovarist dreams And swagger heroine and the hero's gloomy anticipation of something more than the usual affair).

What does it consist of? shamelessness filling the heroine ecstatic horror and scary the delight of depravity? The text is not straightforward, but quite suggestive. In light of the previous scenes with the hero wishing/hugging the heroine behind(see), her oblique look at oblique window slats, close-up of her breasts and her tilt, the need to remove All(see), that is, somewhat uncomfortable pantaloons, as well as the subsequent (see) cursory message that this did not happen on the bed (remember standing sex in Antigone), the culminating erotic pose is read more or less unambiguously. One of its manifestations is a radical change in the mutual visual contact of the heroes oblique the heroine's gaze outward, not only away from the hero, but also, as it were, at the audience, whose potential, although blocked shutters,scary, but she also excitedly imagines the latently desired voyeurism. (By the way, this audience can only be two supposed homosexuals - besides them, no one walks on deck.)

The climactic scene is eloquent and intertextual.

Firstly, the author's hero Bunin manages in one day to make a leap from an ordinary affair to something exceptional, which Chekhov's Gurov needs almost his entire subsequent life to achieve; Of course, this “exceptional” is different between them: Chekhov is interested in the soul, Bunin – in the body.

Secondly, and with overtones from Maupassant, a specialist in the body, Bunin acts radically. There, the climax also includes non-standard sex:

…she… undressed, slipped into bed... and began to wait.... But she was artless as soon as there can be a legal wife provincial notary, and he - more demanding than the three-bunchu Pasha. And they didn't understand each other, didn't understand each other at all…

[O]she... looked in anguish at... the round man who was lying next to her on his back, and his protruding belly was inflating the sheet, as if inflated with gas balloon. He snored noisily, with a long whistle... and funny aspirations... A stream of saliva flowed from the corner of his half-open mouth[Maupassant 1946: 137-138].

Unlike the ugly hero of Maupassant, Buninsky - by the way, also a famous writer - is also endowed with masculine attractiveness, and creative ability read the heroine and actively lead the intrigue. In Maupassant, a lady is in charge, and the writer does not understand the script he followed throughout the story:

“You’ve been surprising the hell out of me since yesterday.” Be frank, admit it why did you do all this? I do not understand anything. - She quietly approached him blushing like an innocent girl. - I wanted to know... vice... well... and it’s not at all attractive![Maupassant 1946: 138].

Bunin allows his provincial bovarist to fully enjoy shameless - at that time and according to her provincial ideas - an erotic pose!

This whole luxurious cluster - symbolic rape-defloration in a provocative pose, but by mutual consent, at the intersection of two opposing erotic-literary scenarios - reaches an unexpected but carefully prepared climax simultaneously with the final maturation in the hero’s head, so that his creative love act echoes the course of narrative improvisation of the author who composed VC, starting from a minor real episode with a fan.

After he is her like dead, put on the bed. Gritting my teeth, she was lying with eyes closed and already with sorrowful reassurance on pale And very young face.

Denouement. Hindsight confirms that the characters did not make love while lying down. Following the sacramental Then the metaphorical death of the heroine occurs (perhaps referring to the metaphorical “murder” of Anna by Vronsky during their first intimacy); This more or less idyllic story is free from Bunin’s frequent death in earnest; Wed playing on the word “idyll” in “Madrid”, which is also practically conflict-free and similar to VC along the line of undressing vicissitudes:

“...maybe I’ll arrange such a place for you somewhere.” - I would bow at your feet! - So that it becomes a complete idyll... - What? - No, nothing... Sleep.

Clenched teeth the heroines echo him clenched teeth(V ). She seems to be dying at the same time, in particular again turns pale(cf. pinking in), and finally getting younger(cf. this line in, as well as “Sunstroke”, where the hero ages ten years in the finale), calms down and mourns (her duality remains until the end). Her eyes closed, that is, they continue not to look at their partner, but symbolically fit into a silent scene where the heroine appears as a kind of statue - a monument to her wonderful transformation as a result of a risky but successful pas de deux of two creatively courageous protagonists (so to speak, Pygmalion and Galatea) .

Before the evening, When the ship has moored where she needed to go, she stood quietly next to him, with drooping eyelashes. He kissed her cold hand with the love that remains somewhere in the heart all life, and she, without looking back, she ran downstairs along the gangplank into a rough crowd on the pier.

Epilogue: parting, long shot (ship, pier - remember the beginning), the heroine still does not look at the hero ( with lowered eyelashes; without looking back) - her role is fully played; he kisses her cold hand again, overtaken by love all (!) life(cf.: “Sunstroke”). Verb ran mirrors the verbal motif set in the first phrase of the story, and the heroine’s descent along the gangplank into the rude crowd is the motive of her ascent to the first class deck (see), marking her return to everyday low life, against which the events of the story will remain a unique splash.

In conclusion, two words about the title. Is there a hint in it of other, not business cards, but erotic cards, and if so, then does it not mean a series of increasingly seductive poses taken by the heroine as the play progresses?

Bibliography / References

[Bunin 1999] — Bunin I. Collection Op.: In 8 volumes / Comp. A.K. Baboreko. T. 6. M.: Moscow worker, 1999.

(Bunin I.A. Complete works: In 8 vols. /Ed. by A.K. Baboreko. Vols. 6. Moscow, 1999.)

[Bunin 2016] - Bunin I. Clean Monday; Close reading experience / Comment. M. A. Dzyubenko, O. A. Lekmanova. M.: B.S.G.-Press, 2016.

(Bunin I. Chistyi ponedel’nik; Opyt pristal’nogo chteniia / Comment. by M.A. Dziubenko, O.A. Lekmanov. Moscow, 2016.)

[Zholkovsky 2016] - Zholkovsky A.K.“In a certain kingdom”: Bunin’s narrative tour de force // Zholkovsky A.K. Wandering dreams. Articles different years. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016. pp. 81-94.

(Zholkovsky A.K.“V nekotorom tsarstve”: povestvovatel’nyi tur-de-fors Bunina // Zholkovsky A.K. Bluzhdaiushchie sny. Stat'i raznykh let. Saint Petersburg, 2016. P. 81-94.)

[Zholkovsky 2017] - Zholkovsky A.K. Poses, times, paraphrases. Notes from a narratologist // Zvezda. 2017. No. 11. P. 248-260.

(Zholkovsky A.K. Pozy, razy, perifrazy. Zametki narratologa // Zvezda. 2017. No. 11. P. 248-260.)

[Ivanov 1994] — Ivanov G. Atomic decay // Ivanov G. Collection. cit.: In 3 volumes. T. 2. Prose. M.: Consent, 1994. P. 5-34.

(Ivanov G. Raspad atoma // Ivanov G. Complete works: In 3 vols. Vol. 2. Proza. Moscow, 1994. P. 5-34.)

[Kapinos 2014] - KapinosE.IN. Poetry of the Maritime Alps. Bunin's stories of the 1920s. M.: Languages Slavic culture, 2014.

(Kapinos E.V. Poeziia Primorskikh Al'p. Rasskazy Bunina 1920-kh godov. Moscow, 2014.)

[Korostelev, Davis 2010] - I.A. Bunin. New materials. Vol. II / Comp. and ed. O. Korostelev, R. Davis. M.: Russian way, 2010.

(I.A.Bunin. Novye materialy / O. Korostelev, R. Davies (Eds.). Vol. 2. Moscow, 2010.)

[Marchenko 2015] — Marchenko T.V. Poetics of perfection: About the prose of I.A. Bunina. M.: House of Russian Abroad named after. A. Solzhenitsyn, 2015.

(MarchenkoT.V. Poetika sovershenstva: O proze I.A. Bunina. Moscow, 2015.)

BUSINESS CARDS

It was the beginning of autumn, the steamship Goncharov was running along the deserted Volga. The early cold weather had set in, a chilly wind blew hard and fast across the gray floods of its Asian expanse, from its eastern, already reddened shores, fluttering the flag at the stern, the hats, caps and clothes of those walking on the deck, wrinkled their faces, beat their sleeves and floors. And aimlessly and boringly, a single seagull accompanied the steamer - either it flew, heeling convexly on sharp wings, right behind the stern, or it slanted off into the distance, to the side, as if not knowing what to do with itself in this desert of the great river and the autumn gray sky.

And the ship was almost empty - only a team of men on the lower deck, and on the upper deck there were only three walking back and forth, meeting and separating: those two from the second class, who were both sailing somewhere to the same place and were inseparable , always walked together, all busily talking about something, and were similar to each other in stealth, and the first-class passenger, a man of about thirty, a recently famous writer, noticeable for his half-sad, half-angry seriousness and partly his appearance: he was tall, strong - even slightly bent, like some strong people - well dressed and handsome in his own way: dark-haired oriental type, what is found in Moscow among its ancient trading people; he left this crowd, although he no longer had anything in common with them.

He walked alone with a firm step, in expensive and durable shoes, in a black Cheviot coat and a checkered English cap, walked back and forth, now towards the wind, now into the wind, breathing this strong air of autumn and the Volga. He reached the stern, stood on it, looking at the river spreading out and running like a gray swell behind the steamer, and again, turning sharply, walked towards the bow, into the wind , bending his head in an inflating cap and listening to the rhythmic knock of the wheel plates, from which the noisy water rolled like a glass canvas. Finally, he suddenly stopped and smiled gloomily: a cheap black hat appeared rising from a flight of stairs, from the lower deck, from the third class, and under it the worn, sweet face of the one he had accidentally met last night. He walked towards her with long strides. Having all risen to the deck, she awkwardly walked towards him, also with a smile, driven by the wind, all askew from the wind, holding her hat with her thin hand, in a light coat, under which her thin legs were visible.

How did you like to rest? - he said loudly and courageously as he walked.

Great! - she answered immoderately cheerfully. - I always sleep like a groundhog...

He held her hand in his big hand and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with joyful effort.

“Why are you so sleepy, my angel,” he said familiarly. - Good people already having breakfast.

I dreamed everything! - she answered briskly, completely incongruously with her whole appearance.

What is this about?

Who knows?

Oh look! “This is how little children drown while swimming in the summer; a Chechen walks across the river.”

That's the Chechen I'm waiting for! - she answered with the same cheerful briskness.

“Let’s go and drink vodka and eat fish soup,” he said, thinking: she probably doesn’t have enough for breakfast.

She stomped her feet coquettishly:

Yes, yes, vodka, vodka! Damn cold!

And they quickly walked to the first-class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already looking around her with some greed.

He remembered her at night. Yesterday, having accidentally spoken to her and met her on the side of the steamer, which was approaching at dusk some black high bank, under which lights were already scattered, he then sat with her on the deck, on a long bench running along the first class cabins, under their windows with white through shutters, but I didn’t sit much and at night I regretted it. To his surprise, he realized that night that he already wanted her. Why? Out of habit of road attraction to random and unknown companions? Now, sitting with her in the dining room, clinking glasses over cold grainy caviar with hot kalach, he already knew why he was so attracted to her, and was impatiently waiting for the matter to be completed. Because all this - both vodka and its swagger - was in amazing contradiction with her, he became more and more worried internally.

Well, one more at a time, and it’s a Sabbath! - he says.

“It’s really a coven,” she answers in the same tone. - And wonderful vodka!

Of course, she touched him because she was so confused yesterday when he told her his name, she was amazed at the unexpected acquaintance with a famous writer - to feel and see this confusion was, as always, pleasant, it always attracts a woman if she is not quite bad and stupid, immediately creates a certain intimacy between you and her, gives you courage in dealing with her and already, as it were, some right to her. But this was not the only thing that excited him: he apparently struck her as a man, and she touched him precisely with all her poverty and simple-heartedness. He has already mastered the unceremoniousness with fans, the easy and quick transition from the first minutes of meeting them to the freedom of treatment, supposedly artistic, and this feigned simplicity of questions: who are you? where? married or not? He asked the same question yesterday - he looked in the twilight of the evening at the multi-colored lights on the buoys, reflected for a long time in the darkening water around the ship on the red-burning fire on the rafts, felt grains of smoke from there, thinking: “This must be remembered - in this haze you can immediately smell the smell of fish soup.” , - and asked:

May I know your name?

She quickly said her first and middle name.

Are you returning home from somewhere?

I was visiting my sister in Sviyazhsk, her husband suddenly died, and she, you know, was left in a terrible situation...

At first she was so embarrassed that she kept looking off into the distance. Then she began to answer more boldly.

Are you married too?

She began to smile strangely:

Married. And, alas, this is not the first year...

Why alas?

Stupidly jumped out too early. Before you know it, life will pass!

Well, that's still a long way off.

Alas, not far! And I haven’t experienced anything, nothing in my life yet!

It's not too late to try.

And then she suddenly shook her head with a grin:

And I will try!

Who is your husband? Official?

She waved her hand:

Ah, a very good and kind, but, unfortunately, not at all interesting person... Secretary of our zemstvo district government...

And the ship was almost empty - only a gang of men on the lower deck, and on the upper deck there were only three walking back and forth, meeting and separating: those two from the second class, who were both sailing somewhere to the same place and were inseparable , always walked together, all busily talking about something, and were similar to each other in stealth, and the first-class passenger, a man of about thirty, a recently famous writer, noticeable for his half-sad, half-angry seriousness and partly his appearance: he was tall, strong - even slightly bent, like some strong people - well dressed and handsome in his way: a brunette of the oriental type that is found in Moscow among its old merchant people; he left this crowd, although he no longer had anything in common with them.

- How did you like to rest? – he said loudly and courageously as he walked.

- Great! – she answered immoderately cheerfully. – I always sleep like a groundhog...

He held her hand in his large hand and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with joyful effort.

“Why are you so sleepy, my angel,” he said familiarly. “Good people are already having breakfast.”

- I dreamed everything! – she answered briskly, completely inappropriate for her whole appearance.

– What is this about?

- You never know what?

- Oh, look! “This is how little children drown while swimming in the summer; a Chechen walks across the river.”

– That’s the Chechen I’m waiting for! – she answered with the same cheerful briskness.

“Let’s go drink vodka and eat fish soup,” he said, thinking: she probably doesn’t have enough for breakfast.

She stomped her feet coquettishly:

- Yes, yes, vodka, vodka! Damn cold!

And they quickly walked to the first-class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already looking around her with some greed.

He remembered her at night. Yesterday, having accidentally spoken to her and met her on the side of the steamer, which was approaching at dusk some black high bank, under which lights were already scattered, he then sat with her on the deck, on a long bench running along the first class cabins, under their windows with white through shutters, but I didn’t sit much and at night I regretted it. To his surprise, he realized that night that he already wanted her. Why? Out of habit of road attraction to random and unknown companions? Now, sitting with her in the dining room, clinking glasses over cold grainy caviar with hot kalach, he already knew why he was so attracted to her, and was impatiently waiting for the matter to be completed. Because all this - both the vodka and its swagger - was in amazing contradiction with her, he became more and more worried internally.

- Well, sir, just one more, and the Sabbath! - he says.

“It’s really a coven,” she answers in the same tone. - And wonderful vodka!

Of course, she touched him because she was so confused yesterday when he told her his name, she was amazed at the unexpected acquaintance with a famous writer - to feel and see this confusion was, as always, pleasant, it always attracts a woman if she is not quite bad and stupid, immediately creates a certain intimacy between you and her, gives you courage in dealing with her and already, as it were, some right to her. But this was not the only thing that excited him: he apparently struck her as a man, and she touched him precisely with all her poverty and simple-heartedness. He has already mastered the unceremoniousness with fans, the easy and quick transition from the first minutes of meeting them to the freedom of treatment, supposedly artistic, and this feigned simplicity of questions: who are you? where? married or not? He asked the same question yesterday - he looked in the twilight of the evening at the multi-colored lights on the buoys, reflected for a long time in the darkening water around the ship on the red-burning fire on the rafts, felt grains of smoke from there, thinking: “You need to remember this - in this haze you can immediately smell the smell of fish soup.” , - and asked:

- May I know your name?

She quickly said her first and middle name.

– Are you returning home from somewhere?

– I was visiting my sister in Sviyazhsk, her husband suddenly died, and she, you know, was left in a terrible situation...

At first she was so embarrassed that she kept looking off into the distance. Then she began to answer more boldly.

-Are you married too?

She began to smile strangely:

- Married. And, alas, this is not the first year...

- Why alas?

– Stupidly jumped out too early. Before you know it, life will pass!

– Well, that’s still a long way off.

- Alas, not far! And I haven’t experienced anything, nothing in my life yet!

- It's not too late to try.

And then she suddenly shook her head with a grin:

- And I will test it!

- Who is your husband? Official?

She waved her hand:

- Ah, a very good and kind, but, unfortunately, not at all interesting person... Secretary of our zemstvo district government...

“How sweet and miserable!” – he thought and took out his cigarette case:

- Would you like a cigarette?

And she clumsily but bravely lit a cigarette, taking a quick, feminine drag. And once again pity for her, for her swagger, trembled in him, and along with pity - tenderness and a voluptuous desire to take advantage of her naivety and belated inexperience, which, he already felt, would certainly be combined with extreme courage. Now, sitting in the dining room, he looked impatiently at her thin hands, at her withered and therefore even more touching face, at the abundant, somehow collected dark hair that she shook out, taking off her black hat and throwing it off her shoulders, from her cotton dress. gray coat. He was touched and excited by the frankness with which she spoke to him yesterday about her family life, about her middle age, and the fact that she suddenly became so brave now does and says exactly what is so surprisingly not going to suit her. She was slightly flushed from the vodka, even her pale lips turned pink, her eyes filled with a sleepy, mocking shine.

“You know,” she said suddenly, “we were talking about dreams: do you know what I dreamed about most as a schoolgirl?” Order your business cards! We were completely poor then, sold the remains of our estate and moved to the city, and I had absolutely no one to give them to, but how I dreamed! Terribly stupid...

He clenched his teeth and firmly took her hand, under the thin skin of which all the bones were felt, but she, not understanding him at all, herself, like an experienced seductress, brought it to his lips and looked languidly at him.

- Let's go to my place...

- Let's go... It's really stuffy and smoky here!

And, shaking her hair, she took the hat.

He hugged her in the corridor. She looked at him proudly over her shoulder. With hatred, passion and love, he almost bit her on the cheek. Over her shoulder, she offered his lips bacchically.

In the half-light of the cabin with the through grille lowered on the window, she immediately, hastening to please him and boldly make full use of all the unexpected happiness that suddenly befell her lot with this handsome, strong and famous man, unbuttoned and pulled off her dress that had fallen to the floor , remained, slender, like a boy, in a light shirt, with bare shoulders and arms and in white pantaloons, and he was painfully pierced by the innocence of all this.

- Take everything off? – she asked in a whisper, just like a girl.

“That’s it, that’s it,” he said, growing more and more gloomy.

She obediently and quickly stepped out of all the underwear thrown on the floor, she was left all naked, gray-lilac, with that peculiarity of a woman’s body when it nervously chills, becomes tight and cool, covered with goose bumps, in only cheap gray stockings with simple garters, in cheap black shoes, and looked at him victoriously and drunkenly, grabbing her hair and taking out the pins. He, growing cold, watched her. She turned out to be better in body, younger than one might think. Thin collarbones and ribs stood out to match the thin face and thin shins. But the hips were even large. The belly with a small deep navel was sunken, a convex triangle of dark beautiful hair under it corresponded to the abundance of dark hair on the head. She took out her hairpins, her hair falling thickly on her thin back in the protruding vertebrae. She bent down to pick up her falling stockings - small breasts with chilled, shriveled brown nipples hung like skinny pears, lovely in their poverty. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness, which was so unbecoming to her and therefore so excited him with pity, tenderness, passion... Between the slats of the window grille, which stuck out obliquely upward, nothing could be seen, but she looked askance with ecstatic horror on them, she heard careless talking and footsteps passing along the deck right under the window, and this increased the delight of her depravity even more terrifyingly. Oh, how close they talk and walk - and it never even occurs to anyone what is happening one step away from them, in this white cabin!

Then he laid her on the bed as if dead. Clenching her teeth, she lay with her eyes closed and already with a mournful calm on her pale and very young face.

Before the evening, when the ship docked where she needed to go, she stood next to it, quiet, with lowered eyelashes. He kissed her cold hand with that love that remains somewhere in his heart for a lifetime, and without looking back she ran down the gangplank into the rough crowd on the pier.

Alexander Zholkovsky

(University of Southern California; Professor of the Department of Slavic Studies; Candidate of Philology)

(University of Southern California; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Professor; PhD)

UDC/UDC: 821.161.1

annotation: The article consists of two parts. The first provides a systematic overview of the invariant motifs of the late cycle of stories by I.A. Bunin's "Dark Alleys", which implement the central theme - cataloging different options for relationships between sexual partners and their consequences; the main parameters of variation are outlined - plot and narrative. The second part of the article is devoted to a holistic analysis of one of the signature stories of the cycle, “Business Cards”; its plot, a frequent story of a fleeting love affair in Bunin, appears as a staging of an erotic experiment carried out by the author’s character-improviser in interaction with the heroine, who willingly accompanies him in a Bovary-like mood.

Abstract: Professor Zholkovsky’s article comprises two parts. The first overviews of the recurrent motifs of Ivan Bunin’s 1940s collection of short stories The Dark Alleys- manifestations of the cycle’s central theme: cataloging the various types of relationships among sexual partners and their consequences. The scholar identifies the set of principal narrative parameters that underlie the variation. The second part focuses on the structure of “Visiting Cards,” one of the signature pieces of the cycle. The typically Buninian story of a brief love affair is shown to unfold as an erotic experiment staged by the improvising authorial protagonist in tandem with a consenting - Madame Bovary-style - heroine.

Alexander Zholkovsky. The Place of “Calling Cards” in Bunin’s Erotic Rolodex

"Business Cards" ( VC), written in the fall of 1940, were published as part of the first New York edition of “Dark Alleys” ( TA; 1943), and at home - with a typical delay of more than twenty years. Not included in Bunin's thaw publications (1956, 1961), they appeared in the 7th volume of Bunin's thorough nine-volume edition (1966). Then they were included in the Moscow collection of Bunin's stories (1978), in his three-volume set (1982, 1984) and in the collection “Antonov Apples” (1987). So they - very gradually - took their rightful place in the Russian canon.

There was a reason for such retardation - the extremely frank, even by the standards of the late Bunin, eroticism of a short story of five book pages. VC They captivate with their outward ingenuousness, but in reality - with the virtuosic perfection of the love narrative. This complex simplicity, full of mysteries, the very presence of which eludes the inexperienced reader, cries out for detailed analysis.

I. "Dark Alleys"

1. Fables. Let's outline the general outline TA, paying special attention to the motives essential to our story.

(1) Bunin’s love prose is distinguished by a combination

intense concentration to the point of insolence on the sexual side of existence, with its physiological realities and exceptional outbursts of love, lust, violence, shamelessness, death,

the projection of relevant plots onto a wide range of everyday and literary situations and the refined fabrication of the narrative fabric, which allows the material to be elevated on the verge of light porn to the pearl of creation.

The same drama of fatal love is played out between representatives of different social groups and nationalities. IN TA appear

nobles, high-ranking officials, poor nobles, priests, merchants, students, serfs, maids, nurses, tutors, poets, artists...

Russians in Russia and in exile, a French gypsy, Indians, Spaniards, Bedouins, Moroccans...

Various characters are in different social relationships with each other, equal or hierarchical - this

older and younger relatives, cousins, spouses, lovers, superiors and subordinates, hosts and guests, hotel owners and guests...

The action takes place in a variety of places, united by a certain common property of “outside the home”; these are

restaurants, hotels, trains, ships, artists' studios, dachas, relatives' estates...

(2) The plots that develop the central theme vary it with almost encyclopedic completeness.

Death can be natural (“Late Hour”, “In Paris”), in particular the result of unsuccessful childbirth following the happy reunion of the heroes (“Natalie”), or violent - death in war (“Cold Autumn”), the result of murder (shot , hitting with a bottle...) or suicide (poisoning, shooting, throwing under a train...).

Love/connection can be remembered throughout your life, even if it was not something exceptional at the time (“Wolves”).

Intimacy begins and its continuation is expected, but the heroine’s husband suspects nothing (“Kuma”);

Closeness comes, the heroine’s father does not interfere with anything; but the heroine commits suicide, suspecting her lover of insufficient affection (“Galya Ganskaya”);

Intimacy ensues, but the heroine’s jealous husband shoots himself (“Caucasus”);

Closeness comes, but is cut short - at the request of the mother, reinforced by inept shooting (“Rusya”);

Intimacy comes, but the connection is interrupted - another lover, who is also the employer, shoots the heroine (“Henry”);

Intimacy does not come - the protagonists’ plans are unraveled by the heroine’s husband, who kills her (“Oaks”);

Intimacy does not occur - under pressure from the hero's father/heroine's employer, who later marries her himself (“The Raven”);

The seminarian, later a successful professional, rapes the cook and she gives birth; his parents allow the boy to grow up among the servants, but the seminarian drives the mother and child out of the parental home (“Fool”).

(3) Female types are diverse - both socially and sexually, but the interest in erotically proactive heroines is noteworthy:

Those who independently move towards rapprochement and dictate the course of the novel (“Muse”: the words of the heroine who boldly kissed the hero are typical: “Well,<…>Nothing more is possible for now”; “Zoyka and Valeria”; Sonya in "Natalie"; "Galya Ganskaya"; “Clean Monday”, where dictation is capricious to the point of sadism),

Or, at a minimum, willingly responding to courtship (“Caucasus”, “Russia”, “Antigone”, “Henry”, Natalie in “Natalie”, “Kuma”, “Dubki”, “Swing”, “In Paris” , “In the spring, in Judea,” and outside TA- “Sunstroke” and “Easy Breathing”); This includes stories about prostitutes (“Madrid”, “Young Lady Clara”, “One Hundred Rupees”; however, in the last two, the prostitute’s readiness is complicated by the contrast: Clara is willful, cf. the heroine of “Clean Monday”, and the exotic beauty looks like an unearthly creature ).

A characteristic motive that realizes the heroine’s “initiative” is her almost maternal concern for the convenience of a date. Wed:

A blanket brought into the forest (“Rusya”);

Shawl thrown to the ground by Valeria (“Zoyka and Valeria”);

A warning against the hero's attempt to place the heroine on the sofa, where they would not be able to see potential witnesses to their embrace ("Antigone");

The efficiency of the heroine, who stays overnight with the hero (“In Paris”).

(4) The plots are not reduced to love on the verge of death - there are stories with a positive outcome:

The hero dissuades a woman abandoned by a scoundrel from plans for revenge, and they begin a love affair (“Revenge”); cf., on the contrary: revenge of husbands in other cases, including the murder by a believing husband of a newlywed who lost her virginity with a bear (“Iron Wool”);

The hero is touched by the naivety of a prostitute who is ready to come only to him, and is going to get her a decent job (“Madrid”); cf.: saving a simple model from a brothel (“Second Coffee Pot”) and a pure girl from a famous libertine (“River Inn”).

However, sometimes salvation comes at the cost of someone’s life, cf.:

attempts at rape made by the prince-daughter-in-law (“Ballad”) and a foreign guest (“Overnight”), but both times stopped by an animal (wolf, dog).

(5) Love conflicts in TA are not limited to attempts by a third party on marital fidelity and can be created by multi-figure rivalry (“Zoyka and Valeria”, “Natalie”, “Henry”).

The relationship between the protagonists can be:

As mutual, based on love, jealousy (“Zoyka and Valeria”) or calculation (“Young Lady Clara”, “Madrid”, “The Raven”),

So are the consequences of deception and even direct violence (“Styopa”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Overnight”).

The paradoxical combination of motives is noteworthy:

The emotions brought into relationships with prostitutes are both positive (“Madrid”; cf.: “In the Spring, in Judea,” where sex begins with an offer of money) and negative, even to the point of murder (“Young Lady Clara”);

The attachment of the victim to the rapist (“Styopa”, “Guest”, “Tanya”, “Iron Wool”);

and the devastating emotional consequences of abandonment:

The heroine does not forgive the hero even after 30 years (“Dark Alleys”);

In the finale, the hero-narrator can barely stand on his feet (“Muse”);

The heroine seeks revenge (“Revenge”).

2. Narratives. This range of characteristic plots is presented by Bunin in a variety of narrative variations, angles and compositional techniques.

(1) The story is usually told in an objective 3rd person, often close to the point of view of the male protagonist.

The female gaze dominates only in one story (“Cold Autumn”) and in some places comes forward in several others (in “Zoyka and Valeria” - the gaze of Zoya, in “Wolves” and “Nochlega” - the unnamed heroine). In a number of shocking cases, the third-person narrator maintains a distance cold to the point of cruelty (“Styopa”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Overnight”).

As a result, the same conflict, for example, “rape of a defenseless girl,” can be presented in completely different ways:

In two cases, the girl remains fascinated by the rapist and waits - in vain! - continuation of communication (“Styopa”, “Guest”);

In “Tana,” a long-term love affair arises from the narrator’s rape of a sleeping maid (the question of whether she was sleeping or pretending occupied him for a long time), and the reader unwittingly takes on the point of view of a character initially similar to real or potential rapists (“Styopa,” “Guest,” "Overnight")

(2) All kinds of modalities occupy a large place in the organization of plots - dreamy anticipations, jealous threats, memories.

Sometimes the narrative voyeuristically focuses on one static board, giving its event potential a minimal place (again, “fluency”). These are

The visual initiation of a teenager reveling in the sight of his compartment neighbor's partial nudity (“The Beginning”);

The narrator's admiration of an exotic beauty, ending with a servant's certificate of her availability (“One Hundred Rupees”);

And the collective devouring by the eyes of a spectacular passenger, whose suppressed libidinousness emerges in the final remark tormented by her beauty, powerful as a bull, Provençal("Camargue")

The powerful virtual plan of Bunin’s narrative is formed by threats:

Serious and partially or completely coming true (“Rusya”, “Henry”);

Frankly exaggerated: the thought of raping the heroine, flashing in the hero’s head (“Natalie”);

Or comic ones: the hero’s threat to kill a naive prostitute (“Madrid”);

as well as various plans and dreams,

Sometimes they come true, for example, Sonya’s demand that the hero love her and pretend that he is caring for Natalie;

Sometimes not: dreams of further life together in Heinrich.

In general, for TA characteristically experimentally sorting through modal variants of one motive, for example, “lethal”:

From comic threats to kill to ridiculous shooting (“Rusya”), to real injury (“In the Spring, in Judea”) and death (“Caucasus”, “Henry”, “Saratov Steamship”).

Such variability was apparently realized by the author, cf. her ironic play on in “Rus”:

- Why didn’t you marry her? <…> - Well, because I shot myself, and she stabbed herself with a dagger...

- “Henry”, where 16-year-old Nadya admits that, thank God I got sick last night But Nowadays it's still possible;

- “Natalie”, where a forced break in dating sick Sonya and the hero are motivated by her subsequent passion, leading to a love date and breakup with the title character);

- “Clean Monday”, where the heroine every month... for three or four days she did not leave the house at all, she lay and read, forcing me to sit in a chair near the sofa and read silently b ;

- “Rusya”: She hugged him frantically... After lying there in exhaustion, she... with a smile of happy fatigue and pain that hasn't subsided yet said: “Now we are husband and wife.”

An interesting parallel to the half-hidden voyeurism of such descriptions is the mutual mental and auditory voyeurism of the heroes who find themselves in neighboring rooms at night (Antigone).

I went By… the stocking up, to the clasp on it, to the elastic band, unfastened it, kissed the warm pink body of the beginning of the thighs A(“Galya Ganskaya”);

Sometimes there is complete nudity (not counting shoes and sometimes stockings), cf.:

Love dates in “Rus”, coupled with night swimming;

Reflection in the mirror of the heroine undressing in the bathroom (“In Paris”);

Nude in “Clean Monday” - before the heroine finally bestows intimacy on the hero;

An episode in “Revenge” where the heroine agrees not to be ashamed because the hero is an artist;

Posing naked for the painting “Bather” (“Second Coffee Pot”).

In other cases, contemplation of a naked female body is limited to imaginary or real spying, for example, on bathers (“Natalie”).

Usually this refers to the missionary position, cf.:

Brief but succinct supine(“Styopa”, “In the Spring, in Judea”, “Tanya”; in “Tanya” the hero separated her legs, their tender, hot warmth; another time they lie breasts with breasts);

Detailed description: Immediately after the last minute she sharply and disgustingly pushed him away and remained lying as she was, only lowered her raised and spread knees… (“Zoyka and Valeria”; cf. also the attempted rape of a prostitute in “Young Lady Clara” and the rape of a newlywed by her husband in “Iron Wool”).

In one case, the capture of a woman from behind is directly described:

And in another, behind the usual ellipsis, an erotic pose is clearly read, standing, face to face:

And with cheerful insolence he grabbed her right hand with his left hand. She… looked over his shoulder into the living room and didn’t take her hand away, looking at him with a strange smile, as if expecting: Well, what next? He... grabbed her lower back with his right hand. She... threw her head back slightly, as if protecting her face from the kiss, but pressed herself against him with her arched waist. He, with difficulty catching his breath, reached out to her. half-opened lips and moved her towards the sofa. She, frowning, shook her head, whispering: “No, no, it’s impossible, lying down we won’t see or hear anything...” - and with dull eyes slowly spread her legs... A minute later he fell face down on her shoulder. She stood still, gritting her teeth., then quietly freed herself from him("Antigone").

But even in this risqué passage, there is a characteristic tension between the implied sexual content and the outward propriety of the narrative that is generally inherent in sophisticated erotic discourse. And in the case of Bunin, it also significantly corresponds to his virtual-experimental
tator's interest in searching through potential variations on a love theme that interests him. A creative flight of fancy needs plausible naturalization and finds it in following the conventions of depicting carnal love, which is built on innuendo and leaves room for imagination.

(4) In some stories, an important narrative device is the choice of title. True, many stories TA entitled without pretension:

By the names of the heroines: “Styopa”, “Rusya”, “Zoyka and Valeria”, “Tanya”, “Natalie”;

Or according to the place / circumstances / meaning of the action: “Caucasus”, “Fool”, “Wolves”, “The Beginning”, “River Inn”, “Dubki”, “Madrid”, “In Paris”, “Camargue” , “Revenge”, “In the spring, in Judea”, “Overnight”, “Swing”, “Chapel”.

But in many cases the title contains an ironic charge, ambiguity or quotative reference, which is revealed only as the story progresses. These are:

- “Clean Monday”, the purity of which is violated;

- “Dark Alleys”: the heroine remembers a quote from Ogarev with resentment;

- “Ballad”: the story appears to fall under this genre;

- “Muse”: this is the name of the heroine, who willfully controls the feelings of the hero-artist;

- “Late Hour”: quote from the character’s words;

- “Beauty”: the title character appears as a soulless destroyer of her stepson;

- “Antigone”: the nurse, named after the noble ancient heroine, turns out to be an imperturbable voluptuous woman;

- “Henry”: a passionate woman is hidden under a man’s name;

- “In a Familiar Street”: characters quote Polonsky’s poem;

- “Godfather”: the heroine coldly plans to betray her husband with her godfather;

- “Second coffee pot”: it interrupts the sitter’s story about her life, marking the end of the break in posing;

- “Cold Autumn”: quote from Fet;

- “Steamboat “Saratov””: in the epilogue of the story, the murderer of the lover who left him appears as a prisoner on it;

- “Raven”: it turns out to be the father who took away the hero’s beloved and deprived him of his inheritance;

- “One hundred rupees”: the price of the services of an unearthly beauty.

This technique is evident, as we will see, in VC.

(1) Quoted titles and episodes associated with quoting poems and romances are only the most visible manifestation of the literary nature of Bunin’s plots . Wed:

The title of “Easy Breathing,” referring to Fet (“Whisper, timid breathing. The trill of a nightingale...”) and to ancient, funny book, which determined the heroine’s life strategy.

Partial undermining of the cited source (usually cited inaccurately), but also an ambivalent recognition of its value is a constant feature of Bunin’s work with intertexts. Thus, in the title story of the cycle, the first mention of Ogarev’s poem is accompanied by an openly negative comment from the heroine, and the last by the hero’s sad duality:

But the intertextual background of the story is not limited to a direct reference to Ogarev.

Following the re-meeting of “His Excellency” the handsome military man with his abandoned serf lover thirty years ago, one reads the venerable tradition represented by “Why are you greedily looking at the road...” by Nekrasov, “I remember, I was still young...” Combs and, of course, “Resurrection” Tolstoy. The “Nekhlyudov” motif one way or another runs through several more stories (“Tanya”, “Styopa”, partly “Antigone”, “Fool”, “Guest”, “Raven”).

Akin to quotations - direct references in the text to literary works and even the authors themselves - read, or even encountered by the characters. So,

The motive for reading Maupassant and even imitating him is in “Gala Ganskaya” and “Antigone”, and the reading of “The Precipice” is woven into the plot of “Natalie”;

In "Rus" memories of past love are crowned with a quote from Catullus ( Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla);

In The Host, rape/defloration is “motivated” by a playful reference to the history of painting (“Flemish Eve”) and the biblical name of the hero (Adam Adamych);

Chaliapin, Korovin and Malyavin act in The Second Coffee Pot;

Bryusov is involved in “The River Inn”;

“Clean Monday” features famous figures of the Silver Age, in particular a whole company of artists from the Art Theater, the latest literature is read and discussed, including Bryusov’s “Fire Angel,” and the heroine focuses her life strategy on “The Tale of Peter and Fevronia.”

The tutor's love for the owner's daughter, which goes back to Rousseau and Chernyshevsky (“Russia”, partly “In the Spring, in Judea”);

Raskolnikov’s motive for saving an innocent girl from an experienced libertine (“River Tavern”);

Chekhov's motif of a dacha courtship with a friend's wife (“Kuma”).

As specificity weakens, these and many other literary plots, so to speak, dissolve into the general “ready-made scenario” TA.

The freedom of movement and behavior enjoyed by the Bedouin heroine of “In the Spring in Judea” is unlikely, but it is naturalized by the archetypal, almost from “A Thousand and One Nights”, motif of the abduction of a beautiful princess kept under lock and key by a visiting wanderer;

There is a well-known attempt by Bunin to base his commissioned story about Spain, where he had never been, on his acquaintance with Provence and the study of Don Quixote.

(2) Essential aspect of intertextuality TA form numerous internal echoes between the stories of the cycle. As we have seen,

Maupassant and Bryusov appear in two stories;

From one story to another, such a detail as turning away a glove when kissing a hand passes;

The rivalry between two women over the hero is repeated, with different outcomes (“Zoika and Valeria”, “Natalie”);

Sometimes it is not the setting and style of the narrative that are similar, but the denouement, cf. “Ballad” and “Overnight”, where an animal saves from rape; however, the invasion of an animal into the love life of the characters can be negative (cf. “Iron Wool,” whose “natural” motif, by the way, has a completely literary background - “Lokis” by Merimee) or simply impressive (“Wolves”);

Stories can be written on similar material, but in a distinctly different vein, for example, about extremely different prostitutes (“Madrid”, “Young Lady Clara”, “One Hundred Rupees”);

Even such a minor motive as the lustful impatience of a male client is used twice, leading either to murder (“Young Lady Clara”) or only to playful prodding (“Madrid”).

Bunin seems to be consciously experimenting with collisions that interest him; So,

A woman’s self-will can play out not only in an educated circle (“Clean Monday,” “Muse”), but also in relationships with a client who paid for her services (“Young Lady Clara”).

II. "Business Cards"

VC belong to the core of the cycle - stories with a beginning, middle and end; with a full-fledged love story unfolding rapidly and at the same time slowly; with close-ups and dialogues; with filigree verbal decoration; with repetitions, build-ups, climax, denouement and epilogue; with a strong mutual feeling - once and for life, but without deaths; with undressing and the act of love intimacy; with the “script” - creative - behavior of the characters, one of whom is a famous writer, a kind of alter ego of the author; with a rich intertextual orchestration of the plot and a crowning narrative tour-de-force, echoing the plot.

The text is naturally divided into 16 narrative and dialogic fragments - plus the title. Let's take a closer look at them in order. So,

"Business Cards". The direct meaning of the title will become clear in the fragment, and the symbolic meaning will become clear towards the end, and then only partially.

It was the beginning of autumn ran along... Volga steamship "Goncharov"...cold wind, chattering... clothes walking on the deck, wrinkling their faces... And... she was the only one who saw off the ship gull… askew washed away... to the side, for sure not knowing what to do with myself in this desert of the great river...

...an artel of men on bottom deck, and on top walked... those two of second class, What both swam... to the same place... were inseparable... similar to each other invisibly, And passenger first class... recently famous writer, perceptible yours... not that sad, not that angry seriousness… he was tall, strong... well dressed... handsome: brunette togo eastern the type that occurs in Moscow among… trading people; He and left this crowd, Although nothing in common no longer had it with him.

He… walked hard step, in Expensive And durable shoes… breathing... strong air autumn and the Volga... reached to the stern... and... sharp turning, walked towards the nose, on wind... Finally he suddenly stopped And smiled gloomily: seemed rising… With bottom decks, from third class, black cheap hat and under it worn out, sweet the face of the one he's with met by chance last night. He went to her towards wide steps. All risen on deck awkward she went too on him and also with a smile, driven by the wind, all askew from the wind, holding thin hand hat, V lung coat, under which visible were thin legs.

The hero is emphatically strong, partly thanks to the absorbed force of the wind, he has expensive, durable shoes, his movements are sharp and wide, he frowns, but also smiles - the heroine who grows impressively in front of him, in contrast to him, who is fragile, awkward, worn out, dressed cheaply, but sweet. She, like a seagull (from), squints from the wind, which attacks her and infects her with its power. She appears in full height and comes to meet the hero - the first sign of reciprocity and the first appearance of an important verbal motif all, all, everything. Holding a hat and seeing your legs under a coat are the first signs of voyeurism and undressing.

- How did you like to rest? - loud and courageous he said... - Excellent! - she answered immoderately fun... He held her hand in his big hand and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with joyful effort.“Why are you so sleepy…” he said familiarly… - I dreamed everything! - she answered smartly, at all inappropriate... to my kind... - Oh, look! “This is how little children drown while swimming in the summer, a Chechen walks across the river" - Here I'm waiting for a Chechen!.. “Let’s go drink vodka and eat fish soup,” he said, thinking: she should have breakfast, right? no matter what.

She stomped her feet flirtatiously: - Yes, yes, vodka, vodka!..

And they quickly walked to the first class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already with some looking at her greedily.

Yesterday... he... sat with her on... a bench running along the first class cabins, under their windows with white through shutters, but sat few and at night I regretted it... I realized that already wanted her. Why? By habit road attraction to random... companions? Now... he already knew why he was so attracted to her, and impatiently waited finishing the job. Because... her swagger... was in an amazing contradictions with her, he internally I was getting more and more worried.

...She touched him because... was amazed… meeting a famous writer, - to feel... this confusion was... Nice, this... creates... intimacy between you and with her, gives... some right to her... But... he, apparently, struck her and like a man, and she touched him precisely with all her poverty and simple-heartedness. He has already mastered... a quick transition... to freedom treatment, supposedly artistic, and this one feigned simplicity... [He] smelled the smoke, thinking: “ This must be remembered“In this haze you can immediately smell the smell of fish soup.”

The hero reads with pleasure the motives for the heroine’s disposition towards him - as a reader and as a woman. The scenario familiarity of his reactions and strategies (including feigned artistry), but there is also a peculiarity emerging: the combination of his male success and rights at her with her touching vulnerability, fueling the reader's interest in how it is right will be implemented. In the behavior of the heroine, the topos of “The Seagull” and, more broadly, “Madame Bovary” are obvious. The implied closeness of the author-narrator to the hero is simultaneously indicated by the use of the pronoun by you, and is disguised by the splitting of his attention between the heroine and writer’s professionalism (in the spirit of Trigorin).

Motive schoolgirls works towards the beginning rejuvenation/infantilization of the heroine.

He squeezed teeth and tightly took her handle, under thin the skin of which was felt all the bones, but she... herself, like an experienced seductress, brought it to his lips and volume but looked at him.

- Let's go to to me...

- Let's go to... It’s true that it’s kind of stuffy and smoky here!

AND, shaking her hair, she took the hat.

He's in the hallway hugged her. She proudly, she looked at him over her shoulder. He with hate passion and love almost bit her on the cheek. She, over the shoulder, bacchanalian offered him her lips.

From conversations, glances, shaking and kissing hands, the characters move on to their first hugs. The ironically described bacchanalian theatrical behavior of the heroine and gloomy, contradictory up to hatred(isn't this an echo of the classic odi et amo? - remember Catullus in “Rus”!) and animalism right up to bites (following clenching teeth) - the passion of the hero. Half-turn repeated twice ( over shoulder) is not only theatrical, but also effectively combines a meeting of glances and a contradictory hug from behind.

In the half-light of the cabin with a through grille lowered on the window she immediately, in a hurry please to him until the end dare to use all the unexpected happiness that suddenly befell her with this handsome, strong and famous man, she unbuttoned and stopped dropped from oneself onto the floor dress, stayed, slim like a boy, V light shirt, with bare shoulders and arms and in white pantaloons, and he was painfully pierced innocence all this.

They lay for a long time... kissing with such strength that it hurt my teeth. She remembered that he had not told her to close her mouth, and, trying to please to him, revealed him like a little pebble(“Tanya”).

- Take everything off? - in a whisper she asked, quite like a girl.

- Everything, everything, - he said, getting more and more gloomy.

[She] pulled off... her hat... [I] began... to undress her... threw off her silk... blouse, and my... eyes darkened at the sight of her pinkish body... [She] quickly pulled out of her fallen skirts... slender legs... in openwork cream stockings, in these, you know, wide cambric trousers with a slit in the step, as they wore at that time…

The hero's next despondency reinforces the reader's guess that we can expect some kind of cruel turn in the course of events anticipated by the hero - but what kind is unknown, apparently, to the hero himself, with whose thoughts the narrator systematically introduces us. Doesn't he feel like a virtual rapist-deflorator of a heroine caught in his network, combining feigned readiness for anything with almost virginal innocence?

She obediently... stepped out of Total laundry thrown on the floor remained all naked... in some cheap gray stockings With simple garters, V cheap black shoes, And looked at him victoriously and drunkenly, taking hold of the hair and taking out of them hairpins. He, getting cold, I watched her. Body she turned out to be better, younger… Thin collarbones and ribs allocated according to thin face and thin legs. But hips there were even large. The stomach... was sunken, convex triangle of dark beautiful hair matched underneath an abundance of dark hair on the head. She took out her hairpins, her hair fell thickly on her thin back in the protruding vertebrae. She leaned over to pick up falling stockings, - small breasts with chilled... nipples hanging like skinny pears, lovely in their poverty. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness, which was so unbecoming to her and therefore so excited him with pity, tenderness, passion... Between window grille slats sticking out askew up, nothing could be seen, but she glanced sideways with ecstatic horror on them, heard careless talk... passing along the deck right under the window, and that's more scarier increased delight her depravity. ABOUT, how close they talk and walk - and it doesn’t even occur to anyone, what is being done one step away from them, in this white cabin!

She's clinging to hairpins, over the head pulled off her dress... only wearing only swan slippers, stood... naked back to me...

“He kept saying that I don’t think much about him,” she said... throwing your hair back.

Heroine obediently, but also victoriously drunk looking at him, plays the proposed piece; the hero looks at her and continues with mysterious tension ( getting colder) hatch your daring plan.

The climactic scene is eloquent and intertextual.

Secondly, and with overtones from Maupassant, a specialist in the body, Bunin acts radically. There, the climax also includes non-standard sex:

…she… undressed, slipped into bed... and began to wait.... But she was artless as soon as there can be a legal wife provincial notary, and he - more demanding than the three-bunchu Pasha. And they didn't understand each other, didn't understand each other at all…

She... looked in anguish at... the round man who was lying next to her on his back, and his protruding belly was inflating the sheet like a balloon inflated with gas. He snored noisily, with a long whistle... and funny aspirations... A stream of saliva flowed from the corner of his half-open mouth[Maupassant 1946: 137-138].

Unlike the ugly hero of Maupassant, Buninsky - by the way, also a famous writer - is also endowed with masculine attractiveness and the creative ability to read the heroine and actively lead the intrigue. In Maupassant, a lady is in charge, and the writer does not understand the script he followed throughout the story:

“You’ve been surprising the hell out of me since yesterday.” Be frank, admit it why did you do all this? I do not understand anything. - She quietly approached him blushing like an innocent girl. - I wanted to know... vice... well... and it’s not at all attractive![Maupassant 1946: 138].

Bunin allows his provincial bovarist to fully enjoy shameless - at that time and according to her provincial ideas - an erotic pose!

This entire luxurious cluster - symbolic rape-defloration in a provocative pose, but by mutual consent, at the intersection of two opposing erotic-literary scenarios - reaches an unexpected but carefully prepared climax simultaneously with the final maturation in the hero’s head, so that his creative love act echoes the course of narrative improvisation of the author who composed VC, starting from a minor real episode with a fan.

After he is her like dead, put on the bed. Gritting my teeth, she was lying with eyes closed and already with sorrowful reassurance on pale And very young face.

- ...maybe I’ll arrange such a place for you somewhere. - I would bow at your feet! - So that it would be a complete idyll... - What? - No, nothing... Sleep.

Before the evening, When the ship has moored where she needed to go, she stood quietly next to him, with drooping eyelashes. He kissed her cold hand with the love that remains somewhere in the heart all life, and she, without looking back, she ran downstairs along the gangplank into a rough crowd on the pier.

Epilogue: parting, long shot (ship, pier - remember the beginning), the heroine still does not look at the hero ( with lowered eyelashes; without looking back) - her role is fully played; he kisses her cold hand again, overtaken by love all (!) life(cf.: “Sunstroke”). Verb ran mirrors the verbal motif set in the first phrase of the story, and the heroine’s descent down the gangplank into the rude crowd is the motive for her ascent to the first-class deck (see), marking her return to everyday low life, against which the events of the story will remain a unique splash.

Bibliography / References

[Bunin 1999] - Bunin I. Collection Op.: In 8 volumes / Comp. A.K. Baboreko. T. 6. M.: Moscow worker, 1999.

(Bunin I.A. Complete works: In 8 vols. /Ed. by A.K. Baboreko. Vols. 6. Moscow, 1999.)

[Bunin 2016] - Bunin I. Clean Monday; Close reading experience / Comment. M. A. Dzyubenko, O. A. Lekmanova. M.: B.S.G.-Press, 2016.

(Bunin I. Chistyi ponedel’nik; Opyt pristal’nogo chteniia / Comment. by M.A. Dziubenko, O.A. Lekmanov. Moscow, 2016.)

[Zholkovsky 2016] - Zholkovsky A.K.“In a certain kingdom”: Bunin’s narrative tour de force // Zholkovsky A.K. Wandering dreams. Articles from different years. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016. pp. 81-94.

(Zholkovsky A.K.“V nekotorom tsarstve”: povestvovatel’nyi tur-de-fors Bunina // Zholkovsky A.K. Bluzhdaiushchie sny. Stat'i raznykh let. Saint Petersburg, 2016. P. 81-94.)

[Zholkovsky 2017] - Zholkovsky A.K. Poses, times, paraphrases. Notes from a narratologist // Zvezda. 2017. No. 11. pp. 248-260.

(Zholkovsky A.K. Pozy, razy, perifrazy. Zametki narratologa // Zvezda. 2017. No. 11. P. 248-260.)

[Ivanov 1994] - Ivanov G. Atomic decay // Ivanov G. Collection. cit.: In 3 volumes. T. 2. Prose. M.: Consent, 1994. P. 5-34.

(Ivanov G. Raspad atoma // Ivanov G. Complete works: In 3 vols. Vol. 2. Proza. Moscow, 1994. P. 5-34.)

[Kapinos 2014] - KapinosE.IN. Poetry of the Maritime Alps. Bunin's stories of the 1920s. M.: Languages of Slavic culture, 2014.

(Kapinos E.V. Poeziia Primorskikh Al'p. Rasskazy Bunina 1920-kh godov. Moscow, 2014.)

[Korostelev, Davis 2010] - I.A. Bunin. New materials. Vol. II / Comp. and ed. O. Korostelev, R. Davis. M.: Russian way, 2010.

(I.A.Bunin. Novye materialy / O. Korostelev, R. Davies (Eds.). Vol. 2. Moscow, 2010.)

[Marchenko 2015] - Marchenko T.V. Poetics of perfection: About the prose of I.A. Bunina. M.: House of Russian Abroad named after. A. Solzhenitsyn, 2015.

(MarchenkoT.V. Poetika sovershenstva: O proze I.A. Bunina. Moscow, 2015.)

[Maupassant 1946] - Maupassant Guy de. Selected short stories. M.: OGIZ, 1946.

(MaupassantG. Izbrannye novelly. Moscow, 1946.)

[Panova 2018] - Panova L.G. Three reincarnations of Cleopatra in the prose of the Silver Age: New patterns based on Pushkin’s outline // Russian literature. 2018. No. 1. P. 137-163.

More or less - due to the general riskiness of categorical statements about a pose outlined only by hints, and the ambiguity of specific options; Wed analysis of a partly similar episode from Casanova’s memoirs in: [Zholkovsky 2017: 257-259].

Characteristic are puritanical claims to this fragment by F. Stepun (discussed in: [Kapinos 2014: 37]): “Reading “Dark Alleys,” I remembered... the stunning end... of [one] chapter of “Arsenyev”: “In our city... raged drunken Azov wind... I locked the doors, with icy hands I lowered the curtains on the windows - the wind shook behind them a black spring tree, on which a rook screamed and dangled.” Amazing. Instead of passion, Bunin describes the wind, but reading this description, you feel an interruption in your heart... If, along with the drunken Azov wind and the dangling rook, “falling stockings” and “small breasts” appeared, then the cosmic music would have stopped right now” [Stepun 1951 : 174]. What can I say? If, dear philosopher, while reading literary prose turned off the cosmic music and delved into what was written, he could have noticed that the meaning of the texts he compared is sharply different: in “The Life of Arsenyev” the long-awaited fact of the first love affair between the narrator and the heroine (Lika) is important, and in VK - the erotic dynamics of a lightning-fast improvised romance between those who met by chance partners.

Wed. in Madrid"":

Well, hurry up... I can’t... - Why can’t you? - she asked, standing on the carpet with her small legs in only stockings, touchingly decreasing in stature. - Quite a fool! I can’t wait, understand? - Undress? - No, get dressed!..

The paradoxical difference between two seemingly innocent women on the basis of modesty is noteworthy: unexpected shamelessness is emphasized in the pro-literary heroine of VK, and modesty is emphasized in the cheap prostitute from “Madrid” (she is embarrassed to relieve herself in front of a client).

﻿ Ivan Bunin. Business Cards

I. "Dark Alleys"

II. "Business Cards"

Bibliography / References

I. "Dark Alleys"

II. "Business Cards"

Bibliography / References

Ivan Bunin. Business Cards