Love theme in Bunin's works. Essay “The Theme of Love in the Works of Bunin

I. A. Bunin - the theme of love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal mystery, and every reader of Bunin’s works seeks his own answers, reflecting on the mysteries of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as “ vulgar story”, and someone will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin’s stories telling about the most intimate things will not leave readers of the late 20th century indifferent. Every young person will find in Bunin’s works something consonant with his own thoughts and experiences, will touch great secret love. This is what makes the author of “Sunstroke” always modern writer, arousing deep reader interest.

Mind and feelings.

In exile, where Bunin went after the famous October events, during the years of loneliness and slow oblivion, works on the themes of love, death and human memory appeared in his work. The works of this cycle, marked by an extraordinary poeticization of human feeling, revealed the wonderful talent of the writer, his ability to penetrate into the very depths of the heart with their unknown and unknown laws. For Bunin true love akin to the eternal beauty of nature, and only a natural, uncontrived feeling is truly beautiful. Bunin does not hide that sublime love brings not only joy, but often carries within itself the pangs of disappointment and death. In one of his letters, he himself explained why the antithesis of love and death sounds so often in his work, and not only explained, but convincingly proved: “Don’t you already know that love and death are inextricably linked. Every time I experienced a love catastrophe, and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe, I was close to suicide.”
Bunin told a similar story of tragic love in his short story “Sunstroke.” A chance acquaintance on a ship, an ordinary road adventure, a fleeting meeting that ended in tragedy for its participants. “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me and will never happen again. The eclipse definitely hit me. Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke,” admits the heroine of the story, “a little nameless woman who never gave her name.” But this blow has not yet touched the hero. Having seen off his friend and carefreely returned to the hotel, the lieutenant suddenly felt that his heart “squeezed with an incomprehensible tenderness” at the memory of her. When he realized that he had lost her forever, “he felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by the horror of despair.” Struck, as if by a blow, by this unexpected love, the lieutenant is ready to die just to return this woman. “He, without hesitation, would die tomorrow if it were possible by some miracle to bring her back, to spend one more, this day, with her, only to tell her and somehow prove, convince, how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her...”
In the story “Sunstroke” the writer develops his philosophy of love. If in the works written before, love is tragic (“Chang’s Dreams”) because it is not divided, it is lonely, then here its tragedy lies precisely in the fact that it is mutual and too beautiful to last. The breakdown of the meeting is natural and inevitable. Moreover, both lovers know that if their meeting lasts and lives unite, then the miracle, insight, “sunstroke” that struck them will disappear.
In his book “The Liberation of Tolstoy,” Bunin cited the words of the great Russian writer, once said to him as a young man: “There is no happiness in life, there are only lightnings of it; appreciate them, live by them.”
Bunin considers love to be such “lightnings” of happiness that illuminate a person’s life. “Love does not understand death. Love is life,” Bunin writes out the words of Leo Tolstoy from “War and Peace,” and these words can serve as an epigraph, a cross-cutting theme and a tuning fork of “Dark Alleys.”
The cycle of stories that made up the book “Dark Alleys” (1943, 1946) - kind of the only one in Russian literature where everything is about love, was the central event in Bunin’s work recent years.
This book can truly be called an encyclopedia of love. A variety of moments and shades of feelings occupy the writer; he peers, listens, guesses, tries to imagine the whole gamut difficult relationships hero and heroine. The writer explores everything, driven by the desire to comprehend the mysterious nature of man.
But first and foremost, of course, he is attracted by genuine earthly love, which, as he believes, represents the fusion, the inseparability of “earth” and “sky”, a certain absolute of love, the harmony of its two opposite principles - a harmony that is constantly sought, but not always found by all true poets of the world...
Such love is not invented by people, it occurs, and perhaps not so rarely. She is a great happiness, but the happiness is short-lived, sometimes instantaneous, just like lightning: it flared up and disappeared. (Therefore, as a rule, there is no talk about married couples in Bunin’s stories.) In the book “Dark Alleys,” love is short-lived. And the stronger and more unusual it is, the sooner it is destined to break off. But this lightning of happiness can illuminate a person’s entire memory and life.
The collection of stories “Dark Alleys” consisted of thirty-eight short stories, and each of them has its own tragedy of high feelings. The heroines of the stories: Rusya, Antigone, Natalie and many others - give an idea of ​​​​the diversity female types. Love makes their life significant, but not only because it fills it with joy and happiness, but above all because of the inevitability of their own death.
Although in almost all the stories in the collection “Dark Alleys” love is tragic, Bunin argues that all love is great happiness, even if it ends in separation, destruction or death. But this insight, enlightenment comes to them too late, as, for example, to the main character of the story “Natalie”. In this work, Bunin told the love story of student Vitaly Meshchersky, to a girl, the young beauty Natalie Stankevich, for whom he has a sincere and sublime feeling, and to another. Sonya, “passionate bodily intoxication.” Both seem like love to him. But loving two people at once is impossible. Physical attraction to Sonya quickly passes, but great, true love for Natalie remains for life. Exhausted by this hopeless feeling. Meshchersky soon “got used to the state of the mentally ill person that he secretly was, and lived outwardly. as everybody". Only for a short moment were the heroes given the true happiness of love, but the author completed the idyllic union with the untimely death of the heroine.
The writer's skill in the stories of “Dark Alleys” reached extraordinary virtuosity and expressiveness. Bunin paints intimate human relationships accurately, frankly and in detail, but always on that elusive edge where high art does not reduce one iota to even hints of naturalism. But this “miracle” is achieved at the cost of great creative torment, as, indeed, everything written by Bunin.
So. at the end of his days, the Russian artist accomplished his lonely feat... And his book “Dark Alleys” became that integral part of Russian and world literature, which, while people are alive on Earth, varies in different ways in the “Song of Songs” of the human heart.

Reason and feelings The theme of love in the prose of I. Bunin (On the example of the story “Natalie”)

Love is so omnipotent that it regenerates ourselves...

F. M. Dostoevsky

His fate had a great influence on the work of I. A. Bunin. Emigration became a truly tragic milestone in the writer’s biography, forever breaking his connection with his native land. If we briefly define the mood of the stories of this period, we can say that the author was overcome by a feeling of loneliness, nostalgia for his homeland, and complete isolation. Central event last period Bunin's creativity was the creation of stories that made up the book “Dark Alleys” (1943). Bunin wrote about this collection: “All the stories in this book are only about love, about its “dark” and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys.”

The lives of the heroes in the stories from the collection “Dark Alleys” become more significant due to a deep feeling of love. They experience joyful moments, but love stories for Bunin, they most often lead to separation or even death. At the center of Bunin's stories there is usually a woman, and always a different one. It can be a source of both happiness and tragedy. What is the reason for the tragedy that accompanies every great love? Sometimes, as Bunin replies, it is the social inequality of people. Great love is incompatible with ordinary life, and death, taking away one of the lovers, seems to confirm this. But the greatest interest in the book is those works in which tragic love reveals itself as the greatest happiness.

One of the stories in the collection - “Natalie” - is dedicated to the theme of great and all-encompassing love that captured the student Vitaly Meshchersky.

At the very beginning of the story, we are immersed in the writer’s favorite atmosphere of the old landowner’s life. Bunin recreates in detail the interior of a noble estate ( antique paintings full wall, bureau from grandfather's times, silverware) and conveys the beauty of the fragrant summer garden, in which nightingales sing. The writer has always been inclined to poeticize ancient life, but in this story detailed descriptions have a special meaning: they are designed to create that peculiar atmosphere against the background of which events unfold.

The hero of the story, Vitaly Meshchersky, finds himself in a strange situation: he feels that he loves both his cousin Sonya and her friend Natasha Stankevich at the same time. And if with Sonya he begins something similar to an ordinary romance (although he really loves her), then the feeling for Natasha is of a completely different kind. Meshchersky adores his cousin's friend and worships her. Just the thought of her covers him with “pure love delight.” The hero of the story sees the highest joy even in simply being next to a beautiful girl and looking at her.

The beauty of Natasha Stankevich is truly unearthly. She has golden hair and eyes like “black suns.” And even her name is not just Natasha, but Natalie. Her name itself is associated with something pure, airy and unattainable.

The situation that Bunin recreates in his story is not new in literature and art. The ancient Greek writer and philosopher Plato told us about two Aphrodites: Aphrodite Pandemos - the goddess of carnal love and Aphrodite Urania - the goddess of heavenly love. Dedicated to the same topic famous painting"Love heavenly and earthly" Italian artist Titian.

Bunin transfers the ancient Greek plot to Russian noble estate. Moreover, the author’s position is visible here quite clearly: he does not condemn his hero, showing each feeling as beautiful in its own way and having the right to exist.

However, Natalie accidentally finds out about the connection between Sonya and Meshchersky, and the idyll collapses, breaking the fates of all three at once. When love dies, life itself dies, in essence. We learn nothing more about Sonya - she simply disappears from the author’s narrative, but for some reason it seems that she, too, did not have happiness in her life. As for Meshchersky and Natalie, their lives are tragic. She marries his relative, whom he once, laughing, prophesied as her husband. Natalie does not love her husband, and soon remains a widow with a little daughter in her arms. And Meshchersky leads a life similar to a painful dream, in which there is no place for joy and happiness. He cannot even imagine that love or marriage could happen in his life. Often, remembering Natalie, Meshchersky thinks that that “love until the grave” that Sonya mockingly told him about still exists. Over time, he seemed to get used to the loss of his love, just as a person who has lost an arm gets used to living without an arm.

Meshchersky is destined to meet Natalie again. Moreover, she responds to his feelings, but the heroes again fail to become happy. Natalie soon dies.

Bunin is convinced of the tragic nature of love, apparently following the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, who believed that Eros and Thanatos (gods of love and death) go hand in hand. Bunin’s heroes, even when in love, feel “as if over an abyss,” realizing somewhere deep inside themselves that happiness is too fragile and an unattainable dream, and if it suddenly happens in life, it passes very quickly.

And yet the writer praises love. In the words of his heroine Natalie, he says: “...is there such a thing as unhappy love?.. Doesn’t the most mournful music in the world give happiness?”

So, Bunin, turning to the eternal topic, tries to answer the question: “What is love?” According to the writer, this is something unknown and tragic, but at the same time the most beautiful thing in life, this is what he called “the bewilderment of happiness.”

Mind and feelings. Theme of tragic love. I. Bunin “Dark Alleys”

Bunin considered the collection of stories “Dark Alleys”, created during the Second World War in exile, to be the best thing he wrote in his life. He was a pure source of spiritual inspiration for the writer during this difficult time. The theme of love unites all the short stories in the cycle. Often this feeling is tragic. It brings neither “happiness” nor “unhappiness”. But catastrophism is in the very nature of love, according to I. A. Bunin. What is unrequited love? Is it possible to delay, extend, return it?

The story “Dark Alleys,” which gave the collection its title, was written, as Bunin himself admitted, “very easily, unexpectedly.”

The writer recalls: “I re-read Ogarev’s poems and settled on the famous poem:

It was a wonderful time
They sat on the shore
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black...
The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around,
There was an alley of dark linden trees..."

This is how the image of a “dark alley” arises, its original meaning. Subsequently, the thought of “dark alleys” comes to mind human soul, its incomprehensibility.

The story of the relationship between Nadezhda and Nikolai Alekseevich, the heroes of the story “Dark Alleys,” is simple, like life itself. Thirty years later, people met who once loved each other very much. She is the owner of a “private room” at the post station, he is a “slender old military man” who stopped in the autumn bad weather to rest and have lunch. The owner of the warm and tidy room turned out to be Nadezhda, “a beautiful woman beyond her age,” dark-haired, “with dark down.” upper lip" She recognized her former lover immediately and said that she did not get married because she had loved him all her life, despite the fact that he “heartlessly” abandoned her. I was never able to forgive. Nikolai Alekseevich married, as it seemed to him, for love, but he was not happy: his wife left him, cheating on the man who “loved her madly,” and his son grew up to be a “scoundrel” and a “spendthrift.”

This, it seems, is the whole story, in which nothing can be corrected. And is it necessary to change anything? Does this make sense? Bunin does not give answers to such questions. We don’t know what happened in the former lives of our heroes. However, it seems that at that time Nikolai Alekseevich’s relationship with the beautiful serf Nadezhda seemed like a slight flirtation. Even now he is perplexed: “What nonsense! This same Nadezhda is not the innkeeper, but my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children?”

Nadezhda has nothing left in her life except memories of her first love, although she lives strong and “gives money in interest.” She is respected for her fairness, her straightforwardness, her intelligence. The former serf remained morally intact and forced herself to be respected.

Nikolai Alekseevich left, unable to cope with the surging feelings, remembering the magical poems that he once read to his beloved: “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys...”

This means that the mark on the soul remained quite deep, the memories did not recede. And who isn’t flattered to be the only one in life? The splinter in my heart is firmly lodged, now forever. How else? After all, it turned out that more love never happened. The chance is given only once. They needed to take advantage of it, perhaps by going through a break with family, misunderstanding and condemnation from friends, and perhaps even giving up their career. All this is within the capabilities of a real Man, capable of loving and protecting his Woman. For such a person there are no class differences; he does not accept the law of society as mandatory, but challenges it.

But our hero can neither understand nor appreciate his actions, so repentance does not occur. But love lives in the heart of Nadezhda, who does not stoop to reproaches, complaints, or threats. She's full human dignity and grateful to fate, which gave her, at the end of her days, a meeting with the one whom she once called “Nikolenka,” to whom she gave “her beauty, her fever.”

I believe that true love does not require anything in return, does not ask for anything. “Love is beautiful,” because only love can be answered with love...

Mind and feelings. THEME OF LOVE.I.BUNIN “Sunstroke”

The theme of love is the main one in the work of Ivan Aleksandrovich Bunin. "Sunstroke" is one of his most famous stories. Analysis of this work helps to identify the author’s views on love and its role in a person’s destiny.

What is typical for Bunin is that he focuses not on platonic feelings, but on romance, passion, and desire. For the beginning of the 20th century, this can be considered a bold innovative decision: no one before Bunin openly glorified and spiritualized bodily feelings. For married woman the fleeting connection was unforgivable, a grave sin.

The author stated: “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared.” This statement applies to this story as well. In it, love comes like an insight, like a bright flash, like a sunstroke. This is a spontaneous and often tragic feeling, which, nevertheless, is a great gift.

In the story “Sunstroke,” Bunin talks about the fleeting romance of a lieutenant and a married lady who were sailing on the same ship and suddenly became inflamed with passion for each other. The author sees the eternal secret of love in the fact that the heroes are not free in their passion: after the night they part forever, without even knowing each other’s name.

The sun motif in the story gradually changes its color. If at the beginning the luminary is associated with joyful light, life and love, then at the end the hero sees in front of him "aimless sun" and understands what he experienced "terrible sunstroke". The cloudless sky became grayish for him, and the street, resting against it, hunched over. The lieutenant is sad and feels 10 years older: he doesn’t know how to find the lady and tell her that he can no longer live without her. What happened to the heroine remains a mystery, but we guess that falling in love will also leave its mark on her.

Bunin's style of narration is very “dense”. He's a master short genre, and in a small volume he manages to fully reveal the images and convey his idea. The story contains many short but powerful descriptive sentences. They are filled with epithets and details.

What’s interesting is that love is a scar that remains in the memory, but does not lie as a burden on the soul. Waking up alone, the hero realizes that he is again able to see smiling people. He himself will soon be able to rejoice: the mental wound can heal and almost not hurt.

“Sunstroke,” the love that Bunin describes in his works has no future. His heroes will never be able to find happiness; they are doomed to suffer. “Sunstroke” once again reveals Bunin’s concept of love:
“Having fallen in love, we die...”

MIND AND FEELINGS. THEME OF LOVE.I.BUNIN “EASY BREATHING”

The story “Easy Breathing” was written by I. Bunin in 1916. It reflected the philosophical motives of life and death, the beautiful and the ugly, which were the focus of the writer’s attention. In this story, Bunin develops one of the leading problems for his work: love and death. In terms of artistic mastery, “Easy Breathing” is considered the pearl of Bunin’s prose.

The narrative moves in the opposite direction, from the present to the past, the beginning of the story is its ending. From the first lines, the author immerses the reader in the sad atmosphere of the cemetery, describes the grave of a beautiful girl, whose life was absurdly and terribly interrupted in the prime of her life: “In the cemetery, above its clay embankment, there stands a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth.

April, gray days; The monuments of the spacious county cemetery are still visible far away through the bare trees, and the cold wind rings and rings at the foot of the cross.

A rather large, convex porcelain medallion is embedded in the cross itself, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.

This is Olya Meshcherskaya.”

Bunin makes us feel sorrow at the sight of the grave of a fifteen-year-old girl, bright and beautiful, who died at the very beginning of spring. It was the spring of her life, and she was in it like an unblown bud of a beautiful flower in the future. But a fabulous summer will never come for her. Young life and beauty have disappeared, now eternity hangs over Olya: “the cold wind rings and rings,” without stopping, like a “porcelain wreath” on her grave.

The author introduces us to the life of the heroine of the story, high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, at fourteen and fifteen years old. Throughout her appearance one can see admiring surprise at the extraordinary changes that are happening to her. She quickly became prettier, turning into a girl, her soul was filled with energy and happiness. The heroine is stunned, she still doesn’t know what to do with herself, new and so beautiful, so she simply gives in to the impulses of youth and carefree fun. Nature presented her with an unexpected gift, making her light, cheerful, and happy. The author writes that the heroine was distinguished “in the last two years from the entire gymnasium by her grace, elegance, dexterity, and the clear sparkle of her eyes.” Life is delightfully seething in her, and she happily settles into her new beautiful appearance, trying out its possibilities.

I can’t help but remember the story “Violets,” written by Bunin’s friend and talented Russian prose writer A. I. Kuprin. It talentedly depicts the explosive awakening of the youth of seventh-grader cadet Dmitry Kazakov, who, due to surging feelings, cannot prepare for the exam, with emotion, collects violets outside the walls of the educational building. The young man does not understand what is happening to him, but out of happiness he is ready to embrace the whole world and fall in love with the first girl he meets.

Bunin's Olya Meshcherskaya is a kind, sincere and spontaneous person. With her happiness and positive energy, the girl charges everything around her and attracts people to her. Girls from junior classes the gymnasiums are running after her in a crowd, for them she is an ideal. The last winter of Olya’s life seemed to be so beautiful on purpose: “The winter was snowy, sunny, frosty, the sun set early behind the tall spruce forest of the snowy gymnasium garden, invariably fine, radiant, promising and tomorrow there will be frost and sun, a walk on Sobornaya Street; skating rink in the city garden, pink evening, music and this crowd gliding in all directions on the skating rink, in which Olya Meshcherskaya seemed the most carefree, the happiest.” But it only seemed so. This psychological detail points to the awakening of natural forces, characteristic of the youth of every person, when the mind is still asleep and does not control the feelings. Inexperienced, inexperienced Olya easily flies through life like a butterfly to a flame. And misfortune is already following in her wake. Bunin managed to fully convey the tragedy of this dizzying flight.

Freedom of judgment, absence of fear, manifestation of intense joy, demonstration of happiness are considered defiant behavior in society. Olya doesn’t understand how annoying she is to others. Beauty, as a rule, causes envy, misunderstanding, and does not know how to defend itself in a world where everything exceptional is persecuted.

Except main character The story features four more images, one way or another connected with the young schoolgirl. This is the head of the gymnasium, Olya’s class lady, Olya’s father’s acquaintance Alexei Mikhailovich Milyutin and a certain Cossack officer.

None of them treat the girl as a human being, or even make an attempt to understand her inner world. The boss, out of duty, reproaches Meshcherskaya for her woman’s hairstyle and shoes. An elderly man, Milyutin took advantage of Olya’s inexperience and seduced her. Apparently, a casual admirer, a Cossack officer, mistook Meshcherskaya’s behavior for frivolity and licentiousness. He shoots a girl at a train station and kills her. A fifteen-year-old girl is far from a fatal temptress. She, a naive schoolgirl, shows him a piece of paper from her notebook-diary. Like a child, she does not know a way out of a love situation and tries to isolate herself from an annoying admirer with her own childish and confused notes, presenting them as a kind of document. How could you not understand this? But, having committed a crime, an ugly, plebeian-looking officer blames the girl he killed for everything.

Bunin understood love primarily only as passion that flared up suddenly. And passion is always destructive. Bunin's love walks next to death. The story “Easy Breathing” is no exception. This was the great writer’s concept of love. But Bunin claims: death is not omnipotent. Short but bright life Olya Meshcherskaya left a mark on many souls. “The little woman in mourning,” the cool lady Olya, often comes to the grave, remembering her “pale face in the coffin” and the conversation that she once unwittingly overheard. Olya told her friend that the main thing in a woman is “ easy breath“: “But I have it,” listen to how I inhale, “I really do?”

I believe that if all people were as pure, naive, beautiful as Olya was, and if everyone knew how to enjoy every day, then everyone would be happy. But not everyone has easy breathing. Olya was too different from the society in which she lived. People envied her, did not understand her joy, her happiness, but she did not understand people. Olya was unable to live by the laws by which society lived. The light breath had to dissipate “in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind,” because it cannot be tied to the ground.

The prose of I.A. Bunin is considered a synthesis of prose and poetry. It has an unusually strong confessional beginning (" Antonov apples"). Often the lyrics replace the plot basis, and as a result a portrait story appears ("Lyrnik Rodion").

Among Bunin's works there are stories in which the epic, romantic principle is expanded - the whole life of the hero comes into the writer's field of vision ("The Cup of Life"). Bunin is a fatalist, irrationalist; his works are characterized by the pathos of tragedy and skepticism. His work echoes the modernists’ concept of the tragedy of human passion. Like the Symbolists, Bunin’s appeal to the eternal themes of love, death and nature comes to the fore. The cosmic flavor of the writer’s works and the permeation of his images with the voices of the Universe bring his work closer to Buddhist ideas. Bunin's works synthesize all these concepts.

Bunin's concept of love is tragic. Moments of love, according to Bunin, become the pinnacle of a person’s life. Only by loving can a person truly feel another person, only feeling justifies high demands on himself and his neighbor, only a lover is able to overcome his selfishness. The state of love is not fruitless for Bunin’s heroes; it elevates souls. One example of an unusual interpretation of the theme of love is the story “Chang’s Dreams,” which is written in the form of a dog’s memories. The dog feels the inner devastation of the captain, his master. The image of “distant hard-working people” (Germans) appears in the story. Based on a comparison with their way of life, the writer talks about possible ways of human happiness: firstly, work in order to live and reproduce without experiencing the fullness of life; secondly, endless love, which is hardly worth devoting oneself to, since there is always the possibility of betrayal; thirdly, the path of eternal thirst, search, in which, however (according to Bunin) there is also no happiness.

The plot of the story seems to oppose the mood of the hero. Through real facts a dog's faithful memory breaks through, when there was peace in the soul, when the captain and the dog were happy. Moments of happiness are highlighted. Chang carries the idea of ​​loyalty and gratitude. This, according to the writer, is the meaning of life that a person is looking for.

Bunin's love is most often sad and tragic. A person is not able to resist it; the arguments of reason are powerless against it, for there is nothing like love in strength and beauty. The writer surprisingly accurately defines love, comparing it to sunstroke. This is the title of the story about the unexpected, impetuous, “crazy” romance of a lieutenant with a woman he accidentally met on the ship, who does not give her name or address. The woman leaves, saying goodbye forever to the lieutenant, who at first perceives this story as a random, non-binding affair, a charming road accident. Only over time does he begin to feel “insoluble torment,” experiencing a sense of bereavement. He tries to fight his condition, takes some actions, fully aware of their absurdity and uselessness. He is ready to die just to somehow miraculously bring her back, to spend one more day with her.

At the end of the story, the lieutenant, sitting under a canopy on the deck, feels ten years older. Bunin's wonderful story expresses with great power the uniqueness and beauty of love, which a person is often unaware of. Love is a sunstroke, the greatest shock that can radically change a person’s life, making him either the happiest or the most unhappy.

Bunin's work is characterized by an interest in ordinary life, the ability to reveal its tragedy, the richness of the narrative with details. Bunin is considered to be the successor of Chekhov's realism, but his realism differs from Chekhov's in its extreme sensitivity. Like Chekhov, Bunin addresses eternal themes. Nature is important to him, however, in his opinion, the highest judge of man is human memory. It is memory that protects Bunin’s heroes from inexorable time, from death.

Bunin's favorite heroes are endowed with an innate sense of the beauty of the earth, an unconscious desire for harmony with the world around them and with themselves. This is the dying Averky from the story “The Thin Grass”. Having worked as a farm laborer all his life, having experienced a lot of torment, grief and anxiety, this peasant has not lost his kindness, the ability to perceive the beauty of nature, or the feeling of the high meaning of existence. Memory constantly returns Averky to those “distant twilight on the river” when he was destined to meet “that young, dear one who now looked at him indifferently and pitifully with senile eyes.” A short humorous conversation with a girl, performed for them deep meaning, were unable to erase from their memory either the years they had lived or the trials they had endured.

Love is the most beautiful and bright thing that the hero had throughout his long, difficult life. But, thinking about this, Averky remembers both the “soft twilight in the meadow” and the shallow creek, turning pink from the dawn, against the background of which a girl’s figure is barely visible, amazingly in harmony with the beauty starry night. Nature, as it were, participates in the hero’s life, accompanying him in both joy and sorrow. The distant twilight on the river at the very beginning of life is replaced by autumn melancholy, anticipation near death. Averky’s condition is close to the picture of fading nature. “Dying, the grass dried up and rotted. The threshing floor became empty and bare. A mill in a homeless field became visible through the vines. The rain sometimes gave way to snow, the wind hummed in the holes of the barn, evil and cold.”

For ten years (1939 - 1949) Bunin wrote the book “Dark Alleys” - stories about love, as he himself said, “about its “dark” and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys.” This book, according to Bunin, “talks about the tragic and many tender and beautiful things - I think that this is the best and most original thing I have written in my life.”

Bunin walked on his own in my own way, did not adhere to any fashionable literary movements or groups, as he put it, “did not throw out any banners” and did not proclaim any slogans. Critics noted Bunin's powerful language, his art of raising “everyday phenomena of life” into the world of poetry. For him there were no “low” topics unworthy of the poet’s attention.

Shortly before his death, Bunin wrote in his memoirs: “I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my writing memories would not have been like this. I would not have had to survive... 1905, then the first world war, followed by the 17th year and its continuation, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler... How not to envy our forefather Noah! Only one flood befell him..."

“You are a thought, you are a dream. Through the smoky snowstorm

Crosses are running - arms outstretched.

I'm listening to the pensive spruce -

A melodious ringing...

Everything is just thoughts and sounds!

What lies in the grave, is it you?

Marked by separations and sadness

Is yours hard way. Now they are gone.

Crosses store only ashes.

Now you are a thought. You are eternal. »

At all times, the theme of love has been the main one; many writers glorified the relationship between a man and a woman. Ivan Alekseevich was no exception; he writes about love in many stories. Love is the purest and brightest feeling in the world. The theme of love is eternal in any era.

In Bunin's works, the writer describes the intimate and secret things that happen between two people. The work of Ivan Alekseevich can be divided into periods. Thus, the collection “Dark Alleys,” written during the World War, is dedicated entirely to love. The collection contains so much love and warm feelings, it is simply filled with love.

Bunin believes that love is a great feeling, even if this love is unrequited. The writer believes that any love has the right to life. Also, having read the stories of Ivan Alekseevich, you can see that love in his works goes next to death. He seems to draw the line that behind a great bright feeling there can be death.

In some of his stories, Bunin writes that love is not always beautiful and sunny, and maybe the love story will end tragically. So, for example, in the story “Sunstroke” his characters meet on a ship, where a wonderful feeling flares up between them. The girl in love tells the lieutenant that the feeling that visited them was like a sunstroke that clouded their minds. She says that she has never experienced anything like this and is unlikely to ever experience it. Unfortunately, the lieutenant realizes very late how much he fell in love with the girl, because he did not even know her last name or where she lives.

The lieutenant was ready to die for one more day spent with the girl he loved so much. He was overwhelmed with feelings, but they were big and bright.

In another story, Bunin describes unrequited love a young guy to a girl who doesn't pay any attention to him. Nothing pleases a girl and even a guy’s love doesn’t make her happy. At the end of the story, she goes to a monastery, where she thinks she will find happiness.

In another story, Ivan Alekseevich writes about a triangle in which a guy cannot choose between passion and love. The whole story he rushes between girls and everything ends tragically.

In Bunin's works, where he writes about love, all aspects of this feeling are described. After all, love is not only joy and happiness, but also suffering and grief. Love is a great feeling that you often have to fight for.

Essay Theme of love in the works of Bunin

The theme of love has always been and is an integral part of any work. I. A. Bunin revealed it especially clearly in his stories. The writer described love as a tragic and deep feeling; he tried to reveal to the reader all the secret corners of this strong attraction.

In Bunin’s works, such as “Dark Alleys”, “ Cold autumn", "Sunstroke" love is shown from several sides. On the one hand, this feeling can bring great happiness, on the other, a bright and ardent feeling inflicts a person’s soul deep wounds, brings days only suffering.

For the author, love was not just a naive feeling, it was strong and real, often accompanied by tragedy, and in some moments, death. The theme of love, in different periods of his creative path, was revealed with different sides. At the beginning of his work, Bunin described love between young people as something easy, natural and open. She is beautiful and gentle, but at the same time she can bring disappointment. For example, in the story “Dawn All Night” he describes the strong love of a simple girl for a young man. She is ready to give all her youth and soul to her loved one, to completely dissolve in him. But reality can be cruel, and as often happens, falling in love passes and a person begins to look at many things differently. And in this work he clearly describes the breakdown of a relationship that brought only pain and disappointment.

At a certain period of his time, Bunin emigrated from Russia. It was at this time that love became mature for him and deep feeling. He began to write about her with sadness and longing, remembering his past years of life. This is clearly reflected in the novel “Mitya’s Love,” written by him in 1924. At first everything goes well, feelings are strong and reliable, but later they will lead the main character to death. Bunin wrote not only about the mutual love of two young people, but in some of his works one can also find love triangle: “Caucasus” and “The Fairest of the Sun.” The happiness of some inevitably brings heartache and disappointment for others.

Love played a special role in his great work, “Dark Alleys,” written during the war years. In it, it is depicted as great happiness, despite the fact that it ends in tragedy in the end. The love of two people who met each other in adulthood is shown in the story “Sunstroke.” It was during this period of life that they so needed to experience this true feeling. The love of a lieutenant and a mature woman was doomed in advance and could not unite them for life. But after parting, she left the sweet bitterness of pleasant memories in their hearts.

In all his stories, Bunin glorifies love, its diversity and contradictions. If there is love, a person becomes infinitely bright, manifests true beauty his inner world, values ​​in relation to a loved one. Love in Bunin’s understanding is true, selfless, pure feeling, even if after a sudden outburst and attraction it can lead to tragedy and deep disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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