Review of Bunin's story “Cold Autumn” from the “Dark Alleys” series. Review of the story “Sunstroke” (I. A. Bunin)
Glazunova Veronica
REVIEW OF THE STORY “CLEAN MONDAY”
External events of the story " Clean Monday"It's not very complicated and fits well into the theme of the series" Dark alleys". This is a story about the beautiful young love of two nameless people - a man and a woman.
Like most of Bunin’s works, “Clean Monday” is the author’s attempt to describe and convey to the reader his understanding of the phenomenon of love, which was done by many great writers before and after Bunin, but at the same time everyone found something special in love that distinguishes it from others feelings. For
Bunin, any true, sincere love is great happiness for a person, even if it ends in death or separation. " Sunstroke“- this is the best definition of love in Bunin’s understanding; it comes suddenly, sharply and radically changing a person’s worldview, his view of the surrounding reality. But when the happiness of love passes, only pain remains - the person is no longer able to return to old life. "Happiness has no tomorrow; he doesn’t even have yesterday; it does not remember the past, does not think about the future; he has a present - and that is not a day, but a moment,” writes Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev in the story “Asya”. In my opinion, Turgenev’s concept of love is similar to Bunin’s.
But the story “Clean Monday” is not only a story about love; problems of morality and necessity are also mixed in with this. life choice, honesty with yourself.
Bunin paints these two young people as beautiful, self-confident: “We were both rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that in restaurants and at concerts they looked at us.” The author emphasizes that material and physical well-being is by no means a guarantee of happiness. Happiness is in a person’s soul, in his self-awareness and attitude. “Our happiness, my friend,
- the heroine quotes Platon Karataev’s words, “like water in delirium: if you pull, it’s inflated, but if you pull out, there’s nothing.”
Beloved in "Clean Monday" - absolutely different people. He, despite his attractiveness and education, is an ordinary person, not distinguished by any special strength of character. She is truly an integral, rare “chosen” nature. And she has serious concerns moral issues, the problem of choosing a future life.
She refuses worldly life, entertainment, secular society and, most importantly, from his love, and goes to the monastery on “Clean Monday,” the first day of Lent. Undoubtedly, this is not a groundless impulse; she went towards it for a very long time - she visited monasteries, churches, cemeteries.
Only in contact with the eternal, spiritual did she feel in her place. It may seem strange that she combined these activities with going to theaters, restaurants, reading fashionable books, and communicating with bohemian society.
This can be explained by her youth, which is characterized by the search for herself, her place in life. Her consciousness is torn, the harmony of her soul is disrupted. She is intensely looking for something of her own, whole, heroic, selfless, and finds her ideal in serving God. The present seems to her pitiful, untenable, and even love for young man cannot keep her in worldly life.
The story “Clean Monday” tells about self-improvement and the ascent of the individual to new stages, to which nothing can be an obstacle, not even such a feeling as love. Masterful laconic style
Bunin allows you to fit so much on several pages deep meaning, which can be the basis of an entire novel, and main character“Clean Monday” can be compared in significance with many female images of large prose XIX century, for example, with Sonechka Marmeladova.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a wonderful Russian writer, a great man and difficult fate. He was a recognized classic Russian literature, and also became the first Nobel laureate in Russia.
Bunin combined all the stories written from 1937 to 1944 into the book “Dark Alleys”. They are brought together by the motif of memories, the image of Russian nature. He writes about summer, autumn, day and night, about grief, happiness, sometimes a brief moment of joy or pain. Bunin comes to the fore with an appeal to eternal themes love, death and nature.
One of the stories included in this collection is “Clean Monday”. I decided to dwell on it in more detail.
The external events of the story “Clean Monday” are not particularly complex and fit well into the theme of the “Dark Alleys” cycle. The action takes place in 1913. A kind, handsome and frivolous young man (nameless, like his girlfriend) shares his memories here. Young people, he and she, met one day at a lecture in a literary and artistic circle and fell in love with each other. They began to meet and spend time together free time. He courted her and wanted more Serious relationships, but she was mysteriously silent, never letting him get out of control. He himself says that he always “tried not to think, not to think out” the actions of his beloved. It is no wonder that it was not possible to understand the silent, mysterious, beautiful woman.
The main thing for the author was to convey to the reader all its exclusivity, and he succeeded in full. The eyes of a passionate admirer constantly “catch” the inexplicability of the behavior of his chosen one. She indulged social entertainment, allowed the man to caress, but refused a serious conversation with him. Even more strange was the parallel fascination with restaurants, theatrical "cabbage shows" and cathedrals, holy books. The heroine seems to unite incompatible “styles” in her soul. He dreams of reconciling them. This is exactly how he wants to love the better one, but cannot. Their intimacy still occurs, but after spending just one night together, the lovers part forever, for the heroine on Clean Monday, i.e. on the first day of the pre-Easter fast in 1913, he makes the final decision to enter a monastery, parting with his past. But, hiding in a monastery, he continues to suffer there from the unattainable.
The story is masterfully and concisely written. Each stroke has an obvious and hidden meaning. What is the heroine’s latest, sophisticated, secular, black-velvet outfit with her hairstyle like a Shamakhan queen worth? An unexpected and revealing combination. The girl constantly follows different paths, vividly reminiscent of the differences surrounding her. That's how symbolic meaning female image. He combined a craving for spiritual feat and to all the wealth of the world, doubts, sacrifice and longing for the ideal.
There is another meaning in the story of the author's reflections. The eternal contradictions of human, more specifically, female nature, love, sublime and earthly, sensual, determined the heroine’s trials. Her courage and ability to go through all the prohibitions and temptations help to reveal the mysterious, irresistible power of instinct. But the warmer and more sympathetic the author’s attitude towards the young woman is, the more she resists completely natural, although painful for her, attractions.
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.
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.
Extraordinary strength and sincerity of feeling are characteristic of the heroes Bunin's stories. Love captures all a person’s thoughts, all his strength. In order for love not to fizzle out, it is necessary to part forever, which happens in all of Bunin’s stories. All his heroes live in anticipation of love, search for it, and most often, scorched by it, die. For a writer, love does not last long in the family, in marriage, in everyday life. A short, dazzling flash, which illuminates the souls of lovers to the bottom, leads them to tragic end- death, suicide, separation. The theme of pure and beautiful feeling runs through the entire work of the Russian writer. “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared” - these words are from the story “Dark Alleys”
Bunin could be repeated by all the heroes of his stories.
I. A. Bunin’s story “Sunstroke” was written in 1925, when the author was in the Maritime Alps. The plot is based on the story of a fleeting romance between a man and a woman (their names are not named). Having met on the ship, the main characters decide to spend time together. They get off the ship and go to the hotel. In the morning the woman leaves. Only a little later, main character realizes that in such a short time he was able to love her.
A man is very worried about separation, but he has no opportunity to return his beloved.
The title of the story is symbolic. Just as sunstroke “attacks” a person sharply and imperceptibly, so the feelings of the main characters surged so unexpectedly that they themselves did not have time to realize anything. The relationship between them develops rapidly and sometimes even the reader finds it difficult to keep up with the fast pace of events. The story has a circular composition, since both at the beginning and at the end the main character stands in the same place and hears the impact of an approaching steamship on the pier. It’s only after the events that happened to him in a day that he feels ten years older. Also, the actions do not take place according to the plot, but rather in reverse order.
The main characters understand their feelings after they break up. The author masterfully conveys the mood characters, while addressing their surroundings and nature. If at the beginning of the story the day is sunny and happy for the heroes, then at the end it is too hot, and even the sun, in the opinion of the hero, shines aimlessly. The main topic The story is love, but it differs from our usual concept of it. It describes a bold, sudden and passionate feeling that has no future. For the twentieth century, the chosen topic was very bold and provocative, but now it is fully relevant and interesting to read.
I.A. Bunin's story amazed and surprised me. On the one hand, the love story of the heroes is sad and beautiful. But is this really true? In fact, the behavior of the characters is unacceptable within the framework of both 20th century and modern society. A woman, having a husband and a child, suddenly gives in to her feelings and spends the night with almost stranger. And although the word “treason” does not appear in the story, one cannot help but apply it in the analysis of the work. In my opinion, the heroine betrayed both her husband and the family as a whole. In life we are faced with various circumstances, but I believe that the described action is wrong in any case. In such a situation, V. Vysotsky’s quote is well applicable: “The only thing I’m afraid of more than betrayal is not finding out about betrayal. It’s terrible to love a person who no longer deserves it.” Based on all of the above, for me the story of I.A. Bunin is not beautiful story love, because I believe that loyalty and certain obligations to family are much more important than sudden feelings. Reading this work, I disliked the characters and condemned them. Nevertheless, I.A. Bunin’s story is interesting for its dynamism and originality, so I believe that it is useful to read for both adults and the younger generation.
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Updated: 2018-02-03
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Review of Bunin's story Clean Monday
The story “Clean Monday” (1944) completes the cycle of late creativity I.A. Bunin "Dark Alleys". The writer laughed that he wrote “about the same thing thirty-eight times.” This one theme was the theme of love. And as in all things of genius, when reading “Dark Alleys” we do not feel exhaustion or repetition in similar stories about the relationship between a man and a woman, although even the plot scheme of the stories in the cycle is the same. As a rule, a meeting of heroes, a sudden rapprochement, an outburst of feelings - and an inevitable separation are described. Love for Bunin is just a wonderful moment. And in each story he finds new and new shades of love.
IN last story– “Clean Monday” – amazingly lyricism and pathos merged, folk traditions and modern, divine and secular; It’s as if the poetic and philosophical results of Bunin’s work are summed up here. The author unfolds before us a story not only about love, but about secrets human soul, about the understanding of happiness, about the complex and contradictory national character, about the spirit historical era, about faith. And the deliberate similarity of the plots helps the reader to focus not on the course of events, but on the characters and Bunin’s inimitable style.
Main artistic device in the story “Clean Monday” the device of antithesis appears. A whole system of oppositions is being built: antonyms that permeate the first sentence (“The Moscow gray winter day was darkening, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the shop windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening Moscow life, freeing from daytime affairs, flared up: the cabbies’ sleighs rushed thicker and more vigorously, the crowded sleighs rattled more heavily , diving trams..."); The hero and heroine are different in character (“...and as much as I was inclined to talkativeness, to simple-hearted gaiety, she was most often silent: she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be mentally delving into something...”); elegant Savor the heroine and her deep religiosity; love without external obstacles and its tragic ending. The movement of the text seems to be controlled by two opposing motives - vulgarity surrounding reality and spirituality of eternal values.
The story has a retrospective structure: the hero remembers his passionate love for a mysterious beauty. This makes it possible to present events as if in a double light: what the hero did not notice “then”, he comprehends from memory, as if summing up the results. Constructing a story on individual episodes and a ring composition allows the author not only to show the transience of time, but also to recreate the portrait of the era with the greatest completeness. The historical panorama of the 10s of the 20th century in Russia is presented by people who really existed and personified the culture of that time. Bunin ironically portrays A. Bely, K. Stanislavsky, F. Chaliapin, and this reveals the writer’s manner of communicating with his contemporaries, so familiar to us from his memoirs. At the same time, the details of the reality of the early twentieth century are intertwined with signs of deep antiquity: along with the Yar and Strelna restaurants, the centuries-old history of Russia is reminiscent of the countless names of Moscow churches, monasteries, icons (Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, Zachatievsky monastery, icon of the Mother of God of Three Hands and others), names historical figures(Oslyabli, Peresvet), quotes from chronicles, legends, prayers. This is how the story develops the image of an era that combines modernity and “pre-Petrine Rus'”, and this is how Russian national character woven from contradictions.
The plot and compositional center of the work become difficult relationships two heroes - His and Her. The narration is told in the first person, which creates the effect of presence and enhances the realism of events. The very image of the main character is given sketchily, only his feelings and experiences are shown, and this makes the character similar to lyrical hero Bunin's poetry. But we are alarmed that the hero does not understand the one whom he sincerely worships. Blinded by love, he cannot comprehend what inner work is happening in the soul of his beloved. However, it is love that gives the hero exceptional acuteness of perception, through the prism of which the portrait of the heroine is presented in the story. In her description, the defining epithets are “strange” and “mysterious”: “...she was mysterious, incomprehensible to me, and our relationship with her was strange...”. Details of appearance repeated in portrait sketches, the epithets “black”, “velvet”, “amber” do not clarify psychological condition heroine, but, on the contrary, emphasize her mystery.
We learn that the heroine’s father is “an enlightened man of a noble merchant family,” but further there is a hint of his mediocrity (“he collected something, like all such merchants”). That is, in the origin we do not find an explanation for the duality peace of mind a heroine who enjoys both worldly passions and reveres religious rituals. The duality of character is rather rooted in the combination of Western and Eastern. This girl is serious about reading European literature(Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmeyer, Przybyszewski), but inside her there is a lot of the East, which is manifested even in her appearance: “And she had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat sinister in its thick blackness hair, softly shining like black sable fur, eyebrows, eyes black like velvet coal; The mouth, captivating with velvety crimson lips, was shaded with dark fluff...” The heroine's whole life is woven from inexplicable contradictions. She visits ancient temples, monasteries and restaurants, and skits with equal interest. Her entire existence is a continuous oscillation between flesh and spirit, momentary and eternal. Behind the visible secular gloss, there are primordially national, Russian principles in it. And they turn out to be stronger because they manifest themselves in beliefs.
Incomprehensible in her opposing inclinations, the heroine, at the same time, fits very organically into the contrasts of Moscow of those years, a city that combined the centuries-old beauty of cathedrals, the ringing of bells with the realities of the new bourgeois era.
As in all of Bunin’s work, one of the most important in “Clean Monday” is the motive of beauty, inextricably linked with the image of the heroine. Moreover, beauty is not so much external as internal. The mysterious woman sees her disappearance everywhere - and this is the main torment of her soul. “It’s just that this Rus' remains in some northern monasteries...” The desire to preserve this beauty in herself leads the heroine to the monastery. In addition, she could not find meaning in her existence: “It seemed that she did not need anything: neither flowers,
No books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city...” Therefore, there was a desire to fill life with something significant, the spiritual world. The author managed to convey the essence of the heroine so subtly that we cannot even imagine her in a situation of earthly happiness. It’s interesting that, unlike Liza Kalitina from “ Noble nest“I. Turgenev, Bunin’s heroine herself does not seek happiness in this life, initially realizing its impossibility. The psychologism of the author of “Dark Alleys” differs significantly from the “dialectics of the soul” by L. Tolstoy and the “secret psychologism” of I. Turgenev. The movements of the soul of Bunin's heroes defy logical explanation; the heroes seem to have no control over themselves. In this regard, the impersonal verbal constructions often used by the writer attract attention (“... for some reason I definitely wanted to go there...”).
In "Clean Monday" the motifs of the vain world and spiritual life resonate with other works of Bunin. Typically, each of the motives is supported by its own system of images. And greater concentration of details combined with concise presentation requires us to read carefully. Thus, the substantive basis for the motif of the vain world are functionally loaded details: literary bohemia is depicted as a meaningless “cabbage”, where there is only “shouting”, antics and posturing. The motive of spiritual life corresponds to “spontaneous” details: descriptions of nature and architectural monuments (“The evening was peaceful, sunny, with frost on the trees; on the bloody brick walls of the monastery, jackdaws chattered in silence, looking like nuns, chimes every now and then subtly and sadly played in the bell tower"). Feelings of an artist who loves with all his heart native nature, transmitted via color scheme and emotional-tinged epithets (“subtle and sad”, “light”, “wonderful”, “on the golden enamel of sunset”).
The poetry of the story is manifested in the sound and rhythmic organization of the text. The contrasts are also striking here: “a slow, somnambulistically beautiful beginning” Moonlight Sonata” is replaced by a cancan, and the sounds of the liturgy are replaced by a march from “Aida”. The alternation of the most important motifs - temporary and eternal, the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit - forms the rhythmic basis of the story. The “routes” of the heroes’ walks also convince us of this: “Metropol” – Rogozhskoe cemetery – Egorov’s tavern – theater – “cabbage maker”. Finally, the name “Clean Monday” itself symbolizes, in accordance with Orthodox calendar, the border between vain life and Lent, when people must cleanse themselves of the filth of worldly life. The heroine commits a very great sin, succumbing to temptation with her beloved on this very day. True, she already knew at that moment that she was ready to renounce the earthly world and be reborn spiritually, becoming the bride of Christ. It is important that for the hero, Clean Monday becomes a turning point in life. On Forgiveness Sunday, both heroes say goodbye to their old life, which did not give them happiness, but in their new life their love remains with them. And only by purifying the soul with this high feeling does a person realize true happiness. The relationship between the theme of love and the theme of purification of the soul is the leitmotif of all the works of I.A. Bunina. “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared,” this is what the author wrote in the story “Dark Alleys.”
The story “Clean Monday” (1944) completes the cycle from the late work of I.A. Bunin "Dark Alleys". The writer laughed that he wrote “about the same thing thirty-eight times.” This one theme was the theme of love. And as in all things of genius, when reading “Dark Alleys” we do not feel exhaustion or repetition in similar stories about the relationship between a man and a woman, although even the plot scheme of the stories in the cycle is the same. As a rule, a meeting of heroes, a sudden rapprochement, an outburst of feelings - and an inevitable separation are described. Love for Bunin is just a wonderful moment. And in each story he finds new and new shades of love.
In the last story - “Clean Monday” - lyricism and pathos, folk traditions and modernity, the divine and the worldly merged in an amazing way; It’s as if the poetic and philosophical results of Bunin’s work are summed up here. The author unfolds before us a story not only about love, but about the secrets of the human soul, about the understanding of happiness, about the complex and contradictory national character, about the spirit of a historical era, about faith. And the deliberate similarity of the plots helps the reader to focus not on the course of events, but on the characters and Bunin’s inimitable style.
The main artistic device in the story “Clean Monday” is the device of antithesis. A whole system of oppositions is being built: antonyms that permeate the first sentence (“The Moscow gray winter day was darkening, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the shop windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening Moscow life, freeing from daytime affairs, flared up: the cabbies’ sleighs rushed thicker and more vigorously, the crowded sleighs rattled more heavily , diving trams..."); The hero and heroine are different in character (“...and as much as I was inclined to talkativeness, to simple-hearted gaiety, she was most often silent: she was always thinking about something, she seemed to be mentally delving into something...”); the heroine’s elegant social life and her deep religiosity; love without external obstacles and its tragic ending. The movement of the text seems to be controlled by two opposing motives - the vulgarity of the surrounding reality and the spirituality of eternal values.
The story has a retrospective structure: the hero remembers his passionate love for a mysterious beauty. This makes it possible to present events as if in a double light: what the hero did not notice “then”, he comprehends from memory, as if summing up the results. Constructing a story on individual episodes and a ring composition allows the author not only to show the transience of time, but also to recreate the portrait of the era with the greatest completeness. The historical panorama of the 10s of the 20th century in Russia is presented by people who really existed and personified the culture of that time. Bunin ironically portrays A. Bely, K. Stanislavsky, F. Chaliapin, and this reveals the writer’s manner of communicating with his contemporaries, so familiar to us from his memoirs. At the same time, the details of the reality of the early twentieth century are intertwined with signs of deep antiquity: along with the Yar and Strelna restaurants, the centuries-old history of Russia is reminiscent of the countless names of Moscow churches, monasteries, icons (Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, Zachatievsky monastery, icon of the Mother of God of Three Hands and others), names of historical figures (Oslyabli, Peresvet), quotes from chronicles, legends, prayers. This is how the story develops an image of an era that combines modernity and “pre-Petrine Rus'”, and this is how the Russian national character, woven from contradictions, is drawn.
The plot and compositional center of the work are the complex relationships between the two characters - His and Her. The narration is told in the first person, which creates the effect of presence and enhances the realism of events. The very image of the main character is given in sketch form, only his feelings and experiences are shown, and this makes the character similar to the lyrical hero of Bunin’s poetry. But we are alarmed that the hero does not understand the one whom he sincerely worships. Blinded by love, he cannot comprehend what inner work is happening in the soul of his beloved. However, it is love that gives the hero exceptional acuteness of perception, through the prism of which the portrait of the heroine is presented in the story. In her description, the defining epithets are “strange” and “mysterious”: “...she was mysterious, incomprehensible to me, and our relationship with her was strange...”. Details of appearance that are repeated in portrait sketches, the epithets “black”, “velvet”, “amber” do not clarify the psychological state of the heroine, but, on the contrary, emphasize her mystery.
We learn that the heroine’s father is “an enlightened man of a noble merchant family,” but further there is a hint of his mediocrity (“he collected something, like all such merchants”). That is, in the origin we do not find an explanation for the duality of the heroine’s mental world, who enjoys both worldly passions and reveres religious rituals. The duality of character is rather rooted in the combination of Western and Eastern. This girl is serious about reading European literature (Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmeier, Przybyszewski), but inside her there is a lot of the East, which is manifested even in her appearance: “And she had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty: a dark-amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous hair in its thick blackness, softly shining like black sable fur, eyebrows, eyes black like velvet coal; The mouth, captivating with velvety crimson lips, was shaded with dark fluff...” The heroine's whole life is woven from inexplicable contradictions. She visits ancient temples, monasteries and restaurants, and skits with equal interest. Her entire existence is a continuous oscillation between flesh and spirit, momentary and eternal. Behind the visible secular gloss, there are primordially national, Russian principles in it. And they turn out to be stronger because they manifest themselves in beliefs.
Incomprehensible in her opposing inclinations, the heroine, at the same time, fits very organically into the contrasts of Moscow of those years, a city that combined the centuries-old beauty of cathedrals, the ringing of bells with the realities of the new bourgeois era.
As in all of Bunin’s work, one of the most important in “Clean Monday” is the motive of beauty, inextricably linked with the image of the heroine. Moreover, beauty is not so much external as internal. The mysterious woman sees her disappearance everywhere - and this is the main torment of her soul. “It’s just that this Rus' remains in some northern monasteries...” The desire to preserve this beauty in herself leads the heroine to the monastery. In addition, she could not find meaning in her existence: “It seemed that she did not need anything: neither flowers,
No books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city...” Therefore, there was a desire to fill life with something significant, the spiritual world. The author managed to convey the essence of the heroine so subtly that we cannot even imagine her in a situation of earthly happiness. It is interesting that, unlike Liza Kalitina from “The Noble Nest” by I. Turgenev, Bunin’s heroine herself does not seek happiness in this life, initially realizing its impossibility. The psychologism of the author of “Dark Alleys” differs significantly from the “dialectics of the soul” by L. Tolstoy and the “secret psychologism” of I. Turgenev. The movements of the soul of Bunin's heroes defy logical explanation; the heroes seem to have no control over themselves. In this regard, the impersonal verbal constructions often used by the writer attract attention (“... for some reason I definitely wanted to go there...”).
In "Clean Monday" the motifs of the vain world and spiritual life resonate with other works of Bunin. Typically, each of the motives is supported by its own system of images. And the great concentration of details combined with a concise presentation requires us to read carefully. Thus, the substantive basis for the motif of the vain world are functionally loaded details: literary bohemia is depicted as a meaningless “cabbage”, where there is only “shouting”, antics and posturing. The motive of spiritual life corresponds to “spontaneous” details: descriptions of nature and architectural monuments (“The evening was peaceful, sunny, with frost on the trees; on the bloody brick walls of the monastery, jackdaws chattered in silence, looking like nuns, chimes every now and then subtly and sadly played in the bell tower"). The feelings of the artist, who loves his native nature with all his heart, are conveyed through the color scheme and emotional epithets (“subtle and sad”, “light”, “wonderful”, “on the golden enamel of the sunset”).
The poetry of the story is manifested in the sound and rhythmic organization of the text. The contrasts are also striking here: “the slow, somnambulistically beautiful beginning of the Moonlight Sonata gives way to a cancan, and the sounds of the liturgy give way to a march from Aida.” The alternation of the most important motifs - temporary and eternal, the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit - forms the rhythmic basis of the story. The “routes” of the heroes’ walks also convince us of this: “Metropol” – Rogozhskoe cemetery – Egorov’s tavern – theater – “cabbage maker”. Finally, the very name “Clean Monday” symbolizes, in accordance with the Orthodox calendar, the border between vain life and Lent, when people must cleanse themselves of the filth of worldly life. The heroine commits a very great sin, succumbing to temptation with her beloved on this very day. True, she already knew at that moment that she was ready to renounce the earthly world and be reborn spiritually, becoming the bride of Christ. It is important that for the hero, Clean Monday becomes a turning point in life. On Forgiveness Sunday, both heroes say goodbye to their old life, which did not give them happiness, but in their new life their love remains with them. And only by purifying the soul with this high feeling does a person realize true happiness. The relationship between the theme of love and the theme of purification of the soul is the leitmotif of all the works of I.A. Bunina. “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared,” this is what the author wrote in the story “Dark Alleys.”
