Female images in the stories of I.A. Bunina. Beautiful female images in the works of I. Bunin Female images in the works of Bunin

The work of I. A. Bunin is a major phenomenon in Russian literature of the 20th century. His prose is marked by lyricism, deep psychologism, and also philosophy. The writer created a number of memorable female images.

The woman in the stories of I. A. Bunin is, first of all, loving. The writer glorifies maternal love. This feeling, he claims, cannot be extinguished under any circumstances. It does not know the fear of death, overcomes serious illnesses and sometimes turns ordinary human life into a feat. In the story “The Cheerful Yard,” the sick Anisya goes to a distant village to see her son, who left his home long ago.

* And on the captivity there is a smoky through
* Veil with golden flies,
* Asa is valley, forest,
* Blue melting distance.

Bunin’s painting of feelings is just as accurate and mysterious. The theme of love is one of the most important in his poetry. The main thing here is the awakening of feelings and the painful note of loss, which is always heard where memories come to life. Only in memories does an unstable feeling and disappearing beauty live, so the past in the poems of I. A. Bunin is recreated in exciting details, in each of which there is pain and loneliness:

* Not a stove, not a crucifix.
* It’s still before me -
* Institute dress
* And a shining gaze.
*Are you lonely?
*Aren't you with me
* In our distant past,
* Where was I different?

I. A. Bunin often writes poems that convey the experiences of a particular moment:

* Early, barely visible dawn,
* Heart of sixteen years old,
* Curtain in the window, and behind it
* The sun of my universe.

The poet strives to express the highest value of every elusive moment in the awakening of a young heart. It is these seconds that become the source of inspiration, the meaning of life. Bunin's painting of feelings is subtle and soulful, marked by psychological precision and laconicism. The life of nature, enveloped in light sadness, the mysterious life of human feelings are captured in perfect poetic words.

* Tombs, mummies and bones are silent,
* Only the word is given life.

It awakens thoughts about the perishable and the eternal, about life and its transience. It helps to see the beauty of the world behind simple phenomena and objects, to realize the value of an ever-changing life.

    I. A. Bunin with extraordinary skill describes in his works the natural world full of harmony. His favorite heroes are endowed with the gift of subtly perceiving the world around them, the beauty of their native land, which allows them to feel life in all its fullness. After all...

    Works by I.A. Bunin are filled with philosophical issues. The main issues that concerned the writer were questions of death and love, the essence of these phenomena, their influence on human life. The theme of death is revealed most deeply by Bunin in his story...

    Neither philosophical and historical excursions and parallels could save us. Bunin could not get rid of thoughts about Russia. No matter how far from her he lived, Russia was inseparable from him. However, this was a pushed-back Russia, not the one that previously began outside the window looking out...

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

    ...

In the theme of love, Bunin is revealed as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul, so to speak, wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting in his stories the most intimate human...

It is unlikely that anyone will argue that some of the best pages of Bunin’s prose are dedicated to women. The reader is presented with amazing female characters, in the light of which male images fade. This is especially true for the book “Dark Alleys”. Women play a major role here. Men, as a rule, are just a background that sets off the characters and actions of the heroines.

Bunin always sought to comprehend the miracle of femininity, the secret of irresistible female happiness. “Women seem somewhat mysterious to me. The more I study them, the less I understand” – this is the phrase he writes out

It's from Flaubert's diary.

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

Deep inner world. For more than thirty years she has kept in her soul the love for the master who once seduced her. They met by chance in an “inn” by the road, where Nadezhda is the hostess and Nikolai Alekseevich is a traveler. He is not able to rise to the height of her Feelings, to understand why Nadezhda did not marry “with such beauty that ... she had,” how one can love one person all his life.

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

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

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

It is impossible to remain indifferent to the fatal charm of the Little Russian beauty Valeria (“Zoika and Valeria”): “...she was very beautiful: strong, well-spoken, with thick dark hair, with velvet eyebrows, almost fused, with menacing eyes the color of black blood, with a hot a dark blush on a tanned face, with a bright shine of teeth and full cherry lips.” The heroine of the short story “Camargue,” despite the poverty of her clothes and the simplicity of her manners, simply torments men with her beauty. The young woman from the short story “One Hundred Rupees” is no less beautiful. Her eyelashes are especially beautiful: “...like those heavenly butterflies that twinkle so magically on the heavenly Indian flowers.” When the beauty reclines in her reed chair, “measurably flickering with the black velvet of her butterfly eyelashes,” waving her fan, she gives the impression of a mysteriously beautiful, unearthly creature: “Beauty, intelligence, stupidity - all these words did not suit her, just as it did not suit her.” everything human: truly she was as if from some other planet.” And what is the narrator’s amazement and disappointment, and ours along with it, when it turns out that anyone with a hundred rupees in their pocket can possess this unearthly charm!

The string of charming female characters in Bunin's short stories is endless. But, speaking about the female beauty captured on the pages of his works, one cannot fail to mention Olya Meshcherskaya, the heroine of the story “Easy Breathing”. What an amazing girl she was! This is how the author describes her: “At the age of fourteen, with a thin waist and slender legs, her breasts and all those forms, the charm of which had never yet been expressed by human words, were already clearly outlined; at fifteen she was already considered a beauty.”

But this was not the main essence of Olya Meshcherskaya’s charm. Everyone has probably seen very beautiful faces that you get tired of looking at after just a minute. Olya was, first of all, a cheerful, “lively” person. There is not a drop of primness, affectation or self-satisfied admiration of her beauty in her: “And she was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that became bare when falling while running.” The girl seems to radiate energy and joy of life. However, “the more beautiful the rose, the faster it fades.” The ending of this story, like other Bunin short stories, is tragic: Olya dies. However, the charm of her image is so great that even now romantics continue to fall in love with it. This is how K.G. writes about it. Paustovsky: “Oh, if I only knew! And if I could! I would strew this grave with all the flowers that bloom on earth. I already loved this girl. I shuddered at the irreparability of her fate. I...naively reassured myself that Olya Meshcherskaya was Bunin’s fiction, that only a penchant for a romantic perception of the world made me suffer because of my sudden love for the dead girl.”

Paustovsky called the story “Easy Breathing” a sad and calm reflection, an epitaph to girlish beauty.

Bunin knows how to speak very frankly about the most intimate things, but never crosses the line where there is no longer a place for art. Reading his short stories, you don’t find even a hint of vulgarity or vulgar naturalism. The writer subtly and tenderly describes love relationships, “Earthly love.” “And how he hugged his wife, too, her entire cool body, kissing her still wet breasts, smelling of toilet soap, her eyes and lips, from which she had already wiped the paint.” ("In Paris").

And how touching are the words of Rus' addressed to her beloved: “No, wait, yesterday we kissed somehow stupidly, now I’ll kiss you first, just quietly, quietly. And you hug me... everywhere..." (“Rusya”).

The miracle of Bunin's prose was achieved at the cost of the writer's great creative efforts. Without this, great art is unthinkable. This is how Ivan Alekseevich himself writes about this: “... that wondrous, unspeakably beautiful, something completely special in all earthly things, which is the body of a woman, has never been written by anyone. We need to find some other words.” And he found them. Like an artist and sculptor, Bunin recreated the harmony of colors, lines and shapes of a beautiful female body, glorifying the Beauty embodied in a woman.


It is unlikely that anyone will argue that some of the best pages of Bunin’s prose are dedicated to women. The reader is presented with amazing female characters, in the light of which male images fade. This is especially true for the book “Dark Alleys”. Women play a major role here. Men, as a rule, are just a background that sets off the characters and actions of the heroines. Bunin always sought to comprehend the miracle of femininity, the secret of irresistible female happiness. “Women seem somewhat mysterious to me. The more I study them, the less I understand,” he writes this phrase from Flaubert’s diary. Here in front of us is Nadezhda from the story “Dark Alleys”: “...a dark-haired, also black-browed and also still beautiful woman for her age, who looked like an elderly gypsy, with dark fluff on her upper lip and along her cheeks, walked lightly, but was plump. , with large breasts under a red blouse, with a triangular belly, like a goose’s, under a black woolen skirt.” With amazing skill, Bunin finds the right words and images. They seem to have color and shape. A few precise and colorful strokes - and before us is a portrait of a woman. However, Nadezhda is good not only in appearance. She has a rich and deep inner world. For more than thirty years she has kept in her soul the love for the master who once seduced her. They met by chance in an “inn” by the road, where Nadezhda is the hostess and Nikolai Alekseevich is a traveler. He is not able to rise to the height of her Feelings, to understand why Nadezhda did not marry “with such beauty that ... she had,” how one can love one person all his life. In the book “Dark Alleys” there are many other charming female characters: sweet gray-eyed Tanya, a “simple soul”, devoted to her beloved, ready to make any sacrifice for him (“Tanya”); the tall, stately beauty Katerina Nikolaevna, the daughter of her age, who may seem too bold and extravagant (“Antigone”); simple-minded, naive Polya, who retained the childish purity of her soul, despite her profession (“Madrid”) and so on. The fates of most of Bunin's heroines are tragic. Suddenly and soon the happiness of Olga Alexandrovna, an officer's wife, who is forced to serve as a waitress ("In Paris"), breaks up with her beloved Rusya ("Rusya"), and Natalie ("Natalie") dies from childbirth. The ending of another short story in this cycle, “Galya Ganskaya,” is sad. The hero of the story, the artist, never tires of admiring the beauty of this girl. At thirteen years old, she was “sweet, playful, graceful... extremely, with a face with light brown curls along her cheeks, like an angel.” But time passed, Galya matured: “... no longer a teenager, not an angel, but an amazingly pretty thin girl... Her face under a gray hat is half covered with an ashen veil, and aquamarine eyes shine through it.” Her feeling for the artist was passionate, and his attraction to her was great. However, he soon got ready to leave for Italy for a long time, for a month and a half. In vain does the girl persuade her lover to stay or take her with him. Having been refused, Galya committed suicide. Only then did the artist realize what he had lost. It is impossible to remain indifferent to the fatal charm of the Little Russian beauty Valeria (“Zoika and Valeria”): “...she was very beautiful: strong, well-spoken, with thick dark hair, with velvet eyebrows, almost fused, with menacing eyes the color of black blood, with a hot a dark blush on a tanned face, with a bright shine of teeth and full cherry lips.” The heroine of the short story “Camargue,” despite the poverty of her clothes and the simplicity of her manners, simply torments men with her beauty. The young woman from the short story “One Hundred Rupees” is no less beautiful. Her eyelashes are especially beautiful: “...like those heavenly butterflies that twinkle so magically on the heavenly Indian flowers.” When the beauty reclines in her reed chair, “measurably flickering with the black velvet of her butterfly eyelashes,” waving her fan, she gives the impression of a mysteriously beautiful, unearthly creature: “Beauty, intelligence, stupidity - all these words did not suit her, just as it did not suit her.” everything human: truly she was as if from some other planet.” And what is the narrator’s amazement and disappointment, and ours along with it, when it turns out that anyone with a hundred rupees in their pocket can possess this unearthly charm! The string of charming female characters in Bunin's short stories is endless. But, speaking about the female beauty captured on the pages of his works, one cannot fail to mention Olya Meshcherskaya, the heroine of the story “Easy Breathing”. What an amazing girl she was! This is how the author describes her: “At the age of fourteen, with a thin waist and slender legs, her breasts and all those forms, the charm of which had never yet been expressed by human words, were already clearly outlined; at fifteen she was already considered a beauty.” But this was not the main essence of Olya Meshcherskaya’s charm. Everyone has probably seen very beautiful faces that you get tired of looking at after just a minute. Olya was, first of all, a cheerful, “lively” person. There is not a drop of primness, affectation or self-satisfied admiration of her beauty in her: “And she was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that became bare when falling while running.” The girl seems to radiate energy and joy of life. However, “the more beautiful the rose, the faster it fades.” The ending of this story, like other Bunin short stories, is tragic: Olya dies. However, the charm of her image is so great that even now romantics continue to fall in love with it. This is how K.G. writes about it. Paustovsky: “Oh, if I only knew! And if I could! I would strew this grave with all the flowers that bloom on earth. I already loved this girl. I shuddered at the irreparability of her fate. I...naively reassured myself that Olya Meshcherskaya was Bunin’s fiction, that only a penchant for a romantic perception of the world made me suffer because of my sudden love for the dead girl.” Paustovsky called the story “Easy Breathing” a sad and calm reflection, an epitaph to girlish beauty. On the pages of Bunin's prose there are many lines devoted to sex and descriptions of the naked female body. Apparently, the writer’s contemporaries more than once reproached him for “shamelessness” and base feelings. This is the rebuke the writer gives to his ill-wishers: “... how I love... you, “women of men, a network of human deception”! This “network” is something truly inexplicable, divine and devilish, and when I write about it, try to express it, I am reproached for shamelessness, for low motives... It is well said in one old book: “The writer has the same every right to be bold in his verbal images of love and its faces, which at all times was provided in this case to painters and sculptors: only vile souls see vileness even in the beautiful...” Bunin knows how to speak very frankly about the most intimate, but never crosses the line where there is no longer room art. Reading his short stories, you don’t find even a hint of vulgarity or vulgar naturalism. The writer subtly and tenderly describes love relationships, “Earthly love.” “And how he hugged his wife, too, her entire cool body, kissing her still wet breasts, smelling of toilet soap, her eyes and lips, from which she had already wiped the paint.” ("In Paris"). And how touching are the words of Rus' addressed to her beloved: “No, wait, yesterday we kissed somehow stupidly, now I’ll kiss you first, just quietly, quietly. And you hug me... everywhere..." (“Rusya”). The miracle of Bunin's prose was achieved at the cost of the writer's great creative efforts. Without this, great art is unthinkable. This is how Ivan Alekseevich himself writes about this: “... that wondrous, unspeakably beautiful, something completely special in all earthly things, which is the body of a woman, has never been written by anyone. We need to find some other words.” And he found them. Like an artist and sculptor, Bunin recreated the harmony of colors, lines and shapes of a beautiful female body, glorifying the Beauty embodied in a woman.

The work of I. A. Bunin is a major phenomenon in Russian literature of the 20th century. His prose is marked by lyricism, deep psychologism, and also philosophy. The writer created a number of memorable female images.

The woman in the stories of I. A. Bunin is, first of all, loving. The writer glorifies maternal love. This feeling, he claims, cannot be extinguished under any circumstances. It does not know the fear of death, overcomes serious illnesses and sometimes turns ordinary human life into a feat. In the story “The Cheerful Yard,” the sick Anisya goes to a distant village to see her son, who left his home long ago.

The mother reached the miserable hut of her lonely son and, not finding him there, died. The death of the mother was followed by the suicide of her son, despairing of his stupid life. Rare in their emotional strength and tragedy, the pages of the story, however, strengthen faith in life, because, speaking of maternal love, they elevate the human soul.

The woman in Bunin’s prose embodies true life in its organicity and naturalness.

A typical example is the story “The Cup of Life,” which fully reveals the meaning of its title. Just physical existence, no matter how long it may be, has no price; the “cup of life” is its spirituality, love above all. The image of a woman whose inner world is filled with a joyful and holy feeling is touching; Horizons with his prudence in all his actions is ugly. His “philosophy” was that all a person’s energies should be spent on prolonging his physical existence.

Alexandra Vasilyevna is sure that she would not regret anything for one - even the last - date with her beloved. I. A. Bunin does not hide his compassion for the woman in whose heart “distant, not yet decayed love” has been preserved.

It is a woman who penetrates into the true nature of a love feeling, comprehends its tragedy and beauty. For example, the heroine of the story “Natalie” says: “Is there such a thing as unhappy love?.. Doesn’t the most sorrowful music in the world give happiness?”

In the stories of I. A. Bunin, it is the woman who keeps love alive and imperishable, and carries it through all the trials of life. This is, for example, Nadezhda in the story “Dark Alleys”. Having fallen in love once, she lived with this love for thirty years and, having met her lover by chance, she says to him: “Just as I had nothing dearer than you at that time, so there was nothing later.” It is unlikely that the heroes are destined to meet again. However, Nadezhda understands that love will forever remain in memory: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.” These words contain both forgiveness and light sadness.

Love and separation, life and death are eternal themes that resonate soulfully in the prose works of I. A. Bunin. All these themes are connected with the image of a woman, touchingly and enlightenedly recreated by the writer.

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

Salmanov Gymnasium, 11 "B"

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