Bunin Ivan Alekseevich(1870-1953), prose writer, poet, translator. He was the first Russian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent many years of his life in exile, becoming one of the main writers of the Russian diaspora.
Born in Voronezh in the family of an impoverished nobleman. I could not graduate from high school due to lack of money. Having only 4 classes of the gymnasium, Bunin regretted all his life that he had not received a systematic education. However, this did not stop him from
Get the Pushkin Prize. The writer's older brother helped Ivan learn languages and sciences, going through the entire gymnasium course with him at home.
Bunin wrote his first poems at the age of 17, imitating Pushkin and Lermontov, whose work he admired. They were published in the collection "Poems".
Since 1889 he began to work. In the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik, with which Bunin collaborated, he met the proofreader Varvara Pashchenko, in 1891 he married her. They moved to Poltava and became statisticians in the provincial government. In 1891, the first collection of Bunin's poems was published. The family soon broke up. Bunin moved to Moscow. There he made literary acquaintances with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky.
Bunin's second marriage, with Anna Tsakni, was also unsuccessful, in 1905 their son Kolya died. In 1906, Bunin met Vera Muromtseva, married, and lived with her until his death.
Bunin's work gains fame soon after the publication of the first poems. The following poems by Bunin were published in the collections Under the Open Air (1898), Falling Leaves (1901).
dating the greatest writers leaves a significant imprint in the life and work of Bunin. Bunin's stories "Antonov apples", "Pines" are published. Bunin's prose was published in The Complete Works (1915).
The writer in 1909 becomes an honorary academician of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Bunin reacted rather sharply to the ideas of the revolution, and forever leaves Russia.
Bunin moved and traveled almost all his life: Europe, Asia, Africa. But he never stopped engaging in literary activities: "Mitya's Love" (1924), " Sunstroke"(1925), as well as the main novel in the life of the writer -" The Life of Arseniev "(1927-1929, 1933), which brings Bunin the Nobel Prize in 1933. In 1944, Ivan Alekseevich wrote the story "Clean Monday".
Before his death, the writer was often ill, but at the same time he did not stop working and creating. In the last few months of his life, Bunin was busy working on a literary portrait of A.P. Chekhov, but the work remained unfinished
Bunin always dreamed of returning to Russia. Unfortunately, the writer never managed to do this before his death. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died on November 8, 1953. He was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery in Paris.
Creativity of Ivan Bunin (1870-1953)
- The beginning of Bunin's work
- Bunin's love lyrics
- Bunin's peasant lyrics
- Analysis of the story "Antonov apples"
- Bunin and the revolution
- Analysis of the story "Village"
- Analysis of the story "Sukhodol"
- Analysis of the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
- Analysis of the story "Chang's Dreams"
- Analysis of the story "Easy breathing"
- Analysis of the book "Cursed Days"
- Bunin's emigration
- Foreign prose of Bunin
- Analysis of the story "Sunstroke"
- Analysis of the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys"
- Analysis of the story "Clean Monday"
- Analysis of the novel "The Life of Arseniev"
- Bunin's life in France
- Bunin and the Great Patriotic War
- Bunin's loneliness in exile
- Bunin's death
- The beginning of Bunin's work
The creative path of the outstanding Russian prose writer and poet of the late 19th - first half of the 20th century, a recognized classic domestic literature and its first Nobel laureate I. A. Bunin is very complex, which is not easy to understand, because in the fate and books of the writer, the fate of Russia and its people, the most acute conflicts and contradictions of the time, were refracted in their own way.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 10 (22), 1870 in Voronezh, into an impoverished noble family. He spent his childhood on the Butyrki farm in the Yelets district of the Oryol province.
Communication with the peasants, with his first tutor, home teacher N. Romashkov, who instilled in the boy a love for fine literature, painting and music, life in the midst of nature gave the future writer inexhaustible material for creativity, determined the themes of many of his works.
Studying at the Yelets Gymnasium, where Bunin entered in 1881, was interrupted due to material need and illness.
He completed the gymnasium course of sciences at home, in the Yelets village of Ozerki, under the guidance of his brother Julius, a man of excellent education and democratic views.
Since the autumn of 1889, Bunin began to collaborate in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, then lived for some time in Poltava, where, by his own admission, "corresponded a lot to newspapers, studied hard, wrote ...".
A special place in the life of young Bunin is occupied by a deep feeling for Varvara Pashchenko, the daughter of a Yelets doctor, whom he met in the summer of 1889.
The story of his love for this woman, complex and painful, ending in a complete break in 1894, the writer will later tell in the story "Lika", which made up the final part of his autobiographical novel "Arseniev's Life".
Bunin began his literary activity as a poet. In poems written in his teenage years, he imitated Pushkin, Lermontov, as well as the idol of the then youth, the poet Nadson. In 1891, the first book of poems was published in Orel, in 1897 - the first collection of stories "To the End of the World", and in 1901 - again the poetry collection "Falling Leaves".
The predominant motifs of Bunin's poetry of the 90s - early 900s are the rich world of native nature and human feelings. The life philosophy of the author is expressed in landscape poems.
The motif of the transience of human existence, sounding in a number of the poet's poems, is balanced by the opposite motif - the affirmation of the eternity and incorruptibility of nature.
My spring will pass, and this day will pass,
But it's fun to wander around and know that everything passes,
Meanwhile, as the happiness of living forever will not die, -
he exclaims in the poem "Forest Road".
In Bunin's poems, unlike the decadents, there is no pessimism, disbelief in life, aspiration to "other worlds". They sound the joy of being, a sense of the beauty and life-giving power of nature and the surrounding world, the colors and colors of which the poet seeks to reflect and capture.
In the poem "Leaf Fall" (1900), dedicated to Gorky, Bunin vividly and poetically painted the autumn landscape, conveyed the beauty of Russian nature.
Bunin's descriptions of nature are not dead, frozen wax casts, but dynamically developing paintings filled with various smells, noises and colors. But nature attracts Bunin not only with a variety of shades of colors and smells.
In the surrounding world, the poet draws creative strength and vivacity, sees the source of life. In the poem "The Thaw" he wrote:
No, it's not the landscape that attracts me,
Not the colors I seek to notice,
And what shines in these colors -
Love and joy of being.
The feeling of beauty and grandeur of life in Bunin's poems is due to the author's religious attitude. They express gratitude to the Creator of this living, complex and diverse world:
Thank you for everything, Lord!
You, after a day of anxiety and sadness,
Give me the evening dawn
The expanse of fields and the meekness of the blue distance.
A person, according to Bunin, should be happy already because the Lord gave him the opportunity to see this imperishable beauty dissolved in God's world:
And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn,
And azure, and midday heat - The time will come -
The Lord will ask the prodigal son:
“Were you happy in your earthly life?”
And I will forget everything - I will remember only these
Field paths between ears and grasses -
And from sweet tears I will not have time to answer,
Falling to merciful knees.
("Both Flowers and Bumblebees")
Bunin's poetry is deeply national. The image of the Motherland is captured in it through discreet, but vivid pictures of nature. He lovingly describes the expanses of central Russia, the freedom of his native fields and forests, where everything is filled with light and warmth.
In the “satin sheen” of the birch forest, among the floral and mushroom smells, watching the cranes reaching south in late autumn, the poet feels with special force the aching love for the Motherland:
native steppes. The poor villages
My homeland: I returned to her,
Tired of lonely wanderings
And realized the beauty in her sorrow
And happiness is in sad beauty.
("In the steppe")
Through the feeling of bitterness over the troubles and hardships endured by his homeland, in Bunin's poems, filial love and gratitude for her, as well as a harsh rebuke to those who are indifferent to her fate, sound:
They mock you
They, oh motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity
Wretched view of black huts.
So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother -
Tired, timid and sad
Among his urban friends.
Looks with a smile of compassion
To the one who wandered hundreds of miles
And for him, by the day of goodbye,
Saved the last penny.
("Motherland")
- Bunin's love lyrics
Bunin's poems about love are just as clear, transparent and concrete. Bunin's love lyrics are quantitatively small. But it is distinguished by healthy sensuality, restraint, vivid images of lyrical heroes and heroines, far from beautiful souls and excessive enthusiasm, avoiding pomp, phrase, pose.
These are the poems “I entered her at the midnight hour ...”, “Song” (“I am a simple girl on the tower”), “We met by chance on the corner ...”, “Loneliness” and some others.
Nevertheless, Bunin's lyrics, despite external restraint, reflect the diversity and fullness of human feelings, a rich range of moods. Here is the bitterness of separation and unrequited love, and the experience of a suffering, lonely person.
The poetry of the beginning of the 20th century is generally characterized by extreme subjectivism and increased expressiveness. Suffice it to recall the lyrics of Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and other poets.
In contrast, Bunin the poet, on the contrary, is characterized by artistic secrecy, restraint in the manifestation of feelings and in the form of their expression.
An excellent example of such restraint is the poem "Loneliness" (1903), which tells about the fate of a man abandoned by his beloved.
... I wanted to shout after:
"Come back, I'm related to you!"
But for a woman there is no past:
She fell out of love - and became a stranger to her -
Well! I'll flood the fireplace, I'll drink ...
It would be nice to buy a dog!
In this poem, attention is drawn primarily to the amazing simplicity of artistic means, the complete absence of paths.
Stylistically neutral, deliberately prosaic vocabulary emphasizes everyday life, the everyday life of the situation - an empty cold cottage, a rainy autumn evening.
Bunin uses only one paint here - gray. The syntactic and rhythmic patterns are also simple. A clear alternation of three-syllable meters, a calm narrative intonation, the absence of expression and inversion create an even and seemingly indifferent tone of the entire poem.
However, there are a number of tricks (honoring, repeating the word “one”, using impersonal verb forms “it’s dark for me”, “I wanted to shout”, “it would be nice to buy a dog”).
Bunin emphasizes the acute emotional pent-up pain of a person experiencing a drama. The main content of the poem thus went into subtext, hidden behind a deliberately calm tone.
The range of Bunin's lyrics is quite wide. In his poems, he refers to Russian history (“Svyatogor”, “Prince Vseslav”, “Michael”, “Medieval Archangel”), recreates the nature and life of other countries, mainly the East (“Ormuzd”, “Aeschylus”, “Jericho” , "Flight to Egypt", "Ceylon", "Off the coast of Asia Minor" and many others).
This lyric is philosophical in its essence. Peering into the human past, Bunin seeks to reflect the eternal laws of being.
Bunin did not leave his poetic experiments all his life, but he is known to a wide circle of readers “first of all as a prose writer, although the poetic “vein” definitely affected his prose works, where there is a lot of lyricism, emotionality, undoubtedly brought into them by the poetic talent of the writer.
Already in early prose Bunin reflected his deep reflections on the meaning of life, on the destinies home country. His stories of the 1990s clearly show that the young prose writer sensitively captured many of the most important aspects of the reality of that time.
- Bunin's peasant lyrics
The main themes of Bunin's early stories are the depiction of the Russian peasantry and the ruined petty nobility. Between these themes there is a close connection, due to the author's worldview.
Sad pictures of resettlement peasant families drawn by him in the stories "On the Other Side" (1893) and "To the End of the World" (1894), the joyless life of peasant children is displayed in the stories "Tanka" (1892), "News from the Motherland". The peasant life is impoverished, but the fate of the local nobility is no less hopeless (New Road, Pines).
All of them - both peasants and nobles - are threatened with death by the arrival in the village of a new master of life: a boorish, uncultured bourgeois who does not know pity for the weak of this world.
Not accepting either the methods or the consequences of such a capitalization of the Russian countryside, Bunin is looking for an ideal in that way of life when, according to the writer, there was a strong blood connection between a peasant and a landowner.
The desolation and degeneration of noble nests causes in Bunin a feeling of deepest sadness about the bygone harmony of patriarchal life, the gradual disappearance of an entire class that created the greatest national culture.
- Analysis of the story "Antonov apples"
The epitaph for the old village that is fading into the past sounds especially bright in the lyrical story "Antonov apples"(1900). This story is one of the writer's remarkable works of art.
After reading it, Gorky wrote to Bunin: “And also thank you very much for Yabloki. This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young God, sang. Beautiful, juicy, heartfelt."
In "Antonov's apples" the subtlest perception of nature and the ability to convey it in clear visual images are striking.
No matter how Bunin idealizes the life of the old nobility, this is not the most important thing in his story for the modern reader. The feeling of the motherland, born from the feeling of its unique, peculiar, slightly sad autumn nature, invariably arises when you read Antonov Apples.
Such are the episodes of picking Antonov apples, threshing, and especially skillfully painted hunting scenes. These paintings are organically combined with the autumn landscape, in the descriptions of which the signs of a new reality that frighten Bunin penetrate in the form of telegraph poles, which "only contrast with everything that surrounded the aunt's old-world nest."
For the writer, the arrival of the predatory ruler of life is a cruel, irresistible force, bringing with it the death of the former, noble way of life. In the face of such a danger, this way of life becomes even more dear to the writer, his critical attitude towards the dark sides of the past is weakening, the idea of unity of peasants and landowners is strengthened, whose fates are equally, according to Bunin, now at risk.
Bunin writes a lot in these years about the elderly ("Kastryuk", "Meliton", etc.), and this interest in old age, the decline of human existence, is explained by the writer's increased attention to eternal problems life and death, which did not cease to excite him until the end of his days.
Already in the early work of Bunin, his outstanding psychological skill, the ability to build a plot and composition, is manifested, his own special way of depicting the world and the spiritual movements of a person is formed.
The writer, as a rule, avoids sharp plot moves; the action in his stories develops smoothly, calmly, even slowly. But this delay is only external. As in life itself, passions boil in Bunin's works, various characters collide, conflicts ensue.
A master of an extremely detailed vision of the world, Bunin makes the reader perceive the environment with literally all the senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, giving free rein to a whole stream of associations.
“The light chill of dawn” smells “sweet, forest, flowers, herbs”, the city on a frosty day “creaks and squeals from the steps of passers-by, from the skids of peasant sledges”, the pond shines “hot and boring”, the flowers smell with “feminine luxury”, the leaves “babble like a quiet flowing rain outside the open windows”, etc.
Bunin's text is full of complex associations and figurative connections. A particularly important role in this way of depicting is played by an artistic detail that reveals the author's view of the world, the psychological state of the character, the beauty and complexity of the world.
- Bunin and the revolution
Bunin did not accept the revolution of 1905. She horrified the writer with her cruelty on both sides, the anarchic willfulness of some of the peasants, the manifestation of savagery and bloody malice.
The myth of the unity of peasants and landlords was shaken, and ideas about the peasant as a meek, humble creature collapsed.
All this sharpened Bunin's interest in Russian history and the problems of Russian national character, in which Bunin now saw the complexity and "variegation", the interweaving of positive and negative features.
In 1919, after the October Revolution, he wrote in his diary: “There are two types among the people. In one, Rus' predominates, ”in the other - Chud, Merya. But in both there is a terrible changeability of moods, appearances, “shakyness”, as they used to say in the old days.
The people themselves said to themselves: “From us, as from a tree, both a club and an icon,” depending on the circumstances, on who processes this tree: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelyan Pugachev.
It is these “two types among the people” that Bunin will deeply explore in the 1910s in his works “The Village”, “Dry Valley”, “ ancient man”,“ Night conversation ”,“ Cheerful yard ”,“ Ignat ”,“ Zakhar Vorobyov ”,“ John Rydalets ”,“ I keep silent ”,“ Prince in princes ”,“ Thin grass ”and many others, in which, according to According to the author, he was occupied with "the soul of a Russian person in a deep sense, the image of the traits of the psyche of a Slav."
- Analysis of the story "Village"
The first in a series of such works was the story "The Village" (1910), which caused a flurry of controversy and readers, and criticism.
Gorky very accurately assessed the meaning and significance of Bunin's work, Gorky: “The Village,” he wrote, “was the impetus that made the broken and shattered Russian society seriously think not about the peasant, not about the people, but over the strict question - to be or not to be Russia ?
We have not yet thought about Russia as a whole, this work showed us the need to think specifically about the whole country, to think historically ... No one took the village so deeply, so historically ... ”. Bunin's "Village" is a dramatic reflection on Russia, its past, present and future, on the properties of a historically developed national character.
The writer's new approach to the traditional peasant theme also determined his search for new means. artistic expressiveness. The heartfelt lyrics, characteristic of Bunin's previous stories about the peasantry, were replaced in The Village by a harsh, sober narrative, capacious, concise, but at the same time economically saturated with the image of everyday details of village life.
The author's desire to reflect in the story a large period in the life of the village of Durnovka, symbolizing, in Bunin's view, the Russian village in general, and more broadly - all of Russia ("Yes, it is the whole village," one of the characters in the story says about Russia) - demanded from him and new principles for the construction of the work.
In the center of the story is the image of the life of the Krasov brothers: the landowner and tavern keeper who escaped from the poor, and the self-taught wandering poet Kuzma.
Through the eyes of these people, all the main events of the time are shown: the Russo-Japanese war, the revolution of 1905, the post-revolutionary period. There is no single continuously developing plot in the work, the story is a series of pictures of village, and partly county life, which the Krasovs have been observing for many years.
The main plot line of the story is the life story of the Krasov brothers, the grandsons of a serf. She is interrupted by many inserted short stories and episodes that tell about the life of Durnovka.
important to understanding ideological sense The work is played by the image of Kuzma Krasov. He is not only one of the main characters of the work, but also the main exponent of the author's point of view.
Kuzma is a loser. He “dreamed all his life of studying and writing,” but his fate was such that he always had to deal with an alien and unpleasant business. In his youth, he was a merchant-peddler, wandered around Russia, wrote articles for newspapers, then served in a candle shop, was a clerk and, in the end, moved in with his brother, with whom he had once violently quarreled.
A heavy burden falls on Kuzma's soul and the consciousness of an aimlessly lived life, and bleak pictures of the surrounding reality. All this prompts him to think about who is to blame for such a device of life.
A look at the Russian people and their historical past was first expressed in the story by Kuzma's teacher, the tradesman Balashkin. Balashkin utters words that make one recall the famous "martyrology" of Herzen: "Good God! Pushkin was killed, Lermontov was killed, Pisarev was drowned... Ryleev was strangled, Polezhaev became a soldier, Shevchenko was caulked into a soldier for 10 years... Dostoevsky was dragged to execution, Gogol went crazy... And Koltsov, Reshetnikov, Nikitin, Pomyalovsky, Levitov?"
The list of the best representatives of the nation who have died untimely has been selected extremely convincingly, and the reader has every reason to share Balashkin's indignation against this state of affairs.
But the end of the tirade unexpectedly rethinks everything that was said: “Oh, is there still such a country in the world, such a people, be it thrice cursed?” Kuzma vehemently objects to this: “Such a people! The greatest people, and not "such", let me tell you ... After all, these writers are the children of this very people.
But Balashkin defines the concept of “people” in his own way, placing next to Platon Karataev and Razuvaev with Kolupaev, and Saltychikha, and Karamazov with Oblomov, and Khlestakov, and Nozdrev. Subsequently, while editing the story for a foreign publication, Bunin introduced the following characteristic words into Balashkin's first remark: “Would you say the government is to blame? But after all, a master is a slave, a hat is a cap according to Senka. Such a view of the people becomes decisive for Kuzma in the future. The author himself is inclined to share it.
The image of Tikhon Krasov is no less important in the story. The son of a serf, Tikhon became rich in trade, opened a tavern, and then bought the Durnovka estate from an impoverished descendant of his former masters.
From a former beggar, an orphan, the owner turned out, a thunderstorm of the whole county. Strict, hard in dealing with servants and peasants, he stubbornly goes to his goal, grows rich. Lut! On the other hand, he is also the owner, ”the Durnovites say about Tikhon. The feeling of the owner is indeed the main thing in Tikhon.
Every loafer evokes in him a sharp feeling of hostility: “This loafer would be a worker!” However, the all-consuming passion of accumulation obscured the diversity of life from him, distorted his feelings.
“We live - we don’t shake, if we get caught - we turn back,” is his favorite saying, which has become a guide to action. But over time, he begins to feel the futility of his efforts and his entire life.
With grief in his soul, he confesses to Kuzma: “My life is gone, brother! I had, you know, a dumb cook, I gave her, a fool, a foreign scarf, and she took it and pulled it inside out ... Do you understand? From foolishness and greed. It’s a pity to wear it on weekdays - I’ll wait for the holiday, they say, - but the holiday has come - only rags are left ... So here I am ... with my own life.
This worn, topsy-turvy handkerchief is a symbol of the aimlessly lived life of not only Tikhon. It extends to his brother - the loser Kuzma, and to the dark existence of many peasants depicted in the story.
We will find here many gloomy pages, where the darkness, downtroddenness, and ignorance of the peasants are shown. Such is Gray, perhaps the most impoverished peasant in the village, who never got out of poverty, having lived all his life in a small chicken hut, rather like a lair.
Such are the episodic, but vivid images of guards from the landowner's estate, suffering from diseases from eternal malnutrition and a miserable existence.
But who is to blame for this? This is a question over which both the author and his central characters struggle. “From whom to charge something? - asks Kuzma. - Unfortunate people, first of all - unfortunate! ..». But this statement is immediately refuted by the opposite train of thought: “Yes, but who is to blame for this? The people themselves!"
Tikhon Krasov reproaches his brother for contradictions: “Well, you already don’t know the measure of anything. You yourself are hammering: unfortunate people, unfortunate people! Now it's an animal." Kuzma is really confused: “I don’t understand anything: it’s either unfortunate, or that ...”, but all the same (the author and him) inclines to the conclusion about “guilty”.
Take again the same Gray. Having three acres of land, he cannot and does not want to cultivate it and prefers to live in poverty, indulging in idle thoughts that, perhaps, wealth will come into his hands on its own.
Bunin especially does not accept the hopes of the Durnovites at the mercy of the revolution, which, according to them, will give them the opportunity "not to plow, not to mow - the girls should wear zhamkas."
Who, in Bunin's understanding, is the "driving force of the revolution"? One of them is the son of the peasant Gray, the rebel Denisk. This young idler was beckoned by the city. But he did not take root there either, and after a while he returned to his impoverished father with an empty knapsack and pockets full of books.
But what kind of books are these: the songbook "Marusya", "The Debauched Wife", "Innocent Girl in Chains of Violence" and next to them - "The role of the proletariat ("protaleriat", as Deniska says) in Russia.
Deniska's own writing exercises, which he leaves to Tikhon, are extremely ridiculous and caricatured, prompting a remark from him: "Well, you're a fool, forgive me, Lord." Deniska is not only stupid, but also cruel.
He beats his father with a “mortal combat” only because he tore the ceiling off with cigarettes, which Deniska pasted over with newspapers and pictures.
However, there are bright folk characters in the story, drawn by the author with obvious sympathy. The image of the peasant woman Odnodvorka, for example, is not without attractiveness.
In the scene when Kuzma sees Odnodvorka at night, taking away the shields that she uses for fuel from the railway, this dexterous and arguing peasant woman is somewhat reminiscent of the brave and freedom-loving women of the people in Gorky's early stories.
With deep sympathy and sympathy, Bunin also painted the image of the widow Bottle, who comes to Kuzma to dictate letters to her son Misha, who has forgotten her. The writer achieves significant power and expressiveness in the depiction of the peasant Ivanushka.
This deep old man, who firmly decided not to succumb to death and retreats before it only when he finds out that a coffin has already been prepared for him, a seriously ill person, is a truly epic figure.
In the depiction of these characters, sympathy for them is clearly visible both by the author himself and by one of the main characters of the story, Kuzma Krasov.
But these sympathies are especially fully expressed in relation to the character, who runs through the whole story and is of paramount interest for understanding the positive ideals of the author.
This is a peasant woman nicknamed Young. She stands out from the mass of Durnovsky women primarily for her beauty, about which Bunin speaks more than once in the story. But the beauty of the Young appears under the author's pen as a trampled beauty.
The young one, we learn, is beaten “every day and nightly” by her husband Rodka, she is beaten by Tikhon Krasov, she is tied naked to a tree, she is finally given in marriage to the ugly Deniska. The image of the Young is an image-symbol.
Young in Bunin is the embodiment of desecrated beauty, kindness, hard work, she is a generalization of the bright and good beginnings of peasant life, a symbol of young Russia (this generalization is already evident in her very nickname - Young). Bunin's "Village" is also a warning story. It is no coincidence that it ends with the wedding of Deniska and Young. In the Bunin image, this wedding resembles a funeral.
The ending of the story is bleak: a blizzard rages on the street, and the wedding trio flies to no one knows where, “into the dark haze”. The image of a blizzard is also a symbol, meaning the end of that bright Russia, which Young personifies.
Thus, in a whole series of symbolic episodes and pictures, Bunin warns of what could happen to Russia if she "betrothed" to rebels like Denis Sery.
Later, Bunin wrote to his friend, the artist P. Nilus, that he predicted the tragedy that happened to Russia as a result of the February and October coups in the story "The Village".
The story "The Village" was followed by a whole series of Bunin's stories about the peasantry, continuing and developing thoughts about the "diversity" of the national character, depicting "the Russian soul, its peculiar interweaving."
With sympathy, the writer draws people who are kind and generous at heart, hardworking and caring. The carriers of the same anarchic, rebellious principles, people willful, cruel, lazy cause him invariable antipathy.
Sometimes the plots of Bunin's works are built on the collision of these two principles: good and evil. One of the most characteristic works in this respect is the story “Merry Yard”, where two characters are depicted in contrast: the humble, hardworking peasant woman Anisya and her mentally callous, unlucky son, the “empty talker” Yegor.
Long-suffering, kindness, on the one hand, and cruelty, anarchism, unpredictability, self-will, on the other - these are the two principles, the two categorical imperatives of the Russian national character, as Bunin understood it.
The most important in Bunin's work are positive folk characters. Along with the image of stupid humility (the stories "Lichard", "I keep silent" and others), characters appear in the works of 1911-1913, whose humility is of a different plan, Christian.
These people are meek, long-suffering and at the same time attractive with their kindness; warmth, beauty of the inner appearance. In a nondescript, humbled, at first glance, man, courage and moral stamina are revealed (“Cricket”).
The dense inertness is opposed by deep spirituality, intelligence, and outstanding creative talent (“Lirnik Rodion”, “Good Bloods”). Significant in this regard is the story "Zakhar Vorobyov" (1912), about which the author informed the writer N. D. Teleshov: "He will protect me."
His hero is a peasant hero, the owner of enormous, but unrevealed possibilities: a thirst for achievement, longing for the extraordinary, gigantic strength, spiritual nobility.
Bunin frankly admires his character: his beautiful, spiritual face, open look, article, strength, kindness. But this hero, a man of noble soul, burning with the desire to do something good to people, never finds any use for his powers and dies ridiculously and senselessly, having drunk a quarter of vodka on a bet.
True, Zakhar is unique among the “small people”. “There is another one like me,” he said at times, “but that one is far away, near Zadonsk.” But "in the old man, they say, there were many like him, but this breed is translated."
The image of Zakhar symbolizes the inexhaustible forces lurking in the people, but not yet truly set in motion. Noteworthy is the dispute about Russia, which is conducted by Zakhar and his random drinking companions.
In this dispute, Zakhar was struck by the words “our oak tree has grown quite large ...”, in which he sensed a wonderful hint at the possibilities of Russia.
One of Bunin's most remarkable stories in this regard is "Thin Grass" (1913). With penetrating humanity is revealed here spiritual world laborer Averky.
Seriously ill after 30 years of hard work, Averky gradually passes away, but perceives death as a person who has fulfilled his destiny in this world, having lived his life honestly and with dignity.
The writer shows in detail the parting of his character with life, his renunciation of everything earthly and vain and his ascent to the great and bright truth of Christ. Averky is dear to Bunin because, having lived a long life, he did not become a slave to money-grubbing and gain, he did not become embittered, he was not tempted by self-interest.
With his honesty, gentleness, kindness, Averky is closest to Bunin's idea of \u200b\u200bthe type of Russian common man who was especially common in Ancient Rus'.
It is no coincidence that Bunin chose the words of Ivan Aksakov "Ancient Rus' has not yet passed" as the epigraph to the collection "John Rydalets", which also included the story "Thin Grass". However, both this story and the entire collection are addressed not to the past, but to the present by their content.
- Analysis of the story "Sukhodol"
In 1911, the writer creates one of his largest works of the pre-October period - the story "Sukhodol", called by Gorky a "requiem" for the noble class, a memorial service that Bunin "despite anger, in contempt for the powerless deceased, nevertheless served with great heart pity for them."
Like "Antonov apples", the story "Sukhodol" is written in the first person. In his spiritual appearance, the Bunin narrator from Sukhodol is still the same person, longing for the former greatness of the landowners' estates.
But unlike Antonov Apples, Bunin in Sukhodol not only regrets the dying noble nests, but also recreates the contrasts in Sukhodol, the lack of rights of the courtyards and the tyranny of the landowners.
In the center of the story is the history of the Khrushchev noble family, the history of its gradual degradation.
In Sukhodol, writes Bunin, terrible things were happening. The old master Pyotr Kirillich was killed by his illegitimate son Geraska, his daughter Antonina went crazy from unrequited love.
The stamp of degeneration also lies on the last representatives of the Khrushchev family. They are portrayed as people who have lost not only ties with the outside world, but also family ties.
Pictures of Sukhodolsk life are given in the story through the perception of the former serf Natalia. Poisoned by the philosophy of humility and humility, Natalya does not rise not only to a protest against the master's arbitrariness, but even to a simple condemnation of the actions of her masters. But her whole fate is an indictment against the owners of Sukhodol.
When she was still a child, her father was sent to the soldiers for offenses, and her mother died of a broken heart, fearing punishment because the turkeys she pastured were killed by hail. Left an orphan, Natalia becomes a toy in the hands of the masters.
As a girl, she fell in love with the young master Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life. But not only did he whip her with a rapnik when she “came under his feet once,” but he also exiled in disgrace to a remote village, accusing her of stealing a mirror.
By their own artistic features More than any other work of Bunin the prose writer of these years, Sukhodol is close to Bunin's poetry. The harsh and harsh manner of narration, characteristic of the "Village", is replaced in "Dry Valley" by the soft lyrics of memories.
To a large extent, the lyrical sound of the work is facilitated by the fact that the narration includes the voice of the author, who comments and supplements Natalia's stories with his observations.
1914-1916 is an extremely important stage in Bunin's creative evolution. This is the time for the finalization of his style and worldview.
His prose becomes capacious and refined in its artistic perfection, philosophical - in meaning and meaning. The man in Bunin's stories of these years, without losing his everyday ties with the world around him, is simultaneously included by the writer in the Cosmos.
This philosophical idea Bunin later clearly formulated in the book "The Liberation of Tolstoy": "A person must realize in himself his personality not as something opposite to the world, but as a small part of the world, huge and eternally living."
This circumstance, according to Bunin, puts a person in a difficult situation: on the one hand, he is a part of the infinite and eternal life, on the other hand, human happiness is fragile and illusory in the face of incomprehensible cosmic forces.
This dialectical unity of two opposite aspects of world perception determines the main content of Bunin's creativity of this time, which tells both about the greatest happiness of living and about the eternal tragedy of being.
Bunin significantly expands the range of his work, referring to the image of countries and peoples far from Russia. These works were the result of the writer's numerous travels to the countries of the Middle East.
But it was not the tempting exoticism that attracted the writer. Depicting the nature and life of distant lands with great skill, Bunin is primarily interested in the problem of "man and the world." In the 1909 poem "Dog" he confessed:
I am a man: like God, I am doomed
To know the longing of all countries and all times.
These sentiments were clearly reflected in Bunin's masterpieces of the 1910s - the stories The Brothers (1914) and The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915), united by a common concept of life.
The idea of these works was formulated by the author as an epigraph to "To the Lord from San Francisco": “Woe to you, Babylon, strong city” - these terrible words of the Apocalypse sounded relentlessly in my soul when I wrote “The Brothers” and conceived “The Gentleman from San Francisco”, a few months before the war, ”the writer admitted.
The acute sense of the catastrophic nature of the world, of cosmic evil, which possessed Bunin during these years, reaches its climax here. But at the same time, the writer's rejection of social evil deepens.
To the dialectical image of these two evils that dominate a person, Bunin subordinates the entire figurative system of works, which is characterized by a pronounced two-dimensionality.
The landscape in the stories is not only the background and the scene. It is at the same time a concrete embodiment of that cosmic life to which human destiny is fatally subordinated.
The symbols of cosmic life are the images of the forest, in which “everything was chasing each other, rejoicing in a short joy, destroying each other”, and especially the ocean - “bottomless depth”, “unsteady abyss”, “about which the Bible speaks so terribly”.
The writer simultaneously sees the source of disorder, catastrophicity, and fragility of life in social evil, which is personified in his stories in the images of an Englishman-colonizer and an American businessman.
The tragedy of the situation depicted in the story "The Brothers" is already emphasized by the epigraph to this work, taken from the Buddhist book "Sutta Nipata":
Look at the brothers beating each other up.
I want to talk about sadness.
It also determines the tone of the story, encrusted with intricate lace of the Oriental style. The story of a day in the life of a young Ceylon rickshaw who committed suicide because rich Europeans took his beloved away from him sounds like a sentence of cruelty and selfishness in the story "Brothers".
With hostility, the writer draws one of them, an Englishman, who is characterized by ruthlessness, cold cruelty. “In Africa,” he cynically admits, “I killed people, in India, robbed by England, and therefore, partly by me, I saw thousands dying of hunger, in Japan I bought girls for monthly wives, in China I beat defenseless ape-like old men with a stick on the heads , in Java and Ceylon, he drove a rickshaw to his death rattle ... ".
Bitter sarcasm can be heard in the title of the story, in which one "brother", who is at the top of the social ladder, half to death drives and pushes another, who huddles at its foot, to suicide.
But the life of the English colonialist, being deprived of a high inner goal, appears in the work as meaningless, and therefore also fatally doomed. And only at the end of his life does enlightenment come to him.
In a painfully agitated state, he denounces the spiritual emptiness of his civilized contemporaries, speaks of the pitiful impotence of the human personality in that world, “where everyone is either a murderer or a murdered one”: “We raise our Personality above the heavens, we want to concentrate the whole world in it, so that there they didn’t talk about the coming world brotherhood and equality, - and only in the ocean ... you feel how a person melts, dissolves in this blackness, sounds, smells, in this terrible All-One, only there we understand, in a weak way, what this our personality means ” .
In this monologue, Bunin undoubtedly put his perception of modern life, torn apart by tragic contradictions. It is in this sense that the words of the writer's wife V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina should be understood: "What he (Bunina. - A. Ch.) felt as an Englishman in The Brothers is autobiographical."
The coming death of the world, in which "for centuries the victor stands with a strong heel on the throat of the vanquished", in which the moral laws human brotherhood, is symbolically foreshadowed at the end of the story by an ancient oriental legend about a raven that greedily pounced on the carcass of a dead elephant and died, being carried along with it far into the sea.
- Analysis of the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
The writer's humanistic thought about the depravity and sinfulness of modern civilization is even more acutely expressed in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco".
The poetics of the title of the work is already noteworthy. The hero of the story is not a man, but a "master". But he's a gentleman from San Francisco. With the exact designation of the nationality of the character, Bunin expressed his attitude towards American businessmen, who were already synonymous with anti-humanism and lack of spirituality for him.
"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is a parable about life and death. And at the same time, the story of someone who, even while living, was already spiritually dead.
The hero of the story is deliberately not endowed with a name by the author. There is nothing personal, spiritual in this man, who devoted his whole life to increasing his fortune and turned into a kind of golden idol by the age of fifty-eight: bald head".
Deprived of any human feelings whatsoever, the American businessman himself is alien to everything around him. Even the nature of Italy, where he goes to relax and enjoy "the love of young Neapolitan women - even if not entirely unselfishly", meets him unfriendly and cold.
Everything that surrounds him is deadly and disastrous; he brings death and decay to everything. In an effort to give a particular case a great social generalization, to show the power of gold that depersonalizes a person, the writer deprives his character of individual characteristics, turning him into a symbol of lack of spirituality, businesslikeness and practicality.
Confident in the right choice life path, a gentleman from San Francisco, who never thought of death, suddenly dies in an expensive Capri hotel.
This clearly demonstrates the collapse of his ideals and principles. The strength and power of the dollar, which the American worshiped all his life and which he turned into an end in itself, turned out to be illusory in the face of death.
The ship itself is also symbolic, on which the businessman went to have fun in Italy and which carries him, already dead, in a soda box, back to the New World.
A steamboat sailing in the midst of a boundless ocean is a micromodel of that world where everything is built on venality and falsehood (what is worth, for example, a beautiful young couple hired to portray lovers), where ordinary working people languish from hard work and humiliation and spend time in luxury and fun the powerful of this world: “... in mortal anguish, a siren choked by fog was moaning, the watchmen on their tower, the gloomy and sultry bowels of the underworld, were like the underwater womb of a steamer ... and here, in the bar , carelessly threw their legs on the arms of their chairs, sipped cognac and liqueurs, swam in waves of spicy smoke, everything in the dance hall shone and poured out light, warmth and joy, couples either whirled in waltzes, then bent into tango - and the music insistently, in some then sweetly shameless sadness prayed all about one thing, all about the same ... ".
In this capacious and meaningful period, the author's attitude to the life of those who inhabit this Noah's ark is perfectly conveyed.
The plastic clarity of the depicted, the variety of colors and visual impressions - this is what is constantly inherent in artistic style Bunin, but in the named stories it acquires special expressiveness.
Particularly great in "The Lord from San Francisco" is the role of the detail, in which general patterns shine through through the private, concrete, everyday, and contain a great generalization.
Thus, the scene of the dressing up for dinner of a gentleman from San Francisco is very concrete and at the same time has the character of a symbolic foreshadowing.
The writer paints in detail how the hero of the story squeezes himself into a suit that binds the “strong senile body”, fastens the “tight collar that squeezes his throat too much”, painfully catches the cufflink, “strongly biting the flabby skin in the recess under the Adam's apple”.
In a few minutes, the master will die of suffocation. The costume in which the character is dressed is an ominous attribute of a false existence, like the ship "Atlantis", like the whole "civilized world", the imaginary values of which the writer does not accept.
The story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" ends with the same picture with which it began: the giant "Atlantis" makes its return journey through the ocean of cosmic life. But this circular composition does not at all signify the writer's agreement with the idea of the eternal and unchanging cycle of history.
With a whole system of image-symbols, Bunin claims just the opposite - the inevitable death of the world, mired in selfishness, venality and lack of spirituality. This is evidenced by the epigraph to the story, which draws a parallel between modern life and the sad result of ancient Babylon, and the name of the ship.
Giving the ship the symbolic name "Atlantis", the author oriented the reader to a direct comparison of the steamer - this world in miniature - with the ancient mainland, which disappeared without a trace in the abyss of waters. This picture is completed by the image of the Devil, who watches from the rocks of Gibraltar for the ship leaving into the night: Satan "rules the show" on the ship of human life.
The story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was written during the First World War. And he quite clearly characterizes the mood of the writer of this time.
The war forced Bunin to peer even more closely into the depths of human nature, into a thousand-year history marked by despotism, violence, and cruelty. On September 15, 1915, Bunin wrote to P. Nilus: “I don’t remember such stupidity and spiritual depression, in which I have been for a long time ...
War both torments, and torments, and disturbs. Yes, and many other things too.” Actually, Bunin has almost no works about the First World War, except for the stories “The Last Spring” and “The Last Autumn”, where this topic finds some coverage.
Bunin wrote not so much about the war as, in the words of Mayakovsky, "wrote with war", exposing in his pre-revolutionary work the tragedy and even the catastrophic nature of life.
- Analysis of the story "Chang's Dreams"
Bunin's 1916 story is also characteristic in this regard. "Chang's Dreams". Dog Chang was chosen by the writer as the central character not at all out of a desire to evoke kind and tender feelings for animals, which was usually guided by realist writers of the 19th century.
Bunin from the first lines of his work translates the story into a plane of philosophical reflections on the secrets of life, on the meaning of earthly existence.
And although the author accurately indicates the place of action - Odessa, describes in detail the attic in which Chang lives with his owner - a drunken retired captain, Chang's memories and dreams enter the story on an equal footing with these pictures, giving the work a philosophical aspect.
The contrast between the pictures of Chang's past happy life with his master and their current miserable existence is a concrete expression of the dispute between two life truths, the existence of which we learn at the beginning of the story.
“There were once two truths in the world, constantly replacing each other,” writes Bunin, “the first is that life is inexpressibly beautiful, and the other is that life is conceivable only for madmen. Now the captain claims that there is, was, and forever and ever there will be only one truth, the last ... ". What is this truth?
The captain tells his Friend the artist about her: “My friend, I have seen the whole globe - life is like this everywhere! All this is a lie and nonsense, which is how people seem to live: they have neither God, nor conscience, nor a reasonable goal of existence, nor love, nor friendship, nor honesty, - there is not even a simple pity.
Life is a boring winter day in a dirty tavern, nothing more ... ". Chang essentially leans towards the captain's conclusions.
At the end of the story, the drunken captain dies, the orphaned Chang ends up with a new owner - the artist. But his thoughts are directed towards the last Master — God.
“In this world there should be only one truth, - the third, - the author writes, - and what it is - that last one knows about. The owner, to whom Chang should soon return. This is how the story ends.
He does not leave any hope for the possibility of reorganizing earthly life in accordance with the laws of the first, bright truth and hopes for a third, higher, unearthly truth.
The whole story is permeated with a sense of the tragedy of life. The sudden turning point in the life of the captain, which led him to his death, occurred due to the betrayal of his wife, whom he dearly loved.
But the wife, in fact, is not to blame, she is not even bad at all, on the contrary, she is beautiful, the whole point is that it is so predetermined by fate, and you can’t get away from it.
One of the most controversial issues of Bunin studies is the question of the positive aspirations of the writer of the pre-revolutionary years. What does Bunin oppose - and does he oppose - to the universal tragedy of being, the catastrophic nature of life?
Bunin's concept of life finds its expression in the formula of two truths from Chang's Dreams: "life is unspeakably beautiful" and at the same time "life is conceivable only for madmen."
This unity of opposites - a bright and fatally gloomy view of the world - coexist in many of Bunin's works of the 10s, defining a kind of "tragic major" of their ideological content.
Condemning the inhumanity of the unspiritual egoistic world, Bunin opposes to it the morality of ordinary people living a difficult, but morally healthy, working life. Such is the old rickshaw man from the story "Brothers", "driven by love not for himself, but for his family, he wanted happiness for his son that was not destined, was not given to him."
The gloomy coloring of the narrative in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" gives way to the enlightened when it comes to ordinary people Italy:
about the old boatman Lorenzo, “a carefree reveler and handsome man”, famous throughout Italy, about the bellboy of the Capri hotel Luigi, and especially about two Abruzzo highlanders, giving “humbly joyful praises to the Virgin Mary”: “they walked - and whole country, joyful, beautiful, sunny, stretched over them.
And in the character of a simple Russian person, Bunin persistently seeks a positive beginning in these years, without departing from the image of his "variegation". On the one hand, with the merciless sobriety of a realist, he continues to show the "denseness of village life."
And on the other hand, it depicts that healthy thing that breaks through the thickness of ignorance and darkness in the Russian peasant. In the story "Spring Evening" (1915), an ignorant and intoxicated peasant kills a beggar old man for money.
And this is an act of desperation of a person, when "even with hunger to die." Having committed a crime, he realizes the horror of what he has done and throws the amulet with money.
The poetic image of the young peasant girl Parasha, whose romantic love was rudely trampled on by the predatory and cruel tradesman Nikanor, is created by Bunin in the story "On the Road"(1913).
The researchers are right, emphasizing the poetic, folklore basis of the image of Parasha, personifying the bright sides of the Russian folk character.
A large role in identifying the life-affirming beginnings of life belongs to nature in Bunin's stories. She is a moral catalyst for bright, optimistic traits of being.
In the story The Gentleman from San Francisco, nature is renewed and cleansed after the death of an American. When the ship with the body of a wealthy Yankee left Capri, "on the island, the author emphasizes, peace and tranquility reigned."
Finally, the pessimistic forecast for the future is overcome in the writer's stories with the apotheosis of love.
Bunin perceived the world in the indecomposable unity of its contrasts, in its dialectical complexity and inconsistency. Life is both happiness and tragedy.
For Bunin, love is the highest, mysterious and sublime manifestation of this life. But Bunin's love is a passion, and in this passion, which is the apex manifestation of life, a person burns out. In flour, the writer claims, there is bliss, and happiness is so piercing that it is akin to suffering.
- Analysis of the story "Easy breathing"
Bunin's short story of 1916 is indicative in this regard. "Easy breath". This is a story full of high lyricism about how the flourishing life of a young heroine - schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya - was unexpectedly interrupted by a terrible and at first glance inexplicable catastrophe.
But in this surprise - the death of the heroine - there was a fatal pattern. In order to expose and reveal the philosophical basis of the tragedy, his understanding of love as the greatest happiness and at the same time the greatest tragedy, Bunin builds his work in a peculiar way.
The beginning of the story carries the news of the tragic denouement of the plot: "At the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth ...".
It "has been embedded ... a convex porcelain medallion, and in the medallion there is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes."
Then a smooth retrospective narrative begins, full of jubilant joy of life, which the author slows down, restrains with epic details: as a girl, Olya Meshcherskaya “did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown gymnasium dresses ... Then she began to flourish ... not by the day, but by the hour. ... No one danced at balls like Olya Meshcherskaya, no one ran as fast as she did, no one was looked after at balls as much as she was.
During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium ... ". And then one day, at a big break, when she was running like a whirlwind around the school hall from the first-graders enthusiastically chasing her, she was unexpectedly called to the head of the gymnasium. The boss reprimands her for the fact that she does not have a gymnasium, but a woman's hairstyle, that she wears expensive shoes and combs.
“You are no longer a girl ... but not a woman either,” the headmistress says irritably to Olya, “... you completely lose sight of the fact that you are still only a schoolgirl ...”. And here begins a sharp plot twist.
In response, Olya Meshcherskaya utters significant words: “Forgive me, madam, you are mistaken: I am a woman. And you know who is to blame? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother is Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer in the village.”
At this moment of supreme reader interest story line breaks off abruptly. And without filling the pause with anything, the author strikes us with a new stunning surprise, outwardly in no way connected with the first - with the words that Olya was shot by a Cossack officer.
Everything that led to the murder, which should, it would seem, be the plot of the story, is set out in one paragraph, without details and without any emotional coloring - in the language of the court record: “The officer told the judicial investigator that Meshcherskaya lured him, was close to him , swore to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, seeing him off to Novocherkassk, she suddenly told him that she never thought to love him ... ".
The author does not give any psychological motivation for this story. Moreover, at the moment when the reader's attention rushes along this - the most important plot channel (Oli's connection with the officer and her murder), the author cuts it off and deprives the expected retrospective presentation.
The story about the earthly path of the heroine is over - and at this moment the bright melody of Olya bursts into the narrative - a girl full of happiness, waiting for love.
Cool lady Olya, an overripe maiden who goes every holiday to the grave of her student, recalls how one day she unwittingly overheard a conversation between Olya and her friend. “I’m in one of my father’s books,” says Olya, having read what beauty a woman should have.
Black, resin-boiling eyes, eyelashes as black as night, a gently playing blush, a thin figure, longer than an ordinary arm ... a small leg, sloping shoulders ... but most importantly, you know what? - Easy breath! But I have it, - you listen to me sigh, - is it true, is there?
So convulsively, with sharp breaks, the plot is presented, in which much remains unclear. For what purpose does Bunin deliberately not observe the temporal sequence of events, and most importantly, violates the causal relationship between them?
To emphasize the main philosophical idea: Olya Meshcherskaya did not die because life pushed her first with “an old womanizer, and then with a rude officer. Therefore, the plot development of these two love meetings was not given, because the reasons could receive a very specific, everyday explanation and lead the reader away from the main thing.
The tragedy of the fate of Olya Meshcherskaya is in herself, in her charm, in her organic fusion with life, in complete subordination to her elemental impulses - blissful and catastrophic at the same time.
Olya was striving towards life with such violent passion that any collision with her was bound to lead to disaster. An overstrained expectation of the ultimate fullness of life, love as a whirlwind, as self-giving, as "easy breathing" led to a catastrophe.
Olya burned out like a moth frantically rushing towards the sizzling fire of love. Not everyone has that feeling. Only for those who have a light breath - a frantic expectation of life, happiness.
“Now this light breath,” Bunin concludes his story, “is scattered again in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.”
- Analysis of the book "Cursed Days"
Bunin did not accept the February, and then the October Revolution. On May 21, 1918, he and his wife left Moscow for the south and for almost two years lived first in Kyiv and then in Odessa.
Both of these cities were the scene of a fierce civil war and changed hands more than once. In Odessa, during the stormy and terrible months of 1919, Bunin wrote his diary - a kind of book, which he called "Cursed Days".
Bunin saw and reflected civil war only on one side - from the side of the red terror. But we know enough about white terror. Unfortunately, the Red Terror was as real as the White Terror.
Under these conditions, the slogans of freedom, brotherhood, equality were perceived by Bunin as a "mocking sign", because they turned out to be stained with the blood of many hundreds and thousands of often innocent people.
Here are some of Bunin's notes: “D. arrived - fled from Simferopol. There, he says, is indescribable horror, soldiers and workers walk up to their knees in blood.
Some old colonel was roasted alive in a locomotive firebox ... they rob, rape, foul in churches, cut belts from officer backs, marry priests with mares ... In Kiev ... several professors were killed, among them the famous diagnostician Yanovsky. “Yesterday there was an “emergency” meeting of the executive committee.
Feldman proposed "to use bourgeois instead of horses to transport heavy loads." And so on. Bunin's diary is replete with entries of this kind. Much here, unfortunately, is not fiction.
Evidence of this is not just Bunin's diary, but also Korolenko's letters to Lunacharsky and Gorky's "Untimely Thoughts", Sholokhov's " Quiet Don”, the epic of I. Shmelev “The Sun of the Dead” and many other works and documents of the time.
In his book, Bunin characterizes the revolution as the unleashing of the basest and wildest instincts, as a bloody prologue to the inexhaustible disasters that await the intelligentsia, the people of Russia, and the country as a whole.
“Our children, grandchildren,” Bunin writes, “will not even be able to imagine that Russia ... truly fabulously rich and prospering with fabulous speed, in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understood - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness ... ".
Similar feelings, thoughts and moods pervade journalistic and literary-critical articles, notes and notebooks of the writer, only recently published for the first time in our country (collection "Great Datura", M., 1997).
- Bunin's emigration
In Odessa, Bunin faced the inevitable question: what to do? Run away from Russia or, in spite of everything, stay. The question is painful, and these torments of choice are also reflected in the pages of his diary.
The impending formidable events lead Bunin at the end of 1919 to an irrevocable decision to go abroad. January 25, 1920 on the Greek steamer "Patras" he leaves Russia forever.
Bunin left his homeland not as an emigrant, but as a refugee. Because he took Russia, her image with him. In Cursed Days, he writes: “If I didn’t love this “icon”, this Rus', didn’t see it, why would I go so crazy all these years, because of which I suffered so continuously, so fiercely? "10.
Living in Paris and in the seaside town of Grasse, Bunin until the end of his days felt a sharp, aching pain in Russia. His first poems, created after an almost two-year break, are permeated with homesickness.
His poem of 1922 “The bird has a nest” is filled with special bitterness of the loss of the homeland:
The bird has a nest, the beast has a hole.
How bitter was the young heart,
When I left my father's yard,
Say sorry to your home!
The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.
How the heart beats, sadly and loudly,
When I enter, being baptized, into a strange, rented house
With his old knapsack!
Acute nostalgic pain for the homeland makes Bunin create works that are addressed to old Russia.
The theme of pre-revolutionary Russia becomes the main content of his work for three whole decades, until his death.
In this regard, Bunin shared the fate of many Russian emigrant writers: Kuprin, Chirikov, Shmelev, B. Zaitsev, Gusev-Orenburgsky, Grebenshchikov and others, who devoted all their work to depicting old Russia, often idealized, cleansed of everything contradictory.
Bunin refers to his homeland, to memories of her already in one of the first stories created abroad - "Mowers".
Narrating the beauty of a Russian folk song that Ryazan mowers sing while working in a young birch forest, the writer reveals the origins of that wonderful spiritual and poetic power contained in this song: “The charm was that we were all children of our homeland and all were together and we all felt good, calm and loving, without a clear understanding of our feelings, because they do not need to be understood when they are.
- Foreign prose of Bunin
The foreign prose of I. Bunin develops primarily as a lyrical one, that is, a prose of clear and precise expressions of the author's feelings, which was largely determined by the writer's acute longing for his abandoned homeland.
These works, mostly stories, are characterized by a weakened plot, the ability of their author to subtly and expressively convey feelings and moods, a deep penetration into the inner world of the characters, a combination of lyricism and musicality, and linguistic refinement.
In exile, Bunin continued the artistic development of one of the main themes of his work - the theme of love. The story "Mitina's Love" is dedicated to her,
“The Case of Cornet Yelagin”, the stories “Sunstroke”, “Ida”, “Mordovian Sundress” and especially a cycle of small short stories under the general name “Dark Alleys”.
In covering this eternal theme for art, Bunin is deeply original. Among the classics of the 19th century - I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy and others - love is usually given in an ideal aspect, in its spiritual, moral, even intellectual essence (for the heroines of Turgenev's novels, love is not only a school of feeling, but also a school of thought ). As for the physiological side of love, the classics practically did not touch it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, in a number of works of Russian literature, another extreme was indicated: an unchaste depiction of love relationships, savoring naturalistic details. The originality of Bunin is that his spiritual and physical are merged in an inseparable unity.
Love is portrayed by the writer as a fatal force, which is akin to a primordial natural element, which, having bestowed a person with dazzling happiness, then inflicts a cruel, often fatal blow on him. But still, the main thing in Bunin's concept of love is not the pathos of tragedy, but the apotheosis of human feeling.
Moments of love are the pinnacle of the life of Bunin's heroes, when they learn the highest value of being, the harmony of body and spirit, the fullness of earthly happiness.
- Analysis of the story "Sunstroke"
The story is devoted to the image of love as a passion, as a spontaneous manifestation of cosmic forces. "Sunstroke"(1925). A young officer, having met a young married woman on a Volga steamer, invites her to get off at the pier of the town they are passing by.
Young people stay at a hotel, and this is where their intimacy takes place. In the morning, the woman leaves without even giving her name. “I give you my word of honor,” she says, saying goodbye, “that I am not at all what you might think of me.
There has never been anything even like what happened to me, and there never will be again. It’s like an eclipse hit me ... Or, rather, we both got something like a sunstroke. “Indeed, it’s like some kind of sunstroke,” the lieutenant reflects, left alone, stunned by the happiness of the past night.
A fleeting meeting of two simple, unremarkable people (“And what is special about her?” The lieutenant asks himself) gives rise to both a feeling of such great happiness that they are forced to admit: “Neither one nor the other has ever experienced anything like this in all his life. ".
It is not so important how these people lived and how they will live after their fleeting meeting, it is important that a huge all-consuming feeling suddenly entered their lives - this means that this life took place, because they learned something that not everyone is given to know.
- Analysis of the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys"
The collection of stories by Bunin is devoted to the philosophical and psychological understanding of the theme of love. "Dark alleys"(1937-1945). “I think that this is the best and most original of what I wrote in my life,” the author said about these works.
Each story in the collection is completely independent, with its own characters, plots, range of problems. But there is an internal connection between them, which allows us to talk about the problematic and thematic unity of the cycle.
This unity is defined by Bunin's concept of love as a "sunstroke" that leaves an imprint on the entire later life person.
The heroes of "Dark Alleys" without fear and looking back rush into a hurricane of passion. In this brief moment, they are given to comprehend life in its entirety, after which others burn out without a trace (“Galya Ganskaya”, “Steamboat “Saratov”, “Heinrich”), others eke out an ordinary existence, remembering as the most precious thing in life that visited them once a great love ("Rusya", "Cold Autumn").
Love in the understanding of Bunin requires a person to exert maximum effort of all his spiritual and physical forces. Therefore, it cannot be long: often in this love, as already mentioned, one of the heroes dies.
Here is the story of Heinrich. The writer Glebov met a wonderful in mind and beauty, subtle and charming woman translator Heinrich, but soon after they experienced the greatest happiness mutual love, she was unexpectedly and absurdly killed out of jealousy by another writer - an Austrian.
The hero of another story - "Natalie" - fell in love with a charming girl, and when, after a series of ups and downs, she became his actual wife, and he seemed to have achieved the desired happiness, she was overtaken by a sudden death from childbirth.
In the story "In Paris" there are two. lonely Russians - a woman who worked in an émigré restaurant and a former colonel - having met by chance, found happiness in each other, but soon after their rapprochement, the colonel suddenly dies in a subway car.
And yet, despite the tragic outcome, love is revealed in them as the greatest happiness of life, incomparable with any other earthly joys. The epigraph to such works can be taken from the words of Natalie from the story of the same name: “Is there an unhappy love, doesn’t the most mournful music give happiness?”
Many stories of the cycle (“Muse”, “Rus”, “Late Hour”, “Wolves”, “Cold Autumn”, etc.) are characterized by such a technique as recollection, the appeal of their heroes to the past. And the most significant in their former life, most often at the time of youth, they consider the time when they loved, brightly, ardently and without a trace.
The old retired military man from the story “Dark Alleys”, who still retains traces of his former beauty, meets by chance with the owner of the inn, recognizes in her the one whom thirty years ago, when she was an eighteen-year-old girl, he loved passionately.
Looking back at his past, he comes to the conclusion that the moments of intimacy with her were "the best ... truly magical minutes", incomparable with all his later life.
In the story "Cold Autumn", a woman who tells about her life lost her beloved person at the beginning of the First World War. Remembering many years later the last meeting with him, she comes to the conclusion: "And this is all that was in my life - the rest is an unnecessary dream."
With the greatest interest and skill, Bunin depicts first love, the birth of love passion. This is especially true for young heroines. In similar situations, he reveals completely different, unique female characters.
Such are Muse, Rusya, Natalie, Galya Ganskaya, Styopa, Tanya and other heroines from the stories of the same name. The thirty-eight short stories in this collection present us with a magnificent variety of unforgettable female types.
Next to this inflorescence, male characters are less developed, sometimes only outlined and, as a rule, static. They are characterized more reflectively, in connection with the physical and mental appearance of the woman they love.
Even when only “he” acts in the story, for example, the officer in love from the story “Steamboat Saratov”, all the same, “she” remains in the reader’s memory - “long, wavy”, and her “bare knee in the section hood".
In the stories of the Dark Alleys cycle, Bunin writes a little about Russia itself. The main place in them is occupied by the theme of love - "sunstroke", passion, which gives a person a feeling of supreme bliss, but incinerates him, which is associated with Bunin's idea of eros as a powerful elemental force and the main form of manifestation of cosmic life.
An exception in this regard is the short story "Clean Monday", where Bunin's deep thoughts about Russia, its past and possible ways of development shine through through an external love plot.
Often Bunin's story contains, as it were, two levels - one plot, upper, the other - deep, subtext. They can be compared with icebergs: with their visible and main, underwater, parts.
We see this in Easy Breath and, to some extent, in Brothers, The Gentleman from San Francisco, Chang's Dream. The story “Clean Monday”, created by Bunin on May 12, 1944, is the same.
The writer himself considered this work to be the best of all that he had written. “I thank God,” he said, “that he gave me the opportunity to write Clean Monday.”
- Analysis of the story "Clean Monday"
The external event outline of the story is not very complex and fits perfectly into the theme of the "Dark Alleys" cycle. The action takes place in 1913.
Young people, he and she (Bunin does not mention their names anywhere), met once at a lecture in a literary and artistic circle and fell in love with each other.
He is wide open in his feeling, she holds back her attraction to him. Their intimacy still happens, but after spending only one night together, the lovers part forever, because the heroine on Pure Monday, that is, on the first day of the pre-Easter Lent in 1913, makes the final decision to go to the monastery, parting with her past.
However, with the help of associations, significant details and subtext, the writer enters his thoughts and forecasts about Russia into this plot.
Bunin considers Russia as a country with a special path of development and a peculiar mentality, where European features are intertwined with features of the East and Asia.
This idea runs like a red thread through the entire work, which is based on a historical concept that reveals the most significant aspects of Russian history and national character for the writer.
With the help of everyday and psychological details that abound in the story, Bunin emphasizes the complexity of the way of Russian life, where Western and Eastern features are intertwined.
In the heroine’s apartment there is a “wide Turkish sofa”, next to it is an “expensive piano”, and above the sofa, the author emphasizes, “for some reason, a portrait of barefoot Tolstoy hung”.
A Turkish sofa and an expensive piano are the East and the West (symbols of the Eastern and Western way of life), and the barefoot Tolstoy is Russia, Rus' in its unusual, original, out-of-bounds appearance.
Having arrived in the evening on Forgiveness Sunday at Yegorov’s tavern, which was famous for its pancakes and actually existed in Moscow at the beginning of the century, the girl says, pointing to the icon of the Mother of God with three hands hanging in the corner: “Good! Below are wild men, and here are pancakes with champagne and the Three-Handed Mother of God. Three hands! After all, this is India!”
The same duality is emphasized here by Bunin - "wild men", on the one hand (Asian), and on the other - "pancakes with champagne" - a combination of national and European. And above all this - Rus', symbolized in the image of the Mother of God, but again unusual: the Christian Mother of God with three arms resembles the Buddhist Shiva (again, a peculiar combination of Rus', the West and the East).
Of the characters in the story, the heroine most significantly embodies the combination of Western and Eastern features. Her father, “an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver,” writes Bunin.
At home, the heroine wears arkhaluk - oriental clothes, a kind of short caftan trimmed with sable (Siberia). “The legacy of my Astrakhan grandmother,” she explains the origin of these clothes.
So, the father is a Tver merchant from central Russia, a grandmother from Astrakhan, where the Tatars originally lived. Russian and Tatar blood merged in this girl.
Looking at her lips, at “the dark fluff above them,” at her figure, at the pomegranate velvet of her dress, smelling some spicy smell of her hair, the hero of the story thinks: “Moscow, Persia, Turkey. She had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty, ”the hero concludes.
When they once arrived at the Moscow Art Theater skit, the famous actor Kachalov approached her with a glass of wine and said: “Tsar Maiden, Queen of Shamakhan, your health!” In the mouth of Kachalov, Bunin put his point of view on the appearance and character of the heroine: she is both a “tsar-maiden” (as in Russian fairy tales), and at the same time a “Shamakhani queen” (like the eastern heroine of Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”) . What is the spiritual world of this “Shamakhi Queen” filled with?
In the evenings she reads Schnitzler, Hoffmann-stahl, Przybyszewski, plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, that is, she is closely related to Western European culture. At the same time, everything primordially Russian, primarily Old Russian, attracts her.
The hero of the story, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted, never ceases to be surprised that his beloved visits cemeteries and Kremlin cathedrals, is well versed in Orthodox and schismatic Christian rituals, loves and is ready to endlessly quote ancient Russian chronicles, immediately commenting on them.
Some kind of internal intense work is constantly being done in the soul of a girl and surprises, sometimes discourages her lover. “She was mysterious, incomprehensible to me,” the hero of the story remarks more than once.
When asked by her lover how she knows so much about Ancient Rus', the heroine replies: “You don’t know me.” The result of all this work of the soul was the departure of the heroine to the monastery.
In the image of the heroine, in her spiritual quest, the search for the answer of Bunin himself to the question of the ways of salvation and development of Russia is concentrated. Turning in 1944 to the creation of a work where the action takes place in 1913 - the initial year for Russia, Bunin offers his own way to save the country.
Having found itself between the West and the East, at the point of intersection of somewhat opposing historical trends and cultural structures, Russia has retained the specific features of its national life, embodied in the annals and in Orthodoxy.
This third side of the spiritual appearance turns out to be dominant in behavior and inner world his heroines. Combining Western and Eastern features in her appearance, she chooses serving God as her life outcome, that is, humility, moral purity, conscientiousness, deep love for Ancient Rus'.
It is precisely in this way that Russia could go, in which, as in the heroine of the story, three forces also united: Asiatic spontaneity and passion; European culture and restraint and primordially national humility, conscientiousness, patriarchy in the best sense of the word and, of course, the Orthodox worldview.
Russia, unfortunately, did not follow Bunin, mainly the first way, which led to a revolution in which the writer saw the embodiment of chaos, explosion, and general destruction.
By the act of his heroine (leaving for a monastery), the writer offered a different and quite real way out of the current situation - the path of spiritual humility and enlightenment, curbing the elements, evolutionary development, and strengthening religious and moral self-awareness.
It was on this path that he saw the salvation of Russia, the assertion by her of her place among other states and peoples. According to Bunin, this is a truly original, unaffected by foreign influences, and therefore a promising, saving way that would strengthen the national specifics and mentality of Russia and its people.
So peculiarly, in Bunin's subtle way, the writer told us in his work not only about love, but, most importantly, about his national-historical views and forecasts.
- Analysis of the novel "The Life of Arseniev"
The most significant work of Bunin, created in a foreign land, was the novel "The life of Arseniev", on which he worked for over 11 years, from 1927 to 1938.
The novel "The Life of Arseniev" is autobiographical. It reproduces many facts of childhood and youth of Bunin himself. At the same time, this is a book about the childhood and youth of a native of a landowner's family in general. In this sense, "The Life of Arseniev" is adjacent to such autobiographical works Russian literature, as "Childhood. Adolescence. Youth". L. N. Tolstoy and “Childhood of Bagrov-grandson” by S. T. Aksakov.
Bunin was destined to create the last autobiographical book in the history of Russian literature by a hereditary nobleman writer.
What topics concern Bunin in this work? Love, death, power over the soul of a person of memories of childhood and youth, native nature, duty and vocation of the writer, his attitude to the people and homeland, the attitude of a person to religion - this is the main circle of topics that are covered by Bunin in "The Life of Arseniev".
The book tells about twenty-four years of the life of the autobiographical hero, a young man Alexei Arseniev: from birth to a break with his first deep love - Lika, the prototype of which was Bunin's first love, Varvara Pashenko.
However, in essence, the time frame of the work is much wider: they are pushed apart by excursions into the prehistory of the Arseniev family and individual attempts by the author to stretch the thread from the distant past to the present.
One of the features of the book is its monologue and sparsely populated characters, in contrast to the autobiographical books of L. Tolstoy, Shmelev, Gorky and others, where we see a whole gallery of various characters.
In Bunin's book, the hero narrates mainly about himself: his feelings, sensations, impressions. This is the confession of a man who lived an interesting life in his own way.
Another characteristic feature of the novel is the presence in it of stable images passing through the entire work - leitmotifs. They connect the heterogeneous pictures of life with a single philosophical concept - reflections not so much of the hero as of the author himself about the happiness and at the same time the tragedy of life, its short duration and transience.
What are these motives? One of them is the motif of death that runs through the whole work. For example, Arseniev's perception of the image of his mother in early childhood is combined with the subsequent memory of her death.
The second book of the novel also ends with the theme of death - the sudden death and funeral of Arsenyev's relative Pisarev. The fifth, most extensive part of the novel, which was originally published as a separate work called "Lika", tells the story of Arseniev's love for a woman who played a significant role in his life. The chapter ends with the death of Lika.
The theme of death is connected in the novel, as in all of Bunin's later works, with the theme of love. This is the second theme of the book. These two motifs are connected at the end of the novel by the announcement of Lika's death shortly after she left Arsenyev, who was exhausted from the pangs of love and jealousy.
It is important to note that death in Bunin's work does not suppress or subjugate love. On the contrary, it is love as the highest feeling that triumphs in the author's mind. In his novel, Bunin again and again acts as a singer of healthy, fresh youthful love, leaving a grateful memory in a person’s soul for life.
The love interests of Alexei Arseniev go through three stages in the novel, as it were, corresponding in general to the stages of formation and formation of a youthful character.
His first love with the German girl Ankhen is just a hint of a feeling, the initial manifestation of a thirst for love. Alexei's brief, suddenly interrupted carnal relationship with Tonka, his brother's maid, is devoid of a spiritual beginning and is perceived by him as a necessary phenomenon, "when you are already 17 years old." And, finally, love for Lika is that all-consuming feeling in which both spiritual and sensual principles inseparably merge.
The love of Arseniev and Lika is shown in the novel comprehensively, in a complex unity and at the same time discord. Lika and Aleksey love each other, but the hero increasingly feels that they are very different people spiritually. Arseniev often looks at his beloved, like a master at a slave.
Union with a woman appears to him as an act in which all rights are defined for him, but almost no duties. Love, he believes, does not tolerate rest, habit, it needs constant renewal, involving a sensual attraction to other women.
In turn, Lika is far from the world in which Arseniev lives. She does not share his love for nature, sadness for the outgoing old noble estate life, is deaf to poetry, etc.
The spiritual incompatibility of the characters leads to the fact that they begin to get tired of each other. It all ends with the break of lovers.
However, Lika's death sharpens the hero's perception failed love and is perceived by them as an irreparable loss. The final lines of the work are very indicative, telling about what Arseniev experienced when he saw Lika in a dream, many years after breaking up with her: “I saw her vaguely, but with such power of love, joy, with such bodily and spiritual intimacy I have never experienced it for anyone."
In the poetic affirmation of love as a feeling, over which even death has no power, is one of the most remarkable features of the novel.
Beautiful in the work and psychologized pictures of nature. They combine the brightness and richness of colors with the feelings and thoughts of the hero and the author penetrating them.
The landscape is philosophical: it deepens and reveals the author's concept of life, the cosmic principles of being and the spiritual essence of man, for whom nature is an integral part of existence. It enriches and develops a person, heals his spiritual wounds.
The theme of culture and art, perceived by the consciousness of the young Arseniev, is also of significant importance in the novel. The hero enthusiastically tells about the library of one of the neighbors-landlords, in which there were many "wonderful volumes in thick bindings of dark golden leather": works by Sumarokov, Anna Bunina, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Venevitinov, Yazykov, Baratynsky.
With admiration and reverence, the hero recalls the first works of Pushkin and Gogol he read in childhood.
The writer draws attention in his work to the role of religion in strengthening the spiritual principles of the human personality. Far from calling for religious asceticism, Bunin nevertheless points to the desire for religious and moral self-improvement that heals the human soul.
There are many scenes and episodes in the novel related to religious holidays, and all of them are imbued with poetry, written out carefully and spiritually. Bunin writes about the "storm of delight" that invariably arose in Arseniev's soul at every visit to church, about "an explosion of our highest love for both God and neighbor."
The theme of the people also appears on the pages of the work. But as before, Bunin poeticizes the humble peasants, kind hearted and soul. But as soon as Arseniev starts talking about people who are protesting, especially those who sympathize with the revolution, tenderness is replaced by irritation.
Here the political views of the writer himself, who never took the path of revolutionary struggle and especially violence against the individual, were affected.
In a word, the entire book "The Life of Arseniev" is a kind of chronicle of the inner life of the hero, starting from infancy and ending with the final formation of character.
The main thing that determines the originality of the novel, its genre, artistic structure is the desire to show how, in contact with diverse life phenomena - natural, everyday, cultural, socio-historical - the emotional and intellectual personality traits are revealed, developed and enriched.
This is a kind of thought and conversation about life, which contains many facts, phenomena and spiritual movements. In the novel "The Life of Arseniev" through the thoughts, feelings, moods of the protagonist, that poetic feeling of the homeland, which has always been inherent in the best works of Bunin, sounds.
- Bunin's life in France
How does Bunin's personal life develop during the years of his stay in France?
Having settled in Paris since 1923, Bunin spends most of his time, summer and autumn, with his wife and a narrow circle of friends in the Alpes-Maritimes, in the town of Grasse, having bought the dilapidated villa Jeannette there.
In 1933, an unexpected event invades the meager existence of the Bunins - he is awarded the Nobel Prize - the first of Russian writers.
This somewhat strengthened Bunin's financial position, and also attracted wide attention to him not only from emigrants, but also from the French public. But this did not last long. A significant part of the prize was distributed to compatriot emigrants in distress, and the interest of French criticism in the Nobel laureate was short-lived.
Homesickness did not let Bunin go. On May 8, 1941, he wrote to Moscow to his old friend, writer N. D. Teleshov: “I am gray, dry, but still poisonous. I really want to go home." He also writes about this to A. N. Tolstoy.
Alexei Tolstoy made an attempt to help Bunin in his return to his homeland: he sent a detailed letter to Stalin. Having given a detailed description of Bunin's talent, Tolstoy asked Stalin about the possibility of returning the writer to his homeland.
The letter was handed over to the Kremlin expedition on June 18, 1941, and four days later the war began, pushing far aside everything that had nothing to do with it.
- Bunin and the Great Patriotic War
During the Great Patriotic War, Bunin took a patriotic position without hesitation. According to radio reports, he eagerly followed the course of the great battle that unfolded in the vastness of Russia. His diaries of these years are full of messages from Russia, because of which Bunin turns from despair to hope.
The writer does not hide his hatred of fascism. “Brutal people continue their devilish work - killing and destruction of everything, everything! And it began at the will of one person - the destruction of the entire globe - or rather, the one who embodied the will of his people, who should not be forgiven until the 77th generation, ”he writes in his diary on March 4, 1942. "Only a crazy cretin can think that he will reign over Russia," Bunin is convinced.
In the autumn of 1942, he met with Soviet prisoners of war, whom the Nazis used for labor in France. In the future, they repeatedly visited the Bunins, secretly listening to Soviet military radio reports together with the owners.
In one of the letters, Bunin remarks about his new acquaintances: “Some ... were so charming that we kissed them every day, as with relatives ... They danced a lot, sang - “Moscow, beloved, invincible.”
These meetings sharpened Bunin's long-standing dream of returning home. “I often think about returning home. Will I live? - he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1943.
In November 1942, the Nazis occupied France. Taking advantage of Bunin's difficult financial situation, pro-fascist newspapers vied with each other to offer him cooperation, promising mountains of gold. But all their attempts were in vain. Bunin went to the point of fainting from hunger, but did not want to make any compromises.
The victorious conclusion of the Patriotic War by the Soviet Union was greeted by him with great joy. Bunin carefully looked at Soviet literature.
Known for his high evaluation of Tvardovsky's poem "Vasily Terkin", the stories of K. Paustovsky. By this time, his meetings in Paris with the journalist Y. Zhukov, the writer K. Simonov belong. He visits the USSR Ambassador to France Bogomolov. He was issued a passport of a citizen of the USSR.
- Bunin's loneliness in exile
These steps caused a sharply negative attitude towards Bunin in anti-Soviet emigre circles. On the other hand, the return of the writer to Soviet Union, especially after the repressive party resolution in the field of literature in 1946 and Zhdanov's report.
Lonely, sick, half-destitute Bunin found himself between two fires: many emigrants turned away from him, while the Soviet side, irritated and disappointed that Bunin did not beg to be sent to his homeland, kept a deep silence.
This bitterness of resentment and loneliness was intensified by thoughts of the inexorable approach of death. The motifs of parting with life are heard in the poem "Two Wreaths" and in Bunin's last prose works, philosophical meditations "Mistral", "In the Alps", "Legend" with their characteristic details and images: a coffin, grave crosses, a dead face, similar to mask, etc.
In some of these works, the writer, as it were, sums up his own earthly labors and days. IN little story"Bernard" (1952), he tells the story of a simple French sailor who worked tirelessly and passed away with a sense of honorably fulfilled duty.
His last words were: "I think I was a good sailor." What did he mean by these words? The joy of knowing that he, while living on earth, benefited his neighbor, being a good sailor? - asks the author.
And he answers: “No: the fact that God gives each of us this or that talent along with life and imposes on us the sacred duty not to bury it in the ground. Why, why? We don't know. But we must know that everything in this world, which is incomprehensible to us, must certainly have some meaning, some high intention of God, aimed at ensuring that everything in this world "be good" and that the diligent fulfillment of this God's intention is the whole our merit before Him, and therefore joy, pride.
And Bernard knew and felt it. All his life he diligently, dignifiedly, faithfully fulfilled the modest duty assigned to him by God, served Him not out of fear, but out of conscience. And how could he not say what he said at his last minute?
“It seems to me,” Bunin concludes his story, “that I, as an artist, have earned the right to say about myself, in my last days, something similar to what Bernard said when he was dying.”
- Bunin's death
On November 8, 1953, at the age of 83, Bunin dies. An outstanding artist of the word, a wonderful master of prose and poetry, has died. “Bunin is the last of the classics of Russian literature, whose experience we have no right to forget,” wrote A. Tvardovsky.
Bunin's work is not only filigree craftsmanship, the amazing power of the plastic image. This is love for the native land, for Russian culture, for the Russian language. In 1914, Bunin created a wonderful poem in which he emphasized the enduring significance of the Word in the life of every person and humanity as a whole:
5 / 5. 1
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin - the last classic of pre-revolutionary Russia and the first Russian winner of the main literary award - the Prize. Alfred Nobel. His writings, which have become a golden fund artistic culture, translated into all European languages, repeatedly filmed. Among them: "The Life of Arsenyev", "Mitya's Love", "Sunstroke", "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Antonov's Apples".Childhood
The future literary genius was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh. His father, impoverished due to lack of business qualities, addiction to the card game and alcohol, belonged to an old noble family, which gave the homeland many outstanding minds, including the coryphaeus of the Russian word Vasily Zhukovsky. Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin was a generous and artistically gifted person. 
Mother, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Chubarova, came from a princely family (according to family legend), she was distinguished by a compliant, poetic and gentle nature, as opposed to a quick-tempered and gambling spouse.
In total, the couple had 9 children, but four survived: Julius, Zhenya, Maria and Ivan. When Vanya was 4 years old, the family had to return for financial reasons to their impoverished "noble nest" - Butyrka in the Oryol region.
Vanechka was known as his mother's favorite, possessing a similar subtle and impressionable nature. He learned to read early, amazed with his imagination, curiosity, he composed his first verse at the age of 7-8.
In 1881 he was sent to the Yelets Gymnasium, where he studied for 5 years without earning a certificate: the young man was so homesick that he studied poorly and was eventually sent home.
Subsequently, the lack of formal education depressed him, but did not prevent him from being known as a great writer. The young man comprehended the gymnasium program under the guidance of his 10-year-old elder brother Julius, who graduated with honors from the university and had a special influence on the formation of his brother's personality. Among Ivan's literary idols were Pushkin, Fet, Tyutchev, Lermontov, Semyon Nadson.
The beginning of the way
In 1887, Bunin's literary path began. In the publication "Rodina" his poems "Over the grave of S. Ya. Nadson" and "The Village Beggar" were published. In 1889, he left the estate, having received an offer from Orel to take the place of the head of the local newspaper. Previously, he went to Kharkov to his brother Julius, where he worked in a zemstvo institution, and then visited the south in the Crimea. 
During his collaboration with Orlovsky Vestnik, he published his debut poetic book, Poems, published in the Observer, Niva, Vestnik Evropy publications, earning favorable reviews from eminent writers, including Chekhov.
Ivan Bunin - Poems
In 1892, the writer moved to Poltava, where, under the patronage of Yulia, he got a job in the statistical department of the provincial self-government body. He talked a lot with freethinkers-populists, visited Tolstoy settlements, in 1894 he met with their founder Leo Tolstoy, reflecting his ideas in the story "At the Dacha".
Creative accomplishments
A year later, he entered the literary circles of St. Petersburg, then Moscow, became close to Alexander Kuprin, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, met Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Teleshov, and worked fruitfully. Among his close friends there were also many artists, musicians, including Sergei Rachmaninoff. Art has always attracted Ivan Alekseevich. Since childhood, he was endowed with increased sensitivity and susceptibility to sounds, colors, which affected the features of creativity, its expressive picturesqueness.In 1896, his translation of Henry Longfellow's Song of Geyawat was published, and is still recognized as unsurpassed. Later he translated Saadi, T. Shevchenko, F. Petrarch, A. Mickiewicz. In 1900, "Epitaph" and the famous "Antonov apples" appeared, which provided him with real literary fame. Falling Leaves was also warmly received, bringing in 1903 the prestigious Pushkin Prize of the Academy of Sciences (or rather, half of it, being awarded together with Peter Weinberg).
Ivan Bunin - Falling leaves
After 6 years, the writer was again awarded this literary award (for volumes 3 and 4 of the Collected Works in 5 volumes), sharing it this time with Alexander Kuprin. Almost simultaneously, he became the youngest (39-year-old) holder of the academic title "honorary academician" in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Development of creative activity
After the revolutionary events of 1905, the prevailing theme of the works of the master of the pen, instead of the "requiem" of manor life, was the drama of the historical part of the country. But he remained true to his style and the precepts of great literature, rejecting any avant-garde and modernism - he still wrote realistically, concisely, poetically reflecting nature and revealing the psychological subtleties of characters. The unconditional masterpieces of this period include "The Village", "Dry Valley", where the author shocked readers with terrifying pictures of peasant life without embellishment, as well as stories filled with philosophical meaning: " A good life”, “Brothers”, “John Rydalets”, “Mr. from San Francisco”, “Cup of Life”, “Grammar of Love”. 
In 1907, the writer and his wife made their cherished first "wandering", visiting Egypt. Later, he traveled with pleasure a lot to different countries (Turkey, Ceylon, Romania, Italy, Syria, Palestine). Colleagues participating in the literary and artistic circle "Wednesday", of which he became a member, even gave him the nickname "fidget". The impressions from the trips were reflected in the book "Shadow of a Bird", published in 1931 in Paris.
He did not favor the Bolsheviks and their leaders, he perceived the coup as the beginning of the death of his native state and as a personal tragedy, capturing the ongoing terror in his diary book Cursed Days. In 1918 he left Moscow, moving to Odessa, and two years later he was forced to leave his homeland forever.
Abroad
In 1920, the writer settled in France, spending the warm season in the southeast of the country in the medieval town of Grasse, and the winter months in Paris. Separation from his native land and mental suffering paradoxically had a positive effect on his work. 
In exile, he wrote ten new books, true gems of world literature. Among them: "The Rose of Jericho", which included poetry and prose works created based on travels to the East, "Mitina's Love" about a young man who died from unhappy love, "Sunstroke", which described passion that arose as an obsession and insight. His short novels, included in the collection "God's Tree", also became unique works.
"Mitya's love" - I. Bunin
In 1933, the writer who reached the literary Olympus received the Alfred Nobel award. The choice of the Committee was largely influenced by the appearance of his brilliant work "The Life of Arseniev", where he lyrically, boldly and deeply recreated his past and his homeland.
During the Second World War, the writer lived in Grasse, suffering from financial problems. He did not support the ideas of a certain part of the Russian emigration, ready to welcome the Nazis, capable of destroying Bolshevism, on the contrary, he welcomed the accomplishments of the Soviet armed forces. In 1943 came out recognized as the top short prose writer's collection of stories "Dark Alleys" about thoughts, feelings and love, tinged with sadness.
After the war, the writer again moved to Paris, where he received an offer from the head of the Soviet embassy A. Bogomolov to leave for the USSR. According to K. Simonov, the writer really wanted to go, but his age and attachment to France stopped him.
Personal life of Ivan Bunin
The writer's half-childish love was Emilia, a young governess of the neighbors. He devoted several chapters to the description of this feeling in The Life of Arseniev. And his first common-law wife was Varya Pashchenko, the daughter of a fairly well-to-do doctor, a graduate of the Yelets gymnasium, a proofreader for the Oryol Bulletin. She conquered 19-year-old Ivan with her intelligence and beauty. But the girl wanted to have a more wealthy life partner nearby, and in 1894 she left him. 
The next muse, the Greek Anna Tsakni, the daughter of the Odessa owner of the "Southern Review", the writer met in 1898. They got married, but the cohabitation of the young did not work out. He wanted to create in Moscow, and his wife decided to return to her native Odessa. When she, already pregnant, left, the writer suffered greatly. In 1900, their son Kolenka was born, who passed away at the age of 5 from scarlet fever.
Another chosen one of the writer was Vera Muromtseva, a highly educated beauty, the niece of the head of the State Duma. The young people met in Moscow in 1906. Since Tsakni initially did not agree to give a divorce, they were able to marry only in 1922, and lived together for 46 years. She called her husband Jan, loved him very much and even forgave infidelity.
The last lover of the writer was the Russian poetess Galina Kuznetsova. Their stormy romance began in 1926. A year later, the young passion left her husband and began to live in the Bunin family, shocking the society of Russian emigrants. But in 1933, she brought another surprise to those around her - she entered into a love affair with Margarita, the sister of the philosopher and literary critic Fyodor Stepunov. In connection with this turn of events, the writer, according to the memoirs of his contemporaries, was in a state of absolute despair.
The writer died at the age of 84. He was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.
I. A. Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh. His childhood was spent on the family estate, located in the Oryol province.
At the age of 11, Bunin began to study at the Yelets Gymnasium. In the fourth year of study, due to an illness, he was forced to leave his studies and go to live in the village. After recovery, Ivan Bunin continues his studies with his older brother, both were very interested in literature. At the age of 19, Bunin was forced to leave the estate and provide for himself on his own. He changes several positions, working as an extra, proofreader, librarian, he often has to move. From 1891 he began to publish poems and stories.
Having received approval from L. Tolstoy and A. Chekhov, Bunin focuses his activities on the literary sphere. As a writer, Bunin receives the Pushkin Prize, and also becomes an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Bunin's great fame in literary circles was brought by the story "The Village".
The October Revolution was perceived negatively by him, in connection with which he left Russia, emigrating to France. In Paris, he writes many works relating to Russian nature.
I. A. Bunin dies in 1953, having survived the Second World War.
Short biography of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin Grade 4
Childhood
Bunin Ivan Alekseevich was born on October 10 or 22, 1870 in the city of Voronezh. A little later, he and his parents moved to the estate of the Oryol province.
He spends his childhood in the estate, in the middle of nature.
Without graduating from the gymnasium in the city of Yelets (1886), Bunin receives his subsequent education from his brother Julius, who graduated with honors from the university.
Creative activity
The first works of Ivan Alekseevich were published in 1888, and the first collection of his poems with the same name was published in 1889. Thanks to this collection, glory comes to Bunin. Soon, in 1898, his poems were published in the collection Under the Open Air, and later, in 1901, in the collection Falling Leaves.
Later, Bunin was awarded the title of academician at the Academy of Sciences of the city of St. Petersburg (1909), after which he left Russia, being an opponent of the revolution.
Life abroad and death
Abroad, Bunin does not leave his creative activity and writes works that will be doomed to success in the future. It was then that he wrote one of the most famous works"The Life of Arseniev". For him, the writer receives the Nobel Prize.
Bunin's last work - the literary image of Chekhov was never completed.
Ivan Bunin died in the capital of France - in the city of Paris and was buried there.
4th grade for children, 11th grade
The life and work of Ivan Bunin
1870 is a significant year for Russia. On October 10 (October 22), a brilliant poet and writer who won world fame, I.A. Bunin, was born in a Voronezh noble family. From the age of three, the Oryol province becomes native for the future writer. Ivan spends his childhood in the family, at the age of 8 he begins to try himself in the literary field. Due to illness, he was unable to complete his studies at the Yelets gymnasium. He corrected his health in the village of Ozerki. Unlike his younger brother, another member of the Bunin family, Julius, is studying at the university. But after spending a year in prison, he was also sent to the village of Ozerki, where he became a teacher for Ivan, teaching him many sciences. Literature enjoyed special love among the brothers. The debut in the newspaper took place in 1887. Two years later, due to the need to earn money, Ivan Bunin leaves his home. The modest positions of a newspaper employee, an extra, a librarian, a proofreader brought a small income for existence. He often had to change his place of residence - Orel, Moscow, Kharkov, Poltava were his temporary homeland.
Thoughts about his native Oryol region did not leave the writer. His impressions were reflected in his first collection called "Poems", which was published in 1891. Bunin was especially impressed by the meeting with the famous writer Leo Tolstoy 3 years after the release of Poems. He remembered the next year as the year of his acquaintance with A. Chekhov, before that Bunin only corresponded with him. Criticism was well received by Bunin's story "To the End of the World" (1895). After which he decides to devote himself to this art. The subsequent years of Ivan Bunin's life are completely connected with literature. Thanks to his collections "Under the open sky", "Leaf fall", in 1903 the writer becomes the owner of the Pushkin Prize (this prize was awarded to him twice). The marriage with Anna Tsakni, which took place in 1898, was short-lived, their only 5-year-old child dies. After living with V. Muromtseva.
In the period from 1900 to 1904, well-known stories beloved by many were published: "Chernozem", "Antonov apples", no less significant "Pines" and "New Road". These works made an indelible impression on Maxim Gorky, who will highly appreciate the writer's work, calling him the best stylist of our time. Readers especially liked the story "The Village".
In 1909, the Russian Academy of Sciences acquired a new honorary member. They rightfully became Ivan Alekseevich. Bunin was unable to accept the October Revolution, spoke sharply and negatively about Bolshevism. Historical events in his homeland force him to leave his country. His path lay in France. Crossing the Crimea, Constantinople, the writer decides to stop in Paris. In a foreign land, all his thoughts are about his homeland, the Russian people, natural beauty. Active literary activity resulted in significant works: "Basts", "Mitina's Love", "Mowers", "Far", the short story "Dark Alleys", in the novel "Arseniev's Life", written in 1930, he tells about his childhood and youth. These works were called the best in Bunin's work.
Three years later, another significant event occurred in his life - Ivan Bunin was awarded the honorary Nobel Prize. Famous books about Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov were written abroad. One of his last books, Reminiscences, appeared in France. Ivan Bunin survived historical events in Paris - the attack of the fascist army, saw their defeat. Vigorous activity made him one of the most important figures of the Russian Diaspora. Date of death famous writer – 8.11.1953.
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The first Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is called a jeweler of the word, a prose writer-painter, a genius of Russian literature and the brightest representative Silver Age. Literary critics agree that in Bunin's works there is a relationship with paintings, and in terms of attitude, the stories and novels of Ivan Alekseevich are similar to canvases.
Childhood and youth
Ivan Bunin's contemporaries argue that the writer felt "breed", innate aristocracy. There is nothing to be surprised: Ivan Alekseevich is a representative of the oldest noble family, rooted in the 15th century. The Bunin family coat of arms is included in the coat of arms of the noble families of the Russian Empire. Among the ancestors of the writer is the founder of romanticism, the writer of ballads and poems.
Ivan Alekseevich was born in October 1870 in Voronezh, in the family of a poor nobleman and petty official Alexei Bunin, married to his cousin Lyudmila Chubarova, a meek but impressionable woman. She bore her husband nine children, of whom four survived.
The family moved to Voronezh 4 years before the birth of Ivan to educate their eldest sons Yuli and Evgeny. They settled in a rented apartment on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street. When Ivan was four years old, his parents returned to the Butyrka family estate in the Oryol province. Bunin spent his childhood on the farm.
The love of reading was instilled in the boy by his tutor, a student of Moscow University, Nikolai Romashkov. At home, Ivan Bunin studied languages, focusing on Latin. The first books of the future writer that he read on his own were The Odyssey and a collection of English poems.
In the summer of 1881, Ivan's father brought him to Yelets. The youngest son passed the exams and entered the 1st grade of the male gymnasium. Bunin liked to study, but this did not apply to the exact sciences. In a letter to his older brother, Vanya admitted that he considers the math exam "the most terrible." After 5 years, Ivan Bunin was expelled from the gymnasium in the middle school year. The 16-year-old boy came to his father's estate Ozerki for the Christmas holidays, but never returned to Yelets. For non-appearance at the gymnasium, the teachers' council expelled the guy. Ivan's elder brother Julius took up further education.
Literature
Ivan Bunin's creative biography began in Ozerki. In the estate, he continued to work on the novel “Passion” begun in Yelets, but the work did not reach the reader. But the poem of the young writer, written under the impression of the death of an idol - the poet Semyon Nadson - was published in the Rodina magazine.
In his father's estate, with the help of his brother, Ivan Bunin prepared for the final exams, passed them and received a matriculation certificate.
From the autumn of 1889 to the summer of 1892, Ivan Bunin worked in the journal Orlovsky Vestnik, where his stories, poems and literary criticism were published. In August 1892, Julius called his brother to Poltava, where he got Ivan a job as a librarian in the provincial government.
In January 1894, the writer visited Moscow, where he met with a congenial soul. Like Lev Nikolaevich, Bunin criticizes urban civilization. In the stories "Antonov apples", "Epitaph" and "New road" nostalgic notes for the passing era are guessed, regret is felt for the degenerate nobility.
In 1897, Ivan Bunin published the book "To the End of the World" in St. Petersburg. A year earlier he had translated Henry Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha. Bunin's translation included poems by Alkey, Saadi, Adam Mickiewicz and.
In 1898, Ivan Alekseevich's poetry collection Under the Open Sky was published in Moscow, warmly received by literary critics and readers. Two years later, Bunin presented poetry lovers with a second book of poems - Falling Leaves, which strengthened the author's authority as a "poet of the Russian landscape." Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1903 awards Ivan Bunin the first Pushkin Prize, followed by the second.
But in the poetic environment, Ivan Bunin earned a reputation as an "old-fashioned landscape painter." In the late 1890s, “fashionable” poets became favorites, bringing the “breath of city streets” to Russian lyrics, and with its restless heroes. in a review of Bunin's collection Poems, he wrote that Ivan Alekseevich found himself aloof "from the general movement", but from the point of view of painting, his poetic "canvases" reached "the end points of perfection." Critics call the poems “I Remember a Long Winter Evening” and “Evening” as examples of perfection and adherence to the classics.
Ivan Bunin, the poet, does not accept symbolism and critically looks at revolutionary events 1905–1907, calling himself "a witness to the great and mean". In 1910, Ivan Alekseevich published the story "The Village", which marked the beginning of "a whole series of works that sharply depict the Russian soul." The continuation of the series is the story "Dry Valley" and the stories "Strength", "Good Life", "Prince in Princes", "Sand Shoes".
In 1915, Ivan Bunin was at the height of his popularity. His famous stories "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Grammar of Love", "Easy Breath" and "Chang's Dreams" are published. In 1917, the writer leaves revolutionary Petrograd, avoiding the "terrible proximity of the enemy." Bunin lived in Moscow for six months, from there in May 1918 he left for Odessa, where he wrote the diary "Cursed Days" - a furious denunciation of the revolution and the Bolshevik government.
Portrait "Ivan Bunin". Artist Evgeny Bukovetsky It is dangerous for a writer who criticizes the new government so fiercely to remain in the country. In January 1920, Ivan Alekseevich leaves Russia. He leaves for Constantinople, and in March he ends up in Paris. A collection of short stories called "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was published here, which the public greets enthusiastically.
Since the summer of 1923, Ivan Bunin lived in the Belvedere villa in ancient Grasse, where he visited him. During these years, the stories "Initial Love", "Numbers", "The Rose of Jericho" and "Mitina's Love" were published.
In 1930, Ivan Alekseevich wrote the story "The Shadow of a Bird" and completed the most significant work created in exile - the novel "The Life of Arseniev." The description of the hero's experiences is covered with sadness about the departed Russia, "who died before our eyes in such a magically short time."
In the late 1930s, Ivan Bunin moved to the Jeannette Villa, where he lived during the Second World War. The writer was worried about the fate of his homeland and joyfully met the news about the slightest victory of the Soviet troops. Bunin lived in poverty. He wrote about his predicament:
“I was rich - now, by the will of fate, I suddenly became poor ... I was famous all over the world - now no one in the world needs ... I really want to go home!”
The villa was dilapidated: the heating system did not function, there were interruptions in electricity and water supply. Ivan Alekseevich told his friends in letters about the "cave continuous hunger." In order to get at least a small amount, Bunin asked a friend who had left for America to publish the collection Dark Alleys on any terms. The book in Russian with a circulation of 600 copies was published in 1943, for which the writer received $300. The collection includes the story "Clean Monday". The last masterpiece of Ivan Bunin - the poem "Night" - was published in 1952.
Researchers of the prose writer's work have noticed that his novels and stories are cinematic. For the first time, a Hollywood producer spoke about the film adaptation of Ivan Bunin's works, expressing a desire to make a film based on the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco." But it ended with a conversation.
In the early 1960s, Russian directors drew attention to the work of a compatriot. A short film based on the story "Mitya's Love" was shot by Vasily Pichul. In 1989, the screens released the picture "Unurgent Spring" based on the story of the same name by Bunin.
In 2000, the director's biography film "The Diary of His Wife" was released, which tells the story of relationships in the family of the prose writer.
The premiere of the drama "Sunstroke" in 2014 caused a resonance. The tape is based on the story of the same name and the book Cursed Days.
Nobel Prize
Ivan Bunin was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1922. The Nobel Prize winner was busy with this. But then the prize was given to the Irish poet William Yeats.
In the 1930s, Russian emigrant writers joined the process, and their efforts were crowned with victory: in November 1933, the Swedish Academy awarded Ivan Bunin a literature prize. The appeal to the laureate said that he deserved the award for "recreating in prose a typical Russian character."
Ivan Bunin spent 715 thousand francs of the prize quickly. Half in the first months he distributed to those in need and to everyone who turned to him for help. Even before receiving the award, the writer admitted that he received 2,000 letters asking for help with money.
3 years after the Nobel Prize, Ivan Bunin plunged into habitual poverty. Until the end of his life, he did not have his own house. Best of all, Bunin described the state of affairs in a short poem "The bird has a nest", where there are lines:
The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.
How the heart beats, sadly and loudly,
When I enter, being baptized, into a strange, rented house
With his old knapsack!
Personal life
The young writer met his first love when he worked at the Oryol Herald. Varvara Pashchenko - a tall beauty in pince-nez - seemed to Bunin too arrogant and emancipated. But soon he found an interesting interlocutor in the girl. A romance broke out, but Varvara's father did not like the poor young man with vague prospects. The couple lived without a wedding. In his memoirs, Ivan Bunin calls Barbara just that - "an unmarried wife."
After moving to Poltava, the already difficult relations escalated. Varvara, a girl from a wealthy family, was fed up with a beggarly existence: she left home, leaving Bunin a farewell note. Soon Pashchenko became the wife of actor Arseny Bibikov. Ivan Bunin suffered a hard break, the brothers feared for his life.
In 1898, in Odessa, Ivan Alekseevich met Anna Tsakni. She became the first official wife of Bunin. In the same year, the wedding took place. But the couple did not live together for long: they broke up two years later. The only son of the writer, Nikolai, was born in marriage, but in 1905 the boy died of scarlet fever. Bunin had no more children.
The love of Ivan Bunin's life is the third wife of Vera Muromtseva, whom he met in Moscow, on literary evening in November 1906. Muromtseva, a graduate of the Higher Women's Courses, was fond of chemistry and spoke three languages fluently. But Vera was far from literary bohemia.
The newlyweds married in exile in 1922: Tsakni did not give Bunin a divorce for 15 years. He was the best man at the wedding. The couple lived together until the very death of Bunin, although their life cannot be called cloudless. In 1926, rumors about a strange love triangle appeared among the emigrants: a young writer Galina Kuznetsova lived in the house of Ivan and Vera Bunin, to whom Ivan Bunin had by no means friendly feelings.
Kuznetsova is called the last love of the writer. She lived at the villa of the Bunin spouses for 10 years. Ivan Alekseevich survived the tragedy when he learned about Galina's passion for the sister of the philosopher Fyodor Stepun - Margarita. Kuznetsova left Bunin's house and went to Margo, which caused the writer's protracted depression. Friends of Ivan Alekseevich wrote that Bunin at that time was on the verge of insanity and despair. He worked for days on end, trying to forget his beloved.
After parting with Kuznetsova, Ivan Bunin wrote 38 short stories included in the collection Dark Alleys.
Death
In the late 1940s, doctors diagnosed Bunin with emphysema. At the insistence of doctors, Ivan Alekseevich went to a resort in the south of France. But the state of health has not improved. In 1947, 79-year-old Ivan Bunin spoke for the last time to an audience of writers.
Poverty forced to seek help from the Russian emigrant Andrei Sedykh. He secured a pension for a sick colleague from the American philanthropist Frank Atran. Until the end of Bunin's life, Atran paid the writer 10,000 francs a month.
In the late autumn of 1953, Ivan Bunin's health deteriorated. He didn't get out of bed. Shortly before his death, the writer asked his wife to read the letters.
On November 8, the doctor declared the death of Ivan Alekseevich. It was caused by cardiac asthma and pulmonary sclerosis. The Nobel laureate was buried at the cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, the place where hundreds of Russian emigrants were buried.
Bibliography
- "Antonov apples"
- "Village"
- "Dry Valley"
- "Easy breath"
- "Chang's Dreams"
- "Lapti"
- "Grammar of Love"
- "Mitina's love"
- "Cursed Days"
- "Sunstroke"
- "The Life of Arseniev"
- "Caucasus"
- "Dark alleys"
- "Cold autumn"
- "Numbers"
- "Clean Monday"
- "The Case of Cornet Yelagin"
