What is special about Bunin’s creative style? Man in the circle of existence (About creativity And
Composition
A classic of Russian literature, an honorary academician in the category of belles-lettres, the first Russian writer, Nobel laureate, poet, prose writer, translator, publicist, literary critic Ivan Alekseevich Bunin has long won worldwide fame. His work was admired by T. Mann, R. Rolland, F. Mauriac, R. - M. Rilke, M. Gorky, K. Paustovsky, A. Tvardovsky and others. I. Bunin followed his own path all his life; he did not belong to any literary group, much less a political party. He stands apart, a unique creative personality in the history of Russian literature of the late 19th - 20th centuries.
The life of I. A. Bunin is rich and tragic, interesting and multifaceted. Bunin was born on October 10 (old style) 1870 in Voronezh, where his parents moved to educate his older brothers. Ivan Alekseevich came from an ancient noble family, which dates back to the 15th century. The Bunin family is very extensive and branched, and its history is extremely interesting. From the Bunin family came such representatives of Russian culture and science as the famous poet, translator Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, poetess Anna Petrovna Bunina, and the outstanding geographer and traveler Pyotr Petrovich Semenov - Tyan-Shansky. The Bunins were related to the Kireevskys, Shenshins, Grots, and Voeikovs.
The very origin of Ivan Alekseevich is also interesting. Both the writer’s mother and father come from the Bunin family. Father - Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin married Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Chubarova, who was his niece. I. Bunin was very proud of his ancient family and always wrote about his origins in every autobiography. Vanya Bunin's childhood was spent in the wilderness, in one of the small family estates (the Butyrka farmstead of the Yeletsky district of the Oryol province). Bunin received his initial knowledge from his home teacher, a student at Moscow University, a certain N. O. Romashkov, a man... very talented - in painting, in music, and in literature, - the writer recalled, - probably his fascinating stories on winter evenings... and the fact that my first books to read were "The English Poets" (ed. Herbel) and Homer's Odyssey, awakened in me a passion for poetry, the fruit of which was several infant verses...\ “Bunin’s artistic abilities also showed up early. He could imitate or introduce someone he knew with one or two gestures, which delighted those around him. Thanks to these abilities, Bunin later became an excellent reader of his works.
For ten years, Vanya Bunin was sent to the Yeletsk gymnasium. While studying, he lives in Yelets with relatives and in private apartments. “Gymnasium and life in Yelets,” Bunin recalled, left me with far from joyful impressions, “we know what a Russian, and even a district gymnasium is, and what a district Russian city is!” The transition from a completely free life from the cares of a mother to life in the city, to the absurd strictures in the gymnasium and to the difficult life of those bourgeois and merchant houses where I had to live as a freeloader." But Bunin studied in Yelets for just over four years. In March 1886, he was expelled from the gymnasium for failure to appear from vacation and non-payment of tuition. Ivan Bunin settles in Ozerki (the estate of his deceased grandmother Chubarova), where, under the guidance of his older brother Yulia, he takes a gymnasium course, and in some subjects a university course. Yuliy Alekseevich was a highly educated man, one of the people closest to Bunin. Throughout his life, Yuli Alekseevich was always the first reader and critic of Bunin’s works.
The future writer spent his entire childhood and adolescence in the village, among fields and forests. In his "Autobiographical Notes" Bunin writes: "My mother and the servants loved to tell stories - from them I heard a lot of songs and stories... I also owe them my first knowledge of language - our richest language, in which “Thanks to geographical and historical conditions, so many dialects and dialects from almost all parts of Rus' merged and were transformed.” Bunin himself went to the peasant huts in the evenings for gatherings, sang “suffering” on the streets with the village children, guarded the horses at night... All this had a beneficial effect on the developing talent of the future writer. At the age of seven or eight, Bunin began to write poetry, imitating Pushkin and Lermontov. He loved to read Zhukovsky, Maykov, Fet, Ya. Polonsky, A.K. Tolstoy.
Bunin first appeared in print in 1887. The St. Petersburg newspaper "Rodina" published the poems "Over the grave of S. Ya. Nadson" and "The Village Beggar." There, during this year, ten more poems and stories "Two Wanderers" and "Nefedka" were published. This is how I.A.’s literary activity began. Bunina. In the fall of 1889, Bunin settled in Orel and began to collaborate in the editorial office of the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik, where he was everything he needed to be - a proofreader, an editorial writer, and a theater critic... At this time, the young writer lived only by literary work, he was in great need. His parents could not help him, since the family was completely ruined, the estate and land in Ozerki were sold, and his mother and father began to live separately, with their children and relatives. Since the late 1880s, Bunin has been trying his hand at literary criticism. He published articles about the self-taught poet E. I. Nazarov, about T. G. Shevchenko, whose talent HE admired from his youth, about N. V. Uspensky, G. I. Uspensky’s cousin. Later, articles appeared about the poets E. A. Baratynsky and A. M. Zhemchuzhnikov. In Orel, Bunin, in his words, was “struck..., to great... misfortune, by a long love” for Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, the daughter of an Yelets doctor. Her parents were categorically against marriage with a poor poet. Bunin's love for Varya was passionate and painful, sometimes they quarreled and went to different cities. These experiences lasted about five years. In 1894, V. Pashchenko left Ivan Alekseevich and married his friend A. N. Bibikov. Bunin took this departure terribly hard, his relatives even feared for his life.
Bunin's first book - \"Poems 1887 - 1891\" was published in 1891 in Orel, as a supplement to \"The Oryol Bulletin\". As the poet himself recalls, it was a book of “purely youthful, overly intimate” poems. Reviews from provincial and metropolitan critics were generally sympathetic and impressed by the accuracy and picturesque nature of the pictures. A little later, the young writer’s poems and stories appear in thick metropolitan magazines - Russian Wealth, Severny Vestnik, Vestnik Evropy. Writers A. M. Zhemchuzhnikov and N. K. Mikhailovsky responded approvingly to Bunin’s new works, who wrote that Ivan Alekseevich would make a “great writer.”
In 1893 - 1894, Bunin experienced the enormous influence of the ideas and personality of L. N. Tolstoy. Ivan Alekseevich visited Tolstoyan colonies in Ukraine, decided to take up cooperage and even learned how to put hoops on barrels. But in 1894, in Moscow, Bunin met with Tolstoy, who himself dissuaded the writer from saying goodbye to the end. Leo Tolstoy for Bunin is the highest embodiment of artistic skill and moral dignity. Ivan Alekseevich literally knew entire pages of his works by heart and all his life he admired the greatness of Tolstoy’s talent. The result of this attitude was later Bunin’s deep, multifaceted book “The Liberation of Tolstoy” (Paris, 1937).
At the beginning of 1895, Bunin traveled to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow. From that time on, he entered the capital's literary environment: he met N.K. Mikhailovsky, S.N. Krivenko, D.V. Grigorovich, N.N. Zlatovratsky, A.P. Chekhov, A.I. Ertel, K. Balmont, V. Ya. Bryusov, F. Sologub, V. G. Korolenko, A. I. Kuprin. Particularly important for Bunin was his acquaintance and further friendship with Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, with whom he stayed for a long time in Yalta and soon became part of his family. Bunin recalled: “I didn’t have such a relationship with any of the writers as I did with Chekhov. For all that time, there was never the slightest hostility. He was invariably discreetly gentle with me, friendly, caring like an elder.” Chekhov predicted that Bunin would become a “great writer.” Bunin admired Chekhov, whom he considered one of “the greatest and most delicate Russian poets,” a man of “rare spiritual nobility, good manners and grace in the best meaning of these words, gentleness and delicacy with extraordinary sincerity and simplicity, sensitivity and tenderness with rare truthfulness." Bunin learned about the death of A. Chekhov in the village. In his memoirs, he writes: “On the Fourth of July 1904, I rode horseback to the village to the post office, took newspapers and letters there and went to the blacksmith to reshod the horse’s leg. It was a hot and sleepy steppe day, with a dull shine to the sky, with a hot south wind. I unfolded the newspaper, sitting on the threshold of the blacksmith's hut, and suddenly it was like an icy razor slashed across my heart."
Speaking about Bunin's work, it should be especially noted that he was a brilliant translator. In 1896, Bunin's translation of the poem by the American writer G. W. Longfellow "The Song of Hiawatha" was published. This translation was reprinted several times, and over the years the poet made amendments and clarifications to the translation text. “I tried everywhere,” the translator wrote in the preface, “to stay as close as possible to the original, to preserve the simplicity and musicality of speech, comparisons and epithets, characteristic repetitions of words and even, if possible, the number and arrangement of verses.” The translation, which retained maximum fidelity to the original, became a notable event in Russian poetry of the early twentieth century and is considered unsurpassed to this day. Ivan Bunin also translated J. Byron - \"Cain\", \"Manfred\", \"Heaven and Earth\"; \"Godiva\" by A. Tennyson; poems by A. de Musset, Lecomte de Lisle, A. Mickiewicz, T. G. Shevchenko and others. Bunin's translation activities made him one of the outstanding masters of poetic translation. Bunin's first book of stories, "To the End of the World," was published in 1897, "to almost unanimous praise." In 1898, the collection of poems "Under the Open Air" was published. These books, along with the translation of G. Longfellow's poem, brought Bunin fame in literary Russia.
Often visiting Odessa, Bunin became close to members of the "Association of South Russian Artists": V.P. Kurovsky, E.I. Bukovetsky, P.A. Nilus. Bunin was always drawn to artists, among whom he found subtle connoisseurs of his work. Bunin has a lot to do with Odessa. This city is the setting for some of the writer's stories. Ivan Alekseevich collaborated with the editors of the newspaper "Odessa News". In 1898, in Odessa, Bunin married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni. But the marriage turned out to be unhappy, and already in March 1899 the couple separated. Their son Kolya, whom Bunin adored, died in 1905 at the age of five. Ivan Alekseevich took the loss of his only child seriously. All his life Bunin carried a photograph of Kolinka with him. In the spring of 1900, in Yalta, where the Moscow Art Theater was located in his time, Bunin met the founders of the theater and its actors: K. Stanislavsky, O. Knipper, A. Vishnevsky, V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, I. Moskvin. And also on this visit, Bunin met the composer S.V. Rachmaninov. Later, Ivan Alekseevich recalled this \"meeting when, after talking almost all night on the seashore, he hugged me and said: \"We will be friends forever!\" And indeed, their friendship lasted all their lives.
At the beginning of 1901, the publishing house "Scorpio" in Moscow published a collection of Bunin's poems "Falling Leaves" - the result of the writer's short collaboration with the Symbolists. Critical response was mixed. But in 1903, the collection "Falling Leaves" and the translation of "Songs of Hiawatha" were awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The poetry of I. Bunin has won a special place in the history of Russian literature thanks to many advantages inherent only to it. A singer of Russian nature, a master of philosophical and love lyrics, Bunin continued the classical traditions, opening up the unknown possibilities of “traditional” verse. Bunin actively developed the achievements of the golden age of Russian poetry, never breaking away from the national soil, remaining a Russian, original poet. At the beginning of his creativity, landscape lyrics, which have amazing specificity and precision of designation, are most characteristic of Bunin’s poetry. philosophical lyrics. Bunin is interested in both Russian history with its legends, fairy tales, traditions, and the origins of disappeared civilizations, the ancient East, ancient Greece, early Christianity. The Bible and the Koran are the poet’s favorite reading during this period. And all this is embodied in poetry and write in prose Philosophical lyricism penetrates the landscape and transforms it.In its emotional mood, Bunin's love lyrics are tragic.
I. Bunin himself considered himself, first of all, a poet, and only then a prose writer. And in prose, Bunin remained a poet. The story "Antonov Apples" (1900) is a clear confirmation of this. This story is a "prose poem" about Russian nature. From the beginning of the 1900s, Bunin's collaboration with the publishing house "Znanie" began, which led to a closer relationship between Ivan Alekseevich and A. M. Gorky, who headed this publishing house. Bunin often published in the collections of the Znanie partnership, and in 1902 - 1909, the Znanie publishing house published the first Collected Works of the writer in five volumes. Bunin's relationship with Gorky was uneven. At first, a friendship seemed to begin, they read their works to each other, Bunin visited Gorky more than once in Capri. But as the revolutionary events of 1917 in Russia approached, Bunin’s relationship with Gorky became increasingly cool. After 1917, there was a final break with the revolutionary-minded Gorky.
Since the second half of the 1890s, Bunin has been an active participant in the literary circle "Sreda", organized by N.D. Teleshov. Regular visitors to "Wednesday" were M. Gorky, L. Andreev, A. Kuprin, Yu. Bunin and others. Once on "Wednesday" V.G. Korolenko and A.P. Chekhov were present. At the "Wednesday" meetings the authors read and discussed their new works. Such an order was established that everyone could say whatever they thought about this literary creation without any offense on the part of the author. The events of the literary life of Russia were also discussed, sometimes heated debates flared up, and people stayed up long after midnight. It is impossible not to mention the fact that F. I. Chaliapin often sang at the “Wednesday” meetings , and S. V. Rachmaninov accompanied him. These were unforgettable evenings! Bunin’s wandering nature was manifested in his passion for travel. Ivan Alekseevich did not stay anywhere for long. All his life Bunin never had his own home, he lived in hotels, with relatives and friends. hotels, relatives and friends. In his wanderings around the world, he established a certain routine for himself: "... in winter the capital and the countryside, sometimes a trip abroad, in the spring the south of Russia, in the summer mainly the countryside."
In October 1900, Bunin traveled with V.P. Kurovsky in Germany, France, and Switzerland. From the end of 1903 to the beginning of 1904, Ivan Alekseevich, together with the playwright S. A. Naydenov, was in France and Italy. In June 1904, Bunin traveled around the Caucasus. Impressions from travel formed the basis of some of the writer's stories (for example, the cycle of stories 1907 - 1911 "Shadow of a Bird" and the story "Many Waters" 1925 - 1926), revealing to readers another facet of Bunin's work: travel essays.
In November 1906, in Moscow, in the house of the writer B.K. Zaitsev, Bunin met Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva (1881 - 1961). An educated and intelligent woman, Vera Nikolaevna shared her life with Ivan Alekseevich, becoming a devoted and selfless friend of the writer. After his death, she prepared Ivan Alekseevich’s manuscripts for publication, wrote the book “The Life of Bunin” containing valuable biographical data and her memoirs “Conversations with Memory”. Bunin told his wife: “Without you, I would not have written anything. I would have disappeared!”
Ivan Alekseevich recalled: “Since 1907, V.N. Muromtseva has shared her life with me. From then on, the thirst to travel and work took possession of me with special force... Invariably spending the summer in the village, we gave almost the rest of the time to foreign lands. I visited Turkey more than once, along the shores of Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt up to Nubia, traveled through Syria, Palestine, was in Oran, Algeria, Constantine, Tunisia and on the outskirts of the Sahara, sailed to Ceylon, traveled almost all of Europe, especially Sicily and Italy (where we spent the last three winters in Capri), was in some cities of Romania, Serbia...\".
In the fall of 1909, Bunin was awarded the second Pushkin Prize for the book "Poems 1903 - 1906", as well as for the translation of Byron's drama "Cain" and Longfellow's book "From the Golden Legend". In the same 1909, Bunin was elected honorary academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the category of fine literature. At this time, Ivan Alekseevich was working hard on his first big story - from the Village, which brought the author even greater fame and was a whole event in the literary world of Russia. Fierce debate flared up around the story, mainly discussing the objectivity and truthfulness of this work. A. M. Gorky responded about the story this way: “No one has taken a village so deeply, so historically.”
In December 1911, in Cyprus, Bunin finished the story "Sukhodol", dedicated to the theme of the extinction of noble estates and based on autobiographical material. The story was a huge success among readers and literary critics. The great master of words, I. Bunin studied the folklore collections of P. V. Kireevsky, E. V. Barsov, P. N. Rybnikov and others, making numerous extracts from them. The writer himself made folklore recordings. “I am interested in the reproduction of genuine folk speech, the folk language,” he said. The writer called the over 11 thousand ditties and folk jokes he collected “an invaluable treasure.” Bunin followed Pushkin, who wrote that "the study of ancient songs, fairy tales, etc. is necessary for perfect knowledge of the properties of the Russian language." On January 17, 1910, the Art Theater celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of A.P. Chekhov. V. I. Nemirovich - Danchenko asked Bunin to read his memoirs about Chekhov. Ivan Alekseevich talks about this significant day: “The theater was crowded. In the literary box on the right side sat Chekhov’s relatives: mother, sister, Ivan Pavlovich and his family, probably other brothers, I don’t remember.
My speech caused real delight, because I, reading our conversations with Anton Pavlovich, conveyed his words in his voice, his intonations, which made an amazing impression on the family: my mother and sister cried. A few days later, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich came to me and offered to join their troupe." On October 27-29, 1912, the 25th anniversary of I. Bunin’s literary activity was solemnly celebrated. At the same time, he was elected an honorary member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature at Moscow University and until 1920 he was a fellow chairman, and later temporary chairman of the Society.
In 1913, on October 6, at the celebration of the half-century anniversary of the newspaper "Russian Vedomosti", Bunin said: The literary and artistic circle instantly became famous with a speech directed against "ugly, negative phenomena" in Russian literature. When you read the text of this speech now, you are struck by the relevance of Bunin’s words, but this was said 80 years ago!
In the summer of 1914, while traveling along the Volga, Bunin learned about the beginning of the First World War. The writer always remained her determined opponent. The elder brother Yuli Alekseevich saw in these events the beginning of the collapse of the state foundations of Russia. He predicted \"Well, it's the end of us! Russia's war for Serbia, and then the revolution in Russia. The end of our entire former life!\" Soon this prophecy began to come true...
But, despite all the recent events in St. Petersburg, in 1915 the publishing house of A.F. Marx published the Complete Works of Bunin in six volumes. As the author wrote, it “includes everything that I consider more or less worthy of publication.”
Bunin's books \"John Rydalets: Stories and Poems 1912 - 1913\" (M., 1913), \"The Cup of Life: Stories 1913 - 1914\" (M., 1915), \"Mr. from San - Francisco: Works of 1915 - 1916" (M., 1916) contain the best creations of the writer of the pre-revolutionary era.
In January and February 1917, Bunin lived in Moscow. The writer perceived the February Revolution and the ongoing First World War as terrible omens of an all-Russian collapse. Bunin spent the summer and autumn of 1917 in the village, spending all his time reading newspapers and observing the growing wave of revolutionary events. On October 23, Ivan Alekseevich and his wife left for Moscow. Bunin did not accept the October Revolution decisively and categorically. He rejected any violent attempt to rebuild human society, assessing the events of October 1917 as "bloody madness" and "general madness." The writer's observations of the post-revolutionary period were reflected in his diary of 1918 - 1919, "Cursed Days." This is a bright, truthful, sharp and apt journalistic work, permeated with a fierce rejection of the revolution. This book shows unquenchable pain for Russia and bitter prophecies, expressed with melancholy and powerlessness to change anything in the ongoing chaos of the destruction of centuries-old traditions, culture, and art of Russia. On May 21, 1918, the Bunins left Moscow for Odessa. Recently in Moscow, Bunin lived in the Muromtsevs’ apartment at 26 Povarskaya Street. This is the only house preserved in Moscow where Bunin lived. From this apartment on the first floor, Ivan Alekseevich and his wife went to Odessa, leaving Moscow forever. In Odessa, Bunin continues to work, collaborates with newspapers, and meets with writers and artists. The city changed hands many times, power changed, orders changed. All these events are reliably reflected in the second part of "Cursed Days".
On January 26, 1920, on the foreign steamer "Sparta", the Bunins sailed to Constantinople, leaving Russia forever - their beloved Motherland. Bunin suffered painfully from the tragedy of separation from his homeland. The writer's state of mind and the events of those days are partly reflected in the story "The End" (1921). By March, the Bunins reached Paris, one of the centers of Russian emigration. The entire subsequent life of the writer is connected with France, not counting short trips to England, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and Estonia. The Bunins spent most of the year in the south of the country in the town of Grasse, near Nice, where they rented a dacha. The Bunins usually spent the winter months in Paris, where they had an apartment on Jacques Offenbach Street.
Bunin was not immediately able to return to creativity. In the early 1920s, books of pre-revolutionary stories by the writer were published in Paris, Prague, and Berlin. In exile, Ivan Alekseevich wrote few poems, but among them there are lyrical masterpieces: \"And flowers, and bumblebees, and grass, and ears of corn...\", \"Mikhail\", \"The bird has a nest, the beast has hole...\", \"Rooster on the church cross\". In 1929, the final book of Bunin, the poet, “Selected Poems,” was published in Paris, establishing the writer as one of the first places in Russian poetry. Mainly in exile, Bunin worked on prose, which resulted in several books of new stories: \"Rose of Jericho\" (Berlin, 1924), \"Mitya's Love\" (Paris, 1925), \"Sunstroke\" (Paris, 1927), \"Tree of God\" (Paris, 1931) and others.
It should be especially noted that all of Bunin’s works of the emigrant period, with very rare exceptions, are based on Russian material. The writer recalled his Motherland in a foreign land, its fields and villages, peasants and nobles, its nature. Bunin knew the Russian peasant and the Russian nobleman very well; he had a rich stock of observations and memories of Russia. He could not write about the West, which was alien to him, and never found a second home in France. Bunin remains faithful to the classical traditions of Russian literature and continues them in his work, trying to solve eternal questions about the meaning of life, about love, about the future of the whole world.
Bunin worked on the novel "The Life of Arsenyev" from 1927 to 1933. This is the writer’s largest work and the main book in his work. The novel "The Life of Arsenyev" seemed to combine everything that Bunin wrote about. Here are lyrical pictures of nature and philosophical prose, the life of a noble estate and a story about love. The novel was a huge success. It was immediately translated into different languages of the world. The translation of the novel was also a success. \"The Life of Arsenyev\" is a novel - a reflection on the bygone Russia, with which Bunin's entire creativity and all his thoughts are connected. This is not the writer’s autobiography, as many critics believed, which infuriated Bunin. Ivan Alekseevich argued that “every work of any writer is autobiographical to one degree or another. If a writer does not put part of his soul, his thoughts, his heart into his work, then he is not a creator... - True, and autobiographical is something must be understood not as the use of one’s past as the outline of a work, but, namely, as the use of one’s own, unique to me, vision of the world and one’s own thoughts, reflections and experiences evoked in connection with this."
On November 9, 1933, it arrived from Stockholm; news of the Nobel Prize being awarded to Bunin. Ivan Alekseevich was nominated for the Nobel Prize back in 1923, then again in 1926, and since 1930 his candidacy has been considered annually. Bunin was the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize. This was global recognition of the talent of Ivan Bunin and Russian literature in general.
The Nobel Prize was awarded on December 10, 1933 in Stockholm. Bunin said in an interview that he received this prize possibly for a body of work: “I think, however, that the Swedish Academy wanted to crown my last novel, “The Life of Arsenyev.” In the Nobel diploma, made especially for Bunin in the Russian style, it was It is written that the prize was awarded "for artistic excellence, thanks to which he continued the traditions of Russian classics in lyrical prose" (translated from Swedish).
Bunin distributed about half of the prize he received to those in need. He gave Kuprin only five thousand francs at once. Sometimes money was given to complete strangers. Bunin told Segodya newspaper correspondent P. Pilsky, “As soon as I received the prize, I had to give away about 120,000 francs. Yes, I don’t know how to handle money at all. Now it’s especially difficult.” As a result, the prize dried up quickly, and it was necessary to help Bunin himself. In 1934 - 1936 in Berlin, the publishing house "Petropolis" published the Collected Works of Bunin in 11 volumes. In preparing this building, Bunin carefully corrected everything previously written, mainly mercilessly abbreviating it. In general, Ivan Alekseevich always took a very demanding approach to each new publication and tried to improve his prose and poetry every time. This collection of works summed up Bunin's literary activity for almost fifty years.
In September 1939, the first salvos of the Second World War rang out. Bunin condemned the advancing fascism even before the outbreak of hostilities. The Bunins spent the war years in Grasse at the Villa Jeannette. M. Stepun and G. Kuznetsova, L. Zurov also lived with them, and A. Bakhrakh lived for some time. Ivan Alekseevich greeted the news of the start of the war between Germany and Russia with particular pain and excitement. Under pain of death, Bunin listened to Russian radio and noted the situation at the front on the map. During the war, the Bunins lived in terrible beggarly conditions and went hungry. Bunin greeted Russia's victory over fascism with great joy.
Despite all the hardships and hardships of the war, Bunin continues to work. During the war, he wrote a whole book of stories under the general title "Dark Alleys" (first complete edition - Paris, 1946). Bunin wrote: \"All the stories in this book are only about love, about its \"dark\" and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys\"~. The book "Dark Alleys" is 38 stories about love in its various manifestations. In this brilliant creation, Bunin appears as an excellent stylist and poet. Bunin "considered this book the most perfect in skill." Ivan Alekseevich considered “Clean Monday” to be the best of the stories in the collection; he wrote about it like this: “I thank God that he gave me the opportunity to write “Clean Monday”.
In the post-war years, Bunin followed literature in Soviet Russia with interest and spoke enthusiastically about the work of K. G. Paustovsky and A. T. Tvardovsky. Ivan Alekseevich wrote about A. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin” in a letter to N. Teleshov: a. I (the reader, as you know, is picky and demanding) am completely delighted with his talent - this is a truly rare book: what freedom, what wonderful prowess, what accuracy, precision in everything and what an extraordinary folk, soldier's language - not a hitch, not a single false, ready-made, that is, literary - vulgar word! It is possible that he will remain the author of only one such book, will begin to repeat himself, write worse, but even this can be forgiven for "Terkin."
After the war, Bunin met more than once in Paris with K. Simonov, who invited the writer to return to his homeland. At first there were hesitations, but in the end, Bunin abandoned this idea. He imagined the situation in Soviet Russia and knew very well that he would not be able to work under orders from above and also would not hide the truth. this and knew perfectly well that he would not be able to work on orders from above and would also not hide the truth. This is probably why, and maybe for some other reasons, Bunin never returned to Russia, suffering all his life due to separation from his homeland.
I. Bunin's circle of friends and acquaintances was large. Ivan Alekseevich always tried to help young writers, gave them advice, corrected their poems and prose. He did not shy away from youth, but, on the contrary, carefully observed the new generation of poets and prose writers. Bunin was rooting for the future of Russian literature. The writer himself had young people living in his house. This is the already mentioned writer Leonid Zurov, whom Bunin wrote out to live with him for a while until he got a job, but Zurov remained to live with Bunin. The young writer Galina Kuznetsova, the journalist Alexander Bakhrakh, and the writer Nikolai Roshchin lived for some time. Often young writers who knew I. Bunin, and even those who had not met him, considered it an honor to give Ivan Alekseevich their books with dedicatory inscriptions, in which they expressed their deep respect for the writer and admiration for his talent.
Bunin was familiar with many famous writers of the Russian emigration. Bunin's closest circle included G.V. Adamovich, B.K. Zaitsev, M.A. Aldanov, N.A. Teffi, F. Stepun and many others.
In Paris in 1950, Bunin published the book "Memoirs", in which he openly wrote about his contemporaries, without embellishing anything, and expressed his thoughts about them in poisonously sharp assessments. Therefore, some essays from this book were not published for a long time. Bunin was more than once reproached for being too critical of some writers (Gorky, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, etc.). We will not justify or condemn the writer here, but only one thing should be said: Bunin was always honest, fair and principled and never made any compromises. And when Bunin saw lies, falsehood, hypocrisy, meanness, deceit, hypocrisy - no matter who it came from - he openly spoke about it, because he could not tolerate these human qualities.
At the end of his life, Bunin worked hard on a book about Chekhov. This work proceeded gradually for many years; the writer collected a lot of valuable biographical and critical material. But he did not have time to complete the book. The unfinished manuscript was prepared for printing by Vera Nikolaevna. The book "About Chekhov" was published in New York in 1955; it contains valuable information about the brilliant Russian writer, Bunin's friend - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.
Ivan Alekseevich wanted to write a book about M. Yu. Lermontov, but did not have time to realize this intention. M. A. Aldanov recalls his conversation with Bunin three days before the death of the writer: “I always thought that our greatest poet was Pushkin,” said Bunin, “no, it’s Lermontov! It’s simply impossible to imagine to what height this the man would have risen if he had not died at the age of twenty-seven." Ivan Alekseevich recalled Lermontov’s poems, accompanying them with his assessment: “How extraordinary! Neither Pushkin nor anyone else! Amazing, there is no other word.” The life of the great writer ended in a foreign land. I. A. Bunin died on November 8, 1953 in Paris, and was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint. - Genevieve de Bois near Paris.
In the final version, the story "Bernard" (1952), whose hero remarked before his death: "I think I was a good sailor," ended with the author's words: "It seems to me that I, as an artist, have earned the right to say about to myself, in my last days, something similar to what Bernard said while dying."
I. Bunin bequeathed to us to treat the Word with caution and care, he called for preserving it, having written back in January 1915, when a terrible world war was going on, a deep and noble poem "The Word", which still sounds just as relevant; So let’s listen to the great master of words:
The tombs, mummies and bones are silent, -
Only the word is given life
From ancient darkness, on the world graveyard,
Only the Letters sound.
And we have no other property!
Know how to take care
At least to the best of my ability, in days of anger and suffering,
Our immortal gift is speech.
Take Bunin out of Russian literature, and it will fade, lose its living rainbow shine and starry radiance, his lonely wandering soul... M. Gorky.
The literary fate of Ivan Bunin was extremely happy, although his literary fame, which only strengthened over the years, never reached the popularity that Maxim Gorky or Leonid Andreev had at the beginning of the century. He received recognition first of all as a poet (Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy in 1903 for the poem “Falling Leaves and translation of “The Song of Haywata.” Second Pushkin Prize in 1909 and election as an honorary academician). However, Bunin declared himself as a poet at a time when there was a reassessment of values in Russian literature and a fundamentally new direction appeared - symbolism. You could accept him or reject him, be with him or against him... Of all the major Russian poets, only Bunin went against him. He turned out to be the only new realist in Russian poetry at the beginning of our century.
If at the turn of the century landscape lyrics were most characteristic of Bunin’s poetry, then Bunin increasingly turned to philosophical lyrics. The poet’s personality expands extraordinarily, acquires the ability of the most bizarre transformations, and finds an element of “all-humanity.” Life for Ivan Alekseevich is a journey through memories, and not only of individuals, but also memories of a family, a class, and humanity. Emigration became a truly tragic milestone in the biography of Bunin, who broke forever with his native Russian land, to which he, like few others, owed his wonderful gift and to which he, like few others, was attached “with love to the point of heartache.” Beyond this border there was not only a premature and inevitable decline in his creative power, but also his literary name itself suffered a certain moral damage and was covered with duckweed of oblivion, although he lived for a long time and wrote a lot. Bunin's originality is revealed in his love lyrics. Belonging to the twentieth century in its emotional structure, it is tragic, it contains a challenge and protest against the imperfection of the world and its very foundations, a dispute with nature and eternity in the demand for an ideal, uncompromising feeling. Features of Bunin in the works of 1910, in which, according to the writer himself, he was occupied with “the soul of the Russian man in a deep sense, the image of the features of the Slav’s psyche.” He is attracted by the theme of catastrophism, affecting both the general purpose of man and the possibility of happiness and love. He is especially attracted to people who have been knocked out of their usual rut, who have experienced an internal fracture, a catastrophe, even to the point of abandonment of their “I” (“Chang’s Dreams”, “The Grammar of Love”, “Brothers”).
Sometimes, under the influence of a particularly difficult feeling of separation from his homeland, Bunin came to a real condensation of time, which turned into a cloud, from where there were illuminating lightning, although the horizon remained bleak. But the condensation of time did not always lead to darkness. On the contrary, we must repeat this, Bunin began to see, looking for hope and support in Russia, which he had pushed aside.
There was one problem that Bunin not only was not afraid of, but, on the contrary, went towards it with all his soul. He had been busy with her for a long time, and neither war nor revolution could shake his attachment to her - we are talking about love.
Here, in a field full of unexpressed shades and ambiguities, his gift found worthy use. He described love in all its states (and in emigration even more closely, more concentrated), he knew how to find it even where it does not yet exist, in anticipation, and where it is barely a glimmer and will never come true (“Old Port”, 1927. ) and where she languishes unrecognized (“Ida”, 1925) or in amazement does not discover her past, subject to destructive time (“In the Night Sea”, 1923). All this was grasped in new details that had never been given to anyone and became fresh, today’s for any time. Love in Bunin’s depiction amazes not only with the power of artistic ingenuity, but also with its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man.
Bunin's concept of love is tragic. Moments of love, according to Bunin, become the pinnacle of a person’s life. Only by loving can a person truly feel another person, only feeling justifies high demands on himself and his neighbor, only a lover is able to overcome his selfishness. The state of love is not fruitless for Bunin’s heroes; it elevates souls. One example of an extraordinary interpretation of the theme of love is the story “Dreams of Chang” (1916). The story is written in the form of a dog's memories. The dog feels the inner devastation of the captain, his master. The image of “distant hard-working people” (Germans) appears in the story. Based on a comparison with their way of life, the writer talks about possible ways of human happiness:
1. Labor to live and reproduce without experiencing the fullness of life;
2. Endless love, which is hardly worth devoting yourself to, since there is always the possibility of betrayal;
3. The path of eternal thirst, search, in which, however, according to Bunin, there is also no happiness. The plot of the story seems to oppose the mood of the hero. Through real facts, a dog’s faithful memory breaks through, when there was peace in the soul, when the captain and the dog were happy. Moments of happiness are highlighted. Chang carries the idea of loyalty and gratitude. This, according to the writer, is the meaning of life that a person is looking for.
From his youth, the poet lives in the world of the sweetest memories - both his childhood memories, still overshadowed by the “old linden trees”, still cherished by the remnants of the former landowner's contentment, and the memories of his family and his entire environment about this past contentment and beauty, beauty and harmony of life. Many years later, already in exile, Bunin forgets that the collapse of the beloved world of the Russian landowner estate took place before his eyes, long before the October Revolution
and the Bolsheviks, to whom he addresses his accusations of destroying “the beauty of the earth”, of trampling on the ancestral shrines of his childhood and his memory. Bunin's images of peasants and peasant women are endowed with such individual features that we, as only happens when we come into contact with real art, forget that these are literary characters, the fruit of the author's imagination. Regarding the people of the peasant world in Bunin's pre-revolutionary village things, all the artist's sympathies and genuine sympathy are on the side of the poor, exhausted by hopeless poverty, hunger (almost all of his village heroes, by the way, are constantly hungry, dreaming of food - a piece of bread, an onion, potatoes with salt), humiliation from those in power or capital. In them, he is especially touched by humility in fate, patience and stoicism in all the trials of hunger and cold, moral purity, faith in God, and simple-minded regrets about the past. Bunin sincerely loves his village heroes, people oppressed by the “need,” downtrodden, muzzled, but retaining their original resignation, humility, innate sense of the beauty of the earth, love of life, kindness, unpretentiousness. Bunin loves to portray old and old people who are close to him with the memory of the past, which they tend to see more on the good side, forgetting about everything bad and cruel, loved ones and their spiritual mood, sense of nature, way of speech, much more poetic than that of young people their urban swagger, irreverence and cynicism. Bunin’s sensitivity and acuteness of perception of the processes taking place in the village on the eve, during and after the revolution of 1905, perhaps, is nowhere as clear as in the main work of his “village cycle” - the story “Village”. Death is another constant motif of Bunin's poetry. In the lyrical hero of Ivan Alekseevich, the fear of death is strong, however, in the face of death, many feel inner spiritual enlightenment, come to terms with the end, and do not want to disturb their loved ones with their death (“Cricket”, “Grass”). Death in Bunin's works is an important part that helps to understand the meaning of life and how dear it is. The hero begins to think that a lot could have been avoided or forgiven at some points, but it’s too late. A person remembers God when the end has come and begins to pray, but this is not comparable to his sins. In the works of Ivan Alekseevich there are very often moments of prayer. This suggests that Bunin was a believer, since he shows such details that, in my opinion, embellishes the works.
But in Bunin’s works there is a forced, tragic death. A person takes on sin just to escape from this life. For a person to commit suicide, something incredible must happen to him. In Bunin, for example, this is unrequited love or a difficult separation that the hero cannot survive. (“Mitya’s Love”). Bunin is characterized by a special way of depicting the phenomena of the world and the spiritual experiences of man by contrasting them with each other. Ivan Alekseevich, comparing man and nature, highlights the hero’s mood, and nature helps convey these feelings and states. This brings some kind of liveliness to the works, gives brightness. Bunin fell in love with nature before himself, before people, as he admitted in some early poems, for example, “Beyond the river, the meadows turned green...”
Bunin's detail is characteristic, covering the appearance of an object in color, taste, touch, with its colors, shapes and smells. Reading Bunin’s lines, we seem to inhale “the smell of honey and autumn freshness”, “the smell of melted roofs”, “fresh wood”, hot stoves, wind (“Autumn wind, the smell of salt...”), “...the rye aroma of straw and chaff, “glorious the smell of books” and even the “smell” of history itself. (“The grass smells wild, the smell of ancient times”...). In a lyrical and philosophical vein, Bunin’s works contain the following problems: the role of time in human life; about the individual’s attitude towards death; about the meaning of love. Without pretending to solve social problems in his works, Bunin posed them.
In addition to nature, in Bunin’s work there is another higher authority - memory, that is, a special form of time, a certain form of responsibility for the past. This is the memory of an individual about a past life, the memory of a nation, a people about their roots, about antiquity, the memory of humanity about the past, about history. All these types of “memory” permeate the images of Bunin’s works and constitute their artistic structure. The artist tries to present the Russian character in its endless diversity, drawing ever new individual “variants” of national psychology. In his mind, Rus' arose, which came from very far away, from antiquity - that which acted as a fool, acted like a fool, grieved and was silent for a long time, suffered and became embittered from misfortunes, went to the aid of other peoples, believed in the unspeakable, lofty, could despise wealth, honors and easy to meet death. The world that surrounded Bunin from birth, filled him with dear and unique impressions, no longer seemed to belong only to him - it was already widely open and established in art by artists who had previously brought up Bunin in this world. Bunin could only continue them, develop the great skill of his predecessors to the extreme and subtlest perfection in details, particulars and shades. On this path, a lesser talent than Bunin's almost inevitably had to become sugar-coated and refined to the point of formalism. Bunin managed to say his word, which was not heard in literature by repeating the words spoken before him about his native land, about the people who lived on it, about the time, which, however, could not but be different for him in comparison with the time reflected in his works his teachers in literature. Bunin's indisputable and enduring artistic merit, first of all, is in his development and bringing to high perfection of the purely Russian genre of short story or short story, which has received worldwide recognition, that free and unusually capacious composition that avoids strict contouring of the plot, arises as if directly from the life observed by the artist phenomenon or character and most often does not have a “closed” ending, ending the complete resolution of the issue or problem raised. Having arisen from living life, of course, transformed and generalized by the creative thought of the artist, these works of Russian prose in their endings tend, as it were, to close with the same reality from which they came and dissolve in it, leaving the reader wide scope for their mental continuation, for further thinking, “further investigation” of the human destinies, ideas and questions raised in them. Perhaps the origin of this genre can be traced from a great depth in time, but its closest classical image is, of course, “Notes of a Hunter.” In its most developed form, this Russian form is associated with the name of Chekhov, one of Bunin’s three “gods” in literature (the first two are Pushkin and Tolstoy). Bunin, like Chekhov, in his stories and tales captivates readers by means other than external entertainment, the “mystery” of the situation, and the deliberate exclusivity of the characters. He suddenly attracts our attention to something that seems completely ordinary, accessible to the everyday experience of our lives, something that we have passed by so many times without stopping or being surprised, and would never have noticed for ourselves without his, the artist’s, hint. And this hint does not humiliate us at all - it comes in the form of our own discovery, joint with the artist. Bunin’s ideal in the past was the time of flourishing of noble culture, the stability of noble estate life, which, behind the haze of time, seemed to have lost the character of cruelty, inhumanity of serf relations, on which all the beauty, all the poetry of that time rested. But no matter how much he loved that era, no matter how much he wanted to be born and live his life in it, being its flesh and blood, its loving son and singer, as an artist he could not get by with this world of sweet dreams alone. He belonged to his time with its ugliness, disharmony and discomfort, and few people were given such vigilance for the real features of reality, which irrevocably destroys all the beauties of the world, infinitely dear to him according to cherished family traditions and cultural models. Of all the values of that passing world, the beauty of nature remained, less noticeable than social life, changing over time and the repetition of its phenomena creating the illusion of “eternity” and impermanence, at least of this joy of life. Hence - a particularly heightened sense of nature and the greatest skill in depicting it in the poetry of Ivan Alekseevich. I. A. Bunin makes his readers, regardless of where they were born and raised, as if they were his fellow countrymen, natives of his native places with their grain fields, blue chernozem mud of spring and autumn and white, thick dust of summer steppe roads, with ravines , overgrown with oak trees, with steppe, wind-damaged willows (willows) along the rows and village streets, with birch and linden alleys of estates, with grassy groves in the fields and quiet meadow rivers. His descriptions of the seasons with all the elusive shades of light at the junctions of day and night, at morning and evening dawns, in the garden, on a village street and in a field have a special charm. When he takes us out into an early spring lightly frosty morning in the courtyard of a provincial steppe estate, where the ice crunches, stretched over yesterday's puddles, or into an open field, where young rye with silver-matte tints walks from end to end, or into a sad, thinned and blackened an autumn garden full of the smells of wet leaves and stale apples, or in a smoky, swirling night blizzard along a road studded with disheveled straw poles - all this acquires for us the naturalness and poignancy of personally experienced moments, the aching sweetness of personal memories. Like music, none of the most delightful and exciting natural phenomena is assimilated by us, does not enter our soul the first time, until it is revealed to us again, and becomes a memory. If we are touched by the delicate needle-like green of spring grass, or the cuckoo and nightingale heard for the first time this year, or the thin and sad crowing of young cockerels in early autumn; if we smile blissfully and bewilderedly, inhaling the smell of bird cherry blossoming in the May cold; if the echo of a distant song in an evening summer field interrupts the order of our usual worries and thoughts, it means that all this does not come to us for the first time and evokes in our soul memories that have infinite value for us and the sweetness of a brief return to our childhood. Actually, with this ability for such instant, but memorable experiences, a person begins with his ability to love life and people, for his native land and selfless readiness to do something necessary and good for them. Bunin is not just a master of unusually accurate and subtle captures of nature. He is a great expert on the “mechanism” of human memory, at any time of the year and at any age, powerfully evoking in our soul hours and moments that have sunk into oblivion, giving them new and new repeated existence, and thereby allowing us to embrace our life on earth in its fullness and integrity, and not feel it only as a quick, traceless and irrevocable run through years and decades. In terms of colors, sounds and smells, “all that,” in the words of Ivan Alekseevich, “sensual, material, from which the world is created,” the literature preceding and contemporary to him did not touch upon the subtlest and most striking details, details, shades like his . In his old age, Bunin recalled in his thoroughly autobiographical “Life of Arsenyev”: “... my vision was such that I saw all seven stars in the Pleiades, I heard the whistle of a marmot a mile away in the evening field, I got drunk, smelling the smell of lily of the valley or an old book.” His truly “external senses” as a means of penetrating comprehension of the sensory world were phenomenal from birth, but also unusually developed from a young age through constant exercise for purely artistic purposes. To distinguish “the smell of dewy burdock from the smell of damp grass” is not given to everyone who was born, and grew up, and lived his life among these burdocks and this grass, but, having heard about such a distinction, he will immediately agree that it is accurate and he himself remembers .
It would be worth talking about smells in the poetry and prose of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin separately and in detail - they play an exceptional role among his other means of recognizing and depicting the world, place and time, social affiliation and character of the people depicted. The exceptionally “fragrant”, elegiacally thoughtful story “Antonov Apples” was, as it were, directly inspired by the author by the smell of these fruits of the autumn garden, lying in a desk drawer in an office with windows onto a noisy city street. It is full of those apple smells of “honey and autumn freshness” and the poetry of farewell to the past, from where you can only hear the old song of the inhabitants of the steppe provincial estates who had been having fun “with their last money.” In addition to the smells that densely fill all his works, inherent in the seasons, the village cycle of field and other work, smells familiar to us from the descriptions of others - melted snow, spring water, flowers, grass, foliage, arable land, hay, grain, vegetable gardens, etc. similar - Bunin hears and remembers many more smells characteristic, so to speak, of historical time, era. These are the smells of tumbleweed brooms that were used to clean dresses in the old days; mold and dampness of an unheated manor house; chicken hut; sulfur matches and shag; stinking water from a water truck; vanilla and matting in the shops of the trading village; wax and cheap incense; coal smoke in the grainy steppe expanses crossed by the railway... And beyond the exit from this rural and estate world into cities, capitals, foreign countries and distant exotic seas and lands - there are many other striking and memorable smells. This side of Bunin’s expressiveness, which imparts a special naturalness and noticeability to everything the writer talks about - on all levels, from the subtly lyrical to the caustic sarcastic - has firmly taken root and is developing in our modern literature - among writers very different in nature and talent. Bunin, as it may be, none of the Russian writers, excluding, of course, L. Tolstoy, knows the nature of his Substeppe, sees, hears, and smells in all the elusive transitions and changes of the seasons the garden, and the field, and the pond, and the river, and a forest, and a ravine overgrown with oak and hazel bushes, and a country road, and an old highway, depopulated with the construction of a cast iron road. Bunin is extremely specific and precise in the details and details of his description. He will never say, for example, like some modern writers, that someone sat down or lay down to rest under a tree - he will certainly name this tree, like the bird whose voice or sound of flight is heard in the story. He knows all the herbs, flowers, field and garden; he is, by the way, a great connoisseur of horses and often gives short, memorable characteristics to their characteristics, beauty, and temper. All this gives his prose, and even his poetry, a particularly captivating character of non-fiction, authenticity, and the unfading value of an artistic testimony about the land on which he walked. But, of course, if his visual capabilities were limited only to these, even the most accurate and artistic paintings and strokes, his meaning would be far from what he acquired in Russian literature. No one can replace a person with his joys and sufferings as an object of depiction in art - no charm of the objective-sensory world alone, no “beauties of nature” in themselves. The enduring artistic value of “Notes of a Hunter” is that the author in them talks least of all about hunting matters itself and is not limited to descriptions of nature. Most often, only upon returning from a hunt - at an overnight stop - or on the way to a hunt, those meetings of the “hunter” and exciting stories from folk life that have become such an irreplaceable artistic document of an entire era take place. From the hunting stories and essays of another of our writers, we learn nothing or almost nothing about the life and work of villages or towns in the vicinity of which he hunts and conducts his subtle phenological observations on the day and night life of the forest and its inhabitants, on the habits of his dogs, etc. .P. Bunin knew all kinds of hunting very well, from childhood, by blood, so to speak, but he was not such an inveterate hunter. He rarely stays in the forest or field, except when he rides somewhere on horseback or wanders on foot - with or without a gun - in the days of thoughts and confusion that overcome him. He is drawn to an abandoned estate, and to a village street, and to any hut, and to a village shop, and to a forge, and to a mill, and to a fair, and to mow with the peasants, and to the threshing floor where the thresher works, and to an inn - in a word, where people swarm, sing and cry, scold and argue, drink and eat, celebrate weddings and funerals - the motley, agitated life of the late post-reform era. About Bunin’s deep, close, not third-hand knowledge of this life, one can say approximately the same as about his knowledge by ear, smell and eye of every plant and flowering, frosts and snowstorms, spring thaws and summer heat. Literature did not touch upon such details, such particulars of people’s life, perhaps considering them to already lie outside the boundaries of art. Bunin, like few people before him in our literature, knows the life, the needs, everyday calculations and dreams of the small landed gentleman, often already on the verge of real poverty, and the “starving peasant,” and the growing fat, gaining strength of the rural trader, and a priest with a clergyman, and a tradesman, a buyer or tenant, wandering around the villages in hopes of “turnover,” and a poor teacher, and village authorities, mowers. He shows the life, housing, food and clothing, habits and habits of all this motley people in a visual manner, sometimes close to naturalism, but like a true artist he always knows the edge, the limit - he does not have details for the sake of details, they always serve as the basis for music, mood and thoughts of the story. The first sign of real good prose is when you want to read it out loud, like poetry, in a circle of friends or relatives, experts or, conversely, people with little experience - the reaction of such listeners is sometimes especially revealing. We can only regret that we so rarely read aloud a story or at least a page from a story, novel, or novel by our writers and poets, whether with our family or at a friendly party. This is somehow not even accepted among us. Bunin entered Russian literature with his music of prose writing, which cannot be confused with anyone else. What helped him so clearly define his rhythmic prose was the fact that he was also a poet-verse writer, who spent his entire life writing poetry along with prose and translating Western poetry. But this is not a necessary condition. For Bunin, an excellent poet, poetry still occupies a subordinate position. Ivan Alekseevich's poems, with their strict traditional form, are densely equipped with elements characteristic of his prose: lively intonations of folk speech, realistic details of description of nature, life of the village and small estate, unusual for poetry of that time. In them one can find such prosaic details, unthinkable according to the canons of “high poetry”, such as basins placed under a drop from the ceiling in a neglected manor house with a leaky roof (“The Butler”) or “shreds of wool and droppings” at the site of wolf weddings in the winter steppe (“Peregrine Falcon”). However, if in general prose and poetry come from the two main sources of any real art - from the impressions of living life and the experience of art itself, then we can say about Bunin’s poems that they more clearly than his prose bear the imprint of the traditional classical form. Pushkin, Lermontov and other Russian poets came to Bunin not through school or even through the book itself, but were perceived and absorbed in early childhood, perhaps even before mastering literacy from the poetic atmosphere of their home. They found him in the nursery, they were family shrines. Poetry was part of the living reality of childhood, influencing the soul of the child, determining his inclinations and aesthetic obstacles that were dear to him throughout his life. The images of poetry had for him the same personal, intimate value of childhood impressions as the nature around him and all the “discoveries of the world.” Made at this age. Only the earliest Bunin was touched by the influence of contemporary poetry. Subsequently, he tightly fenced himself off from all sorts of fashionable fads in poetry, adhering to the examples of Pushkin and Lermontov, Baratynsky and Tyutchev, as well as Fet and partly Polonsky, but always remaining original. Bunin’s poetry, which for a long time seemed to his literary contemporaries only to be traditional and even “conservative” in form, lives and resounds, having outlived a great many poems that once looked like sensational “discoveries” and declared itself noisy to the point of obscenity. The most resilient part of Bunin’s poetic poetry, as in his prose, is the lyricism of his native places, the motifs of village and estate life, and the subtle painting of nature. Bunin's language is a language developed on the basis of the Oryol-Kursk dialect, developed and consecrated in Russian literature by a whole constellation of writers - natives of these places. This language does not strike us as unusual in sound - even local words and entire expressions appear in it already legitimized, as if inherent in Russian literary speech from time immemorial. Local words, used with subtle skill and unmistakable tact, give Bunin’s poetry and prose an exceptional earthly charm and, as it were, protect them from “literature” - any rhymed or unrhymed writing, devoid of the warm blood of a living folk language. “Breaking downpour” - this epithet is strange to an unaccustomed ear, but there is so much expressive power in it, giving an almost physical impression of a sudden summer downpour, which suddenly pours down to the ground in torrents as if from the broken sky beneath it. “Foliage of Murugiya” - for most readers, seems to require an explanatory footnote - what color is Murugiya? But from the complete picture painted in the small beautiful poem “Zazimok”, and without explanation, it is obvious that we are talking about the late, hard, brownish foliage of the steppe oak forests, captured by frost, driven by the fierce wind of the winter. In the same way, the rare, almost unknown in literary use, the word “gludki” does not need any explanation when we meet it in its place: “Frozen gludki flew with a thud from under the forged hooves into the front of the sleigh.” But the word is so sonorous, weighty and figurative - without it the description of the winter road would be much poorer. It is interesting that in the Ceylon story “Brothers” Bunin calls the native pirogue too much in Russian - oak, and, however, this does not spoil the color of the tropical island coast: both pirogue and oak are a boat dug out of a single trunk, and this is just a word as if reminding us that this is a story so far in content from the Oryol-Kursk land, writes the Russian writer. In “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” this singer of the Russian steppe, an incomparable master of depicting his native nature, freely and confidently leads the reader through the comfortable salons, dance halls and bars of an ocean-going steamer - at that time a miracle of technology. He descends with him to “the gloomy and sultry depths of the underworld... the underwater womb of the steamship, where gigantic furnaces cackled dully, devouring with their red-hot throats piles of coal, with a roar thrown into them, drenched in caustic, dirty sweat and waist-deep naked people, crimson from the flames... " If you try to replace this common, almost vulgar word “giggle” with the correct “guffaw” - and the hellish tension of these boilers immediately weakens, the terrifying power of the flame, from which the underwater part of the hull of a giant steamship shudders, the power of the remaining words about half-naked people loading the furnaces is immediately lost coal... And that word was taken, again, from the reserves of childhood and youth memory, from the world from which the artist emerged on his distant voyages. This memory of native speech, pictures of nature and rural life and the abyss of all sorts of details of Bunin’s past life was amazingly preserved during the several decades he spent outside his homeland.
One cannot help but love and appreciate Bunin for his strict craftsmanship, for the discipline of his lines - not a single hollow or sagging line - each one is like a string - for his work that leaves no traces of labor on his pages.
In the sense of school, in the sense of the culture of writing in poetry and prose, it is impossible for a young Russian, and not only Russian, writer to pass Bunin in the ranks of masters whose experience is simply mandatory for every writer. No matter how far this young writer is from Bunin in terms of his inclinations and prospects for the development of his gift, in his initial years he must pass Bunin. This will teach him a constant sense of the great value of his native speech, the ability to select necessary and irreplaceable words, the habit of making do with a small number of them to achieve the greatest expressiveness - in short, respect for the work he has taken on, a task that requires constant concentration, and respect for those for the sake of whom you do this business - to the reader.
Bunin is, in time, the last of the classics of Russian literature, whose experience we have no right to forget if we do not want to consciously reduce the demands on skill, to cultivate the dullness, lack of language and impersonality of our prose and poetry. Bunin's pen is the closest example to us in time of the artist's ascetic sophistication, the noble conciseness of Russian literary writing, clarity and high simplicity, alien to the petty tricks of form for the sake of form itself. Bunin is a strict and serious artist, focused on his favorite motives and thoughts, each time solving a certain problem for himself, and not coming to the reader with ready-made and simplified constructions of such a life. A focused and deeply thinking artist, even if he talks about seemingly insignificant, everyday and ordinary subjects, such an artist has the right to count on concentration and even some tension, at least at first, on the part of the reader. But this can be considered a necessary condition for a fruitful “contact” between the reader and the writer, meaning, of course, not only Bunin, but every true artist. Features of Bunin's creativity are: the use in his works of ancient, and not entirely clear, words to us. Bunin uses sharp verbs to describe the liveliness of nature. I saw that Bunin put his soul into his work. He focused his thoughts and feelings on the moments he had experienced. Ivan Alekseevich described small details in detail, thanks to this, Bunin’s work is always open to his readers.
The landscape in Bunin's works very accurately shows the meaning of the theme of the work, since nature experiences together with the heroes.
1870 , October 10 (22) - born in Voronezh into the old impoverished noble family of the Bunins. He spent his childhood on the Butyrki farm in the Oryol province.
1881 - enters the Yeletsk gymnasium, but, without completing four classes, continues his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius, an exiled Narodnaya Volya member.
1887 – the first poems “The Village Beggar” and “Over the Grave of Nadson” are published in the patriotic newspaper “Rodina”.
1889 - moves to Oryol, begins working as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, and newspaper reporter.
1890 – Bunin, having independently studied English, translates G. Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”
1891 – the collection “Poems of 1887-1891” is published in Orel.
1892
– Bunin, together with his common-law wife V.V. Pashchenko, moves to Poltava, where he serves in the city land administration. Articles, essays, and stories by Bunin appear in the local newspaper.
In 1892–94 Bunin's poems and stories begin to be published in metropolitan magazines.
1893–1894 – Bunin is greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, who is perceived by him as a “demigod”, the highest embodiment of artistic power and moral dignity; The apotheosis of this attitude would later become Bunin’s religious and philosophical treatise “The Liberation of Tolstoy” (Paris, 1937).
1895 – Bunin leaves the service and leaves for St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, meets N.K. Mikhailovsky, A.P. Chekhov, K.D. Balmont, V.Ya. Bryusov, V.G. Korolenko, A.I. Kuprin etc. Initially friendly relations with Balmont and Bryusov in the early 1900s. acquired a hostile character, and until the last years of his life Bunin assessed the work and personalities of these poets extremely harshly.
1897 – publication of Bunin’s book “To the End of the World” and other stories.”
1898 - collection of poems "Under the Open Air".
1906 – acquaintance with V.N. Muromtseva (1881–1961), future wife and author of the book “The Life of Bunin”.
1907 – travel to Egypt, Syria, Palestine. The result of his trips to the East is the series of essays “Temple of the Sun” (1907–1911)
1909 – The Academy of Sciences elects Bunin as an honorary academician. During a trip to Italy, Bunin visits Gorky, who then lived on the island. Capri.
1910 - Bunin's first big work comes out, which became an event in literary and social life - the story "The Village".
1912
– the collection “Sukhodol. Tales and Stories” is published.
Subsequently, other collections were published (“John the Rydalec. Stories and Poems of 1912-1913,” 1913; “The Cup of Life. Stories of 1913-1914,” 1915; “The Gentleman from San Francisco. Works of 1915-1916.” , 1916).
1917 – Bunin is hostile to the October Revolution. Writes a diary-pamphlet “Cursed Days”.
1920 – Bunin emigrates to France. Here he is in 1927-33. working on the novel "The Life of Arsenyev".
1925–1927
– Bunin writes a regular political and literary column in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie.
In the second half of the 20s, Bunin experienced his “last love”. She became the poetess Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova.
1933
, November 9 - Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated the typical Russian character in artistic prose."
By the end of the 30s. Bunin increasingly feels the drama of the break with his homeland and avoids direct political statements about the USSR. He sharply condemns fascism in Germany and Italy.
World War 2 period– Bunin in Grasse, in the south of France. He greets victory with great joy.
Post-war period– Bunin returns to Paris. He is no longer an adamant opponent of the Soviet regime, but he also does not recognize the changes that have occurred in Russia. In Paris, Ivan Alekseevich visits the Soviet ambassador and gives an interview to the newspaper “Soviet Patriot”.
In recent years he has been living in great poverty, starving. During these years, Bunin created a cycle of short stories "Dark Alleys" (New York, 1943, in full - Paris, 1946), published a book about Leo Tolstoy ("The Liberation of Tolstoy", Paris, 1937), "Memoirs" (Paris, 1950) etc.
1953 , November 8 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin dies in Paris, becomes the first emigration writer, who in 1954 begins to be published again in his homeland.
Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870-1953) - Russian writer, poet. The first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize (1933). He spent part of his life in exile.
Life and art
Ivan Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 into an impoverished family of a noble family in Voronezh, from where the family soon moved to the Oryol province. Bunin's education at the local Yeletsk gymnasium lasted only 4 years and was terminated due to the family's inability to pay for his studies. Ivan's education was taken over by his older brother Yuli Bunin, who received a university education.
The regular appearance of poems and prose by young Ivan Bunin in periodicals began at the age of 16. Under the wing of his older brother, he worked in Kharkov and Orel as a proofreader, editor, and journalist in local publishing houses. After an unsuccessful civil marriage with Varvara Pashchenko, Bunin leaves for St. Petersburg and then to Moscow.
Confession
In Moscow, Bunin is among the famous writers of his time: L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, V. Bryusov, M. Gorky. The first recognition came to the novice author after the publication of the story “Antonov Apples” (1900).
In 1901, for the published collection of poems “Falling Leaves” and the translation of the poem “The Song of Hiawatha” by G. Longfellow, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Pushkin Prize was awarded to Bunin for the second time in 1909, along with the title of honorary academician of fine literature. Bunin's poems, which were in line with the classical Russian poetry of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet, are characterized by a special sensuality and the role of epithets.
As a translator, Bunin turned to the works of Shakespeare, Byron, Petrarch, and Heine. The writer spoke excellent English and studied Polish on his own.
Together with his third wife Vera Muromtseva, whose official marriage was concluded only in 1922 after a divorce from his second wife Anna Tsakni, Bunin travels a lot. From 1907 to 1914, the couple visited the countries of the East, Egypt, the island of Ceylon, Turkey, Romania, and Italy.
Since 1905, after the suppression of the first Russian revolution, the theme of the historical fate of Russia appears in Bunin’s prose, which is reflected in the story “The Village”. The story of the unpleasant life of the Russian village was a bold and innovative step in Russian literature. At the same time, in Bunin’s stories (“Easy Breathing,” “Klasha”), female images with hidden passions are formed.
In 1915-1916, Bunin’s stories were published, including “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” in which he discussed the doomed fate of modern civilization.
Emigration
The revolutionary events of 1917 found the Bunins in Moscow. Ivan Bunin treated the revolution as the collapse of the country. This view, revealed in his diary entries of the 1918-1920s. formed the basis of the book “Cursed Days”.
In 1918, the Bunins left for Odessa, and from there to the Balkans and Paris. Bunin spent the second half of his life in exile, dreaming of returning to his homeland, but not realizing his desire. In 1946, upon the release of a decree on granting Soviet citizenship to subjects of the Russian Empire, Bunin became eager to return to Russia, but criticism of the Soviet government of the same year against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko forced him to abandon this idea.
One of the first significant works completed abroad was the autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev” (1930), dedicated to the world of the Russian nobility. For him, in 1933, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, becoming the first Russian writer to receive such an honor. The significant sum of money Bunin received as a bonus was mostly distributed to those in need.
During the years of emigration, the central theme in Bunin’s work became the theme of love and passion. She found expression in the works “Mitya’s Love” (1925), “Sunstroke” (1927), and in the famous cycle “Dark Alleys,” which was published in 1943 in New York.
At the end of the 1920s, Bunin wrote a number of short stories - “Elephant”, “Roosters”, etc., in which he honed his literary language, trying to most succinctly express the main idea of the work.
During the period 1927-42. Galina Kuznetsova, a young girl whom Bunin introduced as his student and adopted daughter, lived with the Bunins. She had a love relationship with the writer, which the writer himself and his wife Vera experienced quite painfully. Subsequently, both women left their memories of Bunin.
Bunin lived through the years of World War II on the outskirts of Paris and closely followed events on the Russian front. He invariably rejected numerous offers from the Nazis that came to him as a famous writer.
At the end of his life, Bunin published practically nothing due to a long and serious illness. His last works were “Memoirs” (1950) and the book “About Chekhov,” which was not completed and was published after the author’s death in 1955.
Ivan Bunin died on November 8, 1953. All European and Soviet newspapers published extensive obituaries in memory of the Russian writer. He was buried in a Russian cemetery near Paris.
V.A. Meskin
The Central Russian region, Oryol region, is the birthplace of many wonderful word artists. Tyutchev, Turgenev, Leskov, Fet, Andreev, Bunin - all of them were raised by this region, which lies in the very heart of Russia.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953) was born and raised in a family that belonged to an old noble family. This is a significant fact of his biography: impoverished by the end of the 19th century. the noble nest of the Bunins lived with memories of past greatness. The family maintained the cult of ancestors and carefully preserved romantic legends about the history of the Bunin family. Is this where the nostalgic motives of the writer’s mature work for the “golden age” of Russia originate? Among Bunin's ancestors there were prominent statesmen and artists, such as, for example, the poets Anna Bunina and Vasily Zhukovsky. Was it not their creativity that aroused in the young man’s soul the desire to become a “second Pushkin”? He spoke about this desire in his declining years in the autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev” (1927-1933).
However, it was not at all immediately that he found his theme and that unique style that delighted Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Simonov, Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn, and millions of grateful readers. First there were years of apprenticeship, fascination with fashionable social and political ideas, and imitation of popular fiction writers. The young writer is driven by the desire to speak out on topical topics. In such stories as “Tanka”, “Katryuk” (1892), “To the End of the World” (1834) one can feel the influence of populist writers - the Uspensky brothers, Zlatovratsky, Levitov; The stories “At the Dacha” (1895) and “In August” (1901) were created during a period of fascination with Tolstoy’s ethical teachings. The journalistic element in them is clearly stronger than the artistic one.
Bunin made his debut as a poet, but even here he did not immediately find his theme and tone. It is difficult to imagine that it is he, the future author of the collection “Leaf Fall” (1901), for which in 1903 the Academy of Sciences awarded him the Pushkin Prize, in a poem created “under Nekrasov” - “The Village Beggar” (1886) wrote: “ You won’t see something like this in the capital: / Here one is truly exhausted by poverty! Behind iron bars in a dungeon / Such a sufferer is rarely seen.” The young poet wrote both “under Nadson” and “under Lermontov,” as, for example, in the poem “Over the grave of S.Ya. Nadson” (1887): “The poet died out in the prime of his strength, / The singer fell asleep untimely, / Death tore him from his crown / And carried him into the darkness of the grave."
It is important for the reader to be able to separate the writer’s student works from the works that became classic during Bunin’s lifetime. The writer himself, in the autobiographical story “Lika” (1933), decisively abandoned what was only a test of the pen, a “false” note.
In 1900, Bunin wrote the story “Antonov Apples,” which eclipsed much, if not all, of what the writer had done in previous years. This story contains so much of what is truly Bunin that it can serve as a kind of calling card for the artist - a classic of the 20th century. He gives a completely different sound to themes that have long been known in Russian literature.
For a long time, Bunin was considered among the social writers who, together with him, were members of the literary association "Sreda" and published collections "Knowledge", however, his vision of life conflicts is decisively different from the vision of the masters of words of this circle - Gorky, Kuprin, Serafimovich, Chirikov, Yushkevich and others. As a rule, these writers depict social problems and outline ways to solve them in the context of their time, passing biased verdicts on everything that they consider evil. Bunin can touch on the same problems, but at the same time he more often illuminates them in the context of Russian or even world history, from Christian, or rather from universal, positions. He shows the ugly sides of current life, but very rarely takes upon himself the courage to judge or blame someone .
The lack of an active authorial position in Bunin’s depiction of the forces of evil introduced a chill of alienation into relations with Gorky, who did not immediately agree to publish the stories of the “indifferent” author in “Knowledge.” At the beginning of 1901, Gorky wrote to Bryusov: “I love Bunin, but I don’t understand - how talented, handsome, like matte silver, he won’t sharpen the knife, won’t he poke it where it needs to be?” In the same year, regarding the “Epitaph”, a lyrical requiem to the departing nobility, Gorky wrote to K.P. Pyatnitsky: “Antonov apples smell good - yes! - but - they don’t smell democratic at all...”
“Antonov Apples” not only opens a new stage in Bunin’s work, but also marks the emergence of a new genre, which later conquered a large layer of Russian literature - lyrical prose. Prishvin, Paustovsky, Kazakov and many other writers worked in this genre.
In this story, as later in many others, Bunin abandons the classical type of plot, which, as a rule, is tied to specific circumstances of a particular time. The function of the plot - the core around which the living ligature of the paintings unfolds - is performed by the author's mood - a nostalgic feeling about what is irretrievably gone. The writer turns back and in the past rediscovers the world of people who, in his opinion, lived differently, more worthy. And he will remain in this conviction throughout his entire creative career. Most of the artists - his contemporaries - peered into the future, believing that there would be a victory for justice and beauty. Some of them (Zaitsev, Shmelev, Kuprin) after the catastrophic events of 1905 and 1917. They will look back with sympathy.
Attention to eternal questions, the answers to which lie beyond the current time - all this is characteristic of the author of the classic stories "The Village" (1910), "Sukhodol" (1911) and many short stories. The artist has poetic techniques in his arsenal that allow him to touch entire eras: this is either an essayistic style of presentation that gives scope and retrospectives ("Epitaph" (1900), "Pass" (1902), the mentioned "Antonov Apples"), or, when the need arises describe modernity, the method of parallel-sequential development in the narrative of several plot lines associated with different time periods (in many stories and in these stories), or a direct appeal in one’s work to the eternal themes of the sacraments of love, life, death, and then questions when and where this happened are not of fundamental importance ("Brothers" (1914), the masterpiece "Chang's Dreams" created two years later), or, finally, the technique of interspersing memories of the past into the plot of the present (the "Dark Alleys" cycle and many stories late creativity).
Bunin contrasts the dubious, speculative future with an ideal that, in his opinion, stems from the spiritual and everyday experience of the past. At the same time, he is far from a reckless idealization of the past. The artist only contrasts two main trends of the past and present. The dominant of past years, in his opinion, was creation, the dominant of present years was destruction. Of the thinkers contemporary to the writer, Vl. was very close to his position in his later articles. Soloviev. In his work “The Mystery of Progress,” the philosopher defined the nature of the illness of his contemporary society: “Modern man, in the hunt for fleeting momentary benefits and fleeting fantasies, has lost the right path of life. The thinker proposed turning back in order to lay the foundation of life from enduring spiritual values. The author of “Mr. San Francisco" (1915) could hardly object to these thoughts of Solovyov, who was, as is known, a constant opponent of his teacher, Tolstoy. Lev Nikolaevich was, in a certain sense, a “progressive,” therefore, in the direction of searching for the ideal, Solovyov was closer to Bunin.
How did it happen, why did a person lose the “right path”? All his life these questions worried Bunin, his author-narrator and his heroes more than questions about where to go and what to do. The nostalgic motive associated with the awareness of this loss will sound more and more strongly in his work, starting with “Antonov Apples”. In the work of the 10s, during the emigrant period, it reaches a tragic sound. In the still bright, although sad, narration of the story there is a mention of a beautiful and businesslike elder, “important, like a Kholmogory cow.” “A business butterfly!” the tradesman says about her, shaking his head. “Now they are being translated like this...” Here, as if a random tradesman is sad that “household butterflies” are being translated; in a few years, the author-narrator himself will scream with pain that the will to live is weakening, the strength of feeling is weakening in all classes: both the nobility ("Sukhodol", "The Last Date" (1912), "The Grammar of Love" (1915), and the peasant ("The Cheerful Yard", "Cricket" (both - 1911), "Zakhar Vorobyov" (1912), "The Last Spring", "The Last Autumn" (both - 1916). The main, according to Bunin, classes are becoming smaller - they are becoming a thing of the past once great Russia (“All of Russia is a village,” states the main character of the story “The Village”). In many of the writer’s works, a person degrades as a person, perceives everything that happens as the end of life, as its last day. The story “The Last Day” (1913) - about how a worker, on the orders of a master who has squandered the village, hangs a pack of greyhounds, the old pride and glory of the owner, receiving “a quarter for each” hanged. The story is notable not only for its expressive content; the poetics of its title are significant in the context of so many of the writer’s works.
The premonition of a catastrophe is one of the constant motifs of Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The prophecy of Andreev, Bely, Sologub, and other writers, among whom was Bunin, may seem all the more surprising since at that time the country was gaining economic and political power. Russia mastered industrialization rates unprecedented in world history and fed a quarter of Europe with its grain. Patronage flourished, and the “Russian Seasons” in Paris and London largely determined the cultural life of Western countries.
In the terrible story “The Village”, did Bunin show “all of Russia”, as they wrote about this for a long time (referring to the words of one of its characters)? Most likely, it did not even cover the entire Russian village (just as, on the other hand, Gorky did not cover it in the story “Summer” (1909), where the entire village lives in the hope of socialist changes). A huge country lived a complex life, the possibility of its rise being balanced, due to contradictions, by the possibility of a fall.
Russian artists astutely predicted the potential for collapse. And “The Village” is not a sketch from life, but first of all an image-warning of an impending catastrophe. One can only guess whether the writer listened to his inner voice or to a voice from above, or whether knowledge of the village and people simply helped.
Just as Turgenev’s heroes are tested by the author with love, so Bunin’s are tested by freedom. Having finally received what their forced ancestors dreamed of (the author presents them as strong, brave, beautiful, daring, even long-lived elders often bear the stamp of epic heroes), freedom - personal, political, economic - they cannot withstand it, they are lost. Bunin continued the theme of the dramatic disintegration of what was once a single social organism, begun by Nekrasov in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”: “The great chain broke, / It broke and sprang apart: / One end for the master, / The other for the peasant!..” At the same time, one writer looked at this process as a historical necessity, the other - as a tragedy.
In the artist’s prose there are also other people from the people - bright, kind, but internally weak, lost in the whirlpool of current events, often suppressed by the bearers of evil. Such, for example, is Zakhar from the story “Zakhar Vorobyov” - a character especially beloved by the author himself. The hero’s constant search for a place to use his remarkable strength ended in a wine shop, where he was overtaken by death, sent by an evil, envious, in the words of the hero, “small people.” This is the Young One from the "Village". Despite all the beatings and bullying, she retained her “living soul,” but an even more terrible future awaits her - she, in fact, was sold as a wife to Deniska Seroy.
Zakhar, Molodaya, old man Ivanushka from the same story, Anisya from “The Merry Yard”, the saddler Sverchok from the story of the same name, Natalya from “Sukhodol” - all these Bunin heroes seem to have gotten lost in history, born a hundred years later than they should have been should have been - they are so strikingly different from the gray, mentally deaf mass. What the author-narrator said about Zakhara is not only about him: “... in the old days, they say, there were many of these... yes, this breed is translated.”
You can believe in Buddha, Christ, Mohammed - any faith elevates a person, fills his life with a meaning higher than the search for warmth and bread. With the loss of this high meaning, a person loses his special position in the world of living nature - this is one of the initial principles of Bunin’s creativity. His “Epitaph” speaks of decades of the golden age of “peasant happiness” under the shadow of a cross outside the outskirts with an icon of the Mother of God. But then the time came for noisy cars and the cross fell. This philosophical sketch ends with an alarming question: “What will new people do to sanctify their new life?” In this work (a rare case) Bunin appears as a moralist: a person cannot remain a person if there is nothing sacred in his life.
Usually he forces the reader to come to this statement, unfolding before him pictures of the animal existence of a person, devoid of any faith and even faint bright hope. At the end of the story "The Village" there is a creepy scene of the blessing of the newlyweds. In the atmosphere of a devilish game, the imprisoned father suddenly feels that the icon seems to be burning his hands, he thinks with horror: “Now I’ll throw the image on the floor...” In the final part of “The Merry Court”, the old mother, in search of something edible, lifts the board, with which the makhotka was covered - the tablet turned out to be an icon... A defeated cross, the face of a saint cast down (into a dirty mahotka!) and, as a result, a defeated man. It seems that Bunin has no happy characters. Those who believed that happiness would come with personal freedom and material wealth, having received both, experience even greater disappointment. Thus, Tikhon Krasov ultimately sees wealth itself as a “golden cage” (“Village”). The problem of a spiritual crisis, a godless person, worried not only Bunin and not only Russian literature at that time.
At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Europe was experiencing a period that Nietzsche described as the “twilight of the gods.” The man doubted that somewhere there was He, the absolute principle, strict and fair, punishing and merciful, and most importantly, filling this life full of suffering with meaning and dictating the ethical standards of society. Abandoning God was fraught with tragedy, and it broke out. In the work of Bunin, who captured the dramatic events of Russian public and private life at the beginning of the 20th century, the tragedy of the European man of this time was refracted. The depth of Bunin's problematics is greater than it seems at first glance: the social issues that worried the writer in his works on the topic of Russia are inseparable from religious and philosophical issues.
In Europe, recognition of the greatness of man, the bearer of progress, has been increasing since the Renaissance. People found confirmation of this greatness in scientific achievements, in the transformations of nature, in the creations of artists. The works of Schopenhauer, and then Nietzsche, were logical milestones along the path of the work of human thought in this direction. And yet the cry of the “superman” singer: “God is dead” gave rise to confusion and fear. Of course, not everyone was scared. “Man-worshipper” Gorky, who believed in the triumph of the now absolutely free person, wrote to I.E. Repin: “He (man - V.M.) is everything. He even created God. ... Man is capable of endlessly improving...” (that is, on his own, without reference to the Absolute Beginning) 4. However, this optimism was shared by very few artists and thinkers.
Teachings about the life of a number of major European thinkers of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. called the "philosophy of decline." They denied movement in history, no matter how the direction of this movement was explained: they denied progress both according to Hegel and Marx. Many thinkers at the turn of the century generally denied the ability of human thinking to cognize the causality of the phenomena of the world (after doubts arose regarding the divine first cause). When God left a person’s life, so did the moral imperative that commanded that person to recognize himself as a part of the human world. It is then that the philosophy of personalism arises, which denies the importance of uniting people. Its representatives (Renouvier, Royce, James) explained the world as a system of individuals freely asserting their independence. Everything ideal, in the opinion of their predecessor Nietzsche, is born in a person and dies with him; the meaning of things, of life, is the fruit of the individual imagination of the person himself, and nothing more. The existentialist Sartre concludes that, abandoned by God, man has lost his direction: it is unknown from anywhere that good exists, that one must be honest... A terrible conclusion. A modern philosopher claims that at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. “not overcoming fear, but fear has become... one of the big themes that go beyond the narrow boundaries of philosophical interpretation” 5. The fear of hopelessness and loneliness oppresses Bunin's characters in everyday life.
A contemporary of Bunin, the singer of the passing nobility and the former greatness of Russia, was the “philosopher of decline” Spengler. Idealizing the era of Western European feudalism, he argued that eternal progress, eternal goals exist only in the heads of philistines. Spengler's work "The Decline of Europe", created during the years when Bunin was working on the Kalrian cycle of stories ("Saints", "Spring Evening", "Brothers", and later the short story "Mr. from San Francisco") had a strong resonance. Similar problems of European spiritual life occupied both contemporaries. Spengler is a supporter of the biological philosophy of history; he sees in it only the proximity and alternation of different cultures. Culture is an organism in which the laws of biology operate; it experiences a period of youth, growth, flourishing, aging and withering. In his opinion, no influence from outside or inside can stop this process. Bunin represents world history very similarly.
The author of an interesting book about Bunin, N. Kucherovsky, shows that the writer views Russia as a link in the chain of Asian civilizations (“Asia, Asia!” - the 1913 story “Dust” ends with such a cry of melancholy and despair), inscribed in the biblical “circle of existence”, and man is unable to change anything in the fateful movement of history. Indeed, the Sukhodolsky nobles are trying in vain to prevent ruin and degradation, the peasant Yegor Minaev ("The Cheerful Yard") cannot resist some mystical force that has been pushing him out of the rut of normal life all his life and, finally, forcing him to throw himself, as if unexpectedly for himself, under a train. “In the past there was the great biblical East with its great peoples and civilizations, in the present all this has become a “dead sea” of life, frozen in anticipation of its destined future. In the past there was a great Russia with its noble culture and agricultural people, in the present this Asian country... is doomed... ("He had a mysterious attraction to Asia..." said Bunin's friend, the writer Zaitsev.) Consistent liberation of the peasants from the landowner, the landowner from the peasants, the entire people from God, from moral responsibility - these, according to Bunin, are the reasons for the disastrous fall of the country, but the reasons themselves are caused by the rotation of the “circle of being”, i.e. they are consequences of the meta-law. This is how the German philosopher and the Russian artist simultaneously come to similar views on history.
Bunin had common points in the direction of thinking with his other famous contemporary, Spengler's follower, Toynbee. The philosophical and historical works of this English scientist became famous in the late 20s - 30s. His theory of “local civilizations” (each time in a new drama) proceeds from the fact that each culture is based on a “creative elite”, its rise and decline are determined both by the internal state of the very top of society and by the ability of the “inert masses” to imitate, follow the elite driving force. The ideas that worried Toynbee clearly have points of contact with the view of history expressed a decade earlier by the author of Sukhodol and many stories about the rise and decline of noble culture. These examples already show that Bunin was sensitive not only to the mindset of his people (his researchers have said a lot about this), but also to the mindset of European peoples.
As the writer's talent develops, the focus is increasingly on themes - man and history, man and freedom. Freedom, according to Bunin, is first of all responsibility, it is a test. Bunin’s famous contemporary, philosopher N. Berdyaev, understood it in the same way (for the passion with which he wrote about the meaning of freedom in the life of an individual, the thinker was called, not without irony, “a captive of freedom”). However, from the same premise they drew different conclusions. In his book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (1910), Berdyaev argues that a person must pass the test of freedom, that, being free, he acts as a co-creator... About how much the debate around the ever-present problem of freedom intensified at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, This is evidenced by the fact that under the same name, such famous German philosophers as R. Steiner and A. Wenzel published their polemical works a little earlier. Bunin's ideological position seems very complex and contradictory. The artist himself, it seems, did not clearly formulate or describe it anywhere. He showed the diversity of the world, where there is always a place for mystery. Perhaps that is why, no matter how much is written about his works, researchers in one way or another talk about the mysteries of his problematics and artistic mastery (this was first pointed out by Paustovsky).
One of the mysteries of his work is the coexistence of tragic and bright, life-affirming principles in his prose. This coexistence manifests itself either in different works of the same period, or even in one work. In the 1910s he also creates the stories “The Merry Court”, “The Spear of the Lord”, “Klasha”; in 1925 - the delightful "Sunstroke", and in the 30s - the cycle "Dark Alleys". In general, Bunin's books give rise to the reader's desire to live, to think about the possibility of other relationships between people. The element of fatalism is present in a number of the artist’s works, but does not dominate his work.
Many of Bunin's works end with the collapse of the heroes' hopes, murder or suicide. But nowhere does the artist reject life as such. Even death appears to him as a natural dictate of existence. In the story “The Thin Grass” (1913), the dying man realizes the solemnity of the moment of departure; suffering facilitates the feeling of fulfilling a difficult duty on earth - a worker, a father, a breadwinner. Imaginary mourning before death is a desired reward for all the ordeals. “The thin grass is out of the field” is a law of nature; this proverb serves as an epigraph to the story.
For the author of “Notes of a Hunter,” the person was rather against the backdrop of the landscape, then the famous Kalinich, who knew how to “read” nature, was her grateful reader. Bunin focuses on the internal connection between man and nature, in which “there is no ugliness.” She is the guarantee of immortality. Man and civilization die, but in eternal movement and renewal nature, and therefore humanity, is immortal, which means new civilizations will arise. And the East did not die, but only “froze in anticipation of the destined... future.” The writer sees the prerequisites for the tragedy of the peasantry in the fact that it is cut off from nature, from the land-breadwinner. The rare worker Anisya (“The Cheerful Yard”) sees the world around her as God’s grace, but Yegor, Akim, and Sery are blind and indifferent to it. The hope of Russia, according to Bunin, lies in peasants who regard labor on the land as the main task of life, as creativity. He gave an example of such an attitude in the stories “Castryuk” (1892), “Mowers” (1921). However, he credits more than just rural residents with their connection to nature, or lack thereof.
Hundreds of studies have been devoted to Bunin's story "Easy Breathing" (1916). What is the secret of his deepest impact on the reader, the secret of universal love for this “nothing standing out in the crowd of brown school dresses” girl-girl who paid with her life for her carelessness and frivolity? “And if I could,” Paustovsky wrote in “The Golden Rose,” “I would strew this grave with all the flowers that bloom on earth.” Of course, Olya Meshcherskaya, a “rich and happy girl,” was not a victim of “bourgeois debauchery.” But what? Probably the most difficult of all the questions that arise will be the following: why, despite the dramatic outcome of the plot, does this story leave such a bright feeling? Is it because “the life of nature can be heard there”?
What is the story about? About the murder of a pretty schoolgirl by a “plebeian-looking” officer? Yes, but the author devoted only a paragraph to their “novel,” while the fourth part of the novella was devoted to the description of the life of a classy lady in the epilogue. About the immoral act of an elderly gentleman? Yes, but let us note that the “victim” herself, who poured out her indignation on the pages of the diary, after everything that happened, “fell fast asleep.” All these collisions are components of that hidden, but determining the development of the narrative, confrontation between the heroine and the world of the people around her.
Among all the people surrounding the young heroine, the author did not see a single living soul capable of understanding Olya Meshcherskaya; only twice is it mentioned that she was loved, first-graders were drawn to her, that is, beings not dressed in the uniform of internal and external secular conventions. The exposition of the story talks about Olya's next summons to her boss for non-compliance with etiquette, uniform, and hairstyle. The cool lady herself is the complete opposite of the student. As follows from the narrative, she is always “wearing black kid gloves, with an ebony umbrella” (with such a description the author evokes a very specific and meaningful association). Having dressed in mourning after Olya’s death, she is “deep in her soul... happy”: the ritual eliminates the worries of life and fills its emptiness. You can break the world of conventions only if you are sure that no one will know about it. Of course, it is no coincidence that the author “makes” Mr. Malyutin not an acquaintance, but the closest relative of the boss.
The heroine's conflict with this world is predetermined by the entire structure of her character - living, natural, unpredictable, like nature itself. She rejects conventions not because she wants to, but because she cannot do otherwise, she is a living shoot, swelling the asphalt. Meshcherskaya is simply not capable of hiding something or acting. She is amused by all the rules of etiquette (nature does not know them), even “antique” books, which are usually spoken of with trepidation, she calls “funny.” After a strong hurricane, nature restores itself and still rejoices. Olya also returned to her former self after everything that happened to her. She dies from a shot by a Cossack officer.
Dies... Somehow this verb does not fit with the image created by Bunin. Note that the author does not use it in the story. The verb “shot” seems to be lost in a long, complex sentence that describes the killer in detail; figuratively speaking, the shot sounded almost inaudibly. Even a sensible classy lady mystically doubted the girl’s death: “This wreath, this mound, an oak cross! Is it possible that under it is the one whose eyes shine so immortally from this convex porcelain medallion..?” The word “again” seemingly suddenly inserted into the final phrase says a lot: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.” Bunin poetically endows his beloved heroine with the possibility of reincarnation, the ability to come into this world as a messenger of beauty, perfection and leave it. “Nature in Bunin’s work,” the famous researcher correctly noted, “is not a background, ... but an active, effective principle, powerfully invading a person’s existence, determining his views on life, his actions and deeds.”
Bunin entered the history of Russian and world literature as a talented prose writer, but all his life he tried to attract the attention of readers to his lyrics, claiming that he was “mainly a poet.” The artist also spoke about the connection between what he created in prose and poetry. Many of his stories seem to grow out of lyrical works. “Antonov Apples”, “Sukhodol” - from “Desolation” (1903), “Wasteland” (1907), “Easy Breathing” - from “Portrait” (1903), etc. However, more important than the external thematic connection is the internal connection. Constantly emphasizing the significance of his poetry, Bunin, in our opinion, suggested to the reader that it was precisely in it that the key to understanding his work as a whole lay.
Bunin’s lyrical hero, unlike the lyrical hero, for example, Fet, does not just admire the beauty of the earth, he is overwhelmed by the desire to dissolve in this beauty: “Open your arms to me, nature, / So that I can merge with your beauty!” (“Open your chest wider to receive “The sand is like silk... I’ll cling to the gnarled pine tree...” (“Childhood”); “I see, I hear, I’m happy. Everything is in me” (“Evening”)). Wanting to strengthen the dialogic relationship between man and nature, the poet often turns to the device of personification: “How mysterious you are, thunderstorm! / How I love your silence, / Your sudden sparkle, / Your crazy eyes!” (“The fields smell like fresh herbs...") ; “But the waves, foaming and swaying, / Come, run towards me / - And someone with blue eyes / Looks at the flickering wave” (“On the Open Sea”); “Carrying - and doesn’t want to know for himself / What’s there, under a pool in the forest, / Crazy water rumbles, / Flying headlong along the wheel..." ("River").
Nature is where, according to Bunin, the law of beauty operates, and as long as it exists, so wise, majestic, enchanting, there is hope for the healing of sick humanity.
* * *
They have been talking about the intersection of different genres in Bunin’s work for a long time. Already contemporaries noted that to a large extent he acts as a prose writer in poetry and as a poet in prose. The lyrical subjective principle is very expressive in his artistic and philosophical miniatures, which can be called prose poems without exaggeration. Dressing the thought in an exquisite verbal form, the author here also strives to touch upon eternal questions.
Most often he is attracted to touch the mysterious border where existence and non-existence converge - life and death, time and eternity. However, in his “plot” works, Bunin showed such attention to this border that, perhaps, no other Russian writer showed. And in everyday life, everything connected with death aroused genuine interest in him. The writer’s wife recalls that Ivan Alekseevich always visited the cemeteries of cities and villages where he happened to be, looked at the tombstones for a long time, and read the inscriptions. Bunin’s lyrical and philosophical sketches on the topic of life and death say that the artist looked at the inevitability of the end of all living things with a bit of distrust, surprise and internal protest.
Probably the best thing that Bunin created in this genre is “The Rose of Jericho,” a work that the author himself used as an introduction, as an epigraph to his stories. Contrary to custom, he never dated the writing of this piece. A thorny bush, which, according to Eastern tradition, was buried with the deceased, which can lie somewhere dry for years, without signs of life, but is capable of turning green and producing tender leaves as soon as it touches moisture, Bunin perceives as a sign of all-conquering life, as a symbol of faith in resurrection : “There is no death in the world, there is no destruction to what was, what you once lived!”
Let’s take a closer look at the small miniature created by the writer in his declining years. Bunin describes the contrasts of life and death with childlike alarm and surprise. The mystery, as the artist concludes his earthly journey states somewhere in the subtext, remains a mystery.
L-ra: Russian literature. - 1993. - No. 4. - P. 16-24.
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