Clean Monday is a characteristic of the main characters. Like I.A

The story was written in 1944. I. A. Bunin was 74 years old, the Second World War was raging in the world, the time of great trials continued for Russia, the fate of the nation and the country was being decided. It was at this time that the question of the origins and essence of the Russian language is especially acute for the writer. national character, about the mystery of the Russian soul, about the secrets of national psychology - about everything that gave hope for salvation, instilled confidence in victory, in the power and triumph of the Russian spirit.

“Hour of the night. I got up from the table - it remains to add a few lines of "Clean Monday". Turned off the light, opened the window to ventilate the room - not the slightest movement of air; full moon, dim night, the whole valley in the thinnest fog, the soft freshness of young woody greenery, far on the horizon the obscure pinkish gleam of the sea, silence, in some places the clicking of the first nightingales. Lord, prolong my strength for my lonely, poor life in this beauty and work! ".

AT diary entry, left by I. Bunin on the night of May 8-9, 1944, everything: and a tragedy late years life, and the youthful freshness of the sensation of beauty, charm, and the delight of creativity preserved by him.

« Clean Monday"- one of the central stories of the book "Dark Alleys", on which I. Bunin worked from 1937 to 1945. This book is the final one in the work of I. A. Bunin; she, as it were, absorbed everything that he wrote about, thinking about love, he had previously.

Love makes the life of Bunin's stories more significant. But not only because it fills her with joy and happiness, but above all because of the inevitability of her own death, which gives tragic significance and value to experiences.

The story "Clean Monday", as many researchers rightly noted, stands apart in the "Dark Alleys" cycle, dedicated to love and passion, "incinerating the soul" of a person. In the mastery of everyday details and sensual description of love, Bunin equally remains true to himself in all the stories of the cycle, but still something allows you to highlight "Clean Monday". “We immediately feel hidden significance behind its simple plot,” wrote L. K. Dolgopolov about the story.

The content of the work, at first glance, does not give rise to such broad generalizations. It seems that Bunin's story is only about love, or rather about the "oddities" of love. There are only two main characters in Clean Monday: he and she, both unnamed. Moreover, the image of a hero, a man, is devoid of that psychological depth, those unique features that Bunin endows a woman with. All that is known about the hero is that he is rich, “for some reason handsome with a southern, hot beauty, even “indecently handsome”, and most importantly, in love. It is love that motivates all his actions. Blinded by his love, the hero does not understand and does not try to understand what kind of inner work is being done in the soul of his beloved: he "tried not to think, not to think out." (“You don’t know me,” the heroine remarks). But it is love that gives the hero an exceptional sharpness of sensory perception, through the prism of which the portrait of the heroine is presented in the story.

She probably doesn’t even need a name, her spiritual appearance is so complex and elusive, she is a mystery, a mystery. He leads the narration and does it in the form of a story - memories, therefore his non-naming is also motivated. But both are “inscribed” in completely real time(events take place in December 1911 - March 1912) and space (Russia in the 1910s) and are surrounded by real historical figures, contemporaries of Bunin, who became a kind of "symbols" of the era. Symbolist Andrey Bely gives a lecture on the stage, the famous Kachalov calls the heroine "the tsar-maiden", and Sulerzhitsky, a famous theatrical figure, invites her to the field.

The system of artistic images is "centripetal". The heroine is in the center of the story, he is with her. She is the meaning of his life: "I was unspeakably happy every hour spent near her." She is wiser: "Who knows what love is?" He is trying to figure out what is the secret of her feminine charm: appearance? gestures? demeanor? What is the source of her inner restlessness, her spiritual wandering? Socio-historical circumstances of life, morally religious searches or something else?

In the image of the heroine, the impressions characteristic of Bunin's style are expressed in unity with the olfactory ones, and the repetitive detail - velvet - is turned to a mysterious perception. Details of appearance, repeated in portrait sketches, the epithets "black", "velvet", "amber" do not clarify psychological state the heroines, on the contrary, emphasize her mystery. “She was mysterious, strange to me,” the hero admits. The whole life of the heroine is woven from inexplicable contradictions, throwing: “It looked like she didn’t need anything: no flowers, no books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city,” the narrator notes, but immediately adds: “ Although he had favorite and unloved flowers, she always read all the books, ate a whole box of chocolate a day, ate no less than me at lunch and dinner. most often does not know where to go in the next minute. So, after her visit to the Rogozhsky cemetery, they “for some reason went to Ordynka, where she recalls the nearby Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, but suddenly goes to Yegorov’s tavern, and after talking about monasticism, she unexpectedly goes to a skit shop. How to find an explanation for this? The story tells about her origins (her father, "an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver, he collected something, like all merchants"), about her current occupations ("for some reason she studied at courses" ). Moreover, Bunin is always so precise in details and uses vague adverbs in the depiction of the heroine (for some reason, a portrait of barefoot Tolstoy hung above her sofa.).

Bunin does not try to give her actions the impression of logical motivation. Her whole being is continuous throwing between flesh and spirit, momentary and eternal. All her actions are spontaneous, irrational and at the same time seem to be planned. On the night of Pure Monday, she gives herself to the hero, knowing that she will go to the monastery in the morning, but whether this departure is final is also unclear.

Bunin's "strange" heroine combines opposite principles, her soul is simply woven from contradictions. The habit of luxury, of secular life, coexists with an inner craving for something different, significant (fascination with Russian history, etc.). Interest in Western European fashion writers is combined with love for ancient Russian literature, which she knows well and quotes by heart: “I love Russian chronicles, I love Russian legends so much that until then I re-read what I especially like until I memorize. "There was a city in the Russian land, the name of Murom, in which a noble prince named Pavel ruled." Behind the visible European gloss hides the primordially Russian (the spirit of antiquity lives in the heroine: with quiet delight she talks about the Old Believer funerals, enjoys the sound of old Russian name). A sense of the originality and complexity of her spiritual life - casually thrown remarks, wise and original.

Refined experiences are incomprehensible to the narrator: she accepts his impudent caresses and refuses to have a serious conversation with him, the “tsar-maiden” of the Moscow world is a frequenter of the Rogozhskaya Old Believer Church, the Novodevichy Convent, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He is deprived of the ability to penetrate the mystery of being, he does not feel the metaphysical forces that govern destinies. But the events of the story are given in a double light. What the hero did not notice "then" reproduces the memory "now". Bunin introduces meaningful details into the narrative, hinting at what is to come, and prepares them. The hero, for example, does not think about the meaning of the phrase: "In any case, you are my first and last"; he does not attach importance to the words of the heroine: “No, I am not fit to be a wife. I'm not good, I'm not good"; does not pay attention to the topic of monasticism that appears twice in one conversation; does not realize the prophetic meaning of the words of the old woman, met in the Iberian chapel: “Oh, don’t kill yourself, don’t kill yourself like that! Sin, sin!"

But the soul of the heroine in another life, and here she is painfully looking for the meaning of life, looking for justification for her earthly existence, looking for herself in this world and, not finding it, refuses it, leaves. But he stays. But the memory, which erases whole months from consciousness (“January, February passed like this, Shrove Tuesday came and went”) and even years (“Almost two years have passed”), helpfully reproduces precisely these details, which are now perceived as signs of fate.

Is it possible to imagine the heroine in a situation of earthly happiness, a settled and measured life? She simply does not seek it, because she is aware of the impossibility in advance. “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in a nonsense: you pull it - it pouted, but you pull it out - there’s nothing,” she quotes Platon Karataev. Unlike the heroes of Tolstoy, whose life, despite all the delusions and mistakes, is nevertheless controlled by the presence of a goal or moral and religious quests, Bunin's heroine is in the grip of irrational forces, the action of which is not amenable to logic, rational comprehension. She is one of those Russians in whom there is a need for eternal spiritual purity, a thirst for faith and sacrificial deeds. It is no coincidence that the decision to change life comes to the heroine on Clean Monday, on the first day of Lent.

"Clean Monday" stands out from the stories of the cycle "Dark Alleys" by the special intellectuality of the characters and the richness of literary details. This gives a somewhat more generalized meaning, unlike other stories that contain allegory even in comparison with such a psychological masterpiece as "Natalie". It seems that in "Natalie" Bunin achieved perfection in describing the feeling of love, and in "Clean Monday" he moved on to comprehending the history of mankind, the relationship between East and West through the "torturous beauty of adoration" ("Natalie").

The accuracy and abundance of details in the story are not just signs of the times or nostalgic admiration of Moscow forever lost for the author, but a consistent contrasting contrast between the eastern and western features of life and the appearance of the heroine of the story and Moscow, and through the latter, and all of Russia. In this regard, even a detailed description of the dishes in the tavern becomes significant: Russian pagan Shrovetide pancakes as an ancient cult food of sun worshipers (East) and Western champagne Grained caviar (by no means overseas), associated with ancient Russia or Siberia, and wines from Spanish cellars (sherry) Even writers and their heroes line up in a similar opposition: on the one hand, L. Tolstoy with his Platon Karataev - the Russian of their Russians, Griboedov with his house on Ordynka (the very name of the street reminds of the eastern conquest of Russia), and on the other - Austrians, Poles ( Schnitzler, Pshibyshevsky and others). Even the music! The “somnabulistically beautiful” beginning of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, which the heroine learned everything, and her passion for church singing, not even from notes, but from “hooks” So, the pairing of such different features of both Moscow and the heroine suggests a “symbolic allegory” . “The image of the heroine and the image of the country seem to be synthesized, almost merge, mutually explaining and complementing each other. It is as if a single symbol is formed, in which personal, individual, and “common”, national and even more broadly national-historical features are firmly merged. This is how L. K. Dolgopolov, a researcher of Bunin's work, deciphers the mysterious text. Then the drama of the fate of the heroine is the drama of the fate of Russia, which succumbed to the temptation of the West. who sinned carnally (meaning the bloody events of the revolution and the civil war) and diverted from "solving moral problems." The monastery appears in the story, according to Dolgopolov, "the antithesis, not shown directly, but foreseeable revolution." Indeed, after being seduced by Western revolutionary ideas, Russia must come to humility and repentance. It is the hero of the story, in appearance "some kind of Sicilian (that is, still associated with the West, and not with the East), appears as a seducer for all his humility and subordination to the whims of the heroine (Moscow-Russia). He likes to cheerfully exclaim “Ol right!”, And in the guise of Moscow and his beloved, he especially keenly feels oriental features (Moscow, Astrakhan, Persia, India!”, “Strange city”). One gets the impression that the hero, like Griboyedov's Chatsky, either lived abroad for a long time, or was more biographically connected with St. Petersburg.

With such a symbolic reading of the story, the rapprochement between the hero and the heroine becomes an amazingly accurate and capacious image of the relationship between the European West and Russia. What does the West think of Russia? In Bunin we find: “She was mysterious, incomprehensible to me. Our relationship was also strange - we were not yet quite close; and all this endlessly kept me in unresolved tension. The narrator, who is also the West, offers Russia his hand and heart, that is, complete merger and cooperation, to which he receives the answer: “No, I’m not fit for a wife, I’m not fit.” The West nevertheless agrees to wait - “what remained for me, except hope for time? But two centuries have passed since the rapprochement between Russia and Europe, begun by Peter the Great. Topic Ancient Russia and opposition to her era of Peter is heard in the story and in the references to ancient Russian literature, and in the story of the heroine about the schismatic cemetery, and in her admiration for the heroic deacons (Peresvet and Oslyabya). Then the words of Platon Karataev, quoted by the heroine, addressed to Pierre, are the key to unraveling the name of the hero: he, apparently, is Peter (a hint at Peter the Great and the rapprochement of Russia with the West). It is not for nothing that the hero, in response to the heroine’s words about happiness, bursts out a characteristic remark: “Oh, God bless her, with this oriental wisdom!” Passivity and contemplation, Karataev's non-resistance are, from the point of view of the narrator, purely oriental features.

However, not only a hint of Eastern passivity, almost foolishness, Bunin mentions the portrait of the barefoot Tolstoy and Platon Karataev. This can also mean the Buddhist renunciation of desires, the desire for nirvana and the dissolution of the personality in the world. And the main obstacle on the path to perfection is earthly attachment to a woman. Napoleon is shown in War and Peace as the West enjoying its power over eastern feminine Moscow. Moscow is the object of desire of Napoleon the conqueror. Thus, Bunin develops and continues the comparison of Tolstoy as an allegory, revealing the relationship of Russia (and, above all, the beauty of Moscow) with the West - the conqueror - the enemy - the groom. Hopelessly in love with an incomprehensible neighbor - a beauty and a clever woman - since the time of Peter's reforms, the West cherishes hope, if not for reciprocity, then at least for the creation of a lasting marriage-cooperation, but every time he receives an answer: “No, I am not fit to be a wife, I am not fit ". There were other relationships: violence (wars and intervention) from the West, a due rebuff given by Russia. But the worst thing, according to Bunin, is temptation. The temptation of fame, brilliance, rationalism, pride.

Here on the topic of temptation and I would like to dwell in more detail. It remains not entirely clear why Bunin chooses precisely love story. Of course, it is important that it is love (and even more so happy) that makes a person think more deeply about life in general. Other stories, with the exception of "Russi", do not carry such a symbolic load.

Vladislav Khodasevich noted that "the path to Bunin's philosophy lies through his philology." Indeed, Bunin in his stories creates a generalized picture of the world, never resorting to scientific abstractions; the very artistic fabric of the work reveals its philosophical concept. In the very first sentence of the story, a multi-layered opposition is given: “the day was getting dark” - “the windows were illuminated”, “cold” - “warmth”, “cheerful” - “heavier”. At the same time, the rhythm of a phrase built on syntactic parallelism, and skillful alliteration (“earthly stars hissed down”) help to portray the picture. The world in Bunin's stories is internally contradictory and harmonious at the same time. It is no coincidence that the human condition is most often portrayed by Bunin with the help of an antithesis or an oxymoron: “in enthusiastic despair”, “still the same torment and still happiness”, “Somnabulistically blissful sadness”, “beauty and horror”. “Reflected in these oxymorons are the polar states of the world and human soul, - distinguishes the researcher O. V. Slivitskaya, - are not in conflict with each other. If Bunin writes, for example, “sorrowfully happy days,” this means one inseparable feeling, in which, however, both bitterness and sweetness not only do not lose, but mutually reinforce their taste.

Perhaps this “contradictory unity” is the most important mystery, embodied in the heroine of the work - both sublime and sensual, amazingly beautiful and inexplicable. Love, as the highest manifestation of human essence, aggravates the feelings of a person to the utmost, therefore, in Bunin's stories, it is always “happiness and torment”. The moment of supreme harmony of contradictory principles is incompatible with the state of earthly bliss, so love in Bunin's stories turns into a disaster. But Bunin's sensual love, like death, serves as a bridge to other worlds. The heroine, sacrificing herself to the hero, giving him a moment of pleasure, dies for earthly, carnal life and leaves for the world of pure spirit.

Two years later, on the same evening, he will repeat the route of that old trip (Ordynka, Griboedovsky Lane) and for some reason he will want to go to the church of the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. Maybe unknown forces lead him to meet his beloved, or maybe in his soul there is an as yet unrealized desire for that. spiritual world into which she goes. In any case, the last meeting does not arouse in him a desire to return what was lost, does not awaken the former passions, but ends with his humble departure.

But the conflict in the souls of the characters remains unresolved. The future of the heroes is still unclear. Uncertainty is already felt in the fact that, depicting the arrival of the hero in the church, the writer nowhere directly indicates that the nun he met is his former lover. Only one detail - dark eyes - resembles the appearance of the heroine. But in these eyes there is still the same mystery, perhaps the same unextinguished passion. It is also noteworthy that the heroine goes to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. This monastery is not a monastery, but the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God on Ordynka, in which there was a community of secular ladies who took care of the orphans who lived at the church and the wounded in the First World War.

The past in the story is given with maximum clarity, enlightenment and peace emanates from ancient churches and monasteries; the present, on the contrary, is vague, filled with some kind of fussy flickering of faces, creating a sense of the momentary nature of everything that happens. As for the future, it is absolutely unclear to the heroes, since, according to Bunin, a person has no power over his own destiny.

The motifs of Bryusov's novel "The Fiery Angel" are found in the story. The plot of the novel, which Bunin's heroine was "ashamed to read," is as follows. The heroine of Bryusov's story, Renata, from time to time appears a fiery angel, forcing her to fall into prayerful ecstasy, telling her the gift of healing and even predicting that she will be a saint. When the girl confessed to the beautiful angel that she fell in love with him as a person, he left her indignantly, promising, however, to return to human form. After some time, Renata meets a young handsome count, whose name is Heinrich. The count outwardly resembles a fiery angel, but assures that this is the first time he hears about some kind of angel. After two years of heavenly happiness with Renata, the count completely unexpectedly left his beloved - he simply disappeared from his castle. Since then, Renata has been looking for him everywhere, indulging in frantic prayers, then practicing black magic. The story of Renata ends with her death from torture by the inquisitors, and Renata appears at the end of the novel as a nun who took the tonsure under the name of sister Maria in the monastery where Marta is the abbess. It also turns out to be a kind of Marfo-Mariinsky monastery. It is precisely the contradictory combination of the features of the gospel economic Martha with the features of the spiritualized Mary that we find in both (Bunin's and Bryusov's) heroines. Both bizarrely combine asceticism, craving for luxury, selfishness and selflessness, love of life and focus on thoughts of death, sinfulness and righteousness. Their common feature is also a fascination with old books, reading hagiographic literature and a tendency to quote passages. Renata, like Bunin's heroine, restrains the love impulses of her devoted knight (in Bryusov's novel, the real medieval knight Ruprecht, who accompanies her all the time, is in love with Renata). Then, after a brief love affair, Renata abruptly leaves Ruprecht. This whole plot, as it were, emerges through the episodes of Bunin's story. In the novel The Fiery Angel, Ruprecht, having lost Renata, takes an oath that he will no longer try to "cross the sacred line that separates our world from the dark area where spirits and demons hover", that is, he renounces the temptation of love and black magic. The motif of light and darkness, dark and light areas completes Bunin's story. The heroine from the illuminated space of the church directs her gaze into the darkness, where the hero remains.

So, the plot of the "Fiery Angel" is a prediction of the difficult fate of the heroes of "Clean Monday". Perhaps the fatal decision of Bunin's heroine is born in her on a subconscious level even when she "watched out" to the end her fate in Bryusov's novel, which is why she was "ashamed to read." Indeed, in Bryusov's novel, she saw what she would like to hide from herself.

Another model of the heroine's fate is both contrasting and surprisingly consonant with the first. This is The Tale of Peter and Fevronia, written in the 16th century by the ancient Russian writer Yermolai-Erasmus. Researchers call the heroes of the story Russian Tristan and Isolde. This is really a hymn of love and fidelity, which, after the first reading, is remembered for a lifetime precisely as a model by which life must be built. Bunin's heroine claims to have memorized the story, and she quotes a passage about the "flying snake" and a touching ending about the simultaneous death of the prince and princess. However, the heroine (most likely consciously) retells the story completely wrong. The flying snake that flew to the wife of Prince Paul was killed by his brother Peter. Only he could cope with the snake, since it was predicted to the snake that his death would come "from Peter's shoulder, from Agrikov's sword." The story is called "The Tale of Peter and Fevronia", because it further tells that Peter, who was severely injured in a duel with a snake, could only be cured wise maiden Fevronia, whom he married and with whom he lived a life full of hard trials. It was Peter and Fevronia who remained faithful friend friend and in death, they died on the same day and miraculously ended up buried in the same coffin, although their evil lovers were buried in different cemeteries. Bunin's heroine retells the story in her own way, emphasizing in it the motive of the devil's temptation, on the one hand, and fidelity to her beloved, a blessed death, on the other.

Thus, temptation, and then repentance and monastic seclusion become some kind of obsession with the heroine. She implements this idea. At first, quite in the spirit of demonic revelry, she surrenders to the narrator, like “a snake in human nature, very beautiful,” and then goes to the monastery. It seems that this is the realization of a premeditated model of behavior, largely subtracted from a medieval story and modern novel, dressed in the form of a manuscript of a warlock knight (in Bryusov's novel, the narrator is the knight Ruprecht). This is what the author suggests, introducing into the story a mention of the "Fiery Angel" and the old Russian story as textual signals.

What is love? Serving an angel or a demon? Maybe in love there should be some kind of balance between the spiritual and the physical, but how and when? The pensive Buninskaya heroine "thoughtfully delved into all this", looking inquiringly in front of her. All this she tried to explain to the hero, quoting the lives of the saints and stories about temptation. Perhaps Tolstoy's Platon Karataev for her is not only a preacher of Eastern fatalism, but also new symbol Platonic wisdom and even platonic love? In a word, the heroine rejects the happiness of love, exclusively carnal, in the spirit of the “very beautiful snake”, because she cannot be a harlot and a nun at the same time.

The book "Dark Alleys" is the clearest proof of this.

Handing over this book to journalist Andrey Serykh for publication in the USA, I. A. Bunin said:

This is a book about love with some bold passages. In general, she speaks of the tragic and of many things tender and beautiful. I think this is the best and most original of what I have written in my life.

And the title of the story is, of course, symbolic. The central events of the story fall on Forgiveness Sunday and Clean Monday. On Forgiveness Sunday, people ask for forgiveness and forgive insults and injustices; for the heroine, this is not only a day of forgiveness, but also a day of farewell to worldly life, where she could not find the highest meaning, the highest harmony. On Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, a person begins to cleanse himself of filth, the fun of Shrovetide is replaced by self-deepening and self-contemplation. The very title of the story calls to mind the category of a threshold, a certain boundary beyond which a new life begins: Pure Monday is the beginning of the spring renewal of the world. This day has become turning point in the lives of heroes. Having given her lover a moment of carnal love, the heroine opened the way to other worlds for him. Having gone through the suffering associated with the loss of a loved one, the hero begins to experience the influence of those forces that he did not notice behind his love.

I. A. Bunin hopes that such a clean Monday will come for all of Russia and that his suffering Motherland, cleansed and repentant, will enter into a different existence: “I thank God that he gave me the opportunity to write Clean Monday,” said the writer, finishing the story.

The story "Clean Monday" is included in the collection "Dark Alleys", but in terms of depth of content it differs from other stories depicting numerous variations on the theme of love. “Clean Monday” is only outwardly a story about specific young people and their love, but in reality it is a story about the fate of Russia, as Bunin understood it, and about the Russian character, as the author imagined it. Drama failed love anticipates for the writer the drama of Russia during the First World War and revolutions.

The heroine of Clean Monday has a mysterious Russian character, who in the story has neither a name nor a life story. Only by individual hints can one understand that she is the daughter of a wealthy merchant, attends women's courses for some reason, without burdening herself too much with her studies. In it, as in all surrounding Moscow life, there is clearly a contradiction between two sides, two cultures - Western and Eastern, European and Asian. The heroine's father is a Tver merchant, and her grandmother is from Astrakhan, that is, Russian and some kind of eastern (Tatar, Turkish or Persian?) blood flows in her veins. Outwardly, she looks like an oriental beauty, whom the Moscow Art Theater actor Kachalov once called the Queen of Shamakhan. At the same time, a portrait of the barefoot Leo Tolstoy hangs in her room, she is interested in church life, ancient Russian chronicles, goes to the Old Believer cemetery. To the bewildered question of the hero, how does she know the details of the Old Believer funeral, the heroine meaningfully answers: “You don’t know me.” The strange female student seems to be looking for wholeness for herself, as if trying to combine in her soul spontaneous impulses and logical reasoning, explainable by the chaos of the East and the clarity of the West. In the Novodevichy Convent, in the monument on Chekhov's grave, she noticed inharmonious fragmentation: "What a nasty mixture of Russian leaf style and the Art Theater."

Duality, the interweaving of Western and Eastern in Russian life permeates the entire story. Here the hero looks at the Kremlin and sees the ancient cathedrals built Italian architects, and the tips of the Kremlin towers, similar to Kyrgyz hats. In the tavern, where the heroes ate pancakes on the last day of Shrovetide, the heroine noticed the icon of the Three-Handed Mother of God, similar to indian god Shiva. In the apartment she has a wide Turkish sofa and an expensive piano, on which she is learning Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

The narrator, who is trying to understand the strange female student, feels that there is some secret hidden in her; between the western and eastern details associated with the image of the heroine, details from pre-Petrine Russia are increasingly appearing: historical heroes(Peresvet and Oslyabya), saints (Princess of Murom), signs of ancient piety. This, according to Bunin, is the essence of Russia and the Russian character, restrained, deep and ambiguous. The behavior of the heroine is only externally incomprehensible, but internally it is very meaningful. She plunges into the motley bohemian bustle and at the same time stubbornly ponders her life purpose, gradually becoming stronger in the thought of humility and service to God. She appears in the story already with a firm, but as yet unannounced decision to leave the world for a monastery. This act, unexpected for the hero and the reader, makes the image of a strange female student significant, towering over the love drama underlying the plot.

The significance of the image of the heroine is also manifested in the fact that Bunin directly connects the search for the purpose of life for the student with the search for a path for Russia. The image of the heroine and the image of the country merge, as a result, a complex image-symbol is formed, in which individual and national-historical features are combined. The clash in the image of the heroine of western and eastern traits helps to reveal the third (main) side of her appearance - nationally unique, unaffected by foreign influence.

Summing up, it should be noted that the story "Clean Monday" is not only the story of the fatal love of the nameless hero-narrator. This is also a description of the contradictory nature of a Russian person who, like an incomprehensible female student, is always looking for the truth and cannot find it. In addition, this is a discussion about the historical path of Russia: according to Bunin, she will be saved if the people manage to curb spontaneous (unbridled) passions and embark on the path of humility, as the heroine did, taking monastic vows and patriarchal values.

It is unlikely that the solution proposed by the writer can be considered saving for Russia, which has always been and remains a country of extremes, although for an individual person, turning to God and serving Him is quite possible. So, young, smart, beautiful woman hiding from real life in the monastery, but Bunin already knows that even there she cannot be saved from the impending national tragedy - world war and revolution.

LESSON OBJECTIVES.

1. Educational:

• to give general information about sophiological contexts in European and Russian culture;
• to show the sophiological subtext in the story of I.A. Bunin “Clean Monday”;
• to deepen the knowledge of high school students about the concepts of literary theory: “artistic world”, “philosophical artistic thinking of the author in the work”, “artistic time and space”.

2. Developing:

• develop the skills of philological analysis of a literary text;
• to form a multidimensional (contextual) vision of the artistic world of the work;
• to master the methods of researching symbolic parallels and paradigms in the artistic world of the work.

3. Educational:

• instill interest in the study of the philosophical content of works;
• to form a sense of continuity, a culture of spiritual memory among students.

LESSON EQUIPMENT: portrait of I.A. Bunin; illustrations depicting views of Moscow in the early 20th century; interactive board with definitions of the concept of Sophia, “Attributes of Sophia”.

DURING THE CLASSES

1. opening speech teachers.

The collection "Dark Alleys" was created in 1937-1945. It includes 38 stories. Favorite book by I.A. Bunin is not accidentally called the book of love, but the author sees love in a tragic doom or fragility. This is connected with the attitude of the writer, with his perception of the drama of the surrounding reality.

In one of the critical articles about the writer's work, it is noted that “The essence of “Dark Alleys” is not in the description of fleeting meetings, but in the disclosure of the inescapable tragedy of a person, the only creature in the world that belongs to two worlds: earth and sky, sex and love.”

"Dark Alleys" was written mainly in Grasse during the German occupation of France. I.A. Bunin wrote selflessly, with concentration, he devoted himself entirely to writing a book, as evidenced, in particular, by his diary entries. And in the letters, I.A. Bunin remembered that, rereading N.P. Ogarev, he stopped at a line from his poem: about love, about its “dark” and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys”. Love in the works of the collection is depicted as an inspiring and life-giving force that illuminates a person's life, constituting one of the dominants of a person's spiritual memory. This symbolic subtext of the spiritual power of love unites the stories of the collection "Dark Alleys". The contrast between the images of scarlet wild rose and dark alleys is symbolic. It contains a deep artistic and philosophical meaning, revealing the duality of human life, his eternal stay in the material and eternal being.

The story “Clean Monday” is rightfully called the pearl of the collection “Dark Alleys”, since it intertwines the external simplicity of presentation and the subtextual, philosophical complexity of the content, the clarity of the plot and the symbolism of images, the connection with the mythological and religious coordinates of Russian and world culture. This proves the multidimensionality and multidimensionality of the artistic world of the works of I.A. Bunin. Our goal is to explore some regularities of the intersection of material, everyday, subject-natural and spiritual worldview and worldview in the work of I.A. Bunin “Clean Monday”.

2. Work with culturological concepts (student reports).

To understand the spiritual and philosophical subtext of I.A. Bunin's story, we need to consider cultural concepts and the Orthodox interpretation of spiritual rituals and sacraments.

1st student: “Lent is established in memory of the 40-day fast of the Lord Jesus Christ in the wilderness. The most strict are the first week and the last - Holy Week (strictly speaking, Holy Week is already outside the calendar Lent, this is a special time different from Great Lent, but strict fasting is preserved, its severity is on Holy Week intensifies).

2nd student: “The first day of Great Lent is called Clean Monday. This non-church name was fixed because in Russia there was a custom to clean the house from the “spirit of Shrovetide” that ended the day before, and go to the bathhouse in order to enter Great Lent cleansed spiritually - through asking for forgiveness on Forgiveness Sunday - and bodily.

Word of the teacher: As can be seen from the interpretation, Great Lent begins on Clean Monday, the longest and strictest of the four fasts of the year. This is symbolic, since it is from this day that a new life begins for the hero and heroine of the story, for her it is going to the monastery, for him it is the knowledge of the unknown. inner peace girls and after that parting with her forever. The author brings us to this sacred date very carefully, describing in detail the behavior, character, habits and appearance of the heroine through the eyes of the narrator, who is also the main character of the story. Clean Monday in the Orthodox tradition is a kind of boundary between life - a bustle full of temptations, and the period of Great Lent, when a person is called to cleanse himself from the filth of worldly life. For the heroine, Pure Monday is a transition from a secular sinful life to an eternal, spiritual one.

Thus, we see that the spirituality of the heroine is a key feature of her image and worldview. The origins of her spirituality are connected with the mythopoetic archetype of Sophia the Wisdom of God, which became relevant at the beginning of the 20th century, better known as the Eternal Feminine, World Soul(A. Blok, K. Balmont, V. Soloviev, etc.).

3. Culturological reference: Sophiological contexts in the European and Russian cultural tradition.

Let's consider this problem, referring to the sophiological contexts in the European and Russian cultural traditions.

(Demonstration of the material on the interactive whiteboard).

Sophiology - a set of teachings about Sophia - the Wisdom of God. Sophiology goes back to biblical texts, first of all, to the Book of Wisdom of Solomon. According to traditional Orthodox dogma, the second person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, is identified with Sophia. It is He who in Orthodox theology is the hypostatic and living Wisdom of God the Father. According to the teachings of the Gnostics of the first centuries AD, Sophia is a special person who appears at one of the stages of the metahistorical process and is directly connected with the creation of the world and man. Sophia, as an independent personality, also appears in the philosophy of the new European mystics (Boehme, Swedenborg, Pordage, and others). Sophiology is widely developed in the works of Russian philosophers. XIX -beginning XX centuries - V.S. Solovyov, P.A. Florensky, N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov and others.

It should be noted that many modern writers in one way or another touch on the theme of Sophia in their works, calling her by different names. So, for example, Paolo Coelha speaks of the “female face of God”, identifying it with the Virgin Mary and considering her as the fourth hypostasis of God. Sergei Alekseev in the pentalogy "Treasures of the Valkyrie" creates a myth about a warrior woman who chooses her lover herself. This performance is very similar to the Russian folk Tsar Maiden or, as she is otherwise called Marya Morevna, a beautiful maiden living in a beautiful tent, who chooses her most daring fiancé and lives with him as with her husband, keeping her numerous invincible army in fear (here also you can draw a parallel Sophia - Athena).

With all the differences in the views of these philosophers on Sophia, we can single out the following provisions that are common to most sophiological concepts. (Presentation of the main findings on the interactive whiteboard, recording the findings in workbooks).

1. Sophia - there is a special Personality. She can be identified with the Holy Spirit and with pagan Goddesses (Athena, Heavenly Aphrodite). Sophia is also identified with the Church, the Mother of God, the Guardian Angel, sometimes seen as a special feminine Hypostasis of the Godhead. In rabbinic and later gnostic thought, there is the concept of the fallen Sophia - Achamoth, which brings her closer to the beautiful temptress Lilith, made of fire. In Russian fairy tales, a slightly modified image of Sophia is reflected in Vasilisa the Wise, Marya Morevna, Marya the Tsarevna, the Tsar Maiden, the Beloved Beauty, the Swan Princess, Elena the Beautiful, etc. The personal image of Sophia, both in the Byzantine-Russian and in the Catholic tradition, gradually approaches the image of the Virgin Mary as an enlightened truth, in which it becomes “Sophianic”, the whole cosmos is ennobled.

2. Sophia represents the “Eternal Femininity” (or “Eternal Virginity”), the “Eternal Bride of the Lamb of God”, the “ideal soul” (S. Bulgakov) or the “Soul of the World”.

3. Sophia is ontologically close to the Platonic world of ideas, understood as the totality of God's thoughts about the world, but at the same time it is a holistic and conscious organism.

4. The attributes of Sophia are such symbols as the moon, fire, water, flowers (roses, myrtle, violets, lilies, daffodils, etc.), house, church, etc.

5. The peculiarity of the image of Sophia is feminine passivity, coupled with maternal multiplicity, her “gaiety”, as well as a deep connection not only with the cosmos, but also with humanity, for which she stands up. In relation to God, she is a passively conceived womb, a “mirror of God’s glory”, in relation to the world, she is a builder who creates the world, just like a carpenter or architect builds a house as an image of a habitable and orderly world, protected by walls from the boundless spaces of chaos.

6. In the future, humanity will become the collective incarnation of Sophia - God-manhood.

7. Sophia manifests itself in the world as beauty, harmony, orderliness and coherence. Sophia is the source of human culture in all its diversity of manifestations.

In order to better remember and understand how the archetype of Sophia is connected with the image of the main character, it would be advisable to draw a table in a notebook where, on the one hand, write down the features of the image of Sophia, and on the other, mark the correspondence with the image of the main character.

4. Mini-laboratory: Exploring the Sophiological symbolism of images and motifs in the story “Clean Monday” by I.A. Bunin.

According to our assumption, the subtextual basis of the image of the main character is the archetype of Sophia the Wisdom of God. Let's start the characterization of the image of the main character with an analysis of the natural-objective world in the story, filling in the table along the way and giving examples from the text of the story.

Natural object world exists for the main character (and for the narrator - the main character) as part of her life and soul: descriptions of nature, city, appearance people in the story given a lot of attention. A heightened sense of the natural-objective world penetrates the aesthetics and poetics of the works of I.A. Bunin, is present in the story in every fragment of the story. Give an example from the text describing spatial category in the story.

Pupil: “The Moscow gray winter day was getting dark, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the shop windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening Moscow life, freeing from daytime affairs, flared up: the cab sledges rushed thicker and more vigorously, the overcrowded diving trams rattled harder, it was visible in the dusk, how green stars hissed from the wires, - dully blackening passers-by hurried more animatedly along the snowy sidewalks ... ”, - this is how the story begins. Bunin verbally paints a picture of a Moscow evening, and in the description there is not only the author's vision, but also smell, touch, and hearing. Through this urban landscape, the narrator introduces the reader to the atmosphere of an exciting love story. The mood of inexplicable longing, mystery and loneliness accompanies us throughout the entire work.

Teacher: Almost all descriptions of the appearance of the heroine and the world around her are given against the background of subdued light, in the twilight; and only at the cemetery on Forgiveness Sunday and exactly two years after that Pure Monday, the process of enlightenment, the spiritual transformation of the lives of the heroes takes place, the artistic modification of the worldview is also symbolic, the images of the light and brilliance of the sun change. Harmony and peace dominate in the artistic world: “The evening was peaceful, sunny, with frost on the trees; on the bloody brick walls of the monastery, jackdaws resembling nuns chatted in silence, the chimes now and then played subtly and sadly on the bell tower. The artistic development of time in the story is associated with symbolic metamorphoses of the image of light. . The whole story takes place as if in twilight, in a dream, illuminated only by a secret and a glint of eyes, silk hair, gold clasps on the main character's red weekend shoes. Evening, dusk, mystery - this is the first thing that catches your eye in the perception of the image of this unusual woman. It is inseparable by subtextual symbolic paradigms both for us and for the narrator with the most magical and mysterious time of the day. However, it should be noted that the contradictory state of the world is most often defined by the epithets calm, peaceful, quiet. The heroine, despite her intuitive sense of space and time of chaos, like Sophia, carries within herself and bestows harmony on the world. According to S. Bulgakov, the category of time as a driving image of eternity is “as if not applicable to Sophia, since temporality is inextricably linked with being-non-being,” and if there is no non-existence in Sophia, then temporality is also absent: “She conceives everything, has everything in itself by a single act, in the image of eternity, she is timeless , although it carries all eternity; and in the story, time is also very symbolic.

What aspects of artistic time can be distinguished in the work “Clean Monday”?

Student: Firstly, all events are dated, but not calendar dates, but church or ancient pagan ones: the action takes place on Shrovetide week, the first conversation about the religiosity of the main character takes place on Forgiveness Sunday, the first and only night of the heroes' love happens on Clean Monday. It is also noteworthy that these holidays are determined lunar cycle, and the moon is one of the main symbols and attributes of Sofia.

Student: Secondly, speaking of the fact that “Sofia starts everything” , and she appears in rabbinic, and later in gnostic thought, identical to the words that denote “beginning”, one can note what the author emphasizes: “... she kept learning the slow, somnabulistically beautiful beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata”, - only one Start…". The heroine, like Sophia, plays only the beginning of a piece of music with the symbolic name “Moonlight Sonata”.

Teacher: Thirdly, we can also note that the narrator constantly sent the girl flowers (also a symbol of Sophia, Heavenly Aphrodite), and precisely on Saturdays . This, as is known, is the most sacred day in Judaism, on this day the cosmic intercourse of Shakina and her divine husband takes place. We can note this, since the author repeatedly emphasizes that the heroine is not interested in one particular religious orientation, and until that time, until she finally chose her Orthodox path, she also shows interest in Eastern religions, it is no coincidence that the author also emphasizes the oriental appearance of the heroine: “... Mother of God Three-Handed. Three hands! After all, this is India! You are a gentleman, you cannot understand all this Moscow the way I do ... ”, the heroine expresses herself.

Teacher: Speaking of where does the heroine live , then before us appears vivid image Sofia's houses, one of the most important symbols of biblical Wisdom. Try to find this in the text:

Student: “... Every evening my coachman raced me at this hour on a stretching trotter - from the Red Gate to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: she lived against him ...”

Teacher: Compare with S. Bulgakov: “... The second Hypostasis, Christ, is mainly addressed to Sophia, for He is the light of the world, He is the whole being (Jo. 1), and, perceived by the rays of the Logos, Sophia herself becomes Christophia, the Logos in the world …”.

Student: “She lived alone, - her widowed father, an enlightened man of a noble merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver, collecting something like all such merchants. In the house opposite the Cathedral of the Savior, she rented a corner apartment on the fifth floor for the view of Moscow, only two rooms, but spacious and well furnished.” In this fragment of the text, a noble origin from an enlightened person stands out, who, moreover, lives in retirement not just anywhere, but in Tver - the soul of Russia, a city that is located between two “capitals”, centers - Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Teacher: As you know, the Church is one of the names of Sophia, for example, by S. Bulgakov: “... as receiving the outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, she is the Church and at the same time becomes the Mother of the Son, incarnated by the influx of the Holy Spirit from Mary, the Heart of the Church ...” . The location of the main character's apartment on the fifth floor, from where she can survey the whole city and its center, acquires a symbolic meaning, since the involvement in the large space-time of Russian life is emphasized.

Student: The author gives a detailed description of the apartment where our heroine lives and this is very important for us. There are two rooms in the apartment: “... In the first one, a wide Turkish sofa occupied a lot of space, there was an expensive piano ... and elegant flowers bloomed in faceted vases on the under-mirror table ... and when I came to her on Saturday evening, she, lying on the sofa, over which for some reason - then a portrait of barefoot Tolstoy hung, slowly stretched out her hand to me for a kiss and absentmindedly said: “Thank you for the flowers ...”.

Teacher: The heroine is presented by the narrator as a pensive, majestic woman who stands at the center of events. She, like a goddess or queen, reclines on her rich bed surrounded by flowers.. This fragment of I.A. Bunin’s story: “The room smelled of flowers, and it connected for me with their smell ...” is consonant with the description of Heavenly Aphrodite - Sophia by the ancient Greek poet Lucretius: “Holy garden, she is surrounded by roses, myrtles, violets, anemones , daffodils, lilies and harit”. Symbolically and image piano: Sofia patronizes music and creativity.

Student: As we have already noted, only twice in the entire story we observe a bright sunny landscape, and in the heroine’s house one time the light literally blinds us: “At ten o’clock in the evening the next day, having risen in the elevator to her door, I opened the door with his key and did not immediately enter from the dark hallway: behind it it was unusually light, everything was lit - chandeliers, candelabra on the sides of the mirror and a tall lamp under a light shade behind the head of the sofa, and the piano sounded the beginning of the "Moonlight Sonata" - all rising, sounding the farther, the more wearisome, more inviting, in somnambulistic-blissful sadness. The author emphasizes the unusual nature of such lighting, in in the house of the heroine, as it were, a sacred fire is kindled, we have before us a kind of ritual before the divine, symbolic night. The heroine herself at this moment appears before us in all her perfection.: “I entered - she stood straight and somewhat theatrically near the piano in a black velvet dress that made her thinner, shining with his elegance, a festive dress of resinous hair, a swarthy amber of bare arms, shoulders, a tender, full beginning of breasts, a sparkle of diamond earrings along slightly powdered cheeks, coal velvet eyes and velvety purple lips; on the temples, black shiny pigtails were bent in semi-rings to her eyes, giving her the appearance of an oriental beauty from a popular print.

Teacher: In the symbolic presentation of the heroine, color and light characteristics perform a special artistic function. Determine the artistic meaning of color and light contrast in the description of the image of the main character.

Student: The heroine consciously enters into a light-color dissonance, dressing in black when it is light and clear around, and wearing red velvet in the evenings. The red color of the dress is replaced by dazzling black - the color of the night, humility, mystery, mourning for the past life that the heroine lived, black is the most mysterious and controversial; and at the same time, the author emphasizes that she shone in her attire.

Teacher: I approached the heroes on a skit Kachalov and in a low actor's voice he said: “Tsar Maiden, Queen of Shamakhan, your health!” As we said in the first chapter, in the Russian fairy tales of Sofia corresponds to the Tsar Maiden etc., the author did not accidentally make such a clarification, he also highlights the fact that the heroine differs from other people in her oriental beauty, unearthly charm, as if not from this world. Bunin does not give the heroine a name, as well as his main character-narrator. He only emphasizes their unusualness, exclusivity, selectivity and beauty: she is an oriental beauty from a popular print, he “was handsome for some reason with southern hot beauty ... The devil knows who you are, some kind of Sicilian.” From this we can conclude that the nomination of heroes is not so important for the author, I.A. Bunin studied the culture of Russia of that time, the life of people, their entertainment, everything that occupied their souls, that is, the spiritual life of people.

Why does the author give the exact names of restaurants, exhibitions, theaters, monasteries, famous places, streets of the city of Moscow - the center of Russia; he also gives specific names to people famous in that era that the characters of the story encounter: Stanislavsky, Kachalov, Chaliapin?

Student: It is important for the author to show the real era, the culture of that time, and not the people to whom he gives names, and against the background of this description, an event takes place in which two people take part, two collective images young people. For the author, the heroine is the embodiment of the wisdom, culture, consciousness of Russia of that time, and the hero, her chosen one, is needed in order to look at her through his eyes, through the eyes of a young educated person of that time.

Teacher: Consider the portrait of the heroine, her appearance and actions.

Student: Portrait of the heroine is given through the eyes of her chosen one, the narrator, the main character who is in love with her, so we have a portrait of an exceptional woman, a goddess that this person could not figure out: “But she had some kind of Indian, Persian beauty: a dark amber face, magnificent and somewhat ominous in its thick black hair, eyes softly shining like black coal; the mouth, captivating with velvety crimson lips, was shaded by a dark fluff; when leaving, she most often wore a pomegranate velvet dress and the same shoes with gold clasps (and she went to courses as a modest student, ate breakfast in a vegetarian canteen on the Arbat) ... ”, - it is emphasized here the oriental appearance of the heroine and her so-called “uncreated”, as if she does not consist of flesh and blood, but of expensive fabrics, silk, velvet, fur, amber, diamonds, at the same time, her image causes an inexplicable and mysterious fear in the hero, as before the unknown and the divine mystery: “sinister hair in its thick blackness”, etc. Emphasis is placed on ambivalence of the image of the heroine - a chic oriental beauty in the evenings and a modest student at school.

Student: The author describes in detail her preferences and weaknesses: “It seemed that she did not need anything: no flowers, no books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city, although, nevertheless, flowers were her favorite and least favorite , all the books that I brought her she always read, she ate a whole box of chocolate in a day, at lunch and dinner she ate no less than me, she loved pies with burbot ear, pink hazel grouses in hard-fried sour cream ... Her obvious weakness was only good clothes, velvet , silks, expensive fur…” . All this once again points to the duality of the image of the heroine, it is, as it were, close to cosmic perfection, self-sufficient and at the same time has a deep connection with humanity, has human weaknesses, habits, preferences.

Consider the originality of everyday life and the inner spiritual being of the heroine.

Student: As we have already noted above, the heroine is quite passive outwardly. The narrator is surprised to discover more and more new facets in it. It turned out that behind the seeming inactivity the heroine constantly creating and learning. So, for example, we learn that she is studying in history courses: “I once asked: “Why?” She shrugged her shoulder: “Why is everything done in the world? Do we understand anything in our actions? In addition, I am interested in history ... ". She also played the piano and learned pieces.

The meeting of the heroes took place in an art circle at a lecture by Andrei Bely, so she was interested in art. In the evenings, the heroes went to theaters, restaurants, and exhibitions. Among other things, we discover that the heroine visits churches, cemeteries, holy places during the day.

Teacher: Thus, in the heroine, just like in Sofia, they get along two principles: active, creative: “in relation to the world, she is a builder, creating the world, like a carpenter or an architect…”; and passive, “permitting”: “... in relation to God, Sophia is a passively conceived womb, “a mirror of the glory of God.”

5. The final word of the teacher.

So, our reader's observations, appeal to the spiritual and philosophical subtext of the work of I.A. Bunin "Clean Monday" allow us to draw a general conclusion. The artistic presentation of the image of the heroine in the subtext is given in comparison with the archetype of Sophia. We were convinced that Bunin's artistic consciousness retains a connection with the ancient mythopoetic memory, with the archetype of Sophia - the Wisdom of God. In order to expand your understanding of this, you will need to do the following homework yourself. . Determine the originality of artistic parallelism, find in the subtext the connection between the image of the main character, Sophia the Wisdom of God and Russia. Illustrate your judgments with observations from the text. Use critical literature and the author's diaries.

The writing

Let us turn to "Clean Monday", written on May 12, 1944, when Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was in exile. It was there, abroad, already at an advanced age, that he created the cycle "Dark Alleys", which includes the mentioned story. All the works of this collection are about love, therefore, the main theme of "Clean Monday" is love. This can be confirmed by the words of M. Roshchin: "Dark Alleys" are like a diary, they are so personal, the author is visible in each "adventure". Love is most beautiful in its first, initial stage, what has been achieved turns into sad, everyday, perishable - death overtakes it almost instantly, in its prime, and with the concentration of life that Bunin manages to create, love, along with life, is brought to cosmic density.

You can’t just say about love, you need to think deeper into the name, understand why Bunin used these particular words. In the dictionary, Pure Monday is explained as the first day of Lent, which comes after the rampant Maslenitsa. This interpretation also indicates a kind of purification. From dusk to dawn.

Bunin's love stories have long become classics of the genre; in sterile Soviet times, their discreet but extremely intense eroticism turned the heads of many young ladies of both sexes. Meanwhile, if you think about it, the plot and composition of Bunin's stories are surprisingly monotonous. He (occasionally she), having come across a sudden reminder of the past, begins to reopen a long-healed wound, restoring in his memory all the details of a youthful happy (unhappy, failed) love. Emerging from the pool of memories, he (she) realizes that life has failed. That, in fact, is all. There are relatively few deviations from this scheme.

The heroes of the story "Clean Monday" are rich, and love arises between them. They relax, visit restaurants, theaters, that is, they have a good time ...

At the very beginning of the work, the author uses eight times in the description of the Moscow winter evening words meaning dark shades. Note that from the first lines, I.A. Bunin is preparing us for the tragedy of two loving people. But in the description of the main character, the writer also continues to use black: “And her beauty was some kind of Indian, Persian: a swarthy amber face, magnificent and somewhat sinister in its thick black hair, softly shining like black sable fur eyebrows, black, like velvet coal, eyes; captivating with velvety crimson lips, the mouth was tinted with a dark fluff ..

Perhaps this description of the girl indicates her sinfulness. The features of her appearance are very similar to those of some diabolical creature. Description of clothing is similar to its appearance in terms of colors: "She stood straight and somewhat theatrically near the piano in a black velvet dress that made her thinner, shining with his elegance ..." It is this description that makes us think of the main character as a mysterious, mysterious, diabolical creature.

In the article by E.Yu. Poltavets and N.V. Nedzvitsky "Cryptography of love. I. Bunin's story "Clean Monday" this assumption is confirmed: "The underlined detailing in the description of the rooms and the outfit of the heroine contains motifs of magical action:" the black diabolical color of the dress and the ominous coal velvet of the eyes, "glossy pigtails" and "powdered cheeks" - a hint of the witches' magic ointment, the sounds of the somnambulistically blissful "Moonlight Sonata", an analogue of the moon hypnotizing the witch, are heard in the apartment.

The author also uses moonlight in the story, the meaning of which is explained in the same article: "Moonlight is a sign of unhappy love. The moon that illuminates lovers portends separation or even death. But in the story "Clean Monday", moonlight, of course, also symbolizes The heroine takes part in the Sabbath, and this is on a clean Monday, a day of fasting, repentance and atonement for sins! Truly against Christ the Savior!

The heroine thinks not only in entertainment, the thought of God, of the church slips in her head. No wonder Bunin mentions the Cathedrals of St. Basil the Blessed and the Savior-on-Bora, the Novodevichy Convent, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. This detail in the text indicates the moral purity of the soul, thus speaking about the climax of the story, that is, about the departure of the girl to the monastery.

The text traces the heroine's throwing between purification and the fall into sin. This we can see in the description of the lips and cheeks; "Black fluff above the lip and pink amber cheeks." At first, it seems that the heroine is only thinking about going to a monastery, visiting restaurants, drinking, smoking, but then she abruptly changes her views and suddenly goes to serve God. Spiritual purity, renunciation of the sinful world, the world of cruelty and immorality is associated with the monastery. It is known that White color symbolizes purity. Therefore, after the departure of the heroine to the monastery, the writer prefers this particular color shade, pointing to the purification, rebirth of the soul. In the last paragraph, the word "white" is used four times, pointing to the idea of ​​the story, that is, to the rebirth of the soul, the transition from sin, the blackness of life to spiritual, moral purity. This is how the movement from "black" to "white" is traced - from sin to purity.

Folklorists have long known that there are very few stories in the world. Not a single writer has yet been honored to enter the history of world literature due to mere plot skill and diversity. Bunin managed to create an image with an unexpected combination of words, silence, a hint, to convey an atmosphere of fragility, fragility and doom of feeling with the help of all the strength of his native language accumulated over several centuries. It was not for nothing that Nabokov treated his prose so prejudicedly and unkindly: Bunin came as close as possible to the plot on which the author of "Spring in Fialta" did not want to let anyone in.

Bunin's world in "Dark Alleys" is clearly divided into male and female. The male is saturated with deceit, insincerity, hypocrisy, self-interest, weak will and cowardice. The feminine is full of strong feelings, passions, devotion, naturalness. Only in a fairy tale are the main contradictions of Bunin's world in the Hegelian sense "removed": good fellow receives the bride undefiled, vice is punished, and the villain also repents.

In the world that Bunin offers the reader as real, everything happens quite the opposite.

In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul, wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many artists of the word dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique, individual to this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.
Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person's life, giving his fate a uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with a special meaning.

This mystery of being becomes the theme of Bunin's story Grammar of Love (1915). The hero of the work, a certain Ivlev, on his way to the house of the recently deceased landowner Khvoshchinsky, reflects on "incomprehensible love, which turned the whole human life, which, perhaps, should have been the most everyday life", if not for the strange charm of the maid Lushka. It seems to me that the mystery lies not in the appearance of Lushka, who "was not at all good by herself," but in the character of the landowner himself, who idolized his beloved. "But what kind of person was this Khvoshchinsky? Crazy or just some kind of stunned, all focused soul?" According to the neighbors, the landowners. Khvoshchinsky "was known in the district for a rare clever girl. And suddenly this love fell on him, this Lushka, then unexpected death her, - and everything went to dust: he shut himself up in the house, in the room where Lushka lived and died, and spent more than twenty years sitting on her bed. .
The fate of Khvoshchinsky strangely fascinates and worries Ivlev. He understands that Lushka entered his life forever, awakened in him "a complex feeling, similar to what he once experienced in an Italian town when looking at the relics of one saint." What made Ivlev buy from the heir Khvoshchinsky "at a high price" a small book "Grammar of Love", with which the old landowner did not part, cherishing the memories of Lushka? Ivlev would like to understand what the life of a madman in love was filled with, what he ate long years his orphaned soul. And following the hero of the story, the “grandchildren and great-grandchildren” who heard the “voluptuous legend about the hearts of those who loved” will try to uncover the secret of this inexplicable feeling, and with them the reader of Bunin’s work.

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

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

The story "Dark Alleys" (1935) depicts a chance meeting of people who loved each other thirty years ago. The situation is rather ordinary: the young nobleman easily broke up with the serf girl Nadezhda, who was in love with him, and married a woman of his circle. And Nadezhda, having received freedom from the masters, became the mistress of the inn and never married, had no family, children, did not recognize ordinary worldly happiness. “No matter how much time passed, I lived all the same,” she admits to Nikolai Alekseevich. “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten. I could never forgive you. did not have". She could not change herself, her feelings. And Nikolai Alekseevich realized that he had lost in Nadezhda "the most precious thing that he had in life." But this is a momentary insight. Leaving the inn, he "remembered with shame his last words and the fact that he kissed her hand, and was immediately ashamed of his shame. "And yet it is difficult for him to imagine Nadezhda as his wife, the mistress of the Petegbug house, the mother of his children. This gentleman attaches too much importance to class prejudices to prefer genuine feeling to them. But he paid for his cowardice with a lack of personal happiness.
How differently the heroes of the story comprehend what happened to them! For Nikolai Alekseevich, this is "a vulgar, ordinary story," but for Nadezhda - undying memories, many years of devotion to love.

Yes, love has many faces and is often inexplicable. This is an eternal riddle, and each reader of Bunin's works is looking for his own answers, reflecting on the secrets of love. The perception of this feeling is very personal, and therefore someone will treat what is depicted in the book as a "vulgar story", and someone will be shocked by the great gift of love, which, like the talent of a poet or musician, is not given to everyone. But one thing is certain: Bunin's stories, which tell about the most secret, will not leave indifferent readers of the end of the 20th century. Every young man will find in Bunin's works, something consonant with one's own thoughts and feelings will touch the great mystery of love. This is what makes the author Sunstroke", always a modern writer, causing deep reader interest.

/ / / Analysis of Bunin's story "Clean Monday"

The story of I.A. Bunin "" was written in 1944 and was included in the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys".

This work is of a love-philosophical nature, because it describes a wonderful feeling that arose between two people.

The story “Clean Monday” got its name because the main actions in it take place on Monday - the first day of Lent.

We feel the whole palette of feelings experienced by the main character on ourselves. This becomes possible because the narration is conducted on behalf of the protagonist. It is worth noting that in the story you will not find either the name or the surname of the main characters. Bunin calls them simply - He and She.

The work begins with a description of one winter Moscow day. The author pays great value small details: “a gray winter day”, “trams thundered”, “the smell of bakeries”. At the beginning of the story, we know that He and She are already together. Bunin will tell us about the acquaintance of the main characters almost at the end of the work. They try not to think about the future and drive this thought away.

I would like to note that the main characters lead a rather wasteful life. We dined at the Metropol, Prague or the Hermitage. Bunin even describes to us the dishes that the main characters were treated to: pies, fish soup, fried hazel grouse, pancakes.

In addition to the description of entertainment establishments, the story contains pictures of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Novodevichy Convent, the Marfo-Maryinsky Convent.

The work "Clean Monday" leaves a feeling of constant movement. It is very dynamic, nothing stands still. So, the main character came to Moscow from the Penza province, the main character was from Tver. A couple in love reads modern literature, visits theatrical performances attend lectures.

The main characters I.A. Bunin shows how completely opposite people. If He was an open and cheerful person, liked to talk a lot, then She was a silent and thoughtful lady. The only thing that united them was natural beauty and a good position in society. But even here, the author shows us the differences between the two people. He was like an Italian, She is an Indian.

The story has several time frames. The first is 1912, the time when the main events of the work develop. The second - 1914, time last meeting main characters. The third period is indicated by the graves of Chekhov and Ertel, the house of Griboyedov.

Thanks to these time frames through which the main character passes his feelings, Bunin tried to show us the lyrical basis of his work.

All these small details and historical events cannot distract us from main theme works - love experiences of the protagonist. In the end, this wonderful feeling brought only disappointment to the main character.

Sam I.A. Bunin compared love with a bright flash, hinting not at its short duration. This outbreak almost never brings happiness. That is why he ends his story on a minor note.