The problem of Loyalty and betrayal is one of the main directions of Bunin’s work. In his stories, he shows how people behave at moments of decision-making, how it affects them, and what the manifestation of fidelity or betrayal leads to.
I want to convert special attention on Bunin's stories " Sunstroke" and "Dark Alleys". In the story Sunstroke we are shown the fleeting story of a fellow traveler and a stranger. Having met once, they spent the night together and then went their separate ways. Main character fell in love with this woman, although he knew about her family. But the stranger, on the contrary, took the betrayal lightly and did not attach any importance to it.
Here I believe they are both to blame, since such a connection was wrong in all respects.
The man consciously went against the happiness of the whole family, and the woman was generally aloof from the concepts of morality. The stranger went home and returned to her husband and daughter. She was completely calm. No one knows what she was thinking about, whether she was worried, or whether she did not consider her action bad at all.
In the story Dark alleys main character behaves differently. She once fell in love, but her boyfriend left. The woman was faithful to her lover all her life, as she understood the seriousness of her feelings. She didn't want to cross them. She was honest with herself and with the whole world. Through for many years she met her beloved. He was in a difficult situation. But pity did not force the heroine to get along with him.
Why? She suffered too much because of this love. A huge price was paid for this love. The woman could not get over herself, she could not forgive.
If you write a summary Unified State Exam essay in the direction of fidelity and betrayal, then be sure to use Bunin’s stories. Excellent examples and arguments are shown here. These two stories make it possible to write a full-fledged essay, since they touch on both sides of the direction. Sunstroke shows betrayal, and dark alleys show fidelity. Such a confrontation will definitely give you the opportunity to draw good conclusions.
In addition, you can use other stories from Bunin that the work was more intense and diverse.
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Updated: 2017-11-03
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This aspect of the problem will obviously cause the strongest resonance. Love as a feeling that reveals the true moral character of heroes is traditionally the topic of literature lessons in high school. Here are just a few quotes to help you start thinking about the nature of fidelity and betrayal:
His love disgusted me.
I'm bored, my heart is asking for freedom...
(Zemfira. A.S. Pushkin "Gypsies").
The heroines of Pushkin's poem Zemfira and Mariula have no moral obligations to men and children. They blindly follow their desires, obey their passions. Pushkin deliberately created the image of Zemfira’s mother, who left her daughter for the sake of new love. In a civilized society, this act would cause universal condemnation, but Zemfira does not condemn her mother. She does the same. Gypsies do not consider betrayal a sin, because no one can hold back love. For an old man, his daughter’s action is common. But for Aleko, this is an attack on his rights, which cannot go unpunished. “You only want freedom for yourself,” Zemfira’s father accuses the killer. Considering himself free, Aleko does not want to see others free. For the first time Pushkin depicted exile romantic hero not only from a civilized society, but also from the world of freedom. Aleko betrays not traditions, but universal human values.
Novel A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" contains many problematic issues: marital fidelity, responsibility and fear of being responsible. The characters at the beginning of the novel are completely different people. Evgeny is a city heartthrob who doesn’t know how to entertain himself in order to escape boredom. Tatyana is sincere, dreamy, pure soul. And this first feeling for her is by no means entertainment. She lives and breathes it, so it’s not at all surprising how modest girl, suddenly takes such a bold step as writing a letter to her beloved. Evgeny also has feelings for the girl, but he does not want to lose his freedom, which, however, does not bring him joy at all. After three years, the heroes meet again. They have changed a lot. Instead of a closed, dreamy girl, she is now a sensible socialite who knows her worth. And Evgeny, as it turned out, knows how to love, write letters without an answer and dream of a single glance, a touch of the one who was once ready to hand over her heart to him. Time has changed them. It did not kill love in Tatiana, but it taught her to keep her feelings locked away. As for Eugene, perhaps for the first time he understood what it was to love, what it was to be faithful. Tatyana Larina did not choose the path of betrayal. She's honest:
“I love you (why lie?)
But I was given to another;
I will be faithful to him forever.”
Who doesn't remember these lines? You can argue for a long time: is the heroine right? But in any case, her fidelity to the duty of a wife, fidelity to accepted obligations evokes both admiration and respect.
“We are parting forever, but you can be sure that I will never love another: my soul has exhausted all its treasures, its tears and hopes on you” (Vera. M.Yu. Lermontov "Hero of Our Time") Bela and Princess Mary, Vera and Undine are so different, but equally painfully hurt by Pechorin, experiencing both love for him and his betrayal. Princess Mary, a proud and reserved aristocrat, became deeply interested in the “army ensign” and decided not to take into account the prejudices of her noble relatives. She was the first to admit her feelings to Pechorin. But the hero rejects Mary's love. Offended in her feelings, the sincere and noble Mary withdraws into herself and suffers. Will she be able to trust anyone now? Bela is endowed with more than just beauty. This is an ardent and gentle girl, capable of deep feelings. Proud and bashful Bela is not devoid of consciousness of her dignity. When Pechorin lost interest in her, Bela, in a fit of indignation, says to Maxim Maksimych: “If he doesn’t love me... I’ll leave myself: I’m not a slave, I’m a prince’s daughter!” The relationship with the undine was simply an exotic adventure for Pechorin. She is a mermaid, a girl from a forgotten fairy tale. This is what attracted Pechorin. For him, this is one of the turns of fate. For her, it’s a life where everyone fights for their place. Love for Vera was Pechorin's deepest and most lasting affection. Nothing more! Among his wanderings and adventures, he left Vera, but returned to it again. Pechorin caused her a lot of suffering. He gave her nothing but mental anguish. And yet she loved him, ready to sacrifice her feelings for her loved one. self-esteem, and the opinion of the world, and the honor of her husband. Vera became a slave to her feelings, a martyr of love. Her husband finds out about her betrayal, she loses her reputation, things go wrong good relations with my spouse. Pechorin experiences the final separation from Vera as a catastrophe: he gives in to despair and tears.
Nowhere is the hero's hopeless loneliness and the suffering it generates, which he hid from others by being constantly unfaithful in his relationships with women, more clearly revealed. “It’s not good, it’s a sin, Varenka, why do I love someone else?” ( A.N. Ostrovsky "Thunderstorm") Loyalty and betrayal are always a choice of your behavior in a relationship with your loved one. And not one, but both, He and She, are responsible for this choice. The heroine of Ostrovsky's play "The Thunderstorm" cheated on her husband. With all her heart she fell in love with Boris, a weak, weak-willed man. Katerina’s secret meetings with him are a desire for love and mutual understanding. She realizes the sinfulness of her behavior and suffers from it. Suicide is a mortal sin, Katerina knows this. But he goes for it various reasons, including failing to forgive herself for betrayal. Can the reader justify the heroine? He can understand, he can sympathize, but he can hardly justify. And not only because the commandment was broken - betrayal is difficult to forgive.
“I am tormented only by the evil that I did to him. Just tell him that I ask him to forgive, forgive, forgive me for everything...” (Natasha Rostova about Andrey. L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace").
The story of the quarrel between Natasha and Prince Andrei, the collapse of a seemingly ideal love story, outrages, plunges into bewilderment, forces you to look again and again for the answer to the question: “How did the vile, narrow-minded Anatol Kuragin eclipse the brilliant, sophisticated, intelligent Bolkonsky in the eyes of young Rostova?” What pushed Natasha into the arms of the “mean, heartless breed”? The reader experiences Natasha's fall, her tears and pain with all her heart and, without noticing it, makes her choice in favor of fidelity, sympathizing, and yet condemning the betrayal of the heroine.
“No, Nikolai Alekseevich, I didn’t forgive you. Since our conversation touched on our feelings, I’ll say frankly: I could never forgive you. Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later. That’s why I can’t forgive you.” (Hope. I.A. Bunin "Dark Alleys").
Bunin's works about love are tragic. For a writer, love is a flash, a sunstroke. His love cannot be prolonged. If the heroes are true to this love, it is only in their souls, in their memories. The heroine of the short story “Dark Alleys” managed to retain in her memory fidelity to her first and only love in her life for Nikolai; somewhere in the depths of her soul there glimmers the light of this wonderful feeling, which she experienced so strongly in her youth for “Nikolenka,” to whom, as the heroine says, she gave “her beauty.” What about the hero? For him, the relationship with Nadezhda is a fleeting infatuation for a handsome gentleman's maid. He didn’t even realize that he had betrayed his beloved, betrayed their love when he simply forgot about her. But it turned out that it was this love that was the main thing in his life. Nikolai is not happy: his wife cheated on him and left him, and his son grew up “without a heart, without honor, without a conscience.” Betrayal of love makes both unhappy, and loyalty to her beloved warms the heroine’s heart, although upon meeting she accuses him, not forgiving him for his betrayal.
“Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no real, true, eternal love? Let them cut out the liar’s vile tongue!” ( M.A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita"). This is a novel about the love of two people who, before meeting each other, were each lonely and unhappy in their own way. Margarita will look for her Master, and when she finds him, they will never part again, because love is the force through which you can survive all the hardships and hardships of life without losing such qualities as fidelity, hope, kindness and sympathy! The purity of Margarita’s moral character, her loyalty, devotion, selflessness, courage in the performance of duty are the eternal features of Russian women, capable of stopping a galloping horse and sharing with their beloved all the hardships and hardships that befall them. She is faithful to her Master to the end.
But let’s not forget that Margarita also commits betrayal. Due to their sympathy for the heroine, writers never emphasize the fact that, having fallen in love with the Master, Margarita cheated on her husband. But her love was a betrayal towards him. For the sake of the Master, the heroine, to some extent, betrays herself, because she agrees to sell her soul to the devil, to be at Woland’s ball, hoping that he will help return her beloved, which she probably would not have done under other conditions. This is Margarita’s character - she is ready to do anything for love. The devil's machinations are tempting: Bulgakov's heroine subconsciously suffers because of her betrayal of her husband and acutely feels her guilt.
There are other treacheries in M. Bulgakov’s novel. Judas betrays Yeshua. Pilate betrays justice. The master betrays his life's work. There are traitors among the guests at the ball. And also Baron Meigel, Berlioz. It’s scary when a person consciously devotes himself to serving imaginary values, realizing their falsity. This is self-betrayal! The writer is convinced that more terrible than open evil is the conformity of those who understand evil, are ready to condemn it, but do not do this out of cowardice, that everyone who has ever been led by cowardice, one way or another comes to betrayal.
Story foreign literature gives us another example amazing properties human soul– the ability to faithfully wait for that very moment, that very meeting...
Love that you can't forget
To those of us who truly loved.
(Dante Alighieri. "The Divine Comedy").
Dante and Beatrice. She was unattainable for Dante during his lifetime. But he remained faithful to her and after her death, openly, without hiding, lavished the most sublime praise on his beloved. His Beatrice in the poem exalted, lost earthly features, became a dream, an ideal of life, a beacon on the poet’s mournful path: “If my life lasts a few more years, I hope to say about her what has never been said about any woman.” Dante fulfilled his promise, he wrote great poem, in which he sang his muse. It is no coincidence that in Paradise, Dante and his companion Virgil meet those who were faithful and virtuous: Saint Lucia, the biblical prophets. They are next to her, him divine Beatrice. Isn't this an example of the amazing fidelity of a beloved?
Treason to the Motherland, beloved, friends... What could be worse? Therefore, in the ninth, most terrible circle of Hell, in Dante’s opinion, there were traitors to the homeland, traitors. There is the first murderer on earth - Cain, there is Lucifer, who rebelled against God, there is Judas, who betrayed Christ, there is Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar. This is where the path of a traitor leads – to hell!
One cannot help but recall the tragic outcome of another love story:
No, don't swear by the deceiving moon
In love to the grave of a young virgin!
Or you will be, like the moon, fickle...
(Juliet. W. Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet").
The love of Romeo and Juliet, literally love to the grave, is touching and boundless. But weren’t the two young hearts “traitors”? After all, they betrayed the traditions of the family, violated the unshakable (until then!) truth: the Montagues and Capulets are enemies forever. But who would raise his hand to condemn the lovers? Their loyalty to each other makes them tremble, and death puts an end to the eternal enmity of “two equally respected families.”
You can talk about fidelity and betrayal by analyzing episodes from the works of such authors as:
M. Gorky “Mother of the Traitor”, fairy tales “No. IX, No. XI” from “Tales of Italy”;
L. N. Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”;
A.I. Kuprin “Olesya”, “ Garnet bracelet", "Shulamith";
V. Bykov “Sotnikov”;
M.A. Sholokhov "Quiet Don".
The hero of Bunin’s famous story, an unnamed lieutenant, meets on the ship a charming fellow traveler, a “little woman” returning from a Black Sea resort: “The lieutenant took her hand and raised it to his lips. The hand, small and strong, smelled of tan. And my heart sank blissfully and strangely at the thought of how strong and dark she must be under this light canvas dress after a whole month of lying under the southern sun, on the hot sea sand (she said that she was coming from Anapa).” The lieutenant learns from the lady that she has a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but she gave her name that way.
The lieutenant and the lady get off at the pier nearest city. They spend the evening, night and morning in the hotel: “They entered a large, but terribly stuffy room, hotly heated by the sun during the day, with white drawn curtains on the windows and two unburnt candles on the mirror-glass - and as soon as they entered and the footman closed the door, the lieutenant impulsively rushed to her and both were so frantically suffocated in the kiss that they later remembered this moment for many years: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.”
In the morning they part, and at first this parting does not upset the hero of the story at all: “No, my dear,” she said in response to his request to go further together, “no, you must stay until the next ship.” If we go together, everything will be ruined. This will be very unpleasant for me. I give it to you honestly that I am not at all what you might think of me. Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely hit me... Or, rather, we both got something like sunstroke...
And the lieutenant somehow easily agreed with her. In a light and happy spirit he took her to the pier,<...>He kissed him on the deck in front of everyone and barely had time to jump onto the gangplank, which had already moved back.”
And only later, left alone, the lieutenant felt unbearable grief and the severity of separation: “And he felt such pain and such uselessness of all his later life without her, that he was seized by horror and despair.” The feeling of oppressive melancholy from parting with a woman who has only now become dear to him becomes especially difficult when he sees scenes of someone else’s life - measured and indifferent, as if nothing had happened during this evening, night and morning... “Probably, I’m the only one who’s so scared.” unhappy in this whole city,” he thought<...>“.
The leitmotif of Bunin's story is the scorching, hot sun flooding the city. The cross-cutting motive of the ruthless sun rays and hot air is endowed with additional meaning: the sun and heat are associated with the heat and fire of a recently experienced passion, with the “sunstroke” that he and she experienced. In the second part of the story, following the separation of the heroes, the description of the sun and its effect on things and on the lieutenant himself is dominated by shades of meaning associated with incineration and burning. “The shoulder straps and buttons of his jacket were so burned that they could not be touched. The inside of the cap was wet from sweat, his face was burning...”; “He returned to the hotel, as if he had made a huge journey somewhere in Turkestan, in the Sahara”; “The room was stuffy and dry, like an oven...”. Love does not so much “exalt” or bestow happiness as it turns the one obsessed with it into ashes... The manifestation of this “ash” in the material world of the story becomes “white thick dust”, whitish and tanned face, and the eyes of the lieutenant. “The lieutenant was sitting under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older,” - this is how Bunin ends his story.
“Sunstroke” was written by the author in exile in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1925. More than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1899, a story by another famous Russian writer, A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog,” was created and published. The plot of this story and the story described in “Sunstroke” have undeniable similarities. The hero of Chekhov’s work, Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, meets a married lady, Anna Sergeevna, at a resort in Yalta, and, like a determined lieutenant, almost forces her into a love affair: “<...>he looked at her intently and suddenly hugged her and kissed her on the lips, and he was overwhelmed with the smell and moisture of flowers, and immediately he timidly looked around: had anyone seen?
“Let’s go to you...” he said quietly.
And they both walked quickly.
It was stuffy in her room<...>“.
Let’s compare in Bunin’s story: “The lieutenant muttered:
- Let's go...
- Where? - she asked in surprise.
- On this pier?
He said nothing. She again put the back of her hand to her hot cheek.
- Crazy...
“Let’s get off,” he repeated stupidly. - I beg you...
“Oh, do as you wish,” she said, turning away.”
Unlike the fearful Gurov, who, kissing Anna Sergeevna, is afraid of being seen by anyone, the lieutenant acts bolder and more recklessly. Dmitry Dmitrich began to seek love after a week of dating, while Bunin’s hero does the same in relation to a woman whom he first saw “three hours ago.” And the lieutenant openly kisses her goodbye. But in the main, the situations are similar: the heroes achieve intimacy with unfamiliar women, the date takes place in a stuffy room, and both of them accompany the women - Gurov to the train, the lieutenant to the ship.
The blinding sun and stuffy hot air, the leitmotifs of “Sunstroke,” are anticipated and predicted in “The Lady with the Dog”: it’s not only stuffy in Anna Sergeevna’s room. The stuffiness of the Yalta air becomes one of the topics of Gurov’s first conversation with the lady who interested him: “They talked about how stuffy it is after a hot day.” On the day she became Dmitry Dmitrich’s lover, “the rooms were stuffy, and dust swirled in the streets, hats were blown off. I was thirsty all day, and Gurov often went to the pavilion and offered Anna Sergeevna either water with syrup or ice cream. There was nowhere to go.”
In “Sunstroke,” steamships are mentioned three times: on the first of them, the lieutenant meets a charming fellow traveler, on the second she sails away from the city, on the third he himself leaves. But the steamboat is also in Chekhov’s Yalta story: “In the evening, when it had calmed down a little, they went to the pier to see how the steamer would arrive.” This is the evening of the day when Anna Sergeevna will become Gurov’s beloved. One detail of the furnishings of the rooms in which two dates take place - Gurov with Anna Sergeevna and the lieutenant with a nameless lady - is also similar. In the room of Dmitry Dmitrich’s beloved, there is a candle on the table: “a lonely candle burning on the table barely illuminated her face, but it was clear that she was not well in her soul.” In the hotel room where Bunin’s characters stayed, “two unburnt candles on the mirror.” However, similarities coexist with differences. Chekhov's candle seems to throw on what happened sad light truths: what happened for the heroine is a fall. A distant, vague prototype of this candle is the stub in “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky, illuminating Sonya Marmeladova and Raskolnikov, reading the Gospel story about the resurrection of Lazarus: “The stub had long gone out in the crooked candlestick, dimly illuminating the murderer and a harlot, strangely gathered together to read the eternal book.” Two sinners are sitting by the light of a cinder block, but Sonya repents of her sin and Raskolnikov repents of his. They will be forgiven and saved. So, if it doesn’t save Chekhov’s heroes, it will elevate them above everyday life by a feeling that turns out to be love.
And in “Sunstroke” the candles don’t burn: the lieutenant and his random companion are burning with passion, and they don’t need light. And their connection is not sinful - the passion of Bunin’s heroes is placed by the author outside of morality, perhaps above it...
Two ladies, Anna Sergeevna and a nameless acquaintance of also a nameless lieutenant, are similar in appearance. Both of them are miniature, “little” women.
Like the heroine of Bunin’s story, Anna Sergeevna von Diederitz hastens to inspire her lover with the idea that she is an honest and decent woman:
“- Believe me, believe me, I beg you...” she said. - I love honest clean life, but sin is disgusting to me, I myself don’t know what I’m doing. Ordinary people They say: the unclean one has misled. And now I can say to myself that I have been led astray by the evil one.”
“Messed up by the unclean one” is a metaphorical name for Anna Sergeevna’s closeness with Gurov, assigning a share of the blame to a certain external force. Like her, the heroine of Bunin’s story called the madness and a certain involuntary nature of her intimacy with the lieutenant the expression “sunstroke.”
However, there is also a difference between the two expressions, and a very big one. Medical-physiological “sunstroke” is like a recognition of one’s innocence in what happened; What happened for the heroine is a kind of “illness”, a mental and moral “fainting”. The woman was cheerful and carefree when she met the lieutenant: “She closed her eyes, put her hand to her cheek with her palm outward, and laughed a simple, lovely laugh<...>and said:
- I seem to be drunk... Where did you come from?<...>But still... Is it my head that’s spinning or are we turning somewhere?”
She is not very worried about cheating on her husband: “We slept little, but in the morning, coming out from behind the screen near the bed, washing and dressing in five minutes, she was as fresh as she was at seventeen. Was she embarrassed? No, very little. She was still simple, cheerful and - already reasonable.”
But Anna Sergeevna von Diederitz’s words “being led by an evil spirit” is the heroine’s recognition of the sinfulness of what she did. Betrayal to her husband morally crushed Anna Sergeevna, deprived her of her former beauty and youth: “Anna Sergeevna, this “lady with a dog,” took what happened somehow especially, very seriously, as if she were dealing with her fall<...>. Her features sank and withered, and sad hangings hung on the sides of her face. long hair, she thought in a sad pose, like a sinner in an old painting.
“Not good,” she said. “You’re the first to disrespect me now.”
<...>...It was clear that she was not feeling well at heart.
- May God forgive me! - she said, and her eyes filled with tears. - It's horrible.
- You're definitely making excuses.
- Why should I make excuses? I am a bad, low woman, I despise myself and don’t think about justification. I didn’t deceive my husband, but myself. And not just now, but I’ve been deceiving for a long time.<...>And so I became a vulgar, trashy woman whom anyone can despise.”
Chekhov, who in many ways updated the poetics of Russian prose, evaluates the connection between hero and heroine with the rigor characteristic of Russian classical literature. The justification for Gurov and Anna Sergeevna is both the vulgarity in which the hero’s wife and the heroine’s husband are mired, and the nature of their feelings: a “resort romance” develops into true love. A chance meeting in stuffy Yalta will be followed by Gurov’s crazy and inevitable arrival in the city of S., where Anna Sergeevna lives, and after that his Yalta lover will come to him in Moscow. “And it seemed that a little more - and a solution would be found, and then a new one would begin, wonderful life; and it was clear to both that the end was still far, far away and that the most difficult and difficult thing was just beginning.”
Chekhov does not like to dot all the i’s and often ends his works with open endings (this is discussed in detail in A.P. Chudakov’s book “Chekhov’s Poetics.” M., 1971). This is how he ends “The Lady with the Dog.” But a change took place in the spiritual mood of Anna Sergeevna and especially Gurov: “What wild morals, what faces! What stupid nights, what uninteresting, unnoticeable days! Furious card playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant conversations all about one thing. Unnecessary things and conversations all about one thing take up the best part of the time, best forces, and in the end, what remains is some kind of short, wingless life, some kind of nonsense, and you can’t leave or run, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or in a prison company!” Somewhat pompous pathos and nervous intonations impart a share of irony to this improperly direct speech that conveys Gurov’s thoughts. But in the main she is quite serious.
The lieutenant, after meeting and parting with a charming fellow traveler, also feels everything differently: “At the entrance stood a cab driver, young, in a smart suit, and calmly smoking a cigarette. The lieutenant looked at him in confusion and amazement: how can you sit so calmly on the box, smoke and generally be simple, careless, indifferent?” And a little further: “On the corner, near the post office, there was a photographic showcase. He looked at it for a long time large portrait some military man in thick epaulets, with bulging eyes, with a low forehead, with amazingly magnificent sideburns and a wide chest, completely decorated with orders... How wild, scary is everything everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck - yes, struck, he now understood this - by this terrible “sunstroke”, too much happiness!”
But unlike Chekhov's character Having seen the vulgarity of life, the environment in which he had hitherto resided, Bunin’s lieutenant reveals “just” the ordinariness of the world, of existence. You can turn away from vulgarity, try to run away - this is exactly what Chekhov’s Gurov does. But you cannot escape from the world. The lieutenant’s “insight” does not entail transformation, but a feeling unbearable heaviness and irreparable loss.
Gurov arrives in the city where his beloved lives. The lieutenant can’t even send a telegram: “And he suddenly stood up quickly again, took his cap and riding stack and, asking where the mail was, hurriedly went there with the phrase of the telegram already prepared in his head: “From now on, my whole life is forever, to the grave, yours, in your power." But, having reached the old thick-walled house where there was a post office and telegraph, he stopped in horror: he knew the city where she lived, he knew that she had a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but he did not know her last name or first name! He asked her about this several times yesterday at dinner and at the hotel, and each time she laughed and said:
“Why do you need to know who I am, what my name is?”
Yes, the lieutenant fell in love with his fellow traveler, he fell in love hard and hopelessly. But did she love him? The narrator’s words about their kiss: “neither one nor the other have ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives” seem to undoubtedly indicate that yes. (By the way, this is the only statement that reflects knowledge that only the narrator can possess, and not any of the characters in Sunstroke.)
The differences between Bunin’s text and Chekhov’s are associated with the special understanding of the nature of love by the author of the story “Sunstroke.” “Bunin, by the nature of his nature, acutely felt all the instability, instability, and drama of life itself<...>. And therefore love in this unreliable, although wonderful world turned out, in his opinion, to be the most fragile, short-lived, doomed” - this is how A. A. Saakyants (Anna Saakyants. I. A. Bunin // Bunin I. A. Life of Arsenyev. Stories and stories. M., 1989. P. 38).
The meeting of the two heroes of Bunin’s story is an accident that seems to have never happened. After all, the action of the story ends where it began - on the ship; but now the lieutenant is alone, as if the lady had never existed. The hero and heroine are nameless; M. V. Mikhailova, who analyzed the story, saw in this a special technique of abstraction from specifics, introducing the characters to eternity: “In love, Bunin’s heroes are raised above time, situation, circumstances. What do we know about the heroes of “Sunstroke”? Neither name, nor age” (Mikhailova M.V.I.A. Bunin. “Sunstroke”: unconsciousness of love and memory of feelings” // Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries. Tutorial for applicants to Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov: In 2 volumes. T. 2. Ed. 2nd, add. and processed M., 2000. P. 52). We beg to differ with this: is it really the profession of the hero and exactly what is indicated? military rank serve their participation in eternity? The namelessness of the hero is due to the fact that the story is told from his psychological point vision, and a person realizes himself as a unique “I”, and not as a bearer of a certain name; her name is not mentioned because it is unknown to the lieutenant. It is impossible to imagine Chekhov's Gurov those who know the name Anna Sergeevna. The name testifies to the significance of existence, the heroes’ knowledge of each other’s names indicates the significance and significance of their meeting, which entails spiritual changes. Chekhov writes about such a meeting. Bunin tells about something else - about a fleeting, dazzling and incinerating flash of light. Two outwardly similar stories turn out to be completely different in their depth.
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Works of the 19th century were mainly devoted to the theme of love, but light romantic love was uninteresting to the writers, it was necessary for the main characters to test their feelings by going through a series of tests. Writers in stories tried to answer main question about what love is, how it affects a person’s life, whether it destroys him or is it salvation, how long this feeling can last.
Ivan Bunin shows in his stories all the tragedy of love: it is beautiful, but destructive for a person. Usually, love among Bunin’s heroes does not go into the family channel, where everyday life and everyday life can diminish these feelings or completely destroy them. This is the kind of love the writer shows in the work “Sunstroke”, where the main characters experience the strongest feelings, they are in love.
The characters in the story have no names, there is only he, she and their experiences. Such commonality allows everyone who reads this story to experience some of their own feelings and perceive the plot in their own way. Despite the fact that the main character is a woman, the author still looks at everything that happens through the eyes of a male hero. The traditional beginning of the story: the main characters are traveling on a boat, and their chance meeting turns out to be a flash of a new feeling.
Their attraction is so strong that they decide to enter into more real connection. Not knowing their names, they retire to one of the rooms. But the new day does not bring them anything good: after the instant love that flared up, disappointment appears. They both try not to remember what happened to them. They part without ever having met. The heroes are not worried about the breakup, pretending to be indifferent.
And only a few months later the lieutenant understands that he loves and suffers, but he knows nothing about her, not even her name. Having gone through moral suffering, the hero finds himself back on the ship. But now there is no trace of his fun, his soul has aged, and he himself says that he feels much older than he really is.
The title that the writer gave to his story is interesting. Sunstroke is associated with lightning, a flash that strikes and knocks a person down, but when it disappears, the person suffers and suffers. Nature becomes another actor in Bunin's story. According to the plot, it is always present, creating a certain emotional mood. dark night on the eve of intimacy is so good that they, the heroes, cannot help but end up together. Dawn is mirror image the feeling that the heroes suddenly experienced: the dawn went out, still continuing to glow in some places.
Bunin uses the world around us to show the happiness that awaits the heroes ahead. But the lights floating into the distance are a symbol of the monotony and routine of life, where a bright feeling cannot exist. The details recreated by the author help to show more accurately how this subtle feeling arises, how the mutual attraction of young bodies arises. The girl’s hands are cute and strong, and her body is strong and dark.
The love shown by Bunin is not described by the author spiritually, it is only physical. And then the writer inserts many verbs into the text to show the reality of the picture and how rash the actions of the main characters are. The heroine herself called their romance sunstroke. The young woman behaves judiciously, showing her lover that this was an easy romance in which no continuation is needed.
The main character behaves differently. He, too, does not think about continuing the affair until he begins to realize that he is in love. After this novel, the lieutenant can no longer say that it has become funny. Memories of what happened are already torment and suffering for the main character. Not understanding how to continue to live, he does not see a goal in his life, it seems meaningless to him. His heart was struck by a terrible sunstroke.
At the end of the story, the author shows the reader and appearance hero to match him inner world and the main features of his appearance. The hero's face is gray from tanning, Blue eyes and a faded mustache. Ivan Bunin again shows the reader details that allow him to understand the hero’s feelings. But the author persistently shows and proves that this love has no future, it cannot develop. Happiness and love cannot last forever, the author claims, they are fleeting, but full of suffering.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin today, perhaps more than other writers of the early 20th century, deserves the title of classic. That stormy one revolutionary era, in which he lived, could not but influence his human and literary worldview, but Bunin, unlike other great artists - Gorky, Sholokhov, Zamyatin - remained faithful to the path of serving literature as such, chosen in his youth, regardless of its class , ideological, social orientation. Of course, Bunin has works in highest degree topical (let us at least remember “ Damn days"), and his statements about the events in Russia at that time are more than definite from a political point of view, but still this is not the main thing for the writer. The main content of his works was what worried and occupied us throughout our history: the problems of the relationship between man and the world, good and evil, eternal and momentary, and this is what encourages us today to read and reread Bunin, reliving what we experienced before We are millions of people. Truly, the one who first said it is right: classics are always modern. And, of course, one of the eternal themes embodied in Bunin’s work is love. The writer's understanding of the main thing human feeling far from trivial. Let’s try to figure out what it is and why in Bunin’s works love appears as “sunstroke.”
Life, caught under Bunin’s all-seeing gaze, amazes not only with its power artistic representation, but also by its subordination to some internal laws unknown to man. They rarely break through to the surface: most people never experience their fatal impact. As if paying tribute to the modernist sentiments of that time, Bunin is looking for examples volcanic eruption a passion that tragically subjugates a person to its blind forces.
Actually, this interpretation can already be discerned in some of the writer’s pre-revolutionary works. Let us remember “Ignat”, “Dreams of Chang” or the 1916 story “Son”, which seems to precede “The Case of the Cornet Elagin”. Isn't Emil's murder of Madame Moreau and subsequent unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide are not dictated by the same inexorable reasons as the death of the artist Sosnovskaya at the hands of Elagin?
Like Emil’s meeting with Madame Moreau, Elagin’s acquaintance and rapprochement with Sosnovskaya means not just love, but “an eerie blossoming, a painful revelation, the first mass of sex.” Elagin tells the investigator: “... our unhappy meeting with her is fate, God's will" And in another place the author himself characterizes Sosnovskaya: “Her life was sheer languor, an incessant thirst to get away from the hateful earthly world.”
Here, as in other stories of the 20s (“Consuming Fire”, “Many Waters”, “Transfiguration”), death is the resolver of all contradictions. And later, in the short stories of the famous collection “Dark Alleys,” the same voice of despair is heard, as if saying “no” to human happiness. After a long separation and quarrels, Alexey Meshchersky and Natalie (“Natalie”) unite, but soon the heroine dies in premature birth. Far from Russia, two emigrants meet - a waitress in a Parisian canteen Olga Alexandrovna and General Nikolai Platonovich, both expelled from their homeland, both lonely, but fate in last time punishes them: unexpectedly the general dies (“In Paris”),
Yes, it may seem that these and many other works of Bunin are tinged with pessimism. Gorky’s famous statement: “Bunin rewrites the Kreutzer Sonata under the title Mitya’s Love.” It seems to me that one can and even should argue with this, because in Bunin’s “love” stories there is not a trace of that ascetic denial of the flesh that permeates L.N.’s work. Tolstoy.
Mitya’s love for Katya is a feeling of extraordinary strength and purity, which in comparison with Katya’s “ordinary” passion looks almost supernatural. For Mitya, the tragic contradiction is inherent from the very moment of the birth of their love. “Even then, it often seemed as if there were two Katyas: one, whom from the first minute of meeting her Mitya began to persistently desire and demand, and the other, genuine, ordinary, painfully different from the first.” Mitya dies when this other Katya breaks the ideal he created, and his rapprochement with the lively village girl Alenka only exacerbates the feeling of terrible loss. True love - greatest good, and it is by no means limited to the sphere of the platonic, but it cannot be replaced by sensuality alone, as the writer seems to be telling us.
The chaste young man feels robbed, devastated in a world where love is just an object of trade, either frank in a village way (“for a fiver for piglets”), or “spiritualized” by Katya’s “service to art.” Mitya cannot live with such love. With his character, structure of feelings, strength and tenacity of love, Mitya is similar to the heroes of Bunin’s early stories, for example, Andrei Streshnev (“ Last date"), unable to “just love” and cruelly deceived by Vera. By the way, like Katya, Vera explains her action by her love of art, in this case to music.
Extraordinary strength and sincerity of feelings are characteristic of the heroes of Bunin's stories, and in them there is no savoring of the intimate aspects of the relationship between a man and a woman. Where there is love, everything is sacred. A certain lieutenant met an unfamiliar, seductive woman on the ship, married and quite decent (“Sunstroke”). What is this? Run-of-the-mill adultery? "Steamboat" novel? “I give you my word of honor,” the woman says to the lieutenant, “I am not at all what you might think of me. The eclipse definitely hit me. Or rather, we both got something like sunstroke.” The sensual impulse of the heroes of the story gradually and as if against their will introduces the lieutenant and the woman into the enchanted world of new relationships, which affect them strongly and painfully, and all the more terrible because they parted forever and seemed to have died to each other. A road adventure develops into a real shock from which the heart will never recover. It is difficult to find another story that, in such a condensed form and with such force, would convey the drama of a person who suddenly knew the true, too happy love. So happy that if intimacy with this little woman had lasted, love would have immediately gone away, leaving only the pain caused by “sunstroke.”
This is love according to Bunin. Blind fate, drama of inconsistencies, tragedy of hopelessness. You can grumble and complain when you get sunstroke, but you cannot live without the sun. You can complain about evil fate, which led to destructive love, but one cannot live without it at all. It seems to me that this is exactly what I.A. is telling us. Bunin in his works, and to this day they are dear to us and loved by us because in them the skill of a great artist is combined with an original and at the same time very close to any person vision of the world in which we live and die and in between, Of course we love you.
