19. Ivan Bunin

Opponent of modernism

We have already talked quite a lot and will continue to talk about that fragment, the segment of Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX century, which can conditionally be placed under the heading "modernism". Today we will try to look at the opposite pole and talk a little about the figure, strategy and work of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin.

As I will try to show, in many respects he built his position on the opposite side of modernism, he was in many respects aware of himself, quite consciously, as an opponent of modernism, and we will talk about this quite a lot today. But before I talk about it, precisely because it is important, it really is, I would like to say this first. When we talk about acmeism, symbolism or futurism, when we talk about the confrontation between realism and modernism, we should not, it seems to me, forget one important thing: that these boundaries did not always overlap with reality. If only because - it's hard for us to realize now - that there were simply far fewer writers than there are now.

And since there were much fewer of them, one way or another in writers' restaurants, in writers' clubs, at evenings, at all kinds of discussions literary works, in the editorial offices they, writers, constantly met, constantly collided. They talked to each other and they read each other.

If you now imagine that some writer will read all the other Russian writers who wrote some kind of work that day, it’s impossible, plus if you also take into account that modern Russian writers read Facebook, LiveJournal or some other resource, then, in general, it can be said that notable writers read almost all of each other's works, or at least carefully looked through them. And since they did this, they reacted in their texts not only according to some kind of their own ideological guidelines, etc., but also experienced each other's influence.

And therefore, when we talk about Bunin, let's remember that he was a man who not only opposed himself to Russian modernism, but also experienced the influence of Russian modernists, including those whom he despised, whom he opposed. And in order to talk about Bunin and his position, it seems to me that we do not always do this with you, but in this case talk a little about his biography, briefly outline the stages of his life path necessary.

Descendant of a great family

And the very first thing they usually say about him, and this is important: Bunin comes from an ancient noble family, and many fairly well-known figures of Russian culture belonged to this family. "Quite famous" is perhaps an unfortunate word; frankly, great people. For example, Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky - we will talk about this later. He was the illegitimate son of the landowner Bunin.

For example, the great traveler Semenov-Tyan-Shansky. For example, the remarkable in her own way, at least very interesting poetess Bunina, one of the first Russian poetesses, she belonged to this family. And this was very important for Bunin; as we shall see, this largely determined his literary position.

He was born in Voronezh, lived in the Oryol province. And this is also significant, because Bunin himself never forgot that it was precisely this strip of Russia that gave a lot to great Russian literature. He himself said this, I quote: “In central Russia ... a rich Russian language was formed,<отсюда>Almost all the greatest Russian writers have come out, headed by Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Indeed, the feeling of being a descendant of Zhukovsky, the feeling of being a countryman, if we understand this word a little broader, of Turgenev and Tolstoy - this was very, very important for Bunin. And it is also important that this ancient noble family of once rich landowners, wealthy landowners, after the abolition of serfdom, as happened with almost all landowners, was more and more ruined, and by the time Bunin entered into adult life, the family was completely ruined. They were almost poor. Of course, they did not lead such a life as the poor peasants or the proletariat, but nevertheless, Bunin did not have free funds, i.e. very early he felt himself not only the heir of a great family, capturing literature too, but such an impoverished heir, the last, perhaps the last representative of this great family.

In addition, in reality, this also led to the fact that Bunin did not have his own house for a very long time, that he was forced to wander around the provinces, not in St. Petersburg and not in Moscow, because, of course, living in Moscow or St. capitals, was much more expensive than living in the provinces.

Admirer of Nadson and Tolstoy

During these wanderings, he, in fact, begins to engage in literary activities. And I’m afraid that you are already a little fed up with this and will get bored even more further, but still I have to say that the first poet he became interested in was Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson, and the first poem that Bunin published was called “Over Nadson’s Grave”, 1887

In general, we, unfortunately, will probably not have time to talk about this in detail and specifically, but I simply suggest that you think, if you like, about this phenomenon, about this effect: the most popular poet of the era, Nadson, who was read by a variety of writers , from Bryusov and Bunin to Mandelstam and Gumilyov, is completely forgotten today. What attracted them all so much in this poet, in this consumptive youth? This is an interesting topic.

But we will continue about Bunin. At the same time, when he began to study literature, when he wandered around Russia, he became interested in Tolstoyism. Here, just let's not confuse: he was also carried away by the works of Tolstoy, too, but at that time he was interested, fascinated by the teachings of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which he expounded in the Confession, first of all and in the later such thing, The Kreutzer Sonata. And for some time, Bunin was simply even a Tolstoyan: he preached non-resistance to evil by violence, simplification, forgiveness, universal love, etc. And even for some time he was a vegetarian, then, however, he moved away from this.

From the province to the capital

In 1895, Bunin takes a decisive step in his literary career: despite the fact that he still doesn’t have much money, he quits his service in Poltava, in provincial town, where he then lived, and comes first to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow and devotes himself entirely to literary activity.

In general, this path from the provinces to the capital - we will probably talk about this a little more - is one of the most frequent and, perhaps, one of the most fruitful paths: when, with the accumulated baggage, with the provincial speech heard, with knowledge of the provincial characters, the young or a relatively young person came from the provinces to the capital, this very often turned into an interesting literary debut, interesting literary texts.

And, having arrived in Moscow, Bunin approaches, as it were, simultaneously with two circles of writers. On the one hand, he gets to know Chekhov, who, along with Tolstoy, becomes for him such a main moral and literary guide, whom he speaks of as, I quote, "a man of rare spiritual nobility, rare truthfulness", and with Kuprin, i.e. e. gets acquainted with the circle of those who can conditionally be called realists.

On the other hand, and this is also very important, initially Bunin reacted with great interest to the modernists, and, in particular, to the first Russian symbolists - Balmont and Bryusov, with whom he gets to know and, if not begins to make friends, then in any case friendly for sure.

Moreover, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the first book of poems by Bunin, and he was not only a prose writer, but also a poet, was published in 1901 by the symbolist publishing house Scorpion. In the publishing house supervised by Bryusov, Bunin publishes the book Falling Leaves, and this is exactly what we were talking about: closeness is largely human, which, perhaps, was not always even supported by some kind of poetic closeness, a good acquaintance allow Bunin to publish such a book.

Break with the Symbolists

However, what happens next is that Bunin forever pushes away from the symbolists: Bryusov, the main, most authoritative reviewer of that time, writes a not too benevolent review of this book. Bunin was an extremely scrupulous person in this respect, and there is a break with Bryusov, and then with all the Symbolists.

I will quote what Bryusov writes. “Bunin chose the role of a writer of nature. But in poetry there is not and cannot be any other content than the human soul. And then comes such a completely deadly finale of this review: “The first collection of poems by Mr. Bunin, Falling Leaves, was an observer’s notebook. "Yes, it happens" - that's all that could be said about his first poems.

Here, it is not so much even this characterization itself that sounds insulting and harsh - “Yes, it happens”, - but this “g.”, because in the language of that time to call this or that poet or prose writer “Mr.”, “Mr. Bunin” or "Mr. Severyanin" meant to show that he was outside of great literature. From this fraternal circle of writers, he moved to some periphery. "Well, there is still such Mr. Bunin."

Bunin, of course, was very offended and since then consciously - I repeat, consciously - opposed himself to modernism. On the one hand, of course, this gap is human, it should not be underestimated, it was important that, humanly, they parted ways with the modernists. On the other hand, apparently, there was still something different in the poetics, since Bryusov responded so harshly to poetry. And since that time, as Vyacheslav Khodasevich, one of the most tenacious and attentive observers of the literature of that time, writes, since the 1910s, Bunin's poetics has been - I quote again - "a consistent and stubborn struggle against symbolism."

Attitude towards the work of F.M. Dostoevsky

And here, before going further, it is probably worth mentioning that not only the modernists, but also the main previous writer for the modernists, namely Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, was always put very low by Bunin. As much as he always wrote with enthusiasm about Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Leskov, so he always spoke harshly about Dostoevsky at the slightest opportunity.

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, who studied this problem a little, formulated Bunin's attitude towards Dostoevsky very well: “Neither Tolstoy, nor Chekhov interfered with Bunin, but Dostoevsky interfered. The themes of irrational passions, love-hate Bunin considered his own. And even more so, he was annoyed by the stylistic manner that was alien to him. Dostoevsky was a strange home for him in his own land. Here is what Lotman said about Bunin and Dostoevsky, one can partly say about Bunin and the modernists.

Bunin described human physiology like no other, he knew how to do it. He described smells... In general, everything related to human physiology in the broadest sense of the word. He was wonderful at doing it. And some of the modernists did the same, for example, the same Balmont, the same Bryusov, later, for example, the same Akhmatova. And this irritated Bunin. In his opinion, they did it the wrong way.

And, accordingly, after a departure, a rollback from the modernists, Bunin draws closer to a group of writers who called themselves "Znanevtsy" (from the word "knowledge"). The ideological inspirer of this society was Gorky. It also included various writers - Teleshov, Kuprin ...

"Antonov apples" as a literary-centric text

And from that time on, Bunin began to consciously oppose himself to the modernists. And in 1910 he wrote and published the story "The Village" (he himself called it a novel), which is Bunin's main realistic text. But today we will not talk about this text, but we will try to make out Bunin’s early text, his early story, the famous story from which Bunin, in fact, began for many - “Antonov apples”.

"Antonov apples" - a story written in a significant year. It was written in 1900, i.e. just at the turn of two eras - XIX era century, which is ending, and the era of the twentieth century, which is just beginning. On the one hand, we will try to understand how this text is structured, on the other hand, since we are still trying to outline the main milestones in the history of Russian literature, we will try to understand what is Bunin's originality as a writer in that context, and realistic, and modernist, in which he found himself.

What is this story? I hope, I'm sure almost everyone has read it. This is a rather short text, which is a description of the old life in comparison with the new life. And in this description of the former life, one circumstance cannot but attract attention, as it seems to me, a key one, important for explaining this text and for explaining Bunin's position in general. He describes those places, those segments of Russian life in the 19th century, which were traditionally described before him by the great Russian writers of the first or second half of the 19th century. Those. very often he does not describe directly some types or some kind of activity, but he describes as if orienting himself, referring to his predecessors.

What I mean? Well, for example, he describes the hunt in the most detailed way, as far as a short story allows, in his text, and describes it in such a way that we immediately recall a very large number of descriptions of hunting in Russian literature, from, of course, Turgenev as the author of "Notes of a Hunter" to Nekrasov who described the hunt.

Or, suppose, if we plunge into an earlier time, Pushkin as the author of "Count Nulin" and, of course, the famous hunting scene in Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" cannot but be remembered. Moreover, just describing the hunt, Bunin reveals the technique that I am talking about now. There, one of the characters, preparing to go hunting, quotes "It's time, it's time to saddle the agile bottom / And throw the ringing horn over your shoulders." What are these lines? These are lines from the great poet, Bunin's predecessor, who dies just in 1910, lines from Afanasy Fet's poem "Hound Hunting".

But not only hunting, of course. For example, Bunin describes a fire at night. I will quote. "In the dark, in the depths of the garden - fabulous picture: just in a corner of hell, a crimson flame burns near the hut, surrounded by darkness, and someone's black silhouettes, as if carved from ebony, move around the fire, while giant shadows from them walk through the apple trees. This is a very expressive and very Buninian description.

And of course, it brings to mind a number of works that also describe the night fire and the shadows around it, the people around it. This, of course, is also Chekhov's Steppe, where one of the important scenes is just the scene of a nighttime conversation around a campfire. This, of course, is Chekhov's short story "Student", where, however, the action does not take place at night, but also by the fire. By the evening fire, student Ivan Velikopolsky tells the story of Peter's abdication to two widows. And this, of course - I hope you remembered, just from school curriculum- the famous story by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev "Bezhin Meadow", where the characters also sit by the fire and indulge in all sorts of memories.

And, finally, one of the key scenes of the story "Antonov apples" is a description of the noble landowner's library: "Then you start reading books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines." And, of course, this description, to which we will return later - it is here, it seems, that the key to understanding Bunin's story is located - brings to mind the famous scene from "Eugene Onegin": Tatyana, in Onegin's absence, comes to his estate, reading books in his library.

Moreover, the very description of the outgoing life, where everything is cozy, where everything is nice, where in the center there are golden, almost heavenly fruits - Antonov apples - of course, makes us recall one of the sweetest, most delicious long arguments of this kind, about one from the key scenes of Ivan Goncharov's novel "Oblomov" - Oblomov's memories of his childhood in his native Oblomovka, which simply textually resonate with Bunin's story.

Those. we see that the story is built not simply as a description of some loci and some motifs associated with the 19th century. As a matter of fact, this is such a literary-centric text. Bunin looks at the passing era through the prism of literature, through the prism of the works of those writers who, in fact, represent this 19th century. These are Turgenev, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Pushkin...

The fading of an era

Note that Dostoevsky is not included in this list, Dostoevsky with his themes is absent, significantly absent in the story "Antonov apples". And the question that I want to ask is the question “Why? What's the point? Why does Bunin construct his story in this way? And the answer seems simple.

The answer lies in the fact that Bunin feels himself ... One of the most important themes of the story, by the end of the story, the theme of the fading of the era, the fading of noble nests arises - so I used another formula from the works of the great writers of the 19th century - the theme of extinction arises, and Bunin feels like the last in this series. Let's take a look at his biography. “The nobles are ruined after the abolition of serfdom, an era is ending, and now I am the last in this once great, glorious series” - this is an important theme of the story.

But perhaps even more important, even more interesting, is that Bunin feels the same way about the literature that is coming to an end. He is not just a writer of the turn of the century - you and I talked a little about this when we talked about modernists, about this new sensation. He makes a completely different emphasis: I am the last of those great figures who no longer exist. And this literature is, in fact, almost non-existent. And I - this is also a very important topic of Bunin, early Bunin, at least - I am smaller than each of them. I am less than Turgenev, I less than Chekhov, I am smaller than Goncharov, I am smaller than Nekrasov ... I am no longer as big, not as great as these representatives of this golden age, the age of "Antonov apples", but nevertheless I still exist, I am, as it were, the sum of all these writers, I bring to an end the epoch which they so gloriously began.

And, analyzing this complex of motives, I would like to draw your attention to one more short phrase, which seems to me very interesting to parse, which is a pleasure to parse, a phrase from the story "Antonov apples". Just describing the library, he describes it like this: "And here are the magazines with the names: Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin's lyceum student." And we, it seems to me, should ask ourselves why this particular set of names? Why these particular authors? For example, why does he write not "Pushkin", but "Lyceum student Pushkin"?

I think the answer is pretty simple. As a matter of fact, Batyushkov, Zhukovsky, and the lyceum student Pushkin begin that very era, no matter how you call it: the era of Russian romanticism, the era of great Russian literature - which by 1900, with the exception of Tolstoy and Chekhov, is already, as it were, coming to an end, ending. Moreover, it is understandable why he speaks of both Batyushkov and Zhukovsky - because each of them is a father, if metaphorically expressed, a progenitor of a completely certain direction in Russian poetry. If elegies are primarily associated with Batyushkov, then ballads are associated with Zhukovsky. And the lyceum student Pushkin, of course, is the beginning of a new Russian literature. Only poets are mentioned, and this, of course, is very important.

Zhukovsky-Bunin

On the other hand, it is very significant, and I have already said about this, that Zhukovsky was not only a metaphorical ancestor of Bunin - he was his real ancestor. He was the illegitimate son of the landowner of the Tula province Afanasy Ivanovich Bunin, and the father of the author of Antonov apples was the landowner of the Oryol and Tula provinces. And therefore, Zhukovsky was perceived not only as the progenitor of literature, the initiator of great literature, but also as one of the initial links of that family chain, the last representative of which Bunin considered himself.

Apparently, Zhukovsky, although Bunin did not write very much about him as a result, was generally key figure. For example, a year after he wrote "Antonov apples", in May 1901 he wrote to his brother Julius, with whom he generally corresponded a lot, who was also a writer, he writes like this: "Bow to Nikolai Fedorovich Mikhailov, publisher of Vestnik upbringing,” and ask him if he would take an article about Zhukovsky from me in the fall? You know how much I love him."

Despite the fact that Bunin, generally speaking, did not write so many articles in his life, it was not his genre - literary critical articles. But he was going to write about Zhukovsky on purpose. This article was not, however, written. But he was going to write on purpose, because Zhukovsky found himself at the crossroads of the most important topics for Bunin - one of the Bunin family, a representative of the Bunin family, and the initiator of the literary era.

Now I want to expand the context a little so that more light falls on the story "Antonov apples". What is there side by side with these lines about Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, lyceum student Pushkin? And next to it is this: “And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her clavichord polonaises, her languid reading of poems from “Eugene Onegin”. And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... Good girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, their aristocratic-beautiful heads in ancient hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ... "

We see that Bunin here again crosses a whole series of motives connected with this theme, his most important theme, and the theme of the story. With what theme: on the one hand, the literature of the past - "Eugene Onegin" is mentioned and the reading of his poems, i.e. the main or one of the main estate texts of Russian literature, which the hero's grandmother reads languidly. And here again, this, among other things, is simply related to the biography. Why?

After the death of Afanasy Bunin, Zhukovsky's father, it was his grandmother Maria Grigoryevna Bunina who took care of the growing Zhukovsky. The mention of the grandmother, thus, also turns out to be connected with the literary genealogy of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin already, and with his real genealogy.

And in order to understand, to make sure that this is not my fantasy and I did not read all this into Bunin's text myself, I will quote one of the fragments of Bunin's late letter, when he was already a great writer, had already received the Nobel Prize. And he in the third person, understanding his meaning, looking at himself from the side, writes about himself like this: “He<т.е. Бунин>classically ends that glorious literature that Zhukovsky began, together with Karamzin ...

Look, this first motive arises, which is very important for our story and for understanding Bunin's position. Bunin - last writer in the row in which Zhukovsky was the first. And then: “... which was started, together with Karamzin, by Zhukovsky, or more precisely, by Bunin, the native, but illegitimate son of Afanasy Ivanovich Bunin, who received the surname Zhukovsky from his godfather only because of this illegality.”

Those. Bunin first writes about Zhukovsky as a writer, as a great poet who began the era that Bunin ends, and then he goes simply to family relations, he writes that Zhukovsky was the first in this series, but in fact he is generally he was not even Zhukovsky, in conscience he should have had the surname Bunin. And this new Bunin, Bunin - the author of "Antonov apples" completes this line, which Zhukovsky began.

And I think that it is of paramount importance to understand about Bunin as a writer of the early twentieth century, and this explains a lot in his attitude towards the modernists, who, of course, seemed to him the same barbarians who destroy everything that Bunin worshiped, destroy this magnificent building , a magnificent temple, if you like, which was built by Bunin's predecessors. And he defended this temple, this building with all his might, he tried as best he could to resist the modernist barbarians.

Modernists on Clean Monday

At the same time - and this is where we will end our conversation - when he writes in 1944 the story that he considered his best story, " Clean Monday”, and inserts hairpins into it against the modernists (and the “Fiery Angel” is cursed in this story, and Andrei Bely appears there as an idiot) - that’s all yes. Moreover, the portrait of barefoot Tolstoy, on the contrary, hangs on the wall near the main character, i.e. this contrast runs openly in the story again, as always.

But at the same time, when Bunin portrays the main character of the story at the same time as a real girl, and at the same time she absorbs the features of Russia, and when at the end the heroine casts a glance from under her scarf at the main character, we suddenly realize that none other than the one whom Bunin hated, whom Bunin considered a dangerous and harmful poet, namely Alexander Blok with his image of Russia - beautiful woman, casting a glance from under a scarf, influenced the concept, I repeat once again, of this story by Bunin, which he himself considered his best work.

Fet's heir is at enmity with everyone

Like many great prose writers, for example, like Nabokov, with whom there is reason to compare him, Bunin believed that, first of all ... He appreciated, of course, his prose, but still the main thing that he writes is poetry. Only with poetry he seemed to be less fortunate, because it turned out to be wiped out by these stupid modernists who did not appreciate it (I'm trying to speak for Bunin himself), but in prose, since there was no such dominance of modernist writers, he was able to express himself more .

But in general it must be said that, of course, this is not modernist poetry. It's understandable why they didn't like him. In poetry, he also very consciously strove for clarity, for intelligibility. Of course, he is Fet's heir primarily as a poet. They also read Fet all. Moreover, acmeists will then also strive for clarity and intelligibility. And moreover, there will be critics who will say: well, why do they propagate this clarity and intelligibility in our country and say that we need to strive for a balance between the metaphysical and the real, when Bunin already did it before them! Bunin was the first to call a man to the earth - I am quoting this almost literally - and not at all acmeists.

But still, it was a different setting for him as a poet. And not only Bryusov - Blok wrote extremely about Bunin too ... On the one hand, he praised him, he said that these were wonderful poems, he recognized Bunin as a master. But on the other hand, it was a very strange poet to all of them.

What is surprising to me is not that they quarreled and parted, but nevertheless, this is how they are - I explain this both by Bunin’s youth, and his greater tolerance in his youth, and, perhaps, by the fact that he still didn’t he decided which way to go - that how they got together, how they were around for some time! And he really was a sharp person, he really spoke harshly about many of his contemporaries. And there were some poets who simply did not exist for him, whom he hated. Let's say, I said that it was difficult with Blok in different years, he still recognized the talent of Bryusov or Bely, but the futurists there, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky - they didn’t exist at all. This is poetics, which was deeply alien to him. He really didn't seem to take anything from them.

But I now remembered - even some modernists were interesting to him. And, for example, his senior and junior comrades like Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Kuprin, and even Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who seemed to be a “red count”, located at a completely different literary pole - he, of course, appreciated them. Moreover, again, he spoke very harshly about all of them, sometimes very sharply.

But the same Tolstoy, for example, when he read "Peter the Great" (not the most, in my opinion, beautiful work Alexei Nikolaevich), he sent a letter, the contents of which I can’t vouch for, that I’ll quote it right now, but the meaning was such that “Alyoshka, you, of course, are a bastard, but you are a very talented, wonderful writer.” That was enough to appreciate him so much.

But as for the pantheon, was there anyone he never spoke ill of? Indeed, Tolstoy, first of all, Chekhov. These two figures, these two people, two writers... They were not writers of the past for him! Well, at some point they did. But he was familiar with both of them, and communicated quite closely with both of them. Here they were writers for him, who were almost beyond criticism, he bowed to both of them.

Although, by the way, they are also about Chekhov - I don’t remember if they are in this selection, but, let’s say, he did not like Chekhov’s plays. Except for The Seagull, everything else seemed rubbish to him, he believed that Chekhov was a bad playwright. However, he himself did not write or almost did not write plays, Chekhov was not his rival.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953)

The writer came from a noble family, among the ancestors were not only statesmen, but also people of art. Their work engendered in his still adolescent soul the desire to become the "second Pushkin", which he told about in his autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev"(1927–1933). The impoverished aristocratic nest of the Bunins lived with memories of past greatness, carefully preserved the romantic legends of the family. Probably, nostalgic motifs of Bunin's creativity for the golden age of Russia, for the times of V. Zhukovsky, A. Pushkin, E. Baratynsky, F. Tyutchev, M. Lermontov, originate here.

The childhood of the future master of the word - a poet, prose writer, translator - passed in the Oryol region, as he himself wrote, "in the deepest field silence." The first teacher, a young man from eternal students, a polyglot, a bit of a violinist, a bit of a painter, "at the table" taught the boy to read from Homer's Odyssey. The endless stories of an intellectual vagabond about life, about people, about distant lands contributed a lot to the development of children's imagination, a craving for travel. Another teacher wrote poetry, and eight-year-old Vanya also began to try his hand at versification. Systematic education was limited to three classes at the Yelets gymnasium. Good knowledge was obtained from brother Julius, a university graduate, exiled to the village under police supervision for political unreliability. Thanks to the passion for reading that arose early and was preserved for life, by the age of twenty-five, I. Bunin was already encyclopedically educated. His translations of the Romantics, G. Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha", the mysteries "Cain" and the poem "Manfred" by J. Byron, made at this age, are recognized as classics. At the same time, the young artist began to publish in the capital's magazines and attracted the attention of A. Chekhov, whose advice he greatly appreciated. A little later, a meeting took place with M. Gorky, who introduced the novice prose writer and poet, like many others, to the circle of authors of the Znanie publishing house, the writers of Sreda. In 1909, the Russian Academy of Sciences elected I. Bunin an honorary academician, in 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his true artistic talent in creating a Russian character in prose. The laureate was a little offended: he wanted to receive this award for his poetry.

The February Revolution, the October Revolution of 1917, I. Bunin perceived as the collapse of Russia. He expressed his vision and sharp rejection of these dramatic events in a pamphlet diary. "Cursed Days"(1918-1920, full publication - 1935). This work, permeated with pain and melancholy, has the same pathos as "Untimely Thoughts" by M. Gorky, "S.O.S." L. Andreeva. The artist remained a principal opponent of Soviet power until his death. In 1920, I. Bunin was forced to leave Russia. He expressed his feelings as an exile in poetic lines:

The bird has a nest, the beast has a hole.

How bitter was the young heart,

When I left my father's yard,

Say sorry to your home!

The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.

How the heart beats sadly and loudly,

When I enter, being baptized, into a strange, rented house

With his old knapsack!

(According to the first, p., 1922)

For more than thirty years, the artist of the word lived in France, mainly in Paris, was engaged in social and political activities, and wrote a lot over the years. Modernity, which was before for I. Bunin, a poet and prose writer, is secondary, almost leaving his artistic world. The main themes, ideas and, it seems, he drew inspiration from memory, from dear to my heart of the past. "Mowers"(1921) and " Sunstroke " (1925), "Mitina love" and " Alexey Alekseevich"(both - 1927), a cycle of 38 short stories " Dark alleys" (full publication - 1946), where everything is about love, "a beautiful, but fleeting guest on our earth", and the book "Memories"(1950), - all this and much more from the emigrant heritage, of course, the pinnacle of verbal art.

Having made his debut at the age of 17 as a poet, I. Bunin did not immediately find his themes, his tone. Future author of the original lyric collection "Leaf fall"(1901), awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Academy of Sciences, first wrote poems "under Nekrasov":

You will not see this in the capital:

Here really weary need!

Behind the iron bars in the dungeon

It is rare to see such a sufferer...

("The Village Beggar", 1886)

The young poet also wrote "under Nadson", "under Lermontov":

The poet died in the prime of life,

The singer fell asleep prematurely

Death tore off his crown

And carried away into the darkness of the grave ...

("Over the grave of S. Ya. Nadson", 1887)

In five to seven years, I. Bunin will abandon these stanzas, later, in an autobiographical story "Lika"(1933), he called this pen test "a false note".

In prose, as in poetry, I. Bunin did not immediately acquire his vision of the diversity of human relations with the world, and hence his own style. This vision will be reflected in the "final" novel "The Life of Arseniev", in which he will say: "I was born in the universe, in the infinity of time and space." First there were years of fascination with social and political ideas, literary apprenticeship and imitation of popular fiction writers. He was attracted by the desire to speak out on social topics. "Tanka" (1892), "In the country"(1895) were created under the influence of Tolstoy's idea of ​​simplification. The journalistic beginning in them is clearly stronger than the artistic one. In literary memoirs Tolstoy"(1927) describes how Lev Nikolayevich himself advised the debutant to "throw off the uniform" of the then fashionable ethical doctrine. The "uniform" was thrown off, the influence art school eminent contemporary is tangible in the mature I. Bunin. In other early stories and essays, such as " Nefedka" (1887), "God's people..." (1891), "Castryuk" (1892), "To the edge of the world"(1894), one can hear echoes of the ideology of populist writers - the Uspensky brothers, A. Levitov, N. Zlatovratsky. The young author called for a sympathetic attitude towards the peasantry - the "bearer of the highest truth" offended by fate.

Later he would be more careful about the definition of truth. The change in position is partly explained by the works with confessional motives that appeared later in Bunin's work. So, in the Cairi cycle (1912-1913) there is a story "Night Talk" about a revolution in the views of a young man on the people, social progress. The entries left in the author's diary indicate that the plot of this story is taken from life.

The hero of the story is a nameless high school student who, under the influence of the books of populist writers, decided to "study the people". In the summer in the village, he worked until dawn with the peasants in the field, ate from a common boiler, refused a bath, from clean clothes, measuring the degree of his "simplicity" by the habit of "the smell of a body not washed for a long time." Reality breaks popular ideas about the people: satanic cruelty is revealed where holy Russia was expected. “He would have thought all his life,” the narrator reflects, “that he had perfectly studied the Russian people, if ... a frank conversation had not started between the workers that night.” Rudeness, slyness - this was forgiven to the peasants as something accidental, hiding a light base. But behind the veil of "accidents" something unexpectedly opens up that plunges one into horror. As about something ordinary, the peasants talk about the murders they committed, about how their fellow villager-father "master on the head ... looked after" the body of a dead child, and then, with a laugh - how they themselves "skinned clean" a living bull -buyana. A revolution takes place in the soul of a young man. "The schoolboy ... hunched over, went to the dark noisy garden, home. All three dogs ... ran after him, curving their tails." The departure is symbolic: yesterday's idols are abandoned...

"Night Conversation" and other Bunin's works about the countryside, which are close to the topic, were created in the years when the populist approach to the peasantry still took place in literature. The author, who knew the village firsthand, wrote to the publisher II about the critics, who saw in "Night Conversation" only "a libel on Russia." Klestov in 1912: "Should they talk about my images of the people? They have more ideas about the Papuans than about the people, about Russia ...". In a later published "Autobiographical note"(1915) he will repeat this statement. I. Bunin was among the first Russian intellectuals who realized the perniciousness of blind admiration for the people and the great danger of being called "to the ax."

Bunin's vision of life's conflicts differs from the vision of other "znanie" - M. Gorky, A. Serafimovich, S. Skitalets and others. Often, these writers pass biased sentences on what they consider evil, outline the solution of social problems in the context of their time. I. Bunin may touch upon the same problems, but at the same time he more often covers them in the context of Russian or world history, from a universal standpoint. Not indifferent to the ugly phenomena of life, he rarely acts as an artist-judge. No one is to blame, because everyone is to blame - this is his lawyer's position. “Does it matter who you talk about?” the narrator asks in the exposition of the story "Dreams of Chang"(1916) and claims: - Everyone who lived on earth deserves it." Judging by the memoirs of people who knew the writer, the spiritual life of contemporaries, their ideals, beliefs, did not really excite him. I. Bunin was bored within the current time. he saw only the effect of what lies in the eternal.

I am a man: like God I am doomed

To know the longing of all countries and all times.

("Dog", 1909)

According to Bunin, good and evil are eternal, mystical forces, and people are unconscious conductors of these forces, creating or destroying empires, forcing a person to commit a sacrificial feat or a crime, to commit suicide, exhausting titanic natures in search of power, gold, pleasures, pushing angelic creatures to primitive lechers, innocent youths to married women, and so on. I. Bunin's lack of a socially conditioned position in depicting evil, goodness introduced a chill of alienation into relations with M. Gorky, who did not always immediately agree to place the works of the "indifferent" author in the almanacs "Knowledge". Concerning the lyrical requiem for the outgoing nobility, M. Gorky wrote to the publisher K. Pyatnitsky: "Antonov apples smell good - yes! - but - they smell by no means democratically ...". The essence of the disagreement between the artists was that for I. Bunin "demos"- these are all estates without exception, M. Gorky reasoned differently then.

"Antonov apples"(1900) - the visiting card of the classic. It seems that from the time the story was written, a mature stage in the work of I. Bunin begins, this story is also associated with a new direction that has matured in the depths of Russian classics - lyrical prose. In "Antonov's apples" the function of the plot is performed by the author's mood - an experience about the irrevocably gone. The writer in the past discovered the world of people who lived, in his opinion, more beautiful, more worthy. In this conviction, he will remain throughout his entire career. Most contemporary artists then peered into the future, believing that there was a victory for beauty and justice. Some of them (A. Kuprin, B. Zaitsev, I. Shmelev), only after the catastrophic events of 1917, will turn back with sympathy in exile.

I. Bunin does not idealize the past, but argues that the dominant of the past was creation, unity, while the dominant of the present was destruction, isolation. How did it happen that man lost the "right way"? This question worried I. Bunin, his narrator and his heroes more than the question "what to do?". Starting with "Antonov's apples", the nostalgic motif associated with the realization of this loss will sound stronger and more tragic in his work. In the light, although sad story a beautiful and important, "like a Kholmogory cow", a business elder is mentioned. "A household butterfly!" the tradesman says about her, shaking his head. "Now such people are being transferred ...". Here, a casual tradesman is sad that the owner is leaving, in a few years the narrator will insistently and painfully assert that the will to live is weakening, the strength of feeling is weakening in all classes - and in the nobility. ("Dry Valley", "Last date", 1912; "Grammar of love 1915), and in the peasant ("Merry Yard", "Cricket", both - 1911; " last spring, "Last autumn, both - 1916). Everything is getting smaller, great Russia is becoming a thing of the past.

The Bunin nobles are pitiful, living in memories of the past - of their surnames, which served as the backbone of the great empire, and alms in the present - a piece of bread, a log of firewood. The peasants who have become free are pitiful, both hungry and well-fed, and many are dangerous because of the envy lurking in them, indifference to the suffering of their neighbor. There are other peasant characters in the artist's creations - kind, bright, but, as a rule, weak-willed, confused in the maelstrom of current events, suppressed by evil. Such, for example, is Zakhar from the story " Zakhar Vorobyov"(1912) - a character beloved by the author himself. The search for the "hero" of the opportunity to use his remarkable strength ended in a wine shop, where he overtook his death, sent by the evil "petty people." What the narrator said about Zakhar - but in essence, a repetition of what was heard earlier in Antonovsky apples" - refers, of course, not only to him: "... in the old days, they say, there were many of these ... yes, this breed is translated." Nodding at ill-wishers who claimed that I. Bunin slandered the Russian people, the writer said: "I have Zakhar, Zakhar will save me."

Zakhar Vorobyov, Elder Ivanushka, ("Village", 1910), old saddler Cricket from the story of the same name, old man Taganok ("Ancient man", 1911), old woman Anisya ("Merry Yard"), old Natalia ("Dry Valley"), old people Kastryuk and Meliton, whose names also headlined typologically similar works (1892, 1901) - special Bunin heroes who retained "the soul of life." They seemed to be lost in the labyrinths of history. In the mouth of one of them, Arsenich ("The Saints", 1914), the author puts in a remarkable self-assessment: "My soul, however, is not of this age ..." The writer's wife spoke of her husband's genuine interest in the "spiritual life of old people," of his constant readiness to have long conversations with them.

In the story "The Village" I. Bunin creates a generalized image of Russia in an era that combined the remnants of the past and the phenomena of a new life. It is about the fate of the country, about its future. In dialogues and monologues, discussions about the fate of Durnovka and the Durnovkas, as a rule, end with big generalizations. "Russia?- asks the market nihilist Balashkin. - Yes, she is the whole village, get it on your nose!" I. Bunin marked this phrase in italics, which happened infrequently in his practice. M. Gorky formulated the main question of the work: "To be or not to be Russia?". To complete the picture of Russian life, the author surveyed the village and "from the end of the nobility": he created a dilogy, soon writing the story "Sukhodol". In her exposition there is such a phrase: "The village and the house in Sukhodol were one family." "This work," I. Bunin said to a correspondent of a Moscow newspaper about Sukhodol, "is in direct connection with my previous story ...".

The Krasov brothers - the main characters of "The Village" - represent, the author wrote, "the Russian soul, its light and dark, often tragic foundations." In socio-historical terms, they represent two branches of the genealogical tree of Russians in the post-reform era. Tikhon - one part of the people who remained in the village, Kuzma - the other, rushing to the city. “Almost all of Durnovka consists of the Krasovs!” the narrator summarizes. No part of the people finds a place for itself: Tikhon, at the end of his life, rushes to the city, Kuzma - to the village. Having been at war for ideological reasons all their lives, both in the finale of the story come to the realization of a dead end, a life lived in vain. "Dry Valley" is a story about the death of the third branch of the same trunk. The last pillar Khrushchevs, "inscribed in the sixth book", from the "legendary ancestors of noble people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princelings" are half-witted old women.

The reforms of the beginning of the century increased attention to the theme of freedom. According to Bunin, freedom is a test. For dozens of generations of peasants, the dream of happiness was associated with the dream of prosperity, which was associated with the dream of social freedom, of "freedom." This was the ideal of radical writers, starting with A. Radishchev. With this extensive literature, with the story of D. Grigorovich "The Village", which denounces serfdom, I. Bunin is polemicizing. It is freedom that the author tests many of his characters. Having received it, personal, economic, they can not stand it, they get lost, they lose their moral guidelines. Tikhon, whom dozens of people call "the master," dreams: "The master would be here, the master!" The family of the Grays, stricken with laziness, and the industrious peasants, Yakov, Odnodvorka, who work "tirelessly" live senselessly. "And whoever is not lazy," remarked Kuzma, glancing sideways at his brother, "there is no point in that either." Slavery, but to Bunin, is not a social category, but a psychological one. In "Sukhodil" he created a charming image of a free serf peasant woman Natalia. She is the chronicler of Drydol, its glorious past and its vegetating present.

I. Bunin continued the theme of the dramatic disintegration of what was once a single social organism, begun by N. Nekrasov in the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia": "The great chain broke, It broke - it jumped: One end over the gentleman, the other over the peasant! .. ". At the same time, one writer looked at this process as a historical necessity, as a progressive, albeit dramatic development of history, the other - differently: as the beginning of the end, the beginning of the tragic decline of the state and its culture. Russian culture, - said I. Bunin at the anniversary evening of the Russkiye Vedomosti newspaper in 1913, - "was condemned to disappear even in those days when the great chain broke" .

According to Bunin, it was impossible to prevent the tragedy, since the course of history is determined by a mysterious meta-law, the action of which manifests itself in big and small, to which the soul of both the master and the serf equally obeys. In vain the nobles try to prevent the destruction of their nests. And the peasants cannot resist the hidden force that knocks them out of the rut of expediency. The social liberation of the peasants, the moral liberation of the nobles from responsibility for the people, the gradual liberation of both from the Savior, from the morality dictated by him, the alogism of real life - all this, according to Bunin, is predetermined by the movement of the "circle of being".

The alogism of life is manifested in the alogism of phenomena, in the strange actions of the characters in the Village. The author speaks of this with expressive opposing constructions. "They have been plowing for a whole thousand years, but what am I! more! - but to plow by way - that is, not a single soul knows how!". There is a highway, but "they drive along a dusty country road, nearby." The hunters wear waders, and "there were no swamps in the county." The defeat of the Russian army leads the statesman Tikhon into "gloating admiration." He, "to spite someone" either poisons himself with obscene food, or torments his horses. "Motley soul!" - the village philosopher is touched by the bizarre interweaving of evil and good in the character of a Russian person and immediately beats the dog that ran up to him at the call "with a boot in the head." In the previous episode, which is clearly related to the next one, he recalls how once in childhood his father affectionately called him "and unexpectedly grabbed him by the hair ...". The absurdity of what is happening is indicated by the perplexed Bunin narrator in other works. "On the slip," it is said, for example, in " weekdays"(1913) - a dead chicken was hanging upside down - it was a scarecrow, although there was no one to scare away and nothing to scare away from."

Dust, a companion of impoverishment, extinction, a detail often mentioned by the author in the description of estates, acquires a symbolic meaning in I. Bunin, as well as an indication of the deterioration of things. In the Sukhodolsky house, the piano "collapsed on its side", and family golden spoons are still served for tea, but already - "thinned to a maple leaf." And the hand of the bankrupt landowner Voeikov ("Last day", 1913) adorns the "thinned" ring. In the village" main character finds "peace and rest" only in the cemetery. Peasant hut reminiscent of "animal housing", as well as in other works. So, for example, the dwelling of Lukyan Stepanov ("Prince in princes", 1912) resembles a "lair". The author will create the impression of the completion of the circle of life, the convergence of the beginning and the end. The course of events is largely determined by the antagonism not between classes, but between relatives. The peasants Krasovs, brothers Tikhon and Kuzma, "once almost cut themselves with knives - and parted from sin. "In the same way, in order not to tempt fate, the nobles Khrushchev, the brothers Peter and Arkady, dispersed. The disintegration of life was expressed in material and spiritual impoverishment, in the breaking of family and simply friendly ties between man and man.

The climax of "Village" is the scene of the blessing of the young in the finale. Down the aisle comes Young, a sinful and holy character, rebellious and submissive, associated with the female images of N. Nekrasov, F. Dostoevsky, A. Blok, with a collective image of Russia, and Denis Gray - "a brand new typical, new Russia." An expressive detail speaks of the interests and political views of the parasite: a scabrous little book about the "wife-debauchee" in his style is adjacent to the Marxist one - about the social "role of the proletariat". Realizing the blasphemy of what is happening, the imprisoned father Kuzma feels that he is unable to hold the icon in his hands: "Now I will throw the image on the floor ...". In the image of the wedding train, the researchers shrewdly noticed a "parodic meaning", a variant of Gogol's "troika bird" with the age-old question: "Rus, where are you rushing to?" The religious and masquerade rite of the fatal deal expresses the author's apocalyptic forebodings: Young - an image from the past, in fact, is sold as a wife to Deniska - a terrible image from the future.

Such unexpected prophecies during the years of the economic recovery that began then in Russia can only be taken as figurative warnings about the threat of catastrophe. Bunin's understanding of life goes in line with the "philosophy of sunset" that arose somewhat later. Its authors denied the forward movement in history, they proved the fact of its circular movement. I. Bunin's younger contemporary was the German philosopher O. Spengler - the overthrower of the "theory of progress", we note, like the Russian writer, who positively singled out the era of feudalism among other eras. Culture, according to Spengler, is an organism in which the laws of biology operate, it is going through a period of youth, growth, flourishing, aging and wilting, and no influence from outside or inside can stop this process. I. Bunin and A. Toynbee, the author of the theory of "local civilizations", had common moments in understanding history. The English scientist proceeded from the fact that every culture relies on the "creative elite": the heyday and decline are due to the energy of the top of society and the ability of the "inert masses" to imitate, follow the elitist driving force. I. Bunin comes to these ideas in "Sukhodil" and other works about the rise and fall of noble culture. He considers Russia as a phenomenon in a series of past and future civilizations involved, in biblical language, in the "circle of being".

The writer considered public lack of spirituality as a cause or symptom of degeneration, as the beginning of the end, as the completion of the cycle of life. I. Bunin was not a deeply religious person, like his close friend B. Zaitsev or I. Shmelev, but he understood the creative significance of religion (religions) and the church separated from the state. His wife called him "a kind of Christian." The positive heroes of I. Bunin, as a rule, are religious, realize that there is sinfulness, are capable of repentance, some of them renounce secular life. Leaving for a monastery, as a rule, is not motivated, the philosophy of the act is as clear (to pray for the sins of the world) as mysterious. There are many omissions, signs, hints in the stories about those who renounce. Man-mystery appears, for example, Aglaya, the heroine of the story of the same name (1916), in the world called Anna. "Fifteen years old, at the very time when a girl should become a bride, Anna left the world." Bunin's holy fools, good and evil, are even more mysterious; they are often found in his artistic world. Alexander Romanov from a story with a remarkable title "I keep quiet"(1913) does everything possible to lose the well-being granted to him by fate, get off the supposed rut of life and become a foolish cripple, a poor Shasha. The author, as in other similar works, mystifies the situation, omitting the answer to the question, was it the choice of the character or was it the will of the conduct? Even more tragic fate the author endows the son of wealthy and pious parents of the boy Vanya from the story "John Rydalets"(1913). Holy fool John filled his whole life with self-torture, the search for suffering. And the unfortunate one is angry at the whole world, and - perhaps this is the main idea of ​​​​the work - he suffers, weeps in atonement for the sins of this world.

The writer discovers proper spirituality in pre-European cultures. The deeper he plunges into history, the more significant it seems to him. And each faith - in Buddha, in Yahweh, in Christ, in Mohammed - according to Bunin, exalted a person, filled his life with a meaning higher than the search for bread and warmth. "Holy times" the writer calls the time of the Old Testament, early Christianity - about this is his cycle of lyrical prose " The shadow of the bird(1907-1915) which began to be created after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. "Blessed" is feudal Russia, all the estates of which clung to the Orthodox canons and which the heirs, breaking away from these canons, lost. In his" Epitaphs"(1900) speaks of the decades of the golden era of "peasant happiness" under the shadow of the cross outside the outskirts with the icon of the Virgin. But then the cross fell... This philosophical etude ends with the question: "Will the new people sanctify their new life with something? Whose blessing will they call upon their cheerful and noisy work?" The same disturbing intonation completes the essay "A rock"(1908): "What does the future hold for the world?".

In the second decade of the new century, I. Bunin turned to criticism of the consumerless life of the entire Old World (he considered Russia in every sense as its integral part), warning of a catastrophe threatening the entire European civilization. Without a thought about the eternal, he reflects in the story "Case of Cornet Yelagin"(1925) man is not a builder, "but a real destroyer." With the loss of the high meaning of life, according to Bunin, people lose their special position in the world of wildlife, and then they are brothers in misfortune, individuals torturing themselves, each other in pursuit of ephemeral values, imaginary gentlemen at an imaginary holiday. As the author admitted, the words from the Apocalypse: "Woe to you, Babylon, strong city!", He heard when he wrote " Brothers"(1914) and conceived" Gentlemen from San Francisco(1915). For a vain life, for pride, for disobedience, God severely punished the Babylonians. In the subtext of these stories, the question arises: is not Europe following the path of Babylon?

The events described in the story "Brothers" take place on the "land of the ancestors", in the "paradise shelter" - on the island of Ceylon. But everything truly beautiful is hidden from the eyes of a vain person. Sayings attributed to deities form one meaningful plan of the story, and the life of semi-wild natives and enlightened Europeans - another. The tragedy is predetermined by the fact that people do not heed the teachings of the Exalted and "multiply their earthly sorrows." All of them, rich and poor, regardless of skin color, eye shape, cultural development, worship the "god of life and death Mar": "Everything chased each other, rejoiced in a brief joy, destroying each other", no one thinks that "a new mournful life, a trace of the wrong one" awaits them behind the grave. Origin, wealth, way of life - everything separates people in this fleeting life, but - all are equal, all "brothers" in the face of the inevitable tragedy beyond the threshold of passing into eternal life.

Immersion in the circle of inherited desires - well-being, love, offspring - turns life, according to Buddhism, into a bad infinity, from the point of view of a narrator close to the author, into a rivalry of more or less well-fed rickshaws. The philosophical problems of the story are extensive, the author convinces with expressive generalizations of various kinds. The many-sided Colombo is a concentrated and contradictory image of the world. In the circle of characters there are representatives of all continents, different parts of Europe. But everyone is united by the same ups and downs. The behavior of parishioners in Buddhist temples resembles the behavior of parishioners in Christian temples. "Our bodies, sir, are different, but the heart, of course, is one," says the Buddhist mythical hero Anand to the Exalted.

The semantic center of the story is a kind of epiphany of a poor aboriginal rickshaw and a rich colonial Englishman. Having learned about the betrayal of the bride, the young man punishes himself with painful suicide for having succumbed to the seduction of Mary. The snake plunged the progenitors into a fatal movement in a vicious circle, but the snake stopped this movement. And what the semi-wild Sinhalese felt, but could not express in a word, was expressed in the finale of the story by a European in a Buddhist parable about an elephant and a crow.

I. Bunin continued the same theme in the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco". By depriving the central person of a name, the author achieves maximum generalization. In it, he displayed the type of person who is not capable of insight, smugly believing that money makes him great and invulnerable. The ending is ironic and tragicomic. By traveling around the world, the rich man decided to reward himself for many years of work. But fate, in the person of the mystical Devil, who followed the ship from the rocks of Gibraltar, "master" was overthrown from his imaginary pedestal, and just when he felt himself at the zenith of his high position. The image of a giant ship is expressive, in which hundreds of respectable "masters" naively feel completely protected. The symbol of the daring and audacity of a person, the prototype of which could serve as the tragic "Titanic", is called "Atlantis". The author refers to the name of a prosperous island-state in the Atlantic Ocean, which, according to ancient Greek legend, sank as a result of an earthquake. The ship, on which each person has a place corresponding to their social status, with the body of a "dead old man" in a soda box in the lower hold, is a dull copy of the big world.

I. Bunin entered the history of world literature, first of all, as an outstanding prose writer, while he himself tried all his life to draw attention to his lyrics, claimed that he was "mainly a poet", and was offended by "inattentive" readers. Often stories, essays by I. Bunin, as it were, grow out of lyrical works. For example, "Antonov apples" (1900), "Sukhodol" (1911) - from "Desolations" (1903), "Wastelands" (1907), "Easy breath"(1916) - from "Portrait"(1903), cycle "Shadow of the Bird"(1907-1931) - from poems about the ancient East, "Desert of the Devil"(1909) - from " Jerusalem"(1907), sketches of nature in prose - from landscape lyrics, etc. Much less often he went to a lyrical version on a close topic from prose, such as from a story "On the farm"(1892) - to a poem "On the farm"(1897). However, more important than the external, thematic connection is the internal connection. The artist himself hinted at it, he always published poetry and prose under the same cover. This composition suggests a simple and clear idea of ​​the author: disharmony human life, described in prose, is contrasted with the harmony of the life of nature, captured in poetry.

The poetry of I. Bunin retains the style of the poets of the 19th century. It echoes the traditions of A. Pushkin, F. Tyutchev, N. Nekrasov, A. Fet, A. Tolstoy. The ability of the poet to convey admiration for the beauties of the earth - Asia, the East, Europe and, of course, the Central Russian strip, is perfect. In his surprisingly laconic verses, space, air, sun, all combinations of colors. The visual, semantic effect is achieved by the concentration of epithets, a complex metaphor: "The mute silence is tormenting me ..." ("Desolation", 1903). About lyrics II. He was said to be paints the word I. Bunin paints with a word, conveys the living life of nature, its continuous movement. His lines evoke the works of Russian artists - I. Levitan, V. Polenov, K. Korovin. The lyrical hero of the poet is a citizen of the world, an eyewitness to great historical events. I. Bunin has almost no poems "on the topic of the day." If there is an appeal to a public event, then to one that has become the property of history. If he speaks of a feat, as in verses about "Giordano Bruno"(1906), then about one that remained forever in the memory of descendants. "Earthly life, the existence of nature and man are perceived by the poet as part of a great mystery, a grandiose "action" unfolding in the expanses of the Universe" .

In the lyrical pictures of nature, Bunin's personifications are very picturesque:

How mysterious you are, thunder!

How I love your silence

Your sudden brilliance

Your crazy eyes!

(According to the first page: "The fields smell, – fresh herbs...", 1901)

But the waves, foaming and swaying.

They go, they run towards me -

And someone with blue eyes

Looks in a flickering wave.

("ß open sea", 1903-1905)

Carries - and does not want to know for himself,

What is there, under the pool in the forest,

Madly Water rumbles,

Headlong flying on the wheel ...

("River", 1903-1906)

In I. Bunin, man and nature are equal participants in the dialogue. The lyrical hero not only admires the beauty of the earth, he is overwhelmed by the desire to touch, merge, return to the bosom of eternal beauty:

You open me, nature, hugs,

So that I merge with your beauty! ..

(According to the first page.: "Wider, chest, open for acceptance ...", 1886)

Sand is like silk... I'll cling to the gnarled pine...

("Childhood", 1903-1906)

I I see, I hear, I'm happy. Everything is in me.

("Evening", 1914)

In unity with harmonious nature, he finds peace of mind, saving faith in immortality, because life is just an overnight stay in the forest:

BUT early morning, white and dewy,

Wave your wing, rustle among the foliage,

And dissolve, disappear in the clear sky -

Come back home, soul!

("Overnight", 1911)

This is the worldview of both the lyrical hero, and the narrator in prose, and, undoubtedly, the artist of the word himself.

I. Bunin has prose works in which nature, one might say, is objectified, it determines both the ethical and aesthetic content of the characters, and the nature of essential conflicts. This is very clearly shown in the story "Easy breathing". Remarkably, this work is as difficult to retell as a perfect lyric poem, as a piece of music. The events that form the plot appear random, weakly connected with each other.

It is difficult to name the semantic grain of this, according to formal signs, a criminal story. Pet, it is not in the murder of a schoolgirl by an officer of a "plebeian appearance": the author devoted only a paragraph to their "novel", while a third of the space of "Easy Breath" is given to the description of the life of an uninteresting class lady, other secondary descriptions. It is not in the immoral act of the elderly gentleman: the “victim” herself, having splashed out indignation on the pages of the diary, after everything that had happened, “fell fast asleep”. And this is not about worldly frivolity. The point of convergence of all lines of force, the "perspectives" of the work, if we speak in the language of the theory of painting, which is appropriate here, is the outwardly unremarkable high school student Olya Meshcherskaya. In the center of the narrative, the image is clearly not typical, but symbolic.

Deep in the subtext, the author "hid" the secret of the charm of the outwardly "not distinguished in the crowd" girl-girl, tragically early descended into the grave. “And if I could,” K. Paustovsky wrote in “Golden Rose”, “I would cover this grave with all the flowers that only bloom on earth.” This lyrical-epic work, built on the opposition of the natural and the social, the eternal and the temporal, the spiritualized and the inert, tells of the manifestation of nature in the life of unnatural people. Olya Meshcherskaya - "easy breathing", immensity in the world of measures. Absence intercom with nature, according to Bunin, is a sign of trouble, and the story "Light Breath" is about this.

Deep in the subtext lies an explanation for the life-affirming aura emanating from this highly dramatic piece.

The movement of the plot here is determined by the lonely resistance of the heroine to the hidden aggression of the middle-class environment. Always in the spotlight, she confesses in her diary: "I am alone in the whole world." The story does not say a word about the schoolgirl's family. At the same time, more than once it is said about the love for her of first-graders, noisy creatures, not dressed in a uniform of conventions. I recall the lines of F. Sologub: "Children are alive, only children, - // We are dead, long dead." It is precisely by non-compliance with conventions - prescriptions, rules - that Olya differs from other classmates, for which she receives reprimands from the head of the gymnasium.

All ladies-teachers are antipodes of pupils. The description of the details of the teacher's toilet evokes a quite definite Chekhovian association: always "in black kid gloves, with an ebony umbrella." Having dressed in mourning after Olya's death, she is "in the depths of her soul ... happy." Ritual, black clothes, visits to the cemetery protect from the unrest of "living life", fill the void. Conventions are dictated by the surrounding people, outside the environment they can be neglected, and this is what Mr. Malyutin is guided by. The author "makes" the respectable libertine not just an acquaintance, but the closest relative of the ascetic headmistress of the gymnasium.

The conflict is set by the character of the heroine, natural, unpredictable. In Tyutchev's line, "the life of nature is heard there", and nature does not know conventions, etiquette, past tense. Old books, about which it is customary to speak with reverence, are "funny" for Olya. She is not capable of acting, and shocks her boss with a frank confession: "Forgive me, madame, you are mistaken ..." Olya is self-sufficient, like nature, and does not need outside help during shocks. Her end is an exit from the life-game, the conditions of which she does not understand and does not accept.

The word "dies" clearly does not fit with this romantic image. However, the author does not use it. The verb "shot", according to the correct observation of L. Vygodsky, is lost in a lengthy sentence describing the murderer in detail. Figuratively speaking, the shot sounded inaudibly. It is noteworthy that the sensible cool lady mystically doubts the death of the girl: "This wreath, this mound, an oak cross! Is it possible that under it is the one whose eyes shine so immortally from this convex porcelain medallion ..?". The defining semantic load is carried by the unexpected word "again" in the final phrase: "Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind." So I. Bunin poetically endows the mysterious heroine with the possibility of reincarnation, the ability to leave and come to this gray world as a messenger of beauty. She is a symbol of true and eternal life. "Nature in Bunin's work, as the researcher correctly noted, is not a background ... but an active, effective principle that powerfully invades a person's being, determining his views on life, his actions and deeds" .

In a poem "Night"(1901) I. Bunin wrote:

I'm looking for combinations in this world

Beautiful and eternal. away

I see the night: sands in silence

And starlight above the dusk of the earth.

I'm looking for combinations in this world

Beautiful and secret, like a dream.

I love her for the happiness of merging

In one love with the love of all time!

In the story "Light Breath" the poet and prose writer found and displayed all these combinations.

In exile, I. Bunin was engaged in social activities, wrote a lot. Modernity has completely disappeared from his artistic world. It seems that with bated breath he peered into the bright past, creating, for example, the story "Mowers", the book "Memoirs". Works about love still occupy a large place in his work. A number of masterpieces are dedicated to the "Beautiful Guest": "Mitina's Love", "Cornet Yelagin's Case", "Sunstroke" and the brilliant book of short stories "Dark Alleys". This book, which the writer himself considered his "best work in terms of conciseness, painting and literary skill," is rightly called the "encyclopedia of love." Tales of uncontrollable and vague feeling are equally realistic and romantic. Love appears here as attractive and insidious, moving life, giving life and taking it away. No one is protected from the fatal "sunstroke". Bunin's ideas about love are original, in many ways I. Kuprin imagined love, for whom this topic was also very attractive.

Many motifs of the "encyclopedia of love" intersect in little story "Dark alleys"(1938), who gave the cycle its name. Here, love appears as a feeling that gives rise to a state of boundless happiness, burning passion and, on the contrary, bitter despair, incurable hatred, as a mystical force that unites different characters according to its whim. The heroes of the story, Nikolai Alekseevich and Nadezhda, are antipodal characters, overtaken by one "sunstroke". The plot of the work belongs to the category of "stray", known both in foreign and domestic literature - from II. Karamzin, author of the story " Poor Lisa", to L. Tolstoy, the author of the novel "Resurrection" - about the gentleman and the seduced poor girl. The original solution to the conflict, which is based on this plot, was found by A. Pushkin in the short story "The Stationmaster", A. Kuprin is also banal in "Oles", I. Bunin is also original.

The story is in a minor key. The characters are experiencing the autumn of life, and in nature it is autumn: it begins with a description of "cold autumn bad weather" and ends with a description of the sun, "shone yellow on empty fields". The tonality is broken only by a couple of exclamations by Nikolai Alekseevich, recalling past "truly magical" feelings. The story, as it happens with I. Bunin, is outwardly static. On three pages there is a fleeting meeting thirty years later of elderly people, an officer and the hostess of an inn, who once experienced a short period of passionate love. The dynamics are "hidden" in the subtext, screaming about the drama of wasted lives. The details of the narration, emotional dialogue, gestures, demeanor speak about the drama.

The narrator's sympathies are on the side of a woman whose soul contained and retained great love: she immediately recognized "Nikolenka", while it took him effort; she remembers the dates exactly, but he is five years wrong, and so on. The hasty departure of Nikolai Alekseevich is perceived as an escape - he is frightened by the greatness of Nadezhda's character. Take aback, fear conveys Nikolai's interrogative exclamation - "After all, you could not love me all your life!", To which he would like to receive a negative answer. Justifying himself, he presents everything that was, "vulgar history."

Significant references to the dark alleys in the story - the iconic attributes of the master's estates. Poems "about all sorts of" dark alleys "" recalls "with an unkind smile" Nadezhda. In the finale, Nikolai inaccurately quotes the lines of N. Ogarev's poem "An Ordinary Tale".

The author provokes the reader to think about the meaning of this image in the story, about the ambiguous perception of his characters. "Dark alleys" - a symbol of evil circumstances that broke a possible union. In the story, as often with I. Bunin, there are no villains, but evil wins.

Story "Clean Monday"(1944) from the "Dark Alleys" cycle, the author, according to his wife, "considered the best of all that he wrote."

And here the plot of the story takes several lines. Beautiful, rich, young people close to each other live for their own pleasure. They are regulars in Moscow theaters, club parties, expensive restaurants. Quite unexpectedly, when the marriage seemed to be decided, the woman asks her beloved not to look for her, and on the eve of Great Lent, on Clean Monday, she goes to the monastery. And here the semantic meaningful plan is shifted into the subtext, obscured by many as if unrelated to the main storyline details. "As if" - because the master has nothing accidental.

The composition of the story is remarkable. His reading captures from the first lines, although the intrigue appears only at the end of the work. The main space of "Clean Monday" is occupied by a descriptive exposition, followed by an unexpected plot - "departure" - and the finale, behind which there is a reticence, a mystery. For more than half a century, domestic and foreign researchers have been trying to unravel this mystery, and the author, it seems, with a smile of a leopard Mona Lisa, looks at all attempts to explain the final part, the idea of ​​the story. But don't all these attempts at unraveling come down to banal explanations of what the artist himself wanted to present precisely as a mystery - love, passion, soul? The narrator says about the main character that even for a loved one "she was mysterious." “Do we understand anything in our actions?” this young woman says about herself.

However, even here, I think, there is a characteristic Bunin invitation to reflection. I. Bunin's psychologism has a special nature. The writer illuminates a phenomenon, an act, a consequence, leaving the reader to draw in his imagination the "bridge of causality", internal motivation.

The lack of intrigue in the story is compensated by the dynamics of "outside" events. The exposition is a cultural panorama of the capital with the mention of many historical figures. Moscow of the "Silver Age" is considered in the same context with pre-Petrine Russia and with modern Europe, with the states of the East and Asia. The created image of the capital of the empire is many-sided, polyphonic, contradictory. Moscow "rides like a goat" on bohemian skits and earnestly prays at Iverskaya. It is represented by a living organism with a brilliant history, a rich present and a vague future.

Heroes are mobile in this space, their feelings are mobile. Outwardly, the daughter of a merchant from Tver is her own in her modern secular environment, she follows literature and fashion. They allowed women to higher education - she became a student. But inwardly, with her soul, she gravitates towards ancient Moscow, only in her reserved corners does her soul rest. The area of ​​her educational interests is history, she is interested not in the popular, "leaf" stereotype of Russia, but in the foundation she is looking for. The stylized concerts of F. Chaliapin irritate her: "I don't like yellow-haired Russia at all." Close person calls "strange" her love for Russia. The author shows something Indo-European and Turkic in appearance, in the interior of the girl's apartment. Something universal sacred in the image of a girl is correlated with the universal sacred beginning of Moscow, and both are related to Bunin's idea of ​​the universality of enduring Russian spirituality.

The phrase addressed to a loved one: “No, you don’t understand this!” Has a deep subtext. Is it not this “misunderstanding” that predetermines the denouement for her, which is not unexpected for her: she “pronounces” the departure - liberation from the snake, similar to the one that tormented the princess in her favorite legend. Only her serpent is not only a "very beautiful" personality, but also the whole impersonal modernity. A modern young man every day went "to the temple", where her apartment was, made plans for the future, but she preferred the temple to the apartment, the present - the past sought in the monastery.

It is impossible not to mention the creations of I. Bunin in the genre of artistic and philosophical miniatures. Peculiar poems in prose combine the possibilities of prose and poetry. Dressing thought in an exquisite verbal form, the author, as a rule, talks here about the enduring. He is attracted by the mysterious border where time and eternity, existence and non-existence converge. The artist looks at the inevitability of the end of all life with a bit of surprise and protest. Perhaps the best work in this genre is a miniature "Rose of Jericho". Remarkably, this small work was used by him as an epigraph to the stories. Contrary to custom, the writing of this thing is not dated. The thorn bush, which in the east was buried with the deceased, which lies dry for years, but turns green as soon as it touches moisture, the author interprets as a sign of all-conquering life, as a symbol of faith in the resurrection. The final statement: "There is no death in the world, there is no death to what was, what once lived!" - is perceived as the motto of the artist, as the key to the cipher of his creations.

I. Bunin perceived nature and art as eternal life-giving elements, he relied on them, they fed his hidden optimism.

• Baboreko A. I. A. Bunin. Materials for the bibliography (from 1870 to 1917). M., 1967. S. 5-6.
• Baboreko Λ. I. A. Bunin. Materials for the bibliography (from 1870 to 1917). M., 1967. S. 161. It is important to understand the stories "The Village" and "Dry Valley" as socio-historical and equally socio-philosophical works. In almost every individual character, a type is declared here, a great generalization is hidden, connected with the past, present and, dottedly, future life of a part of the people, society. Without such an understanding, reading these and many other Bunin's works is simply not interesting.
• Five years later, M. Gorky shared his thoughts about "two souls", light and dark, living among the Russian people. The writers painted a similar negative picture, although they explained it differently and drew different conclusions.
• The Bunins were inscribed in the sixth book of noble noble families.
• literary heritage. M., 1973. T. 84: in 2 books. Book. 1. S. 318. This is also described in the "Notebook of a Writer", with a very unflattering assessment of the activities of the raznochintsy: "A raznochintsy came and ruined everything." I. Bunin's images of raznochintsev are, as a rule, impartial, and in this he approaches the authors of anti-nihilistic novels.
• We can talk about the prophetic nature of I. Bunin's work. The "brand new typical" will be further reflected in the literature on collectivization in the countryside in the 1920s-1930s, by B. Mozhaev, V. Astafiev, V. Belov and other writers.
• In "John Rydalets", as in "White Horse", surprisingly organically recognizable reality is intertwined with mysticism, irreality.
• Afonin L. A word about Bunin // Bunin collection: Materials of scientific. Conf. dedicated to the centenary of the birth of I. A. Bunin. Orel, 1974. P. 10. Ensrafs of stories clearly express their main ideas.
• The story was written shortly after I. Bunin's visit to the island of Ceylon. I traveling around the island and later, the writer showed great interest in Buddhism, a world religion that arose in the VI-V centuries. BC. The “teacher” Buddha, as the author calls him, the Sublime, in particular, advises to despise earthly pleasures, since they certainly lead to suffering, and to prepare, purifying the soul, for a new, brighter and more perfect life. Buddha is not the only deity in this religion. Maara is the ruler of the kingdom of the gods, he is also a demon-tempter, distracting people from spiritual aspirations, seducing them with the sweetness of earthly life, passing off the negative for the positive.
• Jericho - a city in Palestine, VII-II millennium BC.

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich(10 (22) October 1870, Voronezh - November 8, 1953, Paris) - Russian writer; prose writer, poet, translator,honorary academician Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909 ), the first Russian laureate Nobel Prize in Literature (1933).

The childhood of the future writer proceeded in the conditions of a noble, impoverished life, completely ruined " noble nest"(Butyrki farm, Yelets district, Orel province). He learned to read early, had a fantasy from childhood and was very impressionable. Entering the gymnasium in Yelets in 1881, he studied there for only five years, since the family had no funds for this, to complete the gymnasium course had to be at home (to master the program of the gymnasium, and then the university, he was helped by his elder brother Julius, with whom the writer had the closest relationship.) A nobleman by birth, Ivan Bunin did not even receive a gymnasium education, and this could not but affect his future fate.

Central Russia, in which Bunin spent his childhood and youth, sunk deep into the soul of the writer. He believed that it was the middle zone of Russia that gave the best Russian writers, and the language, the beautiful Russian language, of which he himself was a true connoisseur, in his opinion, originated and was constantly enriched precisely in these places.

Literary debut Since 1889, an independent life began - with a change of professions, with work both in provincial and metropolitan periodicals. Collaborating with the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, the young writer met the newspaper's proofreader Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, who married him in 1891. The young spouses, who lived unmarried (Pashchenko's parents were against marriage), subsequently moved to Poltava (1892) and began to serve as statisticians in the provincial government. In 1891, Bunin's first collection of poems, still very imitative, was published.

1895 - a turning point in the fate of the writer. After Pashchenko got along with Bunin's friend A.I. Bibikov, the writer left the service and moved to Moscow, where he made his literary acquaintances (with L.N. Tolstoy, whose personality and philosophy had a strong influence on Bunin, with A.P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, N. D. Teleshov, in which the young writer became a participant in the “environments”). Bunin made friends with many famous artists, his painting always attracted him, it is not for nothing that his poetry is so picturesque. In the spring of 1900, while in the Crimea, he met S. V. Rachmaninov and the actors of the Art Theater, whose troupe toured in Yalta.

Climbing Literary Olympus In 1900, Bunin's short story "Antonov's Apples" appeared, later included in all anthologies of Russian prose. The story is distinguished by nostalgic poetry (mourning for the ruined noble nests) and artistic refinement. At the same time, "Antonov apples" were criticized for the incense of the blue blood of a nobleman. During this period, wide literary fame came: for the poetic collection "Leaf Fall" (1901), as well as for the translation of the poem by the American romantic poet G. Longfellow "The Song of Hiawatha" (1896), Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences (later, in 1909 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences). Even then, Bunin's poetry was distinguished by devotion to the classical tradition, this feature would later permeate all of his work. The poetry that brought him fame was formed under the influence of Pushkin, Fet, Tyutchev. But she possessed only her inherent qualities. So, Bunin gravitates towards a sensually concrete image; the picture of nature in Bunin's poetry is made up of smells, sharply perceived colors, and sounds. A special role is played in Bunin's poetry and prose by the epithet used by the writer, as it were, emphatically subjectively, arbitrarily, but at the same time endowed with the persuasiveness of sensory experience.

Family life. Journey through the East Bunin's family life, already with Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (1896-1900), also developed unsuccessfully, in 1905 their son Kolya died. In 1906, Bunin met Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva (1881-1961), who became the writer's companion throughout his later life. Muromtseva, possessing outstanding literary abilities, left wonderful literary memoirs about her husband ("The Life of Bunin", "Conversations with Memory"). In 1907, the Bunins went on a trip to the countries of the East - Syria, Egypt, Palestine. Not only bright, colorful impressions from the trip, but also the feeling of a new round of history that has come, gave Bunin's work a new, fresh impetus.

A turn in creativity. Mature master If in the earlier works - the stories of the collection "To the End of the World" (1897), as well as in the stories "Antonov apples" (1900), "Epitaph" (1900), Bunin refers to the theme of small-scale impoverishment, nostalgically tells about the life of the poor noble estates, then in the works written after the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the theme of the drama of Russian historical fate becomes the main one (the stories "The Village", 1910, "Sukhodol", 1912). Both stories were a huge success with readers. M. Gorky noted that here the writer raised the question "... to be or not to be Russia?". The Russian village, Bunin believed, was doomed. The writer was accused of a sharply negative reflection of the life of the village.

The "merciless truth" of Bunin's letter was noted by a variety of writers (Yu. I. Aikhenvald, Z. N. Gippius, and others). However, the realism of his prose is ambiguously traditional: the writer draws with persuasiveness and force the new social types that appeared in the post-revolutionary village. In 1910, the Bunins undertook a journey, first to Europe, and then to Egypt and Ceylon. The echoes of this journey, the impression that Buddhist culture made on the writer, are felt, in particular, in the story "Brothers" (1914). In the autumn of 1912 - in the spring of 1913 again abroad (Trapezund, Constantinople, Bucharest), then (1913-1914) - to Capri.

In 1915-1916, collections of short stories "The Cup of Life", "The Gentleman from San Francisco" were published. In the prose of these years, the writer's idea of ​​the tragedy of the life of the world, of the doom and fratricidal nature of modern civilization is expanding (the stories "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Brothers"). This goal is also served by the symbolic, according to the writer, the use in these works of epigraphs from the Revelation of John the Theologian, from the Buddhist canon, literary allusions present in the texts (comparison of the hold of the ship in "The Lord from San Francisco" with the ninth circle of Dante's hell). The themes of this period of creativity are death, fate, chance. The conflict is usually resolved by death. The only values ​​that have survived in the modern world, the writer considers love, beauty and the life of nature. But the love of Bunin's heroes is also tragically colored and, as a rule, doomed ("Grammar of Love"). The theme of the union of love and death, which imparts the utmost sharpness and intensity to the feeling of love, is characteristic of Bunin's work until the last years of his writing life.

The heavy burden of emigration took the February Revolution with pain, anticipating the coming trials. The October coup only strengthened his confidence in the approaching catastrophe. The book of journalism "Cursed Days" (1918) became a diary of the events of the life of the country and the writer's reflections at that time. The Bunins leave Moscow for Odessa (1918), and then - abroad, to France (1920). The break with the Motherland, as it turned out later, forever, was painful for the writer.

The themes of the writer's pre-revolutionary work are also revealed in the work of the emigrant period, and even more fully. The works of this period are permeated with the thought of Russia, the tragedy of Russian history of the 20th century, loneliness modern man, which is only for a brief moment broken by the invasion of love passion (collections of stories "Mitya's Love", 1925, "Sunstroke", 1927, "Dark Alleys", 1943, autobiographical novel "Arseniev's Life", 1927-1929, 1933). The binarity of Bunin's thinking - the idea of ​​the drama of life, associated with the idea of ​​the beauty of the world - gives Bunin's plots the intensity of development and tension. The same intensity of being is palpable in Bunin's artistic detail, which has acquired even greater sensual authenticity in comparison with the works of early creativity.

In 1927-1930 Bunin turned to the genre short story("Elephant", "Veal head", "Roosters", etc.). This is the result of the writer's search for ultimate conciseness, ultimate semantic richness, semantic "capacity" of prose.

In exile, relations with prominent Russian emigrants were difficult for the Bunins, and Bunin did not have a sociable character. In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. It was, of course, a blow to the Soviet leadership. The official press, commenting on this event, explained the decision of the Nobel Committee by the intrigues of imperialism.

During the centenary of the death of A.S. Pushkin (1937), Bunin, speaking at the evenings in memory of the poet, spoke about "Pushkin's ministry here, outside the Russian land."

He did not return to his homeland With the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, the Bunins settled in the south of France, in Grasse, at the Villa Jeannette, where they spent the entire war. The writer closely followed the events in Russia, refusing any form of cooperation with the Nazi occupation authorities. He experienced the defeat of the Red Army on the eastern front very painfully, and then sincerely rejoiced at its victories.

In 1927-1942, Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova lived side by side with the Bunin family, who became a deep late affection of the writer. Possessing literary abilities, she created works of a memoir nature that recreate Bunin's appearance in the most memorable way ("Grasse Diary", article "In Memory of Bunin").

Living in poverty, he stopped publishing his works, being much and seriously ill, he nevertheless wrote a book of memoirs in recent years, worked on the book "About Chekhov", published posthumously (1955) in New York. Bunin repeatedly expressed a desire to return to his homeland, calling the decree of the Soviet government of 1946 "On the restoration of citizenship of the USSR subjects of the former Russian Empire ..." called "a generous measure." However, the Zhdanov decree on the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" (1946), which trampled on A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko, forever turned the writer away from the intention to return to his homeland.

In 1945 the Bunins returned to Paris. The greatest writers of France and other European countries highly appreciated Bunin's work during his lifetime (F. Mauriac, A. Gide, R. Rolland, T. Mann, R.-M. Rilke, J. Ivashkevich and others). The writer's works have been translated into all European languages ​​and some Eastern ones.

He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.

Novels

• "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1933, 1939)

Tale

• "Village" (1909)
• "Dry Valley" (1912)
• "Mitina's Love" (1924)

stories

• "Numbers" (1898)
• "To the End of the World and Other Stories" (1897)
• "Antonov apples" (1900)
• "Wildflowers" (1901)
• "The Shadow of a Bird" (1907-1911; Paris, 1931)
• "John Rydalets" (1913)
• "The Cup of Life" (St. Petersburg, 1915; Paris, 1922)
• "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1915)
• "Light Breath" (1916)
• "Chang's Dreams" (1916, 1918)
• "Temple of the Sun" (1917)
• « Initial love» (Prague, 1921)
• "Scream" (Paris, 1921)
• Mowers (Paris, 1921)
• "Rose of Jericho" (Berlin, 1924)
• "Sunstroke" (Paris, 1927)
• "God's tree" (Paris, 1931)
• "Dark Alleys" (New York, 1943; Paris, 1946)
• "Spring in Judea" (New York, 1953)
• Loopy Ears and Other Stories (1954, New York, posthumously)
• "Youth" (1930)

Poems

• "Poems" (1887-1891)
• "Motherland" (1896)
• "Under open sky» (1898)
• "Leaf fall" (M., 1901)
• "Poems" (1903)
• "Poems" (1903-1906)
• "Poems of 1907" (St. Petersburg, 1908)
• "Favorites" (Paris, 1929)
• "On Nevsky" (Petrograd, 1916)

Translations

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Song of Hiawatha
• George Gordon Byron - "Cain"
• George Gordon Byron - "Manfred"

Memoirs and diaries

• "Many Waters" (1910, 1926)
• "Cursed Days" (1925-1926)
• "Memories. Under the hammer and sickle" (Paris, 1950)
• "Mouth of the Bunins" vols. 1-3, Frankfurt am Main, 1977-1982

Biography

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870 - 1953)

"No, it's not the landscape that draws me,
Not the colors I seek to notice,
And what shines in these colors,
Love and joy of being. "
I. Bunin

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 23, 1870 (October 10, old style) in Voronezh, on Dvoryanskaya Street. The impoverished landowners Bunins belonged to a noble family, among their ancestors - V. A. Zhukovsky and the poetess Anna Bunina.
In Voronezh, the Bunins appeared three years before the birth of Vanya, to teach their eldest sons: Yulia (13 years old) and Evgeny (12 years old). Julius, who was extremely capable of languages ​​and mathematics, studied brilliantly, Eugene studied poorly, or rather, did not study at all, he left the gymnasium early; he was a gifted artist, but in those years he was not interested in painting, he chased pigeons more. As for the youngest, his mother, Lyudmila Alexandrovna, always said that "Vanya was different from the rest of the children from birth," that she always knew that he was "special", "no one has such a soul as his" .
In 1874, the Bunins decided to move from the city to the village to the Butyrki farm, in the Yelets district of the Oryol province, to the last estate of the family. That spring Julius graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal and had to leave for Moscow in the fall to enter the university's mathematics faculty.
In the village, little Vanya "heard enough" of songs and fairy tales from his mother and yard servants. Memories of childhood - from the age of seven, as Bunin wrote - are connected with him "with the field, with peasant huts" and their inhabitants. He spent whole days disappearing in the nearest villages, grazing cattle with peasant children, traveling at night, making friends with some of them.
Imitating the shepherd, he and his sister Masha ate black bread, radish, "rough and bumpy cucumbers", and at this meal, "without realizing it, they shared the earth itself, all that sensual, material, from which the world was created", wrote Bunin in the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev". Even then, with a rare power of perception, he felt, by his own admission, "the divine splendor of the world" - the main motive of his work. It was at this age that an artistic perception of life was revealed in him, which, in particular, was expressed in the ability to depict people with facial expressions and gestures; He was already a talented storyteller. About eight Bunin wrote the first poem.
In the eleventh year he entered the Yelets gymnasium. At first he studied well, everything was easy; could memorize a whole page of a poem from one reading, if it interested him. But from year to year, the teaching went worse, in the third grade he remained for the second year. Most of the teachers were gray and insignificant people. In the gymnasium, he wrote poetry, imitating Lermontov, Pushkin. He was not attracted to what is usually
read at this age, and read, as he said, "anything."
He did not graduate from the gymnasium, he later studied independently under the guidance of his older brother Yuly Alekseevich, a candidate of the university.
In the autumn of 1889, he began work in the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, often he was the actual editor; published in it his stories, poems, literary-critical articles, and notes in the permanent section "Literature and Printing". He lived by literary work and was in great need. His father went bankrupt, in 1890 he sold the estate in Ozerki without a manor, and having lost his manor, in 1893 he moved to Kmenka to his sister., Mother and Masha - to Vasilyevsky to Bunin's cousin Sofya Nikolaevna Pusheshnikova. There was nowhere for the young poet to wait for help.
In the editorial office, Bunin met Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, the daughter of a Yelets doctor who worked as a proofreader. His passionate love for her was marred at times by quarrels. In 1891, she married, but their marriage was not legalized, they lived without getting married, the father and mother did not want to marry their daughter to a poor poet. Bunin's youthful novel formed the plot basis of the fifth book of Arseniev's Life, which was published separately under the title Lika.
Many imagine Bunin dry and cold. V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina says: "True, sometimes he wanted to seem like he was a first-class actor," but "he who did not know him to the end cannot imagine what kind of tenderness his soul was capable of." He was one of those who did not reveal himself to everyone. He was distinguished by the great strangeness of his nature. It is hardly possible to name another Russian writer who, with such self-forgetfulness, so impetuously expressed his feeling of love, as he did in his letters to Varvara Pashchenko, combining in his dreams the image with everything beautiful that he found in nature, in poetry and music. With this side of his life - restraint in passion and the search for the ideal of love - he resembles Goethe, in whom, by his own admission, much is autobiographical in Werther.
At the end of August 1892, Bunin and Pashchenko moved to Poltava, where Julius Alekseevich worked as a statistician in the provincial zemstvo council.
He took both Pashchenko and his younger brother into his administration. In the Poltava zemstvo, the intelligentsia was grouped, involved in the populist movement of the 70-80s. The Bunin brothers were part of the editorial board of the Poltava Provincial Gazette, which since 1894 has been under the influence of the progressive intelligentsia. Bunin placed his works in this newspaper. By order of the Zemstvo, he also wrote essays "on the fight against harmful
insects, about the harvest of bread and herbs. " As he believed, they were printed so much that they could make up three or four volumes.
He also collaborated with the Kievlyanin newspaper. Now Bunin's poems and prose began to appear more often in "thick" magazines - "Bulletin of Europe", "World of God", "Russian wealth" - and attracted the attention of leading figures in literary criticism. N. K. Mikhailovsky spoke well of the story "The Village Sketch" (later entitled "Tanka") and wrote about the author that he would become a "great writer." At this time, Bunin's lyrics
acquired a more objective character; autobiographical motifs characteristic of the first collection of poems (it was published in Orel as an appendix to the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper in 1891), by definition of the author himself, excessively intimate, gradually disappeared from his work, which now received more complete forms.
In 1893-1894, Bunin, in his words, "from falling in love with Tolstoy as an artist," was a Tolstoyan and "adapted to the cooper's craft." He visited the Tolstoyan colonies near Poltava and traveled to the Sumy district to the sectarians. Pavlovka - to the "Malevants", in their views close to the Tolstoyans. At the very end of 1893, he visited the Khilkovo farm, which belonged to Prince. D. A. Khilkov. From there he went to Moscow to see Tolstoy and visited him on one of the days between January 4 and 8, 1894. The meeting made on Bunin, as he wrote, "an amazing impression." Tolstoy and dissuaded him from "giving up to the end."
In the spring and summer of 1894 Bunin traveled around Ukraine. "In those years, he recalled, I was in love with Little Russia in its villages and steppes, eagerly sought rapprochement with its people, eagerly listened to songs, his soul."
The year 1895 was a turning point in Bunin's life: after the "flight" of Pashchenko, who left Bunin and married his friend Arseny Bibikov, in January he left the service in Poltava and went to St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow. Now he entered the literary milieu. The great success at the literary evening, which took place on November 21 in the hall of the Credit Society in St. Petersburg, encouraged him. There he made a reading of the story "To the End of the World".
His impressions from more and more new meetings with writers were varied and sharp. D. V. Grigorovich and A. M. Zhemchuzhnikov, one of the creators of Kozma Prutkov, who continued the classical XIX century; Narodniks N. K. Mikhailovsky and N. N. Zlatovratsky; symbolists and decadents K. D. Balmont and F. K. Sollgub. In December, in Moscow, Bunin met the symbolist leader V. Ya.
Moscow "hotel - with Chekhov. He was very interested in Bunin's talent V. G. Korolenko - Bunin met him on December 7, 1896 in St. Petersburg at the anniversary of K. M. Stanyukovich; in the summer of 1897 - with Kuprin in Lustdorf, near Odessa.
In June 1898 Bunin left for Odessa. Here he became close with members of the "Association of South Russian Artists", who were going to "Thursdays", became friends with the artists E. I. Bukovetsky, V. P. Kurovsky (about her
Bunin's poems "In Memory of a Friend") and P. A. Nilus (from him Bunin took something for the stories "Galya Ganskaya" and "Chang's Dreams").
In Odessa, Bunin married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (1879-1963) on September 23, 1898. Family life did not go well, Bunin and Anna Nikolaevna separated in early March 1900. Their son Kolya died on January 16, 1905. In early April 1899, Bunin visited Yalta, met Chekhov, and met Gorky. During his visits to Moscow, Bunin visited N. D. Teleshov's "Wednesdays", which united prominent realist writers, willingly read his unpublished works; the atmosphere in this circle was friendly, no one was offended by frank, sometimes destructive criticism.
On April 12, 1900, Bunin arrived in Yalta, where the Art Theater staged his "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya" and other performances for Chekhov. Bunin met Stanislavsky, Knipper, S. V. Rakhmaninov, with whom he forever established friendship. The 1900s were a new frontier in Bunin's life. Repeated travels through the countries of Europe and to the East widened the world before his eyes, so
hungry for new experiences. And in the literature of the beginning decade, with the release of new books, he won recognition as one of the best writers of his time. He spoke mainly with poetry.
On September 11, 1900, he went with Kurovsky to Berlin, Paris, and Switzerland. In the Alps, they climbed to great heights. Upon returning from abroad, Bunin ended up in Yalta, lived in Chekhov's house,
I spent "an amazing week" with Chekhov, who arrived from Italy somewhat later. In the Chekhov family, Bunin became, in his words, "one of his own"; with his sister Maria Pavlovna, he was in "almost brotherly relations." Chekhov was invariably "gentle, affable, cared for him like an elder." Since 1899, Bunin met with Chekhov every year, in Yalta and in Moscow, during the four years of their friendly communication, until Anton Pavlovich's departure abroad in 1904, where he died. Chekhov predicted that Bunin would become a "great writer"; he wrote in the story "The Pines" as "very new, very fresh and very good". "Magnificent", in his opinion, "Dreams" and "Gold Bottom" - "there are places just surprisingly."
At the beginning of 1901, a collection of poems "Leaf Fall" was published, which caused numerous reviews from critics. Kuprin wrote about the "rare artistic subtlety" in conveying the mood. Blok for "Falling Leaves" and other poems
recognized Bunin's right to "one of the main places" among contemporary Russian poetry. "Falling Leaves" and Longfellow's translation of "The Song of Hiawatha" were awarded the Pushkin Prize Russian Academy Sciences, awarded to Bunin on October 19, 1903. Since 1902, the collected works of Bunin began to appear in separate numbered volumes in Gorky's publishing house "Knowledge". And again travel - to Constantinople, to France and Italy, across the Caucasus, and so all his life he was attracted by various cities and countries.
On November 4, 1906, Bunin met in Moscow, in the house of B.K. Zaitsev, with Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the daughter of a member of the Moscow City Council and the niece of the chairman of the First State Duma, S.A. Muromtsev. On April 10, 1907, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna set off from Moscow to the countries of the East - Egypt, Syria, Palestine. On May 12, having made their "first long journey", they went ashore in Odessa. From this journey began their life together. About this journey - a cycle of stories "The Shadow of a Bird" (1907-1911).
They combine diary entries describing cities, ancient ruins, monuments of art, pyramids, tombs - and legends of ancient peoples, excursions into the history of their culture and the death of kingdoms. About Bunin's depiction of the East, Yu. sometimes as if flooded with sultry waves of the sun, decorated with precious inlays and arabesques of imagery; and when it comes to gray-haired antiquity, lost in the distances of religion and mythology, you experience the impression that some majestic chariot of mankind is moving before us.
Bunin's prose and poetry now acquired new colors. An excellent colorist, he, according to P. A. Nilus, decisively instilled in literature the “principles of painting”. The previous prose, as Bunin himself noted, was such that "made some critics interpret" him, for example, "as a melancholy lyricist or a singer of noble estates, a singer of idylls", and his literary activity was revealed "more vividly and diversely only from 1908.1909 years". These new features were given to Bunin's prose by the stories "Shadow of a Bird". The Academy of Sciences awarded Bunin the second Pushkin Prize in 1909 for poetry and translations of Byron; the third - also for poetry. In the same year, Bunin was elected an honorary academician.
The story "The Village", published in 1910, caused great controversy and was the beginning of Bunin's enormous popularity. The "Village", the first major thing, was followed by other novels and stories, as he wrote
Bunin, "sharply depicting the Russian soul, its light and dark, often tragic foundations", and his "merciless" works caused "passionate hostile responses". During these years, I felt how my literary forces were growing stronger every day. " Gorky wrote to Bunin that "no one took the village so deeply, so historically." Bunin widely captured the life of the Russian people, touches on historical, national problems and what was the topic of the day - war and revolution - depicts, in his opinion, "in the footsteps of Radishchev," the village of his time without any embellishment. After Bunin's story, with its "merciless truth" based on a deep knowledge of the "peasant kingdom", it became impossible to depict the peasants in the tone of populist idealization. Bunin's view of the Russian countryside developed partly under the influence of travel, "after a sharp slap in the face abroad." The village is depicted not motionless, new trends penetrate it, new people appear, and Tikhon Ilyich himself thinks about his existence
shopkeeper and tavern keeper. The story "The Village" (which Bunin also called a novel), like his work in general, asserted the realistic traditions of Russian classical literature in an age when they were attacked and denied by modernists and decadents. It captures the richness of observations and colors, the strength and beauty of the language, the harmony of the drawing, the sincerity of tone and truthfulness. But "The Village" is not traditional.
People appeared in it, mostly new in Russian literature: the Krasov brothers, Tikhon's wife, Rodka, Young, Nikolka Gray and his son Deniska, girls and women at the wedding of Young and Deniska. Bunin himself noted this.
In mid-December 1910, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna went to Egypt and further to the tropics - to Ceylon, where they stayed for half a month. They returned to Odessa in mid-April 1911. The diary of their voyage is "Many Waters". About this journey - also the stories "Brothers", "City of the King of Kings". What the Englishman felt in The Brothers is autobiographical. According to Bunin, travel in his life played a huge role "; regarding his wanderings, he even developed, as he said," some philosophy. both for Bunin and for Russian literature of lyrical prose.
He wrote that "this is something like Maupassant." Close to this prose are the stories immediately preceding the diary - "The Shadow of the Bird" - poems in prose, as the author himself defined their genre. From their diary - the transition to "Dry Valley", which synthesized the experience of the author of the "Village" in creating everyday prose and lyrical prose. "Dry Valley" and the stories written shortly afterwards marked a new creative takeoff Bunin after "The Village" - in the sense of great psychological depth and complexity of images, as well as the novelty of the genre. In "Sukhodil" foreground not historical Russia with its way of life, as in "The Village", but "the soul of a Russian person in the deepest sense of the word, the image of the traits of the psyche of a Slav," said Bunin.
Bunin went his own way, did not join any fashionable literary movements or groups, in his words, "did not throw out any banners" and did not proclaim any slogans. Criticism
noted the powerful language of Bunin, his art of raising "everyday phenomena of life" into the world of poetry. There were no "low" topics unworthy of the poet's attention for him. There is a great sense of history in his poems. The reviewer of the journal "Bulletin of Europe" wrote: "His historical style is unparalleled in our poetry... Prosaism, accuracy, beauty of the language are brought to the limit. There is hardly another poet whose style would be so unadorned, everyday as here; dozens of pages you will not find a single epithet, not a single comparison, not a single metaphor ... such a simplification of poetic language without prejudice to poetry is only possible for true talent ... With regard to pictorial accuracy, Mr. Bunin has no rivals among Russian poets " . The book "The Cup of Life" (1915) touches upon the deep problems of human existence. The French writer, poet and literary critic René Gil wrote to Bunin in 1921 about the French edition of The Cup of Life: “How complicated everything is psychologically! And at the same time, this is your genius, everything is born from simplicity and from the most accurate observation of reality: an atmosphere is created where one breathes something strange and disturbing, emanating from the very act of life! This kind of suggestion, the suggestion of that secret that surrounds the action, we know in Dostoevsky too; but with him it comes from the abnormal imbalance of the characters, from -for his nervous passion, which hovers, like some kind of exciting aura, around some cases of madness.You have the opposite: everything is a radiation of life, full of strength, and disturbs precisely by its own forces, by primitive forces, where complexity, something inescapable, is hidden under visible unity, violating the usual clear norm.
Bunin developed his ethical ideal under the influence of Socrates, whose views are set forth in the writings of his students Xenophon and Plato. More than once he read the semi-philosophical, semi-poetic work of the "divine Plato" (Pushkin) in the form of a dialogue - "Phidon". After reading the dialogues, he wrote in his diary on August 21, 1917: "How much Socrates said, that in Indian, in Jewish philosophy!" ". Bunin was fascinated by his doctrine of the value of the human person. And he saw in each of the people to some extent "concentration ... of high forces", to the knowledge of which, Bunin wrote in the story "Returning to Rome", called Socrates. In his enthusiasm for Socrates, he followed Tolstoy, who, as V. Ivanov said, followed the paths of Socrates in search of the norm of good. " Tolstoy was close to Bunin and the fact that for him goodness and beauty, ethics and aesthetics are inseparable. "Beauty as crown of good
- wrote Tolstoy. Bunin affirmed in his work the eternal values ​​- goodness and beauty. This gave him a sense of connection, fusion with the past, the historical continuity of being. "Brothers", "Lord of San
Francisco", "Loopy Ears", based on the real facts of modern life, are not only accusatory, but deeply philosophical. "Brothers" is a particularly illustrative example. This is a story on eternal themes love, life and death, and not just the dependent existence of colonial peoples. The embodiment of the idea of ​​this story is equally based on the impressions of a trip to Ceylon and on the myth of Mar - a legend about the god of life and death. Mara is an evil demon of Buddhists - at the same time - the personification of being. Bunin took a lot for prose and poetry from Russian and world folklore, his attention was attracted by Buddhist and Muslim legends, Syrian traditions, Chaldean, Egyptian myths and the myths of the idolaters of the Ancient East, the legends of the Arabs.
He had a great sense of homeland, language, history. Bunin said: all these sublime words, the wondrous beauty of the song, "cathedrals - all this is necessary, all this has been created for centuries ...". One of the sources of his creativity was folk speech. The poet and literary critic G. V. Adamovich, who knew Bunin well and communicated closely with him in France, wrote to the author of this article on December 19, 1969: to the ostentatious style russe. Cruel and correct - his review of Gorodetsky's poems is an example of this. Even Blok's "Kulikovo Field" is, in my opinion, a wonderful thing, he was annoyed precisely because of his "too Russian" outfit ... He said - "this is Vasnetsov", that is, a masquerade and an opera. But he treated the fact that it was not a "masquerade" differently: I remember, for example, something about "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". The meaning of his words was approximately the same as in Pushkin's words: all poets who have gathered together cannot compose such a miracle! But the translations of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" revolted him, in particular, Balmont's translation. Because of the forgery of an exaggeratedly Russian style or size, he despised Shmelev, although he recognized his talent. Bunin generally had a rare ear for falsehood, for "pedals ": as soon as he heard falsehood, he fell into a rage. Because of this, he loved Tolstoy so much and how once, I remember, he said: "Tolstoy, who nowhere has a single exaggerated word ..." In May 1917, Bunin arrived in the village of Glotovo, in the estate of Vasilyevsky, Oryol province, lived here all summer and autumn. On October 23, he and his wife left for Moscow, on October 26 they arrived in Moscow, lived on Povarskaya (now Vorovsky Street), in Baskakov's house No. 26, apt. 2, with the parents of Vera Nikolaevna, the Muromtsevs. The time was alarming, battles were going on, "past their windows, wrote Gruzinsky A.E. on November 7 to A.B. Derman, - a gun rattled along Povarskaya". Bunin spent the winter of 1917-1918 in Moscow. In the lobby of the house where the Murmtsevs' apartment was, a watch was established; the doors were locked, the gates were blocked with logs.
Bunin was also on duty.

Bunin joined the literary life, which, in spite of everything, with all the swiftness of social, political and military events, with devastation and famine, still did not stop. He has been to
"Book Publishing Writers", participated in its work, in the literary circle "Wednesday" and in the Art Circle. On May 21, 1918, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna left Moscow - through Orsha and Minsk to Kyiv, then to Odessa; January 26, Art. Art. 1920 sailed to Constantinople, then through Sofia and Belgrade arrived in Paris on March 28, 1920. started long years emigration - in Paris and in the south of France, in Grasse, near Cannes.
Bunin told Vera Nikolaevna that "he cannot live in the new world, that he belongs to the old world, to the world of Goncharov, Tolstoy, Moscow, St. Petersburg; that poetry is only there, and in the new world he does not catch it." Bunin as an artist grew all the time. Mitina's Love (1924), Sunstroke (1925), Cornet Elagin's Case (1925), and then Arsenyev's Life (1927-1929,1933) and many other works marked new achievements in Russian prose. Bunin himself spoke of the "shrill lyricism" of Mitya's Love. This is most captivating in his novels and short stories of the last three decades. They can also be said in the words of their author - a kind of "fashion", poetry.
In the prose of these years, the sensual perception of life is excitingly conveyed. Contemporaries noted the great philosophical meaning of such works as Mitina's Love or Arseniev's Life. In them, Bunin broke through "to a deep metaphysical sense of the tragic nature of man."
K. G. Paustovsky wrote that "The Life of Arseniev" is "one of the most remarkable phenomena of world literature." In 1927-1930, Bunin wrote short stories ("Elephant", "Sky over the Wall" and many others) - a page, half a page, and sometimes several lines, they were included in the book "God's Tree". What Bunin wrote in this genre was the result of a bold search for new forms of extremely concise writing, the beginning of which was laid not by Turgenev, as some of his contemporaries claimed, but by Tolstoy and Chekhov. Sofia University Professor P. Bitsilli wrote: "It seems to me that the collection "God's Tree" is the most
perfect of all Bunin's creations and the most revealing. In no other place is there such eloquent conciseness, such clarity and subtlety of writing, such creative freedom, such truly
royal dominion over matter. No other, therefore, contains so much data for studying his method, for understanding what lies at its basis and on what it, in essence, is exhausted. This is the same, it would seem, simple, but also the rarest and most valuable quality that Bunin has in common with the most truthful Russian writers, with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov: honesty, hatred of any falsehood ... ".
In 1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, as he believed, primarily for "The Life of Arseniev." When Bunin came to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, in Sweden he was already recognized by sight. Bunin's photographs could be seen in every newspaper, in shop windows, on the cinema screen. On the street, the Swedes, seeing the Russian writer, looked around. Bunin pulled his lambskin hat over his eyes and grumbled: - What is it? An absolute success for the tenor. The remarkable Russian writer Boris Zaitsev spoke about Bunin's Nobel days: "... You see, what - we were some kind of last people there, emigrants, and suddenly an émigré writer was awarded an international prize! A Russian writer! .. And they awarded him for some political writings, but still for art... I was writing in the Vozrozhdenie newspaper at that time... So I was urgently assigned to write an editorial about receiving the Nobel Prize. It was very late, I remember what happened ten in the evening when they told me this. For the first time in my life I went to the printing house and wrote at night ... I remember that I left in such an excited state (from the printing house), went out to place d "Italie and there, you know, went around everything bistro and in each bistro he drank a glass of cognac for the health of Ivan Bunin! .. I arrived home in such a cheerful mood ... at three o'clock in the morning, at four, maybe ... other countries, as well as to meet publishers and translators. In the German city of Lindau, he first encountered fascist orders; he was arrested, subjected to an unceremonious and humiliating search.
In October 1939, Bunin settled in Grasse at the Villa Jeannette, and lived here throughout the war. Here he wrote the book "Dark Alleys" stories about love, as he himself said, "about her" dark "and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys." This book, according to Bunin, "talks about the tragic and about many things tender and beautiful - I think that this is the best and most original thing that I have written in my life."
Under the Germans, Bunin did not print anything, although he lived in great lack of money and hunger. He treated the conquerors with hatred, rejoiced at the victories of the Soviet and allied troops. In 1945, he said goodbye to Grasse forever and returned to Paris on the first of May. He has been sick a lot in recent years. Nevertheless, he wrote a book of memoirs and worked on the book "About Chekhov", which he did not manage to finish. In total, Bunin wrote ten new books in exile.
In letters and diaries, Bunin speaks of his desire to return to Moscow. But in old age and in illness, it was not easy to decide on such a step. Most importantly, there was no certainty whether the hopes for a quiet life and for the publication of books would come true. Bunin hesitated. The "case" of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, the noise in the press around these names finally determined his decision. He wrote to M. A. Aldanov on September 15, 1947: “Today I wrote a letter from Teleshov on the evening of September 7 ... “What a pity that you did not experience the time when your big book was typed, when you were so expected here, when you could be fed up and rich and in such high esteem! “After reading this, I tore my hair for an hour. And then I immediately calmed down, remembering what could have been for me instead of satiety, wealth and honor from Zhdanov and Fadeev ...” Bunin is now read in all European languages ​​​​and in some eastern. We publish it in millions of copies. On his 80th birthday, in 1950, Francois Mauriac wrote to him about his admiration for his work, about the sympathy that his personality inspired and his cruel fate. André Gide, in a letter published in the Le Figaro newspaper, says that on the threshold of his 80th birthday, he turns to Bunin and greets him "on behalf of France", calls him a great artist and writes: "I do not know writers ... whose sensations would be more precise and at the same time unexpected. ". They admired the work of Bunin R. Rolland, who called him a "brilliant artist", Henri de Regnier, T. Mann, R. -M. Rilke, Jerome Jerome, Yaroslav Ivashkevich. Reviews of German, French, English, etc. the press from the beginning of the 1920s onwards were mostly enthusiastic, establishing world recognition for him. As early as 1922, the English magazine The Nation and Athenaeum described the books The Gentleman from San Francisco and The Village as extremely significant; this review is peppered with great praise: " new planet in our sky! "," Apocalyptic power ... ". At the end:" Bunin won his place in world literature. " Bunin's prose was equated with the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, while saying that he "updated" Russian art both in form and content. In the realism of the last century, he brought new features and
new colors, which brought him closer to the Impressionists.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died on the night of November 8, 1953 in the arms of his wife in dire poverty. In his memoirs, Bunin wrote: “I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my writing memories would not have been like that. I wouldn’t have to go through ... 1905, then the first world war, followed by the 17th year and its continuation, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler ... How not to envy our forefather Noah! Only one flood fell to his lot ... " Bunin was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois near Paris, in a crypt, in a zinc coffin.
You are a thought, you are a dream. Through the smoky blizzard
Crosses run - outstretched arms.
I listen to the pensive spruce
A melodious ringing... Everything is just a thought and sounds!
What lies in the grave, are you?
Parting, sadness was marked
your hard way. Now from no. Crosses
They only keep the ashes. Now you are a thought. You are eternal.

The first Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is called a jeweler of the word, a prose writer-painter, a genius of Russian literature and the brightest representative Silver Age. Literary critics agree that in Bunin's works there is a relationship with paintings, and in terms of attitude, the stories and novels of Ivan Alekseevich are similar to canvases.

Childhood and youth

Ivan Bunin's contemporaries argue that the writer felt "breed", innate aristocracy. There is nothing to be surprised: Ivan Alekseevich is a representative of the oldest noble family, rooted in the 15th century. The Bunin family coat of arms is included in the coat of arms of the noble families of the Russian Empire. Among the ancestors of the writer is the founder of romanticism, the writer of ballads and poems.

Ivan Alekseevich was born in October 1870 in Voronezh, in the family of a poor nobleman and petty official Alexei Bunin, married to his cousin Lyudmila Chubarova, a meek but impressionable woman. She bore her husband nine children, of whom four survived.

The family moved to Voronezh 4 years before the birth of Ivan to educate their eldest sons Yuli and Evgeny. They settled in a rented apartment on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street. When Ivan was four years old, his parents returned to the Butyrka family estate in the Oryol province. Bunin spent his childhood on the farm.

The love of reading was instilled in the boy by his tutor, a student of Moscow University, Nikolai Romashkov. At home, Ivan Bunin studied languages, focusing on Latin. The first books of the future writer that he read on his own were The Odyssey and a collection of English poems.

In the summer of 1881, Ivan's father brought him to Yelets. The youngest son passed the exams and entered the 1st grade of the male gymnasium. Bunin liked to study, but this did not apply to the exact sciences. In a letter to his older brother, Vanya admitted that he considers the math exam "the most terrible." After 5 years, Ivan Bunin was expelled from the gymnasium in the middle school year. The 16-year-old boy came to his father's estate Ozerki for the Christmas holidays, but never returned to Yelets. For non-appearance at the gymnasium, the teachers' council expelled the guy. further education Ivan's elder brother Julius took care of him.

Literature

Ivan Bunin's creative biography began in Ozerki. In the estate, he continued to work on the novel “Passion” begun in Yelets, but the work did not reach the reader. But the poem of the young writer, written under the impression of the death of an idol - the poet Semyon Nadson - was published in the Rodina magazine.

In his father's estate, with the help of his brother, Ivan Bunin prepared for the final exams, passed them and received a matriculation certificate.

From the autumn of 1889 to the summer of 1892, Ivan Bunin worked in the journal Orlovsky Vestnik, where his stories, poems and literary criticism were published. In August 1892, Julius called his brother to Poltava, where he got Ivan a job as a librarian in the provincial government.

In January 1894, the writer visited Moscow, where he met with a congenial soul. Like Lev Nikolaevich, Bunin criticizes urban civilization. In the stories "Antonov apples", "Epitaph" and "New road" nostalgic notes for the passing era are guessed, regret is felt for the degenerate nobility.

In 1897, Ivan Bunin published the book "To the End of the World" in St. Petersburg. A year earlier he had translated Henry Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha. Bunin's translation included poems by Alkey, Saadi, Adam Mickiewicz and.

In 1898, Ivan Alekseevich's poetry collection Under the Open Sky was published in Moscow, warmly received by literary critics and readers. Two years later, Bunin presented poetry lovers with a second book of poems - Falling Leaves, which strengthened the author's authority as a "poet of the Russian landscape." Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1903 awards Ivan Bunin the first Pushkin Prize, followed by the second.

But in the poetic environment, Ivan Bunin earned a reputation as an "old-fashioned landscape painter." In the late 1890s, “fashionable” poets became favorites, bringing the “breath of city streets” to Russian lyrics, and with its restless heroes. in a review of Bunin's collection Poems, he wrote that Ivan Alekseevich found himself aloof "from the general movement", but from the point of view of painting, his poetic "canvases" reached "the end points of perfection." Critics call the poems “I Remember a Long Winter Evening” and “Evening” as examples of perfection and adherence to the classics.

Ivan Bunin, the poet, does not accept symbolism and critically looks at the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, calling himself "a witness to the great and vile." In 1910, Ivan Alekseevich published the story "The Village", which marked the beginning of "a whole series of works that sharply depict the Russian soul." The continuation of the series is the story "Dry Valley" and the stories "Strength", " A good life”,“ Prince in princes ”,“ Bast shoes.

In 1915, Ivan Bunin was at the height of his popularity. His famous stories "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Grammar of Love", "Easy Breath" and "Chang's Dreams" are published. In 1917, the writer leaves revolutionary Petrograd, avoiding the "terrible proximity of the enemy." Bunin lived in Moscow for six months, from there in May 1918 he left for Odessa, where he wrote the diary "Cursed Days" - a furious denunciation of the revolution and the Bolshevik government.

Portrait "Ivan Bunin". Artist Evgeny Bukovetsky

It is dangerous for a writer who criticizes the new government so fiercely to remain in the country. In January 1920, Ivan Alekseevich leaves Russia. He leaves for Constantinople, and in March he ends up in Paris. A collection of short stories called "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was published here, which the public greets enthusiastically.

Since the summer of 1923, Ivan Bunin lived in the Belvedere villa in ancient Grasse, where he visited him. During these years, the stories "Initial Love", "Numbers", "The Rose of Jericho" and "Mitina's Love" were published.

In 1930, Ivan Alekseevich wrote the story "The Shadow of a Bird" and completed the most significant work created in exile - the novel "The Life of Arseniev." The description of the hero's experiences is covered with sadness about the departed Russia, "who died before our eyes in such a magically short time."

In the late 1930s, Ivan Bunin moved to the Jeannette Villa, where he lived during the Second World War. The writer was worried about the fate of his homeland and joyfully met the news about the slightest victory of the Soviet troops. Bunin lived in poverty. He wrote about his predicament:

“I was rich - now, by the will of fate, I suddenly became poor ... I was famous all over the world - now no one in the world needs ... I really want to go home!”

The villa was dilapidated: the heating system did not function, there were interruptions in electricity and water supply. Ivan Alekseevich told his friends in letters about the "cave continuous hunger." In order to get at least a small amount, Bunin asked a friend who had left for America to publish the collection Dark Alleys on any terms. The book in Russian with a circulation of 600 copies was published in 1943, for which the writer received $300. The collection includes the story "Clean Monday". The last masterpiece of Ivan Bunin - the poem "Night" - was published in 1952.

Researchers of the prose writer's work have noticed that his novels and stories are cinematic. For the first time, a Hollywood producer spoke about the film adaptation of Ivan Bunin's works, expressing a desire to make a film based on the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco." But it ended with a conversation.

In the early 1960s, Russian directors drew attention to the work of a compatriot. A short film based on the story "Mitya's Love" was shot by Vasily Pichul. In 1989, the screens released the picture "Unurgent Spring" based on the story of the same name by Bunin.

In 2000, the director's biography film "The Diary of His Wife" was released, which tells the story of relationships in the family of the prose writer.

The premiere of the drama "Sunstroke" in 2014 caused a resonance. The tape is based on the story of the same name and the book Cursed Days.

Nobel Prize

Ivan Bunin was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1922. The Nobel Prize winner was busy with this. But then the award was given Irish poet William Yeats.

In the 1930s, Russian emigrant writers joined the process, and their efforts were crowned with victory: in November 1933, the Swedish Academy awarded Ivan Bunin a literature prize. The appeal to the laureate said that he deserved the award for "recreating in prose a typical Russian character."

Ivan Bunin spent 715 thousand francs of the prize quickly. Half in the first months he distributed to those in need and to everyone who turned to him for help. Even before receiving the award, the writer admitted that he received 2,000 letters asking for help with money.

3 years after the Nobel Prize, Ivan Bunin plunged into habitual poverty. Until the end of his life, he did not have his own house. Best of all, Bunin described the state of affairs in a short poem "The bird has a nest", where there are lines:

The beast has a hole, the bird has a nest.
How the heart beats, sadly and loudly,
When I enter, being baptized, into a strange, rented house
With his old knapsack!

Personal life

The young writer met his first love when he worked at the Oryol Herald. Varvara Pashchenko - a tall beauty in pince-nez - seemed to Bunin too arrogant and emancipated. But soon he found an interesting interlocutor in the girl. A romance broke out, but Varvara's father did not like the poor young man with vague prospects. The couple lived without a wedding. In his memoirs, Ivan Bunin calls Barbara just that - "an unmarried wife."

After moving to Poltava and without that complicated relationship escalated. Varvara, a girl from a wealthy family, was fed up with a beggarly existence: she left home, leaving Bunin a farewell note. Soon Pashchenko became the wife of actor Arseny Bibikov. Ivan Bunin suffered a hard break, the brothers feared for his life.

In 1898, in Odessa, Ivan Alekseevich met Anna Tsakni. She became the first official wife of Bunin. In the same year, the wedding took place. But the couple did not live together for long: they broke up two years later. The only son of the writer, Nikolai, was born in marriage, but in 1905 the boy died of scarlet fever. Bunin had no more children.

The love of Ivan Bunin's life is the third wife of Vera Muromtseva, whom he met in Moscow, at a literary evening in November 1906. Muromtseva, a graduate of the Higher Women's Courses, was fond of chemistry and spoke three languages ​​fluently. But Vera was far from literary bohemia.

The newlyweds married in exile in 1922: Tsakni did not give Bunin a divorce for 15 years. He was the best man at the wedding. The couple lived together until the very death of Bunin, although their life cannot be called cloudless. In 1926, rumors appeared among the emigrants about a strange love triangle: in the house of Ivan and Vera Bunin lived a young writer Galina Kuznetsova, to whom Ivan Bunin had by no means friendly feelings.

Kuznetsova is called the last love of the writer. She lived at the villa of the Bunin spouses for 10 years. Ivan Alekseevich survived the tragedy when he learned about Galina's passion for the sister of the philosopher Fyodor Stepun - Margarita. Kuznetsova left Bunin's house and went to Margo, which caused the writer's protracted depression. Friends of Ivan Alekseevich wrote that Bunin at that time was on the verge of insanity and despair. He worked for days on end, trying to forget his beloved.

After parting with Kuznetsova, Ivan Bunin wrote 38 short stories included in the collection Dark Alleys.

Death

In the late 1940s, doctors diagnosed Bunin with emphysema. At the insistence of doctors, Ivan Alekseevich went to a resort in the south of France. But the state of health has not improved. In 1947, 79-year-old Ivan Bunin spoke for the last time to an audience of writers.

Poverty forced to seek help from the Russian emigrant Andrei Sedykh. He secured a pension for a sick colleague from the American philanthropist Frank Atran. Until the end of Bunin's life, Atran paid the writer 10,000 francs a month.

In the late autumn of 1953, Ivan Bunin's health deteriorated. He didn't get out of bed. Shortly before his death, the writer asked his wife to read the letters.

On November 8, the doctor declared the death of Ivan Alekseevich. It was caused by cardiac asthma and pulmonary sclerosis. The Nobel laureate was buried at the cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, the place where hundreds of Russian emigrants were buried.

Bibliography

• "Antonov apples"
• "Village"
• "Dry Valley"
• "Easy breath"
• "Chang's Dreams"
• "Lapti"
• "Grammar of Love"
• "Mitina's love"
• "Cursed Days"
• "Sunstroke"
• "The Life of Arseniev"
• "Caucasus"
• "Dark alleys"
• "Cold fall"
• "Numbers"
• "Clean Monday"
• "The Case of Cornet Yelagin"