The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around. Dark alleys of an ordinary story
“The book has always been an adviser, a comforter, eloquent and calm for me, and I did not want to exhaust its benefits, saving them for the most important occasions.” George Sand
On the channel "Culture" in the program "The Glass Bead Game" the writer Igor Volgin at the end always turns to viewers with an edification: "Read and re-read the classics!"
To the extent possible, I do this. My pencil notes in books (only from my personal library!) help me return to what I read.
After a recent trip to the city of Efremov Tula region, where the Bunin family museum is located, has finally returned to the work of her beloved writer in Once again. I re-read and analyze.
For example, I finally received an answer to the question: why is the collection of short stories, the hymn of love “Dark Alleys”, named after the first story in it, called exactly that. It turns out that Ivan Alekseevich read a poem by Nikolai Ogarev " An ordinary story", where there are lines:
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
The river was quiet, clear,
The sun was rising, the birds were singing;
The valley stretched beyond the river,
Calm, lush green;
Nearby, a scarlet rosehip was blooming,
There was an alley of dark linden trees...
The text of “Dark Alleys” says that in his youth the hero of the story, Nikolai Alekseevich, read poems about “dark alleys” to his beloved Nadezhda. The story ends with exactly the lines from Ogarev’s poem, only slightly edited: “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys…”
Before its release on television in 2014 feature film Nikita Mikhalkov with the title of Bunin's story of the same name " Sunstroke"(1925) I re-read the original source. I was very surprised that from such a short story it was possible to create big movie. The “Observer” program of October 17, 2014 helped me figure this out, where the curtain was lifted in a conversation between Andrei Maksimov and Nikita Mikhalkov and Boris Lyubimov. It turns out that Vladimir Moiseenko (1963-2011) and Alexander Adabashyan wrote their original script, based on the story itself and the diaries of I.A. Bunin 1918-1920 "Cursed Days".
I kept putting off reading “Cursed Days,” which I printed from the Internet, until later, preparing myself for the next experience. Now, after the film “Sunstroke” and Mikhalkov’s documentary “The Light Breath of Ivan Bunin” found on the Internet, she said to herself: it’s time.
I knew the writer’s attitude towards revolutions in general from his stories. But the view on the events of 1917-1919 in Russia is clearly expressed in diary entries.
Historically, the goal of any revolution is FREEDOM. As a rule, in this event, at the helm is a LEADER or COLLECTIVE COLLUSION under the baton of “leaders” from the outside. What motivates the LEADER? I.A. Bunin quotes Napoleon’s statement on this matter: “What made the revolution? Ambition. What put an end to it? Also ambition. And what a wonderful excuse freedom was for all of us to fool the crowd!”
Freedom at any cost. Even with such calls as in Odessa in 1919: “Forward, dear ones, don’t count corpses!".
Losses in this case are the costs of the revolutionary moment. After all, there is a bright future ahead: “Factories for the workers, land for the peasants!”, which is what the newspaper “Odessa Communist” (1919) wrote about:
Communist worker
Knows what strength lies in:
He has a love for work
A diary entry dated April 15, 1919, with an unflattering description of a man named Shchepkin, alerted me: “Ten months ago, some Shpan, an extremely lousy and ragged little man, something like the worst traveling salesman, came to me and offered me to be my impresario, to go with him to Nikolaev, to Kharkov, to Kherson, where I will publicly read my works “every evening for a thousand Duma money.” Today I met him on the street: he is now one of the comrades of this crazy bastard Professor Shchepkin, the commissioner for theater business", he is shaven, well-fed - from everything it is clear that he is well-fed - and dressed in a wonderful English coat, thick and soft, with a wide tab at the back."
I knew only about one Shchepkin, Mikhail Semyonovich (1788-1883), Russian actor, founder of Russian acting school. The Higher Theater School bears his name.
Further, in the diary entry dated April 16, I read: “Prof. Evgeny Shchepkin, “commissar of public education” (Odessa), handed over the management of the university to “seven representatives of the revolutionary student body,” such scoundrels, they say, that even today one would be hard pressed to look for them during the day.”
The name Evgeniy gave me a hint to determine from the reference book that this was none other than Evgeniy Nikolaevich Shchepkin (1860-1920), a Russian historian and teacher, the son of Nikolai Mikhailovich Shchepkin and the grandson of the same Russian actor mentioned earlier.
Bunin’s entry from April 25 about the “commissar of public education” (for some reason Ivan Alekseevich quotes the name of this position) is generally a caricature, there is no trace of it here.
Probably, the 49-year-old writer, already well-known in Russia, had reasons for such categorical and disdainful attitude to the revolutionary figure Shchepkin during the short period of Soviet power in Odessa (April - August 1919), God be his judge. But it’s still surprising what kind of person, descendant famous actor? Dry information reference books gives little idea about him. And his early death on December 12, 1920 makes us think.
My acquaintance with Maximilian Voloshin began unexpectedly with his poem about Russia “The Burning Bush,” written on May 28, 1919 in Koktebel:
Who are you, Russia? Mirage? Obsession?
Have you been? There is? or not?
Whirlpool... rapids... dizziness...
Abyss... madness... delirium...
Everything is unreasonable, unusual:
Waves of victory and destruction...
The thought freezes before the thing's mystery
And the spirit is terrified...
We are infected with conscience: in every Stenka there is Saint Seraphim, Given over to the same hangovers and thirsts, We are tormented by the same will. We perish without dying, We strip the Spirit to the bottom. It’s a wondrous miracle - the Burning Bush burns without being consumed!
Before this acquaintance, I associated the phrase Burning Bush with the Icon Mother of God“The Burning Bush”, which she wrote about in the commentary to Svetlana Tishkina’s article “The Road to the Diocese” http://site/content/view/doroga-v-eparhiyu-/
And here, in the poem, it emphasizes the inviolability of our sacred Russian state.
I met the poet’s beloved woman without knowing who she was. I read to my son a fairy tale in verse by a certain Cherubina de Gabriac, “A Mule Without a Bridle.” It turned out that this was the poetess Elizaveta Dmitrieva, and her pseudonym was invented by Voloshin. Reading about Anna Akhmatova, I learned about love triangle Voloshin-Dmitrieva-Gumilev and about the duel between poets. I also read Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose about her friend Max. I also discovered that the poet’s house in Koktebel was a haven for the Russian cultural elite until the owner’s death in 1932. Director Andrei Osipov made a documentary about this, “Koktebel Pebbles” (2014). This is, in fact, a portrait of the “Silver Age”.
IN Time of Troubles civil war, Maximilian Voloshin, according to the recollections of his contemporaries, in his house in Koktebel saved one by one, and sometimes simultaneously, whites from reds and reds from whites.
An assessment of the personality of this person, who does not hold any revolutionary positions, I.A. Bunin in “Cursed Days” is clearly identified as a traitor to the monarchical foundations of the Russian state.
On two excerpts diary entries out of five I'll stop:
Yesterday the poet Voloshin sat with us for a long time. He ran into a terrible situation with the offer of his services (“to decorate the city for the first of May”). I warned him: don’t run to them, it’s not only low, but also stupid, because they know very well who you were just yesterday. He responded with nonsense: “Art is timeless, outside politics, I will participate in decoration only as a poet and as an artist.” Decorating what? The gallows, and your own too? Still, he ran. And the next day in Izvestia: “Voloshin came to us, every bastard is now in a hurry to cling to us...” Now Voloshin wants to write a “letter to the editor”, full of noble indignation. Even stupider.
Here is Voloshin. The day before yesterday he called upon Russia the “Angel of Vengeance,” who was supposed to “put the delight of murder into a girl’s heart and bloody dreams into a child’s soul.” And yesterday he was a White Guard, and now he is ready to sing the Bolsheviks...
My opinion is that this God-fearing man LOVED PEOPLE, no matter what color of clothing they were dressed in. His restless soul sought justification for the events taking place in Russia at that time. It is enough to read his poems, love for the Motherland is everywhere.
It's over with Russia... Lastly
We talked about her, chatted,
They slurped, drank, spat,
Got dirty in dirty squares,
Sold on the streets: shouldn't it?
Who wants lands, republics, and freedoms,
Civil rights? And the people's homeland
He was dragged out to rot like carrion.
Oh, Lord, open up, waste away,
Send fire, plagues and scourges upon us,
Germans from the west, Mongol from the east,
Give us into slavery again and forever,
To atone humbly and deeply
Judas' sin until the Last Judgment!
"Peace", 1917
All Rus' is a bonfire. Unquenchable Flame
From edge to edge, from century to century
It hums, roars... And the stone cracks.
And every torch is a person.
Are we not, like our ancestors,
Did they let him in? A hurricane
Inflated it, and drowned in acrid smoke
Forests and villages are lit...
"Kitezh", 1919
From the blood shed in battles,
From ashes turned to dust,
From the torment of executed generations,
From souls baptized in blood,
Out of hateful love
From crimes, frenzy -
A righteous Rus' will arise.
I pray for her all the time
And I believe in the eternal plans:
She is forged with a sword blow,
She builds on bones
She is holy in fierce battles,
It is built on burning relics,
It melts in mad prayers.
"Spell", 1920
For a long time I could not get an answer to the question why Maximilian Voloshin did not leave Russia in 1920, when Bunin sailed from Odessa abroad? Accepted Soviet power? Resigned? The opinion of my mother’s friend, a school literature teacher with extensive experience, is authoritative for me. She thinks: no, this broad-hearted man did not accept Soviet power and did not reconcile. He simply outlined his field of activity with his slogan “Art is timeless, outside politics.” The pain about my native country hid in my heart for the time being.
The poem “Our Lady of Vladimir” from 1929 is another outburst of emotions:
And Our Lady of Vladimir
Rus' led through abomination, blood and shame
On the rapids of the Kyiv boats
Indicating the correct fairway.
But a blind people in a time of wrath
He himself gave away the keys of his shrines,
And the Representative-Virgo left
From their desecrated strongholds...
Faithful guardian and zealous guardian
Mother Vladimirskaya, - to you -
Two keys: golden to Her abode,
Rusty - to our sad fate.
The bell rang for Maximilian Voloshin at the age of 55. His heart is tired.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin lived to be 83 years old.
God works in mysterious ways!
In Kyiv, "the destruction of the monument to Alexander II has begun." A familiar activity. After all, back in March 17, eagles and coats of arms began to be torn off...
How does this resonate with modern times? The Lenin attack began in Ukraine. Alexander II is the Russian Emperor. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is the founder of Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a nation. This is the attitude towards history!
Now I will return to the beginning of the note with gratitude to my faithful friends, books. I'll finish famous words A.S. Pushkin:
Oh how many wonderful discoveries we have
Prepare the spirit of enlightenment
And experience, the son of difficult mistakes,
And genius, friend of paradoxes,
And chance, God the inventor.
The story “Dark Alleys” opens perhaps Bunin’s most famous cycle of stories, which got its name from this first, “title” work. It is known what importance the writer attached to the initial sound, the first “note” of the narrative, the timbre of which was supposed to determine the entire sound palette of the work. A kind of “beginning” that creates a special lyrical atmosphere of the story were lines from N. Ogarev’s poem “An Ordinary Tale”:
It was a wonderful spring
They sat on the shore
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black.
The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around,
There was an alley of dark linden trees...
But, as always with Bunin, “sound” is inseparable from “image”. He, as he wrote in the notes “The Origin of My Stories,” when starting work on the story, was presented with “some kind of big road, a troika harnessed to a tarantass, and autumn bad weather.” We must add to this the literary impulse, which also played a role: Bunin named “Resurrection” by L.N. Tolstoy, the heroes of this novel - young Nekhlyudov and Katyusha Maslova. All this came together in the writer’s imagination, and a story was born about lost happiness, the irrevocability of time, lost illusions and the power of the past over man.
The meeting of the heroes, once united in their youth by a passionate feeling of love, takes place many years later in the most ordinary, perhaps even nondescript setting: in a muddy road, at an inn located on a large road. Bunin does not skimp on “prosaic” details: “a mud-covered tarantass,” “simple horses,” “tails tied up from the slush.” But the portrait of the arriving man is given in detail, clearly designed to arouse sympathy: “a slender old military man,” with black eyebrows, a white mustache, and a shaved chin. His appearance speaks of nobility, and his stern but tired look contrasts with the liveliness of his movements (the author notices how he “threw” his leg out of the tarantass and “ran up” onto the porch). Bunin clearly wants to emphasize the combination of vivacity and maturity, youthfulness and sedateness in the hero, which is very important for the overall concept of the story, implicated in the desire to collide the past and the present, to strike a spark of memories that will illuminate bright light the past will incinerate, turn into ash what exists today.
The writer deliberately drags out the exposition: of the three and a half pages devoted to the story, almost a page is occupied by the “introduction”. In addition to the description of the stormy day, the hero’s appearance (and at the same time a detailed description of the coachman’s appearance), which is supplemented with new details as the hero frees himself from outer clothing, it also contains detailed characteristics the room where the visitor found himself. Moreover, the refrain of this description is an indication of cleanliness and neatness: a clean tablecloth on the table, cleanly washed benches, a recently whitewashed stove, new image in the corner... The author emphasizes this, since it is known that the owners of Russian inns and hotels were not very tidy and a constant feature of these places were cockroaches and dull windows covered with flies. Consequently, he wants to draw our attention to the almost unique way in which this establishment is maintained by its owners, or rather, as we will soon learn, by its mistress.
But the hero remains indifferent to environment, although later he will note cleanliness and neatness. From his behavior and gestures it is clear that he is irritated, tired (Bunin uses the epithet tired for the second time, now in relation to the entire appearance of the arriving officer), perhaps not very healthy (“pale, thin hand”), and is hostile to everything that is happening (“ “hostilely” called the owners), absent-minded (“inattentively” answers the questions of the hostess who appeared). And only this woman’s unexpected address to him: “Nikolai Alekseevich,” makes him seem to wake up. After all, before that, he asked her questions purely mechanically, without thinking, although he managed to glance at her figure, note her rounded shoulders, light legs in worn Tatar shoes.
The author himself, as if in addition to the “unseeing” gaze of the hero, gives a much more sharply expressive, unexpected, juicy portrait of the woman who entered: not very young, but still beautiful, similar to a gypsy, plump, but not overweight, a woman. Bunin deliberately resorts to naturalistic, almost anti-aesthetic details: large breasts, a triangular belly, like a goose’s. But the anti-aestheticism of the image is “removed”: the breasts are hidden under a red blouse (the diminutive suffix is intended to convey a feeling of lightness), and the stomach is hidden by a black skirt. In general, the combination of black and red in clothes, the fluff above the lip (a sign of passion), and the zoomorphic comparison are aimed at emphasizing the carnal, earthly nature in the heroine.
However, it is she who will reveal - as we will see a little later - the spiritual principle as opposed to the mundane existence that, without realizing it, the hero drags out, without thinking or looking into his past. That's why she's the first! - recognizes him. No wonder she “looked inquisitively at him all the time, squinting slightly,” and he will look at her only after she addresses him by name and patronymic. She - and not he - will name the exact number when it comes to the years they have not seen each other: not thirty-five, but thirty. She will tell you how old he is now. This means that she meticulously calculated everything, which means that every year she left a notch in her memory! And this is at a time when he should never forget what connected them, for in the past he had - no less than - a dishonest act, however, completely ordinary at that time - having fun with a serf girl when visiting friends' estates, sudden departure...
In the terse dialogue between Nadezhda (that’s the name of the owner of the inn) and Nikolai Alekseevich, the details of this story are restored. And the most important thing is the different attitude of the heroes towards the past. If for Nikolai Alekseevich everything that happened is “a vulgar, ordinary story” (however, he is ready to put everything in his life under this standard, as if removing from a person the burden of responsibility for his actions), then for Nadezhda her love became a great test, and a great event, the only one of significance in her life. “Just as I didn’t have anything more valuable than you in the world at that time, so I didn’t have anything later,” she will say.
For Nikolai Alekseevich, the love of a serf was only one of the episodes of his life (Nadezhda directly states this to him: “It’s as if nothing happened for you”). She “wanted to kill herself” several times, never when extraordinary beauty she never got married, unable to forget her first love. That’s why she refutes Nikolai Alekseevich’s statement that “everything passes over the years” (he, as if trying to convince himself of this, repeats the formula that “everything passes” several times: after all, he really wants to brush aside the past, to imagine everything is not enough significant event), with the words: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.” And she will say them with unshakable confidence. However, Bunin almost never comments on her words, limiting himself to monosyllabic “answered”, “approached”, “paused”. Only once does he slip an indication of the “unkind smile” with which Nadezhda utters the phrase addressed to her seducer: “I was deigned to read all the poems about all sorts of “dark alleys”.”
The writer is also stingy with “ historical details" Only from the words of the heroine of the work: “The gentlemen soon after you gave me my freedom,” and from the mention of the hero’s appearance, which had “a resemblance to Alexander II, which was so common among the military during his reign,” we can get the idea that The story apparently takes place in the 60s or 70s of the 19th century.
But Bunin is unusually generous in commenting on the condition of Nikolai Alekseevich, for whom a meeting with Nadezhda becomes a meeting with both his past and his conscience. The writer here reveals himself as a “secret psychologist” in all his splendor, making it clear through gestures, intonation of voice, and the behavior of the hero what is happening in his soul. If at first the only thing that interests a visitor at the inn is that “from behind the stove damper there was a sweet smell of cabbage soup” (Bunin even adds this detail: the smell of “boiled cabbage, beef and bay leaf”, - from which we can conclude that the guest is clearly hungry), then upon meeting Nadezhda, upon recognizing her, upon further conversation with her, fatigue and absent-mindedness instantly disappear from him, he begins to look fussy, worried, talking a lot and confusedly (“ mumbled,” “added quickly,” “said hastily”), which is a sharp contrast with the calm majesty of Nadezhda. Bunin points three times to Nikolai Alekseevich’s reaction of embarrassment: “he quickly straightened up, opened his eyes and blushed,” “he stopped and, blushing through his gray hair, began to speak,” “blushed to the point of tears”; emphasizes his dissatisfaction with himself with sudden changes in position: “he walked decisively around the room,” “frowning, he walked again,” “stopping, he grinned painfully.”
All this indicates what a difficult, painful process is taking place in him. But at first, nothing comes to mind except the divine beauty of the young girl (“How beautiful you were!... What a figure, what eyes!... How everyone looked at you”) and the romantic atmosphere of their rapprochement, and he is inclined brush aside what he had heard, hoping to turn the conversation, if not into a joke, then into the direction of “whoever remembers the old will...” However, after he heard that Nadezhda could never forgive him, because one cannot forgive the one who took away the most dear - the soul, who killed it, he seems to see the light. He is especially shocked, apparently, by the fact that to explain her feeling she resorts to the proverb (obviously, especially loved by Bunin, already used by him once in the story “The Village”) “they don’t carry the dead from the graveyard.” This means that she feels dead, that she never came back to life after those happy spring days, and that for her, who knew great power love - not without reason to his question-exclamation: “You couldn’t love me all your life!” - she firmly answers: “So, she could. No matter how much time passed, I lived alone,” - there is no return to life ordinary people. Her love was not easy stronger than death, A stronger than that the life that came after what happened and which she, as a Christian, had to continue, no matter what.
And what kind of life this is, we learn from several remarks exchanged between Nikolai Alekseevich, who is leaving the short-term shelter, and the coachman Klim, who says that the owner of the inn is “smart,” that she is “getting rich” because she “gives money on interest,” that she is “cool”, but “fair”, which means she enjoys both respect and honor. But we understand how petty and insignificant for her, who has fallen in love once and for all, all this mercantile frivolity, how incompatible it is with what is going on in her soul. For Nadezhda, her love is from God. No wonder she says: “What does God give to whom... Everyone’s youth passes, but love is another matter.” That is why her unpreparedness for forgiveness, while Nikolai Alekseevich really wants and hopes that God will forgive him, and even more so Nadezhda will forgive him, because, by all standards, he committed not such a great sin, is not condemned by the author. Although such a maximalist position runs counter to Christian doctrine. But, according to Bunin, a crime against love, against memory is much more serious than the sin of “grudge.” And it is precisely the memory of love, of the past, in his opinion, that justifies a lot.
And the fact that a true understanding of what happened gradually awakens in the hero’s mind speaks in his favor. After all, at first the words he said: “I think that in you I too have lost the most precious thing I had in life,” and his act - he kissed Nadezhda’s hand goodbye - do not cause him anything but shame, and even more - the shame of this shame, are perceived by him as false, ostentatious. But then he begins to understand that what came out accidentally, in a hurry, perhaps even for the sake of a catchphrase, is the most genuine “diagnosis” of the past. His internal dialogue, reflecting hesitation and doubt: “Isn’t it true that she gave me best moments life? - ends with an unshakable: “Yes, of course, the best moments. And not the best, but truly magical.” But right there - and here Bunin acts as a realist who does not believe in romantic transformations and repentance - another, sobering voice told him that all these thoughts were “nonsense”, that he could not do otherwise, that nothing could be corrected then , not now.
So Bunin, in the very first story of the cycle, gives an idea of the unattainable height to which the most ordinary person in case his life is illuminated, albeit tragic, but with love. And short moments of this love can “outweigh” all the material benefits of future well-being, all the joys love interests, not rising above the level of ordinary affairs, in general throughout the rest of life with its ups and downs.
Bunin draws the subtlest modulations of the characters’ states, relying on the sound “echo”, the consonance of phrases that are born, often without meaning, in response to spoken words. Thus, the words of coachman Klim that if you don’t give Nadezhda the money on time, then “blame yourself,” echo like echolalia when Nikolai Alekseevich pronounces them out loud: “Yes, yes, blame yourself.” And then in his soul they will continue to sound like “crucifying” his words. “Yes, blame yourself,” he thinks, realizing what kind of guilt lies with him. And the brilliant formula created by the author and put into the heroine’s mouth: “Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten,” was born in response to Nikolai Alekseevich’s phrase: “Everything passes. Everything is forgotten,” which was previously supposedly confirmed in a quotation from the book of Job: “as you will remember the flowing water.” And more than once throughout the story words will appear that refer us to the past, to memory: “Over the years, everything passes”; “everyone’s youth passes”; “I called you Nikolenka, and you remember me”; “Do you remember how everyone looked at you”, “How can you forget this”, “Well, why remember.” These echoing phrases seem to be weaving a carpet on which Bunin’s formula about the omnipotence of memory will be forever imprinted.
It is impossible not to notice the obvious similarity of this story with Turgenev’s “Asya”. As we remember, even there the hero at the end tries to convince himself that “fate was good in not uniting him with Asya.” He consoles himself with the thought that “he probably would not be happy with such a wife.” It would seem that the situations are similar: in both cases the idea of misalliance, i.e. the possibility of marrying a woman of a lower class is initially rejected. But what is the result of this, it would seem, from the point of view of the attitudes of the right decision accepted in society? The hero of “Asia” found himself condemned to forever remain a “familyless loner”, dragging out “boring” years of complete loneliness. It's all in the past.
For Nikolai Alekseevich from “Dark Alleys” life turned out differently: he achieved a position in society, is surrounded by family, he has a wife and children. True, as he admits to Nadezhda, he was never happy: his wife, whom he loved “without memory,” cheated and abandoned him, his son, who was trusted big hopes, turned out to be “a scoundrel, a spendthrift, an insolent person without a heart, without honor, without a conscience...”. Of course, it can be assumed that Nikolai Alekseevich somewhat exaggerates his feeling of bitterness, his experiences, in order to somehow make amends for Nadezhda, so that it would not be so painful for her to realize the difference in their states, their different assessment of the past. Moreover, at the end of the story, when he tries to “learn a lesson” from the unexpected meeting, to sum up his life, he, reflecting, comes to the conclusion that it would still be impossible to imagine Nadezhda as the mistress of his St. Petersburg house, the mother of his children. Consequently, we understand that his wife, apparently, returned to him, and besides the scoundrel son, there are other children. But why, in this case, is he so initially irritated, bilious, gloomy, why does he have a stern and at the same time tired look? Why is this look “questioning”? Maybe this is a subconscious desire to still give oneself an account of how he lives? And why does he shake his head in bewilderment, as if driving away doubts... Yes, all because the meeting with Nadezhda brightly illuminated him past life. And it became clear to him that there had never been anything in his life better than those “truly magical” minutes when “the scarlet rose hips were in bloom, there was an alley of dark linden trees,” when he passionately loved passionate Nadezhda, and she recklessly gave herself to him with all recklessness youth.
And the hero of Turgenev’s “Asia” cannot remember anything more vividly than that “burning, tender, deep feeling” that was given to him by a childish and serious girl beyond his years...
Both of them have only “flowers of memories” left from the past - a dried geranium flower thrown from Asya’s window, a scarlet rose hip from Ogarev’s poem that accompanied love story Nikolai Alekseevich and Nadezhda. Only for the latter it is a flower that has caused unhealed wounds with its thorns.
So, following Turgenev, Bunin paints greatness female soul, capable of loving and remembering, in contrast to men, burdened with doubts, entangled in petty preferences, subordinate to social conventions. Thus, already the first story of the cycle reinforces the leading motifs of Bunin’s late work - memory, the omnipotence of the past, the significance of a single moment in comparison with the dull succession of everyday life.
When the dark comes hard days autumn, the rain is annoyingly knocking on the windows, I usually read Bunin.
So yesterday I accidentally opened an unfamiliar folder on the desktop of my computer, and in it was Bunin’s Diary for 1939-1945. From his notes, you can trace all the key moments of the Second World War, find out how hard life was for him in those years. But something else surprises me: how much he wrote during that difficult time of hunger, when he was no longer young and sick.
. All the brightest stories were written at that time and they made up his most famous and beloved collection by readers, “Dark Alleys.”
And the title for the collection and, perhaps, the very idea of writing such a collection was suggested to Ivan Alekseevich by Ogarev’s poem:
ORDINARY STORY
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
The river was quiet, clear,
The sun was rising, the birds were singing;
The valley stretched beyond the river,
Calm, lush green;
Nearby, a scarlet rosehip was blooming,
There was an alley of dark linden trees.
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black.
Oh, if only someone could see them
Then, at their morning meeting,
And I would look out for their faces
Or would I overhear their speeches -
How sweet his tongue would be,
The original language of love!
He would probably himself, for this moment,
Bloomed at the bottom of a sad soul!..
I met them later in the world:
She was the wife of another
He was married, and about the past
There was not a word in sight;
There was peace on their faces,
Their life flowed brightly and smoothly,
They, meeting each other,
We could laugh in cold blood...
And there, along the river bank,
Where did the scarlet rose hips bloom then?
Just simple fishermen
We went to a dilapidated boat
And they sang songs - and it was dark
What remains is closed to people,
What was said there
And how much has been forgotten.
At the end of the short story “Dark Alleys,” which gave the title to the entire collection, Bunin quotes two lines from this poem:
“The low sun shone yellow on the empty fields, the horses splashed smoothly through the puddles. He looked at the flashing horseshoes, knitting his black eyebrows, and thought:
“Yes, blame yourself. Yes, of course, the best moments. And not the best, but truly magical! “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, there were dark linden alleys...” But, my God, what would have happened next? What if I hadn't left her? What nonsense! This same Nadezhda is not the innkeeper, but my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children?” And, closing his eyes, he shook his head.”
October 20, 1938
Tsvetaeva dreamed of having a garden in her declining days, she wrote:
"For this hell,
For this nonsense
Send me a garden
For old age."
But Bunin had it. . .
From his diaries:
6.9.1940
I’m writing and looking into the sunny “lantern” of my room, at its five windows, behind which there is a light fog of everything that lies around with such beauty and spaciousness below us, and a huge whitish-sunny sky. And among all this is my lonely, eternally sad self.
(They brought a newspaper. [...] Churchill’s speech devant la chambre des communes. Over the last 2 months, England lost 558 avions. In August, 1075 civilian deaths occurred, 800 houses were destroyed. German attacks will intensify in September [. ..])
21.4.1940
2 1/2 hours. I walked around the garden - the second area (from the lower road) was already overgrown with tall grass. Still blooming pale pink, light, delicate, very. feminine flowers of some special variety of cherry, 2 gnarled apple trees are blooming with white flowers (also pinkish in buds). Irises are blooming, I found a blooming rosehip branch (easy scarlet color with yellow pollen in the middle), some flowers, like poppies - light, but bright orange... I sat on a crumbling wicker chair, looking at the light and vague mountains behind Nice, like smoke... A paradise! And for how many years now I have seen and felt it!
Lonely, uncomfortable, but to move to Paris... the insignificance of nature, the vile climate!
As always, almost exactly alone in the whole house. [...]
It’s a bright day, a holiday, the sea seems emptier - and they’re calling, calling in the city... I don’t know how to express what’s behind all this.
Many moths hover around the lilac color - white with a greenish tint, transparent. And again bees, bumblebees, flies are born...
23.5.42
I thought again today: there is nothing more beautiful in the world than flowers and birds. More butterflies.
30.4.40
Night, a dark strip of forest in the distance and above it a star - humble, charming. This somewhere, sometime struck me throughout my life in childhood... My God, my God! I once had a childhood, the first days of my life on earth! I just can't believe it! Now just the thought that they were. And now the last ones are coming. [...]
7.5.40
Somehow, as often happens to me out of nowhere, I imagined: evening after a thunderstorm and downpour on the road to the station. Baborykina. Both the sky and the earth - everything is already darkening gloomily. In the distance, above the dark strip of forest, the forest still flares. Someone is standing on the porch of an inn near the highway, clearing dirt from his boots with a whip. There is a dog next to him... This is where “Styopa” came out.
30.7.40
Suddenly I remembered: Moscow, the Maly Theater, the stairs - sometimes very warm, sometimes icy drafts.
20. IX. 40.
Started "Rusya". 22. IX. 40. Wrote “Mom’s Chest” and “On the Pavement Street.” 27. IX. 40. I added “Rus”. 29. IX. 40. Sketched "Wolves". 2. X. 40. Wrote "Antigone". Z.H.40. Wrote "Pasha" and "Smaragd". 5.X.40. Yesterday and today I wrote " Business Cards"." , 20, 21, 22. X. 40. Wrote and finished (at 5 o’clock) “Tanya.” 25 and 26. X. 40. Wrote “In Paris” (first pages – 24. X. 40). 27 and 28 X. 40. Wrote “Galya Ganskaya” (finished at 4:40 on the day 28.10.
7.5.40
“A man and his body are two... When the body desires something, think whether You really desire it. For You are God... Penetrate within yourself to find God within yourself... Do not mistake your body for yourself ... Don't give in to the constant worry about little things that many people spend their time in most of its time. . ."
"One of those who have no rest.
From the thirst for happiness..."
It seems like it has been like me, all my life (even to this day).
30.7.40
“I read about the experiment that two Viennese students did several years ago: they decided to hang themselves so that they would be taken out of the noose a moment before death and they could tell what they experienced. It turned out that they experienced a blinding light and a roar of thunder.”
16.VI. 41. Monday, evening.
The contempt of the first Christians for life, their disgust from it, from its harshness, rudeness, animality. Then the barbarians. And going into caves, crypts, founding monasteries... Will this be the case in the 20th and 21st centuries?
28.VII. Sunday.
I’m reading Krasnov’s novel “God With Us.” I didn’t expect that he was so capable, knew so much and was so entertaining. [...]
2 hours. Yes, I live in paradise. I still can’t get used to such days, to such a view. Today is a particularly magnificent day. I looked out the windows of my lantern. All the valleys and mountains around are in a sunny blue haze. Towards Nice there are wonderful thunderclouds over the mountains. To the right, in pine forest above them, the beauty of the heat, dryness, visible in the tops of the sky. To the right, along our stone staircase, small flowers bloom. pink flowers two oleanders with their small sharp leaves. And loneliness, loneliness, as always! And the agonizing wait for England's fate to be resolved. In the morning I'm afraid to open the newspaper.
Since ancient times, Jews have been prescribed: always (and especially in happy Days) think about death.
"Belligerants". It can be translated by an old Russian word: anti-wrestlers.
The beacons were lit. First time I saw it from here (with "Jeannette")
22.6.41
WITH new page I am writing a continuation of this day - a great event, Germany this morning declared war on Russia - and the Finns and Romanians have already “invaded” its “limits”.
After breakfast (naked pea soup and salad) I lay down to continue reading Flaubert’s letters (letter from Rome to his mother dated April 8, 1851), when suddenly Zurov shouted: “I.A., Germany declared war on Russia!” I thought he was joking, but Bahr shouted the same thing from below. I ran to the dining room to the radio - yes! We are terribly excited. [...]
Quiet, cloudy day. . .
***
The day before yesterday M. rewrote “The Ballad”. Nobody believes that I almost always make things up - everything, everything. It's a shame! “The Ballad” was invented entirely, from word to word – and all at once in one hour: I once woke up in Paris with the thought that I definitely needed to [send] something to “Posl.N.”, it should be there; drank coffee, sat down at the table - and suddenly, for no apparent reason, he began to write, not knowing what would happen next. And the story is wonderful.
From 8 to 9. V. 44.
It's one o'clock in the morning. I got up from the table - there were a few things left to finish. lines of "Clean Monday". I turned off the light, opened the window to ventilate the room - not the slightest. air movement; full moon, dim night, the whole valley in the thinnest fog, far on the horizon the vague pinkish shine of the sea, silence, the soft freshness of young tree greenery, here and there the clicking of the first nightingales... Lord, extend my strength for my lonely, poor life in this beauty and at work!
14. 5. 44.
21/2 o'clock in the morning (which means it is no longer May 14, but May 15).
During the evening I wrote “Steamboat Saratov”. I opened the window, darkness, silence, cloudy in some places. stars, raw freshness.
23. 5. 44.
In the evening I wrote "Camargue". Very good cold night. . .
20.I. 44
Stop again. day. I visited K[yagin].
Novgorod was taken.
The nights are starry, clear, cold. Whatever you remember (and fragments of memory every minute), everything is painful, sad. Sometimes I sleep until 9 and more hours. And almost every one. in the morning, as soon as you open your eyes, there is some kind of sadness - aimlessness, the end of everything (for me).
I looked through my notes about the former Russia. I keep thinking, if I live long enough, I’ll get to Russia! What for? The old age of the survivors (and the women with whom I once lived), the cemetery of everything that I once lived with...
25.I. 44
[...] Suddenly I remembered Gagarinsk. lane, my youth, my fictitious love for Lop[atina] - which for some reason now lies (5 kilometers from me) in a grave in some Valbona. Isn't this wild?
27.1. 44
Without 1/4 6. I am sitting by the window to the west. On the horizon the sky is green - the sun has just set - closer the entire part of the sky (in front of me) is in a continuous cloud, under which (inaudible - O.M.) is like a fleece and is colored orange-copper.
Now its color is getting redder, the forest valley towards Draguignan is in a purple steam.
All around - towards Nice, towards Cannes - everything is in moderation, rather flowery, it’s true, tomorrow there will be bad weather.
Today, after breakfast, there is great cheerfulness - steak and curry, real coffee and lemon?
Received 2 Swedish. parcels.
Review of I. A. Bunin’s work “Dark Alleys”
Oh, these dark alleys...
Silent corners of the soul
***
“The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around,
There were dark linden alleys.
I walked in anticipation of sweets
To the beautiful, fiery Venus.
The taste of ripe lips, an alluring look
The daring dope warmed the heart
All the tenderness of dreams is a deadly poison.
Desires took over me.
I'm a prisoner of the spell, at your feet
I'm waiting for a verdict or... affection.
Minutes of happiness for two
We will share with you without publicity...”
***
How beautifully it all started.
Youth spun in a sonorous waltz.
Blind love was born
In a rich house: overweight, boring.
One day a young master
Fell in love with a simple girl.
He was handsome, good-looking.
And I found a couple like this:
Rosy cheeks, slim figure.
Resin eyes sparkle...
Who could find a flaw in it?
Only the blind will miss.
She was loved...
The maid was happy.
And it was alien to them then,
That he is a master, she is a peasant.
***
But time moves forward.
Vile treason is creeping...
The scarlet rose hips are blooming again.
Only the linden alley was empty...
Cold look and proud look.
Arrogance is caustic in the eyes.
Proud "thief of hearts"
Her fate is in his hands.
***
This was the master - brave and ardent.
His whole life is a continuous jerk.
From the inevitable clutches of mistakes
Unfortunately, he couldn't escape.
Dear Nikolai has left,
Leaving behind the heaviness of parting.
The rose hip paradise has bloomed:
He said goodbye, not goodbye.
Their paths parted
Nadezhda was given freedom.
But love has no freedom!
Such a girl's fate.
The tavern has become a substitute for love.
I wanted to forget, but I couldn’t
I waited for him and suffered so much.
She lived only for him.
***
“...however, the best moments.
She gave me in my life...
And yet morals are cool these days!
Or maybe... she still loved?
***
Apparently something didn't work out
The simpleton has become not nice...
Why did this happen?
The truth here is not at all tricky.
What could be stronger than love?
More tender than an early forget-me-not?
What could be wiser than hearts?
Nobles have stingy prejudices.
Reviews
Alexander, thank you)
IN school years I was drawn to such retellings)
Emotions, impressions, experiences... - the world of literary heroes seemed like a real world) And Buninskaya village was an echo of childhood memories. Centuries are different, but the essence is the same. And the smell, taste, color, timbre, mood, colors, landscapes, orders, characters, people... - time, worlds, although parallel, intersect)
The daily audience of the portal Stikhi.ru is about 200 thousand visitors, who in total view more than two million pages according to the traffic counter, which is located to the right of this text. Each column contains two numbers: the number of views and the number of visitors.
The role of N.P. Ogarev’s poem “An Ordinary Tale” in the fate of the heroes of I.A. Bunin’s story “Dark Alleys.”
Introduction.
In Ivan Bunin’s story “Dark Alleys” (1938), written by a 68-year-old writer, the hero-nobleman, quite mature at that time, reads N.P. Ogarev’s poems “An Ordinary Tale” (1842) to the young serf girl Nadezhda, his short-lived lover. ), in which "dark alleys" are mentioned. According to Bunin’s recollections, his story came to light as a result of his rereading this poem Nikolai Ogarev, who became the author of "An Ordinary Tale" at the age of 29. Indeed, in these two works, created by the young Ogarev and the already quite old, mature Bunin, analogies can be traced. And the title of Bunin’s short story is essentially a quote from Ogarev: “There were dark linden alleys...” How, it would seem, is a poem by a poet who is more familiar to us from history textbooks as a friend of the revolutionary A. Herzen, not so well known to a wide circle of readers, shared emigration with him, served as the birth of "Dark Alleys", an undeniable masterpiece of Russian classics? How did one literary event lead to another almost a hundred years later? What intersecting temporal paths exist in the vast field of Russian literature? Let's think about these questions, but first we will re-read, following Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev's poem "An Ordinary Tale."
ORDINARY STORY
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
The river was quiet, clear,
The sun was rising, the birds were singing;
The valley stretched beyond the river,
Calm, lush green;
Nearby, a scarlet rosehip was blooming,
There was an alley of dark linden trees.
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black.
Oh, if only someone could see them
And I would look out for their faces
Or would I overhear their speeches -
How sweet his tongue would be,
The original language of love!
He would probably himself, for this moment,
Bloomed at the bottom of a sad soul!..
I met them later in the world:
She was the wife of another
He was married, and about the past
There was not a word in sight;
There was peace on their faces,
Their life flowed brightly and smoothly,
They, meeting each other,
We could laugh in cold blood...
And there, along the river bank,
Where did the scarlet rose hips bloom then?
Just simple fishermen
We went to a dilapidated boat
And they sang songs - and it was dark
What remains is closed to people,
What was said there
And how much has been forgotten.
<1842>
1.
Poems open with a picture have a wonderful spring. Nine quatrains, thirty-six lines. The author divided the story into two unequal parts. The first, of eight lines, is a description of Russian nature, early morning, a quiet, clear river. Dawn. The scarlet rose hips are blooming - that means it's May. The nearby “dark linden alley” is an indication of the proximity of the manor’s estate.
The nobles, a young man and a young lady, meet the dawn together, most likely because one of them was visiting the estate and early in the morning they could take a walk together.
Repeating exactly the first two lines in the second part of the poem -
It was a wonderful spring!
They sat on the shore -
The author describes the young heroes in short but succinct strokes:
She was in her prime,
His mustache was barely black.
The characters are not given names - He, She, They - only personal pronouns that generalize the situation, spreading it widely to all Russian landowner estates in Russia in the forties of the nineteenth century.
Let’s not think that the author used a special artistic technique of “spying” on the development of other people’s feelings: most likely, the third hero was chosen by these young people as the confidant of their relationship, because it was he who knew, when they came to the river, what they spoke to each other “in the language of original love.” ". Perhaps Ogarev sees himself in the face of a young man with a barely visible mustache, peering intently into the past.
The literary device of detachment, which gives the opportunity to look at oneself and the characters from the outside, allows the author to closely see the faces of young lovers and for a moment “bloom at the bottom of a sad soul.” Spring in nature, spring in life, spring in love...
“I met them later in the world”... - so the second, long, stanza of seven quatrains told us a seemingly “ordinary story”: the author sees his acquaintances who did not have their common life, in one of noble meetings. She, like Pushkin's Tatiana, is married; he, unlike Onegin, is married. But that's where the slight similarity ends literary situations. What is striking - and the author emphasizes this with great emotional force - is the non-standard use of the Russian literary love tradition: former lovers do not suffer, do not love, do not want to remember their common past, they are self-satisfied, cold-blooded in communicating with each other in the world and seem to laugh at their former innocence. It is likely that each of them solved, first of all, an economic problem in marriage: she married favorably and is happy with her security; he married favorably.
IN time, according to the generally accepted opinion, (not without the persistent pressure of their parents) their youth, freshness, and beauty of youth were sold - their main quickly expendable capital.
In the detailed description of new secular habits, cynical in relation to the bright, naive, inexperienced past of the heroes, in the description of a lonely dilapidated boat on the shore of that river of youth and young happiness, a boat to which lovers will no longer descend, lies all the narrator’s pain, his spiritual protest against such a mutual situation of betrayal of the ideals of youth. He is the only one who feels sorry for the love that was desecrated in this way, the first bright feeling that He and She abandoned under the pressure of life’s circumstances.
But how much was said about this feeling - and how much was forgotten! - only the main thing knows about this to the lyrical hero, an author suffering from the disharmony of the world, pierced by its imperfections. Probably a lot of passionate and lofty things were said, melting away like smoke, if such sad poems were born.
In the penultimate quatrain, the author again (for the second time) mentions the blooming rosehip of past years. The use of odd repetition is most likely not accidental and is also intended to solve the stated artistic task - to reveal feelings of regret and sadness.
Memories of the past are accompanied by the singing of fishermen by the river, by that boat, in the present. The songs of ordinary peasants, people from the people, of course, sad and mournful, perhaps with an appeal to the Mother River, show the deep class division of Russia, the indifference of the Russian nobles to the problems of the serfs, to their people who nursed them. Remembers that Russian society consists not only of the metropolitan nobility and provincial landowners, and life is not only of high-society balls only the author, thereby very different from the representatives of his class.
The epithet “dark” is also used in the text of this poem twice: “there was an alley of dark linden trees” (at the beginning of the poem) and “... it remained dark, closed for people...” (at the end of the work) The adverb “dark” ends line, and the verb “remained” transfers the thought to a new line, starting it. Thus, the location of the word and its stress on the last syllable is emphasized special meaning for the author of the concept “dark”, contrastingly highlighting this color with scarlet rosehip flowers. Many plants bloom in spring. Why does the author focus our attention on the rose hips? An analogy between the thorns of a wild rose and the wounding thorns of life is easily visible (and here the romance of the Russian poetic tradition is evident), but the image of the riotous flowering of the scarlet rose hips also contrasts with the well-groomed flower beds of the lordly estates, like the “unkempt” element of Russian folk life.
And the linden alleys? After all, they are not only an indication of the nature of central Russia, of the preference of Russian landowners for this particular tree (dried linden blossom was widely used as a medicinal sedative, and what kind of tea party in the lordly estates would be complete without it!) Dark linden trees, most likely densely planted, forming cool fragrant vaults with their crowns, and the mystery of the spiritual life of young people for those around them (hence the epithet “dark”) under these linden trees becomes an artistic device designed to draw the reader’s attention to the depth and complexity of the life of a young soul, whose movements can only be caught, understood and revealed the refined nature of the poet-psychologist, which N. Ogarev is here.
So what still comes to the fore in Ogarev’s poem? Are his young heroes memorable? No, it’s boring with them, they are empty, vulgar, blurry images, you don’t want to think about them, with them there is nothing for the soul to dwell on. And it’s memorable, it touches you heartache and with the ability to see the present and the past, the narrator, perhaps, unwittingly revealed to us and unwittingly brought to the fore the Russian nature dear to the heart of every Russian person, filling his ballad with tints of colors and tangible smells of linden leaves, blooming rosehip, peacefully, wisely and calmly flowing river in the outback of the local province and voiced this picture dear to him and to us with ethnic songs of peasant fishermen, songs capable of purifying, reviving and supporting a sorrowful soul.
2.
The heroes of Bunin's short story, a brilliant but already old officer of the tsarist army, Nikolai Alekseevich, and his former serf lover, Nadezhda, and now the owner of a private hotel on the Tula road, we find them in their chance meeting in a hut-tavern, where a sixty-year-old military man returning to St. Petersburg from a business trip comes in, waiting for a change of horses. The old acquaintances did not stay together for long in this clean room with wooden tables and benches, smelling of freshly cooked cabbage soup, but how much life and feelings this unexpected short meeting contained both for the heroes of the story and for its readers. N. Ogarev's poems "An Ordinary Tale" immediately become part of the fabric of Bunin's work in the dynamic dialogue of the characters. Nadezhda reminds her old lover that during their stormy love thirty years ago (and the heroine is now forty-eight years old), “I was deigned to read all the poems about all sorts of “dark alleys.” Most likely illiterate at eighteen years old, a former serf girl in long years she remembered Ogarev’s lines performed by the young master and now, thirty years later, she quotes them “on one of the big Tula roads,” where her establishment was located. In the words of Ogarev,
Oh, if only someone could see them
Then, at their morning meeting,
And I would look out for their faces
Or I would overhear their speeches...
Shocked by the unexpected meeting, Nikolai Petrovich is extremely frank and honest; he twice (again the unlucky odd number “two”, used as an artistic device by Ogarev) calls his life “an ordinary story,” thus involuntarily using Ogarev’s title, adding to this the epithet “vulgar,” that is, hackneyed, famous, going after everyone one scenario. His wife, whom he “loved madly,” cheated on him and left him “even more insultingly than I did you” (Ogarev’s theme of betrayal). The adored son “turned out to be a scoundrel, a spendthrift, an insolent person, without a heart, without honor, without a conscience” (and again Ogarev’s motifs in the characterization of high-society youth).
This is how now, it turns out, we need to understand the generalizing meaning of the title of N.P.’s work. Ogarev - already in the title “An Ordinary Tale” there is a comprehensive description of the noble class, the main property of its nature and the author’s rejection of its immoral traits are emphasized.
It’s interesting to figure out why thirty-year-old Nikolenka (that’s what Nadya called him then) read exactly these poems to an eighteen-year-old peasant girl, whether his life began with such a betrayal of a young girl, who could then calmly meet him in the world, which is so poignant depicted Ogarev in his sad story. Was the passion for the beautiful Nadezhda a replacement for a violated feeling and at the same time a secret revenge on a flighty friend of her class? The genre of the short story, suggesting understatement, incompleteness, revealing artistic painting several perspectives, provides the opportunity for a varied reading of the reader, and we have the right to put forward such assumptions, simultaneously following two texts, examining their interconnected details.
But it is obvious, when comparing the two works we have chosen, that the still very weakly outlined theme of serfdom and its destructive impact on the souls, destinies, morality of people by N.P. Ogarev, the attitude of the Russian nobility to this shameful phenomenon - takes on paramount importance in I. .A.Bunin. Remembering the beauty of Nadezhda, admiring her eyes and figure, remembering that this girl from the people, who had no equal (and everyone recognized this), not only submitted to his lordly whim, but passionately, for the rest of her life, fell in love with him, that she was sensitive to poetry, even if thirty years later he remembers the lines from Ogarev by heart, the old tsarist polished officer blushes with shame, but cannot help but express his admiration for Nadezhda. Unlike Ogarev's heroes, Bunin's heroes have both conscience and memory. The meeting with the aged Nadezhda, who never consciously married, and the bright flash of memories of their former love further highlighted in the hero’s eyes the dirtiness of intra-family high-society relations and revealed the worthlessness of a life lived in a humiliating marriage. It would seem that the past, as if buried under the layers of life, should never have declared itself, but it flared up in the hero’s soul, just as smoldering coals suddenly flare up in an extinguished fire.
With ineradicable evidence, a former serf, and now a lonely, but independently living free entrepreneur, not only maintaining a private hotel, but also giving money in growth (having known the refined love of the master, giving him “her beauty, her fever,” she could no longer get married for a peasant), who received, as a reward for all her trials, about which “it’s a long time to talk about, sir,” freed from the second landowner (which means the estate along with the serfs was sold by Nikolai Alekseevich) pushed far aside with her spiritual essence, the honestly lived life of all secular the hero's beloved, wife and mistresses. Having received freedom, and with it the initial capital (and this fact worthily distinguishes the heroine from the general mass of serf martyrs), Nadezhda is now independent, independent, as long as she can support herself, run a business, she is respected in her community (the coachman told the master about this on his way back), she stands firmly on her feet, although she is no longer young.
Why did the author, who had been living abroad for a long time, push his heroes at the intersection of Russian roads? To convey to the reader how tangibly, interpenetratingly these two concepts are connected in the genotype of a Russian person - the nobility and the people? So that the endlessly blushing old military man can shake himself out of this shame and thus, with the help of the meeting given by fate, go through its cleansing influence? It is clear that the author, although he himself admires the fruit of his artistic imagination - His Excellency with a “beautiful elongated face with dark eyes", still slim figure military man, his tall stature and the way he “easily ran up to the porch of the hut” - and I am ashamed of my hero, and I feel sorry for him, and I really want to help him somehow morally. One thing is certain: Bunin there, in exile, cannot live without Russia, he constantly thinks about it, it lives indestructibly in him.
In what position could Nikolai Alekseevich abandon Nadezhda? Of course, pregnant. “But, really, you abandoned me very heartlessly - how many times I wanted to lay hands on myself out of resentment alone, not to mention everything else,” - this is how Nadezhda reminds the hero in what position he left her. "Everything else" - this could be the death of an illegitimate baby adopted from a landowner, that " ordinary story", which is found in many works of Russian literature. The blood of Nikolai Alekseevich dissolved in Nadezhda. So the lordship, trampling on its people, but feeding on its juices, dissolved in it. And the Russian serf woman, breastfeeding barchats, nursing them? From infancy the future government official or military man fell asleep to her lullaby songs, it was she, the milk mother, who sometimes became his spiritual mother, from whom he took over, sucking in with her milk and songs, native language. And it was she, at the moment of his advancing manhood, who came to him in the form of a young, but full of strength, physical health, a strong, tanned village woman, pouring into him pure young energy, coming as if from the earth itself.
The fate of Hope shows the indestructible people's power, endurance, Russian love common man to creative work, the spiritual beauty and greatness of the Russian woman - to a large extent, this Nekrasov theme found a kind of refraction in the prose of I.A. Bunin.
To what court could a serf appeal? How could justice be achieved? There were no such state mechanisms for the forced Russian people, and they created their own deep philosophy of long-suffering, love and forgiveness to help them live. The characters' dialogue about forgiveness is filled with different shades of meaning. It is important for Nikolai Alekseevich to be forgiven by Nadezhda, because he does not renounce his guilt towards her, even if the years have passed. “If only God would forgive me. And you, apparently, have forgiven me,” he says “patter,” “taking out a handkerchief and pressing it to his eyes.” To which Nadezhda replies like this: “No, Nikolai Alekseevich, I didn’t forgive. Since our conversation touched on our feelings, I’ll say frankly: I could never forgive you. Just as I had nothing more precious than you in the world at that time, so it will be later.” it didn’t happen. That’s why I can’t forgive you. Well, why remember, they don’t carry the dead from the graveyard.” In Nikolai Alekseevich’s understanding, “forgive” means not holding a grudge, not getting angry, and letting go of a sin. In Nadezhda’s understanding, “forgive” means forgetting, not remembering, not remembering. How can we forget that it was so expensive? Thus, Ogarev’s theme of memory in “An Ordinary Tale” is polemically continued in its own way and refracted by Bunin in “Dark Alleys”.
Farewell scene. Nadezhda kissed Nikolai Alekseevich’s hand (a common gesture for a Russian woman in serf Russia), and he kissed her hand (we agree that this is a completely unusual gesture). It contains the hero’s plea for forgiveness, reconciliation, recognition of previously unrecognized equality, no - humble recognition of her spiritual superiority over him, gratitude for the best moments of life (as it is now clear to him) with her, for the height of the spirit.
This behavior of the old Russian nobleman, who, at the cost of terrible mistakes, losses and disappointments, came to a new philosophy of life in relation not only to the woman who gave him her feelings and youth for free, but in relation, in her person, to his people, puts Bunin’s hero on the same level. from the first places in the gallery of the best male portraits not only of Russian literature abroad, but also of Russian literature in general.
Although the main overwhelming feeling in Nikolai Alekseevich’s further journey to St. Petersburg remains a painful feeling of shame, it, according to its spiritual laws, turns into a cleansing feeling of gratitude, freeing from the dirty layers of life, for the best, “truly magical moments” for a woman with such a deep and capacious named Nadezhda. Therefore, on the way to the train, on the Tula road, “cut with many black ruts,” Ogarev’s favorite lines come to mind for the hero: “All around the scarlet rose hips were blooming, there were dark linden alleys...”
Thus, the poems of N.P. Ogarev, reread by I.A. Bunin, brought to life a wonderful short story, became part of the amazing story of the meeting of two Russian people, entwining their destinies with thorns of suffering, but also with scarlet flowers of true happiness, not bought with money, history , would have remained “closed to people” if it had not been told to us by the author with such artistic talent.
Note that the hero drives up to the post station “in the cold autumn weather” along a road “drenched in rain,” and leaves without drinking tea from the samovar, already in the low sun, “shine yellow on the empty fields,” although the horses continue "splash smoothly through puddles." The image of the autumn nature of the Tula region is deeply artistically combined with " autumn age"of the heroes of the short story and the age of its author himself, in contrast to the "spring age" of the young people of the "Ordinary Tale", which is probably why the philosophical outline of "Dark Alleys" is so undeniably wise. And the yellow light of the already setting sun, and the measured movement of the tarantass, setting the mood for calm thoughts, and the image of an elderly, but still handsome military man with a white mustache and sideburns, “still black-browed,” who had just received a new, strong, unpredictable, but reviving lesson in life, and Nadezhda looking after him from the window of her room, and talking about the merits of the owner of the inn, the driver Klim - in all these pictures, Russia of the 50s-60s of the 19th century, a country of dark mysterious alleys and extraordinary human stories, in its slow but steady forward movement.
