Moral values ​​in the works of Bunin and Kuprin. The theme of love in the works of Chekhov, Bunin and Kuprin essay

The theme of love occupies a special place in the works of Bunin and Kuprin. Of course, writers described this feeling in different ways and discovered new aspects of its manifestation. There are also similar features: they talk about both an all-consuming passion and a tragic feeling that does not stand up to scrutiny. life situations. The theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin shows it in all its diversity, allowing us to see new facets of this feeling.

A game of contrasts

The theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin is often shown by contrasting the characters of the main characters. If we analyze their works, we can note that in most of them one of the lovers has a stronger character and is ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of their feelings. The other side turns out to be weaker, for which it is more important public opinion or personal ambitions than feelings.

This can be seen in the example of the heroes of Bunin's story "Dark Alleys". Both heroes met by chance and remembered the time when they were in love. The heroine, Nadezhda, carried love throughout her life - she never met someone who could outshine the image of Nikolai Alekseevich. He got married, however, without having strong feelings for his wife, but he didn’t regret it much. To think that the innkeeper could become his wife, the mistress of the house - for him it was unthinkable. And if Nadezhda was ready to do anything to be with her beloved and continued to love him, then Nikolai Alekseevich is shown as a person for whom it is more important social status and public opinion.

The same contrast can be seen in Kuprin’s work “Olesya”. The Polesie witch is shown as a girl with a warm heart, capable of great feeling, ready to sacrifice not only her well-being, but also the peace of her loved ones for the sake of her lover. Ivan Timofeevich is a man of a gentle character, his heart is lazy, incapable of experiencing love of the strength that Olesya had. He did not follow the call of his heart, its movement, so he only had the girl’s beads as a souvenir of this love.

Love in the works of Kuprin

Despite the fact that both writers considered a bright feeling to be a manifestation of goodness, nevertheless, they describe it slightly differently. The theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin has various manifestations; if you read their works, you can understand that most often the relationships they describe have differences.

So, A.I. Kuprin most often talks about tragic love, sacrificial, for the writer real love must certainly be accompanied life's trials. Because a strong and all-consuming feeling could not bring happiness to the beloved. Such love could not be simple. This can be seen in his works, such as “Olesya”, “Garnet Bracelet”, “Shulamith”, etc. But for the heroes, even such love is happiness, and they are grateful that they had such strong feeling.

Love in Bunin's stories

For writers, a bright feeling is the most beautiful thing that could happen to a person. Therefore, the theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin occupied a special place, which is why their works worried readers so much. But they each understood it in their own way. In the works of I. A. Bunin, love is a flash of emotions, a happy moment that suddenly appears in life, and then ends just as abruptly. Therefore, in his stories, the characters evoke conflicting feelings among readers.

Thus, the story “Sunstroke” shows a flash of love, a moment of love that illuminated the lives of two people for a brief moment. And after they parted, main character I felt many years older. Because this fleeting love took away all the best that was in him. Or in the story "Dark Alleys" main character continued to love, but was never able to forgive her lover’s weaknesses. And he, although he understood that she gave him best years, continued to believe that he did the right thing. And if in Kuprin’s work, love was certainly tragic, then in Bunin it is shown as a more complex feeling.

The unusual side of a bright feeling

Although love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin is a sincere, real relationship between two people, sometimes love can be completely different. This is precisely the side shown in the story “The Mister from San Francisco.” Although this work is not about love, in one episode it is said that one woman walked around the ship happy couple and everyone, looking at her, saw two lovers. And only the captain knew that they were hired specifically to play a strong feeling.

It would seem, what could this have to do with the theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin? This also happens - this also applies to actors who play lovers on stage, and to such couples who were hired on purpose. But it also happens that a real feeling can arise between such artists. On the other hand, someone, looking at them, gains hope that he will also have love in his life.

The role of details in the description

Description love feeling both A.I. Kuprin and I.A. Bunin take place against the background of a detailed description of the everyday life of the heroes. This allows us to show how strong feelings flow in simple life. How can the characters' attitude towards familiar things and phenomena. And some details of the characters’ everyday life allow us to better understand the characters’ personalities. The writers managed to organically combine everyday life and bright feeling.

Can everyone feel

In the essay “The Theme of Love in the Works of Bunin and Kuprin” it is also worth noting that only strong people. After all, why can’t the heroes of their works be together? Because strong personality falls in love with someone who cannot experience feelings of equal strength. But thanks to this contrast, the love of such heroes looks even stronger and sincere. A. I. Kuprin and I. A. Bunin wrote about a bright feeling in its various manifestations, so that readers would understand that whatever love there is, it is happiness that it happened in life, and a person should be grateful for what he has He has the ability to love.

Love in reasoning has limitless meaning. Many people express it in their own way. The skill of transformation excites the mind. What are the transitions and expressions of Kuprin and Bunin’s feelings in their works. The beauty of the word, bewitching at once permeates the lines of such famous works, like “Garnet Bracelet” and “Dark Alleys”.

Both poets characterize love as a sacrificial, light, volatile, soaring and vulnerable feeling “from the word evil tongue and depravity of speech." The main characters of the works experience the feelings of their creators, they are the embodiment of lonely and unbridled love, the frantic power of attraction and rejection, unquestioning decisions, madness and at the same time lightness. What is love according to Kuprin and Bunin? And what is their role?

Many poets of the 18-19 centuries of Golden Rus', such as Pushkin, M.V. Lermontov and other poets of that time built similar meaning the embodiment of the white bird of love, hope and calmness.

The reminder of this “caste of poets” is not accidental. Because for many years greatest poets Russian poetry and lyricists tried to build a certain algorithm for the manifestation of love in their works, no matter how rude it may sound. Kuprin and Bunin were not afraid of showing unbridled love and exposing it to the public; without any restrictions, the reader accepts this feeling and experiences it together with the poet and the heroes of the works. The theme of love in the works of Bunin and Kuprin has 3 aspects in its style:

  1. Exemplary import
  2. Theoretically-textured
  3. Allegorical-matophoric;

Each of these aspects is connected by one similar thing - they all have a single goal in their own way, they connect the unique feeling of love in the work with a feeling of sacrifice, affection, warmth of penetration. But there are also differences between the styles of manifestation of love and its passage through the reader. To understand this, let's remember Kuprin's work "The Garnet Bracelet" where the heroine realizes that she missed the feeling of love. And Kuprin’s tough love, from which the hero suffers, sacrifices himself, but remains completely true to his feeling, never gives up his position and tries to analyze the aspect of his passion, the object is always elevated to the heart, the strategic position of courier and arthropy in the allegorical description.

In Bunin, the superficial theme of love is revealed in the same way as in Kuprin, but inner meaning is not revealed in the same way as the heroes of “Kuprin Stories”. Windy sensuality and unlimitedness can be seen in almost every work. But “Dark Alleys” is a kind of exception to the theme of manifestations of love.

It seems that the poet is trying to show both light and dark side manifestations of “love fun”. In some places the theme of love touches the reader’s soul, and in others it touches the body. For Bunin and Kuprin, it was important that their heroes and readers felt the torment of sacrificial love not only in their souls, but also in their bodies. To make this whole feeling seem similar in our time. Therefore, the manifestation of love in the works of both authors is still a relevant topic to this day.

“Love is the same as before: sacrificial, prosaic, tragic, real, imbued with anxiety and emotions, heartbreaking magic of body and soul. And deceitful happy ending"- said the Russian publicist of the 19th century Arsenty Gudelman Banshtorden. It was the theme of love between Kuprin and Bunin in prose and lyrics that helped a person gain an understanding of that time, to feel the hero through and through, the feelings tearing apart both body and soul.

“The equality of feelings of allegorical love and their tender care, feelings of unreliability, anxiety and childish impressionability, loss, separation and restoration again,” is the love expression of Kuprin and Bunin. “Percurte adre as ad aspra” - the passage of love like light is the truth of the works of these greatest Russian lyric writers.

ESSAY ON THE WORK OF I. A. BUNIN AND A. I. KUPRIN

I. A. Bunin and A. I. Kuprin in their works touch on and reveal many topics, but one of the most important is the theme of love. Of course, the authors describe this bright feeling in different ways, find its new facets and manifestations, but we can also find common features. In both authors we encounter an all-consuming, deep and pure love, and weak love, which cannot withstand the blows of fate and social inequality.
For example, in I. A. Bunin’s story “Dark Alleys” we read about faithful, ardent love for life - the love of Nadezhda. But her love is unrequited. She loved Nikolai Alekseevich all her life; Because of this love, she didn’t get married and didn’t forgive him for leaving her (“I could never forgive you”). And Nikolai Alekseevich also had love, but it was the love of oblivion. He forgot Nadezhda and her pure deep feeling. He says, "Isn't it true that she gave me best moments life? But then he thinks: “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?” The heroes broke up not only because social conflict, there is also a psychological difference: Nadezhda a strong character, a warm heart, but Nikolai Alekseevich’s character is soft, weak, and indecisive. This conflict is the tragedy of the story.
We are faced with a completely different situation in the work of A. I. Kuprin “Garnet Bracelet”. In it, General Anosov asks Vera: “Where is the love? Is love unselfish, selfless, not waiting for reward? The one about whom it is said “strong as death”? The kind of love for which to accomplish any feat, to give one’s life, to suffer torment is not work at all, but pure joy.” For the hero, his own question is rhetorical. But Vera encountered such love. “She realized that the love that every woman dreams of had passed her by.” IN this work love is tragic, it is constantly connected with death. In his confession, Zheltkov writes: “Only one thing remains - death.” A premonition of this tragedy visited Vera when she examined the garnet bracelet given by Zheltkov. “Definitely blood!” - she thought.
In Bunin's story "Mr. from San Francisco" we again encounter the theme of love, although it is not the main one in this work. The author shows some more sides of it. We will encounter this bright feeling on the pages that tell about the feelings of the protagonist’s daughter for a foreign prince. But love has other, repulsive sides: “...there was an elegant couple in love, whom everyone watched with curiosity and who did not hide their happiness...only one commander knew that this couple was hired by Lloyd to play at love for good money...”. But this is a mockery of the greatest and pure feeling person! But it turns out that there is such a thing in our lives.
Very beautifully A.I. Kuprin describes the love of two young people in the story “Olesya”. To create a bright picture love between the Polesie witch Olesya and the Russian intellectual Ivan Timofeevich, the author surrounds the heroes with an aura of the mysterious Polesie forest and nature in general. Olesya is a representative of Kuprin’s favorite “natural people”, “children of nature”, not spoiled by civilization, capable of fullness of feelings. The girl grew up in the forest, she loves and understands nature, she has a sensitive, insightful heart, a sharp mind, kind soul. But the most important thing about her is that she loves with all her heart, sincerely, deeply, tenderly and caringly. In the name of love, she is capable of great sacrifices. The girl went to physical and moral torment, fulfilled the absurd desire of her beloved, although she knew how it would end.
Not only superstition and lack of education of the villagers interfered with the love of two young people. Their love was doomed, because there is a huge difference between the characters' characters: Olesya has a sensitive, warm heart, capable of feats in the name of love. But Ivan Timofeevich has a lazy, cold heart, deaf to everything around him. He “did not listen to the vague desire of his heart”, did not stop his beloved, and it all ended in tragedy.
In each work we find more and more new sides of the most beautiful of human feelings- feelings of love. The works of I. A. Bunin and A. I. Kuprin discovered new facets of this incomprehensible and beautiful feeling. They both write about unhappy love, collapsing due to the vicissitudes of fate, social inequality or the characters themselves.


The theme of love was one of the main themes of writers of the 20th century. They have written about love in all centuries, and even with the advent of modern times, it does not go unnoticed. This problem worried all generations of writers, among whom were A. Kuprin and I. Bunin. The prose of A. Kuprin, I. Bunin and other major artists of the era uniquely expressed the common aspiration. Writers were attracted not so much by the history of the relationship loving couple or the development of her psychological duel, as well as the influence of the experience on the hero’s understanding of himself and the whole world.

The limitless spiritual possibilities of man and his inability to realize them - this is what worried A. Kuprin, and was already captured in his early stories. Kuprin closely associated the awakening of personality with the eternal feeling of love.

In Kuprin's prose of the 1890s and early 1900s there are many stories about the death of love, instability love unions. The initial attraction to beauty and self-sacrifice is very important for the author. Kuprin was especially fond of solid, strong personalities.

“Garnet Bracelet” is one of the most wonderful works in Kuprin's work.

The rarest gift of unrequited worship of a woman - Vera Sheina - became “enormous happiness”, the only content, the poetry of Zheltkov’s life. The phenomenality of his experiences elevates the image young man over all others. Not only the rude, narrow-minded Tuganovsky, Vera’s brother, her sister, a frivolous coquette, but also the smart, conscientious Shein, the heroine’s husband, who regards love as the “greatest secret” Anosov, the beautiful and pure Vera Nikolaevna herself are in a clearly reduced everyday environment.

From the first lines there is a feeling of fading. This can be seen in autumn landscape, in the sad appearance of uninhabited dachas with broken glass. All this is connected with the monotonous life of Vera, whose tranquility is disrupted by Zheltkov.

Not finding reciprocal love, Zheltkov decides to die without permission. The psychological climax of the story is Vera’s farewell to Zheltkov’s ashes, their only “date” - a turning point in her spiritual state.

Only with his death does Sheina learn about true love, which she never had.

Bunin's prose reflects dislike rather than love. Nevertheless, the attraction to this feeling is filled with poetry and passionate power.

It was created by him wonderful story"Mitya's love." Its plot is very simple. Katya, passionately loved by Mitya, swirled in a false, bohemian environment and cheated on him. The suffering of the young man forms the content of the story, but it ends with suicide.

In both works there is a tragic ending that was inevitable.

A person cannot live only with his heart and only with his heart and only in a woman or in a man can he find the whole meaning of life: in this way he could reach the very opposite true love- to the point of selfishness.

Updated: 2013-10-23

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You can talk about love for a long time and tediously, you can argue until you are hoarse and convince your opponent that your point of view is “more correct,” or you can say nothing at all. But the fact remains that every mature personality has their own idea of ​​true love. I see no point in listing them - as they say, there are so many people, so many opinions. But it turns out that this is not entirely true.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, two great prose writers lived in our country - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin and Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin. These personalities are of particular interest simple fact– their ideas about love were so similar that I am not afraid to call them the same. Moreover, they are so identical that the thoughts of one writer can be expressed in the words of another, and vice versa.

Take, for example, the wonderful lines from “ Garnet bracelet“Kuprin (they perfectly reflect the essence of the author’s understanding of this feeling) - remember where General Anosov asks Vera: “Where is love? Is love unselfish, selfless, not waiting for reward? The one about whom it is said “strong as death”? The kind of love for which to accomplish any feat, to give one’s life, to suffer torment is not work at all, but pure joy.” He doesn’t even ask, but rather reasons, but Vera understood everything - “the love that every woman dreams of passed her by.” She passed quietly and deliberately unnoticed. Vera Nikolaevna didn’t even try to grab onto it. Why? The answer is quite simple - the mentality of our people is to blame. When Zheltkov began writing letters to his beloved, Vera already had a fiancé. Then the groom became a husband, but the letters continued. And Vera, like anyone else, “ faithful wife", it just worked defensive reaction– ignore. She didn't even try to meet this man, listen to him and maybe even understand him. Vera simply ignored him, and when she finally understood everything, it was already too late...

IN " Dark alleys“Bunin’s situation is similar. Throughout her life, Nadezhda loved only one person - the St. Petersburg officer Nikolai Alekseevich. She not only loved him, she gave him all of herself: “No matter how much time passed, she lived alone. I knew that you had not been the same for a long time, that it was as if nothing had happened to you, but... It’s too late to reproach you now.” But for the officer there was only hope a pleasant memory from past. And why all? Yes, because she was a serf. What would the public say if Nikolai Alekseevich married her? That was all he cared about. Even as he was leaving her inn, he thought: “But, my God, what would happen 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?” Bunin expresses his position in one sentence: “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared.”

As you can see, the desire for realism led these authors to one conclusion - true love exists, but if it is mutual, it does not last, if it is unrequited, it is destined to live much longer...