Is the name of the ship Atlantis in the story coincidental? The symbolic image of “Atlantis” in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” by Bunin

Epigraph from the Apocalypse: “Woe to you, Babylon, strong city!” According to the Revelation of John the Theologian, Babylon, “the great harlot, has become a habitation of demons and a refuge for every unclean spirit... woe, woe to you, Babylon, mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come” (Revelation, 18).

San Francisco, one of the richest cities in America, is named after Francis, as if by irony of fate. And the gentleman himself - a rich man, a representative of the new world - arrives from a city named after the preacher of poverty, to the homeland of this preacher.

The motive of the story is the motive of death, death. Why is the giant ship called Atlantis? "Atlantis" is a lost mythological continent. The main event of the story is the death of a gentleman from San Francisco, quick and sudden, in one hour. A gentleman from San Francisco, a millionaire, does not notice the harbingers of death. It is noteworthy that he is going to go to Rome to listen to the Catholic prayer of repentance there (which is usually read before death), then the ship Atlantis, which is a dual symbol in the story: on the one hand, the ship symbolizes a new civilization, where power is determined by wealth and pride, that is, from which Babylon perished. Therefore, in the end, a ship, especially with such a name, must sink. “Atlantis” is the personification of heaven and hell, and if the first is described as a “modernized” paradise (waves of spicy smoke, radiance of light, cognacs, liqueurs, cigars, joyful vapors, etc.), then the engine room is directly called the underworld: “to its last, the ninth circle was like the underwater womb of a steamship - the one where the gigantic furnaces cackled dully, devouring with their red-hot throats breasts of coal, with a roar thrown into them, drenched in acrid, dirty sweat and naked people to the waist, crimson from the flames ... "

A gentleman from San Francisco, who is never named by name in the story, since, the author notes, no one remembered his name either in Naples or Capri, goes with his wife and daughter to the Old World for two whole years so that to have fun and travel. He worked hard and is now rich enough to afford such a vacation.

At the end of November, the famous Atlantis, which looks like a huge hotel with all the amenities, sets sail.

Life on the ship goes smoothly: they get up early, drink coffee, cocoa, chocolate, take baths, do gymnastics, walk along the decks to whet their appetite; then they go to the first breakfast; after breakfast they read newspapers and calmly wait for second breakfast; the next two hours are devoted to relaxation - all decks are lined with long reed chairs, on which travelers lie, covered with blankets, looking at the cloudy sky; then - tea with cookies, and in the evening - what constitutes the main goal of this entire existence - dinner.

A wonderful orchestra plays exquisitely and tirelessly in a huge hall, behind the walls of which the waves of the terrible ocean roar, but low-cut ladies and men in tailcoats and tuxedos do not think about it. After dinner, dancing begins in the ballroom, men in the bar smoke cigars, drink liqueurs, and are served by blacks in red camisoles.

Finally, the ship arrives in Naples, the family of the gentleman from San Francisco stays in an expensive hotel, and here their life also flows according to a routine: early in the morning - breakfast, after - visiting museums and cathedrals, second breakfast, tea, then preparing for dinner and in the evening - a hearty lunch. However, December in Naples this year turned out to be stormy: wind, rain, mud on the streets. And the family of the gentleman from San Francisco decides to go to the island of Capri, where, as everyone assures them, it is warm, sunny and lemons bloom.

A small steamer, rolling from side to side on the waves, transports a gentleman from San Francisco with his family, who are seriously suffering from seasickness, to Capri. The funicular takes them to a small stone town at the top of the mountain, they settle into a hotel, where everyone warmly welcomes them, and prepare for dinner, having already fully recovered from seasickness.

Having dressed before his wife and daughter, a gentleman from San Francisco heads to a cozy, quiet hotel reading room, opens a newspaper - and suddenly the lines flash before his eyes, his pince-nez flies off his nose, and his body, writhing, slides to the floor. Another guest was present. The hotel owner runs into the dining room screaming, everyone jumps up from their seats, the owner tries to calm the guests, but the evening is already irreparably ruined.

The gentleman from San Francisco lived his whole life in intense and meaningless work, postponing “real life” and all pleasures for the future. And just at the moment when he finally decides to enjoy life, death overtakes him. This is precisely death, its triumph. Moreover, death triumphs already during life, because the very life of the rich passengers of a luxurious ocean ship is as terrible as death, it is unnatural and meaningless. The story ends with material, terrible details of the earthly life of the corpse and the figure of the Devil, “as huge as a cliff,” watching from the cliffs of Gibraltar a passing steamship.

The gentleman from San Francisco is transferred to the smallest and worst room; his wife, daughter, servants stand and look at him, and now what they were waiting for and fearing happened - he dies. The wife of a gentleman from San Francisco asks the owner to allow the body to be moved to their apartment, but the owner refuses: he values these rooms too much, and tourists would begin to avoid them, since the whole of Capri would immediately know about what happened. You can't get a coffin here either - the owner can offer a long box of soda water bottles.

At dawn, a cab driver carries the body of a gentleman from San Francisco to the pier, a steamboat transports him across the Bay of Naples, and the same Atlantis, on which he arrived with honor in the Old World, now carries him, dead, in a tarred coffin, hidden from the living deep below, in the black hold. Meanwhile, on the decks the same life continues as before, everyone has breakfast and lunch in the same way, and the ocean wavering behind the windows of the windows is still just as scary.

To the 60th anniversary of the death of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

The story "Mitya's Love" (1924), which brought Bunin European fame (it delighted the famous Austrian poet Rilke), was published in 1926 in Leningrad in the series "Book New Issues", and in 1927 by the main publishing house of the USSR - GIZ - published a collection of stories by an "anti-Soviet writer." In the eighth volume of the first Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1927), a rather large article about Bunin was published, with a portrait, which not every Soviet writer was awarded at that time.

All over the world I.A. Bunin is considered a classic of “love prose”. But this, of course, does not limit the influence that the Russian Nobel laureate had on world art. He, in fact, became the founder of a genre that is so widespread today, which can be conventionally described as “the death of the Titanic.” Bunin’s story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) was the first literary response to the disaster of the famous superliner. Many details in “The Gentleman” suggests that the ship with the name "Atlantis" means the "Titanic".

Only at the end of the twentieth century did European artists come to understand the crisis of technogenic civilization, which Bunin so forcefully expressed in “The Gentleman from San Francisco.”

Here, first of all, it is appropriate to recall F. Fellini’s film “And the Ship Sails On…” - about the “good old Europe” that is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, as it was before 1914, and his other film, “La Dolce Vita,” about which the director himself spoke , that this is “a ship, luxurious and at the same time poor, rushing towards the rocks on which it is destined to break - a pompous shipwreck: silk, brocade, crystal, thrown into the abyss by a gust of storm.” In essence, the same can be said about the idea of "Mr. from San Francisco."

From the very beginning of the story you feel a kind of chill, which by the end turns into the icy breath of death. There is even a doubt: were the people described by Bunin real? Perhaps Atlantis is a ghost ship, a ship of the dead? The overweight captain of the Atlantis looks like a “huge idol” (exactly like the captain of the Titanic, Smith). The crown prince of an Asian state, traveling incognito, had “a large mustache showing through like a dead man.” Death is in everything, everywhere, even in the wax-smelling medieval Italian temples: “a majestic entrance... and inside there is a huge emptiness, silence... slippery gravestones underfoot.” There is no place for living human feelings here, they dissolve into emptiness without even having time to be born, everything is ephemeral, even sexual attraction - in this case, the “feeling” of the daughter of a gentleman from San Francisco for the crown Asian prince. “After all,” Bunin states, “it doesn’t matter what exactly awakens a girl’s soul - whether it’s money, fame, or nobility...”

The Yankees, impenetrable in their positivism, have access only to bad premonitions, and even then - fleetingly... The owner of the hotel on Capri “for a moment amazed the gentleman from San Francisco: he suddenly remembered that that night, among other confusion that besieged him in his sleep, he I saw exactly this gentleman, exactly the same as this one, in the same business card and with the same mirror-combed head. Surprised, he even almost paused, but there was no mustard left in his soul a long time ago. the seed of so-called mystical feelings, then his surprise immediately faded..."

A cruel American businessman walks briskly, his bulldog jaw thrust out, towards his death. He dies in the reading room, among newspapers with headlines about the never-ending Balkan war (how everything looks like the end of the twentieth century!). “...The lines suddenly flashed before him with a glassy sheen, his neck tensed, his eyes bulged, his pince-nez flew off his nose... He rushed forward, wanted to take a breath of air - and snored wildly; his lower jaw fell off, illuminating his entire mouth with gold fillings...”

Panic begins in the hotel. Something went wrong in the well-oiled mechanism of the scenery hiding the emptiness. “... In all languages they heard: “What, what happened?” - and no one answered properly, no one understood anything, since people are still most amazed and do not want to believe death for anything.” “With offended faces,” people silently went to their rooms. The rich Yankee broke the rules of the game - he died. And it was so fun, carefree...

Nature in Bunin’s story seems to be absolutely indifferent to the death of a stranger and cruel person. Who is he to her - a scary character from a puppet theater? She is Life, and he came from the world of Death.

Two peaks rise above Capri: Monte Solaro and Monte Tiberio. “...In the grotto of the rocky wall of Monte Solaro, all illuminated by the sun, all in its warmth and shine, stood in snow-white plaster robes and in a royal crown, golden-rusty from the weather, the Mother of God, meek and merciful, with her eyes raised to the sky ..." But the Mother of God is of little interest to tourists like the late gentleman from San Francisco. They come from all over the island to look at the remains of a stone house in which “two thousand years ago there lived a man who was unspeakably vile in satisfying his lust and for some reason had power over millions of people, inflicted cruelties on them beyond all measure, and humanity will forever remember his". This is the Roman Emperor Tiberius, whose governor in Judea, Pontius Pilate, cowardly turned away from Jesus Christ...

The body of the dead gentleman from San Francisco, “having spent a week moving from one port shed to another, (...) again finally ended up on the same famous ship on which so recently, with such honor, he was transported to the Old World. But now They hid him alive - they lowered him deep into a black hold in a tarred coffin, and again, again the ship went on its long sea journey. Here appears on the pages of the story someone whose painful presence we have long invisibly felt. This is the supreme patron of both the deceased Yankee capitalist and the “indescribably vile” Tiberius. “The countless fiery eyes of the ship were barely visible behind the snow to the Devil, who was watching from the walls of Gibraltar, from the stone gates of two worlds, the ship leaving into the night and blizzard.” While he is just watching... “The devil was huge, like a cliff, but the ship was also huge, multi-tiered, multi-pipe, created by the pride of a New man with an old heart.” The Devil's essence materialized in Atlantis, and they are now comparable - the Devil and the ship.

The story ends with sweetly languid, “shamelessly sad” music playing in the first class cabin. This is a direct hint to the reader. After all, it was to these melancholic sounds that the Titanic sank.

The musicians played until the last minute, numb in the Atlantic wind, until the legendary command of Captain Smith was heard: “Now - every man for himself!”

Well, if you look at Bunin’s story as one of the versions of the death of the Titanic, then it is the most accurate. All others imply technical reasons, Bunin’s “version” - moral ones. A ship created by the dead is doomed to Death.

What is Bunin's "Atlantis"? Modern civilization? Humanity in general? Earth? The possibility of interpretation is limitless, just as the nature of Bunin’s image is endless.

Of course, "Mr. from San Francisco" influenced not only works in the "disaster" genre. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was under the strong charm of this story all his life. In “The White Guard” we read: “In front of Elena there is a cooling cup and “Mr. from San Francisco.” Blurred eyes, not seeing, look at the words:

... darkness, ocean, blizzard."

And here is “The Master and Margarita”: “This darkness, which came from the west, covered a huge city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything was gone - as if it had never existed in the world.”

Compare with “Mr. from San Francisco”: “A heavy fog hid Vesuvius to its very foundations, low above the leaden swell of the sea. The island of Capri was not visible at all - as if it had never existed in the world.”

It would be tempting to continue the comparisons (for example, to trace how the theme of Tiberius, the terrible patron of Bulgakov’s Pilate, moved from “Master” to “Master”; no less interesting is the theme of the devil that unites both works; in Bunin, “as huge as a rock,” but at first appeared before the tourist from San Francisco in the guise of an “excellently elegant young man,” and before Berlioz in the guise of the dapper foreign tourist Woland, who at the end of the novel turned into a “block of darkness”; it would be interesting to compare the ball on the ship with the ball at Satan’s, the reaction of the characters; on the death of the Yankees and the death of Berlioz; the storm over Moscow in the finale of “The Master” and the storm over “Atlantis” in the finale of “The Master”), but all this, as they usually say in such cases, is the topic of a separate large work. And the point, in general, is not about who influenced whom, this is a natural process in literature. Bunin himself loved to say: “I am from Gogol!”, which few people believed. But they did not understand what the writer meant. Language, style, plot, etc. are not the main thing here. So what? Here is what Bunin himself wrote in “The Life of Arsenyev” about the significance of Gogol in his creative destiny: “Terrible revenge” awakened in my soul that high feeling that is embedded in every soul and will live forever - the feeling of the most sacred legality of retribution, the most sacred necessity of final triumph good over evil and the utmost mercilessness with which evil is punished in due time. This feeling is an undoubted thirst for God, faith in Him."

The second theme, acutely experienced by Bunin even in his first poems and stories, is the theme of death. In “The Life of Arsenyev,” a young hero in one village, where he usually went on business, met at a walk with “a tall-breasted red-haired girl with large lips.” One day she went to accompany him to the station, and he, passing a freight car with open doors, pulled her there. “...She jumped up after me and hugged me tightly around the neck. But I struck a match to look around, and recoiled in horror: the match illuminated a long, cheap coffin in the middle of the carriage.” This coffin, which appeared so inopportunely, is, by the way, an indispensable motif in the poetics of Bunin’s works about love.

With a sensitivity unusual for Russian literature, heightened to the extreme, he describes the instinct of life, procreation and death awakening in people: as an inevitable, inescapable ending...

Alexey Arsenyev and the nameless dead man in a cheap coffin are traveling by rail in different ways, but this is for the time being... Sooner or later, their paths, alas, will intersect... As a writer, Bunin depicted this fatal contradiction of human existence with stunning, realistic force, but he himself as a human being, I could never come to terms with this... That is why, perhaps, with such heightened sympathy he described Leo Tolstoy, jumping over the snow-covered ditches on Devichye Pole and saying to Bunin - “sharply, sternly, sharply:

There is no death, there is no death!

Some readers ask the question: why did Bunin, whose early and mature works harmoniously combined a variety of themes, including “feminine”, in his old age gave preference to the latter, and often in an openly erotic spirit? Maybe this meant that at the end of his life he was disillusioned with everything except sensual, carnal pleasures? Or maybe, having spent the Nobel Prize, he openly decided to make money on the “strawberry”? Here it must be said that the stories that made up “Dark Alleys” were mainly written during the Nazi occupation of France, when Bunin lived in the resort town of Grasse, and only a small part of them was published then (9 out of 25), and only in newspapers. Bunin wrote them practically “on the table”, “for himself”, as in his distant youth. And in general, you should clearly imagine the atmosphere in which “Dark Alleys” were created: occupation, hunger, cold (in winter in the Alpes-Maritimes it is not at all warm, and firewood cost a lot of money). To all these “charms” was added old age - during the war years, Bunin “exchanged” his eighties... So maybe he warmed his cooling blood with love stories?

There are dozens of “maybes” possible here. But here's what critics usually don't take into account. A person who lives outside his homeland for many years gradually ceases to feel it as something that exists in time and space as truly as his country of residence. Images of the Motherland pass into the realm of memories, and memories tend to fade over time (especially among writers who use them like negative photographers). For non-religious people (and Bunin was a believer, but not a very religious person), what is most reliably preserved in memory is that which is associated with sensory experiences.

This pattern can be easily seen if we compare Bunin’s work of the 20s and 40s. In the 20s, he wrote such stories as “Mowers” - a hymn to a Russia that has passed into the past, and such as “Sunstroke” - a short story that begs to be included in “Dark Alleys”. In addition, Bunin was then an active publicist and sharply polemicized with the left flank of the emigration, in particular with the “Miliukov party.” From the second half of the 30s, all his artistic interests seemed to be focused on the intimate sphere, although it is well known that he did not change his views.

All this suggests that the images of women in “Dark Alleys” are images of the Motherland, extracted by Bunin from the sensory sphere of his consciousness.

And trains and steamships, where stories often begin or end, were for the writer something like a literary time machine, delivering his heroes there, through the looking glass, to Russia, which “will not return forever.” To understand this, the story "Rusya" (after the heroine's shortened name - Marusya) is important. It reads like this: “At eleven o’clock in the evening, the Moscow-Sevastopol fast train stopped at a small station outside Podolsk, where it was not supposed to stop, and was waiting for something on the second track.” It was a train stopped in time. The hero remembers his beloved, who once lived in an estate nearby. The train finally started moving. He picked up speed and flew - as time flies in our fast-paced life: “... still the blue-violet peephole above the door looked at him from the black darkness just as steadily, mysteriously, gravely, and still with the same speed, steadily rushing forward, rushing forward, springing, the carriage is swaying. That sad stop is already far, far away. And all this was already twenty years ago - copses, magpies, swamps, water lilies, snakes, cranes...” In the morning, the wife asks the hero: “You’re still sad, remembering your dacha girl.” with bony feet?

“I’m sad, I’m sad,” he answered, smiling unpleasantly. - Country girl... Amata nobis quantum amabitu nulla!" ("Beloved by us, like no other will be beloved!" - Lat.)

This mysterious Russia, of course - Rus', Russia, beloved by Bunin, like no other country can be beloved.

Special for the Centenary

“The Mister from San Francisco” is a philosophical story-parable about man’s place in the world, about the relationship between man and the world around him. According to Bunin, a person cannot withstand world upheavals, cannot resist the flow of life that carries him like a river carries a chip. This worldview was expressed in the philosophical idea of the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco”: man is mortal, and (as Bulgakov’s Woland claims) suddenly mortal, therefore human claims to dominance in nature, to understanding the laws of nature are groundless. All the wonderful scientific and technical achievements of modern man do not save him from death. This is the eternal tragedy of life: a person is born to die.

The story contains symbolic details, thanks to which the story of the death of an individual becomes a philosophical parable about the death of an entire society, ruled by gentlemen like the main character. Of course, the image of the main character is symbolic, although it cannot be called a detail of Bunin’s story. The backstory of the gentleman from San Francisco is presented in a few sentences in the most general form; there is no detailed portrait of him in the story, his name is never mentioned. Thus, the main character is a typical character in a parable: he is not so much a specific person as a type-symbol of a certain social class and moral behavior.

In a parable, the details of the narrative are of exceptional importance: a picture of nature or a thing is mentioned only when necessary, the action takes place without decoration. Bunin violates these rules of the parable genre and uses one bright detail after another, realizing his artistic principle of subject representation. In the story, among various details, repeating details appear that attract the reader’s attention and turn into symbols (“Atlantis,” its captain, the ocean, a couple of young people in love). These repeating details are symbolic simply because they embody the general in the individual.

The epigraph from the Bible: “Woe to you, Babylon, strong city!”, according to the author’s plan, set the tone for the story. The combination of a verse from the Apocalypse with the image of modern heroes and the circumstances of modern life already sets the reader in a philosophical mood. Babylon in the Bible is not just a big city, it is a city-symbol of vile sin, various vices (for example, the Tower of Babel is a symbol of human pride), because of them, according to the Bible, the city died, conquered and destroyed by the Assyrians.

In the story, Bunin draws in detail the modern steamship Atlantis, which looks like a city. The ship in the waves of the Atlantic becomes for the writer a symbol of modern society. In the underwater belly of the ship there are huge fireboxes and an engine room. Here, in inhuman conditions - in the roar, in the hellish heat and stuffiness - stokers and mechanics work, thanks to them the ship sails across the ocean. On the lower decks there are various service spaces: kitchens, pantries, wine cellars, laundries, etc. Sailors, service personnel and poor passengers live here. But on the upper deck there is a select society (about fifty people in total), who enjoy a luxurious life and unimaginable comfort, because these people are the “masters of life.” The ship (“modern Babylon”) is named symbolically - after the name of a rich, densely populated country, which in an instant was swept away by the waves of the ocean and disappeared without a trace. Thus, a logical connection is established between the biblical Babylon and the semi-legendary Atlantis: both powerful, prosperous states are perishing, and the ship, symbolizing an unjust society and named so significantly, also risks perishing every minute in the stormy ocean. Among the ocean's turbulent waves, a huge ship looks like a fragile little vessel that cannot resist the elements. It is not for nothing that the Devil is watching from the rocks of Gibraltar after the steamship leaving for the American shores (it is no coincidence that the author wrote this word with a capital letter). This is how the story reveals Bunin’s philosophical idea about man’s powerlessness before nature, incomprehensible to the human mind.

The ocean becomes symbolic at the end of the story. The storm is described as a global catastrophe: in the whistle of the wind, the author hears a “funeral mass” for the former “master of life” and all modern civilization; the mournful blackness of the waves is emphasized by white shreds of foam on the crests.

The image of the ship captain, whom the author compares with a pagan god at the beginning and end of the story, is symbolic. In appearance, this man really looks like an idol: red-haired, monstrously large and heavy, in a naval uniform with wide gold stripes. He, as befits God, lives in the captain's cabin - the highest point of the ship, where passengers are prohibited from entering, he is rarely shown in public, but passengers unconditionally believe in his power and knowledge. The captain himself, being human after all, feels very insecure in the raging ocean and relies on the telegraph apparatus standing in the next cabin-radio room.

At the beginning and at the end of the story, a couple in love appears, which attracts the attention of the bored passengers of the Atlantis by the fact that they do not hide their love and their feelings. But only the captain knows that the happy appearance of these young people is a deception, for the couple “breaks the comedy”: in fact, she was hired by the owners of the shipping company to entertain passengers. When these comedians emerge among the glittering society of the upper deck, the falsity of human relationships, which they so persistently demonstrate, spreads to everyone around them. This “sinfully modest” girl and a tall young man, “resembling a huge leech,” become a symbol of high society, in which, according to Bunin, there is no place for sincere feelings, and depravity is hidden behind ostentatious brilliance and prosperity.

To summarize, it should be noted that “The Mister from San Francisco” is considered one of Bunin’s best stories both in terms of its idea and its artistic embodiment. The story of a nameless American millionaire turns into a philosophical parable with broad symbolic generalizations.

Moreover, Bunin creates symbols in different ways. The gentleman from San Francisco becomes a sign-symbol of bourgeois society: the writer removes all the individual characteristics of this character and emphasizes his social traits: lack of spirituality, passion for profit, boundless complacency. Other symbols in Bunin are based on associative rapprochement (the Atlantic Ocean is a traditional comparison of human life with the sea, and man himself with a fragile boat; fireboxes in the engine room are the hellish fire of the underworld), on rapprochement in structure (a multi-deck ship is human society in miniature), on rapprochement by function (the captain is a pagan god).

Symbols in the story become an expressive means for revealing the author's position. Through them, the author showed the deceit and depravity of bourgeois society, which has forgotten about moral laws, the true meaning of human life and is approaching a universal catastrophe. It is clear that Bunin’s premonition of a catastrophe became especially acute in connection with the world war, which, as it flared up more and more, turned into a huge human massacre before the author’s eyes.

I. Bunin is one of the few figures of Russian culture appreciated abroad. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the rigorous skill with which he develops the traditions of Russian classical prose." One can have different attitudes towards the personality and views of this writer, but his mastery in the field of fine literature is undeniable, so his works are, at a minimum, worthy of our attention. One of them, “Mr. from San Francisco,” received such a high rating from the jury awarding the most prestigious prize in the world.

An important quality for a writer is observation, because from the most fleeting episodes and impressions you can create a whole work. Bunin accidentally saw the cover of Thomas Mann’s book “Death in Venice” in a store, and a few months later, when he came to visit his cousin, he remembered this title and connected it with an even older memory: the death of an American on the island of Capri, where the author himself was vacationing. This is how one of Bunin’s best stories turned out, and not just a story, but a whole philosophical parable.

This literary work was enthusiastically received by critics, and the writer’s extraordinary talent was compared with the gift of L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov. After this, Bunin stood with the venerable experts on words and the human soul on the same level. His work is so symbolic and eternal that it will never lose its philosophical focus and relevance. And in the age of the power of money and market relations, it is doubly useful to remember what a life inspired only by accumulation leads to.

What a story?

The main character, who does not have a name (he is just a gentleman from San Francisco), has spent his entire life increasing his wealth, and at the age of 58 he decided to devote time to rest (and at the same time to his family). They set off on the ship Atlantis on their entertaining journey. All passengers are immersed in idleness, but the service staff works tirelessly to provide all these breakfasts, lunches, dinners, teas, card games, dances, liqueurs and cognacs. The stay of tourists in Naples is also monotonous, only museums and cathedrals are added to their program. However, the weather is not kind to tourists: December in Naples turned out to be stormy. Therefore, the Master and his family rush to the island of Capri, pleasing with warmth, where they check into the same hotel and are already preparing for routine “entertainment” activities: eating, sleeping, chatting, looking for a groom for their daughter. But suddenly the death of the main character bursts into this “idyll”. He died suddenly while reading a newspaper.

And this is where the main idea of the story is revealed to the reader: that in the face of death everyone is equal: neither wealth nor power will save you from it. This Gentleman, who only recently wasted money, spoke contemptuously to the servants and accepted their respectful bows, is lying in a cramped and cheap room, respect has disappeared somewhere, his family is being kicked out of the hotel, because his wife and daughter will leave “trifles” at the box office. And so his body is taken back to America in a soda box, because even a coffin cannot be found in Capri. But he is already traveling in the hold, hidden from high-ranking passengers. And no one really grieves, because no one can use the dead man’s money.

Meaning of the name

At first, Bunin wanted to call his story “Death on Capri” by analogy with the title that inspired him, “Death in Venice” (the writer read this book later and rated it as “unpleasant”). But after writing the first line, he crossed out this title and named the work by the “name” of the hero.

From the first page, the writer’s attitude towards the Master is clear; for him, he is faceless, colorless and soulless, so he did not even receive a name. He is the master, the top of the social hierarchy. But all this power is fleeting and fragile, the author reminds. The hero, useless to society, who has not done a single good deed in 58 years and thinks only of himself, remains after death only an unknown gentleman, about whom they only know that he is a rich American.

Characteristics of heroes

There are few characters in the story: the gentleman from San Francisco as a symbol of eternal fussy hoarding, his wife, depicting gray respectability, and their daughter, symbolizing the desire for this respectability.

The gentleman “worked tirelessly” all his life, but these were the hands of the Chinese, who were hired by the thousands and died just as abundantly in hard service. Other people generally mean little to him, the main thing is profit, wealth, power, savings. It was they who gave him the opportunity to travel, live at the highest level and not care about those around him who were less fortunate in life. However, nothing saved the hero from death; you can’t take the money to the next world. And respect, bought and sold, quickly turns into dust: after his death nothing changed, the celebration of life, money and idleness continued, even the last tribute to the dead had no one to worry about. The body travels through authorities, it is nothing, just another piece of luggage that is thrown into the hold, hidden from “decent society.”
The hero's wife lived a monotonous, philistine life, but with chic: without any special problems or difficulties, no worries, just a lazily stretching string of idle days. Nothing impressed her; she was always completely calm, probably having forgotten how to think in the routine of idleness. She is only concerned about the future of her daughter: she needs to find her a respectable and profitable match, so that she too can comfortably float with the flow all her life.
The daughter did her best to portray innocence and at the same time frankness, attracting suitors. This is what interested her most. A meeting with an ugly, strange and uninteresting man, but a prince, plunged the girl into excitement. Perhaps this was one of the last strong feelings in her life, and then the future of her mother awaited her. However, some emotions still remained in the girl: she alone foresaw trouble (“her heart was suddenly squeezed by melancholy, a feeling of terrible loneliness on this strange, dark island”) and cried for her father.

Main themes

Life and death, routine and exclusivity, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness - these are the main themes of the story. They immediately reflect the philosophical orientation of the author's intention. He encourages readers to think about themselves: are we not chasing something frivolously small, are we getting bogged down in routine, missing out on true beauty? After all, a life in which there is no time to think about oneself, one’s place in the Universe, in which there is no time to look at the surrounding nature, people and notice something good in them, is lived in vain. And you can’t fix a life you’ve lived in vain, and you can’t buy a new one for any money. Death will come anyway, you can’t hide from it and you can’t pay off it, so you need to have time to do something really worthwhile, something so that you will be remembered with a kind word, and not indifferently thrown into the hold. Therefore, it is worth thinking about everyday life, which makes thoughts banal and feelings faded and weak, about wealth that is not worth the effort, about beauty, in the corruption of which lies ugliness.

The wealth of the “masters of life” is contrasted with the poverty of people who live equally ordinary lives, but suffer poverty and humiliation. Servants who secretly imitate their masters, but grovel before them to their faces. Masters who treat their servants as inferior creatures, but grovel before even richer and more noble persons. A couple hired on a steamship to play passionate love. The Master's daughter, feigning passion and trepidation to lure the prince. All this dirty, low pretense, although presented in a luxurious wrapper, is contrasted with the eternal and pure beauty of nature.

Main problems

The main problem of this story is the search for the meaning of life. How should you spend your short earthly vigil not in vain, how to leave behind something important and valuable for others? Everyone sees their purpose in their own way, but no one should forget that a person’s spiritual baggage is more important than his material one. Although at all times they have said that in modern times all eternal values have been lost, every time this is not true. Both Bunin and other writers remind us, readers, that life without harmony and inner beauty is not life, but a miserable existence.

The problem of the transience of life is also raised by the author. After all, the gentleman from San Francisco spent his mental strength, made money and made money, postponing some simple joys, real emotions for later, but this “later” never began. This happens to many people who are mired in everyday life, routine, problems, and affairs. Sometimes you just need to stop, pay attention to loved ones, nature, friends, and feel the beauty in your surroundings. After all, tomorrow may not come.

The meaning of the story

It is not for nothing that the story is called a parable: it has a very instructive message and is intended to give a lesson to the reader. The main idea of the story is the injustice of class society. Most of it survives on bread and water, while the elite waste their lives mindlessly. The writer states the moral squalor of the existing order, because most of the “masters of life” achieved their wealth by dishonest means. Such people bring only evil, just as the Master from San Francisco pays and ensures the death of Chinese workers. The death of the main character emphasizes the author's thoughts. No one is interested in this recently so influential man, because his money no longer gives him power, and he has not committed any respectable and outstanding deeds.

The idleness of these rich people, their effeminacy, perversion, insensitivity to something living and beautiful proves the accident and injustice of their high position. This fact is hidden behind the description of the leisure time of tourists on the ship, their entertainment (the main one is lunch), costumes, relationships with each other (the origin of the prince whom the main character’s daughter met makes her fall in love).

Composition and genre

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" can be seen as a parable story. Most people know what a story (a short piece of prose that contains a plot, a conflict, and has one main storyline) is, but how can you characterize a parable? A parable is a small allegorical text that guides the reader on the right path. Therefore, the work in terms of plot and form is a story, and in terms of philosophy and content it is a parable.

Compositionally, the story is divided into two large parts: the journey of the Master from San Francisco from the New World and the stay of the body in the hold on the way back. The culmination of the work is the death of the hero. Before this, describing the ship Atlantis and tourist places, the author gives the story an anxious mood of expectation. In this part, a sharply negative attitude towards the Master is striking. But death deprived him of all privileges and equated his remains with luggage, so Bunin softens and even sympathizes with him. It also describes the island of Capri, its nature and local people; these lines are filled with beauty and understanding of the beauty of nature.

Symbols

The work is replete with symbols that confirm Bunin’s thoughts. The first of them is the steamship Atlantis, on which an endless celebration of luxurious life reigns, but there is a storm outside, a storm, even the ship itself is shaking. So at the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole society was seething, experiencing a social crisis, only the indifferent bourgeois continued the feast during the plague.

The island of Capri symbolizes real beauty (that’s why the description of its nature and inhabitants is covered in warm colors): a “joyful, beautiful, sunny” country filled with “fairy blue”, majestic mountains, the beauty of which cannot be conveyed in human language. The existence of our American family and people like them is a pathetic parody of life.

Features of the work

Figurative language and bright landscapes are inherent in Bunin’s creative style; the artist’s mastery of words is reflected in this story. At first he creates an anxious mood, the reader expects that, despite the splendor of the rich environment around the Master, something irreparable will soon happen. Later, the tension is erased by natural sketches written in soft strokes, reflecting love and admiration for beauty.

The second feature is the philosophical and topical content. Bunin castigates the meaninglessness of the existence of the elite of society, its spoiling, disrespect for other people. It was because of this bourgeoisie, cut off from the life of the people and having fun at their expense, that two years later a bloody revolution broke out in the writer’s homeland. Everyone felt that something needed to be changed, but no one did anything, which is why so much blood was shed, so many tragedies happened in those difficult times. And the theme of searching for the meaning of life does not lose relevance, which is why the story still interests the reader 100 years later.

I. A. Bunin is a realist writer. From Bunin's stories, one can easily imagine the life of pre-revolutionary Russia in all its details: noble estates, the life and culture of a class carried away by time, clay huts of peasants and rich black soil on the roads. The writer strives to comprehend the human soul, to see the “signs” of the Russian national character.
As a sensitive artist, Bunin senses the approach of great social catastrophes, and the catastrophic nature of existence becomes the main theme of his stories of 1913-1914. How can a writer in prose convey his premonitions, sensations, and depict what is visible only to the prophetic gaze of a thinker?
Realist writers often used symbolic images that expand the possibilities of realistic depiction.
Thus, the steamship Atlantis becomes a symbol in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” written in 1915. In it, the hero of the story goes to the Old World to “reward himself for years of work.” “There were many passengers, the steamship - the famous Atlantis - looked like a huge hotel with all the amenities, with a night bar, with oriental baths, with its own newspaper...” Bunin’s “Atlantis” is not only the scene of action in the story. She is a model of the world in which the writer’s heroes and he himself live. This is a model of the bourgeois world, divided into a snow-white deck and the underwater womb of a steamship, similar to the ninth circle of hell,
with gigantic fireboxes and people drenched in sweat. It is they who set this “floating world” in motion. “A great many servants in the cooks’, sculleries and wine cellars” ensure a calm and well-fed life for those at the top, for those at the bar who carefreely put their feet up on the arms of their chairs, sip cognac and liqueurs, floating in waves of spicy smoke.” The inhabitants of the “upper” and “lower” worlds of “Atlantis” do not see each other, do not enter into any relationships, but both of them float “in the icy darkness,” “among a storm with sleet.” And overboard the ocean roars and roars, and the ship trembles, overcoming the black mountains of waves. How can one not remember here the very name of the ship: Atlantis - an entire civilization that disappeared in the depths of the ocean.
But so far only the prophet-writer can hear the alarming roar of the “ocean”, the inexorable passage of time approaching its “rush hour”.
In the story, time stops only for one passenger - a gentleman from San Francisco, whose name no one remembers. But the reader is left with a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of the inevitability of terrible events, the death of the whole world with its established order.
Bunin, seeing around him the abundance of social evil, ignorance, cruelty, having witnessed the bloody carnage on the fields of the World War, expected with sorrow and fear the imminent collapse of the “great Russian power.” This determined his attitude to the revolution and his subsequent thirty-year “self-exile.”
But even after the revolution, after two world wars and after the death of the author himself, the “Atlantis” created by him reminds us of how illusory and fragile the world is, how small and sometimes helpless a person is in this world, where the ocean constantly hums, rages and “calls with furious anger" siren of "Atlantis".