Reason or feelings: Clean Monday I. Bunin (Unified State Examination Arguments). Plot analysis: “Clean Monday”, Bunin I

Bunin's tragic love story forms the basis of the story " Clean Monday" Two people suddenly meet, and beauty and beauty flare up between them. pure feeling. Love brings not only joy, lovers experience enormous torment that torments their souls. The work by Ivan Bunin describes a meeting between a man and a woman, which made them forget about all their problems.

The author begins his story not from the very beginning of the novel, but immediately from its development, when the love of two people reaches its climax. I. Bunin perfectly describes all the details of this day: the Moscow day was not only winter, but, according to the author’s description, dark and gray. The lovers dined in different places: today it could be “Prague”, and tomorrow they ate at the “Hermitage”, then it could be “Metropol”, or some other establishment.

From the very beginning Bunin's work the premonition of some kind of misfortune, a great tragedy, does not leave. Main character tries not to think about what will happen tomorrow, about what this relationship might lead to. He understood that he shouldn’t talk about the future with someone who was so close to him. After all, she simply did not like these conversations and she did not answer any of his questions.

But why didn’t the main character want to, like many girls, dream about the future and make plans? Maybe this is a momentary attraction that should end soon? Or does she already know everything that is about to happen to her in the future? Ivan Bunin describes his heroine as if she were a perfect woman who cannot be compared with other beautiful female images.

The main character is studying in courses, not understanding how she manages to do this later in life. The Bunin girl is well educated, she has a sense of sophistication and intelligence. Everything in her house should be beautiful. But the world she is not at all interested, she moves away from him. From her behavior it seemed that she was indifferent to theaters, and to flowers, and to books, and to dinners. And this indifference does not prevent her from completely immersing herself in life and enjoying it, reading books and getting impressions.

The beautiful couple seemed ideal to the people around them; they were even watched as they went. And there was something to envy! Young, beautiful, rich - all these characteristics suited this couple. This happy idyll turns out to be strange, since the girl does not want to become the wife of the main character. This makes you think about the sincerity of the lover’s and the man’s feelings. For all his questions, the girl finds only one explanation: she does not know how to be a wife.

It is clear that the girl does not understand what her purpose in life is. Her soul is tossing: a luxurious life attracts her, but she wants something else. That is why she constantly arrives in thoughts and reflections. The feelings that the girl experiences are incomprehensible to her, she cannot and main character understand them.

She is attracted to religion, the girl goes to church with pleasure, and admires holiness. The heroine herself cannot understand why this attracts her so much. One day she decides to take an important step - to cut her hair as a nun. Without telling her lover anything, the girl leaves. After a while, the main character receives a letter from her, where the young woman reports her action, but she doesn’t even try to explain.

The main character finds it difficult to cope with the actions of his beloved woman. One day he was able to see her by chance among the nuns. It is no coincidence that Bunin gives his work the title “Clean Monday.” The day before this day, the lovers had a serious conversation about religion. The main character was surprised for the first time by the thoughts of his bride, they were so new and interesting to him.

External contentment with life hid the depth of this nature, her subtlety and religiosity, her constant torment, which brought the girl to the monastery of a nun. Deep internal searches help explain the young woman’s indifference that she showed towards social life. She did not see herself among everything that surrounded her. Happy and mutual love does not help her find harmony in her soul. In this Bunin story, love and tragedy are inseparable. Love is given to the heroes as a kind of test that they have to pass.

The love tragedy of the main characters lies in the fact that they could not fully understand each other and could not correctly evaluate the individuals who had found their soul mate. Bunin, with his story “Clean Monday”, affirms the idea that every person is a huge and richest world. The inner world of a young woman is rich spiritually, but her thoughts and reflections do not find support in this world. Love for the main character is no longer a salvation for her, but the girl sees this as a problem.

The heroine’s strong will helps her to leave love, to abandon it, to abandon it forever. In the monastery, her spiritual search ceases, and the young woman develops new affection and love. The heroine finds the meaning of life in love for God. Everything petty and vulgar now does not concern her; now no one disturbs her loneliness and peace.

Bunin's story is both tragic and sad. Moral choice stands before every person and must be done correctly. The heroine chooses her life path, and the main character, continuing to love her, cannot find himself in this life. His fate is sad and tragic. The young woman’s act towards him is cruel. They both suffer: the hero because of the act of his beloved, and she of her own free will.

Based on the story by I. A. Bunin “Clean Monday”

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin - greatest writer turn of XIX-XX centuries He entered literature as a poet and created wonderful poetic works. 1895 ...The first story “To the End of the World” is published. Encouraged by the praise of critics, Bunin begins to study literary creativity. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a laureate of various awards, including laureate Nobel Prize on literature 1933

In 1944, the writer creates one of wonderful stories about love, about the most beautiful, significant and highest thing that exists on Earth - the story “Clean Monday”. Bunin said about this story of his: “I thank God that He gave me to write, Clean Monday.”

In the story “Clean Monday,” the psychologism of Bunin’s prose and the peculiarities of “external depiction” were especially clearly manifested.

“The Moscow gray winter day was darkening, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the store windows were warmly illuminated - and the evening Moscow life, freed from daytime affairs, flared up, the cabbies' sleighs rushed thicker and more vigorously, the crowded, diving trams rattled more heavily - in the darkness it was already visible how the green stars hissed from the wires - the dimly blackened passers-by hurried more animatedly along the snowy sidewalks...” - these are the words with which the author begins his narrative, taking the reader to old Moscow at the beginning of the 20th century. Writer with greatest detail, without losing sight of the slightest detail, reproduces all the signs of this era. And from the very first lines he gives the story special sound constant mention of details of deep antiquity: about ancient Moscow churches, monasteries, icons (the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Iveron Church, the Martha and Mary Convent, the icon of the Mother of God of the Three Hands), about the names of outstanding personalities. But next to this antiquity, eternity, we notice signs of a later way of life: the restaurants “Prague”, “Hermitage”, “Metropol”, “Yar”, known and accessible to the wealthiest layers of citizens; books modern authors; “Motla” by Ertel and Chekhov... Judging by how the action unfolds in the story, we can judge that the past for the heroes is extremely clear, the present is vague, and the future is absolutely unclear.

There are two heroes in the story: he and she, a man and a woman. The man, according to the writer, was healthy, rich, young and handsome for some reason with a southern, hot beauty, he was even “indecently handsome.” But the most important thing is that the hero is in love, so in love that he is ready to fulfill any whim of the heroine, just not to lose her. But, unfortunately, he cannot and does not try to understand what is going on in the soul of his beloved: he “tried not to think, not to think about it.” The woman is portrayed as mysterious, enigmatic. She is mysterious, just as the soul of a Russian woman with her spirituality, devotion, dedication, self-denial is mysterious in general... The hero himself admits: “She was mysterious, strange to me.” Her whole life is woven from inexplicable contradictions and tossing. “It looked like she didn’t need anything: no flowers, no books, no lunches, no theaters, no dinners out of town,” the narrator says, but immediately adds: “Although flowers were still her favorite and unloved, all the books... she always read, she ate a whole box of chocolate a day, at lunches and dinners she ate as much as me...” When going somewhere, she most often did not know where she would go next, what she would do, in a word, she did not know, with by whom, how and where he will spend his time.

The writer tells us quite fully about her origins and her current activities. But in describing the heroine’s life, Bunin very often uses indefinite adverbs (for some reason there was a portrait of a barefoot Tolstoy hanging above her sofa).

All a woman’s actions are spontaneous, irrational and at the same time as if planned. On the night of Clean Monday, she gives herself to the hero, knowing that in the morning she will go to the monastery, but whether this departure is final is also unclear. Throughout the entire story, the author shows that the heroine does not feel comfortable anywhere, she does not believe in the existence of simple earthly happiness. “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing,” she quotes Platon Karataev.

The emotional impulses of the heroes of “Clean Monday” often defy logical explanation. It seems as if both the man and the woman have no control over themselves, are not able to control their feelings.

The story centers on events in Forgiveness Sunday and Clean Monday. Forgiveness Sunday is a religious holiday revered by all believers. They ask each other for forgiveness and forgive their loved ones. For the heroine, this is a very special day, not only a day of forgiveness, but also a day of farewell to worldly life. Clean Monday is the first day of Lent, on which a person is cleansed of all filth, when the joy of Maslenitsa gives way to introspection. This day becomes a turning point in the hero's life. Having gone through the suffering associated with the loss of his beloved, the hero experiences the influence of surrounding forces and realizes everything that he had not noticed before, being blinded by his love for the heroine. Two years later, the man, remembering the events of days long gone, will repeat the route of their long-standing joint trip, and “for some reason” he will really want to go to the church of the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery. What unknown forces draw him towards his beloved? Does he strive for the spiritual world into which she goes? We don’t know this, the author does not lift the veil of secrecy for us. He only shows us humility in the soul of the hero, their last meeting ends with his humble departure, and not the awakening of his former passions.

The future of the heroes is unclear. Besides everything, the writer does not even directly indicate anywhere that the nun the man met is his former lover. Only one detail - dark eyes - resembles the appearance of the heroine. It is noteworthy that the heroine goes to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. This monastery is not a monastery, but the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady on Ordynka, which had a community society ladies who took care of the orphans who lived near the church and those wounded in the first world war. And this service in the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God, perhaps, is a spiritual insight for the heroine of “Clean Monday”, because it was the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God who warned the world against war, death, blood, orphanhood...

Glazunova Veronica

REVIEW OF THE STORY “CLEAN MONDAY”

The external events of the story "Clean Monday" are not particularly complex and fit well into the theme of the cycle." Dark alleys". This is a story about the beautiful young love of two nameless people - a man and a woman.

Like most of Bunin’s works, “Clean Monday” is the author’s attempt to describe and convey to the reader his understanding of the phenomenon of love, which was done by many great writers before and after Bunin, but at the same time everyone found something special in love that distinguishes it from others feelings. For Bunin, any true, sincere love is great happiness for a person, even if it ends in death or separation. "Sunstroke" - here best definition love in Bunin’s understanding, it comes suddenly, sharply and radically changing a person’s worldview, his view of surrounding reality. But when the happiness of love passes, only pain remains - the person is no longer able to return to his former life. "Happiness has no tomorrow; he doesn’t even have yesterday; it does not remember the past, does not think about the future; he has a present - and that’s not a day, but a moment,” writes Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev in the story “Asya”. In my opinion, Turgenev’s concept of love is similar to Bunin’s.

But the story “Clean Monday” is not only a story about love; problems of morality and necessity are also mixed in with this. life choice, honesty with yourself.

Bunin paints these two young people as beautiful, self-confident: “We were both rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that in restaurants and at concerts they looked at us.” The author emphasizes that material and physical well-being is by no means a guarantee of happiness. Happiness is in a person’s soul, in his self-awareness and attitude. “Our happiness, my friend,” the heroine quotes Platon Karataev’s words, “is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it’s inflated, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing.”

Beloved in "Clean Monday" - absolutely different people. He, despite his attractiveness and education, is an ordinary person, not distinguished by any special strength of character. She is truly an integral, rare “chosen” nature. And she has serious concerns moral issues, problem of choice later life.

She renounces worldly life, entertainment, social society and, most importantly, her love, and goes to the monastery on “Clean Monday,” the first day of Lent. Undoubtedly, this is not a groundless impulse; she went towards it for a very long time - she visited monasteries, churches, cemeteries. Only in contact with the eternal, spiritual did she feel in her place. It may seem strange that she combined these activities with going to theaters, restaurants, reading fashionable books, and communicating with bohemian society. This can be explained by her youth, which is characterized by the search for herself, her place in life. Her consciousness is torn, the harmony of her soul is disrupted. She is intensely looking for something of her own, whole, heroic, selfless, and finds her ideal in serving God. The present seems to her pitiful, untenable, and even love for young man cannot keep her in worldly life.

The story “Clean Monday” tells about self-improvement and the ascent of the individual to new stages, to which nothing can be an obstacle, not even such a feeling as love. Bunin's masterful, laconic style allows him to fit so much into a few pages. deep meaning, which can be the basis of an entire novel, and the main character of “Clean Monday” can be compared in importance with many female images of large prose XIX century, for example, with Sonechka Marmeladova.

// / The theme of love in Bunin’s story “Clean Monday”

One of the most frequent themes raised in Russian and world literature is the theme of love. The theme of the relationship between a man and a woman, the theme of their feelings and emotional experiences. Many writers and poets wrote about love, and each in their own way tried to show and explain this multifaceted feeling. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was no exception and also shared with us his thoughts on this issue.

The author’s love work is reflected in the collection “Dark Alleys”. This collection consists of 38 stories dedicated to the theme of love. Each of the stories presented is original in its own way. When reading them, we will not come across two identical stories, but after reading them all, we understand that the theme of love is so diverse and multifaceted that we can write about it forever.

The story “” reveals to us a love story between two people. Bunin does not name their names, simply saying - He and She. Heroes of this work were young people who lived in abundance and prosperity. They had everything you could want. They dined in restaurants, attended theaters, social evenings, and were the center of everyone's attention and admiration. But despite such external similarity and unity, the main characters of the story differed from each other in their inner world.

He was "blind" to his beloved. Every day I tried to please her, inviting her to restaurants, social evenings, and the theater. On weekends He spoiled her with “fresh” flowers, sweets, and new literature. He was blinded by his feelings for her. Feelings of love did not allow him to look into her inner world, understand its versatility. She remained a mystery to him. More than once he was perplexed by her behavior, by their relationship, without ever trying to understand it. He once said about their relationship: “ Odd love! He is surprised by her behavior in moments of intimacy; he does not understand why she constantly rejects conversations about their future.

Bunin does not endow his hero with the depth of emotional experiences that he gives to his heroine. She indifferently accepts all gifts and visits entertainment venues. One day She decides to declare that she wants to visit Novodevichy Convent, because restaurants are already extremely boring. The main character does not understand such thoughts and conversations of his beloved. It turns out that He does not know her at all. Her passion for Russian legends and Russian chronicles becomes a real discovery for him. In her free time from entertainment events, She goes to the Kremlin cathedrals. But all these stories are alien to him; it is important for him to be close to his beloved and enjoy every minute spent with her.

For love lyrics Bunin is characterized by what the author does not show us further development love relationship two people. They don't end happy marriage, strong family. The main character of “Clean Monday”, sharing a bed with the main character, left without saying a word. She sent him a letter in which she asked him not to look for her and said that she had gone to a monastery. For a long time she could not make a choice between pleasure and harmony. And only Clean Monday finally determined the choice main character and became decisive in their relationship.

In “Clean Monday” Bunin showed us love as a feeling, as a test, as great mystery of the universe.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a wonderful Russian writer, a man of great and complex destiny. He was a recognized classic Russian literature, and also became the first in Russia Nobel laureate. Bunin combined all the stories written from 1937 to 1944 into the book “Dark Alleys”. They are brought together by the motif of memories, the image of Russian nature. He writes about summer, autumn, day and night, about grief, happiness, sometimes a brief moment of joy or pain. Bunin comes to the fore with an appeal to eternal themes love, death and nature. One of the stories included in this collection is “Clean Monday”. I decided to dwell on it in more detail.

The external events of the story “Clean Monday” are not particularly complex and fit well into the theme of the “Dark Alleys” cycle. The action takes place in 1913. A kind, handsome and frivolous young man (nameless, like his girlfriend) shares his memories here. Young people, he and she, met one day at a lecture in the literary art club and fell in love with each other. They began to meet and spend time together free time. He courted her and wanted more Serious relationships, but she was mysteriously silent, never letting him get out of control. He himself says that he always “tried not to think, not to think out” the actions of his beloved. It’s no wonder that you can understand the silent, mysterious, beautiful woman failed. The main thing for the author was to convey to the reader all its exclusivity, and he succeeded in full. The eyes of a passionate admirer constantly “catch” the inexplicability of the behavior of his chosen one. She indulged social entertainment, allowed the man to caress, but refused a serious conversation with him. Even more strange was the parallel fascination with restaurants, theatrical "cabbages" and cathedrals, holy books. The heroine seems to unite incompatible “styles” in her soul. He dreams of reconciling them. This is exactly how he wants to love the better one, but cannot. Their intimacy still occurs, but after spending just one night together, the lovers part forever, for the heroine on Clean Monday, i.e. on the first day of the pre-Easter fast in 1913, accepts final decision go to a monastery, parting with your past. But, hiding in a monastery, he continues to suffer there from the unattainable.

The story is masterfully and concisely written. Each stroke has an obvious and hidden meaning. What is the heroine’s latest, sophisticated, secular, black-velvet outfit with her hairstyle like a Shamakhan queen worth? An unexpected and revealing combination. The girl constantly follows different paths, vividly reminiscent of the differences surrounding her. That's how symbolic meaning female image. He combined a craving for spiritual feat and to all the wealth of the world, doubts, sacrifice and longing for the ideal.

There is another meaning in the story of the author's reflections. The eternal contradictions of human, more specifically, female nature, love, sublime and earthly, sensual, determined the heroine’s trials. Her courage and ability to go through all the prohibitions and temptations help to reveal the mysterious, irresistible power of instinct. But the warmer and more sympathetic the author’s attitude towards the young woman is, the more she resists completely natural, although painful for her, attractions.
In the theme of love, Bunin reveals himself as a man of amazing talent, a subtle psychologist who knows how to convey the state of the soul wounded by love. The writer does not avoid complex, frank topics, depicting the most intimate human experiences in his stories. Over the centuries, many literary artists have dedicated their works to the great feeling of love, and each of them found something unique and individual about this theme. It seems to me that the peculiarity of Bunin the artist is that he considers love to be a tragedy, a catastrophe, madness, a great feeling, capable of both infinitely elevating and destroying a person.

Love is a mysterious element that transforms a person’s life, giving his destiny uniqueness against the background of ordinary everyday stories, filling his earthly existence with special meaning.

Extraordinary strength and sincerity of feeling are characteristic of the heroes of Bunin's stories. Love captures all a person’s thoughts, all his strength. In order for love not to fizzle out, it is necessary to part forever, which happens in all of Bunin’s stories. All his heroes live in anticipation of love, search for it, and most often, scorched by it, die. For a writer, love does not last long in the family, in marriage, in everyday life. A short, dazzling flash, which illuminates the souls of lovers to the bottom, leads them to a tragic end - death, suicide, separation. The theme of pure and beautiful feeling runs through the entire work of the Russian writer. “All love is great happiness, even if it is not shared” - these words are from the story “Dark Alleys”

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is one of the most prominent Russian writers of the twentieth century. He was excellent at both poetry and prose, as short stories, and novels. But still, I appreciate Ivan Alekseevich’s talent precisely for that part of his work that can be called the “small” genre. And I especially like Bunin’s stories, the main theme of which is love.

These works most clearly reveal the author's talent for describing everything intimate, sometimes quite unusual, for conveying ideas and thoughts. Extraordinary poetry brings sensuality to the narrative, which is so necessary for works with such themes. If you trace Bunin's entire work from beginning to end, you can divide it into periods, based on what theme he prefers in his works. I am interested in the collection “Dark Alleys,” written during the Second World War, because it is entirely devoted to the theme of love; after reading the stories from it, you can try to formulate the main idea, the author’s thought. In my opinion, the main “thesis” of Bunin’s work lies in the quote: “All love is great happiness, even if it is not divided.” But in love dramas collection, namely they form its basis, one can also be convinced that Bunin values ​​only the natural, pure love, high human feeling, rejecting contrived false impressions. Ivan Alekseevich also in his stories inextricably connects love with death, connects the beautiful and the terrible. But this is not a far-fetched composition, the author is thus trying to show readers how close love borders on death, how close the two extremes are to each other.

The most well-known stories to readers are “Sunstroke”, “Clean Monday” and “Natalie”. They all fit perfectly into the description of the tragic love story with a sad ending, but in each of them Bunin reveals to us new aspect, A New Look for love.

The heroes of “Sunstroke” meet completely by chance on a ship. But their fleeting attraction does not pass without a trace for both characters. She tells the lieutenant: “Nothing even similar to what happened has ever happened to me, and there never will be again. The eclipse definitely came over me... Or rather, we both got something like sunstroke" But this shock affects him only when he, having escorted her to the ship, returns to the hotel. His heart “squeezed with an incomprehensible tenderness,” and “he felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was overcome by horror and despair,” because he did not know her name or surname. The love that the lieutenant realized too late almost destroys him; he is ready to die for one more day spent with her. But we are convinced that in fact love is a blessing, despite the fact that it ends so quickly, we understand how strong and comprehensive this feeling is.

In the short story “Clean Monday,” so beloved by the author, we are told about unrequited love hero to the mysterious heroine. She is not interested in and even rejects many things accepted in their circle; her complex nature haunts the hero. The heroine’s alienation (“she doesn’t need anything: neither flowers, nor books, nor dinners, nor theaters, nor dinners outside the city...”) is explained on Forgiveness Sunday, when the heroes go together to the cemetery. We learn about her passion for antiquity, Kremlin cathedrals and monasteries. The heroine tries to find meaning and support in the world around her, but she doesn’t find it, even the hero’s love does not bring her happiness. The meaning of the name is that the heroine, not finding beauty and spirituality in modern world, is cleared of her previous life and goes to a monastery, where, as it seems to her, she will be happy.
The main character of the third story, Vitaly Meshchersky, turns out to be himself guilty of the love tragedy that played out between him, his cousin Sonya and her friend Natalie. The student cannot decide whether to prefer “passionate bodily intoxication” for Sonya or a sincere and sublime feeling for Natalie. Avoidance of choice ends tragic ending. The author shows us that Vitaly’s feeling for Sonya is feigned, but his love for Natalie is true, proving her superiority.

In stories about love, I. A. Bunin claims that love is a high and beautiful feeling, and a person who is capable of love is highly moral. Despite the fact that love brings not only joy and happiness, but also grief and suffering, it is a great feeling. And I completely agree with this.