INSTRUCTIONS AND PROPHECIES OF THE Blessed MOTHER ALIPIA GOLOSEEVSKY, Kyiv...
They meet in the summer, on one of the Volga steamers. He is a lieutenant, She is a lovely, small, tanned woman returning home from Anapa.
I'm completely drunk, she laughed. - Actually, I'm completely crazy. Three hours ago, I didn't even know you existed.
The lieutenant kisses her hand, and his heart beats blissfully and terribly.
The ship approaches the pier, the lieutenant begs her to get off. A minute later they go to the hotel and rent a large but stuffy room. As soon as the footman closes the door behind him, both of them merge into a kiss so frenetically that they later remember this moment for many years: none of them has ever experienced anything like this.
And in the morning this little nameless woman, jokingly calling herself "a beautiful stranger" and "Tsarist Marya Morevna", leaves. Despite the almost sleepless night, she is fresh, as at seventeen, a little embarrassed, still simple, cheerful, and already reasonable: she asks the lieutenant to stay until the next ship.
There has never been anything even similar to what happened to me, and there will never be again. It's like an eclipse hit me... Or rather, we both got something like a sunstroke...
And the lieutenant somehow easily agrees with her, takes her to the pier, puts her on the ship and kisses her on deck in front of everyone.
Easily and carefree, he returns to the hotel, but the room seems to the lieutenant somehow different. He is still full of it - and empty. The lieutenant's heart suddenly shrinks with such tenderness that he has no strength to look at the unmade bed - and he closes it with a screen. He thinks this cute "road adventure" is over. He can’t “come to this city where her husband, her three-year-old girl, in general, all of her usual life».
This thought shocks him. He feels such pain and the uselessness of his entire future life without her that he is seized by horror and despair. The lieutenant begins to believe that this is really a "sunstroke", and does not know "how to live this endless day, with these memories, with this insoluble torment."
The lieutenant goes to the bazaar, to the cathedral, then circles around the abandoned garden for a long time, but nowhere does he find peace and deliverance from this uninvited feeling.
How wild, how absurd everything is everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck by this terrible “sunstroke”, too much love, too much happiness.
Returning to the hotel, the lieutenant orders dinner. Everything is fine, but he knows that without hesitation he would die tomorrow if it were possible by some miracle to return the “beautiful stranger” and prove how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her. He does not know why, but it is more necessary for him than life.
Realizing that it is impossible to get rid of this unexpected love, the lieutenant resolutely goes to the post office with a telegram already written, but he stops in horror at the post office - he does not know either her last name or first name! The lieutenant returns to the hotel completely broken, lies down on the bed, closes his eyes, feeling the tears rolling down his cheeks, and finally falls asleep.
The lieutenant wakes up in the evening. Yesterday and this morning he remembers as a distant past. He gets up, washes, drinks tea with lemon for a long time, pays for the room and goes to the pier.
The ship leaves at night. The lieutenant sits under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older.
The writing
Bunin considered the book "Dark Alleys" - a cycle of stories about love - to be his most perfect creation. The book was written during the Second World War, when the Bunin family found itself in an extremely difficult situation (conflicts with the authorities, the virtual lack of food, cold, etc.). The writer made in this book an attempt unprecedented in artistic courage: he wrote thirty-eight times (such is the number of stories in the book) "about the same thing." However, the result of this amazing constancy is striking: every time a sensitive reader experiences the recreated picture (seemingly known to him) as absolutely new, and the sharpness of the “feeling details” communicated to him is not only not dulled, but, it seems, only intensifies. In terms of themes and stylistic features, the collection "Dark Alleys" adjoins the story "Sunstroke" created back in 1927.
The narrative technique of Bunin's later works is distinguished by a striking combination of noble simplicity and sophistication. "Sunstroke" begins - without any pre-emptive explanation - with a vaguely personal sentence: "After dinner, we left the bright and hotly lit dining room on deck ...". The reader still does not know anything about the upcoming event or about its participants: the very first impressions of the reader are associated with sensations of light and heat. The images of fire, stuffiness, sunshine will keep the “high temperature” of the narrative throughout this six-page story. The heroine's hand will smell like a tan; in a “pink” kosovorotka a hotel footman will meet a young couple, and a hotel room will turn out to be “terribly stuffy, hotly heated”; the “unfamiliar town” will be saturated with heat, in which you will have to burn yourself from touching the buttons of your clothes and squint from the unbearable light.
Who is “she”, where and when does the action take place? Perhaps the reader, like main character, will not have time to give himself an account of this: in Bunin's story, all this will be pushed to the periphery only important event- "too much love", "too much happiness". The story, devoid of exposition, will end with a laconic epilogue - a short sentence, in which the lieutenant, who feels like he has aged ten years, will forever freeze.
The transience of the incident that served as the basis for the plot is emphasized in "Sunstroke", as in other later works of Bunin, by the fragmentation, dottedness of the story about love rapprochement: separate details, gestures, fragments of dialogue are selected and as if hastily assembled. The tongue twister says about the parting of the lieutenant with the “beautiful stranger”: “easily agreed”, “drew to the pier”, “kissed on deck”, “returned to the hotel”. In general, the description of the meeting of lovers takes a little more than one page of text. This compositional feature of Bunin's works about love - the selection of the most significant, critical episodes, the high plot "speed" in the transfer of the love story - allows many literary historians to talk about the "novelistic" nature of Bunin's late prose. Very often (and quite reasonably) researchers directly call these works of his short stories. However, Bunin's works are not limited to a dynamic story about the ups and downs of love.
The repetitive "formula" of the plot - a meeting, a quick rapprochement, a blinding flash of feelings and an inevitable parting, sometimes accompanied by the death of one of the lovers - precisely because of its repetition ceases to be "news" (the literal meaning of the Italian word "novella"). Moreover, as a rule, already the initial fragments of the text contain the author's indications not only of the transience of the upcoming event, but also of the future memories of the characters. In Sunstroke, a similar indication follows immediately after the mention of the first kiss: "... Both ... for many years then remembered this moment: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives." Noteworthy is the “grammatical inaccuracy”, possibly deliberately made by Bunin in this sentence: the verb “experienced” should have been used in plural. A possible explanation is the author's desire for the ultimate generalization: regardless of social, psychological, and even gender differences, the characters in Bunin's stories embody one consciousness and one worldview.
Let us pay attention to how, within the framework of one sentence, “wonderful moment” and “whole life” are conjugated and turn out to be values of the same order. Bunin writes not only about love, the scale of all earthly human existence is important for him, he is attracted by the mysterious fusion of “terrible” and “beautiful”, “miracle” and “horror” of this life. That is why the love plot often turns out to be only a part of the work, coexisting with fragments of a meditative nature.
Almost five of the total six pages of the text of "Sunstroke" describe the state of the lieutenant after parting with a stranger. Actually, the novelistic plot is only a preamble to the hero's lyrically rich reflections on the mystery of life. The intonation of these reflections is given by a dotted line of recurring persistent questions that do not imply an answer: “Why prove it?”, “What to do now?”, “Where to go?”. As we can see, the series of events of the story is subordinated to the universal problems of eternal "joys and sorrows". The growing feeling of immensity and - at the same time - the tragic irretrievability of the experienced happiness constitutes the compositional core of the story in "Sunstroke".
Bunin's focus on the "eternal" questions of human existence, on the existential problems of being, does not make love stories philosophical: the writer does not like logical abstractions, does not allow philosophical terminology into his texts. The foundation of Bunin's style is not a logically consistent development of thought, but an artistic intuition of life, which finds expression in almost physiologically perceptible descriptions, in complex "patterns" of light and rhythmic contrasts.
The experience of life is the material of Bunin's stories. What is the subject of this experience? At first glance, the narrative in his stories is oriented towards the point of view of the character (this is especially noticeable in "Clean Monday", the story in which is told from the perspective of a wealthy Muscovite, outwardly distant from the author). However, the characters, even if they are endowed with signs of individuality, appear in both analyzed stories as a kind of mediums of some higher consciousness. These characters are characterized by "ghostliness": they are like the shadows of the author, and therefore the descriptions of their appearance are extremely concise. The portrait of the lieutenant in "Sunstroke" is made in a deliberately "depersonalizing" manner: "He ... looked at himself in the mirror: the face him, the usual an officer's face, gray from sunburn, with a whitish, sun-bleached mustache and bluish whiteness of the eyes ... ". We only learn about the narrator of Pure Monday that he “was handsome at that time for some reason, southern, hot beauty ...”
Bunin's characters were given exceptional sharpness of sensual reactions, which was characteristic of the author himself. That is why the writer almost never resorts to the form of an internal monologue (this would make sense if the character's mental organization were significantly different from the author's). The author and the characters (and after them the readers) of Bunin's stories see and hear in the same way, they are equally amazed at the infinity of the day and the transience of life. Bunin's manner is far from Tolstoy's methods of "dialectics of the soul"; it is also unlike Turgenev's "secret psychologism" (when the writer avoids direct assessments, but allows one to judge the state of the hero's soul by skillfully selected external manifestations the senses). The movements of the soul of Bunin's heroes defy logical explanation. The characters seem to have no power over themselves, as if they are deprived of the ability to control their feelings.
In this regard, Bunin's predilection for impersonal verbal constructions in descriptions of the character's states is interesting. “We had to escape, to occupy ourselves with something, to distract ourselves, to go somewhere ...” - he conveys the state of the hero of “Sunstroke”. “... For some reason, I definitely wanted to go there,” the narrator of Pure Monday testifies about visiting the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, where he will see his beloved for the last time. The life of the soul in the image of Bunin is beyond the control of reason, inexplicable, it languishes with the mystery of the meaning hidden from mortals. The most important role in the transfer of "emotional whirlwinds" experienced by the characters is played by the methods of lyrical "infection" (associative parallels, rhythmic and sound organization of the text).
Vision, hearing, taste and temperature sensations of the lieutenant in "Sunstroke" are extremely sharpened. That is why the whole symphony of smells is so organic in the story (from the smells of hay and tar to the smells of “her good English cologne ..., her suntan and canvas dress”), and the details of the sound background (“soft knock” of the steamer hitting the pier ; the sound of bowls and pots sold at the market; the noise of “boiling and running forward water”), and gastronomic details (botvinya with ice, lightly salted cucumbers with dill, tea with lemon). But the states of the character most expressively described in the story are associated with a sharp perception of the luminous and radiant sun. It is precisely from the details of light and temperature, again and again presented in close-up and giving distinctness to the inner rhythm of the story, that the "brocade" verbal fabric of "Sunstroke" is woven. Bringing together, focusing these energetic verbal threads, Bunin, without any explanation, without appealing to the consciousness of the character, conveys the ecstasy of the moments he experiences. However, the psychological state of the lieutenant turns out to be not only a fact of his inner life. The inseparability of beauty and horror; joy, from which “the heart was simply torn to pieces,” turn out to be objectively existing characteristics of being.
The writer turns in his late prose not to the rationally comprehended facets of life, but to those spheres of experience that allow, at least for a moment, to touch the mysterious, metaphysical depths of being (metaphysical is that which is beyond the limits perceived by man). natural phenomena; that cannot be rationally comprehended). This is precisely the sphere of love for Bunin - the sphere of unsolved mystery, unspokenness, opaque semantic depth. The love experience in the image of the writer is associated with an unprecedented rise in all the emotional abilities of a person, with his exit into a special - contrasting with the everyday flow of life - dimension. This is the true dimension of being, in which far from everyone is involved, but only those who are given a happy (and always the only) opportunity to experience the painful joy of love.
Love in Bunin's works allows a person to accept life as the greatest gift, to acutely feel the joy of earthly existence, but this joy for the writer is not a blissful and serene state, but a tragic feeling, colored with anxiety. The emotional atmosphere of the stories is created by the interaction of the motifs of love, beauty and inevitable finiteness, the short duration of happiness, which are stable in Bunin's late prose. Joy and torment, sadness and jubilation are fused in Bunin's later works into an indissoluble whole. "Tragic major" - this is how the pathos of Bunin's stories about love was defined by the critic of the Russian abroad Georgy Adamovich: places, the sun is the sun, love is love, good is good.
After dinner they left the brightly and hotly lit dining room on deck and stopped at the rail. She closed her eyes, put her hand to her cheek with her palm outward, laughed with a simple, charming laugh—everything was lovely about that little woman—and said: - I seem to be drunk ... Where did you come from? Three hours ago, I didn't even know you existed. I don't even know where you sat. In Samara? But still... Is it my head spinning or are we turning somewhere? Ahead was darkness and lights. From the darkness a strong, soft wind beat in the face, and the lights rushed somewhere to the side: the steamer, with Volga panache, abruptly described a wide arc, running up to a small pier. The lieutenant took her hand and raised it to his lips. The hand, small and strong, smelled of sunburn. And my heart sank blissfully and terribly at the thought of how strong and swarthy she must have been all under that light linen dress after a whole month of lying under the southern sun on the hot sea sand (she said she was coming from Anapa). The lieutenant muttered:- Let's go... - Where? she asked in surprise. - At this pier.- Why? He said nothing. She again put the back of her hand to her hot cheek. - Madness... "Let's go," he repeated stupidly. - I beg you... "Oh, do as you please," she said, turning away. The steamer ran with a soft thud into the dimly lit pier, and they almost fell on top of each other. The end of the rope flew over their heads, then it rushed back, and the water boiled with noise, the gangway rattled ... The lieutenant rushed for things. A minute later they passed the sleepy desk, stepped out onto the deep, hub-deep sand, and silently sat down in a dusty cab. The gentle ascent uphill, among the rare crooked lanterns, along the road soft from dust, seemed endless. But then they got up, drove off and crackled along the pavement, here was some kind of square, official places, a watchtower, warmth and smells of a summer district town at night ... The cabman stopped near the lighted entrance, behind the open doors of which an old wooden staircase, an old, unshaven footman in a pink blouse and frock coat, took his things with displeasure and walked forward on his trampled feet. They entered a large, but terribly stuffy room, hotly heated during the day by the sun, with white curtains drawn down on the windows and two unburned candles on the under-mirror, and as soon as they entered and the footman closed the door, the lieutenant rushed to her so impetuously and both suffocated so frantically in a kiss that for many years they later remembered this moment: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives. At ten o'clock in the morning, sunny, hot, happy, with the ringing of churches, with a market on the square in front of the hotel, with the smell of hay, tar, and again all that complex and odorous smell of a Russian county town, she, this little nameless woman, and without saying her name, jokingly calling herself a beautiful stranger, she left. They slept little, but in the morning, coming out from behind the screen near the bed, having washed and dressed in five minutes, she was as fresh as at seventeen. Was she embarrassed? No, very little. As before, she was simple, cheerful and - already reasonable. “No, no, dear,” she said in response to his request to go on together, “no, you must stay until the next boat. If we go together, everything will be ruined. It will be very unpleasant for me. I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think of me. There has never been anything even similar to what happened to me, and there will never be again. It's like an eclipse hit me... Or rather, we both got something like a sunstroke... And the lieutenant somehow easily agreed with her. In a light and happy spirit, he drove her to the pier - just in time for the departure of the pink "Airplane", - kissed her on deck in front of everyone and barely managed to jump onto the gangway, which had already moved back. Just as easily, carefree, he returned to the hotel. However, something has changed. The room without her seemed somehow completely different than it was with her. He was still full of her - and empty. It was strange! There was still the smell of her good English cologne, her unfinished cup was still on the tray, and she was gone... And the lieutenant's heart suddenly contracted with such tenderness that the lieutenant hurried to light a cigarette and walked up and down the room several times. — A strange adventure! he said aloud, laughing and feeling tears welling up in his eyes. - “I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think ...” And she already left ... The screen was drawn back, the bed had not yet been made. And he felt that he simply did not have the strength to look at this bed now. He closed it with a screen, closed the windows so as not to hear the bazaar talk and the creak of wheels, lowered the white bubbling curtains, sat down on the sofa ... Yes, that's the end of this "road adventure"! She left - and now she is already far away, probably sitting in a glassy white salon or on deck and looking at the huge river shining under the sun, at the oncoming rafts, at the yellow shallows, at the radiant distance of water and sky, at all this boundless expanse of the Volga. .. And I'm sorry, and already forever, forever... Because where can they meet now? “I can’t,” he thought, “I can’t, for no reason at all, come to this city, where her husband is, where her three-year-old girl is, in general her whole family and her whole ordinary life!” - And this city seemed to him some kind of special, reserved city, and the thought that she would continue to live her lonely life in it, often, perhaps, remembering him, remembering their chance, such a fleeting meeting, and he already would never see her, the thought astounded and astounded him. No, it can't be! It would be too wild, unnatural, implausible! - And he felt such pain and such uselessness of his whole future life without her that he was seized with horror, despair. "What the hell! he thought, getting up, again beginning to pace the room and trying not to look at the bed behind the screen. - What is it with me? And what is special about it and what actually happened? In fact, just some kind of sunstroke! And most importantly, how can I now, without her, spend the whole day in this outback? He still remembered her all, with all her slightest features, remembered the smell of her tan and canvas dress, her strong body, the lively, simple and cheerful sound of her voice ... The feeling of the just experienced pleasures of all her feminine charms was still unusually alive in him. , but now the main thing was still this second, completely new feeling - that strange, incomprehensible feeling, which had not existed at all while they were together, which he could not even imagine in himself, starting yesterday, as he thought, only amusing an acquaintance, and about which it was no longer possible to tell her now! “And most importantly,” he thought, “you can never tell! And what to do, how to live this endless day, with these memories, with this insoluble torment, in this godforsaken town above that very shining Volga, along which this pink steamer carried her away! It was necessary to escape, to do something, to distract yourself, to go somewhere. He resolutely put on his cap, took a stack, quickly walked, jingling his spurs, along empty corridor, ran down the steep stairs to the entrance ... Yes, but where to go? At the entrance stood a cab driver, young, in a dexterous coat, calmly smoking a cigarette. The lieutenant looked at him in confusion and amazement: how is it possible to sit on the box so calmly, smoke, and in general be simple, careless, indifferent? “Probably I am the only one so terribly unhappy in this whole city,” he thought, heading towards the bazaar. The market has already left. For some reason, he walked through the fresh manure among the carts, among the carts with cucumbers, among the new bowls and pots, and the women sitting on the ground vied with each other to call him, take the pots in their hands and knock, ringing their fingers in them, showing their quality factor, peasants deafened him, shouted to him: “Here are the first grade cucumbers, your honor!” It was all so stupid, absurd that he fled from the market. He went to the cathedral, where they were already singing loudly, merrily and resolutely, with a sense of accomplishment, then he walked for a long time, circled around the small, hot and neglected garden on the cliff of the mountain, above the boundless light-steel expanse of the river ... Shoulder straps and buttons of his tunic so hot that they could not be touched. The band of the cap was wet inside with sweat, his face was on fire... ground floor, took off his cap with pleasure and sat down at a table near open window, which carried heat, but still blew air, ordered botvinya with ice ... Everything was fine, there was immense happiness in everything, great joy; even in this heat and in all the smells of the marketplace, in all this unfamiliar town and in this old county inn, there was this joy, and at the same time, the heart was simply torn to pieces. He drank several glasses of vodka while eating salted cucumbers with dill and feeling that he would die without hesitation tomorrow if it were possible by some miracle to bring her back, to spend one more, this day with her - to spend only then, only then, to tell her and something to prove, to convince him how painfully and enthusiastically he loves her... Why prove it? Why convince? He didn't know why, but it was more necessary than life. - The nerves are completely gone! he said, pouring out his fifth glass of vodka. He pushed the botvinia away from him, asked for black coffee and began to smoke and think hard: what should he do now, how to get rid of this sudden, unexpected love? But to get rid of - he felt it too vividly - was impossible. And suddenly he quickly got up again, took a cap and a stack, and, asking where the post office was, hurriedly went there with the telegram phrase already ready in his head: “From now on, my whole life forever, to the grave, yours, in your power.” But, having reached the old thick-walled house, where there was a post office and a telegraph office, he stopped in horror: he knew the city where she lives, knew that she had a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but did not know her name or surname! He asked her about it several times yesterday at dinner and at the hotel, and each time she laughed and said: “Why do you need to know who I am, what is my name?” On the corner, near the post office, there was a photographic display case. He looked for a long time at a large portrait of some military man in thick epaulettes, with bulging eyes, with a low forehead, with amazingly magnificent sideburns and the broadest chest, completely decorated with orders ... How wild, terrible everything is everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck - yes, astonished, he understood it now—that terrible "sunstroke," too much love, too much happiness! He glanced at the newlywed couple—a young man in a long frock coat and white tie, with crew cut, stretched out to the front arm in arm with a girl in wedding gauze—transferred his eyes to the portrait of some pretty and playful young lady in a student cap on one side... Then, languishing with tormenting envy of all these unknown to him, not suffering people, he began to stare intently along the street. - Where to go? What to do? The street was completely empty. The houses were all the same, white, two-story, merchant, with large gardens and it seemed that there was not a soul in them; thick white dust lay on the pavement; and all this was blinding, everything was flooded with hot, fiery and joyful, but here, as if by an aimless sun. In the distance the street rose, stooped and rested against a cloudless, grayish, gleaming sky. There was something southern in it, reminiscent of Sevastopol, Kerch ... Anapa. It was especially unbearable. And the lieutenant, with lowered head, squinting from the light, intently looking at his feet, staggering, stumbling, clinging to spur with spur, walked back. He returned to the hotel so overwhelmed with fatigue, as if he had made a huge transition somewhere in Turkestan, in the Sahara. He is collecting last strength, entered his large and empty room. The room was already tidied up, devoid of the last traces of her - only one hairpin, forgotten by her, lay on the night table! He took off his tunic and looked at himself in the mirror: his face—the usual officer’s face, gray from sunburn, with a whitish sun-bleached mustache and bluish white eyes that seemed even whiter from sunburn—had now an excited, crazy expression, and in There was something youthful and profoundly unhappy about a thin white shirt with a stand-up starched collar. He lay on his back on the bed, put his dusty boots on the dump. The windows were open, the curtains were lowered, and a light breeze from time to time blew them in, blew into the room the heat of the heated iron roofs and all this luminous and now completely empty, silent Volga world. He lay with his hands behind the back of his head, staring intently ahead of him. Then he clenched his teeth, closed his eyelids, feeling the tears roll down his cheeks from under them, and finally fell asleep, and when he opened his eyes again, the evening sun was already reddish yellow behind the curtains. The wind died down, it was stuffy and dry in the room, like in an oven ... Both yesterday and this morning were remembered as if they were ten years ago. He slowly got up, slowly washed himself, raised the curtains, rang the bell and asked for the samovar and the bill, and drank tea with lemon for a long time. Then he ordered a cab to be brought in, things to be carried out, and, getting into the cab, on its red, burnt-out seat, he gave the lackey a whole five rubles. “But it seems, your honor, that it was I who brought you at night!” said the driver cheerfully, taking hold of the reins. When they went down to the pier, the blue summer night was already turning blue over the Volga, and already many multi-colored lights were scattered along the river, and the lights hung on the masts of the approaching steamer. - Delivered exactly! said the driver ingratiatingly. The lieutenant gave him five rubles too, took a ticket, went to the pier... Just like yesterday, there was a soft knock on its pier and a slight dizziness from unsteadiness underfoot, then a flying end, the noise of water boiling and running forward under the wheels a little back of the steamer that was moving forward ... And it seemed unusually friendly, good from the crowd of this steamer, already lit everywhere and smelling of kitchen. A minute later they ran on, up, to the same place where they had taken her this morning. The dark summer dawn was dying away far ahead, gloomy, sleepy and multi-colored reflected in the river, which still shone here and there in trembling ripples far below it, under this dawn, and the lights scattered in the darkness all around floated and floated back. The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older. Maritime Alps, 1925.The writing
Name poetic work always important, because it always points them to the main thing from its actors, in which the thought of the composition is embodied, or directly to this thought.
V. G. Belinsky
The theme of "Sunstroke" (1925) is an image of love that suddenly seizes a person and remains in his soul the brightest memory for life. The idea of the story is in that peculiar understanding of love, which is connected with the writer's philosophical views on a person and his life. Love, from Bunin's point of view, is the moment when all the emotional abilities of a person become aggravated and he breaks away from the gray, unsettled, unhappy reality and comprehends " wonderful moment". This moment quickly passes, leaving in the soul of the hero regret about the irretrievability of happiness and gratitude that it still happened. That is why the short-term, piercing and delightful feeling of two young people who accidentally met on a steamer and parted forever in a day is compared in the story with a sunstroke. This is what the heroine says: "We both got something like a sunstroke ...".
It is interesting that this figurative expression is confirmed by the real suffocating heat of the described day. The author gradually builds up the impression of heat: the steamer smells hot of the kitchen; the “beautiful stranger” is going home from Anapa, where she sunbathed under the southern sun on the hot sand; the night when the heroes got off the ship was very warm; the footman in the hotel is dressed in a pink kosovorotka; in a hotel room heated during the day, it is terribly stuffy, etc. The day following the night was also sunny and so hot that it was painful to touch the metal buttons on the lieutenant's tunic. The town irritatingly smells of various bazaar food.
All the experiences of the lieutenant after a fleeting adventure really resemble a painful condition after a sunstroke, when (according to medical indications) a person, as a result of dehydration of the body, feels a headache, dizziness, irritability. However, this excited state of the hero is not the result of overheating of the body, but a consequence of the realization of the significance and value of the empty adventure that he has just experienced. It was brightest event in the life of a lieutenant and a “beautiful stranger”: “both of them remembered this moment for many years: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.” So for Bunin, a moment of happiness and a whole life become values of the same order. The writer is attracted by the "mystery of being" - a combination of joy and sadness, miracle and horror.
The story "Sunstroke" is short, and five of the six pages are occupied by a description of the lieutenant's experiences after parting with the "beautiful stranger". In other words, it is not interesting for Bunin to draw various vicissitudes of love (they have already been drawn in Russian and world literature thousands of times) - the writer comprehends the meaning of love in human life, without exchanging for enticing little trinkets. Therefore, it is interesting to compare the image of love in Bunin's story "Sunstroke" and in Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Dog", especially since literary critics note the similarity of the plots of these works.
Both Chekhov and Bunin show a gray, ordinary life that suffocates human feelings but show differently. Chekhov shows a nightmare surrounding life, drawing her vulgarity; Bunin - depicting a moment of true passion, that is real life, according to the writer, which is so unlike the gray routine. Chekhovsky Gurov, returning to Moscow, cannot tell anyone about his acquaintance with Anna Sergeevna. Once, however, he admits to his card partner that he met a charming woman in the Crimea, but in response he hears: “And just now you were right: sturgeon is with a smell!” (III). The above phrase made Gurov horrified by his usual life, because he realized that even "in an educated society" few people care about high feelings. And Bunin's heroes are seized by the same fear and despair as Gurov. At the moment of happiness, they deliberately fence themselves off from everyday life, and Bunin, as it were, says to readers: “Now think for yourself what your usual existence is worth compared to wonderful moments of love.”
Summing up, it should be recognized that in Bunin's story, sunstroke became an allegory of high love, which a person can only dream of. Sunstroke demonstrates both the artistic principles and the philosophical views of the writer.
Bunin's philosophy of life is such that for him the moment when a person immediately knows the happiness of love (as in "Sunstroke") or the meaning of being is revealed to him (as in "Silence"), a moment of happiness strikes Bunin's heroes, as sunstroke, and the rest of life is held only by deliciously sad memories of him.
However, it seems that such a philosophy devalues the rest of a person's life, which becomes just a vegetation between rare moments of happiness. Gurov in "The Lady with the Dog" knows no worse than Bunin's "beautiful stranger" that after several happy days everything will end in love (II), the prose of life will return, but he is beaten by Anna Sergeevna and therefore does not leave her. Chekhov's heroes do not run away from love, and thanks to this, Gurov was able to feel that "now that his head has turned gray, he fell in love, properly, for the first time in his life" (IV). In other words, "The Lady with the Dog" only begins where "Sunstroke" ends. Bunin's heroes have enough passionate feelings for one brightly emotional scene in a hotel, while Chekhov's heroes try to overcome the vulgarity of life, and this desire changes them, makes them nobler. The second life position seems to be more correct, although rarely does anyone succeed.
To the Bunin artistic principles, which are reflected in the story, should be attributed, firstly, an uncomplicated plot, interesting not with exciting twists and turns, but with inner depth, and secondly, a special subject depiction, which gives the story credibility and persuasiveness. Thirdly, Bunin's critical attitude to the surrounding reality is expressed indirectly: he draws an extraordinary love adventure in the ordinary life of the heroes, which shows in an unattractive way their entire habitual existence.
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I propose to talk about the story of I.A. Bunin "Sunstroke".
The story of I.A. Bunin "Sunstroke" (you can read it in full here: text) was written at the beginning of the 20th century. Many phenomena and objects of that time have already disappeared from our lives, but the events themselves could have happened anywhere and anytime.
What happens in the story? Unnamed heroes - the lieutenant and his casual acquaintance - get off the ship in an unfamiliar city on the Volga. Their flared passion, as it seems at first, is the climax of the story, and parting after a night of love is an obvious denouement. However, these developments are only the beginning. Only after the hero escorts the "beautiful stranger" to the ship, he realizes that he can no longer live without her, and he will not be able to find her. The hero's senses become extremely acute, he feels invisible connections between everything in the world around him: the color of the tan on the hand of his beloved - and the smell of the sun, the swaying of hot air. Everything around speaks of a found and lost beloved - and that everything is useless and meaningless without her. The culmination of the story is not the night of passion itself, but the realization of how meaningless life and endless time without a lover.
The plot is described in more detail in the section (but we recommend that you familiarize yourself with full text works, because it is quite small). Also you can listen audiobook in excellent acting.
There are only two heroes in the story - the lieutenant and the stranger. We will not know the details about their life before the meeting: maybe because now, for this meetings, all the past is unimportant. They don't have names, as often happens with Bunin. Perhaps because the names Not needed: There is only He and She. The characters might not tell each other their names at all. We know that this is exactly what the heroine does, and her silence leaves no hope for a happy continuation of the love story.
In "Sunstroke", as in many of Bunin's works, we see features of various genres, including epic narrative and lyrics. However, the emotional, spiritual beginning at some point begins to prevail over the events. At first, the actions of the characters are described from the point of view of the author, but as the lyrical plot unfolds external action gives way internal: the perception of the hero is more and more clearly and distinctly conveyed. It is through his eyes that we see the county town, the focus is on the inner evolution of the hero. We note in the work a special intensity of spiritual events: the hero becomes a different person within one day. By the way, this allows researchers to highlight elements in the story. short stories- a short story with fast-paced action and an unexpected ending. Thus before us a story with a very strong lyrical component and features of a novel.
The problem of "Sunstroke" is connected with one of the central issues of Bunin's work - the essence of love. According to Bunin, love is an elemental force that knows no laws. It's always happiness and disaster at the same time, it's and a gift, and a gift(here the ambiguity of the title is revealed). Now the hero, who has known the true feeling, is forever fenced off from other people who do not know it. These people are much happier than he, they don’t suffer like that, but they didn’t experience this dazzling flash either.
Storytelling Supported the keynote of the sun and the details associated with it: heat, light, radiance, sunburn on the hand of the beloved, the brilliance of water, the buttons of the tunic heated from the heat, the flaming face of the hero. All these details keep bringing us back to central theme- a great, burning and unbearable feeling for a person.
