Bunin “Antonov apples. The theme of the outgoing Russia and the change of times in the story I
I.A. Bunin's "Antonov Apples" refers to one of his works, where the writer with sad love recalls the irrevocably gone "golden" days. The author worked in an era of fundamental changes in society: the entire beginning of the twentieth century is covered with blood. The only way to escape the aggressive environment was to remember the best moments.
The idea of \u200b\u200bthe story came to the author in 1891, when he was visiting his brother Eugene at the estate. The smell of Antonov apples, which filled the autumn days, reminded Bunin of those times when the estates flourished, the landowners did not grow poor, and the peasants were reverent for all the lordly. The author was anxious about the culture of the nobility and the old local life, deeply worried about their decline. That is why a cycle of epitaph stories stands out in his work, which tell about a long gone, "dead", but still so dear old world.
The writer nursed his work for 9 years. For the first time "Antonovskie apples" were published in 1900. However, the story continued to be refined and changed, Bunin polished the literary language, gave the text even greater imagery, and removed all unnecessary.
What is the work about?
"Antonov apples" represent an alternation of pictures of the noble life, united by the memories of a lyrical hero. First, he remembers early autumn, a golden garden, picking apples. All this is controlled by the owners who lived in a hut in the garden, organizing a whole fair there on holidays. The garden is filled with different faces of peasants who amaze with contentment: men, women, children - they are all in the best relations with each other and with the landowners. The idyllic picture is complemented by pictures of nature, at the end of the episode the main character exclaims: "How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!"
The harvest year in the ancestral village of the protagonist Vyselki pleases the eye: everywhere contentment, joy, wealth, simple happiness of men. The narrator himself would like to be a man, not seeing any problems in this share, but only health, naturalness and closeness to nature, and not at all poverty, lack of land and humiliation. From the peasant, he passes to the noble life of earlier times: serfdom and immediately after, when the landowners still played the main role. An example is the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, where one felt prosperity, and severity, and serf obedience of servants. The atmosphere at home also seemed to be frozen in the past, even talking only about the past, but this also has its own poetry.
Hunting, one of the main noble entertainment, is spoken of separately. Arseny Semenovich, brother-in-law of the protagonist, arranged large-scale hunts, sometimes for several days. The whole house was filled with people, vodka, cigarette smoke, dogs. The conversations and memories of this are noteworthy. The narrator saw these amusements even in a dream, plunging into a doze on soft featherbeds in some corner room under the images. But it is also pleasant to oversleep the hunt, because in the old estate there are books, portraits, magazines around, at the sight of which "sweet and strange melancholy" is seized.
But life changed, became "beggarly", "small-scale". But even in it there are remnants of the former greatness ¸ poetic echoes of the former noble happiness. So, on the verge of a century of changes, the landowners have only memories of carefree days.
The main characters and their characteristics
- Scattered paintings are connected through a lyrical hero who represents the author's position in the work. He appears before us as a man with a fine mental organization, dreamy, receptive, divorced from reality. He lives in the past, grieving for it and not noticing what is really going on around him, including in the village environment.
- The protagonist's aunt Anna Gerasimovna also lives in the past. Order and neatness reign in her house, antique furniture is ideally preserved. The old woman also talks about the times of her youth, and about inheritance.
- Shurin Arseny Semyonovich is distinguished by a young, dashing spirit, in the conditions of a hunt these reckless qualities are very organic, but what is he like in everyday life, on the farm? This remains a mystery, because in his person the noble culture is poeticized, like that of the past heroine.
- There are many peasants in the story, but they all have similar qualities: folk wisdom, respect for the landowners, dexterity and thrift. They bow low, run at the first call, in general, maintain a happy noble life.
Problems
The problematic of the story "Antonov Apples" mainly focuses on the topic of impoverishment of the nobility, their loss of their former authority. According to the author, the landlord's life is beautiful, poetic, there is no place for boredom, vulgarity and cruelty in village life, the owners and peasants coexist perfectly with each other and are unthinkable separately. Bunin's poeticization of serfdom is clearly visible, because it was then that these beautiful estates flourished.
Another issue raised by the writer is also important - the problem of memory. In a critical, crisis era, in which the story was written, I want peace, warmth. It is his person who always finds in childhood memories, which are colored with a joyful feeling, from that period only good things usually arise in memory. This is beautiful and Bunin wants to leave forever in the hearts of readers.
Subject
- The main theme of Bunin's "Antonov apples" is the nobility and their way of life. It is immediately evident that the author is proud of his own class, therefore he puts it very high. The village landowners are glorified by the writer also because of their connection with the peasants, who are clean, highly moral, morally healthy. In rural concerns there is no place for blues, melancholy and bad habits. It is in these remote estates that the spirit of romanticism, moral values \u200b\u200band concepts of honor are alive.
- The theme of nature occupies an important place. The pictures of my native land are fresh, clean, and respectful. The author's love for all these fields, gardens, roads, estates is immediately visible. In Bunin's opinion, they are the real, real Russia. The nature surrounding the lyrical hero truly heals the soul, drives destructive thoughts.
Meaning
Nostalgia is the main feeling that grips both the author and many readers of that time after reading "Antonov apples". Bunin is a true artist of words, so his village life is an idyllic picture. The author diligently bypassed all sharp corners, in his story life is beautiful and devoid of problems, social contradictions, which in reality accumulated by the beginning of the twentieth century and inevitably led Russia to changes.
The meaning of this story by Bunin is to create a picturesque canvas, to plunge into a departed, but alluring world of serenity and prosperity. For many people, a departure from reality was a way out, but it was short-lived. Nevertheless, "Antonov Apples" is an exemplary work in artistic terms, and you can learn from Bunin the beauty of his style and imagery.
Interesting? Keep it on your wall!II
"Vigorous Antonovka - for a merry year." Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly: it means that bread has been ugly too ... I remember a good year. At early dawn, when the roosters are still crowing and the huts are smoking in a black way, you would open a window into a cool garden filled with a lilac fog, through which the morning sun shines brightly here and there, and you can't bear it - you tell the horse to sit down as soon as possible, and you yourself will run wash in the pond. Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. The water under the vines became clear, icy and as if heavy. She instantly drives away the laziness of the night, and after washing and having breakfast in the room with the workers with hot potatoes and black bread with coarse raw salt, with pleasure you feel the slippery skin of the saddle under you, driving through Vyselki to hunt. Autumn is the time for patronal holidays, and the people at this time are tidied up, happy, the view of the village is not at all the same as at another time. If the year is fruitful and a whole golden city rises on the threshing floor, and geese cackle loudly and harshly in the morning on the river, then it’s not bad at all in the village. In addition, our Vyselki from time immemorial, since the time of grandfather, were famous for their "wealth". Old men and women lived in Vyselki for a very long time - the first sign of a rich village - and they were all tall, big and white, like a harrier. You only hear, it happened: "Yes, - here Agafya waved eighty-three years!" - or conversations like this: - And when will you die, Pankrat? Perhaps you will be a hundred years old? - How would you like to say, father? - How old are you, I ask! “I don’t know, sir. - Do you remember Platon Apollonitch? - Well, sir, I clearly remember. - You see now. You, then, are no less than a hundred. The old man, who stands stretched out in front of the master, smiles meekly and guiltily. Well, they say, to do - to blame, healed. And he probably would have healed even more if he had not overeat on Petrovka onions. I remember his old woman too. Everybody used to sit on a bench, on the porch, bent over, shaking his head, gasping for breath and holding on to the bench with his hands - everyone is thinking about something. “About her good, I suppose,” the women said, because she had a lot of “good” in her chests. And she doesn't seem to hear; blindly looks somewhere into the distance from under sadly raised eyebrows, shakes his head and as if tries to remember something. She was a big old woman, all kind of dark. Paneva is almost of the last century, the chunks are dead, the neck is yellow and dried out, the shirt with rosin joints is always white and white, “just put it in your coffin”. And near the porch, a large stone lay: she had bought herself for her grave, as well as a shroud - an excellent shroud, with angels, with crosses and with a prayer printed on the edges. There were also yards in Vyselki to match the old people: brick, built by their grandfathers. And the rich peasants - Savely, Ignat, Dron - had huts in two or three connections, because sharing in Vyselki was not yet fashionable. In such families, they drove bees, were proud of the gray iron-colored bityug stallion and kept the estates in order. On the threshing floors thick and fat hemp-stands were dark, barns and barns stood, well-covered; in punka and barns there were iron doors, behind which were kept canvases, spinning wheels, new sheepskin coats, typesetting harness, measures, bound with copper hoops. Crosses were burned on the gates and sledges. And I remember that at times it seemed to me extremely tempting to be a man. When, it happened, you drive around the village on a sunny morning, you keep thinking about how well it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omets, and on a holiday to get up with the sun, under a thick and musical message from the village, wash near the barrel and put on a clean shirt, the same trousers and indestructible boots with horseshoes. If, I thought, to add to this a healthy and beautiful wife in festive attire, and a trip to mass, and then dinner with a bearded father-in-law, lunch with hot lamb on wooden plates and with rushes, with honeycomb honey and mash, so more and wish impossible! The warehouse of the average noble life, even in my memory, very recently, had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in terms of its homeliness and rural old-world well-being. Such, for example, was the estate of Anna Gerasimovna's aunt, who lived twelve versts from Vyselki. While, it used to be, you get to this estate, it is already completely impoverished. With dogs in packs you have to walk at a pace, and you don't want to rush - it's so much fun in an open field on a sunny and cool day! The terrain is flat, you can see far away. The sky is light and so spacious and deep. The sun shines from the side, and the road, rolled by carts after the rains, is oily and glistens like rails. Fresh, lush green winter crops are scattered around in wide shoals. A hawk will rise from somewhere in the clear air and freeze in one place, fluttering its sharp wings. And clearly visible telegraph poles run away into the clear distance, and their wires, like silver strings, slide along the slope of the clear sky. On them sit kobchiks - completely black badges on music paper. I did not know and did not see serfdom, but I remember that I felt it at my aunt Anna Gerasimovna's. You enter the courtyard and immediately feel that here it is still quite alive. The manor is small, but all old, solid, surrounded by century-old birches and willows. Outbuildings - low, but homely - are many, and they all seem to be merged from dark oak logs under thatched roofs. It stands out in size, or, better to say, in length, only the blackened human, from which the last Mohicans of the courtyard class peep out - some decrepit old people and old women, a decrepit retired cook, similar to Don Quixote. All of them, when you enter the yard, pull themselves up and bow low and low. The gray-haired coachman, heading from the carriage shed to take the horse, takes off his hat at the shed and walks around the yard with his head naked. He drove with his aunt as a postman, and now he takes her to mass, in a cart in winter, and in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those on which priests ride. Aunt's garden was famous for its neglect, nightingales, turtle doves and apples, and the house was famous for its roof. He stood at the head of the courtyard, right next to the garden, - the branches of the lindens embraced him, - was small and squat, but it seemed that he would not even last, - he looked so thoroughly from under his unusually high and thick thatched roof, blackened and hardened from time to time. To me, its front façade was always alive: as if an old face looked out from under a huge cap with hollows of eyes - windows with mother-of-pearl glass from rain and sun. And on the sides of those eyes were porches - two old large porches with columns. Well-fed pigeons always sat on their pediment, while thousands of sparrows rained down from roof to roof ... And the guest felt comfortable in this nest under the turquoise autumn sky! You enter the house and first of all you will hear the smell of apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried linden blossom, which has been lying on the windows since June ... In all the rooms - in the servants' room, in the hall, in the living room - it is cool and gloomy: this is because the house is surrounded by a garden, and the upper glass of the windows is colored: blue and purple. Silence and cleanliness are everywhere, although it seems that chairs, inlaid tables and mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames have never moved. And then a clearing of the throat is heard: the aunt comes out. It is small, but also, like everything around, strong. She has a large Persian shawl over her shoulders. She will come out importantly, but friendly, and right now, amid endless conversations about antiquity, about inheritances, treats begin to appear: first, “blew”, apples, - Antonovskie, “underbelly”, boletus, “prolific”, and then an amazing dinner : all through and through pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, marinades and red kvass, - strong and sweet, sweet ... The windows to the garden are raised, and from there it blows cheerful autumn coolness.III
In recent years, one thing has kept the dying spirit of the landowners alive - hunting. Before, such estates as the estate of Anna Gerasimovna were not uncommon. There were also decaying, but still living on a grand scale with a huge estate, with a garden of twenty dessiatines. True, some of these estates have survived to this day, but there is no life in them ... There are no triplets, no riding "Kirghiz", no hounds and greyhounds, no courtyard and no owner of all this - a landowner-hunter, like my late brother-in-law Arseny Semyonitch. From the end of September our gardens and threshing floor were emptied, the weather, as usual, changed abruptly. The wind tore and ruffled the trees all day long, rains poured them from morning to night. Sometimes in the evening between gloomy low clouds the trembling golden light of the low sun made its way in the west; the air became clean and clear, and the sunlight sparkled dazzlingly between the foliage, between the branches, which moved like a living net and were agitated by the wind. Coldly and brightly in the north, above the heavy leaden clouds, the liquid blue sky shone, and from behind these clouds the ridges of snowy mountains-clouds slowly floated out. You stand at the window and think: "Perhaps, God willing, it will clear up." But the wind didn't stop. He agitated the garden, tore a stream of human smoke continuously running from the chimney and again caught up with the ominous hair of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. Its shine faded away, the window closed into the blue sky, and the garden became deserted and dull, and again began to sow rain ... at first quietly, carefully, then ever thicker and, finally, turned into a downpour with storm and darkness. A long, disturbing night was falling ... The garden emerged from such a spanking almost completely naked, covered with wet leaves and somehow subdued, resigned. But how beautiful he was when the clear weather set in again, the transparent and cold days of early October, the farewell festival of autumn! The preserved foliage will now hang on the trees even before the first winter. The black garden will shine through the cold turquoise sky and dutifully wait for winter, warming up in the sun's shine. And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with sprouted winter crops ... It's time to hunt! And now I see myself in the estate of Arseny Semyonitch, in a big house, in a hall full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are a lot of people - all the people are tanned, with weathered faces, in jackets and long boots. They had just had a very satisfying dinner, flushed and excited by noisy conversations about the upcoming hunt, but they do not forget to finish their vodka after dinner. And in the yard the horn blows and the dogs howl at different voices. A black greyhound, Arseny Semyonich's favorite, climbs onto the table and begins to devour the remains of a hare with sauce from the dish. But suddenly he lets out a terrible squeal and, knocking over the plates and glasses, rushes off the table: Arseny Semyonich, who has left the office with an arapnik and a revolver, suddenly deafens the audience with a shot. The hall fills even more with smoke, and Arseny Semyonitch stands and laughs. - It's a pity that he missed! - he says, playing with his eyes. He is tall, thin, but broad-shouldered and slender, and his face is a handsome gypsy. His eyes sparkle wildly, he is very dexterous, in a crimson silk shirt, velvet trousers and long boots. Having frightened both the dog and the guests with a shot, he humorously and importantly recites in a baritone:It's time, it's time to saddle the nimble bottom
And throw a sonorous horn over your shoulders! -
And says loudly:
- Well, however, there is nothing to waste golden time! I can still feel how eagerly and deeply the young breast breathed in the cold of a clear and damp day in the evening, when, it happened, you go with a noisy gang of Arseny Semyonitch, excited by the musical din of dogs thrown in the black forest, in some Red Bugor or Gremyachy Island, by its name alone exciting the hunter. You ride an evil, strong and squat "Kirghiz", tightly restraining it with the reins, and you feel almost merged with it. He snorts, asks for a trot, rustles his hooves noisily on the deep and light carpets of black crumbling foliage, and each sound is echoing in the empty, damp and fresh forest. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third answered passionately and pitifully - and suddenly the whole forest thundered, as if it were all glass, from violent barking and shouting. A shot rang out in the midst of this din - and everything "welded" and rolled off into the distance. - Take care! - someone screamed in a desperate voice to the whole forest. "Oh, take care!" - an intoxicating thought flashes in my head. You whine on a horse and, as if you have fallen off the chain, you will rush through the forest, without taking apart anything along the way. Only trees flicker before my eyes and sculpts in the face with mud from under the horse's hooves. You jump out of the forest, see a motley flock of dogs stretching out on the ground on the greens and push the "Kirghiz" even harder across the beast - over the greens, swings and stubble, until, finally, you roll over to another island and disappear from the eyes of the flock together with your frenzied barking and moaning. Then, all wet and trembling with exertion, you sit down a foaming, wheezing horse and greedily swallow the icy dampness of the forest valley. In the distance, the cries of hunters and the barking of dogs freeze, and around you there is a dead silence. The half-open timber stands motionless, and it seems that you are in some kind of reserved palaces. It smells strong from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark. And the dampness from the ravines is becoming more and more noticeable, the forest gets colder and darker ... It's time to spend the night. But collecting the dogs after the hunt is difficult. For a long time and hopelessly dreary horns ring in the forest, for a long time screams, cursing and squealing of dogs are heard ... Finally, already in the dark, a band of hunters rushes into the estate of some almost unknown bachelor-landowner and fills the whole courtyard with noise, which lights up lanterns, candles and lamps brought out to meet the guests from home ... It happened that such a hospitable neighbor had a hunt for several days. In the early morning dawn, in the icy wind and the first wet winter, they left for the forests and fields, and by dusk they returned again, all covered in mud, with flushed faces, smelling of horse sweat, the hair of a hunted animal, and the drinking began. It is very warm in a bright and crowded house after a whole day in the cold in the field. Everyone walks from room to room in unbuttoned jackets, randomly drinking and eating, noisily transmitting to each other their impressions of the killed hardened wolf, which, showing its teeth, rolling its eyes, lies with its fluffy tail thrown to the side among the hall and paints its pale and already cold blood on the floor. After vodka and food, you feel such sweet fatigue, such a bliss of youthful sleep, that you can hear a talk like through water. A weathered face is on fire, and if you close your eyes, the whole earth will float under your feet. And when you go to bed, in a soft feather bed, somewhere in an old corner room with an image and a lamp, ghosts of fiery-variegated dogs flash before your eyes, the sensation of a jump will start all over your body, and you will not notice how you will drown along with all these images and sensations in a sweet and healthy dream, forgetting even that this room was once the prayer room of an old man, whose name is surrounded by gloomy serf legends, and that he died in this prayer room, probably on the same bed. When it happened to oversleep the hunt, the rest was especially pleasant. You wake up and lie in bed for a long time. There is silence throughout the house. You can hear how the gardener carefully walks through the rooms, lighting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots. Ahead - a whole day of rest in the already silent winter estate. You slowly get dressed, wander around the garden, find in the wet foliage an accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple, and for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others. Then you will start working on books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with gold stars on morocco spines. These books, similar to church missal books, smell nice of their yellowed, thick, rough paper! Some pleasant sour mold, old perfume ... The notes in their margins are also good, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose feather. You unfold the book and read: "A thought worthy of ancient and new philosophers, the color of reason and feelings of the heart" ... And involuntarily you will be carried away by the book itself. This is "The Noble Philosopher", an allegory published a hundred years ago by the sponsorship of some "holder of many orders" and printed in the printing house of the order of public charity - a story about how a "nobleman philosopher, having time and the ability to reason, what a man's mind can ascend, once received a desire to compose a plan of light in the vast place of his village "... Then you stumble upon" the satirical and philosophical works of Monsieur Voltaire "and revel in the sweet and mannered style of translation for a long time:" My sovereigns! In the sixth century, Erasmus composed praise for tomfoolery (a mannered pause, a busy period); You order me to exalt reason before you ... ”Then you will pass from Catherine's antiquity to romantic times, to almanacs, to sentimentally pompous and long novels ... The cuckoo jumps out of the clock and mockingly, sadly cuckoes over you in an empty house. And little by little a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into my heart ... Here is "The Secrets of Alexis", here is "Victor, or the Child in the Forest": "Midnight strikes! Sacred silence takes the place of daytime noise and cheerful songs of the villagers. Sleep spreads its gloomy wings over the surface of our hemisphere; he shakes off darkness and dreams from them ... Dreams ... How often only the suffering of the evil one continues! .. "And favorite ancient words flash before my eyes: rocks and oak groves, a pale moon and loneliness, ghosts and ghosts," erots ", roses and lilies, "leprosy and playfulness of young rascals", lily hand, Lyudmila and Alina ... But the magazines with the names: Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Lyceum student Pushkin. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her polonaises on the clavichord, her languid reading of poetry from Eugene Onegin. And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... Good girls and women once lived in noble estates! Their portraits look at me from the wall, aristocratic-beautiful heads in old hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes to sad and tender eyes ...IV
The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the manor houses. Those days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a century has passed since then. The old people in Vyselki died, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonich shot himself ... The kingdom of the small local people, impoverished to beggary, is coming! .. But this beggarly small local life is also good! So I see myself again in the village, in late autumn. The days are bluish and cloudy. In the morning I sit down in the saddle and with one dog, a gun and a horn, I leave for the field. The wind is ringing and humming into the muzzle of the gun, the wind is blowing hard against, sometimes with dry snow. All day I wander across the empty plains ... Hungry and vegetated, I return to the manor at dusk, and my soul becomes so warm and joyful when the Vyselok lights flash and pulls from the manor with the smell of smoke, housing. I remember that at this time in our house they liked to "twilight", not to light a fire and conduct conversations in the semi-darkness. Upon entering the house, I find the winter frames already inserted, and this sets me up even more for a peaceful winter mood. In the servants' room, the worker stokes the stove, and, as in childhood, I squat down beside a heap of straw, already smelling sharply of winter freshness, and look now into the blazing stove, now at the windows, behind which, blue, the dusk is dying sadly. Then I go to the human. It’s light and crowded: the girls chop cabbage, the chippings flicker, I listen to their fractional, friendly knocking and friendly, sadly cheerful village songs ... Sometimes some small-scale neighbor will drop in and take me to his place for a long time ... Small-scale life is also good. ! The small one gets up early. Stretching tight, he gets out of bed and twirls a thick cigarette made of cheap, black tobacco, or just makhorka. The pale light of an early November morning illuminates a simple, bare-walled study, the yellow and hardened skins of foxes over the bed and a stocky figure in wide trousers and a loose-fitting blouse, while the sleepy face of the Tatar make-up is reflected in the mirror. In a semi-dark, warm house, dead silence. Outside the door in the corridor, snoring is the old cook, who lived in the manor house as a girl. This, however, does not prevent the master from shouting hoarsely to the whole house: - Lukerya! Samovar! Then, putting on his boots, throwing a jacket over his shoulders and not buttoning the collar of his shirt, he goes out onto the porch. It smells like a dog in the locked entryway; lazily reaching out, yawning yawning and smiling, the hounds surround him. - Burp! He says slowly, in an indulgent bass, and goes through the garden to the threshing floor. His chest breathes widely with the harsh air of dawn and the smells of a naked garden that has chilled over the night. Leaves curled up and blackened by frost rustle under boots in a birch alley, already half cut. Looming in the low gloomy sky, the cuddly jackdaws are sleeping on the ridge of the barn ... It will be a glorious day for hunting! And, stopping in the middle of the alley, the master gazes for a long time into the autumn field, at the desert green winter crops, along which the calves wander. Two hound bitches squeal at his feet, and Fill is already behind the garden: jumping over the prickly stubble, he seems to be calling and asking in the field. But what will you do with the hounds now? The beast is now in the field, on the fly, on the black trail, and in the forest he is afraid, because in the forest the wind rustles the leaves ... Oh, if only greyhounds! Threshing begins in the riga. The thresher drum hums slowly, dispersing. Lazily pulling the strings, resting their feet on the dung circle and swaying, the horses are driven. In the middle of the drive, spinning on a bench, the driver sits and monotonously shouts at them, always whipping only one brown gelding with his whip, who is the laziest of all and is completely asleep on the go, since his eyes are blindfolded. - Well, well, girls, girls! Shouts the sedate clerk sternly, putting on a wide linen shirt. The girls hastily scatter the current, run around with stretchers and brooms. - With God! - says the handler, and the first bunch of starnovka, launched for testing, flies into the drum with a buzz and squeal and rises upward from under it in a disheveled fan. And the drum hums more and more persistently, the work begins to boil, and soon all sounds merge into the general pleasant noise of threshing. The master stands at the gates of the barn and watches as red and yellow scarves, hands, rakes, straw flicker in its darkness, and all this moves and fusses with regularity to the sound of a drum and the monotonous cry and whistle of the driver. The trunk flies like clouds towards the gate. The master stands, all gray from him. Often he glances in the field ... Soon, soon the fields will turn white, soon the winter will cover them ... Zazimok, first snow! There are no greyhounds, there is nothing to hunt with in November; but winter comes, "work" with the hounds begins. And here again, as in the old days, small people come to each other, drink on their last money, disappear for whole days in the snow fields. And in the evening on some remote farm, far away, the windows of the wing gleam in the darkness of a winter night. There, in this little outbuilding, clouds of smoke are floating, tallow candles are dimly burning, the guitar is tuning ...Larisa Vasilievna TOROPCHINA - teacher of the Moscow gymnasium No. 1549; honored teacher of Russia.
"The smell of Antonov's apples disappears from the landlord estates ..."
The cherry orchard is sold, it is no longer there, it's true ...
They forgot about me ...
A.P. Chekhov
Speaking about the cross-cutting topics in the literature, I would like to highlight the topic the extinction of landlord nests as one of the interesting and deep. Considering it, pupils in grades 10-11 turn to the works of the XIX-XX centuries.
For many centuries the Russian nobility was the stronghold of state power, the ruling class in Russia, the “color of the nation,” which, of course, was reflected in literature. Of course, the characters of literary works were not only honest and noble Starodum and Pravdin, open, morally pure Chatsky, not satisfied with an idle existence in the light of Onegin and Pechorin, who went through many trials in search of the meaning of life Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, but also rude and ignorant The Prostakovs and Skotinin, who pleases exclusively the “dear little man” Famusov, the projector Manilov and the reckless “historical man” Nozdryov (the latter, by the way, are much more numerous, as in life).
Reading the works of art of the 18th - first half of the 19th century, we see the heroes-masters - whether it is Mrs. Prostakova, accustomed to blind obedience to the will of those around her, or Dmitry Larin's wife, single-handedly, “without asking her husband,” who managed the estate, or “damn fist” Sobakevich, a strong owner, who knew not only the names of his serfs, but also the peculiarities of their characters, their skills and crafts and, with the legitimate pride of a landowner father, extolled “dead souls”.
However, by the middle of the 19th century, the picture of Russian life had changed: reforms were ripe in society, and the writers were not slow to reflect these changes in their works. And now before the reader are no longer self-confident owners of serf souls, who quite recently proudly pronounced: “The law is my desire, the fist is my police”, and the confused owner of the Maryino estate Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, an intelligent, kind-hearted man who turned out to be on the eve of the abolition of the serf rights in a difficult situation, when the peasants almost cease to obey their master, and he can only exclaim with bitterness: "My strength is no more!" True, at the end of the novel, we learn that Arkady Kirsanov, who left in the past the worship of the ideas of nihilism, “became a zealous owner” and the “farm” he created already brings quite a significant income, ”and Nikolai Petrovich“ got into world mediators and is working hard forces ”. As Turgenev says, “their affairs are beginning to get better” - but for how long? Another three or four decades will pass - and the Kirsanovs will be replaced by the Ranevskys and Gaevs ("The Cherry Orchard" by AP Chekhov), the Arsenyevs and Khrushchevs ("The Life of Arsenyev" and "Sukhodol" by IA Bunin). And about these heroes, about their way of life, characters, habits, actions, you can talk in more detail.
First of all, it is necessary to select works of art for conversation: it can be the story "Flowers belated", the plays "The Cherry Orchard", "Three Sisters", "Uncle Vanya" by A.P. Chekhov, the novel "The Life of Arseniev", the novellas "Sukhodol", "Antonovskie apples", the stories "Natalie", "Snowdrop", "Russia" by I.A. Bunin. Of these works, you can choose two or three for detailed analysis, while others can be addressed in fragments.
Students analyze "The Cherry Orchard" in the classroom; a lot of literary studies are devoted to the play. And yet everyone - with a careful reading of the text - can discover something new in this comedy. So, speaking about the extinction of the life of the nobility at the end of the 19th century, students notice that the heroes of the "Cherry Orchard" Ranevskaya and Gaev, despite the sale of the estate, where the best years of their lives passed, despite the pain and sorrow for the past, are alive and even in the final relatively safe. Lyubov Andreevna, taking fifteen thousand that the Yaroslavl grandmother sent, goes abroad, although she understands that this money - with her extravagance - will not last long. Gaev also eats up not the last piece of bread: a place in the bank is provided for him; it is another matter whether he, master, aristocrat, condescendingly saying to a devoted lackey: “You go away, Firs. I will undress myself, so be it, ”- with the position of“ banker ”. And always bustling about where to borrow money, impoverished Simeonov-Pischik at the end of the play will perk up: the Englishmen came to his estate and found some kind of white clay in the ground ”and he“ handed them a plot of clay for twenty four years". Now this fussy, simple-minded person even distributes part of his debts (“owes everyone”) and hopes for the best.
But for the devoted Firs, who, after the abolition of serfdom, “did not agree to freedom, remained with the masters” and who remembers the blessed times when cherries from the garden were “dried, soaked, pickled, jam cooked”, life is over: he is not today or tomorrow will die - from old age, from despair, from uselessness to anyone. His words sound bitter: “They forgot about me ...” The gentlemen, like old Firs, abandoned the old cherry orchard, left what, according to Ranevskaya, was her “life”, “youth”, “happiness”. The former serf, and now the new master of life, Yermolai Lopakhin, has already “grabbed an ax in the cherry orchard”. Ranevskaya cries, but does nothing to save the garden, the estate, and Anya, a young representative of the once rich and noble noble family, leaves her native place even with joy: “What have you done to me, Petya, why I no longer like the cherry orchard, like before?" But “loving do not renounce”! That means she didn't love that much. It is bitter that it is so easy to leave what was once the meaning of life: after the sale of the cherry orchard, “everyone calmed down, even cheered up ... indeed, now everything is fine”. And only the author's remark at the end of the play: “In the midst of the silence, there is a dull knock on wood, sounding lonely and sadly”(Italics mine. - L.T.) - says that sadly becomes Chekhov himself, as if warning his heroes from forgetting their former life.
What happened to the characters in Chekhov's drama? Analyzing their life, characters, behavior, students come to the conclusion: this degeneration,not moral (“dumblings” are noblemen, in essence, not bad people: kind, unselfish, ready to forget the bad, to help each other in some way), not physical (the heroes - everyone except Firs are alive and well), but rather - psychological, consisting in the absolute inability and unwillingness to overcome difficulties sent by fate. Lopakhin's sincere desire to help the "dullards" is broken against the sheer apathy of Ranevskaya and Gaev. “I have never met such frivolous people like you, gentlemen, such non-businesslike, strange people,” he states with bitter bewilderment. And in response he hears the helpless: "Dachas and summer residents - it's so vulgar, I'm sorry." As for Ani, it is probably more appropriate to talk about rebirth, about the voluntary abandonment of previous life values. Is it good or bad? Chekhov, a sensitive, intelligent person, does not give an answer. Time will tell…
Zh al and other Chekhov's heroes, smart, decent, kind, but completely incapable of active creative activity, of survival in difficult conditions. After all, when Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky, a nobleman, the son of a privy councilor, who spent many years "like a mole ... within four walls" and scrupulously collecting income from the estate of his late sister in order to send
money to her ex-husband, Professor Serebryakov, exclaims in despair: “I am talented, smart, brave ... If I lived normally, then Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky could come out of me ...” - then you don't really believe him. What prevented Voinitsky from living a full life? Probably the fear of plunging into the whirlpool of events, the inability to deal with difficulties, inadequate assessment of reality. After all, he, in fact, made himself an idol out of Professor Serebryakov (“all our thoughts and feelings belonged to you alone ... we pronounced your name with reverence”), and now he reproaches his son-in-law for ruining his life. Sonya, the daughter of a professor, who after the death of her mother formallyowns the property, cannot defend his rights to it and only begs his father: “You must be merciful, dad! Uncle Vanya and I are so unhappy! ” So what prevents you from being happy? I think it's still the same mental apathy, softness, which prevented Ranevskaya and Gaev from saving the cherry orchard.
And the Prozorov sisters, the general's daughters, throughout the play (“Three Sisters”), like a spell, repeating: “To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! ”, They do not realize their desire to leave the dull district town. Irina is going to leave, but at the end of the play she is still here, in this “philistine, contemptible life”. Will he leave? Chekhov puts an ellipsis ...
If Chekhov's heroes-nobles are passive, but at the same time they are kind, intelligent, benevolent, then the heroes of I.A. Bunin are subject degeneration both moral and physical. Students, of course, will remember the characters of the piercingly tragic story "Sukhodol": the crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillych, who "was killed ... by his illegitimate son Gervaska, a friend of the father's" of the young Khrushchevs; the wretched, hysterical aunt Tonya, who had gone mad “from unhappy love”, “who lived in one of the old courtyard huts near the impoverished Sukhodolsk estate”; the son of Peter Kirillych - Peter Petrovich, in whom the courtyard Natalia fell selflessly in love and who exiled her for this “into exile, to the farm S aboutshki ”; and Natalia herself, the foster sister of another son of Pyotr Kirillych - Arkady Petrovich, whose father was “driven into the soldiers” by the “high lords Khrushchevs”, and “the mother was in such awe that her heart broke at the sight of dead turkeys”. It is amazing that at the same time the former serf does not hold a grudge against the owners, moreover, she believes that “it was simpler, kinder than the Sukhodol masters in the whole universe”.
As an example of the consciousness mutilated by serfdom (after all, the unfortunate woman literally sucked the slave submission with her mother's milk!), The students will cite an episode when a half-crazy young lady, to whom Natalya is assigned to “be a member,” “brutally and with pleasure tore her hair out” just the maid “awkwardly pulled” the stocking from the lady's leg. Natalia kept silent, did not resist the attack of unreasonable rage in any way and only, smiling through her tears, determined for herself: “It will be difficult for me”. How not to remember Firs ("The Cherry Orchard"), forgotten by everyone in the confusion of departure, as a child rejoicing that his "mistress ... has arrived" from abroad, and on the verge of death (in the literal sense of the word!) Who is not grieving about himself, but that “Leonid Andreevich ... didn't put on a fur coat, went in an overcoat,” but he, the old lackey, “didn't even look”!
Working with the text of the story, students will note that the narrator, who undoubtedly has features of Bunin himself, a descendant of a once noble and wealthy, and by the end of the 19th century, a completely impoverished noble family, recalls the former Sukhodol with sadness, because for him and for all the Khrushchevs, "Sukhodol was a poetic monument of the past." However, the young Khrushchev (and with him, of course, the author himself) is objective: he also talks about the cruelty with which the landowners unleashed their anger not only on the servants, but also on each other. So, according to the recollections of the same Natalya, in the estate “they sat down at the table ... with arapniks” and “not a day passed without a war! They were all hot - pure gunpowder. "
Yes, on the one hand, says the narrator, “there was a charm ... in the ruined Sukhodol estate”: it smelled of jasmine, the elderberry and euonymus were thriving in the garden, “the wind, running through the garden, brought ... a silky rustle of birches with satin-white trunks streaked with black ... the green-gold oriole cried out sharply and joyfully "(recall Nekrasov's" there is no disgrace in nature "), and on the other hand, a" nondescript "dilapidated house instead of the burnt down" grandfather's oak ", several old birches and poplars left over from the garden," overgrown with wormwood and podbekolnik "barn and glacier. Everything is in ruin, desolation. A sad impression, and after all, once, according to legend, the young Khrushchev, his great-grandfather, notices, “a rich man, only in his old age moved from Kursk to Sukhodol”, did not like the Sukhodol wilderness. And now his descendants are doomed to vegetate here almost in poverty, although before “money, according to Natalia, did not know what to do”. “Fat, small, with a gray beard,” the widow of Pyotr Petrovich, Klavdia Markovna, spends time knitting “thread socks”, and “Aunt Tonya” in a torn dressing gown, put directly on her naked body, with a high slime on her head, made “from some kind of dirty rag ”, looks like Babu Yaga and is a truly pitiful sight.
Even the father of the narrator, a “carefree man” for whom “no attachments seemed to exist,” is grieving at the loss of the former wealth and power of his family, complaining until his death: “Alone, Khrushchev is now left in the world. And that one is not in Sukhodol! " Of course, “the power of ... ancient nepotism is immensely great,” it is difficult to talk about the death of loved ones, but both the narrator and the author are sure: a series of ridiculous deaths in the estate is predetermined. And the end of the “grandfather” from Gervasius’s hand (the old man slipped from the blow, “waved his hands and just hit his temple against the sharp corner of the table”), and the mysterious, incomprehensible death of the intoxicated Pyotr Petrovich, returning from his mistress from Lunevo (or really “the horse killed ... attached ”, or some of the courtyard, angry with the master for the beatings). The family of the Khrushchevs, once remembered in the chronicles and given to the Fatherland "and stewards, and governors, and eminent men", ended. There was nothing left: “no portraits, no letters, not even simple accessories ... everyday life”.
G orek and the finale of the old Sukhodol house: it is doomed to slow dying, and the remains of the once luxurious garden were cut down by the last owner of the estate, the son of Pyotr Petrovich, who left Sukhodol and entered the railway as a conductor. How similar to the death of the cherry orchard, with the only difference that in Sukhodol everything is simpler and more terrible. The “smell of Antonov's apples” has disappeared from the landowners' estates forever, life has gone. Bunin writes with bitterness: “And sometimes you think: yes, it’s enough, did they live in the world?”
Treasured alleys of noble nests. These words from K. Balmont's poem "In Memory of Turgenev" perfectly convey the mood of the story "Antonov apples". Apparently, it is no coincidence that on the pages of one of his first stories, the very date of creation of which is extremely symbolic, I.A. Bunin recreates the world of a Russian estate. It is in it, according to the writer, that the past and the present, the history of the culture of the Golden Age and its fate at the turn of the century, family traditions of the noble family and individual human life are united. Sadness about the noble nests receding into the past is the leitmotif of not only this story, but also numerous poems, such as “A high white hall, where a black piano ...”, “Into the living room through the garden and dusty curtains ...”, “On a quiet night, a late month came out ... ". However, the leitmotif of decline and destruction is overcome in them “not by the theme of liberation from the past, but on the contrary, by the poeticization of this past that lives in the memory of culture ... Bunin's poem about the estate is characterized by picturesqueness and at the same time inspired emotionality, sublimity and poetry of feeling. The estate becomes for the lyrical hero an integral part of his individual life and at the same time a symbol of the homeland, the roots of the clan ”(L. Ershov).
The play "The Cherry Orchard" is Chekhov's last dramatic work, a sad elegy about the passing times of "noble nests". In a letter to N.A. Chekhov confessed to Leikin: “I love terribly everything that is called an estate in Russia. This word has not yet lost its poetic connotation. " Everything connected with the estate life was dear to the playwright, it symbolized the warmth of family relations, to which A.P. Chekhov. And in Melikhovo, and in Yalta, where he happened to live.
The image of the cherry orchard is the central image in Chekhov's comedy; it is presented as a leitmotif of various time plans, involuntarily connecting the past with the present. But the cherry orchard is not just a background of current events, it is a symbol of the estate life. The fate of the estate organizes the play by plot. Already in the first act, immediately after the meeting of Ranevskaya, a discussion of saving the mortgaged estate from the auction begins. In the third act the estate is sold, in the fourth - the farewell to the estate and the past life.
The cherry orchard not only represents the estate: it is a wonderful creation of nature, which must be preserved by man. The author pays great attention to this image, which is confirmed by the detailed remarks and replicas of the heroes. The whole atmosphere that is associated in the play with the image of the cherry orchard serves to affirm its enduring aesthetic value, the loss of which cannot but impoverish the spiritual life of people. That is why the image of the garden is included in the title.
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In the story “ Antonov apples”I.A. Bunin recreates the world of a Russian estate.
C ama the date of writing the story is symbolic: 1900 - the turn of the century... It kind of connects the world of the past and the present.
Sadness about the past noble nests - the leitmotif of not only this story, but also of numerous poems by Bunin
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"Evening"
We always only remember about happiness.
Waitare everywhere. Maybe it
This autumn garden behind the barn
And clean air pouring through the window.
In the bottomless sky with a light white edge
A cloud rises, shines. Long
I follow him ... We see little, we know
And happiness is given only to those who know.
The window is open. Squeaked and sat down
A bird is on the windowsill. And from books
I look away for a moment, tired.
The day is getting dark, the sky is empty.
The rumble of a thresher is heard in the threshing floor ...
I see, I hear, I'm happy. Everything is in me.
(14.08.09)
Questions:
1. Determine the theme of the poem.
2. How is the feeling of time and space conveyed in the poem?
3. What are the emotionally charged epithets?
4. Explain the meaning of the line: "I see, I hear, I'm happy ...".
Pay attention to:
- subject realities of the landscape painting painted by the poet;
- techniques of "sounding" the landscape;
- the colors used by the poet, the play of light and shadow;
- vocabulary features (word selection, paths);
- favorite images of his poetry (images of the sky, wind, steppe);
- prayers of loneliness of the lyrical hero in the "Bunin" landscape.
The very first words of the work"... I am reminded of an early fine autumn" plunge us into the world of the hero's memories, andplot begins to develop as a chain of sensations associated with them.
lack of plot, i.e. event dynamics.
WITHsouthwest of the storylyrical , that is, based not on events (epic), but on the experience of the hero.
The story contains poeticization of the past. However, the poetic vision of the world does not conflict with the reality of life in Bunin's story.
The author speaks with undisguised admiration of autumn and country life, making very accurate landscape sketches.
Bunin makes in the story not only landscape, but also portrait sketches. The reader meets many people whose portraits are painted very accurately, thanks to epithets and comparisons:
lively girls-one-yard workers,
lordly in their beautiful and rough, savage costumes
boys in white dress shirts
old men... tall, big and white as a harrier
- In the first chapter:« In the dark, deep in the garden - fabulous picture: exactly in the corner of hell, a crimson flame is burning in a hut. surrounded by darkness, and someone's black, as if carved from ebony, silhouettes move around the fire, while giant shadows from them walk over the apple trees " .
- In the second chapter:“Almost all of the small foliage has flown from the coastal vines, and the twigs are visible in the turquoise sky. Water under the willows became transparent, icy and as if heavy... When you used to drive around the village on a sunny morning, you keep thinking about what is good mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omets, and on a holiday to rise with the sun ... " .
- In the third:« The wind tore and ruffled the trees all day long, rains poured them from morning to night ... the wind did not stop. He agitated the garden, tore up the human stream of smoke continuously running from the chimney and again caught up with the ominous hair of ash clouds. They ran low and fast - and soon, like smoke, clouded the sun. His shine was extinguished the window was closing into the blue sky, and in the garden it became deserted and boring, and more and more often began to sow rain ... ".
- And in the fourth chapter : "The days are bluish, cloudy ... All day I wander across the empty plains ..." .
Output
Autumn's description conveyed by the narrator through color and sound perception.
Reading the story, you yourself feel the smell of apples, rye straw, fragrant smoke of a fire ...
The autumn landscape changes from chapter to chapter: colors fade, there is less sunlight... That is, the story describes the fall of not one year, but several, and this is constantly emphasized in the text: "I am reminded of a fruitful year"; "These were so recently, and yet it seems that almost a century has passed since then.".
- Compare the description of the golden autumn in Bunin's story with the painting by I. Levitan.
- Composition
The story is divided into four chapters:
I. In a thinned out garden. At the hut: at noon, on a holiday, at night, late at night. Shadows. Train. Shot. II. A village in a good year. At my aunt's estate. III. Hunt before. Bad weather. Before leaving. In the black forest. In the estate of a bachelor landowner. For old books. IV. Small-scale life. Threshing in riga. Hunt now. In the evening at a remote farm. Song.
Each chapter is a separate picture of the past, and together they form a whole world that the writer admired so much.
This change of pictures and episodes is accompanied by successive references to changes in nature - from Indian summer to the onset of winter.
- Way of life and n ostalgia for the past
Description follows the interior of the estate, rich in details "Blue and purple glasses in the windows, old mahogany furniture with inlays, mirrors in narrow and twisted gold frames".
Bunin fondly remembers his aunt Anna Gerasimovna and her estate. It is the smell of apples that revives in his memory the old house and garden, the last representatives of the courtyard class of the former serfs.
Lamenting that noble estates are dying, the narrator is surprised at how quickly this process goes: "These days were so recently, and yet it seems to me that almost a century has passed since then ..."The kingdom of the small-class people, impoverished to begging, is coming. "But this beggarly small-scale life is also good!" The writer pays special attention to them. it Russia in the past.
The author recalls the hunting rite in the house Arseny Semenovich and "Especially pleasant stay when it happened to oversleep the hunt", silence in the house, reading old books in thick leather bindings, memories of girls in noble estates ("Aristocratic beautiful heads in old hairstyles meekly and femininely lower their long eyelashes over sad and tender eyes ..."). The gray, monotonous everyday life of the inhabitant of the ruining noble nest is languishingly flowing. But, despite this, Bunin finds in him a kind of poetry. "Small-scale life is also good!" he says.
Exploring Russian reality, peasant and landlord life, the writer sees the similarity of both the lifestyle and the characters of the man and the master: "The warehouse of an average noble life, even in my memory, very recently, had much in common with the warehouse of a rich peasant life in its efficiency and rural old-world well-being."
Despite the serenity of the narrative, in the lines of the story, one feels pain for the peasant and landlord Russia, which was going through a period of decline.
The main character in the story remains the image of Antonov apples. Antonov apples Is wealth ("Village affairs are good if Antonovka is ugly")... Antonov apples are happiness ("Nuclear Antonovka - for a Happy Year")... And finally, Antonov's apples are all of Russia with its “Golden, dry and thinned gardens”, “maple alleys”,with "The smell of tar in the fresh air" and with a firm consciousness "How good it is to live in the world"... And in this regard, we can conclude that the story "Antonov apples" reflected the main ideas of Bunin's work, his worldview as a whole , longing for the outgoing patriarchal Russia and understanding of the catastrophic nature of the coming changes. ..Picturesque are characteristic of the story, emotionality, sublimity and poetry. Story "Antonov apples" - one of the most lyrical stories of Bunin. The author is fluent in the word and the slightest nuances of the language.
Bunin's prose has rhythm and inner melodylike poetry and music.
"Bunin's language is simple, almost stingy, pure and picturesque ", wrote K. G. Paustovsky. But at the same time he is unusually rich in figurative and sound relations. can be called a poem in prose, since it reflects the main feature of the writer's poetics: perception of reality as a continuous flow, expressed at the level of human sensations, experiences, feelings. The estate becomes for the lyrical hero an integral part of his life and at the same time a symbol of the homeland, the roots of the clan.
Vasily Maksimov "Everything is in the past" (1889)
- Organization of space and time
The very date of writing the storysymbolic
... It is this date that helps to understand why the story begins. (“... I remember an early fine autumn”) and ends ("White snow covered the way-road ...").Thus, a kind of "ring" is formed, which makes the narrative continuous. In fact, the story, like eternal life itself, is neither begun nor finished. It sounds in the space of memory, since the soul of a person, a dushan people, is embodied in it.
The very first words of the work: "... I am reminded of an early fine autumn" - give food for thought: the work begins with an ellipsis, that is, what is being described has neither origins nor history, it seems to be snatched from the very element of life, from its endless stream. First word "Remembered" the author immediately plunges the reader into the element of his own ("to me ")memories and sensationsrelated to them. But in relation to the past they are used present tense verbs ("Smells like apples", “It gets very cold...”, "We listen for a long time and distinguish tremors in the ground" etc). Time seems to have no power over the hero of the story. All events taking place in the past are perceived and experienced by him as developing before his eyes. Such relativity of timeis one of the features of Bunin's prose. The picture of being acquires a symbolic meaning: a road swept by snow, wind and a lonely trembling light in the distance, that hope without which no man can live.
The narration ends with the words of a song that is sung awkwardly, with a special feeling.
Opened my gates wide
White snow covered the way-road ...
Why does Bunin finish his work this way? The fact is that the author was quite soberly aware that "white snow" was covering the roads of history. The wind of change breaks centuries-old traditions, established landlord life, breaks human destinies. And Bunin tried to see ahead, in the future, the path that Russia would take, but sadly he realized that only time could find him. The words of the song that ends the work once again convey the feeling of uncertainty, the ambiguity of the path.
- Smell, color, sound ...
"Pulls tightly with fragrant smoke of cherry twigs",
“Rye aroma of new straw and chaff”,
“The smell of apples, and then others: old mahogany furniture, dried lime color, which has been on the windows since June ...”,
"These books, similar to church missals, smell nice ... Some kind of pleasant sour mold, old perfume ...",
"Smell of smoke, shelter",“The delicate aroma of fallen leaves and - the smell of Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness”,
"Smells strong from the ravines of mushroom dampness, rotted leaves and wet tree bark".
Special role smell imageis also due to the fact that over time the nature of smells changes from subtle, barely perceptible harmonious natural scents in the first and second parts of the story - to sharp, unpleasant odors that seem to be some kind of dissonance in the world around them - in the second, third and fourth parts of it ("The smell of smoke", "it smells like a dog in the locked passage", smell "Cheap tobacco"or “Just makhorka”). The change in smells reflects a change in the hero's personal feelings, a change in his worldview. Color plays a very important role in the picture of the surrounding world. Like smell, it is a plot-forming element, changing noticeably throughout the story. In the first chapters we see "Crimson flame", "Turquoise sky"; "Diamond seven-star Stozhar, blue sky, golden light of low sun" - a similar color scheme, built not even on the colors themselves, but on their shades, conveys the diversity of the surrounding world and its emotional perception by the hero.
The author uses a large number of color epithets... So, describing early morning in the second chapter, the hero recalls: "... you would open a window into a cool garden filled with purple fog ..." He sees how "Twigs shine through the turquoise sky, like the water under the vines becomes transparent"; he notices and “Fresh, lush green winter crops”.
Often found in the work of the epithet "gold":
“Big, all golden ... garden”, “golden city of grain”, “golden frames”, “golden light of the sun”.
The semantics of this image is extremely extensive: this is the direct meaning ("Golden frames")and fall foliage color designation, and transmission the emotional state of the hero, the solemnity of the minutes of the evening sunset, and a sign of abundance (grains, apples), once inherent in Russia, and a symbol of youth, the “golden” period of the hero's life. E piet "gold"
Bunin refers to the past tense, being a characteristic of noble, outgoing Russia. The reader associates this epithet with another concept: "golden age" Russian life, a century of relative prosperity, abundance, solidity and solidity of being. This is how I.A. Bunin's age is leaving.
But with a change in the outlook, the colors of the surrounding world also change, colors gradually disappear from it: “The days are bluish, cloudy ... All day I wander across the empty plains"," Low gloomy sky ", "Gray master". Halftones and shades ("Turquoise", "lilac"and others), present in the first parts of the work, are replaced contrast of black and white(“Black garden”, “fields turn black with arable lands ... fields turn white”, “snow fields”).
Visual imagesin the work are as clear and graphic as possible: “The black sky is traced with fiery stripes of shooting stars”, “the small foliage has almost all flown from the coastal vines, and twigs are visible in the turquoise sky”, “the liquid blue sky shone cold and brightly in the north above heavy leaden clouds”, “the black garden will see through on cold turquoise sky and humbly wait for winter ... And the fields are already sharply turning black with arable land and bright green with sprouted winter crops ”.
A similar “cinematic”
an image based on contrasts creates for the reader the illusion of an action taking place before the eyes or captured on the artist's canvas:
“In the dark, in the depths of the garden, there is a fabulous picture: as if in a corner of hell, a crimson flame is burning near the hut, surrounded by darkness, and someone's black, like silhouettes carved from ebony, move around the fire, while gigantic shadows from them are walking on apple trees. Either a black hand of several arshins will lie all over the tree, then two legs will be clearly drawn - two black pillars. And suddenly all this slips from the apple tree - and the shadow falls along the entire alley, from the hut to the very gate ... "
The element of life, its diversity, movement is also conveyed in the work of sounds:
“The cool silence of the morning is broken only by well-fed clucking of thrushes... voices and the resounding thud of apples poured into measures and tubs ”,
“We listen for a long time and discern a tremor in the ground. The tremor turns into noise, grows, and now, as if already behind the garden, the noisy beat of the wheels is accelerated, thundering and pounding, the train rushes ... closer, closer, louder and angrier ... And suddenly it starts subside, deafenas if going into the ground ... ”,
“A horn blows in the yard and howl at different voicesdogs",
“you can hear how the gardener walks carefully through the rooms, melting the stoves, and how the firewood crackles and shoots ”,
is heard "How carefully it creaks ... a long train along the high road", the voices of people sound. At the end of the story, one can hear more and more insistently "Pleasant threshing noise"and "The monotonous cry and whistle of the driver" merge with the rumble of a drum. And then the guitar tunes in and somebody starts a song that everyone picks up “With sad, hopeless prowess”.
"With pleasure you feel the slippery skin of the saddle",
"Thick rough paper"
“All through and through pink boiled ham with peas, stuffed chicken, turkey, marinades and red kvass - strong and sweet, sweet ...”,
"... a cold and wet apple ... for some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others."
Thus, noting the hero's instant sensations from contact with the outside world, Bunin seeks to convey all that "Deep, wonderful, inexpressible that is in life":
"How cold, dewy, and how good it is to live in the world!"
A hero in his youth is characterized by an acute experience of joy and fullness of being: "My chest breathed eagerly and deeply", "you keep thinking about how well it is to mow, thresh, sleep on the threshing floor in omelets ..."
However, in Bunin's artistic world, the joy of life is always combined with the tragic consciousness of its finitude. And in "Antonovskiye Apples" the motive of extinction, the dying of everything that is so dear to the hero, is one of the main ones: "The smell of Antonov's apples disappears from the landowners' estates ... The old people in Vyselki were overwhelmed, Anna Gerasimovna died, Arseny Semyonich shot himself ..."
It is not just the old way of life that is dying - an entire epoch of Russian history, the noble era, poeticized by Bunin in this work, is dying. Towards the end of the story, it becomes more and more distinct and persistent motive of emptiness and cold.
This is shown with particular force in the image of a garden, once "Big, golden", filled with sounds, aromas, now - "Chilled over the night, naked", "blackened", as well as artistic details, the most expressive of which is the found "Accidentally forgotten cold and wet apple in wet foliage"which "For some reason it will seem unusually tasty, not at all like the others."
This is how, at the level of personal feelings and experiences of the hero, Bunin depicts the process taking place in Russia degeneration of the nobility, bringing with it irreparable losses in spiritual and cultural terms:
"Then you will take up books - grandfather's books in thick leather bindings, with golden stars on morocco spines ... Good ... notes in their margins, large and with round soft strokes made with a goose pen. You unfold the book and read:“ A thought worthy ancient and new philosophers, the color of reason and feelings of the heart ”... and involuntarily you will be carried away by the book itself ... And little by little a sweet and strange longing begins to creep into your heart ...
... But the magazines with the names of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Lyceum Pushkin. And with sadness you will remember your grandmother, her polonaises on the clavichord, her languid reading of poetry from “Eugene Onegin”. And the old dreamy life will rise before you ... "
Poetising the past, the author cannot but think about her future. This motive appears at the end of the story as future tense verbs: "Soon, soon the fields will turn white, soon the winter will cover them ..."The repetition technique enhances the sad lyrical note; images of a bare forest, empty fields emphasize the dreary tonality of the ending of the work.The future is unclear and foreboding. The epithets sound the lyrical dominant of the work:“Sad, hopeless prowess”. ..
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