The story "Clean Monday", written in 1944, is one of the author's favorite stories. I.A. Bunin recounts the events of the distant past on behalf of the narrator - a young wealthy man without much work. The hero is in love, and the heroine, as he sees her, makes a strange impression on the reader. She is pretty, loves luxury, comfort, expensive restaurants, and at the same time she walks around as a “modest student girl”, has breakfast in a vegetarian canteen on the Arbat. She has a very critical attitude towards many fashionable works of literature, famous people. And she is clearly not in love with the hero the way he would like it to be. To his marriage proposal, she replies that she is not fit to be a wife. "Strange Love!" - the hero thinks about it. The inner world of the heroine is revealed completely unexpectedly for him: it turns out that she often visits churches, is deeply passionate about religion, church rites. For her, this is not just religiosity - this is the need of her soul, her sense of homeland, antiquity, which are internally necessary for the heroine. The hero believes that these are just “Moscow whims”, he cannot understand her and is deeply shocked by her choice when, after their only night of love, she decides to leave and then go to a monastery. For him, the collapse of love is the catastrophe of a lifetime, an unthinkable suffering. For her, the power of faith, the preservation of her inner world turned out to be higher than love, she decides to devote herself to God, renouncing everything worldly. The author does not reveal the reasons for her moral choice, which influenced her decision - social circumstances or moral and religious quests, but he clearly shows that the life of the soul is not subject to reason. This is especially emphasized in the episode of the last meeting of the heroes in the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. The heroes not only see how much they feel each other, they do not control their feelings: the hero “for some reason” wanted to enter the temple, the heroine internally feels her presence. This mystery, the mystery of human sensations is one of the essential properties of love in the image of Bunin, a tragic and powerful force that can turn a person's whole life upside down.
- The story "Clean Monday" is included in Bunin's cycle of stories "Dark Alleys". This cycle was the last in the life of the author and took eight years of creativity. The creation of the cycle fell on the period of the Second World War. The world was collapsing, and the great Russian writer Bunin wrote about love, about the eternal, about the only force capable of preserving life in its high destiny. The cross-cutting theme of the cycle is love in all its diversity, the merging of the souls of two unique, inimitable worlds, the souls of lovers. The story "Clean Monday" […]
- Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a famous Russian writer and poet of the late 19th - early 20th century. A special place in his work is occupied by the description of native nature, the beauty of the Russian region, its catchiness, brightness, on the one hand, and modesty, sadness, on the other. Bunin conveyed this wonderful storm of emotions in his story “Antonov apples”. This work is one of the most lyrical and poetic works of Bunin, which has an indefinite genre. If we evaluate the work by volume, then this is a story, but with […]
- The story, composed by I. Bunin in April 1924, is straightforward. But it does not apply to those that we all know by heart and are used to discussing, arguing about them and expressing our own (sometimes read from textbooks) opinion. Therefore, it is worth giving a 2-line retelling. So, winter, night, detached, away from the village, farm. It's been snowing for almost a week, everything is covered with snow, it's impossible to send for a doctor. In the house - a lady with a young son, and several servants. There are no men (for some reason, the reasons are not clear from the text). I'm talking about […]
- Ivan Alekseevich Bunin - the greatest writer of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. He entered literature as a poet, created wonderful poetic works. 1895 ... The first story "To the End of the World" is published. Encouraged by the praise of critics, Bunin begins to engage in literary work. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is the winner of various awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. In 1944, the writer creates one of the most wonderful stories about love, about the most beautiful, significant and lofty, […]
- The story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" is the result of the writer's reflections on the meaning of human existence, the existence of civilization, the fate of Russia during the First World War. The story appeared in print in 1915, when a worldwide catastrophe was already taking place. The plot and poetics of the story Bunin describes the last month of the life of a wealthy American businessman who arranged for his family a long and "pleasure" trip to Europe. Europe was to be followed by the Middle East and […]
- The writer's individuality of V. Bunin is marked to a great extent by such a worldview in which a sharp, hourly "feeling of death", constant memory of it is combined with a strong thirst for life. The writer might not have confessed to what he said in his autobiographical note: "The Book of My Life" (1921), because his work itself speaks of this: "The constant consciousness or feeling of this horror / death / haunts me a little not from infancy, under this fatal sign I live all […]
- Many stories by I.A. are devoted to the theme of love. Bunin. In his image, love is a formidable force that can turn a person’s whole life upside down and bring him great happiness or great grief. Such a love story is shown by him in the story "Caucasus". The hero and heroine have a secret romance. They must hide from everyone, because the heroine is married. She is afraid of her husband, who she thinks suspects something. But, despite this, the heroes are happy together and dream of a daring escape together to the sea, to the Caucasian coast. AND […]
- “All love is a great happiness, even if it is not divided” - in this phrase, the pathos of Bunin's image of love. In almost all works on this subject, the outcome is tragic. Precisely because love was "stolen", it was not complete and led to tragedy. Bunin reflects on the fact that the happiness of one can lead to the tragedy of another. Bunin's approach to describing this feeling is somewhat different: love in his stories is more frank, naked, and sometimes even rude, full of unquenched passion. Problem […]
- After the revolution of 1905, Bunin was one of the first to feel the changes in the life of Russia, namely the mood of the post-revolutionary village, and reflected them in his stories and novels, especially in the story "The Village", which was published in 1910. On the pages of the story "The Village" the author paints a horrifying picture of the poverty of the Russian people. Bunin wrote that this story was "the beginning of a whole series of works that sharply depicted the Russian soul, its peculiar interlacings, its light and dark, but almost always […]
- Bunin's cycle of stories "Dark Alleys" includes 38 stories. They differ in terms of genre, in creating characters of heroes, reflect different layers of time. This cycle, the last in his life, the author wrote for eight years, during the First World War. Bunin wrote about eternal love and the power of feelings at a time when the world was collapsing from the bloodiest war in the history known to him. Bunin considered the book "Dark Alleys" to be "the most perfect in terms of skill" and ranked it among his highest achievements. This is a memory book. In the stories […]
- The theme of the village and the life of the nobles in their family estates was one of the main ones in the work of Bunin the prose writer. As the creator of prose works, Bunin declared himself in 1886. At the age of 16, he wrote lyric-romantic stories, in which, in addition to describing the youthful impulses of the soul, social problems were already outlined. The process of disintegration of noble nests in the work of Bunin is devoted to the story "Antonov apples" and the story "Dry land". Bunin knew the life of the Russian village well. He spent his childhood and youth on the […]
- The theme of criticism of bourgeois reality was reflected in Bunin's work. One of the best works on this subject can rightly be called the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco", which was highly appreciated by V. Korolenko. The idea to write this story came to Bunin while working on the story "The Brothers", when he learned about the death of a millionaire who had come to rest on the island of Capri. At first, the writer called the story that way - "Death on Capri", but later renamed it. It was the gentleman from San Francisco with his […]
- The story "Easy breathing" was written by I. Bunin in 1916. It reflected the philosophical motives of life and death, the beautiful and the ugly, which were the focus of the writer. In this story, Bunin develops one of the leading problems for his work: love and death. In terms of artistic skill, "Light Breath" is considered the pearl of Bunin's prose. The narrative moves in the opposite direction, from the present to the past, the beginning of the story is its finale. From the first lines, the author immerses the reader in [...]
- Throughout his creative activity, Bunin created poetic works. Bunin's original, unique in artistic style lyrics cannot be confused with the poems of other authors. The individual artistic style of the writer reflects his worldview. Bunin in his poems responded to the complex issues of life. His lyrics are multifaceted and deep in philosophical questions of understanding the meaning of life. The poet expressed moods of confusion, disappointment, and at the same time knew how to fill his […]
- In the work of I. A. Bunin, poetry occupies a significant place, although he gained fame as a prose writer. He claimed to be primarily a poet. It was from poetry that his path in literature began. When Bunin was 17 years old, his first poem "The Village Beggar" was published in Rodina magazine, in which the young poet described the state of the Russian village: It is sad to see how much suffering, And longing, and need in Rus'! From the very beginning of his creative activity, the poet found his own style, his themes, […]
- We don't like getting sick. We do not like to cough, sneeze, lie down with a fever, feel weak, our own impotence. We do not like to find spoiled food, food accidentally forgotten for a couple of hours, a day, a week. We do not like - very much do not like the culprit of these our troubles: bacteria. Bacteria are to blame for both our diseases and our spoiled foods. Sometimes, some of us in a fit of anger wish them to disappear completely. Let's imagine what would actually happen if one day all the bacteria really […]
- Bulgakov was able to skillfully combine the contradictions of the era into one whole, to emphasize their interrelationships. The writer in his story "The Heart of a Dog" showed the phenomena and heroes in all their inconsistency and complexity. The theme of the story is man as a social being, on whom a totalitarian society and the state are conducting a grandiose inhuman experiment, embodying the brilliant ideas of their theoretic leaders with cold cruelty. The personality is destroyed, crushed, all its centuries-old achievements - spiritual culture, […]
- The story "Shot" is distinguished by a multi-level composition, which is created by several narrators and a complex plot. A. S. Pushkin himself is on the top rung of the compositional ladder. But he, as it were, transfers the right to become an author to Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is why he calls his works, which includes The Shot, Belkin's Tales. The content of the story was conveyed to him by people who witnessed everything that happened or had at least some relation to those with whom it all happened. From one […]
- The greatest achievement of civilization is not a wheel or a car, or a computer or an airplane. The greatest achievement of any civilization, any human community is language, the way of communication that makes a person a person. No animal communicates with its own kind with the help of words, does not pass on records to future generations, does not build a complex non-existent world on paper with such plausibility that the reader believes in it and considers it real. Any language has endless possibilities for […]
- I want to talk about the painting by I.E. Grabar "February Blue". I.E. Grabar is a Russian artist, landscape painter of the 20th century. The canvas depicts a sunny winter day in a birch grove. The sun is not depicted here, but we see its presence. Purple shadows fall from the birches. The sky is clear, blue, without clouds. The entire meadow is covered with snow. It is on a canvas of different shades: blue, white, blue. In the foreground of the canvas stands a large, beautiful birch. She is old. This is indicated by a thick trunk and large branches. Near […]
"Clean Monday" I.A. Bunin considered his best work. Largely because of its semantic depth and ambiguity of interpretation. The story occupies an important place in the Dark Alleys cycle. May 1944 is considered to be the time of its writing. During this period of his life, Bunin was in France, far from his homeland, where the Great Patriotic War was going on.
In this light, it is unlikely that the 73-year-old writer devoted his work only to the theme of love. It would be more correct to say that through a description of the relationship between two people, their views and worldviews, the reader discovers the truth of modern life, its tragic background and the urgency of many moral problems.
In the center of the story is the story of the relationship between quite wealthy men and women, between whom feelings for each other appear. They have an interesting and pleasant time visiting restaurants, theaters, taverns and many others. etc. The narrator and the protagonist in one person are drawn to her, but the possibility of marriage is immediately excluded - the girl clearly believes that she is not suitable for family life.
One day on the eve of Clean Monday on Forgiveness Sunday, she asks to pick her up a little earlier. After that, they go to the Novodevichy Convent, visit the local cemetery, walk among the graves and remember the funeral of the archbishop. The heroine understands how much the narrator loves her, and the man himself notices the great religiosity of his companion. The woman talks about life in the monastery and herself threatens to go to the most deaf of them. True, the narrator does not attach much importance to her words.
The next day, in the evening, at the request of the girl, they go to the theatrical skit. A rather strange choice of place - especially considering that the heroine does not like and does not recognize such gatherings. There she drinks champagne, dances and has fun. After that, at night, the narrator brings her home. The heroine asks the man to come up to her. They are finally getting closer.
The next morning, the girl reports that she is leaving for a short time in Tver. After 2 weeks, a letter arrives from her, in which she says goodbye to the narrator, asking not to look for her, since “I won’t return to Moscow, I’ll go to obedience for now, then maybe I’ll decide to take the vows.”
The man complies with her request. However, he does not disdain spending time in dirty taverns and taverns, indulging in an indifferent existence - "he drank himself, sinking in every possible way, more and more." Then he comes to his senses for a long time, and two years later he decides to go on a trip to all the places that, together with his beloved, they visited on that Forgiveness Sunday. At some point, the hero is seized by a kind of hopeless humility. Having approached the Marfo-Maryinsky monastery, he learns that there is a service going on there and even goes inside. Here, for the last time, the hero sees his beloved, who participates in the service along with other nuns. At the same time, the girl does not see the man, but her gaze is directed into the darkness, where the narrator is standing. Then he quietly leaves the church.
Story Composition
The composition of the story is based on three parts. The first serves to represent the characters, describe their relationships and pastime. The second part is dedicated to the events of Forgiveness Sunday and Pure Monday. The shortest, but meaningfully important third movement completes the composition.
Reading the works and moving from one part to another, one can see the spiritual maturation of not only the heroine, but also the narrator himself. At the end of the story, we are no longer a frivolous person, but a man who has experienced the bitterness of parting with his beloved, who is able to experience and comprehend his actions of the past.
Considering that the hero and the narrator are the same person, you can see the changes in him even with the help of the text itself. The worldview of the hero after a sad love story changes dramatically. Talking about himself in 1912, the narrator resorts to irony, showing his limitations in the perception of his beloved. Only physical intimacy is important, and the hero himself does not try to understand the feelings of a woman, her religiosity, outlook on life, and many others. others
In the final part of the work, we see the narrator and a man who understands the meaning of the experience. He evaluates his life retrospectively and the general tone of writing the story changes, which indicates the inner maturity of the narrator himself. When reading the third part, one gets the impression that it was written by a completely different person.
In terms of genre features, most researchers attribute "Clean Monday" to a short story, because there is a turning point in the center of the plot, which makes one interpret the work differently. We are talking about the departure of the heroine to the monastery.
Novella I.A. Bunin is distinguished by a complex spatio-temporal organization. The action takes place in late 1911 - early 1912. This is confirmed by the mention of specific dates and textual references to real historical figures who were known and recognizable at that time. For example, the characters first meet at a lecture by Andrei Bely, and at a theatrical skit, the artist Sulerzhitsky appears before the reader, with whom the heroine is dancing.
The time range of a small work is quite wide. There are three specific dates: 1912 - the time of the plot events, 1914 - the date of the last meeting of the characters, as well as a certain "today" of the narrator. The entire text is filled with additional time references and references: “the graves of Ertel, Chekhov”, “the house where Griboedov lived”, mentions pre-Petrine Rus', Chaliapin’s concert, the schismatic Rogozhskoe cemetery, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky and much more. It turns out that the events of the story fit into the general historical context, turn out to be not just a specific description of the relationship between a man and a woman, but personify an entire era.
It is no coincidence that a number of researchers urge to see in the heroine the image of Russia itself, and interpret her act as the author’s call not to follow a revolutionary path, but to seek repentance and do everything to change the life of the whole country. Hence the name of the short story “Clean Monday”, which, as the first day of Lent, should be the starting point on the path to the better.
There are only two main characters in the story "Clean Monday". This is the heroine and the narrator himself. The reader will never know their names.
In the center of the work is the image of the heroine, and the hero is shown through the prism of their relationship. The girl is smart. He often speaks philosophically wisely: "Our happiness, my friend, is like water in a delusion: you pull - it puffed up, but you pull it out - there is nothing."
Opposite essences coexist in the heroine, there are many contradictions in her image. On the one hand, she likes luxury, social life, visiting theaters, restaurants. However, this does not interfere with the inner craving for something different, significant, beautiful, religious. She is fond of the literary heritage, and not only domestic, but also European. He often quotes famous works of world classics, hagiographic literature tells about ancient rituals and funerals.
The girl categorically denies the possibility of marriage, believes that she is not fit to be a wife. The heroine is looking for herself, often in thought. She is smart, beautiful and prosperous, but the narrator was convinced every day: “it looked like she didn’t need anything: no books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city ...” In this world, she is constantly and up to some pores senselessly looking for itself. She is attracted by a luxurious, cheerful life, but at the same time she is disgusted with her: “I don’t understand how people don’t get tired of it all their lives, having lunch and dinner every day.” True, she herself “dined and dined with a Moscow understanding of the matter. Her obvious weakness was only good clothes, velvet, silks, expensive fur ... ". It is this contradictory image of the heroine that I.A. creates. Bunin in his work.
Wanting to find something different for herself, she visits churches, cathedrals. The girl manages to escape from the familiar environment, albeit not thanks to love, which turns out to be not so sublime and omnipotent. Faith and departure from worldly life helps her find herself. Such an act confirms the strong and strong-willed character of the heroine. This is how she responds to her own thoughts about the meaning of life, realizing the futility of the one she leads in a secular society. In a monastery, the main thing for a person becomes love for God, serving him and people, while everything vulgar, base, unworthy and ordinary will no longer bother her.
The main idea of the story by I.A. Bunin "Clean Monday"
In this work, Bunin brings to the fore the history of the relationship between two people, but the main meanings are hidden much deeper. It will not be possible to unambiguously interpret this story, since it is simultaneously dedicated to love, and morality, and philosophy, and history. However, the main direction of the writer's thought is reduced to questions of the fate of Russia itself. According to the author, the country should be cleansed of its sins and reborn spiritually, as the heroine of the work "Clean Monday" did.
The theme of love is an eternal theme. Poets and writers of different times turned to her, and each tried to interpret this multifaceted feeling in his own way.
I. A. Bunin gives his vision of the topic in the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys”. The collection includes thirty-eight stories, all of them about love, but none of them creates a feeling of repetition, and after reading all the works of the cycle, there is no feeling of exhaustion of the topic.
In the center of the story "Clean Monday" is a mysterious and mysterious love story. His characters are a young couple in love. Both of them are “rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that in restaurants, at concerts” others followed them with their eyes. But the inner world of the characters is not so similar.
He is blinded by his love. Every Saturday he brings flowers to his chosen one, every now and then pampers her with boxes of chocolate, tries to please her with new brought books, every evening invites her to a restaurant, then to the theater, then to some party. Completely absorbed in the feeling of adoration, he cannot and does not really try to understand what a complex inner world lies behind the beautiful appearance of the one he fell in love with. Repeatedly, he thinks about the unusual, strangeness of their relationship, but he never puts an end to these reflections. "Strange Love!" he remarks. Another time he says: “Yes, after all, this is not love, not love ...”. He wonders why she "once and for all averted conversations about their future", is surprised at how she perceives his gifts, how she behaves in moments of rapprochement. Everything about her is a mystery to him.
The image of the hero is devoid of the psychological depth that the heroine is endowed with. There is no logical motivation in her actions. Every day she visits those places where the young lover invites her, she once notices that she wants to go to the Novodevichy Convent, because "all taverns and taverns." The hero has no idea where such thoughts come from, what they are for, what suddenly happened to his chosen one. And a little later, she declares that there is nothing to be surprised at, that he simply does not know her. It turns out that she often visits the Kremlin cathedrals, and this happens when her lover "does not drag" her to restaurants. There, and not in places of entertainment, she finds a sense of harmony and peace of mind. She loves "Russian annalistic, Russian legends" and her stories about this are full of depth. She says she is not fit to be a wife. Thinking about happiness, he quotes Platon Karataev. But the hero still cannot understand what is going on in her soul, he is “indescribably happy every hour spent near her” and that’s all.
As in the rest of the stories in the Dark Alleys cycle, Bunin does not show love in Clean Monday, which develops into a state of lasting earthly happiness. Love here also does not end with a happy marriage, and we do not find the image of a woman mother here. The heroine, having entered into a physically close relationship with her beloved, silently leaves, begging him not to ask anything, and then informs him by letter of her departure to the monastery. She rushed between the momentary and the eternal for a long time, and on the night of Pure Monday, surrendering herself to the hero, she made her final choice. On Clean Monday, the first day of Lent, a person begins to cleanse himself of all evil. This holiday was a turning point in the relationship of the heroes.
Love on Clean Monday is happiness and torment, a great mystery, an incomprehensible riddle. This story is one of the pearls of Bunin's creativity, captivating the reader with rare charm and depth.
/ / / The theme of love in Bunin's story "Clean Monday"
One of the most frequent themes raised in Russian and world literature is the theme of love. The theme of the relationship between a man and a woman, the theme of their feelings and emotional experiences. Many writers and poets wrote about love, and each in his own way tried to show and explain this multifaceted feeling. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was no exception and also shared with us his thoughts on this issue.
The love work of the author is reflected in the collection "Dark Alleys". This collection consists of 38 stories dedicated to the theme of love. Each of the presented stories is original in its own way. When reading them, we will not meet two identical stories, but after reading them all, we understand that the theme of love is so diverse and many-sided that you can write about it forever.
The story "" reveals to us the love story of two people. Bunin does not name them, simply saying - He and She. The heroes of this work were young people who lived in abundance and prosperity. They had everything you want. They dined in restaurants, attended theaters, secular evenings, were in the center of everyone's attention and admiration. But with such external similarity and unity, the main characters of the story differed from each other in their inner world.
He was "blind" to his beloved. Every day he tried to please her, inviting her to restaurants, to social evenings, to the theater. On weekends, He spoiled her with "fresh" flowers, sweets, and new literature. He was blinded by his feelings for her. Feelings of love did not allow him to look into her inner world, to understand its versatility. She remained a mystery to him. He was more than once at a loss from her behavior, from their relationship, never once trying to figure it out. About their relationship, he once said: "Strange love!". He is surprised by her behavior in moments of intimacy, he does not understand why she constantly rejects talk about their future.
Bunin does not endow his hero with the depth of emotional experiences that he gives to his heroine. She indifferently accepts all gifts, visits entertainment establishments. One day, She decides to declare that she wants to visit the Novodevichy Convent, because the restaurants are already extremely tired. The main character does not understand such thoughts and conversations of his beloved. It turns out that He does not know her at all. Her hobbies for Russian legends, Russian chronicles become a real discovery for him. In her free time from entertainment events, She goes to the Kremlin cathedrals. But all these stories are alien to him, it is important for him to be close to his beloved and enjoy every minute spent with her.
Bunin's love lyrics are characterized by the fact that the author does not show us the further development of the love relationship between two people. They do not end in a happy marriage, a strong family. The main character of "Clean Monday", having shared a bed with the main character, left without saying a word. She sent him a letter in which she asked him not to look for her and said that she had gone to the monastery. For a long time she could not make a choice between pleasure and harmony. And only Clean Monday finally predetermined the choice of the main character and became decisive in their relationship.
In Clean Monday, Bunin showed us love as a feeling, as a test, as a great mystery of the universe.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin - the greatest writer of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. He entered literature as a poet, created wonderful poetic works. 1895 ... The first story "To the End of the World" is published. Encouraged by the praise of critics, Bunin begins to engage in literary work. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a laureate of various awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933.
In 1944, the writer creates one of the most wonderful stories about love, about the most beautiful, significant and lofty thing on Earth - the story "Clean Monday". About this story, Bunin said: “I thank God that He gave me to write, Pure Monday.”
In the story "Clean Monday" the psycho-logism of Bunin's prose and the features of "external pictorialism" were especially clearly manifested.
“The Moscow gray winter day was getting dark, the gas in the lanterns was coldly lit, the shop windows were warmly lit - and the evening Moscow life, freed from daytime affairs, flared up, the cab sledges did not merge thicker and more cheerfully, the overcrowded diving trams rattled harder, — in the dusk it was already clear how green stars hissed from the wires - dully black passers-by hurried more animatedly along the snowy sidewalks ... ”- these are the words the author begins his narration, transferring the reader to old Moscow at the beginning of the 20th century. The writer with the greatest detail, without losing sight of the slightest detail, reproduces all the signs of this era. And already from the first lines, the story is given a special sound by the constant mention of the details of deep antiquity: about ancient Moscow churches, monasteries, icons (Church of Christ the Savior, the Iberian Church, the Martha and Mary Convent, the icon of the Mother of God of the Three Hands), about the names prominent personalities. But next to this antiquity, eternity, we notice signs of a later life: the restaurants Prague, Hermitage, Metropol, Yar, known and accessible to the most wealthy strata of citizens; books by contemporary authors; "Motl" by Ertel and Chekhov... Judging by how the action unfolds in the story, we can judge that the past for the characters is extremely clear, the present is vague, and the future is absolutely unclear.
There are two characters in the story: he and she, a man and a woman. The man, according to the writer, is healthy, rich, young and handsome for some reason with southern, hot beauty, he was even "indecently handsome." But the most important thing is that the hero is in love, in love so much that he is ready to fulfill any whims of the heroine, just not to lose her. But, unfortunately, he cannot and does not try to understand what is happening in the soul of his beloved: he "tried not to think, not to think out." The woman is depicted as mysterious, enigmatic. She is mysterious, just like the soul of a Russian woman is mysterious in general with her spirituality, devotion, selflessness, self-denial ... The hero himself admits: "She was mysterious, strange to me." Her whole life is woven from inexplicable contradictions, throwing. “It looked like she didn’t need anything: no flowers, no books, no dinners, no theaters, no dinners outside the city,” the narrator narrates, but immediately adds: “Although all the same, you were flowers she has her favorites and her least favorites, all the books ... she always read, she ate a whole box of chocolate a day, at lunch and dinner she ate no less than me ... ”When she went somewhere, she most often did not know where she would go then, what she would do, in a word, he does not know with whom, how and where he will spend his time.
The writer quite fully tells us about her origin, about her current occupations. But in describing the life of the heroine, Bunin very often uses indefinite adverbs (for some reason, a portrait of barefoot Tolstoy hung over her sofa).
All the actions of a woman are spontaneous, irrational and at the same time seem to be planned. On the night of Clean Monday, she gives herself to the hero, knowing that in the morning she will go to the monastery, but whether this departure is final is also unclear. Throughout the story, the author shows that the heroine does not feel comfortable anywhere, she does not believe in the existence of simple earthly happiness. “Our happiness, my friend, is like water in a delusion: you pull - puffed up, but you pull it out - there’s nothing,” she quotes Platon Karataev.
The spiritual impulses of the heroes of Clean Monday often defy logical explanation. It seems that both men and women have no power over themselves, are not able to control their feelings. material from the site
In the center of the story are the events on Forgiveness Sunday and Pure Monday. Forgiveness Sunday is a religious holiday honored by all believers. They ask each other for forgiveness and forgive their loved ones. For the heroine, this is a very special day, not only a day of forgiveness, but also a day of farewell to worldly life. Clean Monday is the first day of fasting, on which a person is cleansed of all filth, when the fun of Shrovetide is replaced by self-contemplation. This day becomes a turning point in the life of the hero. Having gone through the suffering associated with the loss of a loved one, the hero experiences the influence of surrounding forces and realizes everything that he did not notice before, being blinded by love for the heroine. Two years later, the man, recalling the events of bygone days, will repeat the route of their long-standing joint trip, and for some reason he will really want to go to the church of the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. What unknown forces draw him towards his beloved? Does he yearn for that spiritual world into which she goes? We do not know this, the author does not open the veil of secrecy for us. He only shows us humility in the soul of the hero, their last meeting ends with his humble departure, and not the awakening of his former passions in him.
The future of the heroes is unclear. In addition to everything, the writer nowhere even directly indicates that the nun met by the man is his former lover. Only one detail - dark eyes - resemble the appearance of the heroine. It is noteworthy that the heroine goes to the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. This monastery is not a monastery, but the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God on Ordynka, in which there was a community of secular ladies who took care of the orphans who lived near the church and the wounded in the First World War. And this service in the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God, perhaps, is a spiritual insight for the heroine of Pure Monday, because it was the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God that warned the world against war, death, blood, orphanhood...
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- love is a mysterious word according to Bunin's stories
- why the heroine of Pure Monday went to the monastery
- clean monday details
- the meaning of the title of the story clean monday composition
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