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 present, the history of the culture of the golden age and its fate at the turn of the century, the family traditions of the noble family and individual human life are united. Sadness about the noble nests fading into the past is the leitmotif not only of this story, but also of numerous poems, such as “The high white hall, where the black piano is...”, “Into the living room through the garden and dusty curtains...”, “On a quiet night, the late moon 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, living in the memory of culture... Bunin’s poem about the estate is characterized by picturesqueness and at the same time inspired emotionality, sublimity and poetic 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 family” (L. Ershov).
The play “The Cherry Orchard” is Chekhov’s last dramatic work, a sad elegy about the passing time of “noble nests”. In a letter to N.A. Chekhov confessed to Leikin: “I terribly love everything that in Russia is called an estate. This word has not yet lost its poetic connotation.” The playwright valued everything connected with estate life; it symbolized the warmth of family relationships that A.P. so strived for. Chekhov. And in Melikhovo, and in Yalta, where he happened to live.
The image of a cherry orchard is the central image in Chekhov’s comedy; it is represented as a leitmotif of various time plans, involuntarily connecting the past with the present. But the cherry orchard is not just a backdrop to ongoing events, it is a symbol of estate life. The fate of the estate organizes the plot of the play. Already in the first act, immediately after Ranevskaya’s meeting, a discussion begins on saving the mortgaged estate from auction. In the third act the estate is sold, in the fourth there is a farewell to the estate and past life.
The cherry orchard personifies not only the estate: it is a beautiful creation of nature that must be preserved by man. The author pays great attention to this image, which is confirmed by extensive remarks and remarks from the characters. 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.

Answer

The theme of the passing of Russia and the change of times in I. Bunin’s story “Antonov Apples”

Take Bunin out of Russian literature, and it will fade, lose the living rainbow shine and starry radiance of his lonely wandering soul.

M. Gorky

I. A. Bunin is a successor to the traditions of critical realism in the literature of the 20th century. His name is on a par with the names of L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov. Bunin's works amazingly combine beautiful, fragrant prose and realism of events, reflecting the experiences of Russian society. Bunin's contribution to literature is enormous. He really brought into it, as M. Gorky rightly noted, “a living rainbow shine and starry radiance.” The writer is fully worthy of the Nobel Prize awarded to him.

Bunin's work cannot be considered outside of its historical context. The writer did not accept either the February or October revolutions, and was opposed to the changes that emerging capitalism brought with it. According to the intellectual Bunin, a man of noble culture, bourgeois society brings inhumanity, hypocrisy, thirst for profit, and introduces cruelty into relations between people. The ideal life for the writer is the past life of the nineteenth century, which he glorifies in the story “Antonov Apples” (1900).

Bunin's prose organically includes the theme of reproducing the life of the local nobility, namely the motive of the impoverishment of old landowner estates. Stories of this kind are colored with notes of sadness and regret. They are distinguished by a lyrical style of narration and are often autobiographical in nature.

The author is bitterly aware that the usual way of life is collapsing; the old landowner's life, idealized in his mind, comes to an end. Life broke like a cup. And to once again emphasize this sad thought, the writer uses an artistic technique that can be called “mosaic imagery.” Bunin's stories are often frames, sketches of individual pictures of reality. One of the best works of this kind is the story “Antonov Apples”.

It is built on a first-person narration, like the narrator's recollection of his childhood and youth spent in a noble estate. The author dwells on the attractive aspects of the former landowner's life - abundance, prosperity, unity of man and nature, nobility and peasantry. The smell of Antonov apples serves as the starting point of the story.

It is Antonov’s apples that become a symbol of the idyllic patriarchal life, which Bunin poetizes. The chapters on ancient life are in many ways reminiscent of prose poems. They are musical and poetic. Major pictures of nature occupy a special place: sketches of an apple orchard, a description of the “diamond constellation Stozhar”, a panorama of the steppe, a moment of hunting.

The author places the main emphasis on revealing the beauty, harmony of life, its peaceful flow. From the past, the narrator remembers only the brightest and most attractive moments. “I remember a harvest year...” - this is how one of the chapters of the story begins. And this is the whole essence of the author’s position. For him, the past Russia becomes the personification of a happy land, where there was no need and hunger, where peasants wore clean white shirts, and the apple harvest exceeded all expectations.

“I don’t remember serfdom,” says the narrator, deliberately avoiding social problems; he is convinced that in the distant times of his childhood, landowners and peasants did not oppose each other, they all lived in harmony and unity with nature and with each other.

The poetic past is compared in the story with the prosaic present, where the smell of Antonov apples disappears, where there are no troikas, hounds and greyhounds, and there is no landowner-hunter himself. The story about the present reproduces a whole series of deaths of powerful old men, beautiful women, Arseny Semenovich's brother-in-law, Anna Gerasimovna.

Pictures of cemeteries and the passing of beautiful and strong people give rise to elegiac motifs and are associated with changes in life.

Many critics note that the story “Antonov Apples” resembles an epitaph of a bygone life, akin to Turgenev’s pages about the desolation of “noble nests.”

But the contrast between the old noble and new life, the longing for the passing patriarchal life is only the surface layer of the novel. The author poetizes not only the past life of the nobles, but also simple village life in general. She is beautiful in her unity with nature. Here Bunin, apparently adhering to the point of view of the French philosopher and writer J.-J. Rousseau admires a person living in natural conditions - among forests and fields, breathing clean air, and therefore leading a healthy and simple lifestyle.

The central motif of the story - the motif of Antonov apples - becomes almost a symbol. He plays an important plot-forming role here. The narrator associates the smell of apples with the aroma of life itself. This is something beautiful in itself. Even the shape of apples is perfect, just as natural life itself is perfect and harmonious. That is why, along with the sadness caused by the pictures of the destruction of the old way of life, the story also contains a motive of joy, affirmation of life. And here the author’s hope for the all-healing power of nature is embodied, which, in his opinion, lies the salvation of the world and man.

There is an even deeper, philosophical layer in the story. The writer describes not just a change in ways of life in Russia, he reproduces a series of days, then the change of seasons and, finally, the rhythm of time itself, the flow of history. He guessed and reflected in “Antonov Apples” the time of a turning point, the transition of existence. And in this respect, “Antonov Apples” slightly anticipates “The Cherry Orchard” by A.P. Chekhov. Perhaps Bunin’s story later had a response in Yesenin’s lines “Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.”

Thus, in “Antonov Apples” Bunin turned to a broad understanding of the historical destinies of Russia and its people, to the disclosure of the most significant, as it seemed to him, properties and features of the Russian national character, to the identification of connections between the past and the modern, to the pattern of changing eras.

Bunin truthfully reflected the decline of old landowner Russia. He clearly sees the current situation of the nobility, doomed by history itself to “irreparable decay.” But, realizing the inevitability of a change of eras, Bunin still gives his sympathies to the past.

Larisa Vasilievna TOROPCHINA - teacher at Moscow gymnasium No. 1549; Honored Teacher of Russia.

“The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the landowners’ estates...”

The Cherry Orchard has been sold, it’s no longer there, it’s true...
They forgot about me...
A.P. Chekhov

Speaking about cross-cutting themes in literature, I would like to highlight the theme fading of the landowners' nests as one of the interesting and deep ones. Looking at it, students in grades 10–11 turn to the works of the 19th–20th centuries.

For many centuries, the Russian nobility was the stronghold of state power, the dominant class in Russia, “the flower of the nation,” which, of course, was reflected in literature. Of course, the characters in literary works were not only the honest and noble Starodum and Pravdin, the open, morally pure Chatsky, Onegin and Pechorin, who were not satisfied with an idle existence in the world, who went through many trials in search of the meaning of life, Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, but also the rude and ignorant Prostakovs and Skotinin, Famusov, who cares exclusively for the “native little man”, the projector Manilov and the reckless “historical man” Nozdryov (the latter, by the way, are much more numerous, as in life).

Reading works of art from the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries, we see heroic owners - be it Mrs. Prostakova, accustomed to the blind obedience of those around her to the will, or the wife of Dmitry Larin, who alone, “without asking her husband,” managed the estate, or “the devil’s fist” Sobakevich, a strong owner, knew not only the names of his serfs, but also the characteristics of their characters, their skills and crafts, and with the legitimate pride of his father-landowner, he praised “dead souls.”

However, by the middle of the 19th century, the picture of Russian life had changed: reforms were ripe in society, and 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 just recently proudly said: “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 found himself on the eve of the abolition of serfdom rights in a difficult situation, when the peasants almost cease to obey their master, and he can only exclaim with bitterness: “I have no more strength!” True, at the end of the novel we learn that Arkady Kirsanov, who left the worship of the ideas of nihilism in the past, “has become a zealous owner” and the “farm” he created is already bringing in quite a significant income, and Nikolai Petrovich “has become a global mediator and is working hard strength." As Turgenev says, “their affairs are beginning to improve” - but for how long? Another three to four decades will pass - and the Kirsanovs will be replaced by the Ranevskys and Gaevs (The Cherry Orchard by A.P. Chekhov), the Arsenyevs and the Khrushchevs (The Life of Arsenyev and Sukhodol by I.A. Bunin). And we can talk about these heroes, their way of life, characters, habits, and actions in more detail.

First of all, you should select works of art for conversation: this could be the story “Belated Flowers”, the plays “The Cherry Orchard”, “Three Sisters”, “Uncle Vanya” by A.P. Chekhov, the novel “The Life of Arsenyev”, the stories “Sukhodol”, “Antonov Apples”, the stories “Natalie”, “Snowdrop”, “Rus” by I.A. Bunina. Of these works, you can select two or three for detailed analysis, while others can be addressed in fragments.

Students analyze “The Cherry Orchard” in class; a lot of literary studies have been devoted to the play. And yet, everyone - with a careful reading of the text - can discover something new in this comedy. Thus, speaking about the fading 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 they spent the best years of their lives, despite the pain and sorrow of the past, are alive and even in the end relatively prosperous. Lyubov Andreevna, having taken the fifteen thousand that her Yaroslavl grandmother sent, goes abroad, although she understands that this money - given her extravagance - will not last long. Gaev, too, is not finishing his last piece of bread: he is guaranteed a place in the bank; it’s another matter whether he, the master, the aristocrat, can handle it, condescendingly telling the devoted lackey: “You go away, Firs. So be it, I’ll undress myself,” with the position of “bank clerk.” And, always fussing about where to borrow money, the impoverished Simeonov-Pishchik will perk up at the end of the play: “the English came to his estate and found some white clay in the ground” and he “rented them a plot of clay for twenty four years". Now this fussy, simple-minded person even distributes part of the 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, made jam,” life is over: he is not today or tomorrow will die - from old age, from hopelessness, from being useless to anyone. His words sound bitter: “They forgot about me...” The gentlemen abandoned him, like old man Firs, and the old cherry orchard, leaving what, according to Ranevskaya, was her “life”, “youth”, “happiness”. The former serf and now the new master of life, Ermolai Lopakhin, has already “taken an ax to the cherry orchard.” Ranevskaya cries, but does nothing to save the garden, the estate, and Anya, a young representative of a once rich and noble noble family, leaves her native place even with joy: “What have you done to me, Petya, why do I no longer love the cherry orchard, like before?" But “they do not renounce in love”! So, she didn’t love her that much. It’s bitter that they so easily leave what was once the meaning of life: after the sale of the cherry orchard, “everyone calmed down, even became happier... in fact, everything is fine now.” And only the author’s remark at the end of the play: “Among the silence, a dull knock on wood is heard, sounding lonely and sad” (italics mine. - L.T.) - says that sad becomes Chekhov himself, as if warning his heroes against forgetting their former life.

What happened to the characters in Chekhov's drama? Analyzing their lives, characters, behavior, students come to the conclusion: this degeneration, not moral (“klutzes” noblemen, in essence, are not bad people: kind, unselfish, ready to forget the bad, to help each other in some way), not physical (the heroes - all except Firs - are alive and well), but rather - psychological, consisting of absolute inability and unwillingness to overcome difficulties sent by fate. Lopakhin’s sincere desire to help the “klutzes” is shattered by the complete apathy of Ranevskaya and Gaev. “I have never met such frivolous people like you, gentlemen, such unbusinesslike, strange people,” he states with bitter bewilderment. And in response he hears a helpless: “Dachas and summer residents - it’s so vulgar, sorry.” As for Anya, here it is probably more appropriate to talk about rebirth, about the voluntary renunciation of previous life values. Is it good or bad? Chekhov, a sensitive, intelligent man, does not give an answer. Time will show…

It’s a pity for other Chekhov heroes, smart, decent, kind, but completely incapable of active creative activity or survival in difficult conditions. After all, when Ivan Petrovich Voinitsky, a nobleman, the son of a privy councilor, who spent many years “like a mole ... within four walls” and scrupulously collected 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 I could make a Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky...” - then you don’t really believe him. What prevented Voynitsky from living a full life? Probably the fear of plunging into the maelstrom of events, the inability to deal with difficulties, an inadequate assessment of reality. After all, he, in fact, created an idol for himself 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 professor's daughter, who, after the death of her mother, formally belongs to the estate, 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, repeat throughout the entire play (“Three Sisters”), like a spell: “To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!”, their desire to leave the dull provincial town is never realized. Irina is about to leave, but at the end of the play she is still here, in this “philistine, despicable life.” Will he leave? Chekhov puts an ellipsis...

If Chekhov's noble heroes are passive, but at the same time kind, intelligent, and benevolent, then the heroes of I.A. Bunin susceptible degeneration, both moral and physical. Students, of course, will remember the characters of the piercingly tragic story “Sukhodol”: the crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillich, who “was killed ... by his illegitimate son Gervaska, a friend of the father” of the young Khrushchevs; gone crazy “from unhappy love,” the pitiful, hysterical Aunt Tonya, “who lived in one of the old courtyard huts near the impoverished Sukhodolsk estate”; the son of Pyotr Kirillich - Pyotr Petrovich, with whom the courtyard Natalya selflessly fell in love and who exiled her for this “into exile, to the farm C O shki”; and Natalya herself, the foster sister of Pyotr Kirillich’s other son, Arkady Petrovich, whose father was “driven into becoming a soldier by the Khrushchevs,” and whose “mother was in such trepidation that her heart broke at the sight of the dead turkey poults.” It is amazing that at the same time, the former serf does not hold a grudge against her owners, moreover, she believes that “there were no simpler, kinder Sukhodol gentlemen in the entire universe.”

As an example of a consciousness disfigured by serfdom (after all, the unfortunate woman absorbed slavish obedience literally with her mother’s milk!), students will cite an episode when a half-crazed young lady, to whom Natalya was assigned to “be in charge,” “cruelly and with pleasure tore her hair” just because the maid “clumsily pulled” the stocking from the lady’s leg. Natalya remained silent, did not resist the attack of unreasonable rage, and only, smiling through her tears, determined for herself: “It will be difficult for me.” How can one not remember Firs (“The Cherry Orchard”), forgotten by everyone in the turmoil of his 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!) lamenting not for himself, but about the fact that “Leonid Andreich... didn’t put on a fur coat, he went in a coat,” and he, the old footman, “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 rich, but by the end of the 19th century, completely impoverished noble family, remembers the former Sukhodol with sadness, because for him for all the Khrushchevs, “Sukhodol was a poetic monument of the past.” However, young Khrushchev (and with him, of course, the author himself) is objective: he also talks about the cruelty with which the landowners brought down their anger not only on the servants, but also on each other. So, according to the memoirs of the same Natalya, on the estate “they sat down at the table... with arapniks” and “not a day passed without war! They were all hot - pure gunpowder.”

Yes, on the one hand, says the narrator, “there was charm... in the ruined Sukhodolsk estate”: it smelled of jasmine, elderberry and euonymus grew rapidly in the garden, “the wind, running through the garden, brought... the silky rustle of birches with satin-white trunks speckled with niello ... the green-golden oriole cried out sharply and joyfully” (remember Nekrasov’s “there is no ugliness in nature”), and on the other - a “nondescript” dilapidated house instead of the burnt “grandfather’s oak house”, several old birches and poplars left over from the garden, “overgrown with wormwood and beetroot” barn and glacier. There is devastation and desolation everywhere. A sad impression, but once upon a time, according to legend, the young Khrushchev noted that his great-grandfather, “a rich man, only moved from Kursk to Sukhodol in his old age,” did not like the Sukhodol wilderness. And now his descendants are doomed to vegetate here almost in poverty, although before “they didn’t know what to do with the money,” according to Natalya. “Fat, small, with a gray beard,” the widow of Pyotr Petrovich Klavdiya Markovna spends her time knitting “thread socks,” and “Aunt Tonya” in a torn robe, put directly on her naked body, with a high shlyk on her head, constructed “from some kind of dirty rag”, looks like Baba Yaga and is a truly pathetic sight.

Even the narrator’s father, a “carefree man” for whom “there seemed to be no attachments,” grieves the loss of the former wealth and power of his family, complaining until his death: “Alone, only Khrushchev is now left in the world. And even that one is not in Sukhodol!” Of course, “the power of... ancient family is immensely great,” it’s hard to talk about the death of loved ones, but both the narrator and the author are sure: a series of absurd deaths on the estate are predetermined. And the end of “grandfather” at the hands of Gervasy (the old man slipped from the blow, “waved his arms and just hit his temple on the sharp corner of the table”), and the mysterious, incomprehensible death of the intoxicated Pyotr Petrovich, returning from his mistress from Lunev (or did the horse really kill ... attached”, or one of the servants, embittered at the master for beatings). The Khrushchev family, once mentioned in chronicles and which gave the Fatherland “stewards, governors, and eminent men,” has ended. There was nothing left: “no portraits, no letters, not even simple accessories... household items.”

The ending of the old Sukhodol house is also bitter: it is doomed to slowly die, 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 became a conductor on the railway. How similar it is to the death of the cherry orchard, with the only difference that in Sukhodol everything is simpler and more terrible. The “smell of Antonov apples” disappeared forever from the landowners’ estates, life was gone. Bunin writes with bitterness: “And sometimes you think: come on, did they even live in the world?”

Target:

• To introduce the variety of themes of Bunin's prose,
• To teach to identify literary techniques used by Bunin to reveal human psychology, and other characteristic features of Bunin’s stories,
• Develop prose text analysis skills.

Tasks:

Cognitive:

1) identify students’ first impressions of the work they read;

2) monitor how the hero’s age changes and, along with it, the perception of the world;

3) draw students’ attention to the intonation of light sadness in the story;

4) to conclude that this story widely includes landscapes that help to most deeply understand the internal state of the hero and express nostalgia for the bygone past;

5) consider the image of nature, the image of the human world, the mood of the hero-storyteller, the images and symbols of the story “Antonov Apples”.

Educational:

1) develop students’ skills in literary critical analysis of a work;

2) develop in students the skill of a complete, competent oral response;

3) develop the ability to draw conclusions and generalizations.

Educators:

1) instill in students a sense of beauty;

2) education of a cultural reader; writing; interest in the history of language and people

Lesson type: lesson explanation of new material

Technology: the lesson was developed using problem-based teaching technology, health-saving, system-activity approach and general pedagogical technologies, as well as using information and communication technologies.

Lesson Methods: reproductive, search, heuristic

Forms of work: frontal, individual, in pairs

Equipment: story by I.A. Bunin “Antonov apples”, interactive board, presentation, notebook.

Stages of the lesson and activities of students and teachers

During the classes

We just remember happiness.

And happiness is everywhere. Maybe it-

This autumn garden behind the barn

And clean air flowing through the window.

I. Bunin.

Teacher's word: Hello, guys! Today we have a very interesting lesson ahead of us, in which we will continue to get acquainted with the work of I.A. Bunin and talk about his story “Antonov Apples”. In order to create the right atmosphere, I suggest listening to the poem by I.A. Bunin's "Evening", an excerpt from which I took as an epigraph to our lesson. (A trained student reads the poem “Evening”)

EVENING
We always only remember about happiness.
And happiness is everywhere. Maybe it's -
This autumn garden behind the barn
And clean air flowing through the window.

In the bottomless sky with a light white edge
The cloud rises and shines. For a long time
I'm watching him... We see little, we know,
And happiness is given only to those who know.

The window is open. She squeaked and sat down
There's a bird on the windowsill. And from books
I look away from my tired gaze for a moment.

The day is getting dark, the sky is empty.
The hum of a threshing machine can be heard on the threshing floor...
I see, I hear, I am happy. Everything is in me.

What mood is this poem permeated with? What is the main idea of ​​this poem? (mood of quiet sadness, sadness. The main idea is that happiness can be found in the simplest things that surround us, the main thing is to be happy yourself).

I.A. Bunin was convinced that there should be no “division of fiction into prose and poetry,” and admitted that such a view seemed to him “unnatural and outdated.” He wrote: “The poetic element is spontaneously inherent in works of fine literature, equally in both poetic and prose form. The prose should also differ in tone. Many purely fictional things are read as poetry, although neither meter nor rhyme are observed in them... Prose, no less than poetry, must be subject to the requirements of musicality and flexibility of language.”

These requirements were most fully realized in Bunin’s masterpiece of prose - the story “Antonov Apples”. The story was written in 1901. An attentive reader will notice that this story is a single lyrical monologue of the hero, conveying his state of mind. The story is like a poem. First of all, how the plot is built. Many may say that there is no plot here. And they will be wrong. There is a plot. It is based on memory. The rhythm of poetic breathing, the vague unsteadiness of intonation, and impressionistic imagery become significant. The lyrics seem to lead the prose. Thanks to the saturation of the narrative with poetic imagery, a special laconicism is developed, coupled with magical smoothness and bewitching length. Repetitions of words and pauses create an expressive musical harmony. Let's listen to the excerpt: “I remember an early, fine autumn... I remember an early, fresh, quiet morning<…>I remember a large, all golden, dried up and thinning garden, I remember maple alleys, the subtle aroma of fallen leaves and the smell of Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness. “The extreme concentration of details, the boldness of comparisons give the impression of elegance, a rich decoration of the narrative, while remaining strict, sharp, and clear. The aroma of Antonov apples is constantly present in the work, and this smell sounds like a musical leitmotif.

Bunin is the greatest master of words, attentive to details. This story is often compared to impressionist paintings. If you come very close to the painting, you will see nothing but brush strokes; if you move away a little, individual objects appear, and if you move even further away, you will see the whole picture.

At home you read this amazing story, filled with smells, sounds, impressions, memories, tell me, what is the general mood of the story? (sadness, nostalgia, despondency, farewell to the past).

Let's carefully read the topic of today's lesson, what kind of “paradise lost” is the writer talking about? (Paradise is a past life, life in a manor, life in harmony with nature)

What is the composition of the work? (the work consists of 4 parts) And if you read the story carefully, you will notice that the mood in each part is different. In order to confirm this thesis, we will conduct a small study. You are divided into 4 groups, each group will work with one part of the story, the result of your work will be a table consisting of the following columns:

Students work with the text, then present their work.

General conclusion: The four-part composition of “Antonov Apples” is full of deep meaning. The fate of the specific village of Vyselki and specific people is perceived as the common fate of the entire noble class, and of all of Russia as a whole. Bunin’s conclusion is clear: only in the imagination, only in the memory does the time of happy, carefree youth, thrills and experiences, harmonious existence with nature, the life of ordinary people, and the greatness of the cosmos remain. Estate life seems to be a kind of “lost paradise”, the bliss of which, of course, cannot be returned by the pitiful attempts of small-scale nobles, who are perceived rather as a parody of past luxury. The breath of beauty that once filled the ancient noble estates, the aroma of Antonov apples gave way to the smells of rottenness, mold, and desolation.

Do you think there is a central image in this work? (Yes, this is an image of a GARDEN). Implementation of homework, students prepared in advance make a presentation.

Student message: In “Antonov Apples” the lexical center is the word SAD, one of the key words not only in Bunin’s work, but in Russian culture as a whole. The word “garden” revived memories of something dear and close to the soul.

The garden is associated with a friendly family, home, and with the dream of serene heavenly happiness, which humanity may lose in the future.

You can find many symbolic shades of the word garden: beauty, the idea of ​​time, memory of generations, homeland. But most often the famous Chekhov image comes to mind: the garden-nests of the nobility, which recently experienced a period of prosperity, but have now fallen into decay.

Bunin's garden is a mirror that reflects what is happening to the estates and their inhabitants.

In the story “Antonov Apples” he appears as a living being with his own mood and character. The garden is shown each time through the prism of the author’s moods. In the blessed time of Indian summer, he is a symbol of well-being, contentment, prosperity: “... I remember a large, all golden, dried up and thinning garden, I remember maple alleys, the subtle aroma of fallen leaves and the smell of Antonov apples, the smell of honey and autumn freshness.” In the early morning, it is cool and filled with a “lilac fog,” as if stripping away the secrets of nature.

It is interesting that back in 1891, Bunin conceived the story “Antonov Apples,” but wrote and published it only in 1900. The story was subtitled “Pictures from the Book of Epitaphs.” Why? What did the writer want to emphasize with this subtitle?

(An epitaph is a saying (often in poetry) written on the occasion of someone's death and used as a funeral inscription.)

Homework:
1) Write a short essay on the topic “Paradise Lost” by Ivan Bunin” or “What brings together the comedy of A.P. Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard” and the story by I.A. Bunin's "Antonov Apples"?.