Peru, Nobel laureate, Russian writer I.A. Bunin, belongs to many outstanding works. Among them is a collection of short stories under the general title âDark Alleys,â an essay that has become a true masterpiece of the master pen.
Consider the history of the creation of this work, its significance in the work of Bunin, as well as the main artistic intent.
History of the collection
The work âDark Alleysâ is an essay by a mature Bunin. The collection of stories was created by the author already in exile, for 6 years, during the difficult period of World War II for Europe.
At this moment, the writer himself experienced both deprivation and want, and a difficult state of mind caused by a personal love drama. Reflections on love and death intertwined into a single compositional node, which contributed to the creation of a cycle of love stories.
In total, the collection includes 40 stories. They all describe the feeling of love that gripped the heroes in different periods of their lives. And love is very different: blind and depraved, pure and bright, inseparable and painful.
The author considers all the overflows of this amazing feeling and leads his readers into the mysterious and mysterious world of dark alleys.
Bunin himself, having published his collection in 1953, considered this work the best in his prose work.
Artistic embodiment and composition of the collection
In his stories, Bunin resorts to numerous reminiscences from works of world and Russian classical literature. These are excerpts from ancient authors, Renaissance poets, quotes from Pushkin, Turgenev, Goncharov, Fet, Polonsky, Chekhov.
Thanks to this technique, the works of Bunin become on a par with the works of great writers and poets of the past. Bunin, and the poet himself by nature, very skillfully describes the love feeling that embraces the souls of his heroes. In each story, the state of love is considered in its new unique shade. Therefore, âDark Alleysâ is a special composition. Bunin, as an experienced artist, paints 40 small landscapes with various colors, and each of them is unique.
At the same time, Bunin is far from the traditional description of love scenes against the backdrop of the spring flowering of nature. His favorite season is autumn. Late autumn is a tragic state of nature, which echoes the inner state of its heroes.
The composition of the collection is cyclical. It begins with the story âDark Alleysâ, in which two former lovers meet - officer Nikolai Alekseevich, who was disappointed in life, and his former serf girlfriend Nadezhda, and ends with the story âOvernightâ, which returns readers to the atmosphere of the same fall and the same failed tragic love, but with a hint of animal cruelty: Nikolai Alekseevich's double - an elderly Moroccan, arrives at the inn and, seeing her young niece at the hostess, decides to rape the girl at night, however, having started her dishonorable business, she died emanating from the teeth of a beast devoted to its victim.
"Dark Alleys" - an essay full of tragedy of life
Many of Bunin's works tell about the complex and dramatic fate of the main characters. This can be fully attributed to the collection of short stories âDark Alleysâ. Love is very often accompanied by the death of heroes or their eternal separation. The very feeling of love is tragically fleeting and temporary, and worries about parting with a loved one can then last the rest of your life.
Often death is the result of forbidden love, love associated with betrayal of a spouse (spouse), that is, the fall of the heroes. For example, the story âNatalieâ describes how the bright feeling that the Meshchersky hero feels for young Natasha is replaced by a carnal passion for another heroine - Sonya. As a result of the fact that the hero cannot make the final choice between the two girls, he has to part with Natalia. She marries another, Meshchersky himself converges with the maid and takes root from her child, a few years later he meets the widowed Natalia, converges with her and experiences her painful death in premature birth.
The meaning of human existence - is it there?
Bunin's stories âDark Alleysâ often contain in concentrated form the most important problems of manâs life on earth: is there real love on earth , what is death, what is the meaning of life?
In these stories there is a place for everything: and the suicide of the main character-officer, who learned that his wife had run away from him with her lover (the story âThe Caucasusâ); and the real murder of the protagonist, a prostitute who was naughty in front of her client (the story âyoung lady Claraâ); and the sudden and absurd death of the hero, as, for example, in the story âIn Parisâ, in which a middle-aged white officer, having lost both his homeland and his wife, meets his first love in a restaurant - a Russian woman who works as a waitress, however, their joint happiness lasts only 4 months, until the unexpected death of the hero.
Light motifs in Bunin's collection
However, some of Buninâs stories âDark Alleysâ carry a luminous imprint of love. This love is alien to carnal passion, it is sublime and saving.
This feeling is described in the famous story of the Cold Autumn series. The main character, a middle-aged Russian emigrant, admits that in her life there was only one real day that gave meaning to her whole life - this is an autumn day when she spent on the front of her fiancĂŠ who died on the battlefields of the First World War. Then there was a civil war and emigration, marriage to a man who died of typhus and left his niece girl in the arms of his wife, years of need and deprivation, raising an adopted daughter, but all this turned out to be empty chores compared to the love for the deceased bridegroom, which the heroine carried through her entire earthly life.
Or the story âClean Mondayâ, the main character of which, having abandoned the carnal passion for her lover, goes to the monastery and smooths the tragedy of their love by turning to the higher meaning of life.
As we see, many motifs intertwined in the collection "Dark Alleys". The content of each story is unique!
All shades of love in Bunin's collection
Love in the story of Bunin's âDark Alleysâ appears before readers in different images.
The first image is carnal passion. Often it is accompanied by gross treason, violence, and even murder (âYoung Lady Klaraâ, âKumaâ, âGuestâ).
The second image is a random passion, which has become a deep memory of all life ("Business Cards", "Antigone").
The third image is love as a take-off of the soul, causing both joy and pain ("Rus", "Smaragd", "Clean Monday").
Readers of Dark Alleys can teach a lot, the theme of love in this work perfectly embodies the authorâs intention.
According to literary scholars, the artistic value of the collection lies precisely in contrasting the bodily and spiritual fundamental principles of love. Moreover, according to the writer, a person should strive precisely for the spiritual principle, it is he who exalts it and connects it with the world of a higher immortal being.