Eternally only the sea, the boundless sea and sky,
Only the sun, the earth and its beauty are eternal.
Only that which binds with an invisible connection is eternal
The soul and heart of the living with the dark soul of the graves.
I. Bunin
The wonderful writer I. A. Bunin, having left a rich heritage of poems and stories in the treasury of Russian literature, always had a sharply negative attitude towards symbolism. Remaining a realist writer, he often did not elevate private observations to a holistic concept of seeing the world, leaving the reader the opportunity to independently reflect on what he read and draw conclusions. And yet, from time to time, eternal and multi-valued symbols appear in Bunin’s works, giving his stories an internal mystery, a sense of involvement in the great mysteries of existence. Such is the symbolic image of the steamship “Atlantis”, which turns the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” into a kind of parable.
It is not for nothing that this name was given to the ship, which was chosen to begin its journey by an unnamed gentleman - a rich man, a money bag, who feels like the “master of life” only on the grounds that money granted him power over people. Many such “gentlemen” enjoyed themselves in the comfortable cabins of the ship, because “the ship - the famous Atlantis - looked like a huge hotel with all the amenities - with a night bar, with oriental baths, with its own newspaper - and life on it flowed very measuredly...” Luxury, coziness, comfort, confidence in the own well-being of rich travelers create for them the illusion of life, despite the fact that everything around is more like a masquerade. These people are mannequins trying to lead a familiar way of life in isolation from the ground, not wanting to see the raging elements of the ocean beneath them, a menacing abyss, at the sight of which they cowardly disperse to their cabins, which create the illusion of safety. Millionaires firmly believe in the captain - a man who, as it seems to them, knows how to control this ship, magically leading it on the desired course. But a steamship is a small grain of sand for the vastness of the ocean, and therefore anxiety, a premonition of tragedy, settles in our hearts. However, the wealthy passengers are calm, they watch with interest the pair of lovers who are hired by the captain to attract the attention of the rich. And here the mirage is the appearance of love and passion. Material from the site
How does the illusory well-being and happiness in the cabins and on the decks of the Atlantis contrast with the description of the “underwater womb of the steamship,” which is likened here to the “dark and sultry depths of the underworld, its last, ninth circle,” where “gigantic furnaces cackled dully, devouring piles of coal with their hot mouths, with a roar thrown into them by drenched in acrid, dirty sweat and naked people to the waist, crimson from the flames.” It was here, in this hell, that he was destined to make his way back, but no longer to the respected and noble gentleman from San Francisco, but to the “body of a dead old man” into which he had turned so unexpectedly. His return journey in a tarred coffin in the black hold of the ship, hidden from the eyes of the “masters of life” on the decks, symbolizes the sinking of his personal “Atlantis” under the water, which threatens other standards of visible well-being who are not yet aware of this.
But life goes on, and therefore the story does not end with the death of the millionaire. The Eternal has undeniable power over the transitory and therefore “the countless fiery eyes of the ship were barely visible behind the snow to the Devil, who was watching from the rocks of Gibraltar, from the rocky gates of two worlds, the ship leaving into the night.... The devil was huge, like a cliff, but the ship was also huge, multi-tiered, multi-pipe, created by the pride of the New Man with an old heart.”
I. Bunin is one of the few figures of Russian culture appreciated abroad. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the rigorous skill with which he develops the traditions of Russian classical prose." One can have different attitudes towards the personality and views of this writer, but his mastery in the field of fine literature is undeniable, so his works are, at a minimum, worthy of our attention. One of them, “Mr. from San Francisco,” received such a high rating from the jury awarding the most prestigious prize in the world.
An important quality for a writer is observation, because from the most fleeting episodes and impressions you can create a whole work. Bunin accidentally saw the cover of Thomas Mann’s book “Death in Venice” in a store, and a few months later, when he came to visit his cousin, he remembered this title and connected it with an even older memory: the death of an American on the island of Capri, where the author himself was vacationing. And so it turned out to be one of the best Bunin's stories, and not just a story, but a whole philosophical parable.
This literary work was enthusiastically received by critics, and the writer’s extraordinary talent was compared with the gift of L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov. After this, Bunin stood with venerable experts on words and human soul in one row. His work is so symbolic and eternal that it will never lose its philosophical focus and relevance. And in the age of the power of money and market relations, it is doubly useful to remember what a life inspired only by accumulation leads to.
What a story?
The main character, who does not have a name (he is just a gentleman from San Francisco), has spent his entire life increasing his wealth, and at the age of 58 he decided to devote time to rest (and at the same time to his family). They set off on the ship Atlantis on their entertaining journey. All passengers are immersed in idleness, but the service staff works tirelessly to provide all these breakfasts, lunches, dinners, teas, card games, dances, liqueurs and cognacs. The stay of tourists in Naples is also monotonous, only museums and cathedrals are added to their program. However, the weather is not kind to tourists: December in Naples turned out to be stormy. Therefore, the Master and his family rush to the island of Capri, pleasing with warmth, where they check into the same hotel and are already preparing for routine “entertainment” activities: eating, sleeping, chatting, looking for a groom for their daughter. But suddenly the death of the main character bursts into this “idyll”. He died suddenly while reading a newspaper.
And this is where it opens up to the reader the main idea the story that in the face of death everyone is equal: neither wealth nor power can save you from it. This Gentleman, who only recently wasted money, spoke contemptuously to the servants and accepted their respectful bows, is lying in a cramped and cheap room, respect has disappeared somewhere, his family is being kicked out of the hotel, because his wife and daughter will leave “trifles” at the box office. And so his body is taken back to America in a soda box, because even a coffin cannot be found in Capri. But he is already traveling in the hold, hidden from high-ranking passengers. And no one really grieves, because no one can use the dead man’s money.
Meaning of the name
At first, Bunin wanted to call his story “Death on Capri” by analogy with the title that inspired him, “Death in Venice” (the writer read this book later and rated it as “unpleasant”). But after writing the first line, he crossed out this title and named the work by the “name” of the hero.
From the first page, the writer’s attitude towards the Master is clear; for him, he is faceless, colorless and soulless, so he did not even receive a name. He is the master, the top of the social hierarchy. But all this power is fleeting and fragile, the author reminds. The hero, useless to society, who has not done a single good deed in 58 years and thinks only of himself, remains after death only an unknown gentleman, about whom they only know that he is a rich American.
Characteristics of heroes
There are few characters in the story: the gentleman from San Francisco as a symbol of eternal fussy hoarding, his wife, depicting gray respectability, and their daughter, symbolizing the desire for this respectability.
- The gentleman “worked tirelessly” all his life, but these were the hands of the Chinese, who were hired by the thousands and died just as abundantly in hard service. Other people generally mean little to him, the main thing is profit, wealth, power, savings. It was they who gave him the opportunity to travel, live at the highest level and not care about those around him who were less fortunate in life. However, nothing saved the hero from death; you can’t take the money to the next world. And respect, bought and sold, quickly turns into dust: after his death nothing changed, the celebration of life, money and idleness continued, even the last tribute to the dead had no one to worry about. The body travels through authorities, it is nothing, just another piece of luggage that is thrown into the hold, hidden from “decent society.”
- The hero's wife lived a monotonous, philistine life, but with chic: without any special problems or difficulties, no worries, just a lazily stretching string of idle days. Nothing impressed her; she was always completely calm, probably having forgotten how to think in the routine of idleness. She is only concerned about the future of her daughter: she needs to find her a respectable and profitable match, so that she too can comfortably float with the flow all her life.
- The daughter did her best to portray innocence and at the same time frankness, attracting suitors. This is what interested her most. A meeting with an ugly, strange and uninteresting man, but a prince, plunged the girl into excitement. Perhaps this was one of the last strong feelings in her life, and then the future of her mother awaited her. However, some emotions still remained in the girl: she alone foresaw trouble (“her heart was suddenly squeezed by melancholy, a feeling of terrible loneliness on this strange, dark island”) and cried for her father.
Main themes
Life and death, routine and exclusivity, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness - these are the main themes of the story. They immediately reflect the philosophical orientation author's intention. He encourages readers to think about themselves: are we not chasing something frivolously small, are we getting bogged down in routine, missing out on true beauty? After all, a life in which there is no time to think about oneself, one’s place in the Universe, in which there is no time to look at the surrounding nature, people and notice something good in them, is lived in vain. And you can’t fix a life you’ve lived in vain, and you can’t buy a new one for any money. Death will come anyway, you can’t hide from it and you can’t pay off it, so you need to have time to do something really worthwhile, something so that you will be remembered with a kind word, and not indifferently thrown into the hold. Therefore, it is worth thinking about everyday life, which makes thoughts banal and feelings faded and weak, about wealth that is not worth the effort, about beauty, in the corruption of which lies ugliness.
The wealth of the “masters of life” is contrasted with the poverty of people who live equally ordinary lives, but suffer poverty and humiliation. Servants who secretly imitate their masters, but grovel before them to their faces. Masters who treat their servants as inferior creatures, but grovel before even richer and more noble persons. A couple hired on a steamship to play passionate love. The Master's daughter, feigning passion and trepidation to lure the prince. All this dirty, low pretense, although presented in a luxurious wrapper, is contrasted with the eternal and pure beauty of nature.
Main problems
The main problem of this story is the search for the meaning of life. How should you spend your short earthly vigil not in vain, how to leave behind something important and valuable for others? Everyone sees their purpose in their own way, but no one should forget that a person’s spiritual baggage is more important than his material one. Although at all times they have said that in modern times all eternal values have been lost, every time this is not true. Both Bunin and other writers remind us, readers, that life without harmony and inner beauty is not life, but a miserable existence.
The problem of the transience of life is also raised by the author. After all, the gentleman from San Francisco spent his mental strength, made money and made money, postponing some simple joys, real emotions for later, but this “later” never began. This happens to many people who are mired in everyday life, routine, problems, and affairs. Sometimes you just need to stop, pay attention to loved ones, nature, friends, and feel the beauty in your surroundings. After all, tomorrow may not come.
The meaning of the story
It is not for nothing that the story is called a parable: it has a very instructive message and is intended to give a lesson to the reader. The main idea of the story is the injustice of class society. Most of it survives on bread and water, while the elite waste their lives mindlessly. The writer states the moral squalor of the existing order, because most of the “masters of life” achieved their wealth by dishonest means. Such people bring only evil, just as the Master from San Francisco pays and ensures the death of Chinese workers. The death of the main character emphasizes the author's thoughts. No one is interested in this recently so influential man, because his money no longer gives him power, and he has not committed any respectable and outstanding deeds.
The idleness of these rich people, their effeminacy, perversion, insensitivity to something living and beautiful proves the accident and injustice of their high position. This fact is hidden behind the description of the leisure time of tourists on the ship, their entertainment (the main one is lunch), costumes, relationships with each other (the origin of the prince whom the main character’s daughter met makes her fall in love).
Composition and genre
"The Gentleman from San Francisco" can be seen as a parable story. What is a story ( short work in prose, containing a plot, conflict and having one main storyline) is known to most, but how can you characterize the parable? A parable is a small allegorical text that guides the reader on the right path. Therefore, the work in terms of plot and form is a story, and in terms of philosophy and content it is a parable.
Compositionally, the story is divided into two large parts: the journey of the Master from San Francisco from the New World and the stay of the body in the hold on the way back. The culmination of the work is the death of the hero. Before this, describing the steamship Atlantis and tourist places, the author gives the story an anxious mood of expectation. In this part, a sharply negative attitude towards the Master is striking. But death deprived him of all privileges and equated his remains with luggage, so Bunin softens and even sympathizes with him. It also describes the island of Capri, its nature and local people; these lines are filled with beauty and understanding of the beauty of nature.
Symbols
The work is replete with symbols that confirm Bunin’s thoughts. The first of them is the steamship Atlantis, on which an endless celebration of luxurious life reigns, but there is a storm outside, a storm, even the ship itself is shaking. So at the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole society was seething, experiencing a social crisis, only the indifferent bourgeois continued the feast during the plague.
The island of Capri symbolizes real beauty (that’s why the description of its nature and inhabitants is covered in warm colors): a “joyful, beautiful, sunny” country filled with “fairy blue”, majestic mountains, the beauty of which cannot be conveyed in human language. The existence of our American family and people like them is a pathetic parody of life.
Features of the work
Figurative language, vibrant landscapes are inherent in a creative manner Bunin, the mastery of the word artist is reflected in this story. At first he creates an anxious mood, the reader expects that, despite the splendor of the rich environment around the Master, something irreparable will soon happen. Later, the tension is erased by natural sketches written in soft strokes, reflecting love and admiration for beauty.
The second feature is the philosophical and topical content. Bunin castigates the meaninglessness of the existence of the elite of society, its spoiling, disrespect for other people. It was because of this bourgeoisie, cut off from the life of the people and having fun at their expense, that two years later a bloody revolution broke out in the writer’s homeland. Everyone felt that something needed to be changed, but no one did anything, which is why so much blood was shed, so many tragedies happened in those difficult times. And the theme of searching for the meaning of life does not lose relevance, which is why the story still interests the reader 100 years later.
Interesting? Save it on your wall!Ivan Alekseevich Bunin portrayed real life Russia, therefore, reading his works, one can easily imagine how the Russian people lived on the eve of the revolution. Bunin picturesquely depicts the life of noble estates and common people, the culture of nobles and the lopsided huts of peasants, and the thick layer of black soil on our roads. But still, what interests the author most of all is the soul of the Russian person, which is impossible to comprehend and understand completely.
Bunin feels that big changes will soon occur in society, which will lead to a catastrophe of existence and a catastrophe of the social structure of life. Almost all the stories he wrote in 1913-1914 are devoted to this topic. But in order to convey the approach of a catastrophe, to express all his feelings, Bunin, like many writers, uses symbolic images. One of the most striking such symbols is the image of a steamboat from the story “Mr. from San Francisco,” written by the author in 1915.
By boat from a telling name"Atlantis" main character the work goes on a long journey. He worked hard and for a long time, earning his millions. And now he has reached the level where he can afford to go and see the Old World, rewarding himself in a similar way for his efforts. Bunin gives an accurate and detailed description of the ship on which his hero boards. It was a huge hotel, which had all the amenities: the bar was open around the clock, there were oriental baths, and even published its own newspaper.
"Atlantis" in the story is not only the place where most of the events take place. This is a kind of model of the world in which both the writer and his characters live. But this world is bourgeois. The reader is convinced of this when he reads how this ship is divided. The second deck of the ship is given over to the ship's passengers, where fun takes place all day long on the snow-white deck. But the lower tier of the ship looks completely different, where people work around the clock in the heat and dust; this is a kind of ninth circle of hell. These people, standing near the huge stoves, set the steamship in motion.
There are many servants and dishwashers on the ship who serve the second tier of the ship and provide them with a well-fed life. The inhabitants of the second and last deck of the ship never meet each other, there is no relationship between them, although they are sailing on the same ship in terrible weather, and huge waves of the ocean are boiling and raging overboard. Even the reader feels the trembling of the ship, which is trying to fight the elements, but bourgeois society does not pay any attention to this.
It is known that Atlantis is a civilization that strangely disappeared into the ocean. This legend about a lost civilization is included in the name of the ship. And only the author hears and feels that the time of disappearance of the world that exists on the ship is approaching. But time will stop on the ship only for a rich gentleman from San Francisco, whose name no one remembers. This death of one hero indicates that very soon the death of the whole world will come. But no one pays attention to this, since the bourgeois world is indifferent and cruel.
Ivan Bunin knows that there is a lot of injustice and cruelty in the world. He had seen a lot, so he was anxiously waiting for the Russian state to collapse. This also influenced his subsequent life: he was never able to understand and accept the revolution and spent the rest of his life, almost thirty years in exile. In Bunin's story, the steamship is a fragile world where a person is helpless and no one is interested in his fate. A civilization is moving in a vast ocean that does not know its future, but it does not want to remember the past.
To the 60th anniversary of the death of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
The story "Mitya's Love" (1924), which brought Bunin European fame (it delighted the famous Austrian poet Rilke), was published in 1926 in Leningrad in the series "Book New Issues", and in 1927 by the main publishing house of the USSR - GIZ - published a collection of stories by an "anti-Soviet writer." In the eighth volume of the first Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1927), a rather large article about Bunin was published, with a portrait, which not every Soviet writer was awarded at that time.
All over the world I.A. Bunin is considered a classic of “love prose”. But this, of course, does not limit the influence that the Russian had on world art. Nobel laureate. He, in fact, became the founder of a genre that is so widespread today, which can be conventionally described as “the death of the Titanic.” Bunin’s story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) was the first literary response to the disaster of the famous superliner. Many details in “The Gentleman” suggests that the ship with the name "Atlantis" means the "Titanic".
Only at the end of the twentieth century did European artists come to understand the crisis of technogenic civilization, which Bunin so forcefully expressed in “The Gentleman from San Francisco.”
Here, first of all, it is appropriate to recall F. Fellini’s film “And the Ship Sails On…” - about the “good old Europe” that is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, as it was before 1914, and his other film, “La Dolce Vita,” about which the director himself spoke , that this is “a ship, luxurious and at the same time poor, rushing towards the rocks on which it is destined to break - a pompous shipwreck: silk, brocade, crystal, thrown into the abyss by a gust of storm.” In essence, the same can be said about the idea of "Mr. from San Francisco."
From the very beginning of the story you feel a kind of chill, which by the end turns into the icy breath of death. There is even a doubt: were the people described by Bunin real? Perhaps Atlantis is a ghost ship, a ship of the dead? The overweight captain of the Atlantis looks like a “huge idol” (exactly like the captain of the Titanic, Smith). The crown prince of an Asian state, traveling incognito, had “a large mustache showing through like a dead man.” Death is in everything, everywhere, even in the wax-smelling medieval Italian temples: “a majestic entrance... and inside there is a huge emptiness, silence... slippery gravestones underfoot.” There's no place for the living here human feelings, they dissolve into the void without even having time to be born, everything is ephemeral, even sexual attraction - in this case, the “feeling” of the daughter of a gentleman from San Francisco for the crown Asian prince. “After all,” Bunin states, “it doesn’t matter what exactly awakens a girl’s soul - whether it’s money, fame, or nobility...”
The Yankees, impenetrable in their positivism, have access only to bad premonitions, and even then - fleetingly... The owner of the hotel on Capri “for a moment amazed the gentleman from San Francisco: he suddenly remembered that that night, among other confusion that besieged him in his sleep, he I saw exactly this gentleman, exactly the same as this one, in the same business card and with the same mirror-combed head. Surprised, he even almost paused, but there was no mustard left in his soul a long time ago. the seed of so-called mystical feelings, then his surprise immediately faded..."
A cruel American businessman walks briskly, his bulldog jaw thrust out, towards his death. He dies in the reading room, among newspapers with headlines about the never-ending Balkan war (how everything looks like the end of the twentieth century!). “...The lines suddenly flashed before him with a glassy sheen, his neck tensed, his eyes bulged, his pince-nez flew off his nose... He rushed forward, wanted to take a breath of air - and snored wildly; his lower jaw fell off, illuminating his entire mouth with gold fillings...”
Panic begins in the hotel. Something went wrong in the well-oiled mechanism of the scenery hiding the emptiness. “... In all languages they heard: “What, what happened?” - and no one answered properly, no one understood anything, since people are still most amazed and do not want to believe death for anything.” “With offended faces,” people silently went to their rooms. The rich Yankee broke the rules of the game - he died. And it was so fun, carefree...
Nature in Bunin’s story seems to be absolutely indifferent to the death of a stranger and cruel person. Who is he to her - a scary character from a puppet theater? She is Life, and he came from the world of Death.
Two peaks rise above Capri: Monte Solaro and Monte Tiberio. "...In the grotto of the rocky wall of Monte Solaro, all illuminated by the sun, all in its warmth and shine, stood in snow-white plaster robes and in a royal crown, golden-rusty from the weather, the Mother of God, meek and merciful, with her eyes raised to the sky ..." But the Mother of God is of little interest to tourists like the late gentleman from San Francisco. They come from all over the island to look at the remains of a stone house in which “two thousand years ago there lived a man who was unspeakably vile in satisfying his lust and for some reason had power over millions of people, inflicted cruelties on them beyond all measure, and humanity will forever remember his". This is the Roman Emperor Tiberius, whose governor in Judea, Pontius Pilate, cowardly turned away from Jesus Christ...
The body of the dead gentleman from San Francisco, “having spent a week moving from one port shed to another, (...) again finally ended up on the same famous ship on which so recently, with such honor, he was transported to the Old World. But now They hid him alive - they lowered him deep into a black hold in a tarred coffin, and again, again the ship went on its long sea journey. Here appears on the pages of the story someone whose painful presence we have long invisibly felt. This is the supreme patron of both the deceased Yankee capitalist and the “indescribably vile” Tiberius. “The countless fiery eyes of the ship were barely visible behind the snow to the Devil, who was watching from the walls of Gibraltar, from the stone gates of two worlds, the ship leaving into the night and blizzard.” While he is just watching... “The devil was huge, like a cliff, but the ship was also huge, multi-tiered, multi-pipe, created by the pride of a New man with an old heart.” The Devil's essence materialized in Atlantis, and they are now comparable - the Devil and the ship.
The story ends with sweetly languid, “shamelessly sad” music playing in the first class cabin. This is a direct hint to the reader. After all, it was to these melancholy sounds that the Titanic sank.
The musicians played until the last minute, numb in the Atlantic wind, until the legendary command of Captain Smith was heard: “Now - every man for himself!”
Well, if you look at Bunin’s story as one of the versions of the death of the Titanic, then it is the most accurate. All others imply technical reasons, Bunin’s “version” - moral ones. A ship created by the dead is doomed to Death.
What is Bunin's "Atlantis"? Modern civilization? Humanity in general? Earth? The possibility of interpretation is limitless, just as the nature of Bunin’s image is endless.
Of course, "Mr. from San Francisco" influenced not only works in the "disaster" genre. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was under the strong charm of this story all his life. In “The White Guard” we read: “In front of Elena there is a cooling cup and “Mr. from San Francisco.” Blurred eyes, not seeing, look at the words:
... darkness, ocean, blizzard."
And here is “The Master and Margarita”: “This darkness, which came from the west, covered a huge city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything was gone - as if it had never existed in the world.”
Compare with “Mr. from San Francisco”: “A heavy fog hid Vesuvius to its very foundations, low above the leaden swell of the sea. The island of Capri was not visible at all - as if it had never existed in the world.”
It would be tempting to continue the comparisons (for example, to trace how the theme of Tiberius, the terrible patron of Bulgakov’s Pilate, moved from “Master” to “Master”; no less interesting is the theme of the devil that unites both works; in Bunin, “as huge as a rock,” but at first presented to a tourist from San Francisco in the image of an “excellently elegant young man", and before Berlioz - in the guise of the dapper foreign tourist Woland, who at the end of the novel turned into a "block of darkness"; it would be interesting to compare the ball on the ship with the ball at Satan's, the characters' reaction to the death of the Yankees and the death of Berlioz; the storm over Moscow in the finale of "The Master" "and the storm over "Atlantis" in the finale of "The Master"), but all this, as they usually say in such cases, is the topic of a separate large work. And the point, in general, is not about who influenced whom, it’s in literature the process is natural. Bunin himself liked to say: “I am from Gogol!”, which few people believed. But they did not understand that the writer had in mind the language, style, etc. But what? what Bunin himself wrote in “The Life of Arsenyev” about the significance of Gogol in his creative destiny: “Terrible revenge” awakened in my soul high feeling, which is embedded in every soul and will live forever - a feeling of the most sacred legality of retribution, the most sacred necessity of the final triumph of good over evil and the utmost mercilessness with which evil is punished in due course. This feeling is an undoubted thirst for God, faith in Him."
The second theme, acutely experienced by Bunin even in his first poems and stories, is the theme of death. In “The Life of Arsenyev,” a young hero in one village, where he usually went on business, met at a walk with “a tall-breasted red-haired girl with large lips.” One day she went to accompany him to the station, and he, passing a freight car with open doors, pulled her there. “...She jumped up after me and hugged me tightly around the neck. But I struck a match to look around, and recoiled in horror: the match illuminated a long, cheap coffin in the middle of the carriage.” This coffin, which appeared so inopportunely, is, by the way, an indispensable motif in the poetics of Bunin’s works about love.
With a sensitivity unusual for Russian literature, heightened to the extreme, he describes the instinct of life, procreation, and death awakening in people: as an inevitable, inescapable ending...
Alexey Arsenyev and a nameless dead man in a cheap coffin are driving along railway in different ways, but this is for the time being... Sooner or later, their paths, alas, will intersect... As a writer, Bunin portrayed this fatal contradiction of human existence with stunning, realistic force, but he himself, as a human being, could never come to terms with it... Therefore, perhaps , with such heightened sympathy he described Leo Tolstoy, jumping over snow-covered ditches on Devichye Pole and saying to Bunin - “sharply, sternly, sharply:
There is no death, there is no death!
Other readers ask the question: why did Bunin, in the early and mature creativity who harmoniously combined a variety of themes, including “feminine”, in his old age gave preference to the latter, and often in an openly erotic spirit? Maybe this meant that at the end of his life he was disillusioned with everything except sensual, carnal pleasures? Or maybe, having spent Nobel Prize, frankly decided to make money on “strawberries”? Here it must be said that the stories that made up “Dark Alleys” were mainly written during the Nazi occupation of France, when Bunin lived in the resort town of Grasse, and only a small part of them was published then (9 out of 25), and only in newspapers. Bunin wrote them practically “on the table”, “for himself”, as in distant times teenage years. And in general, you should clearly imagine the atmosphere in which “Dark Alleys” were created: occupation, hunger, cold (in winter in the Alpes-Maritimes it is not at all warm, and firewood cost a lot of money). To all these “charms” was added old age - during the war years, Bunin “exchanged” his eighties... So maybe he warmed his cooling blood with love stories?
There are dozens of “maybes” possible here. But here's what critics usually don't take into account. Human, long years living outside the homeland, gradually ceases to feel it as something that exists as truly in time and space as the country of residence. Images of the Motherland pass into the realm of memories, and memories tend to fade over time (especially among writers who use them like negative photographers). For non-religious people (and Bunin was a believer, but not a very religious person), what is most reliably preserved in memory is that which is associated with sensory experiences.
This pattern can be easily seen if we compare Bunin’s work of the 20s and 40s. In the 20s, he wrote such stories as “Mowers” - a hymn to a Russia that has passed into the past, and such as “Sunstroke” - a short story that begs to be included in “Dark Alleys”. In addition, Bunin was then an active publicist and sharply polemicized with the left flank of the emigration, in particular with the “Miliukov party.” From the second half of the 30s, all his artistic interests seemed to be focused on the intimate sphere, although it is well known that he did not change his views.
All this suggests that the images of women in " Dark alleys"There are images of the Motherland that Bunin extracts from the sensory sphere of his consciousness.
And trains and steamships, where stories often begin or end, were for the writer something like a literary time machine, delivering his heroes there, through the looking glass, to Russia, which “will not return forever.” To understand this, the story "Rusya" (after the heroine's shortened name - Marusya) is important. It reads like this: “At eleven o’clock in the evening, the Moscow-Sevastopol fast train stopped at a small station outside Podolsk, where it was not supposed to stop, and was waiting for something on the second track.” It was a train stopped in time. The hero remembers his beloved, who once lived in an estate nearby. The train finally started moving. He picked up speed and flew - as time flies in our fast-paced life: “... still the blue-violet peephole above the door looked at him from the black darkness just as steadily, mysteriously, gravely, and still with the same speed, steadily rushing forward, rushing forward, springing, the carriage is swaying. That sad stop is already far, far away. And all this was already twenty years ago - copses, magpies, swamps, water lilies, snakes, cranes...” In the morning, the wife asks the hero: “You’re still sad, remembering your dacha girl.” with bony feet?
“I’m sad, I’m sad,” he answered, smiling unpleasantly. - Country girl... Amata nobis quantum amabitu nulla!" ("Beloved by us, like no other will be loved!" - Lat.)
This mysterious Russia, of course - Rus', Russia, beloved by Bunin, like no other country can be beloved.
Special for the Centenary
I.A.Bunin. "Mr. from San Francisco" (1915)
Published in 1915, the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” was created during the First World War, when the motifs of the catastrophic nature of existence, the unnaturalness and doom of technocratic civilization noticeably intensified in Bunin’s work. Image of a giant ship with symbolic name“Atlantis” was prompted by the sinking of the famous “Titanic,” which many saw as a symbol of future world catastrophes. Like many of his contemporaries, Bunin felt the tragic beginning of a new era, and therefore the themes of fate, death, and the motif of the abyss became increasingly important during this period in the writer’s works.
Symbolism of Atlantis. The ship "Atlantis", bearing the name of a once sunken island, becomes a symbol of civilization in the form in which it was created by modern humanity - a technocratic, mechanistic civilization that suppresses man as an individual, far from the natural laws of existence. Antithesis becomes one of the main techniques for creating a figurative story system: “Atlantis,” with its contrast of deck and hold, with its captain, like a “pagan god” or “idol,” is a disharmonious, artificial, false world, and therefore doomed. She is majestic and formidable, but the world of “Atlantis” rests on the illusory foundations of “money,” “fame,” “nobility of the family,” which completely replace the value of human individuality. This world artificially created by people is closed, fenced off from the elements of existence as a hostile, alien and mysterious element for him: “The blizzard beat in his gear and the wide-mountain pipes, white with snow, but he was steadfast, firm, majestic and terrible.” This grandeur is terrible, trying to overcome the elements of life itself, to establish its dominion over it, this illusory grandeur, so unsteady and fragile before the face of the abyss, is terrible. The doom is also palpable in how contrasting the “lower” and “middle” worlds of the ship are, the peculiar models of “hell” and “paradise” of a spiritless civilization: the light and color palette, aromas, movement, the “material” world, sound - everything is different in them , the only common thing is their isolation, isolation from the natural life of existence. The “upper” world of “Atlantis”, its “new deity” is a captain, similar to a “merciful pagan god”, a “huge idol”, a “pagan idol”. This repetition of comparisons is not accidental: the modern era is portrayed by Bunin as the dominance of a new “paganism” - obsession with empty and vain passions, fear of the omnipotent and mysterious Nature, the riot of carnal life outside its sanctification by the life of the spirit. The world of “Atlantis” is a world where voluptuousness, gluttony, passion for luxury, pride and vanity reign, a world where God is replaced by an “idol.”
Passengers of Atlantis. M Despite the artificiality and automatism, it intensifies when Bunin describes the passengers of Atlantis; it is no coincidence that a voluminous paragraph is devoted to their daily routine: this is a model of the deathly regimentation of their existence, in which there is no place for accidents, secrets, surprises, that is, precisely what makes human life truly exciting. The rhythmic-intonation pattern of the line conveys a feeling of boredom, repetition, creates an image of a clockwork with its dull regularity and absolute predictability, and the use of lexical and grammatical means with the meaning of generalization (“they were supposed to walk briskly”, “got up... drank... sat down... did... committed... walked") emphasizes the impersonality of this brilliant “crowd” (it is no coincidence that the writer defines the society of the rich and famous gathered on “Atlantis” in this way). In this fake glittering crowd there are not so many people as puppets, theatrical masks, wax museum sculptures: “Among this glittering crowd there was a certain great rich man, there was a famous Spanish writer, there was an all-world beauty, there was an elegant couple in love.” Oxymoronic combinations and semantically contradictory comparisons reveal a world of false moral values, ugly ideas about love, beauty, human life and personal individuality: “a handsome man who looks like a huge leech” (a surrogate for beauty), “hired lovers,” “disinterested love” of young Neapolitan women, which the master hoped to enjoy in Italy (a surrogate for love).
The people of “Atlantis” are deprived of the gift of surprise at life, nature, art, they have no desire to discover the secrets of beauty, it is no coincidence that they carry this “trail” of deadness with them wherever they appear: museums in their perception become “deadly pure”, churches are “cold”, with “enormous emptiness, silence and quiet lights of the seven-branched candlestick”, art for them is only “slippery gravestones underfoot and someone’s “Descent from the Cross”, certainly famous.”
The main character of the story. It is no coincidence that the main character of the story is deprived of a name (his wife and daughter are also not named) - precisely what first of all separates a person from the “crowd”, reveals his “self” (“no one remembered his name”). The key word of the title “Mr.” determines not so much the personal and unique nature of the protagonist, but his position in the world of technocratic Americanized civilization (it is no coincidence that the only proper noun in the title is San Francisco, thus Bunin defines the real, earthly analogue of the mythological Atlantis), his worldview: “He was firmly convinced that he had every right to rest, to pleasure... he was quite generous on the road and therefore fully believed in the care of all those who fed and watered him, from morning to evening served him.” The description of the gentleman’s entire previous life takes only one paragraph, and life itself is defined more precisely - “until that time he did not live, but only existed.” In the story there is no detailed speech characterization of the hero; his inner life is almost not depicted. The inner speech of the hero is extremely rarely conveyed. All this reveals that the master’s soul is dead, and his existence is just the fulfillment of a certain role.
The appearance of the hero is extremely “materialized”, the leitmotif detail, acquiring a symbolic character, is the shine of gold, the leading color scheme is yellow, gold, silver, that is, the colors of deadness, lack of life, the color of external brilliance. Using the technique of analogy, likening, Bunin, with the help of repeated details, creates external “doubles” portraits of two completely different similar friends on the friend of people - the lord and the eastern prince: in the world of domination of facelessness, people mirror each other.
The motive of death in the story. The antithesis “life-death” is one of the plot-forming elements in the story. The “heightened sense of life” characteristic of Bunin was paradoxically combined with a “heightened sense of death.” Quite early, a special, mystical attitude towards death awakened in the writer: death in his understanding was something mysterious, incomprehensible, which the mind cannot cope with, but which a person cannot help but think about. Death in the story “Mr. from San Francisco” becomes a part of Eternity, the Universe, Being, but this is precisely why the people of “Atlantis” try not to think about it, they experience a sacred, mystical fear of it that paralyzes consciousness and feelings. The gentleman tried not to notice the “harbingers” of death, not to think about them: “In the gentleman’s soul a long time ago, there were no so-called mystical feelings left... he saw in a dream the owner of the hotel, the last in his life... without trying to understand, without thinking what exactly was terrible ...What did the gentleman from San Francisco feel and think on this so significant evening? He was just really hungry." Death struck the millionaire from San Francisco suddenly, “illogically,” rudely and repulsively, crushing him just at the time when he was about to enjoy life. Death is described by Bunin in an emphatically naturalistic manner, but it is precisely such a detailed description, paradoxically, that enhances the mysticism of what is happening: as if a person is fighting something invisible, cruel, mercilessly indifferent to his desires and hopes. Such death does not imply the continuation of life in another - spiritual - form, it is the death of the body, final, plunging into oblivion without hope of resurrection, this death has become the logical conclusion of an existence in which there has been no life for a long time. Paradoxically, fleeting signs of the soul lost by the hero during his lifetime appear after his death: “And slowly, slowly, in front of everyone, pallor flowed over the face of the deceased, and his features began to thin out and brighten.” It was as if that divine soul, given at birth to everyone and killed by the gentleman from San Francisco himself, was freed again. After death, strange and, in fact, terrible “shifters” happen to the now “former master”: power over people turns into inattention and moral deafness of the living towards the deceased (“there is and cannot be a doubt about the correctness of the desires of the gentleman from San Francisco”, “the owner bowed politely and elegantly” - “This is completely impossible, madam,... the owner besieged her with polite dignity... the owner with an impassive face, already without any courtesy”); instead of Luigi’s insincere, but still kindness, there is his buffoonery and antics, the giggling of the maids; instead of luxurious apartments, “where a high-ranking person stayed,” - “a room, the smallest, the worst, the dampest and coldest,” with a cheap iron bed and coarse woolen blankets; instead of a brilliant deck on the Atlantis there is a dark hold; Instead of enjoying the best - a box of soda water, a hungover cab driver and a horse dressed up in Sicilian style. Near death, petty, selfish human vanity suddenly flares up, in which there is both fear and annoyance - there is only no compassion, empathy, no sense of the mystery of what has happened. These “shifters” became possible precisely because the people of “Atlantis” are distant from the natural laws of existence, of which life and death are part, that the human personality is replaced by the social position of “master” or “servant”, that “money”, “fame”, “nobility of the family” completely replaces man. The “proud man’s” claims to dominance turned out to be illusory. Dominance is a transitory category; these are the same ruins of the palace of the all-powerful Emperor Tiberius. The image of ruins hanging over a cliff is a detail that emphasizes the fragility of the artificial world of “Atlantis”, its doom.
Symbolism of images of the ocean and Italy. Opposed to the world of “Atlantis” is the vast world of nature, of Being itself, of all things, the embodiment of which are Italy and the ocean in Bunin’s story. The ocean has many faces and is changeable: it walks with black mountains, chills with a white water desert, or amazes with the beauty of “waves as colorful as a peacock’s tail.” The ocean frightens the people of Atlantis precisely because of its unpredictability and freedom, the element of life itself, changeable and ever-moving: “the ocean that walked outside the walls was scary, but they didn’t think about it.” The image of the ocean goes back to the mythological image of water as the original element of existence, which gave birth to life and death. The artificiality of the world of “Atlantis” is also manifested in this alienation from the elements of the ocean-being, protected from it by the walls of an illusory majestic ship.
Italy becomes the embodiment of the diversity of the ever-moving and multifaceted world in Bunin's story. The sunny face of Italy was never revealed to the gentleman from San Francisco; he only managed to see its prosaic, rainy face: palm leaves shiny with tin, wet from the rain, a gray sky, constantly drizzling rain, shacks smelling of rotten fish. Even after the death of the gentleman from San Francisco, the Atlantis passengers, continuing their journey, do not meet either the careless boatman Lorenzo or the Abruzzese highlanders; their path is to the ruins of the palace of Emperor Tiberius. The joyful side of existence is forever closed from the people of “Atlantis”, because they are not ready to see this side, to open up to it spiritually.
On the contrary, the people of Italy - the boatman Lorenzo and the Abruzzese mountaineers - feel themselves to be a natural part of vast universe, it is no coincidence that at the end of the story the artistic space sharply expands, including the earth, the ocean, and the sky: “a whole country, joyful, beautiful, sunny, stretched beneath them.” A childish joyful rapture at the beauty of the world, naive and reverent surprise at the miracle of life is felt in the prayers of the Abruzzese highlanders addressed to the Mother of God. They, like Lorenzo, are integral to the natural world. Lorenzo is picturesquely handsome, free, royally indifferent to money - everything about him is contrary to the description of the main character. Bunin affirms the greatness and beauty of life itself, whose powerful and free flow frightens the people of “Atlantis” and draws in those who are capable of becoming an organic part of it, spontaneously, but childishly wise, to trust it.
The existential background of the story. The artistic world of the story includes limiting, absolute values: equal participants in the story about the life and death of an American millionaire include the Roman Emperor Tiberius and the “cricket” singing with “sad carefreeness” on the wall, hell and heaven, the Devil and the Mother of God. The connection of the heavenly and earthly worlds paradoxically appears, for example, in the description of the forty-third issue: “The dead man remained in the dark, blue stars looked at him from the sky, a cricket sang with sad carefreeness on the wall.” The eyes of the Devil are watching the ship as it departs into the night and blizzard, and the face of the Mother of God is turned to the heavenly heights, the kingdom of her Son: “The countless fiery eyes of the ship behind the snow were barely visible to the Devil, who was watching the ship... Above the road, in the grotto of the rocky wall of Monte Solaro, all illuminated by the sun, all in its warmth and shine, stood in snow-white plaster robes... the Mother of God, meek and merciful, with her eyes raised to heaven, to the eternal and blissful abodes of her thrice-blessed son.” All this creates an image of the world as a whole, a macrocosm, including light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, moment and eternity. Infinitely small against this background turns out to be the closed world of “Atlantis”, which considers itself great in this isolation. It is no coincidence that the structure of the story is characterized by a compositional ring: the description of “Atlantis” is given at the beginning and end of the work, while the same images vary: the lights of a ship, a beautiful string orchestra, the hellish fireboxes of the hold, a dancing couple playing in love. This is a fatal circle of isolation, fenced off from being, a circle created by a “proud man” and turning him, who realizes himself as a master, into a slave.
Man and his place in the world, love and happiness, the meaning of life, the eternal struggle between good and evil, beauty and the ability to live with it - these eternal problems are at the center of Bunin’s story.