Summary of the story “Antonov Apples” in chapters (I.A. Bunin)

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“Antonov Apples” by I. Bunin is a panoramic image of the life of landowners, in which there was also room for a story about peasant life. The peculiarity of the work is its rich landscape sketches, from which unique autumn smells emanate. This is a striking example of poetic prose in Russian literature. The story is in the Unified State Examination codifier, so it is important to remember the basic information about it. Studying “Antonov apples in 11th grade. We offer a qualitative analysis of this work by I. Bunin.

The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Ilyina Galina Sergeevna.

Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 36 years.

Brief Analysis

Year of writing - 1900.
History of creation - In 1891, I. Bunin stayed at the estate of his brother Evgeniy. Once, going outside, the writer caught the smell of Antonov apples, which reminded him of the times of the landowners. The story was written only 9 years later.

Theme - In this lyrical narrative, two themes can be distinguished: autumn in the village and poeticization of the life of landowners, regret about the passing noble culture.

Composition - The organization of the story is special, since the event line is very poorly represented in it. The main role is played by memories, impressions, and philosophical reflections that are associated with landscapes, smells, and sounds.

Genre : Short story, lyrical monologue.

Direction – Sentimentalism.

Analysis 3

Bunin’s famous story “Antonov Apples” was written in the shortest possible time, but not completely finished. For a long time, the author constantly returned to this story, which is why each subsequent edition has some adjustments. Throughout the entire work, the author misses the past, constantly remembering it.

In the story, the actions take place in autumn, namely early. After all, then the harvest and apples begin to be harvested. Apples are very tasty and have a pleasant smell. The reader himself is already burning with desire to try these apples, because everything is described so appetizingly. The smell of fruit mixed with the smell of autumn, resulting in a wonderful and pleasant aroma. It is this smell that Bunin smells all his life. When the author describes nature, he uses many metaphors and epithets. He wants to describe everything as accurately as possible. In order for the reader to plunge into the atmosphere that is conveyed throughout the entire work.

In the story “Antonov Apples” the main character is a barchuk. Bunin did not want to reveal the story of the main character, he simply described his life. The author does not completely devote himself to describing nature; he does not forget to describe ordinary everyday things. For example, he talks about an old woman who is about to die. She remembers her aunt, whom she adored so much. Then Bunin switches to a landowner who loved to hunt with all his heart. He enjoys the process of hunting. Hunters constantly gathered at this landowner's place; together they loved to sit and drink. To make the feeling of melancholy greater, Bunin describes late autumn. Although the bad weather has ended, the sun is no longer warm. And everyone lacks warmth and playfulness. This is what causes sadness and melancholy for everyone.

Unfortunately, with all this warmth, the smell that the author loved so much also disappeared. The aroma of Antonov apples. It's all over a long time ago, childhood too. Unfortunately, all that remains is sadness and sadness for what is already gone. Winter has already begun. Everything was covered with snow. With this, Bunin wants to show that there is no turning back.

Bunin very accurately selected the time of year that he described in the work. Here it is - early autumn. The time when the harvest is harvested. During this time, childhood continues. Everything is fine. Late autumn is the old woman’s farewell to life, and then winter. The past remains only in thoughts and heart. Life, oddly enough, goes on. The story can even be called sad, but despite this, Bunin put his whole soul into it.

History of creation

The history of the creation of the work is connected with the writer’s trip to his brother Eugene. In a country estate, I. Bunin caught the smell of Antonov apples. The aroma reminded Ivan Alekseevich of the life of landowners. This is how the idea for the story arose, which the writer realized only nine years later, in 1900. “Antonov Apples” became part of Bunin’s cycle of epitaphs.

The story was first seen by the world in the year it was written in the magazine “Life”, published in St. Petersburg. Critics received it positively. But the publication did not mark the end of the work. Bunin continued to polish his creation for twenty years, so there are several versions of “Antonov Apples”.

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Reader's diary “Antonov apples”

Story Analysis

Bunin’s work “Antonov Apples” is a reflection by writers on the fate of the local nobility, which gradually faded away and disappeared. The writer’s heart aches with sadness when he sees vacant lots in the place where only yesterday there were busy noble estates. An unsightly picture opens before his eyes: only ashes remain from the landowners' estates and now they are overgrown with burdocks and nettles. Sincerely, the author of the story “Antonov Apples” worries about any character in his work, living with him all the trials and anxieties. The writer created a unique work, where one of his impressions, creating a bright and rich picture, is smoothly replaced by another, no less thick and dense.

Subject

To grasp the essence of the story “Antonov Apples,” one should consider the main themes and problems of the work.

It is dominated by an autumn theme . The author reveals the beauty of nature at the time of its withering and the changes that autumn brings to human life. Then I.A. Bunin proceeds to describe the life of a landowner. The image of Antonov apples plays an important role in revealing both themes. These fruits have become a symbol of childhood, antiquity, intoxication with nature and serenity. This is the meaning of the title of the story.

The peculiarity of the work is that the lyrical component plays the leading role in it. It is not for nothing that the author chooses the first-person narrative form. This way the reader can get as close as possible to the narrator, see the world through his eyes, observe his feelings and emotions. The narrator of the work resembles the lyrical hero whom we are accustomed to seeing in Bunin’s poems.

First, the narrator describes early autumn, generously “sprinkling” the landscape with folk signs. This technique helps to recreate a rustic atmosphere. At the beginning of the story, the image of Antonov apples already appears. They are collected by peasants in the gardens of bourgeois gardeners. Gradually, the author moves on to a description of a bourgeois hut and a fair near it. This allows you to introduce colorful peasant images into the work. The first part ends with a description of an autumn night.

The second part begins again with landscape and folk signs. In it, Bunin talks about long-lived old people, hinting that his generation is much weaker than the past. In this part the reader can find out how wealthy peasants lived. The narrator describes their life with delight, not hiding the fact that he himself would like to live like that.

Memories take the narrator back to the times when his landowner aunt was alive. He enthusiastically tells how he came to visit Anna Gerasimovna. Her estate was surrounded by an apple orchard. The hero describes in detail the interior of the house, paying special attention to smells, the main one being the aroma of apples.

The third part of I. Bunin’s work “Antonov Apples” is a story about hunting - the only thing that “sustained the fading spirit of the landowners.” The narrator describes the preparations for the hunt, the process itself and the evening feast. In this part, another hero appears - the landowner Arseny Semyonovich, who pleasantly surprises with his appearance and cheerful disposition.

In the final part, the author talks about the death of landowner Anna Gerasimovna, landowner Arseny Semyonich and the elderly. The spirit of antiquity seems to have died along with them. All that remained were memories of the “small-scale life.” Nevertheless, I. Bunin concludes that she is also good, confirming this with a description of small-scale life.

The problems of the work are concentrated around the extinction of landowner culture and the death of antiquity.

The idea of ​​the story is to show that the old days had a special charm, so descendants should preserve it at least in memory.

The main idea is that a person cherishes the memories that remain in his heart from childhood and youth.

Analysis of the composition and problems of the story “Antonov Apples”

The work belongs to the short story genre in which there is a form of internal monologue. The story consists of four chapters, each of which contains a description of a new world. But, combining them together, we get a complete picture of the world, which Bunin so masterfully created.

First part: an amazing garden, its unity with nature, universal fragrance.

Second part: golden autumn, the aroma of apples, village chores are described.

The third part: the change from foggy autumn to harsh winter, along with which the spirit of the landowners, ready to leave their homes, fades away.

Part four: loneliness and melancholy

Analyzing the story “Antonov Apples,” Bunina will note that the work is filled with sounds, as if nature wants to convey something important to the reader. The sounds and noises only intensify towards the end of the story. Only Antonov apples remain unchanged. There is an effect of a closed space; it seems that there is nothing in the world except the estate. The story lacks a familiar plot, there is only a life cycle filled with feelings and emotions. As much as man experiences, so does nature. After all, everything in life is interconnected.

The main theme not only of this story, but of the writer’s entire work is the theme of Russia. Bunin is worried about the ruined noble estates and estates. This lyrical and soulful work seems to immerse you in the world of reality and a passing Russia. Bunin shows that with the disappearance of the smell of apples, the former Russia also leaves.

The characters in this story have no names. This technique is used to show that any person can be in the place of the characters; there is no specific type. However, along with the consistent change of seasons, the main character also changes. He grows from a child to a youth, from a youth to an adult, and then to an old man.

Composition

The compositional features of the work are manifested both at the formal and semantic levels. It is written in the form of memories of a lyrical hero. The main role in the story is played not by events, but by extra-plot elements - landscapes, portraits, interiors, philosophical reflections. They are closely intertwined and complementary. The main tool for their creation is artistic means, among which there are both original and folklore ones.

It is difficult to identify the elements of the plot - exposition, plot, development of events and denouement, since they are blurred by the indicated extra-plot components.

Formally, the text is divided into four parts, each of which is devoted to certain memories of the narrator. All parts are connected by the main theme and the image of the narrator.

Kataev V.: The life-giving power of memory. “Antonov Apples” by I. Bunin

The life-giving power of memory. “Antonov Apples” by I. Bunin

1

Bunin's story “Antonov Apples” (1900) was met with bewilderment by some contemporaries. The review of the writer I. Potapenko said: Bunin writes “beautifully, smartly, colorfully, you read him with pleasure and still can’t get to the main point,” since he “describes everything that comes to hand.” 10-15 years earlier, the works of Bunin’s senior contemporary, Chekhov, were met with the same accusations of the abundance of “accidental” and the absence of a “main” critic. The point was that the relationship between the “main” and the “accidental” in Chekhov, like in Bunin, turned out to be new, unusual for criticism and not understood by it. But A. M. Gorky warmly welcomed Bunin’s story: “Thank you very much for “Apples.” This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young god, sang. Beautiful, juicy, soulful: Potapenko’s angry and stupid review in “Russia” is ridiculous.”

There is something significant in the fact that “Antonov Apples” was written in 1900, on the verge of two centuries. The entire 19th century is behind us; the magnificent edifice of Russian classical literature, created by generations of writers, is already rising. Any new builder who steps onto the scaffolding of this building must feel a centuries-old tradition behind him. Among the most important things from which the “vital composition” of Bunin the writer was formed were the prose of Gogol and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, the poems of Pushkin and Fet. To select and assimilate from the richest heritage that which corresponds to one’s own aspirations, artistic and social experience of a person living at the turn of the century, and to enrich it with a new vision, the development of traditions (which is one of the main traditions of great Russian literature) - this task was accomplished by his creativity of Bunin.

“Antonov Apples” is a story that has taken root in the centuries-old thickness of Russian literary traditions. Here, as in grain, one can find those generic, main features of Bunin’s worldview, Bunin’s style, which will develop later, in the writer’s subsequent work. And Bunin, who began writing and publishing back in the eighties of the 19th century, would live through most of the 20th century (he died in 1953). Bunin’s stories such as “Antonov Apples” gave impetus to new traditions that find an unexpected continuation and response in the works of our contemporaries.

2

To show the complex behind the seemingly simple, to lead from the small to reflection on the significant is one of the long-standing and characteristic properties of Russian literature.

When you read “Antonov Apples,” at first it may seem that this story is about a rare human gift: the memory of smells. About the amazing ability to restore with the smallest details a picture of the past, remembering the smells once inhaled.

The whole story seems to be filled with the smell of ripe Antonov apples - the smell of honey and autumn freshness. It is poured over the thinned autumn garden into which we are introduced from the first paragraph. He, the narrator recalls, is inseparable from the village in a rich, fruitful year. It can also be heard in the cozy old house of the landowner Aunt Anna Gerasimovna. And the extinction of the old way of life is conveyed as follows: “The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the landowners’ estates.”

From the very first lines, dozens of other smells mix with this apple aroma, prompting the narrator’s memory with details of his youth, spent far from cities, among the fields, forests and gardens of Central Russia.

“It’s so nice to lie on a cart, look into the starry sky, smell tar in the fresh air and listen to how a long train creaks carefully in the dark along the high road.” Rye aroma of new straw and chaff. “And here’s another smell: there’s a fire in the garden, and there’s a strong wafting of fragrant smoke from cherry branches.” In my aunt’s cool and gloomy house, surrounded by trees, in addition to apple, you can hear other smells: old mahogany furniture, dried linden blossom, which has been lying on the windows since June... And on the days of the autumn hunt: “... How greedily and capaciously the young breast breathed the cold of the clear and a damp day." If you happen to fall behind from the hunt and stop in the forest, “The ravines smell strongly of mushroom dampness, rotten leaves and wet tree bark.” At dusk, the hunters return, “smelling of horse sweat, the fur of a hunted animal”... The smells of the earth, forest, nature are inseparable in the narrator’s memory from the glorious smell of his grandfather’s old books, their “yellowed, thick, rough paper”...

(Perhaps, later only Sholokhov’s “Quiet Don” will be so rich in descriptions of smells - there the life of the heroes is also inseparable from the world of smells of the steppe, surrounding their nature and everyday life.)

The memory of smells in “Antonov Apples” is combined with the memory of sounds, colors, and the memory of touch:

“... The cool silence of the morning is disturbed only by the well-fed cackling of blackbirds on the coral rowan trees in the thicket of the garden, voices and the echoing sound of apples being poured into measures and tubs”;

“... With pleasure you feel the slippery leather of the saddle under you, driving through Vyselki on a hunt”;

“... rustles noisily with its hooves on deep and light carpets of black crumbling foliage”;

“A dog barked somewhere in the distance, another, a third answered it passionately and pitifully - and suddenly the whole forest thundered, as if it were all made of glass, from violent barking and screaming”...

Bunin admitted more than once that by nature he was generously endowed with a rare acuteness of perception. Alexey Arsenyev, the hero of his book “The Life of Arsenyev”, who is close to the author himself, says: “My vision was such that I saw all seven stars in the Pleiades, I heard the whistle of a marmot a mile away in the evening field, I got drunk, smelling the smell of lily of the valley or an old book " Such sophistication of feelings must have been possessed by Uncle Eroshka from Tolstoy’s “Cossacks” or the Indian Hiawatha, the hero of Longfellow’s beloved poem by Bunin, brilliantly translated by him into Russian.

This sensitivity, vigilance, sophistication of all feelings was the source of amazing details, observations, comparisons that overflowed Bunin’s works. Such as the famous, often quoted lines from the story “Sukhodol”: “A dog ran in the cold shade under the balcony, crunching on grass burned by frost and sprinkled with salt.” Or from the story “The Last Date”: “The gelding raised his head and, breaking the moon in a puddle with his hoof, set off with a vigorous amble.”

And in this area, Bunin felt like a rich heir: after all, his experience was determined by “that amazing imagery, verbal sensitivity for which Russian literature is so famous.” The abundance of such details of living life, “severe and beautiful,” also fills Chekhov’s works. But Chekhov himself determined the difference in the style of his younger contemporary: “We are similar to you, like a greyhound to a hound. You, for example, are much sharper than me. You write: “The sea smells like watermelon”... It’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t say that.”

statements of a character or the logic of plot development. They themselves constitute the main thing in Bunin’s works; in any case, a very significant part of this main thing. The critic was blind and deaf to this main thing, who considered that Bunin “describes everything that comes to hand.”

Ultimately, all the details hit one goal and evoke one feeling in the reader of Antonov Apples. In the already mentioned “The Life of Arsenyev” (the book after which Bunin received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933), the hero is indignant upon hearing the opinion that there are too many descriptions of nature in Fet’s works. “I was indignant: descriptions! — set out to prove that there is no nature separate from us, that every slightest movement of air is the movement of our own life.” The ability to express such a worldview is one of the main tasks of the author of “Antonov Apples”, that is, in the name of which this story was written.

Everything earthly, everything living in its many manifestations, fragmented into individual smells, sounds, colors, is an independent subject of depiction in Bunin. Whole heaps of fresh, memorable observations and details rain down on the reader, reminding of the threads connecting human life with plant and animal life, of the inextricable unity of man and nature.

Here the serf Natalya returns to her native Sukhodol after a two-year exile to a distant farm: “In everything, in everything - and especially in the smell of flowers - a part of her own soul, her childhood, adolescence, first love was felt” (“Sukhodol”).

“And with a thoughtfully sad smile she began to pick flowers; picked it up, picked up a large motley bunch, tender, beautiful, fragrant, into her dark, rough hand, looking tenderly and pitifully first at it, then at this fertile land, indifferent only to her, at the juicy and thick green-tin peas, confused with scarlet mouse peas... A silky noise and rustle ran through the bushes, the oatmeal rang monotonously and crystalline in them, piteously clicking and flying from place to place, from blade to blade of grass, as if searching and still not finding something” (“Merry Yard” ).

“Thin, like a hair, the crescent of the moon glittered over the black sloping plain across the river, in the transparent sky. Far away in the village, the girls sang well and drawlingly an old song of praise: “In the evening, in the evening, in a clear ray...” When and with whom did this happen? Soft dusk in a meadow, above a shallow pool, warm, pinkish from the dawn, trembling with small ripples, water spreading in circles, someone’s water carrier on the shore, a girl’s figure faintly visible in the dusk, bare feet - and inept hands, with difficulty lifting a full ladle... The little one walks past in the night, sweetly breathing in the freshness of the meadow...” (“Thin Grass”).

The light breath of Olya Meshcherskaya after her death “dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind” (“Light Breath”).

The earthly existence of the dog Chang was inextricably united with the captain, his owner: “The wind from different directions beat strongly and softly from the darkness into Chang’s face, fanned and cooled the thick fur on his chest, and, tightly, kindly clinging to the captain, Chang smelled the smell as if cold sulfur, breathed the open womb of the sea depths, and the stern trembled, it was lowered and raised by some great and unspeakably free force, and he swayed, swayed, excitedly contemplating this blind and dark, but a hundred times alive, dully rebellious Abyss" ("Dreams" Chang").

Reading these descriptions, you feel that the novelty, freshness and joy of “all impressions of life” are subject to the artist’s visual power. Of course, before that there were Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter” and Tolstoy’s “Cossacks,” and there was Chekhov’s brilliant “Steppe.” But no one in Russian literature of the early 20th century returned with such persistence to this theme of the inseparability of human life and nature as Bunin.

In his works of the 1900-1910s, created after “Antonov Apples,” Bunin will often speak with cold contempt about the meaninglessness of the world and human aspirations, about the illusory, deceptive nature of the composition that fills the “cup of life,” about the thin and fragile partition , which separates life from death, about the proximity of the rough and dirty with the most beautiful. The material for these conclusions will be the life of a Russian poor village, a bankrupt estate, a new bourgeois city, and observations of the global offensive of capital, gleaned from his trips to Italy, the Middle East, and Ceylon. Such are his “Easy Breathing”, “Cup of Life”, “Mr. from San Francisco”, “Chang’s Dreams”, “Brothers”. Bunin expressed this cold, unshakably contemptuous look at the entire universe, at the “crowd” living “in the valley” in a conventionally romantic form in his sonnet “On the heights, on the snowy peak...”. (Bunin really did not like the decadents and symbolists of his time, but such an individualistic denial of the world unites him with them.)

“to the top” (that is, to self-directed creativity, to pure art), in Bunin’s works an uncontrollable, tireless admiration of life in all its manifestations, and above all, of the native Central Russian nature, constantly breaks through. “Life should be admiration...” Bunin would say later.

And when in 1920, not understanding or accepting the revolution, caught up in a wave of emigration, Bunin found himself far from his homeland and continued to write about what he saw only “with the gaze of memory,” this memory of the sounds, colors, smells of his native land supported and nourished everything that remained writer's creativity.

Remembering the song of the Ryazan mowers he had once heard in a foreign land, Bunin reflected: “Its charm... was in that unconscious, but blood relationship that was between them and us... and this grain field that surrounded us, this field air that we breathed and they and we since childhood, this late afternoon, these clouds in the already pinkish west, this fresh, young forest, full of waist-deep honey herbs, countless wild flowers and berries... And there was also a charm (already completely unrecognized by us then) “that this homeland, this common home of ours, was Russia, and that only her soul could sing as the mowers sang in this birch forest that responded to every breath” (“Mowers”).

Feelings of connection with the native land, the fullness of life grow for the hero of the story “Mitya’s Love” from small things - from familiar smells (just like in “Antonov Apples”): “... these fragrant smoke huts... warm, sweet, fragrant rain... night, spring, the smell of rain, the smell of plowed land ready for fertilization, the smell of horse sweat and the memory of the smell of a kid glove..."

And summing up the most important results of his life, Bunin will remember “that marvelous blue of the sky, turning into purple, which appears on a hot day against the sun in the tops of the trees, as if bathed in this blue...” - and will say: “This purple blue, shining through branches and foliage, even when I die I will remember...” (“The Life of Arsenyev”).

“the pleasure of one’s powers of observation,” expressing in words all the richness of impressions given by life. A whole galaxy of Russian writers of the 20th century calls Bunin their teacher in this vigilance, sensitivity to the details of the surrounding world: Yuri Olesha, Konstantin Paustovsky, Valentin Kataev...

3

We have seen how important it is in itself—it’s important substantively, not formally—the attention of the author of “Antonov Apples” to colors, smells, sounds, the abundance of observations of natural life and everyday life. And yet, the idea of ​​the story is not limited to the task of depicting the native and familiar multi-colored, sounding, breathing world; it's wider.

It is extremely significant that Antonov Apples unfolds as a series of memories. All these “I remember”, “it happened”, “in my memory”, “as I see now” are constant reminders of the passage of time, that the persistence of memory is opposed by the destructive force of time. Descriptions and sketches are continually interrupted by reflections on the passing and disappearing.

It is difficult to unambiguously determine the genre of this work. We call it a story - rather because of its volume. But the features of an essay are clearly visible in “Antonov Apples”: there is no plot, no chain of events. And not just an essay, but a biographical essay, a memoir: this is how the old Russian writer S. T. Aksakov recalled his childhood, spent in an established way of life, in kinship with nature (“Family Chronicle”, “Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson”). And in the two middle chapters, which describe Vyselki, Anna Gerasimovna’s estate, and Arseny Semenych’s hunt, there are undoubted features of the idyll - a genre that Gogol immortalized in his “Old World Landowners.”

Bunin does not hide this connection; he reminds of Gogol with hidden quotes, interspersed with Gogol’s words and phrases in the text of these chapters. The aunt rides “in a strong, iron-bound cart, like those that priests ride in,” a phrase that came from the opening lines of “Dead Souls” and was repeated again by Chekhov in “The Steppe.” Like Gogol, the description of the mistress of the estate is given in the same terms as the description of the furnishings: “It is small, but, like everything around, it is strong.” Both the buildings and the amazing treats are described in detail, in Gogolian style. Even death among this “rural old-world prosperity” is spoken of with a Gogolian grin: a hundred-year-old man would have lived there longer “if he had not eaten too much onions in Petrovka.”

“Antonov Apples”, we must not forget, perhaps, the main thing: this is the poet’s prose. The kinship with lyric poetry and music is primarily in the way the theme is developed.

The four chapters of “Antonov Apples” fall into a series of paintings and episodes: I. In the thinned garden. At the hut: at noon, on a holiday, towards night, late at night. Shadows. Train. Shot. II. A village in a harvest year. At my aunt's estate. III. Hunting before. Bad weather. Before leaving. In the black forest. In the estate of a bachelor landowner. For old books. IV. Small-scale life. Threshing in Riga. Hunt now. In the evening on a remote farm. Song.

But not only these pictures and episodes change. Their change is accompanied by successive references to changes in nature - from Indian summer to the first snow and the onset of winter. In the background, parallel to the memories, a plot unfolds about nature’s slide towards winter, the first snow. And the gradual extinction of nature corresponds to the extinction of local life. The boundaries between changes in the states of nature coincide with the boundaries between the past and present of landowners' estates.

“I remember an early fine autumn” - this is how we enter the story. The words “fresh” and “freshness” are heard three times in the first paragraph. And the chapter about the rich, fruit-bearing garden ends with a cheerful exclamation: “How cold, dewy and how good it is to live in the world!”

In the second chapter, memories transport the narrator as if to another place and time, to other paintings. But hidden and continuous development continues. The descriptions of both the village and the aunt’s estate are given “in general,” but they are attached to the next period of autumn (mid-September), also still bright and still serene. And nothing seems to foreshadow changes in this “strong” life, the description of which ends like this: “The windows to the garden are raised, and the cheerful autumn coolness blows from there.” But gradually the intonation of cheerfulness and freshness gives way to another, sad intonation.

“In recent years, one thing has kept the fading spirit of the landowners alive—hunting.” The hunt in this chapter will be described as before, on a grand scale. But a reminder of the inexorable passage of time will be the words that the weather has changed dramatically since the end of September, and the description of the “bashing” that the bad weather gave to the garden. True, after the ominous storms at the end of October, “clear weather, clear and cold days came again” - but this is already a “farewell holiday of autumn”! It’s as if this landowner’s amusement is traditional and unchangeable, but in fact this custom is also heading towards extinction and degeneration. And it is no coincidence that the frantic hunt takes off twice into the distance and the narrator is left alone - first in the dead silence of the forest, then in the silence of the estate library.

“Mockingly sad” the cuckoo crows in the office clock, “sweet and strange melancholy” arises when reading grandfather’s books, “sad and tender eyes” look from the portraits of beauties who once lived in noble estates - with this imperceptibly changed intonation Bunin approaches the story that “the kingdom of the small estates, impoverished to the point of beggary, is coming.”

And in that parallel plot, it’s already deep autumn. Wind, sometimes with dry snow, empty plains, leaves curled up and blackened by frost “in a birch alley, already half cut down.” And in the song, which “with sad, hopeless daring” is sung by small-scale farmers on some remote farm on a winter night, there is also the wind that “covered the path with white snow.” Cheerful exclamations interrupt the narrative in the last chapter: “The small-scale life is good!”; “It will be a glorious day for hunting!” But they do not contradict her elegiac tone, but themselves are interspersed with exclamations of annoyance: “But what will you do now with the hounds? … Oh, if only they were greyhounds!”

Bunin’s dear thought is the inseparability of human life from the life of nature. The world created in Antonov Apples is completely under the control of the artist.

4

But why does the story telling about the landowner's ruin end so sadly and touchingly? And why this undisguised regret that estate life is leaving, disappearing?

"Antonovsky apples" is a former village. Serfdom and serf-owning landowners are mentioned in a tone-deaf tone; the “gloomy legends of serfdom” are mentioned in passing. “Good girls and women once lived in noble estates!” Of course, what comes to mind is not Korobochka, but Tatyana Larina, Liza Kalitina...

Bunin knew about the contradictions of the Russian countryside: about peasant children facing hunger, about the onslaught of the fist, about the degeneration of the nobility. He wrote and will write about this in the stories “Tanka”, “Merry Courtyard”, in the story “Village”. In this story, ten years after “Antonov Apples,” the reader will read: “Lord God, what a land! One and a half arshins worth of black soil, what a difference! And not five years pass without hunger. The city is famous throughout Russia for its grain trade, and a hundred people in the whole city eat this bread to their fill. What about the fair? Beggars, fools, blind and cripples - and all of them that are scary and sickening to look at - there’s just a whole regiment!” And it is Bunin who will write about the same native lands that he admires in “Antonov Apples.” No, it’s not a matter of ignorance of the dark sides of life, which is so fondled by the memory of the narrator of “Antonov Apples”!

What is this sadness about then?

It’s not at all about the landowners who are now being squeezed out of their ancient estates. These small-scale creatures swagger, but do not live. They want to adhere to the customs of their environment, established long before them, although they, being impoverished, can no longer afford it.

The same lordly fun - autumn hunting - but the hunting trophies are no longer the same. After that long-standing hunt - a killed seasoned wolf, who, “baring his teeth, rolling his eyes, lies with his fluffy tail thrown to the side in the middle of the hall and stains the floor with his pale and already cold blood.” So you see this picture, in the spirit of the old masters, as if painted in oil paints, enclosed in a rich frame. And now? “The pale light of an early November morning illuminates a simple, bare-walled office, the yellow and crusty skins of foxes above the bed”... In comparison with the above description, this is like a lithographed picture, in its simplicity speaking about the sad affairs of the owner. If there were nothing in the story except these two descriptions of hunting trophies, past and present, then we could say that “Antonov Apples” were written by a poet and they poetically express the theme of the passage of time, the change of eras and ways of life. The current owners of the estates are shown soberly; Bunin has no illusions about them.

"The Cherry Orchard" by Chekhov. Bunin, an ardent admirer of Chekhov, did not accept this play: “Chekhov did not know estates, there were no such gardens.” The point is not only the difference in gardens, the difference in the life experiences of the two writers. In Chekhov's garden, as is now clear to us, memories of the huge Don cherry orchards, and of dear Babkin on Istra, and of Lyubimovka near Moscow, and of the large estate of the millionaire Yakunchikova will merge. Chekhov's Garden will become a symbol of the past, present, and future. But won’t this symbol turn out to be so capacious because among the literary predecessors of “The Cherry Orchard” were Bunin’s “Antonov Apples”?

Contemporaries might have been struck by the difference in details. We now know better what is in common. The current owners of the estates of both Bunin and Chekhov are people living in a way of life that has been created over centuries, in an environment inherited from the past. In themselves, they may not be so bad, but they had the fate of paying for the debts and sins of their class. Individual destinies find themselves in the way of history. That is why there is so much pitifulness in them, they are so confused. They are trying to forget themselves, to hide for a while in a hunt (in Bunin), in an absurd ball (in Chekhov), to preserve in their lives the customs handed down to them from the recent past...

But we feel that this small-scale life, despite the passage of time, clinging to old customs, is somehow dear to the author. Ending his story with the words of a song about wide-open gates and a path covered with white snow, a song that small-scale residents, “pretending that they are joking, pick up with sad, hopeless daring,” he wanted to express not joy about irreversible changes in the shadow of old gardens, but another, more complex relationship.

“If you write about ruin, then I would like to express only its poetry,” Bunin’s later hero, the aspiring writer Alexei Arsenyev, will defiantly declare. “Antonov Apples” is covered in this poetry. And this poetry lies in the fact that the present is shown in inextricable connection with the past, as its continuation; in a reminder of that which is gone and leaving, without which the present would not exist.

You can write about the transition from the old to the new, about the replacement of one way of life by another. The thirst for change and renewal is natural; Bunin understands and shows the inevitability of change, the passing of the past. But the writer wants our memory not to thoughtlessly and joyfully part with the past, but to preserve all the best, poetic in it, its charm and charm.

- distant and very recent - a person is not only immeasurably poorer, he is morally inferior. This is especially true when part of one’s personal destiny and part of the history of one’s country are connected with the past - and the past is gone irrevocably, disappearing before our eyes, within one human life.

In everything - be it the changing colors of the garden, the sounds of village work, the smells of an old landowner's house, the joyful sensations of hunting - Bunin sees a part of his own soul, childhood, youth. A person does not choose his childhood, just as he does not choose his homeland and parents. Only in adulthood will he be able to correlate what his soul has become familiar with since childhood with social categories, with the laws of history. But forever the impressions of childhood and youth will determine his attachments and retain power over his memory. And very often, childhood and youth, contrary to the arguments that reason and knowledge suggest, appear in our memories better than they really were, and what is gone will forever remain sweet and unforgettable. After all, there is that feeling of the inseparability of man from nature. Which determines so much in Bunin’s work, was nurtured by his childhood and youth spent on the Oryol farm, among the “sea of ​​bread, herbs, flowers.”

The memory of the past, which Bunin cherishes, is not only the memory of the family, the clan. Life on the estates, irretrievably disappearing before the eyes of the narrator of “Antonov Apples,” created its own customs, its own way of life - the very ones that the best Russian poets and prose writers wrote about. Bunin mentions the flock with “mad barking and groaning” - and Pushkin’s words immediately come to mind: “And the winter ones suffer from mad fun, And the barking of dogs awakens the sleeping oak forests.” And the power of these customs is higher than each individual landowner, it irresistibly takes possession of him, becomes an imperious need.

What is even more important is that this life also created a wonderful artistic culture, primarily literature, deposited in the cabinets of ancient estate libraries.

- and more than a century is covered: from Catherine’s antiquity to the “romantic times” of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, lyceum student Pushkin, then to my grandmother’s era, playing the clavichord and reading “Eugene Onegin.” “And the old, dreamy life will stand before you...” Yes, poems were published next to advertisements for the sale of serfs. This is how the history of Russian culture was written, and this complexity can neither be straightened nor simplified. But, not forgetting the dark sides of the past, let us gratefully preserve the memory of the best in its heritage.

“Sukhodol” he will reflect: “The Sukhodol people grew up among a life that was deaf, gloomy, but still complex, which had a semblance of a stable life and prosperity...” But “in half a century, an entire class has almost disappeared from the face of the earth...”. “We don’t have even the slightest accurate idea of ​​the life of not only our ancestors, but also our great-grandfathers... every day it becomes more and more difficult for us to imagine even what happened half a century ago!” And further, as a call: “We must remember...”

Let “we”, “our class” here be nobles, descendants of ancient families, and “our ancestors” - stewards, governors, “eminent men”, closest associates, even relatives of kings. But “Sukhodol,” like “Antonov Apples,” is incomparably more than an epitaph on local life.

Not a narrow-class, but a great universal meaning is contained in this poeticization of the past.

“Antonov Apples”, “Sukhodol”, “The Life of Arsenyev”, has become a living tradition and has unexpectedly - and in fact, deeply naturally - been revived in our days. So, this theme sounds in a different era, in the work of a writer with a completely different social and historical experience, our contemporary, in the story of the Siberian Valentin Rasputin “Farewell to Matera.”

“And spring came again, its own in its endless series, but the last for Matera, for the island and the village that bear the same name.”

hydroelectric power stations. But many things unite these works, which are so far apart in time, and first of all - the course of the author’s thoughts.

Rasputin, like Bunin, is sensitive to the details of living life: “Here stands the earth, which seemed eternal, but it turns out that it seemed there would be no earth. It smells like herbs, it smells like forest, separately with a leaf and separately with a needle, each bush breathes its own breath; it smells like the wood of the building, the smell of cattle, housing, a dung heap behind a flock, cucumber tops, old coal from a forge - the rain washed out and took away the pink tart smells from everything, giving everything a free breath.” And in a completely Bunin-like way - the transition from these smells of the native land that speak so much to the heart to reflections on the connection between the past and the present: “Why, why, with them, who lives now, none of this will happen on this land? - not earlier and not later. Is it for nothing? Is it good? What, what consolation can you use to calm your soul?”

“You are not only what you carry within yourself, but also what is not always noticed, what is around you, and losing it is sometimes more terrible than losing an arm or a leg... Perhaps this is the only thing that is eternal, only this, transmitted, like the holy spirit, from person to person, from fathers to children and from children to grandchildren, confusing and protecting them, guiding and purifying...” Without this memory of the past, Rasputin argues, it is impossible to know the truth about a person: why he lives. And that is why his conclusion is so categorical: “The truth is in memory. He who has no memory has no life.”

It is no coincidence that Valentin Rasputin, a prose writer who entered literature in the 70s, turns to the memory of the past. The same Bunin theme is in Vasily Belov’s book “Lad”, in “The Fish Tsar” by Viktor Astafiev, and in the books of our other contemporaries. We, the people of the 20th century, a century of unheard-of upheavals and changes, had to say goodbye to so many forever. And more than once again the memory of literature will turn to understanding what remains in the past, behind.

“I want life and people to be beautiful, to evoke love and joy, and I only hate what interferes with this,” Bunin once said. This pathos, which fills the best works of the writer, is what makes them dear to us.

Published based on the book: Peaks: A book about outstanding works of Russian literature / Comp. V. I. Kuleshov - M.: Det. lit., 1983.

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