“Mitya’s Love” summary of Bunin’s story

Summary

Chapters 1-7

Mitya is in love with Katya, a pretty young girl, a student at a private theater school. Mitya is terribly jealous of her representatives of the aristocratic bohemia, who pay special attention to the girl. Katya asks Mitya not to be jealous, and reminds that for her he is “still the best, the only one.”

Mitya constantly accompanies his beloved “to the studio of the Art Theater, to concerts, to literary evenings.” He just can’t get used to Katya’s mother, a woman with crimson hair who always smokes, wearing rouge.

After a while, Mitya begins to feel that “something has changed, something has begun to change in Katya.” He tries in every possible way to explain Katya’s inner inattention to him, but nothing helps, and the young man experiences painful jealousy.

Katya plunges headlong into theatrical life and shares her first successes - the director constantly praises her and predicts a brilliant future. It was known about this man that “he corrupted schoolgirls, every summer he took one with him to the Caucasus, Finland, and abroad.”

At the final exam, Katya, dressed in a white dress, causes a storm of applause. The first success makes her head spin, and she moves further and further away from Mitya. From a tender, touching, naive girl, she quickly turns “into some young society lady, dressed up and always in a hurry to get somewhere.”

Chapters 8-15

During the first days in the village, Mitya sleeps it off, comes to his senses, and gets used to his home again. But the change of place does not affect Mitya’s feelings in any way - he sees Katya’s image everywhere, feels her invisible presence next to him.

Mitya is looking forward to a letter from her lover - “Katya should have answered at least one of the letters that he sent her a long time ago.” When he receives the first news, he acutely feels that “the cup of his love was full to the brim.”

With the arrival of spring, nature transforms, fresh foliage appears on the trees, but there are no more letters from Katya. Mitya knows very well “Katya’s inability to write letters,” but this does not lessen her anxiety. He stops going for walks and spends almost all his time in the library, reading poems about love. Tired of waiting, Mitya no longer doubts that “there will be no letter and it cannot be, that something has happened in Moscow.”

Mitya’s mother, Olga Petrovna, advises her son to go on a visit and unwind. For example, the Meshchersky neighbors have a “house full of brides.” Mitya can hardly restrain himself - it’s difficult for him to hide his feelings, and he clenches his teeth “until his head hurts.”

Chapters 16-25

The torment of the unhappy lover is intensifying. He stops noticing changes in the world around him and hardly sleeps at night. Mitya begins to “go to the post office himself,” but each time he returns home only with a newspaper. He decides to shoot himself “if there is no letter in a week.”

With a “desperate, extreme effort of will,” Mitya forbids himself to go to the post office, write letters to Katya with assurances of love, humiliate himself, and beg for friendship.

Seeing Mitya’s suffering, the headman invites him to have fun on the side. For a small fee, Alenka can spend time with him - “a poisonous woman, young, husband in the mines.” The headman cleverly organizes Mitya a date with Alenka in the forest.

Chapters 26-27

In terrible tension, Mitya waits to meet the girl. Having learned that his younger brother and sister will soon arrive, he begins to worry that the children will disrupt his plans. The night passes anxiously, and in a dream Mitya sees himself “hanging over a huge, dimly lit abyss.”

The whole next day drags on endlessly, but the closer the evening gets, the more nervous tremors seize Mitya. He goes to the forest, to the hut, where a meeting has been arranged. Soon Alenka appears, and the first thing Mitya does is shove a crumpled five-ruble note into her “palm.” He is lost and doesn't know how to behave. After the long-awaited intimacy, Mitya feels disappointed - he expected completely different emotions and experiences.

Chapters 28-29

It's been raining like crazy all Saturday. Mitya wanders around the garden all day and cries bitterly, marveling at “the strength and abundance of her tears.” “All wet through, without a single spot of blood on his face, with tear-stained, crazy eyes,” he rereads Katya’s letter, in which she asks him to forget her - bad, disgusting, spoiled. She admits that she is madly in love with art and leaves with the director. There’s no point in writing to her anymore – “it’s useless.”

A raging thunderstorm drives Mitya into the house. He climbs into his room through the window and locks himself from the inside. He begins to develop a fever, and in his delirium he sees Katya in the director’s arms.

The “voices and laughter” of younger children can be heard from the next room. Mitya understands that there is no way to “save his beautiful love” and quietly cries from the pain tearing him apart. Desperately wanting to “get rid of her at least for a minute,” Mitya takes out a revolver and, “sighing deeply and joyfully,” shoots himself forcefully in the mouth.

Main themes of the work

The story about the death and life of the student covers the period from December (the time of meeting Katya) to mid-summer. The reader can only learn about Mitya’s past from the hero’s fragmentary memories. All-encompassing love and death are the two main themes that arise in the story. Bunin described the most painful and wonderful time in the young man’s life, which ended with his unexpected suicide. The feelings of a young man are the main motive of the work. The writer presents a detailed psychological analysis. Mitya’s love is an independent “hero” of the story. She was practically born with him. The young man experienced his first vague feelings in infancy towards the nanny caring for him. Then followed a series of fleeting hobbies with charming young ladies of different ages. The attraction to the cute high school student living next door lasted a little longer. Then there were the dizzying sensations at school balls. As a student, Mitya met Katya and in her person he found the material embodiment of his unclear dreams. For the main character, love is the meaning of existence. It is no coincidence that Mitya’s life turned out to be so short. It ended along with the lost hope for mutual feelings.

Mitya's love characterization of the image of Mitya (Mitry Palych)

Mitya (Mitry Palych) is a student, the main character of the story.
He is in a transitional age, when the masculine principle is intertwined with the not yet completely exfoliated childish principle. M. is “thin, awkward” (the girls in the village called him “greyhound”), doing everything with boyish awkwardness. He has a large mouth, black, coarse hair - “he was one of that breed of people with black, as if constantly widened eyes, who almost never grow a mustache or beard even in their mature years...” (M.’s beloved, Katya, calls his eyes are “Byzantine”). The story of M.'s life and death covers a period of just over six months: from December, when he met Katya, to mid-summer (late June - early July), when he commits suicide. We learn about M.'s past from his own fragmentary memories, one way or another connected with the main themes of the story - the theme of all-encompassing love and the theme of death. Love captured M. “even in infancy” as something “inexpressible in human language,” when one day in the garden, next to a young woman (probably a nanny), “something leapt up in him like a hot wave,” and then in various guises: a neighbor -gymnasium student, “the acute joys and sorrows of sudden love at school balls.” A year ago, when M. fell ill in the village, spring became “his first true love.” Immersion in the March nature of “moisture-saturated stubble and black arable land” and similar manifestations of “pointless, ethereal love” accompanied M. until December of his first student winter, when he met Katya and almost immediately fell in love with her. The time of crazy exciting happiness lasts until the ninth of March (“the last happy day”), when Katya talks about the “price” of her reciprocal love: “I still won’t give up art even for you,” that is, a theatrical career that should begin after she graduates from private theater school this spring. In general, the depiction of theater in the story is accompanied by an intonation of decadent falsehood - Bunin sharply emphasizes his rejection of modernist art, partly in accordance with the views of L. N. Tolstoy. At the final exam, Katya reads Blok’s poem “A Girl Sang in the Church Choir” - perhaps, from Bunin’s point of view, a manifesto of decadent art. M. perceives her reading as “vulgar melodiousness... and stupidity in every sound,” and defines the theme of the poem very harshly: “about some seemingly angelically innocent girl.” January and February are a time of continuous happiness, but against the background of the beginning of a split in a previously whole feeling - “even then it often seemed as if there were two Katyas: one is the one <...> Mitya persistently desired, demanded, and the other is genuine, ordinary , painfully inconsistent with the first.” M. lives in student rooms on Molchanovka, Katya and her mother live on Kislovka. They see each other, their meetings proceed “in a heavy dope of kisses”, becoming more and more passionate. M. is increasingly jealous of Katya: “manifestations of passion, the very thing that was so blissful and sweet <...> when applied to them, Mitya and Katya, became unspeakably disgusting and even <...> unnatural when Mitya thought about Katya and others to a man." Winter gives way to spring, jealousy increasingly replaces love, but at the same time (and this is the irrationality of feelings according to Bunin) M.’s passion increases along with jealousy. “You only love my body, not my soul,” Katya tells him. Completely exhausted by the duality and vague sensuality of their relationship, M. leaves for a village estate at the end of April to relax and understand himself. Before leaving, Katya “became tender and passionate again,” she even cried for the first time, and M. again felt how close she was to him. They agree that in the summer M. will come to Crimea, where Katya will relax with her mother. In the packing scene on the eve of departure, the motif of death—the second theme of the story—sounds again. M.’s only friend, a certain Protasov, comforting M., quotes Kozma Prutkov: “Junker Schmidt! honestly, Summer will return,” but the reader remembers that the poem also contains a motive for suicide: “Junker Schmitt wants to shoot himself with a pistol!” This motif returns once again when, in the window opposite Mitya’s room, a certain student sings A. Rubinstein’s romance to the poems of G. Heine: “Having fallen in love, we die.” On the train, everything again speaks of love (the smell of Katya’s glove, which M. fell for at the last second of parting, the men and workers in the carriage), and later, on the way to the village, M. is again full of pure affection, thinking “about all that feminine, which he approached over the winter with Katya.” In the scene of M.'s farewell to Katya, an inconspicuous detail is extremely important - the scent of Katya's glove, recalled several times. According to the laws of melodic composition, leitmotifs opposing each other are intertwined here: the smell of love (except for the glove - Katya’s hair ribbon) and the smell of death (nine years ago, when his father died, Mitya “suddenly felt: there is death in the world!” a “terrible, vile, sweetish smell” lingered for a long time “or imagined.” In the village, M. at first seems to be freed from the suspicions tormenting him, but almost immediately a third theme is woven into the fabric of the narrative - love, devoid of a spiritual component. As the hope for a future together with Katya fades, M. becomes increasingly overwhelmed by pure sensuality: lust at the sight of a “charwoman from the village” washing windows, in a conversation with the maid Parasha, in the garden where the village girls Sonya and Glasha flirt with the barchuk. In general, the theme of the village-soil-earth-naturalness (“the saving bosom of Mother Nature,” according to G. Adamovich) in Bunin is associated with sensuality and longing, therefore all the village heroes of the story in one way or another participate in the seduction of M. The only clue in the fight against carnal feelings for Katya become temptations. M.'s mother, Olga Petrovna, is busy with housework, sister Anya and brother Kostya have not arrived yet - M. lives with the memory of love, writes passionate letters to Katya, looks at her photograph: the direct, open look of his beloved answers him. Katya's replies are rare and terse. Summer is coming, but Katya still doesn’t write. M.'s torment intensifies: the more beautiful the world is, the more unnecessary and meaningless it seems to M. He remembers the winter, the concert, Katya’s silk ribbon, which he took with him to the village - now he even thinks about it with a shudder. To speed up receiving news, M. goes to get the letters himself, but all in vain. One day M. decides: “If there’s no letter in a week, I’ll shoot myself!” It is at this moment of spiritual decline that the village headman offers M. to have some fun for a small reward. At first, M. has enough strength to refuse: he sees Katya everywhere - in the surrounding nature, dreams, daydreams - she is not there only in reality. When the headman again hints at “pleasure,” M., unexpectedly for himself, agrees. The headman proposes M. Alenka - “a poisonous woman, young, husband in the mines <...> married for only the second year.” Even before the fateful date, M. finds something in common with Katya: Alenka is small, active - “feminine, mixed with something childish.” On Sunday M. goes to mass in church and meets Alenka on the way to the temple: she, “wagging her behind,” passes without paying attention to him. M. feels “that it is impossible to see her in church,” the feeling of sin is still capable of holding him back. The next evening, the headman takes M. to the forester, Alenka’s father-in-law, with whom she lives. While the headman and the forester are drinking, M. accidentally runs into Alenka in the forest and, no longer able to control himself, agrees to meet tomorrow in a hut. At night M. “saw himself hanging over a huge, dimly lit abyss.” And throughout the next day, the motive of death sounds more and more clearly (while waiting for M.’s date, it seems that the house is “terribly empty”; Antares, a star from the constellation Scorpio, is shining in the evening sky, etc.). M. heads to the hut, and Alenka soon appears. M. gives her a crumpled five-ruble note, he is overcome by “a terrible force of bodily desire that does not turn into... mental.” When what he wanted so much finally happens, M. “rose up completely overwhelmed with disappointment” - the miracle did not happen. On Saturday of the same week it rains all day. M. wanders around the garden in tears, rereading yesterday’s letter from Katya: “forget, forget everything that happened!.., I’m leaving - you know with whom...” In the evening, thunder drives M. into the house. He climbs into his room through the window, locks himself from the inside and, in a semi-conscious state, sees in the corridor a “young nanny” carrying a “child with a big white face” - this is how memories of early childhood return. The nanny turns out to be Katya, in the room she hides the child in a dresser drawer. A gentleman in a tuxedo comes in - this is the director with whom Katya went to Crimea (“I absolutely love art!” from yesterday’s letter).” M. watches as Katya gives herself to him and eventually comes to her senses with a feeling of piercing, unbearable pain. There is no and cannot be a return to what was “like heaven.” M. takes out a revolver from the drawer of his night table and “sighing joyfully […] with pleasure” shoots himself. R. M. Rilke insightfully points out the main cause of the tragedy: “the young man loses <...> the ability to expect the course of events and a way out of an intolerable situation and ceases to believe that after this suffering <...> something should follow <...> something else , which, due to its otherness, should seem more bearable and bearable.” “Mitya’s Love” caused many conflicting reviews. So, 3. Gippius put the story on a par with Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” but sees in the hero’s feelings only “a grimacing Lust with white eyes.” At the same time, the poetess M.V. Karamzina defined the “sacrament of love” in Bunin’s story as a “miracle of grace.” P. M. Bicilli in the article “Notes on Tolstoy. Bunin and Tolstoy" finds Tolstoy's influence in "Mitya's Love", namely, a echo of L. Tolstoy's unfinished story "The Devil". Bunin himself indicated that he took advantage of the story of his nephew’s “fall”. V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina names the surname of the prototype: “... the young novel of Nikolai Alekseevich (Pusheshnikov, Bunin’s nephew - Ed.) is touched, but the appearance is taken from <...> his brother, Petya.” V. S. Yanovsky in his memoirs “The Fields of the Champs Elysees” confirms the reality of the prototype: “In “Mitya’s Love” the hero ends up in a rather banal suicide, while in fact the young man from his story became a monk and soon became an outstanding priest.” V.V. Nabokov in a letter to Z. Shakhovskaya wrote: “Bunin told me that, when starting Mitya’s Love, he saw before him the image of Mitya Shakhovsky,” that is, Z. Shakhovskaya’s brother Dmitry Alekseevich, a poet, twenties, he became a monk under the name of Father John.

Catastrophic end

That same week, on Saturday, it rains all day. Mitya wanders around the garden in tears and always re-reads the letter from Katya that she acquired the other day. In it, a woman reports that she is leaving for Crimea with the director. In the evening, strong thunder drives Mitya into the house. He climbs into his room through the window, closes it tightly from the inside and, half asleep, sees in the long corridor a young nanny carrying in her arms a baby with a snow-white and huge face. Thus the memoirs of distant youth return to the young man. The nanny suddenly turns out to be Katya. A woman hides her baby in a dresser drawer. A shaved man in a tuxedo comes into the room. This is the director with whom Mitya’s lover cheated. The guy imagines that he sees a woman giving herself to this hated man. The guy suddenly comes to his senses. A feeling of unbearable pain pierces his entire being. Mitya realizes that there will never be a return to what was “like paradise.” He takes a pistol out of the drawer and, “sighing with joy,” kills himself with pleasure. Such a sad end to the story “Mitya’s Love.” A short summary of this work will only give a vague idea of its true artistic value.

Tragic ending

That same week, on Saturday, it rains all day. Mitya wanders around the garden in tears and constantly re-reads the letter he received from Katya the day before. In it, the girl reports that she is leaving for Crimea with the director. In the evening, strong thunder drives Mitya into the house. He climbs into his room through the window, locks himself tightly from the inside and, half asleep, sees in the long corridor a young nanny carrying in her arms a child with a white and large face. This is how the memories of distant childhood return to the young man. The nanny suddenly turns out to be Katya. The girl hides the baby in a dresser drawer. A shaved man in a tuxedo enters the room. This is the director with whom Mitya’s beloved cheated. The guy imagines that he sees how the girl gives herself to this hated man. The young man suddenly comes to his senses. A feeling of unbearable pain pierces his entire being. Mitya understands that there will never be a return to what was “like paradise.” He takes a revolver out of the box and, “sighing joyfully,” kills himself with pleasure. This is the sad ending of the story “Mitya’s Love”. A brief summary of this work will help to form only a vague idea of its true artistic value.

Longing for my beloved

The only way to fight carnal temptation is to feel for Katya. Mitya’s mother, Olga Petrovna, is always busy with housework. Brother Kostya and sister Anya have not yet arrived from the gymnasium. The student is absorbed in thoughts about his beloved. He writes passionate messages to her, looks at her photos. However, Katya, contrary to her promises, writes very rarely. The beauty and charm of every new summer day seems meaningless to Mitya without his beloved. He remembers how they met, the winter, the concert. Now he even thinks about Katya’s tape, hidden in the closet, with a shudder. Mitya goes to the post office every day to speed up the receipt of letters. One day he decides to himself that if in a week he does not receive news from his beloved, he will shoot himself. In separation from Katya, Mitya’s love becomes stronger and more obsessive. A summary of Bunin's story in such an abbreviated version cannot convey the full force of despair that took possession of the young man.