>Essays on the work Clean Monday

The theme of love in the story

The story “Clean Monday” was written in May 1944, when the writer was already in old age and was in exile. The story was included in the “Dark Alleys” cycle, entirely dedicated to love. Thus, main topic The story “Clean Monday” is also love, multifaceted, mysterious and mysterious. The story involves only two characters: he and she. Even though their names are hidden, we can see how their relationship develops. The author portrays his characters as young, beautiful, rich and full of strength, which involuntarily evokes sympathy among the reader. However, external similarities are emphasized by internal differences.

He is a passionate young man, blinded by his love. It does not have the depth that is characteristic of the main character. Visiting her every evening, visiting restaurants and concerts with her, he does not even notice how absorbed she is in other values. In his eyes, it’s just her mystery, strangeness and originality. He spends all his time recklessly, since he is quite wealthy and is not forced to think about anything. The only thing that has consumed his thoughts since they met is the uncertainty of the relationship. This love sometimes seems “strange” to him or “not love” at all.

She, in turn, is silent and reserved. There is something strange in her behavior that defies logic. Sometimes she attends some lectures and says that she likes history. He never thought about why she came to Moscow and rented an apartment overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. To him, these are just “fads.” And this was precisely the girl’s main secret. The heroine was seriously interested in religion, church rituals, admired monasteries, and loved visiting cathedrals. Perhaps that is why she liked Moscow - the city of cathedrals and Kremlin towers. After living there for some time, she became even more convinced of her desire to take monastic vows and enter a monastery.

However, the hero never fully understood what was going on in his beloved’s soul. They spent the night of Clean Monday together, and then she disappeared from his life forever. After some time, he received a letter from Tver, in which she explained her action with love for the church and asked, if possible, not to look for her and try to forget. For young man, who sincerely loved and believed in reciprocity, this was a difficult test. He tried to get through it by visiting taverns and drinking alcohol. Over time, the pain subsided, but did not leave him. Once it even seemed to him that he saw her among the singing nuns of the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent.

In almost all the stories in the Dark Alleys series, love is doomed. It does not develop into real earthly happiness. So in the story “Clean Monday,” love appears as a great sacrament, an incomprehensible riddle, bringing both happiness and torment. This story is considered one of the best in creativity

Bunin's tragic love story forms the basis of the story "Clean Monday". Two people suddenly meet, and a beautiful and pure feeling flares up between them. Love brings not only joy, lovers experience enormous torment that torments their souls. The work by Ivan Bunin describes a meeting between a man and a woman, which made them forget about all their problems.

The author begins his story not from the very beginning of the novel, but immediately from its development, when the love of two people reaches its climax. I. Bunin perfectly describes all the details of this day: the Moscow day was not only winter, but, according to the author’s description, dark and gray. The lovers dined in different places: today it could be “Prague”, and tomorrow they ate at the “Hermitage”, then it could be “Metropol”, or some other establishment.

From the very beginning of Bunin's work, there is a premonition of some kind of misfortune, a great tragedy. Main character tries not to think about what will happen tomorrow, about what this relationship might lead to. He understood that he shouldn’t talk about the future with someone who was so close to him. After all, she simply did not like these conversations and she did not answer any of his questions.

But why didn’t the main character want to, like many girls, dream about the future and make plans? Maybe this is a momentary attraction that should end soon? Or does she already know everything that is about to happen to her in the future? Ivan Bunin describes his heroine as if she were a perfect woman who cannot be compared with other beautiful female images.

The main character is studying in courses, not understanding how she manages to do this later in life. The Bunin girl is well educated, she has a sense of sophistication and intelligence. Everything in her house should be beautiful. But the world around us she is not at all interested, she moves away from him. From her behavior it seemed that she was indifferent to theaters, and to flowers, and to books, and to dinners. And this indifference does not prevent her from completely immersing herself in life and enjoying it, reading books and getting impressions.

The beautiful couple seemed ideal to the people around them; they were even watched as they walked. And there was something to envy! Young, beautiful, rich - all these characteristics suited this couple. This happy idyll turns out to be strange, since the girl does not want to become the wife of the main character. This makes you think about the sincerity of the lover’s and the man’s feelings. For all his questions, the girl finds only one explanation: she does not know how to be a wife.

It is clear that the girl does not understand what her purpose in life is. Her soul is tossing: a luxurious life attracts her, but she wants something else. That is why she constantly arrives in thoughts and reflections. The feelings that the girl experiences are incomprehensible to her, she cannot and main character understand them.

She is attracted to religion, the girl goes to church with pleasure, and admires holiness. The heroine herself cannot understand why this attracts her so much. One day she decides to take an important step - to cut her hair as a nun. Without telling her lover anything, the girl leaves. After a while, the main character receives a letter from her, where the young woman reports her action, but she doesn’t even try to explain.

The main character finds it difficult to cope with the actions of his beloved woman. One day he was able to see her by chance among the nuns. It is no coincidence that Bunin gives his work the title “Clean Monday”. The day before this day, the lovers had a serious conversation about religion. The main character was surprised for the first time by the thoughts of his bride, they were so new and interesting to him.

External contentment with life hid the depth of this nature, her subtlety and religiosity, her constant torment, which brought the girl to the monastery of a nun. Deep internal searches also help explain the young woman’s indifference to social life. She did not see herself among everything that surrounded her. Happy and mutual love does not help her find harmony in her soul. In this Bunin story, love and tragedy are inseparable. Love is given to the heroes as a kind of test that they have to pass.

The love tragedy of the main characters lies in the fact that they could not fully understand each other and could not correctly evaluate the individuals who had found their soul mate. Bunin, with his story “Clean Monday”, affirms the idea that every person is a huge and richest world. The inner world of a young woman is rich spiritually, but her thoughts and reflections do not find support in this world. Love for the main character is no longer a salvation for her, but the girl sees this as a problem.

The heroine’s strong will helps her to leave love, to abandon it, to abandon it forever. In the monastery, her spiritual search ceases, and the young woman develops new affection and love. The heroine finds the meaning of life in love for God. Everything petty and vulgar now does not concern her; now no one disturbs her loneliness and peace.

Bunin's story is both tragic and sad. Every person faces a moral choice and must make it correctly. The heroine chooses her life path, and the main character, continuing to love her, cannot find himself in this life. His fate is sad and tragic. The young woman’s act towards him is cruel. They both suffer: the hero because of the act of his beloved, and she of her own free will.

- the first writer in Russia to be awarded Nobel Prize. This is a man with a difficult life, who had a talent for writing works, including those on love themes. Moreover, Bunin can be confidently called a writer of stunning talent, regarding everything related to love. He knew how to very subtly and accurately convey the feelings of the characters and their state of mind during the period of falling in love. Bunin managed to touch on frank topics, revealing intimate human experiences that we can trace, for example, in Bunin’s story Clean Monday. Let's make this piece.

Brief analysis of the story

In grade 11, we studied Bunin's work Clean Monday, written by the author in 1944. This story, like many others that were written between 1937 and 1944, was included in the book Dark alleys. Here we also see a flashback motif, where the narrator takes the reader to the capital. He is handsome and young, and met an equally beautiful heroine. The author does not give them names, but this does not prevent us from enjoying a love story that began beautifully and ended quickly.

Analyzing Bunin's story Clean Monday, I would like to note that when getting acquainted with the work, the reader meets such famous personalities as Andrei Bely, who gives a lecture where the characters get to know each other. Here we see Stanislavsky and Moskovin at the next skit. The story contains the name of the famous theater figure Sulerzhitsky and other famous people of that time. The main character falls in love with a woman and is ready to do anything for her. She turned out to be a mystery. Her actions were inexplicable, irrational and spontaneous. The main character of the story immediately stands out among other representatives of the fair sex. She takes courses, not understanding why she needs this study. The girl is educated, smart, but very distant. At the same time, she knows how to live, enjoying reading, food and entertainment.

The characters love each other, but as the narrator notes, their love is somehow strange. He seems to foresee a quick end to their relationship, because the girl does not allow them to develop. The heroine interrupts all conversations about the wedding and constantly says that she is not meant to be a wife. We see what she likes idle life, but at the same time she wants something different.

And so, on Clean Monday, having decided to surrender completely to the feelings of love, the heroes spend the night together. This was not only their first night of love, but also their last. After the night, the young man found a note in which he learned that his beloved had decided to go to a monastery.

It was a terrible shock for him; he was going through the breakup painfully and became an alcoholic. Under New Year he wanted to walk along the same roads along which he wandered with his beloved. Walking like this, he approached the monastery. Entering the church, he accidentally saw his lady of his heart. I saw it and immediately ran out. This was their last meeting.

The theme of love in Bunin's story Clean Monday

After reading Ivan Bunin's work Clean Monday, we became acquainted with the story of a mysterious love. This feeling was both happiness and torment, and a great mystery, and an unsolved riddle. The story introduced us to young lovers, beautiful couple, which everyone paid attention to. However these were different people, with a different inner world. The hero in love looked after him beautifully, gave gifts, took her to clubs and restaurants, and was so blinded by love that he did not try to examine the inner world of his heroine. Only occasionally did he notice their strange relationship, even calling their love strange. Meanwhile, he didn’t even try to figure out the problem. Absorbed in the adoration of his beloved, he did not consider the complex, multifaceted world of his chosen one.

The girl also loved the young man, but at the same time she was attracted spiritual world. For a long time she could not understand what was more important to her, the eternal or the momentary. Only after the night of love, on Clean Monday, the girl decided everything for herself and left silently, without saying goodbye. Later she will answer in a letter that she has decided to become a nun.

Reading Clean Monday, you understand that there is some kind of barrier of misunderstanding between the characters. The problem was that their love had no depth. The hero, having surrounded his beloved with attention, did not know her inner world and spiritual desires. The girl herself managed to understand that social life petty and insignificant. So she chose love for God, sacrificing romantic attraction to a man.

As we see, this time love does not end with the happiness of the two heroes. And there is neither a wedding nor a created family. However, there is love - mysterious, enigmatic, incomprehensible. And this is the charm of Bunin’s story.

Main characters

There are only two main characters in the story Clean Monday. They are nameless. Just him and her.

He is a young, rich nobleman who fell in love main character story. His love was sincere and strong. He was ready to seal the relationship by marriage. But the heroine constantly avoided answering. He is afraid to look into the future and lives in the present, while feeling a certain detachment from his chosen one. He suffers from this incompleteness of reciprocal feelings, but he begins to suffer even more when he finds out that the girl has become a nun. He becomes an alcoholic and cannot find peace.

She is rich, beautiful, loves secular society And beautiful life. At the same time he behaves very strangely. The reader will find out the reason later. Her detachment was due to the search for her self. In the end, the girl makes her choice, drowning out her earthly feelings.

The meaning of the story

If we talk about the meaning of Bunin's story Clean Monday, then everything is very complicated. As for me, the meaning of the story is as follows. The author tried to show the reader that not only the feeling of love, but also the state of the soul is important in life. To achieve true happiness, you have to make a moral choice. Many of us make the wrong choices and are afraid to admit it to ourselves. But others, like the heroine of the story, find strength and are not afraid to change their destiny.

“Clean Monday” essay based on the story by I. Bunin

What rating will you give?

Composition

Man, like no other earthly creature, is lucky to have reason and the ability to choose. A person chooses his whole life. Having taken a step, he is faced with a choice: to the right or to the left - where to go next. He takes another step and chooses again, and so he walks until the end of the path. Some walk faster, others slower, and the result is different: you take a step and either fall into a bottomless abyss, or end up with your foot on an escalator in the sky. A person is free to choose his job, passions, hobbies, thoughts, worldviews, love. Love can be for money, for power, for art, it can be ordinary, earthly love, or it can happen that above all, above all feelings, a person places love for his homeland or for God.

In Bunin's story "Clean Monday" the heroine is nameless. The name is not important, the name is for the earth, and God knows everyone even without a name. Bunin calls the heroine - she. From the very beginning, she was strange, silent, unusual, as if a stranger to the whole world around her, looking through it, “she kept thinking about something, it was as if she was mentally delving into something; lying on the sofa with a book in her hands, she often lowered it and looked in front of her questioningly." She seemed to be from a completely different world, and just so that she would not be recognized in this world, she read, went to the theater, had lunch, dinner, went for walks, and attended courses. But she was always drawn to something lighter, intangible, to faith, to God, and just as the Church of the Savior was close to the windows of her apartment, so God was close to her heart. She often went to churches, visited monasteries and old cemeteries.

And finally she made up her mind. IN last days She drank the cup of worldly life to the bottom, forgave everyone on Forgiveness Sunday and cleansed herself of the ashes of this life on “Clean Monday”: she went to a monastery. "No, I'm not fit to be a wife." She knew from the very beginning that she could not be a wife. She is destined to be an eternal bride, the bride of Christ. She found her love, she chose her path. You might think that she left home, but in fact she went home. And even her earthly lover forgave her for this. I forgave, although I did not understand. He could not understand that now “she can see in the dark,” and “left the gates” of a strange monastery.

Other works on this work

Analysis of the last episode from I. A. Bunin’s story “Clean Monday” Analysis of I. A. Bunin’s story “Clean Monday” I. A. Bunin’s story “Clean Monday”: heroes, their love, the surprise of the ending The theme of love in the works of I. A. Bunin (based on the story “Clean Monday”) Review of Bunin's story "Clean Monday" Heroes of the story "Clean Monday" Literary review of I. A. Bunin’s story “Clean Monday” Analysis of I. A. Bunin's story "Clean Monday" The theme of love in the prose of I. A. Bunin (based on the story “Clean Monday”)

The story “Clean Monday,” written in 1944, is one of the author’s favorite stories. I.A. Bunin recounts the events of the distant past from the perspective of the narrator - a young wealthy man with no special occupation. The hero is in love, and the heroine, as he sees her, makes a strange impression on the reader. She is good-looking, loves luxury, comfort, expensive restaurants, and at the same time she is a “modest student” and has breakfast in a vegetarian canteen on Arbat. She has a very critical attitude towards many fashionable works of literature, famous people. And she is clearly not in love with the hero as much as he would like. To his proposal of marriage, she replies that she is not fit to be a wife. "Strange love!" - the hero thinks about this. The heroine’s inner world is revealed completely unexpectedly for him: it turns out that she often goes to churches, is deeply passionate about religion and church rituals. For her, this is not just religiosity - it is the need of her soul, her sense of homeland, antiquity, which is internally necessary for the heroine. The hero believes that these are just “Moscow quirks”; he cannot understand her and is deeply shocked by her choice when, after their only night of love, she decides to leave and then go to a monastery. For him, the collapse of love is a catastrophe of his entire life, unimaginable suffering. For her, the power of faith and the preservation of her inner world turned out to be higher than love; she decides to devote herself to God, renouncing everything worldly. The author does not reveal the reasons for her moral choice, what influenced her decision - social circumstances or moral and religious quests, but he clearly shows that the life of the soul is not subject to reason. This is especially emphasized in the episode of the last meeting of the heroes in the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. The heroes not only see how much they feel each other, they do not control their feelings: the hero “for some reason” wanted to enter the temple, the heroine internally feels her presence. This riddle, the mystery of human feelings, is one of the inherent properties of love in Bunin’s depiction, a tragic and powerful force that can turn a person’s whole life upside down.

• The story “Clean Monday” is part of Bunin’s series of stories “Dark Alleys”. This cycle was the last in the author’s life and took eight years of creativity. The cycle was created during the Second World War. The world was collapsing, and the great Russian writer Bunin wrote about love, about the eternal, about the only force capable of preserving life in its highest purpose. The cross-cutting theme of the cycle is love in all its many faces, the merging of the souls of two unique, inimitable worlds, the souls of lovers. The story “Clean Monday” […]
• Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is a famous Russian writer and poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A special place in his work is occupied by the description of his native nature, the beauty of the Russian region, its catchiness, brightness, on the one hand, and modesty, sadness, on the other. Bunin conveyed this wonderful storm of emotions in his story “Antonov Apples.” This work is one of Bunin’s most lyrical and poetic works, which has an indefinite genre. If you evaluate the work by volume, then it is a story, but with [...]
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