Analysis of the concept of love in the story “Sukhodol. Sukhodol (Samara region)
Sukhodol is a description of the life of the Khrushchevs, local landowners. The story of the Khrushchev family is told by the courtyard girl Natalya, Arkady Petrovich's foster sister. Natalya raised the younger Khrushchevs, who lived in Lunevo. She lived with them for about eight years, all the time telling her pupils about their family estate in Sukhodol.
Natalya was left an orphan as a child. Her father died when he was sent to serve as a soldier, and her mother died of a broken heart at the sight of the owner’s turkey poults dying from a hailstorm. In Natalya's stories, the estate was described as a scary and gloomy house, in which they even sat down to dinner with whips, in case of a fight.
Having buried his untimely deceased wife, Pyotr Kirillovich lost his mind. The master constantly quarrels with the footman Gevraska, who is considered his illegitimate son. Feeling his impunity, the footman behaves impudently and rudely, humiliating the old man. Son Arkady and daughter Tonya are taught by French teachers discharged from the city, but only son Peter is awarded a full education.
Having retired, Peter returns to the estate along with his friend Voitkevich. Tonya has tender feelings for the young officer, but his attempts to get closer are fiercely rebuffed. Without having explained himself to the girl, the young man leaves the estate. Out of despair, the girl’s mind becomes clouded and she becomes uncontrollable. Fearing the condemnation of his neighbors, Pyotr Petrovich sends Tonya to Lunevo.
Natalya feels love for the young master. In a fit of passion, the girl stole a small mirror from her owner. Admiring herself in front of this trifle, Natalya tried to attract the attention of Pyotr Petrovich. But all her efforts only led to shame. The master, having discovered the theft, gave instructions to exile the girl to a remote farm, after cutting off her hair.
On Pokrov, Pyotr Petrovich summons all the influential people of the area to his estate, which made his grandfather incredibly happy. Having imagined himself as the owner, the grandfather created fuss and unnecessary troubles, causing only pity with his behavior. Pyotr Petrovich, feeling the strength of the matured lackey, praises Gevraska in every possible way in front of influential guests, offending his grandfather even more. Guests stay overnight at the estate.
In the morning, after spending a sleepless night, the grandfather began to rearrange the furniture in the living room. A servant came and started shouting at him. Grandfather wanted to put the footman in his place, but he hit the old man with force. While falling, the grandfather's temple hit the corner of the table, which was the cause of death. Having torn off the gold jewelry from the body that had not yet cooled down, Gevraska disappeared from the estate.
Tonya forces Natalya to be returned to the estate. The girl quickly adapts to the whims of the young lady, who takes it out on her by throwing various objects at her. Claudia Markovna, whom the master married, is waiting for a new addition to the family. Mad Tonya infects Natalya with her fears, who has nightmares and prophetic dreams. She does not want to get married, fearing the prophecy. The house is constantly bustling with some strangers who consider themselves God's chosen ones. Among them is Yushka, introducing himself as a former monk. The lustful and unceremonious impudent man takes possession of Natalya and disappears from the estate. Natalya remains pregnant. Soon there is a fire, and Natalya loses her child from the horror she experienced.
They are trying in every possible way to cure Tonya of her illness, but all efforts are in vain. Pyotr Petrovich, returning from a hunt, falls under a horse's hoof. In a house that has fallen into disrepair, elderly women - Tonya, Klavdia Markovna and Natalya - are whileing away their lives. Young Khrushchev only feels a connection with his ancestors in the cemetery, but he cannot find the graves of his relatives.
A person must know and remember the history of his family.
Picture or drawing of Sukhodol
Other retellings for the reader's diary
- Summary of Boris Godunov Pushkin
Boris Godunov becomes king after the murder of the seven-year-old prince. However, in one monastery there is a rootless monk who decides to declare himself Tsarevich Dimitri. Lithuanians and Poles support him.
- Brief summary of Prishvin Chicken on poles
The main characters of the story are a chicken named the Queen of Spades and her unusual children. It all started when neighbors gave one family several goose eggs. The owners placed them in the nest of a black hen to hatch, and she hatched four cute goslings
- Summary of Ionesco's Rhinoceroses
In the square of a small town, a saleswoman yells after a woman with a cat. This woman was a housewife and went to another store to buy groceries. Beranger and Jean walked into a nearby cafe and sat down at the same table.
- Summary of The Tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf by Zhukovsky
A beautiful apple tree grew in Demyan Danilovich’s green garden. And suddenly, one day, he began to notice that there were much fewer apples on the tree. He called his sons and ordered them to take turns guarding the garden.
- Summary of the Parma Monastery of Stendhal
In the family castle of the Marquis Valserra del Dongo, a second son was born, who was named Fabrizio. The family already had an eldest son, the future heir of the marquis, and two daughters.
The abysses of the Russian soul in I. A. Bunin’s story “Sukhodol”
In the story “Sukhodol” I. A. Bunin depicts the crazy Russian reality, which gives rise to the Russian soul, full of bizarre contrasts: sometimes generous and responsive, sometimes uncontrollable and passionate.
As Ivan Alekseevich himself later wrote, “Sukhodol” refers to works that “sharply depicted the Russian soul, its peculiar interweavings, its light and dark, but almost always tragic foundations.”
It’s amazing how passionate Sukhodol’s inhabitants were. So, the yard girl Natalya “rested for eight whole years... from Sukhodol, from the fact that he made her suffer,” but still returns there at the first opportunity. The “young lady” Aunt Tonya vegetated in poverty, in a poor peasant hut, but did not even allow the thought of life in another place, although “Sukhodol deprived her of happiness, reason, and human appearance.” Carefree and frivolous Arkady Petrovich deeply misses his native place. “Only, only Khrushchev remains in the world now. And even he is not in Sukhodol!” - he says.
What is the reason for such a strong attachment to this remote place, to “...the bare pasture, to the huts and ravines, and the ruined estate of Sukhodol”? The writer explains this by the peculiarity of the “Sukhodolsk” soul, over which memories, the charm of the steppe open spaces and ancient nepotism have enormous power. The story shows the blood and secret ties that “illegally” connect servants and gentlemen. Everyone is, in essence, relatives in Sukhodol. "...The blood of the Khrushchevs has been mixed with the blood of the servants and the village since time immemorial." According to family legends, not only the blood of noble and legendary ancestors, “people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princes” flows in the veins of Pyotr Kirillovich’s grandfather. The lackey Gervaska is his illegitimate son, and Natalya, the nanny of the young gentlemen Khrushchev, is perceived by them as a truly dear person. Maybe that’s why the character of the Sukhodol residents is so intricately intertwined with hot temper, reaching the point of frenzy, and easygoingness, extreme cruelty and gentleness, sentimentality, and dreaminess. Everyday life also had an impact on people’s state of mind. Even the Sukhoi Dolsk house was gloomy and scary: dark log walls, dark floors and ceilings, dark heavy doors, black icons that were terribly illuminated by flashes and reflections of lightning on stormy stormy nights. “At night it was scary in the house. And during the day it was sleepy, empty and boring.” Even the treasured grandfather’s icon of Saint Mercury, a “noble man” beheaded by his enemies, evokes fear: “And it was terrible to look at the Suzdal image of a headless man, holding in one hand a deathly bluish head in a helmet, and in the other an icon of the Guide - this one, as they said, the treasured image of the grandfather, which survived several terrible fires, was split in flames, thickly bound with silver and kept on the reverse side of its genealogy of the Khrushchevs, written under the titles.
A village spreads widely around the manor's house - "big, poor and carefree." Its inhabitants are “all masters” - they are not distinguished by their thriftiness and practicality. They were also influenced by the decline and degeneration of landowner life, its abnormality. Sukhodol's life - ugly, idle and slack, could only lead to madness. Thus, the descendants of the Khrushchevs learn from the stories of their nanny Natalya that “... our crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillich was killed in this house by his illegitimate son Gervaska, a friend of our father and Natalya’s cousin; they learned that she had long gone crazy - from the unfortunate love - and Aunt Tonya; ... found out that Natalya was also going crazy, that as a girl she fell in love with her late uncle Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life, and he sent her into exile, to the Soshki farm..."
It is not surprising that Gorky called the story "Sukhodol" one of "the most terrible Russian books." This is a story about crushing passions, secret and open, sinless and vicious. Any arguments of reason are powerless against these passions; they always destroy lives.
"Love in Sukhodol was unusual. Hatred was also unusual." Here is grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich, who has fallen into childhood and is living out his days in quiet insanity. Romantics from the courtyards explained his dementia as a love longing for his dead, beautiful wife. Pyotr Kirillovich dies suddenly and absurdly at the hands of his illegitimate son Gervaska, a terrible man whom both the servants and the gentlemen themselves are afraid of. “The masters had the same character as the slaves: either to rule or to be afraid.”
The next victim of fatal passions was the daughter of Pyotr Kirillovich - young lady Tonechka. Having fallen in love with her brother’s friend, she was “moved” and “doomed herself to be the bride of sweetest Jesus.” She lived, moving from dull indifference to bouts of frantic irritability. But even in her madness, everyone saw something mystical and terrible. “Everyone now understood: at night the devil himself moves into the house. Everyone understood what, in addition to thunderstorms and fires, drove the young lady crazy, what made her moan sweetly and wildly in her sleep, and then jump up with such terrible screams, before which nothing more than the most deafening clap of thunder."
The young lady lived out her days in a peasant hut, littered with fragments of old furniture, littered with shards of broken dishes, cluttered with a piano that had collapsed on its side." On this piano, young Tonechka, dark-skinned and black-eyed, in a dress made of orange lye, once played for Him...
The fate of Natalya, the yard girl, was also tragic. Not surprising - after all, Sukhodol dried out her soul and took over her entire life. And the most beautiful and amazing thing in her life was her love for master Pyotr Petrovich, which she carried until the end of her days. Natalya herself compares her to a fairy-tale scarlet flower. But the scarlet flower is not destined to bloom in Sukhodol. The fairy tale ended very soon, ended in shame and disgrace: “A scarlet flower that bloomed in fairy-tale gardens was her love. But to the steppe, to the wilderness, even more reserved than the wilderness of Sukhodol, she took her love, so that there, in silence and solitude , overcome her first, sweet and burning torments, and then bury her in the depths of her Sukhodolsk soul for a long time, forever, right up to the grave.”
Bunin calls Natalya's soul "beautiful and pitiful." Perhaps the beauty of her inner world is that she is capable of deep and noble feelings. Although Pyotr Petrovich treated her cruelly, she did not harbor anger, but carried her love throughout her life. She also has no grudge against the young lady, who “tortures” her: she either speaks as if she were an equal, or attacks her for the slightest offense, “cruelly and with pleasure,” tearing out her hair. But Natalya does not hate her tormentor. Moreover, she “dotes on her”, feels sorry for her, considers herself responsible for her, her nanny and friend. Natalya is ready to share the unfortunate fate of the young lady: “... apparently, it was written in her family to die together with the young lady,” “... God himself marked them and the young lady with his destructive finger.” This is probably one of the features of the Slavic soul - the desire for self-sacrifice, for passionate selfless love, humility and even adoration for one’s offenders. In the same way, grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich and Arkady Petrovich love Gervaska, who mocks them and behaves rudely and impudently.
These feelings are difficult to explain. They defy logic and common sense. A German, Englishman or Frenchman could not behave like this, perhaps that is why the myth about the mysterious Russian soul arose.
The inhabitants of Sukhodol are also characterized by fatalism - “what will happen, will not escape” - and religiosity.
Young lady Antonina's religiosity has a hysterical connotation, somewhat reminiscent of hysteria. For Natalya, faith in God brings obedience and humility before fate: “God has a lot of everything.” From passing praying mantises she learned patience and hope, and resigned acceptance of all life's trials. After what she had to go through, she willingly takes on the role of “the blueberry, the humble and simple servant of everyone”: “And since the Sukhodol people love to play roles, to inspire themselves with the immutability of what supposedly should be, although they themselves invent This is due, then Natasha took on the role." It is probably because of this resigned submission, lack of will, and non-resistance to fate that Bunin considers the soul of this woman pathetic.
According to the writer, the ugliness of Russian reality brings to life the abysses of the Russian soul. Bunin does not impose this idea; it suggests itself. Why do the inhabitants of Sukhodol have to endure so much suffering, why do their fates turn out so absurdly and tragically and why do they die just as absurdly and horribly? According to the writer, the centuries-old backwardness of Russia, Russian impenetrable laziness, and the habit of savagery are to blame for this. Later he wrote: “What an old Russian disease this is, this languor, this boredom, this spoilage - the eternal hope that some frog will come with a magic ring and do everything for you: you just have to go out onto the porch and throw it from hand to hand ring! It's a kind of nervous disease..."
The Sukhodol residents, descendants of the steppe nomads, turned out to be weak and “ready for reprisals.” Their family quickly became poor, degenerated and began to disappear from the face of the earth. Their children and grandchildren no longer saw life, but legends and memories of it. The steppe region became alien to them, and the connection with life and the class from which they came weakened. Perhaps this is for the best. They, the young ones, contained all the hopes of Russia, the desire for change and a better life.
Geography
Sukhodol is located 6 km (by road) south of the regional center - the village of Sergievsk. The village is located on the left bank of the Surgut River (a tributary of the Soka).
Story
The settlement was first mentioned in 1849, then it was called a village Epiphany.
The status of an urban village has been since 1970.
The earliest information about the village of Bogoyavlenka (the original name of the village of Sukhodol), as a settlement that is part of the district town of Sergievsk, dates back to 1849. By that time, there were 68 households in the village, with 486 residents living in them. There was no church in the village. The nearest church was two miles away, in the village of Sergievsky Mineral Waters, where peasants went to pray. Epiphany (or Sukhodol) was located in the 2nd camp of the district on the right side of the road from Sergievskie Mineralnye Vody to Samara. The Sukhodol River flowed near the village. In 1859, the population of the village increased and reached 620 people. At the end of the 19th century, Bogoyavlenka became a village, the number of residents reached 1,149 people.
In 1910, a wooden church with a bell tower was built in the village, and a literacy school was opened at the church.
Before the revolution of 1917, the population in Bogoyavlenka increased to 1,400 people. At the end of the 20s, the church bells were dropped and the parish was closed. The wooden frame of the church (built according to the “no nails” principle) turned out to be so strong that it stood until 2000 and was dismantled, the logs were used to build a bell tower at the new church in the name of “Archangel Michael”.
After the establishment of Soviet power, the village of Bogoyavlenka was renamed Sukhodol. In 1928, the Sukhodolsky Village Council was formed. Since the late 20s, after famine and devastation, the village began to grow slowly. So in 1931, there were 248 households in the village, in which 1,268 people lived, mostly Russians. The population was mainly engaged in agriculture; they sowed rye, wheat, oats, as well as millet, peas, barley and other crops. In 1933-1934. A radio appeared in Sukhodol.
The development of oil and gas fields in the north of the province led to the fact that the village began to grow rapidly after the Great Patriotic War, technical support bases and engineering services for field development appeared. A central gas compressor station (CS) was built in the southwest of Sukhodol, providing blue fuel to the entire north of the province.
Population
Transport
The Ural federal road runs south of the village. In the village itself there is a railway station of the Samara branch of the Kuibyshev railway Sernye Vody 1 (ECR code 658806).
Media
- "Our Radio" 103.2 FM, rock station.
Bunin's story is full of events from the time of the first Russian revolution. A multivocal gathering of peasants is seething, incredible rumors are spreading, landowners' estates are on fire, and the poor are walking around desperately. All these events in the “Village” bring discord and confusion into the souls of people, disrupt natural human connections, and distort age-old moral concepts. The soldier, who knows about Tikhon Krasov’s relationship with his wife, humiliatingly asks the owner not to kick him out of service, brutally beating Young. All his life, the self-taught poet Kuzma Krasov has been searching for the truth, painfully experiencing the senseless and cruel behavior of men. All this speaks of the disunity of the peasants, their inability to rationally arrange their fate.
In an effort to understand the reasons for this state of affairs, Bunin turned to the serfdom past of Russia in the story “Sukhodol”. But the writer was far from idealizing that era. In the center of the image is the fate of the impoverished noble family of the Khrushchevs and their servants. In the life of the heroes, as in “The Village,” there is a lot of strange, wild, abnormal things. The fate of Natalya, the former serf nanny of the young Khrushchevs, is indicative. This extraordinary, gifted nature is deprived of the opportunity to realize herself. The life of a serf girl is mercilessly broken by the masters, who condemn her to shame and humiliation for such a “terrible” offense as love for the young master Pyotr Petrovich. After all, it was this feeling that was the reason for the theft of the folding mirror, which amazed the yard girl with its beauty. There is a great contrast between the feeling of unprecedented happiness that overwhelms Natasha, who furrowed her eyebrows in front of the mirror to please her idol, and the shameful shame experienced by a village girl with a face swollen from tears, who, in front of the entire servants’ eyes, was put on a dung cart and sent to a distant farm . After returning, Natalya is subjected to cruel bullying from the young lady, which she endures with stoic submission to fate. Love, family happiness, warmth and harmony of human relationships are inaccessible to a serf woman. Therefore, all the strength and depth of Natalya’s feelings are realized in her touching affection for the masters and devotion to Sukhodol.
This means that the poetry of the “noble nests” hides the tragedy of souls disfigured by the cruelty and inhumanity of serfdom, reproduced with stern truthfulness by the writer in “Sukhodol”. But the inhumane social system also cripples representatives of the nobility. The fate of the Khrushchevs is absurd and tragic. Young lady Tonya goes crazy, Pyotr Petrovich dies under the hooves of a horse, and the feeble-minded grandfather Pyotr Kirillovich dies at the hands of a serf. The perversity and ugliness of the relationship between masters and servants was very accurately expressed by Natalya: “Gervaska bullied the barchuk and grandfather, and the young lady bullied me. Barchuk, and to be honest, grandfather themselves, doted on Gervaska, and I doted on her.” Violation of normal, natural concepts even leads to deformation of the feeling of love. What fills the life of a person in love with joy, tenderness, and a sense of harmony, in “Sukhodol” leads to dementia, madness, shame, and emptiness.
What is the reason for the distortion of moral concepts? Of course, feudal reality is largely to blame for this. But Bunin’s story, without sharpening social contradictions, reveals this problem more widely and deeply, transferring it to the plane of human relations characteristic of any time. The point is not only in the socio-political system, but also in the imperfection of man, who often lacks the strength to fight circumstances. Nevertheless, even in “Sukhodol” the peasant woman’s amazing ability for great unrequited and selfless feeling is revealed.
When revealing the love concept in Sukhodol, the story of the main character Natalya is of particular interest. It is worth noting that this image is not entirely the fruit of Bunin’s whimsical imagination. At the beginning of the summer of 1911, while contemplating a future story, the writer mentioned in his diary about a certain “Natakha”, with whom he had a long conversation about serf life, and specially noted: “Admires.” According to another point of view, the fate of the heroine has a literary origin.
Thus, in Leo Tolstoy’s story “Childhood” there is a story about the Irtenyevs’ housekeeper Natalya Savishna. The central events in the lives of both heroines are surprisingly similar: they both experienced unhappy love, for which they were punished by exile. But unlike Tolstoy’s heroine, Bunin’s Natalia’s chosen one was not the waiter, but the master Pyotr Petrovich Khrushchev. In order to show the purity of his heroine’s love, Bunin uses the technique of comparison, comparing Natalya’s feelings with a scarlet flower that bloomed in a fairy garden. Natalya stole a keepsake mirror from the master and was accused of theft for this and expelled from Sukhodol for eight years. After returning to Sukhodol, a number of more dramatic events happen to Natalya: perceiving the world as fabulous, romantic?
According to religious canons, Natalya wastes all the strength of her rich nature, voluntarily accepting the role of a great martyr. The young lady Antonina “tortures” her, Natalya has a relationship with the lustful holy fool Yushka, who forced the heroine to give in to him, as a result of which Natalya became pregnant, but during the fire she lost her child from fear. But, despite all these facts, Natalya carried her love for Pyotr Khrushchev until her last days, considering this feeling the most amazing and beautiful in life.
Thus, here Bunin shows one of the key features of his love concept: the writer perceives love as a dual principle, which is both happiness and tragedy. Later, this position will be formulated and expressed by the writer in the book “Dark Alleys”: all love is great happiness, even if it is not shared.
In addition, “Sukhodol” reveals another feature of Bunin’s philosophy of love: under the influence of this feeling, absolutely everyone is equal, regardless of social status. So, the second victim of dramatic passions in this story was the young lady Antonina Petrovna, the daughter of the owner of Sukhodol Arkady Petrovich. Tonya didn’t even notice how she fell in love - it seemed to her that “life just became more fun.”
Her brother's friend Voitkevich became her lover. He reads poetry to her, plays the piano with her, gives her flowers, in all likelihood, having serious intentions towards the girl. But Tonya, due to her girlish inexperience, repels her suitor. She flared up so furiously every time the young man tried to confess his feelings to her that he suddenly left their house. Tonya lost her mind from melancholy: she became irritable, cruel, and uncontrollable. She began to live, moving from resigned indifference to attacks of angry irritability and madness, in which everyone around her saw something terrible and mystical.
In the story, love leads not only women, but also men, to fatal consequences. So, Pyotr Kirillich went crazy from love's melancholy after the death of his beautiful wife, and his son Pyotr Petrovich, the horse on which he returns from his mistress, is killed by his hoof.
Thus, we can conclude that the love described by Bunin in “Sukhodol” is devoid of bright dreams and has a rather dramatic character, but still it is a feeling in which the writer sees the only justification of existence.
