The writing

In his prose work, I. A. Bunin often refers to eternal themes. The theme of love is one of the most important in his works. In true love, according to I. A. Bunin, there is something in common with eternal nature. Only that feeling of love is beautiful, which is natural, not invented. To this feeling, the writer composed a genuine poetic hymn. Already in the very title of the story "Sunstroke" the irresistible power of love feeling, its transformative effect on a person, is expressed.

The everyday situation, the everyday situation - a one-day flash of passion of nameless heroes - was chosen by the author of the story specifically to shade this idea. Only the memories of the lieutenant - spontaneous, all exciting - clarify the true meaning of the flashed moments of the past. The hero recalls a chance meeting on a steamer, a love adventure and separation forever. Beloved got off the ship in a small county town late in the evening. And in the morning, after a heady night - "sunny, hot, happy, with the ringing of churches" - the end of equally hot, ardent experiences and the beginning of separation.

With the departure of his beloved, the lieutenant had a painful feeling of loss: "a strange, incomprehensible feeling that did not exist at all when they were together." Suffering grows: “How wild, terrible everything is everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck ... by this terrible “sunstroke”, too much love, too much happiness!”

The feeling of loss dramatically changes the hero's perception of the world around him. The life of the town becomes "stupid, absurd", the beauty of nature seems unnecessary, and the blinding light, "fiery and joyful", comes from the "seemingly aimless sun". With the loss of a loved one, all the beauty of the world becomes meaningless. The master of landscape painting, I. A. Bunin, recreates the bright natural flowering, but only in order to convey the suffering of a lonely person born to him. The whole world, objectively beautiful, is subjectively perceived as a painful test, everything in it intensifies misfortune. It is not surprising that the story (after a poetic sketch of the evening dawn) ends with a brief message: "The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older."

Within the shortest period of time, a psychological metamorphosis took place. This compositional technique convinces us: all the experiences of the lieutenant - longing for the departed beloved, inner focus on feeling for her, the pain of loneliness - are as naturally characteristic of his soul as the first impulse of passion.

Unexpectedly, but naturally, the inherent in any person and for the time being dormant ability for all-consuming love awakens. The comprehension of love in the stories of I. A. Bunin expresses the general idea of ​​the writer about life: the world is catastrophic, and love is only a ghost of the true happiness of earthly existence and, perhaps, the shortest way to know its impracticability. Art for I. A. Bunin becomes an opportunity to perpetuate a moment in which beauty, tragedy, and the eternal mystery of the world are manifested.

Other writings on this work

Love in the story of I. A. Bunin "Sunstroke": an easy hobby or a tragedy of a lifetime? The motive of love "like a sunstroke" in the prose of I. A. Bunin The meaning of the title and the problems of the story by I. A. Bunin "Sunstroke" The theme of love in the prose of I.A. Bunin (on the example of the story "Sunstroke"). Review of I. Bunin's story "Sunstroke" The history of the creation and analysis of stories about love ("Sunstroke", "Clean Monday")

Russian literature was distinguished by extraordinary chastity. Love, in the view of a Russian person and a Russian writer, is primarily a spiritual feeling.

Bunin in "Sunstroke * fundamentally rethinks this tradition. For him, the feeling that suddenly arises between random fellow travelers on the ship turns out to be as priceless as love. Moreover, it is love that is this heady, selfless, suddenly arising feeling, causing association with a sunstroke.

Bunin's interpretation of the theme of love is connected with his idea of ​​Eros as a powerful elemental force - the main form of manifestation of cosmic life. It is tragic at its core. Since it turns a person, dramatically changes the course of his life. Much in this respect brings Bunin closer to Tyutchev.

In love, Bunin's heroes are raised above time, situation, circumstances. What do we know about the heroes of "Sunstroke"? No name, no age. Only that he is a lieutenant, that he has "an ordinary officer's face, gray from sunburn, with a whitish, sun-bleached mustache and bluish white eyes." And she was resting in Anapa and now she is going to her husband and three-year-old daughter, she has a lovely laugh and she is dressed in a light canvas dress.

It can be said that the entire story "Sunstroke" is devoted to describing the experience of a lieutenant who lost his random lover. This immersion in darkness, almost "insanity", takes place against the backdrop of an unbearably stuffy sunny day. All descriptions are literally saturated with burning sensations. This sunshine should remind readers of the “sunstroke” that befell the heroes of the story. This is at the same time immense happiness, but it is still a blow, a loss of reason. Therefore, at first the epithet "sunny" is adjacent to the epithet "happy", then "the aimless sun" appears in the story.

The writer draws that terrible feeling of loneliness, rejection from other people, which the lieutenant experienced, pierced by love.

The story has a circular composition. At the very beginning of it, a blow is heard on the pier of the moored steamer, and at the end, those same sounds are heard. Days passed between them. But in the mind of the hero and the author, they are separated from each other by at least ten years (this figure is repeated twice in the story), but in fact by eternity. Now another person is riding on the ship, having comprehended some of the most important things on earth, having joined her secrets.

The hero of the famous Bunin story, the lieutenant who was not named by name, meets a charming fellow traveler on the ship, a “little woman”, returning from the Black Sea resort: “The lieutenant took her hand, raised it to his lips. The hand, small and strong, smelled of sunburn. And blissfully and strangely my heart sank at the thought of how strong and swarthy she must have been all under this light canvas dress after a whole month of lying under the southern sun, on the hot sea sand (she said that she was coming from Anapa). The lieutenant learns from the lady that she has a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but she called her name that way.

The lieutenant and the lady go to the pier of the nearest town. They spend evening, night and morning in the hotel: “We entered a large, but terribly stuffy, hotly heated room during the day by the sun with white curtains drawn down on the windows and two unburned candles on the under-mirror, and as soon as they entered and the footman closed the door, the lieutenant impetuously rushed to her and both suffocated so frantically in a kiss that for many years they later recalled this moment: neither one nor the other had ever experienced anything like this in their entire lives.

In the morning they part, and at first this parting does not upset the hero of the story in the least: “No, my dear,” she said in response to his request to go further together, “no, you must stay until the next ship. If we go together, everything will be ruined. It will be very unpleasant for me. I give you my word of honor that I am not at all what you might think of me. There has never been anything even similar to what happened to me, and there will never be again. It's like an eclipse hit me... Or rather, we both got something like a sunstroke...

And the lieutenant somehow easily agreed with her. In a light and happy spirit he drove her to the pier,<...>he kissed everyone on deck and barely had time to jump onto the gangway, which had already moved back.

And only later, left alone, the lieutenant felt unbearable grief and the burden of separation: “And he felt such pain and such uselessness of his entire future life without her that he was seized by horror, despair.” The feeling of oppressive anguish from parting with a woman who has only now become dear to him becomes especially difficult at the sight of scenes of someone else's life - measured and indifferent, as if nothing had happened during these evening, night and morning ... “Probably, only I am so scared unhappy in this whole city, he thought<...>“.

The leitmotif of Bunin's story is the scorching, hot sun flooding the city. The cross-cutting motif of merciless sunbeams and hot air is endowed with an additional meaning: the sun and heat are associated with the heat and fire of a recently experienced passion, with the “sunstroke” that he and she experienced. In the second part of the story, following the parting of the heroes, the description of the sun and its effect on things and on the lieutenant himself is dominated by shades of meaning associated with incineration, with burning. “The shoulder straps and buttons of his tunic were so hot that they could not be touched. The band of the cap was inside wet with sweat, his face was on fire...”; “He returned to the hotel, as if he had made a huge transition somewhere in Turkestan, in the Sahara”; “the room was stuffy and dry, like in an oven...”. Love not so much “elevates” or bestows happiness, but turns the one possessed by it into ashes ... The manifestation of this “ashes” in the material world of the story is “white thick dust”, whitish and tanned face, and the lieutenant's eyes. “The lieutenant sat under a canopy on the deck, feeling ten years older,” Bunin ends his story.

Sunstroke was written by the author in exile in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1925. More than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1899, the story of another famous Russian writer, A.P. Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”, was created and printed. The plot of this story and the story described in "Sunstroke" have an undeniable similarity. The hero of Chekhov's work, Dmitry Dmitritch Gurov, meets a married lady, Anna Sergeevna, at a resort in Yalta, and like a determined lieutenant almost forces her to a love meeting: “<...>he looked intently at her and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips, and he was bathed in the scent and moisture of the flowers, and at once he looked around timidly: had anyone seen it?

"Let's go to you..." he said softly.

And both went fast.

It was stuffy in her room.<...>“.

Compare in Bunin's story: “The lieutenant muttered:

- Let's go...

- Where? she asked in surprise.

- On this pier?

He said nothing. She again put the back of her hand to her hot cheek.

- Madness...

"Let's go," he repeated stupidly. - I beg you...

“Oh, do as you please,” she said, turning away.

Unlike the timid Gurov, who, kissing Anna Sergeevna, is afraid of being seen by anyone, the lieutenant acts more boldly and recklessly. Dmitry Dmitrich began to seek intimacy after a week of acquaintance, while Bunin's hero does the same with a woman whom he first saw "three hours ago." And the lieutenant openly kisses her at parting. But in the main, the situations are similar: the characters achieve intimacy with unfamiliar women, the meeting takes place in a stuffy room, and both of them escort the women - Gurov to the train, the lieutenant - to the ship.

The blinding sun and stuffy hot air, the leitmotifs of "Sunstroke", are foreshadowed, foreseen in "The Lady with the Dog": it is stuffy not only in Anna Sergeevna's room. The closeness of the Yalta air becomes one of the topics of Gurov's first conversation with the lady who interested him: "They talked about how stuffy after a hot day." On the day she became Dmitri Dmitritch's lover, “it was stuffy in the rooms, and dust swirled in the streets, hats were torn off. All day long he was thirsty, and Gurov often went to the pavilion and offered Anna Sergeevna now water with syrup, now ice cream. There was nowhere to go."

Steamboats are mentioned three times in “Sunstroke”: on the first of them, the lieutenant meets a charming fellow traveler, on the second she sails away from the city, on the third he himself leaves. But there is also a steamboat in Chekhov's Yalta story: "In the evening, when it calmed down a bit, they went to the pier to see how the steamboat would arrive." This is the evening of the day when Anna Sergeevna will become Gurov's lover. One detail of the furnishings of the rooms in which two dates take place are also similar - Gurova with Anna Sergeevna and the lieutenant with a nameless lady. In the room of Dmitri Dmitritch's beloved, there is a candle on the table: "a lone candle burning on the table barely illuminated her face, but it was clear that she was not feeling well in her soul." In the hotel room where Bunin's characters are staying, "two unburned candles on the under-mirror". However, the similarity goes hand in hand with the difference. Chekhov's candle seems to cast a sad light of truth on what happened: what happened for the heroine is a fall. A distant, vague prototype of this candle is the cinder in F. M. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, illuminating Sonya Marmeladova and Raskolnikov, reading the gospel story about the resurrection of Lazarus: harlot, strangely come together while reading the eternal book. Two sinners are sitting by the light of the candle, but Sonya repents of her sin and Raskolnikov repents of his. They will be forgiven and saved. So Chekhov's heroes, if not saved, will elevate a feeling that turns out to be love above the ordinary.

And in "Sunstroke" candles do not burn: the lieutenant and his random companion are burning with passion, and they do not need light. And their relationship is not sinful - the passion of Bunin's heroes is placed by the author outside of morality, perhaps higher than it ...

Two ladies, Anna Sergeevna and an unnamed acquaintance of also an unnamed lieutenant, are outwardly similar. Both of them are petite, “little” women.

Like the heroine of Bunin's story, Anna Sergeevna von Diederitz hurries to inspire her lover with the idea that she is an honest and decent woman:

“Believe me, believe me, I beg you...” she said. “I love an honest, clean life, but sin is disgusting to me, I myself don’t know what I’m doing. Ordinary people say: the unclean has beguiled. And I can now say to myself that I was beguiled by an unclean one.

“The impure one beguiled” is a metaphorical for Anna Sergeevna naming closeness with Gurov, allocating a share of the blame to some external force. Like her, the heroine of Bunin's story called the madness and a certain involuntary nature of her closeness with the lieutenant the expression "sunstroke".

However, there is also a difference between the two expressions, and a very large one. The medical-physiological "sunstroke" is, as it were, an admission of one's innocence in what happened; what happened for the heroine is a kind of “disease”, mental and moral “fainting”. The woman was cheerful and carefree when she met the lieutenant: “She closed her eyes, put her hand to her cheek with her palm outward, laughed with a simple charming laugh.<...>and said:

- I seem to be drunk ... Where did you come from?<...>But still... Is it my head spinning or are we turning somewhere?”

She is not very worried about cheating on her husband: “We slept a little, but in the morning, coming out from behind the screen near the bed, having washed and dressed in five minutes, she was as fresh as at seventeen. Was she embarrassed? No, very little. She was still simple, cheerful and - already reasonable.

But the words of Anna Sergeevna von Diederitz "beguiled the unclean" - this is the recognition of the sinfulness of the deed by the heroine. Cheating on her husband morally crushed Anna Sergeevna, deprived her of her former beauty and youth: “Anna Sergeevna, this“ lady with a dog ”, what happened, reacted somehow especially, very seriously, just like her fall<...>. Her features drooped, withered, and long hair hung sadly on the sides of her face, she thought in a sad pose, like a sinner in an old picture.

“Not good,” she said. "You're the first one who doesn't respect me now."

<...>... It was clear that she was not feeling well at heart.

May God forgive me! she said, and her eyes filled with tears. - It's horrible.

“You are definitely correct.

- Why should I make excuses? I am a bad, low woman, I despise myself and do not think of justification. I did not deceive my husband, but myself. And not only now, but for a long time I have been deceiving.<...>And so I became a vulgar, trashy woman whom anyone can despise.

Chekhov, who in many ways updated the poetics of Russian prose, evaluates the connection between the hero and the heroine with the severity characteristic of Russian classical literature. The justification for Gurov and Anna Sergeevna is both the vulgarity in which the hero's wife and the heroine's husband are mired, and the nature of their feelings: the "holiday romance" develops into true love. A chance meeting in stuffy Yalta will be followed by Gurov's crazy and inevitable arrival in the city of S., where Anna Sergeevna lives, and after his Yalta lover will come to him in Moscow. “And it seemed that a little more - and the solution would be found, and then a new, wonderful life would begin; and it was clear to both that the end was still far, far away, and that the most complex and difficult was just beginning.”

Chekhov does not like to dot the "i" and often ends his works with open endings (this is described in detail in the book by A.P. Chudakov "Chekhov's Poetics". M., 1971). In this way he also ends The Lady with the Dog. But a change in the mental mood of Anna Sergeevna and especially Gurov took place: “What wild morals, what faces! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, imperceptible days! A frantic game of cards, gluttony, drunkenness, constant talking all about one thing. Unnecessary deeds and conversations all about the same thing take away the best part of the time, the best strength, and in the end there is some kind of short, wingless life, some kind of nonsense, and you can’t leave and run away, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or in a prison cell. companies!” A few lofty pathos and nervous intonations convey a share of the irony of this improperly direct speech, which conveys Gurov's thoughts. But in the main, she is quite serious.

The lieutenant, after meeting and parting with a charming fellow traveler, also feels everything differently: “A cab driver stood at the entrance, young, in a dexterous coat, and calmly smoked a cigarette. The lieutenant looked at him bewildered and in amazement: how is it possible to sit on the box so calmly, smoke, and in general be simple, careless, indifferent? And a little further: “On the corner, near the post office, there was a photographic display case. He looked for a long time at a large portrait of some military man in thick epaulettes, with bulging eyes, with a low forehead, with amazingly magnificent sideburns and the broadest chest, completely decorated with orders ... How wild, terrible everything is everyday, ordinary, when the heart is struck - yes, astonished, he now understood it - this terrible "sunstroke", too much happiness!

But unlike Chekhov's character, who saw the vulgarity of everyday life, the environment in which he had hitherto been, Bunin's lieutenant reveals "only" the everyday life of the world, of being. You can turn away from vulgarity, try to run away - this is exactly what Chekhov's Gurov does. But you can't run away from the world. The "enlightenment" of the lieutenant entails not a transformation, but a feeling of unbearable heaviness and irretrievable loss.

Gurov arrives in the city where his beloved lives. The lieutenant cannot even send a telegram: “And he suddenly got up again quickly, took a cap and a stack and, asking where the post office was, hurriedly went there with the telegram phrase already ready in his head: “From now on, my whole life forever, to the grave, yours, in your authority." But, having reached the old thick-walled house, where there was a post office and a telegraph office, he stopped in horror: he knew the city where she lives, knew that she had a husband and a three-year-old daughter, but did not know her name or surname! He asked her about it several times yesterday at dinner and at the hotel, and each time she laughed and said:

“Why do you need to know who I am, what is my name?”

Yes, the lieutenant fell in love with his fellow traveler, fell in love hard and hopelessly. But did she love him? The words of the narrator about their kiss: “Neither one nor the other has ever experienced anything like this in all his life” seems to undoubtedly indicate that yes. (By the way, this is the only statement that reflects the knowledge that only the narrator can have, but none of the characters in Sunstroke.)

The differences between Bunin's text and Chekhov's are associated with a special understanding of the nature of love by the author of the story "Sunstroke". Bunin, by the nature of his nature, acutely felt all the instability, unsteadiness, drama of life itself.<...>. And therefore, love in this unreliable, although beautiful world turned out to be, in his opinion, the most fragile, short-lived, doomed, ”says A. A. Saakyants (Saakyants Anna. I. A. Bunin / / Bunin I. A. Arseniev's Life: Novels and Stories, Moscow, 1989, p. 38).

The meeting of the two heroes of Bunin's story is an accident that seems to have never happened. After all, the action of the story ends in the same place where it began - on the steamer; but now there is only one lieutenant, as if the lady had never existed. The hero and heroine are nameless; M. V. Mikhailova, who analyzed the story, saw this as a special technique of abstracting from specifics, introducing the characters to eternity: “In love, Bunin's heroes are raised above time, situation, circumstances. What do we know about the heroes of Sunstroke? No name, no age ”(Mikhailova M.V.I.A. Bunin. “Sunstroke”: unconsciousness of love and memory of feeling” // Russian literature of the XIX-XX centuries. Textbook for applicants to Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov: In 2 vols. T. 2. 2nd ed., supplemented and revised M., 2000. P. 52). Let us disagree with this: do the profession of a hero and the precisely indicated military rank really serve to commune them with eternity? The namelessness of the hero is due to the fact that the narration is conducted from his psychological point of view, and the person is aware of himself as a unique “I”, and not as the bearer of a certain name; her name is not mentioned, because the lieutenant does not know. It is impossible to imagine Chekhov's Gurov not knowing the name of Anna Sergeevna. The name testifies to the significance of existence, the knowledge of each other's names by the heroes indicates the significance and significance of their meeting, which entails spiritual changes. Chekhov writes about such a meeting. Bunin tells about something else - about a fleeting, blinding and withering flash of light. Two seemingly similar stories turn out to be completely different in their depth.
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(375 words) When love is born, you do not have the right to choose what it should be. You cannot predict the end, or at least the middle of the path that you have to go along with these feelings. She can turn into happiness or tragedy, but no matter what she turns out to be, she is always truly beautiful. But this beauty is based on a solid foundation - fidelity, without which it is impossible to truly love.

In the story of I.A. Bunin "Dark Alleys" there are opposite examples that will help us verify this statement for authenticity. Nadezhda's feelings for Nikolai Alekseevich did not disappear even after he left her. The main proof of her pure love is that she could not marry another man. If she did this, her emotions would be reduced by us to a banal infatuation of youth, because what kind of fatal passion is it if a person calmly replaced it with another? But Nadezhda chose a life of loneliness, and only thirty years later she again met the one for whom she made this choice. Hope still remembers both her love and her grievances. Pain and disappointment languish inside her, but even they cannot shake her devotion to those feelings that so cruelly deceived her. However, she is happy that she felt and carried through her whole life a real, sincere, pure passion.

The second example is Nicholas. He, too, was not indifferent to Nadezhda, but his attitude towards her was rather consumerist. He got what he wanted and did not feel responsible for the one he tamed. Soon he became interested in another woman and even sincerely fell in love with her, because she was a representative of his estate, and Nadia was a simple peasant woman who cannot be introduced to friends and parents. It would seem that he did not even betray, but found true love and settled down, but could he build happiness after he ruined someone's life? No. He, too, became a victim of the betrayal of the dearest person. It cannot be said that this is somehow connected with his past, on the contrary: it is worth pitying him, because he realized how much he is guilty before Nadia. In addition, despite the experience, he did not know true love: while he complains and complains about deceit, the woman does not blame him and does not humiliate herself to complain.

Thus, a person who cheats deprives himself of the ability to really love deeply. This feeling cannot live in a heart corrupted by betrayal. Of course, sometimes it is difficult to get rid of temptation, but one memory of love, pure and passionate, is worth being faithful all your life.

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"How did all this happen?" This is the slogan of Nikita Mikhalkov's new film Sunstroke. According to the director, he tried to combine two works of the writer Ivan Bunin into a single whole - the story of the same name and diary entries of 1918-1919, known as "Cursed Days". What did the master end up with?

Literary canvas

The story "Sunstroke" is a small but very deep text. His heroes have no names, they are just a lieutenant and a beautiful stranger. Accidental acquaintance on the Volga steamer. Stop and overnight in a remote town. Relationships that nameless heroes cannot find an explanation for can only sum up. “There has never been anything even similar to what happened to me, and there will never be again. It’s like an eclipse has found me ... Or, rather, we both got something like a sunstroke ... ”says the stranger. Left alone with himself, the lieutenant sees only the hotel room, so unexpectedly empty. The emptiness that filled the room fills the lieutenant's heart with inexorable mercilessness and poses a pitiless question: how will he "spend now, without her, the whole day in this outback?"

Cursed Days is a record of the successive days in the new revolutionary world. This is an attempt to describe the turn of the epochs, an attempt by an eyewitness: “Our children, grandchildren will not even be able to imagine the Russia in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understand - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness…” (entry dated April 12, 1919).

Damn question

In an interview, Nikita Mikhalkov admits: “I have come a long way. For 30 years, I've come back in one way or another to the idea of ​​making a film based on Sunstroke. "Sunstroke" is not just an ordinary love story. “Sunstroke” is providence, magic, something intangible and elusive, understandable only to two ... But you can get closer to the mystery of this short story, understand its atmosphere, only by trying to understand Bunin himself. Therefore, I again and again began to re-read the works of Ivan Alekseevich. And at some point I realized that I wanted to show a different Bunin in the film, contrasting, recognizable and completely unfamiliar. This is how the idea to combine “Sunstroke” and “Cursed Days” appeared, where the fate of the main characters is woven into the life and death of great Russia, the Russian world.”

This is due to the appearance of two storylines of the film, which are shown in contrast - one in light and the other in dark colors, and become like two sides of the same coin. The nameless army officer of Baron Wrangel, who believed the promise of the Bolsheviks to release all surrendered enemies abroad and therefore ended up in the south of Russia in one of the filtration camps at the end of 1920, asks the question: “How did this all happen? When did it all start? Everything is a revolution, a Civil War, a retreat, and... a gloomy, cold camp, which until recently was a military fortification. The search for an answer unexpectedly takes the hero away to the summer of 1907, to the Volga steamer Flying, where he survived the same “sunstroke”. So gloomy, covered with a gray foggy haze of late autumn, reality alternates with sunny days of memories.

The question that torments the protagonist in his present may well sound in his memoirs: “How did this all happen?”. How did this acquaintance of an engaged officer, who thinks tenderly of his bride, come about with a beautiful but married stranger? What brought them to this ship and what made them spend the night together, then to part forever?

Hope and expectation

Is it logical just such a combination of two different lines in one film? The answer to this question depends on how the film corresponds to the works on which it is based.

Actually, "Cursed Days" is not in the film. The diary entries break off on June 20, 1919, and Bunin himself explains it this way: “My Odessa notes break off here. The sheets following these I buried so well in one place in the ground that before fleeing from Odessa, at the end of January 1920, I could not find them in any way. The film takes place in November 1920.

In the film there is Rozalia Zemlyachka, Bela Kun and a certain Georgy Sergeevich (an obvious allusion to the real associate of Zemlyachka and Kun in the “extraordinary troika in Crimea” Georgy Pyatakov). This trio was responsible for organizing the "Red Terror in the Crimea", that is, for the mass executions of residents and captured officers. In "Cursed Days" nothing is said about Zemlyachka, Kun and Pyatakov.

The only thing that unites Ivan Bunin's diary and Nikita Mikhalkov's film is expectation. Almost every day in Bunin's notes is marked by the general expectation that Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, or some other city is about to be taken by the Germans, the forces of the Entente, or one of the generals of the former tsarist army. The French destroyer becomes a symbol of hope in Odessa; Here is how Bunin writes about this: “Everyone runs to Nikolaevsky Boulevard to look at the French destroyer, graying in the distance on a completely empty sea, and they tremble: no matter how they leave, God forbid! It all seems that there is at least some kind of protection, that in the event of some too excessive atrocities against us, the destroyer can start shooting ... that if he leaves, it’s all over, complete horror, complete emptiness of the world ... ". The heroes of the film are also full of expectation - waiting for their fate to be decided. There is still hope for evacuation.

In the film, the narrative of Sunstroke is short and concise, complemented by various scenes - successful and unsuccessful. The flight of the lieutenant's passion for a beautiful stranger is illustrated by comedic digressions: the pursuit of a scarf, tricks of an illusionist, acquaintance with the eccentric wife of a foreigner traveling on the same ship, as well as philosophical conversations that pass by the consciousness of the lieutenant, intoxicated by a surging feeling. The result of this flight is shown in the tape - it is absent in Bunin's story, because what happened is clear and without words. I think that the film would not have suffered from some reticence and mystery.

Meanings

The author of the film mourns for the lost Russia and, perhaps, therefore idealizes it in a certain sense. It is shown in bright colors, everything is fine in it. Even the "sunstroke" that happened to the main characters. But to idealize for Mikhalkov does not mean to approve of everything, so the answer to the main question: “When did it all start?” - lies somewhere in history on a steamboat during a trip along the Volga.

The answer is contained in the monologue of one of the officers at the end of the film: “We did everything ourselves, we did everything with our own hands. What didn't we see? Didn't understand something? I saw everything, understood everything, but I didn’t want to touch anything with my hands. What for? Let it be someone else, let it be somehow by itself… And they calmed down. The country is big. Let's make a mess here - we'll move there, we'll sit down there. Lots of places. It will cost ... But it didn’t work ... What a country they ruined! These are the hands that ruined the country. They ruined the whole world, they ruined the Russian man, they ruined the Russian state. Well, how, how to live with it now?

For some reason, you expect these words when you start watching a movie. After all, the problem is always - not somewhere outside, it is always - inside. In this sense, the film does not say something new and does not reveal the unknown. It turns out that the main message of "Sunstroke" is as follows: you can pay dearly for carelessness and intoxication with passion.

The film produces a dual impression. This is an attempt to explain that somewhere in the already distant, but ideal and bright Russia, an error occurred, a fatal “sunshine” strike that changed the course of history. But from the piling up of details, the lightness and Bunin's brevity seem to be lost ...

Photos from open Internet sources

Newspaper "Orthodox Faith" No. 23 (523)