The lyrics of I. A. Bunin delight with their patriotism. Even in his early poems, the poet expressed an insurmountable sorrow for Russia, about its doom to poverty and suffering.
Bunin put forward such a concept of the fate of the Motherland in his first published lyrical work, “The Village Beggar.” The author, sympathizing with the old man exhausted by poverty, worries about all of Russia. Bunin identifies the bitter fate of the beggar with the fate of the entire country. The homeland is gradually becoming poorer and exhausted, but still fighting. The melancholy and need of Russia weigh heavily on the author. He introduces the image of a beggar not only to emphasize the similarity between the fate of Russia and the fate of its citizen, but also to reveal the reason for the failure of the Motherland: how can a mother be happy and carefree, whose sons, sparing no effort, day after day pray to passersby for alms?
Bunin predicts a sad fate for Russia in the future - the idea of this is hidden in the final lines:
He fell asleep... And then with a groan
For Christ's sake ask and ask...
The suffering of the Motherland will not end - this is not the fault, but the misfortune of the country, therefore the author does not indicate the culprits, does not offer a way to get rid of misfortunes, but only sympathizes with the old man without shelter and a slice of bread and the whole country where such elders exist and, most importantly, where there are people who don't hear their pleas.
Bunin also speaks about the impoverishment and wretchedness of Russia in the poem “Motherland”. The poet expresses boundless love for the Fatherland and sincerely sympathizes with its abandonment. He compares her fate with the fate of an unappreciated mother, whom her own son abhors:
So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother -
Tired, timid and sad
Among his city friends...
Russia stands out for its “simplicity, the wretched appearance of its black huts.” But she gives all her property to her “sons” - just like an abandoned mother “saves the last penny for the date.” And he responds with ingratitude. In this comparison, in addition to sympathy, the author’s admiration, respect, and worship are evident. The Motherland gave too much kindness and warmth to each person, too much for its true patriot to forget about it. She is always sweet to him, even in poverty.
Bunin compares the Motherland with the most dear person - the Mother. He draws a parallel between these images and sympathizes with both. He shows the ingratitude and inactivity of the “son”, who:
Looks with a smile of compassion
To the one who walked hundreds of miles...
And the “son” (“son” is a collective image), ashamed of the Motherland in its current state of wretchedness, nevertheless realizes this. He looks at her with a smile of compassion, latently feeling that it is his fault that Russia is fading.
Yes, Russia is fading, but it still lives. And her patriots will always admire her. Love for native nature is reflected in the poem “On the side far from the native land...”. The lyrical hero admires the immense and, unfortunately, inaccessible to contemplation beauty of nature: he lives in a foreign land. He turns his dreams and dreams, his most cherished things, to the Motherland:
I dream of the freedom of quiet villages,
In the field by the road there is a white birch,
Winter and arable land - and an April day.
In dreams, the “exile” sees Russian nature, an abode of warmth and light, full of harmony, beauty, etc. peace. The poet is drawn by the white swell of floating clouds, the blue morning sky, the aerial heights - familiar, and therefore unique; Nowhere can a person see such a majestic beauty of Spring, feel the drift of light air, except in the Motherland. The lyrical hero sees the “Spring Girl”; she is the embodied combination of joy and wisdom, the bearer of the elixir of youth, eternity and infinity - and... she is also devoted to the Motherland:
Her native land is dear to her - the steppe and silence,
The poor north is dear to her, the peaceful labor of the peasants,
And she looks at the fields with greetings:
There is a smile on the lips, and thoughtfulness in the eyes -
The first spring of youth and happiness!
Spring reminds the lyrical hero of his youth spent in his native land and brings him closer to his inaccessible Motherland.
He envies Spring, who is not constrained by anything, and who has the opportunity to enjoy the freedom of her native open spaces. He wants to return and consoles himself with vague hope.
The motif of the Motherland, revealed in the same vein, is also heard in the poem “Far beyond the sea...”. Like the previous one, it contains the experiences of a poet forced to be away from his native land. Fate separated the poet from his Fatherland, doomed him to suffer in a foreign land, where everything is dim and unfamiliar: the sky, waves, sunset. Everything here is melancholy. Everything around him reminds him of his sweet side:
And familiar sadness
The heart aches sweetly:
It seems that again
According to my native steppe
I'm driving down the road...
Bunin is attracted by the simplicity and naturalness of Rus', where the sunset is brighter and everything seems more beautiful. He admires his Motherland and extols its beauty. These feelings were reflected in the poem “Motherland”.
This is a laconic (consisting of eight lines), but capacious lyrical work. Reflecting on the Motherland, the author first of all thinks about an ideal world, alien to vanity, about the eternal component of existence - nature. He admires the vastness and vastness of the expanses of his native country:
Under a sky of dead lead
The winter day is gloomily fading,
And there is no end to the pine forests,
And far from the villages.
The poet sings of this gloominess, and the milky-blue fog similar to gentle sadness, and the dead-leaden veil of a winter day. Despite its exhaustion, gloom and gloom, Russia is beautiful and strong.
And the poem “Overnight” shows the beauty of our native nature, the entire range of its changes. Morning gives way to night, giving the bird-soul the opportunity to return to its homeland. For the soul rejoicing at the imminent merger with the Motherland, everything around is transformed: the sky, previously thickened in darkness, but now shining with purity, a dewy morning. A transformation took place in the soul itself: the night before it meekly froze, grieving, and in the morning it spread its wings. Bunin calls: “Return to your homeland, soul!”, knowing how hard it is to stay away from it.
Bunin also described the feeling of isolation from his native land in the allegorical poem “The Canary”. Longing for her homeland, the canary turned from green to gold. In this there is a hint of a golden cage, of captivity in the “overseas” side, which, although it foreshadows contentment, is still burdensome. Nothing is sweet to a canary - not free, imprisoned in a foreign land. Bunin sympathizes with her, identifying her with his soul:
A free, emerald bird
You won’t, no matter how you sing
About a distant, wonderful island
Above the tavern crowd!
Even worse for Bunin is exile. He talks about this in the poem “Mohammed in Exile.” In separation from the Motherland, even a strong personality is not able to withstand morally. The Prophet was forced to part with everyone he loved. His sadness poured out into “sorrowful words”; he “complained to the rocks.” And although in order to carry out his mission the prophet needed to maintain self-control and not break down before the fate of an exile, he could not overcome his mental pain.
Another poem about an exile is “Prince Vseslav”. Its plot is borrowed from Russian history. “Having sat down in the prince’s place at the wrong time,” Vseslav cowardly fled to Polotsk. The prince was a “dark”, cowardly and cunning man, but in Bunin’s understanding, patriotism redeems all his negative qualities. Vseslav remained faithful to his homeland and yearned for it:
What now, far from the world, in the schema,
Does the dark prince Vseslav remember?
Only your morning bell, Sofia,
Only the voice of Kyiv!
The unforgettable Motherland, according to Vseslav, surpasses Polotsk in everything: both in the beauty of winter landscapes and in the harmony of the city’s panorama. Everything seems to the prince to be painted in gray tones. He dreams of his homeland - he sees it as if in reality:
The prince hears: they call again and are thrilled
Sounds like angelic heights!
In Polotsk they call, but it’s different
He hears in a subtle dream... What years
Sorrows, exile! Unearthly
He remembered it in his heart forever.
Sweet for the “dark” prince are the memories of his native land, where his cowardly, but still noble blood previously raged.
Another facet of the Motherland motif is revealed in the poem “For Treason.” The epigraph to it is a wise saying from the Koran: “Remember those who left their country for the fear of death.” The poem describes the fate of the traitors to the Motherland:
The Lord destroyed them for treason
Unhappy Fatherland,
He littered the fields with the bones of their bodies and skulls.
The traitors were justly punished by God, but the prophet had mercy on them: he begged the Almighty to resurrect them, and he fulfilled the request - he restored their life and forgave their sins. But the traitors did not accept forgiveness from the land, for, according to its laws, such guilt can only be atone for at the cost of one’s own life, given in the name of the Fatherland. Two contradictory legends arose about their further fate, one read: “The resurrected died in battle,” the other objected: they “... lived until their graves in a deserted and wild land.” Bunin despises betrayal; he believes that the crime entailed a well-deserved punishment - to experience torment, being “bowed down in sadness.” Death is a relief for them, and heroic death is an undeserved lot. The homeland deserves to be avenged, both by God, and by the prophet (he softened the punishment sent by the Lord, but by no means abolished it), and by man.
Bunin's philosophical concept of existence is closely intertwined with the theme of the Motherland. This theme permeates the poem “In the forest, in the mountain, a spring, alive and ringing...”. In it, Bunin builds a simple figurative series: an old cabbage roll, a blackened popular print icon, a birch bark. The author claims that he is an opponent of Russian “timid, thousand-year-old slave poverty,” but:
...this cross, but this ladle is white...
Humble, dear features!
A parallel is emerging: “humble features” and the poet’s humility in relation to the wretchedness and poverty of Rus'. He accepts her for who she is - a timid slave, humiliated, crushed and “crumpled,” but who has not lost her living naturalness. Namely, naturalness fascinates the poet.
“In Moscow” is a kind of praise for the native capital. The author admires everything: the thawing snow, the moonlight swaddling the sky, and the drowsy bliss inspired by the night air. The poet accepts everything that belongs to his beloved country and admires nature:
During the day there is a sap, drops of water, the sun warms,
And at night it will freeze, it will become clear,
It’s light - and so similar to Moscow,
Ancient, distant.
There is also nostalgia in the poem: the poet yearns for old Moscow (“old lanes behind the Arbat”, “crosses on an ancient church”). The poem seems torn off, the conclusion is not clearly indicated, but it is easy to guess: Moscow is “... a very special city,” it is gentle and calm at night, bright and sunny during the day. And Moscow is a part of that very Russia, the Motherland that Bunin loved, poor and rich (wealth of nature, history, spiritual strength) at the same time.
Russia, according to Bunin, is an amazing combination of greatness and helplessness. What was laid down long ago, the Motherland has preserved in its entire breadth. However, what people did to her is sad, untenable, meager. This is the country's problem.
In his lyrics, Bunin reflected selfless, devoted love for the Motherland. Seeing the socio-political situation of Russia, he sympathized with it, a country with great opportunities. As a true patriot, he was attracted, and not repelled, by the “wretched huts,” as well as by the greatness of nature, the strength of the country’s spirit, and its rich history. And a living naturalness preserved for centuries.
(Illustration: Sona Adalyan)
Analysis of the poem "Motherland"
The nature of our homeland is capable of evoking a wide variety of emotions and impressions in Russian writers and poets; its diversity and originality have never left them indifferent, pushing them to create unique artistic images that touch us all by the soul and awaken deep, reverent feelings for the place where we were born and grew up to his homeland.
In two small quatrains, written by Bunin back in 1896, before he left Russian soil forever in 1920, the Russia that he took in his heart forever far to a foreign land is clearly described, clearly and without any embellishment: old and gloomy, not yet stained by the blood of the fratricidal civil war, dull and devoid of joy, but so real and original, not without its certain charm, dear and therefore still loved and dear.
The poem begins with a dull and gloomy picture of one winter day going to sunset. Bunin very accurately, with the help of color epithets, conveys the mood of this day, helping readers imagine a sky of deathly lead color, “blue-milky” fog, a desert of snow and the distance hidden in the dusk. Before us appears a dull and gloomy picture of a winter day in Rus', with its endless and vast expanses that stretch endlessly and wherever you look, “there is no end to the pine forests and far from the villages.”
If the first part of the work involuntarily evokes melancholy and despondency, when everything around is gloomy and depressing, the psyche is pressed by the feeling of a “deadly leaden sky”, the absence of people and signs of life, then the second quatrain is no longer filled with such a depressive mood and artistic descriptions of nature become softer and even “humane”. For example, this can be felt in the comparison of the milky blue fog with someone’s gentle sadness, which “softens the ghostly distance.” In this comparison, the poet unites nature with the spirit of Russian people, making them united in their gentle sadness. In general, humility has always been inherent in the Russian peasantry; the sadness that Bunin noticed during his trips through the Russian outback in the eyes of children and adults was, in his opinion, a harbinger of those terrible historical events that befell the Russian peasantry in the future. Nature and Russian people in this poem become one, because just as fog “softens the gloomy distance,” so bright sadness makes a person’s face softer and defenseless, washes away despondency and hopelessness, adding features of spirituality and sublime feelings. After reading Bunin’s poem, you experience a storm of opposite feelings, first despondency and even depression, and then enlightenment and bright sadness. For Bunin, his homeland was and remained a country of contradictions, in which the broken ruts of dirty roads coexisted with the mesmerizing beauty of the landscapes around, ignorance and poverty with the beauty of the Russian soul. And although his feelings for her were very controversial and contradictory, he always kept her in his heart, even in a distant foreign land.
They mock you
They, O Motherland, reproach
You with your simplicity,
Poor looking black huts...
So son, calm and impudent,
Ashamed of his mother -
Tired, timid and sad
Among his city friends,
Looks with a smile of compassion
To the one who wandered hundreds of miles
And for him, on the date of the date,
She saved her last penny.
Analysis of the poem “Motherland” by Bunin
In the work of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, the theme of the Motherland occupies a key place. Russian culture and history are the sources of his inspiration.
It has already become a tradition to see the influence of Nekrasov’s poetry in each such poem, but “To Motherland” was written so excitedly and aphoristically that it is still one of the peaks of I. Bunin’s work. The genre is patriotic lyrics, the size is iambic tetrameter with cross rhyme, 3 stanzas. Rhymes are open and closed. “They” and “you, Motherland” are the main characters of this work. Here the reader sees patriotism not from the front side, not as a set of rattling phrases, but as complicity coming from the depths of the heart, empathy for all the troubles of Russia. I. Bunin's diary entry for this year contains a confession of his love, blood relationship with the ancient history of the country, with the richness of the Russian language.
The homeland as a mother is a typical comparison for world artistic culture, but in I. Bunin it is not just an abstract image of a mother calling, for example, to heroic deeds, but the painfully sweet features of an ordinary provincial Russian old woman, humble and loving. She admires her “impudent son” who has left for the city; he seems so important, smart, and kind to her. She is glad that there are so many well-dressed friends around him. She is even a little ashamed that she is so old-fashioned and clumsy and stupid. Rejoicing at the meeting, she waits for the moment when, left alone, she can hand over the pennies she has saved to her son. The poet does not use strong epithets, just three words convey his indignation, but what an effect they produce: mocking, impudent, ashamed. Every reader immediately recalls in his heart a memory when he himself was the same as this “son”. There are no exclamations, only ellipses in the first stanza, and a bitter appeal in the second line. This detailed image of an ungrateful son and his timid mother is a response to the social and political views of Russia of those years, the thoughtless demands for revolutionary changes.
The revolution of 1917 separated the writer I. Bunin from Russia. Forced to emigrate, in his further work he tried to preserve the lost spirit and features of the Russian past dear to his heart.
"Motherland" Ivan Bunin
Under the sky of deathly lead
The winter day is gloomily fading,
And there is no end to the pine forests,
And far from the villages.One fog is milky blue,
Like someone's gentle sadness,
Above this snowy desert
Softens the gloomy distance.
Analysis of Bunin's poem "Motherland"
Ivan Bunin is one of the few Russian writers who, after the October Revolution, decided to leave Russia, believing that the country in which he was born and raised simply ceased to exist. It was not easy for the author of numerous works, who by that time was already a recognized writer and publicist, to dare to do such an act. However, the year spent in Odessa, where Bunin became an eyewitness to the constantly changing power, which was accompanied by bloody massacres, forced the famous writer to reconsider his attitude towards emigration. In 1920, Ivan Bunin left Russia forever and moved to France, regretting his decision from time to time, but making no attempt to return home. Russia, in Bunin’s perception, remained a gloomy, unkempt country, to which he dedicated the poem “Motherland” back in 1896. Two short quatrains, devoid of attempts to embellish the harsh Russian reality, subsequently became a kind of spell for the author. The poet remembered that old and devoid of civilization Russia, which had not yet become mired in bloody strife, just like that - gloomy, dull and joyless. However, this was Bunin’s true homeland, not devoid of originality and a certain charm.
Creating an image of Russia, the poet uses many epithets. Thus, in his perception, the sky looks “deadly blue,” resembling the face of a deceased person not only in its color, but also in the indifference that is characteristic of abstract or inanimate objects. The winter day itself, according to the author’s definition, “gloomily fades,” without adding joyful feelings. At the same time, “there is no end to the pine forests, and the villages are far away.” This line indicates that before us are the author’s travel notes in poetic form. Bunin probably had to make a trip through the Russian outback, which was so etched in his memory that it formed the basis of the poem “Motherland.”
The second part of this work is already devoid of such a gloomy coloring and despondency characteristic of the first lines. In particular, Ivan Bunin draws attention to the “milky blue” fog, which brightens up the ugliness of an overcast landscape and adds some mystery to it. The poet compares it to someone’s meek sadness, and this is not surprising. After all, humility is one of the national traits of the Russian people, whose life Bunin perceives through the prism of communication with ordinary peasants during his numerous travels through the villages. At the same time, the author believes that the sadness that lurks in the eyes of not only adults, but also children, is associated with the special state of mind of the Slavs, who seem to foresee what their life will be like, and therefore mourn numerous losses and troubles in advance. Thus, Ivan Bunin perceives the Russian people and native nature as two parts of a single whole that are in harmony and can leave a deep imprint on each other. After all, the fog, which gives the Russian winter landscape a special beauty, which “softens the gloomy distance,” has much in common with the age-old Russian sadness. It smooths out the gloomy faces of people, as if washing away the expression of hopelessness from them, making them more spiritual and sublime. But at the same time, in Bunin’s perception, Russia remains a very contradictory country, where completely incompatible phenomena and concepts coexist perfectly, which at the same time perfectly complement each other. Ignorance coexists with high moral qualities, the dirt of Russian roads coexists with gloomy landscapes that are delightful in their pristine beauty. And the author calls all this in one word - Motherland, towards which he has very contradictory feelings.