Trilogy man in a case. Analysis of the cycle (using the example of “Little Trilogy” A

Chekhov wrote the story “About Love” in 1898. The work completes the author’s “Little Trilogy,” which also included the stories “The Man in a Case” and “Gooseberry” studied in literature lessons. In the story “About Love,” the author reveals the theme of “caseness” in love, showing how people limit themselves and do not allow themselves to be happy. You can read the online summary of “About Love” directly on our website.

Main characters

Pavel Konstantinych Alekhine- a poor landowner who shared with the guests his love story for Anna Alekseevna.

Anna Alekseevna– a kind, intelligent woman, Luganovich’s wife; Alekhine was in love with her.

Other heroes

Luganovich- “comrade chairman of the district court”, “dearest person”, Anna Alekseevna’s husband.

Burkin, Ivan Ivanovich- Alekhine’s guests, to whom he told his story.

Alekhine, Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin were talking at breakfast. The owner said that his maid Pelageya was very much in love with the cook Nikanor, but did not want to marry him, since he drank, became violent and even beat her.

Reflecting on the nature of love, Alekhine comes to the conclusion that “this secret is great.” The man believes that Russians decorate love with fatal questions: “is it fair or dishonest, smart or stupid, where will this love lead?” And Alekhine spoke about his love.

He moved to Sofiino immediately after graduating from university. Since “the estate had a large debt,” Alekhine decided to give in to his city habits and work hard until he paid everything off. Alekhine plowed, sowed, and mowed together with everyone else.

In the very first years, the man was chosen as an “honorary justice of the peace.” At one of the meetings he met Luganovich. He called Alekhine to dinner and introduced him to his wife Anna Alekseevna, who was then no more than twenty-two years old. Alekhine “felt in her a close, already familiar being.” The next time Alekhine saw Anna Alekseevna was at a charity performance.

Pavel Konstantinych visited the Luganovichs more and more often, becoming “one of their own” with them, they were always happy to see him. And every time Anna Alekseevna made on him “the impression of something new, unusual and important.” They could talk, be silent for a long time, or she would play the piano for him.

If Alekhine did not come to the city for a long time, the Luganoviches began to worry. They did not understand how an educated person could live in a village. The Luganoviches gave Alekhine gifts, and if he was “oppressed by some creditor,” they offered to lend him money, but he never agreed.

Alekhine was constantly trying to “understand the secret of a young, beautiful, intelligent woman who marries an uninteresting man, almost an old man, and has children from him.”

Every time he came to the city, the man saw that Anna Alekseevna was waiting for him. However, they did not admit their love, “they hid it timidly and jealously.” Alekhine thought about what their love could lead to, that he could not offer her an interesting life, but only a “more everyday environment.” “And she, apparently, reasoned in a similar way,” thinking about her husband and children. They often visited the city and the theater, and there were even unfounded rumors about them.

In recent years, Anna Alekseevna “was already being treated for a nerve disorder” and felt dissatisfied with life. In front of strangers, she experienced “some strange irritation” against Alekhine.

Soon Luganovich was appointed “chairman in one of the western provinces.” At the end of August, the doctor sent Anna Alekseevna to Crimea for treatment, and it was decided that she would come to the family later. Seeing the woman off, Alekhine ran into the compartment at the last moment. He hugged her and began to kiss her, she clung to him and cried. “I confessed my love to her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, petty and how deceptive everything was that prevented us from loving.” He kissed her for the last time and they parted forever.

Reflecting on what they heard, Burkin and Ivan Ivanovich regretted that Alekhine was not involved in science or something similar, and about what a sorrowful face the young lady must have had during farewell.

Conclusion

The main characters of the story “About Love” close themselves off from their feelings, trying to hide them not only from each other, but also from themselves. With the compositional technique of “a story within a story,” Chekhov emphasizes how much Alekhine regrets his lost love even many years after what happened.

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Chekhov's Little Trilogy essay according to plan

Plan

1. Introduction

2. History of creation

3.The meaning of the name

4.Genre and theme

a) Man in a case

b) Gooseberry

c) About love

5.Plot and composition

6.Conclusion

“The Little Trilogy” by A.P. Chekhov, and many critics immediately after its publication called it a turning point in the writer’s work. If in Chekhov’s early stories he was primarily interested in the comic side, then the trilogy, especially the story “About Love,” is “dramatic in nature, sometimes rising to high tragedy” (A. Izmailov).

“The Little Trilogy” really resembles the writer’s serious philosophical discussion about the inevitable negative aspects of human life. A. I. Bogdanovich noted that Chekhov “cannot remain only an artist and ... becomes a moralist and accuser.”

"The Little Trilogy" was written by Chekhov in 1898 and first published in issues 7-8 of the Russian Thought magazine. "The Man in the Case" was originally subtitled "A Story", "Gooseberry" and "About Love" were labeled with Roman numerals II and III.

The name of the short series of stories was given by researchers of the writer’s work. Chekhov himself planned to create a whole series of works united by the theme of “case life.” However, after writing the story “About Love,” the writer felt tired and indifferent to this topic. "Little Trilogy" is the simplest and most specific name for three stories touching on the same topic. In addition, they are united by the main characters with their own stories.

A series of stories in the genre of critical realism. The main theme of the Little Trilogy is “case life,” which Chekhov regarded with great indignation. This broad concept, which has become a household word, refers to people who deliberately fence themselves off from living reality and isolate themselves in their own small, wretched world.

The general tone for the entire cycle is set by the first story with an unambiguous title - “The Man in the Case”. The Greek teacher Belikov inspires disgust from the very first lines. The narrowness and limitations of his life and inner world are brought almost to the point of absurdity. Belikov voluntarily encloses himself in a “case”. Moreover, the very existence of the protagonist poses a serious danger to society. His suspicion gradually changes the people around him, forcing them to be in a state of fear all the time. Nobody likes or respects Belikov, but everyone is afraid to say a word against him. Belikov's death brings relief to the whole city, but the "case" has already penetrated into the souls of people and it will be extremely difficult to get rid of it.

The main character of the story "Gooseberry" is an equally limited person. His main dream is his own estate. Over the years, narrow ideas about happiness are reduced to an even more insignificant thing - gooseberries. Having tasted the berries from the first harvest, Nikolai Ivanovich is at the height of bliss. He will never understand that he wasted the best years of his life in the senseless pursuit of these sour berries.

In the story "About Love" the theme of "case" is not so obvious. It is revealed through the problem of the discrepancy between spiritual and physical communication between people. The landowner Alekhine found himself in his “case” - intense economic work. An educated person gradually immersed himself in ordinary peasant life. Meeting the Luganovich family brought him back to the cultural world. Love for Anna Alekseevna revived hopes for some other, happy life. Neither Alekhine nor Anna doubted their mutual love. But social prejudices and fear of condemnation by society weighed heavily on them. The young people gradually grew old, although happiness was in their hands. Only during the farewell did the feelings and words that had accumulated for years come out, but it was too late to fix anything. 6. Problems The main problem of the cycle is the voluntary refusal of people from all the opportunities that are presented to them in life. A person narrows his field of activity too early and is most often limited to some small dreams and aspirations.

The Chimsha Himalayan and Burkin went hunting together. Having settled down for the night in the barn, they began to talk. Burkin tells a story about his colleague, teacher Belikov (“The Man in a Case”). The next day, the friends visit the landowner Alekhine. In the evening, Ivan Ivanovich continues the conversation with a story about his brother (“Gooseberry”). After spending the night with Alekhine, Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin learn from him the story of the landowner's unhappy love. A close connection arises between the stories when, in the finale, the hunters realize that they also knew Anna Alekseevna.

Throughout his life, Chekhov called on people to tirelessly useful activity and himself set an example for this. Images of people “in a case” are a vivid example of how not to live.

In 1898, three Chekhov stories appeared in print - “The Man in a Case”, “Gooseberry” and “About Love”, united not only by a common author’s idea, but also by a similar composition (“a story within a story”). The very title of the first work in this cycle is significant. It is built on a clear contrast, antithesis: Human And case. Belikov hides from the world, limiting his space as much as possible, preferring a cramped and dark case to a broad and free life, which becomes a symbol of philistine inertia, indifference, and immobility. There is something deathly, inhuman about Belikov, a teacher of the ancient Greek (dead) language. Only when he was already lying in the coffin, “his expression was meek, pleasant, even cheerful, as if he was glad that he had finally been put in a case from which he would never come out.” However, Belikov's death did not yet mean victory over Belikovism...

The brother of Ivan Ivanovich (one of the narrators), a “kind, meek man,” having fulfilled his life’s dream and bought an estate, becomes like a pig (“Gooseberry”). His story gives the narrator a reason to enter into polemics with the idea of ​​one of L. Tolstoy’s folk stories: “It is customary to say that a person only needs three arshins of land. But three arshins are needed by a corpse, not a person... A person needs not three arshins of land, not an estate, but the entire globe, all of nature, where in the open space he could demonstrate all the properties and characteristics of his free spirit.” Thus, the artistic image of space becomes one of the main ways of expressing the author’s concept. A narrow, enclosed space (a case, three arshins, an estate) is contrasted with an unprecedentedly wide expanse - the entire globe necessary for a free person.

The small trilogy concludes with the story “About Love”, in which the study of the problem of “caseness” continues. Also in “Gooseberry” Ivan. Ivanovich said: “... these estates are the same three arshins of land. Leaving the city, from the struggle, from the noise of everyday life, leaving and hiding in your estate - this is not life, this is selfishness.” These words are directly related to Alekhine, who talks about himself. The life that Alekhine chose for himself is the same case. He, looking more like a professor or an artist than a landowner, for some reason considers it necessary to live in cramped small rooms (narrow space), although he has a whole house at his disposal. He doesn’t even have time to wash himself, and he’s used to talking only about cereals, hay and tar... Material from the site

Alekhine is afraid of change. Even great, true love is not able to force him to break established norms, to break with existing stereotypes. So gradually he himself becomes impoverished, devastates his life, becoming similar - not in details, but in essence - to the heroes of “The Man in the Case” and “Gooseberry”.

The arrangement of stories in the “trilogy” was carefully thought out by Chekhov. If in the first of them “caseness” is shown and exposed directly and, so to speak, visually, then in the latter we are talking about hidden and, perhaps, even more dangerous forms of human escape from reality, life, love, happiness...

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A classic example of a prose cycle is Chekhov’s composition of three stories (numbered in Latin numerals when published in magazines), the meaning of which is noticeably impoverished and changes somewhat when perceived separately: “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberry,” “About Love.”

The constructive moment of the interconnection of independent artistic wholes here is the compositional principle of a “story within a story,” and the storytellers (who in turn turn out to be heroes for the narrator) act as end-to-end characters of the cycle.

If the meaning of the first part of the cycle was reduced to a sarcastic denunciation of “caseness”, “Belikovism”, then it could be stated that in this case there is essentially nothing for a literary critic to analyze. Didn’t Burkin himself, outlining the story of the “man in a case,” make the appropriate observations, generalizations, and conclusions? Does Belikov's character really need our additional assessment or reassessment?

In fact, the expressive-symbolic detailing of the image, which in other cases the researcher has to record and identify bit by bit, has already been carried out and interpreted by the narrator Burkin. At the same time, the aesthetic position of the sarcastic Burkin coincides with the irony of the author in “The Death of an Official” or in the finale of “Ionych”. But this time Chekhov needed an intermediary, a character telling the story, who was also endowed with a rather caricatured appearance:

He was a short man, fat, completely bald, with a black beard that almost reached his waist. The caricature of this portrait is set off by the contrasting appearance of his interlocutor, turning them into a kind of “carnival couple”: a tall, thin old man with a long mustache. (Recall that Belikov himself turned out to be the hero of the cartoon “Anthropos in Love.”)

Attention to the external appearance of the narrator, completely excessive for the narrative about Belikov’s “case”, forces us to assume that the author’s position is irreducible to the one that Burkin quite definitely occupies. “The subject of consciousness,” wrote B.O. Korman, “the closer to the author, the more he is dissolved in the text and is not noticeable in it”; and on the contrary, “the more the subject of consciousness becomes a certain personality with his own special way of speech, character, biography (not to mention appearance - V.G.), the lesser the extent he directly expresses the author’s position.”

The relative narrowness of the narrator’s horizons consists, for example, in the fact that he easily and arrogantly separates himself from those about whom he speaks: ... and how many more such people are left in the case, how many more will there be! Meanwhile, the pathetic hymn to freedom, sounding from the lips of Burkin himself, unexpectedly reveals the limitations, a kind of “caseness” of his own thinking:

No one wanted to discover this feeling of pleasure - a feeling similar to what we experienced a long time ago, back in childhood, when the elders left home and we ran around the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom. Ah, freedom, freedom! Even a hint, even a faint hope of its possibility gives the soul wings, doesn’t it?

Such an infantile experience of freedom as short-term permissiveness in the absence of elders, a timid aspiration for only a hint of such a possibility explains Burkin’s “case” reaction to the bitter generalizations of his interlocutor: “Well, you’re from a different story, Ivan Ivanovich.”<...>Let's sleep. (Note that the motif of sleep is a common allusion to inauthentic existence in Chekhov’s texts, while insomnia usually indicates the tension in the hero’s inner life.)

But isn’t the fact that we live in a city in a stuffy, cramped environment, writing unnecessary papers, playing vint - a case in point? And the fact that we spend our whole lives among idle people, quarrelsome people, stupid, idle women, talking and listening to all sorts of nonsense - isn’t this just a case?

But these words cannot serve as an exhaustive expression of the author’s own position, since they are also put into the mouth of the character, the depicted subject of speech.

Ivan Ivanovich is also an intermediary, but not between the hero (Belikov) and the author, like Burkin, but between the hero and the reader. An attentive listener to the story about Belikov is, as it were, an image of the reader introduced into the work. It is no coincidence that he speaks on behalf of a certain “we”.

If Burkin, ironically distancing himself from Belikov, limited himself to a sarcastic interpretation of his story, then Ivan Ivanovich, including himself among the people burdened with “case,” dramatizes the situation:

See and hear how they lie<...>endure insults, humiliation, do not dare to openly declare that you are on the side of honest, free people, and lie yourself, smile, and all this because of a piece of bread, because of a warm corner, because of some bureaucrat who is penniless price - no, it’s impossible to live like this anymore!

However, Ivan Ivanovich is just one of the heroes of the work, fraught with a peculiar “matryoshka effect”: Ivan Ivanovich’s moral horizon is wider than Burkin’s sarcasm (which, in turn, is wider than Varenka’s humorous laughter at Belikov), but narrower than the author’s moral norm. To identify this latter, it is necessary to focus on the “semantic context” that arises “at the boundaries of the individual components” of the cycle.

In "Gooseberry", the function of narrator passes to Ivan Ivanovich, and he offers us a very dramatic picture of life.

True, the hero of his story, the Chimsha-Himalayan Junior, joins the ranks of sarcastic Chekhov characters, but Ivan Ivanovich’s story turns into his personal confession: But it’s not about him, it’s about me. I want to tell you what change has occurred in me...

The presentation of the brother's story begins with a picture of their free, healthy childhood. The emotional closeness of the characters is emphasized, which does not completely disappear over the years. Immediately after the Gogol-style portrait of his brother-landowner, which ends with the words of him about to grunt into the blanket, follows: We hugged and cried with joy and with the sad thought that we were once young, but now we are both gray-haired, and it’s time to die.

Ivan Ivanovich peers into the new character of Nikolai Ivanovich as if into a mirror: I, too, at dinner and while hunting, taught how to live, how to believe, how to rule the people, etc. That night the narrator experiences dramatic catharsis. Feeling himself a subject of the broad internal predetermination of existence (famous: A person needs not three arshins of land, not an estate, but the entire globe, all of nature, where in the open space he could demonstrate all the properties and characteristics of his free spirit), Ivan Ivanovich in the shameful contentment of his brother the narrowness of the external reality of everyday life becomes clear. He comprehends the inconsistency and incompatibility of these parameters of human life.

In this experience, a kind of formula for Chekhov's drama is born: ...there is no strength to live, and yet you need to live and want to live! (like Gurova, Anna Sergeevna from “The Lady with the Dog” and many other heroes of the writer).

The second “story within a story” requires virtually no interpretation. Ivan Ivanovich himself convincingly dots the i’s. Two-fifths of the text is given to the framing of this confessional story, which in no way allows us to completely identify the author’s position with the final judgments of the narrator.

There can apparently be no talk of antagonism between the author and the narrator, however, not only the younger, but also the elder Chimsha-Himalayan shows a narrow moral outlook, proclaiming drama as the norm of life: There is no happiness, and there should not be...

“When I saw a happy man, I was overcome by a heavy feeling, close to despair,” says Ivan Ivanovich. He does not fully realize that his brother’s contentment is just the imaginary happiness of a purely “external” person, a degenerate pseudo-personality. The “existentialist” position of despair that he himself occupied, which Chekhov sensitively captured in the atmosphere of the era, leaves no room in life for a feeling of the joy of being.

Meanwhile, this kind of joy, by the will of the author, constantly makes itself felt in the frame of the main story. Then the hunters become imbued with love for this field and think about how great and how beautiful this country is. Either Alekhine sincerely rejoices at the guests, and they are delighted with the beauty of the maid Pelageya. Elderly Ivan Ivanovich swims and dives in the rain among the white lilies with boyish enthusiasm and delight. Alekhine with visible pleasure feels the warmth, cleanliness, dry dress, light shoes, rejoices at the guests talking not about cereals, not about hay, not about tar.

It is said not only about Alekhine, but also about Burkin (and even as if about the invisibly present author and reader): For some reason I wanted to talk and listen about elegant people, about women (in the mouth of Ivan Ivanovich, women are stupid and idle). A kind of formula for feeling the living joy of being, not overshadowed, not supplanted by the drama of confession, sounds: ... and the fact that beautiful Pelageya was now silently walking here was better than any stories.

Ivan Ivanovich rejects the joys of life from a strictly moralistic position. However, in fact, don’t all kinds of joys serve as a kind of “case” for happy people, deaf to the suffering of those who are unhappy? Let's try to extract a reasonable Chekhov's answer to this question from the trilogy as a whole as a cyclic formation. For now, let us note some features of the moral position of the narrator in “Gooseberry”.

The dramatic maximalism of Ivan Ivanovich (for me now there is no more difficult sight than a happy family sitting around a table drinking tea) is not harmless to those around him. It carries within itself not only a thirst for goodness, but also a subtle poison of despair. This is indicated, in particular, by the close connection at the level of focalization of the final situations of the first and second stories.

At the end of “The Man in a Case,” Burkin, having told Belikov’s story, quickly falls asleep, and the agitated, unspoken Ivan Ivanovich kept tossing from side to side and sighing, and then got up, went outside again and, sitting down by the door, lit a pipe. In the finale of “Gooseberry,” Chimsha-Himalayan, who has relieved his soul with a confession of despair, covers himself with his head (like Belikov!) and falls asleep, after which the narrator remarks:

His pipe, lying on the table, smelled strongly of tobacco fume, and Burkin did not sleep for a long time and still could not understand where this heavy smell came from.

It is significant that the narrator, not demonstratively, but quite obviously changes his position by the fact that this time he is awake with Burkin, and not with Ivan Ivanovich. It is also significant that the heavy smell associated with the painful thoughts of the owner of the pipe, with his dramatic confession, is poisoned by a different smell that speaks of the simple joys of life - two phrases before the quoted ending it was reported: ... from their beds, wide, cool, which the beautiful Pelageya laid, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.

It should also be noted that Ivan Ivanovich, having lost faith in personal happiness, loses confidence in the capabilities of the human personality in general, pinning his hopes only on the unknown superpersonal beginning of being: ... and if there is a meaning and purpose in life, then this meaning and purpose are all not in our happiness, but in something more reasonable and greater.

At the same time, the narrator clearly “moves away” from this thesis (which Tolstoy liked so much), noticing a certain inconsistency in communicative behavior: the hero said this as if he was asking for himself personally. There is no reproach in this remark, but it reveals the author’s latent idea that any meaning is rooted in a person’s personal existence. Chekhov, as the final text of the trilogy (and the general context of his work) shows, does not know anything more reasonable and greater.

Alekhine's confession, which makes up the third story in the cycle, is very dramatic. The grain of this drama, as in “The Lady with the Dog,” written a year later, is the unrealization of personal secrets: We were afraid of everything that could reveal our secret to ourselves (the word secret appears three more times in Alekhine’s speech).

The framing of the story being told does not conflict with the aesthetic situation of a “story within a story,” as was the case in “Gooseberry,” but there is a lot of contradiction in the protagonist’s reasoning itself. The contradiction lies, for example, in the fact that, in the opinion of Alekhine (we emphasize: not the author!), it is necessary to explain each case separately, without trying to generalize, but Alekhine himself completes his story with a generalization.

Having stated at the very beginning that issues of personal happiness are important in love (and thereby indirectly entering into an argument with Ivan Ivanovich), Alekhine at the end of his monologue, like the narrator of “Gooseberry,” states: I realized that when you love, then in your reasoning about this love must come from the highest, from something more important than happiness or unhappiness... And then he adds: ... or there is no need to reason at all, which discredits the highest as a source of reasoning.

The entire inner life of Alekhine in his relationship with Anna Alekseevna is permeated with the usual dramatic contradiction for mature Chekhov’s prose between the hero’s personality and his character: I loved tenderly, deeply, but I reasoned... The first comes from the personality, the second from the character as a way of adapting this personality to circumstances. The “case” of the sarcastic characters of the first two stories lies precisely in the absorption, suppression of the once living personality - the “shell” of character (it is no coincidence that both, by the will of the author, die).

The discrepancy between Alekhine’s character and his personality is manifested, for example, in the following: his work on the estate was in full swing, but, although he took an active part in it, he was bored and frowned with disgust. But this inconsistency, in Chekhov’s way, testifies to the presence of a living human “I” in the hero.

This is his advantage (confirmed by Anna Alekseevna’s love) over Luganovich, who hangs around respectable people, listless, useless, with a submissive, indifferent expression, as if he had been brought here to sell. Calling Luganovich a good-natured man, Alekhine accompanies this characterization with a paradoxical explanation: ...one of those simple-minded people who firmly hold the opinion that since a person has been put on trial, that means he is guilty.

Luganovich’s commitment to expressing his opinion legally, on paper, clearly tells the reader of the trilogy that in front of him is a “case” man - a version of Belikov, who nevertheless decided to get married. But the narrator Alekhine himself does not realize this, characterizing Anna Alekseevna’s husband as the sweetest person.

The author's hidden irony also makes itself felt in the hero-narrator's commitment to the theme of sleep (Chekhov's sleep is almost always allusively associated with spiritual death). Even in the previous story, Alekhine really wanted to sleep. Now he enthusiastically talks about how he slept on the move, how at first, when he went to bed, he read at night, and later he did not have time to get to his bed and fell asleep in a barn, in a sleigh or somewhere in a forest lodge. District court hearings seem like a luxury to Alekhine after sleeping in a sleigh. At the same time, he complains to Anna Alekseevna that he sleeps poorly in rainy weather.

However, in general, Alekhine's story is noticeably closer to the author's style of the mature Chekhov than the stories of Burkin and Chimshi-Gimalaysky. This closeness consists “in the rejection of the mission of teaching,” in the fact that “Chekhov did not impose any postulate,” and “he addressed moral demands primarily to himself.”

These words are quite applicable to Alekhine, a narrator who individualizes his own love story as a separate incident, while the first two narrators of the trilogy sharply condemn their characters, decisively generalize and generally “teach”:

Burkin is a teacher by profession, and Ivan Ivanovich preaches passionately (by the way, his pathetic exclamation: Don’t let yourself be lulled to sleep!<...>don’t get tired of doing good! - very inappropriately addressed to Alekhine, who had worked hard during the day, whose eyes were drooping from fatigue).

And yet, there is undoubtedly some authorial detachment from the sleepy Alekhine, who did not delve into the meaning of Ivan Ivanovich’s speech and was only happy to talk about something that was not directly related to his life. It is also obvious in relation to the other two narrators. And although in bringing all three stories to the reader there is a considerable share of the narrator’s internal agreement with each of them, the life positions of the telling characters are far from realizing the moral norm of the author’s consciousness.

In search of textual traces of this consciousness “clothed in silence” (Bakhtin), let us pay attention to what unites all the characters in the cycle without exception. What is common to them in one way or another is the life position of solitary existence, which is, apparently, the deepest meaning of the phenomenon of “caseness.” A significant phrase from “Gooseberry” brings together the focalizations of all three narrator characters within one frame: Then all three sat in armchairs, at different ends of the living room, and were silent.

Tyupa V.I. — Analysis of literary text — M., 2009