There is one peculiarity in Bunin's work: perhaps none of the Russian authors, except him, do not meet so often descriptions of stars and constellations, unless Tyutchev, perhaps, is comparable to him in his partiality for the firmament, "shining with the glory of the star."

Bunin himself speaks about a special love for the stars:

I will never tire of singing your praises, stars!

You are always mysterious and young.

Since childhood, I timidly comprehend

Dark abysses with shining runes.

("I will never tire of singing your praises, stars...")

In the poem" Night " he writes:

I'm looking for a combination in this world

Beautiful and eternal. Far away

I see the night: the sands of silence

And the starlight above the twilight of the earth.

Like writing, they twinkle in the firmament of blue

Pleiades, Vega, Mars and Orion.

I love their flow over the desert

And the secret meaning of their royal names!

Bunin's works include not only the well-known Venus, Mars, Polaris, dipper of Ursa Major and the Milky Way, but also Sirius (my favorite star!), Arcturus, Vega, Jupiter, the constellations Capella, Osiris, Orion, Scorpio, Canis, Pleiades, Canopus, Raven, and the Southern Cross...

Bunin spent his childhood in a remote estate in the Voronezh forest-steppe, where the sky is wide open, and a leisurely lifestyle creates conditions for contemplation. He developed an interest in the stars from an early age. The writer speaks about its origins in the "Life of Arsenyev", and, apparently, his mother was the person who drew attention to the starry sky: "If you go out , there is no fire in the hall, only a clear moon in height outside the windows, the hall is empty, stately, full as if with the thinnest smoke, and she (el. - A.A.), dense, in its coniferous, snow-mourning vestments,

page 29

it rises regally behind the glass, its point goes into the pure transparent and bottomless dome-shaped blue, where the widely spread constellation of Orion is white and silvered, and below, in the bright emptiness of the sky, the magnificent Sirius, the mother's favorite star, shines sharply, shudders with azure diamonds "(Quoted from Bunin I. A. Sobr. op.: In 4 vols. Moscow, 1988).

Sirius will also become Bunin's favorite star, about which he will write a romance poem:

Where are you, my cherished star,

A crown of heavenly beauty?

Unrequited charm

Snow and moonlit heights?

("Sirius")

Perhaps Sirius, the star of Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility, particularly attracted Bunin and as a symbol of creative Eros.

The contrast between the eternal beauty of the stars and the fleeting beauty of life on earth - youth, love, coming for a moment and leaving forever, the contrast between the Divine and the human, permeates Bunin's poems and prose with acute pain:

Like me now, the miriads of the eye watched

Their ancient way. And in the depths of the ages

All for whom they shone in the dark,

They disappeared into it like a trail in the sand:

There were many of them. Gentle and loving,

And girls, and boys, and wives,

Nights and stars that glistened like silver

Euphrates and Nile, Memphis and Babylon!

"Night"

Yet not only pain, but bold hope:

And maybe I'll understand you, stars,

And the dream may come true,

What are Earth's hopes and sorrows

Destined to merge with the heavenly mystery!

("I will never tire of singing your praises, stars...")

Through the images of the stars comes a sense of heavenly mystery, a sense of God. So, in the poem "God" we read:

He was in the wind, in my bottomless soul -

And shuddered with the blue glare of the stars

In the azure sky, clear and vast.

page 30

Bunin's stars are not just a detail of the landscape - they are a symbol. Through them, times, spaces, the divine and the earthly are connected. They have a mystical and mysterious meaning, and they appear at the most important, dramatic moments: a love explanation, a last date, death, reflections on the meaning of life, on God... Often the story ends with a description of the stars: "Tanka", "Birds of the sky", "Saucepan", "Late hour", "Brothers", "Burden", "Night" , etc. In the stars there is a universal connection between everything and everything that cannot be comprehended by the human mind: hence the image of crystal threads pouring down to the earth ("Night", "Birds of the Sky", "Sea of Gods"), which is repeated in various stories. The image is contradictory, because at the same time it makes you feel the gap between the earthly and the Divine: "Venus hung there like a triangle of quivering molten gold. Mars and Arcturus sparkled high in the west. And all the stars, small and large, were so separated from the bottomless sky, so bright and pure, that golden crystal threads flowed from them almost to the snows, which reflected their brilliance."

And immediately the transition to the earthly, as a kind of method of contrast between the earthly and the heavenly, the transitory and the eternal: "The lights were burning in the huts in the village, the roosters as it were lulled the gently sloping crescent moon. And with a resounding creak, a familiar troika - all gray-curly with frost, with white fluffy eyelashes-drove through the gate with a squeal. And next to it is the theme of death, which often occurs when describing stars: "When the student ran up to the sleigh, his mother and the coachman shouted in unison that there was a dead body lying on the Znamenskaya road." ("Birds of the Sky").

In the story "Ignat", "a big red Mars rises above the dark border of the forest", foreshadowing a bloody denouement-treason, murder.

The same contrast between the dark and the cosmic, the momentary and the eternal, the commensurate and the immeasurable - in the story "Sukhodol": "And the nights, dark, warm, with purple clouds, were calm, calm. The babble of sleepy poplars ran and flowed drowsily. The lightning flashed cautiously over the dark Troshinu forest - and the warm, dry smell of oak. Near the forest, above the plains of oats, in a clearing in the sky among the clouds, a Scorpion burned like a silver triangle, a grave cabbage roll." Small and vast, grains of Ox and an ordinary village mill, some unknown Troshinny forest and the constellation of Scorpio, illuminating half the world.

In the story" Saucepan " stars for the peasant-the personification of God's powers: "And when the horses were calmly absorbed in the food and the scuffling of the children lying down next to each other, the laughter at the crake, which creaks so much that it jerks its legs, stopped, grandfather laid a sheepskin coat and a zipun for himself at the boundary, and with a pure heart, with a blessing, knelt down and prayed for a long time to the dark, starry, beautiful sky, to the The Milky Way is the bright road to the city of Jerusalem."

page 31

After describing the conversation with the old man about ownership of land, about death, the author ends the story "Burden" as follows: "I went out and, again through the garden, went to the threshing floor, in the field. A bare garden can be seen far through. A large star stands low and looks mystically happy from behind the distant century-old birches, their trunks turning white near the rampart." The star here is a symbol of the highest supramundane freedom, alien to earthly concerns. That's why she shines so joyfully - nothing earthly weighs her down...

In "The Late Hour", the hero, on whose behalf the story is being told, after many years finds himself at night in the city where he spent his youth. He finds the bench where he declared his love for the girl, and recalls that when he looked at the sky at those moments, he saw a green star in it, which "seemed to say something silently." At the end of the story, he finds the cemetery, the grave of his beloved: "... in front of me, on a flat place, among dry grasses, an elongated and rather narrow stone lay alone, with its opening to the wall. From behind the wall, like a wondrous gem, a low green star looked out, radiant like the one before, but mute, motionless." The star, the only witness of a long-standing love that is no longer in the hero's soul, takes on the meaning of a mystical symbol that combines love and death. So the image of the star becomes the main thing in the story.

The icy glint of stars in the story "Cold Autumn" portends the parting of lovers forever: "We sat quietly that evening, only occasionally exchanging insignificant words, exaggeratedly calm, hiding our secret thoughts and feelings. With feigned simplicity, my father also said about autumn. I went to the balcony door and wiped the glass with a handkerchief: in the garden, in the black sky, the clear ice stars shone brightly and sharply. My father was leaning back in his chair, smoking, looking absently at the hot lamp hanging over the table, and my mother, wearing glasses, was carefully sewing a small silk bag under its light - we knew what kind-and it was both touching and creepy. When we were dressed, we went through the dining room to the balcony and out into the garden. At first it was so dark that I held on to his sleeve. Then black branches began to appear in the brightening sky, showered with mineral-glittering stars. He paused and turned back to the house:

"Look how the windows of the house are shining in a very special autumn way. I'll be alive, I'll remember this evening forever..."

When the stars witness, the theme of love and death is heard, again a tragic contrast, a painful gap between the human and the superhuman (the icy light of stars and the warm light of windows).

Speaking about the theme of stars in Bunin's work, of course, it is impossible not to mention the religious and philosophical story "Night". The starry sky is a magnificent lyrical accompaniment to reflections throughout the story, a kind of resonator that enhances its sound: "Jupiter has reached its maximum height. And the limit value

page 32

silence, ultimate immobility before his face, the ultimate hour of its beauty and grandeur has reached the night (...) The vast and bottomless temple of the full-starred sky became even more regal and menacing-already many large pre-dawn stars had risen on it. And already a foggy golden pillar of radiance falls quite vertically into the milky mirror of the lethargy of the embraced sea... " This story is a deep artistic introspection of the author, a study of the bowels of the human soul.

Bunin assumes the existence of a particularly pronounced hereditary memory: "My birth is not my beginning. My origin is in this (completely incomprehensible to me) darkness in which I was conceived before birth, and in my father, in my mother, in my grandfathers, in my great-grandfathers, for they are also me, only in a slightly different form, from which very much was repeated in me almost identically."

In Bunin's works, we feel the loneliness of a person in the face of a gigantic, mysterious Cosmos, and at the same time a secret relationship, correlation with it. Purely national frameworks are disappearing. The stars become the writer's symbol of human unity, a reminder that, as stated in the story "Brothers", "all people have one heart."

Permanent link to this publication: