The bird is one of the most common poetic images and symbols in literature and folklore. This is a creature of the natural world, which is given something that has always been inaccessible to man - the ability to fly. The image of a bird has always been associated with the idea of an ideal beginning-harmony, freedom, height, movement.

In his works, Turgenev makes extensive use of this image, filling it with deep content. The motif of movement and flight is the main one in the composition of the story "Ghosts". This becomes apparent when a flying flock of cranes appears in the story: "Large beautiful birds (there were only thirteen of them) flew in a triangle, sharply and rarely flapping their convex wings. With their heads and legs stretched out tightly, their chests thrust out sharply, they were rushing uncontrollably and so fast that the air whistled around them. It was wonderful to see at such a height, at such a distance from all living things, such a hot, strong life, such a steady will. Without ceasing to cross the space triumphantly, the cranes occasionally called to each other with the foremost comrade, with the leader, and there was something proud, important, something indestructibly self-confident in these loud exclamations, in this cloudless conversation. "We'll probably make it, even if it's difficult," they seemed to say, encouraging each other. And then it occurred to me that such people as these birds were, in Russia-where in Russia! there is not much in the whole world" (Cited in: Turgenev I. S. Poln. sobr. soch. i pis'mov: V 28 t. M.-L., 1960-1968. Vol. IX. pp. 103-104; further only volume and p.).

"Big beautiful birds" is a symbol of the integrity of the spirit, unity and inflexibility of the will, a state that is usually inaccessible to Turgenev's hero. Dreaming of combining the mind and will in one person, Turgenev could not create such a hero, because he did not see him in real life.

In "Enough", the image of migratory birds flying high in the sky completes and animates the picture of early spring created by Turgenev. The focus is not on the landscape, but on the psychological state of the hero: "And gradually, growing with each step, with each movement forward, a kind of joyful, incomprehensible anxiety rose and grew in me... "(IX, 114). For the hero, spring, life, love, and happiness are associated with the image of migratory birds - everything that makes his brief earthly existence so attractive to a person.

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The issue of "Pretty" has a certain connection with the story "Ghosts". The central part of the work is a detailed recollection of the experienced love. This part is full of poetic images, but none of them reflects such a concentration of spiritual energy as the image of a bird. Turgenev uses this image to denote a state that defies rational comprehension: "And I stand, all tense and light, like a bird that has just folded its wings and is ready to fly up again , and my heart burns and trembles with a cheerful fear of my loved one, before the oncoming happiness "(IX, 114). Undoubtedly, the image of a bird is associated with the state of finding the wholeness of the human spirit, overcoming the painful inner discord. Such a state, which fills the life of Turgenev's hero with meaning and reconciles him to life, is in itself happiness for him.

The image of a swallow tumbling in the sky in the story "Lull"also goes back to this meaning. Without touching upon the problems of the story as a whole, we will focus on one obvious antithesis: Veretyev - Marya Pavlovna, associated with the symbolic motif under consideration. Turgenev in his work often contrasts two main characters - male and female. In the female character, Turgenev always emphasizes integrity, his heroines overcome the painful internal discord, reflection, which is fatal for male characters.

The image of a swallow expresses Veretiev's life philosophy, his (and the author's) ideal of individual human existence: "Look at that swallow over there... See how she boldly disposes of her little body, where she wants, there she will throw it! Vaughn jumped up, vaughn hit down, even screamed with joy, do you hear? So that's what I drink for. Masha, in order to experience the very sensations that this swallow experiences" (VI, 124).

The swallow enjoys physical freedom, and Turgenev's hero dreams of flying the spirit, and this feeling, he believes, is given by wine and passion. To experience such a passion that consumes the whole person, he is not given. A bird in the sky is associated with something that is far, high, inaccessible.

The image of a bird (seagull) plays a symbolic role in the story "Singers". Turning to this work, let us recall the famous words of Leo Tolstoy about Turgenev, whose distinctive feature as an artist, Tolstoy believes, was "faith in beauty, female love, art."

Yakov Turok, the main character of the story "The Singers", is an artist in the highest sense of the word. The episode of his performance of the song is the climax in the work. Turgenev masterfully conveys the state of all the characters involved in this scene, and above all himself

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Yakov: "Yakov, apparently, was overcome by ecstasy: he was no longer timid, he gave himself up entirely to his happiness; his voice no longer trembled - it trembled, but with that barely noticeable inner tremor of passion that pierces the soul of the listener like an arrow, and constantly grew stronger, firmer and expanded. I remember seeing one evening, at low tide, on the flat sandy shore of the sea, which was making a terrible and heavy noise in the distance, a large white gull: it sat motionless, its silken breast exposed to the scarlet glow of the dawn, and only occasionally slowly extended its long wings to meet the familiar sea, to meet the low crimson sun: I remembered it listening to James" (IV, 241). The comparison with a bird, so common in Turgenev's works, is complicated by a symbolic function: the image of a bird reveals the state in which the hero is.

The song contest scene is central to the story. It is framed by pictures of rural life; their emphasized prosaicity creates a contrasting background for the main episode. In the finale, Turgenev deliberately eases the emotional tension that has arisen in the competition scene; the image of the bird remains in the story a symbol of the spiritual height to which the singer soars, dragging others with him, but he cannot stay at this height. The motif of falling from a height is almost invisible in the story, but it is deeply organically present in the symbolic plan of the work.

The state of flight is experienced by Sanin and his companion ("Spring Waters"), who went for a ride. References to the bird - "Well, now we are free birds"," Let's go straight as birds fly " (XI, 143) - precede the description of the walk, and flight becomes its leitmotif. By themselves, these comparisons and metaphors are by no means original, but the leitmotif formed by them receives a symbolic load, connecting with the special psychological state of the characters (ecstasy of life, sensory sensations, harmony with nature, with the world), which occurs during rapid rhythmic movement. The leading role in this episode belongs to the heroine, she carries the hero along with her. In Marya Nikolaevna Turgenev emphasizes the natural principle, and this is important: the state that expresses the image of a bird is organic for her, unlike the hero.

The image of a bird in Turgenev's works is usually associated with the symbolic image of wings, which has its own range of meanings. In the story "Correspondence" we meet the metaphor "wings of youth": "How often, how long they are connected! And then the time comes when they fall away, and it is no longer possible to rise above the earth, to fly to the sky " (VI, 177, 178). This metaphor is introduced to characterize the main temporal states of the human soul, its youth, maturity, and old age. And then the hero writes: "In my first youth, I was a nepra-

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menno wanted to conquer the sky for himself "(VI, 190)." Sky " here is the highest sphere of aspirations of the human person.

Patient Lukerya in the "Living Relics" is inaccessible to any movement, her existence is extremely poor impressions. Turgenev does not tell the reader whether Lukerya was thinking about anything when she spent the whole summer watching the life of the swallows that made their nest in her shed. Meanwhile, the image of the bird family embodies what fate deprived the heroine of-freedom of movement, joy of life, family ties.

The image of swallows seems to be a random detail in this fragment, but it gets an additional meaning, being correlated with one of the heroine's dreams, told by her to the hunter. This dream is deeply symbolic. The central figure in it is Christ, whose wings " spread out all over the sky, long as a gull's." Christ carries Lukerya high into the sky, and she finally finds the possibility of movement and freedom. Lukerya's spirit gradually gets out of the control of the body during her lifetime, this connection becomes minimal, but in the heroine's dream, this still captive spirit soars, freeing itself. It's like he's taking on wings. The images of a bird and a bird's wing in the story symbolize, on the one hand, the unfulfilled hopes of the heroine in her difficult earthly life, on the other-the heavenly soaring of the spirit, spiritual freedom.

In the "Living Relics" there is another image characteristic of Turgenev's works - the image of a shot bird. In the story, he correlates with the tragic fate of Lukerya, who before her illness was "a giggler, a dancer, a singer." Her illness had taken everything from her, and the hunter who had shot the swallows had robbed her of her last comfort.

A similar symbolic motif is found in "The Day Before". At the moment of the deepest emotional crisis, overcome by a premonition of the impending catastrophe, Elena watches the flight of a seagull over the sea and makes a wish: "That's if she comes here... that would be a good sign." However, "the gull spun around, folded its wings , and, as if shot, fell with a plaintive cry somewhere behind the dark ship "(VIII, 157).

A variant of this image is the image of a broken bird's wing. We meet him, for example, in The Diary of an Extra Person: "Needless to say, all this became clear to me only in the aftermath of the time when I had to lower my damaged, already weak wings" (V, 198). With the help of such a metaphor, Turgenev characterizes the weakness of character, lack of vitality, modest scale of the hero's personality, early break in his soul.

This motif is found in the story more than once. The conversation between Lisa and Bizmyonkov takes place in an old, abandoned gazebo. This conversation is sad, Liza's heart is broken, the prince's departure and his letter

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they had robbed her of all hope of happiness. Her heart is empty, and she confesses this to her interlocutor. The description of the abandoned gazebo in which the conversation takes place ends with a detail that adds a sad note to this description: "The door did not close at all, like a broken bird's wing" (V, 227). This detail acts as a dominant feature in the episode as a whole, it conveys the state in which the characters are. A broken bird's wing is a symbol of unfulfilled hopes, an interrupted flight, an injury inflicted on the soul, a broken fate, a loss suffered, a life drama. This symbolic detail expresses the state of not only Lisa, but also Chulkaturin, who learns from the conversation that Lisa despises him and gives her hand to Bizmyonkov.

In" Poems in Prose", describing the eyes of a dying man, Turgenev notes that in the depths of them "something was beating and fluttering, like the broken wing of a wounded bird" (XIII, 192).

The opposite state of the Turgenev hero denotes the motif of the found wings. In "Smoke", the heroine's determination, inner readiness, composure, and aspiration to an invisible but very significant goal are conveyed in this way: Irina, on the day of her first "celebration", her first appearance in society, when talking to Litvinov, "looked somewhere into the distance with her strange, as if darkened and dilated eyes, and shaken with a slight movement of the air, the ends of the thin ribbons lifted slightly behind her shoulders, like wings "(IX, 189). An irresistible and domineering force draws her, and the choice is already made, and she, having made up her mind, no longer resists, but flies, caught up in this force.

The image of wings is found in the novel more than once. For example, in one of the descriptions, the wings and the vortex form a single motif. Now Litvinov was "caught up in something unknown and cold" (IX, 257); "Sometimes it seemed to him that a whirlwind was swooping down on him and he felt the rapid rotation and disorderly blows of its dark wings" (IX, 258). This is a whirlwind of passion, the danger of which for the hero is emphasized by the epithet "dark".

The symbolic image of a bird's wing gets an additional range of meanings that serve to characterize the relationship between the deceased mother and daughter of the Yeltsovs. The hero writes about Vera: "I remember asking her why, when she is at home, she always sits under the portrait of Mrs. Yeltsova, like a baby bird under her mother's wing. "Your comparison is very true," she replied, "I would never want to leave her wing" (VII, 35, 36). The image of a bird with a chick in its nest is also associated with the image of a guardian angel, who protects Faith from the destructive power of love-passion, from temptation. At the same time, does not the mother play a fatal role in the fate of her daughter, taking her with her into oblivion with the same goal - to save her soul from destruction? Symbolic mo-

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tiv complicates the image, revealing two of its opposite facets to the reader at once.

The theme of the power of a dead person over a living person continues in the story "After Death". Klara Milich is one of the most mysterious and complex female images of Turgenev. Readers '(and authors') attitude to this character is as ambiguous as Turgenev's attitude to female love.

The image of Clara is built on the principle of "from a riddle to a solution", and the riddle is solved after the death of the heroine. Turgenev describes her expressive appearance in detail: "Her face is dark, not of the Jewish or Gypsy type, her eyes are small, black, under thick, almost fused eyebrows, her nose is straight, slightly turned up, her lips are thin with a beautiful but sharp curve, a huge black braid, heavy even in appearance, low, motionless, his forehead was made of stone, and his ears were tiny... her whole face is pensive, almost severe" (XIII, 85, 86), then deliberately coarsens her features in Aratov's perception: "dark-skinned, dark-skinned, with coarse hair, with a mustache on her lip" (XIII, 90). Her appearance is almost repulsive, not at all the way the hero imagined his future lover: "gentle profile", "kind, bright eyes", "silky hair" (XIII, 89).

However, Turgenev builds this image in such a way that it seems to grow in the eyes of the reader into a kind of monolith containing a colossal force, mysterious and irresistible (it is not for nothing that the author hints at its similarity to the statue). "Your cell is small... not by the wings, " Klara declares to her family (XIII, 113). This unruly, rebellious spirit finds expression in the image of a large, strong and predatory bird or, more precisely, in the image of a demon. The leading trait of her character is self - will: like Lermontov's Demon, she has a powerful influence on the person chosen by her, and this influence is not lost, but even strengthened after her death. Aratov recalls her words about the one she will love: "I will meet you and take you" (XIII, 118). And she really deprived him of his will, completely subdued him: the feeling inspired by her is not the inclusion of nature, not the result of free choice-the hero is captured, he is unable to resist her powerful power, her witchcraft, "magnetism", something that is difficult to find a name for. Wings in this case are a symbol of a powerful, wayward spirit, a demonic personality that does not fit into the framework set for it by the environment, everyday life.

In the story "Three Encounters", the symbolic motif of wings is also associated with a female image. The hero, whose imagination is excited by a new meeting with a mysterious beauty who is eluding him, sees her in a dream. In this dream, the woman who attracts him so much suddenly finds wings, long and white, and, rushing through the air, beckons the hero to follow her, but he cannot leave the ground and stretches out in vain to her

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their "greedy hands". The author's emphasis on the spatial separation of the hero and the object of his aspirations symbolizes the inaccessibility for him, the elusiveness of the mysterious beauty, and the fact that she suddenly grows wings and feels free in the air element means here that this image belongs to the realm of the ideal, raising it to the degree of a certain perfect feminine principle. By the way, in one of the pictures of this dream, he calls her Psyche.

The image of a bird, being traditional in literature and folklore, is strongly associated with the realm of the inaccessible, dreams, fantasies, and ideals. It retains this basic meaning in the poetics of Turgenev's works.

The image of a bird is also associated with the "through" image of a bird's wing, which also forms two opposite poles. The motif of finding wings characterizes the state of spiritual uplift, the fullness of the feeling of life; the image of a broken wing is similar to the motif of an interrupted flight. It is a symbol of mental mutilation, a broken fate.

Like other" cross-cutting " images and motifs of Turgenev's poetics, the symbolic image of the bird expresses the author's concept of individual human existence, especially one of its facets - the confrontation between man and nature, the fall of man from the natural whole. At the same time, this image embodies Turgenev's longing for the lost harmony of man with the natural world.

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