Composition
Story " Easy breath", written in 1916, is deservedly considered one of the pearls of Bunin’s prose - the image of the heroine is so succinctly and vividly captured in it, the feeling of beauty is so tenderly conveyed. What is “light breathing”, why has this phrase long ago become a common noun to denote human talent - the talent to live? To understand this, let’s analyze the story “Easy Breathing.”
Bunin builds his narrative on contrasts. Already from the first lines, the reader has some kind of dual feeling: a sad, deserted cemetery, a gray April day, a cold wind that “rings and rings like a porcelain wreath at the foot of the cross.” Here is the beginning of the story: “In the cemetery, over a fresh clay mound, there is a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth... In the cross itself there is a rather large, convex porcelain medallion, and in the medallion there is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.” . The whole life of Olechka Meshcherskaya is described according to the principle of contrast: cloudless childhood and adolescence are contrasted with the tragic events of the last year Olya lived. The author everywhere emphasizes the gap between the apparent and the real, external and internal state heroines. The plot of the story is extremely simple. The young, recklessly happy beauty schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya becomes first the prey of an elderly sensualist, and then a living target for the Cossack officer deceived by her. The tragic death of Meshcherskaya motivates a lonely little woman - a classy lady - to frantic, withering “service” to her memory. The apparent simplicity of the story's plot is disrupted by the contrast: a heavy cross and joyful, lively eyes, which makes the reader's heart clench anxiously. It will haunt us throughout the entire story about the short life of Olya Meshcherskaya. The simplicity of the plot is deceptive: after all, this is a story not only about the fate of a young girl, but also about the joyless fate of a classy lady, accustomed to living someone else’s life, shining with reflected light - the light of Olya Meshcherskaya’s “living eyes”.
Bunin believed that the birth of a person is not his beginning, which means that death is not the end of the existence of his soul. The soul - its symbol is “light breathing” - does not disappear irrevocably. She is the best, real part of life. The embodiment of this life was the heroine of the story, Olya Meshcherskaya. The girl is so natural that even the external manifestations of her existence cause rejection among some and admiration among others: “And she was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that became bare when falling while running. Without any of her worries or efforts, and somehow imperceptibly, everything that distinguished her from the entire gymnasium in the last two years came to her - grace, elegance, dexterity, the clear sparkle of her eyes...” At first glance, before us is an ordinary high school student - a beautiful, prosperous and slightly flighty girl, the daughter of wealthy parents, who is expecting a brilliant match.
But our attention is constantly and persistently directed to some hidden springs of Olya’s life. To do this, the author delays the explanation of the reasons for the death of the heroine, as if generated by the very logic of the girl’s behavior. Maybe she herself is to blame for everything? After all, she flirts with the high school student Shenshin, flirts, albeit unconsciously, with Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin, who seduces her, for some reason promises the Cossack officer to marry him. For what? Why does she need all this? And gradually we understand that Olya Meshcherskaya is beautiful, just as the elements are beautiful. And just as immoral as she is. She wants to reach the limit in everything, to the depth, to the innermost essence, regardless of the opinions of others. In Olya’s actions there is no meaningful vice, no sense of revenge, no pain of repentance, no firmness of decision. It turns out that a wonderful feeling of fullness of life can be destructive. Even the unconscious longing for her (like a classy lady) is tragic. Therefore, every detail, every step of Olya’s life threatens disaster: curiosity and pranks can lead to violence, frivolous play with other people’s feelings can lead to murder. Olya Meshcherskaya lives, and does not play the role of a living being. This is her essence. This is her fault. To be extremely alive without following the rules of the game means to be extremely doomed. After all, the environment in which Meshcherskaya was destined to appear was completely devoid of an organic, holistic sense of beauty. Here life is subject to strict rules, the violation of which has to be paid. Olya, who was accustomed not only to teasing fate, but simply to courageously go towards new sensations and impressions in their entirety, did not have the chance to meet a person who would appreciate not only her physical beauty, but also her spiritual generosity and brightness. After all, Olya really had “light breathing” - a thirst for some special, unique destiny, worthy only of the chosen few. The teacher, who was unable to save her student, recalls her words, accidentally overheard during recess. Among detailed description feminine beauty and the half-childish “trying on” of this description to one’s own appearance, the phrase about “easy breathing” sounds so unexpectedly, taken literally by the girl: “...But the main thing is, do you know what? - easy breath! But I have it - listen to how I sigh...” The author leaves to the world not the beauty of the girl, not her experience, but only this never-revealed opportunity. She, according to Bunin, cannot completely disappear, just as the craving for beauty, happiness, for perfection cannot disappear: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind.”
“Easy breathing” in Bunin’s view is the ability to enjoy life and accept it as a bright gift. Olya Meshcherskaya captivated those around her with her generous and fierce love of life, but in the meager world of the small town, unfortunately for her, there was no person who could protect her “light breath” from the “cold spring wind.”
In many of his works, Bunin addresses eternal themes: love and tragedy, life and death. These themes also become the main ones in the story “Easy Breathing,” which amazes with the light breath of Bunin’s prose and its special aroma.
The meaning of the story's title is primarily related to the main character. The first detail in the description of Olya Meshcherskaya’s appearance is noteworthy, revealing her personal individuality - “live, joyful eyes.” Liveliness, simplicity, naturalness, spontaneity, beauty, naivety, femininity, lightness make up Olya’s endless charm, her attractiveness, seductiveness, “seductiveness”. The “light breath” of her femininity joyfully and all-conqueringly triumphs in the smallest details of appearance and behavior. All this was given to her by nature, it came to her without the slightest effort - “easily.” The motif of lightness is the main one in the description of Olya’s appearance, behavior and life itself. Only death is hard - the “oak cross” on Olya’s grave, “strong, heavy, smooth.” The principle of antithesis will remain throughout the entire story, reflected both in the system of images and in the composition.
Bunin's heroine walked freely and joyfully through life, without thinking about its dark, muddy currents; the meaning of life for her was in life itself. On the path of her easy flight were the love of elementary school students, dancing at balls, fun, ice skating, the love of the high school student Shenshin, but there was also the fifty-six-year-old “ladiesman” Malyutin, there was a Cossack officer, “ugly and plebeian in appearance.” Olya, again, easily took a step towards moral decline, because in her attitude towards Malyutin there was not even a shadow of love, she easily admitted this to the school governor, and easily played with the feelings of the Cossack officer. It is no coincidence that Malyutin mentions Faust and Margarita: in the story of Margarita’s temptation in Faust, the carnal triumphs over the spiritual; Malyutin does not hide the “Mephistophelian” beginning in his carnal desire to possess Olya’s young charm, and Olya is not aware of the necessary moral boundaries of her life’s flight - only lightness, only freedom, only a fun game.
The death of Olya at the station is spoken of dryly and abruptly, as in the chronicle of a criminal case. Flight through life - without awareness and responsibility - draws Bunin's heroine into the dangerous sphere of "plebeian" feelings, unilinear and cruel decisions: the Cossack officer saw in Meshcherskaya one mockery of himself, of his, so to speak, principles, of his "morality", he punished Olya as a frivolous, immoral seductress - and believed himself to be right. Olya’s life was easy, and death also easily took away this fragile, “moth” life.
However, the author's task has nothing to do with a melodramatic and moralizing description of the life and death of a charming but confused schoolgirl. The work has an unusual composition: it begins and ends with a description of the cemetery, the chronology of events has been changed by the writer, the plot does not coincide with the plot. Episodes appear that seem to have no connection with Olya’s story - her story to her friend about “easy breathing” and a cool lady coming to the grave.
The image of the main character is included in a system of antitheses, one of which is Olya Meshcherskaya and the cool lady. A cool lady lives in fiction, which replaces her real life. Olya's life was full of energy, fast-paced and festive - the life of a classy lady is lonely, sparse in events, devoid of love and happiness. This “middle-aged girl” is smart, but she does not have that “easy breathing” that Olya was endowed with, life passes by the cool lady, giving her only fragile illusions, hence her attraction even to the memory of “easy breathing”.
“Light breathing” is the energy of femininity, eternally living in the world, capable of driving you crazy, giving either the highest happiness or tragedy. This energy is not connected (or least of all connected) with beauty as the harmony of external features - it is no coincidence that Olya, speaking to her friend about beauty, rejected everything externally decorative: “black eyes boiling with resin”, “knees the color of a shell”, “gently playing blush ” and so on - and chose only “light breathing”. This is a great mystery that can be marveled at, but which cannot be completely solved.
“Easy breathing” is also the energy of creativity, inspiration, which is also inexplicable and cannot be decomposed into formulas and definitions. It is the “light breath” of creativity that is felt in the chain of events of Bunin’s story. The art critic and psychologist of the last century, L.S. Vygotsky, said this most accurately: “The life of the high school student Olya Meshcherskaya is dark, muddy, confused, but the events are connected and linked in such a way that they lose their everyday burden and opaque turbidity; They melodically interlocked with each other, and in their build-ups, resolutions and transitions they seem to unravel the threads that bind them, they renounce reality. Thus, the everyday story of a dissolute schoolgirl is transformed here into the light breath of Bunin’s story.”
One of the most widely famous works I.A. Bunin is undoubtedly the story “Easy Breathing”. It can be assumed that the impetus for its writing was the writer’s trip to Capri, where during a walk the writer saw a tombstone with a medallion in a small cemetery. It depicted a very young and unusually beautiful girl with a happy expression on his face. The tragedy of this terrible contradiction, apparently, struck the writer so much that he decided to “revive” the heroine on the pages of his prose.
The image of “light breathing” that organizes the entire story is taken from an old book, which the main character Olya Meshcherskaya reads, retelling to her friend an episode that particularly struck her. It says that a woman should be able to be beautiful and the most important thing about her is “easy breathing.” The heroine joyfully concludes that she has it and that only happiness awaits her in life. However, fate decrees otherwise.
The central character of this story is high school student Olya Meshcherskaya. She is famous for her beauty, sweet spontaneity, charming naturalness. “She was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that became bare when falling while running,” the author of the story lovingly writes about her. There is even something from Natasha Rostova in Olya - the same love of life, the same openness to the whole world. No one danced better than Olya, no one skated better, no one was looked after like that. This young creature with sparkling, lively eyes seemed created only for happiness.
But one Cossack officer, who sought intimacy with her and was refused, ends this young wonderful life with one shot.
This ending is too tragic, and sometimes I want to reproach the writer for such a painful ending. But let’s think about it: did the shot really kill the heroine? Maybe the officer only pulled the trigger, and the tragedy happened much earlier?
Indeed, reading the story, you wonder why, besides Olya, in this provincial town there is not a single person worthy of being depicted with the same admiration. The rest of the characters simply leave us indifferent, like, for example, Meshcherskaya’s friend, or they cause disgust. This is Olya’s father’s friend, fifty-six-year-old Malyutin. The whole city seems to be saturated with a suffocating atmosphere of vulgarity, inertia and depravity. Indeed, how can you explain Olya’s behavior? Yes, she is charming, sweet, natural, but reading the scene where Meshcherskaya admits to the head of the gymnasium that she is already a woman, you can’t help but be embarrassed by such a terrible split personality: on the one hand, Olya is perfection itself, on the other, she is just a girl , who knew the joy of carnal pleasures too early. These contradictory images of the same heroine do not make it possible to understand her character unambiguously, and sometimes an almost hooligan thought comes to mind: isn’t Olya Nabokov’s Lola, introduced by Bunin into literature long before the author of “Lolita”?
In my opinion, the motives for the heroine’s actions “ Easy breathing" is very difficult to evaluate from a logical point of view. They are irrational, “uterine”. Revealing the image of such an ambiguous heroine as Meshcherskaya, one should not be afraid to consider different and even opposing points of view. We said above that Olya’s fate and character are a product of the inert provincial environment where she grew up. Now, faced with the amazing inconsistency of the heroine, we can assume something completely different.
Bunin, as you know, although he is considered the last classic of critical realism, still does not fully follow his principles of depicting reality. To say that Meshcherskaya is just a product of an environment that corrupts and kills young innocence means, in my opinion, to consider the story too straightforwardly, thereby impoverishing the original author’s intention. Correct society, and there will be no vices - this is what they said in the 19th century, but in the 20th they increasingly do not look for reasons, saying that the world is unknowable. Meshcherskaya is like that, and nothing more. As another argument, we can recall the stories of Bunin
about love, especially “Dark Alleys”, where the actions of the heroes are also very difficult to motivate. It’s as if they are controlled by some blind, unreasoning force, spontaneously giving people happiness and sorrow in half. In general, Bunin is characterized by just such a worldview. Let us recall the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” in which fate takes the hero’s life in the most unexpected way, without giving any explanation. In the light of these considerations, we can make a judgment about Olya that is opposite and to some extent counterbalances our first conclusions: the writer, in the image of a high school student unlike others, wanted to show the true nature of a woman who is completely at the mercy of blind, “uterine” instincts. The conviction that life disposes of us solely at its own discretion is best illustrated by the example of a young girl who knew life too early and therefore died untimely.
Probably, it is impossible to give an unambiguous answer to the question of who Olya really is, what problems Bunin raises in this story, and it is hardly necessary. You can delve deeper into the image of the main character, better understand the specifics and problems of the story and try to reconcile the two opposing points of view outlined above by thinking about the title. “Light breath”, which “dissipated forever in this cold wind”, is, in my opinion, a figurative expression of what is spiritual, truly human in a person. A charming and at the same time depraved schoolgirl, a stupid and evil officer who left her, a provincial town with all its ugliness - all this will remain on the sinful earth, and this spirit that lived in Ola Meshcherskaya will fly up to be embodied in something again and remind us that, besides our vain and petty thoughts and deeds, there is something else in the world that is beyond our control. This, in my opinion, is the enduring significance of the outstanding story of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin.
The story “Easy Breathing” was written by I. Bunin in 1916. It reflected the philosophical motives of life and death, the beautiful and the ugly, which were the focus of the writer’s attention. In this story he develops one of the leading problems for his work: love and death. In terms of artistic mastery, “Easy Breathing” is considered the pearl of Bunin’s prose.
The narrative moves in the opposite direction, from the present to the past, the beginning of the story is its ending. From the first lines, the author immerses the reader in the sad atmosphere of the cemetery, describes the grave of a beautiful girl, whose life was absurdly and terribly interrupted in the prime of her life: “In the cemetery, above its clay embankment, there stands a new cross made of oak, strong, heavy, smooth.
April, gray days; The monuments of the spacious county cemetery are still visible far away through the bare trees, and the cold wind rings and rings at the foot of the cross.
A rather large, convex porcelain medallion is embedded in the cross itself, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes.
This is Olya Meshcherskaya.”
Bunin makes us feel sorrow at the sight of the grave of a fifteen-year-old girl, bright and beautiful, who died at the very beginning of spring. It was the spring of her life, and she was in it like an unblown bud of a beautiful flower in the future. But a fabulous summer will never come for her. Young life and beauty have disappeared, now eternity hangs over Olya: “the cold wind rings and rings,” without stopping, “like a porcelain wreath” on her grave.
The author introduces us to the life of the heroine of the story, high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, at fourteen and fifteen years old. Throughout her appearance one can see admiring surprise at the extraordinary changes that are happening to her. She quickly became prettier, turning into a girl, her soul was filled with energy and happiness. The heroine is stunned, she still doesn’t know what to do with herself, new and so beautiful, so she simply gives in to the impulses of youth and carefree fun. Nature presented her with an unexpected gift, making her light, cheerful, and happy. The author writes that the heroine was distinguished “in the last two years from the entire gymnasium by her grace, elegance, dexterity, and the clear sparkle of her eyes.” Life is delightfully seething in her, and she happily settles into her new beautiful appearance, trying out its possibilities.
I can’t help but remember the story “Violets,” written by Bunin’s friend and talented Russian prose writer A. I. Kuprin. It talentedly depicts the explosive awakening of the youth of seventh-grader cadet Dmitry Kazakov, who, due to surging feelings, cannot prepare for the exam, with emotion, collects violets outside the walls of the educational building. The young man does not understand what is happening to him, but out of happiness he is ready to embrace the whole world and fall in love with the first girl he meets.
Bunin's Olya Meshcherskaya is a kind, sincere and spontaneous person. With her happiness and positive energy, the girl charges everything around her and attracts people to her. Girls from the junior classes of the gymnasium run after her in a crowd, for them she is an ideal.
Last winter Olya’s life seemed to be so beautiful on purpose: “The winter was snowy, sunny, frosty, the sun set early behind the tall spruce forest of the snowy gymnasium garden, invariably fine, radiant, promising frost and sun for tomorrow, a walk on Cathedral Street; skating rink in the city garden, pink evening, music and this crowd gliding in all directions on the skating rink, in which Olya Meshcherskaya seemed the most carefree, the happiest.” But only seemed. This psychological detail points to the awakening of natural forces, characteristic of the youth of every person, when the mind is still asleep and does not control the feelings. Inexperienced, inexperienced Olya easily flies through life like a butterfly to a flame. And misfortune it's already underway in her footsteps. Bunin managed to fully convey the tragedy of this dizzying flight.
Freedom of judgment, absence of fear, manifestation of intense joy, demonstration of happiness are considered defiant behavior in society. Olya doesn’t understand how annoying she is to others. Beauty, as a rule, causes envy, misunderstanding, and does not know how to defend itself in a world where everything exceptional is persecuted.
In addition to the main character, the story features four more images, one way or another connected with the young schoolgirl. This is the head of the gymnasium, Olya’s class lady, Olya’s father’s acquaintance Alexey Mikhailovich Milyutin and a certain Cossack officer.
None of them treat the girl as a human being, or even make an attempt to understand her inner world. The boss, out of duty, reproaches Meshcherskaya for her woman’s hairstyle and shoes. An elderly man, Milyutin took advantage of Olya’s inexperience and seduced her. Apparently, a casual admirer, a Cossack officer, mistook Meshcherskaya’s behavior for frivolity and licentiousness. He shoots a girl at a train station and kills her. A fifteen-year-old girl is far from a fatal temptress. She, a naive schoolgirl, shows him a piece of paper from her notebook-diary. Like a child, she does not know a way out of a love situation and tries to isolate herself from an annoying admirer with her own childish and confused notes, presenting them as a kind of document. How could you not understand this? But, having committed a crime, an ugly, plebeian-looking officer blames the girl he killed for everything.
Bunin understood love primarily only as passion that flared up suddenly. And passion is always destructive. Bunin's love walks next to death. The story “Easy Breathing” is no exception. This was the great writer’s concept of love. But Bunin claims: death is not omnipotent. The short but bright life of Olya Meshcherskaya left a mark on many souls. “The little woman in mourning,” the cool lady Olya, often comes to the grave, remembering her “pale face in the coffin” and the conversation that she once unwittingly overheard. Olya told her friend that the main thing in a woman is “easy breathing”: “But I have it,” listen to how I inhale, “I really do?”
The story ends with the words of the author: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold wind.” Beauty cannot be destroyed, it will be reborn again.
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The story “Easy Breathing” is one of the most complex and philosophically filled works by I.A. Bunina. The reader is presented with a rather simple story from the life of an ordinary high school student, but it is precisely this story that makes one think about many pressing issues not only of modernity, but also of existence.
“Easy Breathing”, according to its genre features, belongs to the short story, which sets itself the task, through a unique and specific event, to show not only the fate of its hero, but also to recreate a picture of the life of the entire society, including its vices and delusions.
The composition of the story is complex and unusual. The technique of reverse narration is used as a basis. At the beginning of the work, the reader learns that the main character Olya Meshcherskaya is dead, and then gets acquainted with her and the story of her life, already understanding that it will be tragic.
Analysis of Bunin’s work “Easy Breathing”
Compositional shifts and contrasts occur throughout the story. First there is a narrative from the present (the girl’s grave), which moves on to events of the past (a description of life in the gymnasium). Then the reader returns to a time close to the present - the death of Olya and the investigation of the officer who committed the murder. After which the narrative again moves into the past, telling about the vulgar connection between the girl and Malyutin. Here again the present is described: a cool lady on the way to the cemetery where the heroine is buried. The work ends with another reference to the past - a dialogue between Ole Meshcherskaya and her friend and her thoughts about the “light breathing” of a woman.
In each episode telling about the stage of Meshcherskaya’s life (growing up, moral decline and death), the author turns to various forms: narration, portrait, speech characters, landscape sketches, diary entries and author's remarks.
The time of the work is constantly interrupted or stopped, and the reader reconstructs the chronology of what happened. The narrative is vague, but thanks to this, reading the novel not only arouses interest, but also gives new meanings, provides an answer to the main question: “Why is Olya’s fate so tragic?”
Everyone is to blame for what happened. This is also a cool lady who was unable to establish communication with her student, give her advice and become a mentor. Naturally, this is Malyutin, who seduced and seduced Olya. There is some blame also on the shoulders of the girl’s parents, who are mentioned a little in the story. Were they not obliged to protect their daughter from frivolity and, at a minimum, not to make friends with a person like Malyutin.
The tragic outcome was also predetermined by Ole Meshcherskaya’s attitude towards life. A person is also responsible for his destiny and what happens to him. I.A. Bunin speaks about this very clearly in his work.
Interpretation of “Easy Breathing” in the context of the psychology of art
The book about the psychology of art belongs to the outstanding psychologist and cultural scientist Lev Vygotsky. In particular, the author is also considering the story of Ivan Bunin. According to Vygotsky, in the story the writer innovatively introduces two lines of narrative that develop in parallel and do not fit into the traditional chronotope (the term used by Mikhail Bakhtin, another, no less eminent Russian culturologist). This storylines.
The first line is dedicated to visiting the grave of Olya Meshcherskaya. In fact, this part tells about the cool lady of the girl, about the headmistress of the boarding house where Olga studied. The woman uses Olya’s grave as a platform for the imaginary realization of her own unrealistic hopes and dreams. The cool lady seems to be trying on the life of Olya Meshcherskaya. The second line - the main one - is the story about the fate of the deceased girl. The heroine Bunin lived a short but bright life, and the reader can easily compare Olya with a moth that lives only one day.
Vygotsky also writes about lines that are outside of Bunin’s story itself. Thus, one line is what “the poet took as ready-made” (meaning a description of nature, a cemetery, life, a boarding house, everyday life, characters, etc.), and the second line is “the arrangement of this material according to the laws artistic construction." Vygotsky calls the first line the material or plot of the work, and the second line the form or plot. In turn, the plot branches into two more chronologically inconsistent lines, which we wrote about above.
Characteristics of the main characters of the story “Easy Breathing”
Olya Meshcherskaya is the main character of the story. She is the daughter of wealthy parents. He dances and skates best at balls. The girl differs from her peers in her beauty and femininity: early “she began to blossom, to develop by leaps and bounds,” and “at fifteen she was already known as a beauty.” Olya is opposed to other high school students with her attitude to life. While others carefully combed their hair, were very clean, and “watched their restrained movements,” the heroine of the story was not afraid of “neither ink stains on their fingers, nor a flushed face, nor disheveled hair.”
Her image intertwines childish naivety, sincerity, simplicity with unprecedented femininity and beauty. Such a destructive combination gave rise to envy, jealousy, and the emergence of thousands of rumors that she was flighty, incapable of love, and was driving her loved one to suicide with her behavior. However, the author makes it clear that these opinions of people about Olga Meshcherskaya are groundless. Her beauty and uniqueness attracts not only young people, but also evil with a fatal outcome.
Children are drawn to the heroine, who feel that she is a good person. The narrator constantly mentions Olya only in the context of beautiful landscapes and harmonious places. When she is skating, it is a beautiful pink evening outside. When a girl is on a walk, the sun shines “through the whole wet garden.” All this indicates the author's sympathy for his character.
Olga always reaches out to the beautiful, the perfect. She is not satisfied with the philistine attitude towards herself and life. However, it is precisely this position of the main character, together with her uniqueness and spiritual subtlety, that predetermine the tragic outcome. How could it have been different? No. Olya Meshcherskaya is opposed to the whole world, her actions are unconscious, and her behavior does not depend on modern norms and rules accepted in society.
The rest of the characters, including the cool lady, Malyutin, Olya’s friend and other people around, were introduced by the author only to emphasize the heroine’s individuality, her unusualness and originality.
The main idea of the story “Easy Breathing”
Researchers have long come to the conclusion that it is not so much the external, but the internal plot, filled with psychological, poetic and philosophical meanings, that helps to understand the author’s intention.
The heroine of the story is frivolous, but in a good sense of the word. Unknowingly, she is exposed to a love affair with Malyutin, her father's friend. But is this really the fault of the girl who believed an adult who talked about his feelings for her, who, as it turned out, showed ostentatious kindness and seemed like a real gentleman?
Olya Meshcherskaya is not like all the other characters, she is opposed to them and at the same time lonely. The episode of the fall and relationship with Malyutin only exacerbated the internal conflict and protest of the heroine.
The main character's motives
A number of researchers believe that the heroine herself sought death. She specifically handed over a sheet from the diary to the officer, who learned about the vicious affair of his beloved and was so upset that he shot the girl. Thus, Olga broke out of the vicious circle.
Other literary scholars believe that one mistake, i.e. The vicious relationship with Malyutin did not make the girl think about what happened. As a result, Olga started a relationship with an officer who had “absolutely nothing in common with the circle to which she belonged,” making her second and already fatal mistake.
Let's look at the episode of farewell to the officer at the station from a different angle. Olga gave him the most valuable and intimate thing - a sheet of paper with an entry from the diary. What if she loved her future killer and decided to tell the bitter truth about what happened to her. True, the officer did not take this as a confession, but as a mockery, a deception of the one who “swore to be his wife.”
One of the most famous stories reveals to the reader Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, without trying to embellish real life of people.
When interpreting the story by I.A. Bunin’s “Easy Breathing” opens up to the reader not only different meanings, but also options for interpreting events. There are many reasons for the tragedy that happened in the work, as well as attempts to explain them.
We can say with confidence that the image of Olga Meshcherskaya is contradictory, but sympathetic to the author. Whereas the world shown as meager and gray, incapable of feelings, actions and understanding of what is happening. This is confirmed by the images of Malyutin, the head of the gymnasium, and a Cossack officer. The heroine’s environment is not just alien, but hostile to beauty, with its stupidity and vulgarity it destroys that extraordinary and unique thing that is in a person - “easy breathing” or the desire to live, surrendering to one’s feelings and emotions.
