Alexander Kuprin wrote the story "Olesya" under the impression of a trip to Polesie, stories, legends and stories he heard there. The story uses features of an ethnographic sketch: a description of local customs, folklore elements, dialect vocabulary. Let's conduct a brief analysis of the story "Olesya" and look at some of the features of the work. On our website you can also read a summary of Kuprin's "Olesya".
The plot of the story "Olesya"
The story "Olesya", which we are analyzing, is dedicated to the love story of Ivan Timofeevich and the Polesie "witch". The relationship of the characters reveals the characters of each of them. The narration is in the past tense, the narrator Ivan Timofeevich recalls the events that happened to him during a trip to one of the Polesie villages. There he hunted, treated peasants, studied customs. He was interested in the story about the witch Manuilikha, who lived in these places.
Once, while hunting, Ivan Timofeevich wandered into her hut. There the narrator met Olesya, Manuilikha's granddaughter. The girl was so unusual that Ivan Timofeevich fell in love with her, "a beautiful fairy tale of love" is depicted surrounded by a mysterious forest. They thought about the wedding. For the sake of love, Olesya decided to go to church on Trinity, but the village women kicked her out and beat her, as they considered her a witch. Olesya shouted in her hearts that they would regret it. The next day, a thunderstorm with hail broke out. Olesya and her grandmother had to flee, otherwise they would face reprisals from local residents. As a souvenir of herself, she left Ivan Timofeevich with a string of coral beads. Although this description cannot be called a summary, without it, it is still difficult to imagine an analysis of the story "Olesya".
Traits of romanticism in the story "Olesya" by Kuprin
The work has a number of features that make it romantic. First of all, it is the opposition of the everyday world and the ideal world. The sad reality appears in the depiction of the life of the protagonist in a distant village, the customs of the peasants. Kuprin shows their ignorance, rudeness and cruelty of actions. Ivan Timofeevich himself is an indecisive and weak-willed person. The ideal and poetic dream is embodied in the image of Olesya and her peaceful life in the bosom of nature.
The romantic ideal is the fleeting happiness of lovers surrounded by “blazing evening dawns”, the smells of lily of the valley and honey, “ringing bird din”. Nature reflects the sublime and beautiful feelings of the heroes.
At the heart of romanticism is an exceptional personality. This is the main character of the story - Olesya. Continuing the analysis of the story "Olesya", let us turn directly to the image of the main character.
The image of the main character
Olesya's first appearance in the story is unusual. At first, Ivan Timofeevich, sitting in a hut near Manuilikha, hears a song that Olesya hums, only then a girl appears. "Fresh, strong and sonorous voice" shows the youth and beauty of Olesya, who grew up in the forest. Kuprin paints the image of Olesya with the help of a psychological portrait: original beauty, "an elusive shade of cunning, imperiousness and naivety", brilliant, dark eyes, willful curl of lips. All this shows Olesya's decisive, strong character, at the same time her childishness and kindness. It is no coincidence that Olesya appears for the first time, carrying chicks in her arms, which "tied" behind her. This thought is very important when we analyze the story "Olesya".
The girl considers herself a real witch. She knows how to read cards, understands the language of birds, speaks and stops blood, shows many more "tricks" (as Ivan Timofeevich calls them).
Olesya's love is as beautiful as the evening and morning dawns, it is no coincidence that many years later for the narrator the image of the beloved remains inextricably linked with the June freshness of nature. He notes the girl's subtle delicacy and sensitivity. She is ready for much for love.
One of the trials for the "witch" was going to church. She knew how this could turn out for her, because the locals hated witches. But even after Olesya paid for this act, she never rebuked Ivan Timofeevich. Analysis of the story "Olesya" by Kuprin shows that the girl turns out to be bolder and taller than the man, who cannot decide what to do. He loves Olesya, but he cannot imagine that she will turn out to be his wife, mistress of social evenings. The hero's hesitation leads to the fact that Olesya and her grandmother leave, and he remembers his beloved and lost happiness all his life.
We hope that this article, which presented a brief analysis of the story "Olesya", will help you better understand the meaning of the work and Kuprin's intention. Visit our literature blog for hundreds of articles on similar topics. You may also be interested in
The story "Olesya" was written by Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin in 1898.
Kuprin spent 1897 in Polesie of the Rivne district, where he served as the estate manager. Observations of the peculiar way of life of local peasants, the impressions of a meeting with majestic nature gave Kuprin rich material for creativity. A cycle of so-called "Polesie stories" was conceived here, which later included the stories "Into the wood grouse", "Wilderness", "Silver wolf" and one of the best works of the writer - the story "Olesya".
This story is the embodiment of the writer's dream about a wonderful person, about a free and healthy life in merging with nature. Among the eternal forests, permeated with light, fragrant with lilies of the valley and honey, the author finds the heroine of his most poetic story.
The story is short, but beautiful in its sincerity and completeness of love for Olesya and Ivan Timofeevich, steeped in romance. The romantic intonation is already guessed at the very beginning behind the outwardly calm description of the life and customs of the Polesie peasants, the state of health of Ivan Timofeevich in the unusual atmosphere of a remote village. Then the hero of the story listens to Yarmola's stories about the "witchers" and about a witch living nearby.
Ivan Timofeevich could not help but find lost in the swamps "a fairy-tale hut on chicken legs" where Manuilikha and the beautiful Olesya lived.
The writer surrounds his heroine with mystery. Nobody knows and will never know where Manuilikha came from with her granddaughter to the Polesye village and where they disappeared forever. This unsolved mystery is a special attractive force of Kuprin's poem in prose. Life for a moment merges with a fairy tale, but only for a moment, because the cruel circumstances of life destroy the fairy world.
In love, disinterested and honest, the characters of the heroes of the story are revealed with the greatest completeness. Growing up in the forests, akin to nature, Olesya does not know calculation and cunning, selfishness is alien to her - everything that poisons relationships between people in the "civilized world". Olesya's natural, simple and sublime love makes Ivan Timofeevich forget for a while the prejudices of his environment, awakens in his soul all the best, light, humane. And that is why it is so bitter for him to lose Olesya.
Olesya, possessing the gift of providence, feels the inevitability of the tragic end of her short happiness. She knows that their happiness in a stuffy, cramped city, from which Ivan Timofeevich could not renounce, is impossible. But all the more humanly valuable is her self-denial, an attempt to reconcile her way of life with what is alien to her.
Kuprin is merciless in portraying the inert, downtrodden, terrible in its dark anger of the peasant masses. He speaks the bitter truth about human souls ruined by centuries of slavery. He speaks with pain and anger, does not justify, but explains the ignorance of the peasants, their cruelty.
The landscape fragments of the story belong to the best pages of Kuprin's work and Russian prose in general. The forest is not a background, but a living participant in the action. The spring awakening of nature and the birth of love of heroes coincide because these people (Olesya always, her beloved only for a short time) live one life with nature, obey its laws. They are happy as long as they maintain this unity.
There was a lot of naivety in the understanding of happiness, which is possible only apart from civilization. Kuprin himself understood this. But the ideal of love as the highest spiritual force will continue to live in the mind of the writer.
It is known that Kuprin rarely came up with plots, life itself prompted them in abundance. Apparently, the plot of "Olesya" had roots in reality. At least it is known that at the end of his life the writer confessed to one of his interlocutors, speaking about the Polissya story: “All this happened with me”. The author managed to melt the material of life into a uniquely beautiful work of art.
Konstantin Paustovsky, a wonderful writer, a true connoisseur and admirer of Kuprin's talent, wrote very correctly: “Kuprin will not die while the human heart is agitated by love, anger, joy and the spectacle of the deadly tempting land allotted to our lot for life”.
Kuprin cannot die in the memory of people - just as the wrathful power of his "Duel", the bitter charm of the "Pomegranate Bracelet", the amazing picturesqueness of his "Listrigons" cannot die, just as his passionate, intelligent and direct love for man and his native land cannot die ...
The theme "Olesya" by Kuprin is the immortal theme of cordial relationships and burning passions. She is brightly and sincerely shown for her time in Kuprin's touching story, written in the very center of nature in Polesie.
The clash of lovers from different social groups exacerbates their relationship with a shade of self-sacrifice, their own life principles and their evaluations by other people.
Analysis of "Olesya" Kuprin
A mysterious girl who was born surrounded by nature, has absorbed all the genuine and immaculate traits of a meek and simple character, she comes across a completely different person - Ivan Timofeevich, who is considered a spectacular representative of society in the city.
The quivering relationship that began between them presupposes a life together, where, as usual, a woman is obliged to adapt to the new surrounding atmosphere of life.
Olesya, accustomed to her fabulous life in a calm, beloved forest with Manuilikha, takes the changes in her life experience very hard and painfully, in fact giving up her own principles in order to be with her lover.
Sensing the fragility of her relationship with Ivan, she makes perfect self-sacrifice in the ruthless city, poisoned by heartlessness and misunderstanding. Until then, however, the relationship of the young is strong.
Yarmola describes to Ivan the image of Olesya and her aunt, proves to him the uniqueness of the fact that magicians and sorceresses live in the world, encourages him to be extremely carried away by the riddle of a simple girl.
Features of the work
Very colorfully and naturally, the writer draws the habitat of the magical girl, which cannot be overlooked when analyzing Kuprin's "Olesya", because the landscape of Polesie emphasizes the exclusivity of the people living in it.
It is often said that the stories of Kuprin's stories were written by life itself.
Obviously, the majority of the younger generation will at first find it difficult to understand the meaning of the story and what the author wants to convey, but later, after reading some chapters, they will be able to become interested in this work, discovering its depth for themselves.
The main problems of "Olesya" Kuprin
This is an excellent writer. He managed to express in his own work the most difficult, high and tender human emotions. Love is a wonderful feeling that a person experiences, like a touchstone. Not many people have the ability to truly and with an open heart. This is the fate of a strong-willed person. These are the people the author is interested in. Right people, existing in harmony with themselves and the world around them, are a model for him, in fact such a girl is created in the story "Olesya" by Kuprin, whose analysis we analyze.
An ordinary girl lives in the vicinity of nature. She listens to sounds and rustles, deciphers the cries of various creatures, is very pleased with her life and independence. Olesya is independent. She has enough of the sphere of communication that she has. She knows and understands the forest surrounding from all sides, the girl perfectly feels nature.
But a meeting with the human world promises her, unfortunately, continuous troubles and grief. The townspeople think that Olesya and her grandmother are witches. They are ready to blame all mortal sins on these unfortunate women. One fine day, the anger of people has already driven them from a warm place, and from now on the heroine has only one desire: to get rid of them.
However, the soulless human world knows no mercy. This is where the key problems of Olesya Kuprin lie. She is especially intelligent and smart. The girl is well aware of what a meeting with a city dweller, "Ivan the Panich", portends for her. It is not suitable for the world of enmity and jealousy, profit and falsehood.
The girl's dissimilarity, her grace and originality instill anger, fear, panic in people. The townspeople are ready to blame Olesya and the grandmother for absolutely all hardships and misfortunes. Their blind fear of the "witches" they called them is kindled with violence without any consequences. Analysis of "Olesya" Kuprin makes us understand that the appearance of a girl in the temple is not a challenge to the inhabitants, but a desire to understand the human world in which her beloved lives.
The main characters of Kuprin's "Olesya" are Ivan and Olesya. Secondary - Yarmola, Manuilikha and others, less important.
Olesya
A young girl, slim, tall and charming. She was raised by her grandmother. However, despite the fact that she is illiterate, she has a natural mind of centuries, a fundamental knowledge of the human nature and curiosity.
Ivan
A young writer, looking for a muse, came from town to village on official business. He is intelligent and smart. The village is distracted by hunting and meeting the villagers. Regardless of his own background, he behaves normally and without arrogance. "Panych" is a good-natured and sensitive guy, noble and weak-willed.
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin often painted in his works the ideal image of a "natural" person, one who is not subject to the pernicious influence of light, whose soul is pure, free, who is close to nature, lives in it, lives with it in a single impulse. A striking example of the disclosure of the theme of "natural" man is the story "Olesya".
The story described in the story did not appear by chance. Once A.I. Kuprin visited the landowner Ivan Timofeevich Poroshin in Polesie, who told the writer a mysterious story of his relationship with a certain witch. It was this story, enriched with artistic fiction, that formed the basis of Kuprin's work.
The first publication of the story took place in the magazine "Kievlyanin" in 1898, the work bore the subtitle "From memoirs about Volyn", which emphasized the real basis of the events taking place in the story.
Genre and direction
Alexander Ivanovich worked in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, when the controversy between two directions gradually began to flare up: realism and modernism, which was just beginning to declare itself. Kuprin belongs to the realistic tradition in Russian literature, so the story "Olesya" can be safely attributed to realistic works.
In terms of genre, the work is a story, since it is dominated by a chronicle plot that reproduces the natural course of life. The reader lives through all the events, day after day, following the main character Ivan Timofeevich.
The essence
The action takes place in the small village of Perebrod, Volyn province, on the outskirts of Polesie. The young master-writer is bored, but one day fate takes him to the swamp to the house of the local witch Manuilikha, where he meets the beautiful Olesya. A feeling of love flares up between Ivan and Olesya, but the young sorceress sees that she will die if she connects her fate with an unexpected guest.
But love is stronger than prejudice and fear, Olesya wants to deceive fate. For the sake of Ivan Timofeevich, a young witch goes to church, although she is prohibited from entering there due to her occupation and origin. She makes it clear to the hero that she will commit this bold act, which may entail irreparable consequences, but Ivan does not understand this and does not manage to save Olesya from the angry crowd. The heroine is severely beaten. She sends a curse to the village in revenge, and on the same night a terrible thunderstorm occurs. Knowing the power of human anger, Manuilikha and his pupil hastily leave the house in the swamp. When a young man comes to this dwelling in the morning, he finds only red beads, as a symbol of their short but true love with Olesya.
The main characters and their characteristics
The main characters of the story are the master-writer Ivan Timofeevich and the forest sorceress Olesya. Completely different, they got along, but could not be happy together.
- Characteristics of Ivan Timofeevich... This person is kind, sensitive. He was able to discern a living, natural beginning in Olesya, because he himself had not yet been completely killed by a secular society. The fact that he left the noisy cities for the village speaks volumes. The heroine for him is not just a beautiful girl, she is a mystery to him. This strange healer believes in conspiracies, guesses, communicates with spirits - she is a sorceress. And all this attracts the hero. He wants to see, learn something new, real, not covered with falsehood and far-fetched etiquette. But at the same time, Ivan himself is still at the mercy of the world, he thinks about marrying Olesya, but he is embarrassed by how she, a savage, appears in the halls of the capital.
- Olesya is the ideal of a "natural" person. She was born and lived in the forest, nature was her teacher. Olesya's world is a world of harmony with the surrounding world. In addition, she is in harmony with her inner world. It is possible to note the following qualities of the main character: she is wayward, straightforward, sincere, she does not know how to be mean, pretend. The young sorceress is smart, kind, you just have to remember the first meeting of the reader with her, because she was tenderly carrying chicks in the hem. One of the main features of Olesya can be called insubordination, which she inherited from Manuilikha. They are both, as it were, against the whole world: they live aloof in their own swamp, do not profess an official religion. Even knowing that you can't escape fate, the young sorceress still tries, flatters herself with the hope that everything will work out with Ivan. She is original and unshakable, despite the fact that love is still alive, she leaves, throws everything, without looking back. Olesya's image and characteristics are available.
Topics
- The main theme of the story - Olesya's love, her readiness for self-sacrifice - is the center of the work. Ivan Timofeevich was lucky to meet a real feeling.
- Another important semantic branch is the theme of the opposition of the ordinary world and the world of people of nature. Inhabitants of villages, capitals, Ivan Timofeevich himself are representatives of ordinary thinking, permeated with prejudices, conventions, and clichés. Olesya and Manuilikha's worldview is freedom, open feelings. In connection with these two heroes, the theme of nature appears. The environment is the cradle that brought up the main character, an irreplaceable helper, thanks to which Manuilikha and Olesya live far from people and civilization without need, nature gives them everything they need for life. This topic is disclosed most fully in this.
- The role of landscape the story is huge. It is a reflection of the feelings of the characters, their relationships. So, at the origin of the novel, we see a sunny spring, and at the end, the breakup is accompanied by a strong thunderstorm. We wrote more about this in this.
Problems
The subject matter of the story is varied. First, the writer sharply outlines the conflict between society and those who do not fit into it. So, once they brutally expelled Manuilikha from the village, beat Olesya herself, although both sorceresses did not show any aggression towards the villagers. Society is not ready to accept those who differ from them in any way, who do not try to pretend, because they want to live by their own rules, and not by the template of the majority.
The problem of her relationship to Olesya is most clearly manifested in the scene of her going to church. For the Russian Orthodox people of the village, it was a real insult that the one who serves the evil spirits, in their opinion, came to the temple of Christ. At the church, where people ask for God's mercy, they themselves administered a cruel and merciless judgment. Perhaps, the writer wanted to show on the basis of this antithesis that the idea of \u200b\u200brighteousness, goodness, and just was distorted in society.
Meaning
The idea of \u200b\u200bthe story is that people who grew up far from civilization turn out to be much nobler, more delicate, polite and kinder than the "civilized" society itself. The author hints that herd life dulls the personality and erases its individuality. The crowd is submissive and promiscuous, and is often taken over by the worst members of the crowd, not the best. Primitive instincts or acquired stereotypes, such as misinterpreted morality, direct the collective towards degradation. Thus, the inhabitants of the village show themselves to be more savages than two sorceresses living in a swamp.
Kuprin's main idea is that people must again turn to nature, must learn to live in harmony with the world and with themselves, so that their cold hearts melt. Olesya tried to open the world of real feelings to Ivan Timofeevich. He could not understand this in time, but the mysterious witch and her red beads will remain in his heart forever.
Conclusion
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin in his story "Olesya" tried to create the ideal of man, to show the problems of the artificial world, to open people's eyes to the guided and immoral society that surrounds them.
The life of the wayward, unshakable Olesya was to some extent destroyed by the touch of the secular world in the person of Ivan Timofeevich to her. The writer wanted to show that we ourselves are destroying the beauty that fate gives us, simply because we are blind, blind in soul.
Criticism
The story "Olesya" is one of the most famous works of A.I. Kuprin. The strength and talent of the story was appreciated by the writer's contemporaries.
K. Barkhin called the work a "forest symphony", noting the smoothness and beauty of the work's language.
Maxim Gorky noted the youth, the spontaneity of the story.
Thus, the story "Olesya" occupies an important place, as in the work of A.I. Kuprin, and in the history of Russian classical literature.
Interesting? Keep it on your wall!"Olesya" by A.I. Kuprin
"Olesya" is one of the first major works of the author and, in his own words, one of the most beloved. It is logical to start the analysis of the story from the background. In 1897, Alexander Kuprin served as an estate manager in the Rivne district of the Volyn province. The young man was impressed by the beauty of Polissya and the difficult fate of the inhabitants of this region. On the basis of what he saw, a cycle of "Polesie stories" was written, the decoration of which was the story "Olesya".
Despite the fact that the work was created by a young author, it attracts literary critics with its complex problems, the depth of the characters of the main characters, and amazing landscape sketches. In terms of composition, the story "Olesya" is a retrospective. The narration comes from the person of the narrator, who recalls the events of days gone by.
The intellectual Ivan Timofeevich comes from a big city to stay in the remote village of Perebrod in Volyn. This reserved land seems very strange to him. On the threshold of the twentieth century, technical and natural sciences are rapidly developing, and enormous social transformations are taking place in the world. And here, it seems that time has stopped. And people in this land believe not only in God, but also in goblin, devils, water and other otherworldly characters. Christian traditions are closely intertwined with pagan traditions in Polissya. This is the first conflict in the story: civilization and wildlife live according to completely different laws.
Another conflict follows from their confrontation: people brought up in such different conditions cannot be together. Therefore, Ivan Timofeevich, who personifies the world of civilization, and the witch Olesya, living according to the laws of the wild, are doomed to part.
The closeness of Ivan and Olesya is the culmination of the story. Despite the mutual sincerity of feelings, the characters' understanding of love and duty differ significantly. Olesya in a difficult situation behaves much more responsible. She is not afraid of further events, it is only important that she is loved. Ivan Timofeevich, on the contrary, is weak and indecisive. In principle, he is ready to marry Olesya and take her with him to the city, but he really has no idea how this is possible. In love, Ivan is not capable of an act, since he is used to going with the flow in life.
But one in the field is not a warrior. Therefore, even the sacrifice of a young witch, when she decides to go to church for the sake of her chosen one, does not save the situation. A beautiful but short tale of mutual love ends tragically. Olesya and her mother are forced to flee their home, fleeing the wrath of superstitious peasants. In memory of her, only a thread of red coral remains.
The story of the tragic love of an intellectual and a witch inspired the adaptation of the work of the Soviet director Boris Ivchenko. The main roles in his film Olesya (1971) were played by Gennady Voropaev and Lyudmila Chursina. And fifteen years earlier, the French director André Michel based on Kuprin's story made the film "The Witch" with Marina Vlady.