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The story "Olesya" was written by Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin in 1898.

Kuprin spent 1897 in Polesie, 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. Here was conceived a cycle of the so-called "Polesie stories", which later included the stories "On 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 Polissya 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. No one 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 the special attraction 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, bright, 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 his portrayal of 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 the 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 its 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 was 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 "Listrigones" cannot die, just as his passionate, intelligent and direct love for man and his native land cannot die ...

What topics does the writer touch upon in the story "Olesya"?

Kuprin, in his story "Olesya", touches upon several very important topics. They are very vividly revealed in this work.

One of the themes revealed in this work is man and society. Olesya and her grandmother Manuilikha faced a complete misunderstanding of people. Olesya and Manuilikha even had to live in a forest, outside of civilization, although the society from which they fled can hardly be called a civilization.

Because those people from the village are very narrow minded. Society does not like those people who are not like them. Olesya and Manuilikha differ from everyone in that they have a great gift, they do not go to church. People always strive to destroy the one whom they do not understand, who is different from them.

Another theme that is revealed in this work is the theme of love. Ivan and Olesya love each other. Despite the mutual sincerity of feelings, the heroes' understanding of love and duty is significantly different. 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 other hand, is weak and indecisive. Olesya, in order to please Ivan, went to church, but it all ended badly. A beautiful but short tale of mutual love ends tragically. Serious feelings sometimes require various sacrifices from people - this is evident from Olesya's serious attitude to Ivan.

The third topic that is revealed here is the topic of generations. Nastena treats her grandmother very well, does not leave her in a difficult situation and always obeys.

Updated: 2018-03-18

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The work uses the opposition of two worlds: civilization and nature. Through this theme, the theme of love is revealed.
The theme of the story is that young people who fell in love with each other do not suspect that their love is doomed in advance and that a person should be as close to nature as possible.
The story is the embodiment of the writer's dream of a wonderful person, of a free and healthy life in merging with nature. The intonation of love is guessed at the very beginning of the piece in the rustle of foliage and the howling of the wind. Nature here does not so much serve as a background, as it lives its own life and merges with the character of the heroine.
The main character appears before us as a very impulsive, cheerful and at the same time wise and kind and unpredictable girl to the core. She knows neither calculation nor cunning, selfishness is alien to her.
“... The charm of her face lies in those large, shiny, dark eyes, to which thin, broken in the middle of the eyebrows gave an elusive shade of guile, imperiousness and naivety; in a dark-pink skin tone, in the willful curl of the lips, of which the lower, somewhat fuller, protruded forward with a decisive and capricious look. "
At first, Ivan was attracted by her beauty, cheerfulness and childish naivety, but then he notices the following:
"... Not only Olesya's beauty fascinated me in her, but also her whole, original, free nature, her mind, both clear and shrouded in unshakable hereditary superstition, childishly innocent, but not devoid of the sly coquetry of a beautiful woman."
The main character, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of Olesya. But as you know, opposites attract. So, in our case, they fell in love with each other.
Ivan Timofeevich is a kind person by nature, but weak. This kindness is not good, not cordial. He is not master of his word. He likes to take over people, and although he does not want to, he obeys them. Loves to drink wine. He does not value money and does not know how to save it.
Naturally, Ivan could not help but find the “fabulous hut” lost in the swamps, where Manuilikha and Olesya lived, because Kuprin planned to do it this way and nothing else. Surrounding the mystery of the story of the witch, he shows us that, as the main characters get to know each other, their relationship develops. And in this regard, they not only get to know each other, but mutually change. Their attitude to life is changing and their principles are changing.
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, bright, humane.
Olesya sacrifices herself when she decides to go to church. Naturally, nothing good could come of it. The people recognized her as a witch. They surrounded her. They wanted to smear her with tar, but she twisted and ran away. Olesya wanted to do something pleasant for Ivan, in the end, to please him, overdoing her fear.
Ivan learns from people what exactly happened near the church and is horrified when he hears this. He wants to punish soulless people at the same time and console and numb poor, fragile Olesya.
The culmination of the story falls on the scene when Ivan Timofeevich came to Olesya. In the middle of a conversation with him, she says, remembering:
“- Do you remember when I threw cards at you? After all, it all happened, as they said then. This means that the fate of our happiness with you does not want ... And if it were not for this, do you think I would be afraid of something? "
And no matter how he tried to persuade, no matter what he did, not to convince her, at the expense of leaving. I just told him a fairy tale about a hare and a wolf, emphasizing that she didn’t want to name the day when she left the forest with her grandmother, because she didn’t want him to be tormented by parting and tormented by despair. But he did not fully understand the meaning of her words, only intuitively anticipating loneliness and a moment of suffering.
“The entire sky was covered by a black cloud with sharp curly edges, but the sun was still shining, leaning towards the west, and there was something ominous in this mixture of light and impending darkness. "This passage accurately describes the feelings of the protagonist, his feelings at that moment. At the moment of their farewell, a lifetime and a century. That evening it was raining with hail, as if nature itself showed Olesya its sadness and pain.
He still has a memory of her - red beads.
No one knows and will never know where Manuilikha came from with her granddaughter to the village and where they disappeared forever. And this mysteriousness of the secret Kuprin specially developed in this story in order to create a mysterious halo bordering on a kind of fabulous atmosphere.

Of course, we are used to the fact that all stories must end with a good ending. But what do we see thanks to Kuprin? Before us is a story about two lovers who were as different people as possible. Here, wildness, unity with nature, tenderness, naivety and, at the same time, deep wisdom in the person of a simple girl Olesya are opposed. And in the full sense of the word "city dweller", Ivan Timofeevich, who is by nature not a kind-hearted person, that is, prudent and with malicious intent; weak and a little spender and cannot keep his word. Like all people, without exception, he is an egoist and this is most likely not his fault.
The only thing that really unites them with Olesya is that for the first time in their lives in real time, they fell in love with each other.
I was greatly impressed by the intricacy of the plot and the setting of the action taking place at the edge of the forest. And most importantly, I was delighted with the vivid description of nature, which Kuprin endowed with his emotions and character. His work is thoroughly imbued with a certain lightness and vibrant shades.

The beautiful Olesya and her grandmother, the ancient Manuilikha, are hermit sorceresses who happily lived in their forest corner outside the current time and social space. The catastrophe came as soon as their microcosm came into contact with the big world - the government, the church, the peasants. Kuprin inherits the traditions of the author of the story "Cossacks" and overcomes them. The peasant world is hostile to Olesya, she is a child of nature. The people are men who drive nails into the heels of a thief, women who beat a girl in God's temple. The journal Russkoe Bogatstvo refused to publish the story, disagreeing with the interpretation of the people as an inert mass.

"Olesya" is one of the most heartfelt, probably not only in our literature, works about love. The plot of the story is simple. The master from the city comes to the province, is enchanted by the beauty of the "savage" villager, who also loses her head from the courteous, knowledgeable inhabitant of the capital. Love relationships are developing rapidly and stormy, but the heroes' romance is doomed. Belonging to different classes, different levels of education, habits of different lifestyles - all are against their union. There is a break. A plot from the category of "stray", on which many foreign and domestic classics (from N. M. Karamzin to L. N. Tolstoy, I. A. Bunin) built their works. "Naturally, each writer gave this plot his own twist. - Kuprin is also original in his own way. Usually, unable to withstand the pressure of circumstances, having cooled down, the man left, while the woman, in an aura of author's and reader's sympathies, was left alone with her troubles and remorse. Ivan Timofeevich and Olesya parted at the peak of mutual feelings, convinced that that separation will make them unhappy for the rest of their lives. They part, although the master is ready to disregard the opinion of the world and enter into a marginal marriage. The initiator of the separation from Kuprin is a woman, and she does not regret what happened at all.

Critics who wrote that love here is "killed" by social relations are right, but this is not the main truth about the "forest symphony". In the relationship of the protagonists, psychological conflict plays a more significant role than social one. He and she, unlike readers, perceive social reality as a norm of life. Not the threats of a thieving sergeant, not a woman's pogrom at the church are the main reasons that Olesya leaves Ivan Timofeevich - they are in the mismatch of their natures, in her premonition that such a discrepancy will sooner or later break their union, make them regret their former love.

In a sense, the character of Olesya is higher and wiser than the character of Nadezhda from the story "Dark Alleys" by I. A. Bunin. This judgment, of course, is not entirely legitimate: one story was created according to the canons of romantic poetics, the other - but to the canons of realistic poetics. But it is difficult not to compare these two close plot works, not to note: Olesya leaves so that Ivan Timofeevich would never look at her the way Nikolai Alekseevich looked at Nadezhda years later from the Bunin story, voluntarily or involuntarily comparing what is and what was: "Oh, how good you were! .. How hot, how beautiful! What a flock, what eyes!"

Symbolism, prediction, understatement are effective springs of plot development. Essentially the mystical content of the character of a good sorceress-prophet. Olesya knows everything in advance, this is the guarantee of her strength and weakness, victories and troubles. She understands that she is burdened with "supernatural knowledge", inaccessible to others, knows that it is necessary to pay for this: "all paths are unhappy." After the first meeting, she "reads" the character of her beloved: "Your kindness is not good, not cordial. To your word, you are not a master ... Love wine, and also ... It hurts to hunt for our sister." This fortune-telling predetermined her disappearance, which coincided in time with the threat of reprisals from the village. Olesya understands the peasants: after all, black power, He (Kuprin's italics) helps her ... Note, the last sentimental and tragic meeting of lovers occurs before the thunderstorm and before the threat and is not at all perceived by Ivan Timofeevich as the last, but this is how Olesya perceives her. In retrospect, everything she said then appears as a touching farewell monologue.

Olesya evokes deep sympathy, Ivan Timofeevich - sympathy. She is a whole person, he is different. Presenting a city dweller in his inner monologues - and Kuprin was a master of this form - the author points to a painful split in the character, and the monologues themselves speak of the villager's intelligence and insight. (Note that a simple, open witch is not shown in internal monologues.) Offering Olesya his hand and heart, Ivan Timofeevich has an internal dispute with himself: “I did not even dare to imagine what Olesya would be like in a fashionable dress, talking in the living room with my wives co-workers ... "Offering to transport my grandmother to the city, he says to himself:" Frankly, the thought of my grandmother jarred me a lot. " The hero can be humanly understood, but this resignation does not decorate him. The spiritual level of Ivan Timofeevich is not much higher than the level of Nikolai Alekseevich Buninsky, who came to the rhetorical question: "What nonsense! .. Nadezhda ... my wife, the mistress of my St. Petersburg house, the mother of my children?"

Of course, both writers are far from banal assessments, "bad" or "good" one or the other character, they speak first of all that life is more complicated than ethical formulas, that a person's guilt and misfortune can merge into one whole. The guilt and misfortune of the characters deduced in these stories is rooted in the existence of different views on "dark alleys", nature, on man, on God himself. They are different - Ivan Timofeevich and Olesya. He is just a bad good person, she is a "sweet ideal", a bright image from the "poetic legends" that he came to collect.

The author emphasizes the originality of Olesya. The secret of the girl's birth is not revealed. Favorite grandmother Manuilikha, aggressive, tearful, greedy, untidy, only reminds her granddaughter with a forest soul. The author decisively divorces the girl and the peasants, the people. The rough, dry speech of the villagers is contrasted with the melodious, metaphorical, "magic" speech of the sorcerers. Poor fortune-tellers anticipate unkindness ("shame ... of the lady of clubs"), but their charms are powerless to prevent the inevitable. The awakening of feelings cannot be stopped, like the onset of morning, spring.

Olesya's actions are determined by such character traits as love of freedom, self-control, pride. Even love in her did not dull all this: Ivan Timofeevich's sacrifice is not accepted. The local, the narrator notes, are always ready to "kiss ... the boots" of a master or an official. The author opposes the girl's knowledge-hungry mind to the mental laziness and stupidity of the villagers, otherwise he would hardly have paid so much attention to Yarmola's futile attempts to learn the spelling of his surname. They, hunters, farmers, eagerly take from nature everything they can, she helps nature. Olesya cannot stand the sight of a gun, on the pages of the story she appears from a song, with orphan finches in an apron. For her, everything in nature is beautiful, but the people believe that a strong wind is a sign that "the witcher was born." Nature explains the behavior of Olesya, the season, the land "longing for ... motherhood", "that fresh, seductive and powerful drunken smell of spring." Nature warns her, sends a sign of trouble: on the evening that decided her fate, the forest turned into a formidable "crimson reflection of the dying dawn ..."

Kuprin belongs to the category of artists who know how to work with a thin brush. Definition of a noun, repetition of the same expression, "accidental" mention of an extraneous detail of the interior - these and other shaded elements play an important role in its artistic whole. His paintings cannot be confused with "pastels" by B. K. Zaitsev, with "graphics" by I. A. Bunin.

Olesya says that she is not afraid of wolves as she is afraid of people. It is symbolic that the author named the village closest to the swamp "Volchee". Another name - "Fermented" - is associated with the word "rabble", meaning fermented wine. On the drunkenness of the villagers - "barbarians", according to Manuilikha's definition, who lived around the vast square "from church to pub" it is said more than once. The symbolism in the story is diverse. The image of "road", "path", "path", "forest corridor", where the author most often describes homeless lovers, is symbolic. The breaking of the spindle thread is symbolic when Ivan Timofeevich comes on his first date to Olesya; the meaningfully repeated mention of the "low, wobbly bench" on which he sits in the "hut on chicken legs", and much more.