Portrait of Olya Meshcherskaya. Easy breath

Princess Olga (Holy Olga) In her body, the wife of a being, has masculine wisdom, is enlightened by the Holy Spirit, understanding God ... 969) One of the founders of the Russian

Meshchera lowland

Sergey Zenkin. Portraits Exchanging Glances (Bunin's Light breathing)

Sergey Zenkin(Russian State University for the Humanities; Chief Researcher of the Institute of Higher Humanitarian Research; Doctor of Philology) [email protected]

UDC: 821.161.1 + 801.73 + 82.0

Annotation:

Two visual images appear in Bunin's short story "Light Breathing" - a picturesque portrait of the tsar and a tombstone photograph of the heroes of the story. Both images are involved in plot action and are the object of sacralization.

Keywords: Bunin, "Light Breathing", intra-diegetic images, sacralization of the image

Sergey Zenkin(Russian State University for the Huma-nities; research professor, Institute for Advan-ced Studies in the Humanities; Doctor of Sciences) [email protected]

UDC: 821.161.1 + 801.73 + 82.0

Abstract:

Bunin's novella Light breathing features two visual images - the painterly portrait of the tsar, and the gravestone photograph of the story’s heroine. Both images are involved in the narrative action and are the object of sacralization.

Key words: Bunin, Light breathing, intradiegetical images, sacralization of the image

In the now textbook novel by I.A. Bunin's "Light Breathing" (1916), two visual artifacts are present and actively functioning, a painting and a photograph - a royal portrait in the office of the headmistress of the gymnasium, where the heroine of the story, Olya Meshcherskaya, is called on the carpet, and a portrait of Olya Meshcherskaya herself on the grave cross after her death. Both images are accessible to the perception of not only readers, but also the characters of the story, are included in the horizon of their experiences and actions: this is intradiegetic, intra-narrative images belonging to the imaginary world of the story and participating in its development.

They are described very briefly in the text. So, the portrait of the emperor is mentioned twice with literally a few words: “The headmistress, youthful, but gray-haired, calmly sat with knitting in her hands at the writing table, under the royal portrait"(P. 329), and:" She [Olya] looked at the young tsar, painted to his full height in the middle of some brilliant room ..."(P. 330). However, he plays an important role in the dramatic development of the scene. The standard purpose of a royal portrait in a commanding office is to sanctify, legitimize power, including its usual function of suppressing sexuality, which is the notation given by the headmistress to the schoolgirl. In Ernst Kantorovich's terms, this is the second, ideal “king's body”, placed right above the head of a real bureaucrat [Kantorovich 2014]. However, in Bunin's narrative, the symbolic solidarity of these two figures is violated, and Olya Meshcherskaya's own intentions are wedged into the space between them. Indeed, the king and the boss are persons of different sexes; moreover, in the appearance of the latter, domestic-feminine features are specially noted - while waiting for the arrival of a guilty student, the boss is engaged in ladies' needlework, knitting, and not studying any papers, as befits an administrator. Her symbolic relationship with the tsar is moving from a political to a family form: these are, as it were, the "parents", the father and mother of the girl, which she uses, entering into an alliance with the "father" against the "mother"; secret complicity with the emperor in the portrait seems to give her courage in the confrontation with the real head of the gymnasium. The Oedipus triangle is formed in the female version: as noted by A.K. Zholkovsky, in the strange pleasure that Olya experiences from the office, where she is actually reprimanded, one guesses “not so much a conflict with the boss as an affair with<…>“The young tsar” ”[Zholkovsky 1992: 143]. Indeed, the epithet "young" applied to this man present in a dispute between two women about sexuality is enough to give him an erotic valence; and every reader, a contemporary of Bunin, who remembered the correct facial features of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, had to think of another, the implied epithet "... and beautiful." Of course, he would have sounded unacceptable familiarity in relation to the most august person, which is why, perhaps, it is censored in the text; but the heroine of the novel looks at the tsar in a familiar, domestic way.

Il. 1. Ernst Lipgart. Ceremonial
portrait of Nicholas II (State
Museum-reserve Tsarskoe Selo)

Il. 2. Ilya Repin. Ceremonial portrait
Nicholas II (Russian Museum)

Her instant flirtation with the autocrat is not expressed by any gestures, it is only outlined by the dynamics of her views. The owner of the study begins the conversation “without raising her eyes from knitting” (p. 329), while Olya looks “at her clearly and vividly, but without any expression on her face” (p. 329). Then the girl lowers her eyes herself, while the boss raises them: “... And, pulling the thread and wrapping a ball on the varnished floor, which Meshcherskaya looked at with curiosity, raised her eyes” (p. 329). Finally, Olya Meshcherskaya also raises her eyes - but looks no longer at the boss’s face, but higher, now “at the young tsar,” now “at an even parting in the boss’s milk, neatly crimped hair” (p. 330). The two interlocutors never manage to meet their gaze, and in this visual game the figure of the boss disappears, metonymically replaced by a ball under her feet, or a parting in her hair; Between them, Olya's gaze quickly crosses over, still managing to dash up to the portrait of the Tsar, to whom the girl furtively makes her eyes from the boss. The portrait hangs over the head of the headmistress, and the tsar is depicted on it in full growth - that is, in order to look into his face, Olya has to raise her eyes high and maybe even throw her head back - this gives an idea of ​​the amplitude of the visual run. Such a sliding, unfocused gaze in general can be characteristic of the perception of intradiegetic images by the characters of the narrative: the movement of the gaze is likened to the movement of the story and itself pushes it.

The work of painting, whose copy appears in "Light Breath", is not invented by the writer and lends itself to identification. Of the many famous images of Nicholas II, the Bunin description best matches the ceremonial portrait by Ernst Lipgart (1900, now in the Tsarskoe Selo State Museum-Reserve (Fig. 1)); on it the tsar's face, although not shown in close-up, is brightly highlighted, and it is clearly visible how he looks at us “clearly and vividly, but without any expression on his face,” that is, Olya Meshcherskaya reproduces his facial expressions with her own physiognomy. The bright light bursting into the room in the picture through the windows makes this canvas on the wall a window, visually wide open outward, into the “snowy, sunny, frosty” (p. 329) winter, and opening the closed space of the government office. The space opens up not only visually, but also ontologically: among the conditionally fictional world of the novel (an unnamed Russian city, the averaged scenery of provincial life), an exit opens into the unconditionally real world, where there really is a portrait of the reigning emperor painted by a specific painter. Like a scrap of yesterday's newspaper pasted on the surface of a painting by an avant-garde artist, this visual image turns out to be the most real element of the Bunin text.

For the arrangement of the characters in the story, it is also essential that the king appears as young man on old portrait, and such age duality, on the one hand, introduces instability in the structure of the symbolic "family", which provides power in the gymnasium (the gray-haired "mother" looks much older than the "father"), and on the other hand, already outside this the scene correlates with the ambiguous youthfulness of Olya's real lover and her boss's brother - Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin, also a handsome man (“he is fifty-six years old, but he is still very handsome and always well dressed” (p. 331)). Malyutin has a parody, diminished double - another lover of Olya, an "ugly and plebeian-looking" Cossack officer (p. 330), whom she teases by reporting her romance with Malyutin; but in the episode of her conversation with the boss, Malyutin himself, the provincial seducer of minors, is implicitly present as the base double of the idealized emperor. The implicit rivalry of these two gentlemen determines the moral ambivalence of the entire scene: defending her right to adult, “female” behavior, the heroine not only gracefully flirts with the symbolic “father”, but also blackmails the real “mother” with the shameful secret of her brother. Using the expressions of Lev Vygotsky [Vygotsky 1986: 183-205], we can say that here the "light breath" of the girl's eros and the "mundane" of the district life are clearly colliding in the conflict.

The grave portrait of Olya Meshcherskaya is also very sparingly described at the beginning of the novel: “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” (p. 328). Like the portrait of the emperor, it acquires its significance not from the ekphrastic detailing of the image, but from the story of the experiences and behavior of others in relation to him. This is primarily about the classy lady Olya Meshcherskaya, who “every Sunday” (p. 332) and “every holiday” (p. 332) visits her grave and through whose eyes the grave is described for the second time: “This wreath, this mound, oak cross! Is it possible that beneath him is the one whose eyes shine so immortally from this convex porcelain medallion on the cross ... ”(p. 332). The repetition here of a number of elements of the first, "author's" description is obvious; that is, despite the emphasized naivety and daydreaming, the classy lady is somewhat similar to the storyteller, or at least familiar with him: they note the same details and explain the same words. Thanks to the mechanism of indirect and improperly direct speech, these two - the narrator and the character, another pair of man + woman - jointly unfold a chain of perceptual and mental associations, in which the portrait of the hero-ni is involved. In the imagination of the class lady, her deceased student, who during her lifetime did not seem to evoke special feelings in her, “captivated her with a new dream” (p. 332); like her brother killed in the war before, this girl becomes her second “I”, an ideal symbolic body, which in this case substantiates not power, but disinterested love-adoration. The visual image of Olya (the portrait on the cross) gives rise to visual associations: at first it is “the pale face of Olya Meshcherskaya in the coffin, among the flowers” ​​(p. 333) - the artificial image in the photograph looks more vivid, “immortal” than the real “face” of the deceased , the image is again more real than reality - and then a schematic, but visually definite image of her gymnasium friend, "the plump, tall Subbotina" (p. 333). Zholkovsky showed how the poetics of the particular details that come to the fore in Bunin's short story work; in this case, it leads to a flicker of associatively correlated visual motives (as well as auditory ones - this is the chime of the wind in a porcelain wreath on the grave, mentioned several times in the text), which obscure the integral appearance of the heroine by her private metaphorical and metonymic projections - sometimes a grave portrait, then a face in a coffin, then even a stranger, unlike her figure of a friend. Unnecessary for the plot, the message about the physique of the schoolgirl Subbotina, who no longer manifests herself in the story, is superimposed on the basic image-portrait and, together with other visual motives, creates the same dynamic as in the scene with the boss, the dynamics of a sliding glance, in this case a mental one.

Like the portrait of the emperor, and even stronger than him, the burial portrait of Olya Meshcherskaya is sacralized. If the royal image is sacred only implicitly, due to the general traditions of Russian political culture (the sacralization of the sovereign is still manifested in the portraits of Lenin / general secretary / president, decorating the offices of officials), then the portrait on the grave cross is sacralized in actual fact, directly in the course of the story. Its special status is ensured not only by religious conventions - reverence for the dead and the sanctification of the cemetery land - but also by the personal cult with which the class lady surrounds Olya's grave. In addition, sacredness is not simply posited here as a fixed given, but unfolds in narrative and calendar time. It is known that "Light Breath" is one of the so-called "Easter novels" by Bunin: the story was first published in the newspaper "Russkoye Slovo" on April 10, 1916, on the feast of Orthodox Easter, and the classy lady is making her visit to the cemetery on April days ”(p. 332), following the Passover custom of visiting graves accepted in Russia. Synchronized with the real church calendar, her path is also marked with religious objects and symbols: she walks along Cathedral street, male passes monastery, enters the cemetery through the gate, above which “it is written Dormition of the mother of God"(P. 332), and finally sits down in front of cross at the grave.

The Dormition of the Mother of God is another sacred visual image, however, it is mentioned quite fluently, does not participate in the development of the plot and is reduced to only one name of its own, referring to the church icon-painting code. On the contrary, the two actually intradiegetic, narratively active and, generally speaking, non-church sacred images do not unambiguously reduce the meaning of the novel to festive splendor. Taken separately, neither the portrait of the tsar, nor the portrait of Olya are religious, but together they correspond to the Christian paradigm: the autocrat in the ceremonial portrait is analogous to the almighty god-father, while Olya Meshcherskaya, dying a violent death (and dying almost voluntarily: she provoked her murderer herself), and then "immortally" resurrected in the imagination of an exalted adept, is likened to a god-son, being included in yet another symbolic family structure. If we consider that the tsar-father in the episode with his fate for a moment turns from a figure of power into an erotically attractive image, an object of a flirtatious game, and his real earthly hypostasis, a repressive mother-boss, is put to shame, then the meaning of the whole plot is the neutralization, weakening of the official "parental" power: the compositional montage, at one time analyzed by Vygotsky, replaces this power with the soft-loving power of a young anemone and a sufferer over her older admirer. The heavy, sacred fixed in stable objects gives way to the light, formed by atmospheric effects (cold, wind).

However, this lightness comes at an expensive price. Radicalizing the Christian tradition, Bunin interprets Easter as a holiday of liberation not only from worldly power and from the flesh, but also from form in general. In the last scene of the story, the living figure of the heroine is first replaced by a visual image, and then completely loses its visibility. This final disappearance is the traditional fate of intradiegetic images in fictional narration, where they are often lost or destroyed, from decorated objects they turn into a formless substance (Christianity can positively interpret it as a “spirit”) [Zenkin 2013]. While talking with her friend, Olya Meshcherskaya consistently lists and discards the details of her appearance, which, according to the “old, funny book” she read (p. 333), characterize a beautiful woman - eyes, eyelashes, stature, etc. - so that at the end finally dwell on the main, non-visual moment, "light breathing". After death, she herself is identified with this breath and dissolves in the formless breath of air: “Now this light breath has again scattered in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind” (p. 333). Here there is an intertextual cross-talk with a predecessor significant for Bunin - Flaubert, who similarly described the death of his heroine Emma Bovary: “... And Charles fancied that she radiated from herself, mixed with everything around her, hiding in him - in silence , in the night, in the passing wind and damp smells rising from the river ”[Flaubert 1947: 170]. Not only this particular motive coincides with "Madame Bovary", but also the general plotline - the story of the life and death of a dissolute, but charming provincial woman with a lively gaze of beautiful eyes, who, after her death, becomes an object of cult from the outside her innocent admirer (for Flaubert it is Charles Bovary). Bunin applies the pantheistic interpretation of death-dissolution not only to a living person, but also to his posthumous image: in the last phrase, the novels disappear and are absorbed by nature both Olya Meshcherskaya and her burial photograph. Instead of being an eternal monument to the deceased, the visual image itself is canceled, scattered in the wind, like a handful of dust. Beyond the framework of the story and the author's intention, there was another, more brutal process of death and entropy, not yet known to Bu-no-nu in 1916: this is a revolution that will occur a year later, will kill the handsome emperor, destroy most of his portraits and most likely, he will not spare the fragile porcelain decorations on the grave of the county young lady, and, possibly, the grave itself. History continued literature over the head of the writer.

Two visual images in "Light Breath", which the story correlates with each other and, thanks to the attitude of the characters, closes with complex semantics of love, power and death, form highlighted points in his imaginary world, attracting increased attention of both the reader and the actors persons. The exchange of views between Olya Meshcherskaya and the tsar in the picture continues in the exchange of views between Olya Meshcherskaya in the photograph and her cool lady: the two portraits look at each other through the text of the novel. From a theoretical point of view, they can serve as examples of a visual attractor in a literary text.

Bibliography / References

[Bunin 1970] - Bunin I.A. Favorites / Intro Art. L. Krutikova. Moscow: Artistic Literature, 1970.

(Bunin I.A. Izbrannoe / Ed. by L. Krutikova. Moscow, 1970.)

[Bunin 2009] - Bunin I.A. Collected works: In 9 volumes / Comp. and entered. Art. I. Vladimirova, comments. A. Baboreko. T. 4.M .: Terra - Book Club, 2009.

(Bunin I.A. Sobranie sochineniy: In 9 vols. / Ed. by I. Vladimirov and A. Baboreko. Vol. 4. Moscow, 2009.)

[Vygotsky 1986] - Vygotsky L.S. Psychology of Art / Preface. A.N. Leontyev, comments. L.S. Vygotsky and Vyach. V.S. Ivanova. Moscow: Art, 1986.

(Vygotsky L.S. Psikhologiya iskusstva / Ed. by A.N. Leont'ev and Vyach. Vs. Ivanov. Moscow, 1986.)

[Zholkovsky 1992] - A.K. Zholkovsky Wandering Dreams: From the History of Russian Modernism. M .: Soviet writer, 1992.

(Zholkovsky A.K. Bluzhdayushchie sny: Iz istorii russkogo modernizma. Moscow, 1992.)

[Zenkin 2013] - Zenkin S.N. Intradiegetic image in a fantastic story // A.M. P .: In memory of A.M. Peskova / Ed. A. Bodrova, S. Zenkin, E. Lyamina, N. Mazur, V. Milchina and N. Speranskaya. M .: RGGU, 2013. S. 384-395.

(Zenkin S.N. Intradiegeticheskiy obraz v fantasti-ches-kom rasskaze // A.M.P .: Pamyati A.M. Peskova / Ed. by A. Bodrova, S. Zenkin, E. Lyamin-a, N. Ma-zur, V. Mil'china, and N. Speranskaya. Moscow, 2013. P. 384-395.)

[Kantorovich 2014] - Kantorovich E. Two Bodies of the King: A Study of Medieval Political Theology / Per. from English M.A. Boytsova and A.Yu. Seregina. Moscow: Gaidar Institute, 2014.

(Kantorowicz E.H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Moscow, 2014. - In Russ.)

[Flaubert 1947] - Flaubert G. Selected Works / Per. with French A. Romm. M .: OGIZ, 1947.

(Flaubert G. Izbrannye sochineniya. Moscow, 1947. - In Russ.)

[Yampolsky 2004] - Yampolsky M.B. Physiology of the symbolic. Book. 1: Return of the Leviathan. M .: New literary review, 2004.

(Iampolski M.B. Fiziologiya simvolicheskogo. Vol. 1: Vozvrashchenie Leviafana. Moscow, 2004.)

Wed considerations of Mikhail Yampolsky about the visual image of the sovereign as an organizing factor in the space of power in the new European culture: [Yampolsky 2004].

Her real parents are mentioned in the story only indirectly in the words of the boss: “... You ruin your parents for twenty rubles shoes” (p. 330), and then just as fluently in Olya’s diary: “Dad, mom and Tolya, they all left for the city , I was left alone ”(p. 331). Their whole function is to diminish ontologically, go broke and be absent, leaving the daughter among strangers, at the mercy of substitute parents and their dubious relatives.

There is also another portrait, similar in composition, painted by Ilya Repin in 1896 (now in the Russian Museum (Fig. 2)); the emperor there is younger (28 years old) and is depicted among the "brilliant hall" in full growth, while Lipgart is 32 years old, and the figure is cut off by a frame at knee level. However, in the painting by Repin, the tsar does not have such a dashing posture, and his face is written less clearly; this realistic painting would be less suitable both for decorating an official study and for the erotic interest of a "naughty" (p. 328) schoolgirl.

This mode of visuality differs from the classical one, in which the image could be framed, furnish the outside with items of real props (for example, in panoramas of the 19th century). Here the image is introduced (moreover, “from within” the diegetic reality, and not as an external illustration included in the book) not into the material, but into the textual, ontologically “thinned out” environment; it is more real than its own "frame".

Bunin's story was written in 1916, and the grammatical present in his framing narration makes it clear that the main events took place in the recent past; therefore, the portrait of the "young tsar" was painted no less than 15 years before them. This temporal distance can be connotated by the elderly age of the boss, who once hung this picture in her office and has not changed the situation since then.

“... We call it uterine, and there I called it light breathing” - these words of Bunin are recorded in the “Grasse Diary” by G.N. Kuznetsova [Bunin 2009: 291] (commentary by A. Sahakyants).

The male gaze of the narrator is clearly manifested, for example, in the description of the charms of young Olya. Two gender pairs - the king / boss and the narrator / class lady - have structural parallelism: in both pairs, the woman is present in diegetic reality, and the man is absent, is on the other side of the visual / narrative frame, like a pictorial face or voiceover. The functions of the two couples are also close: mastering and appropriating the world (imperious or visual).

Another age-related ambiguity: the classy lady is called the "middle-aged girl" (p. 332), and this formula, used instead of the standard "old maid," is as much a hidden oxymoron as the "young tsar": in fact, they are both were once are young ... The anachronistic definition of "girl" echoes the characterization of Olya Meshcherskaya ("she imperceptibly became a girl ..." (p. 329)) and fits into the terminological paradigm of her talk with her boss ("You are no longer a girl ... but also not a woman ..." (p. 330)). As a "girl" cool lady, “A little woman” (p. 332), is equated with a “little” schoolgirl in the age sense, who even surpasses her in her femininity (sexuality).

He was the first to point out the relationship between the two portraits in "Light Breath" and their common function: these are "two reviving portraits" (a typical type of intradiegetic image in the literature of romanticism), which, "despite the abundance of restraining frames", break out of them into diegetic reality [Zholkovsky 1992: 141-142]. The harbinger of this process can be considered one of the characters of "Light Breathing" - the killer of the heroine, a Cossack officer " plebeian species that did not have exactly nothing to do with that circle, to which Olya Meshcherskaya belonged ”(p. 330). Now, with a retrospective look at the diegetic world of the novella, his crime is read as a sign of an imminent uprising of the lower social classes, which Bunin will describe with horror in "Cursed Days." (Observation of Alexandra Urakova, to whom I am grateful for the critical reading of my text.)

Bunin wrote the story "Light Breathing" in 1916. In the work, the author touches upon the themes of love and death characteristic of the literature of this period. Despite the fact that the story is not written in chapters, the narrative is fragmentary and consists of several parts, arranged in a non-chronological order.

main characters

Olya Meshcherskaya- a young schoolgirl, was killed by a Cossack officer, as she said that she did not love him.

Head of the gymnasium

Other characters

Cossack officer- shot Olya out of unhappy love, "ugly and plebeian."

Cool lady Olya Meshcherskaya

"In the cemetery, over a fresh earthen embankment, stands a new oak cross." Embedded in the cross is a convex porcelain medallion with a photographic portrait of the schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya "with joyful, amazingly lively eyes."

As a girl, Olya did not stand out among other high school students, she was "capable, but playful and very careless about the instructions" of the class lady. But then the girl began to develop, "blossom". At the age of 14, “with a thin waist and slender legs, her breasts were already well outlined” and shapes. "At fifteen, she was already reputed to be a beauty." Unlike her prim girlfriends, Olya "was not afraid - no ink spots on her fingers, no flushed face, no disheveled hair." Without any effort, "grace, elegance, dexterity, a clear glint of eyes" came to her.

Olya danced best at balls, skated, she was most looked after at balls and was most loved by the younger grades. “She imperceptibly became a girl,” and there was even talk about her frivolity.

"During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium." Once, at a big break, the girl was called to her by the boss and reprimanded her. The woman noted that Olya is no longer a girl, but not a woman yet, so she should not wear a "woman's hairstyle", expensive combs and shoes. “Without losing her simplicity and calmness,” Meshcherskaya replied that the madame was mistaken: she is already a woman, and her father’s friend and neighbor, the boss’s brother, Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin, is to blame - “it happened last summer in the village.”

"And a month after this conversation," a Cossack officer shot Olya "on the platform of the station, among a large crowd of people." And Olga's confession, which stunned the boss, was confirmed. “The officer told the investigating magistrate that Meshcherskaya had lured him, was close to him, swore to be his wife,” and at the station she said that she didn’t love him and “let him read that page of the diary where it was said about Malyutin.”

“On the tenth of July last year,” Olya wrote in her diary: “Everyone left for the city, I was left alone.<…>Alexey Mikhailovich arrived.<…>He stayed because it was raining.<…>He regretted that he had not found dad, was very lively and behaved with me as a gentleman, joked a lot that he had been in love with me for a long time.<…>He is fifty-six years old, but he is still very handsome and always well dressed.<…>For tea we sat on the glass veranda, he smoked, then moved over to me, began again to say some kind of courtesy, then examine and kiss my hand. I covered my face with a silk handkerchief, and he kissed me several times on the lips through the handkerchief ... I don’t understand how this could happen, I lost my mind, I never thought I was like that! Now I have only one way out ... I feel such disgust for him that I cannot survive it! .. "

Every Sunday, after mass, a little woman in mourning comes to the grave of Olya Meshcherskaya - a classy lady of the girl. Olya became the subject of "her persistent thoughts and feelings." Sitting at the grave, the woman recalls the pale face of the girl in the coffin and the accidentally overheard conversation: Meshcherskaya told her friend about what she read in her father’s book that supposedly the main thing in a woman is “light breathing” and that she, Olya, has it.

"Now this light breath has scattered again into the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind."

Conclusion

In the story, Bunin contrasts the main character Olya Meshcherskaya with the headmaster of the gymnasium - as the personification of rules, social norms, and a classy lady - as the personification of dreams that replace reality. Olya Meshcherskaya is a completely different female image - a girl who has tried on the role of an adult lady, a seductress, who is not characterized by either fear of rules or excessive daydreaming.

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