Summary: "Bezhin Meadow" by Turgenev

There are literary works about which the words "brief content" sound inappropriately. "Bezhin meadow" Turgenev - one of them. If you compare this story with the master's paintings, then you will not see there dense smears of saturated oil paint, carefully "written out" details. Everything is transparent, fleeting, like life itself.

It is not by chance that Ivan Turgenev picked up such changing, maturing characters in his story. "Bezhin meadow" is both a freeman and a huge childhood world for boys: Vanya (7 years old), Ilyusha (12 years), Kostya (10 years), Pavlusha (12 years) and Fedya (14 years old). Separate strokes of the master are individualized by Ivan Sergeevich guys: Fedya is a slim, handsome boy from a well-to-do family; Pavlusha - with usual appearance, but with a perceptible inner strength; The furtive and hunch-nosed Ilyusha is notorious and driven by nature; Kostya is pensive and sad; Vanya, the smallest, tired, falls asleep without participating in the conversation.

The writer is certainly a fatalist, therefore he creates a romantic sense of art with the artistic means of the uniqueness and irreversibility of this summer evening. After all, the boys will grow up, become different. Is not this grace of the "drawing on the sand" a short story contained in the story ?! Turgenev captured Bezhin Meadow with the words of a hunter who, by chance, overheard the children's conversation at the fire, that night, the flashes of flame, the spiritualized faces of little storytellers, the horses' manes fluttering in the wind, the stars burning in their pupils. Later, the impression of fleetingness, "watercolor", will increase from the fact that, reading the mini-epilogue of the story, we learn - Paul will soon be killed, having fallen from the horse.

We follow the same behind the idea of the story, presenting its brief content. "Bezhin meadow" Turgenev begins with the fact that the narrator "from the author", hunting at Tula in the Chern district, got lost and by evening came out to the steppe space. He saw the aforementioned guys who brought out horses at night to graze in the steppe (at night). The boys told various naive and mysterious stories. Ilyusha - about the brownie, whom he heard, spending the night in a paper factory. Kostya - about the meeting of the carpenter Gavrila with a mermaid. Ilyusha - infernal "horror stories" about the wizard Yermil and about the woman Ulyana. Ilyusha - about Trishka, who is in a solar eclipse. All this to the boys seems mysterious and significant. Already at the very morning, saying the night, they are trying to determine the difference between wood and water. Kostya tells of a boy who was taken by a water man. Only in the morning the guys fall asleep. Formally, the above sequence of stories author defines a brief content. "Bezhin meadow" Turgenev, thus, appears as a kind of poem in prose - about nature, about childhood, and in a broad sense - about the beauty of the Motherland.

Let us return to the analogy of Turgenev's story with watercolor, light, fleeting and therefore beautiful. The work does not bear any documentary. There is no analytical reasoning in it. But it certainly carries a mood. An adult reader will surely feel sad that childhood has passed, and he is already far from simple and pure boyish dreams and fantasies, that he can not hide at night in the steppe grass-feather grass, not to jump in the middle of the night on horseback and not rush across the steppe towards The wind followed the boys. He will be sad because the childhood is gone, as if the night mist melted under the morning sun.

About Turgenev's story "Bezhin Meadow", probably, one can say in the words of the great Pushkin, that the "Russian spirit" is permeated in it. And in the description of the nocturnal steppe, and in the muffled conversation of the boys, it is imperceptibly and in Turgenev harmoniously "Rus smells". About the same way about Turgenev wrote Saltykov-Shchedrin, who noticed that after getting acquainted with the works of Ivan Sergeyevich "easy to believe", "easy to breathe", life seems more harmonious and perfect.