Making a reader's diary is not an easy task. In order to correctly and as concisely as possible present the main events of a work, you need to have a decent example before your eyes. You can always find him at Literaguru. Here at your service is a very brief summary of Bunin's book, Clean Monday.
(439 words) It was winter, and every evening the narrator drove up to the house next to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to spend this time with his beloved girl. She lived there. Every evening they dined at restaurants, then attended theaters and concerts. Although they spent time together, they weren’t very close - the girl refused to talk about what awaits them in the future.
She lived alone. Each week, the narrator brought her fresh flowers, boxes of chocolates and books, but it seemed that she was indifferent to gifts. She could not understand, for example, why people eat in restaurants every day. At the same time, she always ate with great appetite and read all the books donated. I had a great love for furs and silk.
What a storyteller, that a girl, both were rich and beautiful, both from the cover. And he is handsome with a southern appearance, active and cheerful, and she also had oriental features, but was most often silent and calm. And often, while reading a book, she was distracted and thought about something.
Sometimes the narrator enjoyed those blissful moments when he could kiss her, but the answer was silence. When he spoke of the wedding, she replied that there was no wife from her. The hero hoped that her opinion might change over time, and continued to care for and suffer from their strange and incomplete proximity.
Two winter months passed, and last Sunday she admitted that she often visited Moscow cathedrals alone. She is admired by church hymns, old Russia, old funeral rites. On the same evening, they both went to the Novodevichy Convent, then to the tavern. There, the girl promised herself that one day she would go to some farthest monastery. The narrator was thrilled by her words. The next evening, they went to the theater to the “skit”. There she smoked, drank champagne and danced polka, and then suddenly for the first time she allowed the narrator to stay at night.
In the morning she said that that evening she was going to Tver and did not know when she would return. This day was - clean Monday.
A few weeks after leaving, she wrote that it was useless to look for her, and there was no need to scribble an answer - both would only be more painful from this. She is going to obey, and then, possibly, to get a haircut as a nun.
The hero began to drink in taverns. So two years have passed since that clean Monday. And once, on New Year's Eve, he visited the Archangel Cathedral, where he listened for a long time to the silence of the church and seemed to expect a miracle. Then he went to Ordynka, to the gates of the Martha-Mariinsky monastery. From there a girl’s choir was heard, and he entered the courtyard. A grand princess appeared in the church in a snow-white robe, followed by choristers with candles in their hands. Then one of them looked into the gloom at the narrator. He asked himself how she felt that he was there, seeing nothing, turned around and left the yard.
