(351 words) A very rare work can boast of a strong female character in every sense. “Anna Karenina,” “Lady Macbeth,” and, of course, one of these characters can be called the heroine of the story of the same name M. Gorky, Old Woman Isergil.
Her story is divided into three parts - the legend of Larra, Danko and her own story. Let us focus on the latter. I must note that her image strongly contrasts with the impression that the story makes on us:
The moon lit her dry, chapped lips, a pointed chin with gray hair on it and a wrinkled nose, bent like an owl’s beak ...
However, speaking of her, we do not imagine the old woman at all, but the very brisk, passionate girl that she once was. Her story is quite frank when it comes to love affairs. Perhaps her whole life seems to us a continuous series of stormy novels and wanderings. She recalls each lover and the story associated with him. Fisherman, Hutsul, Pole, Turk, his son and many others ... She is too old and does not remember their names, but each of them was very different from the previous one. However, only one thing united them - they themselves sought its location. The more pride her lover possessed, the more impregnable was the fortress of Isergil. She knew her worth, and she definitely enjoyed watching the men fight for her: “I took mine: he begged me on his knees ...” she said. The heroine was not an affordable woman. Although Isergil was a representative of the “oldest profession” for some time, she valued freedom as nothing else. “I was never a slave, no one” - perhaps this is why she tells us the story of the unfortunate Larra. And, although, unlike him, she knew exactly when to moderate pride, in many ways she resembles an eagle-man, a shadow of former greatness.
The only name she could name was her “last game,” Magyar Arkadek, perhaps her first true love and last disappointment. He was the only one for whom Isergil went so far, but, having received his own, only cooled. It would be an exaggeration to call her a fatal woman, and yet, the majority of Isergil fans did not live to see her age. “You see - no less than the plague is destroyed by the love of people ...” - she says. Having spent her whole life searching for love, she did not burn it, and yet, in her declining years, she appears before us already without a fire in her eyes, an ordinary old woman.
