ОТ МАРГАРИТЫ К ЖЕМЧУЖНИКОВУ («ЛЕГКОЕ ДЫХАНИЕ» И.А. БУНИНА)

Abstract

The paper offers a non-canonical interpretation of Ivan Bunin’s “Light Breathing”, a text which became canonical in the 20th century thanks to Russian formalists and L.S. Vygotsky, as well as later interpreters, which had demonstrated the multiplicity and multilayered meanings of its poetic system. Faust code – one of the significant cultural archetypes of modernity – acts as the main semiotic key of the proposed interpretation. In the paper, within the framework of the structural method, the attention is focused on the following aspects of the text: name semantics, numerology, multilingual transitions and correspondences, intertextual analogies, the embeddedness of Bunin himself in the system of the story, etc. In addition to “Light Breathing” and other works of Bunin’s fiction, the material for the research was also his diaries and literary-critical essays. The paper shows that the central figure of the system is Russian poet Alexei Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov: his patronymic name coincides with the patronymic of the story character Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin (who says of himself that he is “Faust with Margarete”) and his surname is etymologically related to the name Margarete (‘pearl’). Consistently applied structural method allows to discover hidden levels of semantics and to understand the peculiarities of text composition. The presence of the figures and works of Zhemchuzhnikov, A.A. Fet and A.K. Tolstoy in the formation of the characters’ portraits and the nature of treatment of the theme of creativity in the short story is revealed. I examine the grounds of the principle of mirroring, the nature of metamorphosis, and the ways in which Bunin’s own presence is captured in the short story. The research provides an explanation of Bunin’s conceptual system as a whole, which includes notions of inverting the parts in the opposition sets: part – whole, singular – plural, old – young, masculine – feminine.