Ностальгический подтекст рассказа Ивана Бунина «Святочный вечер»

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the analysis of Ivan Bunin’s translated short story “Yule Evening” (1931), which was included in the cycle “Provencal Tales Retold”. The research is undertaken in order to comprehend the role of folklore in the formation of the poetic world of the Bunin text created as a translation (more precisely, a “retelling”) of a novella by the French writer Frederic Mistral (1830-1914), Nobel laureate (1904). The authors of the paper identify the main reasons that forced Bunin to turn to foreign folklore, to the folk epic of Provence, determine the hidden intentions that influenced the writer when creating the translated text. In particular, the authors pay attention to the tendency of diffusion in Bunin’s “retelling” and identify the signs of introduction of motifs and speech-stylistic formulas of Russian folklore into the Provencal text. The study is novel in that it is the first to analyse the short story “Yule Evening”, which has not previously attracted critics’ attention, and to interpret the modal attitude of the author of the translated short story. As a result, it has been proved that the motive for Bunin’s turn to the folklore of southern France, which was foreign to him, was not the semantic layer of F. Mistral’s folk records, but the nostalgic feelings that the folklore of Provence awakened in the prose writer’s soul, conjuring up memories of the Yuletide merrymaking of the abandoned Russian homeland in the author’s mind and that of his emigrant readers. It has been shown that Bunin’s knowledge of the basics and principles of Russian folklore helped the writer, on the one hand, to preserve the identity of Mistral’s folk collection, on the other hand, to bring additional nostalgic intentions to the “foreign” translated text.