Повесть И.А. Бунина «Суходол»: история становления текста

Abstract

The paper considers the history of formation of the text of one of Ivan Bunin’s major literary works ― the short novel “Dry Valley”. Written in 1911, the short novel, based on extensive autobiographical material, was published five times. Acquaintance with the text in different editions leads to the conclusion that the creative history of the “Dry Valley” did not end in 1912 with its publication in the Vestnik Evropy magazine, but lasted up to 1934 comprising the preparation of the final Complete Works in the writer’s lifetime. This is proved by the edit of the short novel which concerns different stages of its edition history. The whole edit in the text of “Dry Valley” can be divided into two groups. The first group comprises the corrections that are common to the writer and caused by reading the work during the preparation of a new edition. They generally concern the narrative style, clarifications in the text, nuances of its certain pieces, descriptions, characters’ personalities and so forth. All of these fit into the concept of variants. The second group comprises the corrections that suggest the writers’ redefinition of the ideas that had served as the original basis of the literary text. This kind of edit is sometimes called “semantic” and doesn’t fit well into the concept of variants, tending more to the concept of editing. The author of the article comes to a conclusion that we actually deal with two texts of “Dry Valley” with identical plot, story line and list of characters, but of different orientation and direction.