Возвращение в усадьбу как повторяющийся мотив в творчестве И.А. Бунина и Б.А. Пильняка

Abstract

This paper investigates the novel “The Life of Arseniev” and the novella “Mahogany” by contemporaries-authors Ivan Bunin and Boris Pilnyak, respectively. Although written in the same period, these two multi-faceted literary works were produced in different historical and cultural contexts. The purpose is to identify the underlying characteristics that they share in order to define an invariant model of the “topos of the country estate” in Russian literature on the cusp of the 1920s and 1930s. The conclusion that can be drawn is that, despite the diametrically opposed political milieus in which the two authors operated — Bunin was an émigré writer of the first wave; Pilnyak was a Soviet writer — in both works the country estate posits itself not only as the cultural space encompassing the history of the Russian state as a whole, but also as the chronicle of the private lives of the people who lived in it, the very quintessence of their being and a covenant for future generations.