«Я главным образом поэт…» (Иван Бунин: поэзия на разломе эпох)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the poetry by I.A. Bunin, which was considered by the author himself as the significant part of his creative activity. I.A. Bunin didn’t accept division of literature into verse and prose and published in his books the poems near the prosaic works. The way of Bunin’s poetry is being examined at the article — which doesn’t lay claim to be an exhaustic historical survey — in its entire length, from the early works from the book of collected poems “Listopad” (“Fall Of the Leaves”) till the last poems. Examination of concrete works shows obviously how the movement of time, the epoch of historic cataclysms in Russia in the XXth century were reflected in Bunin’s poems and largely determined the directions, turns of his poetry. The figure of the writer who has became for his contemporaries the embodiment and stronghold of the classic literary tradition, the invariable and irreconcilable opponent to the modernist trends — in particular, to Russian symbolism — appears here in deep relationships to the experience of modernism and, first of all, to the discoveries of Russian symbolism. The analysis of concrete poetical works which were created both in the beginning of the literary way and in emigration, testifies to the fact that the author of the works never saw himself privy to any concrete trend in literature, always overgrew these limits, resisted to the attempts of some critics who tried their best to “lay” him on “any definite shelf ”.