«Одухотворение материи»: И.А. Бунин во французской критике и переводах Б.Ф. Шлецера

Abstract

Boris de Schloezer, leading literary critic in Russian émigré and French journals (“Sovremennye Zapiski” (“Contemporary Notes”), “La Revue Musicale”, “La Nouvelle Revue Française”) wrote several reviews of the work of Ivan Bunin and in в 1929 translated a collection of his early short stories as well as those written in the emigration (“La Nuit”, éd. Émile-Paul Frères). A mediator between Bunin and the French intellectual world, instrumental for his acquaintance with André Gide, his being invited to the conferences of European writers in Pontigny (Les Décades de Pontigny), his contacts with the French publishing house Stock. Schloezer as translator aims at make real the “spiritualization of matter” — the main feature, in his opinion, of Bunin’s poetics — by means of French terms, rendering the original music, intonations and rhythm. Thanks to a perfect knowledge of both Russian and French and to direct contact with the author, the translation was created according to the laws of artistic oeuvre, based on the model of Bunin’s freely emerging words. The appendix contains a first translation into Russian of Schloezer’s review of Bunin for “La Nouvelle Revue Française”; letters to Ivan Bunin from Boris Schloezer, Benjamin Crémieux, Paul Desjardins, André Gide, Jacques Rivière, and Dumesnil de Gramont (Russian Archive in Leeds), as well as letters from Ivan Bunin to the French publisher Stock, Maurice Delamain.