Time, History, and Fairy Tale in Ivan Bunin’s “A Cold Autumn”

Abstract

Ivan Bunin wrote Kholodnaia osen' (A Autumn) on May 3, 1944, in Grasse, in the South of France, for the collection of short stories entitled Temnye allei (Dark Avenues).l In a deceptively simple short story, Bunin offers a complex treatment of time.2 While there may be different ways of looking at narrative time in this short story, I will investigate its three temporal aspects: personal time, historical time, and fairy-tale time. These temporal aspects, or temporal modes, reveal their own specific logic of events. Personal time spans the birth and death of a person. The biological frame of a person's life determines the boundaries of personal time. Historical time is marked by major historical events, such as revolutions, mass migrations, and wars. All these events involve large numbers of people, so the events in the life of the individual are important only insofar as they influence the historical process. The third mode I call the fairy-tale mode. While personal and historical events constitute a clear story,3 in Cold Autumn the fairy-tale events may be derived from the very structure of Bunin's text. The fairy-tale, temporal-spatial setting is not tied to the historical background. In addition, emphasizing its own concept of the natural order, the fairy-tale mode functions independently of the temporal order of the life of a person: the death of the protagonist in a fairy tale does not necessarily change the course of his or her life. All three temporal modes function in Bunin's short story and yield three distinct readings of this text. In this essay I will show that each reading provides its own version of the heroine's past. The ambiguity of the short story's ending is directly contingent upon three possible readings. But, first, what happens in A Autumn? In this short story a woman narrator recalls the summer and fall she spent on her parents' estate during the first year of World War I. At the time, she is engaged to a young man, the son of her father's friend and neighbour. Her fiance soon gets drafted into the army and, thus, her parents postpone their wedding to the spring of the following year. One month after he bids her farewell, the fiance is killed at the front in Galicia. In Moscow in 1918, the heroine makes her living by selling the remainder of her belongings. At the market she meets an older man, whom she later marries. During the Civil War she escapes with him to the South to the White Army. Her husband dies of typhus, and she then flees Russia to Constantinople. She wanders through Europe and finally settles in Nice. At the end of the story, she maintains that the only meaningful event of her life was that single cool autumn evening when her fiance took his leave from her before departing for the front: And that is all there's been in my life. All the rest has been a useless dream. But I believe, I do ardently believe that somewhere over there he is waiting for me-with the same love and the same youthfulness as on that evening. You live, be happy for a while in the world, and then come to me... I have lived, I have been happy for a while, and now, quite soon, I'll come. PERSONAL TIME To account for how personal time functions in A Autumn, I will examine the relationship between story and text.4 In this short story, story time roughly corresponds to the life of the narrator-heroine (her personal time), since it spans most of her adult life. Bunin arranges all the events of the heroine's life in chronological sequence. The narration, then, corresponds to the linear chronology of the heroine's life. The act of narration ceases when the heroine seems to face death. Strictly speaking, the order of text time in Bunin's short story coincides with the chronological order of events in conventional story time. Rather outdated for the modern short story, this kind of order of events seems more characteristic of the discourse in the biographical sketch. In A Autumn, however, the relationship between story time and text time is not realized on the level of order of events but on the level of duration of events. …