Ivan Bunin Research Articles

Федор Батюшков и Иван Бунин. Неизвестный автограф

In the Manuscripts and Rare Books Division of the Regional Scientific Library of Saratov State University, an early autograph of Ivan Bunin, which has not yet been introduced in scientific circulation, has been discovered. This is a signed copy of the translation of G. G. Byron’s Manfred published by the “Znanie” Partnership. It is known that Fyodor Batyushkov, holding the post of the editor-in-chief of the magazine Mir Bojiy (The World of God), wrote reviews of the works of authors nominated for the Pushkin Prize.

The Conceptual Object "Bird" in the Eponymous Bunin’s Poem and Qur'anic Text

The present paper offers an outlook on the conceptual object “bird” in Ivan Bunin's poem and the Holy Qur'an. Actualizing Bunin's appeal to the Qur'anic meanings is due to the linguistic and cognitive approach to its study to identify sense generating features of the “bird” as a symbol that may be close to the Russian mind. Conceptual object is thought of as an ideal object which enters the people's naive consciousness sphere or religious contemplation and becomes a subject of cognitive specification in their spiritual life. The linguistic sign categorization is associated with abstracting from its primary meaning and metaphorizing but, unlike a concept, the conceptual object is not represented by the national cultural and linguistic code. Analysis of the Qur'anic bird representation as a fate allowed us to evolve its substantial paradigm “fate – deeds – conscience – will – soul ↔ bird ↔ spirit/soul – angel on the right and angel on the left – scripture – will – knowledge/science – predestination” and to draw a parallel with the Bunin's literary image of “prophetic bird” imbedding precognitive symbolism of fate. Extended abstract: The present paper offers an outlook on the conceptual object “bird” in Ivan Bunin's poem and the Holy Qur'an. The article’s objective is actualizing Bunin's appeal to the Qur'anic meanings and identifying sense generating features of the “bird” as a symbol that may be close to the Russian mind. The question formulated concerns the reasoning that the bird may be considered a conceptual object which is thought of as the ideal object and enters the people's naive consciousness sphere or religious contemplation becoming a subject of cognitive specification in their spiritual life. The linguistic sign categorization is associated with abstracting from its primary meaning and metaphorizing but, unlike a concept, the conceptual object is not represented by the national cultural and linguistic code. Our hypothesis is what the analysis of the Qur'anic bird representation might evolve its substantial paradigm and draw a parallel between the Bunin's literary image of “prophetic bird” and the Qur'anic bird imbedding precognitive symbolism of fate. The methodology for proving the hypothesis was based on linguistic and cognitive and hermeneutical approaches to the study of insights into the symbolic image of the bird. The Bunin's poem denotes the semantic paradigm of the conceptual object “bird” captured in the title “amulet – prophetic bird – secret sign – fate – owl” and establishes its relations in the poetic intention implementation: “man – bird”, “God – bird.” The “secret sign” in this case can be seen as a meta-concept by means of which “amulet alike prophetic bird” and simultaneously “fate” are defined. The paradigm derived from the Qur'anic text study includes the following chains of components: “bird ↔ soul – will – conscince – deeds – fate” and “bird ↔ spirit/soul – angel on the right and angel on the left – scripture – will – knowledge/science – predestination.” The bird appears as the interlink in the two chains and the ultimate links in them “fate” and “predestination” align and form a dot commensurate with the concept of “qadar.” In general, the fate of a person (or soul) conditioned by "free will" in deeds and destiny as God's judgement constitute a whole. The convergence of the conceptual meanings of the bird in Islamic culture and Russian word artist's work determines the novelty of the research topic. “The fate-bird” idea entails a conceptual object semantic value which can arise under certain conditions or depending on this idea purposive intent. Such a solution to the conceptual object problem brings together different levels of language awareness.

System of Mythonyms in Poetry of Ivan Bunin

The article is devoted to one of the problems of literary onomastics — an inventory of onomastic units of literary texts as an integral part of the vocabulary of the language of a particular writer. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the poorly studied issue of the mythonymicon of poetry and prose by I. A. Bunin. The novelty of the work is associated with the description of the mythological names of Bunin the poet as an integral system. The classification of mythonyms is based on five principles: the source from which the name was used (there were three such sources: etiological, anthropogonic, heroic, cult and other types of myths; religious and philosophical literature; multi-genre works of Slavic folklore); the nominated image of a fantastic object (eleven semantic groups are recorded: mythoanthroponyms, theonyms, demononyms, mythotonyms, mythohydronyms, mythoornithonyms, etc.); etymology (otonymic, otapellative and special contextual mythological names are marked); structural type (simple or oneword mythonyms, complex, represented by a bilexeme, and compound mythonyms, two-word and three-word ones are fixed); the presence of connotations in semantics (names with negative and positive connotative backgrounds were found). The author comes to the conclusion that mythonyms in I.A.Bunin's poetry become those stable linguistic signs that carry a huge amount of historical and cultural information and have a rich associative potential, accumulating the specifics of the writer's worldview, they contribute to the modeling of the text space.

Ivan Bunin and Eastern Mysticism

The influence of ideas of Eastern mysticism is manifested in Ivan Bunin’s understanding of the artistic path as spiritual ascent. This article analyses Bunin’s short stories The Death of the Prophet and The Stone based on the combination of times and spaces. The artistic specificity of these stories is determined by the presence of Biblical and Quranic motifs, as well as Saadi’s philosophical and parable texts. The article contains surahs of the Quran and fragments of Saadi’s poems, which make it possible to clarify the figurative genesis of Bunin’s stories characterised by a high artistic simplicity, brevity, and philosophical depth. The eastern imagery of the stories receives lyrical development in the poems Abraham, Law, Muhammad and Safiya, and others. It is noted that in The Death of the Prophet, the writer creates a typical image of a sage following the mystical path of spiritual improvement. Qur’anic influence is confirmed by the use of Bismillah in The Death of the Prophet and in the poem Law, i. e. the testimony that reveals 113 surahs of the Quran: In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. The authors pay special attention to the presence in The Death of the Prophet of Shahadatain, the formula of conversion to Islam containing the confession of the testimonies of Islam. Depicting the “other” eastern world, Bunin focuses on cultural, moral, and historical issues. In the work of the writer, emphasis is placed on the unity of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Bunin’s orientalism, the distant world is portrayed as spiritualised and light. It is concluded that for the writer, the main thing is to “survey the Beauty of the World”, to see the “combination of the beautiful and the eternal”, to know what the “truth” is, and, finally, to complete the mystical path.

THE MOTIF OF THE PRODIGAL SON IN THE PLOT OF IVAN BUNIN’S NOVEL THE LIFE OF ARSENIEV

The article is devoted to the research of the reception and transformation of the subject of the Gospel Parable of the Prodigal Son in the novel The Life of Arseniev by Ivan Bunin. The key events in the Parable of the Prodigal Son are present in the structure of The Life of Arseniev: leaving the ancestral home — leaving God behind; temptations of the spirit and flesh, dissolute life, spiritual lust, spiritual death; confession; return to the ancestral home — return to God, to the Heavenly Father’s Home. Arseniev's departure from his ancestral home differs from the departure of the Gospel Parable’s hero, yet this event is one of the landmarks in the main character’s life path of life. Unlike the prodigal son, Aleksey Arseniev leaves his home seeking the highest meaning and purpose of life as the key aim; the sense of God’s presence had been present in his soul since his very childhood. However, the youthful thirst for glory and pleasures of life led Bunin's hero to the abandonment of the Heavenly Father and to immersion in sinful life. The tropes of sensuality, temptation, desire, degradation, sins, unfaithfulness, adultery are the key motifs in the description of the hero’s dissolute life. Arsenyev’s immoral life became the main reason for the damage to his relationship with Lika and her breakup with him. The most important events in the Gospel Parable of the Prodigal Son are repentance of sins, penance before his father and before God — these events appear in Bunin’s novel in an altered form. Since Arseniev did not experience deep repentance before God for his sinful youth, the resurrection of his soul and his return to the Home of the Heavenly Father were impossible. Bunin demonstrates that an entire life is required for the hero to experience true repentance and his final return to God, thus Bunin leaves Arseniev on the path to God. Scenes from the Gospel Parable of the Prodigal Son, such as departure from the ancestral home, dissolute life and spiritual death are recreated most completely in Bunin’s novel The Life of Arseniev; while repentance and return to God, which take up the remainder of the hero’s life, are described by the author in a complex altered form.

RAILROAD PLOTS

The article, among other meaning-forming factors of the narrative text, highlights the specific locus of the railway, which plays a significant role in Russian literature of the 19th and then 20th centuries. It is shown that in the space of the railway car the worldview and behavior of people change. This is due to the nature of the microsociium that develops in such a space. It can occur a variety of, unpredictable meetings, there is an attraction or repulsion of the met, communication can expose the most intimate depths of personality or mask them. All this is done in conditions of heightened mental tension, under the influence of such factors, which rarely occur in systemic communicative acts. Such phenomena is demonstrated by the examples of Leo Tolstoy's novel "Kreutzer Sonata", his novel "Resurrection", Dostoevsky's travel notes and his novel "The Idiot", works by Ivan Bunin ("The Life of Arseniev", "Penguins" etc.), Vladimir Nabokov ("Other Shores", "Glory" and etc.)

«Храм Солнца» или «Тень Птицы»? Поэтика «путевых поэм» И. А. Бунина

«Храм Солнца» или «Тень Птицы»? Поэтика «путевых поэм» И. А. Бунина

Литературное наследство. Т. 110: И.А. Бунин. Новые материалы и следования: В 4 кн. Кн. 1 / Институт мировой литературы им. А.М. Горького РАН; Ред.-сост. О.А. Коростелёв, С.Н. Морозов. М.: ИМЛИ РАН, 2019. — 1184 с.: ил.

Литературное наследство. Т. 110: И.А. Бунин. Новые материалы и следования: В 4 кн. Кн. 1 / Институт мировой литературы им. А.М. Горького РАН; Ред.-сост. О.А. Коростелёв, С.Н. Морозов. М.: ИМЛИ РАН, 2019. — 1184 с.: ил.

Отечество в философских построениях И.А. Ильина: литературные проекции

This is the first attempt at analyzing philosophical works about Motherland by Ivan Ilyin (written in the 1920s) as the solid ideological structure, which influenced literature of the Russian emigration of the 1920s as well as Russian émigré selfawareness. The article describes the system of Ilyin’s thought in its dynamics: from his first speeches, delivered in Berlin in 1922, towards the speeches (and articles) of the second half of the 1920s. It highlights certain changes in the definition of the Motherland: in the beginning of his philosophical career, Ilyin understands Motherland as related to the Civil War and the interests of the White Army; later, he moves this concept to religious sphere; by the end of the 1920s he relegates Motherland to the context of world history and Russian culture. Several examples show how Ilyin’s philosophy influenced (or sounds in consonance with), main ideas of the early émigré literature (including novels and political articles by Ivan Bunin, Nina Berberova, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marina Tsvetaeva). That Ivan Ilyin, a former professor of law turned into the greatest ideologist of Russia Abroad is a typical sign of the time and the proof of politicization of Russian philosophy.

Отражение национальных особенностей в книге И.А. Бунина «Темные аллеи»

The essay highlights traditions, customs, relationships, morals and manners of the Asians and the Europeans as represented in Ivan Bunin’s famous collection Dark Avenues. This article is an attempt to demonstrate the specificity of Bunin’s vision of national mentality shaped both by national identity and by the place where a person belongs to, be it a civilized urban space or a countryside. Russian mentality reveals itself to the fullest when explored against the background of the Russian estate house that became a spiritual home for Bunin in emigration. Bunin discloses the ambiguity of the Russian national character that combines spirituality with vulgarity, empathy and compassion with unrestrained craving for living life to its fullest each day and lack of discipline. The impetuous nature of the Russians is opposed to the more reserved character of other nations. Different attitudes to life and death disclose different cultural codes affected by Catholic and Orthodox traditions. In his ontology of love, Bunin explores, with deep interest, the dark avenues of the human soul, beamed through the national mentality.

Émigré Ivan Bunin and His Native Country

Émigré Ivan Bunin and His Native Country

Проза И. А. Бунина 1917–1920 гг. К вопросу об основном тексте

This is the second article in a series of works devoted to the definition of copy texts of I. A. Bunin's prose. Research conducted after the publication of the article “Ivan Bunin’s Prose Works. An Approach to the Choice of Copy Texts for a Critical Edition”, allowed us to clarify the chronological boundaries within which the writer's works should be printed according to their own and for each group strictly defined principles of text submission. If, at the first consideration, one of these boundaries was proposed to be considered 1920 — the year of Bunin's departure from Russia, later the analysis of specific textual stories of Bunin's stories of the 1917–1920's made it necessary to shift this border to 1917. All the stories written in these years, both in their figurative and thematic structure, and in their printed history, belong to the next, émigré period of the writer's work. Therefore, like other works of this time, they should be presented in Bunin’s Complete Works with the texts of their last lifetime publications, and not the last Russian publications before 1920, as should be the case for works written in previous years.

ОЛЬФАКТОРНОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО РУССКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ: ПРОБЛЕМЫ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ. ЧАСТЬ 2. ПРОЗА И ДРАМАТУРГИЯ

This essay deals with the studies of olfactory imagery in literature - a new trend in literary criticism intensively developed from the beginning of the twenty first century. It concerns different ways of representation of odor perception in Russian prose and drama, particularly in the writings of Ivan Turgenev, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Ivan Goncharov, Fedor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin. The essay traces the significance of odors and smells in the description of psychological portrait of the characters as well as in the plot.

“Cursed Days” by I. A. Bunin in Their Historical Context: Between Realism and Hyperrealism

The article proposes to re-read “Cursed Days” by I. Bunin as an important junction between nineteenth-century realism and contemporary hyperrealism. The author focuses attention primarily on how the writer uses documents not only to capture a photographic image of reality, by inserting those documents into the narrative, but also to make his point of view abundantly clear. After all, it is the writer himself who declares his intention to wield public opinion by offering the truth proven by hard facts. Thereby Bunin paves ground for contemporary hyper-realistic literature. Theoretically, the article draws on the critical works by Raffaele Donnarumma, particularly his book “Ipermodernità. Dove va la narrativa contemporanea” (2014), where the concept of hyperrealism, previously applied to painting and sculpture, is used for the analysis of contemporary literature. Buninʼs political commitment, which back then was representative of opponents of the revolution, is also a typical feature of contemporary hypermodern writers. From this perspective, the work of Ivan Bunin is reconsidered in all its modernity, as a form of realism that precedes contemporary hypermodern fiction by more than a century.

«Что есть поэзия?» Заметки к теме «И. А. Бунин и Е. А. Баратынский»

The article outlines the parallels between the artistic systems of Ivan Bunin and Evgenii Baratynsky. They shared the same view concerning their role in the literary world, the connections between creativity and reminiscences, the way they treated their familial memory as a guarantor of immortality, their awareness of the unbreakable link between the contrasting states of soul and existence. Baratynsky’s influence grew after Bunin’s departure from Russia: only once he had found support in the elegiac tradition, Bunin managed to recreate both his own artistic world and the fi gurative system of his art. The stories Bunin wrote in the fi rst half of the 1920s absorbed a significant body of motifs and direct quotes from Baratynsky’s poetry. The latter’s Fragments from the Poem: Recollections (1819) can be read as a meta-description of the world of Bunin’s émigré years.

Поэзия И. А. Бунина в русской вокальной лирике

Статья призвана определить характер и степень влияния музыки русских композиторов XX−XXI вв. на постижение своеобразия поэзии И. А. Бунина. Материалами послужили поэтические произведения И. Бунина, музыка русских композиторов, сведения нотных библиографических справочников, результаты исследований отечественных филологов и музыковедов. Установлено, что с достаточной полнотой до сих пор учтены лишь ранние (1900−1910-е гг.) переложения поэзии И. Бунина на музыку. Проведен музыковедческий анализ вокальных циклов Г. Дмитриева, создавшего более 30 сочинений на стихи И. Бунина. Изучен созданный русскими композиторами «бунинский пласт» отечественной вокальной музыки. Диапазон творческих стимулов коллективного творческого процесса был соотнесен с бунинской поэтикой, выделены произведения, родственные поэзии И. А. Бунина по художественному методу. Сделан вывод, что отпечаток православного мировоззрения позволил композиторам воплотить черты, кардинально важные для русского гения как такового. The aim of the article is to determine the nature and influence of the music of Russian composers of the 20th and 21st centuries on the comprehension of the artistic originality of Ivan Bunin’s poetry. This will make it possible to come closer to the formulation of the creative method that unites such prominent persons as Ivan Bunin, Sergey Rachmaninoff and Georgy Dmitriyev. The materials of the research were the poetic works of Bunin, the music of Russian composers, information from music and bibliographic reference books, the results of studies by Soviet and Russian philologists and musicologists. The research methodology combines musicological and literary analysis with methods of comparative study of various types of art and a systemic cultural approach to the national worldview. The authors point out that the first romances to Bunin’s poems were written almost 120 years ago, and since then the panorama of musical incarnations of his poetry has been expanding, every year growing due to academic genres, works of contemporary authorial and Orthodox songs. At the first stage of the research, when summarizing the music and bibliographic reference books published in the 1960s−2010s, the authors found that only the early (1900s−1910s) transcriptions of Bunin’s poetry to music were taken into account with sufficient completeness. Lists of works of the academic genre, written in the 1970s−2010s, are extremely incomplete. The second stage of the research was to eliminate the existing gaps, starting with the most significant works. The authors carried out a musicological analysis of the vocal cycles of Georgy Dmitriyev, who created more than 30 compositions based on Bunin’s poems. With a detailed analysis of Dmitriyev’s vocal-instrumental cycles, the authors of the article supplement the musicological analysis of the choral cycle Old Russian Legends (1987) and the polyptych Pictures from an Old Book (2008), which Yury Paisov, a well-known Russian musicologist, performed in 2007−2018. The authors of the article also included romances by Sergey Rachmaninoff, Reinhold Gliere, and Sergei Vasilenko in the musicological analysis and comparison. The research resulted in the study of the “Bunin layer” of Russian vocal music created by Russian composers. The range of creative incentives of the rather wide collective creative process was correlated with Bunin’s poetics proper. The works related to Bunin’s poetry by the artistic method were determined. The authors of the article came to the conclusion that the method they were analyzing was generated by the Orthodox worldview and reflects features that are fundamentally important for the Russian genius as such.

Expressive Derivational Means in Ivan Bunin’s Prose (To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth)

The author introduces the expressive potential of derivational means in Ivan Bunin’s prose. It is noted that the writer consistently avoided occasional word formation. Innovations in his works are potential in nature and few in number. The study is aimed at identifying expressive derivational means and determining their functions in the prose of Bunin. The resources were analysed with descriptive and structural-semantic methods. The author distinguishes the groups of derivational means significant for Bunin’s idiostyle: complex adjectives and adverbs with a trope component in their composition, folk etymological formations and expressive derivational dialectisms. Morphemic repetition is considered as essential for Bunin’s prose. It performs the intensifying-distinguishing and text-forming functions and serves to deploy a certain motif and theme as well as to create a word picture. Actualisation of derivational relations in Bunin’s prose reveals the implied sense of the text.

The Figurative Structure of Ivan Bunin’s Story «The Snow Bull» («Snezhny Byk») (To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth)

The study involves a philological analysis of Ivan Bunin’s story and reveals its multilevel structure. The relevance of the study stems from a growing popularity of Bunin’s works among readers and investigators. Moreover, some of his texts are included in a set of testing and assessment materials for the Unified State Exam in the Russian language as source texts for writing composition. The study is aimed at clarifying and specifying the interpretation of the story based on linguistic analysis in terms of the writer’s biography and legacy. The author identifies the patterns of the lexical structure and composition of Bunin’s story, unfolding the text at the common level as well as at the symbolic one. The author focuses on the title character of the work, which is a counterpoint to psychological and moral-philosophical issues, as well as to other means of revealing subtext semantics. The research methodology involves lexical, intertextual and motif analysis; the research results are presented mainly using the method of linguistic commenting. The research outcomes embrace the philological results (interpretation of the story The Snow Bull, identification of the universal patterns of Bunin’s artistic style and dominants of his vision) and didactic findings (validation of such works as The Snow Bull as the examination material for the USE in the Russian language).

Lev Shestov and Ivan Bunin: existential insight into Russian literature

This paper analyzes the creative interaction between Ivan Bunin and Lev Shestov. After providing constructive feedback on observations and reflections from the preceding scholarly literature on the subject the author argues that the main point of convergence between the writer and the philosopher is their works on Leo Tolstoy. The study includes a textual analysis of the elements of Shestovian discourse that were discovered in Bunin’s essay The Liberation of Tolstoy. The author argues that the ending of The Liberation of Tolstoy can be understood only in the context of existentialist discourse. Bunin's objections to the Shestov's view of Chekhov’s creative work have been studied in detail. In general, Bunin does not appear to be a “disciple” of Shestov, as he is engaged in a philosophical dialogue with him on equal terms. Existentialism is the closest philosophical tradition to Bunin’s thought than any others that arose in the twentieth century.

The Theme of the Change of Times in Ivan Bunin and Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Literary and Philosophical Interpretation

The article presents a philosophical analysis of I.A. Bunin and V.I. Ivanov’s concepts and views on Russian history, culture, literature, and language. The research reveals common and different in the positions of Ivan Bunin and Vyacheslav Ivanov regarding the events of the Russian revolution. An attempt is made to show the special place occupied by I.A. Bunin and V.I. Ivanov in the literature of the Silver Age as well as their attitude toward each other. Special attention is paid to criticism of the writers by their contemporaries. The article discusses the specifics of V.I. Ivanov and I.A. Bunin’s attitude to the Russian revolution of 1917, based on their ideological, artistic, and socio-political views. The author examines their criteria for aesthetic and ethical assessments of some revolutionary events. Particular attention is paid to Ivanov’s interpretation of the root causes of the revolution: the crisis of individualism and the desire for a new organic era. The article also discusses the writers’ attitude to the reform of Russian orthography of 1918, the peculiarities of Ivanov and Bunin’s understanding of the language and its significance for the nation as well as the main findings reached by V.I. Ivanov and I.A. Bunin in their interpretations of the revolutionary changes in the country. The articles concludes that the image of Russia, its culture and revolution is manifested in their artistic worldview in different ways, due to the mismatch of their existential positions on religion, mysticism, social and political structure of the country as well as on the tasks and goals of art.