CC BY
0
«ЕСТЬ НЕЧТО НЕЗЫБЛЕМОЕ... СВОБОДА МЫСЛИ И СОВЕСТИ»: К 90-ЛЕТИЮ НОБЕЛЕВСКОЙ ПРЕМИИ БУНИНА
IN MEMORY OF A MASTER OF WORDS
Galina Petkova1
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" (Sofia, Bulgaria) ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1002-5183
In 2023, the literary world celebrates the memory of the outstanding master of the Russian word I. Bunin. The section of the journal "Philological Class" dedicated to the writer's Nobel anniversary includes articles that suggest an interpretation of Bunin's work through the prism of critical reception, poetics, literary contactology and comparativism. The rubrica-tion of the section and the sequence of works in it correspond to these perspectives.
The articles by G. Petkova (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", Sofia, Bulgaria) "The Development of the Literary Reputation of Bunin" and "Bunin's Reception after the Nobel Prize" reveal the critical reception of the Russian writer in Bulgaria from 1903 to 1943. As a result of source and archival work, 69 titles were identified and 67 of them were analyzed. This number, in addition to texts by Bulgarian critics and scholars, includes articles and reviews published in Russian in emigrant publications in Sofia and the province or translated into Bulgarian from other languages. Most of the reviews are introduced into the scholarly circulation for the first time, thus filling the lacunas in the bibliographic descriptions of the studies of Bunin's oeuvre. A review of the responses shows that, thanks to the critical reflection in the first half of the twentieth century, the future Nobel laureate turned from a little-known writer into a popular and widely studied Russian author in Bul-
1 Petkova G., Guest Editor, PhD, Associate Professor, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" (Sofia, Bulgaria).
garia, who gradually entered the canon of school and university teaching of Russian literature. The whole array of reviews, commentaries, reports, and scientific communications is interpreted as a single text that combines different tendencies in the perception of Bunin's work, designated as aesthetic (literary studies proper), Slavophile, and sociological. The reception in Bulgaria corresponds with the assessments of Bunin in other European countries, and the critical responses contain observations on Bunin's artistic world that have not lost their significance even today.
In addition to introducing a large amount of information and source material that is part of the Slavic-speaking reception of the Russian writer, the section presents research texts analyzing specific aspects of Bunin's poetics. N. V. Prashcheruk (Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Ekaterinburg, Russia) in her article "Heterotopia of the Estate in I. A. Bunin's Prose" considers the interpretation of the Russian noble nest proposed by I. A. Bunin on the material of the story "The Passion" (1897) and the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arsenyev" (1933). The author proves that, relying on the multidimensional depiction of the estate topos in his early work, in his main work "The Life of Arsenyev" the writer recreates the whole estate world through which the face of Russia, beyond the control of historical time and metaphysically transformed, emerges.
In the Russian literary life of the twentieth
"THERE IS SOMETHING IMMUTABLE ... FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND CONSCIENCE":
TO THE 90th ANNIVERSARY OF I. BUNIN'S NOBEL PRIZE
century, Bunin was not only an unattainable authority of the word. His prolific presence stimulated the creative intentions of his contemporary readers, who became literary writers themselves and created their own works. From the point of view of this special dialogue, the following two works are very interesting, examining the influence that Bunin had on the literary production of the Russian emigration in its individual centres. In her article "I. Bunin's The Temple of the Sun in M. Shcherbakov's Collection of Poems Time Off", E. Yu. Kulikova (Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia) explores the collection of poems by the emigrant poet, writer and translator Mikhail Shcherbakov "Time Off' (Shanghai, 1944), identifying various sources of its creation and its literary connotations. Among them the main role belongs to I. Bunin's book of lyrics and essays "The Temple of the Sun" (Petrograd, 1917). On the example of the poem "Japanese Temple" the author analyzes in detail and proves Bunin's influence on Shcherbakov's poetry (ekphrasis technique, rhythmic choice, rhyming).
E. V. Kapinos (Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia) in her article "Under the Influence of I. A. Bunin:
A. P. Klyagin's Novella Mamai's Treasure Trove" presents the story of the Russian engineer and entrepreneur A. P. Klyagin "Mamai's Treasure Trove" (Paris, 1948). Not being a professional writer, A. Klyagin created his work under the influence of Bunin's lyric poetics. The author shows how this influence is manifested at the level of composition, repeating the model of the novel "The Life ofArsenyev"; at the level of plot, referring to Bunin's invariant plots about unfulfilled love; and on the plane of stylistic diversity, it incorporates folklore legends and reveals Russian spiritual life. As a result, Klyagin's historiosophical narrative preserved pre-revolutionary Russia and became part of the debate about its fate.
The published articles testify not only to the filling of still existing gaps in Bunin studies, but also to the development of its internal analytical paradigms. The stabilisation of promising areas in Bunin studies and the sys-tematization of all the knowledge accumulated by literary criticism raise the question of their consolidation in the publication of an independent Bunin Encyclopedic Dictionary. Such a book should take into account the professional labour of various scholars and become an institution that preserves the memory of the outstanding master of the Russian literary twentieth century.
