The Poetic Principles of Ivan Bunin and Alexander Blok (On the Material of Bunin's Marginalia on Blok's One-Volume Book of 1946)

Creative relations between two prominent Russian writers of the modernist era, Ivan Bunin and Alexander Blok, are an interesting, important and still incomplete research problem that allows to clarify the different ways of Russian lyrics development in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim of the article is to analyze the numerous marginal notes of Ivan Bunin on a single-volume edition of Alexander Blok [22]. The archive copy of this publication from the personal library of the writer is currently stored in the Fund of the United Literary Museum n.a. I.S. Turgenev in Orel. This archival material is a new and valuable addition to the picture of the relationship between the two contemporary authors, and also makes it possible to trace the evolution of Bunin's views on a number of Blok's revolutionary works. The analysis of Bunin's notes helps to prove the assumption of a different understanding of the two authors of poetic imagery, differences in the “structure of poetic thinking” that a number of researchers (A.A. Dyakina, L.A. Smirnova, A.V. Bakuntsev, K.N. Galai, T.M. Dvinyatina, etc.) expressed. Bunin's marginal notes do not allow to agree with some conclusions of L.K. Dolgopolov and S.V. Smirnov concerning the reasons of his hostile attitude to Blok which are based on the assessment of his political and social position, characters and writer's strategy. The study is based on the comparison of the content and figurative structure of Blok's poems that Bunin made notes of with his views on poetry expressed in his speeches, oral conversations, letters, diaries, as well as with the analysis of his own works by both his contemporaries (poets, critics, philosophers) and literary scholars of the second half of the 20th - early 21st centuries. Bunin's oral commentaries on Blok's separate works and whole cycles are compared with the modern philological interpretation of the style of the writer's poetry, drama and journalism. The analysis shows that the fundamental differences between the two poets do not relate to social views, opposite psychological types or attitude to historical changes, but to the aesthetic sphere, to the principles of building a lyrical world and a literary image, to operating with a poetic dictionary that results from the idea of the relationship between life and art. Neither the mysticism of the early Block as such nor his Bolshevism of 1918-1921 causes Bunin's rejection of his works but the particular way of creating the allegorical symbolist “overtext” based on a variation of key words and symbols and a maximum deconcretization of images and lyric situations.

Keywords

Authors

References