Temple of the Sun or Bird's Shadow? The Poetics of the Travel Poems by Ivan Bunin

The article is built as a “slow reading” of Ivan Bunin’s book Temple of the Sun (Khram Solntsa), which has a second title - Bird’s Shadow (Ten’ Ptitsy). The aim of the article is to scrupulously analyze the poetics of this rare “large form” in Bunin’s prerevolutionary writings (it may be strange, but the analysis of this kind is undertaken for the first time). The problem of the canonic title (it has a clear solution in terms of both the author’s last will and the frequent use: the book should be titled Temple of the Sun, not Bird’s Shadow as the first Soviet publisher had named it) develops into the problem of composition: Bird’s Shadow is the title of the first chapter, Temple of the Sun is the title of the penultimate chapter. Depending on the choice of the title, the entire text of the book is orientated to the absolute beginning or to the final parts of the cycle. The reading shows that there are two compositional centers in the book, which is consistent with the two titles and the dual narrative strategy of Bunin’s travelogue. In a way polemic with the traditional definitions of the genre of Temple of the Sun (a cycle of travel stories like in the classic literature of the 19th century, or pilgrimage like in the medieval Russian tradition), the author (who has written several works on the theory and typology of travel writing) reads this book (for the first time in Ivan Bunin studies) as a travelogue, which combines several types of narrative. The main narrative types are touristic travelogue and pilgrim travelogue (both Christian and pagan), each of them uses particular genre strategies: a guide-book, an essay, an art criticism opus, a museum catalog for the first type; a symbolist “investigation”, real pilgrim notes, a travel novel about an artifact, a theosophical essay for the second type. There is a fact of interest which proves the idea of the deep modernist roots of Bunin’s thinking: Russian symbolist’s mythopoetics greatly influenced some parts of the book. A highly important addition to the analysis of the final text of Temple of the Sun is taking into consideration the earlier text variants of the book, which were longer and more detailed. The reconstruction of the original meanings of the text follows the “palimpsest” principle, which the narrator proclaims in the chapters on Judea. Using the general methodology of travelogue analysis (i.e. revealing the interaction of narrative strategies, changing narrator’s positions; tracking the mechanisms of symbolic sense formation, primarily the symbolic sense of the route and special loci), the author concludes that Bunin’s travelogue has a complex nature: the dual composition and united narratives of different types form a system of “wavering” meanings. Thanks to this, the narrator can organically combine both pagan and Christian motifs and also the two plots: searching for the Temple and finding the “living Christ”. This travelogue by Bunin should be considered one of the main travelogues of the epoch.

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