Zhukovsky's and Gogol's echo in the 1910s prose by I.A. Bunin: the poetics of the ballad and the aesthetics of horror. Article One

In the first part of the present work the authors formulate the reasons why the ballad genre became so significant in the literary context of the Silver Age, and in the prosaic works by Ivan Bunin in particular. In Bunin's case the feeling of the dramatic historical change which traditionally stimulates writers' attention to the ballad was combined with his personal fears of revolution and finally became apparent in the comprehensive appeal of this author to V.A. Zhukovsky's and N.V. Gogol's artistic experience (both are known as writers who introduced the horror-theme to the Russian literature). The authors of the article attract to the analysis a group of Bunin's short stories where the motif ensemble with a horse ride to a mysterious place as a pivotal story is varied. The implementation of these motifs in the narrative structure of the short stories indicates the traces of their ballad origin. "The Grammar of Love" written in 1915 is studied further as the most remarkable text among the rest. It provides the researcher with the full set of motifs tracing back to the romantic ballad. A number of Bunin's stories, connected with "The Grammar of Love" and written later ("The Winter Dream" and "Once Upon a Time in Neverland"), use the loci communes of the ballad genre archetype intensively and first of all vary motifs taken from Zhukovsky's paraphrases of G.A. Burger's "Lenore". Analyzing the text of "The Grammar of Love", the authors pay attention to the chronotope of the main character's trip. The topography of his journey is presented in accordance with the ballad principle - to constrict the spatial scopes turning them eventually to just a point. In the ballad plots very often this point is a coffin, which is allegorically replaced by Bunin in "The Grammar of Love" with the description of Khvo-schinskii's asylum. Khvoschinskii lost the lady of his heart (she died) and doomed himself to sit motionlessly in her room. A number of other details, e.g., the symbolic of posthumous marriage, refer the reader to the topoi of romantic ballads. It is also noticed that Bunin inverts the traditional ballad roles of bride and bridegroom, imparting, contrary to Zhukovsky, signs of the activeness to a woman and vice versa making a man passive and almost lifeless. The duplicity of this encoding is explained then as a result of the involvement of Bunin's short story not only in the gravitational field of "Lenore" triad but also as a trace of another Zhukovsky's ballad, "The Knight of Toggenburg". Analyzing "The Winter Dream" the authors assume the double dependence of this story's motif-structure not only on Zhukovsky's ballads but also on Pushkin's "Boris Godunov". Along the whole way of the study the authors make an effort to compare the life-creating strategies by Zhukovsky and Bunin; to reveal the ballad implications in Zhukovsky's life-creating myth regarding the fact that the Russian poet of the 19th century was known to Bunin not just as a first romanticist but also as an ancestor to whom Bunin traced his own mythologized and ideologized biography, trying to legitimize himself as the "last classic".

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