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 Two

In the second part of this article the attention of the researchers is focused on Bunin's short stories "The Final Day" (1913) and, again, "The Grammar of Love". The latter is currently studied not in the retrospective of Zhukovsky, but mostly in comparison with N. Gogol's heritage. Before his death in 1953, Bunin marked "The Final Day" as one of his most prominent oeuvres. The analysis of this short story has been undertaken from three methodological positions. Firstly, a number of situations that correspond with the plot and the main idea of the future short story was found in the Bunins' memoirs. Secondly, to clarify in details the initial conception of this text, the authors studied thoroughly the fragments of Bunin's dairy written in June 1912, it was time when some notes, later to be included in the text of "The Final Day", were made. It is noticed that Bunin's work in the beginning of the summer of 1912 was mostly devoted to ethnography and folklore. For example, Bunin makes notes of a big collection of Russian folk songs. The authors also attribute Bunin's mentioning the name of Kireevsky ("I was reading Kireevsky's biography") in a note made on June 7 to Pyotr Kireevsky, contrary to the traditional attribution of this remark to Ivan Kireevsky (a number of influential works on Bunin offer this explanation). Pyotr Kireevsky was a famous folksong collector and editor, who was the first to apply the term "ballad" to some folk verses with an ambiguous genre nature. Bunin includes the name of the folklorist in a life-creating myth, purposefully designed during these years, because both brothers Kireevsky belonged to one of the branches of Bunin-Zhukovsky's big family. Hence, as the article shows, the background of "The Final Day" is formed from a combination of some topics: folklore, the memory of Zhukovsky and the theme of the common people whose culture is represented in folk lyrics. Thirdly, the short story is analyzed from the viewpoint of the ballad genre archetype. Plenty of its elements are available in the poetic structure of the text. On the new stage of the analysis of "The Grammar of Love" the main attention of the authors was centered on the "economic" constituent part of the plot, which hardly derives from Zhukovsky's ballads. Researchers prove that on the level of chronotope the text is encoded with both Zhukovsky's ballad tradition, on the one hand, and Gogol's poem Dead Souls, on the other hand. The peculiarities of functioning of the concept "soul" in both oeuvres are compared. The spatial parameters of the both texts become the second object for comparison as well as the world of domestic private things (Chichikov's small chest, Khvoshchinskiy's box and bookshelves). The authors come to a conclusion that Bunin's intertextual quotation of Gogol's poem Dead Souls contains a polemic intent: Gogol who articulated the problem of the "dead" in disguise of the "living" is disputed by Bunin who, "rewriting" and inverting Gogol's idea, contrariwise aspires to show that the "dead" is still alive.

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