Paschal motifs in Ivan Bunin's "Light Breathing"

The article focuses on the famous Bunin's short story "Lyogkoe dykhanie" [Light Breathing], which became primarily a phenomenon of the theory of literature after the congenial work by L. Vy-gotsky. Most research works that emerged after Vygotsky's Psikhlogiya iskusstva [The Psychology of Arts] developed the observations of this scholar. While analyzing "Light Breathing", the author of the given article attempted to concentrate mostly on the personal writer's context that includes diary notes that refer to the spring of 1916 (the time when the oeuvre was written) and posterior self-commentaries in which Bunin was recalling the conception of the plot. Bunin's confession that he wrote the story intentionally for the paschal issue of one of the Russian newspapers (Easter in 1916 fell on April 10) became the central point of the analysis. The initial newspaper publication shows "Light Breathing" within a group of festive short stories published under the congratulation "Christ has risen!", which was shaped as a head-line typed with capital letters. This primary-source background of the investigation formed a number of premises to reconstruct the paschal line of the plot (for example, the semantics of such a character as Subbotina, the interlocutor of the main heroine), but the most important thing is that the analysis carried out within this framework revealed the aesthetic dimension of the life vs. death collision, which is the only condition to deliver relevance to paschal motifs. The distinctness of Bunin's aesthetics lies not only in ontological non-admittance of death as such (in this sense there would be no difference between Bunin and his mentor Tolstoy), but also in entwining death with all the precedents of semiotic substitution. In the structure of "Light Breathing" paschal allusions that surround Olga Meshcherskaya's image are contra directed to the large ensemble of metaliterary motifs with which Bunin aspires to undermine the conditions of "conventional" literary writing. The diary becomes the genre which provides the author with the tools and devices of his critique. The reflection on the diary as a genre embraces the whole narrative of the short story and marks Bunin's personal notes in his own diary of that time. The present article asserts that the two main "texts in text" (Yu. Lotman) of "Light Breathing" (Meshcherskaya's diary and "daddy's book" which contains the main symbolic concept of the story the author turned into a title) are no more than a medley composed of widespread literary cliches so that this very principle radically contradicts with the author's own vision of what a diary should be. It is worth reminding that later Bunin will be thoroughly practicing the poetics and style of a diary until he bases his only novel, "The Life of Arsen'ev", almost exclusively on the diary as a type of narrative. The conclusion of the article emphasizes the main notion: the role of paschal motifs in the structure of "Light Breathing" is crucial; they show how the author encodes the story of Olga's symbolic resurrection with allusions to Russian national culture.

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